‘That’s over,’ Lieutenant Alverez said. ‘Most of them killed, the rest in custody. We haven’t found their leader, think he might have tried to make it through one of the wormholes.’
‘I did see that display.’
‘That was Barlstilkin, not the Witnesses. The bastard ran out on us.’
Suzy remembered the name. Bonadventure had mentioned it. Barlstilkin was the guy she would have blown to glory, and herself with him, if Robot hadn’t stopped her.
Lieutenant Alverez said, ‘We’re in poor shape here. All we have left is the keel. Local radiation is rising, we have to pull out, no time to retrieve any modules. Do you understand?’
‘You’re saying you can’t come after me, right?’
‘That’s about right, Suzy Falcon. All our combat ships are damaged. We’re running the Vingança from a lash-up in the cableways. We have enough control to get us home, but we’re going to take the long route. Do you hear me?’
‘I’m listening real hard.’
‘We will not trust the wormholes, and the phase graffle is of no use for the distance we must travel. We are twenty-eight thousand light years from Sol, and transit time through contraspace is close to one hundred years.
‘So we will solve this problem by brute force. We’re swinging around the black hole as close as is safe, doing a slingshot manoeuvre. The Vingança’s badly hurt, but her basic structure is in good shape.’
‘She’s a good old ship,’ Suzy said. For some reason tears were pricking her eyes, swelling slowly in the low pull of the singleship’s acceleration, running back above her ears.
Lieutenant Alverez’s crackling voice said, ‘We’re going to boost to as close to light speed as we can, at continuous one gee acceleration. Time dilation will shorten the trip to about ten years, ship time. We’ll do cold sleep, it won’t be so bad. Real time, of course, it will be a trip to the future, twenty-eight thousand years to cross the Galaxy back to Sol, with an indefinite amount added on because of time dilation when we are close to the black hole. The scientists are still trying to work out how much. It depends upon the precise size of the singularity, and on the shape of our hyperbolic orbit around it. We do not know enough to be certain. But at least there will be no charges of mutiny awaiting us. Even the Navy’s statutes will be outrun.’
‘I guess it beats dying, huh?’
‘It may sound ingratiating, but in many ways I envy you. There is little honour in coming all this way and then turning tail in the face of the Enemy. I’ve your file here, Suzy. You had a hell of a record, flying out of the Vingança during the Campaigns.’
‘Well, thanks, but where I’m going that don’t amount to a snowball’s chance on Venus, now does it?’
‘Listen carefully, Suzy. As soon as we know our precise course around the black hole I will transmit it to you. Always keep one antenna directed towards us, wherever you are. If you survive your run, there is a very small possibility that you may be able to perform a manoeuvre similar to ours, that you may be able to match our course and velocity. We will download all the information that we can.’
Suzy said, ‘I hope to see you guys,’ although she knew that it wasn’t even a remote possibility. Even if she did survive the encounter with the Enemy, her little ship didn’t have the shielding to protect her from the X-rays and synchrotron radiation deep in the accretion disc. She’d have a better chance trying for the wormhole planetoid.
She searched for a phrase with a little swagger in it, some suitable brave epitaph. But the crackle of static in her ears had faded. And something was happening to the view of the accretion disc directly in front of her. Blue light rippling and running together, folding around the outline of someone’s face.
Wispy blond hair, dead white face, piercing blue eyes. Thin lips pulled back in a smile, revealing small widely spaced brown teeth.
The ghost said, ‘Hello, Suzy.’
It was Robot’s face, Machine’s flat unemphatic voice. Suzy screamed and swept a hand across the communications board.
But the face did not go away.
‘Now, now,’ Machine said. ‘It is too late for that. I downloaded myself into this ship’s computer at the very beginning of the transmission, and you know that you cannot override the computer any more, not after the modifications made by my little helpers.’
‘I can pull you out with my bare hands, you fucker. See how you like that kind of modification.’
‘You have ninety-three seconds until transition into contraspace, Suzy. I suggest you think carefully about such radical surgery on your ship’s systems at such a critical time. Besides, you need me, and I need you.’
