"What does she say of your theory?"
"She thinks I have achieved truth. "
Tuluk took a small helix from his instrument case, inserted it into a receptacle at the base of the glowing ring.
"Come one, come on," McKie jittered.
"Your urgings will not reduce the necessary time for this task," Tuluk said. "For example, I am hungry. I came without stopping to break my daily fast. This does not press me to speed which might produce errors, nor does it arouse me to complain."
"Aren't you complaining?" McKie asked. "You want some of my water?"
"I had water two days ago," Tuluk said.
"And we wouldn't want to rush you into another drink."
"I do not understand what pattern you hope to identify," Tuluk said. "We have no records of artisans for a proper comparison of . . ."
"This is something God made," McKie said.
"You should not jest about deities," Tuluk said.
"Are you a believer or just playing safe?" McKie asked.
"I was chiding you for an act which might offend some sentients," Tuluk said. "We have a hard enough time bridging the sentient barriers without raising religious issues."
"Well, we've been spying on God -- or whatever -- for a long time," McKie said. "That's why we're going to get a spectroscopic record of this. How much longer you going to be at this fiddling?"
"Patience, patience," Tuluk muttered. He reactivated the wand, waved it near the glowing ring. Again the instrument began humming, a higher note this time. It grated on McKie's nerves. He felt it in his teeth and along the skin of his shoulders. It itched inside him where he couldn't scratch.
"Damn this heat!" Tuluk said. "Why will you not have the Caleban open a door to the outside?"
"I told you why."
"Well, it doesn't make this task any easier!"
"You know," McKie said, "when you called me and saved my skin from that Palenki chopper -- the first time, remember? Right afterward you said you'd been tangled with Fanny Mae, and you said a very odd thing."
"Oh?" Tuluk had extended a small mandible and was making delicate adjustments to a knob on the case below the glowing ring.
"You said something about not knowing that was where you lived. Remember that?"
"I will never forget it." Tuluk bent his tubular body across the glowing ring, stared back through it while passing the wand back and forth in front of the ring's opening.
"Where was that?" McKie asked.
"Where was what?"
"Where you lived!"
"That? There are no words to describe it."
"Try."
Tuluk straightened, glanced at McKie. "It was a bit like being a mote in a vast sea . . . and experiencing the warmth, the friendship of a benign giant. "
"That giant -- the Caleban?"
"Of course."
"That's what I thought."
"I will not answer for inaccuracies in this device," Tuluk said. "But I don't believe I can adjust it any closer. Given a few days, some shielding -- there's an odd radiation pattern from that wall behind you -- and projection dampers, I might, I just might achieve a fair degree of accuracy. Now? I cannot be responsible."
"And you'll be able to get a spectroscopic record?"
"Oh, yes."
"Then maybe we're in time," McKie said.
"For what?"
"For the right spacing."
"Ahhh, you mean the flogging and the subsequent shower of sparks?"
"That's what I mean."
"You could not . . . flog her yourself, gently?"
"Fanny Mae says that wouldn't work. It has to be done with violence . . . and the intent to create intensity of anti-love . . . or it won't work."
"Oh. How odd. You know, McKie, I believe I could use some of your water, after all. It's the heat in here."
Any conversation is a unique jazz performance. Some are more pleasing to the ears, but that is not necessarily a measure of their importance.
-Laclac Commentary
There was a popping sound, a stopper being pulled from a bottle. Air pressure dropped slightly in the Beachball, and McKie experienced the panic notion that Abnethe had somehow opened them onto a vacuum which would rain away their air and kill them. The physicists said this couldn't be done, that the gas flow, impeded by the adjustment barrier within the jumpdoor, would block the opening with its own collision breakdown. McKie suspected they pretended to know about S'eye phenomena.
He missed the jumpdoor's vortal tube at first. Its plane was horizontal and directly above the Caleban's spoon bowl.
A Palenki arm and whip shot through the opening, delivered a lashing blow to the area occupied by the Caleban's unpresence. Green sparks showered the air.
