“Could be better,” he said.
* * *
Bella put on the suit and left her prison. Suit-to-suit communication was available, so Parry did his best to prepare Bella during the long drive back to Crabtree, even as he kept half his concentration on the business of steering the tractor, following the snaking path of the superconductor cable and willing the lights of the High Hab to crest the horizon.
Bella knew more and less than he had expected — clearly some of her visitors had done more than just swap rations and check her blood pressure, but there were still gaps in her knowledge. She knew about Wang Zhanmin and his heroic efforts to coax life into the forge vat. She knew something of the Ofria-Gomberg work on the Spican symbols. She knew nothing of the Maw project, or the study of the lava lines, or the fact that Jim Chisholm was still alive.
“Wang had Chinese medicine on his ship,” Parry said, “some of it more advanced than anything Ryan had in his toolkit. It helped slow the spread of the tumour.”
“Slow but not stop.”
“No. That wasn’t within his capabilities. Wang said it was just emergency field medicine — not even the best they had.”
“We were wrong about the Chinese,” she said. “Badly wrong. We should have embraced them, welcomed their help.”
“Too late to kick ourselves about it now.”
“I think we might be wrong about the Spicans, too.”
Parry pressed her on that, but that was all she would say on the matter. The remark troubled him all the way back, until Crabtree began to emerge over the horizon. First the tower appeared, with the swollen cylinder of the High Hab perched at its top, then the outlying structures, then the squared-off trenches where water had been mined from the ice. They couldn’t waste power illuminating the tower for its own sake, but its shape was defined by the light coming from its windows, and by the glow spilling from the spawn of domes surrounding it. Light raced along the guy lines, bluish as moonlit cobwebs.
“This is the first time I’ve seen this,” Bella said, something like awe in her voice.
“It’s home.”
“It doesn’t even look like a ship any more. If I didn’t know —” She bit down on whatever she had started to say. “How many are there now?”
“One hundred and forty-six — five more than we arrived with.”
“Children,” Bella breathed, as if the word was a kind of oath, or invocation: to be used sparingly, and with caution. “How… how are they?”
Parry steered the tractor around one of the ice trenches. At the far end, a robot was carving out a block with a cutting beam. “They seem okay. We take special care of them. We don’t leave much to chance.”
“This is no place for children,” she said.
“We came here to live. Children are part of that.” He took one hand off the tractor’s steering wheel to point to the hab. “They spend a lot of time up there, in the centrifuge. Six hours a day, at one-point-five gees. Costs power, but we need to give them more gravity than Janus has to offer.”
“That works?”
“Ryan says bone development looks normal.”
“He isn’t a paediatrician.”
“He’s learning.” Parry returned his hand to the wheel in time to steer them down a tunnel ramp, into the labyrinth of corridors under Crabtree. “That’s all any of us are doing, from day to day: learning as best we can. What did you mean back there, by the way, about us being wrong about the Spicans?”
But Bella ignored his question, and silence stretched between them as they pulled into a parking cavern, the walls furred with whorls of hastily applied sprayrock. Robots and tractors huddled in vacuum, but there was no one living to greet them. Parry and Bella disembarked and made their way to a large airlock littered with machine parts.
“I’m glad you named this place after Thom,” Bella said as the lock cycled. “It was bad, what we did to him.”
“What they did to him,” Parry corrected gently.
“No,” Bella insisted, “what we did. All of us. Including you, including me.” She kicked one heel against the ground. “This is our atonement.”
* * *
Ryan Axford still occupied his old medical complex in one of the two Hab centrifuges. He was alone when Parry dropped Bella off, and the lights in the medical complex were dimmed to their lowest settings. He stood up from a desk-mounted microscope with a glass slide in his hands, smeared with something yellow. He wore crumpled green scrubs and white gloves. “Hello, Bella,” he said. “It’s good to have you back.” Axford’s aged appearance didn’t alarm or surprise Bella: she had seen him many times during her exile, and could only guess at the burden of work he had been under since their arrival. He had been a young-looking forty-four before they chased Janus, but now he could have passed for a man in his late fifties, worn down by long decades of overwork. The salt-and-pepper crew cut she remembered was now nearly snow-white.
“I gather I won’t have time to outstay my welcome,” Bella said.
“Six hours is better than nothing. We’ll just have to make the most of it, won’t we?”
She steadied herself against a cabinet. This wasn’t even full gravity — the centrifuge had obviously been spun down for her visit — but it was still taxing after nearly three years in Janus’s microgravity. She struggled to catch her breath before speaking. “Parry told me you’ve been branching into paediatrics.”
“And obstetrics,” Axford added, with a gentle smile. “Not just me, of course: there’s Jagdeep, Thomas, Judy… Gayle.”
Thomas Shen and Gayle Simmons had taken Svetlana’s side during the crisis. Bella wondered what it had cost Axford to keep his team together, despite that rift. Something in the lines of his face spoke of the toll that other kind of healing had taken.
“Parry said there are several children now.”
