Davy frowned. “Yes, I assumed as much myself, till it [73] occurred to me to order an inquiry. I’d lost touch with him. Well, it turns out he’s not popular—”
“Abrasive, yes. I’ve generally gotten along with him. Consulted him about stuff relating to various explorations, you remember.”
Davy’s lips, quirked a bit. “You don’t feel his arrogance, as his inferiors do.” Earnestly: “Also, I suspect that— Never mind. The fact is, he is ... no gentleman. Less than perfectly honest, in spite of that raspy tongue. And I daresay an impoverished childhood like his would leave many people somewhat embittered, but most wouldn’t make it an excuse for chronic ill behavior.”
“As long as he can do the job—”
Lissa broke off, went back to the parapet, gazed over the vast billows of land. After a moment she said, “I think I know where part of his trouble stems from. He’s a scientist born. Nature meant him to make brilliant discoveries. But there aren’t any to make anymore, not in fundamental physics. Nothing new for—centuries, isn’t it? The most he can do is study a star or a nebula or whatever that’s acting in some not quite standard way. Then he puts the data through his computer, and it explains everything in conventional terms, slightly unusual parameters and that’s all. When I hinted we might be on the trail of something truly strange—you should have seen his face.”
“Scientific idealism, or personal ambition?” Once more, Davy sighed. “No matter. Too late now in any event. I’m simply warning you. Be careful. Keep on the watch for ... instability. If he proves out, fine, then I’ve misjudged him; no harm done.”
Lissa turned to face him again. “Have you anything against the rest of the team?”
“Noel, Elif, Tessa? Well, you told me he nominated them to you, but otherwise— No, they appear sound enough, except that they lack deep space experience.”
“Dagmar and Captain Valen supply that.”
She saw the change in him. It was as if the wind reached in under her coat. “All right, what is it, Dad? Speak out.”
[74] “Gerward Valen,” he said bleakly. “Seemed to me, too, as good a choice as any, better than most. But why did he abandon his career, drift away, finally bury himself among us? That’s what it’s amounted to. If he’s certificated for robotic ship command, he was near the top of his profession. Here, the best he might ever get was a captaincy on some scow of an interplanetary freighter—until you approached him. What happened, those many years ago?”
Lissa stood braced against the stones. Their hardness gave strength. “None of our business,” she replied. “A tragedy he doesn’t want to talk about, probably not think about. My guess—a few words that slipped loose a couple of times, when we were sitting over drinks—he does drink pretty fast—I think he lost his wife. If they’d been married a long time, maybe since his first cycle, her death would hit hard, wouldn’t it?”
“Not that hard, that permanently, if his spirit was healthy,” Davy said. “Why has he postponed his next rejuvenation so long? Another two or three decades at most, and it will be too late, you know. I wondered, and got background information on him. He’s making no provision for it, financial or otherwise. How much does he want to live?” He raised a palm. “Yes, of course I had no legal or ethical right to pry. To destruction with that. My daughter’s life will be in his hands.”
“Not really.”
“By now he’s integrated with the ship. Her skipper. His orders will override anyone else’s.”
Defense: “Yes, down underneath, he is a sad man. I think this voyage, this fresh beginning may rouse him out of that. But mainly—Dad, I haven’t survived so far by entrusting myself to incompetents. Look at Gerward—at Valen’s record, just in this system. The Woodstead Castle wreck, the Alanport riot. Both times he earned a commendation. No, whatever his emotions are, they don’t cloud his judgment or dull his sense of duty.” Lissa felt the blood in her face. She turned into the cooling wind. It tossed her hair.
[75] “I took that for granted, given the facts,” Davy pursued. “But were they sufficient? Finally I sent an agent to Brusa, Valen’s home planet.”
She gasped. “You did? Why, the—the cost—”
“It was your life.”
She flared. ‘‘‘And you didn’t see fit to tell me.”
“I did not,” he replied. “You’d object. Even if you promised to keep silent, I feared you’d let something escape to him.”
