Lifeline

“You were always there to catch me when I fell, Sarat,” Ramis muttered. “Are you there to catch me now?”

Sarat’s orbit approached closer than two Earth radii at its nearest point, before they swooped back out again on their way to L-5. He wondered if anyone on the planet could look up and see him blotting out a swath of stars against the night sky. Or if anyone would bother. He wondered if his brother Salita was staring up into the Philippine darkness right now … or if the Islands had been swallowed by an even greater darkness.

Leaving the planet behind, Ramis and Sarat climbed toward Orbitech 1.

Ramis shifted his legs in the cramped cyst-cavity. He had no room to move, no place to stretch—and sitting here in the same position had begun to drive him insane with boredom after a week. He took extreme care not to bump the three sail-creature embryos at his feet.

Ramis removed his helmet and took a deep breath of the humid air. He didn’t want to leave the helmet off long—hard cosmic rays still penetrated even Sarat’s tough exoskeleton—but fresh oxygen drove back the claustrophobic dankness for a while.

By now the wall-kelp had grown all along the inner sides of the cavity, making the air smell rank. But it would be enough to start a new forest growing in Orbitech 1, and it gave him food to eat on the long journey. Unprocessed and raw, the kelp tasted awful, but his stomach kept it down. He knew, conceptually at least, that it provided him with necessary nourishment and moisture.

Ramis groped around the spongy cyst until he found the joystick controls for the external video. Swiveling the camera, he focused on the bright pinpoint of the L-5 colony waxing larger and larger. A week ago the colony had been invisible against the stars. Now, under extreme magnification, he could just make out the two counter rotating wheels of Orbitech 1. Also at L-5, the Soviet station Kibalchich revolved slowly into view on the fringe of the Lagrange gravity well.

Time was growing short for them, for him. He found it difficult to think clearly.

“Calling Orbitech 1!” Ramis squinted at the screen in front of him. Why weren’t they answering? “Orbitech 1, come in please.” Maybe his transceiver was too weak. Maybe he was trying the wrong frequency. Maybe they had stopped listening for messages entirely after Clavius Base had cut off communications.

A thought struck him—what if the new director, Curtis Brahms, had done something else? Brahms did not scare Ramis; it was the uncertainty that made him uneasy.

Ramis muttered under his breath. He had been talking to himself too much in the past few days. “How am I supposed to rescue you if you won’t answer?” He snapped the helmet shut.

Maybe the radio’s gain was too weak. Maybe he had used the batteries too much over the past week, chatting with people on the Aguinaldo just to quell his loneliness and isolation. As he swung close to Earth, he had scanned the radio bands. Briefly he caught a burst of hysterical shouting, but it had faded into static before he could tune it.

There was nothing to do. No way to notice that time was passing. Sarat continued to drift on course, to waste away and die.

Keeping himself occupied, Ramis squinted at the cross hairs barely visible on the video screen. The camera angle had been offset enough to account for the American colony’s orbital motion. By centering the image in the cross hairs, the sail-creature would tack ahead and arrive at the right position to intercept the colony in its orbit.

He saw that Sarat was off course by only a fraction of a radian, but with thousands of kilometers left to travel, he would miss Orbitech 1 with room to spare.

Time to steer again. Ramis withdrew a small knife from the equipment pouch. He looked at the cross hairs and judged the angle from inside the cyst. With the sharp point of the blade he poked Sarat’s sensitive internal membrane.

“Sorry, Sarat.”

The cyst tightened. Ramis felt a tension, a ripple, as the vast creature’s reflexes turned it away from the knife’s prick. The lumbering movement seemed to take years, but the L-5 colony finally drifted into the center of the cross hairs again.

He tried counting stars, then making up rhymes, reciting Bible passages he’d had to memorize for catechism years before—anything to make him forget the boredom for a while. And to forget about his slim chances for ever returning to the Aguinaldo. He would give anything just to stretch his legs.

Inside Sarat, looking at Orbitech 1, Ramis felt as if he were falling down toward the station. The old fears began to come back. Space gave him no reference, no horizon, no gravity. The direction down was where things fell when you dropped them … but out in space, everywhere was down.