DA9// In my dream state I see Werhner vividly, straight, sandy hair, biting his lower lip as he punches a sequence through the console. I can hear voices. I feel my body shift on satin, feel a change in my weight as I sense a massive relocation. In my half sleep I’m not sure what’s going on—a vivid memory of the Daedalus in the movement of this ship, in the metallic voices of dome control—I hear thruster corrections and vane angles traded between the bridge and propulsion, think this is not a liftoff but a course correction, a course change, vaguely think we launched yesterday, yes, remember the moving paintings. But there’s something else.
I can hear voices. As I open my eyes I am as sluggishly alert as a man coming up from underwater. I struggle to rise on the recliner, come awake, the sight of the cabin is a relief, though I don’t feel quite all here. Collette is at the foot in a white satin robe, her hair falling loose on her shoulders. Behind her is the window/wall’s display of the earth’s moon, it is moving onto the screen with the underwater motion of large bodies in deep space, it fills the screen. We are near enough to see the nested craters rising like islands in flat seas, near enough to distinguish volcanic masses from fields of thrown rubble.
Of course. Moonloop, day nine of the program. Through the fantasy co-op yesterday and overnight we have reached the tangent point for our orbit around the moon. The audio is traffic from theTube’s own dome, fixing the tangent angle. I am blinking awake to the sight of the full moon; we are close enough to see the large base at Tranquility, a gold-gray mass with a dull sheen punctuated by the amber double loops of SciCom’s insignia. What a vision—the huge, bright circle of the moon, blue-black deep space beyond, strange and familiar at once.
“Mornin’, lover,” Collette says as I sit up. “We have an orbit correction. Thought you’d like to watch.”
She runs her hand lightly over my thigh as she moves from the foot of the recliner toward me, moves her body, warm and soft, against mine. I look at the moon, the huge, luminous ball we are approaching, identify the vast seas: oceanus procellarum, mare nectaris, mare serenetatis. I realize with a start that it is not the vision which distracts me, not the way I came awake, but one of the voices which crackles through the cabin—yes, that’s it, the voice from propulsion sounds almost like Cooper’s. Its inflection, a slow American drawl, is smooth behind the static, and I can almost imagine Cooper speaking, his large frame leaning over the program table, his headset almost lost in his wild black hair and bushy beard. But the voice is definitely older, its roughness a deepening from age, another body.
Initial on number three.
Comin’ right along.
Mark.
Roger. Mark one.
“Lover, are you all right?”
The confusion is not unpleasant, but that voice like Cooper’s shakes me, makes me wonder where I am, gives me the sensation of floating free without a point of reference. I wonder what he told SciCom before he died, what he said in that last Guam interview; now I’m wondering if he’s alive.
“You don’t look well,” Collette says. “I’ve got something to tell you Rawley. But it had better wait. What’s wrong?”
Clean burn.
Number three, number three.
I ask Collette if she minds my switching off the audio. She says no, it doesn’t matter; starts to rise. I put my hand on her shoulder, get off the recliner, lean over, and hit the toggle on the small console myself. The crackling and the voices disappear. Soft music in the unit, the tape has looped back to Bartok. I settle back on the recliner, concentrate on the music, and my mind mercifully shifts to the first time I heard this music on this ship.
I look into Collette’s liquid green eyes.
She seems a little shaken herself. She slides one hand across my chest, the other around to the back of my neck, and sidles up half behind me. I sigh and feel the relief of it, the light pressure, the sexy warmth of her touch. The weight of her breasts moves across my back, settles as she sighs.
The moon’s bright image is still on the window/wall, and in its silvery light I turn to her, watch her full lips part as she lies back. She is stroking my chest with long, thin fingers, her nail polish as silver as the moon. Tracing patterns with her fingertips, her touch is now so light she barely bristles the ends of the hair; the sensation is extraordinary.
“Better?” she asks. She takes my hand and moves it beneath her breasts, presses upward into its firm weight.
“Mmmm,” I say. “Let’s imagine we took the Lancia. We’re about three hundred kilometers south of LasVenus, alone in the desert, we haven’t seen another vehicle for an hour. We’ve made it.”
“Nice thought,” she murmurs. “Nice to think of it here. Well, at least we’re together.”
Why, I begin to wonder, does she say that? But I am lost already. I sink to her, my hand drifting to the undulating firmness of her thighs, her mons, as she rises to meet me.
As she pours the coffee, aromatic and brown-black, Collette’s hand is slightly wobbly on the handle of the silver pot and she avoids my eye. Now I ask her what it is.
“I wish I didn’t have to tell you this,” she says quietly, sitting on the edge of the recliner; I am on the couch. “Rawley, that man, Taylor, he’s on the ship. Erica came in and woke me at five a.m. She said an early day-briefing, that’s what she’d been told. But it was him, he wanted to talk to both of us. I saw him, Rawley, on this ship.”
I moan. Tantalized by Werhner’s last message from Agana Base, growing smug over my appeal, I have kept Taylor out of my mind. For the life of me I can’t figure out what’s going on—and at the same time wonder about the voice like Cooper’s, wonder if the similarity was a hallucination on my part, triggered by the strange data Werhner reported yesterday, or now if Taylor might have had something to do with my hearing it.
“I hope he didn’t give you too bad a time,” I say finally. “I guess I really should have expected him to board the ship. But I didn’t think he’d bother you. They don’t give up,” I sigh. Then after a moment I ask Collette if there was anything in particular Taylor wanted to know.”
She shrugs, puts one knee over the other as she leans forward. She is still wearing her white satin robe, she’s barefoot, but now the robe seems to droop. “The same thing. Are you talking about the flight you were on, are you saying anything about your debriefing. I think he’s worried about you, maybe whether you’ll put him on report. He asked me if you were doing anything outside the program.”
“The debriefing’s suspended,” I say. “He doesn’t have the right.”
Collette nods, tight-lipped; there is an exhaustion in her green eyes. “He made me wish we had taken off in that beautiful car, just run from LasVenus. But what’s the use?”
“Taylor,” I say with a kind of nervous scorn. “What if you did go through with a resignation now, what if you did quit?”
“Now that we’re in flight, they’d, well… It’s what we talked about before. They’d put me in third class and make me pay. I suppose I could stay here with you. But they’d send you someone else, another woman.”
Despite my growing depression I can’t resist taking advantage of the look on Collette’s face, a hangdog disgust at both third class and the idea of another woman living in the cabin. “How do you know I’d mind?’ I ask with a smile.