“WHAT?”
Sebastian walked across the blue rug, kneading his forearm. The ship’s medico-unit had fixed his broken elbow in forty-five seconds, having taken somewhat less time over the smaller, brighter wounds. (It had blinked a few odd-colored lights when the dark thing with a collapsed lung and three torn rib cartilages was presented to it. But Tyÿ had fiddled with the programming till the unit hummed efficiently over the beast.) The creature waddled now behind its master, ominous and happy. “Mouse, why you not the ship’s med your throat let fix?” He swung his arm. “It a good job would do.”
“Can’t. Couple of times they tried when I was a kid. Back when I got my plugs they gave it a go.” The Mouse shrugged.
Sebastian frowned. “Not very serious now it sounds.”
“It isn’t,” the Mouse said. “It doesn’t bother me. They just can’t fix it. Something about neurological con-something-or-other.”
“What that is?”
The Mouse turned up his palms and looked blank.
“Neurological congruency,” Katin said. “Your unattached vocal cords must be a neurologically congruent birth defect.”
“Yeah, that’s what they said.”
“Two types of birth defects,” Katin explained. “In both, some part of the body, internal or external, is deformed, atrophied, or just put together wrong.”
“My vocal cords are all there.”
“But at the base of the brain there’s a small nerve cluster which, if you see it in cross section, looks more or less like a template of a human being. If this template is complete, then the brain has the nervous equipment to handle a complete body. Very rarely the template contains the same deformity as the body, as in the Mouse’s case. Even if the physical difficulty is corrected, there are no nerve connections within the brain to manipulate the physically corrected part.”
“That must be what’s wrong with Prince’s arm,” the Mouse said. “If it had been torn off in an accident or something, they could graft a new one on, connect up the veins and nerves and everything and have it just like new.”
“Oh,” Sebastian said.
Lynceos came down the ramp. White fingers massaged the ivory clubs of his wrists. “Captain’s really doing some fancy flying—”
Idas came to the rim of the pool. “This star he’s going to, where is—?”
“—its coordinates put it at the tip of the inner arm—”
“—in the Outer Colonies then—”
“—beyond even the Far Out Colonies.”
“That a lot of flying is,” Sebastian said. “And Captain all the way himself will fly.”
“The captain has a lot of things to think about,” Katin suggested.
The Mouse slipped his strap over his shoulder. “A lot of things he doesn’t want to think about too. Hey, Katin, how about that game of chess?”
“Spot you a rook,” Katin said. “Let’s keep it fair.”
They settled to the gaming board.
Three games later Von Ray’s voice came through the commons. “Everyone report to his projection chamber. There’s some tricky crosscurrents coming up.”
The Mouse and Katin pushed up from their bubble chairs. Katin loped toward the little door behind the serpentine staircase. The Mouse hurried across the rug, up the three steps. The mirrored panel slid into the wall. He stepped over a tool box, a coil of cable, three discarded frozen-coil memory bars—melting, they had stained the plates with salt where the puddle had dried—and sat on the couch. He shook out the cables and plugged them in.
Olga winked solicitously above, around, and beneath him.
Crosscurrents: red and silver sequins flung in handfuls. The captain wielded them against the stream.
“You must have been quite a racer, Captain,” commented Katin. “What kind of yacht did you fly? We had a racing club at school that leased three yachts. I thought of going out for it one term.”
“Shut up and hold your vane steady.”
Here, down the galaxy’s spiral, there were fewer stars. Gravimetric shifts gentled here. Flight at galactic center, with its more condensed flux, yielded a dozen conflicting frequencies to work with. Here, a captain had to pick at the trail wisps of ionic inflections.
“Where are we going, anyway?” the Mouse asked.
Lorq pointed coordinates on the static matrix and the Mouse read them against matrix movable.
Where was the star?
Take concepts like “distant,” “isolate,” “faint,” and give them precise mathematical expression. They’ll vanish under such articulation.
