And therefore no high-acceleration, sophotectic war-craft would set forth to retrieve and avenge, Nicol thought.
“The defenses will remain,” Lirion said. “But they are intended for use against meteoroids, which have computable collision orbits. Yes, they can be turned on a spaceship that approaches too nigh. However, a small object moving at high and unpredictable varying accelerations, it should evade them.”
The hair stood up over Nicol’s body. “Ah-h-h,” he whispered, “this is why you need me.”
“Correct. You, with the adaptability of a conscious mind and the gravity tolerance of a Terran, can endure those stresses and arrive fit for action.”
Despite all common sense and conscience, a thrill shot through Nicol. Challenge, risk, assertion of manhood against the machines!
“Once on the hull, you will take over the command turret.” Lirion spoke almost dispassionately. “Thereafter the ship is ours. I will bring in Verdea and use her to start it toward Proserpina.”
Logic nudged Nicol. “Wait,” he protested. “Doesn’t it make regular calls to Earth, verifying its position and that all’s well? That’s what I’d program.”
“Indeed it does. We have a dummy ready to put in the Hohmann orbit, little more than a transmitter, which will give the proper signals at the proper intervals. Meanwhile the ship itself will come to Proserpina, years before it is due at the treasury.”
Coldness waxed in Nicol. “What about the reaction when they realize? When the Teramind does?”
The answer was stark. “We will be prepared. But I do not expect the Federation to send a punitive expedition or missile barrage. Across yon reaches of space, it would be futile.”
And the Teramind was above anything so human as anger, Nicol thought. Its long-range countermove—Who among mortals had the brain to imagine what that might be?
And yet … when the Proserpinans had gained this power, had crossed the energy threshold beyond which they would be free to grow without bounds: they would themselves be the unforeseeable factor, the randomness and chaos, that could perhaps thwart every profound calculation.
Maybe, maybe. Most likely no human alive had enough life span left to witness the outcome.
“In the daycycles ahead, we have much to do, making ready,” Lirion said. “The instruments and weapons we carry must be taken out and emplaced, likewise the docking module whereby our prize is to be diverted. These tasks will require your strength and ability, Pilot Nicol. Moreover, you must learn your role, rehearse it, against every contingency, over and over. Eyach, you will be a-busied, you will earn your pay!”
Nicol tried to muster the resolution for he knew not what.
“Come,” said Lirion in a milder tone, “let me give you a preliminary look at the gear.”
They proceeded to the first hold. Its entry hatch lay inside a steel cylinder. Lirion took a three-centimeter disc from his beltpouch and applied it to the door. Nicol recognized it as an electronic key. Doubtless the lock responded to nothing else. The door slid open.
Lirion saw him observing and remarked, “This controls the locks to every compartment aboard. A precaution against possible … visitors … while Verdea was in Lunar orbit. Naturally, now most can be left unguarded.” He grinned. “Should you wish privacy in any cabin, a simple closing off will serve.”
The uppermost level held ordinary supplies and equipment. On the next deck down, the tour became very thorough, so much so that when they passed by a storage cabinet, Nicol asked, “What’s in there?”
Lirion’s response was unexpectedly sharp. “Naught of concern.”
A quick, mutinous impulse made Nicol say, “Really? I thought I was to learn everything.”
“Not altogether. It is of no concern to you, I say. Come along.” Lirion lengthened his stride.
Nicol obeyed. His guide kept him too busy to dwell on the matter. Nevertheless wonderment lingered. What did the cabinet hide?
Hand weapons, he suspected, for just-in-case use—for instance, if he should become troublesome.
CHAPTER 9
Time and the ship passed onward through space. Nicol’s waking hours went almost entirely to preparing himself. Sometimes, though, nature demanded he take a few of them off.
