Ben pulled it up the stairs. The sled remained parallel to the ground and stuck out oddly from the staircase, and Ben kept checking to make sure Ara’s body wasn’t in danger of sliding off. They brought her to the house and let the sled drift to the balcony floor at the top of the stairs. Ben fixed the sled in place while Harenn went inside to get a sheet to draw over Ara’s face. Harenn’s shout brought him hurtling into the house.
He followed her yelling to the living room. When he got there, he stared in shock. Harenn stood in the center of the room, her arms wrapped around Kendi’s waist. Kendi’s unmoving feet were half a meter off the floor. A rope made a loop around his neck. The other end was tied around one of the high ceiling beams. An endtable lay overturned to one side.
“Help me!” Harenn shouted. “Hurry! I can’t hold him up!”
Ben continued to stare. After a moment, the shock faded, replaced by his earlier crushing despondency. Nothing mattered. Ben was ultimately alone whether Kendi was alive or dead. If Kendi wanted to die, let him.
“Ben!” Harenn gasped. Kendi was slipping from her grasp.
And then more images of his mother washed over him. Her gentle hands. Her crumpled body. Her laugh. His own pain. Ben’s chest tightened with grief and tears he had yet to shed. He had lost his mother. He couldn’t bear losing Kendi, too.
“Ben!”
Ben moved. He rushed over and wrapped his own arms around Kendi, holding him up and preventing the noose from choking him. Harenn righted the endtable and climbed up beside Kendi. She produced her knife and swiftly sawed through the rope. Ben gently lowered him to the ground and, for the second time that day, felt for a pulse. Kendi’s heart was still beating, though he had stopped breathing. Training took over. Ben tilted Kendi’s head back, pinched his nostrils, and breathed into Kendi’s mouth while Harenn got on the phone. Ben was only dimly aware of her voice in the background. His entire world had shrunk to breathing for Kendi.
Come on, he thought. Don’t do this, Kendi. Come on!
“There is no answer at the medical center,” Harenn said behind him, but Ben barely heard. Twelve breaths, check pulse again. Still strong. Another breath and another.
Come on, Kendi. Breathe for me! I lost Mom. I’m not losing you, too.
Abruptly, Kendi coughed into Ben’s mouth. He drew a shuddering breath, then blinked weakly.
“Ben?” he said in a hoarse voice.
It was only then that Ben noticed he was crying again. “Kendi. God, what were you doing?”
“It hurts,” Kendi said. “All life, Ben-why didn’t you let me die?”
Because I love you, you idiot, Ben thought, but he couldn’t make himself say the words. Instead, he said, “We need to get you to the hospital.”
“I told you,” Harenn said, making Ben jump. He had forgotten she was there. “The medical center is not responding. I suspect they are overloaded or understaffed. Or both.”
“We can’t leave him like this.” Ben sat back on his haunches. “What if he tries again?”
“We need to get him away from here,” Harenn said. “We need to take him someplace where he can reach the Dream again.”
“The Post Script,” Ben said. “It’s still at port, isn’t it? Maybe if we move Kendi far enough away from Bellerophon, he’ll snap out of it.”
“Then when should go now.” Harenn helped Ben haul Kendi to his feet.
“We can’t just leave Mom laying there,” Ben said.
Harenn looked ready to protest, then saw the expression on Ben’s face. “We will take her with us and put her in a cryo-chamber on the ship,” she said.
The spaceport, however, was too far away to walk. They managed to get Kendi and the gravity sled to the monorail station where, as luck would have it, the train lay like a dead snake on the track. Ben cautiously poked his head into one of the cars. About half a dozen people and one Ched-Balaar were on board. All of them were alive, but none of them reacted to Ben.
“We’re taking this train to the spaceport,” he announced. “If you don’t want to go, get off now.”
No one reacted. Ben bundled Kendi into the empty control compartment, carefully not looking at the gravity sled and its white-draped burden as Harenn guided it into the passenger area behind him. Ben wondered what had happened to the engineer.