But just before they do, that’s where it lay.
“My star.” Lorq swept vanes aside so they could see. “That’s my sun. That’s my nova, with eight-hundred-year-old light. Look sharp, Mouse, and swing her down hard. If your slapdash vaning keeps me a second from this sun—”
“Come on, Captain!”
“—I’ll ram Tyÿ’s deck down your gullet, sideways. Swing her back.”
And the Mouse swung as all night rushed about his head.
“Captains from out here,” Lorq mused when the currents cleared, “when they come into the inflected confusion of the central hub, they can’t ride the flux in a complicated cluster like the Pleiades to save themselves. They go off beams, take spins, and go headlong into all kinds of mess. Half the accidents you’ve heard about were with eccentric captains. I’ve talked to some of them. They told me that here on the rim, it was us who were always piling up ships in gravity spin. ‘You always fall asleep on your strings,’ they told me.” He laughed.
“You know, you’ve been flying a long time, Captain,” Katin said. “It looks pretty clear. Why don’t you turn off for a while?”
“I feel like diddling my fingers in the ether for another watch. You and Mouse stay tied up. The rest of you puppets cut strings.”
Vanes deflated and folded till each was a single pencil of light. And the light turned off.
“Oh, Captain Von Ray, something—”
“—something we meant to ask you—”
“—before. Do you have any more—”
“—could you tell us where you put—”
“—I mean if it’s okay, Captain—”
“—the bliss?”
Night grew easy about their eyes. The vanes swept them toward the pinhole in the velvet masking.
“They must have a pretty high time of it in the mines on Tubman,” the Mouse commented after a while. “I’ve been thinking about that, Katin. When the captain and me moseyed down Gold for bliss, there were some characters who tried to get us to sign up for work out there. I started thinking, you know: a plug is a plug and a socket is a socket, and if I’m on one end, it shouldn’t make too much difference to me if there’s a starship vane, aqualat net, or an ore cutter on the other. I think I might go out there for a time.”
“May the shade of Ashton Clark hover over your right shoulder and guard your left.”
“Thanks.” After another while he asked, “Katin, why do people always say ‘Ashton Clark’ whenever you’re going to change jobs? They told us back at Cooper that the guy who invented plugs was named Socket or something.”
“Souquet,” Katin said. “Still, he must have considered it an unfortunate coincidence. Ashton Clark was a twenty-third-century philosopher cum psychologist whose work enabled Vladimeer Souquet to develop his neural plugs. I guess the answer has to do with work. Work as mankind knew it up until Clark and Souquet was a very different thing from today, Mouse. A man might go to an office and run a computer that would correlate great masses of figures that came from sales reports on how well, let’s say, buttons—or something equally archaic—were selling over certain areas of the country. This man’s job was vital to the button industry: they had to have this information to decide how many buttons to make next year. But though this man held an essential job in the button industry, was hired, paid, or fired by the button industry, week in and week out he might not see a button. He was given a certain amount of money for running his computer. With that money his partner bought food and clothes for him and his family. But there was no direct connection between where they worked and how they ate and lived the rest of the time. They weren’t paid with buttons. As farming, hunting, and fishing became occupations of a smaller and smaller percent of the population, this separation between man’s work and the way he lived—what he ate, what he wore, where he slept—became greater and greater for more people. Ashton Clark pointed out how psychologically damaging this was to humanity. The entire sense of self-control and self-responsibility that man acquired during the Neolithic Revolution when he’d first learned to plant grain and domesticate animals and live in one spot of his own choosing was seriously threatened. The threat had been coming since the Industrial Revolution and many people had pointed it out before Ashton Clark. But Ashton Clark went one step further. If the situation of a technological society was such that there could be no direct relation between a man’s work and his modus vivendi, other than money, at least he must feel that he is directly changing things by his work, shaping things, making things that weren’t there before, moving things from one place to another. He must exert energy in his work and see these changes occur with his own eyes. Otherwise he would feel his life was futile.
