Nightflyers & Other Stories

by George R. R. Martin

  As quickly as she could, Ryther had left the City of the Steel Angels, trying hard not to look back at the walls. But when she had climbed the hills, back toward the trading base, she had come to the ring-of-stone, to the broken pyramid where Arik had taken her. Then Ryther found that she could not resist, and powerless she had turned for a final glance out over Sword Valley. The sight had stayed with her.

  Outside the walls the Angel children hung, a row of small white-smocked bodies still and motionless at the end of long ropes. They had gone peacefully, all of them, but death is seldom peaceful; the older ones, at least, died quickly, necks broken with a sudden snap. But the small pale infants had the nooses round their waists, and it had seemed clear to Ryther that most of them had simply hung there till they starved.

  * * *

  As she stood, remembering, the crewman came from inside neKrol’s broken bubble. “Nothing,” he reported. “All statues.” Ryther nodded.

  “Go?” the bitter speaker said. “Jamison’s World?”

  “Yes,” she replied, her eyes staring past the waiting Lights of Jolostar, out toward the black primal forest. The Heart of Bakkalon was sunk forever. In a thousand thousand woods and a single city, the clans had begun to pray.

  Chicago

  October, 1974

  Nor the Many-Colored Fires of a Star Ring

  Outside the window the stormfires raged on.

  The view filled an entire wall in the monitoring room, a tapestry of ever-moving flame, a flowing pattern of liquid light of every color and shape. Great swirls of molten gold slid by, sinuous and snakelike. Lances of orange and scarlet flashed into view and then were gone again. Bluegreen bolts hammered against the window like raindrops, tendrils of amber smoke whirled past, streaks of pure white burned their lingering impressions into the eyes of the watchers.

  Dancing, moving, changing; all the colors of nullspace shrieked a silent random song. At least they thought it was random. For five long standard months the vortex had turned in the void of Nowhere, and still the computers had not found a repetition.

  Inside, a long room awash with the lights of the maelstrom, five monitors sat at their consoles facing the window and kept watch on the vortex. Each console was a maze of tiny lights and glowing control studs, and in the center of each were four readout screens where numbers chased by endlessly and thin red lines traced graphs. There was also a small digital timer, where the hundredths of seconds piled up relentlessly on top of the five months already registered.

  The monitors changed shifts every eight hours. Now there were three women and two men on duty. All of them wore the pale blue smocks of techs and dark-lensed safety glasses. But the months had made them careless; only Trotter, at the central console, wore the glasses over his eyes. The rest of them had them up, around their foreheads or tangled in their hair.

  Behind the monitors were the two horseshoe-shaped control consoles and the wall of computer banks. Al Swiderski, a big raw-boned blond in a white lab coat, was tending the computers. Jennifer Gray held down one of the control chairs. The other was empty, but that did not matter. At the moment they were only places to sit; everything was locked on automatic, and the nullspace engines of the Nowhere Star Ring burned in constant fury.

  Swiderski, a sheaf of computer printout in his hand, drifted over to where Jennifer was writing on a clipboard. “We’re nearing critical, I think,” he said in a hard flat voice.

  Jennifer looked up at him, all business. She was a beautiful woman, tall and slim, with bright green eyes and long straight red-blond hair. She wore a severe white lab coat and a gold ring. “Roughly eight hours,” she told Swiderski with a shake of her head. “If my calculations are correct. Then we can kill the engines and see what we have.”

  Swiderski looked out at the swirling stormfires. “Five layers of transparent duralloy,” he said softly. “Four buffers of refrigerated air, and a triple layer of glass. And still the inner window is warm to the touch, Jennifer.” He nodded. “I wonder what we’ll have.”

  The watch went on.

  * * *

  A mile down the ring, on another deck, Kerin daVittio entered the old control room alone.

