I Have a Winter Reason

There are ghosts among the asteroids. Ghosts of warriors and workers, ghosts of pilots and passengers, and ghosts of the Gypsies who originally settled the Belt. The Gypsies speak in ancient Romani and ask nothing of anyone but that they be left to their dreams.

I never heard them before the accident. I never had nightmares before, either. Nor a metal plate in my head to hold my brains in. At first I wondered whether that had anything to do with it, with the ghosts and the nightmares. But when I asked the doctors, they muttered polysyllabically about survivor guilt, said I should feel grateful my pretty face wasn't marred, and suggested I might be due for a vacation.

I'd read about survivor guilt. My cousin Michael was a warrior in the Colonial Incident. Since we were infrequently but permanently in correspondence with one another, I read every chip I could find on the Incident and its aftermath, both socio-politically and on an individual scale for the warriors involved. Survivor guilt was one of the primary components of what the psych-tenders called "PCIS": Post Colonial Incident Syndrome.

My cousin Michael and I never talked about PCIS. We didn't mention the Incident much, either. His sister was killed in the Battle of Viking Plain. His first wife Maria was a member of the Lost Platoon. After the Incident he married at least one of his childhood sweethearts and produced a litter of little michaels all named something out of the Bible like Elijah and Judah and Jonas. I imagined them as red-haired and freckled and impish as Michael himself had been when I last saw him, twenty years ago on Earth.

If anyone had a right to survivor guilt, it was Michael. He mentioned occasional nightmares, but no ghosts. He made a good living in the Colonies and had a life as secure and prosaic and safe as any good Earther could dream of.

His wild warrior days were behind him. He'd gone off to war, suffered whatever agonies and indignities the lowly warrior is expected to endure, killed who he was supposed to kill and survived the opportunities to be killed himself, and went home when the Incident was over to make a real life for himself. If he ever heard the Gypsies, he never mentioned them.

Maybe it wouldn't be the Gypsies for him. Maybe it would be the warriors he'd listen to. But whatever, it seemed to me that if an ex-warrior could make a life for himself, the survivor of a stupid accident like mine should, too.

I took another shuttle out and damn near killed us all when I heard the Gypsies singing. My passengers never knew how close it was, but I did. I decided maybe the psych-tenders were right. Maybe I could use a vacation.

The reunion wasn't really planned; it just happened. I thought I'd visit my parents on Earth and drop by Mars to visit Michael on my way home. When I got to Earth, I learned Michael had selected the same week to visit his parents, and brought his family.

Meanwhile Michael's mother invited a cluster of older relatives--aunts, uncles, grandparents, and great-somethings--to North America at the same time. Most of them lived in the senior-citizen resorts in the islands, and Rendell family reunions were usually held there.

But as one plump, pipe-smoking great-aunt remarked, "The old folks still like to see a bit of the world now and then." (To which another added in sepulchral tones, "Old ain't dead," and she nodded sagely in agreement with herself for several minutes thereafter.)

I probably wouldn't've made the trip if I'd had any idea how many Earth-based Rendells were going to show up at the same time. The inevitable culture shock of coming Earthside was bad enough, without the added nerve-wracking knowledge that there were so many related Earthers watching to see what bizarre and unacceptable traits I might've picked up in twenty years in the Belt.

There were the usual round of comments. Goodness, I had grown into a pretty woman. Didn't I look just like my mother had, at my age? And was it true I was a shuttle pilot? (This last was always asked incredulously, as though a shuttle were about the most unacceptable thing possible to pilot, and piloting the most unacceptable job they could think of. I suppose it was. On Earth, the women stay home and raise families. They wear make-up and long dresses and giggle behind fans. Not all of them, of course, but the "best" of them.)

I nodded and smiled till my face hurt, and very quickly switched from natural coffee, which had seemed such an exotic treat when I first planeted, to the soy beer the rest of them were drinking.

That was exotic too; on the asteroids there are plenty of alcoholic beverages but not much time to drink them. Nor much inclination; getting drunk is not one of the socially accepted forms of entertainment in the Belt as it is on Earth. But the alcohol helped dull my hypersensitivity to the cultural and environmental differences that otherwise unnerved me.

On my first day planetside, it rained. Water, huge drops of it, fell right out of the sky, out of thunderclouds piled as high as eternity like towering wads of dirty air-filter material overhead. Sky was a concept I'd got myself ready for before I planeted. Water falling out of it was something else again.

Then there was the air: limitless, breathable air, unchambered, unguarded. And it moved. It took me two full days to get over the feeling, every time I stepped out of a dwelling, that my chamber had blown a giant leak and I should dive for a space suit.