“Had he lived another hundred years either way, probably nobody would have heard of Ashton Clark today. But technology had reached the point where it could do something about what Ashton Clark was saying. Souquet invented his plugs and sockets, and neural-response circuits, and thus the whole basic technology by which a machine could be controlled by direct nervous impulse, the same impulses that cause your hand or foot to move. There was a revolution in the concept of labor. All major industrial work began to be broken down into jobs that could be machined ‘directly’ by man. There had been factories run by a single man before, an uninvolved character who turned a switch on in the morning, slept half the day, checked a few dials at lunchtime, then turned things off before he left in the evening. Now a man went to a factory, plugged himself in, and he could push the raw materials into the factory with his left foot, shape thousands on thousands of precise parts with one hand, assemble them with the other, and shove out a line of finished products with his right foot, having inspected them all with his own eyes. And he was a much more satisfied worker. Because of its nature, most work could be converted into plug-in jobs and done much more efficiently than it had been before. In the rare cases where production was slightly less efficient, Clark pointed out the psychological benefits to the society. Ashton Clark, it has been said, was the philosopher who returned humanity to the working man. Under this system, much of the endemic mental illness caused by feelings of alienation left society. The transformation turned war from a rarity to an impossibility, and—after the initial upset—stabilized the economic web of worlds for the last eight hundred years. Ashton Clark became the workers’ prophet. That’s why even today, when a woman or a man is going to change jobs, you send Ashton Clark, or his spirit, along with them.”
The Mouse gazed across the stars. “I remember that sometimes gypsies used to curse by him.” He thought a moment. “Without plugs, I guess we would.”
“There were factions who resisted Clark’s ideas, especially on Earth, which has always been a bit reactionary. But they didn’t hold out very long.”
“Yeah,” the Mouse said. “Only eight hundred years. Not all gypsies are traitors like me.” But he laughed into the winds.
“The Ashton Clark system has only had one serious drawback that I can see. And it’s taken it a long time to materialize.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Something professors have been telling their students for years, it seems. You’ll hear it said at every intellectual gathering you go to, at least once. There seems to be a certain lack of cultural solidity today. That’s what the Vega Republic was trying to establish back in 2800. Because of the ease and satisfaction with which men and women can work now, anywhere they want, there have been such movements of peoples from world to world in the past dozen generations that society has wholly fragmented around itself. There’s only a gaudy, meretricious interplanetary society, which has no real tradition behind it …” Katin paused. “I got hold of some of Captain’s bliss before I plugged up. And while I was talking I just counted in my mind how many people I’ve heard say that between Harvard and Hell3. And you know something? They’re wrong.”
“They are?”
“They are. They’re all just looking for our social traditions in the wrong place. There are cultural traditions that have matured over the centuries, yet culminate now in something vital and solely of today. And you know who embodies that tradition more than anyone I’ve met?”
“The captain?”
“You, Mouse.”
“Huh?”
“You’ve collected the ornamentations a dozen societies have left us over the ages and made them inchoately yours. You’re the product of those tensions that clashed in the time of Clark and you resolve them on your syrynx with patterns eminently of the present—”
“Aw, cut it out, Katin.”
“I’ve been hunting a subject for my book with both historical import and humanity as well. You’re it, Mouse. My book should be your biography! My novel should be your life story. It should tell where you’ve been, what you’ve done, the things you’ve seen, and the things you’ve shown other people. There’s my social significance, my historical sweep, the spark among the links that illuminates the breadth of the net—”
“Katin, you’re crazy!”
“No, I’m not. I’ve finally seen what I’ve—”
“Hey, there! Keep your vanes spread taut!”
“Sorry, Captain.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Don’t go chattering to the stars if you’re going to do it with your eyes closed.”
Ruefully the two cyborg studs turned their attention back to the night. The Mouse was pensive. Katin was belligerent.