  The others seldom came here. The room was his alone. Once, years ago, it had been the nerve center of the Nowhere Star Ring; from here, a single man had at his fingertips all the awesome powers of a thousand nullspace engines. From here, he could stir the vortex to life and watch it spin.

  But no longer. The Nowhere Star Ring had been deserted for nearly six years, and when Jennifer and her team had come they’d found the old control room far too small for their purposes. So they abandoned it. Now the engines responded to the twin consoles in the monitoring room. The control room belonged to Kerin, to his spidermechs and the ghosts of his shadowed ring.

  The room was a tiny cube, immaculate and white. The familiar horseshoe console was its center. Kerin sat within it, the controls around him, a reflective look on his face. He was a short, wiry man, with a mop of black hair and restless dark eyes; often he was intense, often dreamy. Long ago he’d discarded his blue tech smock for civilian clothes; now he wore black trousers and a dark red V-necked shirt.

  Practiced hands moved over the controls, and the walls melted.

  He was outside, in blackness, the star ring beneath him.

  The holographic projection gave him a view of the ring and the vortex that the monitoring room window could not match. There was nothing left in the room but him and the console, floating in vacuum miles above the action. The section of the ring that held the control room loomed large under his feet; the rest curved slowly away in both directions, finally dwindling to a metal ribbon that went out and out and out before looping back to join itself in the far dim distance. A silver circlet a hundred miles in diameter; the Nowhere Star Ring was built to standard specifications.

  Within the ring, bound by its dampers and its armor, kept alive by the furious power of a thousand fusion reactors, the nullspace vortex turned in mindless glory. This was the multicolored maelstrom that had given man the stars.

  Kerin glanced at it briefly, until the light began to hurt his eyes. Then he looked down to his console. The bend of the horseshoe, immediately before him, was all dark; his hands moved restlessly over the disconnected studs that once controlled the vortex. But the studs along either arm still glowed softly; to his left, the holo controls, to his right, the spidermech command. Banks and banks of buttons, all lit a soft pale green. No reason to move those, Swiderski had said; so the old control room was half alive, and Kerin worked alone.

  His left hand reached out to the controls, and the holograms spun around him; now he was thirty miles down the ring, getting visual input from another set of projectors. The view was much the same, the five-month old firestorm still turned below. But this was the trouble spot.

  He swiveled to his right, and touched some other studs. Below, a panel slid open in the skin of the star ring, and a spider-mech emerged.

  It was, in fact, much like a metal spider: eight legs, a fat silver body of shining duralloy that reflected the vortex colors in streaks along its flanks, a familiar, scurrying gait. It used all eight legs to cling to the star ring as Kerin sent it running to the problem.

  Once there, he slid back another panel, and switched to his spidereyes. The holos fractured; the illusion of being outside vanished. The spidermech had a lot of eyes, most of them in its stomach. Now it stood above the opening in the ring, reaching down with four legs while the other, alternate four clung to the sides of the panel, and all its eyes studied the troublesome engine. The wall before Kerin gave him visual input; normal range, infrared, ultraviolet. The wall to his right measured radioactivity and saw with X-rays, the one to his left printed out the latest input the computer was getting from the monitors on this particular engine.

  With four hands at work, things went quickly. Kerin shut down the engine briefly, traced the problem to its source, pulled a part and replaced it from a storage cavity with
in the spidermech. Then he withdrew his metal arms and leaned back. The panel slid shut. He jumped from his spidereyes back to the holos.

  The spidermech stood frozen; the vortex burned. Kerin looked at them without seeing. His hand moved left, and again the holos shifted. No longer was he looking in at the spinning fires; now he stared out, beyond the circle of the ring.

  At the infinite empty darkness of Nowhere.

  For a second after he turned around, as always, he thought he was going blind. But then his eyes adjusted, and he could see the console dimly. And that was all. He slouched back in his chair, put his boots up on the console, and sighed. Familiar fear washed over him. And awe.

  Brooding, he watched the emptiness.

