Starseed

Chapter Ten

A small piece of shrapnel, the size and shape of a stylus, was blown right through his left foot from bottom to top. It was a clean wound, and his p-suit was able to self-seal around the two pinhole punctures. If he cried out, it was drowned out by the white noise of dozens of others shouting at once, and when Sulke called for casualty reports, he kept silent. I didn’t know he’d been hurt until we were approaching the airlock, several minutes after the explosion, and I saw that the left foot of his p-suit had turned red. My first crazy thought was that some Symbiote had gotten into his p-suit somehow; when I realized it was blood I came damned near to fainting.

Cameras caught the entire incident—there are always cameras rolling around the docks—and replay established conclusively that Robert was following me, keeping me in his blast shadow, when he was hit. Or else that shrapnel might have hit me.

The explosion had shocked me, and Glenn’s ghastly death had stunned me, but learning of Robert’s comparatively minor injury just about unhinged me. I think if Reb had not been present I would have thrown a screaming fit…but his simple presence, rather than anything he said, kept me from losing control. He got us all inside, kept us organized and quiet, did triage on the wounded and had them all prioritized by the time the medics arrived. Sulke was the last one in, but when she did emerge from the airlock she paused only long enough to inventory us all by eye, and then went sailing off to goddammit get some answers.

Robert was pale, and his jaw trembled slightly, but he seemed otherwise okay. The sight of his torn foot, oozing balls of blood, made me feel dizzy, but I forced myself to hold it between my palms to cut off the bleeding. It felt icy cold, and I remembered that was a classic sign of shock. But his breathing was neither shallow nor rapid, and his eyes were not dull. He seemed lucid, responded reassuringly to questioning; I relaxed a little.

The medical team was headed by Doctor Kolchar, the doctor I’d seen briefly during my first minutes at Top Step. He was a dark-skinned Hindu with the white hair, moustache and glowering eyebrows of Mark Twain, dressed as I remembered him in loud Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts. He handed off Nicole to Doctor Thomas, the resident specialist in vacuum exposure, and came over to look at Robert. He checked pulse, blood pressure and pupils before turning his attention to the damaged foot.

“You’re a lucky young man,” he said at last. “You couldn’t have picked a better place to drill a hole through a human foot. No arterial or major muscle damage, the small bone destroyed isn’t crucial, most of what you lost was meat and cartilage. Even for a terrestrial this would not be a serious injury. Do you want nerve block?”

“Yes,” Robert said quietly but emphatically. Doctor Kolchar touched an instrument to Robert’s ankle, accepted its advice on placement, and thumbed the injector. Robert’s face relaxed at once; he took a great deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Thank you, Doctor.”

“Don’t mention it. That block is good for twelve hours; when it wears off, come see me for another. Don’t bother to set your watch, you’ll know when it’s time. Meanwhile, drink plenty of fluids—and try to stay off your feet as much as possible.” He started to jaunt away to his next patient.

I was in no mood for bad jokes. “Wait a minute! Are you crazy? You haven’t even dressed his foot. What about infection?”

He decelerated to a stop and turned back to me. “Madam, whatever punctured his foot was the size and shape of a pen. There’s nothing like that in a cargo hold, and that’s the only place I can imagine a bug harmful to humans living on a spacecraft. And you know, or should know, that Top Step is a sterile environment. His bleeding has stopped, and there was a little coagulant in what I gave him. If it makes you happy to dress his foot, here.” He tossed me a roll of bandage. “But I’m a little busy just now.” He turned his back again and moved away. I looked down at the bandage and opened my mouth to start yelling.

“It’s all right, Morgan,” Robert said. “Believe me, I won’t bang it into anything.” He smiled weakly in an attempt to cheer me up.

My rage vanished. “Oh, darling, I’m so sorry. Are you all right?”

“Nerve block is a wonderful thing. That hurt like fury!”

I pulled his head against my chest and hugged him fiercely. “Oh, Robert, my God—poor Glenn! What a horrible thing.”

He stiffened in my arms. “Yes. Horrible.”

A thought struck me. “Her body! Somebody’s got to go and retrieve it! Teena, is anyone retrieving Glenn’s body?”

“No, Morgan.” Her voice was in robot mode; she must have been conducting many conversations at once.

“But someone has to!” Why? “Uh, her family might want her remains sent home. They can still track her, can’t they?”

