Nightflyers & Other Stories

by George R. R. Martin

  Forty-five minutes later she looked up at Swiderski. “The Gray Equations are wrong,” she said, emotionless. “According to my predictions, the vortex was supposed to maintain itself for five months at least, the energy level gradually tapering off, until finally booster shots from the nullspace engines were required. That’s not what’s happening.”

  “An error somewhere,” Swiderski started.

  She dismissed him with an impatient toss of her head. “No. The whole equation’s worthless. I made a fundamental mistake somewhere, I misunderstood something key about the nature of the vortex. Otherwise this wouldn’t be going on.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself.”

  “We have to start all over. Bleed all the monitors into the main computer, Ahmed. I don’t want to miss a thing.” Her fingers raced over the keys of the console. The monitor crew set to their tasks, exchanging puzzled looks. Swiderski, frowning, sat in the second throne.

  And up against the door Kerin stood quietly, his arms crossed, watching the racing fires. Then, unnoticed, he turned and left.

  One by one, the others drifted into the control room. The watch changed in silence; those going off stayed in the monitoring room, drinking coffee and exchanging whispers. Once in a while someone laughed. Jennifer never looked up, but Swiderski glared at them.

  As hours passed, he got up, fidgeting, and went over to Jennifer. “You ought to get some sleep,” he told her. “Been up too long. Something like twenty straight hours now, isn’t it?”

  Annoyance flashed across her face. “So have you, Al. This can’t wait.”

  Defeated, he turned to his chair, and ran through some equations of his own.

  More hours of silent waiting, while the fires screamed a few feet away.

  Finally Jennifer leaned back, frowning. Her long fingers drummed on the console. She looked to the central monitor, where Sandy Lindagan had replaced Ahmed. “Call Trotter,” Jennifer said. “Tell him to wake up the off-shifts”—glancing around—“the ones who aren’t loitering around here, anyway.”

  Lindagan gave her a questioning look, shrugged, and did it. “What are you doing?” Swiderski said.

  “Clear your screen,” Jennifer told him. “Have the computer graph the rate of increase prior to switch-off.”

  He did it. A red line traced a slow-ascending curve across his console face. They’d known the rate of increase for months, though. “So?” Swiderski said.

  “Now, let it draw on the monitors. Plot the increase since we reached s-point.”

  Swiderski punched some more studs, bit his lip, wiped the screen, and did it again. The answer was the same. The line soared. A row of blinking figures underneath told the story.

  “Not just an increase in the arithmetic rate of energy gain,” he said.

  “No,” snapped Jennifer. “Geometric. S-point was some sort of point of no return. Somehow we’ve got a chain reaction in nullspace itself.”

  Sandy Lindagan looked over, her face pale. “Jennifer,” she said. “Then you want Trotter so…”

  “So he can get the ship ready,” Jennifer said, standing abruptly. “We’ve got to get out. Al, you take over here. I’m going for Kerin.” She started toward the door.

  One of the off-duty monitors had wandered over to the window. He touched it lightly with his fingertips, and yowled, spilling a cup of coffee.

  When he took his fingers away, they were red and burned.

  * * *

  Their bedroom was empty.

  She went to the old control room. That too was deserted.

  She stood in the white cubicle, puzzled. Where?

  Then she remembered.

  In the sealed-off portion of the ring she found him, pacing slowly back and forth in the gloom and dusty darkness of the probe room. It was the first time she had ever been there. The only light was the glow of the console buttons, and the straight blue tracery of the lines on the readout screens. But a ghostly half-heard whine came from the instrument panels.

  “You hear them, Jenny?” Kerin said. “My lost souls? Wailing in the darkness?”

  “A minor malfunction somewhere,” she said, watching him as he stalked restlessly through the shadows. Then swiftly she told him what had happened. Halfway through she began to sob.

  And Kerin came to her, wrapped her in his arms, pressed her hard against him. Wordless.

  “I failed, Kerin,” she said, and all the disappointment she had hidden from the others, all the agony, came out now. “All my equations, the whole theory…”

  “It’s all right,” he told her. He stroked her hair. Then, despite himself, he shivered. “Jenny,” he said, “what now? I mean, is the ring going to short-circuit or something? And we’ll be stuck here?”

