The Tatja Grimm's World

by Vinge, Vernor

  Tatja’s voice came sharp, tense. “Move into the room slowly. Set down your equipment and line up against the wall.” She was facing into the tunnel, her crossbow aimed at the entrance. Jolle was inspecting the astronomers, in particular the fellow who had just come through the outside door.

  From the tunnel came a puzzled question. It was Haarm Wechsler. “You refer to the Doomsday porters, of course.”

  Tatja replied, “I mean everyone. There is a saboteur in the party and we intended to find him.” Jolle turned to face the tunnel; where he was standing, he could cover both the Doomsday astronomers and the visitors. Svir raised his bow and flicked off the safety. There was one in particular … .

  Crown’s Men and Celestial Servants stumbled into the light; many were too tired to care what was happening. They came through too fast. Tatja told them to come through in single file, but it was impossible to obey. Most of the carts were drawn by two or three men, and people inevitably walked in clusters behind the aerators. The carts were parked in a ragged formation. Then the visitors stood against the wall, in a single rank. The astronomers remained at the center of the room, their self-righteous anger changing to puzzlement. Why were lowlanders and Servants treated alike? Everyone was beginning to realize there was more here than a fickle queen’s whimsy.

  Now every face was visible. Nowhere did Svir see that friendly, wrinkled one from the tunnel. Tatja glanced at Jolle. The alien shook his head slightly.

  “I don’t think so,” he said quietly. Then, sharply, to the astronomers, “Where does that staircase lead?” He gestured with his bow. Stairs? Svir realized that what he had mistaken for an unevenness in the floor was something more. And the hole had been lost from view when the main party came into the dome.

  “Living quarters, may it please Your Most Illustrious Lordship.”

  Jolle ignored the sarcasm. “Is there any way from those quarters to the outside?”

  “No. The only other entrance is by the Number Three Aerator.” Jolle stared at the speaker for several seconds. It seemed to Svir he was considering whether to chase into the basement for Profirio. That would decide things once and for all, but the other might be planning some special ambush. Since he was trapped, it might be best to leave him there.

  Jolle glanced at Tatja, and she said opaquely, “No, that would be—wrong.” She turned back to the Crown’s Men and Celestial Servants. “It is my command that you remove yourselves below. Take two extra oxygen tanks.”

  The Servants shuffled toward the dark stairway. Several of the crown’s generals stood their ground, and Minister Wechsler voiced their feelings. “Marget, you overstep yourself. The Crown’s subjects deserve your confidence. Your liaison with this fellow,” he waved at Jolle, “is—”

  “Haarm, you’re in a bind you don’t understand. Get below or I’ll cut you to pieces.” She raised her crossbow.

  The crown’s officers motioned their men toward the stairs. In three minutes they were all below. Tatja walked to the hole and shut the trap. She rolled one of the supply carts over the door. It might still be possible to open the trap from below, but it could not be done with stealth. She did the same at the other stairway, then walked slowly around the edge of the dome.

  Jolle said, “We want you to do two things tonight, Svir. Be prepared to shoot any saboteur.” He accented the word so that Svir knew he meant one particular saboteur. “And help assemble the equipment.” He waved at the carts full of picture-making and analysis equipment.

  The second job occupied Svir’s time for the next four hours. Even though Jolle and Tatja supervised, and even though the astronomers knew their equipment much better than he, there was plenty for him to do. The Doomsday picture-makers required large quantities of mixed reagents. The optical equipment was both bulky and delicate. At times the astronomers seemed to forget they were working under duress. Then Svir would notice eyes straying to the crossbow slung at his shoulder. These priests were revealing secrets they had sworn to guard forever. If they could think of a way to trick the queen’s gunmen below O’r-mouth, they wouldn’t hesitate to kill him.

  The sun set. Outside, the snow went from yellow to orange to red, and the red became deeper and deeper. Svir remembered seeing that red from many miles away, from far down by the Picchiu River … so many days ago, when there was still a reason, beyond revenge, for living. The thought almost drove him back into the world of what-might-have-been.

