He and his fellow villagers, ignorant of the comparative religion of the schools, would cheerfully have killed the magar if they could. Indeed, one of the boatmen had been fishing for it with an iron hook as thick as a man’s thumb hidden in the well-rotted haunch of a goat. Still, until the boatman caught it or they found it far enough from water to be slain with axes and spears, they would have been fools not to try to persuade it to be content with homage from their village and, especially, to move on up or downstream. Possibly in the dry season, when the river would dwindle to a trickle, something might be done. The peasant set down the water jar carefully so as not to waken his family. He heard his mother’s rasping breath; as the jar made a soft chunk on the earthen floor, his wife moaned and moved her arm.

  The second jar was smaller and older than the first, with a chipped place at the lip. He took it up and left the dimness of his home again for the brilliance of the street. The house had smelled of smoke; outside a breeze brought the rank, indescribable early-morning smell of second-growth jungle, a jungle cut fifty years before for timber, now growing up again in hardwoods. By the water, the river-odor of rotten vegetation returned, and the gray warmth of dust under his bare feet changed once more to the cold slipperiness of mud.

  This time he was not quite so careful, and one of his feet slid a trifle, sending out a slow cloud of fine black sediment. He took two more steps in the direction of the barely perceptible current before bending to fill his jar.

  Without warning, his left calf was struck by steel bars, simultaneously from front and rear. A hip-dislocating wrench sent him sprawling in the shallows while the half-filled jar rocked in the waves of his struggle. Because he was a strong man, taller and bigger of bone than most of his people, he had time for one full-throated scream, and time to draw the breath for another, before the water closed over his nose and mouth.

  For a few seconds he resisted before instinct, or reason, or the passivity of India and the East made him swallow, hug his chest with his arms, and submit, feeling the dark, cold fingers of the river loose his rag of turban and tangle his long, black hair. Then, as his heart pounded and his ears swelled and the trapped breath tried to burst past his closed throat and locked lips, he fought again, ignoring the pain already creeping into his numbed leg.

  When next he came to know our world—may a, that which is not God—it was as a small circle of pale blue far above his eyes. He tried to blink and discovered that he could not, and that his mouth was filled with water and mud (or perhaps with blood) which he could not expel. Even the muscles that controlled the motions of his eyes had forgotten their function, so that he could not direct his gaze to right or left; but he found, in the absence of this ability, that he could treat his field of vision as a window and shift his attention to one side or the other, so as to peer slantwise across his own eyes and examine the edges, where the ghosts of the newly dead and the more material demons flutter away from a man’s view.

  He was lying in a dark abscess in the earth, on mud, as his shoulders told him. Toward his feet was the carcass of a young blackbuck, its belly stretched by the rapid decomposition that attacks dead ruminants.

  To his left (he strained to see, and in straining felt the vertebrae of his neck move ever so slightly, grating one upon another) nearly hidden in shadow, rose the familiar, undulating curves of a young and not unslender woman lying on her side—the roundness of the head, the concavity of the neck, the rise of the shoulder declining to the waist, and the strong domination of the child-bearing hips tapering to thighs and knees lost in darkness. A drugged and whirling concourse of surmises rushed through his mind, until simultaneously and without consciousness of contradiction he felt that he lay in the palace of a scaled river-spirit and asleep beside his wife.

  His attention was drawn from the woman by an alteration in the light, the passage of some dark object across the disk of blue. It came again, hesitated, and returned by the path it had come. This it did three times in what could have been a hundred breaths; and while he watched it, he became aware of a stench indescribably fetid in the air that stirred sluggishly through his nostrils.

  The dark object crossed the light for the fourth time, and he saw it to be a leaf at the tip of a twig. Then he understood that his shadowy vault was the den of the magar, hollowed in the mud of the river bank, where he lay with his face beneath the “chimney” providing the minute ventilation necessary to prevent the den from filling with the gases of putrefaction. When the sun rose higher, it would become an oven in which decay would luxuriate and dead flesh rise like dough until the bodies were soft enough to be dismembered easily. He did not connect this with the crocodile’s teeth, which were of piercing shape only, unable to grind or cut; nor with its short front legs, which were unable to reach what its jaws held, although he knew these things.

