Dante's Equation Part 46

"Well. Quite a while, actually." She smiled. "What are you worried about? You're the one who said this place was lucky."

"Not so lucky for the aliens," he muttered, looking back down at his food.

Jill could feel that Nate was really in the thick of it. She tried her cheeriest voice. "Look at the bright side. We have water, food, and shelter, and all of those indefinitely, as far as we can tell. We can set up a more permanent place to live-a home base, if you will. And we could use an air car or two to save time. You'll have fun with that. Perhaps in a few days you can see if you can find one."

He didn't answer.

"I know this is hard, Nate. But the important thing is thework . We should be able to take notes on the computer now. Remind me to try that tomorrow morning. Of course, the biggest priority is to learn how they're using wave technology, particularly for things like s.p.a.ce travel and energy- maybe even medicine or the production of goods. We really have to go see those antennae tomorrow."

Nate clenched his jaw. She didn't seem to be getting through to him. The clinichad been awful, so very alien and heartbreaking, too, in a way. But it wouldn't do for them to brood. She decided to talk about something she'd been holding back, the way a mother might offer a pouting child a new toy.

"Listen, you've been so worried about the government getting the one-minus-one, about how it could be used as a weapon. Well, it's true, there is the potential for a devastating weapon,if you pushed the negative one pulse. But what if you pushed theonepulse? You could create a climate of benevolence, couldn't you? Imagine the possibilities! Everything you were saying about 'there's always a catch,' well, that might have been true up until now. But if we could increase the crest of the one-minus-one with a one pulse, maybe for the whole world, that wouldn't have to be the case any longer! Think about what that could mean for us, for our entire species. That's why those antennae interest me. Tomorrow we can-"

"Jill, what iswrong with you? Are you crazy or just plain stupid?" Nate's eyes were blazing from under a deeply furrowed brow.

She blinked at him, mouth still open to speak.

"What does any of thatmatter now? Suppose we spend the next ten or twenty years researching this place and writing little notebooks full of our findings.So what? So those notebooks can lie next to our bones bleaching in the sun? If we can't get home,none of it matters . You don't seem to get that. And frankly," a flare of embarra.s.sment stained his cheeks, "frankly, I'm not so sure it wouldn't be the best thing for Earth if we neverdid get home."

"What'sthat supposed to mean?"

"It means . . ." He took a deep breath. "It's exactly like this situation, Jill. All you see is the science, not the human equation, not our predicament. G.o.d! Don't you think I know you were planning to work for the DoD? Even after we'd gone to Poland?"

She pressed her lips tight, looked away.

"Even now you can't give it up. Can't you see that whatever this species knows, it hasn't done them any good? Why do you want it so badly?"

He didn't seem to be angry anymore, more genuinely trying to express himself, to plead with her. But that only made his words that much more unbearable. A groundswelling of resentment pulsed inside her.

"I'm ascientist , that's why! That's my job. And, as long as we're being honest here, why can't you just doyour job instead of whining all the time? If we're stuck here, we're stuck here! What do you want me to do about it? Lie down and give up? You're a man, not a boy. Why don't you act like one!"

He laughed. "A man? Really? I didn't think you'd noticed. How am I not being a man? Because I'mreacting , for G.o.d's sake? You can say that so blithely: 'We'restuck here.' That would be fine with you, wouldn't it? You'd be perfectly happy to bury yourself in workagain . My G.o.d, it isn't even the fame, is it? I always thought you were just incredibly ambitious. But there's no chance of fame here. It's justblind work . What is that? Escapism, is that what it's about for you? Do you work so you don't have tofeel ?"

She started to protest but didn't know where to begin. His words were so malicious and so unfair.

He stood up, shoving himself back from the table. "Well, I, for one,don't like this place . Maybe you're content to spend the rest of your life eating little white food bars and being alone, never seeing your family again, and . . ." There was the angry edge of tears in his voice. "Forget that there's no one to talk to, no TV, no books, no news, no food, no beer, no music, noanything -it's sodead , Jill. The aliens . . . and this whole place-it's sterile and lifeless and dead! Didn't you see what I saw today? Don't you get it? This place is a tomb!"

Jill was purposefullynot looking at him, embarra.s.sed by his emotion. She felt nothing but anger, but she was already cooling, had already decided that she wasn't going to give him what he wanted, wasn't going to have a big scene and allow herself to get all upset. It was the stress, she told herself, the effects of the altered one-minus-one on his system.

