The Avatar

by Poul Anderson

  “Weren’t we supposed to maintain silence? We aren’t actually criminals, Captain. We’re law-abiding citizens, anxious to get home and clear our names. How the hell we ever got accused of anything, I faunch to learn…. All right, if you wish, I’ll screen the pertinent parts of our log and the CE’s notes.”

  Those were works of art, Brodersen judged. Nevertheless he was fumble-thumbed about presenting them. His job as skipper was to talk, nothing else—dish out the blarney as long as possible—keep his adversaries in play, while Joelle and Su and the laws of physics drove his ship onward.

  He had a mere twenty minutes or thereabouts of plausibility until the next acceleration fell due. His pilots would go at top speed, no safety margin to speak of, since every margin around them was beset….

  A renewed boost.

  “Stop, Chinook! Are you insane?”

  “The controls are insane, that’s what.”

  “I can’t believe this any longer.”

  “Ask your own CE to study the information we sent. Have him study it real hard.” Brodersen won that debate also.

  The drive had stopped and he hung as if at the bottom of a dream. Sweat off his face bobbed around in globules. Pegeen might likewise become glitter strewn among the stars. His underwear absorbed perspiration but left him chill and gamy. Time extended.

  Lawes reappeared in the screen. “My engineer says your material does not make sense,” he snapped. “It’s superficially plausible enough that it must have been concocted. You’re attempting to escape.”

  “Escape into what?”

  “Never mind. Brodersen, you will reverse immediately or we shoot.”

  He’s reacting on schedule, he is. “Wait, Captain Lawes. Wait half a tick. You’re about to compromise your mission and jeopardize your career. Take heed while you can.”

  “What are you raving about?”

  “I’m not raving. Please note I’m speaking very carefully.” As slow and wordy as I gauge I can get away with. “Curb your own emotions and listen. You can spare a few minutes for saving your ass and maybe your superiors’, can’t you?”

  “Well—” Lawes swallowed. “Go on. Speak to the point.”

  “I will. Okay, we lied to you, we bought ourselves time to get this far. It was necessary. The fact is, there’s a lot more behind our arrest than a miscarriage of justice. Want to hear?”

  “No! I have my orders!”

  “It mightn’t be safe for you to know, eh? Well, from our viewpoint, we’ve zero to lose. If we go to Phoebus, the way things are, we’re dead. Jumping off into the galaxy, we have the teeniest chance of finding help somewhere. We don’t count on that, of course. But we’ll have several extra years of life while our supplies last. I don’t think this will bother your bosses much. If anything, they should be glad to get rid of us so cheaply.”

  “My orders say, either see you off to Phoebus or kill you. If you don’t return at once, you’ll not get an hour of those years you mention.”

  “We’re armed too, Captain. We can block your missiles for a bit. Meanwhile we’ll broadcast—in Spanish, visual, at full power. Can you be certain they won’t tune in aboard Copernicus? Or chance to catch it on a different spacecraft? We’ve wattage aplenty to be received ten million kilometers off. It’s a story which will bring down some big people. In cases like that, little people get carried along…. I wish you would let me talk to you, Lawes.”

  “No.” Torment. “Have you anything further to say before we start shooting?”

  “Why, yes. I have this suggestion.” Brodersen thrust his whole personality forward. “Call Earth and ask what to do. We’ll be zigzagging on, sure, but you’re aware of how long a proper transit pattern takes, and we’d much rather come out in a planetary system, at a T machine, than in the middle of interstellar space. The best guess is, this means we have to pass from beacon to beacon—the more, the likelier—and swing straight inward from the last. You’ve time for a call. Meanwhile, unless you shoot, we’ll stay quiet.”

  “Well—You have no right to bargain!”

  “I am bargaining, though. Hear me. What I wish you’d do is direct your message not to the office you’re supposed to, but to your own high command. Lay the matter before them. You’ll find them astonished at what’s been going on.”

  “We’re under security.”

  Brodersen sighed. He’d expected nothing else. “Okay, as you choose.” Louder: “But call!”

