Lifeline

He had sat in the lounge with her, pointing out at the universe and tracing the constellations for her. Jessie had been intrigued by the idea of connect-the-dots with the stars, and had made up her own constellations, drawing a chair and a tree, and in the majestic form of Orion, she had drawn her “diddy.”

Jessie had cried when her mother had left for that short sabbatical on Earth, to see trees again, and mountains.…

Once again, like the shark’s mouth of a nightmare, McLaris remembered Jessie’s cracked, empty faceplate with the air hissing out. And though he tried and tried, he couldn’t move in his own splintered agony to help her.

He had told her to be brave. He had told her she’d be all right.

McLaris activated the keyboard. The instrument played back the last song in its memory—a crystalline, synthesized version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

McLaris remembered the three of them sitting in the Miranda as Jessie pushed on the follow-along keys when they lit up, playing the tune as the computer guided her. McLaris and Stephanie Garland sang along, laughing to drive away their fear and nervousness. Jessie giggled and played the song over and over, until McLaris thought he never wanted to hear it again.

But now, in his quarters, the song came out of the keyboard. Jessie’s fingers had played that song into the computer’s memory. It was like a ghost of his daughter coming back to haunt him. Or to forgive him.

Duncan McLaris sat back on his bunk and tilted his head to look through the window near the ceiling, seeing far beyond the stars. Then he closed his eyes, squeezing out warm moisture to run down along his temples as he lay back.

He kept crying, because there was no one to see him.

Chapter 29

ORBITECH 1—Day 39

The Kibalchich hung in the silent blackness fifty miles away. Even outside of Orbitech 1, suited up and floating without any curved walls to block her view, Karen had to squint to discern the Soviet station. It looked like a brilliant point, smeared into shapelessness by reflected sunlight. She couldn’t even tell if it still rotated, much less if it displayed any signs of life.

She knew she would see some of the frozen bodies from the RIF. The Lagrange gravity well encompassed a huge volume of space, but they were still out there, desiccated by the vacuum, frozen solid, their final expressions intact.

Karen had never been outside before. She didn’t like listening to every breath echoing in her head. The air pressure in her suit made her feel stiff, like a knight in rusty armor. During history’s first space-walk, Alexei Leonov had found it impossible even to bend over enough to get back inside the airlock of the Voskhod 2; if he hadn’t risked a desperate vacuum decompression maneuver he would have died in space, a few inches away from safety. Sometimes Karen wished she had limited her Russian background to being able to read their technical journals, as she had originally intended.

She waited quietly, floating next to Ramis as he prepared himself for the journey, checking his suit, looking around with practiced ease. Karen was accustomed to zero-G from her lab space, but this felt colder somehow, blacker, with the whole wide universe waiting to gobble her up. She couldn’t think of any word to describe the absolute opposite of claustrophobia.

Hour after hour, Brahms had his communications people attempting to contact the Kibalchich. They sent greetings, messages of peace; they announced that Ramis was coming over. No reply. They asked to know why the Soviets had warned them away, why they had stopped sending radio transmissions. Karen could have understood the Russian language herself, but no one had asked for her to respond to any contact.

“There’s nobody over there,” Brahms had said.

“Then how is Ramis supposed to get inside?” she had asked. Brahms looked at her as if she had interrupted his thoughts again.

“Do not worry, Karen,” Ramis had said. “They have emergency-access airlocks studded around the hull—all the colonies have them left over from construction. The crews had to be able to get inside quickly if a disaster happened, or if somebody detected a big solar flare. Maintenance people still use them to go out and inspect the hull. Those airlocks are all over the Aguinaldo and Orbitech 1. I can get in even if the Soviets do not answer when I knock.”

Karen didn’t think it made any sense for the Soviets to break off contact, especially now, when they would all have to pull together and pool resources. The Kibalchich was the smallest of the space colonies; perhaps they had run out of supplies already.

Karen’s stomach felt queasy, though she wasn’t the one going across the gulf. Were they all dead over there? What was Ramis getting himself into?