Under Heaven's Bridge

by Ian Watson

  She flushed in acute embarrassment—for him. Did he really have any idea what he had just said?

  “A sentiment worthy of any god-king or Stalin, Andrik.”

  He winced as if she had slapped him. “Or to deny you,” he said in a tone of deliberate reasonableness, comprehending the source of her annoyance. “Or to deny Betti Songa, or Naomi Davis, or even Farrell Sixkiller—if, as an adolescent punk in some sagebrush American pesthole, Sixkiller hadn’t long ago disqualified himself from that pursuit. It’s bad for all of us, Kei, this stance of the captain’s. It’s too bad for all of us.”

  She approached Andrik and took his hands. Carts were going by on the Platform’s decking, and a pair of well-bundled mechanics were painstakingly dismantling a tracking antenna mounted high on an adjacent globe of the observatory. But for the quicksilver mists, the colour of the sky, and the regular spacing of the Kyber palaces on the plain, she might have been gazing down on an uninhabited region of the Moon. Keiko nodded at the landscape, squeezed her lover’s fingers.

  “You’ve forgotten something, haven’t you?”

  “What?”

  “That the Kybers haven’t co-operated in this. To date, they’ve done nothing at all to ‘school us in their techniques’ for obtaining nirvana, if that’s where you really believe they are.”

  “Somewhere like.” He pulled one hand free of her grasp and tapped on the curve of the window-lens. “And you’ve forgotten something, too, Kei. That your former student invited us to a decoupling ceremony—the Rite of Conjoining, it called that little get-together.”

  A dread apprehension gripped Keiko’s heart, squeezing it as she had just squeezed her lover’s hand. “We’ll be abandoning the Platform then, Andrik. If you were to go out there without permission—”

  “Shhhh.” He was smiling.

  She turned away from him. “I didn’t hear what you just said, Andrik. If it finally comes to an open declaration of allegiances, I never heard you say that. I think, too, that I resent your telling me.”

  “Don’t you want to come?”

  “No,” she said. “Not against explicit orders to the contrary.”

  “Then come to my dormicle tonight. We’ll be collapsing all but a few of the sleeping balloons tomorrow and the day following, and privacy—well, there won’t be any, Keiko, not until we’re back aboard the Heavenbridge. More than likely, we’ll all be sacking out on the floor of Craig’s lecture room. Everybody, that is, except the captain and a few of his favoured cronies.”

  “Sixkiller among them?”

  “Bingo,” said Andrik, winking in a sly parody of lechery.

  She could not laugh. The invitation that he had just tendered her struck her as a formality; it seemed to promise farewell at least as much as passion, and she thought again of their last full night together, when Andrik’s lovemaking had suggested to her what it might be like to be ravaged by a Kyber. The irony of this analogy, of course, lay in the fact that the foremost victim of alien rape on Onogoro was Andrik Norn himself. …

  Meanwhile, Dextro was in the throes of fever; the Kybers were comatose; and the expedition was winding down. As the Kyber planet swung outward along its ellipse toward an inescapable leavetaking, perhaps it was also fitting that she and Andrik should commemorate in each other’s arms the disintegration of their love. Ah, that hurt—the very thought hurt, it tore and chafed.

  But in the end, for herself as well as for Andrik, she went to his dormicle to suffer the sweet indignity of his caresses.

  THIRTEEN

  She awoke in the night disturbed by absence, by a disconcerting hollow of cool air.

  “Andrik?”

  He was gone. From her. From his dormicle.

  Already? By night? The defection stung. She felt that she had been left lying in his sheets like a dummy bedroll in the bunk of some prisoner, a ruse to distract the guards while he escaped. She had been lured to his bed for no other reason! Yes, that stung. … And yet she had told him not to implicate her in his folly and he had given her his promise—tacitly, if no other way. Wasn’t that promise printed in her flesh tonight? Or did Andrik imagine that leaving little homunculi of spermatozoa, DNA images of himself, flailing pointlessly inside her cleared him of the blame of abandoning her? Were they and her memories suitable stand-ins for his fleshly warmth?

