that would attract attention. They would know they hadn’t collected everybody; they would keep looking; these suits had powerful transponders in them. Being out of the ecliptic thus probably best explained the delay. Or maybe picking everyone up was just taking a while. The last acceleration of the ETH Mobile might have meant it was going at a speed higher than most spaceships could reach when the last people left it, in which case the people were too. If everything was as it was supposed to be, then all the suits would support their occupants for ten days, and they had only been out there only, what-she had to ask Pauline-twenty hours. It seemed longer, shorter-she couldn’t tell. Venus was definitely a little bigger. Swan recalled stories of castaways, adrift unfound, frozen for the eons. How many had gone that way in the history of the world? Scores, hundreds, thousands? She heard in her head the chorus of the old Martian song:
I floated thinking of Peter Sure I would be saved But the stories lie I’m left to die Black space will be my grave
No doubt many of those unfortunates had drifted expecting till the end they would be saved. Hope drained away more slowly than the air and food in their suits; they would recall the story of Peter circling Mars, or some other marooned person who got rescued, and believe a little spaceship would presently appear and hover before them like a UFO, like redemption, like life itself. But for many it had never come, and at some last point they had had to admit that the story was false, or not true for them. True for others, but not for them; the others elect, they the preterite, the lost ones. The forgotten ones. Thus the stark Martian song.
Maybe this time they would join the forgotten ones. Swan stirred herself, checked the common band, a host of voices; went to the emergency band and croaked out a report, an inquiry. Half an hour later a reply came: they were on the radar, they were getting a rescue ship out to them; they were indeed out of the plane, and all responders were busy. But they were on the charts and help would be on its way eventually.
So… look around. Tell Wahram about it, reassure him. Try to relax.
She was not relaxed. A helpless dread seized her like a boiling of the blood. Pauline would therefore know of it; she might at this very moment be infusing her with antianxiety drugs out of the suit’s pharmacy. Swan hoped so. Nothing to do but wait. Keep breathing. Wait and see. It had been a luxury in her life always to be able to do something, never to have to wait. Now reality kicked in. Sometimes you had to wait for it.
Well, so be it. A wait wasn’t so bad. It was better than the blackliner. Venus was looking a little bit closer, and was maybe a little bit brighter-maybe the sunshield had been torn a little, at the edge nearest the explosion. She could see dark clouds swirling around a darker patch, possibly Ishtar’s highland. There were brighter and darker patches down there under the swirling clouds, but she had no sense of whether they represented frozen ocean or frozen land. There were no blues or browns or greens, just gray clouds over gray lands, dark and darker.
I feel better,” Wahram announced uncertainly, as if testing the assertion.
“Oh good,” Swan said. “Try drinking something. You’re probably dehydrated.”
“I am thirsty.”
More time passed. After a while Wahram began to whistle under his breath, one of the tunes he had whistled in the utilidor. Beethoven, she knew, and not one of the symphonies; so most likely it was from one of the late quartets. A slow movement. Possibly the one that Beethoven had written after recovering from an illness. A thanksgiving. She would only know for sure by the tune that came at the very end of it. It was one of the good ones, anyway. Softly she whistled an accompaniment to it, singing the lark inside her while squeezing his hand. The tune was slow, she could not just lark about in it, but had to find a way to be slow herself, to join him. Her lark brain remembered the parts to this tune that he had taught her under Mercury. During their submercurial existence, a whole lifetime ago it seemed. That life was gone; this one would go; not a lot of difference was made to this moment itself, whether they survived later or not. Oh the beauty of this song, something to twine with. The lark brain kept singing inside her, twisting up out of the slow tune. Different times get woven together.
“Do you remember?” she asked him after breaking off. Voice tight, grip crushing his hand: “Do you remember when we were in the tunnel?”
“Yes, I do.”
Then back to the tune. His whistling was just barely adequate; or he whistled now in a style that made it seem so. Maybe he was still hurting. Musically they had been better in the tunnel. Now they sounded like Armstrong and Fitzgerald, him pretending to a straining effort that only barely hit an accidental and minimal perfection, her perfect without any effort at all, just playing around. Duet of opposites. The struggle and the play, making together something better than either. Maybe you needed both. Maybe she had been making her play into a struggle when she needed to be making her struggle into play.
They came to the melody at the end; yes, it was the thanksgiving. Hymn of thanksgiving after recovering from a serious illness, Wahram had said it was called, in the Lydian mode. And the title described the feeling well; they didn’t always. A thanksgiving laid into the tune itself, with an unerring ear for music as the speech of feeling. How could it be? Who had he been? Beethoven, the human nightingale. There are songs in our brains, she thought, whether bird brain cells have been inserted in them or not; they were already there, down in the cerebellum, conserved for millions of years. No death there; maybe death was an illusion, maybe these patterns lived forever, music and emotion stranding through universes one after the next, on the wings of transient birds.
E ver since the tunnel,” she said to him when he stopped whistling, “we’ve had a relationship.”
“Mmm,” he said, either agreeing or not.
“Don’t you think so?” she demanded.
“Yes, I do.”
“If we hadn’t wanted to run into each other, we could have avoided it. So I’ve been thinking that that’s not what we wanted. That we wanted…”
“Hmm,” he equivocated.
“What do you mean? Are you denying it?”
“No.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“I mean,” he said slowly, thinking it over, pausing, then seeming to lose the inclination to speak. Through his faceplate she could see that he was looking at her at last, rather than out at the stars, and that struck her as a good sign, but it was unnerving as well, he was so grave and intent. This diving into the mind was amphibious work, and her toad was performing it abstracted and silent.
“I like being with you,” he continued. “It seems to me things are more interesting when I’m with you.” He continued to stare at her. “I like whistling with you. I liked our time in the tunnel.”
“You liked it?”
“But of course. You know that.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t know what I know or don’t know. That’s part of my problem.”
“I love you,” he said.
“But of course,” she said. “And I love you.”
“No no,” he said. “I love you.”
“I see!” she said. “But oh dear-I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
He smiled his littlest smile. It was so small, now almost hidden behind his faceplate, and yet it appeared only when he was truly amused. It was never a polite gesture. When he was being polite he glared.
“Neither do I know what I mean,” he said. “But I say it anyway. Wanting to say it to you-it’s that kind of love.”
“Uh-oh,” she said. “Look, this is crazy talk. Your leg is frozen and you’ve got to be in shock. Your suit has you shot up with all kinds of stuff.”
“Very likely true,” he conceded a bit dreamily, “but even so, that is only allowing me to say what I really feel. With some urgency, let us say.”
He smiled again, but briefly; he was watching her like a… well, she didn’t know what. Not like a hawk; not anything like a wolf’s long stare; more a curious look, a questioning look-a froggy inquiry, as if to ask, what kind of creature was she? Robot? Limit? Robber? Robert?
Well, she didn’t know. She couldn’t say. Her toad regarded her, eyes like jasper marbles in his head. She regarded him: so slow, so particularly himself, self-contained, ritualistic… if that was right. She tried to put together all she had seen of him into a single phrase or characterization, and it didn’t work; she had a jumble of pieces, of small incidents and feelings, and then their big time together, which was also a jumble and a smear. But