“Her suit transponder is still active,” Teena said. “But in her contract with the Foundation she specified the ‘cremation in atmosphere’ option for disposition in the event of her death.”

“Oh. Wait a minute—her last vector was a deceleration with respect to Top Step. She was slowing down in orbit—so she’ll go into a higher orbit, right? I did the same thing myself yesterday. The atmosphere won’t get her, she’ll just…go on forever…” Oh God, without her legs, boiled and burst and dessicated! Much better to burn cleanly from air friction in the upper atmosphere, and fall as ashes to Earth—

“Your conclusion is erroneous, Morgan,” Teena said. “She is presently in a higher orbit, yes—but she does not have the mass to sustain it, as Top Step does. In a short time her orbit will decay, and she will have her final wish.”

“Oh.” I felt inexpressible sadness. “Robert, let’s go home. You need rest. And I don’t care what the doctor says, I’m going to bandage your foot.”

“I’m not going anywhere until I get some answers,” he said grimly. “I want to know who shot at us!”

Somehow I had not given that question a conscious thought—but as he said the words I felt a surge of anger. No, more than anger—bloodlust. “Look, there’s Dorothy. Let’s ask her, maybe she’ll know something.”

Dorothy Gerstenfeld had arrived just after the medics, and now she was the center of a buzzing swarm of people. She wore the impervious expression Mother wears when the children are throwing a tantrum, and spoke in firm but soothing tones. We jaunted in that direction, with me making sure no one jostled Robert’s foot.

“—no hard information,” she was saying. “We simply must wait until the investigation is complete. An announcement will be—”

“How do we know there aren’t more missiles on the way right now?” Dmitri called out, and the crowd-buzz became more fearful than angry. I felt my stomach lurch; it had not occurred to me that we might still be in danger.

“At the moment we do not,” she said. “But a UN Space Command cruiser is warping this way right now, and will be here in minutes. It has much more sophisticated detectors than we do. But if our assailants were planning any further attacks, I can’t see why they would wait and give us time to regroup.”

“How come our own anticollision gear didn’t pick up that missile?” Jo demanded.

“Because it’s designed to cope with meteors and debris, not high-speed ASATs at full acceleration,” Dorothy said.

“Why the hell not?” Jo said shrilly. “You mean to tell me this place is a sitting duck?”

“Any civilian space habitat is a sitting duck,” she said patiently. “Not one of them is defended against military attack.”

“That’s what the United Nations is for,” Ben said.

Robert chimed in. “An effective defensive system for this rock would cost millions, maybe billions. It’s not too hard to swat rocks and garbage—but if you want to stop ASATs and lasers, and particle beams, and—”

“I don’t care how much it costs,” Jo said angrily. “It’s fucking crazy to have something this big and expensive undefended.”

“Robert’s right,” Ben said. “There’s just no way to do it effectively. What I don’t understand is why we even have a system as good as we do. I mean, why did the Foundation burrow into Top Step from the front end instead of the back? If the docks were around behind, in shadow, there’d be a lot fewer collisions to defend against.”

I recognized what Ben was trying to do by presenting an intriguing digression. Unfortunately someone knew the answer. “They figure it’s more important to keep the Nanotech Safe Lab back there.”

“You mean the Foundation thinks microscopic robots are more important than people?” Jo squawked.

“Jo, you know that’s not fair,” Dorothy said. “Nanoreplicators are important precisely because they could conceivably threaten people—all the people in the biosphere, not just the handful in this pressure.”

“The hell with that,” Jo said. “We’re naked here…and you’ve got a responsibility to us.” A handful of others buzzed agreement.

“Teena,” Dorothy said calmly, “have the UN vessels arrived yet?” We could not hear the reply, but Dorothy relaxed visibly and said, “Repeat generally.”

Teena’s robot voice said, “S.C. Champion and S.C. Defender have matched our orbit and report ‘situation stable.’ ”

There was a murmur of general relief.

“Teena,” Dmitri called suddenly, “who fired that missile at us?”

“I do not know,” Teena said.

There was a bark of laughter behind me. “Nicely done.”

I spun and saw that Sulke had returned. She was smiling, but she looked angry enough to chew rock.

“What Teena means,” she said to all of us, “is that she doesn’t know the name of the individual who pushed the button.”

“Sulke—” Dorothy began, with a hint of steel in her voice.

“You can’t sit on it,” Sulke said. “It’s already on the Net, for Christ’s sake. And they’re entitled to know.”

