Under Heaven's Bridge

by Ian Watson

  Naomi laughed appreciatively. “Neither is he, dear. Heaven to Hades, Kei, neither is your Andrik.”

  “Well, he would stay out there overnight if Captain Hsi would permit it. Farrell says that Andrik goes to the centre of a different labyrinth every day and perches in the atrium like a naturalist hoping to observe some rare bird, muttering ‘Kyber, Kyber’ at intervals and staring at the statuary as if hypnotized. On the day I went with them, Farrell said, he was better, the whole trip was better—because we abandoned my student’s atrium fairly quickly and went to three others before returning to the Platform. Betti has stopped going altogether. She says that this is a ‘down’ period for the Kybers, and there’s nothing new to be learned until decoupling.”

  “They’re preparing for switchover and controlling the gestation processes of their conjoined mothers.”

  “Growing babies—little Kyber Newtons and Einsteins—who will die when Dextro blazes up, along with all the rest of them.” Keiko swam back to the edge of the tub, folded her arms on the decking, and put her forehead on her wrists. “That’s why Andrik—” She stopped.

  “Why he’s given himself completely to the aliens—at the expense of his own mental well being and his relationships with people. Yes, I know. And you, Kei, are not least among those who have suffered.”

  ELEVEN

  “Time’s up!” shouted a male voice from the entrance to the bathhouse. “Time’s up, ladies! Your time’s up!”

  Keiko turned around, and Naomi dog-paddled to a railing near the door. Through it came Farrell Sixkiller in rubber flip-flops and a blue terry-cloth robe; behind him, similarly dressed, sauntered Captain Hsi, his eyes passing noncommittally over the surface of the tub and the heads of the two women.

  “Your reservations for the bathhouse were for thirty minutes,” said Sixkiller, looking at Keiko. “Captain Hsi has only fifteen to enjoy the water, I’m afraid, and your time is up.”

  “Well, I’m gone,” said Naomi Davis cheerfully enough. “In any case, I’m turned to a prune, and you’re welcome to it.” She found a ladder and hoisted herself to the decking, her rump and midriff quivering as if they might at any moment detach themselves and slide into the water. Sixkiller helped her gain a firm purchase on the floor and handed her a towel.

  “They need not leave,” said Captain Hsi, smiling formally and blinking at the darkening sky. “It is quite a large tub, after all.”

  But Keiko, aware that his courtesy was rote and basically unsympathetic, also hurried to exit the tub, murmuring her own rote courtesies about the captain’s kindness. Besides, he perhaps deserved a few moments of solitude under relaxing circumstances; this had not been a good week for him, either. Of course, it appeared that Farrell was going to share these fifteen minutes with him, and that likelihood also demanded that she and Naomi withdraw. The bathhouse was not customarily a trysting place, but neither was it necessarily a place of abstinence. Keiko thought again of Andrik’s description of the floater pilot as the satellite of an unstable binary consisting of the captain and young Clemencia. Apparently Sixkiller was still in orbit about the former, if, indeed, he had ever swung out of the man’s cold and encompassing shadow.

  Keiko’s towel lay on a bench beneath the polyethylene dome. She retrieved it and pulled it about herself sari-fashion. Naomi was already on the way out, and she did not wish to be left behind with Sixkiller and his praetorian lover. They were often less than pleasant company.

  “Wait,” said the floater pilot, approaching and taking Keiko’s arm. “Please stay. You’ve heard the captain say he doesn’t mind if you remain. Isn’t that right, sir?”

  A slight lifting of that Pekinese snout seemed to second Sixkiller’s assessment of the matter, but the fact that Captain Hsi said nothing more aloud confirmed Keiko in her feeling that she was unwelcome.

  “No, thank you.” She looked at Sixkiller quizzically. “Is Andrik back?”

  “If I am, he is—isn’t he?” Knowing that she would not stay, he tightened his grip on her elbow and wrist, then turned as if to escort her after Naomi. “I’ll be right back, sir. Go ahead and enjoy your bath.”

  On their way to the adjacent dressing chamber, a carpeted area with benches and open lockers, Keiko, glancing back into the dome, saw Captain Hsi raise his eyebrows at her cryptically and then shed his bathrobe with a graceful shrugging of his shoulders. Then, the splash of his dive.

