by Paul Preuss
“I hardly…”
“Don’t interrupt me, Mother. I’ve decided that I can’t leave Blake and the others out there floundering.”
“Linda, whatever you think of me, I’m very proud…”
Again Sparta cut her off. “You don’t understand the Knowledge any better than the Free Spirit, Mother. You and Father—and the commander and the rest—can imagine nothing grander than the return of the Pancreator. You can’t think beyond that, what it might imply. The Free Spirit want to keep it secret, keep Paradise for themselves. You want to make it public—on your own terms, of course. But I’ll tell you this much: this whole business is far more complex and serious than you think.”
Jozsef studied his daughter curiously, but Ari’s smile was patronizing.
Sparta caught her look. “I’m wasting my breath on you. Some things will only become obvious in hindsight.”
“Your insolence isn’t very becoming, dear,” Ari said quietly.
Sparta nodded. “My therapy program would probably call it a sign of humanity. Not that my personal humanity makes any difference now.” She swallowed. “Any meddling could seriously endanger the mission. And my life. I said that none of you understand the Knowledge. Your ignorance has been the source of much confusion. That ghastly stuff they put under my diaphragm … one of your so-called improvements, which I almost died for: was perfectly useless, the medusas knew what to look for. And some things that should have been done weren’t.”
Ari said coolly, “Be that as it may, the best surgeons are available to us as soon as you…”
“For the past three days I’ve been in the clinic. Everything that needs doing has now been done. I’ve told the commander to see to it that neither Father nor you—especially you—make any effort to communicate with the surgeons. My life is my own.”
Ari stiffened. “Linda, you cannot talk to me like that.” Her hands left her lap; her fingernails dug into the leather chair arms. “My role in these matters, like yours, is clearly defined.”
“You and I won’t be discussing this subject again until my mission is complete. Whether you want to see me—whether you think we have anything else to talk about—I’ll leave to you. Now I should go.” She turned away. But then her steel mask slipped. “Unless there’s anything … you think I ought to know.”
“Linda, please!” Ari’s confusion had overwhelmed her anger, but she realized there was nothing to be gained by arguing now. Perhaps later… She stood up, rising from her chair as if abdicating her throne. “My darling, what’s become of you?”
In Sparta’s mind, compassion and cruelty competed to make an answer; she resisted both. With set shoulders she turned her back on her parents and walked quickly out of the library.
10
Beyond the radiation perimeter of Earth the white cutter’s fusion torch lit and the ship, oddly aerodynamic for an interplanetary spacecraft, accelerated on a column of unbearably bright fire.
During the fortnight’s passage Sparta kept to herself, saying as little to the single other passenger and the three-person crew as she needed to. She ate alone in her little cabin. She stretched and lifted and exercised and practiced solitary unarmed combat until the sweat poured from her dancer’s slim body, hours a day, every day. She read and watched viddie chips, few of which had any obvious application to the mission she was undertaking—Eliot and Joyce and good translations of the epic of Gilgamesh and African folk tales. She read a thousand pages of Genji Monogotari before she became mired in its famous sticking place, which was to novice humanists as the pons asinorum was to novice geometers.
She slept ten hours a day.
At the halfway point, acceleration became deceleration. Finally the torch shut off, and the cutter slid smoothly into orbit around Ganymede. Again the blue band and gold star of the Board of Space Control had descended upon the moons of Jupiter.
Blake insisted upon greeting her personally. He hired Kanthaka, a fat round shuttle—an energetic little tin can, really—and took the co-pilot’s seat on the boost up to parking orbit, which was reached in under an hour.
He’d thought about her, the woman he loved, almost without a moment’s pause since he’d lost her three years ago and regained her and lost her again. He did not know how she felt about him, for the simple reason—she’d finally made it plain—that she did not know how she felt about herself. If a person cannot speak with some little grain of confidence in herself, then she cannot be trusted or understood, cannot be depended upon even to say, honestly and knowledgeably, no.
