The pursuers have guns and are blazing away. The fugitive sees her and turns in her direction. Clea is his only chance.
She hesitates and throws open the hatch. He leaps on board in a hail of lasers. The flyer bucks but lifts off and they are away.
But the man is bleeding profusely.
Clea examines him and sees quickly that he’s dying. She does what she can. In the meantime, another flyer takes off in pursuit. In a spectacular sequence, she leads it into a tunnel where an oncoming train takes it out. But the aircraft has also suffered damage and is forced to land.
“What happened?” she asks her passenger when they are on the ground. “What did they want?”
He produces the Raven. Minutes later he is dead and she detects movement in the trees around her. She hides the artifact under a seat. Nomads emerge from the woods and take her prisoner.
They talk of selling her into slavery. Clea tries to win the favor of her captors by performing a torrid torchlight dance. It is this sequence which had prompted Kim to select Raven. The viewer never quite gets a good look at the dancer: everything is firelight and shadow, tempo and drum. Passion and temptation.
While her doppelganger writhed and spun, Kim sat back with a mix of satisfaction and nervousness. It was, after all, not very subtle. If Isabella’s DNA had opened the way for Columbus, hers was now performing a similar service for Solly. A smile formed on her lips: the eternal female, real or virtual, civilized or barbarian. The game never changes.
Solly watched the shadow play, but kept his eyes averted from her.
He knew of course what was happening and it was evident he was trying to play his own game, pretending to be objectively amused by the scenario. But she saw the tension in his face.
She lost track of the narrative at this point. The entire world—curious that she would think in that term, given that the entire world, in this reality, consisted exclusively of the interior of the Hammersmith–the entire world squeezed down to Solly’s eyes, narrowed, looking straight ahead, aware of her all the same.
“I don’t think,” he said finally, still avoiding her glance, “this is a good idea.”
She let almost a minute pass. They might have been frozen in place, illuminated only by the flickering glow of the VR. “Okay,” she said at last. “Whatever you think.”
Solly touched the remote and shut down the projector. The room went dark save for the soft glow of security lights along the base of the wall.
Nobody moved.
“Kim.” His voice was low and seemed to come from far away. “I think I love you.”
And there it was: finally out in the open.
She got up and stood before him, entwined her arms around his neck and drew him to her.
“I’ve always loved you,” he said.
“I know.” It was what made the moment particularly frightening. And particularly joyful.
He pulled her down beside him. Their lips brushed lightly, withdrew, came back. “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said.
She could feel his heart beat. Or maybe it was hers. It was getting hard to tell.
His cheek was hot against hers and she clung to him, reveling in the passion of the moment. She felt him shudder. But he still seemed tentative.
“It’s okay, Solly,” she said.
Inhibited by the behavior pattern of more than a decade, he drew just far enough away to look at her. “I’m not sure about this,” he said.
“Be sure.” She took his hand and placed it against her breast.
The bunks were not portable, nor were they big enough to accommodate two people, so after the first couple of nights, which were spent in a tangle on the floor of the rec room, they retreated to their individual quarters after their passions had been satisfied. Ham, Solly remarked, had not been designed for lovemaking.
Kim found the arrangement eminently unsatisfactory. Solly agreed and removed the mattresses from two of the beds, added some cushions, took over a third compartment, and turned it into their sleeping room. It worked quite well.
As one might expect, morale on the spacecraft soared. Solly revealed to her, under prodding after an offhand remark, that in his view she’d spent much of the first week in a general funk. Reviewing her moods, she realized it was probably true. Despite his presence, she’d felt alone because it was she who had pushed the project, she who had insisted it was worthwhile to hang their careers out to dry. She who would bear the responsibility if they found nothing. And then she had learned that Solly thought it would be better if the mission failed.
Well, now at least Solly had come on board. So to speak.
Kim began to think of those days as the happiest of her life. By the end of the fourth week, she was wondering how she could possibly have waited so long to take him.
At midnight on the thirty-second day of the voyage, February 30, the second nova would be triggered. “If we get lucky,” she said, “Beacon will be obsolete before they’ve blown Ozma.” Ozma was scheduled to be the last star in the series.
Despite the exhilaration that came with giving herself free rein with Solly, she had begun to develop an irritation at being cut off from the outside world. “It isn’t just the newscasts,” she explained. “It’s like being in a cocoon.”
“You need more candlelight and music,” Solly said. “It’s probably the same effect that causes hallucinations in the liners. There, it’s less pressing because there are a thousand or so people on board. They run casinos and gossip shows and all kinds of things like that, but even then the sense of extreme solitude affects people. Here there are only the two of us.”
“I recall,” Kim said, “reading an account once about a woman stranded on a world for three months before help came. She had all she could do to stay sane, knowing she was the only person on the planet.”
Solly nodded.
“Do you feel it?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. “The ship has echoes. It’s like an old house. But look, if it’s getting to you, we can jump back into realspace and at least talk to somebody. You could ask Phil Agostino how he’s doing.”
“How long would that take? To talk to somebody at the Institute?”
“Several days for the transmission to make the round-trip.”
“Not really worth it, is it?”
“It is if you need to do it.”
“No,” she said. “Let’s keep moving.”
That night, at midnight, they toasted the Beacon Project. They did it with mixed drinks and crystal glasses that Kim had brought aboard, and Solly expressed his fervent hope that, when the light from the novas reached Greenway in several centuries, people would still remember Kim Brandywine.
She blushed. “Why me?”
“It would be a reminder of a time when the human race thought it was alone. Before Brandywine opened the door.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Kim, refilling both glasses.
“I’ve something more important for you to drink to.”
She laughed and put down her glass and kissed him and rubbed her breasts against him, warming to see the light come into his eyes. “What could be more important?”
“Kim,” he said, “I know this is a special circumstance, and I don’t want to read more into it than what’s there. But I want you to know that, when we go home, wherever we go from here, I’m not going to want things to go back to being the way they were.”
It was the moment she’d both feared and hoped for. “I don’t think we ought to make any decisions like that out here,” she said.
“Why not? Or is that a no?
They were sitting on their impromptu bed, both in underclothes. A Nelson adventure was running, full-masted naval warships blazing away at one another. They’d turned off the sound and reduced the images so that the vessels simply floated in the middle of the room.
“No, it isn’t. I just don’t think we should rush into this.” She wondered why she was saying something so at odds with what she was feeling.
“Okay,” he said.