* * *
He was there because of Jenny.
Oh, he had a job, and it was a fairly important one. On an ordinary star ring, the spidermechs were seldom used, but the Nowhere experiment put an unheard-of-strain on the nullspace engines. Kerin filled a function. But others could have filled it just as well. It was Jennifer who had gotten him the post, over Swiderski’s protests; it was because of Jennifer that Kerin had taken it.
They shared a cabin, a large one with a mock window at the foot of their king-sized bed. Outside the window were the stars of home; a comforting holo. Bookcases ran along either wall. Hers held obscure texts on nullspace, most of them full of math; his held poetry and fiction, equally obscure. At night, they lit the room dimly, and talked for hours in the tender after-time.
“It’s strange,” he said to her during the first week, as she lay warm against him with her head on his chest. “I don’t know why it fascinates me so much, but it does. I’ve got to do a poem about it, Jenny. I’ve got to make someone else feel what I feel when I’m out there. You understand? It’s the ultimate symbol of death, really. You know?”
She kissed him. “Mmm,” she mumbled in a drowsy voice. “Can’t say. I’ve thought about it much. I suppose it is. It all depends on how you look at it.” She laughed. “Back when this was still a research station, they had more than one crack-up. The place does something to people. Some people, anyway. Others are utterly unaffected. Al, for example. He calls it a lot of nothing.”
Kerin snorted. He and Swiderski had disliked each other from the instant they met. “He would say that. He stays down in the monitoring room and avoids the whole issue.”
“He loves you too. Just the other day he told me that I was a brilliant theoretician, but my taste in men was revolting.” Jenny laughed. Kerin fought briefly, and wound up joining her.
But things changed.
“Kerin,” she said to him two months afterwards, and he answered with a questioning look.
“You’ve been very quiet lately,” she said. “Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He ran his fingers idly through her hair as he stared at the ceiling.
“Talk about it,” she urged.
“It’s hard to put into words,” he said. Then he laughed. “Maybe that’s why I can’t write any poems about it.” There was a quiet. “You remember that time, back in college, when we picnicked in the forest preserve?”
Jenny nodded. “Uh-huh,” she said, puzzled.
“Remember what we talked about?”
She hesitated. “I don’t know. Love? We used to talk about love a lot. That was right when we met.” She smiled. “No, wait, now I remember. That was the day I tried to convert you. All that business about the apple.”
“Yeah,” he said, “only God could make an apple, you said. The existence of apples somehow proved the existence of God. I never quite understood that argument, by the way. And I didn’t even like apples.”
Jenny smiled, gave him a quick kiss. “I remember. That night you dragged me down to that pizza place of yours in the undercity. In the middle of a big pepperoni pizza you said that if God really existed, and if he had any class, he would have created a world where pizza grew on trees instead of apples. I should have been furious, but it was all too funny.”
“I guess,” he said. “But I meant it, too. Apples never awed me; man could do better. Nothing really awed me, when I stop to think about it. I never bought your God, Jenny, you know that. But I had something else.”
“I should have pointed to the stars,” Jenny said. “A lot more impressive than any apple.”
“Admittedly. But I would have answered with the star rings. Man-made, very beautiful, very powerful. And think of what they mean. Even the vast gulfs between the suns, even those, man has beaten.”
He fell silent. Jenny cuddled against him, but she did not break the spell. Finally he resumed, in a slow serious voice.
“Nowhere is something else, Jenny. For the first time, I’ve run up against something I can’t get a grip on. I don’t understand it, I don’t like it, and I don’t like the thoughts it’s making me think. Every time I run a check or do a repair, I wind up staring at it and shivering.”
“Kerin?” Jenny said, concern in her voice. There was something very strange in his.
Sensing her worry, he turned to her and smiled. “Um,” he said. “I’m getting entirely too serious. Comes of reading too much Matthew Arnold. Forget about it.” He kissed her.
But he did not forget.
