She let the little jape go by. “All those centuries, wandering—”
He shrugged. “Would’ve gotten scum-dull staying put.”
“But some people must have become dear to you, and then you drifted apart or—” She winced. “It’s already happened in my much shorter lifespan.”
[254] He went almost somber. “Or they die. We may hang on for a long while, but one way or another, at last the Old Man is coming for everybody.”
“Don’t you find belief in a life after death comforting?”
“Mainly, to be honest, I think how nice it’d be if the faith is true. Whatever the facts of that are, we’ll never get back what we’ve got now. Let’s make the most of it.”
“Is roving around the only way? Didn’t you ever try making a home?”
“Three times.”
“And?” she murmured.
His voice flattened. “Twice, it simply didn’t last. The third, she died. An accident that was ridiculous, unless there is something beyond this universe that sets injustices right.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“No offense.” He smiled. “Instead, I’m glad you’re interested.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
He brightened further. “That’s a great question, coming from you.”
“We’ve already ... been through ... quite a lot ... together.”
“And we’re still busy at it. Think you might like to keep it going afterward?”
Why am I suddenly so lightheaded? “I don’t know—”
“Why not try it out? No cost, no obligation.”
She regained balance. “Oh, there’s always a cost.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I’m willing to pay. Got a notion I’d make a mighty big profit.”
Does he mean that? wondered bewilderment. If he does, how much?—He didn’t have to come to Asborg from Earth, even for his purpose—
Hebo leaned closer and with an odd gentleness laid an arm around her shoulders. “The accomodations aboard aren’t exactly luxurious, and we haven’t a lot of time, but—”
“No,” she interrupted, stiffening beneath the touch. “We [255] can’t afford to, to get involved.” Not yet, she thought while her pulse accelerated. Maybe not ever. Gerward—
But he was a phantom, pale and fading.
Hebo grinned. “Have no fears. I’m only talking good, honest lust.”
Is he? Am I?
We’re both grown, both tough, we can both think coolly in a crisis no matter what our emotions. Can’t we?
Anyhow, there’s no crisis today. If I were cautious and forethoughtful, I wouldn’t be here.
“Only?” Lissa breathed.
“No,” he said, quickly serious. “But you’re right, we’d better postpone anything more. Meanwhile, though—”
Their lips were centimeters apart. Fire kindled. “Well—”
The bunk was narrow, its cubicle cramped and bare. They hardly noticed.
XLVI
AT hundred AU the giant sun cast a tenth the radiance that Sunniva did on Asborg, ample for human eyes; but it was discless, a point of blue-white blaze too brilliant to look anywhere near, drowning most other stars even in empty space.
Mars-sized, the planet shone wanly in that light, a motley of darkling rock, white ices, dull brownish reds and yellows where ultraviolet quanta had forced low-temperature chemistry. Those temperatures were low indeed, ranging around one hundred kelvin. A wisp of atmosphere, a few millibars of pressure at the surface, nitrogen with some methane and argon, scarcely hazed the limb. The axial tilt was small, the rotation period a bit under forty-nine hours.
Such were the facts gathered by the ship as she approached. The sight close by sent shivers along the nerves. Here was a whole world, with all its unforeseeable strangenesses. And here was Forerunner work at work. The instruments had caught enough enigmatic emissions to prove that. What more escaped them?
Otherwise there had been no message, no sign. “I can’t imagine them not having detectors, and equipment to react with,” Hebo muttered. “They couldn’t have predicted that no trouble would ever come in from outside. If nothing else, a comet strike.”
“Those may be only blind machines,” Dzesi suggested.
Lissa shook her head. “They’d have to include robots with at least as much capability as our ship,” she said. “Probably much more.” The thought was cold: that this could be so much more as to lie beyond the imagination of merely organic creatures. She mustered the resolution to add in everyday fashion: “Well, we’ve [257] received no threats thus far. Let’s try for a look.”
