It isn’t as hard to leave life behind, he thinks, once you’ve had a life worth living.
Maybe he should send a message to Mansfield, telling him that. It might help his creator face his own imminent death. Abel may not need to be with Mansfield any longer, but elements of his programming still feel that need—to try to help.
Noemi isn’t the first person Abel ever loved. That was Mansfield. He didn’t only possess Abel’s manufactured loyalty, but the real love of a would-be son. Yet he chose to throw that love away rather than die, even after a long life rich in creative and professional success. Now that Abel is making the opposite choice, he understands just how much luckier he is than his creator. How more alive he is, for all Burton Mansfield’s flesh and blood.
Sending a message to Earth is impossible anyway. Abel lets go of the thought more easily than he would’ve expected.
The air lock finishes its cycle as its door spirals shut again. Gravity returns, and he watches the fighter settle back onto the mesh floor. There’s no reason to delay further.
No objective reason, that is. Noemi asked him to give her time. Best if she’s the one to contact him.
She may not love him, but she cares. His death will matter to her. Surely it’s wrong to welcome that—to want Noemi to suffer any pain whatsoever—but even the most hopeless love must be a little selfish, because Abel finds he wants to be remembered. He wants to be missed. Not too badly, not forever. And yet.
Now he has time to kill. Abel smiles slightly at the dark pun. What should he do? The nameless ship can take Noemi back home, so there’s no need for repairs. He’d like to watch Casablanca again, but he suspects Noemi won’t need that long to pull herself together, and making her wait while he finishes the film would be cruel.
(Leaving in the middle is too appalling to consider.)
Abel decides to let his instincts guide him, since it turns out he has them. First he’s wandering aimlessly up the spiral corridor, looking at nothing in particular, and then he finds himself standing in front of the equipment pod bay doors.
His jail cell for thirty years. His home. Despite all the years he spent wishing to escape, he realizes he needs to tell this place good-bye.
After he steps through the door, Abel even works with the controls to release this area from the ship’s artificial gravity. When his feet drift off the floor, the familiarity of it makes him smile. Before he drifts too far upward, he turns off the lights, too, to make the re-creation almost complete.
He pushes off from the wall, propelling himself toward one of the small side windows. Through this one he watched that last battle near the Genesis Gate and saw Noemi’s fighter approaching for the first time. Even then he’d known she would set him free. He just hadn’t known in how many ways that would be true.
“Abel?”
Glancing down, he sees Noemi standing in the doorway, on the edge of the artificial gravity well. Her face is in shadow, but his sharp vision reveals that she’s regained her calm. Good. It hurt to see her looking so lost. He says, “I wanted to be here one last time. Is that strange?”
She shakes her head no.
Then Noemi steps through, and the lack of gravity buoys her up. Although her hair is held in place by the padded headband she wears in front, the strands in the back fan out behind her. She spreads her arms wide as she bobs into the center of the pod bay and looks up at him. “Will you show it to me?”
In the literal sense, Abel could show her nothing she can’t already see. But among the many gifts she’s given him is the ability to glimpse what lies beyond the literal.
So he propels himself down to her, not too fast. The newly applicable laws of physics mean that he bumps into her back anyway, but not too hard. He catches her around the midsection as they drift toward the far wall, where she braces them with her hand.
“There.” He points, leaning his head close to hers so she’ll see exactly what he’s seeing. “The dent in the wall? I made that when I tried to punch through to the inner corridor, about two weeks after I was marooned. The attempt was unsuccessful, obviously.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Yes.” That seems as irrelevant now as it did then. “Can you see the ceiling?” They’re fairly close, but it’s dark, and Noemi has to look through human eyes.
“I think so.” Her arm covers his, where he’s wrapped it around her waist. “There’s a pattern there—”
“Not a pattern. I made scratch marks. To count the days, using Earth measurement.” All those years ago, he’d spent a long time trying to decide whether to use Earth or Genesis days. He told himself then that calculating the Einsteinian variations for Earth dates would provide more of a mental challenge, but now he knows he wanted Burton Mansfield to understand the full measure of time he was alone. “I stopped after two thousand. It became depressing.”
“I can’t imagine being that lonely,” she murmurs.
Probably she can’t. Few beings could. Abel thinks this over, then says the only thing that still matters. “It helps, being here again but not alone.”
Noemi turns to look at him, her profile silhouetted against one of the starry windows. It strikes him that she is very close, so near their faces are almost touching.
But she knows that, so he keeps saying what he’d wanted to tell her before. “I’ve never been less lonely than I am now. With you.”
“Same here,” Noemi says.
She takes one of his hands as she pushes off against the wall. The momentum isn’t enough to carry them all the way across, so they slow down midway through. Noemi twists around to capture his other hand in hers, and just like that, he’s in her arms.
Abel watches, almost disbelieving, as she brings her face to his until their lips meet.
It’s his first kiss. Kissing turns out to be much more complicated than it looks; there are many variables to account for. So after that initial touch—exhilarating as it is—Abel ignores higher functions and once again gives in to instinct.
This appears to be the right way to proceed. At the beginning he and Noemi are tentative with each other, brushing their lips against each other quickly, lightly, but no more—and then the kiss really begins. Noemi pulls him closer, softly bites his lower lip, then opens his mouth with her own. As the kiss deepens, as they cling to each other suspended in the dark, Abel feels his response crackle throughout his body like electricity—sharp and warm at once. The better it is, the more he needs.
So this is desire. Why do humans describe it as torment? Abel has never known anything more exhilarating than this, the sudden discovery of how much more he can want, and do, and be. He cradles the back of her head in his hand as he kisses her even more intently, hoping to give her even a shadow of the pleasure and joy she’d given him.