could collect. His luck ran true to the end; all bad. A corporate scout filed on his claim and they got it all.”
“What went wrong? What happened to him?” she asked, in spite of herself.
“I don't know.” Chaim's arms crossed his stomach, his hands pulled restlessly at his coveralls. Mythili felt her own stomach clench and turn, remembering what had happened to Sekka-Olefin. “But it doesn't matter to him anymore. And it probably won't matter to anybody before much longer; not even to me.” He pushed off from the panel, reached the rim of the well to the lower levels and sank into it.
She watched him go, uncomprehending; feeling words rattle against her teeth like pebbles, cold and heavy. But she turned back to the board, watching the chronometer tick off seconds like a census of stars.
The census mounted. As seconds piled up into kiloseconds and megaseconds, Mythili wove patterns of behavior that avoided Chaim Dartagnan as completely as possible, keeping her mind as empty of his presence on board as the night they moved through was empty.
Yet even the emptiness turned against her; not bringing her peace of mind, but only leaving room for memories to grow wild, spiny and bitter. She could deny the present or deny the past, but not both together: more and more she could see only the resemblance of this voyage to the last one she had made, with Dartagnan the mediaman, and Sabu Siamang the killer. There was no solace in silence, no comfort in avoidance, no escaping from the gray limbo of her own mind.
She forced herself to perform the routines of her normal shipboard duties—although until they reached the Main Belt her responsibilities were few and unchallenging. She had found herself unconsciously competing with Dartagnan even for the simple activity of feeding their pet; until one day, unused to the behavior of insects, one of them had accidentally set the supply of live crickets free. The creatures had scattered, escaping into all parts of the ship, filling its crannies with their unexpected, chirping song. And so she had set Lucky free as well, to wander the ship at will, capturing crickets with a tongue of impossible length and quickness.
From time to time she was aware of a brief, random fluctuation in the ship's energy levels; but her cursory attempts to trace the source came to nothing. She had checked out the signal separater that Fitch had given them, using every imaginable test, until she was certain it hid no unwelcome secrets. There was nothing else that she could discover a hidden glitch in, and so the problem drifted out of her thoughts again. She did not bother to mention it in her brief exchanges with Chaim—she spoke with him only when she could not avoid it.
She ate listlessly, alone in her cabin; slept badly, dreaming dreams filled with vivid terror which hung on into her waking. She tried to read the books that lay in her private trunk, that had always been her solace; but even they were corrupted by the knowledge that Dartagnan's hands had violated them, that his mind had shared the intimacy of their pages and intruded on her innermost thoughts. She put them back in her trunk again, hating him, hating all men. Hating even her father, who in his own weakness, unable to produce the son he wanted, had given those books to her and encouraged her to act a man's role in a world that would never accept it. And she felt herself sliding further down the yielding walls into a formless blackness where nothing had meaning; knowing that she needed something, anything, to hold on to, but lacking the strength to reach out and find it.
She gathered enough strength, wearily, to perform the functional act of feeding herself one more time; even though her stomach was a shrunken, hard lump of denial. She slipped out of her cabin, confident that Chaim was not outside his own across the well, and let herself fall downward into the eating area. The
But as her eyes readjusted their scale she realized that she was not alone this time. Chaim balanced lightly on a seat at the near side of the wide, dull-metal table in the room's center. He turned as she entered, his face almost eager. She looked away from it quickly, not quickly enough, as her feet settled with a click onto the mirroring floor.
“Mythili—”
She moved away from him stubbornly, toward the food lockers. She pulled a can out of one and pushed it into the warmer without even looking at the label. “What are you doing here?” she said resentfully. She had redesigned her days almost unconsciously so that she ate and slept at nonstandard times, the better to avoid even the sight of him.
“Waiting for you.”
“Why? Is there some problem with the ship?” She half-turned, glancing back; the small, elusive fluctuation of energy intruded on her memory.
“Yes.” He straightened, balancing against the table, searching her face for a response. “With the crew, damn it!”
“What do you mean?” She flinched away from the anger in his voice.
“
“I know,” she murmured, almost inaudibly. The heated container of food popped out at her and she jerked back.
“Do you want it to fail? Don't you care whether we make it or not?”
“I don't know.”
“What?” he said, demanding, not asking.
She bit her suddenly quivering lips, held her face and body rigid against the counter. “Yes, I care.” Some part of her shouted silently that it was a lie,
“Mythili … are you all right?” His anger faded as suddenly as it had come; his voice gentled, his concern reached toward her uncertainly, brushed her straining fingertips like a touch. “Can I help? Let me help, if I can …”
She pulled her hand in, pulled her voice together. “I'm fine!” The past and present fused into one inescapable cage of hot steel.
His silence lay as loudly as speech in the space between them. “I'm not fine,” he said at last, confessing almost defiantly to the weakness she would not admit. “It's like I've been on this ship all alone!” She didn't understand the peculiar vehemence of the words, didn't want to. “I see more of that damn lizard than I see of you! I know you've been avoiding me. But damn it, I haven't given you any reason to, have I?”
“No reason? What reason do I need except the sight of you!” She turned to look at him finally, brushing back her disheveled hair.
“What the—? What's that supposed to mean, for God's sake?” His face clenched.
“It means that every time I see you I remember what happened on Planet Two.” Feeling Siamang's rough hands tearing at her clothing; what he had wanted to do and almost done to her, before they had abandoned her on the lifeless surface.… “That it happened because you wouldn't help me, because you didn't have the guts to stand up to Siamang. You used me as a pawn to save your own life, and every time I see you I remember that!”
“Well, what the hell do you want me to do about it?” He held out his hands, but they were knotted into fists. “Do you want me to mutilate myself, so you don't have to see this—?” One hand leaped at his face, as if he really meant to dig his fingers into his flesh. “Do you want a stick to beat me with? Is that what you want from me? God damn it, Mythili, do you think there's anything you could do to me, say to me, think about me that I haven't done myself?” His hands dropped away. “But it doesn't change anything.… What happened on Planet Two happened. Yes, I was scared, I didn't want to die. I did the best I could—it wasn't good enough. I'd do anything to make it right; but there's nothing I can do! I wish to God you'd pressed the charges against me, and gotten it over with!”
“I don't know why I didn't!” Her voice broke under the weight of the lie, the knowledge of why she had never pressed charges, and why she could never let it go. She shook her head. “But I didn't. And if I didn't, I—I have to live with the consequences, I suppose. I have to face the fact that we are on this ship—together.” She clasped her hands around the food can like a holy offering refused, a useless prayer for understanding. She moved it stiffly to a magnetized tray and felt it click down on the surface; aching to feel the same stability seize her own life and hold it fast. “What do you want changed, then?”
