“Watching the sunrise, Ena. The planetary shadow is fading. Fading…This sun appears behind the horizon curve, just peeping out past it now. I can feel the first breezes of its solar wind.”
Brennan tried to make his voice soft. “You can’t possibly feel a solar wind, Leif. You’re suited up.”
“I feel it.”
Ena said, “Please come back, Leif. We’ve completed the survey, done everything we were supposed to do, and—”
Brennan interrupted her. “The job’s finished, Leif. There’s no life down there. We have rock samples, cores, the works. Habitable planet, no life. Seed it and there could be colonies here in two hundred years. Maybe less.”
Leif said nothing.
Ena said, “I’ve never begged a man for anything—”
“Birds. I see birds.”
Brennan snorted. “You don’t see birds, damnit! There aren’t any, and if there were, you couldn’t see them from up here.”
Ena said, “Think of me, Leif—if you won’t think of yourself, at least think of me. The trip home will take fifteen more years. What if Brennan dies?”
Silence.
“Walt died. So did Barbara and Alaia. Brennan could die, too. I’d try to take the ship home all by myself, and I’d go insane. I couldn’t bear it. You know what the tests showed—nobody could.” She paused, waiting. “Think of me if you won’t think of yourself.”
Leif exclaimed, “You should see these birds! The detail! The colors! The combs and crests and wattles!”
Brennan said, “You’re dreaming them, Leif.”
“I couldn’t dream anything like this. It isn’t in me. It isn’t in anybody. They’re so big, and they get smaller as they come closer. Smaller and smaller, like jewels.”
Ena looked at Brennan, expecting him to reply, and saw that he was suiting up. She switched off her mike. “Are you going out there after him?”
“If I have to, yes.”
“I know you could outwrestle him, but can you catch him?”
“I’ll have to.”
She switched her mike back on. “Leif, I’m offering everything I’ve got. I’ll be your slave if you’ll just come back.” She gulped, and wondered whether her mike had picked it up. “I’ll do your details, all of them, and mine, too. We’ll be heroes when we get home, and I’ll give you a bath first, and clean and press your uniform. I’ll shine your boots and polish your brass. You said I was beautiful once, remember? Wouldn’t you like a beautiful slave?”
Brennan muttered, “Did he really?”
“I’ll—sleep with you like you wanted, Leif. You can do whatever you like with me, and I’ll do whatever you tell me to. Please?”
Leif said, “They’re nesting in me, all the beautiful birds. Perching on nerve fibers, sipping from tiny veins, Ena. Fluttering and singing. This is how a tree feels in summer.”
Wearily, Ena switched off her mike. “He doesn’t care about me.”
“He doesn’t care about us,” Brennan told her. “Not now he doesn’t.”
Leif said, “The wind murmurs in my branches, and the birds nest there.” He sounded rapturous. Ena’s screen showed a silver starfish, arms wide, legs spread, face invisible behind the glare of sunlight on his visor. Slowly, the starfish revolved, rolling like a wheel.
She heard the airlock open. “You’re going after him?”
Brennen stepped into the airlock. “Wish me luck.”
“I do,” she said. The airlock closed, and she added, “I wish you both luck. I hope you don’t kill each other.”
Still later: “Most of all I wish me luck.”
Was there nothing she could do but sit and watch? She unsnapped her belt, floated up, and pushed off.
Walt should have looked just as she remembered him from last time—so quickly frozen that no big crystals had formed, eyes shut, and very, very dead.
He did not. Dead, yes, but still there. So quickly frozen, she thought, that his soul had not had time to leave his body. Brennan thought it might be possible to reanimate him back on earth, and Brennan might be right.
Walt’s eyes were not completely shut. Surely they had been before?
Surely. But Walt was peeking out like one who feigns sleep.
“I may sleep with Leif if Brennan brings him back. I’ll have to sleep with Brennan. You’re dead, Walt.” Ena paused. “You’re dead for now, anyway. I won’t be cheating on you.”
From behind a plastic shield as clear as air, Walt watched her in silence.
“You understand, don’t you?” She began to close the lid. “Besides, I—we’re not all that different from you, we women.”
She returned to the bridge, floating along ovoid black corridors that should have echoed but did not. It had been wrong to silence them, she thought. The sound absorption was too good, it worked too well. Ghosts whispered in the black corridors now, Alaia’s ghost and Barbara’s.
Walt’s ghost.
On her screen, Brennan had a line around Leif’s waist and was playing it out behind him as he returned to the ship. Brightly lit by rising Beta Andromedae, the slack orange line traced fantastic loops and whorls against the still-dark planet they orbited. Ena switched on her mike. “Did he give you any trouble, Brennan?”
“Not a bit.”
Changing viewpoints, she watched Brennan enter the airlock, turn, and begin hauling Leif in. No resistance, but…She inserted a sedative cap in the injector. Leif, she told herself, was not particularly strong. And pushed aside the knowledge that all psychotics were.
Inside, he removed his helmet without assistance. His expression was rapt, his eyes elsewhere. The neck was one of the best places.
Leif relaxed, swaying, and Brennan said, “That was probably a good idea.”
“It can’t hurt.” Ena was opening Leif’s suit.
“I’m full of birds,” Leif told her.
“I see.”
“They’re nesting in me. Have I mentioned that?”
Absently, she nodded.
“We are their trees. That’s why there are no trees down there. We trees have just arrived.” Leif paused. “I would like to sit down.”
“No reason not to,” Brennan told him. “Step out of the boots and I’ll put you in a chair.”
When Leif did not move, Brennan lifted him out, the magnetic boot soles holding them to the deck. When Brennan had Leif in his console seat, Ena belted him in.