"I understand that you're homesick," she said in a let's-be-reasonable tone. "But we have no idea what might happen down the road. We may find a way home. We may even be rescued. In the meantime, I see no excuse for wasting this precious opportunity. If you were thinking clearly, you'd feel the same, so I think we should just-"

"Rescued?" he laughed. "By whom?"

"You'll feel better in the morning," she said, with a deep sigh.

Nate, apparently, didn't agree. He got up abruptly and went outside, flinging his chair aside as he went. The door wasn't the kind you could slam, but Jill heard the noise in her head all the same.

Although she'd been tired for hours, Jill couldn't sleep. What she really wanted was to be alone- alone, as in not having to worry about where Nate was or what he was thinking or when he would come in. She wanted a break from all of this, from the burden of the relations.h.i.+p, from feeling like it was her fault that he was here, that she needed to take care of him. But she wasn't going to get a break from that responsibility. More to avoid another argument upon his return than anything else, she bedded down. She could have pulled his mattress farther away from her cot or even put it in another room, but she didn't want to set him off again, so she left it.

She lay down and tried to sleep, but something was growing inside her. She felt a hollowness blooming, despite her determination to ignore it. It was a niggling doubt: What if Nate was right? What if theycouldn't get home-was it all pointless after all? And would it really be the best thing for Earth if she was lost for good, and the one-minus-one with her?

No. That was Nate's idealistic hogwash. Progress was never bad. Learning, even if it ended up in a notebook next to her bleaching bones, was never for naught. It was her only G.o.d. She had to believe in it.

But the hollowness in her belly deepened, quenching her enthusiasm like coals being overwhelmed by dark, filthy water. The images from the clinic wouldn't leave her. The poor female, chained to a bed and no male willing to go near her. How had this society come to that? How could beings who'd had enough of a spark of life to evolve from nothing, from microbes out in that desert, to a highly technological society suddenly lose the drive to reproduce, to live?

Nate came in. The lights went on automatically at his movement. She was lying on her back, and now she wished she'd been facing the wall. She squeezed her eyes shut. She heard him taking off his shoes, quietly, getting ready for bed. She wanted to say she was sorry, but she wasn't sorry and didn't know why she should be. The room was so still. He lay down. It got quieter. The lights went out.

That hollowness reverberated inside her in the silence, like a place where her name should be and wasn't. Then her name appeared. At first she thought it was just in her head, but it was Nate. He had said her name,"Jill." His tone, lingering in her ears, sent a s.h.i.+ver up her spine.

"Jill."

Again. The hollowness, despair, was in his voice, too. It said a lot of things. It said he was sorry about the argument-not as in an apology but as in it didn't matter anymore, not in the face of that overwhelming emptiness. She knew what he needed-human contact. A touch, comfort, something real, something from home, something to ease the chill. She wanted it, too.

She could reach across in the dark and take his hand. She could even imagine herself rolling off the bed in the dark and lying down next to him, putting her head against his chest. She almost did it. But the thought occurred to her: Then what? Where would it lead? Would he kiss her again? And then what? It had been such a long time since she'd been intimate with a man, not since her college days, and even then it had been a disaster. She'd felt s.e.xual desire for Nate, G.o.d only knew. But the idea of being naked, vulnerable,here in this place-exposing herself so intimately physically and mentally at this precise moment of time? It terrified her.

"Jill," he said again, this time louder, darker, demanding a reply.

She pretended to be asleep. The silence was so uncomfortable that she added a light snore, just to make sure he was convinced, to plug up once and for all the awful stillness.

Loved and honoured hadst thou lain By the dead that n.o.bly fell, In the underworld again, Where are throned the kings of h.e.l.l, Lordly in that citadel -Aeschylus, "The Libation-Bearers,"458B .C., translation by E. D. A. Morshead

19.1. Seventy-Thirty Jill Talcott

When Jill awoke, Nate was gone. She could hardly believe it. She looked around outside the apartment, even outside the building, to confirm. Why would he goanywhere without her? That wasn't very smart. Now she had to sit around and wait for him to get back. Her doubts of the night before had vanished. She was ready to work again, thought it would do them good-dohimgood-if they could get a fresh start on the day, make some progress, keep their minds occupied. She tried to study the pile of printouts from the s.p.a.ceport, but her mind kept wandering, listening for the sounds of his return.