  Naomi was in the dressing chamber, pulling on a pleated, loose-fitting tunic and a pair of pleated gold trousers. “Don’t worry,” she told the floater pilot. “I’m leaving.” After massaging her scalp vigorously with her fingertips, she waved off Keiko’s plea to remain, gathered up a wet towel and a pair of red and gold slippers, and disappeared into the corridor.

  “What do you want?” Keiko demanded.

  “You asked about Andrik—Dr Norn, I mean. Well, today’s watchword, Dr Takahashi, is ‘Time’s up’. Time is up on a number of fronts. Do you understand me?”

  “Dextro,” she said automatically. “Dextro’s—”

  “No, no; not exactly. We don’t know any more about that than you and the others learned last week during Dr Olivant’s briefing of scientific personnel.”

  “What, then?” She was dripping and cold, and she had no desire to dress in front of Sixkiller, despite her usual openness about such matters. He was trying to get under her skin. No need, then, to abet him by making herself more vulnerable.

  “Time’s up for Dr Norn because this was our last day visiting Kyber palaces merely to watch them sleep. Captain Hsi has withdrawn permission for daily field trips.”

  Keiko sat down, leaned forward over her tightly clamped knees, and put her chin in her hands. “That pleases you, I’m sure. Did you engineer the captain’s change in policy?”

  “I doubt it, Dr Takahashi. If I had that sort of influence, we would have stopped going out there several days before your own first visit to the plain. It’s just that Captain Hsi has come to recognize how unprofitable these little expeditions are. The machines are idling. While they idle, Dr Norn is powerless to learn anything significant about them.”

  “They aren’t machines, Farrell.”

  “They might as well be, hadn’t they? Dr Songa has said all along that their behaviour suggests that of an automatic-control system.”

  “But, Farrell, she still doesn’t hold that the Kybers are nothing but machines, as you so obsessively do.”

  “Ah,” said Sixkiller, extracting an atomizer from the pocket of a pair of trousers hanging in one of the open lockers, “but Dr Norn is the man with the true obsession.” He put the atomizer bulb to his nostril and inhaled a whiff of minty-smelling concentrate.

  Before she could consider what she was doing Keiko had sprung from the bench and knocked the atomizer out of Six-killer’s hand. “Obsessions come in a variety of packages! You think the Kybers are machines because that’s finally what you think people are, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” he responded coolly.

  “You subscribe to the biological philosophy of Descartes, Farrell. You’re a mechanist, a believer in systems theory. At every level of analysis, from the molecular right on up, every organism possessess certain control and regulation mechanisms; and if you, Farrell Sixkiller, can get your finger on those, you can do the controlling and the regulating. What bothers you about the Kybers is not that they’re machines—because they’re not, and you know it—but that you can’t begin to find the mechanisms of their control!”

  “I’m hardly alone in that failure, am I?”

  “Perhaps you’re alone in wanting to manipulate them, and to manipulate me and anyone else who doesn’t share your convictions!”

  “Mr Sixkiller!” That was Captain Hsi. His voice echoed in the dome of the bathhouse and reverberated down the corridor to the dressing chamber.

  The floater pilot knelt, picked up the fallen atomizer, and returned it to the pocket of his wrinkled trousers. “Coming, sir!” Then he looked at Keiko with annoying
ly compassionate eyes. “That which manipulates is alive, Dr Takahashi, and that which suffers manipulation lacks life to the degree that it’s controlled.”

  “Neat. Very neat.”

  “You’re more alive than most, except maybe in your relationship with Dr Norn. As for the Kybers, they’re dead, Dr Takahashi, and I’m scared as hell of whatever it is that winds them up, or pulls their wires, or sends juice coursing through their circuits. Scared as hell.”

  “Mr Sixkiller!”

  “Dr Songa says I’m a vitalist, not a mechanist,” Farrell Sixkiller continued. “That’s what I think, too. I’m glad that our time here is nearly up. Human beings have no business kowtowing to machines, even if they’re engineered from DNA—nor any business waiting for the death of a system in which they were first set running.”

