In which John Tracy floats, and Gordon Tracy boils
Buoyancy, thought John, floating on his back. Add that to the list of why Earth was the best planet in the galaxy. Fresh air, oranges and buoyancy. Floating on water was so wonderfully different from floating in zero gravity. In water, you never let go of the awareness of the weight of your body versus the weight of the water. Every part of you woke up, every part of you seemed to matter.
"I get the feeling you're not really into doing any heavy snorkeling today." Gordon said, appearing beside him.
"You know, this sky is truly amazing." John said.
Gordon looked up briefly. "Yeah, we like it. Listen, do you want to snorkel or not?"
John flipped over and dove down, opening his eyes. The other universe was down here. A school of tiny silver fish darted past him like determined shafts of light. Below him, he could see moving streaks of color – red, orange, silver, white. The sunlight softened as it traveled through the water, illuminating millions of tiny life forms. This was the opposite of outer space, John decided. Almost every inch was claimed, all of it seemed utilized. It was the antithesis of a vacuum. And they were still finding new forms of life, still learning and unlearning by each new discovery. Gordon had once remarked that the ocean was around 90 percent unexplored, a statistic that amazed John. He hoped there were sea monsters still around somewhere.
But not here. He kicked up towards the surface and broke into the harsher light, flinging his hair out of his eyes. He was a little out of breath. Gordon appeared next to him, treading water.
"You just want to swim for a while?" Gordon asked.
"I am so happy right now it's almost painful," John told him matter-of-factly.
Gordon laughed. "You know what? You're like someone who just got out of prison or something."
John leaned back until he was floating on his back again. That sounded pretty accurate.
"Was it really that bad?" Gordon asked.
"No. There just isn't any water."
"Would you say it was bad if it was?" Gordon asked.
"Probably not," John admitted. "Would you?"
"Maybe. Sure."
"You lie," John said quietly. "You are lying, and that makes you a liar."
Gordon didn't answer. John closed his eyes. No water, no sky, no warmth from the sun, and all the oranges tasted like they were from Massachusetts.
He felt a shove and flipped over ungracefully. He spun around but Gordon was gone. He took a deep breath and dove under the water. Gordon was hovering a few feet away, smiling with bubbles in his teeth. John made a threatening gesture, and Gordon took off.
He would never catch him. By the time he was thirteen Gordon could beat him in swimming – not that that was so surprising; at twelve he could beat most of his age group in the state of Arizona. John swam as fast as he could, but he simply wasn't in the proper shape. Grissom Base had a gym, and personnel were required to use it. But John spent a lot of time in zero g in the past two months, and besides, required exercise could be a pretty listless experience.
Gordon was just a dark shadow ahead. John's lungs hurt. He headed towards the surface and shot through, sucking in air.
Gordon appeared about thirty feet away. "Man, you're out of shape," he called. "I'm bad, but you're terrible."
"If I could lift my arms, I'd beat you around the head," John called back. Gordon laughed.
"Do you want to go back?"
"No. Do you?"
"Nope." Gordon dolphin dived under the surface, but John just stayed where he was, treading water. He heard a splash behind him.
"I wasn't awake for the worst part, you know." Gordon said. John turned around. Gordon wasn't even out of breath. John didn't say anything. Gordon skimmed his hand over the surface of the water, making a small wave in the palm of his hand.
"Dad told me…Scott and Virgil came, and Alan took leave…they all just stayed at the hospital the whole time. They were the ones who heard all the bad news, talked to the doctors. I was asleep. I had the easy part."
John waited until he was sure Gordon was done. "But you had seven operations."
"I was asleep for them, too."
"Gordon. Come on."
Gordon was quiet for a moment. "Do you know that pain management is an actual medical specialty?"
"No, I didn't know that."
"It is. You can get a degree in it. It's not like physical therapy, you know. It's not pain abatement or pain curing. It's pain management. Like pain is your employee, and you tell it what to do. Get it all together, make it one thing. Learn how to let it not absolutely kill you."
"Does it work?"
"Actually, it does."
"Do you still go?" John asked.
"No," Gordon said. "But it was a long year."
They wound up wandering down the beach, with Gordon giving him a free-associative lecture on the flora and fauna of the island, about fifty per cent of which John was almost positive Gordon was making up. Gordon had an ingenious way of mixing arcane truth with fiction together in such a way that his brothers always had the suspicion he was lying without actually being able to figure out where the lie was in the statement. All of them at one time or another had fallen prey to one of his stories, although none as famously as Alan, who once informed his high school biology class that raccoons had actually evolved from reptiles and still had scales beneath their fur – something Gordon had told him years ago and completely forgotten about.
"So what are you going to do?" John asked.
"I don't know," Gordon said. "Do you know that there tree is actually carnivorous? It can catch prey."
John regarded it – a fairly innocuous, scruffy specimen covered with a flowering vine – and then eyed his brother suspiciously. "You want me to ask how, and I'm really going to regret it, aren't I."
Gordon stared back guilelessly, and then laughed. "Yeah. I'll give you a pass because you're so enfeebled at the moment." He dodged his brother's swipe. "I guess I could go back to WASP. If I wanted to."
