The sunward side of it—the open end of the cone—was a brazen torus, a wheel rolling loose in a madcap orbit. Sunlight blazed against this torus, and was broken down and transformed to whitelines in it; then the newly created whitelines were aimed at the singularity sphere—the tip of the cone—where they were directed to their ultimate destinations. Thus in appearance the station was a thick wheel, with spidery spokes and a tiny hub where ships arrived and departed: much more prominent than this material hub, however, was the ghost hub pushed out to the side away from the sun, the singularity sphere, which was a bright confluence of white light even through the filters. Connecting the torus to the singularity sphere was a flickering cone of “spokes,” made of the shifting gleams of whitelines. Margaret knew from her reading that the singularity sphere was a good distance away from the wheel, and because of the broad shape of the cone of whitelines connecting the torus and the sphere, she could see in a sudden snap of perspective that the torus was immense. And outside the bright tip of the cone, a broad fan of blurred starlight: one quarter of the world’s whitelines, each lancing off across the solar system to its end in one whitsun or another. Even Margaret was moved; here rolled the origin of humanity’s power, an immense white wheel with its white hub punched out to the side, hurtling in a haze of energy. And the Grand Tour chased it down.
All through the evening their rate of acceleration dropped, and they inched closer to the great wheel at a slower rate. “The way this tour’s been going I don’t doubt we’re caught in Zeno’s paradox,” Margaret muttered. But very late in the night hours their Grey guide came to their quarters and asked them to move to a small shuttle craft. “Your belongings are over there already.” Margaret felt that his calm voice concealed a great deal of smugness, but she only nodded at him and led the rest into the shuttle. There they were strapped to couches, and when all was ready they were flattened back one more time as the shuttle shot across the space between ship and station. Then all gravity disappeared; they floated against their restraints and looked to the door of the shuttle. It opened and yet another Grey entered to greet them. This one was as tall as a Martian, with a scraggly red-gold beard and cropped red-gold hair under the floppy bright red cap that some of the Greys wore. Margaret, Johannes and the rest were freed from their couches, and they pulled themselves into a small transfer chamber. From there they were led into an elevator that descended for a long time. They emerged in a big hallway that curved ever up, in both directions; it was the central passageway of the torus, an empty, flat-bottom white tunnel. By the curve of the floor Margaret got an accurate sense of the size of the station at last; the circumference must have been nearly twenty kilometers.
They were led up the hallway, and passed two groups of Greys walking the other way. The hallway was marked by occasional long black windows that filled the nightside wall and half the rounded ceiling, so that through them they could see the cone of whitelines and the singularity sphere, and overhead, the other side of the torus. Though the sun burned behind the unbroken wall on the other side of the hallway, Margaret felt its glare.
They were led into an interconnecting suite of chambers that was to be their quarters, and allowed to rest. The suite had one small window in the nightside wall-ceiling, and through it Margaret felt the sunlight curving, striking her, filling every corner of every room, hurting her eyes, penetrating every cell of her. She surveyed her crew; their pupils were tiny pinpricks, their faces were suffused by the light, and she could see all the marks of the strain of the last several months, the deltas of wrinkles, the reddened eyes, the pale skin. Only Johannes appeared fresh, his face unlined, his artificial eyes as dilated as ever. Black bottomless eyes, showing nothing, seeing nothing.… “Like living in the door of a blast furnace,” Margaret snarled, and took the room next to the one Johannes chose. The red-haired Grey who had welcomed them appeared in the door of the suite. “Master Wright?” he called, and Johannes poked his head out of his doorway. “The Lion says that with your permission he will schedule your concert for—”
“Tomorrow,” Johannes said, and disappeared into his room.
The Grey said, “Yes.”
