“What?” he prompted her.
“I like it.”
He didn’t know what to say to her. This thing was changing her and he was powerless to stop it.
“I wish I could share it with you. You will, won’t you? You’ll learn the language and come here, with me?”
“Yes,” he answered, huskily.
“The Sectilius formed a mental community revolving around him, each member of the network abstractly aware of the others, building a dynamic experience. The synergy, the creative possibilities—artists and engineers, community leaders and philosophers, scientists and entertainers—the entire city feeding off this mental energy, generating novel associations and ideas. The Sectilius initially created these connections with the Kubodera to keep them happy, to keep them challenged, because they take them from everything they’ve ever known to fly these ships. They’re starved for experience. They thrive under this kind of mental stimulation. It’s necessary to keep them from going mad. But the Sectilius quickly learned that Anipraxia was a richly rewarding symbiotic relationship for everyone involved. It’s incredible.”
Her eyes were shining in the dark. He reached out and brushed back a stand of her hair that had fallen forward over her face.
“He knows about Tom. He’s very upset about it and he wants to help us. He’s letting me decide for myself how to handle it. He’s not telling me what to do—I want you to know that. He’s not influencing me, ok?”
“Ok. What’s he doing now?”
“Right now he’s very busy managing the, um…I think you would call them nanites. That’s taking most of his attention at the moment.”
He mentally shifted gears. Nanotechnology on Earth was in its infancy—little more than research and development—an engineer’s dream. “Nanites?”
“Yes. The whole ship is swarming with them. They repair things at a microscopic level. They were never meant to be the only defense against the slug population, but without a crew, there’s no other way to maintain the ship. Ei’Brai kept life support levels at absolute minimum all those years to keep the slug growth rate as low as possible, but when he turned the life support back on for us, the population exploded and the nanites are barely keeping the damage under control. Do you see? This isn’t his fault. He’s doing his best to protect us. There are things that are beyond his ability to control.”
He stared at her, trying to understand. This alien guy was using nanites as damage control? It was plausible, he supposed, to a certain degree. He’d kill to know how that was done. Yet, with the number of slugs he’d seen in that one room alone…that seemed like it was verging on impossible. He started to feel skeptical, but tried not to let it show. “But why didn’t he warn us from the start, Jane?”
“He’s very proud. He feels like the ship’s an extension of himself. These mishaps feel like failures. It’s mortifying to him. He wanted so badly for this to go well. He knows we’re his only hope to survive. He knows about the asteroid, Alan.”
Didn’t that give her pause? Bergen frowned. Jane got to her feet and extended a hand to him. He knew he should say something, but everything he thought of sounded like something Walsh might say and he didn’t want to risk putting distance between them.
14
As Jane rose, Walsh and the others immediately gathered their things. She stood apart from Bergen, her chin lifted, her expression stern. No one else needed to know that inside she was roiling with conflicted thoughts. A good leader acted the part no matter what they felt.
She didn’t allow her gaze to linger on Alan as he labored to his feet. Alan’s confession was heartening. He believed in her. She hoped his faith wasn’t misplaced.
But there was the nagging doubt, that he was affected by the agent that felled the Sectilius. She’d had hints from him all along that he was attracted to her. That had always seemed sort of tantalizing and thrilling, but she’d never believed he really meant any of it. She’d concluded that it was just part of his nature to be flirtatious in a razor sharp way, that he couldn’t help but be enigmatically charming to stoke his own tremendous ego.
Now he seemed to be saying it was more than that and the timing couldn’t be worse. She was already scattered enough, dealing with a constant influx of revelations, insights, foreign concepts—all creating a tumult inside her head. She didn’t have the luxury of time to consider what his proposition might mean…about him, to her, the mission…any of it.
She wondered, if he’d done something similar just a month before, would she have responded in the same way? There’d been that moment in the capsule, the day she’d succumbed to childish grief, reeling from the news that her closest confidant had just given birth to a healthy child. Suddenly she’d found herself unable to contain her feelings, which ran a gamut of extremes—joy, sadness at missing the event, jealousy, loneliness, disconnectedness, and shame.
He’d embraced her tenderly, throwing her concept of his character into complete disarray. It was a bewildering moment because it didn’t change anything between them. Things continued on just as they’d been before, as though she’d just imagined it. It left her watching him curiously for other signs of depth or gestures of goodwill. When nothing else surfaced, she decided it meant nothing to him and did her best not to think about it. Though if she was being completely honest with herself, that had been hard.
At the time, she found herself behaving like a young girl, suddenly self-conscious about her appearance, finding reasons to engage him in conversation, asking for his assistance when she didn’t really need it, surreptitiously watching him work, eat, exercise…dress.
She tricked herself into thinking he was playing along, that he felt the same, that they were both feeling their way in that bizarre environment, knowing that such thoughts were prohibited, should be ignored, or extinguished. Then he’d do something callous or say something that was so off-color that she was sure she was fabricating the whole scenario as a mental defense against boredom.
She shouldn’t have kissed him. In that moment, it felt like clinging to life as it shattered around her. She couldn’t deny her attraction to him. He felt solid and real when her grasp on reality felt like it was slipping. But it also gave him a hold over her, every bit as strong as the hold Ei’Brai was wielding. She was being pulled in too many directions. If she wasn’t careful she’d be drawn and quartered before she could achieve her goals.
Time was a trap. After all the months of confinement—to be confronted with a ticking clock, after only a single day aboard the ship, was cruel. If she waited to send a message to Houston, concentrated on understanding this enigmatic disease, she might wait too long and doom the Bravo mission as well. But every minute spent getting to the capsule, arguing with Walsh, and then getting back again might be letting life trickle through her fingers.
If only Walsh had trusted her, then everything would be different now. They could split into two teams, send a couple of people to the capsule to transmit a message home while the rest of them worked on a solution. But it wasn’t like that. She wondered where along the line she’d lost his trust, or if she’d ever really had it to begin with. Maybe he didn’t think she was a worthy leader. Deep inside, she was afraid he was right.