Starfire a-2

by Charles Sheffield

  They had come to a fork in the passageway, a place where on one branch a flat hatch was set into the side of the tunnel. John released Maddy’s arm as the hatch began to slide open.

  “Won’t we need suits?” Maddy had been warned, over and over. Be careful. Just because you can open a door anywhere on Earth and find air on the other side doesn’t mean you can do the same thing on Sky City.

  “They’re available for emergencies. But today this whole segment is at pressure.”

  The hatch slid open. Beyond was the observation chamber, and Maddy could see that a few unsuited people were already there.

  “Make yourself comfortable.” John glanced at his watch. “Still a few minutes to go. Enjoy the show. The others can answer any questions.”

  “What about you? Aren’t you staying?”

  “I’d love to. But I’m on duty back inside.” He hesitated, then gave Maddy’s arm a gentle pat and stepped back through the hatch. “As a matter of fact, I’m the one who has to make the final decision on whether to move. Without me in the control chamber there’ll be no show.”

  The hatch closed. He was gone. Follow Hyslop all the time? Right, Gordy. Why don’t you tell me how I’m supposed to do that?

  Maddy turned. The observation chamber formed a sphere about twelve feet across. It was equipped with gimballed seats that could swing in any direction, and most of the wall consisted of large transparent ports. The chamber was so close to free fall that assignment of direction was a matter of convention. “Above” Maddy lay the ugly tangle of the power-generation facility. “Below” her the main body of Sky City obscured the stars and shield.

  The people in the chamber had all glanced at Maddy when she appeared, but now they were again looking outward. She was surprised to find that she recognized every one of them. Closest to her were two of Sky City’s engineering team. They must be “the others” that John had referred to: Lauren Stansfield, as ladylike and elegantly dressed as ever; beside her, Torrance Harbish, lank-haired and saturnine. They were clearly present for some official purpose, because they sat by an array of screens and monitoring devices. In front of the two engineers sat Wilmer Oldfield and Astarte Vjansander, their heads close. Finally, in front of them, hunched so that his chin rested on his chest, was Seth Parsigian. When Maddy moved forward to sit next to him he turned and glared.

  She had done what he asked her to, wandering endlessly around the dark corridors and hidden byways of Sky City. With no apparent results, but that was not her fault.

  “I thought you were going back to Earth,” she said softly.

  “Likewise.” He gave her a quick glance. “An’ we’re both still here. I think they stuck all the Earthsiders out here so we can’t get in the way when they goose the whole place. Look, sometime you and me gotta talk some more.”

  “What about?”

  “Stuff. New information. But we can’t do it here and now.” He jerked his head backward. “Too many ears.”

  Maddy doubted that. Wilmer Oldfield and Astarte Vjansander were making enough noise to cover anything that Seth said.

  They were arguing. Anyone sitting in front of them had no choice but to listen. Maybe that was why Seth was so annoyed.

  “Stands ter reason,” Astarte was saying. “Yer can calculate and theorize and speculate ’til your eyeballs pop, but you still won’t know ’less you measure. We have to do it.”

  “Do you think anyone but us cares?” Wilmer hissed. “Look at it from their point of view. We say, you have to build a system to detect and deflect particle bundles.”

  “They do, too. Or they’re dead.”

  “Of course they are. So they listen to us, and they buy what we say, and they change all their plans. What do you think they’ll do if now we say, by the way, deflect some of them particle bundles but not all of ’em because we need some? You can try that if you want, but not me. You’ll be lucky if they don’t grab you and whale your fat black butt.”

  “Yer think you’re the only one allowed ter do that, don’t yer, you dirty old bugger? You’re a fossil, Wilmer Oldfield. You’re all mouth and beer gut. Yer stopped thinking twenty years ago, and you don’t have the brains and nerve of a paralytic parrot.”

  “Better a paralytic parrot than a jumped-up outback madonna who thinks if she just wiggles her tits in Bruno Colombo’s face she can talk him into anything.”