  Then the stars came out. This side of the world had a sky much clearer and darker than anywhere beneath Seraph; except when in eclipse, the sister planet dimmed the fainter stars to invisibility. But here, thirty thousand feet above the sea and the mists, the stars were still brighter. They were so bright the snows glittered faintly beneath their brilliance. The wind turbine was shut down. Convection currents around the outside pipes would degrade the seeing. Besides—said the Doomsday archobserver—the building’s reservoirs now held enough hot water to support operations through the night. The Eye’s lid was pulled back, and aerators were opened full.

  Jolle gave the astronomers an area one degree by twenty and specified a search pattern. He was looking for a new object of sixteenth magnitude. Jolle knew the orbital elements of his craft to several digits, but three quarters after having been marooned, he could know the position only approximately. Fortunately, the search area would be visible through most of the night. They would take dozens of pictures and compare them with the Doo’d’en archives brought from O’rmouth.

  The Doomsdaymen moved surely about the dome, a tribute to their fanatic regard for their profession. Strange reddish light came from pillars scattered about the room. Another Doo’d’en secret. Svir reached up, touched one of the pillars. The glowing surface was flat, warm. The Doomsdaymen had something that glowed when differentially heated? That might explain their use of hot water.

  Finally, the first picture plate was put in the optics beside the main mirror. The clockwork in the base of the instrument was wound, the Eye was aimed, and the exposure began. It would take half an hour for the plate to collect enough light to reveal objects of the sixteenth magnitude. Here was the prime advantage of the Doomsday technique over the greentint method used on the Tarulle Barge. Time exposures were nearly impossible with greentint.

  After the first exposure, plates were changed and the telescope was repositioned. The exposed plate was the object of further chemical ritual; after twenty minutes, a priest announced that the picture might be viewed. He set it beside an archive plate of the same sky region, and positioned a double eyepiece over the pair. Svir recognized the procedure. Each ocular gave a magnified view of a separate plate. In this way, small differences between the pictures could be quickly detected. Svir stepped close to the table. The pictures glowed red where the light from the table showed through them. It took a moment to realize that light and dark were reversed here. Then he felt a stab of envy. The plates showed the Batswing Nebula—as Svir had never dreamed it. The gases extended, twisting, beyond the limits of anything seen in greentints taken with the Krirsarque thirty-incher.

  Now the search could begin.

  The hours passed. There was the routine of setting plates, aiming the Eye, treating exposed plates, and comparing them with previous pictures. But between events, time stretched empty. Jolle and Tatja took positions at the perimeter of the dome. Any intruder would set himself in silhouette against the high windows, unless he crawled along the floor.

  It was nearly midnight when the man on the comparator called to Svir, “New object.” Svir leaned over the binocular eyepiece and looked at the red and black display. It was an undistinguished star field, nothing brighter than sixth magnitude. There was a whirring by his ear as the Doomsdayman turned a crank. The images flickered as first one and then the other lense was blocked. A faint streak was blinking in one corner of the image. Hmm. This wasn’t like the earlier ones. The streak was too long to be a reasonable asteroid.

  He looked up to call Jolle, and found the other standin
g beside him. The alien bent over, and studied the scene for several seconds. Then, with the ease of one trained in the use of the instrument, he flipped a reticle into the optics. “That’s it. Just the right drift, just the right orientation.” There was a hint of triumph in his voice. “No more pictures, Observers. We have found what we came for.”

  “Then you will leave us now?” came the voice of one of the more recalcitrant priests.

  “Not quite yet. We will commit one more small desecration.” He glanced at the micrometer settings on the optics, and thought a moment. “Set the Eye back on the coordinates of plate fourteen.” He turned, walked quickly across the room. “Give me a hand, Svir.”

  Above them, the Eye’s frame slewed fractionally, bringing the huge tube to near horizontal.

  Jolle was already taking equipment out of a cart when Svir caught up with him. The small wooden cabinet was very familiar. Jolle looked up and continued quietly. “I’m going to use what you thought was a golem to operate my signaler.” He pushed the cabinet into Hedrigs’s hands and pulled an oblong box from the cart. Its smooth sides glittered metallically in the red light. “We’ve got to hustle. My boat is almost at the horizon; it’s already in haze, I think.”

