by Janet Morris
"I don't understand."
Rick's couch shot upright: "Here. Here's what happened."
He stared to replay the sequence of events that had begun when the dust devil appeared in their path and blocked out the colored ball.
"I saw that. I called you. You were too busy with the Brow."
"You saw it. And you just sat there?"
Dini crossed her arms. Her mouth was dry. She crossed her legs as well. "I called you, I said. What was I supposed to do? You have an AI pilot. Why didn't it do something?"
"I don't know. Maybe the Brows programmed a workable sequence, somehow. Maybe ... I don't know. I don't know." He rubbed his face with his hand and succeeded only in moving the Brow hair on it into his nose. He sneezed.
"Is it bad?" she said finally, when Rick continued to stare at his controls. She didn't know anything about controls such as these. She didn't know anything about spongespace or star travel, really. She wasn't supposed to know these things. Just because her fake papers said she was a licensed pilot, that didn't mean that the knowledge had somehow seeped into her. Rick was being so unfair.
"Bad? What's bad? Who knows. If we destroyed any property back there with that unauthorized punch, my father will have to pay for it and we'll catch hell. If we ever find any place civilized enough to have a NAMECorp base."
"What do you mean, Rick?" Her voice sounded squeaky and very young.
"We don't know where we are, Dini. We don't know where we're going. It's not just you that doesn't know. It's not just me. The AI doesn't know. The jump was not in a standard lane. It's not an explored route. We're going . . . somewhere."
"Somewhere nobody's ever been?" Her squeak trebled.
Rick looked over at her then. "Now don't panic. Don't cry. We have lots of food, and maybe, if we're out long enough, we can coax the remaining Leetles to breed so the Brows will have food. ..."
"You can't mean this. You're trying to scare me. . . ."
His voice softened but the look on his face was a stiff look she'd never seen before. He cocked his head. "I'm not trying to scare you, but I'm a little scared myself. We'll come out somewhere, and then we'll see where we are."
"That's all, really? We'll just see where we are, and everything will be fine? We'll jump back in and go on to Pegasus's Nostril and get married the way we planned, right?"
Rick didn't answer. He seemed about to yawn, but he didn't do that either. He simply stared at the control panel in front of him.
"Right?" she insisted.
"Right," he eventually agreed.
A great weight lifted from Dini Forat's chest that she hadn't known was there until it was gone. "Good. That's good. Now, since we're agreed on what we'll do, I feel better."
"Me too," said Rick unenthusiastically, perhaps sarcastically.
Again, she felt angry. "If you're so smart, what were we doing headed toward that colored ball in the first place? We might have collided with it."
"I didn't know anything about that colored ball being there until I saw the sequence. It shouldn't have been there. But there's a reasonable explanation. I told you, it must have been the Brows, jumping around on the astronics console."
"Then they're psychic. They were upset before anything happened." For some strange reason, this made her feel better. "The Brows are much happier now, and you know it! The female was purring."
"That's all the assurance I need."
"You're so snide."
"Dini ... I don't want to fight with you, but you don't know what you're talking about."
"If you're so smart, why can't you get us back home, now?" Her voice was thick and it shook.
Her beloved didn't answer. He just reclined his couch and put both hands over his eyes.
Then one of the Brows came forward again and sat up at her side, putting its adorable head in her lap. Its fingers tugged on her suit.
She had a feeling that the Brow was really trying to tell her that everything would be all right. In its eyes she thought she saw a glint of satisfaction, almost pride, as if it had done all this on purpose and it was happy about wherever it was they were going. It certainly wasn't worried anymore. Rick was being such a brat. . . .
And then she realized that her poor little mocket had been locked up all this time.
She'd go feed Pepi and play with the Brows, who were feeling ever so much better.
The one who'd come to get her scampered down the corridor, then turned and looked back to see if she was following, as if asking her to come and play.