  “Not Bruno Colombo, you soft old ponce. I said Nick Lopez.”

  “Colombo, Lopez, makes no difference. For starters, look at the bloody energy problem—”

  Maddy leaned over to Seth. “What’s all that about?”

  “Technical discussion.” Seth stared gloomily out of the port, to where a sunlit Earth loomed thirty times the size of a full Moon. “Far as I can tell, she wants to slow down a few of the bundles and catch them. Then they’d be able to study ’em and find out what sort of structure the bundles have. He’s telling her no one would ever agree. I’m with him. I want to get rid of particle bundles, not sit an’ play with ’em.”

  The musical chime of a bell interrupted his final words. It came from an invisible address system. “Two minutes,” said John Hyslop’s voice. “Station One?”

  There was a five-second silence, then an unfamiliar man’s reply: “Station One ready.”

  “Confirmed. Station Two?”

  “Station Two all set.” Lauren Stansfield’s voice came from directly behind Maddy, and a fraction of a second later the words were repeated from the address system.

  “Confirmed. Station Three?”

  As the count went on, Maddy wondered where the other stations were located. Some of them, from what John had said, must be at the points where the thrustors would fire; engineers there would be alert for buckling plates or failing seals. Lauren Stansfield and Torrance Harbish were doing the same thing, monitoring from their bird’s-eye view on the extended central axis.

  “All stations confirmed. Twenty seconds.”

  Maddy listened closely to John’s voice. It was calm, but with an odd undercurrent of excitement. She thought, That weirdo, he’s enjoying this. If I were a failing component, I’d get more of his attention than I do now. Engineers!

  The soft chime of the bell was back, counting off the final seconds. Everyone in the observation chamber fell silent. All of them were looking in the same direction: out and down, to where the mirror-matter thrustors sat on Sky City’s broad disk.

  The countdown was over. Maddy followed their gaze and saw nothing. That was surely the site of one of the thrustors; John had pointed it out to her on the Sky City hologram only two days ago. So why wasn’t it working?

  She stared again, and realized it was. Not the gaudy orange flare of rockets that you became used to in launches to Earth orbit, but a thin, near-invisible line of blue plasma stabbing out from the thrustor. Unless you followed it from its source you would never know it was there.

  Was that it? Was that frail, gossamer strand of light, with eleven more like it, supposed to hoist the million-ton bulk of Sky City a hundred thousand kilometers to the end of the shield? The idea seemed preposterous.

  Maddy turned. Lauren Stansfield and Torrance Harbish were calmly working their equipment. John Hyslop’s voice came again over the address system. “Station Seven, we’re showing an anomaly.”

  “Correct.” It was a man’s voice, one that Maddy did not recognize. “We have structural give in the main support beam. There’s no danger of overall failure, but it’s throwing the line of thrust off by a couple of degrees. Do you want us to try to do something about it locally?”

  “I don’t think so. Just wait a moment.” There was a pause of a few seconds, then John’s voice again. “General rotation will average most of it out. If we have to, we’ll compensate with a reduced thrust on the opposite side. Hold as you are.”

  “We’re holding.”

  “Station Two? Do you see anything?”

  Torrance Harbish said into his throat microphone, “We verify Station Seven off-lin
e thrust. Everything else is nominal.”

  “Noted. You may switch to automatic recording.”

  Harbish said, “Changeover in process.” And then, in a less formal tone, “Good show, John. We’re wrapping up here. Expect us in the control room in about five minutes.”

  Two more minutes, and he and Lauren Stansfield had set the scopes to automatic mode and left. Wilmer Oldfield and Astarte Vjansander followed, still bickering. Maddy turned to Seth Parsigian. “You want to talk?”

  “Not yet.” His sallow face was thoughtful. “Got some stuff I have to do first. I’ll come to your rooms when I’m ready to chitchat.”

  “If you do come, don’t do it late at night — I found out how much I hate that. And let me tell you how to reach my quarters.”

