by Ian Wallace
“A bit wider, in fact. But all the ray-screening that they can provide will not stop the hotspot tip of a galactic jet-spume more than sixty thousand parsecs long punching in with the energy of a quarter-million stars. The ships can partially neutralize it, but that is a suicide mission, and the crews know it. We can’t hit the jet while it’s young and tender, because it will be growing in uptime which none of our ships other than your Sterbenräuber can penetrate—and Dino and Kolly still control the Sterbenräuber—or can you now countercontrol it?”
“Not yet. And I’m not progressing fast enough.”
“Well: by the time when the full-grown jet snarls into the present, it will already be big enough to engulf every ship in our fleet. By which time it won’t matter whether we still have a fleet or not.” “A bit disturbing, Tannen, eh, what?”
“Aye. But I know you, Croyd: you have a ploy or two in mind.”
“Perhaps. Value dubious. Purely from panic.”
“Care to tell me?”
“Better not. You would disapprove, and my concentration can do without that.”
“But can our mutual coordination do without that? Doesn’t each of us need to know what the other is going to do?”
“I think not, in this case.”
“Why not?”
“I have faith in you, Mister President. Do have faith in me, even when 1 depart from the book and improvise. And that is what you are going to have to do, because right now I don’t have the foggiest what I can do.”
“Always I have faith in you, Croyd, as you well know. But—shouldn’t you maybe order Captain Kedrin to kill him?”
“Whatever else I may do, I won’t do that. In the first place, I absolutely have to see whether he will go through with his plan. But even if he does, I shan’t have him killed, it would be his easy way out. Did I say out? that reminds me: I have to go now. Croyd out.”
CAPER FOUR
CLIMAX
FOR THE
JET-MASTER
14. Detonation
Celestially entranced Frey and Freya, clutching hands together in paired chairs on the Sterbenräuber President’s Bridge, peered into star-blurred space while the yacht plummeted two billion years into uptime; watched their Lesser Magellanic Cloud shrink and coalesce with its even smaller neighbor-cloud to form a single fishbowl-size galaxy with hazily shimmering mantle and fountains, while the Greater Magellanic Cloud shrank also to fishbowl size but remained separate at minuscule distance. The awed Hudibrasian bird-people observed the Flaherty-marshaled roboats maneuvering themselves into circular cyclotron-formation with respect to their yacht; the Zaubergers clung half-frightened as transcolor conferred upon them visual experience of Trigg-engendered energy-building radiation that whirled with ever-increasing intensity from boat to boat to ship to boat until its power was cosmic.
In semi-panic, the Zaubergers were closer together than ever they had been.
Dino and Kolly fed their guest couple at 1100 hours. By noon (ship’s arbitrary time), Frey was back on the President’s Bridge, accompanied only by Kolly—who could spare herself from the Operations Bridge which was pseudo-manned by command robots. Frey, and also Kolly to a lesser extent, braced selves for the start of the Frey-created supragalactic concert.
To Freya’s distress, she had been excluded from the President’s Bridge. Frey had said, not, “Dearest, 1 know you understand my need for solitude except for the necessary presence of Captain Kedrin,” but instead, “Get that moron out of here!” And yet, together this morning they had been so dose . .. Freya with a wounded shrug had accepted Dino’s invitation to be with him, in the President’s Living Suite which Dino had appropriated (with its holographic viewscreen-wall), while he in spectrally dimmed light played the ultra-stereophonic Zauberger flakes, therewith performing his deadly intergalactic surgery.
On the Dino/Freya viewscreen, as on the Frey/ Kolly viewscreen, shone the paired galaxies: the re-coalesced Lesser Cloud (or rather, this cloud before part of it had split away) and the Greater Cloud beyond it; while a small, still-farther-off shimmering represented the Sol Galaxy containing Erth at a time when microscopic life was only beginning to evolve. All was in resolution so perfect that the nearest among these galaxies was not a fuzzy cloud but was instead a clustering of individual stars like the rosettes in a 150-screen color halftone under close scrutiny by perfect eyes. Not even static crackling penetrated from outside; not cosmic-ray sound-spattering, not the universally prevalent noise-residue coming in from the primeval Big Bang; the visuals brooded in the silence of eternity.