  She shook her head. “No, we’re going back, as soon as the ship is ready. The vortex will overload the ring, but not the engines, no. They’re not even in the picture. It’s the dampers we have to worry about, and the armor. The vortex is self-sustaining now, building energy fast, God knows how or from where, but it’s happening. Have you ever seen what a vortex does to an unarmored ship, Kerin? It’ll do that to us soon. It’ll generate so much power that the star ring can’t hold it in any longer. Then it’ll melt free. An explosion, Kerin, and an unbound vortex, expanding at the speed of light, generating more and more energy all the while. But by that time, hopefully, we’ll be through the hole, safe on the flip side. I don’t think it will break through the continuum. I hope not.”

  Her voice faded, and there was only the whine. Kerin shook his head, as if to clear it. And then, wildly, he began to laugh.

  * * *

  Of course, he was the last one to the ship.

  They left within seventy-two hours, over Swiderski’s protests. “You were wrong before, Jenny,” the big blond kept saying, “you might be wrong now. Besides, I ran through your calculations. The ring walls will hold for at least another week minimum, and we could make valuable observations. And still get clear before the ring starts to melt.”

  Jennifer overruled him. “We can’t take the chance. It’s hot in here already. The risk isn’t worth it, Al. We’re leaving.”

  An hour before departure, Kerin vanished.

  Jennifer grabbed a shuttle and went searching. She checked their bedroom, deserted now; the stars in the holo beamed on a bare metal cabin. She tried the old control room, and found that he’d been there. The door slid back on the fracture visions of his spidereyes. But the chair was vacant. Next the probe room. Still no Kerin.

  She flipped on the shuttle intercom and called back to the ring port where the ship lay waiting. Trotter answered. “He’s here,” he said quickly. “Came running up about ten seconds after you went off after him. Hurry back.”

  She did.

  The departure was all confusion. Jenny did not find Kerin until the ship had boosted free of the Nowhere Star Ring and was circling out into the yawning vacuum before turning back toward the vortex. He was sitting in the ship’s main lounge.

  All the lights were out when she entered. But the viewscreen was on, filling one long wall, and Kerin and a half-dozen others watched in silence. Ahead of them a spinning multicolored hell howled in the midst of virgin blackness. The ring, binding the fires, was a tiny glint of silver thread, all but lost in the immense fury of the stormfires.

  Jennifer sat down beside him.

  “Look,” Kerin said. “Look at those ripples, the bulges. Like a thunderhead, all bunched up with lightning, getting ready to explode. It’s always been flat before, Jenny, you know? Sort of two-dimensional? Not now. When she blows, she’ll blow in all directions.” He took her hand, squeezed hard, grinned at her. “My poor probes, they’ll be delighted. After twenty years of darkness, light, coming up behind them fast. Think of it. Something at last, in an infinity of nothing.” Kerin looked at her, still smiling. “You broke the quiet in my little dark room with your intercom buzz. This will be a much bigger noise, in a much bigger quiet.”

  The vortex loomed la
rger and larger ahead, filling the screen. The ringship was nearing and picking up speed.

  “Where did you go?” Jennifer said.

  “To the control room,” he said, and the ghosts were all gone from his voice. “I yanked two of my spiders out of their hidey-holes.”

  “But why?”

  “They’re sitting in the monitoring room now, love. Perched on top of the control chairs, right where you and Al used to sit. I keyed in the computer, a timed command. An hour after we’re safe on the other side of space, my spiders are going to lean forward and punch all your pretty studs and turn back on the engines.”

  She whistled. “That’ll speed up the explosion something fierce. The energy level was increasing fast enough anyway. Why give it more energy to multiply?”

  He squeezed her hand again. “To make the noise bigger, love. Call it a gesture. How much energy would you say is out there, spinning around like a big pinwheel, eh?”

  “A lot. The explosion will begin with the force of a supernova, easily. It’d take that much power to melt down the ring.”