  He knew all these things and the habits of the magar—the rotting-den and the sudden grab at the ford or the rush up from the water—but he was unafraid, though he knew without looking a second time the identity of the woman beside him… After a long while he rose and began working his way out through the chimney, uncertain even as he did whether he laboriously pushed the earth aside to enlarge the hole or merely drifted through, and up like smoke.

  The village was quiet now with the emptiness of noon, when the men were in the fields. He heard sobbing from his house as he dragged his injured leg along the village street, and the softer sound of chanted prayers. Sunlight shone brighter than he could recall having seen it ever before, the dazzle from the dust and the sides of the mud houses so great that he scarcely cast a shadow as he stood in the doorway of his home; neither the young woman, nor the old, nor the Brahman saw him until he entered the gloom of the interior where they sat, though his son ceased his gurgling and stared with wide brown eyes.

  When they saw him at last, he could not speak, but looked from face to face, beginning and ending with his wife, conscious of having come to the close of something.

  After a moment the Brahman muttered, “Do not address it. It is seldom good to hear what they will say.” He took up a handful of saffron powder from the brass bowl beside him and flung it into the air, calling upon a Name that brought dissolution and release.

  The Other Dead Man

  Reis surveyed the hull without hope and without despair, having worn out both. They had been hit hard. Some portside plates of Section Three lay peeled back like the black skin of a graphite-fiber banana; Three, Four, and Five were holed in a dozen places. Reis marked the first on the comp slate so that Centcomp would know, rotated the ship’s image, and ran the rat around the portside of Section Three to show that.

  “Report all damage,” Centcomp instructed him.

  He wrote quickly with the rattail: “Rog.”

  “Report all damage,” flashed again and vanished. Reis shrugged philosophically, rotated the image back, and charted another hole.

  The third hole was larger than either of the first two. He jetted around to look at it more closely.

  Back in the airlock, he took off his helmet and skinned out of his suit. By the time Jan opened the inner hatch, he had the suit folded around his arm.

  “Bad, huh?” Jan said.

  Reis shook his head. “Not so bad. How’s Hap?”

  Jan turned away.

  “How’s Dawson doing with the med pod?”

  “I don’t know,” Jan said. “He hasn’t told us anything.”

  He followed her along the spiracle. Paula was bent over Hap, and Dawson was bent over Paula, a hand on her shoulder. Both looked up when he and Jan came in. Dawson asked, “Anybody left downship?”

  Reis shook his head.

  “I didn’t think so, but you never know.”

  “They’d have had to be in suits,” Reis said. “Nobody was.”

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea for us stay suited up.”

  Reis said nothing, studying Hap. Hap’s face was a pale greenish-yellow, beaded with sweat; it reminded Reis of an unripe banana, just washed under the tap. So this is banana day, he thought.

  “Not all of the time,” Dawson said. “But most of the time.”

  “Sure,” Reis told him. “Go ahead.”

  “All of us.”

  Hap’s breathing was so shallow that he seemed not to breathe at all.

  “You won’t order it?”

  “No,” Reis told Dawson, “I won’t order it.” After a moment he added, “And I won’t do it myself, unless I feel like it. You can do what you want.”

  Paula wiped Hap’s face with a damp washcloth. It occurred to Reis that the droplets he had taken for perspiration might be no more than water from the cloth, that Hap might not really be breathing. Awkwardly, he felt for Hap’s pulse.

  Paula said, “You’re the senior officer now, Reis.”

  He shook his head. “As long as Hap’s alive, he’s senior officer. How’d you do with the med pod, Mr. Dawson?”

  “You want a detailed report? Oxygen’s—”

  “No, if I wanted details, I could get them from Centcomp. Overall.”

  Dawson rolled his eyes. “Most of the physical stuff he’ll need is there; I had to fix a couple things, and they’re fixed. The med subroutines look okay, but I don’t know. Centcomp lost a lot of core.”

  Paula asked, “Can’t you run tests, Sid?”

