She stared into the blankness of him. “You don’t care?” she whispered.
“Oh, it’s too bad, sure, but— No, I don’t approve of slaughtering helpless people. Once I’m back in charge at Fireball, I’ll find out who that man was, whether he left a family and what can be done to help them. But it was an emergency, Kyra. Either Valencia shot first, or we lost everything. Wash Packer too; they’d be certain to arrest and deep-quiz him. That second bullet may or may not have been called for. I hope I couldn’t have brought myself to it. But Nero’s a gunjin. He’ll never stand trial, you know. One way or another, making him a whole new identity or whatever else is called for, his brotherhood will see to that. And I won’t interfere. Because he saved us. And by his standards, he was doing the right and necessary thing.”
Kyra’s eyes blurred and stung. “That’s what I keep telling myself. When can I believe it?”
“Yes, a terrible shock for you. And a ghastly sight, I know all too well. Lass, I wish and I wish I could hold you tight. Even robot arms would be better than this damned box.”
That brought a measure of warmth, the beginning of a thaw. Kyra swallowed, met the lensed gaze, found she could smile a little. “G-gracias, jefe. Muchas gracias.”
“I did think he wasn’t for you.”
The warmth turned absurdly hot. “Nothing serious went on!”
“Good. You’ll have a spell to come to terms with what happened. It was sad and horrible, but it’s done, and it didn’t hurt you in any fundamental way, as a rape would have. That attitude isn’t selfish, it’s practical. You’re too healthy to let a mere nightmare set up housekeeping in your head. Be zen. Play some music you like. Remember glad things. You’ll get over it.”
After some seconds Guthrie added slowly: “You’ll have to decide this for yourself, but I hope you can also get over hating Nero Valencia. I don’t suppose you’ll ever feel exactly cordial, but—well, me, in several ways I’m kind of sorry for him.”
“I’ll try.”
Silence murmured. Ocean sheened on Earth’s disc.
“Shouldn’t we make ready to send me off?” Guthrie said rather than asked.
Kyra started. “Crack, yes! Forgive me. I’ve been a, a self-pitying nullhead. Now, prontito.”
She returned to the console, held herself fast by the toeholds, and gave the problem to the navigation program.
Maui’s path was already determined. The ship was in an orbit low but widening. When she had come about three-fourths of the way around Earth, her drive would fire afresh and put her on course for the Moon. It would be a fast trajectory for a vessel like her, extravagant of reaction mass, but bringing her there in a couple of days. That was the best possible under the initial conditions; this wasn’t a torchcraft, capable of long-sustained boost.
The new question was: Exactly when and how should the auxiliary launcher be released, to carry Guthrie past L-5? Since the colony trailed Luna by sixty degrees in the same orbit, the time wasn’t far ahead. As an additional requirement, Maui’s hull must screen the launcher from Earth-based radar while it was under thrust and for as much longer afterward as might be. If the Union police hadn’t yet locked onto this ship, they soon would. If they noticed anything leaving her, that pretty well ended the game.
To be sure, they were limited to radars within their national boundaries. They wouldn’t ask Federation AstroCon for help; it would involve explanations. But the moment they found the slain guard and the snipped fence, they’d know they’d been had, and very soon false Guthrie would be alerted. He in his turn commanded all the resources of Fireball. Maui was going to be observed from that instant until she reached Luna.
* * * *
“I expect he’d have us blown apart, and invent a story to justify it, if any weapons but small arms were allowed in space,” Guthrie had said during their conference in Hilo—how many millennia ago? “I don’t expect he’ll order a torch to rendezvous with us and her crew to board, assuming he could get one there in time. An awkward, dangerous, time-consuming, and, most especially, conspicuous maneuver. The world would notice and ask why. He’ll see that you’re headed for the Moon, know that in your breed of ship you’ll have no choice but to land at Port Bowen, and set the Sepo ready to nab you when you arrive.”
“Why can’t you broadcast the truth while you’re in space?” Valencia inquired. “What then can he do but confront you publicly? And he’s bound to fail any serious test.”
“Unfortunately,” Guthrie explained, “Fireball owns just about every ship and facility at Earth, Luna, and L-5, plus most of those elsewhere.”
“No, the satellites—”
“Oh, commercial, weather, Peace Authority, and the rest of those sats, they don’t count. I mean ships, ports, interplanetary communications systems, the works. Even Federation personnel ride with us and rent from us when they need offices or quarters off Earth—unless they contract with us to do their jobs for them, which is what happens most often. That’s why there aren’t any government cops for Kyra to appeal to at Bowen. The tiny constabulary is Fireball, and will be under orders to stand aside from whatever the Sepo detachment does.
“As for calls from spacecraft to anywhere, such as Earth, they aren’t direct. The sheer volume of communications traffic, plus the liability of various critical systems to interference, made us give up straightforward transmission quite a while ago. What we use is safer, more efficient, and more reliable. Any signal from or to space passes through Fireball’s relay sats or stations, which are the only ones equipped to amplify and unscramble it. They shunt it through the general communications net, or through Fireball’s own circuits, as the case may be. This is all computer work, you know, and the first chance my twin got, he put in a secret command to watch for suspicious messages and hold them for his inspection or Sayre’s. I would have.”