‘I don’t need anyone, not any more.’
‘Do you know where to find the Enemy? I thought not. But I do, Suzy. The angels told me. I will let you fly the ship if you follow my instructions. And truly, I do need you. I cannot EVA and reset the warheads of the missiles.’
‘Oh shit,’ Suzy said. Her airy feeling of playing hooky suddenly bottomed out. She hadn’t even thought to check the status of the weapons systems beyond seeing that they were still active. Had just assumed the Witnesses wouldn’t have bothered with them. But they had. The warheads of the missiles were still armed, all right, but the control paths to their guidance systems had been cut. They’d fly, but she couldn’t tell them where to go. She’d been even dumber than she’d thought.
And there was no time to do anything about it right now. The clock face counting down to transit had started to flash; its single hand was tracking round the dial. Suzy unclipped the dead man’s switch, squeezed the pistol grip. The timing of phase space transition was too delicate to be trusted to human reactions, but she could halt the sequence up until the last nanosecond by letting go the switch.
She said to Machine, ‘So what’s the deal?’
The ghostly face assembled a smile. ‘We help each other. You go out and reconnect the guidance systems of the missiles, and I will locate the Enemy for you. They live somewhere on the Spike that trails behind the hyper-matter sphere, somewhere on a surface the area of three trillion Earths. You would have difficulty finding them on your own, Suzy, but I was able to talk to the Alea ancestor when we all merged. I learned much from her.’
Twenty seconds.
Suzy was clutching the dead man’s switch so hard her whole arm trembled. She had a terrible suspicion she couldn’t quite define, but there was no other way out. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘You got a deal.’
Machine’s disembodied head nodded—an eerie effect—and faded out just as the sweep hand of the clock came up vertical. Without any hiss, the Universe—accretion disc, gas clouds, smeared birthing stars—folded up all around Suzy, stretching towards a vanishing point set at infinity as the singleship made the jump into contraspace.
15
* * *
Talbeck Barlstilkin listened to the news that Dorthy and Robot had brought back with surprising calm, and even more surprisingly he agreed that they must try the wormhole once more. But even though her Talent was limited by the secretions of her implant, Dorthy could sense the vivid rage clamped deep inside his icy composure, a red worm burning at the heart of a glacier.
Abel Gunasekra was less certain. ‘You call the creatures you dealt with angels, Seyour Robot, but to give a creature a name is not to define or even to know it. Can you be certain that they are of an honourable nature?’
Robot gave a one-sided shrug.
‘We can’t be certain of anything,’ Dorthy said, ‘except that the wormhole is our only way home. There is nothing for us here.’
‘From a student of astronomy,’ Gunasekra said, ‘I find that an astonishing remark. We are at the edge of the greatest natural laboratory in the Galaxy for studying quantum and cosmological processes. I would wish a hundred lifetimes here, to observe and to think, and certainly I do not believe it is yet time to go home.’
Talbeck Barlstilkin said, without a trace of irony, ‘I understand that modern pressure suits can sustai
n life for a year at least, Professor Gunasekra. You are welcome to take one and stay, but for my own part I wish to leave. Dorthy, Robot, our destination will not be Earth, I am afraid. I do not feel that I would enjoy the welcome that awaits me there, or anywhere else in the Federation for that matter. I must resort to a contingency measure I had always hoped I would never have to use. There is a colony planet called Iemanja, a world mostly of oceans, as its name implies. I own a small island in the Archipelago. That is where I intend to go, if the angels grant us passage back to the hypervelocity star. Iemanja is a pleasant enough world, but isolated. Ships bringing new colonists arrive at very infrequent intervals; I believe the next is due in five years. I am prepared to hire return passage on it for you and your child, and for Seyour Robot. Only hard class, but needs must.’
‘That’s generous of you,’ Dorthy said.
‘Given my circumstances, it is more generous than you can imagine, but at least you will be free of the Navy. And please, Seyour Robot, do not entertain the thought of sabotaging my ship. I have already had it deal with the infestation of your cunning little machines. That was an interesting show you put on, by the way. I have tapes of it. Perhaps I could find employment as your agent, if I was not forced to choose so remote a home.