  “I’ve run them. As I said, they look all right. But it’s simple stuff.” Dawson turned back to Reis. “Do we put him in the pod? You are the senior officer fit for duty.”

  “And don’t you forget it,” Reis said. “Yes, we put him in, Mr. Dawson; it’s his only chance.”

  Jan was looking at him with something indefinable in her eyes. “If we’re going to die anyway—”

  “We’re not, Mr. van Joure. We should be able to patch up at least two engines, maybe three, borrowing parts from the rest. The hit took a lot of momentum off us, and in a week or so we should be able to shake most of what’s left. As soon as Ecomp sees that we’re still alive and kicking, it’ll authorize rescue.” Reis hoped he had made that part sound a great deal more certain than he felt. “So our best chance is to head back in toward the sun and meet it partway—that should be obvious. Now let’s get Hap into that pod before he dies. Snap to it, everybody!”

  Dawson found an opportunity to take Reis aside. “You were right—if we’re going to get her going again, we can’t spare anybody for nursing, no matter what happens. Want me to work on the long-wave?”

  Reis shook his head. Engines first, long-wave afterward, if at all. There would be plenty of time to send messages when the ship lived again. And until it did, he doubted whether any message would do much good.

  · · · ·

  Lying in his sleep pod, Reis listened to the slow wheeze of air through the vent. The ship breathed again, they’d done that much. Could it have been… admiration, that look of Jan’s? He pushed the thought aside, telling himself he had been imagining things. But still?

  His mind teetered on the lip of sleep, unable to tumble over.

  The ship breathed; it was only one feeble engine running at half force with a doubtful tube, and yet it was something, they could use power tools again—the welder—and the ship breathed.

  His foot slipped on an oil spill, and he woke with a start. That had happened years back while they were refitting at Ocean West. He had fallen and cracked his head. He had believed it forgotten…

  The ship breathed. She’s our mother, Reis thought. She’s our mother; we live inside her, in her womb; and if she dies, we die. But she died, and we’re bringing her to life again.

  Someone knocked on the pod lid. Reis pushed the Retract lever and sat up.

  Paula said, “Sir, I’m sorry, but—”

  “What is it? Is Jan—?”

  “She’s fine, sir. I relieved her an hour ago. It’s my watch.”

  “Oh,” Reis said. “I didn’t realize I’d been asleep.” He sounded stupid even to himself.

  “My orders were to call you, sir, if—”

  He nodded. “What’s happened?”

  “Hap’s dead.” Paula’s voice was flat, its only emotion this very lack of emotion betrayed.

  Reis looked at her eyes. There were no tears there, and he decided it was probably a bad sign. “I’m truly sorry,” he said. And then, “Perhaps Centcomp—”

  Wordlessly, Paula pointed to the screen. The glowing green letters read: “Resuscitation under way.”

  Reis went over to look at it. “How long has this been up?”

  “Five minutes, Captain. Perhaps ten. I hoped—”

  “That you wouldn’t have to wake me.”

  Paula nodded gratefully. “Yes, sir.”

  He wrote: “Resp?”

  “Respiration 0.00. Resuscitation under way.”

  The ship breathed, but Hap did not. That, of course, was why Paula had called him “Captain” a moment ago. She must have tried pulse, tried everything, before knocking on his pod. He wrote: “Cortex?”

  “Alpha 0.00. Beta 0.00. Gamma 0.00,” Centcomp replied. “Resuscitation under way.”

  Reis wrote: “Discon.”

  There was a noticeable pause before the alpha-, beta-, and gamma-wave reports vanished. “Resuscitation under way,” remained stubbornly on screen.

  Paula said, “Centcomp won’t give up. Centcomp has faith. Funny, isn’t it?”

  Reis shook his head. “It means we can’t rely on Centcomp the way we’ve been used to. Paula, I’m not very good at telling people how I feel. Hap was my best friend.”

  “You were his, Captain.”

  Desperately Reis continued, “Then we’re both sorry, and we both know that.”

  “Sir, may I tell you something?”

  He nodded. “Something private? Of course.”

