CV

20

It was very late, and the crowds in the corridors were thinning out. As she walked past the lighted windows of the shops in the mall, she heard a voice from a distant loudspeaker.

“. . . since early this morning. When last seen, she was wearing a pale yellow skirt and blouse.” In a television screen at the end of the lobby, she caught a glimpse of a photograph, a woman squinting into the camera. She recognized it as a photograph Malcolm carried; it seemed no more herself than any stranger’s face.

She was thinking now with leaden disappointment that the thing was not going to leave her. She must find someplace to hide, to sleep.

What did people do who had nowhere to go? There were the lounges, but a sleeping person would be conspicuous there; probably a steward would come to wake her up. Thinking of night and air, she got into the next elevator she came to and rode up to the Sports Deck. No one was in the lobby. She opened the weather door and stepped out onto the deserted tennis area. The moon and stars were brilliant in a Prussian blue sky. She crossed to the barrier and looked up. Out there, perhaps, was the star she had come from, uncounted millennia ago. It was possible, she thought, that between her sleeping and waking the whole vast wheel of the galaxy had made a quarter-turn in its silent revolution. How many of her siblings had survived she could not know; probably none, unless the universe was richer than they had imagined. She herself had had the greatest possible luck: she had wakened among an intelligent, technically skilled, and highly sensitive race whose culture and psychology were a puzzle that could occupy her happily for centuries.

There were many things she did not yet understand. She knew that she was aboard a floating construction adrift, for reasons incomprehensible to her, on an enormous ocean of water, but she also knew that human beings were a landdwelling race, with many great cities on the continents and islands of this world, and that Sea Venture was intended to land at a place called Guam, and then at another place called Manila, which she visualized as sunny and green.

She turned, and saw someone coming toward her along the deck: it was a man, young, with a silly soft cap on his head. His hands were in his pockets. As he came nearer, she saw that he had a weak pale face.

“Good evening,” he said, touching the visor of his cap. He was dressed in dungarees, much faded and patched, in the style of a generation ago; there was a flowered scarf at his neck. He looked anything but dangerous; he was about to pass on, but she said, “Can you tell me what time it is?”

He stopped and looked at his ring watch. “It’s three-fourteen. Pretty late. Can’t sleep, huh?”

“No. That is—I have a problem.”

He came a step closer. “What’s the problem?”

She tried to smile. “No place to sleep. I—had a quarrel with my husband.”

“Oh.” He peered at her face. “Aren’t you—I saw the squib on the p.a.—Mrs. Claiborne?”

“Yes. Please don’t tell you saw me.”

“Okay, but your husband—won’t he be pretty worried?”

“I can’t go back there. Tomorrow, maybe, when he’s had time to cool down ...”

“Would he hurt you?” His face had turned anxious and sympathetic.

“He might.”

“Well, look—” In the dim light she could see him flushing with embarrassment. “If you wouldn’t mind—you could sleep in my room if you want. I mean, I stay up all night sometimes.”

“That’s very generous of you, Mr.—”

“Norm Yeager.” He put out his hand awkwardly, and she took it. He pulled it away again a moment later, as if she had burned him. That was interesting; he seemed to be thinking of copulatory behavior and yet not to desire it.

“Well, then, if it’s okay?”

“I am awfully sleepy.”

His room was on the Promenade Deck near the bow. When he opened the door for her, the lights came on and music began to play. “I’ll turn that off,” he said hastily.

“No, I like it. It’s Boccherini, isn’t it?”

“You know music? That's great." He looked around the little room, darted at the bed and swept up a pile of magazines. “Uh, can I get you anything? Are you hungry?”

“No, I just want to sleep.” She pulled back the coverlet, kicked her shoes off, and lay down. “Thank you very much,” she said, and closed her eyes. She felt the blackness welling up, and let it come.

The man leaned over to listen to her breathing. She was asleep already, he thought. He went to his relaxer and sat down. He had never had a woman in his room before, not like this, and it was exciting and dangerous. He felt that he had done something noble and strong; he loved her for accepting his protection, and he was glad that she was asleep so that he didn’t have to talk to her.

His name was Norman Peale Yeager; at twenty-five, he was in charge of Sea Venture’s two independent computer systems, not in name but in fact; his boss, Dan Jacobs, attended the staff meetings, made out the reports, and gave Yeager orders, but it was Yeager who knew the systems through and through, and Yeager who had to fix them if anything went wrong. He did a few hours of maintenance a week, and he was on call twenty-four hours a day, but most of his time was his own, and that was the way he liked it.

On his shelves he had dozens of old LPs, silky plastic discs whose almost invisible spirals gleamed iridescent when he tilted them to the light, and he had a lovingly restored 1982 stereo to play them on. In the evenings, alone in the lamplight, he played them over and over, loving the rich sounds hiding behind the hiss and crackle like music from the past filtering up through layers of time.

Even older things obsessed him; he liked tales of dragons and heroes, of fair maidens carried fainting over saddlebows, of caves and quests and treasures. He daydreamed of living in a higher and nobler age, when a man could fight for good against evil and could triumph in victory or make himself immortal in defeat. Everything that was modem seemed to him an offense: the clothes people wore, the way they talked and moved, the blemishes on their skin. It seemed to him that some apocalypse must come, to burn and wash away the grimy world he knew.

He turned the music down and dozed in his chair. In the morning, not wanting the steward to see who was in his bed, he went out for breakfast. A little after noon, when he came back, he saw that the maid had been in the room, but Mrs. Claiborne was still asleep. About two o’clock he tried to waken her, and it was only then that he realized that it was not sleep but something else.