Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  “Twenty-thousand and three. It’s really pretty stable,” Alice replied, “I’m a little surprised.”

  “How’s the navicom?” Steel asked.

  “We’re getting a good position, reception is clear. I’ve let us drift a little bit south so I can head back north into the hook. It will give us a better grapple.”

  Looking down out of the port I could see Manlung and the pass directly below us. Eight-thousand meters below us. Suddenly a white cloud blossomed on the east face that expanded and expanded.

  “Hmm,” I said to Yuri, pointing down, “Avalanche. A big one.”

  Yuri looked down as well. “Yeah,” he said, “Prime’s starting to heat up the mountains.”

  “Five minutes,” Marcus said.

  I looked at Yuri, at Jemal, at Archie, at Steel. All of them were calm, the sort of iron calm that is imposed by will and discipline. I hoped I looked the same. Just in case I didn’t, I looked out the window again.

  “Wow,” I said, “Look at all the clouds starting to form over the mountains.” It was startling how fast a row of cumulus had puffed up over the peaks. Fluffy white clouds, but you could practically see them growing.

  “Mountains that big make their own weather,” Yuri said.

  “One minute,” Marcus announced, “Get ready.”

  I put my head back on the headrest and snuggled down into the couch. Everyone else did the same.

  “Thirty seconds,” Marcus said. “Altitude?”

  “In the groove,” came Alice’s reply. “Twenty-thousand and two.”

  “Close enough,” said Marcus. Steel echoed him. Yuri nodded at me and smiled.

  There was a bang like we hit something. I could see the gasbag above me, now fully expanded, shudder and ripple. And I felt a little heavier.

  “Oh, skag!” Alice said, “We’ve hit a thermal. We’re rising. Twenty-thousand twenty. Twenty-thousand thirty.”

  “Lose some hydrogen,” Marcus said tersely.

  “I am, I am!” said Alice, “We’re going to be high. Twenty-thousand fifty. Damn.”

  “Here it comes!” Marcus said, “Everybody hang on!”

  A superfluous statement if I’d ever heard one. I never saw the hook. The gasbag above me simply collapsed like a falling soufflé and turned into a bright orange fireball. But I couldn’t really worry about it because I weighed over five hundred kilos and was fighting for breath. Burning fabric slapped down onto the top of the gondola like it had been thrown by a really angry giant, then was just as violently torn away. I could see the hook then, digging into the upper gas bag so deeply it looked like two bags; then it, too, collapsed and exploded. There was an instant when we were falling and then a huge CRACK! as the hook finally lodged on the handle. The two opposing expansion bells of its maneuvering rockets made it look like it was wearing a bow-tie.

  “We’re on!” Marcus’ voice was strained with gee forces.

  The remaining tatters of the upper bag rained past us at amazing velocity. Through the shower of flaming remnants and the red haze induced by my eyeballs flattening into my skull I could see the sky turn from deep blue to purple to black as the stars came out. I started to notice a noise, too, a high sibilance. It seemed to be coming from directly behind me.

  I didn’t have to wonder about it long. Marcus’ strained voice announced in the headphones of my helmet, “We’re losing cabin pressure.”

  “How fast?” Steel gritted out.

  “We’re down to—uh—one and a half atmospheres.”

  “How long until we release?” she gasped.

  “Four minutes.”

  Four minutes lasts forever when you weigh half a ton, but we could clock our progress by watching my erstwhile home recede—not below us, but above; the sensation of down was the direction opposite the tether. We were swinging up in a semi-circle around the Lightdancer as she in turn orbited Vesper. We would reach the top of our rotation just before the ship passed under the south pole, at which point Tamika would release the hook, sending us hurtling toward Golgotha at twice orbital velocity. But the Lightdancer was much too far away to see. As we approached the top of our arc it seemed like we were dangling directly from Vesper like a chest-crushingly heavy chandelier.