We know each other too well, Dad and I, she thought.
“Well,” Davy continued, “the spoor was cold, and it led off Brusa, and the upshot is that I only got the report yesterday. I think you’d better hear what it said.”
Her neck had stiffened till it was painful to nod. “Go ahead.”
He regarded her with a pain of his own behind his eyes before he asked low, “Do you remember the Naia disaster?”
The foreboding in her grew colder. “Yes, of course I’ve read about it. But it was long ago and far away. Who on Asborg has given it any thought for decades? I’ve almost forgotten.”
Remorselessly: “Let me refresh your memory, then. Human-colonized planet. A large asteroid was perturbed into a collision orbit. It happened suddenly and unpredictably. A recently settled planet, the system not yet properly charted, no adequate skywatch yet established. The asteroid passed near a gas giant with many moons. Chaotic events occur sometimes in celestial mechanics, as well as on smaller scales. Factors are so precariously balanced that an immeasurably small force can make them go one way rather than another. This asteroid was flung almost straight at Naia.
“Almost. It plowed through the atmosphere. That would have been catastrophe enough, the shock wave, a continent ignited, but friction slowed it into capture. An eccentric, decaying orbit, bringing it back again and again. At each approach, more broke off, huge chunks crashing down on unforeseeable spots. They touched off quakes and volcanoes. The tsunamis from ocean strikes were nearly as bad. A war passing over the planet would have done less [76] harm than that asteroid did, before the last fragment of it came to rest.
“Meanwhile, naturally, as many people as possible were evacuated. Temporary shelters were established on the Naian moon, to hold the refugees till they could be transported outsystem. Spacecraft shuttled between planet and moon. An appeal went out, and ships arrived from far and wide to help. Yes, some of them were nonhuman.
“Your friend Valen was among the newcomers. He commanded a robotic vessel chartered by the Cooperative Stellar Survey. Her owners put her at the disposal of the rescue effort. For a short while, Valen was a busy ferryman.
“Then the asteroid returned. The next bombardment began. He got in his ship and fled. Raced out of the gravity well, sprang through hyperspace, slunk home to Brusa.
“He could offer no excuse. The owners fired him. His wife left him. He went on the bum, drifting about, living hand to mouth off odd, unsavory jobs, now and then wangling a berth in a ship that’d take him to some different system. Finally, when he reached Sunniva, he pulled himself together and got steady employment. But his promotions—I’ve verified this for myself—they haven’t been due to any particular ambition on his part. He’s merely moved up the seniority ladder.
“That is your captain, Lissa,” Davy finished.
She stood a long while mute. The wind skirled, the cloud shadows hunted each other across the downs.
“I’m afraid it’s too late in this case, also,” she said finally, dully.
“No, we can replace him. Chand or Sara aren’t really totally unsuitable. Or I can look outside our House.”
She shook her head. “Any replacement would take too long. Ship-captain integration. Orichalc keeps reminding us that the climax will come soon. Any day now, perhaps. If we showed up afterward, could we discover what the Susaians did? Besides, it’s a cosmic-scale thing. The environment later may be lethal.”
[77] She attempted a grin. “Anyhow,” she said, “aren’t you glad we’ve got a cautious man in charge?”
Schooled in public impassivity, he still could not entirely hide from her what he felt. It was well-nigh more than she could bear.
“Come on,” she proposed, “let’s go down and say silly things at Mother, the way we used to, till lunch.”
XIII
FOREST had overgrown the ruins of the town, pine and hemlock murky against gray heaven, roaring in the wind. The church had stood near its eastern edge, on a headland where surf clashed and burst. Only bushes, bayberry, blueberry, sumac, and harsh grass grew there. Hebo thought he could trace the foundation; and nearby a few gravestones remained, fallen, lichenous, the names long since weathered away.
Here he had married Julie.
