Orbitsville Trilogy

by Bob Shaw

  "Wiped them!" Mathieu conveyed puzzlement. "Do you mean…?"

  "Yeah—total brain scour. Didn't you know?"

  "No, I…" Mathieu paused, sensitive to the question. "How the hell would I know? I've been sitting in my…"

  Costain shook his head. "It's all over the building, Gerald. You'll have to make a statement."

  "I'm on my way down." Mathieu stood up as Costain's image dissolved. He went to the door, smoothing his hair and making slight adjustments to the hang of his jacket. It was important for him to look his best when going into a difficult situation, and facing up to Dallen was going to be the worst ever, the ultimate bad scene. The elevator was waiting, and with almost no lapse of time he was in the lobby, working his way through barriers of people, all of whom were facing the door of a room which had once been used by commissionaires, back in the days when Madison had been booming. Vik Costain, as though telepathically forewarned, opened the door as Mathieu reached it, quickly drew him inside and clicked the lock.

  "We're all going to roast over this one," Costain said, the folds of his grey face set like rippled lava. "Frank has been griping about security for months."

  "I know," Mathieu mumbled, moving further into the room to become part of its central tableau. Cona Dallen was stretched out on her back on the floor, hands making random little pawing movements in the air. Her lightweight saffron dress was in disarray, showing her conical thighs, but the display was asexual because her face was blank and serene, unmarked by identity, and her eyes were those of a baby—bright, humorous, uncomprehending. A bubbled ribbon of saliva ran from one corner of her mouth. Garry Dallen was kneeling beside her, rocking gently with his son gathered in his arms, his face hidden in the boy's hair. Mathieu said a silent farewell to joy.

  Costain touched Mathieu's arm. "Who would do a thing like this?"

  "I know who did it," Dallen announced in a leaden, abstracted voice. He raised his head and slowly looked around the half-dozen men in the room. Mathieu's heart juddered to a standstill as the grey, tear-lensed eyes locked with is own, but—miraculously—Dallen's gaze wandered away from him without pause. It was as if they had become strangers.

  "I did this," Dallen continued.

  One of the policemen in the group moved uneasily. "Garry, I don't think you should…"

  Dallen silenced him with a look. "I brought my family to this place … I handled the job wrong … pushed too hard … ignored the threats…" A muscular spasm pulled his mouth downwards at the corners, producing a caricature of an urchin who had just been thrashed, and when he spoke each word was the snapping of a glass rod. "Why couldn't I have been with them? I don't deserve a brain…"

  "I'm going to see what's holding the ambulance," Costain said, striding to the door.

  "Good idea." Mathieu went through the doorway on the heels of the older man, anxious to leave the emotional autoclave of the room. Instead of following Costain to the lobby's outer doors he turned right along the corridor and went into a washroom. It was cool and empty, heavily perfumed with soap. In the furtive privacy of a cubicle he took the gold pen from his pocket, reset the point and drew it across his tongue, making a line twice as long as was usual for him.

  I might be lucky, he thought. Perhaps I'm going to get away with it.

  He closed his eyes retreating inwards, waiting for chemical absolution.

  Chapter 5

  The accident occurred about eighty minutes into the flight.

  Jean Antony's first intimation that something serious was happening came when instrumentation panels began to go dead without any accompanying warning signals. Her Type 83 freighter was more than a century old and some of its systems were afflicted with a kind of electronic gangrene, but the fault indicator circuits were supposed to be in good shape. The fact that some had failed could be trivial or catastrophic. She knew it could involve as little as an annoying extra maintenance charge, or as much as…

  Dear God! The prayer was instinctive, unconnected with religious belief. Dear God, don't let this cargo kill me.

  The ship's antiquated ion thrusters were creating only a fifth of normal gravity, enabling Jean to cross the control gallery in one floating stride. She glanced at the master status indicator—an array of glowing block diagrams, most of them in the form of longitudinal sections through the hull—and saw a spreading blackness which could only mean that a Bessemon-D container had ruptured in the cargo hold. For a moment she allowed herself to feel shocked at the sheer unfairness of what had happened, a series of supposedly perfect fail-safe devices failing so dangerously, then came the realisation that she was lingering in a spacecraft which could literally be dissolving around her.

  Bessemon-D was a solvent gas which had displaced nine-tenths of the capital equipment traditionally associated with metal foundries. In normal circumstances it was inimical to life, but drifting free within a spacecraft it was capable of ending Jean Antony's existence in a dozen different ways. Destruction of the pressure hull was the obvious danger, but for all she knew the first lethal wisps could already be swirling towards her through ventilation ducts, speeded on their way by plastic impellers. There was no time to waste.

  "Code Zero-zero-one!" she shouted as she hurled herself towards the emergency capsule compartment. No acknowledgement came from the on-board computer. As she opened the door to the compartment most of the lights on the control panel began to flicker and a sudden queasiness in her stomach told her the ship's thrust controllers were behaving erratically. She stepped into the capsule and allowed the door to slam and seal behind her. A shuddering unlike anything she had previously encountered in twenty years of astrogation stirred the capsule into life, bringing with it the conviction that it was too late to escape whatever fate was overtaking the mother ship. The capsule's activator button sprang into ruby brilliance, splintering the claustrophobic darkness.