“Yes, and there’s one more on the way,” Axford said. “I shouldn’t really tell you this, but it’s common knowledge in Crabtree — Svetlana’s pregnant.”
“Nice for her.”
“I don’t suppose word reached you that she lost one child already? A daughter. I did what I could, but…” Axford faltered, as if something had caught in his throat.
“I’m sorry she lost the child,” Bella said, and for an instant she permitted it to be true.
“They named her Hope. Hope was stillborn. That says something, don’t you think?”
“Mind if I sit down, Ryan?”
“I insist on it.” While she shuffled to a chair, he put down the slide, snapped off his gloves and reached for a flexy, glancing at it just long enough to review her case file. “How’ve you been doing since the last checkup?”
Bella smiled bleakly. “Better than Craig, from what I can gather.”
“Nothing to report, then?” He looked at her encouragingly. “Nothing ailing you?”
Through her feet she felt the quiet rumble of the centrifuge, like a fairground ride. “Oh, nothing worth mentioning. Sometimes I wake up screaming with terror because I think there are things outside, trying to get into the dome. Sometimes I catch myself standing naked in the airlock, halfway to the outside. Sometimes I find something sharp and think about killing myself.”
“We all have bad days.”
“Those are the good ones.”
He scratched a note onto the flexy. He held the stylus the way surgeons were trained to hold scalpels: four fingers on the shaft, like a violin bow. “Something stops you, though. Something holds you back, when you could end it all.”
“Duty,” Bella said. “Something that won’t let me turn away from this mission, and my responsibility to it.”
“Your responsibility ended the moment Svetlana took over.”
“No,” she said quietly. “It didn’t. It just got harder. I went peacefully because I knew it was the one thing that would allow Svieta’s people to forgive the others and work with them. It was the one thing that would bring the crew back together.”
“You had
no choice. She made that decision, not you.”
“I went along with it.” She balled one fist and touched it to her heart. “That doesn’t mean I liked it.”
Axford placed the flexy back on his desk. Bella noticed that the display was discoloured, with many dead hexels blotching the iridophore array. “You know you have many friends in Crabtree — almost half the population were on your side. A lot of the people who turned to Svetlana only did so because Parry led the way. And you know Parry doesn’t have anything personal against you.”
She nodded, thinking of Parry’s small kindness in bringing the cigarettes.
“For the last two years we’ve been pushing to make things easier for you,” Axford said. “We haven’t made much progress yet. But I’m confident that when the energy crisis is finally resolved…”
“I don’t want things to be easier,” she said. “I want them harder.”
“I think you’ll get your wish, at least while Svetlana is running things. She can barely bring herself to mention your name.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Don’t take it to heart. That’s often the way it goes when deep friendships turn bad. And there is no denying the fact that you were very good friends.”
“Whatever she feels about me, I don’t hold it against her.” Bella looked down feeling suddenly childlike and vulnerable. “I knew Janus would come between us,” she said. “I felt it coming long before things turned really bad. I saw the lightning on the horizon.”
“Just… hang in there,” Axford said. “For all your other friends, for all of us who still care.”
“Is it true what I heard about Craig Schrope?”
“I still hope Craig will come around,” he said. But something in his tone suggested that he never expected it to happen. “Crabtree could always use an extra pair of hands. It already has to feed and water him so why not make him work for his keep?”
“Has he tried killing himself?”
“Given what we allow him in that room he’d need to be pretty creative. I don’t think he was ever a particularly creative man.”
“No,” Bella said. “I don’t think so either. Is he up here?”
Axford nodded cautiously. “It’s better to have him close.”
“I’d like to see him.”
“Sorry, I can’t possibly allow it.”
“Svetlana need never know. Who’d tell her?”
“Me.”
“You could choose not to. And Craig is not likely to go blabbing, is he?”
“Why, Bella? Why does it matter so much? Craig turned against you. He took the ship from you.”
“He thought it was the right thing to do. Even at the time, part of me wondered if he might be right about it. I just want to let him know,” she faltered offering Axford her best pleading look, the one that’d opened so many doors in the past. “Just a moment with him, that’s all.”
He cocked his head, his nostrils pinched. “She will have my hide if she ever finds out.”
“She won’t.”
“Two minutes, Bella. That’s all.”
“Thank you.”
He fished a key from his pocket and walked her to a door with a small circular window set at head-height. Axford rose upon his tiptoes to peer inside.
“He is awake. That’s good. I wouldn’t want to wake him.”
Axford let her into the room. He remained by the door watching Bella and his patient. Craig Schrope sat on the edge of his bed wearing white pyjamas. He rocked gently back and forth, his hands tucked in his lap, fingers interlaced either in supplication or due to some intense skin crawling anxiety. His hair was shaved almost down to his scalp and he smelled strongly of disinfectant. His expression was blank, alarmingly neutral with the waxy pallor of a shop window mannequin. His lips moved, but not much else. He was saying something, mouthing words at the very limit of audibility.
“Hello Craig,” Bella said. “It’s me, Bella. I’ve come to see you. How are you doing?”
“He won’t respond,” Axford warned in a low voice.