“There’s a star coming up bright and hot. It’s the only thing in the sky. Remember that. Keep it smack in front of us and don’t let her waver. You can babble about cultural solidity on your own time.”
Without horizon, the star rose.
At twenty times the distance of Earth from the sun (or Ark from its sun) there was not enough light from a medium G-type star to defract daytime through an Earth-type atmosphere. At such distances, the brightest object in the night would still look like a star, not a sun—a very bright star.
They were two billion miles, or a little over twenty solar distances, from it now.
It was the brightest star.
“A beauty, huh?”
“No, Mouse,” Lorq said. “Just a star.”
“How can you tell—”
“—tell it’s going to go nova?”
“Because of the buildup of heavy materials on the surface,” Lorq explained to the twins. “There’s just the faintest reddening of the absolute color, corresponding to the faintest cooling in the surface temperature. There’s also a slight speed-up of sunspot activity.”
“From the surface of one of her planets, though, there would be no way to tell?”
“That’s right. The reddening is far too faint to be detected with the naked eye. Fortunately this star has no planets. There’s some moon-sized junk floating up a bit closer that may have been a failed attempt at a world.”
Moons? “Moons!” Katin objected. “You can’t have moons without planets. Planetoids, maybe—but not moons!”
Lorq laughed. “Moon-sized is all I said.”
“Oh.”
All vanes had been used to swing the Roc into its two-billion-mile-radius orbit about the star. Katin lay in his projection chamber, hesitant to release the view of the star for the lights of his computer. “What about the study stations the Alkane has set up?”
“They’re drifting as lonely as we are. We’ll hear from them in due time. But for now we don’t need them and they don’t need us. Cyana has warned them we’re coming. I’ll point them on matrix movable. There, you can follow their locations and their movements. That’s the major manned station. It’s fifty times as far out as we are.”
“Are we within the danger zone when she goes?”
“When that nova starts, that star is going to eat up the sky and everything in it a long way out.”
“When does it begin?”
“Days, Cyana predicted. But such predictions have been known to be off by two weeks in either direction. We’ll have a few minutes to clear if she goes. We’re about two and a half light-hours from her now.” All their views came in not by light, but by etheric disturbance, which gave them a synchronous view of the sun. “We’ll see her start at exactly the instant she goes.”
“And the Illyrion?” Sebastian asked. “How we that get?”
“That’s my worry,” Lorq told him. “We’ll get it when the time comes to get it. You can all cut loose for a while now.”
But no one hurried to release cables. Vanes diminished to single lines of light, but only after a while did two, and two wink off.
Katin and the Mouse lingered longest.
“Captain?” Katin asked after a few minutes. “I was just wondering. Did the patrol say anything special when you reported Dan’s … accident?”
It was nearly a minute before Lorq said: “I didn’t report it.”
“Oh,” Katin said. “I didn’t really think you had.”
The Mouse started to say “But” three times—and didn’t.
“Prince has access to all official records coming through the Draco patrol. At least I assume he has. I’ve got a computer scanning all those that come through the Pleiades. He is certainly programmed to trace down thoroughly anything that comes in vaguely connected with me. If he traced down Dan, he’d find a nova. I don’t want him to find it that way. I’d just as soon he didn’t know Dan was dead. As far as I know, the only people who do know are on this ship. I like it that way.”
“Captain!”
“What, Mouse?”
“There’s something coming.”
“A supply ship for the station?” Katin asked.
“It’s in too far. They’re sniffing along after our faery dust.”
Lorq was silent while the strange ship moved across the coordinate matrix. “Cut loose and go into the commons. I’ll join you.”
“But, Captain—” The Mouse got it out.
“It’s a seven-vaned cargo ship like this one, only its identification says Draco.”
“What’s it doing here?”
“Into the commons I said.”
Katin read the name of the ship as its identification beam translated at the bottom of the grid: “The Black Cockatoo? Come on, Mouse. Captain says cut loose.”
They unplugged, and joined the others at the pool’s edge.