  Then we saw it: the rusty, banded immensity of Golgotha rising over the southern ice cap, attended by her two inner moons. Prime was off to the right with Jumbo several degrees higher. The rest of the sky was strewn with stars. The hook released and we were weightless.

  Just like that. From five hundred kilos to nothing—like we’d stepped off the side of a building. We were falling through space at ten klicks a second. Falling! I grabbed unnecessarily for the arms of my acceleration couch. How long had it been since I’d been weightless? I had no idea, but it had to have been over a millennium. Space travel is so smooth these days, but not with Steel and company.

  “We’re down to half an atmosphere,” Marcus said, “Switch to your suit air.”

  Great. I found the panel on my left wrist and clicked the ‘internal’ button. Everyone else did the same. I saw Archie reach over and do Ham’s for him. Drake had always been on his own air supply. The hissing was dying away, but that was probably because we were running out of air.

  I felt a sharp pang of homesickness for something I’d never seen. I was leaving Vesper behind, but that wasn’t all. The Lightdancer would have to make another full orbit around Vesper to give Tamika time to reel in the tether before she could kick in her graviton impellers to follow us and (hopefully) pick us up before we ran out of air. It occurred to me that being on the wrong end of two thousand kilometers of high-tech rope might be as close as I would ever get to Steel’s starship.

  What do you do while you’re hoping you have enough air to last until you get inside an actual, bona fide space craft? I checked my air supply. Then I checked it again. Then I looked over at Yuri who said something along the lines of “We’ll be fine.” Then I checked it again.

  There was no way for us to maneuver now that we were in space; the blimp’s propellers were now just decoration. We’d picked up a slow tumble when the hook released us and we would continue to tumble until the Lightdancer grappled us, turning over every quarter of an hour or so. It was a little disorienting, a little nauseating, but it meant the view changed out the window. I caught a glimpse of the auroras around the south pole of Vesper. Very pretty. Made me think of magnetic fields and radiation belts and radiation shielding and how much a blimp gondola would have. Not much, I figured. Oh, well, I’d suffocate long before radiation sickness could get me.

  It was a long ride.

  “Rendezvous in five minutes.” Marcus’ voice was calm. The Lightdancer was still over a kilometer away, but we could see her easily. She was a pretty ship. A conventional freewheeler, she was over a kilometer long—a sleek, tapered, conical needle covered with a flat black coating of ablative material. I could see that the habitation module was extended. A brief cylinder of lighted windows interrupted the lines of the cone just forward of the stern. Her torch was retracted; it would extend another five hundred meters out the stern when it was lit. The only thing that differentiated her from other ships like her was the gap right at her center of gravity that held the skyhook spool.

  As we got closer to her I began to see some scoring on the hull. I asked Yuri about it. He started to speak, then he glanced at Steel and she answered me:

  “When Drake got sick he had to drop out of the engine. We were still thirty light years out.”

  Wow. The middle of nowhere. Then it struck me, they couldn’t freewheel with an unbalanced engine; you had to have all the components in place. “You traveled thirty light years in rational space?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “At relativistic speeds?”

  “That’s right.”

  No wonder there was scoring. At close to the speed of light even hydrogen atoms pack a pretty good wallop when they hit you, and though the average density of interstellar space is only around one
atom per cubic centimeter, you go through an awful lot of cubic centimeters in thirty light years, and not all cubic centimeters conform to the average. It was why all starships were long and narrow and covered with an ablative coating. Back in the late twenties, when my wife and I had headed out to Barnard’s Star, they’d stopped in the Kuiper Belt along the way to pick up a fair-sized comet nucleus, just to have something in front of us to get worn away, and that trip was under six light years.

  Then I thought, these people have been out of touch for thirty years. You couldn’t communicate at relativistic speeds. Time dilation made it impossible to carry on a meaningful temporal relationship. It’s what made freewheeling possible. But you couldn’t talk to anyone when one of your seconds took a couple of days or even weeks for everyone else poking along at planetary speeds. And it’s not like there were any other ships moving close to light-speed that you could synch up with. Why would there be? It was dangerous to travel through rational space at that kind of velocity; we lost enough ships in the early days to prove that. No, you accelerated up to just under the speed of light and immediately started to freewheel, and when you stopped freewheeling you decelerated just as quickly.

