“Of course they were. What the hell else would they be?” His voice was thin and hard, a drawn wire. “Just like we were for coming here. There's nothing here. Let's go.”
She glanced back at him, surprised. “But we just got here. Look, there are other rooms—” She gestured toward the walls of rubbish, other dark, narrow mouths opening on other unknowns.
“Forget it. They won't be any different. There's nothing in this hole but death and garbage.” He began to pull himself toward the entrance.
“Damn it, I worked my butt off getting us here! We're not leaving until I'm sure there's nothing else.” She brandished the knife, forgetting she still held it.
His body whiplashed with angry surprise, or maybe with fear. She let go of the knife, pushing it away from them both, embarrassed. She moved off in another direction, toward the first of the openings. Looking back as she reached it, she saw him still motionless where he had been. “Well, are you going to help me?”
He shook his head, his helmet winked in her light. His arms still pressed his stomach. “No. If you want to wallow in it, go ahead. Not me.”
She turned wordlessly and pulled herself into the opening.
The room beyond was crammed with more print-outs, leaving her only enough space to turn around with claustrophobic eagerness and push her way out again. Chaim drifted, watching, as she moved without comment to the next hole. Beyond it was more paper, but she also found numberless copies of prewar pictorials neatly stacked in boxes. She tried to pull one free, wondering whether they might have historical value; only to find that the pages had fused together from some chemical reaction between the synthetic paper and the ink.
She dropped it in disgust, a memory stirring in her mind like dust disturbed: Recluse. She had read about people like this, and that was what they were called; people who withdrew physically as well as mentally into their own private world. The terrible exhilaration of that crippling fear tingled her skin—the ultimate in freedom, the ultimate in security, the ultimate womb of this place.… She kicked off from the side of a box, diving back into the narrow exit-hole.
She passed Chaim still silently waiting, pulled herself through the last of the dark holes into the last claustrophobic room. This one was not as crowded as the others; there was still enough room for her to move a few meters through a sphere around its perimeter. Its quality was different, too: a wilderness of tangled, broken furniture, stuffed with rags of ancient clothing, jammed with trunks and boxes. She pried the boxes open desultorily, poked among the furniture legs for anything that might have some real value.
Light leaped back at her unexpectedly, prisming with color, as she opened a small trunk crammed beneath a desk. Her breath caught, her fingers dug into the color, droplets of congealed rainbow, gold and silver made molten by her violence. She brought up a necklace set with sapphires the size of peas, a ruby as big as her thumbnail, diamonds … glass. They had to be glass, paste, imitation. Her scintillating joy went out, leaving her empty and dark again. Find a treasure, in this squalid midden? She could as soon expect to find the sun shining. Dartagnan was right, there was nothing here worth wasting their time on; it was only her own stubbornness that had kept them here this long.
But her hands moved through the jewelry again, making it float and spiral, winking at her with secret knowledge as she set her fantasies free and dreamed for one brief second that all of it was real. At last she chose two favorites out of the dance; the time-stained, gem-hung necklace, and a golden man's ring, studded with fake rubies and far too massive for the fingers that closed around it. She carried them with her, leaving the rest to resettle into stasis as she left the final room, defeated.
“Find anything?” Chaim's voice was too weary to carry sarcasm.
“Junk jewelry.” She held the pieces up in her fist, defiantly. “My claim. There's more in there if you want to pick it over.”
“I just want to get the hell out of here.” He disappeared into the glacier mass of print-outs.
She followed him through, and back along the corridor of dark stone; he was already waiting in the lock when she reached its end. They went through it together, and she watched him throw himself against the wheel like a man with death at his heels. He reached the Mother ahead of her in a reckless outward leap, almost closing her out of the ship's lock in his impatience.
He peeled off his suit and left it hanging in midair, slamming away and up through the levels of the ship before she could get out of her own. Following him upward, half curious and half concerned, she listened in the emptiness outside the closed door of his cabin, and heard very clearly the sounds of his retching.
She waited until there were no more sounds, and rapped on the door. “Chaim?” There was no answer. She pulled the door open, and entered his cabin for the first time. “Chaim?”
He looked up at her from across the room, where he clung to the doorframe of the bathroom entrance, doubled over in what looked like prayer. But one look at his face told her that it was pain, not worship, that humbled his flesh.
“What's wrong?” She was suddenly frightened for them both. “Can I help you?”
“Pills … in that drawer.” He stretched out his hand, a gesture and a plea.
She moved across the room and opened the top drawer of the cupboard, hearing the magnets snap. Inside, drifting up from a nest of clothing, she found a large, half-empty bottle of pills, plucked it out. “Antacids? There are just antacids—”
“Give them to me!” His hand flagged her frantically.
She carried them to him; he fumbled for a handful, spilling them out into the air. He ate several at once, chewing, grimacing, swallowing. “Damn! Damn …” He pressed his ash-colored face against a rigid arm. “God, I don't want to start bleeding—”
“What is it? For God's sake, Chaim, tell me what it is!” She shook him.
“My gut. My ulcer.”
“An ulcer?” She let him go. “You have an ulcer?”
He nodded.
“Shiva! Why didn't you tell me!”
“Why?” he gasped, not looking at her. “What was the point?”
“Because it's a danger—to both of us!” Her hands closed over the cloth of her jumpsuit in sudden empathy. “Don't you have anything stronger than that?” The antacid pills and bottle were searching for the floor.
“I couldn't afford it.”
She bit her tongue; said, as quietly as she could, “Do you think it's bleeding now?” She had read only a little about ulcers, enough to understand his fear: A perforation could be fatal without medical treatment.
He shook his head. “No sign when I … No. But it gets worse and worse. I never hurt this bad before.”
“What we just saw in there: I didn't know it bothered you so much. I thought you saw a lot of that kind of thing, before—” breaking off, totally uncomprehending.
“And I always hated it! I still hate it. I hate going on and on, never finding anything worth a damn. And always alone—” Tears welled in his eyes; she watched incredulously as they overflowed, spreading across his face in a shining film. “Like those crazy bastards down in the rock, drowning in garbage, dying by centimeters—just like this goddamned system!” His body spasmed with pain and frustration.
“But we're not like them.” She remembered abruptly the strange emotion that had caught her soul there in the dark entrails of the rock.
“We're worse. We had a chance to be a' team; more than a team, a—” He looked up again at her, and she stopped the word with her eyes, as she had stopped it once before.
“No. Never.” Her own words shivered and paled abruptly. She shook her head, needing her whole body to force the motion. “Not after what happened.” She turned her back on him, no longer able to keep her eyes shielded. The bare, ivory-colored walls of his cabin seemed to blur into infinity. “You knew that.”