“I wish you wouldn’t go,” Rosalie said.
“I have to. We know the way, so it won’t be dangerous this time. It’ll take only a few minutes.”
“Then why take a pack?” she asked.
Max was about to answer that it was better to be prepared for any obstacles, but held back. His mother didn’t need to hear that now.
“Be careful anyway,” Joe said, looking tired. “I’m very sad for Jake and Linda. Your mother and I go back a long way with them, so we won’t forbid you to go.”
Max said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back.”
Max kept looking over his shoulder as they made their way across the blue floor toward the place where Lissa’s ship had landed. Only its return would prove that it had gotten out safely. They might never see it again, he realized, or even have any contact with Earth except the long way around, through Centauri, unless the passage opened.
Lucinda and Jake walked next to Max in silence. She took his hand, and let it go as they came to the column. The black and gray storminess still roiled inside it, and Max felt a renewed wariness of how space itself was folded up, foreshortened, inside this alien device, making light-years into a minute’s walk through the dark.
“Which one?” Jake asked.
“Here,” Lucinda said. “I marked it.”
Max nodded. “We’ll come out in another blue station, and pass from there to Centauri.”
“Go ahead,” Jake said, taking Lucinda’s hand.
Max stepped through the square opening and slowly followed the curve to his right, quickening his pace when he saw the exit, and came out into the blue light of the identical station. Jake and Lucinda stepped out behind him.
“Here’s another,” she said with relief, pointing nervously to the next entrance.
“Ready?” Jake asked.
Max tensed. Lucinda took a deep breath and bit her lower lip. His stomach tightened as he faced the portal and went in. The darkness closed around him again. He hurried along the curve, hoping—and bumped into the barrier.
“It’s still closed!” he shouted in frustration.
“We’ll wait,” Lucinda said with sudden calm as she came up behind him. “It might have opened and closed again.”
“Sit down against the barrier,” Max said. “It could be a while, or in the next few minutes.”It could be forever , he thought, squeezing his eyes shut as he leaned against the barrier and slid to the floor.
A flashlight came on, its beam pointing upward. Jake sat down next to him and touched his shoulder gently. “We’ll wait. If we’re waiting too long, we’ll leave and set up a round-the-clock watch with alarm transmitter links, and someone will always be ready to go through.”
“Sure,” Max said bitterly. He had imagined striding through to Centauri and finding Emil sitting up in his hospital bed, eager to hear what he had missed.
Lucinda sat down at his side, and Max held her as she rested against him. They waited silently for a long time, but the barrier did not fall. He heard a deep sigh, then stood up slowly and helped her to her feet.
Max distracted himself by reading and thinking about aliens during the next three weeks, convincing himself that he was trying to understand more of what had happened to him.
He and Lucinda stood watch at the column every day, ready to go through. They would pass through the two portals and always find the barrier up. They would sit against it, waiting, and Max sometimes feared that the window into Earth’s Sun had also closed, preventing Lissa’s ship from reentering the suncore station. The habitat might face a future of isolation and immobility.
When they were not on watch, Lucinda and he sometimes hiked out to the stream in the hollow and sat by the waterfall where he had always gone alone. She became withdrawn in the third week, and rarely spoke, and Max began to fear that he was only a constant reminder of what had happened to her brother.
“Don’t you want to talk to me?” he asked one afternoon. “I know what you’re feeling.”
She stared past him, unable to speak, trapped within herself.
“Try not to let all this get you down, son,” Joe said to him at dinner one evening. “Not until we know more.”
“I’m not depressed,” Max answered. “I’m just trying to understand.” He was beginning to believe that ithad all happened by accident. The alien builders were long dead and gone. The habitat had simply run afoul of automatic systems, maybe ones that were no longer working as well as they had been. Emil, Lucinda, and he had been lured out at random. He wondered if the aliens were clever enough to have made it seem a chance encounter.
“This station and its portals have been here a long time,” Joe said, “maybe longer than human history. We won’t learn everything about it right away. I think you’ve done quite well so far, considering.”
Max was silent.
“It wasn’t your fault or Lucinda’s that Emil got hurt,” Rosalie said.
He looked at his parents. “I know it wasn’t my fault, but I’ll have to live with Emil’s death all my life. It’ll be stuck inside me forever. If we don’t get out of here, I might never even find out what happened to him.”
“I know,” Joe said softly. “We all collect such things. Mine have never gone away, and never will. Don’t think only of how it will be for you if he’s lost. You’ll get very confused if you think only of yourself.”
“You and Lucinda will share a loss,” Rosalie said, “if that’s how it turns out, and you’ll have to make it bearable for each other.” The look of concern on his mother’s face was intense. Max had never seen her this way. “I know that Lucinda sees her mother reliving the death of her brother on Mercury and feels guilty. Jake and Linda are dismayed that their daughter will have the same kind of loss to live with. And they’re all worried sick about Emil.”
Max realized that Lucinda needed him more than ever now, even when she couldn’t show it. He would have to try harder to break through her worry and grief.
He stood up. “Don’t worry about me,” he said to his parents. “I’ll be back late.”