He lay with Falaire in her cabin. Like the others, it held little more than bed, washstand, closet, and computer terminal. However, she had activated the bulkheads. The moving, three-dimensional illusion of a forest that never was enclosed her and him. Trees rose out of night into a dappling, silvering radiance of clustered stars and a huge moon ringed with faceted diamonds. Feather fronds soughed to a breeze whose warmth bore odors like spice. The hueless light frosted her hair and limned her breasts above sliding shadows.
They had propped themselves up on pillows and been a while silent. Nicol stared into the dark. “Again you are troubled,” Falaire said at last. “You should not be,” so soon after making love. Her tone and look were neither affronted nor scornful, as he might have expected of a Lunarian. They seemed half compassionate.
“I’m sorry,” he answered. “I started thinking.”
“You are ever thinking, nay?”
He shrugged. “Bad habit.”
“Where went your thoughts this now?”
“Oh, never mind.”
“But I care, Jesse.” She laid her arm beneath his. “Tell me.”
He doubted that she was quite sincere. How could she be? They were of two different species, and the fact that they could never bring a child into being meant less than the unlikeness of their psyches. At best, he believed, she was mildly fond of him. Of course, that meant he could hope to get his pay in money, not a bullet or a knife thrust.
Bitterness broke through: “The usual. What else?”
“That you slew Seyant? It plagues you yet?”
Speech became difficult. He found he was trying to say what he had been unable to, and had no chance to, before. “I … can’t honestly be sorry he’s dead—”
Falaire laughed low and stroked his cheek.
“But to know I’m a murderer, that’s like a—a—” Groping, he seized on an archaic symbol. “—a cancer in me.”
“I’ve told you over and over, you were overwrought and then he overstressed you.”
“Who else will in the future?”
“Belike no one. You’re intelligent, you learn your lessons. Besides, wealth should prove an excellent buffer against irritations.”
“Will it? Are you sure? What can I do with it?”
“Whatever you choose that your Terran law allows, and I admit it is tolerant.”
He could not help himself, he must turn his face to hers and demand, “Then why are you fleeing from it? What drives your Scaine Croi?”
He felt her stiffen. “Well you know,” she replied curtly. “I said ‘Terran law.’ It is not for my race.”
Nicol wondered why he so often wondered what her Lunarians wanted, and what it might in the course of centuries mean to his kind. Well, why not put the question? “All right, you’re rebelling against the equilibrium society. But what would you make in its place for yourselves? What’s calling you to Proserpina, Falaire?”—to be forever lost to him.
As he might lose a splendid sickness?
“I know not,” she said. “There lies the greatness of it.”
“But it can’t just be chaos,” he protested. Lunarians knew in their bones how unforgiving space was. “There’s got to be some order, something—positive—”
“Eyach, yes,” she breathed. “I was not very certain of it when we embarked. We hear too scantily from yonder.” Nevertheless, she had embarked. Her voice strengthened. “But Lirion brought along not only vivifer scenes from Proserpina, such as you can play if you wish. He brought a dreambox program of life there. See you, he would be gone for many months, and this would relieve the barrenness of shipboard. Also, he foresaw the likelihood of one or two passengers coming back with him. From that program I have gained things I never quite had erstwh
ile, among them a clearer vision of my own desires.” She paused. “Would you care to essay it?”
Astonished, he hesitated. “I, I have to spend most of my time with studies and simulations for the … hijacking, you realize.”
“You can spare a bit. Indeed, I think it would be wise. To understand us better should hearten you the more.”
He remained uncertain. A vivifer was one thing, presenting a show in several sensory modes like this image that surrounded him. A dreambox was not just interactive, it directly stimulated the brain. His nervous system would experience and record everything as real; afterward, nothing but his other memories and his reason would tell him it had been hallucinatory. He had seldom indulged, for he knew the temptation, the potential addictiveness, was high for restless, dissatisfied minds.
Probably that wouldn’t be a danger in this case. The program had been prepared by and for Lunarians, aliens. But on that same account—
Falaire was watching him. The jeweled moonlight filled her big oblique eyes.