It was as if he could see the white clapboard and high steeple, hear the minister say the words, feel her hand in his. He wondered whether anything survived other than his memories, and whether those weren’t imagination. Nature was what Earthfolk today cared about, living Earth, Gaia Gloriatrix, and that—he supposed— mainly as something to explore and enjoy with the senses, like sex, a pause in their communion with the machine gurus. Should somebody take an interest in something left behind by merely human history, the database could immediately present it in full virtuality: or, better yet, reveal it as it originally was, the Parthenon fresh from the hand of Phidias, Columbus’s ships under sail, Broadway ablaze with lights, Cape Canaveral with a Saturn rocket blasting off for the moon.
And that would be half imagination, too, he thought, guesswork, though by intellects colossally greater and more systematic than his.
“Hey, Julie, girl,” he whispered, “how’re you doing? Where are you now?”
No sense asking, after so many centuries. If she lived, which [79] he hoped, and was still on Earth, she must have been taken up into its oneness, little by little, each renewed youth making her able to learn those new things, think and feel in those new ways, that had been evolving around her. It would have been willingly. Refusal would have left her mighty lonesome.
Or did she also at last say, “Enough” and depart for the stars? Now and then he’d tried to find out, but the galaxy was too vast. Even this fragment of its outer reaches that humans and their fellow spacefarers had some slight knowledge of was.
Each time he came to Earth and found it more strange than before, Hebo had wondered if he might already have been escaping, way back then. The change hadn’t gone very far, but he’d had a sense of walls closing in. Or was it plain restlessness, yes, boredom that drove him yonder? He recalled how, after their first rejuvenations, which were among the first ever, he and Julie had fallen head over heels back in love. For a while it’d been a fire fountain. The kids were grown and off their hands, they had ample money, strength and beauty—her beauty—were theirs already. ... He began to chafe and play around, she did, the parting was reasonably amicable. Since, he’d only heard of two or three marriages that lasted more than two or three cycles. Maybe nothing human could be forever.
Fare you well, Julie, always well, and thanks.
The gratitude felt ghostly.
A few gulls wheeled. He couldn’t hear them mewing above the wind they rode. Once upon a time they’d been many, but that was when people lived here, squanderous man, scattering his wastes for the scavengers.
Wolves and bears ruled the woods. They kept the deer down.
Hebo shivered a bit and turned from the sea and the graves toward the little airflitter waiting for him. He ought to stop these sentimental zigzags around the globe and get down to the business of hard thinking.
Face it, his earliest memories, the clearest and most enduring, had left no more behind them than the wind did. It wasn’t just [80] that this church had crumbled away, or the gentle Danish landscape of his childhood was mostly beech forest, or the energy-focusing climate-control satellites he’d helped construct had plunged to their meteoric deaths hundreds of years ago, Earth needing them no more than a recovered invalid needs medicine, or—or any such touchable things.
It was his father lifting him up on a shoulder, he squealing with delight at how suddenly and immensely high above the ground he had risen. It was a hummingbird, a living bit of jewelry, soon after the family moved to America. It was a fiddler in an Irish pub in Santa Fe, of all places, a mug of Guinness, a pretty waitress impulsively joining him in a jig on the sawdust floor. It was tramping through the misty Irish countryside itself, or backpacking in the Rockies, or campfire talk with friends lost when he left the Solar System.
Most of his life was traceless, he realized. Artemis abided, but tamed into almost a New Earth; and maybe Kayleigh, too, lived there yet. That marriage, however, those children, the house in the wilderness, the hunting of the dracosaur—well, yes, some fossils of it were doubtless retrievable if he cared to search them out, but why?
And the other women, more than he could count up—in some cases, had wished for but never won—the times he’d been in love—which did he truly want to keep?
An encounter in a distant spaceyard with his son by Julie? After four hundred Earth years, they discovered they had practically nothing to say to one another. Yet something of her lingered in his face and eyes. Was this a valuable lesson?
The later years, the later enterprises, alien planets, alien beings, those were the memories most apt to blur or drop out of awareness, and those were the ones he most needed. For survival’s sake, they must be recalled, reconstructed, reordered. That was necessarily at the cost of the older. His brain lacked the storage and correlation capabilities of a quantum-net intelligence.