  He’d seen holos of the other dozen star rings; but this ring, this was singular. Cerberus, the first, floats six million miles beyond Pluto, surrounded by a sea of stars. They may be small and cold and distant, but they are stars, proof that Cerberus and its men are safe within the home system and the comforting sanity of the known universe. The same is true for Black Door, adrift in a Trojan position behind Jupiter. And Vulcan, which burns black and broken in the shadow of the sun.

  On the flip side of Cerberus spins another ring, surrounded by strange stars, yet snug for all that. So what if the stars are not the stars of human history? Who cares what galaxy they might be in? Nearby is Second Chance, a warm green world under a bright yellow sun, with fast-rising cities and people.

  And Vulcan? So? It opens on an inferno, yes; its hellish vortex is the gateway to the inside of a star. But that too Kerin could understand.

  Black Door was more frightening; enter here, and find yourself in the yawning gulf between galaxies. No single stars here, no nearby planets. Only distant spirals, far off, in configurations utterly unknown to man. And, luckily, a second hole, around which they’d built a second star ring, to the lush bright system of Dawn.

  But on the far side of the Hole to Nowhere was the darkest realm of all. Here blackness rules, immense and empty. There are no stars. There are no planets. There are no galaxies. No light races through this void; no matter mars its perfection. As far as man can see, as far as his machines can sense, in all directions; only nothingness and vacuum. Infinite and silent and more terrible than anything Kerin had ever known.

  Nowhere. The place beyond the universe, they called it.

  Kerin, alone among the Nowhere crew, still used the old control room. Kerin alone had work that took him outside. Early on, he had hardly minded. It gave him time alone, time to think and dream and fiddle with the poems that were his hobby. He had taken to studying Nowhere the way he and Jenny once had studied stars, back in their days on Earth. But something had caught him, and now he could not stop. Obsessed, possessed, he paused after every job.

  Like a moth and a flame, so Kerin and the darkness.

  Sometimes it was like blindness. He convinced himself that he was sitting in a pitch-black room, that there were walls only a few feet away from him. He could feel the walls, almost. He knew they were there.

  But at other times the void opened before him. Then he could see and sense the depth of the darkness, he could feel the cold grip of infinity, and he knew, he knew, that if he traveled away from the star ring he would fall forever through empty space.

  And there were still other times, when his eyes played tricks. He would see stars then. Or perhaps a dim pinprick of light—the universe expanding toward them? Sometimes nightmare shapes struggled on the canvas of night. Sometimes Jennifer danced there, slim and seductive.

  For five long months they had lived in Nowhere, in a place where the only reality was them. But the rest of them, facing inward toward the flames, lived all untouched.

  While Kerin the displaced poet fought the primal dark alone.

  * * *

  Where were they?

  Nowhere.

  But where is that?

  No one is sure.

  Kerin considered the question, hard, in their first days out here. And before that, on the long voyage to Nowhere and during the months of preparation. He knew something of Nowhere, and of the star rings—as much as any layman. Now he read more. And he and Jenny stayed up late more nights than one, talking it out in bed.

  He got most of his answers from her. He was hardly stupid, Kerin, but his interests lay elsewhere. He was the poet of their partnership; the humanist, the lover, the barroom philosopher, born in the undercity and bred to a world of corridor stickball and slidewalks and elevator races. Jenny was the scientist, the practical one, born on a religious farming commune and raised to be a serious adult. She found her lost innocence in Kerin. They were utterly unalike, yet each brought strength to the relationship.

  Kerin taught her poetry, literature, love. She taught him science—and gave him star rings he could never have grabbed by himself.

  She answered his questions. But this time neither she nor anyone had the answer. In his memory all his talks and readings and study had blended into one blurred conversation with Jenny.

  “It depends on what the star rings are,” she said.

  “Gateways through space, no?”