Dorothy took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “Go ahead.”

Sulke’s smile was gone now. “Credit for the attack has been formally claimed by the terrorist group known as the Gabriel Jihad.”

Another incoming missile could not have caused more shock and consternation. “The fucking Caliphate!” Jo cried.

Dorothy’s voice cut through the noise of the crowd. “The Umayyad Caliphate does not officially support the Gabriel Jihad.”

“Oh, no,” Jo shouted back. “The best police state since Stalin just can’t seem to stamp out those nasty renegades somehow!”

“The Caliphate has publicly disassociated itself from the attack and denounced the Jihad,” Dorothy insisted. “They maintain that the terrorists stole control of one of their hunter-killer satellites and launched one of its missiles.”

“Yeah, sure! What is it, fifteen minutes since the fucking thing went off? That’s plenty of time for a government to react to a total surprise!” That provoked a collective growl of anger. “The goddam Shiites have always hated Stardancers, everybody knows that.”

“The Jihad are claiming that they’ve destroyed us,” Sulke said. “The exact words were, ‘the phallus of the Great Satan has been ruined.’ They think they finished us.”

“What, by blowing up a water-ship?” Ben said.

“Bojemoi,” Dmitri burst out. “They did not know the ship would be there—it was not supposed to be for hours. They were trying to destroy the docking complex!”

“Jesus!” Robert exclaimed. “If the docks were destroyed, we…my God, we’d have to evacuate Top Step! We’d have to—there’d be no way to reprovision.”

There was a stunned silence as we absorbed his words.

“There is nothing further we can accomplish here,” Dorothy said. “Please return to your rooms and try to calm yourselves. We are safe for the present—and Administrator Mgabi and the Foundation Board of Directors are pursuing every possible avenue to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.”

“What avenues?” Jo said. “Diplomacy? Fuck that! My friend Glenn is dead, they hard-boiled her head—I say we all go see Mgabi and—”

“Jo?” Reb interrupted.

“—demand that…what, Reb? I’m talking for Chrissake—”

“Dorothy said ‘please.’ ”

Jo stared at him, and opened her mouth to say something, and stared some more. It was the closest thing to anger I’d ever heard in Reb’s voice.

“She did,” Ben agreed, iron in his own voice.

“That’s right,” Robert said. “I heard her clearly.”

“Fair go, Joey,” Kirra urged. “Mgabi needs us like a barbed wire canoe right now. Let the poor bastard do ’is bleedin’ job, eh?”

Jo closed her mouth, looked around for support without finding any, and then shut her eyes tight and grimaced like a pouting child. “All right, God dammit,” she said. “But I—”

“Thank you, Jo,” Reb said. “Our sister Glenn was Episcopalian; funeral services will be held by Reverend Schiller in the chapel this evening at the usual time, and as usual there will be observances in all other holy places. I will be free from after lunch until then if any of you need to speak with me.”

He spun and jaunted away, and the group dispersed.

I carried Robert back to our room like a package of priceless crystal, determined to bury my confusion and heartache in bandaging and nursing my wounded mate. Ben and Kirra discreetly left us alone and went on down the hall. And in less than five minutes, Robert and I were having our first and last quarrel.

I hate to try and recreate the dialogue of that argument. It was bad enough to live through once.

It came down to this: Robert wanted to go back to Earth. As soon as possible.

No, I must recall some of the words. Because what he said first was not “I think we ought to go back to Earth as soon as possible.” It wasn’t even, “I want to go back to Earth; what do you think?” Or even, “I plan to go back to Earth, how do you feel?”

What he said, as soon as the door sealed behind us, was, “Can I use your terminal? I want to book a seat on the next ship Earthbound. Shall I book one for you too?”

Any of the other three would have been shock enough. God knows I had already had shock enough that day. But the way he phrased it added a whole additional layer of subtext that was just too overwhelming to absorb. He was saying, I want to go back to Earth so badly that I do not care whether you want to or not. He was saying, I can want something so much that I don’t care what you want. It took me days to get it through my head, to convince my brain—I refused to know it, for just as long as I was able—but an instant after he said that, the pit of my stomach knew that Robert did not love me.

My brain reverted to the intelligence level of a be-your-own-shrink program. “You want to book a seat on the next ship to Earth.”

“If it’s not already too late. But it should take the others awhile to work it out. Hours, maybe days. None of them is exactly a theoretical relativist. Glenn probably would have caught on fast.”