Oh, sure, the kindly mind in the clinic would record [81] everything that it deleted—everything that wasn’t hopelessly garbled or decayed—and turn the crystal over to him, for playback whenever he chose. Some parts of it might be suitable for virtuality; most would doubtless just be words and patchy images. All of it would be abstract to him, narration of events that might as well have happened to somebody else. In fact, the stories would be more vivid if he’d come upon them in a piece of fiction.
How much of the old half-reality must he give up?
How much could he find it in his heart to give up?
Hebo walked slowly back to the flitter.
XIV
THE ship accelerated outward, seeking free space for her leap across light-years. Aft, Sunniva dwindled. Forward and everywhere around, night glittered with stars, the Milky Way was a white torrent of them, nebulae glowed or reared dark across brilliance, sister galaxies beckoned from across gulfs that imagination itself could not bridge.
In her saloon, revelation. The physicists—Esker Harolsson, Elif Mortensson, Noel Jimsson, Tessa Samsdaughter—stared over the table at Orichalc. After a moment their eyes swung toward each other’s, as if for comfort or comradeship. Watching in a corner, Lissa saw lips move silently and caught Esker’s muttered, amazed obscenity.
He, the team chief, recovered his wits first. But then, he had always kept his associates dependent on him. “Have you no clues to what the object may be? he demanded.
Curled on the opposite bench, head uplifted, the Susaian considered before responding. “None that appear significant. We common crew were seldom allowed as much as a look out; viewscreens were kept blank most of the time. I obtained my star sightings, from which I later calculated the location, when I went forth in a work party to retrieve a probe that had failed to dock properly with our ship.”
Esker’s dark, hooknosed features drew into a scowl. “How did you take measurements, anyway?”
“I had fashioned an instrument while home on leave, and smuggled it aboard in my personal kit. On a prior trip, despite the unfamiliar shape of the Galactic Belt, I had recognized certain [83] navigational objects, such as the Magellanic Clouds. When this opportunity came, I withdrew from my gang, telling them I had spied what might be a loose object, missing from the probe. When out of sight, I quickly made my observations and discarded the instrument. The numbers I stored in my mind. I had been confident such a chance would come, because the probes
frequently had difficulty with rendezvous.”
“Yah, your Susaian robotics aren’t worth scrap. And we’re supposed to proceed on your memories of your amateur star shooting?”
“We’ve satisfied ourselves that the data are adequate,” Lissa declared.
Esker glanced her way. “Uh, sure. Sorry, milady.” Half ferociously, he turned back to Orichalc. “But did you never see or overhear anything? Did you never think what this might all be about?”
“The Dominance knows well how to keep secrets. Given our species’ ability to sense emotional states, perhaps it has developed a few methods slightly better than you conceptualize.”
A shame, Lissa thought, that the trans just gives out unemphatic Anglay. What’s Orichalc really saying with overtones and body language?
“But you must have speculated,” exclaimed Tessa.
Esker threw her a glower. “I’ll handle this discussion,” he said.
Well, Lissa thought, everybody babbling at once would make for confusion and wasted time. Nevertheless—
She admired how Orichalc remained dignified. Or did he not care whether the bipeds were polite? “Since the location is in interstellar space, the phenomenon is presumably astronomical,” the Susaian said. “The probability of someone having come upon it by accident is nil, considering the volume of space involved.”
Was that a studied insult? Certainly Esker flushed. “Doubtless something was noticed from afar. Most likely this was in the course of a general astrographic survey. The Great Confederacy, [84] like most nations that can afford to, has mounted several during its history. They do not significantly overlap, as huge as the galaxy is. One of these ships detected some anomaly, such as a peculiar spectrum, and went for a closer look. The report that it brought back caused the Dominance to make this a state secret and mount its own intensive investigation.”
For Love and Glory Page 7