  Naked she rose, careless tonight of the trickle of his seed—his alibi—and roamed his stripped dormicle. She flashed on the sun-bulb and stood blinking against its glare. Was there to be a farewell letter atop her clothes or a final message scribbled on the wall? Had he stylized his departure to such a degree?

  But perhaps it was she who was stylizing his departure—by fantasizing about some final letter to mute the pain and the betrayal, to cauterize these. Damn it, I’m still trying to cast him in some noble, dramatic role! That, I shall not do.

  Swiftly she dressed, and left the dormicle.

  A light showed. She hesitated, then hurried on, fluttering mothlike toward its flame.

  It was Craig Olivant who sat, alone, in the denuded observatory—with a Go board arrayed before him. Loops of white stones ellipsed around black strongholds in no pattern that she had ever seen before.

  The astrophysicist looked up. “Ah, the originator of this naughty game! You know, I’m dog-tired, but it seems such a damn shame to sleep. You, too?”

  His index finger curved around the pattern of the stones as though tracing out some mystic sign of power. The white stones—she realized belatedly—were set out in some approximate map of Onogoro’s interchanging orbit, with gravity wells of black stones representing Laevo, Dextro, Il Penseroso, and El Pesado.

  She shook her head. “I’m afraid I slept all too well.”

  After studying the board, he placed another stone.

  Looking at his ruddy face, she was forcibly reminded of another beefy countenance—of a gaijin in Kyoto in the winter, long ago, when the arrows had flown time and again. Now, if she chose to, she could speak to him. Now she could speak to genuine aliens, too—but only, still, in human language.

  “Occasionally I’m a bit clumsy,” he said, touching the board as though trying to find a way to touch on her own problem. He tapped a black stone. “I’m not always the most dextrous of people.” He looked up at her. “But I’ve noticed, if I place a stone exactly on each of the cross hairs all the way across the board, they never quite fit into line. I never produce a perfect symmetry.”

  He was being more evasively allusive than the most discreet Japanese—so much so, in fact, that she was unable to tell whether he was alluding to her problems or his own. Was he simply worried about his own computer-verified calculations of orbits, or about the private orbits of some of his fellow expedition members?

  She perched on a stool. “The best boards are designed that way,” she said brightly. “And the best stones. The stones are just slightly too large, or else the board is just slightly too small. It’s traditional.”

  He shrugged at the perversity of it, then nodded thoughtfully. “An inherent instability? Like Onogoro’s orbit? The stones jostle. … You know, you’d have to move off the board, on to a meta-board—a meta-cosmos—to get everything absolutely neat. Neat, yeah, and maybe sterile, too. Awful, even? Why am I sitting here like a child playing with pebbles when I’ve got computers to run through all the billion vectors for me?”

  Keiko felt a surge of sympathy for the astrophysicist, who was not quite sure how the Moebius tightrope of Onogoro’s orbit had come into being, even though he now knew why it worked. Or thought he did.

  There was something almost sacramental, she fancied, about what Craig was doing with this Go board: not playing a genuine game with himself—as though between independent brains in the same skull—nor even mapping out true orbits, but rather telling the beads of the universe.

  “But it is a cosmic game,” she said, leaning over, pointing here, here, there. “Originally, that is. In conception. The nine spots on the board stand for the celestia
l bodies. And, yes, look,” lifting one black stone, “you’ve got Dextro on one of the special spots, and Laevo down here on another. …” Can I help him, she wondered, even though I cannot help myself?

  Craig Olivant chuckled. “I didn’t realize.” His clasped blond hair was—well, an occidental pigtail.

  She gazed at the very centre of the board, the central spot. She tapped it with her fingernail. “This one is called taikyoku, which means something like the Primordial Principle of the Universe.”

  She did not need to lift a stone. That space was empty. Nothing occupied it. Only absence.

  Craig picked up a white stone. His hand dithered, but did not descend. Not yet.

  “It’s considered to be in bad taste,” she murmured, “and inappropriate, to place a stone in the taikyoku position in the early stages of the game.”

  “This game’s well advanced,” said Craig. “Insofar as this medley can be called a game. Let the Primordial Principle make itself felt! Andrik would like to play this stone, wouldn’t he?” he added casually, without looking her in the eye, whereupon he slapped the white stone down.

