Outnumbering the Dead Read online

  'You should have slept a little longer,' he said fondly.

  She blinked up at him. 'I can't. Anyway' - she paused for a yawn - 'there's a staff meeting coming up. I ought to decide what I want to put in for.'

  Rafiel gently pushed the cats out of the way and sat down companionably next to her. They had talked about her future plans before. He knew that Alegretta would have to be reassigned to some other task for the long trip. Unless something went seriously wrong with the reactors there would be little for her to do there. (And if, most improbably, anything did go seriously wrong with them in the space between the stars, the ship would be in more trouble than its passengers could hope to survive.) 'What kind of job are you looking for?'

  'I'm not sure. I've been thinking of food control, maybe,' she said, frowning. 'Or else waste recycling. Which do you think?'

  He pretended to take the question seriously. He was aware that both jobs were full-time, hands-on assignments, like air and water control. If any of those vital services failed, the ship would be doomed in a different way. Therefore human crews would be assigned to them all the time the ship was in transit - and for longer still if they found no welcoming planet circling Tau Ceti. But he knew that there was nothing in his background to help Alegretta make a choice, so he said at random: 'Food control sounds like more fun.'

  'Do you think so?' She thought that over. 'Maybe it is, sort of, but I'd need a lot of retraining for aeroponics and trace-element management. The waste thing is easier. It's mostly plumbing, and I've got a good head start on that.'

  He kissed her. 'Sleep on it,' he advised, getting up.

  She looked worriedly up at him, remembering to be a doctor. 'You're the one who should be sleeping more.'

  'I've had plenty, and anyway I can't. Manfred will be waiting for me with the babies.'

  'Must you? I mean, should you? The boy can handle them by himself, and you look so tired....'

  'I'm fine,' he said, trying to reassure the person who knew better than he.

  She scolded, 'You're not fine! You should be resting.'

  He shook his head. 'No, dearest, I really am fine. It's only my body that's sick.'

  He hadn't lied to her. He was perfectly capable of helping with the babies, fine in every way - except for the body.

  That kept producing its small aches and pains, which would steadily become larger. That didn't matter, though, because they had not reached the point of interfering with tending the children. The work was easier than ever now, with the hectic last-minute labours all completed. The ten-year-old, Manfred Okasa-Pennyweight, had been allowed to return to the job, which meant that now there were two of them on the shift to share the diapering and feeding and playing.

  Although Rafiel had been demoted to his assistant, Manfred deferred to him whenever possible. Especially because Manfred had decided that he might like to be a dancer himself - well, only for a hobby, he told Rafiel, almost apologizing. He was pretty sure his main work would be in construction, once they had found a planet to construct things on. And he was bursting with eagerness to see Rafiel perform. 'We're all going to watch the Oedipus,' he told Rafiel seriously, looking up from the baby he was giving a bottle. 'Everybody is. You're pretty famous here.'

  'That's nice,' Rafiel said, touched and pleased, and when there was a momentary break he showed the boy how to do a cramp roll, left and right. The babies watched, interested, though Rafiel did not think it was one of his best performances. 'It's hard to keep your feet down when you're tapping in a quarter-gee environment,' he panted.

  Manfred took alarm. 'Don't do any more now, please. You shouldn't push yourself so hard,' he said. Rafiel was glad enough to desist. He showed Manfred some of the less strenuous things, the foot positions that were basic to all ballet...though he wondered if ballet would be very interesting in this same environment. The grandest of leaps would fail of being impressive when the very toddlers in the nursery could jump almost as high.

  When their shift was over, Manfred had a little time to himself before going to his schooling. Bashfully he asked if Rafiel would like to be shown anything on the ship, and Rafiel seized the chance. 'I'd like to see where they do the waste recycling,' he said promptly.

  'You really want to go to the stink room? Well, of course, if you mean it.' And on the way Manfred added chattily, 'It probably doesn't smell too bad right now, because most of the recycled organics now are just chopped-up trees and things - they had to cut them all down before we launched, because they were growing the wrong way, you see?'

  Rafiel saw. He smelled the processing stench, too; there was a definite odour in the waste-recycling chambers that wasn't just the piney smell of lumber, though the noise was even worse than the smell. Hammering and welding was going on noisily in the next compartment, where another batch of aeroponics trays were being resited for the new rearward orientation. 'Plants want to grow upward, you see,' Manfred explained. 'That's why we had to chop down all those old trees.'

  'But you'll plant new ones, I suppose?'