Tuluk, bending over his instruments, muttered excitedly.
The Palenki arm drew back, hesitated.
"Again! Again!"
The voice through the jumpdoor was unmistakably that of Cheo.
The Palenki delivered another blow and another.
McKie lifted his raygen, dividing his attention between Tuluk and that punishing whip. Did Tuluk have his readings? No telling how much more of this the Caleban could survive.
Again the whip lashed. Green sparks glimmered and fell.
"Tuluk, do you have enough data?" McKie demanded.
Arm and whip jerked back through the jumpdoor.
A curious silence settled over the room.
"Tuluk?" McKie hissed.
"I believe I have it," Tuluk said. "It's a good recording. I will not vouch for comparison and identification, however."
McKie grew aware that the room was not really silent. The thrumming of Tuluk's instruments formed a background for a murmur of voices coming through the jumpdoor.
"Abnethe?" McKie called.
The opening tipped, gave him a three-quarter view of Abnethe's face. There was a purple bruise from her left temple down across her cheek. A silver noose held her throat, its end firmly in the grip of a PanSpechi hand.
Abnethe, McKie saw, was trying to control a rage which threatened to burst her veins. Her face was alternately pale and flushed. She held her mouth tight, lips in a thin line. Compressed violence radiated from every pore.
She saw McKie. "See what you've done?" she shrieked.
McKie pushed himself away from the wall, fascinated. He approached the jumpdoor. "What I did? That looks more like Cheo's handiwork."
"It's all your fault!"
"Oh? That was clever of me."
"I tried to be reasonable," she rasped. "I tried to help you, save you. But no! You treated me like a criminal. This is the thanks I got from you."
She gestured at the noose around her throat.
"WHAT DID I DO TO DESERVE THIS?"
"Cheo!" McKie called. "What'd she do?"
Cheo's voice came from a point beyond the arm gripping the noose. "Tell him, Mliss."
Tuluk, who had been ignoring the exchange, busying himself with his instruments, turned to McKie. "Remarkable," he said. "Truly remarkable."
"Tell him!" Cheo roared as Abnethe held a stubborn silence.
Both Abnethe and Tuluk began talking at once. It came through to McKie as a mixed jumble of noises: "Youinterstellferederhydrowithgenlawnmassfulexecufrom . . ."
"Shut up!" McKie shouted.
Abnethe jerked back, shocked to silence, but Tuluk went right on: ". . . and that makes it quite certain there's no mistaking the spectral absorption pattern. It's a star, all right. Nothing else would give us the same picture."
"But which star?" McKie asked.
"Ahhh, that is the question," Tuluk said.
Cheo pushed Abnethe aside, took her place in the jumpdoor. He glanced at Tuluk, at the instruments. "What's all this, McKie? Another way to interfere with our Palenkis? Or did you come back for a new game of ring-around-your-neck?"
"We've discovered something you might like to know," McKie said.
"What could you discover that would possibly interest me?"
"Tell him, Tuluk," McKie said.
"Fanny Mae exists somehow in intimate association with a stellar mass," Tuluk said. "She may even be a stellar mass -- at least as far as our dimension is concerned."
"Not dimension," the Caleban said. "Wave."
Her voice barely reached McKie's awareness, but the words were accompanied by a rolling wave of misery that rocked him and set Tuluk to shuddering.
"Wha-wha-what w-w-was th-th-that?" Tuluk managed.
"Easy, easy," McKie cautioned. He saw that Cheo had not been touched by that wave of emotion. At least, the PanSpechi remained impassive.
"We'll have Fanny Mae identified shortly," McKie said.
"Identity," the Caleban said, her communication coming through with more strength but with an icy withdrawal of emotion. "Identity refers to unique self-understanding quality as it deals with self-label, self-abode and self-manifestations. You not me hang yet, McKie. You hang term yet? Self-I overstand your time node."
"Hang?" Cheo asked, jerking the noose around Abnethe's neck.
"A simple old-fashioned idiom," McKie said. "I imagine Mliss gets the hang of it."
"What're you talking about?" Cheo asked.
