*** *** ***
He woke with a sense of wrongness. It took him a moment to see it, but then he sat up, hands going to the dark surface of the main touchboard, where a thousand telltales should have burned.
The ship was dead. What had she done?
What was she doing now?
He leaped to the bulkhead, slapped his hand against the lockplate.
Nothing happened. He beat against the monomol until his hands bled.
Finally he noticed the glimmer of a message marker and activated it.
“Jolo,” Sinda spoke from the screen. “You were stupid. Did you think this moron of a ship could keep me locked up, when it couldn’t even keep Talm from the synthesizer?” Her face twisted. “It was easy, Jolo, easy to fool it into letting me go, easy to make it lock you up, and easiest of all to make it kill itself.” She was spitting the words.
“But you can fix it, when I come back and let you out. So you see, everything will still be fine.”
She drew a deep breath, then seemed to get control of herself. “I left the life support systems up; you won’t starve or thirst.
“I’ll see you soon.” Her image shattered into random specks of color.
*** *** ***
Her sabotage had blinded the exterior cams, so he couldn’t see what was happening outside.
He remembered the matrix he’d taken from the robocam. He found it in his pocket, a thin white flake of memory.
He slowed the scan when the robocam swiveled to catch a shot of the crawler thumping over the lip of the cirque. Sinda drove to the foot of the ascensor, crunching through the powdery bones of the oxen. She went directly to the pool.
The pool accepted her as readily as before.
Barram watched her spinning in glory, then her slow painful emergence at the far end. Her face had aged, for all its tranquillity, and she sat gasping in the shade of an arch.
Barram turned up the speed of cycle again. In all, he watched Sinda go to the pool three more times before the matrix saturated. Each time she was weaker. Each time she returned to the pool sooner.
*** *** ***
Days passed in silence. The crippled ship could support him for a few weeks, no more. Then the systems would fail, one by one. He sat on the con couch, his face in his hands, trying to face death calmly.
A shudder ran through the ship. Barram remembered the ship’s precarious footing. Under the landing struts, the friable stone was subsiding. He strapped himself to the acceleration couch.
With an ominous grinding rattle the ship lurched, then stabilized for a moment. But then it went over in a rush, tumbling faster and faster, down the slope.
Until it smashed into the shrine, and split open.
*** *** ***
Daylight shone on his face. His mouth tasted bloody, and he hung upside down from the harness.
A long time later, he crawled from the shattered hull, bruised and scraped, but with, it seemed, no broken bones or serious internal injuries. When he had gathered his strength, he went to the pool.
Her body formed the newest petal in the flower, lying at a slight angle to the wall, as if she’d drawn close to it at the final moment, seeking escape or comfort.
She wasn’t decomposing, in the usual sense. Her body was simply dissolving into transparency, the bones beginning to show through. Her hair was a white cloud in the motionless depths. He was grateful that she lay face down. He reached out his hand to touch the surface of the pool, and felt a cool dry resilience.
When the sun had dropped close to the hills, he rose painfully and went to the place where Sinda had first fallen in. He approached gingerly, stretching out to test each step. When he touched the sensitive area of the coping, it started to tilt, and he jerked his foot away. The coping settled back, almost reluctantly. He cackled.
“Not yet, not yet,” he whispered.
As the sun fell behind the edge of the world, Barram considered his options.
He was old. And tired. Trapped on this empty world, without even the minimal rejuve tech aboard the ship, he had only a few years left, five, maybe less. He would die alone, unless he reactivated the seed-ship’s wombs. There were plenty of viable human embryos, but that was an ugly choice, too. He would be dead long before the children were old enough to learn to fear the pool.
Barram almost took the one step forward.
“No,” he said, old body trembling. “No, I won’t.” He moved back.
He wasn’t Sinda, young and soft, consumed by grief, vulnerable to the pool’s terminal mercy. No, he was old and hard, and the long years had burned away some of his capacity for sorrow.
Barram shook his fist at the pool, tears of anger streaming down his lined cheeks. But then a wild notion came stealing into his mind. He smiled. If the pool took away pain and gave years, when swum from this end, then perhaps...
*** *** ***
He circled the pool, looked down at her one last time, then he sprang from the coping in a clean, shallow dive.
His momentum carried him skipping along the surface, bouncing on an impossibly tight, impossibly slippery membrane. A crimson light flared across the pool, and the sorrows rose up, tearing at him.
If all the griefs had taken firm hold of him, he would certainly have been pulled to the bottom. But so much pain ... the sorrowing dead jostled each other, fighting to enter him, so that only a few succeeded.
He flailed his arms wildly, kicked his legs, and moved a few inches. The pain that entered him pulled him deeper into the membrane, so that his traction increased. And as he progressed, his strength increased, his heart grew younger, his muscles more supple.
He moved faster and faster, his tears leaving a trail of darkness on the glowing surface of the pool.
Such sadness, such hideous sadness.
He had a terrible vision of Sinda rising toward him, her hair streaming, crone’s face distorted in a scream of grief, claws reaching. He would not look down.
At the far end, he pulled himself from the pool, quick as a seal, and as the coping began rising to dump him back in, he grasped the lifting edge and flipped nimbly onto safe ground.
His body shook with the griefs of the colonists. Hard work, the strange sicknesses, the rootless sadness felt by men and women raised by mother-droids, a thousand other hurts. He told himself, over and over, it won't last, it won't last.
A dozen times during the night he made up his mind to roll back into the pool, but the dawn finally came, and with it a trickle of joy, that he had survived.
Barram got to his feet. He looked at his hands, corded with new muscle. He felt the strong blood pumping, vigorous life filling the arch of his chest. He was young again.
*** *** ***
The crawler carried him back to the village.
Barram went up to the seedship and decanted the first embryo. Spinning the womb’s lockwheel down, he said, “Hurry, now,” as if the embryo could hear him. He smiled, thinking of the terrible stories he would imagine for the children, to frighten them away from the badlands. Someday, when their sorrows were smaller and Barram was old again, he would tell them about the pool. By then they would be wise enough to be frightened by the truth.
He set about filling the rest of the wombs.