Being outside was okay in itself. I was ready for that. But I guess I'd thought of it as some kind of oversized chamber with attendant overhead megawattage to light it and the usual filters and controls to keep the air in.

Even a gentle breeze I could have accepted; in large chambers, the air does move, sometimes enough that you can feel it. But it doesn't move briskly. When air moves briskly, people had better move briskly too, if they want to go on breathing.

While I was getting used to air that moved briskly and water that fell out of the sky, indigenous life forms bit me. They left little red welts that swelled and itched. Mosquitoes, gnats, and flies all seemed particularly attracted to me. None of this was entirely new, of course; I did live Earthside the first ten years of my life. But in twenty years gone I'd forgot what to expect of a planet. Not all the rediscovery was fun.

Even the temperature wasn't properly regulated. I suppose I should amend that statement; I've put it in terms of the asteroids. On Earth, God regulates the temperature, and mostly what She does is assumed to be for the best. But in the area of temperature control I thought She did a lousy job.

After four days Earthside I was still too uncomfortable to do much of anything at midday but sip soy beer in the shade and sigh a lot. I'd spent most of my time so far saying hello to various relatives whose names I promptly forgot, and listening to little lectures from my mother on How a Proper Earther Behaves in a Hostile Environment, like for instance we don't talk to strangers in bars and we don't go for walks in the middle of the night by ourselves and we don't use the salad fork for dessert and we don't--

I forgot what all we don't. On the fifth day I found myself at midday sitting at a picnic table in the shade across from my cousin Michael, both of us sipping soy beer while all the Earthers were inside eating lunch. God regulates the temperature on Mars too (with a little help from the Terraformers), but on Mars She keeps the heat to a reasonable minimum. Michael didn't seem any more comfortable in the broiling sun of Earth than I.

It was the first time we'd been alone together, and we had nothing to say to each other. The groundcover around the picnic table had little white flowers that attracted some of the indigenous life forms I thought might want to bite me. It seemed to be mostly bees in this case. They hummed and buzzed, and the moving air rustled the leaves of the big old deciduous tree that shaded us, and we didn't look at each other.

I kept tilting my head back every once in a while to get a look at the puffy white clouds that dotted the deep blue sky. I didn't like to look at it too long. It made my eyes dizzy.

"Penny for your thoughts," said Michael.

He'd grown man-size and then some in twenty years. Somehow I hadn't expected that; nor the serious, intent way he looked at people; nor the sudden, stunning beauty of his rare smile. When we were children, I thought he was plain. He'd been a red-headed freckle-faced monster, good for nothing but tormenting girl-cousins.

Now he saw with a baby on his lap and patted it absently when it complained: the perfect image of the ideal father. I wondered, but didn't ask, how many wives he had at home. If he had more than the one he'd brought with him he wouldn't mention it here. Earthers still maintain their rigid, centuries-old stand on monogamous marriage through thick and thin.

"What's a penny?" I asked. "I've always wondered."

He shrugged, a gesture I was aware of though I didn't turn to look at him. There was something about the way those eyes watched me. I wouldn't look. "It was a US coin," he said. "Prob'ly worth a fortune as a collectible by now, so I hope you don't accept the offer."

I glanced up, expecting to see the freckle-faced boy I'd known, and saw instead a dark-eyed stranger. This was a man to whom I'd been writing the intimate details of my life and times--with a few notable details left out, like for instance my stupid accident and the ghosts and the nightmares--for years, but he looked like a stranger. A relative stranger.

There were hints of the red-haired boy in his mannerisms, but not in those deep eyes. I wasn't sure that I wanted to confide in him out loud. "I was thinking," I said, watching him, "how many rules there are to follow on Earth."

The dark eyes widened almost imperceptibly. His face was lean and vulnerable, devoid of freckles. "Rules?"

I looked back at the sky. It hurt my eyes, but not as much as looking at him. I wanted to cry when I looked at him. I didn't know why. "You know," I said. "Social rules. Acceptable behavior."

I wasn't really sure he did know. Except in the matter of marriages, the colonies were nearly as strait-laced as Earth. He might be perfectly comfortable here. Even the environment was more familiar to him than to me. He was used to sky and clouds and all-day gravity, and houses, and all the whole long list of everything physical that made this so different from the asteroids: all the things that made me uncomfortable, perpetually on edge, alert on a subliminal level because things were so uncontrolled, so gut-level wrong. I stared at Michael, waiting.