  “That’s the accepted theory, the most popular one, but it’s not established fact yet. Call it the space warp theory. It says that the universe is warped, that the fabric of the space-time continuum has holes in it, places you can punch through to come out someplace else. Black holes, for example…”

  “The so-called natural star rings?” he interrupted.

  “So the theory says. If we could reach a black hole, we’d find out. We can’t, though, not with sub-light ships. Luckily, we don’t need to. We found a second kind of warp, the nullspace anomalies. The accidental discovery of a spot six million miles beyond Pluto where matter seemed to be leaking into space from nowhere—the later discovery that, with enough energy the warp could be widened temporarily so that a ship could slip through—that was the breakthrough. Thusly, Cerberus, the first of the star rings. We went through the nullspace vortex, and found ourselves deep within another system, near Second Chance.

  “Fine. But where was Second Chance in relation to Earth? At first, astronomers guessed it was simply somewhere else in our galaxy. Now they’re not so sure. The stars in a Second Chance sky are completely unfamiliar, and the local configuration can’t be found. So it looks as though the space warp—if that’s what it was—threw us a long, long way.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “I’m not. The discovery of the Hole to Nowhere twenty-odd years ago badly shook the space warp theory. If we simply jump to another portion of space when we go through a star ring, then where was Nowhere? The only feasible answer that’s been suggested is Whitfield’s Hypothesis. He said that Nowhere is beyond the expanding universe—at a spot in the space-time continuum so far from everything else that even the light of the Big Bang hasn’t reached it yet. The only problem with this is that it disagrees with the established belief that matter defines space. If Whitfield is correct, then either space can exist without matter—picture a pre-creation universe of infinite hard vacuum—or, alternatively, Nowhere never existed at all until the first probe ship came through the vortex and created it.”

  “Wild,” he said. “Is he right?”

  She laughed. “You think I know? The space warp theory, modified by Whitfield’s Hypothesis, is still accepted by the vast majority of nullspace theoreticians. But there are two other contenders, at least.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as the alternate universe theory. Accept that, and you buy a cosmic picture where the star rings are gates between alternate realities that occupy the same space. History is different in each reality, stellar geography is changed, even the natural laws might not be the same.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Kerin. “I see. Then Nowhere is a reality where creation has never taken place, a universe that was utterly without matter or energy—until we entered.”

  “Right. Except the theory is generally discredite
d nowadays, except by mystics. We’ve opened a good dozen star rings, and so far we have yet to come upon any alternate Earths, or even the tiniest modification in the speed of light. Excepting Nowhere, all these side-by-side continuums seem pretty much like our own.

  “The time travel theory is a more serious one. It’s got a good bit of support. Its adherents claim the star rings throw us backwards or forwards in time, to periods when different stars occupied the same cosmic space now occupied by Sol, the colony systems, and such.”

  “In which case ships to Nowhere either go back before the Big Bang, or forward in time, after the universe has fallen in on itself,” Kerin said.

  “If it’s going to fall in,” Jenny replied, grinning. “They’re not so sure of that anymore. You should keep up with the latest theories, love. But you do have the general drift. The hypothesis is a lot more sophisticated than that, of course. It has to account for the fact that the nullspace anomalies stay put, relative to the solar system, even though Sol and the galaxy and the universe are all moving. Foster modified the original time travel theory by postulating that the nullspace vortex moves ships through both time and space, and nowadays most of the scientists who don’t buy the space warp theory line up with him.”

  “And you?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. When they discovered Nowhere and punched through to build a ring on this side, they thought they’d find the answer. Nowhere was a very singular place. Figure it out, and you figure out the star rings, and maybe the cosmos. They tried, for a long time. The Nowhere Star Ring used to be a full-time research base, but finally it was abandoned. Robot probes launched in fifty different directions twenty years ago are still reporting back, and their reports are still the same—vast unending nothingness. Absolute vacuum. Not much you can do with findings like that.”

  “No,” he said, thoughtful.

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’ll leave Nowhere for someone else to crack. My own research has a more practical thrust.”