‘And you, Professor Doctor Gunasekra. Will you stay here?’
‘Do not play games with me, Seyour. Of course not. If there was a possibility of my surviving long enough to learn all I could…perhaps. But I would be needing a great deal more than a pressure suit.’
‘I see,’ Talbeck Barlstilkin said. ‘Well, and I had always thought that the worth of knowledge lay in its availability to all.’
‘As long as I know a thing, what does it matter to me if others do not? You cannot know what it is like, to know something no one has known before—well, no human, I should say. I discover only now that that is why I am here, and too late, alas.’
Talbeck Barlstilkin turned to go, but at the top of the helical stairway to the bridge he turned and leaned at the slender rail. He said, ‘Do you think the angels will let us return, Robot?’
Again, Robot made his graceless, one-sided shrug.
‘I thought not,’ Barlstilkin said, and smiled his dreadful smile before departing.
Dorthy sprawled on one of the big couches and asked it to massage her back, relaxing bonelessly as it got to work on the muscles knotted down the ladder of her spine. ‘I think we’re all right,’ she said. ‘He is close to the edge, but he isn’t standing on it. If he wasn’t Golden, I might be worried.’
‘I don’t know if we should talk about him like this,’ Gunasekra said, perching at the very edge of the padded shelf across from Dorthy’s couch. ‘He is probably eavesdropping, after all.’
‘What does it matter?’ Dorthy raised her voice. ‘It gives him some harmless amusement. Am I right, Talbeck? Don’t worry, Professor Gunasekra, Golden his age do not commit suicide. The habit of enduring goes deep in them. And he can still hope that what we’ve learned can hurt the Federation in some way. He can wait in exile, and watch. He’ll have agatherin in his hideaway, you can bet on it, and some kind of medical programme ready, too. Golden think in decades, not days. Right now he has retreated to a place where the present can’t touch him…that’s why he seems remote.’
‘I am not a Talent, Dr Yoshida. But it seems to me that one more setback might truly and irrevocably hurt him.’
‘If the angels don’t let us return to the hypervelocity star, it won’t matter.’
‘You sound as if you don’t care.’
‘Oh, but I do. For so long, now, I have been following a path that was never mine, trudging along with the neuter female and her relatives on my back and not knowing it. Now, I am at the threshold of my own life, for the first time in a dozen years.’ She asked the couch to elevate her head and shoulders, and smiled at Gunasekra. ‘Do you drink alcohol? I know for a fact that unless the Witnesses plundered it the wine store Talbeck laid down is far from exhausted. A little wine, for your stomach’s sake?’
Gunasekra started to fuss with the controls of the holotank. ‘I sound priggish, perhaps, if I say that I do not take any drugs. It is true, none the less. But I will toast your freedom in fruit juice, if you like. Perhaps Seyour Robot will join you.’
Robot had been staring at the impassive servant, his face only a few centimetres away from hers. He looked around at the mention of his name, then returned his gaze to the servant. He had been curiously subdued ever since he and Dorthy had returned to the ship. Missing the companion he had hardwired into his own brain, Dorthy thought. It was an insight granted her by the muffled spark of her Talent; and with it came an echo of Robot’s lonely despair, the aching void inside his skull and an almost post-coital sadness, the craziness of his creativity entirely worn off and nothing to replace it.
Part of being a Talent, the part Dorthy had always resisted and resented, was the need to keep others happy. An almost desperate need sometimes, a defence mechanism that staved off what would otherwise be an almost continual bombardment of various degrees of despair. That Dorthy had tried to grow her own armour against this, a certain callousness, a certain selfishness, was perhaps one of the reasons that she had never become a fully professional Talent, a personal entertainer/confessor/ advisor to whoever could afford to hire her. She’d tried it once, whoring with her Talent to pay her way through Fra Mauro. Never again, she’d vowed, too protective of her own self, despite all the training at the Kamali-Silver Institute, to want let alone need to let the minds of others impinge on her own. Silence, exile and cunning would be her watchwords…but the Alea Campaigns had promptly caught up with her, and thereafter she was a prisoner of her Talent to a degree she had never before imagined even in her blackest moments.