  Jean hit the button with the heel of her right hand. There was an explosion, a wrenching jolt and a second later she was adrift in space, only fifty kilometres above the inconceivable vastness of Orbitsville.

  Jean's first reflexive action was to check that the capsule's radio beacon was functioning properly. She located the pulsing green rectangle on the miniature instrument panel, touched it for reassurance, then raised her eyes to see how the doomed freighter was faring. The coffin-sized capsule had ail-round visibility, and from its viewpoint the universe was divided into two equal parts. "Above" was a hemisphere of stars, many of them individually brilliant against fainter swarms and the frozen luminous clouds of the Milky Way; "below" there appeared to be nothing.

  In spite of her years of plying the two-hundred-plus equatorial portals, Jean's brain still tended to interpret the scene as though she were in a low-flying plane which was skimming the surface of a dark ocean. She scanned the region directly below the capsule, expecting to pick out the lights of the freighter at once, and was surprised and only faintly alarmed to observe unbroken night. Did it mean that every power source on the ship had failed, dousing even the astrogation lights?

  That can't be, she told herself. Not so soon.

  She frowned, still puzzled rather than worried, turning her head from side to side to take in larger areas of the blackness below her. Then, from a corner of her eye, she became aware of something huge occulting the star fields above her. She twisted around in the confined space and verified what the first intuitive shock had already told her—that the opaque mass was the freighter sliding ahead on its own course.

  Refusing to allow herself to panic, Jean studied the larger vessel and tried to decide what had gone wrong with the escape. The answer came quickly. Astrogation and marker lights were slipping across the long silhouette at increasing speed, which meant that the disfunction of its thrust controllers had caused the ship to rotate. And instead of the capsule having been ejected upwards, to carry it into space and clear of the equatorial trade lanes, it had been fired downwards in the direction of Orbitsville. She was bound for a grazing collision w
ith the unseen surface a mere fifty kilometres below.

  Until that moment Jean's principal concern had been the loss of the Atkinson Grimshaw, the old ship—named after a favourite Victorian artist—which was on the point of annihilating both itself and most of her assets. With the skimpiness of her insurance coverage, the incident probably meant the end of the one-woman transport business she had been operating for eight years, ever since her mother had died, but now such considerations were trivial. The capsule was travelling downwards at about forty kilometres an hour, and also had a forward component of about thirty thousand—the speed at which it had parted company with the ship. These velocities, relative to the Orbitsville shell, were small compared to normal operational speeds, but they were enough to destroy the thin-walled capsule in the collision which was due in approximately seventy-five minutes.

  Life or death, for her, had become a question of how long it would take the rescue services to react.

  At the age of forty, Jean had retained the instinctive belief in immortality which comes from good health, good looks, an active intelligence and a satisfying life style. But now, floating in silence above the invisible vastness of the Big O's outer surface, she had to weigh up the chances of surviving the day, knowing in advance that the odds were not in her favour.

  Orbitsville had three bands of circular portals—one at its equator, one in each of the northern and southern hemispheres. Those on the equator, spaced at intervals of roughly five-million kilometres, had been given the identification numbers 1 to 207, counting east from the portal which had first been penetrated by Vance Garamond and the crew of his SEA flickerwing. Thriving ports and cities had subsequently sprung up around many of the entrances during the great migrations from Earth, and at that time the equatorial trade lanes had been busy and well regulated. But those cities had been built almost from force of habit, dying manifestations of mankind's need for safe huddling places. With unlimited territory available there was no longer any need for competition, conflict or defence. The millions from Earth had been effortlessly absorbed, lured by Orbitsville's endless savannahs, and—as quickly as they were created—many cities had been abandoned, echoing the fate of their forebears on the home world.

  During Jean's career the interportal space traffic had dwindled drastically, and therein lay the threat to her life. She had been flying east from 156 to another still-viable industrial centre at 183. Eighty minutes into the flight she was, as a consequence of the freighter's puny acceleration, only twenty-thousand kilometres from her starting point, and in the old days would quickly have been reached by the high-performance patrol vessels monitoring the traffic around each portal. In the last decade of the 23rd Century, however, the emergency services had been pared down to the minimum and in any case were accustomed to the leisurely type of recovery mission which would have been effective had Jean been ejected upwards. She had a conviction that nobody would even notice anything unusual about her distress signal until it was too late.

  She stared down into the featureless blackness and tried to see it as an incredibly hard wall which was rushing upwards with deadly speed. The air circulating around her smelted strongly of rubber and plastics, a reminder that the capsule was new, having been installed a year earlier in compliance with safety regulations. She almost smiled at the irony involved. The old capsule had been equipped with full radio communication and a Covell propulsion unit—either of which could have been enough in her present circumstance to make the difference between living and dying.