Everything was going to be fine. The Brows were happy. Only Rick was unhappy, because he was a man like any other man and he couldn't bear to admit to a mistake.
The Brow cavorting in her path stopped and reached up to her. She lifted it. It nuzzled her ear. "You wouldn't hurt us, would you? You wouldn't lure us into some awful fate? You're trying to tell me everything will be fine and not to worry, aren't you?"
The Brow actually licked the tip of her nose and began to whistle its happiest sound.
Whether or not she could convince Rick of the fact, Dini was sure that the Brows thought that something wonderful was going to happen.
Let her beloved think dark thoughts of being forever lost in space. When the Brows were this happy, nothing could be terribly wrong.
Nothing.
CHAPTER 25
What You See …
"Damn! Did you see that, Keebler?" South tried to rub his eyes and hit his hand on his visor.
"What? I didn't see nothin'."
South toggled a switch and Birdy replayed on the console's viewscreens what South had been watching on his helmet's heads-up display.
In magnified, living color; in multispectral imagery and with three levels of resolution, South watched again as the speeding NAMECorp freighter veered sharply across STARBIRD's bow a second time, heading straight for the ball on a collision course.
The ball's colors coruscated brilliantly for approximately one minute and thirty seconds while the freighter approached. Then the ball disappeared to visual scanners, occluded by a spacetime perturbation that swallowed the big ship whole. Then, in its turn, the perturbation disappeared.
"See that, Keebler?" South said as his visor retracted.
"Must be a glitch in your sensor array."
"Glitch my ass," South said, and asked Birdy for infrared and every other damn thing she had: electro-optical, lidar, anything. . . .
In every available search mode, viewed any which way he could, utilizing all signature readers, the speeding freighter was swallowed up by a virtual hole in spacetime. South had seen holes like that before, twice in his life. Both times, he'd pushed an experimental button that punched the hole, into which he and STARBIRD flew.
"I dunno what's so excitin' about a spongehole, Cap'n. They're all over the place."
"Here? This close to a spacedock? Even I know that's not safe. And did you see the way that ball was lit up? Looked like Christmas ..." Did they still have Christmas in the twenty-fifth century? He'd heard the scavenger call on Jesus, so at least some of these folk were Christian. . . .
"Safe, schmafe, when somebody's a-chasin' yer ass. . . . Here comes that cop we was expectin', hot on their trail."
In the single monitor that was left displaying realtime, you could see the closing patrol cruiser.
South would never forget what one of those looked like. And then he magnified the image, dumping the replay to bring it into focus across the boards.
"The Blue Tick." South toggled on his hailing frequency and let Birdy do the rest.
Pretty soon a voice he'd never mistake said, "South, is that you?"
"Yep. Reice, if you're after that freighter—"
"I was but I can't scope it at all now. You see it?"
"That's why I'm calling. It disappeared into a spongehole, right in front of me. My telemetry says the hole's between that. . . artifact and STARBIRD, so maybe somebody ought to alert the Spacedock Seven people and—"
"What ar
e you talking about, you crazy Relic? Holes don't open up all by themselves. And they sure as hell don't open up around here. And nobody'd try to open one with a freighter like that, even if it were equipped to do exotic entries. Conditions aren't exactly primo for spongejumping. ..." Reice trailed off.
Keebler poked South in the ribs. South ignored him. He didn't answer Reice, either. Reice wasn't his favorite person among those he'd met since he'd come to Threshold.
After about twenty seconds, Reice said, "You say you've got that jump recorded? Want to boot it over here?"
"If I can." He checked with Birdy, who gave him a Transmission Ready signal. "Here it comes, if you can catch it."
He let Birdy send the sequence.
About the time that South's communications monitor was telling him Transmission Complete, Reice's voice came back: "Thanks, South." There was wonder in it. "Never saw anything like that in my life. I'd think it was a bogey reading, some weirdness in that geriatric ship of yours, but the time-framing's exact to when I lost contact. Those stupid kids. If they aren't dead, they could have been killed. Or killed somebody else. We're lucky that artifact didn't go with their ship into that hole—or even the whole spacedock."