But now Robot’s despair touched her as she had not been touched for so long. As she had not been touched since P’thrsn and the death of poor Arcady Kilczer; or since she had rescued her sister, Hiroko, from the incestuous clutches of their uncle, so long ago on Earth. Rescued, and lost. I cannot live amongst strangers.
But to Dorthy no one was truly a stranger. She was at least reconciled to that.
Robot did not turn his gaze from the servant when Dorthy put a hand on his left shoulder, just above the seam with his prosthesis. ‘She isn’t Machine,’ Dorthy said.
‘She could be. The part governing her, I mean.’
‘It wouldn’t help you, Robot. You’d have to give all of yourself, become like her.’
‘Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea,’ he said, swinging to face Dorthy. The alloy and plastic of his augmented arm brushed her hand away. She raised it again, set her palm inside his vee’d open suitliner, on the cage of his ribs.
‘It’s going to be hard, but I know you’ll learn. To keep something for everyday life, to live like everyone else.’
Robot took a deep breath. He said, ‘That’s the whole point.’ But he did not brush her hand away.
‘Putting Machine inside your head was a work of art, too? Your whole life was a work of art?’
‘Or an act. But it’s over. It’s destroyed.’
‘If Machine was part of a work of art, or a performance, or whatever…why do you think you have to control it? Isn’t that the point of what you do? To set things going and see what will happen? Maybe Machine’s…leaving you, that’s just part of the performance. It hasn’t ended. It’s still going on.’
Robot said, ‘Everyone’s a critic.’
Dorthy smiled. ‘I don’t know if I’m a critic, but I certainly enjoyed your last performance.’
‘It was kind of crude, and half of the projections were wildly out of focus most of the time…but yeah, given the circumstances it wasn’t so bad. For a prank, that is. Not a work of art. Kind of a terminal prank for the Witnesses.’
Dorthy had been about to say she wouldn’t mourn them, but she remembered the glimpse of Ang’s dead face through the frosted visor. And remembered with a shiver what the neuter femal
e had been about to do.
Robot took her hand in his own. ‘Maybe that’s what happens, when you set yourself up as God’s messenger without consulting Her first. Maybe I was set up to be the agent of Her wrath. Suzy and I called the things in the interzone angels. Well, maybe they are. I still haven’t filled all the gaps in what they told me. Or maybe that’s my Substantivist upbringing doing my thinking for me.’
‘Soon we will find out if your angels are satisfied with what has happened here,’ Gunasekra said. He was fiddling with the controls of the holotank. ‘If I could get this over-ornamented device to work, we might see it happen.’
The servant stepped around Robot and Dorthy, leaned over Gunasekra’s shoulder—he looked up, startled—and did something to control plates set amongst gold and mother-of-pearl encrustations. The indirect illumination of the commons dimmed: the holotank’s grey slab was displaced by a view of a black double curve against frozen swirls of crimson and vermilion.
It was the planetoid, shadowed against the gas clouds. The ship had already left its surface, was moving towards the wormhole pit. Moving into it, Dorthy decided, because the sooty icescapes of the planetoid were rising out of the holotank, pushing the gas clouds beyond its margin. Dead centre, dim phosphenes defined a circular maw. Dorthy craned for a last glimpse of the black hole’s accretion disc, and the tank flared with light.
Sunlight.
Gunasekra fell back in the couch, his face shining in the light that poured out of the holotank. White sand sloped to blue water salted with whitecaps; the white beach curved away right and left, fringed by palms.
‘Where is that?’ Gunasekra asked. ‘Have the angels opened a way to Earth? Or is it the ocean world Barlstilkin talked of?’
‘No,’ Robot said. ‘I know this place. It’s where the angels live. And look! Look!’ He stepped forward, stabbed towards the holotank with his augmented arm.
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