Now zhounded-in sound: big frightening sound, a system of polyphonic cadenzas, a demonic multi-plounding: they could see the three Magellanic galaxies blurring under the onslaught, for the intership cyclotron swelled the power of this output with all the radiance of several million stars. Only within their yacht, of course, could the term sound be applied to what they were experiencing; in space, it was rekamatic bombardment—which transformers in their observation equipment downgraded to visual range, so that it became a multicolor assault; the watchers could almost descry individual rays as they rained themselves into the galaxies, vanishing as they penetrated and maniacally energized atoms.
After hours of subtly changing musical bombast, its effect on the tiny galactic triplets was beginning to become visible. Red stars were going pink, pink ones were yellowing, yellows were going blue-white, blue-white ones virgin white. Now the galaxies had entirely blurred into multicolor clouds; and then “HAUFENLAUGEN!” Frey rasped to Kolly by his side and through intercom to Dino and Freya. Each of the three galaxies had gone into color-mitosis! After a few minutes, during which all spectators held silent with eyeballs bulging, each galaxy had entirely twinned; and the new higher-frequency triplet was beginning to rise toward them leaving its lower-frequency mitotes behind.
Through intercom, Kolly told the Operations Bridge: “Hold spatial position for the moment, but adjust our downtiming speed so that we stay precisely this far ahead of those galactic mitotes; as of now, they are temporally gaining on us.” (In the computer, the Croyd mindself had now achieved control over a multiple system of pertinent inhibitors; but for now, Croyd desisted, allowing the command robots to comply with Kolly’s order.) Terrified Freya quavered: “Please tell me what is happening.”
To reassure her, tenderly Dino leaned toward her and slipped an arm around her torso between her upper and lower arms, explaining: “Your husband’s music, elaborating my themes, has profoundly stung the souls of those three dead galaxies, resurrecting three newborn living galaxies out of them. The new galaxies are speeding in time toward their own future, developing far faster than their parents did, overtaking our present. Within days the new galaxies would burst into now—except that there is one more thing to be done with them first. Listen to the change in the music, and watch!”
Having been a many-valued cacaphonous fugue, the music resolved itself into a rhythmic soughing of thrust-and-draw, thrust-and-draw, sounding like UGHhhh, HUHhhh, UGHhhh, HUHhhh, endlessly, with every UGHhhh contorting their guts. Gradually it became apparent that the three new-budded galaxies WERE NEARER TOGETHER! and the UGHhhh’s emerging from the Greatest Cloud now began to be semi-answered by a series of depressedly ecstatic HEHhhh, HEHhhh sigh-groans from the masochized smaller galaxies. The mesmerized onlookers watched the two least clouds conjoin and coalesce into a single new-germinal Lesser Cloud; and now Lesser was being sucked into Greater—sucked by Greater whose gravitational intensity was being pulsatingly enhanced by the Zauberger UGHhhh HUHhhh noise-grindings.
“Now dammit, Trigg,” fumed the voice of Zauberger, “you and I had agreed on a particular developmental order of these musical episodes to make a good overall composition, but you have viciously violated this order, and there will be critics who will guffaw and make mincemeat of these results—”
Dino suggested a thing to Kolly, who obliged with a split-screen effect that silenced Frey and was visible also to Freya. The left scree
n-half zoomed into the heart of the Greater Cloud, the right half into the center of the merged Lesser: the new-germinal clouds, not the old fossils. The watchers were primitively aroused by the intermix of supernova catastrophes intermingled with swirling black-hole hunger-darknesses in each of the two galactic nuclei; and always, the motion of the right-hand Lesser nucleus toward the left-hand Greater nucleus was perceptible…
Abolishing the screen-split, Sterbenräuber backed off a bit. Now the allured Lesser, all of it, was coming in upon the gravity-alluring Greater with the inevitability of a languid sperm drawn toward a gravid egg; the arousals of the spectators were almost sexual.
And then the galaxies were in contact.
And then…
Distressed Freya murmured: “Oh, my!” Leaning forward, biting all four thumbs, Frey grunted: “Siegenliegen!”
