Sweat trickled along his flanks, his legs, ran down his face. The air was cool but the sun warmed him, filled him with its life-giving energy.
He was nearing the top of the stairway. He could hear the breeze sighing, hear fully leafed trees up there calling to him. He looked down at the fetish in his hand and the bear smiled at him. Only a few steps more, my son, said his grandfather’s voice. Only a few steps more.
Jamie reached the top. The city was there, just as he had known it would be. Magnificent. Straight clean walls of fresh adobe brick. Tier upon tier of houses rising to the top of the cleft where the overhanging rock sheltered them like the protective arm of god.
“It is good,” Jamie said. “Ya’aa’tey.”
His grandfather appeared before him, young and strong and naked as Jamie himself. “It is good,” his grandfather said.
All the people poured out of their homes, thronging into the central plaza where Jamie stood with his grandfather, smiling, singing, carrying wreaths of flowers that they put over Jamie’s head. The women were beautiful, the men strong and handsome.
Yet Jamie turned to his grandfather. “I can’t stay. The others- they need me.”
“I know,” said the old man. “Go in beauty, my grandson.”
Jamie’s eyes snapped open.
The dream had been so vivid, so real. He dug his hand into the pocket of his coveralls and felt the fetish resting there, a warm comforting lump of stone. Only then did he allow himself to relax in his bunk and take stock of the new day.
His entire body ached with a dull sullen pain that sapped his strength. His head throbbed, pulse thumping in his ears like a drum slowly beating out the cadence of death. Next to him Connors moaned softly in his troubled sleep, his breath whistling slightly.
Quietly, Jamie slid out of his bunk. His legs were almost too weak to hold him up. For long minutes he gripped the edge of Joanna’s bunk, uncertain that he could squeeze past the bunks and make it to the lavatory. She was huddled in a fetal position. Ilona lay facedown, unmoving. For a moment Jamie feared she might be dead, but then he saw the slow rhythm of her breathing.
He pushed past the bunks, grabbing at the hand grips set into the bulkheads to make his way to the lav. In the polished metal mirror above the tiny sink his face stared back at him, gaunt, unshaven, hollow eyed. Slowly, with the deliberate care of a drunk or an old, old man, Jamie washed his face and hands. When he brushed his teeth the brush came away bloody. The teeth even felt loose in his gums. He peeled off his night coveralls and pulled on his day pair. Not much between them, he realized. They were both wrinkled and smelly.
The others did not begin to awaken until he had mixed himself a glass of instant orange drink and a mug of steaming coffee. They got up slowly, looking as exhausted and pain wracked as Jamie himself felt. Gaunt faces, red eyes, hands trembling, legs almost too weak to hold them up.
They barely said a dozen words to one another. Mumbles. Grunts. Sighs that turned into gasping, labored breathing.
Jamie slid past them, the coffee mug in one hand, and forced himself to the cockpit. Sliding into the right-hand seat, he punched up the comm unit and put in a call to the dome.
Paul Abell’s face appeared on the screen. He was smiling-weakly, but smiling. His cheeks and chin looked freshly shaved, slightly red. His bulging frog’s eyes were clearer than Jamie remembered them.
“Good morning!” Abell was almost cheerful.
“How are you?” Jamie’s voice was a scratchy croak.
“Yang’s vitamin doses seem to be helping,” Abell said brightly. “Got a good night’s sleep. I feel better this morning than I have in days. Not one hundred percent yet, but better.”
“That’s good.”
Abell pointedly did not ask how Jamie felt. He could see.
“Heard from the Russkies yet?”
“Who?”
“Mikhail and Ivshenko. They ought to be just about at the canyon’s edge by now.”