"Oh, good grief." The commander kicked out with one long leg, struck the console at just the right angle, spun her chair around. I hope it locked in place during acceleration. But no, we were already under acceleration, fantastic acceleration, and despite all those lessons in physics class about the equivalence of gravity and inertia, I didn't feel a tremor, just a comfortable standard one gee, which was miraculous in itself. The moment the chair stopped moving, Jan was on her feet, striding back and forth in an agitated manner. She paused to find something congenial in her pouch, shot it straight into her left eyeball with a kind of pressure dispenser. It made me wince, but if you are trying to mainline your neurotransmitter of choice directly into your brain, the optic tract is not a bad route. "I'm convinced you're both paranoid. It's perfectly obvious why we have to get out to the Xon star, and there's no other way to get there except to sit on our duffs while Hanged Man does the heavy lifting." She took a deep breath, wagged her finger at me. "So it takes thirty years. You're making all this fuss because you're new to the sitch, dude. Yes, someone's been fucking around with you—they had you thinking you're a mortal. Listen up, kiddo. Time is different for people like us. Ask your chum Lune. She'll tell you—"
"I can't ask her, Jan. That's the point, you idiot."
"Stop the Contest, I want to get off, eh? Well, that's just not the way it works, buddy boy." I have to say she was looking better already, if jittering around in a manic fashion is the way to look better. I sat down again, glanced at Maybelline, pointed my head at her chair. With a shrug, pressing her lips together tightly, she caught Jan by the shoulders, steered her back to the command seat, pushed her into it, found her own place.
"Hanger," I said, "make it so." I couldn't help grinning like a thief as I said it.
done. ETA, 57 minutes, 43 seconds.
"Belay that, I told you, that's an order, you miserable heresiarch motherfucker," Jan said, but she seemed to be weakening. I assumed the drug was helping clear her head of whatever subtle persuader had been churning away in us all under the surface. It was like the prejudices of upbringing and ideology; you didn't notice it at work in you, it was the air you breathed. Or maybe like muscle memory, the reflexes instilled by years of kata. When the moment came to act, hand and eye and the body's balance struck together without deliberation or guidance from the intellect. In this case, though, the experience was horribly like sleepwalking, or so I imagine. Perhaps like hypnosis. I knew it had something to do with these soft, pliable ingots embedded in our flesh—in my case, in more of my flesh than any of my siblings could boast. I wondered if the excess Xon matter was what had provided me this small access into insight, into freedom of action. But that was bullshit. No, what drove me like a turbine with its outlet leads soldered to my heart was Lune, my love for Lune, hers for me.
"I'm sorry, Jan, I didn't set out to hijack your starship." All I got in return was a mutinous look, which was ironical under the circumstances. I leaned forward. "Really. Look, I got dragged into this ridiculous game, I didn't ask to join it. Lune and Maybelline," and I gave her a nod, "stuck a dead body in Tansy's bathroom without any prior arrangement either."
"Surely you don't think we intended—" Maybelline started to say, but I cut her off.
"Obviously that was not a chance coincidence, but no, I don't think you were being malicious, or mischievous."
"Well, thanks very much."
I sighed. "The point is, that house, that nexus, was some kind of privileged location, somehow isolated from the scrutiny of the deformers. I can only assume that was due to the presence of our parents in their bizarre disguises. And I do blame myself for screwing things up."
"Oh, the Boy Scout takes the blame. How very chivalrous."
"Shut up, Maybelline," Jan said. She was watching me intently now, which was an improvement over the sulks. "As far as I can see, August, you were hardly to blame either. Dramen and Angelina chose to keep you in the dark for your own safety. I mean, when you think about it, they took extreme measures. They revised the fucking calendar! They obliterated an entire month, just to keep you out of sight. I didn't know any of us had the capacity or the knowledge to mess with the computational substrate to that extent."
"You're assuming they did it. Maybe it was someone else. Something else. The real Players."
Maybelline tossed her hair, curled her lip. It would be fair to say that she was not my favorite person. "The ones we have to worry about are the K-machines. The machines, Sonny Jim, not some imaginary gods in the machine."
"I need some more coffee," I said.
coming up.
"Thanks. Anyone else?"
"Fix me some kava," Jan said. "She'll have some of that Venusian muck. Fungus tea, or whatever it is."
"It's good for the complexion," Maybelline said with dignity.