For the two galaxies had become one. Lesser was covered, or Lesser was devoured. Greater swelled. The video came in upon dinner-torpid Greater’s nucleus: already black holes were beginning to multiply, and so was the population of supernovae, in this frighteningly accelerated burgeoning.
Overwhelmed by the unexpectedly cosmic power of his own music, Frey seized Kolly with his two right arms and hugged her to him. Kolly submitted as per Dino’s instructions (and Croyd’s reinforcement); and presently, still cold-submitting, she reflected that there were body-mysteries about these Garbans people—whereupon she moistened her lips with a hard-pointed tongue and submitted softly.
In the President’s Suite, Dino was embracing Freya who had swooned against him; follow-up of this piquant trail was, however, for later. Just now he was mentally savoring his accomplishment of the most colossal legerdemain ever devised. It was done. The fossil galaxies had been made to spawn new buds of themselves; the newborn galaxies had merged, the amalgamation was fountaining vigorously, the fountaining was beginning to generate a central node of maximum energy which would surely become a jet—or, look: there already was the new jet’s thin ghosting.
It had been accomplished without warning Croyd ahead of the actuality. It was now not merely a logically done thing, it was an actually, kinetically done thing!
Wearily, Dino Trigg concluded that there was no real need to tell Croyd what was about to happen to Croyd’s galaxy. When the effects would start being apparent to Croyd, that would be when to explain. Darkside be damned!
15. Surprises in Bed
Early that morning, prior to the musical business of cosmic rearrangement, the Zaubergers had been ornately welcomed aboard the grinning yacht by Captain Kedrin accompanied by a small retinue of command and crew robots (among which, the former were androids). Valet robots had been assigned to the guests who in turn had been assigned to a three-room suite adjacent to the President’s Suite; each of their bedrooms opened onto their central salon and also had doors offering immediate access to a corridor. Neunbals, which Dino had brought along, had been assigned to the kitchen to ensure that the two Hudibrasians would be fed opulently in terms of their native tastes.
After the musical jet-engendering, Frey and Freya excused themselves from their respective companions, from Kolly in Frey’s case and from Dino in Freya’s case, in order to repair to their suite and prepare themselves for dinner. In their suite, they said little to each other (except that Frey kept testily knocking Freya’s choice of dress), but each was thinking profoundly. During that hour, in a Dino-Kolly session which had begun stormily and had gradually subsided into a relational oil slick, Dino had persuaded Kolly that the situation could be sehr amusante, and could grow mehr amusante, if Kolly would tickle her own fancy by getting to know Birdman Frey in ways that would have to be titillatingly perverse. Would Kolly have spat into Dino’s eye had not computerized Croyd requested (i.e., commanded) that she go along? interested Kolly wasn’t sure.
During hours in the stardomed lodge (real stars, but not clearly featuring Doradus because this was two billion years ago), die Zaubergers emitted ohs and ahs while replenishing their oh-ah energy with delicately blended wines given tang by an exotic assortment of small Hudibrasian undersea creatures immersible in a variety of piquant sauces. Thereafter, dinner was constituted by bewilderingly diversified dishes, inspired by Hudibras and by Erth, accompanied by more wines and seductive flakemusic.
Whereafter well-coached, not-unwilling Kolly found pretext to conduct Frey on a guided tour of the yacht. This freed Freya to move with Dino forward to the President’s Bridge for an hour of pre-prehistoric star-study with the swiftly growing jet-spume front and center. (Part of Dino’s musical jet-formation process had been to tilt the amalgamated galaxy so as to aim the jet precisely at Sol Galaxy.) A time came when Dino pointed out to Freya that there would be greater comfort in his private salon which had an equally intriguing celestial view. At first, Freya timidly demurred; but when Dino finger-stroked Freya’s back between the two pairs of shoulder-blades and queried what harm there could be in it, Freya yielded, although not without perturbation.
Affairs with Frey developed rather more readily than Kolly had anticipated: clearly, Cosmically Successful Performer Zauberger was hot, aggressively wanting Liebesmahl after his long period of self—driving under Dino’s musical carrot-and-whip. It was not so very long before tall Frey was gently massaging one-hand the upper back of diminutive Kolly while, standing side-by-side at ease in Frey’s boudoir, they studied stars, holding drinks in mutually leeward hands.