  Only the Lightdancer hadn’t. I mean, she hadn’t been outrageously lucky. Interstellar space really is pretty empty, but if she’d hit anything of any size—like, say, the size of a grain of sand—there wouldn’t have been much of anything left but gamma rays.

  But what else could you do if part of your engine got sick? No one got sick anymore, not like that, if they did they just got on the net and got better again. If someone was close to re-booting and having real health problems you sure didn’t hire them as a crewman. But suppose you did lose a crewman somehow, as the Lightdancer evidently had. You’re forced to drop immediately back into rational space, traveling so close to the speed of light that you could shake hands with passing photons. Do you decelerate to a safe speed? No one carried enough supplies to spend years and years in transit; it just wasn’t a situation that arose anymore. And suppose you did slow down enough to significantly increase your chances of surviving a major impact? At ten per cent of c it would take three hundred years to make that same thirty light-year journey, with no noticeable time dilation to make it seem shorter. Even with re-booting and Realities on the net and any other creative way you could come up with to pass the time, could you make it three centuries cooped up with seven other people on a starship? No, you’d do what Steel and her crew had done—take your chances and not decelerate until you were close to a populated star system.

  What the hell could be wrong with Drake? There was only one thing I could think of, and I didn’t want to think of it.

  Archie said, “He’s convulsing again. We’ve got to get him under acceleration.”

  I turned around to look at her. She was floating over Drake’s pod, peering in the window. I looked forward at Steel.

  “He never did well in weightlessness,” she said to me. “That’s why I had to bring him down to the surface. I wanted him to be as comfortable as possible.” She looked unutterably sad. Then she got on her system. “Tamika, get underway as soon as we’ve docked.” She looked back at Drake’s pod again.

  We passed between the fore and aft sections of the hull that slid closed behind us. We were aboard the Lightdancer.

  Part II

  F. S. Lightdancer

  Chapter 9

  As soon as the hull closed, large davits swung out from the bulkhead just aft of the tether spool to grab and secure us. Weight hit us as Tamika kicked in the impellers. It seemed like she accelerated at about a standard gee; I felt about a third again as heavy as on Vesper.

  The bulkhead became the floor. The huge tether spool that had stretched out beside us as we entered the ship now loomed over us, filling the diameter of the Lightdancer for a hundred meters. We unstrapped and carried Drake’s pod out of the gondola and across the metal deck to a large airlock that led to the interior of the pressure hull. Even though Drake stopped convulsing as soon as we had weight, Steel was in a hurry to get him to the medical bay. We didn’t even stop to take off our pressure suits after the lock cycled. Carrying him down a short corridor brought us to a lift that descended the third of a kilometer to the habitation module.

  Once again Steel’s money was in evidence. The ship was appointed well. Not lavishly, but all of the fittings and components were top of the line.

  We carried Drake’s pod into the medical bay and set it on the examination table. Archie shooed us out and sealed the bay behind her. Marcus caught Steel’s eye and said, “I’ll go to Control.” Steel nodded and he walked off down the curving passageway, removing his helmet as he went. Ham evidently knew where he belonged, because he headed off somewhere, too. The rest of us followed Archie into the medical interface booth.

  Archie turned and faced Steel. “Is there really any point in this?”

  Steel took off her helmet as she replied, “I want to see if anything we did was effective. Who knows?” She turned to Alice. “Maybe those herbs you got in Kindu helped.” Her tone of voice changed when she spoke to Alice. It puzzled me. There was something sing-songy about it, a mannerism I hadn’t heard in a long time, like the way people talk to a pet.

  Alice looked stoic and said nothing. I was struck by her freshness. Maybe that’s the wrong word. Even in her grim concern for Drake she seemed, I don’t know, new. Unworn. Something.