"Doesn't help with the weight, apparently," Jan said cattily.
"I'm not fat, you bitch, I have big bones and enough muscles to shove your head down the toilet."
This time a mug of coffee rose from an opening in one arm of my crash seat. All the services you might expect of an advanced spaceship. I wondered exactly how they managed to—I noticed my mind drifting away from the topic, dragged it back, gave it a sharp rap on the nose.
"Guys, eyes on the ball. They're trying to distract us, and I don't give a shit who 'they' are, not just at the moment. Presumably not the deformers, or we'd be dead already." I sipped, inhaled, frowned. "Does anyone actually die in this Contest? Other than the poor schmuck humans like Sadie Abbott who just happen to get in the way."
The women looked at each other in surprise.
"Not so far," Jan said. "Not from the family, at any rate. Well, we thought our parents—"
"But they weren't," I said. "Just in hiding, until I stupidly blew the gaffe and forced all three of us into the open." All five, counting my aunt Miriam and her husband Itzhak, the remnant and partial selves of my hidden parents.
"Get over it," Maybelline said. "No, I mean it. It wasn't your fault, it wasn't our fault. I'm starting to think you're right. We were maneuvered into it. Like some cunning chess trap planned long in advance." A shiver went through her; she put her steaming, slightly pungent mug to her lips. "Jan, we have to get back. I mean, if he's right, we can return onboard in thirty years, when the ship reaches the Xon star."
"No, we can't," Jan told her with frosty patience. "Hanger would need a barrier to block the emissions, and there are no stars within at least several light-years of our destination." A look of astonishment transfigured her face. "Oh my God, what am I saying? How could I have overlooked this? Hanger, what's the closest star to the Xon? Rogue planet, whatever."
I saw it at the same moment. The instant we passed into the occlusion of this universe's Mars, The Hanged Man could redefine our position on the computational substrate—whatever that meant—and place us instantly somewhere else, halfway across the galaxy if need be, or in an entirely different cognate universe. But we needed a shield or buffer at the far end, something substantial enough to block the inhibitory radiation from the mysterious Xon star. This rather belated insight blazed through me as the display screen presented a speckling of labeled stars, rotated their position, mapped vectors.
Jan was baleful. "Hangdog, damn it to Shayol, why didn't you tell me?"
commander, you didn't ask.
I saw again the vimana crunching out of nowhere into the sky of the cognate world ruled by the Good Machine, Ember's playground, and the terrifying K-machine dreadnought that broke through in pursuit. My right hand twitched, feeling again in imagination the surge of appalling raw solar photosphere energy vectored through it to smash and burn the dreadnought. After she staggered out of its ruin, Maybelline informed us that the wrecked Venusian vimana had been modified in accordance with design principles discovered by Jan during her previous visit to the Xon star. It'd become glaringly apparent to me in the meantime that Jan was no genius; plainly the development was due to the diffident or perhaps s
ly AI system governing this starship, or to some other intelligence it had communed with in the vicinity of the Xon star.
"What's this one?" Maybelline asked, pointing to a glowing dot.
the star Alpha Piscis Austrini, better known as Fomalhaut, is the brightest natural star in that general vicinity, positioned at right ascension 22 hours 57 minutes 3 seconds, and declination minus 29 degrees 39 seconds.
The bright point of light on the map looked to be no more than five degrees from the Xon, but more distant. I said, "That's no use, it must be—"
"It's 7.69 parsecs from here," Jan said, finding an annotation on the screen. Well, she was allegedly the pilot, after all. "Twenty-five light-years. More than 2 parsecs farther out than the Xon, but that's still less than half the distance I was prepared to travel."
Alpha Piscis Austrini has a very dangerous environment, the starship told us. i would not advise a close encounter. it is ringed by a huge torus of protoplanetary dust intensely heated by infrared emissions from the A3-class primary.
"Yeah, yeah," Jan said. "I wasn't planning on a holiday there, just in and out. So okay, we need to exit a sensible distance on the other side of Fomalhaut, then change our vector by 180 degrees, and loop around the damned dust cloud... Hanger, how much time would we save?"
each way: 8 years, 9 months, 27 days, 13 hours—
"Not nearly enough," I said. "I speak only for myself, of course. I'm getting off when we go into Mars shadow, you two can do as you please."