Now she had said, in the precise but cryptic way that had become more than a pleasant joke between them, that she was joining him. Not meeting or observing or going along with, but joining. Not joining the expedition, but him.
He wanted nothing more in time and the worlds. But there was so much now between them, so much strange and private, belonging to what had virtually become their alternate universes, that he no longer knew if he could trust her or his own desire. For she had warned him (or was it a promise?) that she had changed.
Kanthaka came into orbit. He went back into the passenger cabin as the cutter’s pressure tube snaked out of the lock and fastened itself over the shuttle’s hatch with a solid clunk of magnets. There was a suck of air and the throb of pumps, equalizing pressure. Then the inner hatch opened with a pop. Inside the lock Ellen floated alone, carrying a duffle almost as small as it was weightless. He felt his heart catch.
“You look good, as a Mongol,” she said, with a tiny smile.
“You look beautiful.” He reached out to her. Hugging needs caution in microgravity, and he had to keep one hand through the safety strap. “It’s been a long time.”
Did she seem resistant to his touch, or was it only his imagination? He wanted to cry out against his fear. Disappointment flooded his senses … then he felt her stiffness melt, and in a moment she was clinging to him as if he were the only solid thing in the world’s vortex.
“Isn’t he coming? Are you alone?” he asked.
“He’s staying with the cutter for now.”
Blake risked letting go of the strap. They rolled slowly in mid-air in the padded cabin. He only half heard her whispered words when she said, “I needed to touch you more than I let myself know.”
For answer, he held her tighter.
They were interrupted by a jolly shout. “Whenever you’re ready, folks.” A small brown female face, the pilot’s, peered at them through the flight-deck hatch.
Sparta reluctantly detached herself from Blake. “Does anyone know I’m here yet?”
He hesitated before answering. “A Space Board cutter brings out all the busybodies. There’ve been rumors ever since they broke off the quarantine. Forster didn’t think there was any point in trying to hide you.”
“But he didn’t…”
Blake nodded. “He called a press conference.”
She sighed.
“The professor’s been under a lot of pressure,” Blake said. “Randolph Mays has been on Ganymede for over a month. Raising hell with the Space Board and the Culture Committee because Forster won’t give him an interview. Forster hasn’t given an interview to anybody. He’s been in hiding so long most of the hounds finally got bored and went away. But Mays has whipped them all up again.”
“So…” Sparta nodded, unsurprised. “Forster’s decided to throw me to the hounds.” She found a seat and started buckling herself into it.
Blake looked acutely embarrassed. “Just one press conference. Then it’s over. He’ll be there too.”
“The difference is, he loves this sort of thing.”
“You can handle it.” In a less than enthusiastic voice he called to the pilot, “Need me up there?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the woman replied, and closed the flight-deck door firmly behind her.
A minute later the retrorockets rumbled, beginning an unusually slow and gentle burn. Blake and Sparta, sitting side by side with safety harnesses in dangerously l
oose condition, failed to notice the smooth deceleration, which they owed to their pilot’s weakness for romance.
After a wild ride by moon buggy, involving two transfers to escape prying telescopes, Sparta reached the ice cave under the pressure dome where the Michael Ventris still waited. The ship’s cargo hold and equipment bay were sealed, and its tanks smoked with liquid fuel. The cave was empty except for the huts of the little encampment; the Ventris was poised to blast off.
Sparta met the crew. It was almost a homecoming for her—she knew not only Forster, but Walsh, who had piloted cutters that had carried her to the moon and Mars. And then there was McNeil…
“Angus, it really is you.” She grabbed the burly engineer’s hand in both hers, keeping him at arm’s length while she looked him in the eye. “Found yourself a captain with a grand wine cellar, did you now?”
He returned her knowing look. “Still in the inspectin’ business, Inspector?”
“And haven’t made lieutenant in all these years, is that what you’re askin’, McNeil?”