And as time passed, he got steadily more sober. His duties kept him away from Jennifer on-shift, and more and more he seemed to be avoiding people during the off-shift. Even in the cafeteria he seemed a little too solemn, too preoccupied, for the rest of the crew to be comfortable. Some of the others started to avoid him; Kerin never seemed to notice.
One night he said he felt sick. Jennifer found him in bed, staring at the ceiling again. She sat down next to him. “Kerin, we have to talk. I don’t understand. You’ve been positively morbid lately. What’s going on?”
He sighed. “Yeah.” A pause. “I went down to the fourth deck today, and found the old probe room.”
Jennifer said nothing.
“It’s still there,” he continued, “still functioning after six years. The lights were out, and there was a layer of dust. And ghosts. I could hear my footsteps and something else, sort of a thin whine coming from the control consoles.
“I watched the readout screens for a long time. They were all the same, just straight blue lines moving slowly across a black screen. Nothing, Jenny. They’ve found nothing. Twenty years now, accelerating steadily to near light speed, and they’ve yet to find a single particle, an atom, a ray of light. Then I thought I knew what the whine was. The robots were crying, Jenny. For twenty years they’ve been falling through night, and the only island of light and sound and sanity is far behind, lost in the void. That’s too much, even for machines. They’re alone and they’re scared and they’re crying. And the whole probe room was alive with their whispers and their wails. No wonder the researchers went away. The dark beat them, Jenny. Nowhere is beyond human understanding.” He trembled.
“Kerin,” she said. “They’re only probes. They don’t have emotions.”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “I work with those spidermechs every day, and every damned one of them is different. Moodiest damned machines I’ve ever seen. Nowhere is getting to them too. For the probes, it’s a thousand times worse. So, all right, they are only machines. But they don’t belong out here.”
He looked at her. “And neither do we, Jenny, at least not now. We’ll be there soon enough. Every day I watch it, and I know. Whatever we have, whatever we believe in, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, except the void out there. That’s real, that’s forever. We’re just for a brief meaningless little time, and nothing makes sense. And the time will come when we’ll be out there, wailing, in a sea of never-ending night.
“Invictus is a child’s joke. We can’t make a mark on that, out there. It’s not a symbol of death, Jenny. What a fool I was. It’s the reality.
“Maybe we’re dead already. And this is hell.”
There was nothing she could say; she did not understand.
* * *
He was floating high above the ring, surveying his dark domain, when the intercom buzzed. The noise startled him, yet brought a smile to his face. He leaned forward and flicked open the channel. “You have just disturbed the silence of infinity with your intercom buzz,” he said.
“I always was irreverent,” Jennifer’s voice replied. “You sound cheerful, Kerin.”
“I’m trying, what can I say? We’re all doomed and everything we do is meaningless, but maybe we have to fight.” He said it lightly, in a guarded half-mocking tone. He had given up being serious about it; he and Jenny had been arguing entirely too much, and his gloom had driven her into spending more and more time with Swiderski.
“We’re close,
Kerin. Come up. I want you to be here when it happens.”
Kerin stretched stiff muscles. “All right,” he said. “I’ll be right up. Don’t think I’ll be much help, though.”
“Just so you’re there,” she answered.
He flicked off, quickly ran the spidermech back to its lair, urging it on under his breath, then banished the darkness with a snap of his thumb. Back in the bright white control room, he unstrapped, exited through a sliding door. Then he moved down the corridor to an interdeck ladder, climbed to a shuttle, and rode to the monitoring room.
Where all the folk of Nowhere had gathered to watch the colors dance. The third shift was on, attentive at the monitor consoles, restless, watching the seconds pile up. But the two off-shifts were there too, prowling the room, hands shoved into pockets, pale blue smocks rumpled. This was a moment no one wanted to miss.
Swiderski, sitting in one of the control chairs, glanced up when Kerin entered. “Aha,” he said. “Our black philosopher lives! To what do we owe this singular pleasure?”
Jenny was in the second lighted throne. Kerin moved behind her, and rested a hand on her shoulder. He stared at Swiderski. “You know, Al, I’ve got spidermechs with a better personality than you.” One of the techs guffawed.