  “Hmmm. Except that this time, the explosion doesn’t damp out, right? It keeps going, the vortex expands and expands and—”

  “—expands. Yes. Geometrically.”

  The viewscreen was alive with the colors of the vortex. For an instant it almost seemed as if they were back in the monitoring room on the Nowhere Star Ring. Tongues of fire leaped up at them, and bluish demon shapes whipped by, shrieking.

  Then the ship shuddered, and there were stars again.

  Jennifer smiled. “You look smug,” she told Kerin.

  He put his arm around her. “We look smug. We have a right to be. We just beat that fucking darkness. There’s only one thing we did wrong.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “We put apples on the trees, instead of pizza.”

  A Song for Lya

  The cities of the Shkeen are old, older far than man’s, and the great rust-red metropolis that rose from their sacred hill country had proved to be the oldest of them all. The Shkeen city had no name. It needed none. Though they built cities and towns by the hundreds and the thousands, the hill city had no rivals. It was the largest in size and population, and it was alone in the sacred hills. It was their Rome, Mecca, Jerusalem; all in one. It was the city, and all Shkeen came to it at last, in the final days before Union.

  That city had been ancient in the days before Rome fell, had been huge and sprawling when Babylon was still a dream. But there was no feel of age to it. The human eye saw only miles and miles of low, red-brick domes; small hummocks of dried mud that covered the rolling hills like a rash. Inside they were dim and nearly airless. The rooms were small and the furniture crude.

  Yet it was not a grim city. Day after day it squatted in those scrubby hills, broiling under a hot sun that sat in the sky like a weary orange melon; but the city teemed with life: smells of cooking, the sounds of laughter and talk and children running, the bustle and sweat of brickmen repairing the domes, the bells of the Joined ringing in the streets. The Shkeen were a lusty and exuberant people, almost childlike. Certainly there was nothing about them that told of great age or ancient wisdom. This is a young race, said the signs, this is a culture in its infancy.

  But that infancy had lasted more than fourteen thousand years.

  The human city was the real infant, less than ten Earth years old. It was built on the edge of the hills, between the Shkeen metropolis and the dusty brown plains where the spaceport had gone up. In human terms, it was a beautiful city; open and airy, full of graceful archways and glistening fountains and wide boulevards lined by trees. The buildings were wrought of metal and colored plastic and native woods, and most of them were low in deference to Shkeen architecture. Most of them … the Administration Tower was the exception, a polished blue steel needle that split a crystal sky.

  You could see it for miles in all directions. Lyanna spied it even before we landed, and we admired it from the air. The gaunt skyscrapers of Old Earth and Baldur were taller, and the fantastic webbed cities of Arachne were far more beautiful—but that slim blue Tower was still imposing enough as it rose unrivaled to its lonely dominance above the sacred hills.

  The spaceport was in the shadow of the Tower, easy walking distance. But they met us anyway. A low-slung scarlet aircar sat purring at the base of the ramp as we disembarked, with a driver lounging against the stick. Dino Valcarenghi stood next to it, leaning on the door and talking to an aide.

  Valcarenghi was the planetary administrator, the boy wonder of the sector. Young, of course, but I’d known that. Short, and good-looking, in a dark, intense way, with black hair that curled thickly against his head and an easy, genial smile.

  He flashed us that smile then, when we stepped off the ramp, and reached to shake hands. “Hi,” he began, “I’m glad to see you.” There was no nonsense with formal introductions. He knew who we were, and we knew who he was, and Valcarenghi wasn’t the kind of man who put much stock in ritual.

  Lyanna took his hand lightly in hers, and gave him her vampire look: big, dark eyes opened wide and staring, thin mouth lifted in a tiny faint smile. She’s a small girl, almost waiflike, with short brown hair and a child’s figure. She can look very fragile, very helpless. When she wants to. But she rattles people with that look. If they know Lya’s a telepath, they figure she’s poking around amid their innermost secrets. Actually she’s playing with them. When Lyanna is really reading, her whole body goes stiff and you can almost see her tremble. And those big, soul-sucking eyes get narrow and hard and opaque.

