The State of the Art(15)

head hurts as well.Normally, the suit would pump

me full of painkiller, relaxants or a sleeping

draught, and whatever it is helps your muscles to

build up and your body to repair itself.My body

can't do those things for itself, the way most

people's can, so I'm at the mercy of the suit.

It says its recycler is holding out.I don't like to tell

it, but the thin gruel it's dispensing tastes

disgusting.The suit says it is still trying to track

down the site of the leak; no progress so far.

I have my arms and legs inside now.I'm glad,

because this lets me scratch.The suit lies with its

arms clipped in to the sides and opened into the

torso section, the legs together and melded, and the

chest expanded to give me room.Meanwhile the

carbon dioxide frosts outside and the stars shine

steadily.

I scratch and scratch.Something else more altered

humans wouldn't have to do.I can't make itches go

away just by thinking.It isn't very comfortable in

here.Usually it is; warm and cosy and pleasant,

every chemical whim of the encased body catered

for; a little womb to curl up in and dream.The

inner lining can no longer alter the way it used to,

so it stays quite hard, and feels - and smells -

sweaty.I can smell the sewage system.I scratch my

backside and turn over.

Stars.I stare at them, trying to match their

unblinking gaze through the hazy, scratched surface

of the helmet visor.

I put my arm back into the suit's and unclip.I reach

round onto the top of the blown-out chest and feel

in the front pack's pocket, taking out my antique

still camera.

'What are you doing?'

'Going to take a photograph.Play me some

music.Anything.'

'All right.' The suit plays me music from my youth

while I point the camera at the stars.I clip the arm

back and pass the camera through the chest

lock.The camera is very cold; my breath mists on

it.The viewer half unrolls, then jams.I tease it out

with my nails, and it stays.The rest of the

mechanism is working; my star pictures are fine,

and, switching to some of the older magazines from

the stock, they come up bright and clear too.I look

at the pictures of my home and friends on the

orbital, and feel - as I listen to the old, nostalgia-

inducing music - a mixture of comfort and

sadness.My vision blurs.

I drop the camera and its screen snaps shut; the

camera rolls away underneath me.I raise myself up

painfully, retrieve it, unroll the screen again and go

on looking back through old photographs until I fall

asleep.



I wake up.

The camera lies beside me, switched off.The suit

is quiet.I can hear my heart beat.

I drift back to sleep eventually.



Still night.I stay awake looking at the stars through

the scarred visor.I feel as rested as I ever will, but

the night here is almost twice standard, and I'll just

have to get used to it.Neither of us can see well

enough to be able to travel safely at night, besides

which I still need to sleep, and the suit can't store

enough energy during the hours of sunlight to use

for walking in the darkness; its internal power

source produces barely enough continuous energy

to crawl with, and the light falling on its

photopanels provides a vital

supplement.Thankfully, the clouds here never seem

to amount to much; an overcast day would leave

me doing all the work whether it was my turn or

not.

I unroll the camera screen, then think.

'Suit?'

'What?' it says quietly.

The camera has a power unit.'

'I thought of that.It's very weak, and anyway the

power systems are damaged beyond the junction

point for another source of internal energy.I can't

think of a way of patching it in to the external

radiation system, either.'

'We can't use it?'

'We can't use it.Just look at your pictures.'

I look at the pictures.

There's no doubt about it; education or not, once

you've been born and brought up on an O you never

quite adjust to a planet.You get agoraphobic; you

feel you are about to be sent spinning off, flying

away into space, picked up and sent screaming and

bawling out to the naked stars.You somehow sense

that vast, wasteful bulk underneath you, warping

space itself and self-compressing, soil-solid or

still half-molten, quivering in its creaky, massy

press, and you; stuck, perched here on the outside,

half-terrified that despite all you know you'll lose

your grip and go wheeling and whirling and

wailing away.

This is our birthplace though, this is what we

deserted long ago.This is where we used to live,

on balls of dust and rock like this.This is our home

town from before we felt the itch of wanderlust,

the sticks we inhabited before we ran away from

home, the cradle where we were infected with the

crazy breath of the place's vastness like a metal

wind inside our love-struck heads; just stumbled