“Quiet,” Jennifer said. She studied her clipboard, ignoring Swiderski’s puzzled frown. The rest kept impatient eyes on the window.
Out there, bright-burning shadows raced from right to left, caught in the unending flow. Yellow, silver, blue, crimson, orange, green, purple. Gushes and spears, swirls and tendrils, firedrops and roaring floods. In the airless starless empty they turned and mingled and mixed and turned. The window, as always, drenched the room with shifting light. The many-colored flames of the star ring flickered in the eyes of the watchers.
“Five minutes,” Trotter announced in a loud voice. A short, stout man, the head of the tech crew; off duty now, but still here to officiate.
“Safety lenses,” Jennifer said suddenly, looking up from her chair. “In case something goes wrong.”
Around the room, one by one, the watchers lowered their dark goggles until all the eyes were hidden. All but Kerin’s. His glasses were forgotten, somewhere back in his room.
A short brown-haired woman drifted up to his side, offering him a pair. He tried to remember her name, failed. A tech. “Thanks,” he said, taking the goggles and covering his eyes.
She shrugged. “Sure. A big moment, isn’t it?”
He looked back toward the window, where the colors now were muted. “I suppose.”
She refused to go away. “We don’t see much of you anymore, Kerin. Is everything all right?”
“Sure,” he said. But his face stayed somber.
“Two minutes,” Trotter announced. Kerin fell silent, and his hand tightened on Jenny’s shoulder. She looked up at him, and smiled. They watched the window.
Over a year ago she had found the key. He’d shared that moment, the start, as she waved her battered clipboard in his face and whooped. Now he could share the finish. Somehow, despite everything he had said, that still mattered.
“One minute,” Trotter said. Then the seconds peeled off one by one. The next voice was Jennifer’s. It was her right. She’d started it all. “Now,” she said. She hit the controls before her. And all around the star ring, the nullspace engines died.
Dead silence in the monitoring room; a hush of indrawn breath. Long seconds. Then, with a rush, explosion. Laughter, tears, papers flying, techs hugging each other.
Beyond the window, the colors were still spinning.
Swiderski was suddenly there, standing at Jennifer’s side, grinning. “You did it!” he said. “We did it. A self-sustaining vortex.”
Jenny permitted herself a brief smile, immune to the riot around her. “It hasn’t been a minute yet,” she said, cautiously. “The vortex may fade, after all. Before we celebrate too much, let’s see how long the thing sustains itself without the engines.”
Swiderski shook his head, laughing. “Ah, Jenny. It doesn’t matter. A second is time enough, shows that it’s possible. It’s a big breakthrough. Now maybe we can even generate a vortex without an anomaly, anywyere—think of it! A hundred star rings in orbit around Earth!”
Jennifer rose. Swiderski, still dripping enthusiasm, grabbed her, hugged her hard. She accepted the hug calmly, disengaged as soon as he released her. “That’s still a long way off, Al,” she told him. “We may not see it in our lifetimes. Let’s just wait to make sure all my calculations work out, okay? You take the next watch.”
She glanced toward Kerin. He grinned. They left the monitoring room together. Out in the corridor, she took him by the hand.
* * *
An anomaly is not a gate; it is too small. But it can be opened. The price—energy.
Thus the star rings, built around the holes. A thousand fusion engines provide a lot of energy.
Wake them, and in the center of the ring a bright-colored star flares to sudden brilliance. The star becomes a disc, the colors changing, spinning. The disc grows with each flicker of the eye. In seconds it spans the ring; the nullspace vortex, the colored maelstrom of space. Kept alive by energy, it is itself a creature of awful power.
The armored ringships tear into its center, and suddenly are gone, to reappear on the flip side of the hole. Elsewhere, far elsewhere.
Then the ring man kills the engines. And—in an instant—the vortex is gone. It blinks out. Like a light, turned off.
It works. But why? How?