He met my gaze without blinking. The baby on his lap complained briefly, and he patted its back with automatic tenderness. "It's not really very important," he said. "If you don't know a rule--"

"--they'll crow over it," I said. "You were going to say they'd excuse me because I'm from the Belt, right? Well, wrong. Haven't you seen the cat-faced old ones watching? Didn't you see the way they eyed my table manners and hung on every casual word I spoke at dinner last night? Aunt Hazel and Uncle Alfred and Grandma Rendell--they're just waiting to pounce."

He studied me. I wanted to look away, but I didn't. "Sounds paranoid," he said seriously.

It reminded me of the psych-tenders, and I grinned. "Even paranoids have enemies," I said. "People hate us."

Something dark crossed his eyes like a shadow from the sun. "Not hate," he said with startling certainty.

I stared. "Of course not," I said. "It was a joke." Then I remembered, and frowned. "Oh. I've read that about veterans of the Incident. Loaded word?"

He hesitated. "I guess I have a lot of them," he said. "'Incident' is another."

"Sorry. I know they called it a war in the colonies."

His eyes went so dark inside themselves I couldn't look at them. "It was a war," he said. "You weren't there, you don't--"

"I know. Nobody who wasn't there gets to talk about it. I've read that before too. So space it, okay?" Suddenly unaccountably sad, I gulped down half my beer before turning back to the sky.

"Sorry," he said.

I ignored him. I hadn't realized before I planeted how big a sky would be. I wasn't really accustomed to it yet. Staring into the bottomless blue, I thought suddenly, If the gravity generator fails now....

Shivering, I clutched the table and forcibly reminded myself of the laws of physics. The Earth itself was the gravity generator here, and that couldn't fail.

"You can't handle sky, can you?"

His voice startled me. In my moment of private terror I'd nearly forgotten his presence. But with his words, the world fell back into place and I heard again the moving air in the deciduous tree overhead and the discordant jangle of birdsongs in the distance.

"I can handle anything," I said with undue ferocity, and lifted my beer.

"Even rules?" he asked.

I put the beer down and stared at him. I really didn't know how he was. I never heard this voice in his letters. We corresponded on printout chips, not voice; but I'd imagined the voice that typed the words he sent would sound different from this. This was a total stranger. My cousin Michael.

"If I have to," I said carefully. "Even rules."

He grinned in triumph. It lighted his whole face till even the darkest shadows of his eyes were banished and I saw, just for a moment before the smile faded, the face of the freckled child I knew. "Gotcha," he said.

I couldn't return the smile. I was living on nerves alone, and they were badly jangled. The air kept moving, the indigenous life forms kept biting and singing, and the sky stretched untold kilometers above my head with a sun in it so near and so hot I found it hard to understand how this planet ever came to be settled in the first place. The fact that our ancestors evolved here was irrelevant. It was a hostile environment.

And now I saw a gaggle of elders emerging from the house, sloe-eyed and content from their meal. I couldn't face them. I could not, at that moment, tolerate their eyes--or their rules--or my cousin Michael, the stranger.

"I'm going for a walk," I aid, and rose without waiting for a reply. The elders, and Michael too, could make of it what they would; I didn't really care if it was bad form to walk away from them. I walked.

I wanted to cry. I'd had too much beer--far more than I was used to--and I was turning into a weepy drunk. There's probably something more tiresome than a weepy drunk, but I couldn't think just then what it would be.

I concentrated on the groundcover underfoot. I couldn't remember what it was called, but it smelled delicious: like something from which one might make an excellent tea. And it was most extraordinary to be permitted to walk on green growing things. The novelty of that wasn't even beginning to wear off.

Nor was the scent of things on Earth, really, though I felt homesick for the sweet damp tang of metal and rock of the asteroids. Things on Earth smelled of colors: green for the groundcover, purple and red and yellow for the flowers, rich black for the loamy soil. Even sunlight had an odor. It smelled hot, with a hint of green and yellow mixed with the tang of memories.

The Rendell residence--my parents' white clapboard home--was right on the edge of town, and I headed out for the dark green fields where nobody would stare if I did cry. Which is how I found myself walking past the rusting wrought-iron fence of a cemetery after a while.

I'd forgotten cemeteries. It took a moment for the full significance of the white crosses and colored granite blocks to sink in. Earthers buried their dead whole--or at least those dead whose parts weren't reusable, or whose relatives chose not to permit their reuse.

Each cross or stone marked the final resting place of someone's body. They were only spiritless, empty husks, yet many of the sites were decorated with cut flowers. And there was a feeling of serenity here that wasn't only the result of air moving in trees, or singing birds and insects.