The controls turned out to be easy to run, but the trip itself was a nightmare. The heavy lethargy kept slowing him down, making him want to quit. Once, a series of shots rang out and one of windows shattered. This gave Ben a brief spurt of adrenaline-fueled energy, but it didn’t last.
Somehow, he got the train down to the spaceport. Ben hauled Kendi onto the platform while Harenn guided the gravity sled. They rushed through the spaceport as quickly as they could, ignoring the clumps of apathetic humans and Ched-Balaar.
Ben had to get Kendi to safety. He couldn’t let Kendi die like he had let his mother die. The words became a mantra as he picked his way through the port with Harenn and the sled behind him. He couldn’t let Kendi die. He wouldn’t let Kendi die.
Eventually they emerged near the landing field. Ben was jumping at every noise, afraid someone with no feelings left might have gotten hold of an energy pistol or rifle. It felt like gun sights were being trained on him from every shadow. Every corner held a potential lunatic. By the time he got to the Post Script, he was wringing wet with sweat.
The hatch swung obediently open at Ben’s touch and they maneuvered the sleds inside. Harenn went down to the engines while Ben got Kendi off the sled and up to the bridge. He parked Kendi in the captain’s chair while he powered up the systems. His earlier lassitude had mostly left him, swallowed up by the need to make sure Kendi was safe, that he wouldn’t end up-that he would be all right.
“Peggy-Sue,” Ben said, “are you on line?”
“On line,” the computer replied.
He got Harenn on the intercom and they went through the pre-flight checks together. Each check was a small goal, one step toward the overall one. Focusing on the little problems let him ignore the big ones.
An hour later, the checks were done and Ben tried to contact the control tower to authorize takeoff. Kendi slumped in the captain’s chair, sometimes quiet, sometimes crying softly. Ben only spared him enough attention to make sure he didn’t do anything foolish.
To Ben’s complete lack of surprise, there was no answer from the control tower despite repeated attempts to raise one. He got Harenn on the intercom again and told her to ready herself for takeoff.
The Post Script rumbled heavily into the sky. Ben didn’t bother with the sound dampeners. Although fully licensed, Ben wasn’t as experienced as Kendi, and the power drain from the dampeners made the ship harder to handle. If the noise spooked a few dinosaurs, that was too bad.
Ben worked the controls calmly and efficiently, as if he piloted a ship with his mother’s corpse in it every day. The blue sky on the screens darkened to purple and faded to black. Stars made hard points of light. He kept a sharp eye on sensors, but picked up no other ships in flight. Several circled the planet in orbit, and he kept his distance from them. The moment he had cleared Bellerophon’s gravity well, he let the ship coast while he figured out where to go. It ultimately didn’t matter to him, but he didn’t want to bring Kendi close to any other planets that had been swallowed by the thing in the Dream.
It was now no mystery to Ben why the Silent from the engulfed planets had remained missing and why none of the investigating ships had returned. With apathy, sorrow, and even sociopathic behavior overwhelming the people, they would not care about notifying anyone else. He only hoped taking Kendi out of the affected area would help. It might not. Ben’s knowledge of Dream theory was far from expert, but he did know that the Silent built their image of the Dream from the minds closest to them. A Silent who moved to another “place” in the Dream simply leapfrogged to other minds and built his or her image from them. Getting Kendi away from the minds on Bellerophon and closer to untainted ones should make him recover.
Unless Kendi’s mind kept reaching back to Bellerophon. Unless Ben’s understanding was less than perfect. Unless…
Ben put the doubts out of his head. If he turned out to be wrong, he’d try something else. He couldn’t let Kendi die like he had let his mother die.
Ben consulted the charts and decided to avoid the closest planets, since they might well be suffering under the same problem as Bellerophon. Instead he chose a planet toward the center of the Independence Confederation.