  “We were married. You know how they still do it in some churches? We went to one. He told them we didn’t belong, but we wanted to have the ceremony and we’d pay for it. I thought sure they’d say no, but they did it, and he cried—Hap cried.”

  Reis nodded again. “You meant a lot to him.”

  “That’s all, sir. I just wanted somebody else to know. Thanks for listening.”

  Reis went to his locker and got out his suit. It shone a dull silver under the cabin lights, and he recalled a time when he had envied people who had suits like that.

  “Aren’t you going back to sleep, sir?”

  “No. I’ll be relieving you in less than an hour, so I’m going hullside to have another look around. When I come back, you can turn in.”

  Paula gnawed her lower lip. He was giving her something to think about besides Hap, Reis decided; that was all to the good. “Sir, the captain doesn’t stand watch.”

  “He does when there are only four of us, dog tired. Check me through the airlock, please, Mr. Phillips.”

  “Of course, sir.” As the inner hatch swung shut Paula said softly, “Oh, God, I’d give anything to have him back.”

  Neptune was overhead now; they were spinning, even if the spin was too slow to be visible. With only a single engine in service it was probably impossible to stop the spin, and there was no real reason to. The gravitational effect was so slight he had not noticed it.

  He found Jupiter and then the sun, slightly less brilliant than Jupiter or Neptune but brighter than any other star. The sun! How many thousands—no, how many millions of his ancestors must have knelt and sung and sacrificed to it. It had been Ra, Apollo, Helios, Heimdall, and a hundred more, this medium-sized yellow star in a remote arm of the galaxy, this old gas-burner, this space heater laboring to warm infinite space.

  If you’re a god, Reis thought, why aren’t you helping us? Quite suddenly he realized that the sun was helping, was drawing them toward the circling inner planets as powerfully as it could. He shook his head and turned his attention back to the ship.

  A faint violet spark shone, died, and rekindled somewhere on Section Six, indicating that Centcomp had at least one of its mobile units back in working order. Centcomp was self-repairing, supposedly, though Reis had never put much faith in that; human beings were supposed to be self-repairing too, but all too often were not.

  And deep space was supposed to make you feel alone, but he had never really felt that way; sometimes, when he was not quite so tired, he was more alive here, more vibrant, than he ever was in the polluted atmosphere of Earth. Now Hap was dead, and Reis knew himself to be alone utterly. As he jetted over to check on the mobile unit, he wished that he could weep for Hap as he had wept for his father, though he had known his father so much less well than Hap, known him only as a large, sweet-smelling grown-up who appeared at rare intervals bringing presents.

  Or if he could not cry, that Paula could.

  The mobile unit looked like a tiny spider. It clung to the side of Section Three with six legs while two more welded up one of the smaller holes. Centcomp, obviously, had decided to close the smallest holes first, and for a moment Reis wondered whether that made sense. It did, he decided, if Centcomp was in actual fact fixing itself; there would be more units as well as more power available later. He swerved down toward the mobile unit until he could see it for what it was, a great jointed machine forty meters across. Three clicks of his teeth brought ghostly numerals—hours, minutes, and seconds—to his faceplate, which had darkened automatically against the raw ultraviolet from the mobile unit’s welding arc. Still twenty-four minutes before he had to relieve Paula.

  For a minute or two he watched the fusing of the filament patch. The patch fibers had been engineered to form a quick, strong bond; but a bit of dwell was needed just the same. The mobile unit seemed to be allowing enough, working slowly and methodically. In the hard vacuum of space there was no danger of fire, and its helium valves were on Off just as they should have been.

  Reis glanced at the time again. Twenty minutes and eleven seconds, time enough yet for a quick look inside Section Three. He circled the hull and jetted through the great, gaping tear, landing easily in a familiar cabin that was now as airless as the skin of the ship. The hermetic hatch that sealed Section Two from this one was tightly dogged still. He had inspected it earlier, just after the hit, and inspected it again when he had come with Dawson, Jan, and Paula to work on the least damaged engine. He threw his weight against each of the latches once again; you could not be too careful.