“You ‘knew’ it! You wouldn't give me a chance. That's why this could never have worked, even if we'd found something—” His breath hissed between his teeth. “Get the hell out of here. Let me be alone by myself.”
She went out of the room, slamming the door to, and fled across the narrow well into her own cabin. She huddled there, eyes closed, clinging to the brace beside the door; burying herself in the deeper blackness of her mind until she lost all track of time. But still the light was waiting for her, she knew that it waited—in this room, or beyond its door, or among the million stars burning endlessly in the depths of night. She was alive, she could not escape it, she had only to open her eyes to see the light, acknowledge it, commit an act of faith. And to open them was in the end easier than keeping them closed.… She opened her eyes, blinking painfully in the glare.
She released her death-grip on the metal, pushed away from the wall toward the trunk by her bed and bedroll. In it were the few possessions she was never without, among them the small trove of her Old World book translations—the keys that had set her free from the solitary confinement of her life and let her share other minds, other worlds. She unfastened the lid and opened it, searching through the shifting, rising contents as carefully as she could. At last her hand found the one book she wanted, the one she had not touched since the moment when Chaim Dartagnan had put it back into her hands during their reunion on Mecca.
She opened it, watching its pages riffle effortlessly in the cover's wake. She separated them hesitantly, randomly, hanging in the air. Her eyes caught an old familiar phrase from this essay, a paragraph of that one, the notes she had scrawled in answer in the margins. She pressed aside one more page, and her eyes fell to the lodestone of a stranger's writing below her own. She had written. It will be lonely to be dead; but it cannot be much more lonely than it is to be alive. And answering her, the stranger had written, Yes, yes, yes.…
The book drifted out of her strengthless hands; she felt her own face grow slick and warm with tears. She cried as she had not cried in longer than she could remember, filling the empty room with lamentation, for all the times that she had held life at bay, taking the world's contempt into herself and letting it wound her. She wept herself to exhaustion and beyond it, knowing as she wept that she would never wash away the last grain of her regret.
But at last her body grew light enough to overcome its own inertia; she went out of her room and crossed the hallwell again. A single cricket chirped somewhere in the commons down below. She tapped softly, and then more loudly, on Chaim's still-closed door, getting no answer. She pushed the door aside. At first she thought the room was empty; until she saw him buried in the cocoon of his sleeping bag, tethered on the frame of his bed. She crossed over to his bedside, making certain that he was only deeply asleep. The chameleon, which hung suspended from a grip on the wall above him, pale with sleep, opened one eye to look at her. Its color began to change, darkening and brightening as it woke, adjusting instinctively to new conditions, as it always did. Two of a kind … she thought, looking back at Chaim, but there was no bitterness in the thought.
Settling back in the air, her arm loosely through a handhold, she watched him sleeping; able to observe him without being observed, laying down her shield at last in the face of his defenseless sleep. Able to see that the past was past: the mistakes paid for, the wrongs righted, as far as humanly possible. She had let the past fill up the present until there was no room left for a new life, for tomorrow.… Who was she punishing besides herself? And why? And when would she have suffered enough … Oh God, is there anyone alive who doesn't hate herself—himself (looking down at Chaim's sleeping face)—in their deepest heart? Just by living we betray ourselves and are betrayed.… And only we can end it.
Chaim stirred toward waking; the sleeping bag strained against the fastenings that held it immobile.
“Chaim.” Her voice shook him gently.
His eyes opened, staring blankly at the ceiling.
“Chaim—”
He turned his head; body and bag revolved toward her. The blank look stayed on his face as he registered her presence. He looked at her, saying nothing; his eyes were red-rimmed.
“How are you?”
He grimaced, at her or at himself, she wasn't sure. “I don't know.”
“I'm better.” She glanced down. “Better than I've been in a long time, I think.”
The incomprehension returned, chill with resentment. And yet somewhere an ember of understanding still strained toward fire.…
She breathed on it tentatively, afraid of being left alone in the darkness now. “I found what you wrote in my book.”
Slow surprise filled his face. “Yeah?” He pulled himself partway out of the sleeping bag.
A nod. “When you're so lonely, you feel like you're the only one …” She twisted her hand around the support bar.
He laughed softly, unexpectedly. “You are.”
She let her mouth relax, and found that it began to smile. She put her free hand up, feeling the strangeness of her face, the smile's distortion of it, the puffiness that remained of her grief. “Chaim—I don't hate myself, anymore. Not the way I've hated myself since Planet Two, at least.”
He plucked at the seal on his sleeping bag, separating his cocoon. “Does that mean I can stop hating myself, then?”
She blinked. “Yes … I suppose it does.”
He searched her eyes for affirmation; she met his gaze, no longer afraid. He pushed up from the bed, a man released. “Partners, then?” He reached out to her.
She nodded; took his hand and squeezed it briefly before she let it go. Warmth stayed in her palm.
The chameleon left its perch and began to creep down the wall, moving with extreme deliberation, going in search of its dwindling, ever-moving food supply. Chaim watched its progress for a long moment. He crossed his arms gingerly against the front of his coveralls, looking up at the ceiling as if he could see through it into space. “So where do we go from here? Where do we look, what do we try next?”
She jerked abruptly at the handhold. “Damn it! I'm not ready to face that now, too.” She shook her head.
“We've got to face it, sooner or later. It's better if we do it now.” He unzipped his pockets and pushed his hands into them. “Everybody in creation's been over the Main Belt with tweezers. We don't have supplies enough to keep random searching for as long as it'll take to hit a strike. We've got to think of something better.”
“There must be something nobody's tried, something everybody's overlooked, for some reason. Like the station on Planet Two that Sekka-Olefin found.” She turned, following his drifting motion out into the room. “Chaim, you're the prospector; isn't there something you heard about, some clue?”
“That's the point—I'm not such a damn great prospector, Mythili! Neither was my old man. He had lousy luck; even when he made a strike, it killed him. And I never learned half of what he knew.” His eyes grew distant. “Except … I do remember something. I told you back at the start, he had a lot of wild get-rich schemes. And there's one that didn't sound as crazy as the rest … about that factory rock from the Demarchy, that just disappeared during the war. Nobody ever found a trace of it, they all figured it must've been hit with a nuke barrage that kicked it clear out of the system. But the odds are against that; it takes a lot of energy to give escape velocity to a rock that big. There was a whole atomic battery plant on it. It was …” he frowned, concentrating, “let's see … my father said that even if it was knocked out of the fore-trojans—and it must've been, since they would have found it by now if it was still there—if it was, then its orbit should still have similar elements. That means it would drift around the Belt over a gigasecond or so, and it should've been spotted again eventually.”