“Wouldna ha’ crossed my mind.” Both their Scottish accents were growing thicker, as they tried to outdo each other. “I’m mightily pleased to see you, whate’er your rank may be.”
She let go of his hand and hugged him. “And I’m pleased to be working with you.”
In the supply hut Forster mounted one of the lavish dinners that made their lives in the ice cave tolerable. Sparta sat between Forster and Tony Groves, and learned something more of Groves than the quick navigator suspected, for as usual he was asking most of the questions. As she told him the standard tale of Ellen Troy’s “lucky” exploits, she inspected him with a cold macrozoom eye and an ear trained in the inflections of speech, confirming his restlessness and daring. But it was on the basis of his nice smell that she decided he was a person to be trusted.
The other new face at the table was poor Bill Hawkins, who sat enveloped in gloom and had to struggle just to get out the pleasantries; he said he was pleased to meet her, but Sparta suspected he could not have given an adequate description of her five minutes later, so absent were his thoughts. When he excused himself early, Groves leaned over and told Sparta, in an unnecessarily low voice, what she already suspected.
“Lovesick. Poor boy was dumped for another fellow. He was rather gone on the girl, and I don’t blame him. She was a looker. Oh, and very intelligent, to hear him tell it.”
“We’ll take his mind off such things soon enough,” growled J. Q. R. Forster. “Now that the Inspector has joined us, there is no reason to delay another day.”
Sparta shared Blake’s dark, warm hut and its narrow bunk.
“Just think,” she whispered, “within twenty-four hours this little place will be swept away in a torrent of fire … or maybe sooner.” She muffled his laughter with her mouth.
They struggled to find room. “Just one thing,” she said, hesitating. “There are some places you have to be careful.”
“I’ll be careful of everyplace.”
“I’m serious. Here, and here…” She showed him the results of her surgery. “They’re sensitive.”
“Hm. Are you going to explain all this to me, or do I have to take it on faith?”
“I’ll explain everything. Later.”
Much later Blake sat on the end of the bunk, dangling a leg over the edge and watching her in the light from the single torch, turned down to less than a candle’s glow. Even completely exposed, there was nothing visible in this eccentric light to reveal that her long-limbed, small-breasted body was other than simply human.
To her infrared-sensitive vision, Blake presented a much brighter image, for he glowed with heat wherever the blood coursed through his veins. She amused herself, watching the heat slowly redistribute itself.
“Sleepy?” she asked.
“No. You?”
She shook her head. “You wanted me to explain. It’s a very long story. Some parts you’ve already heard, but not in the same order.”
“Tell me a long story. Any order you want.”
On the far side of the ice cave, Bill Hawkins lay alone on his bunk and stared with open eyes into pitch darkness. With the imminent arrival of Inspector Troy, and thus of the launch of the Ventris, Forster had finally brought poor Hawkins out of the glare of the spotlight and into hiding with the rest of the expedition. He was grateful. He was a shade less miserable once he’d gotten away from the Interplanetary, which now held nothing but bitter associations.
He repeatedly replayed his few hours with Marianne in his mind, noting that the same events looked a bit different each time he analyzed them. Each time, his behavior looked worse.
It began the very morning after their first night, when they met at a dim sum place in the square and she arrived with a smile that lit up her green eyes—straight from the travel agency. She announced to him that she’d canceled the rest of her Grand Tour. He’d turned her smile to anger with his disapproval; what, after all, did she intend to do with herself without him? She’d answered that she would find something to do until he came back from Amalthea. So he’d given her a lecture on broadening her knowledge of the worlds, etc., and she’d thrown in his face his own remarks about how two weeks wasn’t enough to get to know Ganymede… He’d had the sense to retreat, but not until she’d accused him of sounding like her mother, for God’s sake…
It got worse. Hawkins was the sort who got himself twisted into moral knots over whether to speak up every time somebody said something that was well known but untrue—for example, that Venus had once been a comet, or that ancient alien astronauts had bulldozed runways in the Peruvian desert—and some imp of the perverse wouldn’t let him keep his mouth shut whenever she made a petty mistake, even ones far less egregious than these. She took this treatment longer, perhaps, than she should have, for she was acutely aware of the scattered nature of her education.