Encouraged by Kolly’s acceptance of the high massage, Frey added a hand a bit lower; and Kolly, making a moue, tabled her drink. Increasingly titillated, Frey shelved his, took both of Kolly’s hands in two of his own, engaged Kolly’s eyes, used his free hands to finger-touch Kolly’s chest while finger-touching also his own. Kolly, allowing her eyes to go dreamy, nodded just perceptibly and, drifting to the gravistat, turned gravity down to zero; whereafter she pushed off with her toes and drifted in semi-horizontal languor above Frey’s bed before the ravenous eyes of Frey—who aggressively pursued the issue, until at white heat, floating all but naked above eiderdown-recumbent Kolly, deliciously Frey removed from Kolly the ultimate small garment and paused and stared down, while Kolly came alert to the shocked change in the Zauberger facial expression and the quivering distress of the Zauberger antennae.
Frey thrust herself (and her it was, in the semantics of Erth rather than the usages of Hudibras) up and away from Kolly so rapidly that her shoulder-blades gently kissed the cabin ceiling, while Kolly came up off her bed and stood naked upon it with her startled-inquiring face turned up to desperately confused Frey.
A possibility occurred to Kolly. She reached up, grasped the final small Zauberger garment, yanked it legward to bare what counted and gaped at the what, then gaped at the contorted Zauberger face and clapped a hand over her mouth to hide a grin and stifle a laugh and, after moments of struggle, achieved self-control, composed her face into tenderness, uncovered her mouth so that Frey could see its nevertheless-desire, and raised both arms high inviting Frey to come into her embrace.
For, later Kolly semi-reasoned within herself, such misunderstandings are perfectly comprehensible when there are confusions of linguistics and usages as between alien cultures. For Hudibras, Dino and Frey are tall and dominant and therefore male, while Freya and I are small and yielding—at least,I yield to Dino, damn him—and therefore female. It just goes to show that the question, who is female and who is male, ends up as a matter of symbolic label-convention; and what really counts is, who has the babies. Well, all right:Iundertook the duty of having perverse interspecies pleasure, andIgot a surprising extra dimension of it; nobody loses, except…
Hey: wonder how that sweet little Freya will react when that arrantly heterosexual sexist paranoid Dino discovers the truth…
Oho: more to the point—when Dino learns the truth and explodes, HOW will he explode?
While Kolly was tempting Frey, elsewhere the Dino-Freya romance was progressing like an intimate minuet. Freya continued deliciously timid in his presen
ce; and because each Dino-touch caused small Frau Zauberger to shiver with some feeling or other while continuing to cling, Dino’s passion exceeded anything he had known since the very first night with Kolly. They were midair-floating, Dino having considerately turned down the cabin gravistat—down, but not wholly off: a minim of gravity is piquant.
With climax near-distantly desirable, Freya uttered small: “o dino—o dino—dino, until now i have never been unfaithful to frey—” Caressing Freya, Lover Trigg low-hummed into Freya’s ear: “Never think of this as infidelity; think of it as high romance.” Instantly it quenched Freya’s guilt: Frau Zauberger went all helpless, relaxing, enjoying until deliciously Dino plucked away from Freya’s loins the ultimate small garment and paused and stared down, while Freya came alert to the shocked change in the facial expression of militantly heterosexual mother-worshiper Dino Trigg-Volcanic fury hot-flowed, engulfing the Trigg-brain, and his rigid right hand all the way up arm into shoulder and back swung in a hard arc backhand-smashing into Freya’s head which cracked to its left, and he felt the crunch and heard-felt the neck snap, and Freya, surprised dead eyes wide open, was catapulted across cabin to bounce rubbery off a bulkhead while the Dino-body in reaction went into midair spin until with a small series of convulsive twists he stopped his own spinning and in profound reactive distress contemplated the now-purposeless drifting of the slaughtered Freya-body.
Twisting himself convulsively in midair, Dino swam to the gravistat and turned it up, dropping Freya heavily on the bed and himself upright on the cabin floor. He stared down at dead Freya whose groin displayed nothing at all that was anything but male in the semantic connotations of Erth or most planets that Dino knew about. Now it was ghastly apparent that Freya’s equipment was female only in the semantics of Hudibras.