I paused outside the gate, waiting to hear the Gypsies. I closed my eyes, and opened them again abruptly when what I saw on the inside of my eyelids was the reflection of Django's smile.

Django wasn't here. He was somewhere lost in the Belt, floating and singing, singing....

I stared at the crosses and granite blocks; and the world seemed curiously still, as if in waiting. I glanced back toward the little village I'd left behind. My parents' house was half-hidden behind a low deciduous forest. Somewhere not very far away a bird burst into a brief, extravagant song. Meadowlark? I'd been told the song of the meadowlark was very beautiful. I decided it was a meadowlark.

I didn't know the rules about cemeteries. It could be illegal or ill-mannered to explore one out of curiosity. But the strange serenity within that gate was tempting beyond measure. My soul was beer-sodden chaos. My nerves were in a state of ill repute. And I was, I realized belatedly, crying.

My cousin Michael asked if I could handle "even rules," and I told him I could. The song of dead Gypsies was another matter, but he didn't ask after that and I wasn't telling. I stepped inside the gate. If exploring were illegal, surely an ignorant Belter would be forgiven the transgression. And if it were merely bad manners, I didn't care.

The first gravestone I read was inscribed in bold, stone-cut letters:

ELLIOT RENDELL--Born 1924--Died 1944

The meadowlark burst into song again just as I bent to touch the sun-warmed stone. It might have been an omen.

My fingers sank deep into the unforgiving past. Cold and hard and empty, the stone resisted my touch with unexpected hostility. Someone very far away, in a voice I didn't recognize, called my name. I didn't respond. I froze still and bewildered but not quite frightened, my fingers caught up against the stone in memories not my own:

The chatter of an automatic weapon. The shrill death-voice of mortar fire. The screams, the pitiful howling cries and the tangy dark scent of blood and scattered earth....A sense of fear. A sense of failure. A sense of overwhelming loss....There were vultures raucous in the hard blue sky. There were shadows, converging; there were the screams of the damned and the dying, and the salt taste of tears in my mouth; and through it all the fierce longing like unappeasable hunger--PLEASE GOD I WANT--

With a startled whimper I jerked my fingers away from the stone and fell back into here-and-now in a rush that left me dizzy. The sky was a million kilometers above my head. Below my head? I choked on a scream and threw myself full-length in the dusty groundcover, fingers clawing for some safe purchase in the hard black earth beneath, and inadvertently I touched another stone.

REBECCA GARDENER RENDELL

Born 1966--Died 2054

I pulled my hand away, but it was too late. I could hear them all now, their voices raised in discordant melancholy, their images like mirrors fractured in the sun:

pleasegodiwant...

My head hurt.

It took a long time to understand they weren't shouting at me. It took longer still to realize they didn't know I was there. The Gypsies always knew when I was there. They asked only to be left to their dreams; but they sang their damned songs to taunt me, to haunt me, to drag me down out of the sunlight and into their dreams....

"I'm sorry," I said. I didn't mean to say it. The words popped out of their own accord, and they wouldn't stop. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, i'm sorry i'm sorry i'msorryi'msorryi'msorry..." It mingled with the voices of the Earthers: I'm sorry please God I want I'm sorry please God I want i'msorrypleasegodiwant..."

When I realized the end of both sentences, theirs and mine, was "...to be alive," I shut up. My head still hurt. I realized I was holding it, crouched in the sun-scented groundcover with both hands folded over the top of my head where under the scalp there was a metal plate to hold me together; and I let go and sat up.

The voices seemed quieter. There was still a prism effect of memories pushing and shoving at one another for space in my mind, but none of them were mine. None except Django, and he wasn't even here. He was somewhere in the asteroids, lost and dead because of a stupid accident that never should have happened; and I was here in green groundcover and yellow sunlight, listening to ghosts that weren't even real.

None of my ghosts were real. Very little of the pain I felt really belonged to me. Only the dull ache in my head and the tightness of unshed tears in my throat; the rest was shadows. Images. Imagination or empathy, the words didn't really matter. I wasn't alive in 1944. How could I feel Elliot Rendell's pain?

Nineteen forty-four. World War II. Elliot Rendell died there, among shattering bombs and shattered comrades, fighting a visible enemy for a comprehensible cause. If, in the middle of that battlefield, he had stubbed his toe on a rock, fallen into a puddle of rainwater, and drowned, maybe I'd have a right to feel his pain. That was more like what happened to me.

Only it killed Django, not me. Django, one of the last few Romany in the asteroids. One of the last few heroes in the universe. Django with his gentle voice and his riverwater eyes and his sweet, clear smile for me....

"Melacha?"

