There was no one with whom she could claim a romantic relationship. There'd been some men over the years, of course. One was dead. The others were happily married in suburban New Jersey or points west.
She sat quietly, trying to think what to say to old friends, and found herself regretting things not done. People for whom she had not made sufficient time. The great love that had never quite shown up. The child not borne.
Now that she faced possible termination, her life seemed curiously incomplete. She'd heard somewhere that, when death was near, one's regrets were not for one's actions, the assorted small and petty acts, the occasional immoralities, even the periodic cruelties visited on others. But rather one regretted things not done, adventures not undertaken, experiences left untasted, whether through some false code of morality or, more likely, shyness or fear of failure.
She smiled to herself. MacAllister had said somewhere, through fear of getting caught.
XXVII
Few of the virtues are realty useful. Fidelity leads to lost opportunity, truth-telling to injured feeling, charity to additional solicitations. The least productive, and possibly the most overrated, is faith. The faithful deny reason, close their minds to the evidence of their senses, and remain unfailingly optimistic in the face of disaster. They inevitably get just what they deserve.
— Gregory MacAllister, "Along for the Ride," Reminiscences
Hours to breakup (est): 45
Janet Hazelhurst's people had been transported to their stations and were ready to go.
John Drummond reported that his team had worked out the details for the assembly. "They've got it all down?" demanded Marcel. "Every step?"
"Every step."
"What about the rest of it?"
Beekman took him through the entire plan. The shuttles were fueled and ready. Phil Zossimov was on schedule with his collar and dividers. They were working on this, getting that set up. There were problems, but that was unavoidable on a jury-rigged operation this big.
"Nothing insurmountable?"
"Not so far."
Marcel had slept a few hours, and felt better than he had in a week. But he watched Beekman suspiciously.
"What?" asked Beekman. "What's wrong?"
"I'm waiting for you to tell me."
"Marcel, nothing is wrong. We're doing pretty well. Better than we have a right to expect."
They were still twenty minutes from the tower when Marcel told them Wendy's search team had given up trying to find the capacitors.
"Up to us," said Mac. "Good thing we didn't go to Mt. Blue."
Hutch felt better in flight, with full fuel tanks and the ground far below. Her natural optimism came back when she could throttle up. Even in these circumstances she could not escape the sense that with the jets running, anything was possible. She wondered at the recovery of her spirits and mentioned it to Mac, who suggested she was wired to assume the world was a permanent place, a view which had surely been shaken by recent events. Here among the clouds, however, they could see forever, and life did indeed seem infinite.
The day had closed in almost as soon as they'd left the ground. Hutch had gotten away from a long line of storms, and they were flying through gray, overcast skies streaked with dust. "Volcanoes, probably," said Nightingale.
Kellie shook her head. "I think they'd tell us if volcanoes were going off in the neighborhood."
Hutch wondered if that were so. Marcel might be reluctant to introduce still more bad news. In fact this had to be a nightmare for the people on Wendy. They might almost be wishing it were over.
There were occasional calls, from Embry, asking whether everyone was physically okay, and could she be of assistance in any way? Guilty conscience, probably.
And from Tom Scolari, also sounding guilty, telling her he was doing everything he could to help recover them. Scolari was with the Outsiders. "It's going to be okay," he said. Sure. How good was he at manufacturing landers?
Kellie got calls from friends on Wendy. "I wish," she said, "they'd just let me be. They keep telling me to hang in. What the hell else can we do?"
Mac received one from Nicholson, assuring him they were making "every effort to extract him from his plight." MacAllister thanked him politely and shook his head. "How's your plight, Hutch?.You know, I believe that's the first time I've ever actually heard a living person use that word."
The lander flew on through the deepening morning, on this twelfth local day since their arrival on Deepsix. It now seemed to Hutch as if their departure from Wildside had occurred in another lifetime.
Sometimes the clouds closed in, and they could see nothing. There was no other traffic in the sky, of course, and she was confident she was above any nearby peaks, but she disliked flying blind, with neither vision nor instruments. She was dependent exclusively on guidance from Wendy and the satellites. To complicate matters, they lost communications with the orbiting ships for almost six minutes.
"Local interference," their contact told them when the system came up again. "The storm systems are starting to play hell with communications."
Augie Canyon called, asked a few questions, and reminded them a lot of people were praying for them back home.
"Anybody here believe in life after death?" Kellie looked around at her companions.
"I do," MacAllister said carefully.
"You do?" Nightingale suppressed a smile. "You've made a career of attacking moralists and reformers, Mac. And whole sections of the country that you thought took their preachers too seriously. Which is to say that they took them at all. What are we getting here? A deathbed conversion?"
"Randy." MacAllister's expression denied all charges. "I'm shocked and dismayed that you would think that of me. I have only attacked people who pretend to have the answers to everything. For the very good reason that they're either imbeciles or charlatans. But that doesn't mean I've denied there's a spiritual dimension to life."
"Really? A spiritual dimension?" Nightingale arched his eyebrows. "Sir, what have you done with Gregory MacAllister?"
"Wait a minute," said Kellie. "That's a fairly sweeping statement anyhow. Are you making those charges about everyone who belongs to an established faith? What about Brother Dominic?"
Yes, thought Hutch. Brother Dominic was a modern St. Francis who'd worked forty years among the poor in east Asia. "A fine man," MacAllister allowed. "I'll give you that. But I'd say he's locked into a belief system that's closed his mind."
"You're talking about the Roman church?"
"I'm talking about any system that sets up a series of propositions that are supposed to be taken as the word from on high. Adherents
get so caught up in their certainties that they miss the important things. What does Brother Dominic know about quantum mechanics?"
"What do you know about quantum mechanics?" demanded Hutch.
"Not much, I'll grant you. But then, I don't pretend to be pious."
"I'm a bit slow," said Nightingale. "Make the connection for me."
"Randy, doesn't it strike you that anyone truly interested in the creator, if in fact there is a creator, would want to take time to look at his handiwork?" He smiled benevolently at Hutch. "Or her handiwork? Matter of fact, doesn't it seem likely that the creator might be a bit miffed at anybody who spends a lifetime walking around paying serious attention to church architecture and misses the stars?
"People who wear their religion on their sleeves talk a lot about going to Sunday school, reading the Bible, and doing good works. And I suppose there's no harm in that. But if I'd gone to the trouble to put all this together"-he raised his hands in the general direction of infinity-"and people never paid any attention to it, never bothered to try to find out how the world worked, then I think I'd get annoyed."