“Why can’t I see it, then? It ought to look like Sol does from the Belt, only bigger; but there’s just a shimmer in the sky, even when it’s not raining.”
“The waves diffract the light and break up the image. You’d see the Focus, though, if the air weren’t so clear. Do you know what the Focus is?”
Nicholas shook his head.
“We’ll get to it pretty soon, after this rain stops. Then I’ll tell you.”
“I still don’t understand about the rain.”
Unexpectedly Diane giggled. “I just thought—do you know what I was supposed to be? While I was going to school?”
“Quiet,” Nicholas said.
“No, silly. I mean what I was being trained to do, if I graduated and all that. I was going to be a teacher, with all those cameras on me and tots from everywhere watching and popping questions on the two-way. Jolly time. Now I’m doing it here, only there’s no one but you.”
“You mind?”
“No, I suppose I enjoy it.” There was a black-and-blue mark on Diane’s thigh, and she rubbed it pensively with one hand as she spoke. “Anyway, there are three ways to make gravity. Do you know them? Answer, clerk.”
“Sure; acceleration, mass, and synthesis.”
“That’s right; motion and mass are both bendings of space, of course, which is why Zeno’s paradox doesn’t work out that way, and why masses move toward each other—what we call falling—or at least try to; and if they’re held apart it produces the tension we perceive as a force and call weight and all that rot. So naturally if you bend the space direct, you synthesize a gravity effect, and that’s what holds all that water up against the translucent shell—there’s nothing like enough mass to do it by itself.”
“You mean”—Nicholas held out his hand to catch a slow-moving globe of rain—“that this is water from the sea?”
“Righto, up on top. Do you see, the temperature differences in the air make the winds, and the winds make the waves and surf you saw when we were walking along the shore. When the waves break they throw up these little drops, and if you watch you’ll see that even when it’s clear they go up a long way sometimes. Then if the gravity is less they can get away altogether, and if we were on the outside they’d fly off into space, but we aren’t, we’re inside, so all they can do is go across the center, more or less, until they hit the water again, or Dr. Island.”
“Dr. Island said they had storms sometimes, when people got mad.”
“Yes. Lots of wind, and so there’s lots of rain too. Only the rain then is because the wind tears the tops off the waves, and you don’t get light like you do in a normal rain.”
“What makes so much wind?”
“I don’t know. It happens somehow.”
They sat in silence, Nicholas listening to the dripping of the leaves. He remembered then that they had spun the hospital module, finally, to get the little spheres of clotting blood out of the air; Maya’s blood was building up on the grilles of the purification intake ducts, spotting them black, and someone had been afraid they would decay there and smell. Nicholas had not been there when they did it, but he could imagine the droplets settling, like this, in the slow spin. The old psychodrama group had already been broken up, and when he saw Maureen or any of the others in the rec room they talked about Good Old Days. It had not seemed like Good Old Days then except that Maya had been there.
Diane said, “It’s going to stop.”
“It looks just as bad to me.”
“No, it’s going to stop—see, they’re falling a little faster now, and I feel heavier.”
Nicholas stood up. “You rested enough yet? You want to go on?” “We’ll get wet.”
He shrugged.
“I don’t want to get my hair wet, Nicholas. It’ll be over in a minute.”
He sat down again. “How long have you been here?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Don’t you count the days?”
“I lose track a lot.”
“Longer than a week?”
“Nicholas, don’t ask me, all right?”
“Isn’t there anybody on this piece of Dr. Island except you and me and Ignacio?”
“I don’t think there was anyone but Ignacio before you came.”
“Who is he?”
She looked at him.
“Well, who is he? You know me—us—Nicholas Kenneth de Vore; and you’re Diane who?”
“Phillips.”
“And you’re from the Trojan Planets, and I was from the Outer Belt, I guess, to start with. What about Ignacio?