Michael's voice startled me. I turned and saw him poised at the graveyard gates, watching me.

"Melacha, are you all right?"

I was still half-caught in the memories. "Can you hear them?" I asked him, not even vaguely aware how the question might sound.

He hesitated, then passed the gate and walked with long, sure strides across the groundcover toward me. "Of course I can hear them," he said. There was a look in his eyes I didn't understand.

I watched him till he was standing beside me, looking down into my face with an odd half-smiling, half-questioning expression.

"Then, are they real?" I asked.

He sat beside me. "Of course they're real," he said. Not just "yes"; not even "what do you mean"; but "of course."

I sighed, and rubbed my cheeks with the heels of my hands. They came away wet with tears. I looked at them. "I wasn't sure," I said.

He watched me for several moments. "What happened?"

I stared. "When?"

He eyed me almost curiously. "Whatever it was you didn't send me a chip about," he said. "Whatever it was that sent you running for Earth. Whatever it was that made you come out to the cemetery to listen to ghosts."

"He wasn't ready to die," I said, as if in answer.

"Nobody's ready to die," said Michael. "Haven't you been listening? Look at the birth and death dates. It doesn't matter whether somebody lives two years or two hundred, death always comes too soon."

"It was so stupid," I said.

"There's no smart way to die," he said. "Tell me, Melacha."

I told him. I didn't know how much he knew about shuttles or about the asteroids or about air filters; but I told him the whole pathetic, foolish story of the accident that could have happened in anybody's living room, only it happened on my shuttle and it killed my lover. And it was my fault. And you don't get a second chance in space.

We had to make two docking procedures. People die every day in docking procedures, but we didn't.

We had to duck an unexpected flurry of "wild" rocks. People die every day in evasive actions from "wild rocks," but we didn't.

Django had survived, over the years, two holed chambers and two Insurrectionist battles. He had survived the rescue mission that brought the Sunjammer in at the cost of three people's lives. He had survived the Big Eagle's fiasco flight.

He died on my shuttle of a clogged air filter that blew its top because I didn't check the tubes before the flight.

It was no particular comfort that I very nearly died with him. "Very nearly" is the operative phrase there. If I had died, I'd be out there singing with the Gypsies. But I didn't. I survived, and Django died in just about the stupidest, most useless way any Belter ever did die short of walking out of a chamber without a suit.

Michael listened without comment, all the way through to the end. Then, when he still didn't say anything, I told him about the ghosts; and about the nightmares. I told him about the metal plate in my head and the shuttle I nearly wrecked when I heard the Gypsies. I told him about Elliot Rendell and Rebecca Gardener Rendell. I told him about all the ghosts of the asteroids; the workers and warriors, pilots and passengers, Gypsies and gentlemen.

Eventually I ran out of steam and came to a shuddering halt with the echoes of Gypsy songs in my ears. Michael just watched me, and we both listened to the ghosts.

After a while he said, "People die every day."

I didn't look at him. "Why did you come out here?"

"Out where?"

"To the cemetery."

"I thought you might need me," he said.

I looked at him then. But there were no answers in those shadowed eyes. "So you could tell me people die every day?" I was startled at the bitter sound of my voice.

To my surprise, he smiled. "Partly that."

"And?" I said when he didn't go on.

"And to hold your hand," he said. "And to let you know you aren't alone. Other people listen to the ghosts. Everybody's guilty."

"Other people's ghosts are real," I said.

"No more real than yours," he said. "You have a right to your pain, Melacha. But you have a right to your life as well. It's okay for you to be alive."

"You came out here to tell me that?"

If I thought he would defend himself from my bitterness, I was wrong. He just smiled again and held my hand. After a while I realized that was enough. It was more than enough. It was a gift of greater proportions than I would have dared ask: the gift of acceptance.

I never did get used to living under a sky. I'm more comfortable in the asteroids, where life is carefully bounded by stone and steel and plastic and I know what the boundaries are, and how to behave. But I learned to pilot a shuttle again, safely among the songs of Gypsies not everyone can hear. Sometimes I even sing with them; and when I'm dead I'll join them. But there's no rush.

Copyright © 1981 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine March 1981. Reproduction and distribution specifically prohibited. All rights reserved.

Website copyright © 1993-2000 by Melisa Michaels. Reproduction and distribution specifically prohibited. All rights reserved. Melisa Michaels is the author of the science fiction novels Skirmish, First Battle, Last War, Pirate Prince, Floater Factor, and Far Harbor, the fantasy novels Cold Iron and Sister to the Rain, and the mystery novel Through the Eyes of the Dead.