“Who said that?”
“You did, I thought.”
“I don’t remember that. Maybe I did. But what if I’m not a very good artist?”
“It’s a long-term project.”
“And some people are late bloomers, is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, I suppose. Something like that. You keep getting chances.”
“Maybe. But, you know, it would be good to be making progress somehow. Not making the same mistakes over and over.”
“Spirals,” he suggested. “Spiral up, doing the same things at a higher level. That’s the art of it no matter what you do.”
“Maybe for you.”
“But there’s nothing unusual about me.”
“I beg to differ.”
“No, nothing unusual. Principle of mediocrity.”
“You’re an advocate of that?”
“An exemplar of it. The middle way. Middle of the cosmos. But only just as much as anyone else. A strange feature of infinity. We’re all in the middle somehow. Anyway, it’s a view I find useful. I use it to work on things. To structure my project, so to speak. Part of a philosophy.”
“Philosophy.”
“Well, yes.”
She fell silent at the thought.
M aybe we missed it,” Swan said one day as she walked behind him. “Maybe we walked all the way under the brightside and the nightside too, and are back under the sun again. Maybe we’ve lost track of the time or the distance. Maybe you’ve screwed us with your ineptitude, just like Pauline.”
“No,” he said.
She ignored him and muttered about things that could have gone wrong while they had been underground. It unreeled into quite an amazingly long list, gothically inventive: they could have gotten disoriented and were now actually walking west; they could have gotten into another utilidor, angled toward the north pole; Mercury could have been evacuated and them the only ones left on the planet; they could have died in the sun and the first elevator taken them down to hell. Wahram wondered if she was serious, hoped she wasn’t. There was so much that made her unhappy. Circadian rhythms; possibly she was walking when she should be sleeping. Many years before, he had learned you could not trust anything you thought between two and five a.m.; in those dark hours the brain was deprived of certain fuels or functions necessary for right mentation. One’s thoughts and moods darkened to a sometimes fugilin black. Better to sleep or, failing that, to discount in advance any thought or mood from those hours and see what a new day brought in the way of a fresh perspective. He wondered if he could ask her about this without offending her. Possibly not. She was irritable already, and seemed miserable.
“How are you doing?” he would ask.
“We never get anywhere.”
“Imagine that we were never getting anywhere, even before we came to this place. No matter where we move, we have never gotten anywhere.”
“But that is so wrong. God, I hate your philosophy. Of course we’ve gotten somewhere.”
“We’ve come a long way, we have a long way to go.”
“Oh please. Fuck you and your fortune cookies. Here we are now. It’s too long. Too long…”
“Think of it as an ostinato passage. Stubbornly repetitive.”
But then she fell silent, and then began to moan-almost a hum, a sound she was unaware that she made. Little miserable grunts. Someone crying. “I don’t want to talk,” she said when he asked again. “Shut up and let me be. You’re worthless to me. When things get tough, you’re worthless.”
That night they reached another elevator station. She stuffed food in her as if sticking batteries in a machine. After that she muttered again, wandering in ways he couldn’t follow. Possibly talking to her Pauline. On it went, a muttering in his ear. They performed their ablutions back down the tunnel without incident, and then lay down on their pads and tried to sleep. The muttering continued. After a while she whimpered herself to sleep.
T he next morning she wouldn’t eat, or talk, or even move. She lay on her side in a catatonic fit, or a syncope, or simply paralysis.
“Pauline, can you talk?” Wahram asked quietly, when Swan would say nothing.
The slightly muffled voice from Swan’s neck said, “Yes.”
“Can you tell me about Swan’s vital signs?”
“No,” Swan said from nowhere.
“Vital signs available to me are nearly normal, except for blood sugar.”
“You need to eat,” Wahram said to Swan.
She did not respond. He spooned some electrolyte water into her mouth, patiently waited for her to swallow. When she had taken in a few deciliters without drooling too much of it away, he said, “It’s noon up there. Up above us, on the surface, it’s noon. Middle of the brightside crossing. I think we need to take you up to have a look at the sun.”
Swan cracked an eyelid and looked up at him.
“We need to see it,” he told her.
She shoved her torso off the floor. “Do you think?”
“Is it possible?” Wahram asked in reply.
“Yes,” she said after thinking it over, “it is. We can stay in the shade of the tracks. It’s less bad at noon than in the morning or afternoon, because the photons come straight down and fewer hit your suit. We shouldn’t stay out for long though.”
“That’s all right. You need to see it, and now’s the time. Noon on Mercury. Come on.”
He helped her up. He found their helmets and carried them into the elevator car, went back and picked up Swan, took her to the elevator. Up they went, and he got her helmet on and sealed it, checked her air, did the same for himself. The suits showed all was well. The elevator car came to a halt. Wahram felt his pulse pounding in his fingertips.
The elevator door opened at the upper platform, and the world went white. Their faceplates adjusted, and a basic black-and-white sketch of a world appeared before them. To the left and slightly below were the city’s tracks, glowing a deep incandescent white. To the right Mercury’s noontime landscape extended to the horizon. In the absence of an atmosphere, there was only the land itself to take the blow of sunlight; it was glowing white-hot. His helmet’s tint had shifted so hard that the stars were no longer visible in the sky. It was a white plane topped by a black hemisphere. The white was lightly pulsing.
Swan walked out the door onto the platform. “Hey!” Wahram said, and went out after her. “Get back in here!”
“How would we see the sun in there? Come on, it will be all right for a while.”
“The platform must be seven hundred K like everything else.”
“Your boot soles are completely insulated at that temperature.”
Amazed, Wahram let her go. She tilted her head back to stare at the sun. Wahram couldn’t help following her glance-a stunning blast-fearfully he looked down again. The afterimage was there to contemplate: a circle both white and red at the same time, giant in his vision. The dhalgren sun, real at last. Clearly his faceplate was filtered to an almost completely polarized black opacity, and yet the land was still white, etched with tiny black lines. Swan was still looking up. Dying of thirst, she now drowned in the torrent. Following her example, breaking out all over in a sweat, he glanced up again. The surface of the sun was a roiling mass of white tendrils. It bounced as if throwing off thermal waves; then he realized it was his heart bouncing him, bumping his body hard enough to make his vision jostle. Writhing white circle in a starless charcoal sky. White banners flowing over themselves everywhere in the circle, the movement suggestive of some vast living intelligence. A god, sure, why not? It looked like a god.
Wahram dragged his gaze away and took her arm.
“Come on, Swan. Back inside now. You’ve gotten your infusion.”
“Wait just a second.”
“Swan, don’t do this.”