“And you want to know if I want you to book a seat for me.”

“Come on, Morgan, I know you’re bright enough to figure it out.”

“I’m bright enough to figure it out.”

“Marsport Control to Morgan: come in. You know exactly what I mean. We have to get off this rock.”

He was right—I did know what he meant. And he was wrong—because that was only half of what he meant, and the least important half. But that was the half I chose to pursue. “Leave Top Step? Why?” I said, already knowing the answer.

“Why? Because they’re shooting at us! This pressure is not safe anymore.”

Perhaps I should have taken a long time to absorb that too. It made me remember Phillipe Mgabi’s words to us, our first day inboard: You are as safe as any terrestrial can be in space, now. It should have been a shock to realize how unsafe that really was, that even in vast Top Step I was terribly vulnerable. But I come from the generation that grew up being told that rain is poison and sex can kill. Part of me wasn’t even surprised.

Argue it anyway. This argument is better than the next one will be.

“Just because some religious fanatics stole a missile?”

“Remember the mysterious something that hulled us on the way up here? You know that was a laser—hell, you and Kirra told me. And the failure in the circulation system that first week—do you have any idea how many failsafes there are on an air plant? That was only the fifth failure there’s ever been, in fifty years of spaceflight! And now this. You know what they say: ‘Three times is enemy action.’ ”

“But they’re just a bunch of terrorists in burnooses, for Christ’s sake—nobody can even prove they’ve got the Caliphate behind them.”

He drifted close, stopped himself with a gentle touch at my breast. “Morgan, listen to me. If the People’s Republic of China were to declare open war on the Starseed Foundation, I would not be unduly worried. But terrorists are weak—that’s what makes them so terribly dangerous.”

“They fired one lousy missile. If they could hack their way into a hunter-killer satellite, they could just as well have fired a dozen if they wanted to.”

“What they did was scarier. They used precisely the minimum amount of force that would achieve their objective. That tells me they are not fanatics in burnooses. They’ve studied their Sun Tzu. One missile, all by itself, should have done the job. That it didn’t is a miracle so unlikely I’m still shaking. If that water-ship hadn’t sprung a leak at just the right time on its way here, we’d all be trying to figure out how to walk back to Earth right now. Without the docks, this place can’t support life.”

Oh God, he was right. I wanted badly to be hugged. He was close enough to hug. “Jesus Christ, Robert—they’ve been trying to kill us for two months, and the total body count is five. We ought to have time to finish out our course and Graduate.”

“You just said yourself, they could send more missiles any time they want. There could be more on the way now.”

“There are two goddam UN heavy cruisers out there!”

“Right now, yeah. They may even stay awhile. But have you considered the fact that the Starseed Foundation is not a member of the United Nations, and the Caliphate is?”

“But—that’s ridiculous!”

“Sure, there’s a friendly relationship of long standing—the member nations all know perfectly well there wouldn’t still be a UN if it weren’t for the Stardancers, whether they’ll admit it or not—even the Caliphate knows that, that’s just what’s driving them crazy. But you tell me: if it comes to it, is the UN going to go to war to defend a corporation from one of its member nations? When, as you pointed out, it can’t even prove the Caliphate is involved? You wait and see: within two or three days, India will have lodged a protest over the diversion of UN resources to protect a Canadian corporation, and then Turkey will chime in, and finally China…and one day those two ships will quietly warp orbit.”

“They wouldn’t.”

“They might have no choice. Suppose there were a plausible diversion somewhere else. Say, somebody bombed the Shimizu Hotel? At any given time there’s upwards of seven trillion yen on the hoof jaunting around inside that pressure, some of the most influential humans there are. The Space Command hasn’t got a lot of military strength in space to spare: most of their real muscle is the Star Wars net, and that’s aimed one way, straight down. I don’t know how soon the next ship leaves here for Earth, but I do know I’m going to be on it.”

Whether I’m beside you or not.

“You’re just going to run away?”

Think well before saying that to your man, even if it’s true—maybe especially if it’s true; I might just as well have stuck a knife in his belly. Even his unexpressive face showed it. For an instant I remembered his torn foot, injured in trying to shield me, and almost said something to at least try to recall my words. But I was too angry.

He didn’t let the pain reach his voice; it came out flat, firm, controlled. “You bet your life.”

“You mean, just go home and waste all this? All this time, all this work, forget Symbiosis and run away?”

