The Stalk

by Janet Morris

  "Okay, South, okay. So I overreacted. If you'd have told me what to expect, I woulda done better. There's always next time."

  "Coming right up," said South's amused voice in Reice's helmet comlink. which didn't seem to be negatively affected by having a crop of tendrils or scilla growing out of it.

  Reice promised himself silently that, when this was over, if he lived through it and wasn't some sort of monster afterward, he was going to find a good woman, settle down on a colony world, and raise a bunch of unremarkable children.

  But he didn't believe he could keep his vow: everything was different, from now on. He'd had plenty of warning. He'd ignored all the evidence. Croft. South, Riva Lowe, none of them had managed to get through this alien encounter business unchanged. The whole UNE was on its way to irrevocable change.

  Somehow, this time, when he looked at the second tier monitors, the twists and turns of so many multidimensional images didn't make his stomach queasy. He even thought he could make sense of the instrumentation around him. You just had to realize that these systems were grown, not computer designed and manufactured.

  Then all the screens dumped, and everything was dead black.

  "South!" he yelled, struggling in his cocoon again. "What's happening?"

  "Notime translation," came the test pilot's voice, "in progress." Except all the words spilled into Reice's helmet at once. He had to get out of this place. Get back to STARBIRD. Implement his emergency escape plan.

  But the universal foot of gravity was on his chest and he couldn't move. Notime

  Dark.

  Empty.

  Full.

  Light.

  South's voice: "That's it. We get an A for effort. We've got coordinates for the Stalk."

  All the sights and sounds of the alien vessel rushed in on Reice in a cascade of stimuli. He tried once more to move his gun hand, and this time, part of the cocoon gave way. He raised his hand and stared at it, a horrid thing covered with orange gelatin and coconut, or with sprouts, or with milkweed floating on a gentle breeze

  "South, how do you keep your concentration? Your focus?"

  "Practice," South's voice said. "Like learning to walk. Complicated but worth the effort. Imagine your spacesuit in perfect shape, with whatever new capability you want, but make sure it's compatible with STARBIRD's systems."

  "How do I do that?" Reice was staring around at the monitor tiers. Plasma tektites and jellyfish were floating around caressing control panels with their Portuguese man-of-war tentacles. Music was tinkling in his ears. The monitors showed clouds with sparks inside them, graphs with past/future axes, north to south, and spatial event baselines intersecting them, east to west.

  Reice had been a pilot for a lot of years. He could almost make sense of the simpler graphs. The more complicated ones, with dual time axes at a forty-five degree angle to the north/south grid, gave him the willies.

  There was one representation he didn't need Joe South to interpret: the poles of its horizontal axis were labeled in English: Bad—Good. Its vertical axis read: Alien—Doesn't Matter. And clumped to the left of center on the horizontal were lots of four-dimensional colored blocks.

  Just as Reice was going to ask South what South's psychometric profile was doing on a Unity craft display, the whole clumped block of psychometric data shifted until it was centered on the intersection of the vertical and horizontal lines. "What's that psych graph for, South?"

  "Just doing some mental housekeeping while I have the time," said the voice in his ear. All the words came out sequentially this time—or else Reice was getting used to operating in a milieu where seconds ran together and your pulse was one giant throb in your ears.

  "We've got our fix on the Stalk. Thanks, Reice."

  "What for? I didn't do nothin' but be real scared and hope like hell we'd get through this."

  "Look at your hand," South's voice suggested.

  Reice's hand was safe in its space glove, and the glove was mated to a perfectly normal suit sleeve. He tried to turn his head and nothing limited his movement. South was standing at the control station, one hip cocked, playing with his ribbon-candy controls, looking just the way Commander South ought to look, dressed for spaceflight, not Halloween.

  Reice realized he was still leaning back into—something. He stood up straight and turned around. A nice spacegoing acceleration couch, ratcheted up nearly vertical, was behind him. He wished it wasn't that ambergris color, and it turned blue.