Margaret went into her room and shut the door. Dark: but wasn’t that light, spilling in from under the doorjambs, from the intersection of wall and wall? She closed her eyes hard and still saw the light streaming in.
the other orchestra
Early on that morrow, Dent, Karna, and Yananda took a small shuttle from Orion to one of the space stations that slowly orbit in Mercury’s shadow. There Karna had arranged to rent a skeletal little spider rocket. They got into their spacesuits and were led to one of the launching chambers. “All ready?” Karna asked, voice clear and calm in Dent’s ear. Dent cleared his throat nervously, said, “Yes.” They climbed onto their rocket, a spindly four-legged metal thing that looked to Dent like the bottom section of a music stand. It had no interior; passengers sat in the vacuum at the control panel, and the craft consisted of no more than the main rocket, an array of side jets, the landing legs, and the seats bolted around the control panel. Nervously Dent sat in one of the seats and strapped himself down. “It’s awfully small,” he said.
“That’s why we chose it,” Yananda said. He finished strapping down his box of tools.
Karna waved a hand back at the launch center terminal. The door at the top of their bay opened, and with a bump they were catapulted gently out of the launch center and into space. Stars glared around them in every direction but one, where the black circle of Mercury blocked off the sun. Down at the sunward edge of the planet Terminator was just visible, a speck of greenish light that shone on the fine silver wire of the tracks. “My,” Dent said. The big double wheel of the space station gleamed behind them. Karna began to fiddle with the controls, and the rockets vibrated the little skeleton. They spun slowly, stopped spinning, spun the other way. “Good,” Karna said.
“You know where The Duke of Vienna is?” Yananda asked.
“Hope so.” Karna activated the main propulsion rocket and Dent’s head was pressed back in the seat. For a moment he saw on Yananda’s face the mirthless grin of acceleration. Then they were coasting again, and he could lift his head and look around. There above them arched the orbit line of spaceships, tightly bunched so they could all sail in slow Clarke orbits to stay in Mercury’s shadow. “It’s near the beginning of the line, almost in the sunlight.…” As they approached the line the ships became variegated metallic shapes, pinpointed by the glow from windows and running lights. “That big one is Le Havre. Duke of Vienna is just two ahead of it.” Karna began to work in earnest at the control panel, and their craft swerved neatly into the orbit line ahead of Le Havre. The big rockets of the ship before them were dark black holes, like eyes. “That’s the Positron,” Karna said. “Right around it, our ship. We’re going to have to hope Ekern’s people are keeping a loose watch. The bridge on their ship doesn’t have a direct view aft, and we’ll approach them from behind keeping ourselves right inside the radar image of the Positron. Then we land on the hull. While we’re approaching stay quiet.”
With a series of spurts from all of their rockets (their ship vibrated like a silent pipe organ, Dent thought), they rounded the Positron, passing just a few meters from its hull, and curved in ahead of it. The Duke of Vienna was a good distance away, perhaps five kilometers. Karna made a small tkh sound between his teeth. Slowly, ever so slowly, they drifted across the vacuum toward their quarry. The Duke of Vienna grew bigger, they passed its rocket vents, decelerated to a speed that nearly matched the larger ship’s, until they drifted no more than two meters from the big hull. Yananda unstrapped himself, climbed over the side. His boots stuck to the bright surface of The Duke of Vienna, and he pulled their craft to it. The four legpads touched and stuck. Karna released himself from his chair, and gestured for Dent to do the same. Other gestures clearly conveyed that Dent was to move very carefully.
There was a lock door several meters along the hull, and
Yananda floated there to place what looked like a giant’s stethoscope against the hull. Dent climbed down one of their craft’s legs to the ship’s hull and tested out the grabpads on his feet and forearms; he was barely held to the metal, and so he moved very carefully indeed. Karna slinked over to the lock door, which was recessed by a step into the hull. Yananda pulled away from the stethoscope and gave Karna a go-ahead sign, so Karna lifted a small packed-light jigsaw from Yananda’s box of tools, and went to work on the wheel of the lock door’s handle. Suddenly Dent became aware of his breathing. It was all he could hear, it seemed to fill all the space around him; when to breathe next? This was when they were most vulnerable, straddling the outside of the ship like this.…
Karna turned the handle and then pulled the outer door open. He ducked into the lock, which was large enough to hold all three of them easily. After they had closed the outer door and Yananda had completed his search for alarms, Karna went to work on the inner door. Everything at this door took longer. Finally he looked up at both Yananda and Dent, and nodded. Yananda pulled dartguns from his box and passed them out; he kept two for himself, one in his suit’s chest pouch. Karna checked to see that they were ready. Dent nodded, felt the blood hammer through him; the incredible speed of his pulse reminded him of his assault on Red Whiskers in Munich, but he banished the memory to attend to the action at hand. Yananda was twitching from side to side like a cat—
Karna shoved the door open and leaped through the round opening, and Yananda dove in after him. Dent pulled his way through. An amazed young woman stood in the doorway of the room they had entered, staring at them. Both Karna and Yananda had shot her with darts, and she slumped back onto the wall behind her. Dent stared at the two little red darts protruding from her torso, feeling the heat in his suit. He was sweating, his moustache was wet. Imitating the other two, he pushed the button on his arm that caused his faceplate to slide down.