  'Oh, I don't think so. I mean, not pines and maples like these. They'll be planting some small ones - they help with the air recycling - and probably some fruit trees, I guess, but not any of these big old species. They wouldn't be fully grown until we got to Tau Ceti, and then they'd just have to come down again.'

  Rafiel peered into the digesting room, where the waste was broken down. 'And everything goes into these tanks?'

  'Everything organic that we don't want any more,' Manfred said proudly. 'All the waste, and everything that dies.'

  'Even people?' Rafiel asked, and was immediately sorry he had. Because of course they had probably never had a human corpse to recycle, so far.

  'I've seen enough,' he said, giving the boy a professional smile. He did not want to stay in this place where he would soon enough wind up. He would never make it to Tau Ceti, would never see his son born... but his body would at some fairly near time go into those reprocessing vats, along with the kitchen waste and the sewage and the bodies of whatever pets died en route, ultimately to be turned into food that would circulate in that closed ecosystem for ever. One way or another, Rafiel would never leave them.

  While Alegretta was once again fussing over her diagnostic readouts Rafiel scrolled the latest batch of his messages from Earth.

  The first few had been shocked, incredulous, reproachful; but now everyone he knew seemed at least resigned to their star's wild decision, and Mosay's letters were all but ecstatic. The paps were going crazy with the story of their dying Oedipus going off on his last great adventure. Even Docilia was delighted with the fuss the paps were making, though a little put out that the stories were all him, and Alegretta was pleased when the news said that another habitat had been stirred to vote for conversion to a ship; maybe Rafiel's example was going to get still others to follow them.

  But she was less pleased with the vital signs readings on her screen. 'You really should go into the sickbay,' she said fretfully.

  'So they could do what for me?' he asked, and of course she had no answer to that. There was no longer much that could be done. To change the subject Rafiel picked up the kitten. 'Do you know what's funny here?' he asked. 'These cats. And I've seen dogs and birds - all kinds of pets.'

  'Why not? We like pets.' She was only half attentive, most of her concentration on the screen. 'Actually, I may have started the fashion myself.'

  'Really? But on Earth most people don't have them. You hardly ever see a pet animal in the arcologies. Aren't you afraid that they'll die on you?'

  She turned to look at him, suddenly angry. 'Like you, you mean?' she snapped, her eyes flashing. 'Do you see what the screen is saying about your tests? There's blood in your urine sample, Rafiel!'

  For once, he had known that before she did, because he had seen the colour of what had gone into the little flask. He shrugged. 'What do you expect? I guess my rognons are just wearing out. But, listen, what did you mean when you said you started the fashion-'


  She cut him off. 'Say kidneys when you mean kidneys,' she said harshly, looking helpless and therefore angry because she was helpless. He recognized the look. It was almost the way she had looked when she first gave him the bad news about his mortality, so long and long ago, and it chased his vagrant question out of his mind.

  'But I'm still feeling perfectly well,' he said persuasively - and made the mistake of trying to prove it to her by walking a six-tap riff - a slow one, because of the light gravity.

  He stopped, short of breath, after a dozen steps.

  He looked at her. 'That didn't feel so good,' he panted. 'Maybe I'd better go in after all.'

  15

  Hakluyt's sickbay is just about as big as a hospital in an average Earthly arcology, and just about as efficient. Still, there is a limit to what any hospital can do for a short-timer nearing the end of his life expectancy. When, after four days, they wake Rafiel, he is in far from perfect health. His face is puffy. His skin is sallow. But he has left strict orders to wake him up so he can be on hand for the showing of Oedipus. As nothing they can do will make much difference anyhow, they do as he asks. They even fetch the clothes he requests from his room, and when he is dressed he looks at himself in a mirror. He is wearing his fanciest and most theatrical outfit. It is a sunset-yellow full dress suit, with the hem of the tails outlined in stitches of luminous red and a diamond choker around his neck. The diamonds are real. With any luck at all, he thinks, people will look at his clothing and not at his face.

  Probably not every one of Hakluyt’s five thousand people were watching Oedipus as the pictures beamed from Earth caught up with the speeding interstellar ship. But those who were not were in a minority. There were twenty viewers keeping them company in the room where Rafiel and Alegretta sat hand in hand, along with Manfred and his brother and a good many people Rafiel didn't really know - but whom Manfred knew, or Alegretta did, and so they were invited to share.