“Well—” He gulped. No, he would not be timid under that gaze. “Yes. Thank you.”
Thus it came to pass that he sought the tank, disrobed, fitted on the helmet and associated connections, lay down in a fluid that smoothly changed its temperature and specific gravity to match his, slipped away toward sleep—
He floated in space. At his distance from Earth, the sun was no more than the brightest of the stars. But they thronged heaven, and its bleak fierce luminance still equaled almost two full Lunas above Nauru. He could readily see Proserpina before him, and even trace out rills and ranges, darkling though the planetoid was.
Well-remembered science spoke to him. This was a piece from the core of a larger body that had orbited in what was now the Asteroid Belt, one of several fragmented by collisions over the eons. Jupiter had cast it into an enormous, eccentric new path, which passing stars drew higher yet. Some two thousand kilometers in diameter, it was chiefly nickel-iron with a stony crust; hence the surface gravity amounted to eighty-six percent of Luna’s, ample for the colonists. Craters were few because impacts were rare in these immensities, but a comet had once crashed, bringing a wealth of ices and organics, and other comets were in range of venturesome spacecraft—and others beyond them, uncounted millions, the Oort Cloud reaching so far that its outer fringes mingled with the clouds around neighbor suns, an archipelago to lead multimillennial explorers ever onward. … Lights gleamed across the globe, the radio band seethed, humans lived here.
The ghost of Jesse Nicol flew downward, swept low above, beheld roads and rails, turrets and towers, domes, blockhouses, ground vehicles and space-suited striders, spacefields, the comings and goings of ships.
He went through an airlock and a tunnel to the country underground. For a short while he felt he was well-nigh home in Tychopolis, amidst slender arches, plazas where trees rustled to forced winds and fountains sprang singing, secretive doorways marked with kin emblems, small curious shops and worksteads—No. Those were Lunarians who walked the streets, quietly and alone or in aloof pairs or trios. At many heels or on many wrists and shoulders went a wild variety of metamorphic beasts, counter-colored leopard, miniature griffin, giant white bat, rainbow-winged hawk, feathered serpent. … Music trilled, soared, and throbbed on no Terrestrial scale. A troupe of dancers, masked and plumed, preceded a Selenarch and his lady. The ceiling high above simulated a violet sky where flames played in the clouds.
Ranging about, Nicol found that he had not actually visited a city. Proserpina had none, simply nodes of culture and commerce. Most folk lived apart, families by themselves or in communities that were feudal units, except that “feudal” was too Earthly a concept. It could be anyplace from a forested cavern to a topside castle. At intervals he glimpsed a Terran. Circumstances through the decades had brought a few here to stay. What was their life, they the tiny, foreign, childless minority? He didn’t think Lunarians would deign to persecute them, but they were no part of the mainstream.
Their special abilities must be useful now and then in work for which robots were not adaptable enough. (If the Proserpinans had made sophotects at all, it was not evident, and any such machines were surely kept subordinate, their intelligence strictly limited.) Great engineering projects were under way, expansion of living space and capabilities, exploitation of resources, life overrunning this world and reaching out. They went with less noise and fuss than Terrans normally raised, but they went.
Nicol could, though, see how much more was needed, and how the work was beginning to starve for energy.
In heart-thudding eagerness, he set about sharing the life. He found he could not. It was Lunarian. When he tried to play an active role, the scenes dissolved into illogic and grotesquerie. The program could not accommodate him. He quit his efforts and became a passive, invisible observer.
He stood in taverns where captains returned from the comets related their odysseys. It was more than a quest for raw materials, it was shrewdness in the search and boldness in the seizing, it was danger—quakes, chasms, collapses, gravel storms, radiation leaks, equipment failures—and sometimes death, it was starlight aglisten on a mountain of ice sent tumbling toward Proserpina to become rain and rivers, it was comradeship (maybe more like a pride of lions than a band of Stone Age hunters) in striving and in victory. Wine splashed from crystal decanters, men and women flowed together. …
He watched a breakneck footrace over the thin-skinned crevasses of Iron Heath, a ceremony each year to honor the memory of Kaino, who first betrod it. (That was an Earth year; Proserpina’s was nearly two million times as long, its seasons and the myths of its people cosmic.)