  “Don’t need to; I already know. But I got a question for you. Have you been workin’ on the Argos Group deliveries?”

  “Not up here. I worked deliveries down on Earth, years ago.”

  “That’s all right, then. See you.” Seth slipped out of his seat and was gone.

  Maddy was alone in the observation chamber. She could go back to her rooms and wait for Seth, but she lacked the will to do so. This was a better place for thinking, here with the great wheel of Sky City below her and the silent stars above.

  There was plenty to think about. Far beyond Sky City, out beyond the shield and more than four light-years away, lay the source of the particle storm. Maddy was in no danger. In principle, particle bundles spit out by the Alpha Centauri supernova could hit Sky City right this very minute, and she would be protected by the bulk of the massive structure.

  Each particle bundle averaged four trillion separate nuclei, but each bundle was still minute, its mass less than a billionth of a gram. Even so, each one packed enormous energy. Maddy had heard Astarte’s casual comment a few days earlier. “Yeah, they’re little, but yer don’t want ter underestimate them. They’re really smoking. Traveling close to a tenth of light speed — not really relativistic, but getting up there — and energy goes like the square of velocity. Every one of the little buggers packs as much of a wallop as a half-gram pellet traveling at a third of a kilometer of a second — that’s the speed of a bullet as it comes out of the muzzle of a handgun. A particle bundle can do a lot more damage to human tissue than a bullet, too, because the particles in it are all charged. If the bundle comes apart inside you when it hits, that’s still worse. We still don’t know if that will happen or not.”

  Maddy was protected by Sky City, but Earth was not. She looked to her left, where the hazy globe hung in the heavens. She could see the moving day-night boundary of the terminator, but the planet itself seemed exactly the same size as before. She held up her hand and measured the width of Earth between thumb and first finger. The space city was leaving its orbit, but you would never know by looking. Acceleration was imperceptible. It would be days before Earth began to shrink in the sky.

  And yet Maddy had the uneasy feeling that she was already infinitely far away. Out here she had been thrown into the company of people whose dreams and ambitions and daily lives were so far removed from her own that they seemed incomprehensible. Odder yet, listening to them had made her own ambitions just as hard to understand. For the first time since she was fifteen years old, Maddy was not consumed by the immediate pressures of the here and now. She had been provided with a fatal indulgence: time to think.

  Did she want to be the head of the Argos Group? Would she take Gordy Rolfe’s job, even if he (unlikely thought) went down on his knees and begged her?

  A month ago, she had thought she had the best job in the world and Gordy was a genius. He was still a genius in electronics and robotics, but more and more he was also an obvious lunatic. She had spent the past nine years trying to get close to him, doing whatever pleased him, clawing her way up the Argos Group ladder so that she could be a lunatic, too.

  Surely there had to be more to life than that.

  Drearily Maddy lifted out of her chair and began the solitary trek back to her rooms. The four o’clock blues. They came as easily in space as back on Earth. A few hours of sleep would probably make a difference.

  After that, sooner or later, would come the unsought meeting with Seth Parsigian. They had roamed Sky City together, with no result. What else did he want from her — and could she wriggle out of it?

  Probably not. Maddy saw before her the rough-cut hair, the bullet head, and the wary brown eyes. It was a close call, but in his own way Seth perched as far up the tree of lunacy as Gordy Rolfe.

  23

  From the private diary of Oliver Guest.

  I agreed to contact Seth Parsigian only in an emergency. There has been no emergency, and it is eight days since we last spoke to each other.

  For all I know, Seth could be dead, although I would hate to be the one who sought to bring about that event. Seth is a man with a tenacious hold on life.

  Where is he? Presumably he is still on Sky City, but I cannot even be sure of that. Occasionally I have donned the RV helmet, and been rewarded only with a view of the interior of his apartment. The jacket has obviously been left to hang on the wall. Wherever Seth is, and whatever he is doing, he feels no desire to share his experiences with me.