“It will not be wasted. We can always come back, sometime when it is safe again. Even if we never do come back, it hasn’t been a waste: we’ve learned a lot and acquired a lot of very useful skills, and we found each other—” You’re a good three or four minutes late in mentioning that, buster. “—but surely you see that all of that will be wasted if we die?”

“But—but we don’t have to quit. We could…look, we could go to Reb and tell him we want to Graduate early! Right away. We could make him buy it—hell, you’re spaceworthy already, and I know enough to survive long enough to reach the Symbiote mass, I’ve proved that, what more do I really need to know? Whatever it is, I’ll know it as soon as I enter the Starmind! We could pull it off—”

He looked me square in the eye. “Are you ready to take Symbiote? Right now?”

I looked away. “Soon, I mean. A week, say.”

He took my face in his hands and made me look back at him. “Morgan—I am not one hundred percent certain I want to go through with Symbiosis. It scares me silly. But I am one hundred percent sure I do not want to be pressured into it. If it’s a choice between do it within a week and don’t do it, make up your mind, the clock’s ticking…I pass.” He let go of me. “I don’t know about you, but I could use another six months or so to think about it. And besides, I have no way to know we have a week.”

“You think the UN will sell us out that fast?”

“No—but how would you like to go EVA tomorrow and find out you’ve got tanks full of pure nitrogen? The Jihad got to the circulation system: they could get to the tank-charging facilities. Or the Garden. There could be an unfortunate outbreak of botulism, or plague, or rogue replicators from the Safe Lab—all my instincts tell me to get out of here, fast. You mark my words: in twenty-four hours every scheduled seat Earthside will be booked, and they’ll be screaming for special extra flights to handle the overflow. And a lot of people will be suddenly making plans to Graduate ahead of schedule, like you said. But I won’t be one of them. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to risk dying, just at the very verge of life eternal. I’m going home, as fast as I can.”

Damn him for being so intelligent! With anyone else I might have kept that first argument going for hours yet—but he had gone and won the fucking thing. What now? Refuse to concede that, and have us both repeat our lines with minor variations in word choice two or three more times?

No. God damn it. It was time to have the second argument…

“And you don’t care if I come along or not?”

His mouth tightened and his nostrils flared. Again I had stung him. Good.

And again the son of a bitch controlled it and answered reasonably. “Of course I care, Morgan. You must know how much I care. But you’re a free adult: I can’t make your choice for you.”

“The hell you can’t! That’s what you’re trying to do!”

“I am not. I am trying very hard not to. Look, it’s very simple, Morgan. There are two choices: Graduate too early, for the wrong reasons, under the gun, gamble with our lives and our sanity—or fall back and try again later. There’s only one sensible choice. I hope with all my heart that you’ll be sensible. But I can’t make you be.”

“You do, huh? Why do you hope that, Robert?”

He did not answer.

“Why do you hope that, Robert? Say the words. You’ve never said the words.”

“Neither have you.”

“Because I didn’t think we needed to!”

“I didn’t either!” he snapped back, letting anger show in his voice for the first time.

“Well, maybe we were wrong! God damn you, I love you!”

That silly statement hung in the air between us. As if any more irony were needed, the violence of our combined shouting had caused us to start drifting ever so slowly apart. I waved air with my cupped hands to try and cancel it, but he didn’t follow suit, so I stopped.

He seemed to consider several responses. What he finally settled on was, “Do I correctly hear you say that if I loved you, I would be trying to tell you what to do with your life?”

“Of course not!”

“Don’t you see that if you and I hadn’t talked Glenn into staying here, she’d be alive now?”

That hurt. I counterattacked hastily. “And I don’t mean anything more to you than Glenn did?”

“Morgan, for heaven’s sake, be reasonable! I’ve spent thirty years trying to unlearn the idea that women are property, and if you want someone to go twentieth century and start giving you orders like a Muslim or a Fundamentalist…well, I’m afraid you’ll have to get somebody else; it’s just too late for me to start all over again. I don’t want to be any grown-up’s father.”

Is there anything more infuriating than an argument-opponent with impeccable logic? The correct answer was: I don’t want you to give me orders—I want you to be so crazy in love with me that you can’t cut your own marching orders until you know my plans—but I just could not say that out loud…or even to myself.

“Damn you,” I cried, “you leave my father out of this!”