Tuluk took the question as having been directed to him. "In some way," he said, "Calebans manifest themselves in our universe as stars. Every star has a pulse, a certain unique rhythm, a never-duplicated identity. We have Fanny Mae's pattern recorded now. We're going to run a tracer on that pattern and try to identify her as a star."
"A stupid theory like that is supposed to interest me?" Cheo demanded.
"It had better interest you," McKie said. "It's more than a theory now. You think you're sitting in a safe hidey-hole. All you have to do is eliminate Fanny Mae, that's supposed to eliminate our universe and leave you out there the only sentients left at all? Is that it? Ohhh, are you ever wrong."
"Calebans don't lie!" Cheo snarled.
"But I think they can make mistakes," McKie said.
"Proliferation of single-tracks," the Caleban said.
McKie shuddered at the icy wave which accompanied the words. "If we discontinue, will Abnethe and her friends still exist?" he asked.
"Different patterns with short limit on extended connectives," the Caleban said.
McKie felt the icy wave invade his stomach. He saw that Tuluk was trembling, facial slit opening and closing.
"That was plain enough, wasn't it?" McKie asked. "You'll change somehow, and you won't live very long after us."
"No branchings," the Caleban said.
"No offspring," McKie translated.
"This is a trick!" Cheo snarled. "She's lying!"
"Calebans don't lie," McKie reminded him.
"But they can make mistakes!"
"The right kind of mistake could ruin everything for you," McKie said.
"I'll take my chances," Cheo said. "And you can take . . ."
The jumpdoor winked out of existence.
"S'eye alignment difficult," the Caleban said. "You hang difficult? More intense energy requirement reference. You hang?"
"I understand," McKie said. "I hang." He mopped his forehead with a sleeve.
Tuluk extended his long mandible, waved it agitatedly. "Cold," he said. "Cold-cold-cold-cold."
"I think she's holding on by a thin thread," McKie said.
Tuluk's torso rippled as he inhaled a deep breath into his outer trio of lungs. "Shall we take our records back to the lab?" he asked.
"A stellar mass," McKie muttered. "Imagine it. And all we see here is this . . . this bit of nothing."
"Not put something here," the Caleban said. "Self-I put something here and uncreate you. McKie discontinues in presence of I-self."
"Do you hang that, Tuluk?" McKie asked.
"Hang? Oh, yes. She seems to be saying that she can't make herself visible to us because that'd kill us."
"That's the way I read it," McKie said. "Let's get back and start that comparison search."
"You expend substance without purpose," the Caleban said.
"What now?" McKie asked.
"Flogging approaches, and I-self discontinue," the Caleban said.
McKie put down a fit of trembling. "How far away, Fanny Mae?"
"Time reference by single-track difficult, McKie. Your term: soon."
"Right away?" McKie asked and he held his breath.
"Ask you of intensity immediate?" the Caleban inquired.
"Probably," McKie whispered.
"Probability," the Caleban said. "Energy necessity of self-I extends alignment. Flogging not . . . immediate."
"Soon, but not right away," Tuluk said.
"She's telling us she can take one more flogging and that's the last one," McKie said. "Let's move. Fanny Mae, is there a jumpdoor available to us?"
"Available, McKie. Go with love."
One more flogging, McKie thought as he helped Tuluk gather up the instruments. But why was a flogging so deadly to the Caleban? Why a flogging, when other energy forms apparently didn't touch them?
The most common use of abstraction is to conceal contradictions. It must be noted that the abstracting process has been demonstrated to be infinite.
-Culture Lag, an unpublished work by Jorj X. McKie
At some indeterminate moment, and that soon, the Caleban was going to be lashed by a whip, and it would die. The half-mad possibility was about to become apocalyptic reality, and their sentient universe would end.
McKie stood disconsolately in Tuluk's personal lab, intensely aware of the mob of enforcer guards around, them.
"Go with love."
The computer console above Tuluk's position at the bench flickered and chittered.
Even if they identified Fanny Mae's star, what could they do with that new knowledge? McKie asked himself. Cheo was going to win. They couldn't stop him.