  That is an attitude with which I sympathize. I am impatient for results on the Sky City murders, but were Seth to call me at this instant I would be able to report negligible progress in my thinking. I know the murderer, yet I cannot suggest a foolproof method of capture.

  In truth, my thinking has been embarrassingly limited about the whole problem. My mind has been otherwise engaged. Although I can point to no one overriding concern, we have seen several distracting events.

  The term we offers its own ambiguities. The meaning extends from the single elevated personage — “We are not amused” — to a family or local group, and thence the whole human race — “We are not alone.”

  My comment concerning recent distracting events does not refer to our race, or, more correctly, our species, although it might well have. One might assume that the collective human mind of Earth would at this time be concentrated on the single issue of its own possible demise. The great swarm of particles generated by the Alpha Centauri supernova advances steadily, and no human power can halt or slow it. The most recent reports point to the arrival of a devastating sleet from space sooner than expected, just a few weeks or months from now. A new way of protecting Earth will be implemented, Sky City is already on the move toward the end of the space shield, the timing of everything is touch and go, and we (the species) could be wiped out or find our civilization sent back millennia.

  And so one looks around the world. Are people consumed by contemplation of cosmic catastrophe, obsessed by their own potential demise?

  I scanned the news leads this morning. Look on these words, ye mighty, and despair.

  Scientists Prove Alpha Centauri Supernova Was “Hand of God”

  According to Star Vjansander, sexy young Australian super physicist, a superbeing created the 2026 supernova of Alpha Centauri. The superbeing is being carried here in a cloud of superparticles and will shortly reach Earth.

  Ghost of Lucille DeNorville Haunts Sky City

  Psychic Marion Mentorian, in contact with the soul of the murder victim whose body was recently discovered, is asking funding from the wealthy DeNorville family to visit Space City and reveal the identity of the killer.

  Clones of Bill Gates, Queen Victoria, Announce Plans to Marry

  “True love knows no boundaries of space or time,” declares the smitten pair.

  Energy from Nothing, Electricity “Too Cheap to Meter”

  Inventor Raoul Segura today revealed a new form of engine that draws its power directly from the cosmic consciousness. He promises an era of “endless plenty and universal wealth” as soon as final tests are completed and government backing is guaranteed.

  The Missing Money: Where Did It Go?

  Officials of the Golden Ring consortium Fortune To
day pronounce themselves baffled by vanished assets that apparently exceed the total net worth of the organization. They promise a full investigation and a worldwide search for missing financial executive Lloyd Persil.

  In truth, we (the species we) can tolerate but a little reality. I wonder if we (the individual we that is I) can tolerate much more.

  In the last eight days, Paula and Amity reached menarche, apparently simultaneously; Gloria announced her undying love for and intention to marry Michael O’Brien, a witless seventeen-year-old from Derrybeg; and Beth, Dawn, and Willa disappeared from the castle.

  For Paula and Amity it was a natural and irreversible event. In the case of Gloria, I suspected that sanity would reassert itself in a month or two-she so surpasses her professed lifelong love in wit and intellect that it would be like marrying a monkey.

  Therefore, the last must be first. I had to concentrate on Beth, Dawn, and Willa. It was not until midday that I realized the three ten-year-olds were not present at lunch. Missing a meal was, especially for Willa, an unprecedented event and one that immediately caused me concern.

  For most people in the world, this was a problem with a simple and immediate solution. If I forwarded the girls’ digital DNA records to GSARS, the Global Search-And-Rescue System would tune its network to those signatures and use the body resonance patterns to locate each missing person to within twenty feet.

  There were, however, obvious problems. GSARS was integrated into GGDB, the General Global Data Base, and the complete DNA patterns of my darlings might already be stored there. What alarm bells would go off if the genome of a ten-year-old matched, nucleotide base by nucleotide base, the genome of a pubescent girl who had been murdered more than thirty years ago?

  I dared not take that risk. After a hurried lunch the other girls fanned out across the countryside to begin the search. I stayed behind, filled with my own presentiments. Had I made a mistake? Should I have asked for help from GSARS?