  After more argument he won his point. The screen blinked and he collapsed, breathing hard. It would take about three-quarters of an hour for an interchange, via the relay satellite, between here and Earth. By then, at her headlong pace, Chinook should be deep into the transport field.

  Stars exulted. He stirred and said through the intercom: “You heard that, boys and girls? We’re this far along. Rejoice.”

  A few small cheers replied. Caitlín struck a ringing chord from her sonador and declared, “You carried us, Daniel.”

  “No, you all did,” he answered. “Hey, Pegeen, I love you.”

  “Wait till I get you to myself again,” she said.

  Joelle is listening—By tacit agreement, conversation died away. Occasional words went around, most of them functional. Tastes in music varied too widely for a shared concert. Folk at their posts remained in their lonelinesses. Brodersen relived his latest passages with Caitlín; the first had rated twelve on the Beaufort scale, the second had been as gentle as that final union, close to dawn, in the cave beneath Mount Lorn…. He even dozed for a spell. The ship roused him, changing direction, squandering chemical auxiliaries as well as expending nuclear fuel in order to keep hard on her way.

  He was bobcat-alert before the response from Earth came due.

  Dozsa’s voice delivered it, a shout: “Missiles!”

  The decision was, “Kill,” Brodersen realized. Quick, or whoever is at the other end, is afraid we may have a plan.

  He must sit with nothing but fingernails in his fists. Survival had ceased to be any affair of his.

  At high accelerations, crossing the gap in a couple of minutes, though they changed vectors at varying intervals to confuse counterfire, the torpedoes homed on Chinook. Nobody aboard was spacesuited. If a nuclear warhead exploded near the hull, that was that.

  Brodersen spied the exhaust streaks, silver and narrow. Sensors locked onto the tubes. A computer extrapolated. Zarubayev had fine-tuned the system. Fire sprayed across darkness as energy-gorged laser beams found their targets. An “All clear” jubilated, telling humans they would not die in the next few seconds.

  The ship trembled. Von Moltke had launched missiles of her own. This was her ultimate job, to outguess a living opponent.

  Chinook was not only much bigger than Alhazen, she carried throw weight out of proportion. Watchships weren’t really intended for battle. Their weapons were partly a relic of the Troubles, partly a concession to vague fears… which Quick’s faction strove to entrench….

  The vessel surged around Brodersen., plunging toward her next way station.

  Twinkles in heaven—“Gunner to captain,” von Moltke intoned, “they stopped our barrage.”

  “They were meant to, this first time,” he reminded her. “A lesson. Stef, have you got contact?… Okay, put me through.”

  His intention was to repeat his original threat, negotiate for the escape of his command. He did not, repeat and repeat not, wish to kill more men who were doing what they’d been assured was their duty.

  The stars were beginning visibly to crawl in the viewscreens. Soon he’d be in such warped space-time that no rocket would have a prayer of tracking him down. Of course, any signal he transmitted from there would be hopelessly garbled. Well, everybody would be satisfied, sort of—

  “Missiles!” Dozsa bawled. He spat an oath and rattled off RA, dec, approximate vectors. They had to be from Copernicus.

  Judas priest, this was my worst fear, that Quick’s influence would be strong enough to compel Janigian’s honest crew
—

  “Missiles!” Those came from Alhazen, one, one, one, one, as fast as the tube could launch them.

  “Captain,” von Moltke said starkly, “I do not belieff we can strike that many in a flock.”

  Granville’s wail: “No, I compute we cannot. Mon père—

  Joelle, like steel striking steel: “We can reach the next beacon and accelerate straight inward before they arrive.”

  Brodersen surged against his harness, even as weight returned. “No!” he bawled. “We’ll end up anywhere—” Knowledge smote home. “Carry on.”

  The ship blasted. Almost, he imagined he saw the T machine grow before him, whirling and whirling.

  He did see the first few splashes of flame, as Frieda parried. Then Sol was gone from its screen. The stars were an altogether different horde. The sun was not white nor yellow nor the blood-orange of Centrum, but ember-hued and shrunken. Tawny beneath colored bands, thrice the width of Luna seen from Earth, stood a planet. Frighteningly close gyred a great iridescent cylinder.