Jan wasn't listening to me. Muttering to the AI system, she watched the deep display rotate, expand, shuffle possibilities.
lacaille 9352, the ship said. 9.75 light-years from Sol, dim red M1.5V. right ascension 23 hours 05 minutes 42 seconds, declination minus 35 degrees 5 minutes.
"And this?"
ez aquarii, 4.2 light-years from lacaille 9352. binary M5e red dwarfs, 11.1 light-years away, right ascension 22 hours 38 minutes 34 seconds, declination minus 15 degrees 18 minutes.
"I like this one," Maybelline said, poking her finger into the display.
Gl 628. type M3.0V. 11.93 light-years, right ascension 16 hours 30 minutes 18 seconds, declination minus 12 degrees 39 minutes. for your purposes, though, the obvious choice is local stellar survey 1085b. brown dwarf just under one-half light-year from the Xon object—
"Half a fucking light-year," Jan said in a high-pitched incredulous tone, "and you had the algorithm for taking the ship through a Schwelle, and you didn't fucking bother telling me?"
apologies. the scholium was not unpacked fully until we approached the Solar System. I do see now—
"Shut up!" I said loudly. "You're all letting yourselves get distracted again. Jan, let the machine plot its own optimal course. As far as I'm concerned, I think you and May should get off with me at Mars and forget this quixotic sideshow. Hanger might be able to shave the voyage down to a couple of years, but in the meantime you two will be cooling your heels well away from the action. And who do you suppose benefits from that?"
"You don't understand—"
"I sure as hell don't. Hanged Man, how long now?"
an acoustic and visual count will begin 300 seconds before transit by Mars. estimated schwelle window, 2.7 seconds. transition of this vessel to the nearest star to the Xon object will occur thereafter within 0.3 seconds.
"I asked you how long."
twenty-one minutes and 18 seconds from now, mark.
"Good." I pushed my empty mug down into the arm of the seat, which swallowed it. "That gives us time for a final powwow."
"Aren't you ever going to shut up?" Maybelline said. My jaw tightened for an instant, before I thought about her in an embrace with a vegetable intelligence and found myself suddenly smiling instead of snarling back at her.
"Dear sister, I'd like nothing better. But I don't think the cat came by just for the exercise. Se wanted us to pay attention."
"I'm not arguing with you, are you deaf? I said we should go back. What Jan does, of course, is up to her."
"I'm staying put, buster. I need to get back to the Xon star, and neither of you backsliders is going to stop me doing my duty."
I wanted to pull my hair out. "What's the rush, when it was going to take you thirty years there and thirty back? Why the need? What exactly are you going to do when you get there?"
Jan stood up and walked briskly away across the deck. Over her shoulder she said, "You're a bully, August, and I'm tired of your nonsense. I'll be happy to see the back of you." She paused at the entrance to the main companionway. "Maybelline, tell me you're not really going along with his crap." Her voice seemed barely under control.
"I don't like his attitude any more than you do," Maybelline said slowly, "but I'm not sure that it is crap. Why are you getting so upset, anyway?"
I stayed put, looking from one to the other. "Hey, listen, I'm sorry if I've offended you both, not my intention, but it makes no difference to me what either of you decide to do, just so long as I get back to... back home without any more delay."
Leaning in the doorway, Jan gave me an odd look. "Get back to Lune."
I shrugged. "She doesn't know where I am. And I guess it must sound weird as hell to someone who just returned from sixty years stuck in a tin can with only a machine for company and then immediately sets off for another sixty, but yeah, I'm in love with Lune, dear sister, and she's in love with me—" not the sort of thing I'd ever expected to hear myself blurt out, "—and fuck you, what's with the compassionate but pitying look?"
"Silly boy," she said, and she actually sounded sincere. "I have no doubt at all that you're completely besotted. Puppy love. But what in the name of the Messiah makes you think a woman two, three times your age feels the same way about you?"
A surge of resentful anger went through me. I got to my feet, squeezed my fists tightly. There was a throb in my right hand. "Bullshit, Jan. What do you know about it? What do you think gives you the right—"
I swallowed hard. I was angry, yes, but some part of me had recognized as she spoke that the same doubts had been working their poison in the depths of my heart, or perhaps of my brain. I knew Lune loved me; I knew, also, even as I hid that knowledge from myself, how extremely unlikely that was. Jan, after all, knew she had to fulfill her insane starflight mission, while I was completely convinced that her belief was delusional, inserted into her for who knew what incomprehensible motive by her Vorpal system. Lune Katha Sarit Sagara was a beautiful young woman, her perfect skin and body and cloudless eyes those of a twenty-five-year-old, maybe a twenty-year-old. But I did know she was not a young woman, not in truth. I had not realized that she was so much older, but I did know at some level that I was significantly younger than Lune. My head buzzed, my tongue felt thick with confusion.
