He carried the books back to the ship on top of a pannier of food packets. The drive accumulators were nearly recharged. He could leave whenever he liked, but it was better to charge them all the way and he did not think there was any need to hurry. He spent most of an hour filling plastic bags with water for the tedious journey. What a pity there were no readers in the ship to make it less tedious! And then, wearying of the labor, he decided to say good-bye to the Dead Men. They might, or might not, respond, or even care. But he had no one else to talk to.
Wan was fifteen years old, tall, stringy, very dark by nature and darker still from the lights in the ship, where he spent so much of his time. He was strong and self-reliant. He had to be. There was always food in the hoppers, and other goods for the taking, when he dared. Once or twice a year, when they remembered, the Dead Men would catch him with their little mobile machine and take him to a cubicle in the blue passages for a boring day during which he was given a rather complete physical examination. Sometimes he had a tooth filled, usually he received some long-acting vitamin and mineral shots, and once they had fitted him with glasses. But he refused to wear them. They also reminded him, when he neglected it too long, to study and learn, both from them and from the storehouses of books. He did not need much reminding. He enjoyed learning. Apart from that, he was wholly on his own. If he wanted clothes, he went into the gold and stole them from the Old Ones. If he was bored, he invented something to do. A few days in the passages, a few weeks on the ship, a few more days in the other place, then back to repeat the process. Time passed. He had no one for company, had not had since he was four and his parents disappeared, and had almost forgotten what it was like to have a friend. He did not mind. His life seemed complete enough to him, since he had no other life to compare it with.
Sometimes he thought it would be nice to settle in one place or another, but this was only dreaming. It never reached the stage of intention. For more than eleven years he had been shuttling back and forth like this. The other place had things that civilization did not. It had the dreaming room, where he could lie fiat and close his eyes and seem not to feel alone. But he could not live there, in spite of plenty of food and no dangers, because the single water accumulator produced only a trickle. Civilization had much that the outpost did not have: the Dead Men and the books, scary exploring and daring raids for clothes or trinkets, something happening. But he could not live there either, because the frog-jaws would surely catch him sooner or later. So he commuted.
The main lobby door to the place of the Dead Men did not open when Wan stepped on the treadle. He almost bumped his nose. Surprised, he stopped and then gingerly pushed against the door, then harder. It took all his strength to force it open. Wan had never had to open it by hand before, though now and then it had hesitated and made disturbing noises. That was an annoyance. Wan had experienced machines that broke down before; it was why the green corridors were no longer very useful. But that was only food and warmth, and there was plenty of that in the red, or even the gold. It was worrisome that anything should go wrong around the Dead Men, because if they broke down he had no others.
Still, all looked normal; the room with the consoles was brightly fluoresced, the temperature was comfortable and he could hear the faint drone and rare click of the Dead Men behind their panels as they thought their lonely, demented thoughts and did whatever they did when he was not speaking to them. He sat in his chair, shifting his rump as always to accommodate to the ill-designed seat, and pulled the headset down over his ears.
“I am going to the outpost now,” he said.
There was no answer. He repeated it in all of his languages, but no one seemed to want to talk. That was a disappointment. Sometimes two or three of them would be eager for company, maybe even more. Then they could all have a nice, long chat, and it would be as though he were not really alone at all. Almost as though he were part of a “family”, a word he knew from the books and from what the Dead Men told him, but hardly remembered as a reality. That was good. Almost as good as when he was in the dreaming place, where for a while he could have the illusion of being part of a hundred families, a million families. Hosts of people! But that was more than he could handle for very long. And so, when he had to leave the outpost to return for water, and for the more tangible company of the Dead Men, he was never sorry. But he always wanted to come back to the cramped couch and the velvety metal blanket that covered him in it, and to the dreams.
It was waiting for him; but he decided to give the Dead Men another chance. Even when they were not eager for talk, sometimes they were interestable if addressed directly. He thought for a moment, and then dialed number fifty-seven.
A sad, distant voice in his ear was mumbling to itself: “...tried to tell him about the missing mass. Mass! The only mass on his mind was twenty kilos of boobs and ass! That floozy, Doris. One look at her and, oh, boy, forget about the mission, forget about me. . .
Frowning, Wan poised his finger to cancel. Fifty-seven was such a nuisance! He liked to listen to her when she made sense, because she sounded a little like the way he remembered his mother. But she always seemed to go from astrophysics and space travel and other interesting subjects directly to her own troubles. He spat at the point in the panels behind which he had elected to believe fifty-seven lived-a trick he had learned from the Old Ones- hoping she would say something interesting.
But she didn’t seem to intend to. Number fifty-seven-when she was coherent she liked to be called Henrietta- was babbling on about high redshifts and Arnold’s infidelities with Doris. Whoever they were. “We could have been heroes,” she sobbed, “and a ten-million-dollar grant, maybe more, who knows what they’d pay for the drive? But they kept on sneaking off in the lander, and-Who are you?”
“I’m Wan,” the boy said, smiling encouragingly even though he did not think she could see him. She seemed to be coming into one of her lucid times. Usually she didn’t know he was speaking to her. “Please keep on talking.”
There was a long silence, and then, “NGC 1199,” she said. “Sagittarius A West.”
Wan waited politely. Another long pause, and then she said, “He didn’t care about proper motions. He made all his moves with Doris. Half his age! And the brain of a turnip. She should never have been on the mission in the first place-“
Wan wobbled his head like a frog-jawed Old One. “You are very boring,” he said severely, and switched her off. He hesitated, then dialed the professor, number fourteen: although Eliot was still a Harvard undergraduate, his imagery was that of a fully mature man. And a genius at that. ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws.’ The self-deprecation of mass man carried to its symbolic limit. How does he see himself? Not merely as a crustacean. Not even as a crustacean, only the very abstraction of a crustacean: claws. And ragged, at that. In the next line we see-“
Wan spat again at the panel as he disconnected; the whole face of the wall was stained with the marks of his displeasure. He liked when Doc recited poetry, not so much when he talked about it. With the craziest of the Dead Men, like fourteen and fifty-seven, you didn’t have any choice about what happened. They rarely responded, and almost never in a way that seemed relevant, and you either listened to what they happened to be saying or you turned them off.
It was almost time for him to go, but he tried one more time: the only one with a three-digit number, his special friend, Tiny Jim. “Hello, Wan.” The voice was sad and sweet. It tingled in his mind, like the sudden frisson of fear that he felt near the Old Ones. “It is you, Wan, isn’t it?”