  Brodersen let himself tumble for a minute into a night that roared.

  Winter fell downward, white around the tower in Toronto.

  “Well,” Quick said at last. “They’re gone.”

  “You are sure?” Makarov demanded through a choking haze of smoke. He lacked the scientific education to follow each detail of what had just come in.

  “Yes,” Quick told him. “Whatever scheme they had—if they did—I suspect they were in fact running off at random, except for trying to… to maximize their probability of—Oh, how can you estimate it?… Never mind. They were forced to make their gate entry from the spot where they happened to be. They are gone, Makarov. I beg your pardon. They are gone, Premier Makarov. Like the thousands of probes our species wasted, searching for new guidepaths. We can forget about them.”

  Makarov hunched his bulky frame. “You are quite certain?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.” Quick sagged and covered his eyes. Exhaustion shuddered in him.

  “Ah.” Makarov puffed. “Good. What a simplification.”

  Quick looked back up. “Hm?”

  Makarov smiled. He seldom did. “A factor less in the equation, perhaps the least known factor, do you see?”

  I see you’re a mathematical illiterate, went through Quick.

  He gathered strength together. A civilized man had better stay the equal of a barbarian war lord. “Right. We’ll have the personnel of Alhazen and Copernicus interrogated, of course, but apparently they heard nothing they shouldn’t. This leaves us Lomonosov for any special missions we decide on—plus a welcome breathing space, I’d say.”

  “We do not sit and pant much,” Makarov warned. “In the bright light of the new situation, we act. First, after notifying our major collaborators, I think we should send Lomonosov to the Wheel. If they find no undue complication, they dispose of those who are there, including Troxell’s group. Afterward we have leisure to make complete arrangements. Is this agreed?”

  I’ve had an inferno’s worth of hours to agonize over the moral issues, Quick thought. A time finally comes when the civilized man must attack alongside his ally of expediency, or he left behind and have no voice at the peace conference. “Sir, let’s sleep on it and then talk further, but at the moment I am inclined to believe that in principle you are right.”

  XXVII

  CAITLÍN FLOATED by herself in the common room. A handclasp on a table edge held her against air currents that made a cloud of her unbound hair. She had turned off lights, the better to see out the viewscreens. Like big windows, they gave her the encompassing universe.

  In most, stars crowded as ever before, the same god-hoard of gems in a crystal-black bowl, so many that she could not see how heaven was altered; nor did the argence of the Milky Way pour through channels greatly different from those above Earth or Demeter. In one direction the T machine was visible, but barely, a needle lost among vastnesses. Chinook had moved well clear of it before assuming a stable orbit around the planet.

  The strangeness stood to right and left of her. Right was the sun disc, one-sixth the width of that which shone upon her birthland. Its red glow needed no stopping down; she could look straight at it, suffer nothing but after-images, and discern a faint, ocherous corona. She found no zodiacal lens, which turned the sight doubly foreign.

  Left was the giant world. The ship happened to have emerged opposite the dayside, and at her distance would need a pair of Terrestrial years to swing once around. Hence the globe stayed nearly at full phase, broad and bright enough to shine all else out of the screen which revealed it. Unaided vision noticed how spin had flattened the disc. Tones of amber shaded subtly into each other, below cloud belts that were deep or pale orange streaked by blue-green and auburn. The shadow of a moon was like the pupil of an eye. Where night sliced off a crescent, it was not wholly dark, but a faint sheen wavered.

  Mingled luminances turned the room into a cavern of soft lights and lairing shadows, a place of mystery and silence.

  The stillness did not break the moment Martti Leino entered. He checked his flight in the doorway when he spied Caitlín and hung for a minute, staring at the slender, frosted form, before he almost barked, “Hello.”

  Tresses swirled in radiance and darkness as she pivoted on her arm. The free hand brushed a lock aside to clear sight for her. “Oh. The top of the morning to you,” she hailed, though in a hushed voice.

  “Morning—well, yes, our clocks do say eight hundred—as close to a morning as we’ll ever know,” he blurted. Immediately: “I was looking for you.”