"So they did punch a hole." South wanted Keebler to have his nose rubbed in whatever this was.
"Either they did or that kaleidoscopic ball did," said Reice sourly. "Or else we've witnessed the first spacetime tornado recorded by man and machine. I couldn't do that with my ship, not here. Not and survive."
"So these kids ... are they all right?" South didn't care much. But he cared that he'd done Reice a favor, warning him about the hole. Although Reice didn't seem worried about falling into it the way South was. But then, Reice had never been to X-3 and nobody'd been interested in South's report on it.
"How do I know if the kids are all right? You see them around here? Their ship, maybe? I don't. Look, you better not get too close to that ball, not while space out here's so perturbed."
Keebler virtually howled a stream of objections in South's ear. South went visor-down and ignored him, for the moment.
"What about you, Lieutenant Reice? You going to fly right over that spot? What if the same thing happens?"
These guys knew more about this sort of thing than South did. Even Keebler knew more about it. South wasn't anxious to fall into some kind of spacetime quicksand or game pit, or whatever that was there. If there was any question of STARBIRD's safety, Keebler could park by his find some other time. There'd be some way to make Director Lowe understand. ConSec, in the person of Reice, had ordered South not to get too close to the ball. And Birdy, as well as Keebler, had heard that order. Of course, "too close" was a term open to interpretation.
Reice transmitted: "I'm going to fly right over it, Captain South. Match their flight path. And hope to hell the same thing does happen. I really need to apprehend those particular fugitives. So you stay back, just in case I get lucky and it opens up and swallows me."
"You're not going to punch for it?"
"Punch—oh, like you guys did in the old days? Hell, no. First off, it's against the law to perturb populated spaces. Secondly, how the hell could you be sure you got the same hole they did? They didn't exactly log a flight plan. Thirdly, we use established lanes and perpetual holes, these days— places where it's easy to get in and out and you know where a hole will take you. If you want more lessons, you'll have to take a course. Now you do as I order, and stay back. I'd be grateful if you'd record my flight path, just in case something goes seriously wrong. If it does, send the log and my felicitations to ConSec. Copy?"
"You bet, Lieutenant." South was pleased with himself for having hailed Reice. Making yourself useful is never a bad thing. Performing this mission creditably was still uppermost in South's mind. He was demonstrating his skills for Director Lowe, the best he could. If he got Reice on his side, it could only help in future. Their first meeting had left a bad taste in both men's mouths that was going to be hard to wash away.
Blue Tick signed off and headed past South's ship on exactly the same course that the fugitive freighter had taken. Whoever was in that ship, ConSec wanted them very badly.
If anybody'd ever bothered to download South's log, maybe they'd have been prepared for holes opening up like that. Maybe they'd have been prepared for the sort of Northern Lights effect that South had seen on the ball, too. But maybe not. The ball, so far as South could see, was just a ball, now.
And the colors and the places and the memories that South had . . . those were recorded only in his dreams.
South toggled a parameter scan on the now-innocuous bit of spacetime that had swallowed the fugitive spacecraft.
Birdy brought it up as normal, with no anomalous readings whatsoever, the whole time that the ConSec vessel approached the coordinates where the perturbation had been.
The ball, too, was quiescent, now.
Since Birdy was keeping an eye on the ConSec ship, South let his stray to the artifact. What a strange damned coincidence, this thing looking so much like . . . what?
If somebody'd taken his X-3 log dump, would they have seen the colors he'd seen? The lavender and fiery striations and the strangely flowing pulses on the ringed planet in the purple haze. . . .
He shook his head. The planetary flyby was real enough. Birdy had that. The rest of it—his half-memories of landing somewhere achingly beautiful that looked nothing like home but reminded him of home, somewhere he watched a sunset with aliens standing by his side—those weren't real memories. At least they weren't the sort that would be in Birdy's memory.