Yananda’s face was shiny with sweat. “This was the right lock,” he said as he looked around. “The only big storage chamber is just down the hall from here. If Ekern left only a skeleton crew aboard—”
“Let’s go,” Karna said. He and Yananda slipped out the room’s main door and Dent trailed them, pushing off with his toes and grabbing the wall railing for pulls, just as Yananda ahead of him was doing. They flew down one broad hallway until Yananda pulled on Karna’s leg. “Around this corner,” he mouthed. Karna aimed the gun, yanked himself around the turn in the hall. Dent heard the click of the dartgun; by the time he had pulled himself around the corner the guard before the storage chamber door was stretched out insensible, a dart hanging from the skin of his bare forearm. Yananda took the man’s hand and grabbed the forefinger, placed the fingertip on the door’s handle. It clicked open and they maneuvered the unconscious body into the room with them.
The room was well lit, and nearly filled by Holywelkin’s Orchestra.
Dent stared at the arc of cellos immediately above him, mouth open. A second Orchestra, replica of the unreplicable, standing there like a mirage.
Karna floated around it, examining the room. Yananda took a small camera from one of his suit pockets and began taking pictures. “Room’s empty,” Karna said. “And no security cameras that I can see.” He looked up at the glittering statue—the boxes of the synthesizers, the broken staircase of trombones, the copper burnish of the tympanis suspended far above. “Good copy,” he said, at a loss.
“It’s exact,” Dent said. “Ekern used Holywelkin’s blueprints for the thing. So now there are two of them.” He saw details he remembered from the original: the hedgelike tangle of flutes, clarinets, and oboes, the funny way the cymbals hung in their glass arms, the collection of boxes and instruments hiding the control booth. “Johannes has got to see this. We’ve got to send news of this down to Prometheus—”
“We can send these pictures,” Yananda said.
“We’ve got to tell him!” Dent said. “The concert on Prometheus is Ekern’s last chance to do something. Something’s going to happen down there, oh,” his mind raced into a nest of ominous possibilities, “we’ve got to get word to him now!”
“Calm down, Dent,” Karna said. “We don’t have a radio.”
“But this ship does. We could take it over like we did this room.” Suddenly he was sure what their course should be. “Come on, they won’t be ready for us. We’ve got to try—Johannes has to see this!”
“We’ve told him before,” Karna said. “You already told him about it—”
“No!” Dent exclaimed, dread filling him. “We have to show him.”
Karna glanced over at Yananda, who shrugged. After a moment Karna nodded. “All right. We can try. But we’re going to have to hurry, and pay close attention. If those people we knocked out have been found—”
“Let’s just hurry,” Yananda said tensely.
They left the second Orchestra’s chamber and slung themselves down halls and around corners, moving forward in the ship as fast as possible, heedless of meeting crew members. Dent banged into the walls at every turn, he nearly dislocated a shoulder on one, but he hurried on, ignoring the pain. Trailing the other two he passed a door that was opened by a woman who started to speak—he shot her and was gone before she even began to drift back. He felt light-headed, and unnaturally powerful—they could race through the sparsely inhabited ship at will, putting anyone they encountered to sleep for eight or more hours. He had a purpose at last—
He crashed into the stationary Yananda, piling them both into a wall. Yananda shrugged him off. “Radio room,” he whispered. Karna had the giant’s stethoscope to the door. After a moment’s wait—they were breathing hard—Karna opened the door and shot a surprised radio operator. He pulled the man away from the radio. “Make sure the bridge doesn’t monitor this transmission,” he said to Yananda, who crouched before the control console. “And hurry.”