  “Were you that? Why?”

  He shoved from the doorframe, arrowed across to the table, caught it and let his body stream free like hers, directly across from her. This close to him, her face was clear in the shinings from outside, while shadows brought forth the sculpturing of it. His speech stumbled: “I noticed what trouble you were having at breakfast—”

  “Aye, weightlessness is grand until one must clean up and stash things, then it becomes a polka-dotted bitch.” While supplies did include plenty of squeeze-tube rations and other materials intended for these conditions, housekeeping for nine humans and a nonhuman got complicated even when the quartermaster was experienced. “Well, my ancestors outlived worse. Only think, I might have been a maidservant in a Victorian Protestant home! I’ll be learning the way of this.”

  “You shouldn’t have to cope alone, now that Su will be too busy. I—I can help, Caitlín.”

  “What? Will yourself not be in hourly demand?”

  “No. I’ll get jobs, of course, but—Oh, true, every spaceman’s trained to assist in some kind of research, and when we’ve no proper scientists along—Well, the studies that our best qualified people can carry out won’t need much support from me. Phil Weisenberg can generally handle the setting-up and so forth. I’ve talked with him and he agrees I can probably be more useful, most of the time, helping you … if you want,” Leino finished, dropping his glance.

  “Why, that’s dear of you and I thank you.” She reached to clasp his shoulder. “May the roads you take be always soft beneath your feet.”

  “We, we have to help each other… be as kind to each other…as we can,” he mumbled. “Don’t we? While we live? There will never be any roads really for us, roads we can walk on, ever again.”

  She smiled. “Sure, and you’re not losing heart already, are you, Martti, lad? When we’ve only just snatched our lives back to us and won free?”

  “Free?” His gaze swung wildly about, he gripped the table edge with needless force, till his nails whitened. “Locked in a metal shell, blundering blind through space as long as our food holds out, no longer, if we don’t go crazy first—” He wrestled for control.

  She stroked his head and made comforting noises low in her throat. At last he could say with simple despair, “You do know, don’t you, we’re lost? Fidelio’s confirmed his folk have never been here. We’ll grope from T machine to T machine—In a thousan
d years, spending billions of probes, the Betans found how to go between a couple of score stars… and no Others, nobody to help… Caitlín, we’re done for.”

  She shook her head, still smiling through the hair that streamed athwart stars, and answered quietly, well-nigh merrily, “I’ll believe that of me when they lay the coppers on my eyes, and maybe not then. But suppose the thing that you say is the worst, Martti, darling.”

  He jerked violently. “Och,” she breathed, “you’re in bad shape, so you are. If you’re to help me, let me help you first. Hold still.”

  In a deft maneuver she released the table, drew alongside him and slightly behind, caught his left arm in her left hand and pinned his legs between her knees. He uttered amazement. “Easy, lad, easy,” she said. “I must be anchoring myself if I’m to give you the good strong back rub you need.” Her right hand went over him. “Aye, a rat’s nest of Charlie horses, as my father would say were he less dignified and more Irish. Peel down your coverall to the waist.”

  He trembled as he obeyed. “Relax,” she urged. “Let go. We’ll drift loose, but sooner or later we’ll fetch up against a wall—a bulkhead—and meanwhile I can be loosening of that poor latissimus dorsi for you.”

  Kneading, she chuckled. “All my own invention. Free fall sex made me wonder about free fall massage, the more so when himself often is tensed—No, easy, I told you, easy.”

  Looking about her as she worked: “Suppose we shall indeed go lost for some years, until our food is no more and each of us much choose how to die. I do not admit this is the case, mind you, but suppose it is. What a grand fate!”

  “Huh?” he exclaimed. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am that. Oh, it will be hard to give up mountains and seas, sunshine through rain, a hearthfire at evening. But think, Martti, dear. Look. The glory yonder, and we making ready to know it—then more Suns, more worlds, more beauties and marvels, maybe at last a new Demeter for us, though if not, why, then at the end our few years out here in the universe will have held more than most centuries ever did before.” Her hold upon him tightened, her working hand grew eager. “Be glad in your life!”