  It was not the same as slipping a final jigsaw piece into place, thereby locking everything together. The taikyoku stone jerked its neighbours aside. A quick Shockwave ran along one line of stones. A black stone slid off the edge of the board, into oblivion, into the astrophysicist’s maybe meta-space. …

  Keiko wondered if she should tell Craig what was happening. That would not make her responsible for betraying her lover, would it, as he had betrayed her?

  Instead she asked, “How could he possibly play that stone?”

  A footfall sounded in the corridor.

  Jerking erect, bumping the board, she sent stones flying: all Craig’s orbits clattered into chaos.

  It was Andrik.

  “Counselling session?” he asked lightly.

  She shook her head. “Where have you been? Where did you go?”

  Andrik stared at the shattered binary code of stones, on the table, on the floor. “Not yet,” he said vaguely. “I went for a bath.”

  “In the middle of the night? In this—this darkness?” What stain were you hoping to cleanse? she thought. The stain of me? But it is I who am stained. … She felt the dry pull of the glaze of his seed on her skin. Confused, she bent to gather up the spilt stones, hoping to restore some small sense of order to the night.

  “It was like a sensory deprivation tank tonight,” came Andrik’s voice. “Except that I was afloat in water instead of Epsom salts. The tank was one of the preparatory methods we tried out, you know, at the Xenology Centre in Zurich—as a way of reprogramming ourselves for new alien realities. Simulations of them, anyway. Our guesses, our models.” He laughed, a brief, estranging bark. “The ultimate total-immersion experience—except for the nostrils. Complete cut-off of our terrestrial senses. A womb without a view, save an inward one. The amazing thing is that I always felt like I was on fire, even in those calm spaces—my mind burning in the darkness.”

  Then his hands were drawing her up from the floor. He took the stones from her and tossed them carelessly on the board, as though paying Craig Olivant for the counsel he had not given. Keiko allowed herself to be led from the room, but in the corridor pulled away from Andrik and studied his strange, untroubled face.

  “I’m going back to my own dormicle,” she said. “I’ll neither help nor hinder you, Andrik. Do you understand?”

  He nodded. “For that I thank you, Lady Kei.” He took her hand again and touched his lips to it in a courtly gesture that seemed to her expressive of genuine emotion. He was bidding her a quiet farewell, not mocking her innocence and confusion.

  “Goodbye,” she said. Goodbye, not goodnight. She would probably see him again the next day, and even the day after that, for he would not leave until it was too late to turn back—but this moment, this very moment, was goodbye.

  “Sayonara,” he said. He pronounced the word wrong.

  FOURTEEN

  Precisely when Olivant and Mahindra had predicted its decoupling, seventy-seven days after the arrival of the Heaven-bridge in synchronous orbit, Onogoro sailed free of Dextro. A stone flung from an immense, centrifugal sling, it flew through the Shockwave barrier where the solar wind from its fevered sun collided with the wind from Laevo. The snow that had drifted down on previous days—like powdered sugar buffeted by weird gravitational turbulences, no longer white but iridescent, multicoloured with the wintry spectra of both haloed suns—lay no deeper than a coverlet of silk on the rocks beneath the Platform. Meanwhile, like running paint, auroras dripped down the sky. To Keiko it seemed that the heavens were already melting in nova-light.

  It was the evening of the last day.

  “Beautiful and spooky,” said Craig Olivant, who stood with Keiko, Betti Songa, Naomi Davis, and the atmospheric specialist Nikolai Taras at the western railing of the Platform—just as he had stood with a somewhat differently constituted group on the night that he had used Il Penseroso as a “visual aid” to explain the mechanics of this very decoupling.

  Betti shuddered, not merely from the cold. “I can’t help thinking that the planet’s going to stop turning and throw us out into deep space, the way you go over a bicycle’s handlebars when you brake too quickly.”

  “Well, we haven’t braked, have we? Gravity’s brakes are off. We’re the runaway.”