But eventually she had to stand and fight, for her own self-respect. And it was Hawkins’s bad luck that she chose to make her stand upon the theories of Sir Randolph Mays. Something about Mays sent her into raptures—so many piles of facts, perhaps, his truly extraordinary erudition, as if somehow he had read five times as much as any other man alive—and that same something sent Hawkins into paroxysms of offended rationalism—perhaps because Mays’s facts, taken individually, were unassailable: it was just the cockamamie way he stacked them up…
The more she defended Mays, the more Hawkins attacked him. Hawkins always won the arguments, of course. But in retrospect it seemed inevitable that Randolph Mays would show up in person during one of their little debates.
Now Hawkins could brood at leisure upon his disastrous success in reducing Marianne to silence.
11
A huge stupa-like dome dominated the port’s striated icy plain; big curving black-glass windows took in the panoramic view. Through one of them, Randolph Mays idly watched a pressurized moon buggy bound across the ice.
Mays stood slightly apart from the crowd of media-hounds who’d gathered to slice newsbites out of Inspector Ellen Troy and Professor J. Q. R. Forster. His new production assistant craned her neck to see the door, at present firmly shut, where the media victims were scheduled to appear. “Shouldn’t we be closer?” Marianne fretted. “They’ll be here any minute.”
“We’re quite well situated,” Mays replied, speaking into the microfiber that tight-linked him to the pick-up unit Marianne wore in her ear. When the time came to take his pictures and ask his questions, his great height and unmistakable voice would make it unnecessary to actually come in contact with the squirming mass of his fellows.
“I can’t see very well,” Marianne complained.
“I can,” said Mays, putting an end to the discussion. His assistant didn’t need to see in order to do her job—such as it was. Having decided he could use her help, Mays had been prepared to put up with bare competence in some areas provided he got complete cooperation in others. To his surprise, Marianne had proved far f
rom useless; indeed, she had shown herself quite adept at making travel arrangements and appointments and generally keeping his schedule in order, using the phonelink in that half-efficient, half-sexy, American college girl voice of hers as if she’d been born to the device. She didn’t even balk at carrying his luggage; in his workmanlike old leather satchel she’d brought along his recorders and extra chips and the old-fashioned notebook he sometimes used as a prop.
If Mays were given to such thoughts, he would have had to credit Bill Hawkins with his good luck. But Mays wasn’t the sort to give credit to others, unless forced to it. After all, he’d decided to seduce Marianne no matter what; Hawkins had just made it that much easier…
“Here they come, Randolph,” said Marianne. There was hissing and jostling in the pack of newshounds. She handed him the camera and microphone pick-up he’d specified.
Mays slipped into the rig and expertly framed the shot in time to catch the opening of the door. Professor Forster was first through it, followed by the rest of his crew. Last onto the dais was Inspector Ellen Troy, trim in her Space Board blues. Marianne stood by, thrilled, watching the scene unfold on her tiny auxiliary remote monitor.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” Forster began. “I would like to start by…”
“Why have you been avoiding the media, Forster?” someone yelled at him.
“What have you got to hide?” another screamed.
“Troy! Inspector Troy! Isn’t it true—”
“You, Troy! What about reports that you—”
“—that you’ve been locked up in an asylum for the past twelve months?”
“—tried to kill Howard Falcon and sabotage the Kon-Tiki expedition?”
Forster closed his mouth with an almost audible snap, tucked in his chin, and glared from beneath gingery brows, waiting for the questioners to wear themselves down. Finally there was a lull in the cacophony. “I’ll read a brief statement,” he said, clearing his throat with a growl. “Questions afterward.”
