Damn my human-basic ancestry. My side and belly are hurting badly. My legs and feet held out better than I expected, but my injuries torment me. My head hurts as well. Normally, the suit would pump me full of painkiller, relaxants or a sleeping draught, and whatever it is helps your muscles to build up and your body to repair itself. My body can’t do those things for itself, the way most people’s can, so I’m at the mercy of the suit.
It says its recycler is holding out. I don’t like to tell it, but the thin gruel it’s dispensing tastes disgusting. The suit says it is still trying to track down the site of the leak; no progress so far.
I have my arms and legs inside now. I’m glad, because this lets me scratch. The suit lies with its arms clipped in to the sides and opened into the torso section, the legs together and melded, and the chest expanded to give me room. Meanwhile the carbon dioxide frosts outside and the stars shine steadily.
I scratch and scratch. Something else more altered humans wouldn’t have to do. I can’t make itches go away just by thinking. It isn’t very comfortable in here. Usually it is; warm and cosy and pleasant, every chemical whim of the encased body catered for; a little womb to curl up in and dream. The inner lining can no longer alter the way it used to, so it stays quite hard, and feels — and smells — sweaty. I can smell the sewage system. I scratch my backside and turn over.
Stars. I stare at them, trying to match their unblinking gaze through the hazy, scratched surface of the helmet visor.
I put my arm back into the suit’s and unclip. I reach round onto the top of the blown-out chest and feel in the front pack’s pocket, taking out my antique still camera.
'What are you doing?'
'Going to take a photograph. Play me some music. Anything.'
'All right.' The suit plays me music from my youth while I point the camera at the stars. I clip the arm back and pass the camera through the chest lock. The camera is very cold; my breath mists on it. The viewer half unrolls, then jams. I tease it out with my nails, and it stays. The rest of the mechanism is working; my star pictures are fine, and, switching to some of the older magazines from the stock, they come up bright and clear too. I look at the pictures of my home and friends on the orbital, and feel — as I listen to the old, nostalgia-inducing music — a mixture of comfort and sadness. My vision blurs.
I drop the camera and its screen snaps shut; the camera rolls away underneath me. I raise myself up painfully, retrieve it, unroll the screen again and go on looking back through old photographs until I fall asleep.
I wake up.
The camera lies beside me, switched off. The suit is quiet. I can hear my heart beat.
I drift back to sleep eventually.
Still night. I stay awake looking at the stars through the scarred visor. I feel as rested as I ever will, but the night here is almost twice standard, and I’ll just have to get used to it. Neither of us can see well enough to be able to travel safely at night, besides which I still need to sleep, and the suit can’t store enough energy during the hours of sunlight to use for walking in the darkness; its internal power source produces barely enough continuous energy to crawl with, and the light falling on its photopanels provides a vital supplement. Thankfully, the clouds here never seem to amount to much; an overcast day would leave me doing all the work whether it was my turn or not.
I unroll the camera screen, then think.
'Suit?'
'What?' it says quietly.
'The camera has a power unit.'
'I thought of that. It’s very weak, and anyway the power systems are damaged beyond the junction point for another source of internal energy. I can’t think of a way of patching it in to the external radiation system, either.'
'We can’t use it?'
'We can’t use it. Just look at your pictures.'
I look at the pictures.
There’s no doubt about it; education or not, once you’ve been born and brought up on an O you never quite adjust to a planet. You get agoraphobic; you feel you are about to be sent spinning off, flying away into space, picked up and sent screaming and bawling out to the naked stars. You somehow sense that vast, wasteful bulk underneath you, warping space itself and self-compressing, soil-solid or still half-molten, quivering in its creaky, massy press, and you; stuck, perched here on the outside, half-terrified that despite all you know you’ll lose your grip and go wheeling and whirling and wailing away.
This is our birthplace though, this is what we deserted long ago. This is where we used to live, on balls of dust and rock like this. This is our home town from before we felt the itch of wanderlust, the sticks we inhabited before we ran away from home, the cradle where we were infected with the crazy breath of the place’s vastness like a metal wind inside our love-struck heads; just stumbled on the scale of what’s around and tripped out drunk on starlike possibilities…
I find that I’m staring at the stars, my eyes wide and burning. I shake myself, tear my sight away from the view outside, turn back to the camera.
I look at a group photograph from the orbital. People I knew; friends, lovers, relations, children; all standing in the sunlight of a late summer’s day, outside the main building. Recalled names and faces and voices, smells and touches. Behind them, almost finished, is — as it was then — the new wing. Some of the wood we used to build it still lies in the garden, white and dark brown on the green. Smiles. The smell of sawdust and the feel of pushing a plane; hardened skin on my hands and the sight and sound of the planed wood curling from the blade.
Tears again. How can I help but be sentimental? I didn’t expect all of this, back then. I can’t cope with the distance between us all now, that awful gap of slow years.
I flick through other pictures; general views of the orbital, its fields and towns and seas and mountains. Maybe everything can be seen as a symbol in the end; perhaps with our limited grasp we can’t help but find similarities, talismans… but that inward facing plate of orbital looks false to me now, down here, so far away and lonely. This globe of ordinary, soft, accidental planet seems the cutting edge and the flat knife of twinned adamantine thoroughness, our clever, efficient little orbitals, lacking that fundamental reality.
I wish I could sleep. I want to sleep and forget about everything, but I can’t, tired though I still am. The suit can’t help me there, either. I don’t even remember dreaming, as though that facility, too, is damaged.
Maybe I’m the artificial one, not the suit, which doesn’t try to pretend. People have said I’m cold, which hurt me; which still hurts me. All I can do is feel what I can and tell myself it’s all anyone can ask of me.
I turn over painfully, face away from the treacherous stars. I close my eyes and my mind to their remindful study, and try to sleep.
'Wake up'
I feel very sleepy, the rhythms all wrong, tired again.
'Time to go; come on.'
I come to, rubbing my eyes, breathing through my mouth to get rid of the stale taste in it. The dawn looks cold and perfect, very thin and wide through this inhospitable covering of gas. And the slope is still here, of course.
It’s the suit’s turn to walk, so I can rest on. We redeploy the legs and arms again, the chest deflates. The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.
The suit walks faster than I do. It reckons it is only twenty percent stronger than the average human. Something of a come-down for it. Even having to walk must be galling for it (if it feels galled).
If only the AG worked. We’d do the whole trip in a day. One day.
We stride out over the sloped plain, heading for the edge. The stars disappear slowly, one by one, washed out of the wide skies by the sunlight. The suit gains a little speed as the light falls harder on its trailed photopanels. We stop and squat for a moment, inspecting a discoloured rock; it is just possible, if we find an oxide of some sort… but the stone holds no more trapped oxygen than the rest, and we move on.
'When and if we get back, what will happen to you?'
'Because I’m damaged?' the suit says. 'I imagine they’ll just throw the body away, it’s so badly