  It was a nice room. A room that might almost have been Rafiel's own old condo, open to the great central space within Hakluyt; they could look out and see hundreds of other lighted rooms like their own, all around the cylinder, some a quarter of a kilometre away. And most of the people in them were watching, too. When the four children of Jocasta and Oedipus did their comic little dance at the opening of the show, the people in the room laughed where Mosay wanted them to - and two seconds later along came the distant, delayed laughter from across the open space, amplified enough by the echo-focusing shape of the ship to reach their ears.

  Rafiel hardly looked at the screen. He was content simply to sit there, pleased with the success of the show, comfortable with Alegretta's presence ... at least, in a general sense comfortable; comfortable if you did not count the sometimes acute discomforts of his body. He didn't let the discomforts show. He was fondly aware that Alegretta's fingers slipped from hand to wrist from time to time, and knew that she was checking his pulse.

  He was not at all in serious pain. Of course, the pain was there. Only the numbing medications they had been giving him were keeping it down to an inconvenience rather than agony. He accepted that, as he accepted the fact that his life expectancy was now measured in days. Neither fact preyed on his mind. There was an unanswered question somewhere in his mind, something he had wanted to ask Alegretta, but what it could have been he could not clearly say. He accepted the fact that his mind was confused. He even drowsed as he sat there, aware that he was drifting off for periods of time, waking only when there was laughter, or a sympathetic sound from the audience. He did not distinguish clearly between the half-dreams that filled his mind and the scene on the screens. When the audience murmured as he - as Oedipus - took his majestic oath to heal the sickness of the city, the murmur mingled in Rafiel's mind with a blurry vision of the first explorers from Hakluyt stepping out of a landing craft on to a green and lovely new planet, to the plaudits of an improbable welcoming committee. It wasn't until almost the end that he woke fully, because next to him there was a soft sound that had no relation to the performance on the screen.

  Alegretta was weeping.

  He looked at her in confusion, then at the screen. He had lost an hour or more of the performance. The play was now at the farewell of the chorus to the blinded and despairing Oedipus as, alone and disgraced, he went off to a hopeless future. And the chorus was singing:

  There goes old Oedipus.

  Once he was the best of us.

  Now he drowns in misery and dread.

  Down from the top he is,

  Proof that all happiness

  Can't be known until you're dead.

  Rafiel thought that over for some time. Then, blinking himself awake, he reached to touch Alegretta's cheek. 'But I do know that now,' he said, 'and, look, I'm not dead yet.'

  'Know what, Rafiel?' she asked huskily, not stopping what she was doing. Which, curiously, was pressing warm, sticky, metallic things to his temples and throat.

  'Oh,' he said, understanding, 'the show's over now, isn't it?' For they weren't in the viewing room any more. He knew that, because he was in a bed - in their room? No, he decided, more likely back in the ship's sickbay. Another doctor was in the room, too, hunched over a monitor, and in the doorway Manfred was standing, looking more startled than grieving, but too grieving to speak.

  Rafiel could see that the boy was upset and decided to say something reassuring, but he drifted off for a moment while he tried to think of what to say. When he looked again the boy was gone. So was the other doctor. Only Alegretta sat beside him, her eyes closed wearily and her hands folded in her lap; and at that moment Rafiel remembered the question on his mind. 'The cats,' he said.

  Alegretta started. Her eyes flew open, guiltily turning to the monitor before they returned to him. 'What? Oh, the cats. They're fine, Rafiel. Manfred's been taking care of them.' Then, looking at the monitor again, 'How do you feel?'

  That struck Rafiel as a sensible question. It took him a while to answer it, though, because what he felt was almost nothing at all. There was no pain in the gut, nor anywhere else, only a sort of generalized numbness that made it hard for him to move.

  He summed it all up in one word. 'Fine. I feel fine.' Then he paused to rehearse the question that had been on his mind. When it was clear he spoke. 'Alegretta, didn't you say you started the fashion of having pets?'

  'Pets? Yes, I was one of the first here on Hakluyt, years and years ago.'

  'Why?' he asked. And then, because he felt a need to hurry, he made his thickening tongue come out with it: 'Did you do it so you could get used to things you loved dying? Things like me?'

  'I didn't know you were a psychotherapist, dear Rafiel,' she whispered. It was an admission, and she knew he understood it... though his eyes had closed and she could not tell whether he had heard the words. She did not need the confirmation of the screen or of the other doctor as he came running in to know that Rafiel had joined the minority of the dead. She kissed the unresponding lips and retired to the room they had shared, to weep, and to think of what, some day, she would tell their son about his father: that he had been famous, and loved, and brave ... and most of all that, certainly, yes, Rafiel had after all been happy in his life, and known that to be true.