He saw a duel to the death, swords beneath stars till one blade ripped the other suit and water vapor gushed out, white, swiftly gone, an icon of the departing spirit. He observed how the families negotiated peace and how the celebration and the mourning were equally grim.
He attended a drama that was half a soaring ballet, and did not understand the conventions but sensed incandescent emotion. Nor did he understand what the woodcarver who sat on a mossy bank under a glass cliff was shaping, but somehow the curves and lines of it spoke to him. He heard songs—
After he left the dreambox, for the rest of that daycycle everything around him seemed unreal, a parade of flat puppets. Only a nightwatch in which he drugged himself to sleep restored him to what he supposed was sanity.
CHAPTER 10
Finally, finally the sessions ended, text, vivifer, simulators, practice; and actual work started. First Nicol brought out the guns, with their instruments, and installed them on the hull. Then came the docking module at the ship’s nose, section by massive section. That was still more demanding.
Even so, as well schooled as he was, on top of his previous experience, the job proceeded rather smoothly. Robots did the bulk of the labor. He supervised, gave orders, made decisions, inspected and tested the results stage by stage, calibrated or adjusted, occasionally improvised, seldom exerted his full muscular strength. Often he need simply be present, aware of what went on but his mind free to wander.
Toward the end his musings began to take form, as complex molecules do in solution, their lesser units meeting randomly but making bonds according to the chemistry. There was no moment of revelation, yet there was a moment when he realized that something irreversible had taken place.
He stood on the hull, held fast by the magnetism his boots induced, a jetpack between his shoulders for when he must do more than walk from point to point, weightless because the ship went free on trajectory during these shifts. Sunlight had dwindled to a few percent of what fell on Luna, but his helmet must still darken to save his eyes whenever he happened to turn them that way. The matte surface shone mutedly, and shadows had slightly fuzzy edges. Illumination sufficed for ordinary purposes; other wise, his suit carried assorted lamps to brighten a close view. Two robots scuttled like large beetles or stiff octopuses over the girders of the docking module, attaching the collar
and the motors that would close it tight on the cargo ship’s after assembly. With the sun at his back, Nicol saw them as if they moved across an abyss where stars beyond counting burned and the Milky Way cataracted frosty through silence.
Splendor, he thought. Here is the boundlessness out of which all things and anything may grow.
His gaze drifted south until he found Alpha Centauri in the multitude. Yonder are download Guthrie and the descendants of his followers, he thought. Doomed with their planet, or hopeful? We hear rumors of strange developments—only rumors, for communication was always thin across four and a third light-years, and eventually it ceased. Or so the cybercosm tells us.
No matter, I imagine. Unreachably remote. Such an exodus cannot happen again, at least not for a very long time to come and probably never. Proserpina, though, is here in the Solar System.
Barely. Guarded by distance, it goes its own ways. Given the wellspring of power—antimatter—what eerinesses will it bring forth, and what may they provoke on Earth? Unforeseeable, uncontrollable, chaos in the scientific sense of the word. No wonder if the cybercosm wants to curb it. The very Teramind is troubled.
Hu! A shudder. Best stay home among humans, my kind of humans.
What have they? Contentment, yes, peace, prosperity, but also adventure and achievement. For most people. Their doings may be old in history, but to each generation they are new, a dawn, a boat, a mountain, an ancient monument, a young sweetheart, enough.
Not for me, with my irrational, inchoate yearnings. For me, the passions will be in wild sports and wilder carousals, a play of lightnings above the ultimate void, until one way or another I kill myself and the void takes me back.
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