Valencia whistled. “I knew you had a great empire, sir. I didn’t realize how great.”
“It works so smoothly that people don’t notice it much,” Packer said. “We don’t want power over them, we simply want to do what interests us and make an honest profit on it.”
Guthrie had kept Fireball true to that, Kyra thought. Without him, no doubt it would have evolved into a quasi-government, or a robber barony.
“The monopoly wasn’t planned, it grew,” Guthrie said. “Being the only real pioneers in space at the time we began, we could negotiate a charter from Ecuador that kept politicians’ and bureaucrats’ picky-paws off us. Later, when troubles broke out here and there, we strengthened ourselves as a precaution. But I haven’t got time today for a history lesson.”
“Spacecraft can talk directly with each other, of course,” Kyra put in. “But it’d be fantastic luck if any manned vessel—manned by folk of ours—happened to be locatable and in beam range of us. Especially since false Guthrie will revise flight plans to avoid the possibility.”
“He’ll clap a firm grip on L-5 the moment he suspects I’ve made for it,” the jefe said. “However, his attention should be on Maui Maru, bound for Luna. Our best bet is that when Kyra lands, the Lunarians will spring her free of Sayre’s goons and she can release the truth to the Solar System.
“Partly to make that outcome likelier, partly as a backup in case it fails, my destination is L-5. If all goes well, Tamura will bring me in. After I’ve announced the facts to the colony, the Sepo there will be lucky if they aren’t lynched. If for some reason Tamura can’t, well, I’ll be on an orbit known to Kyra, and she can arrange for me to be collected at a more convenient date.”
Valencia turned his eyes to the woman. “But you,” he said. The note of worry tugged at her. “You will walk into the hands of the enemy on the Moon.”
“That’s why we’ll alert my lord Rinndalir before we leave,” Guthrie told him. “I can’t convey the actual story in any message that would get by the monitoring. But I can encrypt a few words that ought to, hm, intrigue him. We’ve had dealings before, he and I.”
Valencia scow
led. “Suppose he can’t or won’t do anything.”
Kyra gave him a smile. At the moment she felt excited, exalted, a-wing. “From what I know about him,” she said, “it will be strange if he doesn’t take action.”
What that action might be, she admitted to herself, they could only guess at.
* * * *
Her mind snapped back to immediacies. The computer was presenting the figures she wanted.
Briefly, that weighed her down. What was she but a parasite on the machine? It carried her, kept her alive, informed her within the limits of her comprehension—to what purpose? This operation could have been entirely robotic. It well-nigh was. She’d told the ship she wanted to go to Luna, expeditiously, departing at such-and-such an instant. The ship did everything else, computations, thrust, steering, maintenance. Should they run into a bit of space junk, or encounter almost any sort of trouble, the ship would cope. Kyra had brought Guthrie aboard, and she’d put him in the launcher, but the most elementary of robots could have done either job. The ship would communicate with the ground control machines at Port Bowen, come in as they directed, and land herself. Kyra’s part would be to touch a button bidding the airlock open and let her out.
“Crack!” she muttered. “Come off that, will you?” It wasn’t the first time she must ram this depression away from her. Pilots did still have genuine tasks, like engineers, prospectors, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs. They made the basic decisions. Their hands and voices gave the commands that mattered. When the universe suddenly threw something at them out of its boundless reservoir of unknownness, theirs was the imagination or intuition or hunch that might save lives and, yes, machines. Wasn’t her body as automatic, as self-guiding, as a ship or a robot? Yet it was the servant of her mind. .
But once the machines had, fully, their own minds—which looked like being soon— No, she would not dwell on it. She had work to do.
She returned to Guthrie. “Launch time’s earlier than I expected, jefe,” she said. “Let’s get you snugged down.”
“Okay.” What feelings lay behind that flat word? Did any? Yes, she insisted, yes.
She took him aft. The launcher was not much more than a solid-fuel rocket with a basic autopilot and a bay for small cargo. It would take three days to come near L-5. Their prime hope was that meanwhile Kyra would have informed humankind, so that the true Guthrie would arrive not as a fugitive but as a conqueror.
She connected the launcher’s computer to the ship’s. While the calculated parameters were being downloaded, she laid Guthrie in and made him secure. The machines would take care of everything else.
“You may as well go to your quarters now and relax,” he suggested. “Why hang around for the next ten minutes wondering what to say? ‘Have a nice trip.’ ‘Gracias, you have a nice time too.’ ‘Say hello to everybody.’ ‘Of course I will.’“ He fashioned a laugh. “That was how my wife quoted it, with the most adenoidal accent she could produce. When one of us was going somewhere alone, we’d swap a scandalously big kiss in the terminal and whoever was staying home would leave.”