"Do you want to?" John asked.
"I don't know." Gordon put his hands behind his back, laced his fingers together, and stretched. "I can't now – I wouldn't be able to pass the physical." Off John's glance, he added, "I don't have complete mobility."
"You look pretty mobile to me," John said.
Gordon stopped walking, and began turning from the waist, twisting to the right. He got only a few inches, and then stopped. "This is as far as it goes on this side." He turned back and twisted to the left. "I think it's almost full on this side. I've got a doctor's appointment in a couple of weeks, so I'll find out then."
"Why?"
"A lot of reasons. The muscle tissue is all screwed up. Two of my lower vertebrae are fused, which never makes you super bendy. Hey, check it out, right there." He pointed to a brightly colored blur flying into the deeper foliage. "I think it's a parrot."
John turned, but it was gone. Gordon had already started walking, and he had to trot to catch up to him.
"It's a matter of physical therapy," Gordon said. "Swimming helps, so I do that as much as I can. I figure I'll be fine by the end of the year."
"Is that what the doctors say?"
Gordon made an angry dismissive gesture. "What do they know? I've already proved them wrong lots of times. I'm alive. So screw ' em. Anyway, at the end of the year I reckon I could pass the physical and rejoin, if I wanted to. But everybody would…I don't know why it is that we're all such suckers for organizations. Except for Virgil. You ever wonder that?"
"What do you mean?"
"Scott was in the Air Force, you're in ISA, Alan is in NASA, and I was in WASP. I mean, you and me especially. I was always like, nobody's going to make me be a pilot. And you – I remember you bitching all the time about Dad using military time and the company being so hand-in-glove with the military. And now you're in the military."
"I am not in the military," John snapped. "You can't be in the military in an international research organization. What are we going to do, throw calculators at people?"
"You have a uniform. You have rank."
"I have a job title! And…well, yeah, I do have a uniform. But it's not the military, and I don't have any rank."
"You're funded by the government."
"So is the post office."
"Fine. You're not in the military. You're just in a super structured organization with a rigid promotional system that demands complete loyalty and won't tolerate dissent." He grinned at John. "This is all stuff you said to me in a letter, so don't get all snarly face. I'm saying, how did we all wind up in these things? Scott, I get. Alan…well, it won't kill him, I guess. But you and me? We were supposed to be different."
"We were?" John said. "I didn't think it was allowed."
Gordon laughed.
"Yeah. But you know, I was expecting to hate it. I figured I would like the work but hate the structure but really, the structure makes sense." He kicked a small rock out of his way with a spray of sand. "I miss the work."
"You'll find something else." John said. This wasn't so much encouragement as statement of fact. His younger brother had too much energy to stagnate.
"Yeah," Gordon said. "I've got to start thinking about it, though, before Father signs me up for something without telling me."
"He wouldn't do that."
"Oh yeah? Ask Alan. But I think Dad's got some sort of secret plan for me."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. See, every time I try to say something to him like, you know, I'm thinking about doing – whatever, anything – next year, he gives me this lecture on the importance of my physical therapy that I think he got out some drill sergeant's handbook. It's like he doesn't want me to get any ideas about what I'm supposed to do next because he's plotting something. And you know Dad. I could wind up on some sort of horrible corporate-guilt reducing trip to India to bathe lepers for a year or something."
"It builds character," John said, quoting their father's favorite reason for making his sons do just about anything they didn't want to.
"I've got enough character. I've got steel rods made of character in the base of my spine. I'm good for character."
Gordon's vehemence startled John away from what he had been about to say. He tried to frame his next sentence delicately. "Maybe he wants you to concentrate on your physical therapy first so when you do finally decide, you don't…" John hesitated, not sure how much he was allowed to talk about Gordon's injuries.
Gordon reached down and picked up a rock. He hefted it in his hand a couple of times and then reared back and threw it out at the ocean. It went wildly to the left, and fell well short of the waves. He pulled his mouth to one side. "Yeah, I know the routine. Don't get your hopes up."
"What are you talking about?"
Gordon deepened his voice, in imitation of what John supposed was a doctor. "Well, you're a very lucky young man, Mr. Tracy. Everyone else died, but you might be lucky enough to never walk again. We want you to work at this really hard and painful routine, but we don't really think it's going to do any good. So don't get your hopes up."
"They didn't really say that."
"Not out loud. But it was in their voices. I know there was a while there when they thought I wasn't ever gonna walk. I remember that, because for a few days Dad and everyone else couldn't look at me." Gordon shrugged. "But it's frustrating, you know? You're trying your hardest, and everyone around you is saying things like, 'well, you can still lead a full life.'"
"But now…now that you're better…"
Gordon shook his head. "I'm not better. I'm recovering. And if it was up to them, I'd be recovering for the rest of my life and never even get there. At some point, this stuff has got to end and the next part needs to start. I want it to start." He spoke bitterly, sounding more adult than John could ever recall him sounding. "Since nobody expects me to be able to do anything I think what I do next is pretty important."
"You want to take their expectations and shove them down their throats." John said.
"Pretty much. I just need to find a way to do it."
"Well," John said after a minute. "If you find a way, let me know."