“Wish they’d fire up a little gravity in this ship,” Yananda said. He flicked a switch, turned a dial. “There. Duke of Vienna to Mercury Four, Duke of Vienna to Mercury Four, come in please.”
“… Duke of Vienna, this is Mercury Space Station Four,” said a voice from the radio’s speaker.
“Mercury Four, we need a link up to Prometheus Station, we wish to transmit to Prometheus Station, thank you.”
A pause. “I’m sorry, Duke of Vienna, Prometheus passed behind Sol a few minutes ago. They’ll be out of direct radio contact for another forty hours.”
“Can’t you bounce it?”
“… Only from Vesta. The delay would be about an hour and forty-five minutes.”
Silence. Karna said, “Send it.” Yananda got out his camera and plugged it into the radio. “Mercury Four, bounce the following message for us, please.” He looked at Dent, then gave the operator a short description of the picture’s origin.
More silence.
“Too late?” Dent said weakly. A dreadful singularity in his stomach pulled at him, inward and inward, toward implosion.… Without willing it he slammed a fist onto the radio console and shot up toward the ceiling. Karna grabbed him and slowed him down. “Too late,” Dent choked out. “Too late again! Too late! Too late!”
Karna squeezed his shoulder. “Let’s get out of here while we can.” He pulled Dent from the room.
Once again they flew down the dim halls, tranquilizing a single crew member they passed. It seemed to take much longer getting back to the Orchestra chamber than it had to get to the radio room.
Without discussing it they pulled inside the big storage chamber to regroup. All three of them were silent. No one seemed in any hurry to leave once they were safely inside. Light from the ceiling rebounded from the polished surfaces of the instrument tree, rich brown, bright brass—
“Now what?” Yananda asked.
Dent felt his fists tighten. He grinned involuntarily, as if accelerating. “This room is soundproofed, isn’t it?”
“For God’s sake don’t play the damned thing,” Karna said
sharply.
Dent shook his head. “Isn’t it?”
“Sure,” Yananda said. “Look at the walls.”
Dent drifted over to the door to make sure it was completely closed. He touched down and floated back to the Orchestra, circled it, eyed it closely.… Climbing it was like climbing a tree. Balancing on a glass knob at the end of one branch, he stepped onto the top of the harpsichord, about halfway up the statue. He reached up and grabbed the slide of the lowest trombone, pulled it out and twisted the glass arm holding it until it came free in his hand. He held it up for Karna and Yananda to see. They watched him closely, faces blank. He looked around the room. Then he swung the slide into the neck of a violin, crack!
Splinters of glass and wood flew through the Orchestra, and a few floated across the room. Dent himself rebounded away from the statue, but he was holding onto the glass knob with his free hand and he pulled himself back. The neck of the violin sagged away from its body, severed and hanging by the four tangled strings. Dent looked back down at his two companions.
“Eh?” he croaked.
He whipped the slide through the air and blasted another violin and its glass carriage to smithereens.
“Eh?” he cried, vision blurred. “Eh?” He shook himself back to clarity, and spherical teardrops joined the bits of glass floating in the air. He looked back down. Karna leaped in the air, a stiff expression on his face, and made a lazy arc up, twisted, and with a vicious kick shattered a brace of clarinets. Black wood and silver keys everywhere. Lengths of glass spun away blinking under the light. Yananda methodically pulled loose a trumpet, secured his feet in the body of a cello so that he stood out from the side of the thing, and holding the instrument like a hatchet he chopped hard at the other cellos under him, crack, crack, crack, crack! How delicate the thing was, how complex and various! Karna kicked off from the ceiling and lashed out with his boot again, blasting a French horn free of its glass so that it spun wildly across the room, like a big gold soccer ball. Yananda moved on to the trumpets, and he made a lot of noise clanging his trumpet against the rest of them. Karna practiced weightless savate on the little white box of the celesta, up near the ceiling, crash, crash, clang!
The Memory of Whiteness: A Scientific Romance Page 31