He understood. Kyra made a laugh to give back to him. “Muy bien, jefe. Hasta la vista. And—” Hovering over him, she laid hold of his case, pulled herself down, and kissed the cold hardness between the eyestalks. “Buen viaje. To both of us.”
As she went out, she heard the cover slide into place over the cargo bay.
* * * *
PART TWO
EIKO
25
Cherry blossoms white—
Sunset colorless, breath-quick—
Stars hastening, cold.
E
iko Tamura shook her head, sighed, and laid the paper down. The haiku had not yet come right. It remained words, with scant feel in them of what she had hoped to call forth, the day and night of a whirligig spin betokening the evanescence of life, an artificial springtime a symbol of how small and fragile great Ragaranji-Go really was. Perhaps it would never find its true voice, and end in the recycler. Most of her poems did.
This one, though, troubled her more. It had arisen from a deeper need. The news in these past several days, and then the sudden direness in her father, locked away from her behind his face, made her reach once again for the eternal. Calm and consolation lay in understanding that humanity is the slightest of ripples over it; and from them could arise the strength to deal with human griefs; but she renewed that understanding by giving it utterance. Now she seemed unable to. Anxiety gnawed so sharply.
She raised her head to look at the scroll above. In its ink painting of a mountainscape and its calligraphy, certain lines by Tu Fu, she found serenity oftener than in any scene played on the multiceiver or any virtuality experienced with a vivifer. Today it likewise was just marks on paper. Her gaze flitted around the room as if seeking escape.
She had more space here than was usual in the colony, having enlarged it after the last of her siblings departed, but mainly it was space, occupied by little more than this table where she wrote, a dresser, a cabinet, and the futon on which she slept. A shelf held a few objects: a seashell from Earth, a glittery piece of comet rock given her by Kyra Davis, old books, her bamboo flute. For her extensive reading and music listening she had the world’s databases to draw on, and for mementos she had her memory.
Through the thin walls she heard a door open and shut. Feet walked slowly. That must be her father, home late. She rose and hurried across the tatami out to the common room to greet him.
Noboru Tamura stood in his dark clothes like a blot. Ordinarily one saw past small stature, bald head, furrowed countenance, to the chief of space operations in L-5, the friend of Anson Guthrie himself. Today his shoulders were stooped and his hands faintly trembled. Compassion and concern rushed over Eiko, not for the first time since her mother’s death. She bowed to him—in a crowded shell where survival required universal self-discipline, courtesy was less a set of rituals than it was a necessity—but thereafter she went to take both those hands in hers and ask low, “What is wrong? I wish you would tell me, Father.”
“I wish I dared,” he answered.
She let go. “Why not? Always before, you have honored me with your trust.”
He glanced away from her. “This knowledge is dangerous, and you could make no use of it.”
“Please sit down and rest,” she urged. “Let me bring you some refreshment.”
He nodded and sank onto a cushion. Though they had chairs for visitors, both preferred traditional—no, archaic—ways when possible. Many in the colony did. Eiko supposed it was, at heart, a kind of defiance. Behold us, you stars; we remain the children of Gaia, and so does this tiny world we have created.
To make tea in the kitchen brought a similar comfort. She had never permitted herself to think of her home as empty. Instead, her mind evoked the clatter and laughter that filled it before the children grew up and left; or it might be her mother’s soft tones, or Kioshi murmuring in her ear during a stolen moment— Not that. In the end, Kioshi Matsumoto had married another girl, and may all be well with them. Eiko had her father to look after.
She arranged pot, cups, and cakes pleasingly on a tray, brought it in, and settled down opposite him. A smile crinkled his weariness. “You are a good daughter,” he said. “Praise to Amida Buddha.” For a while they were silent, contemplating. Though not a real tea ceremony, it gave restoration to spirit as well as body.
“I have been alone this whole daywatch, and tuned nothing in,” she ventured at length. That was true. She had taken leave from her programming job in his department, because she felt the stress of wondering what would erupt next between the company and the Union government, together with the general disarray among the staff, precluded her doing honestly creative work there. “Has something happened that I should know about?”
He showed surprise. “You haven’t heard?” A shrug, a wryness. “That’s my Eiko.” He went bleak. “A detachment of North American Security Police has arrived by torchcraft.
We are under martial law.”
The words hit like a knife. She dropped her cup and barely caught it. Coriolis force splashed several drops onto her kimono. “What? But—but, Father, we are not of their country. We are in space. We are Fireball.”
“This is by agreement with our directorate.”
“With Guthrie-san?” Dream-gibberish.
“Yes. He informed us personally, yesterday. We were to keep it confidential until it was accomplished, for fear of public unrest.”
A fear well justified, Eiko thought, considering the opinion of Avantism held by most people here. “Is that what has been preying on your mind?” she asked.
“It was,” he replied carefully. “If the situation was in truth that desperate— You know how vulnerable we are.”
“It was,” he had said. Eiko wondered whether to hear that as an invitation. A burden borne alone is twice heavy. Yet she ought not alarm him by rushing in. She took a sip of tea. The heat and metallic-green savor were heartening. “What will they do, those officers?”
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