Yes, there is something more infuriating than a logical opponent. A man who is impervious to illogic. He turned and found a handhold, pushed himself over to my terminal. He belted himself in so he could punch keys without ricocheting away, and looked back to me. “May I? I could just go through Teena, but I think you can guess why I’d rather not do that.”

Days ago we had given each other the booting code to our personal terminal…as lovers will, and mere sexers will not. It’s a step more intimate than swapping housekeys, much more intimate than sharing bodily fluids. Someone who can access your personal memory node can drain your financial accounts, read your mail, read your diary if you keep one, send messages in your name. Hands on your keyboard touch you more deeply than hands on your vagina. “Use your own terminal,” I said.

“Certainly,” he said calmly, and unstrapped again. “How many seats shall I reserve?”

“One!” I shouted.

“Morgan—” he began.

“Dammit, you don’t want to be pressured to Graduate, but you’re trying to pressure me into giving it up! Maybe forever—suppose two months from now they blow this place up, and the chance is gone for our lifetime?”

“Then we’ll have a lifetime. That’s the most they promise you when you get born. And we could have it together.”

“But I could never dance again!”

“Then you have to decide whether it’s me you want, or dance. If you stay here, and it happens just as you say…you and I will never see each other again.”

“Not if you don’t run out on me!”

At last I got to him. “I won’t be running out on you if you do the smart thing and leave with me!” he said, raising his voice for the first time.

I had to press the advantage. “Go on, get out of here—you’ve got a plane to catch!”

He drew in breath…and let it out. And took another deep breath, and let that out, a little more slowly. “I’ll reserve two seats. You can always cancel if you choose to.”

I was still in my p-suit; I unsnapped an air bottle and threw it at him. Stupid: he was the only one of our class who had ever beaten Dorothy Gerstenfeld in 3-D handball. He side-stepped like a bullfighter and the tank shattered the monitor screen above my terminal, rebounded with less than half of its original force but spinning crazily. I was spinning myself from having thrown it, and whacked my head on something. The tank swacked into Kirra’s sleepsack and was stopped by it. When I looked around, Robert was gone.

Good riddance, I thought, and doubled over and wept in great racking sobs. My eyes grew tendrils of silvery tears; I smashed them into globular fragments that danced and eddied in the air like little transparent Fireflies before breaking apart and whirling away.

God damn him to hell, turning it around like that and dumping it back on me! Now if we break up it’ll be my choice, because I choose to cancel my seat home—and it’s his fierce respect for my free womanhood that keeps him from saying anything more than ‘he hopes I’ll be sensible.’ He wouldn’t say the fucking words, even after I did!

So close to having it all! Another lousy two or three weeks and I would have had dance and Symbiosis and Robert. How could I have been so stupid, thinking they’d let me have it all?

A part of my mind tried to argue. You can still have Symbiosis. The whole Starmind, all these people, will enfold you and—

—and love me, right? When nobody else ever has.

A thought forced its way into my head. Robert had gone down the hall to use his own terminal. Kirra and Ben were presumably there. They would see what he was typing. Or he’d shield the monitor, which would make them curious. At any moment Kirra might come jaunting in here, grimly determined to have me cry on her shoulder. I don’t cry on anybody’s shoulder. When I cry, I cry alone. I forced my sobs to subside. I could not achieve control of my breath, but I made the tears dry up. I jaunted to the vanity, got tissues, and honked and wiped and snuffled and wiped. I checked my face in the mirror, made myself wash it. “Teena, is my studio free?”

“Repeat, please, Morgan,” Teena said in her mechanical voice.

I took a shuddering deep breath, got my voice under control, and repeated the question. Yes, she said, it was available. I told her I wanted it for the rest of the day, and she said that was acceptable. I told her I wanted it for the rest of month, and she said I would have to clear that with Dorothy Gerstenfeld or Phillipe Mgabi. I started to tell her I wanted it for the rest of my life…and thanked her and left for the studio. I actually got within fifty meters of it before collapsing into tears again. What triggered it was the sudden realization that I had not given a single thought to Glenn since I’d gotten back to my room. And now I was going to miss her funeral. The tears flew from my eyes like bullets. No one was around to see, and I sealed the hatch behind me before anyone came along.

If you’re ever going to have a day like that, try to have it later in the day. It took me hours to cry myself to sleep.

In similar situations back on Earth I used to lie on the studio floor and cry, let the floor drink my tears as it so often drank my blood. Here there was no floor. I missed it bitterly.