  "You okay now, Reice? Fit to fly?"

  "Yeah. You bet." He was getting the hang of it. He stepped up to a control station on South's left hand and stared at the unknowable configuration until it began to resemble something like a conventional astrogator's station.

  "Ready to go to the party?" South wanted to know.

  "What party?" Reice wasn't taking South's banter for granted anymore. Not ever.

  "We've still got to get Threshold and her outriders through to their new orbit in one piece. Just coast along and give them a little hand when they need it."

  "You're sure they're going to need it?"

  "I'm sure that if they do," said the pilot, turning his helmeted head, visor down, to Reice, "we can be a whole lot of help to them."

  All Reice could see in the reflective curve of South's helmet was his own image, less distorted than the impossible angles and chaotic colors of the multidimensional craft in which they were riding to Threshold's rescue.

  Hopefully. And only, of course, in the event that Threshold needed help with the jump out of and into spacetime.

  The reflection in South's helmet seemed to contain the whole of the interior of the Ball, all its expanse coming to a center behind his head. He saw STARBIRD there, nestled between two plasma shuttles, waiting.

  He could haul out his A-potential pistol now and shoot up the place, but what was the point? Reice didn't want to go guns blazing into a future that was going to be whatever you made of it, for better or worse.

  South had adapted to this environment. South was thriving, in fact. And South wasn't afraid.

  Maybe there wasn't so much to be afraid of, just the unknown.

  After an interval of systems recalibration that was beginning to make sense to Reice, South said, "Ready for a real honest-to-God, seat-of-the pants test flight, Reice? Find the Threshold needle in the notime haystack, sync clocktimes, and lend a hand without scaring them to death?"

  Reice knew just what to say. "Let's go do it, hotshot. It's going to be just like old times, keeping your butt out of hot water."

  And they did.

  CHAPTER 30

  Parking Orbit

  "Riva, explain to me about these time terminologies that you and Mickey keep using," Remson said to her as the two of them watched the stars fall back, streaming colored Doppler tails behind them. "I've heard the Interstitial Interpreter talk that way—nowtime, notime. soontime, pasttime, alltime—but I'm damned if I know what any of it means. Am I missing something?"

  Remson's words rode the wobbling growl of mock-banding engines hard at work below. The noise was reverberating from the spiral stairway that connected the observation lounge atop the new NAMECorp-built command and control center to Threshold's Blue North tubeway. She'd come up here with Remson to wait for the jump where they wouldn't be in anyone's way. So close to a critical phase of their journey, the observation lounge was otherwise deserted.

  Still gazing out at the mesmerizing starscape, she replied, "You're not missing anything the rest of us didn't, until we had to face facts." They were alone together with their doubts, their fears, and their hopes. But not as alone as Mickey Croft was, barricaded in his quarters with an electronic do not disturb sign on his door.

  "And those facts are?" Vince Remson was determined to have an answer to his question.

  Ever since the incident in Mickey's residence, Remson had been on her like glue. As if it were her fault that Mickey took the Interpreter's visit so badly. What had Croft expected the Interstitial Interpr
eter to do, send him a fixed and immutable statement, handwritten on scented paper, when to the Unity, any communication about the future had to take place in the mutable present, or be construed as hostile, or, worse, as history? The Secretary General had demanded immediate communication with the Unity and he got his wish, in all eleven dimensions. Mickey should know by now that when you dealt with the Unity you had to be careful what you wished for.

  "Riva?" Croft's Chief of Staff prompted. "I want an answer."

  Riva Lowe sighed. What should she say? Her permanent appointment as ambassador to Unity space probably depended on her response. But that appointment wouldn't mean a thing if the jump through spongespace failed. If the Stalk lost its outriders or split apart from the stresses of the punch into n-space, Vince might have eternity to answer his own questions about alternate experiences of time. If all of Threshold broke into small enough pieces during the jump into or out of the energy sea, none of them would have to worry about answering trick questions. Ever.

