NASA had forwarded her important messages, providing secretaries to handle fan mail and bills. So she was denied even the solace of busywork during those awkward first hours. Her autosec flashed the queue of her clipping program… a backlog of fifteen thousand headlines culled from news services and Net-zines in every time zone. She flushed everything having to do with the accident, and the tally dropped below a hundred. Those she might scan later, to catch up with what was happening in the world.
Teresa wandered room to room, not exactly avoiding thoughts of Jason, but neither did she go straight to the photo album, shelved between the bound-paper encyclopedia and her husband’s collection of rare comic books. She didn’t need photographs or holo-pages in order to replay moments from her marriage. They were all in her head — the good and not so good — available on ready recall.
All too ready…
She slipped two hours of Vivaldi into the sheet-reader and went out to the patio with a glass of orange juice. (Someone had read her file and left two liters of the real thing in her cooler, fresh squeezed from Oregon oranges.)
Beyond the polarized UV screen, Teresa looked out on the swaying elms sheltering several blocks of low apartment buildings, ending abruptly at the white dikes NASA had erected against the rising Gulf of Mexico. The tracks of a new rapitrans line ran atop the levee. Trains swept past on faintly humming superconducting rails.
A bluebird landed on the balcony and chirped at her, drawing a brief smile. When she was little, bluebirds had been threatened all over North America by competition from starlings and other invaders brought to the continent by prior, careless generations of humans. Worried devotees of native fauna built thousands of shelters to help them survive, but still it seemed touch and go for the longest time.
Now, like the elms, bluebirds were resurgent. Just as no one could have predicted which plants or animals would suffer most from the depleted ozone and dryer climate, nobody seemed to have imagined some might actually benefit. But apparently, in a few cases, it was so.
On the downside, Teresa remembered one awful autumn when she and Jason came home almost daily to find pathetic creatures dying on the lawn. Or worse, hopping about in panic because they could no longer see.
Blind robins. Some threshold had been reached, and within weeks they were all dead. Since then Teresa sometimes wondered — had the extinction been universal? Or was the die-off just a local “adjustment,” restricted to south Texas? A few words to her autosecretary would send a ferret program forth to fetch the truth in milliseconds. But then, what good would knowing do? The Net was such a vast sea of information, sipping from it sometimes felt like trying to slake your thirst from a fire hose.
Besides, she often found the Net tedious. So many people saw it as a great soapbox from which to preach recipes for planetary salvation.
Solutions. Everybody’s got solutions.
[INSERT IMAGE HERE]
One group wanted to draft the entire space program into an effort to suspend ozone generators in the stratosphere. A preposterous idea, but at least it was bold and assertive, unlike the panacea offered by those calling for the abandonment of technology altogether, and a return to “simpler ways.” As if simpler ways could feed ten billion people.
As if simpler ways hadn’t also done harm. Astronauts suffered few illusions about the so-called “benign pastoral life-style,” having seen from space the deserts spread by earlier civilizations — Sumerians, Chinese, Berbers, Amerinds — armed with little more than sheep, fire, and primitive agriculture.
Teresa had her own ideas about solutions. There were more riches on the moon and asteroids than all the bean counters in all the capitals of the world could add up in their combined lifetimes. Lots of astronauts shared the dream of using space to cure Earth’s ills.
She and Jason had. They had met in training, and at first it had seemed some magical dating service must have intervened on their behalf. It went beyond obvious things, like their shared profession.
No. I just never met anyone who could make me laugh so.
Their consensus had extended to shopping among the pattern-marriage styles currently in vogue. After long discussion, they finally selected a motif drawn up by a consultant recommended by some other couples they knew. And it seemed to work. Jealousy never loomed as a question between them.
Until late last year, that is.
Until that Morgan woman appeared.
Teresa knew she was being unfair. She might as well blame Glenn Spivey. It was also about when Jason started working for that awful man that their troubles began.
Or she could lay the blame on…
“Dumpit!” She cursed. All this introspection brought a tightness to her jaw. She’d hoped absolute openness — giving the shrinks everything inside of her — would get her through all these “grief phases” quickly. But personal matters were so completely unlike the physical world. They followed no reliable patterns, no predictabilities. Despite recent optimistic pronouncements about new models of the mind, there hadn’t yet been a Newton of psychology, an Einstein of emotions. Perhaps there never would be.
Teresa felt a constriction in her chest as tears began to flow again. “Damn… damn…”
Her hands trembled. The glass slipped from her fingers and fell to the carpet, where it bounced undamaged, but juice sprayed over her white pants. “Oh, cryo-bilge…”
The telephone rang. Teresa shouted on impulse, before the NASA secretaries could intervene.
“I’ll take it!” Of course she ought to let her temporary staff screen all calls. But she needed action, movement, something!
As soon as she’d wiped her eyes and stepped inside, however, Teresa knew she’d made a mistake. The broad, florid features of Pedro Manella loomed over her from the phone-wall. Worse, she must have left the unit on auto-send before departing on that last mission. The reporter had already seen her.
“Captain Tikhana…” He smiled, larger than life.
“I’m sorry. I’m not giving interviews from my home. If you contact the NASA—”
He cut in. “I’m not seeking an interview, Ms. Tikhana. This concerns another matter I think you’ll find important. I can’t discuss it by telephone—”
Teresa knew Manella from press conferences. She disliked his aggressive style. His moustache, too. “Why not?” she broke in. “Why can’t you tell me now?”
Manella obviously expected the question. “Well, you see, it has to do with matters conjoining onto your own concerns, where they overlap my own…”
He went on that way, sentence after sentence. Teresa blinked. At first she thought he was speaking one of those low-efficiency dialects civilians often used, bureauciatese, or social science babble … as impoverished of content as they were rich in syllables. But then she realized the man was jabbering the real thing — bona fide gibberish — phrases and sentences that were semantic nonsense!
She was about to utter an abrupt disconnect when she noticed him fiddling with his tie in a certain way. Then Manella scratched an ear, wiped his sweaty lip on a sleeve, wrung his hands just so…
The uninitiated would probably attribute it all to his Latin background — expressiveness in gestures as well as words — but what Teresa saw instead were crude but clear approximations of spacer hand talk.
… OPEN MIKE, she read, WATCH YOUR WORDS CLASS RED URGENCY… CURIOSITY…