When he came in an hour or so later, he said he'd gone for a walk, hadn't slept well. His answers were clipped and stiff. Jill was determined to be patient.

"Nate, please don't go off on your own like that, not without telling me." "You know what?" Nate flashed an icy smile. "You're not my mother, or even my boss for that matter, not here."

Jill stared at him in dismay. "What is thematterwith you?" "I know you were awake last night. I mean, how stupid do you think I am?" Jill was embarra.s.sed. The snore had, perhaps, been overdoing it. "I'm-I'm sorry. I just . . ." "Whatever." He began folding his blanket in quick jerks. "What are you doing?" He didn't answer. "Nate,please. I do . . . I do care about you. It's just that at this moment I think we should stay focused on what's important here." "You know what? When you say 'we should stay focused on what's important' what you're really saying is 'this is what Ichoose to deal with.' That way, you can sweep everything you can't handle- all that 'unimportant stuff,' like emotions, andlove , and yourhumanity -under the rug. You know what that leaves you with?"

She blinked at him, speechless.

"It leaves you with a very fat rug!"

Jill was at a loss. She had never seen him like this. His face was harsh with anger and pain. His words were not half as bad as that look on his face.

"Nate . . . I-"

"Forget it. You do what you want. I'm done with it." He stalked out, leaving her alone.

Jill ran to the door of the building and called after him, told him he was being childish, told him he couldn't go off on his own. G.o.d only knew what all she said, but she didn't say theright thing. Nate disappeared around a corner, never even turning around.

Jill waited at the apartment for several hours. It was a stressful situation, she told herself. It would be for anyone. She tended to forget that Nate had a very large Greek family, friends. He might never see any of them again. Of course he'd be grieving about that.

She tried to understand, to imagine what he was feeling, but it was hard. The truth was, this place did not feel all that bad to her. She rather liked the quietness of it, the feeling of owning the City that its desertion allowed her to have. And there was that sense she'd had from the start of something familiar. She didn't miss all those things Nate missed-TV, radio, even food. Not really, not when she had her work, the potential of the alien technology laid out in front of her. It was about as thrilling an opportunity as any scientist could imagine.

And she wasn't leaving anyone behind. If there was one person in her old life she would have missed, it was Nate, and he was here. Nate was here.

And if Nate werenot here? Would she like being here then? No, she would not be nearly so okay with this if Nate were not here.

Still, whatever pressure he was under, he was being outrageously unprofessional and irresponsible by going off like that. Something might happen to him out there on his own. How would he get back? How would she know? Would he evencomeback?

Of course he would come back. Of course he would.

The printouts were on her lap. She tried to pull her mind back to them and could not. She sighed. How much time this was all taking! They should be getting work done, not wasting time arguing. But the only thing she could think about at the moment was, How could she get him to forgive her? How could she make it okay?

If theycouldn'tget off the planet it only made sense to allow her relations.h.i.+p with Nate to . . . to develop. He had needs, even here apparently, even on a seventy-thirty world. At the very least he had emotional needs. She should be more sympathetic. For the sake of the mission, if nothing else.

The flat, featureless cubicle of a room was dead, so amazingly empty. Jill had never heard a quiet this deep. She suddenly realized that since Nate had sprung her from the hospital she'd been with him every second. How many hours had that been? Seventy-two? Longer than that. Well over a hundred. At least a week since she'd not known where he was, since he had not been within earshot, if not right beside her.

Shedid desire him; that was not the issue. It was . . . what? Her, her own body, her own self. She was afraid of . . . of not being attractive enough, of being foolish in her intimacy, of being absurd. How could she bear that? Better not to let him get close at all.

And she finally saw that for what it was: a very old defense mechanism. When, she wondered, had she decided she was unlovable? Decided rejection was so inevitable it was better not to try?

"This is ridiculous," she said, standing up. When Natedeigned to return they could discuss it like rational human beings. She was willing to . . . to make concessions, even if the mere thought turned her to jelly. Yes. Okay. Yes. Fine!

Until then, she was going to go see those d.a.m.ned antennae!

