At the end of the opera, the anti-Party gang handed over their weapons and boarded the bus that would take them to Pennsylvania for reeducation, while the Renmin marshal and the schoolteacher led the cadres in a victorious procession across the sagebrush landscape, banners flying. The audience applauded in delight, Castor included. As the images faded from the holo area and the hall lights went up he looked for Maria to share his pleasure, but she had gone. '
Castor found his wife in the screen room, rapt before one of the consoles. She was listening to the audio portion through earplugs and did not hear him enter; when she caught sight of him, she clicked the screen off. By the time he could see it, the screen was only winking in orange letters Waiting... Waiting... Waiting... in both Chinese and English.
There were twenty screens in the room, each with its own seat. Castor knew every one of them. This was where he had got most of his education after schooling stopped for him because his university application was turned down. His teacher had fought for him—and failed. Had coached him in the high tongue until he was almost accent-free—to no purpose. Had begged him to continue on his own with the teaching machines, because his mind was too good to waste on plowing rice paddies. And indeed he had done so, every chance he got, doggedly pursuing one course after another out of the limitless catalogue, until Maria had made him aware there were other things to do with his spare time than study.
She was still watching him politely, waiting for the interruption to be explained. He said awkwardly, "You're not finished yet, then?"
"Not really."
He nodded, looking around at the empty machines. "Well," he said, surrendering to the impulse, "listen, take your time. I'd like to, ah, check out a few things, too." And it was true. He had always liked that, every time he got a chance at the screens. He liked it now. So much so that as he punched in his codes and instructions, his wife's peculiar behavior slipped out of his mind.
What Castor had mostly studied was space. Everything about space, theory and practice. It was his dream. Because it was only a dream, it was also his curse. He had discovered bitterly early that only an ethnic Han Chinese had any real prospect of receiving space-going training. For that matter, there was hardly any space program to be trained for. The Chinese had a few Comsats, of course, and some meteorological and resource-spotting satellites. That was all—even for China. For America, of course, there was nothing at all.
No human being had gone into space, from any country, for nearly one hundred years. Oh, there were human beings up there even now, to be sure. Dead ones. Astronauts and cosmonauts caught in orbit by the outbreak of the war, unable ever to get back. In the data stores of the screens, there were fifty or sixty "identity uncertains" stored—some of them actual sightings, some only recorded trajectories.
What fascinated Castor was that there was a new one in the stores. "Identity uncertain" barely described this one. It was on the far side of the Sun, well over an A.U. away, far too small for any detail to be seen. So it could be anything, and Castor's imagination was unchecked. Spacelab gone adrift? One of those old Russian Soyuz things? A lost shuttle, an Ariane—anything!
He gazed longingly at the smudged dot that was all telescopy had been able to retrieve of the object. It was there all right, though what "it" was he could not say. Still, the orbital elements were clear enough. In a few months it would be close to Earth—then there would be plenty to see! Of course, it almost certainly was one of the sixty other "identity uncertains" perturbed, perhaps, by passing too close to the Sun...
But what if it were not?
Castor was smiling as he pulled the earphones off and turned to his wife. Surprisingly, she did not seem quite finished with what she was doing—whatever she was doing. She glanced up at him politely, still awaiting the explanatory key, her great blue eyes cool and hooded. He hesitated, trying to think of a conversational gambit that would turn this polite and distant woman back into his wife. He pulled out a packet of honey-dried fruit sticks and offered her one. She shook her head. He said, "But you didn't eat much dinner, either."
"I wasn't hungry," she explained.
Castor nodded as though that clarified the subject completely, chewing the edible paper off his own stick. He bit into the rich, delicious pear flavor. There was no use asking Maria any question she didn't want to answer, and no use asking questions at all when she'd been given every chance to volunteer. Still, he was curious. "What were you looking up?" he asked with a generous, wise, I-know-you've-got-some-little-secret grin.
"Oh, just some things," she said vaguely, and that settled that.
Castor shrugged. "I'm about ready to go to bed," he said, all subtlety put aside.
The blue eyes gazed at him coolly, then turned to the machine. She paused, then made a decision. Briskly she clicked the screen off and clicked off the cool, distant Maria at the same time. "So am I," she said, standing up and untangling the earplugs. When she put out her hand to his arm her touch was warm and intimate, and so was her voice. "Real ready," she added. "After all, what harm can it do now?"
II
If anyone had asked Castor if he loved his wife his answer would have been instant and loud. Of course he did! Even when she was withdrawn. Even when she insisted on taking chances with getting pregnant. He certainly did not blame her, he would have said at that point in any conversation (or perhaps was rehearsing in advance of the conversations that he knew were bound to come), for the problem they now confronted. She was very dear to him—
But strange, all the same, for after a night just like old times, in the morning she was cool and withdrawn again. She slipped away to catch her bus for Biloxi before breakfast was over. She didn't have to. She needn't have left till almost noon. She certainly needn't have left it to him to explain to the exercise leaders why she had skipped the group aerobic dance and tai chi. So Castor's day began sulkily again, and when Fat Rhoda called on all of Production Team Three to put in a voluntary day's work, in spite of the fact that this was officially a rest day for them, to make up for the time lost yesterday, Castor set his chin and refused. And, as he didn't want to hang idly around the village after that, he took out an electrobike and went to the beach. He stripped quickly on the sand, sniffed for methane—but the air was clean today—and slipped on backpack and face mask as he was already wading into the salt, warm waves.
As soon as he was underwater, safe in the amniotic sea, Castor felt soothed, alive, almost joyous again. It had been much too long since he had swum there last!
It had been since his marriage, in fact, for Maria was terrified of sharks. Castor decided he would have to teach her better or even go without her, because this pleasure was too great to give up. Ever since he was ten, barely old enough to be allowed to swim by himself, he had biked or trudged the long, quiet roads to the coast, between the cane fields or the marshes, skirting the edge of the giant radio-telescope installation, heading for the sea. And it never changed.
He had an hour's air in each tank, and so he let himself follow the gentle fall of the sea bottom, out half a kilometer and more. He knew where to find the trail buoys, but allowed himself to be diverted from the straight swim to poke into interesting-looking hummocks or bits of debris, chasing the fish—and sometimes being chased by them, too, because although he had no fear of the occasional stupid shark, he went away from its annoying presence. It was always cool under the water and so much cleaner than the land; the currents that fed the Gulf brought no muck, no industrial wastes, no city sewage—no reminders of the terrible wiped-out world of a century ago. Or not very many, anyway. There was always the death-glass. It was far out, but the closer patches of it not yet very deep; sometimes on a dark night you could see the pale blue fire in the water, even from the beach. The children were warned against them. Of course, that kept no child away.