  Steel turned back to Archie. “We’d better have a look.”

  Archie stood there for a moment, started to respond, then nodded and turned to the control panel. She waited for a moment, then unlatched her helmet, doffed her pressure suit and kicked it into a corner. I was beginning to feel like I wanted to keep mine on, but everyone else was losing theirs, so I took mine off too. We stood there holding them as we watched Archie begin to work.

  The first thing she did was to evacuate the medical bay. The compressors were high quality. We could barely hear them as they pumped the air out of the chamber. She then activated filters in the observation window, making it opaque to anything but visible light, and bathed the bay in intense infrared, UV, X-rays and gamma radiation. “That ought to take care of any residual organic matter,” she mumbled.

  She inhaled once, let it out, and took up the controls to the remote manipulators. Slowly and carefully, she opened the thermal covering on Drake’s pod. It fell away, exposing a transparent capsule. The bottom half was filled with life support equipment; the top half held Drake.

  My heart rate jumped, but I think I managed to keep any expression off of my face. I’d seen people in Drake’s condition before, but never in person, and not for over five hundred years. He was in the final stages. His eyes were already gone, and his teeth were exposed. Pieces of his skin clung to the sides of the capsule where he had rolled against it. The skin that he had left was running with sweat. A black, pancake-sized melanoma covered the hollow above his left collarbone and extended up the side of his neck. His forearms were raised and his fingers occasionally clenched half-heartedly. Other than that he didn’t move.

  “Is he in pain?” Steel asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Archie replied. “I’ve got him heavily sedated. I hope he’s not aware at all.”

  “There’s been no improvement.”

  “What did you expect?”

  Steel was silent for a moment. Then, “We can’t—We’ll have to—” Another silence. I think we were all afraid to meet each other’s eyes. What Drake had couldn’t be cured. If we tried to re-boot him the very cellular restructuring that would have saved him in any other circumstance would cause the degeneration to accelerate. He was already lost.

  I still wasn’t prepared for what Steel said next.

  “We’ll drop him into Prime after we refuel. Before we boost for Earth.” She looked at Drake again. “We can’t leave ... we can’t leave anything. For anyone to ...”

  We all stood there for a moment, looking at him, not looking at him, I’m not sure
which.

  Steel turned to me. “I’ll have Jemal show you your quarters. Then I’d like to meet with you in my cabin in, say, fifteen minutes.”

  I was going to say, ‘Aye-aye, Captain’ but she was already out the hatch and down the passageway.

  Fifteen minutes later I was standing outside her cabin wondering what I would say to her, what she would say to me. The hatch opened and her voice flowed over me. “Come in. Please.”

  I walked into her suite. The lighting was subdued. I faced a row of windows that reached from floor to ceiling. The habitation module must have still been extended, for I could see out. We were diving in toward Golgotha, tacking around her to head down into the inner system to the anti-matter station close in around Prime. I could see the banded globe swelling visibly as I watched.

  “Please sit down,” she said. She was wearing a long, lavender, satin robe. It clung and flowed as she moved. In the soft lighting her voice was so rich and compelling that it almost wiped out the vision of Drake’s pathetic, ravaged body. Almost.

  I took a seat, as did she. She asked me, “Would you like anything to drink?”

  “How did Drake get the plague?” I answered.

  She picked up an exquisite blue-crystal decanter off the small table that stood between us (it looked like twenty-ninth century Murano) and poured some of its contents into a matching glass. She lifted it to her lips, tasted it, put the glass down. Her eyes met mine and she said, “He picked it up on Brainard’s Planet.”

  That was not the right answer. I don’t know what answer I wanted—I don’t know what answer there could have been—but that wasn’t it.

  “On Brainard’s Planet,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I just stared at her, trying to think of something to say that would make this all go away.

  “On Brainard’s Planet?” I repeated, “What do you mean, on Brainard’s Planet? You can’t land on Brainard’s—”