  “Lord,” said Taras, “I hope they’re getting this aboard the Heavenbridge: transmission images, atmospheric readings, all the telemetry.” Rainbows of colour washed across Taras’s face. When he turned, his irises and pupils brilliantly reflected the sky’s prismatic light-show. “I suppose I’d better get back to the monitors. It’s damn unfair, having to go inside. When am I ever going to witness—with my own naked eyes—an event like this?”

  “Stop grumbling,” Craig advised him. “You’ve been out here plenty. Besides, I’m taking mental photographs for you.”

  Taras raised his hand in mock anger, as if to cuff the astrophysicist, then shuffled off toward the observatory, all the while rubbernecking the heavens.

  The globes of the observatory and that of the single remaining inflataform shone white and orange and indigo, like soap bubbles turning under coloured lamps. On the southeastern corner of the Platform stood the final shuttle from the light-skimmer, poised for a midnight departure, a spire with polarized slit-windows girdling its fuselage like the cartridge chambers of an old-fashioned pistol. …

  As Taras entered the observatory, another figure jostled him briefly in the opening, then rebounded and swaggered toward the railing. It was Captain Hsi, out, it seemed, strolling the deck of his planetside command in a kind of sentimental farewell observance.

  Except that Keiko knew exactly what was brewing, had expected the matter to climax hours ago, and wished that she could avoid this confrontation, just as she had earlier managed to sidestep a minor administrative meeting with the captain and two communal meal periods.

  “Good evening,” said the captain when he had joined them, observing the amenities and prolonging Keiko’s agony.

  The group murmured a number of indistinguishable responses, overridden by Naomi’s pointedly demanding, “So we are going to leave them to their fate, eh? No reprieve for the Kybers and no guilty consciences for leaving them in the frying pan? If we ever do come back, you know, they’ll be about as communicative as a plate of burnt kippers.”

  “My conscience is clear,” said Captain Hsi, shivering. His Pekinese eyes bulged with a suppressed rebuke. “Where is Dr Norn?”

  This was ostensibly addressed to all four of them, but Keiko took the brunt of the question. The others had clearly not even considered the matter, having occupied themselves, until their spontaneous outing to the rail, with the last-minute details of decamping—so that now they turned to her automatically, as a single person, with the captain’s pointed inquiry mirrored in their eyes. Where was Dr Norn?

  Keiko did not answer. She had no idea what to
say.

  “Surely you know where your lover is, Dr Takahashi?”

  “I’m right here,” said Naomi hurriedly, trying to defuse the situation with a joke that conveyed more wistfulness than bite. No one laughed, but Keiko could feel the others’ curiosity give way to sympathy and apprehension. Captain Hsi was almost unfailingly polite, even if chilly in his correctness, and that he should descend to innuendo or personal abuse said a great deal about his state of mind, most of it unpleasant. It made Keiko angry.

  “Do you know where Farrell Sixkiller is, sir?”

  This retort shocked Betti Songa and Craig Olivant at least as much as it delighted Naomi Davis, but it ricocheted off Captain Hsi like a pebble off a concrete wall. “I repeat, Dr Takahashi: where is Dr Norn?”

  She felt her anger and her resolve caving in, toppling into a maelstrom of divided loyalties and repressed self-doubts. She gestured vaguely at the Onogorovan plain and the chaos of auroras above it.

  “Out there. Somewhere.”

  “How long has he been—out there—somewhere—” Each phrase was a razor, slicing away the threadbare fabric of her self-confidence.

  “I’m not completely sure. Since two or three hours ago, I believe. I didn’t say goodbye to him, and I didn’t help him get ready to go.”

  “But you didn’t prevent him, either.”

  Craig, staring in disbelief at the crater-pocked terrain, dragon-snorted, “What the hell—what the hell is he doing out there, anyway?”

  “I didn’t try to prevent him,” Keiko confessed. “Not today, at least.”

  “We are supposed to leave in approximately five hours, Dr Takahashi. Did you consider that? Nor does the Heavenbridge depart this world without its full complement of crew and scientific personnel. That means that you—by your failure to report Dr Norn’s intentions to me—have obstructed the purposes and the directives of Expeditionary Command. I hereby relieve you of your duties.”