Lucinda was sitting on the grass in front of her house, and Max almost missed her in the twilight glow of the sunplate. He went over and sat down next to her.
“You don’t have to talk or anything,” he said softly. “We can just sit.”
“I’d like to talk,” she said suddenly.
“Sure,” he answered, surprised. “Go ahead.”
“You’ve been thinking about what’s happened. I know you have.”
“Tell me what you think first,” he said.
“I don’t think the aliens are malevolent,” she answered. “They expect us to look out for ourselves. What happened to Emil was simply an accident.”
Max knew she was right. It wasn’t reasonable to expect the aliens to have set up warnings about poisonous vegetation on every world in their transport web, but he still felt resentful.
She frowned. “Why would they take the trouble to lure us out, to get us interested, just to be mean? It would make no sense, would it?”
“You’re probably right.”
“I am right. One day we’ll know it all. You’re not going to be the only one who will help figure it out. I’m going to be right there with you.”
Max felt a rush of relief. “You have been thinking.”
“Of course.” She leaned toward him and rested her head on his shoulder. “Just feeling all the time makes you blind.”
As he held her, Max knew that his fear of Earth, of returning to the large mass of humanity from which he had sprung, was gone, just as his father had said. His fears and doubts were probably like humanity’s suspicion of the Others. He held the thought, because it explained him to himself. He was to Earth, and even to other people, as Earth was to the Galaxy. Earth would fear the galactic civilizations around it for a while, then would grow out of that fear, as he was growing out of his own. But there would always be new problems.
“I’m afraid for my mother,” Lucinda
said suddenly. “I think she’ll hate me if Emil dies. She’ll resent us both, Max, because we’ll still be alive, while he won’t.”
Shaken by Lucinda’s fears, Max went home. If she was right, and Emil died, then he might never be able to tell Lucinda how much he cared about her, how attracted he was to her. He had suppressed his feelings, hoping that he could tell her when all this was over.
As he walked up the road to his house, Arthur Cheney pulled up to him on his bike and stared.
“What is it?” Max asked, noticing that Arthur seemed shy of him. He had seen the same wide-eyed nervous look on the faces of the other kids lately; even Muhammad was more nervous around him. They admired him now, it seemed, but Max found it hard to enjoy the attention. Now even Arthur was trying to ingratiate himself.
“We’ve got the next watch together,” Arthur said.
“I didn’t know,” Max answered.
“I saw you sitting with Lucinda. I guess she’s really upset about Emil.”
Max nodded, remembering when Arthur had been her favorite.
“He didn’t like me much,” Arthur said. “Maybe that’s why she dropped me, when Emil gave her the word. I hope he’s all right, but he was a little prick in some ways. Not that I’d wish anything really bad on the kid, but he wouldn’t be much of a loss.”
Max was silent.
“Well, it’d be too bad for Lucinda and her parents, I suppose, but it’d give you a clear way with her.”
As Arthur started to pull away, Max put his foot into the front spokes, and the bike fell over. “You’re a bit of a prick yourself,” Max said as Arthur hit the ground.
“Hey!” the boy cried. “I thought you didn’t like him at all.”
“Yeah, well maybe I do, just a little,” Max said, helping Arthur up.
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21
Max was in the library the next day, reading about rolled-up dimensions and superstring theories, wondering if he might get some idea of how the alien passages worked, when the Sanger twins came by and stopped at his desk.
“What was it like to be lured out?” Jane asked.
“Did you feel weird?” Alice added.
Max was about to explain when Muhammad Bekhter stopped to listen. Then Arthur Cheney and a few of his friends from the lower grade wandered by. Max found himself surrounded.
“Well?” Jane asked.
Max saw that a few of the younger kids seemed eager to hear what he had to say. Stories and inaccurate rumors had begun to circulate as soon as he and Lucinda had come back, now more than three weeks ago, and the level of curiosity had continued to increase in direct proportion to the few available answers.
“Do you really know why we’re here?” Muhammad asked. “My father says everyone’s just guessing.”
“We can’t be sure,” Max answered, “but—”
“Your screen’s flashing,” Alice said.
Max touched the message release:
I’M AT YOUR HOUSE AND WOULD LIKE
TO TALK WITH YOU—LISSA
“The ship’s back!” Max shouted, springing up and pushing past the group. Voices babbled excitedly behind him as he hurried from the library.
He raced home on his bike, and was surprised to find Lissa sitting on the back steps to his house. She looked up and smiled.
“I promised, Max, remember? I’ve been here for a few hours, talking with your parents and Lucinda’s. The announcement that we’ve returned should be going out to everyone here any minute now.”
“What took you so long?” Max slipped his bike into the rack and sat down next to her apprehensively.
“We had some trouble with the ship,” she said, “and I had to break a few bureaucratic heads, but I do have some good news, too.”
“I thought you might not come back,” Max said.
“I’m sorry for the anxiety we’ve caused, but it couldn’t be helped. We found the other window, Max. It’s just past the orbit of Venus. Alek—Captain Calder—thinks there may be others. It seems likely that we’re being invited to come and go as we please.”