  But she had to say something, in case the Stalk made it to its new orbit intact and the Threshold bureaucracy reestablished itself on the far side of Pluto. The Unity was sending help, which meant that it saw not only a serious problem, but a viable solution.

  For Riva Lowe's career, it might have been better if the Unity had left humanity completely on its own, sole architect of its fate, without devising a way to render aid and comfort in four-dimensional terms. It was the Interstitial Interpreter's offer of help in the jump phase that had pushed Mickey Croft over the edge and given substance to all of the Stalk bureaucracy's fears of being manipulated by an omnipotent force.

  "Vince, I understand you need answers, but it's both too early and too late to be asking these questions. We weren't asking Commander South any questions when he showed up fresh from his experimental flight to X-3 and began to reopen the X-3 question. Oh, no. We classified the whole matter and shelved it—out of sight, out of mind. We weren't any more receptive when Keebler first towed in the Ball, full of questions of his own. We sure as hell weren't asking—or answering—any questions when the Cummings boy and the Forat girl disappeared before our very eyes—or when Reice and South logged the event for the record. Only when their parents raised a stink did we set up the permanently manned science station at the Ball site, and that was pro forma. Why did you think that the Unity established a physical presence out at Spacedock Seven? built and staffed the embassy, a stable, multidimensional construct and a truly Herculean feat and gave the UNE constant access to Unity Interpreters, on demand? provided the Secretary General with the psychometric modeler data that gave him a real-time link to Unity officials?"

  "I think that's what I'm asking you," Remson said levelly, never taking his eyes away from the cosmos speeding past, as the clock ticked away to jump time and Riva squirmed.

  "Why? Because the Unity functions diplomatically only in the present tense," Riva nearly shouted in his face, then got control of her frustrations. Was there no way to explain the critical difference between the UNE and the Unity, which was causing so much unnecessary strain in an already crucial and possibly degenerating situation? "The Unity doesn't make unilateral decrees about real-time events and consign them as faits accomplis, decisions taken, to the past, the way the UNE does, so it won't take static one-way communications from the Secretariat seriously. If we send the Unity a message other than a request for a real-time conference, it considers the information contained in that message to be an artifact of humankind's propensity for creating a nonrepresentative, artificial historical record and not pertinent to current events. The Unity doesn't understand how we can make decisions about the future from a reasoning base they consider to be a figment of our imagination—the dead and unreachable past."

  Remson turned to look at her then, his brow furrowed. "So where does that leave us? How do we create a bilateral agreement, a permanent framework for treaties, technology transfer, and trade relations, if the Unity is culturally incapable of working on a document setting out both parties' responsibilities?"

  "It leaves us on our honor," Riva said softly.

  "On our honor?" Remson repeated, staring at her in disbelief. Behind Remson's head, the Doppler tails of the stars were lengthening into pastel streamers. Very soon it might not matter whether or not the United Nations of Earth could create An Historic Document memorializing its relationship with the Unity worlds. Overcoming cultural incompatibilities wouldn't matter if everyone opposed in the Stalk bureaucracy was dead. Maybe the death of a space habitat full of bureaucrats was worth the sacrifice of her own life. Maybe the Unity would fare better with humanity when the race was more mature—in a few thousand years.

  "On our honor. We do have some. Or at least we did, the last time I checked. Perhaps we'll have to dust it off and polish it up, remember how to use it without wearing our collective heart on our sleeve, but it's there. The Unity has waited for humankind a long time. They believe the time is right." She was trying to convince herself as much as Remson. She hoped it didn't show.

  A chime sounded, cutting through the mock-banding. "Ten minutes to jump. Five minutes to roll call. To your stations, all personnel." The computer-simulated female voice was cheery, calling the command and control center staff to attention and the Stalk to its destiny with enviable aplomb. The same call was being heard in every add-on power module, data-fusion pod, and outriding vessel.