Dr. Jennifer Gray made the first big advance in the field. A leading nullspace theoretician, she got permission for a series of controlled experiments with the Black Door Star Ring. Her first step was to let the vortex burn for a full day; previously no vortex had been kept alive for much over an hour. The costs in terms of fuel and energy were too great.
At Black Door, Dr. Gray discovered that the vortex, somehow, gains energy.
Her measurements were very precise. A certain amount of energy is poured into the ring center by the engines; enough to create the vortex, to keep it alive. But the energy of the vortex itself was greater than what was being pumped in. A minute difference at first. But it builds, the longer the vortex turns.
There followed the Gray Equations; run a star ring long enough, her figures said, and the vortex will be self-sustaining. Then the ring can possibly be a power source, instead of a drain. More importantly, her work provided the first real insight into the nature of the nullspace vortex. It was hoped that in time, enough understanding might be acquired so that star rings could be constructed anywhere.
Further experimentation was called for. Since Black Door was a busy gateway, and since the work might possibly be dangerous, the government gave Dr. Gray and her team access to the abandoned Nowhere Star Ring.
They had been saving a special bottle of wine. They broke it out and took it back to their room. Kerin poured two glasses, and they drank a toast to the Gray Equations.
“I’d like to give Swiderski a hit in the face,” Kerin said, sitting on the bed. He sipped his wine thoughtfully.
Jenny smiled. “Al is all right. And you sound better.”
Kerin sighed. “Ah, so that’s why we haven’t been arguing.” He set down his glass on a night table, rose, and shook his head. “Maybe I’m getting resigned to it,” he said. “Or maybe I’m just getting better at hiding it. I don’t know.”
“And I thought my triumph had put you in a good mood.”
“I wonder,” he mused. He walked across their room to the mock window, and stared out at the starscape. “I think maybe it was more that buzz you gave me. That never happened before. I mean, there I am in the midst of infinite darkness, and suddenly there’s this big raucous noise.” He tapped the window glass lightly with his fist. “It’s a lie,” he said. “There’s only darkness and death, Jenny, and nothing we can do to change it. Except…”
He turned to face her. “Except make noises? I don’t know.”
“Oh, Kerin. Why do you let it obsess you? Just let it be.”
He shook his head violently. “No, that’s no answer. We can avoid thinking about it, but it still won’t go away. No, I’ve got to beat it somehow, face it down and beat it. Only I don’t have anything to beat it with. Not even the vortex, not even the star rings. But that noise … that doesn’t do it either, of course, but, but…”
Jenny smiled. “Our black philosopher. Al is right. I really don’t understand you, love. I’m afraid I’m like Swiderski in that. To me it’s just a lot of nothing. Oh, I get hints of what’s bothering you, but it’s all an intellectual exercise. To you it’s more than that.”
He nodded.
“I wish I could help more, help you work it out. Whatever it is.”
“Maybe you can,” Kerin said. “Maybe you have. I’ve got to think this through.” He stared at nothing and rubbed his chin.
And suddenly the intercom buzzed. Jenny shook off her musings, put down her glass, and reached over to the bedside. “Yes,” she said.
Swiderski’s voice. “Jennifer, you’d better get up here at once.”
“What’s wrong? Is the vortex fading already?” Kerin, across the room, stood frozen.
“No,” Swiderski said. “There’s something wrong. It’s not fading at all, Jenny. It’s gaining energy, from no place. Even faster than before.”
“That can’t be,” she said.
“It is.”
* * *
Outside, winds of scarlet flame shrieked by in silent fury.
Jenny sat in one of the control chairs, clutching her talisman clipboard, and cleared a computer screen. “Give me the figures,” she said to Ahmed, on the central monitor.
He nodded, hit a stud, and the figures from one of his readout screens blinked into life on hers. Jennifer studied them in silence, looking up every once in a while at the raging fire outside. Behind her, Swiderski stood near the computers, scratching his head. The monitors, goggles down, tended to their screens.
Her fingers went to a console, tentatively, thoughtfully. She punched in an equation, paused, tugged absently at her hair. Then she nodded firmly, and set to work.
Nightflyers & Other Stories Page 22