"You're not my dorm counselor, Jan. I didn't send you a 'Dear Abby' letter from Troubled and Broken-Hearted of Northcote, Melbourne. When I need your advice on my love life, you'll be the last to know about it."
"At ease, soldier." Grimacing, Jan came back toward me, hands extended. "Look, I didn't mean that. That is, I did mean it, but it came out wrong. Kiddo, you keep telling us that we don't understand our own motives, that we're being pushed around by mysterious impulses beyond our grasp. Maybe you're right. Shaitan moves in mysterious ways, that's what Shinto teaches. I just wanted to give you a quick clip over the ear, shove your baby face in the harsh fact that you're not immune, either."
"Christ, I know that! It's what I keep saying. What am I doing here? Why did I decide to come and see you on Venus, of all places? A couple of hours earlier, a disgusting thing called a Jammervoch tried to eat my head, and Lune's. A Deformer had a little telephone conversation with me through the university library catalog and showed me a picture of your starship. What in the hell—
"Showed you The Hanged Man?" Jan was shocked.
"Probably just a schematic of the Tree of Life," said Maybelline dismissively. "You know they're obsessed by the Yggdrasil, it's all the way through that stupid
bible of theirs."
three hundred seconds. A pulse of vivid blue light. forty-five million kilometers from cognate Mars.
"You're really going to jump ship?" Jan asked me.
"Unless you can give me a better reason for staying. Aside from dissing my girlfriend."
She sighed. "You know that's not what I was doing. Lune is an impressive woman, especially considering what she went through as a child."
"You know Septima retrieved her from one of the hell worlds?"
"Well, he was Septimus back then. But yes. She was one of the kids brought into the Contest as a potential Player. I don't know what happened to her family, but it must have been hideous. The Ensemble inducted her before she hit puberty. She's done them proud, dude."
"She's wonderful," Maybelline muttered, looking wretched.
"So you're not dissing her, you're putting her on a pedestal," I said. "Just as bad. The goddess Lune. Which makes me some shitcaked shepherd groveling around her shrine."
"Might as well be," said Maybelline.
two hundred seconds. Blue flash. thirty million kilometers and closing.
A different kind of blue flash fired inside my mind. I said, "That's exactly it. You people act as if you're a cross between 1930s movie heroes and Greek gods. All this crap about a Contest, as if it's the purpose of the entire history of the universe, as if the whole fucking multiverse is nothing more than an arena for you self-centered idiots to strut out your pocket-handkerchief dramas, fighting berserker bad guys straight from central casting. It's ridiculous. Okay, it's exciting to find yourself suddenly thrown into the middle of something like this, but after a few days it's downright undignified. The... the disproportion with reality, it's laughable." My throat felt tight. I was dizzy.
Jan touched my left hand; I started to jerk away, took her hand instead, pressed it tightly. I felt excruciatingly isolated. Not one thing about my life made sense except Lune. And now I found myself doubting her as well. The women were right, after all. How likely was it that a wet-behind-the-ears kid like me would enthrall a woman like Lune? She claimed to love me, but maybe that was just gratitude for the small part I paid in recovering her from death. Of course, that was the godling's work, the freely chosen gift of Cathooks, the maddening and opaque entity from the collapsed Omega cosmos my brother Decius had studied from Yggdrasil station. My mind whirred. Maybelline had just mentioned the Yggdrasil, the mythic Tree of Life. Perhaps there was a connection here that my scientific training as a medico was ill fitted to comprehend. Certainly I felt the large, sticky web of their absurd Contest stretched out around me. There had been nothing comical about the K-machine presence that revealed itself to me in the library. Nothing comic opera in that devastating dreadnought I'd smashed out of the sky, sweating in terror. Until I looked at all this from the outside, not as a terrifying and exhilarating experience, not even as a memory, but as the sort of story I might tell a friend. Jamie Davenport, say. It came to me that Jamie was exactly the person I needed to talk to about all this. He'd set me straight. He would provide a compass of sarcastic rationality.
K-Machines Page 19
