“Please go on, Rob,” Sigfrid says after a moment.
“I am going on! Give me a minute. It hurts; I guess it’s what you call primal pain.”
“Please don’t diagnose yourself, Rob. Just say it. Let it come out.”
“Oh, shit.”
I reach for a cigarette and then stop the motion. That’s usually a good thing to do when things get tight with Sigfrid, because it will almost always distract him into an argument about whether I am trying to relieve tension instead of dealing with it; but this time I am too disgusted with myself, with Sigfrid, even with my mother. I want to get it over with. I say, “Look, Sigfrid, here’s how it was. I loved my mother a lot, and I know — knew! — she loved me. I knew she wasn’t very good at showing it.”
I suddenly realize I have a cigarette in my hands, and rolling it around without lighting it and, wondrous to say, Sigfrid hasn’t even commented on it. I plunge right on: “She didn’t say the words to me. Not only that. It’s funny, Sigfrid, but, you know I can’t remember her ever touching me. I mean, not really. She would kiss me good night, sometimes. On the top of the head. And I remember she told me stories. And she was always there when needed her. But—”
I have to stop for a moment, to get control of my voice again, so I inhale deeply and evenly through my nose, concentrating breath flow.
“But you see, Sigfrid,” I say, rehearsing the words ahead of time and pleased with the clarity and balance with which I deliver them, “she didn’t touch me much. Except for one way. She was very good to me when I was sick. I was sick a lot. Everybody around the food mines has runny noses, skin infections — you know. She got me everything I needed. She was there, God knows how, holding down a job and taking care of me, all at once. And when I was sick she…”
After a moment Sigfrid says, “Go on, Robbie. Say it.”
I try, but I am still stuck, and he says:
“Just say it the fastest way you can. Get it out. Don’t worry if you understand, or if it makes sense. Just get rid of the words.”
“Well, she would take my temperature,” I explain. “You know, stick a thermometer into me. And she’d hold me for, you know, whatever it is, three minutes or so. And then she’d take the thermometer out and read it.”
I am right on the verge of bawling. I’m willing to let it happen, but first I want to follow this thing through; it is almost a sexual thing, like when you are getting right up to the moment of decision with some person and you don’t think you really want to let her be that much a part of you but you go ahead anyhow. I save up voice control, measuring it out so that I won’t run out before I finish. Sigfrid doesn’t say anything, and after a moment I manage the words:
“You see how it is, Sigfrid? It’s funny. All my life now — what is it, maybe forty years since then? And I still have this crazy notion that being loved has something to do with having things stuck up my ass.”
Chapter 25
There had been a lot of changes on Gateway while I was Out. The head tax had been raised. The Corporation wanted to get rid of some of the extra hangers-on, like Shicky and me; bad news meant that my prepaid per capita wasn’t good for two or three weeks, it was only good for ten days. They had imported a bunch of double-domes from Earth, astronomers, xenotechs, mathmaticians, even old Professor Hegramet was up from Earth, bruised from the lift-off deltas but hopping spryly around the tunnels.
One thing that hadn’t changed was the Evaluation Board, and I was impaled on the hot seat in front of it, squirming while my friend Emma told me what a fool I was. Mr. Hsien was actually doing the telling, Emma only translated. But she loved her voice: “I warned you you’d fuck up, Broadhead. You should have listened to me. Why did you change the setting?”
“I told you. When I found out I was at Gateway Two I couldn’t handle it. I wanted to go somewhere else.”
“Extraordinarily stupid of you, Broadhead.”
I glanced at Hsien. He had hung himself up on the wall by his rolled-up collar and was hanging there, beaming benignly, hands folded. “Emma,” I said, “do whatever you want to do, but get off my back.”
She said sunnily, “I am doing what I want to do, Broadhead, because it’s what I have to do. It’s my job. You knew it was against the rules to change the settings.”
“What rules? It was my ass that was on the line.”
“The rules that say you shouldn’t destroy a ship,” she explained. I didn’t answer, and she chirped some sort of a translation to Hsien, who listened gravely, pursed his lips and then delivered two neat paragraphs in Mandarin. You could hear the punctuation.
“Mr. Hsien says,” said Emma, “that you are a very irresponsible person. You have killed an irreplaceable piece of equipment. It was not your property. It belonged to the whole human race.” He lilted a few more sentences, and she finished: “We cannot make a final determination of your liability until we have further information about the condition of the ship you damaged. According to Mr. Ituno he will have a complete check made of the ship at the first opportunity. There were two xenotechs in transit for the new planet, Aphrodite, at the time of his report. They will have reached Gateway Two by now, and we can expect their findings, probably, with the next out-pilot. Then we will call you again.”
She paused, looking at me, and I took it the interview was over. “Thanks a lot,” I said, and pushed myself toward the door. She let me get all the way to it before she said:
“One more thing. Mr. Ituno’s report mentions that you worked on loading and fabricating suits on Gateway Two. He authorizes a per diem payment to you amounting to, let me see, twenty-five hundred dollars. And your out-captain, Hester Bergowiz, has authorized payment of one percent of her bonus to you for services during the return flight; so your account has been credited accordingly.”
“I didn’t have a contract with her,” I said, surprised.
“No. But she feels you should have a share. A small share, to be sure. Altogether—” she looked under a paper, “it comes to twenty-five hundred plus fifty-five hundred — eight thousand dollars your account has been credited with.”
Eight thousand dollars! I headed for a dropshaft, grabbed an up-cable and pondered. It was not enough to make any real difference. It certainly would not be enough to pay the damages they would soak me for messing up a ship. There wasn’t enough money in the universe to pay that, if they wanted to charge me full replacement cost; there was no way to replace it.
Vessel 1-103, Voyage 022D18. Crew G. Herron.
Transit time out 107 days 5 hours. Note: Transit time return 103 days 15 hours.
Extract from log. “At 84 days 6 hours out the Q instrument began to glow and there was unusual activity in the control lights. At the same time I felt a change in the direction of thrust. For about one hour there were continuing changes, then the Q light went out and things went back to normal.”
Conjecture: Course change to avoid some transient hazard, perhaps a star or other body? Recommend computer search of trip logs for similar events.
On the other hand, it was eight thousand dollars more than I’d had.
I celebrated by buying myself a drink at the Blue Hell. While I was drinking it, I thought about my options. The more I thought about them, the more they dwindled away.
They would find me culpable, no doubt about that, and the least they’d assess me would be somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Well, I didn’t have it. It might be a lot more, but that didn’t make any difference; once they take away all you have, there isn’t anything left anyway.