“You’re wrong,” Maya said to Frank.
“Maybe so. Anyway, they’re the body politic. They have at least the power to follow.” He said this as if the idea depressed him.
John, due for a shift on the bridge, said good-bye and left.
Frank floated over to Maya’s side, and she shifted nervously. They had never discussed their brief affair, and it hadn’t come up, even indirectly, in quite a while. She had thought about what to say, if it ever did: she would say that she occasionally indulged herself with men she liked. That it had been something done on the spur of the moment.
But he only pointed to the red dot in the sky. “I wonder why we’re going.”
Maya shrugged. Probably he meant not we, but I. “Everyone has their reasons,” she said.
He glanced at her. “That’s so true.”
She ignored his tone of voice. “Maybe it’s our genes,” she said. “Maybe they felt things going wrong on Earth. Felt an increased speed of mutation, or something like that.”
“So they struck out for a clean start.”
“Yes.”
“The selfish gene theory. Intelligence only a tool to aid successful reproduction.”
“I suppose.”
“But this trip endangers successful reproduction,” Frank said. “It isn’t safe out here.”
“But it isn’t safe on Earth either. Waste, radiation, other people. . . .”
Frank shook his head. “No. I don’t think the selfishness is in the genes. I think it’s somewhere else.” He reached out with a forefinger and tapped her between the breasts— a solid tap on the sternum, causing him to drift back to the floor. Staring at her the whole while, he touched himself in the same place. “Good night, Maya.”
• • •
A week or two later Maya was in the farm harvesting cabbages, walking down an aisle between long stacked trays of them. She had the room to herself. The cabbages looked like rows of brains, pulsing with thought in the bright afternoon light.
Then she saw a movement and looked to the side. Across the room, through an algae bottle, she saw a face. The glass of the bottle warped it: a man’s face, brown-skinned. The man was looking to the side and didn’t see her. It appeared he was talking to someone she couldn’t see. He shifted, and the image of his face came clear, magnified in the middle of the bottle. She understood why she was watching so closely, why her stomach was clenched: she had never seen him before.
He turned and looked her way. Through two curves of glass their eyes met. He was a stranger, thin-faced and big-eyed.
He disappeared in a brown blur. For a second Maya hesitated, scared to pursue him; then she forced herself to run the length of the room and up the two bends of the joint, into the next cylinder. It was empty. She ran through three more cylinders before stopping. Then she stood there looking at tomato vines, her breath rasping hard in her throat. She was sweating yet felt chilled. A stranger. It was impossible. But she had seen him! She concentrated on the memory, tried to see the face again. Perhaps it had been . . . but no. It had been none of the hundred, she knew that. Facial recognition was one of the mind’s strongest abilities, it was amazingly accurate. And he had run away at the sight of her.
A stowaway. But that too was impossible! Where would he hide, how would he live? What would he have done in the radiation storm?
Had she begun to hallucinate, then? Had it come to that?
She walked back to her room, sick to her stomach. The hallways of Torus D were somehow dark despite their bright illumination, and the back of her neck crawled. When the door appeared she dove into the refuge of her room. But her room was just a bed and a side table, a chair and a closet, some shelves of stuff. She sat there for an hour, then two. But there was nothing there for her to do, no answers, no distractions. No escape.
Maya found herself unable to mention her sighting to anyone, and in a way this was more frightening than the incident itself, as it emphasized to her its impossibility. People would think she had gone mad. What other conclusion was there? How would he eat, where would he hide? No. Too many people would have to know, it really wasn’t possible. But that face!One night she saw it again in a dream, and woke up in a sweat. Hallucination was one of the symptoms of space breakdown, as she well knew. It happened fairly frequently during long stays in Earth orbit, a couple dozen incidences had been recorded. Usually people started by hearing voices in the ever-present background noise of ventilation and machinery, but a fairly common alternative was the sighting of a workmate who wasn’t there, or worse yet of a doppelgänger, as if empty space had begun to fill with mirrors. Shortage of sensory stimuli was believed to cause the phenomena, and the situation on the Ares, with its long voyage, and no Earth to look at, and a brilliant (and some might say driven) crew, had been judged a potential hazard. This was one of the main reasons the ship’s rooms had been given so much variety of color and texture, along with changing daily and seasonal weather. And still she had seen something that couldn’t be there.