  Behind them, Tatja was herding the Doomsdaymen to the far side of the room. Just three people were needed now. Any intruder would be Profirio. For once there would be no trouble in penetrating others’ disguises and ruses. Everything was very simple.

  Svir walked back to the scope, gingerly set the hand-carved cabinet on the floor beside the picture-maker. Above his head, the framework of girders and struts moved infinitesimally, tracking the stars beyond. Jolle opened the cabinet. The jewels glowed even brighter than Svir remembered. The shifting glitter sent blue-green ripples around the room. There was a collective gasp from the Doomsday astronomers, then an even more impressive silence. They had thought they were dealing with madmen. Now the world itself had gone mad.

  Jolle drew a cable from the shimmering heap, attached it to the oblong box, and clamped the box to a telescope-alignment strut; evidently this was the signaler. Jolle stood, looked through a sighting scope. In the blue light, his face held a new intensity. “Damn. They didn’t leave it tracking properly.” He slung his crossbow, and adjusted the tracking wheels. “I could use my machine to do the aiming, but the scope is ready-made for—”

  If Svir had not been looking directly into the maze of struts around the mirror, what followed would have seemed like magic. In one flashing motion, Profirio leaped from the scope to the floor, kicked over the glowing cabinet, and shouted, “Jolle killed her!” Svir’s weapon was pointed directly at Profirio’s middle killing him was a matter of tightening one finger. But the other’s words held him back for a split second; then Tatja. screamed “Don’t, Svir!”

  Time slowed to a human pace. In a single second, Profirio had forced a stalemate. Svir realized this as he glanced at Jolle, who had his weapon nearly unslung—and could probably aim and shoot in a fraction of a second. But he didn’t move. Svir looked at Profirio, who appeared to be unarmed. This was the Celestial Servant who had talked to him in the tunnel. But now his face seemed younger, though very different from Jolle’s. Above his beard, Jolle’s face was smooth, deeply tanned. Profirio’s was paler, and creased with frown and smile lines.

  Why didn’t Jolle shoot? Svir glanced at Tatja. Her crossbow was leveled and aimed—at Jolle. He looked at the glowing pile Profirio had spilled from the cabinet, and realized that at the instant he had accused Jolle of killing Cor, on a different level he had convinced Tatja. that things were not as they seemed. Now that Jolle’s machine lay exposed, Svir could see there was a shape imbedded in its fiery matrix. That shape was horribly familiar: An oval lump, six inches across. From the lump led a ropelike strand, with finer strands splitting off it. Barely visible, the finest ones touched the silvery boxes that surrounded the pile. How many times had he passed that exhibit at U Krirsarque Museum, and shuddered at the pickled brain and spinal column there? Here the spinal column was bent into a circle to conserve space, but the rest was all the same.

  As it lay on the floor, the pulsing treasure whimpered. Broken away from its machine tasks and left for a moment without a program, its high-pitched voice keened over and over, “Where am I, where am I, am I …” and the answer was nowhere anymore. Several of the astronomers fled outside, preferring hypoxia to the nightmare that had come to their shrine.

  So Jolle was the slaver, after all. The revelation had strangely little effect on Svir; it was irrelevant what Jolle had done to strangers. The stock of his crossbow drifted back to the intruder. Svir’s universe shrank to Profirio’s blue-lit face. This murderer must die.

  Less than five seconds had passed since the other’s appearance. Now he spoke for the second time. “And this is how he did it!” His hand whipped out to slap the side of the signaler. Red lightning. Even at ten feet, the heat of that beam scorched his face—just as it had once before. The beam clipped the dome, and shards of wood and glass showered down. Prompted by this cue, the thing on the floor spoke, its voice suddenly deep and male, “Ter dshe gaul, Jolle.”