"Is it possible," Tuluk asked, "that the Calebans created this universe? Is this their 'garden patch'? I keep remembering Fanny Mae saying it would uncreate us to be in her presence."
He leaned against his bench, mandibles withdrawn, face slit open just enough to permit him to speak.
"Why's the damn computer taking so long?" McKie demanded.
"The pulse problem's very complicated, McKie. The comparison required special programming. You haven't answered my question."
"I don't have an answer! I hope those numbies we left in the Beachball know what to do."
"They'll do what you told them to do," Tuluk chided. "You're a strange sentient, McKie. I'm told you've been married more than fifty times. Is it a breach of good manners to discuss this?"
"I never found a woman who could put up with a Saboteur Extraordinary," McKie muttered. "We're hard creatures to love."
"Yet the Caleban loves you."
"She doesn't know what we mean by love!" He shook his head. "I should've stayed at the Beachball."
"Our people will interpose their own bodies between the Caleban and any attacks," Tuluk said. "Would you call that love?"
"That's self-preservation," McKie snarled.
"It's a Wreave belief that all love is a form of self-preservation," Tuluk said. "Perhaps this is what our Caleban understands."
"Hah!"
"It's a probability, McKie, that you've never been overly concerned about self-preservation, thus have never really loved."
"Look! Would you stop trying to distract me with your babbling nonsense?"
"Patience, McKie. Patience."
"Patience, he says!"
McKie jerked himself into motion, paced the length of the lab, the guardian enforcers dodging out of his way. He returned to Tuluk, stooped. "What do stars feed on?"
"Stars? Stars don't feed."
"She inhales something here, and she feeds here," McKie muttered. He nodded. "Hydrogen."
"What's this?"
"Hydrogen," McKie repeated. "If we opened a big enough jumpdoor. . . . Where's Bildoon?"
"He's conferring with the Consent representative over our h
igh-handed actions in quarantining the Beautybarbers. It's also a distinct possibility that our dealings with the Taprisiots have leaked out. Governments do not like this sort of action, McKie. Bildoon is trying to save your skin and his own."
"But there's plenty of hydrogen," McKie said.
"What is this of jumpdoors and hydrogen?"
"Feed a cold and starve a fever," McKie said.
"You are not making sense, McKie! Did you take your angeret and normalizers?"
"I took 'em!"
The computer's readout chamber made a chewing sound, spewed forth a quadruple line of glowing characters which danced in the chamber and resolved themselves into legible arrangements. McKie read the message.
"Thyone," Tuluk said, reading over his shoulder.
"A star in the Pleiades," McKie said.
"We call it Drnlle," Tuluk said. "See the Wreave characters in the third row? Drnlle."
"Any doubt of this identification?"
"You joke."
"Bildoon!" McKie hissed. "We have to try it!"
He spun around, pounded out of the lab, dodged through Tuluk's assistants in the outer area. Tuluk darted in his wake, drawing their enforcer guardians into a thin line close behind.
"McKie!" Tuluk called. "Where are you going?"
"To Bildoon . . . then back to Fanny Mae."
The value of self government at an individual level cannot be overestimated.
-BuSab Manual
Nothing could stop him now, Cheo told himself.
Mliss could die in a few, minutes, deprived of air in the Beautybarber tank where he'd confined her. The others on their refuge world would have to follow him, then. He would control the S'eye and the threads of power.
Cheo stood in his quarters with the S'eye controls near at hand. It was night outside, but all things remained relative, he reminded himself. Dawn would be breaking soon where the Caleban's Beachball rested above the surf on Cordiality.
The Caleban's ultimate dawn . . . the dawn of ultimate discontinuity. That dawn would slip into eternal night on all the planets which shared a universe with the doomed Caleban.
In just a few minutes, this planet-of-the-past where he stood would reach its point of proper connectives with Cordiality. And the Palenki waiting across the room there would do what it had been commanded to do.
Jorj X. McKie 1 - Whipping Star Page 17