He was watching the ball pensively for any sign of color and life when something poked him.
Keebler! He'd forgotten all about Keebler.
And Keebler was mad as a wet hen. Even before South retracted his faceplate and Keebler's demands for justice washed over him, he knew what the old scavenger was going to say:
"—no right to interfere wit' m' sanctioned examination of my personal property, that ConSec bastard! Y' kin see that nothin's happenin' that has anythin' to do with m' property! I was promised this opportunity, and I demand that we continue, or I'll talk to Missus What's Her Name, right now! And then we'll see. Then we'll see!"
"Easy, Keebler. Just calm down. We wait and watch what the ConSec ship does, and then we'll go on our way, just as we planned, if there's no trouble. Okay?"
Now that he'd had a moment to think it over, South didn't want to go back to Threshold having failed in his first mission, with an angry passenger who was going to raise hell about South's poor performance.
That was no way to resuscitate your career.
Keebler, who had Sling's black box in his hands and was shaking it under South's nose, was convincing him of that.
And Birdy wasn't afraid of a little old spongehole. They'd been trained to jump into the abyss with their eyes wide open, taking notes all the way.
Maybe these twenty-fifth-century pansies had to have road maps and boxed lunches; but where South was from, you paid your money and you took your ride. No questions asked, because there was nobody around to answer those questions.
So what if, these days, everybody knew the best routes through spongespace to get here or there or the other place? Those folks knew where they wanted to go, and why.
For Joe South and Birdy, it really wouldn't be so much of a loss if they slipped into oblivion and never found Threshold again.
They could never find their own century again, that was for sure. And nobody'd bothered to talk to him about that, as if he just should have realized that there was no way to compensate for the tricks that relativity was going to play on an X-class ship and her pilot.
Well, he hadn't known better. Nobody had. And, except for the fact that he didn't want to be stuck with Keebler for any significant portion of eternity, an unexplored spongehole wasn't looking like a bad option.
Since he hadn't known any better, he'd been considering that as one of his options all along.
&nbs
p; All he had to do was get away from this local congestion, get up enough speed, and push his x-button. In a moment, he'd have left this time and place behind.
And if, the next time STARBIRD stuck her nose back into normal space, it was a few years down the line—or a few hundred—what difference did that really make?
"Sonny, are we goin' to park this tub o' bolts, or what?" came Keebler's crotchety voice.
Well, it would make a difference to Keebler. So South would play along, give things a chance to work themselves out. The least he could do was let the old guy off with his precious ball.
But he'd been expressly ordered not to do that. And South followed orders. Doing so had kept him alive all this time.
When you had two sets of orders, you took your pick. You chose what seemed the most survivable.
And, if nothing happened to the Blue Tick, then there was no reason not to finish his mission.
Punching out of here was still an option, just like heading for Earth no matter who tried to stop him.
A part of him envied the fugitives, whoever they were.
But the better part of him said: "Come on, Keebler, keep your shirt on, and wait until that cop out there forgets we're here. Then you can play with your box. Okay?"
Keebler came scrambling up beside him. "Okay, sonny. That's great. I knew y' weren't the kind to let a cop tell y' what to do."
South was watching his monitors. On them, the ConSec ship was flying the coordinates where the hole had been, and in the background, Keebler's silver ball seemed to be covered with some kind of purple haze.
And then it wasn't.
CHAPTER 26
Goose Chase
The Blue Tick was the right tool for this job, Reice consoled himself as he flew the pursuit craft into the portion of spacetime that had so recently swallowed up his quarry. The Tick had all the capabilities a pilot could want when heading into the unknown: a zero-point apport pack that couldn't run out of power during a spongejump because it drew on the energy sea itself; asymptotic spacetime rectifiers and temporal navigation aids, which made sure that Reice's biological clock time and Threshold calendar time wouldn't get wildly out of sync, despite relativistic effects.
