Freya watched him silently. His fever was really very high.
He lay down on the sand. His helmet cam now mostly showed the sand under him, rumpled and granular, flecked with streamers of foam. Broken waves swept up the strand, stalled, retreated in a pebbly rush, leaving a line of foam. The water hissed and grumbled, and occasionally waves offshore cracked dully. Tau Ceti had separated from the sea cliff now, and all the water between the beach and the horizon was a bouncing mass of blue and green. The broken waves were an intense tumbling white. The waves as they were about to break turned translucent. Euan sounded like he might be asleep. Freya herself nodded over her arms, put her forehead on the table.
Much later something caused her to raise her head. She watched as Euan stood up.
“I’m hot,” he croaked. “Really hot. I guess it’s got me.”
He dug around in his little backpack.
“Well, I’m out of food anyway. Water too.”
He tapped away at his wristpad. There was a whirring noise.
“There you go,” he said. “Now I can drink from the stream. From the pool here too, I’m sure. It must be mostly fresh.”
“Euan,” Freya croaked. “Euan, please.”
“Freya,” he replied. “Please yourself. Look, I want you to turn your screen off.”
“Euan—”
“Turn your screen off. Wait, I guess I can do it myself from here.” He tapped again at his wristpad. Freya’s screen went dark.
“Euan.”
“It’s all right,” he said out of the dark screen. “I’m done for. But we’re all done for sometime. At least I’m in a beautiful place. I like this beach. I’m going to go for a swim now.”
“Euan.”
“It’s all right. Turn your sound off too. Turn it down anyway. These waves are loud. Wow, this water is cold. That’s good, eh? Colder the better.”
Water sounds enveloped his voice. He was saying “Ah, aah,” as if getting into a bath that was too hot. Or too cold.
Freya held her hands over her mouth.
The watery sounds got louder and louder.
“Aah. Okay, big wave coming! I’m going to ride it! I’m going to stay under if I can! Freya! I love you!”
After that there were only water sounds.
“No!” Freya kept shouting through her tears, watching her screen as she hastily dressed to leave their apartment. “No! No! No!” She threw things at the walls as she banged around her bedroom, looking for her shoes.
“What are you going to do?” Badim asked her from the door.
“I don’t know! I’m going to kill them!”
“Freya, don’t. You need to have a plan. Everyone is upset, but look, the people who have died are dead, we can’t get them back. It’s happened. So now we have to think about what to do next.”
Freya was still looking at her wristpad. “No!” she shouted again.
“Please, Freya. Let’s think about what we can do now. You can’t just wade in there and join the fight. That’ll happen without you. We have to think what we can do to help.”
“But what canwe do?”
She found her second shoe and jammed her foot into it, then sat there.
“I’m not sure,” Badim confessed. “It’s a mess, no doubt about it. But listen—what about Jochi?”
“What about him? He’s still down there!”
“I know. But he can’t stay there forever. And while everyone is caught up in the disaster here, I’m wondering if we could take advantage of that, and get him up here.”
“But they’ll kill him too!”
“Yes, if he tries to enter the ship. But if he takes a ferry up here, and stays in the ferry, he would be within reach. We could resupply him, talk to him. There’s a good chance he isn’t infected with this pathogen. After a while that will become clear, and we can move on from there.”
Freya had begun to nod. “Okay. Let’s talk to Aram. He’ll want to know about this and help.”
“That’s right.”
Badim began tapping at his wristpad.
“We’re just making sure,” this group’s spokespersons announced. “This dock is now closed for good. We’re sealing it off. We’ll leave the outer door open, and presumably the vacuum will sterilize it, but we aren’t taking any chances with that. We’re sealing the inside doors. No more access. We’ll have to use the other docks now. No sense having such a disaster happen without making sure it keeps us safe.”
Ejecting the bodies of seventy-seven of their fellow citizens in a pilotless ferry was denounced as a callous act, a desecration of people whose surviving family and friends were all in the ship. The dead had been integral members of the community until all this happened; now their bodies wouldn’t even be returned to the cycles to nourish the generations to come. In the fights still breaking out over control of the spine, these grievances were shouted out, and just as loudly denied.
Freya went up to the spine to see if she could do anything to defuse the situation. She floated up and down the passageways, pulling herself on the cleats and stopping abruptly to talk to people she knew. People saw her and shot through the air at her to tell her their views and see what she thought. Soon she moved in the center of a group that moved with her down the spine.
No one attacked her, although it often looked like it was about to happen. When people yanked to a halt before her, she asked people what they thought, as in the years of her wandering. If they asked her what she thought, she would say, “We’ve got to get past this! We’ve got to come together somehow, find a way forward—we don’t have any choice! We’re stuck with each other! How could you forget that? We’ve got to pull together!”
Then she would urge everyone to get out of the spine and back down into the biomes. It was dangerous up there, she pointed out. People were getting hurt, the ship could get hurt. “We shouldn’t be up here! The ferry is gone, those people are gone, there’s nothing more that can be done here. Nothing! So get out of here!”
Hours passed while she said things like this to people. Some of them nodded and descended the spokes to the rings. Down there the struggle over access to the spokes went on. There were not enough people committed to guarding all twelve spokes, and some were still being used to get up to the spine. Fights occurred in the spokes, and here, if people fell or were shoved off the stairs running up the inner walls of the spokes, they could fall to their deaths. In Spoke Five three young men died tangled in a single fall, and after that the shock of the blood on the floor seemed instrumental in getting that spoke closed to all traffic.