Bella lowered herself onto one knee to face Schrope on his level. He was staring at the floor. His eyes betrayed no sign of having noticed her presence.
“Craig, listen to me. This is not how it has to be.”
“Bella…” Axford purred.
She reached out and touched Schrope’s pyjama-covered knee.
“Something bad happened to us all,” she said. “You were caught up in something you never wanted to be a part of. It’s been hard for you ever since, Craig. Probably harder than it’s been for any of us. I can’t begin to imagine what you are going through but we still need you back.”
Axford stepped from the door and placed a hand on Bella’s shoulder.
“I should run your medical, Bella.”
She ignored him, reaching up to place one hand under Schrope’s clean-shaven chin. She tried to tilt his head so that she could look into his eyes. He was as stiff as a corpse.
“I said something bad to you once, Craig. You know what it was. I said sorry… but that wasn’t enough. I want to say it again now. I want you to know that you’re still a good man. You can still come back to us.”
His head moved the tiniest of degrees under the pressure of her hand. He did not look at her. She let go and stood up.
* * *
Axford worked efficiently: bloodwork, bone density, radiation dosimetry. Aside from the calcium depletion due to her permanent exposure to low gravity, Bella was healthy enough. She had an exercise cycle in the dome and she made a point of using it, even on the bad days. She might take her own life out there, but she was not going to let Janus do it for her.
She hated the moon and gave it no quarter.
When they were done, Axford sat her down in a quiet annexe and told her about Jim Chisholm.
“I give him a week, maybe two, of lucidity. The glioblastoma is interfering with normal brain function, squeezing some structures and infiltrating others. It’s also competing with them for blood and nutrients. He has elevated arterial and venous hypoxia: his brain’s literally being starved by the blastoma. Metabolic end-products are upsetting normal neurochemistry. For the last six months I’ve been seeing clear focal deficits.”
“Deficits in what?” she asked.
Axford ticked off fingers. “Language, comprehension, spatial tasks — none of them, are as good as they used to be. Seizures are getting worse — anticonvulsants can only do so much.” Axford pushed himself up in his seat and tried to look bright. “Today’s a good day, though. Jim knows it, I know it. That’s why Parry came out for you.”
“So that I could say goodbye to Jim?”
“That’s part of it, I guess.”
“I’m surprised Svieta allowed it.”
“Jim wanted to speak to you. That wasn’t the kind of request she could turn down.”
“That must have stuck in her craw.”
“She always liked and respected Jim. She couldn’t have lived with herself if she said no.”
“That’s all there is to this? Jim just wanting to see me one last time?”
“That’s between you and Jim,” Axford said.
* * *
Since Rockhopper had been grounded on Janus, Axford had expanded his medical complex, incorporating some of the surrounding rooms. Bella supposed he had more patients on his hands these days: not just the children and the pregnant women but all the people who were falling ill with things that would otherwise have been fixed once they returned to Earth. He had set aside an entire room for Jim Chisholm, furnished with plants and pictures. The room was clean but careworn: there were chips missing from the green tiles on the walls and ceiling, smudges of ineradicable colour on the floor.
One wall was sewn with iridophores, dappled with dead patches like leaf mould. A ShipNet portal was open, flanked on either side by some kind of X-ray or PET image of a human skull in lateral section, with its bones and tissue and liquid secrets traced in pale-blue monochrome, ov
erlaid with white text and digits. She made out the tumour, lurking in one side of his brain like a weather system in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a third bigger than the last time she had seen an image of it, and angrier, somehow.
As they entered, Gayle Simmons was leaning over the figure on the bed, adjusting a fawn-coloured medical cuff. It sat like an oversized bangle around Chisholm’s stick-thin wrist.
“I’ll give you as much time as you need,” Axford said, “but don’t tire him out. You don’t have to leave Crabtree immediately — I can always invent some tests I need to run on you.”
“Thanks,” Bella said, and she squeezed his hand in gratitude.
Simmons stepped away from the bed as she approached. Bella noticed that she had something around her neck: a collection of plastic shapes in primary colours, threaded together on a nylon line. She whispered something to Axford and then the two of them left the room, leaving Bella alone with their patient.
It looked at first as if Chisholm was comatose or absent, unaware of her presence. He stared dead ahead, his attention fixed on a spot on the ceiling. She moved to his side and was about to speak when he moved his head by the tiniest of degrees.
“Bella,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”
“Least I could do.”
He fumbled for the half-moon glasses strung around his neck on an elastic cord. “Have they been treating you well?” She wondered how much he knew. She considered mentioning her visit to Schrope, but decided against it. It was not as if there had been any communication between them.
“I’ve only seen Parry and Ryan. They’ve never treated me with anything other than kindness.”
“That’s good.” He nodded — an effort that must have been Herculean, given his situation. “Parry and Ryan: good people. We need more like them.”
“I think we have a lot of good people,” Bella said. “The fact that this place even exists, that they’ve managed to make it work —”
“It’s an achievement,” Chisholm said. “Did they tell you about the work in the Maw?”