  But not many people know that, so they squirm under her vampire eyes and look the other way and hurry to release her hand. Not Valcarenghi, though. He just smiled and stared back, then moved on to me.

  I was reading when I took his hand—my standard operating procedure. Also a bad habit, I guess, since it’s put some promising friendships into an early grave. My talent isn’t equal to Lya’s. But it’s not as demanding, either. I read emotions. Valcarenghi’s geniality came through strong and genuine. With nothing behind it, or at least nothing that was close enough to the surface for me to catch.

  We also shook hands with the aide, a middle-aged blond stork named Nelson Gourlay. Then Valcarenghi ushered everybody into the aircar and we took off. “I imagine you’re tired,” he said after we were airborne, “so we’ll save the tour of the city and head straight for the Tower. Nelse will show you your quarters, then you can join us for a drink, and we’ll talk over the problem. You’ve read the materials I sent?”

  “Yes,” I said. Lya nodded. “Interesting background, but I’m not sure why we’re here.”

  “We’ll get to that soon enough,” Valcarenghi replied. “I ought to be letting you enjoy the scenery.” He gestured toward the window, smiled, and fell silent.

  So Lya and I enjoyed the scenery, or as much as we could enjoy during the five-minute flight from spaceport to tower. The aircar was whisking down the main street at treetop level, stirring up a breeze that whipped the thin branches as we went by. It was cool and dark in the interior of the car, but outside the Shkeen sun was riding toward noon, and you could see the heat waves shimmering from the pavement. The population must have been inside huddled around their air-conditioners, because we saw very little traffic.

  We got out near the main entrance to the Tower and walked through a huge, sparkling-clean lobby. Valcarenghi left us then to talk to some underlings. Gourlay led us into one of the tubes and we shot up fifty floors. Then we waltzed past a secretary into another, private tube, and climbed some more.

  * * *

  Our rooms were lovely; carpeted in cool green, and paneled with wood. There was a complete library there, mostly Earth classics bound in synthaleather, with a few novels from Baldur, our home world. Somebody had been researching our tastes. One of the walls of the bedroom was tinted glass, giving a panoramic view of the city far below us, with a control that could darken it for sleeping.

 
; Gourlay showed it to us dutifully, like a dour bellhop. I read him briefly though, and found no resentment. He was nervous, but only slightly. There was honest affection there for someone. Us? Valcarenghi?

  Lya sat down on one of the twin beds. “Is someone bringing our luggage?” she asked.

  Gourlay nodded. “You’ll be well taken care of,” he said. “Anything you want, ask.”

  “Don’t worry, we will,” I said. I dropped to the second bed, and gestured Gourlay to a chair. “How long have you been here?”

  “Six years,” he said, taking the chair gratefully and sprawling out all over it. “I’m one of the veterans. I’ve worked under four administrators now. Dino, and Stuart before him, and Gustaffson before him. I was even under Rockwood a few months.”

  Lya perked up, crossing her legs under her and leaning forward. “That was all Rockwood lasted, wasn’t it?”

  “Right,” Gourlay said. “He didn’t like the planet, took a quick demotion to assistant administrator someplace else. I didn’t care much, to tell the truth. He was the nervous type, always giving orders to prove who was boss.”

  “And Valcarenghi?” I asked.

  Gourlay made a smile look like a yawn. “Dino? Dino’s OK, the best of the lot. He’s good, knows he’s good. He’s only been here two months, but he’s gotten a lot done, and he’s made a lot of friends. He treats the staff like people, calls everybody by his first name, all that stuff. People like that.”

  I was reading, and I read sincerity. It was Valcarenghi that Gourlay was affectionate toward, then. He believed what he was saying.

  I had more questions, but I didn’t get to ask them. Gourlay got up suddenly. “I really shouldn’t stay,” he said. “You want to rest, right? Come up to the top in about two hours and we’ll go over things with you. You know where the tube is?”

  We nodded, and Gourlay left. I turned to Lyanna. “What do you think?”

  She lay back on the bed and considered the ceiling. “I don’t know,” she said. “I wasn’t reading. I wonder why they’ve had so many administrators. And why they wanted us.”