The walk took several hours. The round dome was smaller than that of the s.p.a.ceport, but it had the same thick walls. There was the suction sound of a breaking seal as she tugged the doors open. Inside, endless branching corridors were labeled at the top in numbers, probably coordinates. The individual rooms were comprised of enormous panels in rows like bookshelves, panels with millions of tiny light indicators, most of them dark. This was the City's power grid.

The place was empty. She thought about searching for the grid's control room, to try to learn more about their power source, but she didn't want to spend hours in here, not alone. Besides, what had really drawn her was the antennae. She left the building to check out the field next door.

The antenna field was on the power plant's western side. It was the coolest time of day. The larger sun was setting and the smaller was still too low in the sky to broach the skyline. She explored the field in the shadows. It was one vast plain, ten or twelve of the City blocks long and almost as wide. It was also ancient-much, much older than the power planet itself. The antennae rose only about twelve feet from the ground, and up close she realized she was seeing just the tops of them. Most of their bulk had been buried. And not, she was pretty sure, because the ground had been purposefully filled in: they'd been covered by the drifting sands of the planet; they'd been covered by time. Their metal tubing, like the s.h.i.+p she and Nate had seen on the s.p.a.ceport runway, had fossilized, coated with red dust that had baked hard, layer after layer. Even thin wires jutting from the tops of the antennae had this coating. They looked like lacquered Chinese chopsticks.

Jill fingered them, as if she could tell time by the density of the layers.Old. How old? She had no idea. But she had the feeling it was like finding ancient pyramids in the middle of a modern city.

This place was a riddle, but it was not what she'd been hoping for. If this civilization was manipulating the wave, this kind of antenna field might be how they would do it. Had they used this technology long ago? Had they since developed subtler ways of influencing the wave? If so, why hadn't they torn all this down?

She had walked quite a ways into the antenna grid and now she turned around and headed back to the power plant, puzzling things over in her mind. She hadn't noticed the bunker the first time she'd pa.s.sed it, but this time it caught her eye-a set of concrete steps leading down under the antenna field. She contemplated it, moved closer without much motivation.

The bunker, too, looked like it hadn't been used in years. At the bottom of the stairs was a door. Did she dare? Was there a reason to? She sighed. What she wanted was to go back to the apartment and see if Nate was there. But she was here and it had been a long walk. She might as well get her money's worth.

She went down the steep well of a staircase and felt the air grow chill. The door at the bottom looked heavy and old. It did not open automatically. She put her fingers experimentally into a narrow slot and found a latch. The door sprang inward.

Inside, steep stairs continued down and down. A cool tunnel of a stairwell arched overhead, lit by protruding lights. These were on a dim level of power causing the steps to cast shadows on one another and bleed together. And she was greeted with the smell of old air, surprisingly musty for such a dry planet. She hesitated, glancing behind her, then decided she would just go a little ways.

She began descending, one hand checking her balance against the wall.

The stairs went on and on for a long time. At several points she almost turned around, but in the end she went down the steps because they were there, because the bottom, by definition, had to exist. She felt as though she was descending into the underworld. There was a metallic smell, like the reek of a subway system.

The stairs leveled out, growing narrower and narrower. Then there were no more stairs.

She stepped out into a vast underground complex. It was so cavernous, the distant sides were lost in darkness. It had to be vast because it had been built to house a machine, a machine with long, curving arms that stretched for miles. Its scale reminded her of a superconductor, but it wasn't a superconductor. No, she knew what it was: it was a generator, a wave generator. She had found what she'd been looking for.

She stood and admired it, heart tripping in her chest, appreciating its scale, appreciating its very existence. The antennae were aboveground from here. This machine had originally, she surmised, been built underground, though not nearly as deep as this. It had been built underground to insulate the wave it was generating. The antennae above relayed the resultant pulse.

But this machine was as ancient as the antennae. It was covered with inches of dust and rusted with time. Still, she felt extraordinarily hopeful. This technology would be closer to the world she and Nate could understand, closer to what Earth might be able to accomplish. It lay between where the aliens were now and where the humans were before the one-minus-one. It was the connection, the missing link.

She found a door in one of the curved walls-a door with a handle not very much different from those on Earth. She pulled on it-it gave a little, but it was stuck from neglect. She tugged and tugged, slowly gaining half inch by half inch.