  Brave new world! Another indication that humans bad turned their backs on space travel, that the dispersal of whole cultures could be followed by pointing telescopes into the night skies of the Big O's interior, charting the firefly glows of their caravans and camps…

  As the minutes went by Jean's fear increased. A normal reaction would have been to scan the band of sky close to the Orbitsville horizon in the hope of seeing marker lights drawing near, but she was unable to drag her gaze from the spurious depths below. How far away was the shell now? Could the altimeter have been as haywire as everything else on the Atkinson Grimshaw, giving an inflated reading? Would the capsule's flashing beacons produce even the faintest smudge of reflection in the instant before the collision? Mesmerised, unblinking, Jean stared into the crawling darkness, trying to penetrate screens of after-images to reach the terrible reality beyond.

  She had been that way for some time, her lips drawn into a unconscious grimace, when wonder intervened.

  First appearing on the extreme left, a thin line of green radiance swept across the vastness of Orbitsville, moving so quickly from east to west that it crossed her entire field of view in less than a second.

  Jean gave a sharp scream, keyed up to believe that any change in the unvarying blackness ahead signalled the final impact, then as quietness and stillness returned—as life continued—it began to dawn on her that she had witnessed the unthinkable. The fleeting green meridian had been a genuine phenomenon, an objective reality.

  There had been a change in the enigmatic material of the Orbitsville shell.

  Facing imminent death though she was, Jean felt a near-blasphemous excitement. Spherology was the name given to the science which had been born two centuries earlier when teams had first begun to study the shell material, and it was a discipline which was characterised by total lack of success. Even when viewed through a quark microscope the material appeared continuous—an embodiment of the pre-Democritus concept of matter—and in two-hundred years of concentrated effort no researcher had been able to make the slightest scratch on it or to alter it in any way. After millions of man-hours of study, spherologists knew the material's thickness, its albedo, its index of friction, and very little more.

  It was, however, a basic tenet of their calling that the shell was immutable. And Jean Antony—swinging ever closer to it in the lonely darkness of her collision course—had seen a strange and transient stirring of life, like the first pulse of an embryo heart.

  The attendant awe—for one who had spent half a lifetime flying that illusory black ocean—almost transcended the fear of death.

  Chapter 6

  In five weeks, with some medical assistance, Cona Dallen had learned to walk and to feed herself, and had almost completed her toilet training. According to Roy Picciano, senior physician for the community, her progress had been excellent—at least as good as would have been achieved had she been in full-time care at the Madison clinic. But as the sheer physical burden of looking after an adult-sized baby had gradually eased, the mental wear and tear on Garry Dallen had increased.

  At first he had been too numbed by exhaustion and delayed shock even to consider Picciano's prognostication and advice. There had, for example, been no room in his mind for the monstrous suggestion that Cona might never again be able to speak. Her brain and nerve connections and muscles were all there, intact, and he—Garry Dallen, the man who never made a mistake—knew that by sheer perseverance and the force of his own will he would induce that delicate apparatus to function properly again.

  The simple mind-filling truth which seemed to elude all doctors was that their science was based on studies of generalised humanity, on what had happened to anonymous masses of commonplace people, whereas in this case the subject was a unique and special entity who was central to Dallen's unique and special existence. Ordinary rules could not apply. Not this time.

  The first unmanning blow had been the discovery that it was necessary for Cona and Mikel to live separately, because she was a real threat to the boy's safety. Cona is a baby again, had been the gist of Picciano's comments. She's locked in the true psychosis of the first weeks of infancy, unable to distinguish between herself and the outside world, with a feeling range which is limited to anger, pleasure, pain and fear. All babies react with violent anger when frustrated, especially where food is concerned. Given the necessary size and strength any infant would kill the mother who withdrew the teat too soon or who thwarted any other infantile
desire. Cona is big and strong, particularly in comparison to Mikel, and one moment of rage is all it would take.

  Dallen never failed to be dismayed each time that sudden fury asserted itself, usually over matters of diet. Cona had always had a strong appetite, and as a thinking adult had barely managed to control her weight by avoiding sweet and starchy foods. The new Cona, even after she had learned to chew, would have been content to subsist on nothing but chocolate and ice cream, and there were clashes when he tried to persuade her otherwise. Initially she had shown her anger by rolling on the floor and screaming, a sound which daunted him both with its volume and incoherence. At a later stage, when co-ordination and spatial awareness had developed, she had once succeeded in striking him on the face. The blow had stung, but the real pain had come in the swiftness of her transition from rage to crowing happiness as he had relaxed his grip on a disputed candy bar.

  The message had been clear—Cona Dallen doesn't live here anymore—and it had caused him to back away, timorously, shaking his head in denial…

  When Dallen answered the door chimes he was surprised to see Roy Picciano in place of the voluntary worker he had been expecting. It was mid-morning on a Tuesday and he had been planning some necessary shopping before going to the clinic to visit Mikel.

  "Betti has been delayed for a while, so I offered to fill in for her," Picciano said, his smile showing the gold fillings which had again become fashionable. He was a bushy-haired, tanned man of about fifty whose preference for lightweight sports clothes created the impression that all his professional appointments were sandwiched between rounds of golf.

  "Thanks, Roy." Dallen stepped back to let the doctor come in. "I could have waited, you know."

  "It's no trouble. Besides, I wanted to have a look at my patients."

  Dallen noticed the use of the plural. "I'm all right."