  “Our time here is nearly up?”

  “That’s right. The Heavenbridge received a message from Expeditionary Command yesterday. We’re to leave Onogoro—the entire Gemini system—no later than a week after decoupling. Outfitting interstellar expeditions is an expensive business. The bigwigs at Luna Port aren’t going to risk losing a light-skimmer and four dozen highly qualified personnel to an untimely nova, Keiko.”

  There. Her first name, as if Sixkiller had decided that in dispensing privileged information he could afford a patronizing intimacy. Keiko recoiled from this presumption, and from the information occasioning it.

  “But Craig said we’d have two months’ notice, at least. The nova may not occur for another four or five years.”

  “Expeditionary Command says we have too little experience of such celestial events to try to soothsay ’em. Despite the expertise of Doctors Olivant and Mahindra, we could still conceivably get fried along with the Kybers. So as soon as we’ve observed the decoupling, we’re to abandon the Platform and head for home with our bodies and souls intact.”

  “Mr Sixkiller!”

  Keiko turned her back on the floater pilot, stripped her towel aside, and began dressing at her locker. “How long do we have?”

  “Fourteen, fifteen days.”

  “Does Andrik know this? Does he know you’re not going to permit him to go out to the Kyber palaces again?”

  “It’s not me who isn’t permitting him, it’s Captain Hsi.”

  “All right. Whatever. Does Andrik know?” She was already reaching for the pulse blower on her locker’s top shelf.

  “Sure. I thought he ought to know.”

  Holding the drier like a weapon, Keiko faced Sixkiller. “And?”

  “Captain Hsi probably wants me to pumice his back. If I don’t do it now, Lady Keiko, it won’t get done. Our time’s nearly up, you know.” He inclined his head, popped the heels of his flip-flops together, and smiled at her with something like pity. Then he left.

  “Mr Sixkiller!” The echo of the captain’s voice had the laughable poignancy of a broken trumpet playing taps.

  TWELVE

  Necessarily given over to the dog work of consolidating scientific gains and preparing to decamp, the next twelve days passed in a flurry of research activity, shuttle runs, and backbreaking manual labour in the ever-increasing cold.

  Maintenance equipment broke down, as did cranes and mobile lifts, with the result that even scientific personnel occasionally found themselves performing such tasks as disassembling non-vital structures and stacking cargo. The Platform was stripped to a functional skeleton of its former self, only the inflatables comprising its lab complex and its essential sleeping quarters going untouched. In fact, before she had a chance to assess her reaction to this frenzied withdrawal, threequarters of Keiko’s personal gear—including her microfiche projector and her portfolio of projectable memories—had been packed and shuttled aloft to the Heavenbridge.

  She was glad to be going home—of that she was not in doubt—but that their sudden decampment might be owing in part to Sixkiller’s poisoning of Captain Hsi’s attitude toward the Kybers seemed to her an insidious possibility. What if the captain had told Expeditionary Command that the aliens represented a threat to the psychological well-being of humanity? What if, contaminated by his lover’s superstitious fear of the Kybers, Captain Hsi had actually recommended an early departure from the Gemini system? The impending nova of Dextro would provide a reason for retreat more palatable to human sensibilities—for the fear of a demonstrable danger implied discretion, whereas fear of an unprobed unknown might well be construed as cowardice. No one disputed that Dextro was going to flare up, after all, and the only truly controversial aspect of Olivant and Mahindrsa’s prophecy was when.

  Keiko, caught up in the dismantling of the Platform, mulled these suspicions helplessly, afraid that the dwindling time remaining to the Onogoro Expedition was directly traceable to the subtle influence of Farrell Sixkiller on a man whose professional judgment and integrity she had rarely questioned, even if she no longer found admirable either his off-duty personality or his taste in friends and confidants. It now seemed to Keiko that the captain and the floater pilot had set themselves up in opposition to the pursuit of truth.

