It seemed so meaningless now, small and pointless, when he had been so proud of it. It wasn’t music, not in the sense that Bach was music, it wasn’t important with Ching lying near death, perhaps already dead — no, Teague clung to the knowledge that Peake would tell him if there had been any serious change.
He stared at the melody line, hearing it sung in Ching’s small sweet voice. She had treasured it, then, she had kept it here so that he would not, in a fit of depression, destroy it.
And suddenly Teague felt the weight of guilt slip from his heart. He had not forced Ching to try the experiment which had led to her accident; she had been eager to be free of the paralyzing fear and incapacity, eager to function in free-fall as well as he did, and the others. It was part of her desire to do everything she did as well as it could possibly be done, part of the character which had made her a computer expert. His guilt was pointless. In the face of the death which might face them all if Ching did not recover, everything was pointless, perhaps.
And yet he looked at his quartet with new, cherishing eyes. Ching had thought it good, worth preserving. Perhaps the quartet was pointless, too, as pointless as his guilt.
But it is as important, and as unimportant, as anything else. And as he smoothed out the sheets, he drew a stylus from his pocket and corrected a minor flaw in the music. He saw that Ching had penciled in another small correction. And he knew that if they lived through another day, and Ching did not die, he would show the quartet to Peake, who was undeniably the best musician among them, and ask for his opinion and his help. And some day, if they lived, all of them would play it together. That day might never come, but he was going to prepare for it, anyhow.
He curled up his big body into the bunk where he and Ching had made love, and began to scribble on the music paper. He would finish it, for Ching, and for their love, and for himself. And for all of them. Because, if he was important to them, his music was important too, the best of himself to be shared with them all.
Moira found that she was not hungry; but with the discipline of years, she forced herself to eat. Ravi had chosen foods for her that he knew she liked, and she spared him a grateful thought.
She thought how wretchedly ironic it was that Ching, the most perfect among them, the G-N, the self-sufficient, should be the one to fail them.
If she dies, she thought, and quailed from the thought. She was surprised at her own reaction. As recently as the day before they left Earth, she would have thought Ching was the one who would be most readily expendable, the G-N, the one nobody really liked. She herself had admired Ching, but never really liked her; now she faced the fact that she had envied Ching. Envied her her sharp intelligence, the special High-IQ genes of the G-N; and even more, envied her the perfect self-sufficiency. Envied that Ching had not seemed to need men, whereas she herself, Moira, had reached out, always, for approval, wanting to see herself mirrored in other eyes. Men’s eyes. Feeling isolated by the Wild Talent, the ESP which had made her feel like a freak, she had turned to sex as some people turn to art, or music, or other forms of self-expression; she had enjoyed the appreciation men gave her body, enjoyed reducing the proudest men to her physical slaves. Yet, she realized miserably, although she had given her body to many men, she had never been able to give to any man the happiness she had seen in Teague’s face when Ching snuggled on his lap in the music room.
And now Ching was dying, and Teague had probably got it into his head that it was his fault. Damn it, no, it wasn’t his fault, it was the fault of the damned DeMags; and, she thought, my fault too. I’m supposed to be so good with machinery, and I couldn’t even find it. And I didn’t even trust my ESP enough to tell everybody in no uncertain terms: Stay out of the gym — the trouble isn’t over yet.
Why, she wondered, had she not warned anyone?
And then, humiliated, she knew, If she had demanded, stormed, said that her ESP was giving her severe warnings of more trouble, she would have had to admit that she was a freak, different, not the happy, sexy, carefree Moira they all liked and admired. She would have had, for once, to admit her own difference, her own isolation, that she was not perfectly independent and self-sufficient after all, but a cringing child in the grip of something she, for all her intelligence and all her talent, could not understand.
I was willing to let somebody be killed, rather than admit I was a/raid of my own ESP! If Ching dies, how can I ever live with that?
And here I am again, thinking only of myself and not of Ching.
She realized that she had gone to ail kinds of lengths to avoid admitting this to herself. She had tried to validate herself by making Ravi her slave, then showing her power over him by rejecting his love. And, staring at the floor, she knew that this, at least, she had the power to put right even if they all died.
If I could offer myself to Peake, who doesn’t want me, I can offer myself to Ravi, who wants me in a way that frightens me to think about. I can’t do anything to help Ching, just now. I couldn’t do anything for Peake except make him uncomfortable; and if I go to Teague he would think, and quite rightly too, that I was trying to take a mean advantage of Ching while she’s hurt. The one person I can make happier just now is Ravi.
She put her plate in the disposer and stole quietly toward Ravi’s door.
Ravi had turned the DeMags down as low as he could, and curled up cross-legged, in midair, letting his mind go free in meditation. Yet it stayed fiercely locked to his body, without the reassuring freedom of the meditative state.
It was likely, he thought, that they were all going to die. It did not seem to matter. But he felt sick with regret at the waste. So much they might have done. The whole Cosmos waiting out there to be seen and explored, and they would die before they even left the Solar System.
But it seemed that as he floated there, he was a part of the whole Ship, of the whole crew, suffering Peake’s shaken lack of confidence, Fontana’s surging terror of death, Teague’s guilt… it even seemed that he shared Ching’s lifelessness. He wished fiercely that he had been taught to pray. There Is no human help for this kind of crisis. Therefore we need God,
And then he wondered, sharply; wasn’t it demeaning God, to call on the forces of the Deity for help in purely mundane problems? If God was ineffable, he could not be a kind of super-Mommy, contorting cries and tears and fears. God, if there was a God at all, and Ravi knew he could not admit any such possibility, God had to be something above and beyond all human problems, something not to be questioned about Its divine ways, but accepted, endured, shared. God was all of them together, the crew, the Ship, the stars, everything. And how did he dare to think that he alone suffered for some spiritual awareness? It was the same problem every one of them had; how to deal with the terrifying fact that every human being, every atom of material matter, is forever alone, shut up inside the confines of his own thought processes. Everyone needed that awareness of NOT being alone, and when for a moment they were conscious of the truth, that every atom in the great universe needed every other atom, not to DO anything, but simply to BE, then they had realized God. No matter what they called it.