Read Online Beyond the Farthest Suns by Greg Bear - Free Book Online Page B

wanted to ask, And have you had lovers and children, and lost people you loved and under­stood with the grace of your own years what they lost by dying ?
    â€œIt’s filthy,” she said, “just filthy, not telling me what’s going to happen.”
    â€œI don’t want to make you unhappy.”
    â€œI’m not a child,” she said softly, evenly.
    Alista lifted the shoulder with Jerk on it and patted the orange lump, head cocked to one side. “You may make it. You’ll last longer than I will, anyway. But more than likely the ship will hit a rock in the belt of moonlets and everything will go …” He made a whoosh with lips and slapped his palms together.
    â€œIt will?”
    He nodded.
    â€œGoodbye to all, then.”
    â€œHello to what?” he grinned.
    â€œWhere are you from?” she asked, and he told her. He talked for a few minutes, telling of old Earth, where she’d never been, of Molokai in a group of islands in a big ocean, of schools and brown children and going away to seek the stars.
    She spoke of her schools on Satiyajit, and the boy friend who waited for her, and of her parents. When she could find nothing more to say, she told him how little she had really seen. She was surprised to find she had no more self-pity, only a deep well of honesty which told her all the sad, sad pressure in her gut was something human, of course, but of no use to anybody, least of all her.
    They ate dinner together in silence. Alista’s face was more relaxed, lines untensed, and his cheeks less wrinkled. But he grew visibly more pale and weaker.
    Alone in his cabin, he vomited up his food and slept fitfully, sweating, on the floor, wrapped in a curtain un­hooked from the lounge wall. He couldn’t stand the form­less comfort of the net.
    â€œLet’s be a little happy,” Karen said when the sleep period was over and she met Alista in the hall around the gymnasium. “Can you make the music play?” He said he could, but he was too weak to dance. “Then let me dance for you,” she said. “You won’t mind?”
    He could hardly mind. She slipped on blue tights and pulled her hair into a long braid, putting a round white cap on her head. With a clapper in one hand and a bell in the other, she showed him a smooth ballet to or­chestrated concréte sounds.
    She moved in slow motion in the low gravity, but when she finished her breath came in heavy gasps. Her face, flushed with exertion, showed no awareness of the upcoming third passage.
    Alista put himself to bed an hour later and took a small drink of water from a cup brought by Karen. With the weakening of his blood, his face was pale; with the failure of his liver, it was turning yellow.
    He asked her to get him the kit from the medical officer’s cabin and she did so. When she came back he saw she’d been crying and he asked her why.
    â€œI can’t hold it back,” she said. “I just wish I was never born, to have to feel like I do now. It’s all so damned use­less! I haven’t seen or done anything, anything at all!”
    â€œA little while ago you said you weren’t a little child. Do you still think that?”
    â€œNo,” she said. “I feel like I’ve just been born.”
    â€œWould you like to hear a story?” he asked. “Maybe it’ll make both of us feel better.”
    â€œAll right,” she said.
    â€œI was a gigolo once, a long time ago, and do you know whom I was a gigolo to?” Karen shook her head, no. “I was a consort to Baroness Anna Sigrid-Nestor.”
    â€œYou knew her?” Karen asked, not quite believing. Anna Sigrid Nestor had been the richest woman in the galaxy, with her control of Dallat Enterprises, the third largest Economische.
    â€œI did. I knew her for three years, the last three years of her life. She was a hundred and fifty years old and she was an abstainer. She