  But perhaps these suspicions all stemmed from private disappointment, Keiko reflected; perhaps she was being unduly censorious. It was unlike her to engage in the mental gymnastics of paranoia and blame-shifting; and when you carefully considered the matter, you could scarcely fault Expeditionary Command for refusing to play guessing games with the radiative dynamics of a sun and the lives of nearly fifty people. Even if neither Captain Hsi’s nor Sixkiller’s motives were entirely pure, they were not evil men, not cowards, not fools. Why, during this period of logistical upheaval and horrifyingly discoloured skies, had she aligned herself so implacably against the one’s leadership and the other’s fear-tainted philosophy?

  The answer, of course, was Andrik. Embittered by what he viewed as an arbitrary form of house arrest, he had infected her with these very suspicions over the last several days. Although he seldom spoke, holding himself aloof from her under the pretext of collating data from his previous studies of the Kybers, on one recent occasion he had spent an entire work day with her helping to assemble the archives of the knowledge centre for shuttle shipment to the Heavenbridge. The window-lens of the inflatable had provided, as always, a chilling panorama of the Onogorovan landscape: a silvered expanse of crater mouths and great, blisterlike boulders. The face of the sun, shimmering alternately red and orange, was pocked with leprous plagues. Meanwhile, the mists streaming from the mountain flanks and migrating like ghost glaciers from the foothills to within only a few kilometres of the Platform twinkled with snapping networks of ice. It was not hard for Keiko to imagine a snowfall at this crucial time drifting to such depth that the legs of the Expeditionary Platform utterly disappeared, stranding them atop the buildup like a raft on an ocean of unbroken white.

  As he worked, Andrik kept looking out of the window-lens—not at the snows of Keiko’s fancy, but at a beckoning terrain of mysteries and wonders forbidden his footprint by a stupid executive decree. The tautness of his face as he disconnected the knowledge centre’s computer link to the Heavenbridge and unplugged a series of secondary terminals was as expressive of his frustration and anger as any verbal outburst, and Keiko’s heart ached with a mute compassion. More out of respect for his pain than from any childish desire to force his hand, she had resolved not to speak intimately until Andrik showed he was ready. Their conversation, then, was limited for long periods to exchanges like “Hand me that microfiche file, would you?” and “Here it is, Kei.” That they had once been lovers—had, in fact, fairly recently professed themselves each other’s loved one—only a clairvoyant would have been able to perceive.

  Finally, nearly two hours after they had taken lunch together in the lecture room of the observatory (for the refectory had already been collapsed and packed away with the bathhouse dome and the skins of several storage balloons), Andrik folded the last of the knowledge centre’s study chairs and slid it into the streamlined cargo cart especially mad
e for them.

  “Kei,” he said, sitting down on the cart and dropping his hands between his knees.

  “Yes?”

  “Keiko, I’m sorry that I’ve been the way I have.”

  She cocked her head. “How have you been?”

  “Fine,” he responded. “How have you been?”

  As fragile and uninspired as it so obviously was, this bit of nonsense marked Andrik’s first attempt at humour since the day that Craig Olivant had told them that Dextro was going to flare up. Keiko laughed, and Andrik let his lips approximate a smile. The fire had not gone out of him of late; he had simply put it under a bushel and fanned its coals in secret. The smoke from the flames of his personality was bitter, flavoured with wormwood.

  “I haven’t been able to think about anything but the Kybers.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Listen, Kei. What we’re abandoning on Onogoro is more important than either you or me, more important than Sixkiller or the captain or anyone else connected with this expedition.”

  A small hostility moved in her. “Why?”

  “Because the Kybers have struck through the mask of our illusory reality to what’s truly real—”

  “Now you sound very much like a Buddhist, Andrik.”

  “That shouldn’t disturb you, should it? What I’m trying to say is that if Captain Hsi doesn’t permit the Kybers to school us in their techniques for achieving a similar breakthrough, he’ll be depriving our entire species of its finest chance for the fulfilment of … well, of our spiritual potential.”

  “Captain Hsi? By himself? And are you worried about the whole of humanity as much as you are about the individual soul of Andrik Norn?”

  “Of course I’m worried about the individual soul of Andrik Norn!” He squinted at her appraisingly, then got up and strode to the window-lens. “But just as we expeditionary personnel are representatives of everyone who stayed at home, I’m a stand-in for those same people in our dealings with the Kybers. I want what we all should want, Keiko. To deny me in this is to deny multitudes.”