  The memory of the last time Svir saw that light was suddenly very sharp: Jolle had dismissed the signalman just before it happened. He had moved himself out of the way. Jolle put the golem in the tree and made it use the signaler to kill. Svir felt his muscles jerk. All men had been puppets to these three. Even now he was being maneuvered as unsubtly as a skoat. That didn’t matter. He was remembering a charred face; he would never quite be able to remember how Cor’s face had looked in life. His crossbow swung toward Jolle. The bearded one hardly seemed to notice. He was talking low and fast, to Tatja. “We can be. You love—”

  Svir’s finger pressed the trigger. Jolle reacted with characteristic speed, bringing his weapon down before Svir could shoot. The alien’s left leg was blown off as Tatja loosed her bolt. The last thing Svir felt was the explosion as Jolle’s bolt smashed everything into darkness.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The daybat fluttered through the intricately wound branches of the needle tree, settled beside a large pink flower, and folded its blue and orange wings. Its tiny, sleek head moved back and forth as it wiggled between the petals and licked the juices in the base of the flower. This far from human settlement, most animals were not shy of humans—the flower in question was barely fifteen inches above Svir’s head.

  O’rmouth was one hundred miles away. The mountains dominated the horizon to the east—if one chose to look through the leaves and green branches in that direction. Here the air was thick and rich, just warm enough so that the breeze moving along the ground was pleasantly cool. Here the sunlight was muted by green leaves, not reflected with merciless intensity by snow and ice.

  Three hundred feet away, their battle group was setting up bivouac. The universe had chosen to wear its mask of light and love today. Svir recognized the deception. The real world was snow and ice and red thunderbolts that …

  There was a crackle of branches as Tatja entered the little open spot by the tent and sat down beside him. The daybat jerked its head from the flower and looked warily about, then went back within the pinkness.

  They sat in silence for several minutes. Tatja wore a gray fatigue uniform. There was about her none of the purpose or intensity that had driven her before. The Doomsdaymen were far behind them. There were no more threats to face.

  Tatja’s hand slipped onto his elbow. Then her face was before his and her eyes bore the same quiet, personal interest that he had seen more than four years ago in a certain tavern in Krirsarque—where this dream had begun. “A lot of people died in this adventure, and I am truly sorry it had to be … but Cor I miss the most. The most.”

  He tried to produce an ironic chuckle but all that came out was a croaking sound.

  “What?” asked Tatja.

  He opened his mouth again. The words came fast, low, slurred. “I was just thinking if Jolle’s golem had been a bit more ac
curate he could have had me too an’ maybe saved himself later on.”

  She raised her hand to his shoulder. “The golem was perfectly accurate, Svir. By killing her, Jolle made you into a tool and eliminated a major threat. Of all the people there, Cor was the only one I might have listened to.” Tatja’s voice faded. “In all the world, Cor and Rey Guille were the only ones I might have listened to … . How I wish I hadn’t frightened Rey away. I was just a brilliant animal when I found Tarulle; they made me a person. For a while I had a home, people I could talk to. Rey’s telescope was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. He and Cor seemed so smart, almost like me. The first days on the barge were the happiest of my life. Now years have passed … and those I didn’t drive away are all dead. Friends deserve better.” She made a peculiar choking sound.

  “No, Svir. Jolle meant to kill Cor. And it was only luck that his plan did not work. You see, Profirio was less than one hundred yards from the bunker when the golem shot Cor. Pröfe had already been separated from his supporters. He was trying to move across the no-man’s-land to our side. He saw the murder; eventually he learned who had been killed. He talked to you during the walk up the snow tunnel. By the time we reached the observatory, he knew how Jolle was using you, and he knew how to approach you.

  “He did sneak below the main floor, as we thought. But you remember that the water from the wind turbines had to go into those quarters. The pipe was too small for him, but the ground around the entrance hole was not rock hard. Pröfe dug his way out during the first hours. Jolle was too near his goal to take everything into account and I … I wasn’t thinking very straight myself. Anyway, Pröfe got outside, and while you and Jolle were mounting the signaler, he crawled onto the dome and down into the telescope.”

  Svir looked at her face, saw without comprehension the tears in her eyes. His attention wandered back to the bat on the branch above them. The flower’s juices splashed over the petals and a sweet smell drifted down. He had no interest in what had happened in the last hundred hours—in whether the world had been saved or not. His hands clenched and unclenched as he considered what he would do if that bat were so incautious as to come lower.