“What do you want to talk to me about?”
“I promised we’d talk. But you’re right, there’s more. You’re an important player in what’s happened, and I want to find out more about you.”
“About me?”
“Don’t be so modest. I want you to come back to Earth, with a stop at Bernal One, where we’ll go over what you’ve already recorded. We have experts and facilities there that can help you get at things you may not have registered completely, or which you don’t think important. Have you drawn your map?”
“Yes, I have, and I would like to come. Have you asked Lucinda?”
“Of course. I had a long talk with her. She was with the guards at the column when our ship was brought in. She thinks that the habitat should become our outpost inside the Sun, a staging area for further exploration of the portal system. She suggested it to her mother.”
“That seems logical,” Max said.
“We can’t take the habitat out. Its drive systems are still dead, for no good reason at all, so she thinks maybe the habitat is supposed to stay here.”
“Lucinda said that?” Max asked.
“Yes, and I think she’s right. The navigator agrees.”
“But you will be taking people out,” Max said.
Lissa nodded. “We’ll ferry out those who want to get back to Earth and other points in Sunspace, and we’ll bring in fresh teams. Many of your habitat’s people, the navigator told me today, feel they’ve put in the years they contracted for, and are anxious to get back to Earth, Mars, Bernal One and the Moon, where they have friends and relatives, or new jobs waiting for them. Many just want to retire and pursue their interests for a few years. Ferry service will begin as soon as we assemble ships at the Venus window.”
“When do you want Lucinda and me to go?”
“How about in a few days? Your parents will be coming with you, of course. Lucinda’s won’t just yet. They’re still hoping for news of their son.”
“You know about the closed passage,” Max said.
Lissa looked puzzled. “I still don’t see why it should be closed. They wanted to show us their system, so we’d see how knowledge and mind could bend the limits of space-time to overcome distance. We’ve struggled with relativistic ships and radio, but nothing we’ve done can compare to using the very strength of suns for both travel and faster-than-light communications. The scale they’ve worked on is elegantly equal to the task.” She sighed. “But maybe the builders no longer exist.”
“They have to be there,” Max insisted. “You’ve been monitoring tachyon communications for years, haven’t you?”
“Maybe those are automatic, too, routine signals between suncore stations, old cybernetic systems babbling to each other.”
“No,” Max said. “That would be too disappointing.” He realized that he sounded like Lucky Russell.
Lissa said, “I’ve been thinking that our suncore station is a kind of automatic cradle rocker, keeping our Sun adjusted, protecting the Earth from catastrophe. When you found the portals, it signaled to the Others that we were ready to look beyond our Sunspace, that we could appreciate, if not fully understand, what they had left for us to find.” She looked at him with interest. “What do you think about the way the three of you were lured outside?”
“I think they only weakened our resistance and let our curiosity lead us,” he said. “It’s not too different from sleepwalking. I’ve read some stuff about that. Have you ever walked in your sleep?”
“A long time ago.”
“Well, what happens is that you know, in a distant way, what you’re doing. At least that’s what it’s like for me. You feel you have to do something, even if it makes no sense. When you realize it’s crazy, your mind regains control and you wake up. It’s as if dream states are a different way of being awake, maybe a simpler one, and you’re only completely awake when all the different p
arts of your brain work together.”
She nodded. “That’s interesting, Max, but we couldn’t do what they did to you. Hypnosis is the closest.”
“I know,” Max replied. “I wasn’t affected at first. I just went along with Emil and Lucinda when they came to get me. I felt it when I came outside, and later. Other people were affected, but were stopped, so we weren’t the only ones.”
“But that was later. You three were the first. Any ideas?”
“Maybe just chance,” Max said. “We happened to get scanned first, if that’s how they did it.”
“Or the system could only handle three at a time?”
“Maybe. Or maybe we were more suggestible.”
She smiled. “I guess we won’t know until they tell us. What plans have your parents made?”
“Dad wants to visit New York. He grew up there. Mom will probably visit her father on Bernal One, if he’s still living. After that I don’t know.”
“What do you want to do?” she asked, looking at him carefully.
“I’m not sure,” he said, looking out across the length of the hollow. It seemed too small, suddenly, to become a crossroads to countless worlds. Its importance would grow, but his endless days of school and private afternoons were over, and he was no longer sure that he would miss them. But where would there be a new place for him?
“Would you like to study at the Interstellar Institute on Earth?” Lissa asked.
Max looked at her with surprise and interest.
“I think you have the aptitudes,” she said. “Our main activity, besides teaching, is the study of the alien signals that crisscross the Galaxy. But to that we’ll now add exploration through the portals. You’d come to your studies with a lot of experience, which at the Institute counts for very little if you can’t get knowledge out of it, but talking with you makes me think you’ll know how to make the most of what you’ve seen. You’re lucky. The kind of discoveries you’ve made often come at the end of an explorer’s career, not at its beginning.”
“Do you teach at the Institute?” Max asked, feeling a growing excitement.
The Sunspacers Trilogy Page 47