Hulda slipped into a forty-five degree orbit, two thousand kilometers out. That was too close for hyperjump or hyperwave; in the near neighborhood of a substantial rotating mass, which drags slightly on the inertial frame, the function steepens from the smooth potential-well dropoff of astronomical distances. However, a hard boost would quickly bring her to an escape point. Meanwhile, here was a good altitude for observation, with a period neither inconveniently long nor short. And there had been no sign of hostility, opposition, anything other than those stray pulses she intercepted.
Acceleration ended. The three hung weightless in harness and silence.
After a long half minute, Hebo hunched his shoulders and growled, “All right, search.” The viewscreen display shifted from stars to planet, swept across desolation, steadied and magnified.
They were lucky, happening just then to be where a site was in daylit view. Seen slantwise, three slim helices reared gleaming against a broad ice-field, a horizon rimmed with murky cliffs, and a cloudless blue-black sky. Spread around and among them were several delicate, intricate three-dimensional webs. Lesser shapes moved over bare rock which had been rendered mirror-flat. Sun-glare made vision difficult. When the optics filtered that out, a subtle, shifting veil seemed to remain; the scene was almost dreamlike.
“I think,” Lissa whispered, “what we see is framework and, and attendants, and—yes, that thing yonder looks half finished, with activity on it—construction, preparing for the wave front. ... I think most must be not matter but forces, maybe subatomic, maybe the energy of the vacuum itself—” She was no physicist, but this epiphany wakened learning that had lain half forgotten.
“When did it start?” Hebo asked. “Yeah, three million years ago or more. I should guess that’d be a von Neumann type operation. A kind of seed left, with a clock that germinated it at the right time, to begin making the machines that’d make the [258] machines—but maybe ‘grow’ is a better word than ‘make.’ Or ‘generate’ or—”
“Probably it began before the black holes met,” Lissa ventured, faintly amazed to hear how calm her tone had become. “Building probes to be present at the event and afterward. I suspect they’re there yet. Expeditions of ours wouldn’t spot them except by super-unlikely accident. Meanwhile, newer machines have been making ready to conduct long-range studies in these nonviolent surroundings.”
Again they were repeating ideas they had uttered before, back and forth, apes reassuring each other with chatter, a need that was not in Dzesi—but not entirely so. Reality stimulated a certain hardheadedness that abstract speculation never could.
It spoke through Hebo: “Whatever knowledge can be had here, whatever power, has goddamn got to be kept out of the wrong hands.”
Lissa shuddered a bit. “Whose are the right hands? And how long will they stay clean?”
“I dunno. But I remember reading a historian on Earth, writing way before I was born. ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’ We can hope we’re more or less amongst the good.” Hebo’s hand sought hers and closed on it. His voice went warm. “You are, for sure.”
The eeriness below neared the edge of sight as Hulda swung on toward the night ahead.
“We’d better send these data straight home,” said Lissa. While we still can, said her mind.
“Uh-huh. You’re smart, too. And beautiful, I might
add.”
She drew a breath to order the ship back to hyperwaving distance.
Dzesi yowled. Hulda sang an alert. “What the hell!” roared Hebo.
A gleam lifted from darkside into sunlight. It arrowed at them. In seconds it had waxed to a complex of coils and strands, half the size of their vessel, shimmering like the constructs down on [259] the planet. At the center pulsed an iridescent sphere: a heart, a brain? With no trace of jets, of any propulsive force, maneuvering as deftly as a barracuda in the sea, and with no sign of deceleration stress, it glided to a relative halt and poised three hundred meters away.
Dzesi crouched a-bristle, right hand gripping the arm of her chair, left hand on her knife. Both humans kept still, staring, shocked into that coolness and clarity, that weird detachment, which sudden extremity can throw upon their kind. The compartment, the control board, the huge day-crescent of the planet were blade-sharp in their eyes; they heard each murmur of the air; they smelled its fragrance of summery meadows and the observers in their heads noted how inappropriate that was—but meaningless, meaningless; they waited for whatever would befall.