  Remson took a step back from the stars. "I think I'm beginning to understand—at least, the part about living in the present. We've just got time for you to explain about the terminology, the way I first asked you. I wouldn't want to go into this crisis still wondering about the difference between notime and nowtime."

  Riva didn't care anymore what Remson—or the Secretary General—did or did not understand. She wanted to spiral down the stairway, into the command and control center, where she had wangled a slot at the integration console. She needed to be where she could mitigate or at least interpret any surprises that might be in store for the operations staff.

  She said hurriedly, "Nowtime is what you're currently experiencing—a present that's elastic, containing the immediate past and present, where you can mediate actions. No-time is where we're going: the energy sea, where nothing sequential occurs, no duration is possible, and no phenomenal time passes. Pasttime is what's in the historical record and can't be altered. Soontime is the bridge from the nowtime to longtime, what we call the future, along which the forward moving arrow of human time flows, and where duration exists as a malleable force shaping events and pulling them into soontime. Longtime is the temporal baseline, necessary to have forward-moving, sequential durational intervals. Okay? You got it? There'll be a quiz after the jump." She turned to go.

  Remson grabbed her arm. "Not so fast. What about the alltime?"

  He wasn't as thick-headed as he was pretending, then. "The alltime is a nondurational, infinite interval, an undifferentiated instant in which everything exists that ever was, is, or will be. And that's where the Unity Council is most comfortable. That's where they're from, or at least, it's then-natural state of being."

  Remson's hand dropped from her arm. His eyes narrowed. He craned back his neck as if to get a better look at her. "You're saying they're gods? Gods? Eternal? Omniscient? Omnipotent?"

  "I didn't say anything of the kind," she replied carefully. "I was just trying to answer your questions as you asked them. All of these terms are English equivalents for experiences we aren't intellectually capable of validating. Why don't you wait and see? Make your decision on the far side of the jump."

  Then she did turn and run, away from Remson and his dogged pursuit of linguistic revelation, down the spiral stairs and into the tense nowtime of the command and control center below.

  As she took her place at the integration console. Richard Cummings II nodded hello, one hand cupped around a com bead in his ear, the other caressing the control panel before him. Cummings radiated excitement, challenge, confidence, and anti
cipation.

  Riva wished the Secretariat were reacting so well.

  She wished Mickey would come out and show himself, make an appearance, take part in the moment, be with his people as a commander-in-chief should.

  But Mickey didn't appear as the clock shaved seconds with a deadbeat count. Remson came, squeezed her shoulder, and took the seat next to hers. She was feeling superfluous, regretting her conversation with Remson, regretting her own inability to translate her experiences in the Unity into words that would comfort her human compatriots, who were facing the unknown with less information than she.

  But what did you do? You listened to the count. You watched muscles tic in Remson's jaw as he reacted to words you couldn't hear through his Secretariat-only comm channel. You watched the military officers slide their chairs back and forth along the channeled decking. You took a moment to relax enough that the courage and determination of the astrogators made you feel better about your part in creating this moment.

  Riva took a deep breath, sat back in her own wheeled I chair, and slipped a com bead into her right ear so that she could hear the jump coordinator talking to the outriding spacecraft.

  She wasn't here to do anything, unless called upon to give an opinion. Or unless the Unity really did send someone.

  Send help.

  Send the Ball.

  Send spacetimers.... She sat up straight as she realized what the Interstitial Interpreter's words to Mickey Croft could mean.

  "Four minutes, twenty seconds," tolled the jump coordinator in her ear. Damn South for leaving her to deal with this on her own, for escaping in STARBIRD the way he'd always wanted. Or had he? The Unity couldn't have seriously considered what she now suspected. Could they?

  A disturbance behind her leaked into her reverie through her free ear. She swiveled in her chair and there was Michael Croft, spidery and wasted, all elbow, jaw, and ears, with those limpid, bloodshot eyes darting from person to person, as if uncertain of where he should sit.