Inside the machine, the corridors were so dark she had to grope her way along. With some trepidation she moved away from the door, unwilling to give up now. She felt chairs and walls and k.n.o.bby instruments. She thought she could make out a faint glow up ahead, and she stumbled toward it.

The glow, up close, was coming from a screen set in a disarray of wires and switches, a screen that looked very much like a computer or a television screen. There was a b.u.t.ton underneath the screen and she touched it. The glow was replaced by a video recording of a man. It wasn't a man exactly, but it was humanoid and closer to her own species than the aliens were. The translator in her ear clicked into action, deciphering his words.

He was explaining the use of the machine. His voice was low-pitched and slow and there was something wrong with him. There was something in his voice, in the wildness of his large, swimmy eyes. But she couldn't quite make out what he was saying about the machine because he was repeating himself. He kept talking about "only wanting to help" and the dead, the dead, the dead.

The screen switched to images of b.l.o.o.d.y carnage in the desert sun, of red-soaked sand and fragments of limbs and unidentifiable body parts, of a city in ruins, smoldering, parts of it oddly warped and distorted. In one surreal image the camera panned in and Jill could see fingers sticking out of a solid wall like some horrific avant-garde art.

Explosion,Jill thought, her mind and heart sickening. It was the only thing that came to mind. But where was this city and who were these people? Why were these imageshere , in the bowels of this machine, in the subterranean vaults ofthis place?

And then on the screen she saw the wall as the camera panned out into the desert. There-the red gla.s.s wavy wall. It was new and sharp and the sand beyond it was seared and blackened and in places sprayed with blood. The wall marked the boundaries of the rubble as if the sand had risen up . . .

. . . in a giant "splash." As if the City had been set down intact, like the house inThe Wizard of Oz.

The ruined city she was seeing wasthiscity or, at least, its predecessor. And the planet where this cataclysm had taken place wasthisplanet.

The man was back, his voice rising and falling with emotion. He tried to explain what had gone wrong, but it didn't sound like he really knew. He knew only that they had turned on the machine, they had turned it on, and at first it had all gone well, but then at nine hours, twenty-three minutes, and sixteen seconds after throwing the switch . . .

Idiots!Jill thought, furious.They made a weapon! They made a negative one pulse machine. And it . . .it . . . it exploded. Or . . . for G.o.d's sake!

Her hands were clammy. She felt dizzy. She was going to pa.s.s out; her consciousness was slipping away like quicksilver. It was the musty air in this place, those ghastly images.

She groped around in the dark for a chair, but her hands found nothing. The man was saying that the machine had been shut down and it must never, ever be turned on again, at least not until they had found a way to reverse the effect, to get home. But Jill just kept thinking,They made a weapon; they made a G.o.dd.a.m.n weapon!

The dark was stifling, suffocating, and she wanted out. The slightly restrained hysteria of the man on the tape was getting to her; it was sinking hooks into her that would probably never come out. But if she turned around now and tried to grope her way through the dark toward the door she might not find it in her panic-she might miss the door and spend hours wandering this vast machine in the dark!

She made herself sink to the floor and put her head between her knees. The air in here was so bad, it was like breathing the air of a coffin. But her nausea did slowly fade. As her head cleared, she kept hearing the man repeating over and over,We only wanted to help,and those words, and a dozen other hints in his long speech, finally clicked.

Dear G.o.d. Oh dear G.o.d. This isn't a negative one pulse machine. It wasn't created as a weapon. This machine was made to senda one pulse.

Jill gasped hugely, her head coming up, eyes riveted on the screen. It was true. She had just told Nate about her idea, that they could push the one pulse instead of the negative one, make Earth a living paradise. She thought she would be a G.o.d, a legend, an immortal for inventing such a thing, that she would change humanity's lot forever. And this very machine was just that-a "benevolent atmosphere producer"-and the aliens had built it. And it had donethat.

"Get up now," a voice said.

She looked around, confused. For a moment she thought it was another television speaking. But the source of the voice stepped in front of the monitor and the light of the screen gave it form. It was an alien, a male, one of the tall, pale creatures they'd seen several times on this planet. He switched the b.u.t.ton to end the video transmission.

"I am becoming ill on this air," the alien said flatly. "And I cannot leave you alone inside the machine. You must exit at once."

Jill didn't move, too amazed to connect these words with herself.

"Please get up and leave the machine," the alien repeated in a higher pitch, motioning his long fingers.