Set for broad-band reception—though how did the thing know which band?—the radio said forth in a calm human contralto and unaccented Anglay: “Outsiders are forbidden access. You shall depart immediately. There is no wish to harm you. However, in token of what can be brought to bear against intruders, your hyperwave communicator is now disabled. Bring the warning home, and broadcast it to all your societies. Make known that further attempts will suffer penalties more severe, up to and including destruction. But make known, also, that otherwise no one has anything to fear from this quarter. The prohibition is in large part for their own sake. Think about this.”
After a moment the voice changed to flutings and rumbles that shaded off into the humanly subsonic. Lissa recognized the principal Gargantuan language. She had acquired few words of it, but grasped that the message was the same.
“How about that hypercom?” Hebo demanded.
“Ruined,” Hulda replied. “Circuit elements burnt out, quantum superpositions decohered, programs wiped. My systems registered nothing while it occurred.”
No, Lissa thought, the Forerunners would have means more subtle than an energy blast. But I’ll bet they—their robots, or [260] whatever these are—can call up as much energy as they want, any time they want.
The voice became Rikhan. Dzesi snarled.
“Yep, everybody,” Hebo said.
“We haven’t much choice but to obey, do we?” Lissa asked needlessly.
“Reckon not. Still, I expect we’ve got a grace period, at least till it’s run through its repertoire. Plain to see, it doesn’t know just who or what we are. And since it wants us to take the news back, if we’re still here when it’s done talking, logically it ought to say, ‘Scram, I mean it,’ maybe with some extra token that doesn’t really hurt us either, like turning our food stock to charcoal. Then of course we’ll say, ‘Sorry, honorable sir,’ and skedaddle. Meanwhile, though, we’re up against heap big medicine, but not God Almighty. How about we collect any more information we can?”
Recklessness? No, Lissa thought, boldness. Taking a risk, yes, but you can’t cross a street without taking a risk. He’s my kind of man. “Keep scanning,” she ordered the ship.
Susaian turned into clicks, while an Arzethian image appeared on the visiscreen and went through the body language that was most of its converse.
Hulda and the alien were not precisely co-orbital. They drifted slowly apart. The alien kept sending. The sun slipped behind the planet, which became a circle of blackness, very faintly edged with light, and stars sprang into heaven.
“Another site,” Hulda reported, displaying and amplifying— not quite the same as the first, though it was hard to distinguish between such foreignnesses.
Having run through every known spacefaring race, and three or four that Lissa couldn’t identify, the radio returned to human. Han, this time. How many important languages would the sentry try before it—lost patience—and struck again? Already it had dwindled to a small, exquisite piece of jewelry.
Something high caught sunlight and flashed.
[261] “Hoy!” Hebo exclaimed. “Give us that!”
The optics locked on and magnified. The thing hurtled inward. Plasma jets made ambient atoms fluoresce, ghostly sparkles. Velocity already closely matched, the vessel needed little adjustment to lay her nearby, in adjacent orbit. She must have emerged from hyperspace about as far down the gravitational well as possible.
“Jesus Christ, what a piece of navigation!” blurted Hebo.
Lissa knew that lean body, those flat turrets from which projectors reached out like snakes. A Susaian—no, a Confederacy warship.
Hulda’s receiver continued dispassionately. But the Forerunner machine must have observed too. Was it transmitting the same command, backed by the same disablement?
A streak leaped from the newcomer. The viewscreen muffled a fireball to a flare. Then incandescent gases dissipated into space, and the sentry was gone.
XLVII
“A tactical nuke,” Hebo mumbled into the abrupt void. “No, we’re not confronting God. It’s worse than that.”
The warship still looked small at her remove, toylike athwart the stars. Another missile could cross the distance between in a second or less. Lissa seized his hand.
“Receive any communication,” Dzesi coolly ordered Hulda.
The visiscreen flashed to life with the blunt head and snaky neck of a Susaian. Lissa caught a gasp. She knew that countenance, that rufous, cloudily spotted skin. “Naval unit Authority of the Great Confederacy, Dominator Ironbright commanding, calling Asborgan vessel,” rendered a trans. “You are under arrest. Make no attempt to escape or otherwise resist. If you do, we shall fire upon you. Acknowledge.”
“Do you wish to transmit?” asked Hulda.
“Yes, and challenge this outrage,” Dzesi rasped.
Hebo made a shushing motion. “Better let Lissa speak for us,” he said. “You seem to’ve met yon bugger before.”
She nodded, again abruptly cool, totally alert. “He was second in command of their expedition to the black hole.”
“And you saved his slippery ass. Some gratitude.”
The pickup focused on her. Recognition became mutual. “Greeting, Milady Windholm,” said Ironbright. The nonhuman voice sounded as imperturbable as what came out of the trans. “We thought very possibly you would be here. We trust you will understand that necessities of state force us to take stern measures. Cooperate, and you will live.”
A part of Lissa noted a change in the underlying timbre and, [263] yes, barely perceptible to a human who knew what to look for, the posture and manner. During the years since their last encounter, Ironbright’s life cycle had changed gender. She was no less grim now for that—if anything, was more so. That could well be part of the reason for giving her this mission, that and past experience and—
We’re caught, knew the detached observer and calculator. No weapons except for what we brought along ourselves. We can’t reach hyperjump distance if they don’t let us. Oh, we can out-accelerate that craft by more than enough to make pulp of us. However, we can’t a target-seeking missile.
She had a far-away sense of feeling cold, but her body did not tremble or sweat or even uselessly tense very much. “Why are you doing this?” she heard herself ask.
“It ought to be fairly obvious.” Was Ironbright capable of dry humor?
“That was insanely reckless, blasting the Forerunner guardian. I hope we aren’t included in the retaliation.”
“It has not happened thus far. Observation leads us to think that there are no others.” Ironbright leaned forward, as if to stretch across the kilometers till she hissed in the woman’s ear. “Still, delay among countless unknowns does certainly court disaster. For your own survival, you will do well to obey orders promptly and fully.”
“How can we unless we know what thi
s is all about?” This nightmare upset of everything.
“Suffice it for now that the Great Confederacy has established sovereignty, which you have violated. You are therefore prisoners subject to what penalties any agent of the Confederacy sees fit to apply.” A pause, as though to give weight to what followed. “Do not claim innocence. At the black hole event, an agent of Asborg committed massive theft of data obtained at large cost and sacrifice, belonging to the Confederacy. Since then, Asborgans have freely made use of the information and disseminated it indiscriminately. Consider this the first of the sanctions to be imposed.”
[264] Yes, Esker Harolsson did “borrow” and copy that file, recalled the calculator in Lissa’s head. How did the lizards find out?’’ We never publicized the fact. It somewhat shamed House Windholm. We simply released the data, because suppressing it would have been worse. ... Well, the deduction was rather simple, after all. But what more about the incident has their intelligence service collected over the years? I wonder if Esker kept his own mouth shut. It’d be like him to at least drop what he imagined were sly hints—and at last be such a fool as to go to the lizards!
“No more delay,” snapped the trans. “Have your scanner sweep the compartment where you are. Identify each member of your crew. At once.”
Lissa cast a glance at Hebo. Though rage whitened his face, he shrugged. Dzesi hissed but sat still. “Do that,” Lissa told her ship, and named her companions.
A human would have nodded. The skin rippled down Ironbright’s neck. “This is as expected,” she said. And who led you to expect it? wondered Lissa. I can guess. “If you are concealing anyone, that will come to light and be punished. Meanwhile, it hardly matters. You have been cruising around in this system for some time. In due course you will give the details. Again, it does not matter at the moment. You surely sent a few hyperwave progress reports as you scouted. But now the guardian has disabled your transmitter.”
“And yours,” Hebo put in. “How else would you know?”
“Silence. These are your orders. Listen well, carry them out faithfully, and redeem your lives. The alternative is immediate death.
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