At the head of the winding steps, the door rolled up. Lorq stepped out on the shadowed stair.
The Mouse watched Von Ray come down and thought: Captain’s tired.
Katin watched Von Ray and Von Ray’s reflection on the mirrored mosaic and thought: He moves tired, but it’s the tiredness of an athlete before his second wind.
When Lorq was halfway down, the light-fantasia in the gilt frame on the far wall cleared.
They started. The Mouse actually gasped.
“So,” Ruby said. “Nearly a tie. Or is that fair? You are still ahead. We don’t know where you intend to find the prize. This race goes by starts and stops.” Her blue gaze washed the crew, lingered on the Mouse, returned to Lorq. “Till last night at Taafite, I’d never felt such pain. Perhaps I’ve lived a sheltered life. But whatever the rules are, handsome Captain—” contempt resonated now—“we too have been bred to play.”
“Ruby, I want to talk to you …” Lorq’s voice faltered. “And Prince. In person.”
“I’m not sure if Prince wants to talk to you. The time between your leaving us at the edge of Gold and our finally struggling to a medico is not one of my—our pleasantest memories.”
“Tell Prince I’m shuttling over to The Black Cockatoo. I’m tired of this horror tale, Ruby. There are things you want to know from me. There are things I want to say to you.”
Her hand moved nervously to the hair falling on her shoulder. Her dark cloak closed in a high collar. After a moment she said, “Very well.” Then she was gone.
Lorq looked down at his crew. “You heard. Back on your vanes. Tyÿ, I’ve watched the way you swing on your strings. You’ve obviously had more experience flying than anyone else here. Take over the captain’s sockets. And if anything odd happens—anything, whether I’m back or not, take the Roc out of here, fast.”
The Mouse and Katin looked at each other, then at Tyÿ.
Lorq crossed the carpet, mounted the ramp. Halfway over the white arc, he stopped and gazed at his reflection. Then he spat.
He disappeared before ripples touched the bank.
Exchanging puzzled looks, they broke from the pool.
On his couch, Katin plugged in and switched on his sensory input outside the ship to find the others were all there already.
He watched The Black Cockatoo drift closer to receive the shuttle.
“Mouse?”
“Yeah, Katin.”
“I’m worried.”
“About Captain?”
“About us.”
The Black Cockatoo, beating vanes on the darkness, turned slowly beside them to match orbits.
“We were drifting, Mouse, you and I, the twins, Tyÿ and Sebastian, good people all of us—but aimless. Then an obsessed man snatches us up and carries us out here to the edge of everything. And we arrive to find his obsession has imposed order on our aimlessness—or perhaps a more meaningful chaos. What worries me is that I’m so thankful to him. I should be rebelling, trying to assert my own order. But I’m not. I want him to win his infernal race. I want him to win, and until he wins or loses, I can’t seriously want anything else for myself.”
The Black Cockatoo received the shuttle boat like a cannon shot in reverse. Without the necessity of maintaining matched orbits, she drifted a ways from them. Katin watched her dark rotations.
“Good morning.”
“Good evening.”
“By Greenwich time it’s morning, Ruby.”
“And I do you the politeness of greeting you by Ark time. Come this way.” She held back her robe to let him pass into the black corridor.
“Ruby?”
“Yes?” Her voice was just behind his left shoulder.
“I’ve always wondered something, each time I’ve seen you. You’ve shown me so many hints of the magnificent person you are. But it gleams from under the shadow Prince throws. Years ago, when we talked at that party on the Seine, it struck me what a challenging person you would be to love.”
“Paris is worlds and worlds away, Lorq.”
“Prince controls you. It’s petty of me, but that’s what I can least forgive him. You’ve never shown your own will before him. Except at Taafite, that once beneath the exhausted sun on the other world. You thought Prince was dead. I know you remember it. I’ve thought of little else since. You kissed me. But he screamed—and you ran to him. Ruby, he’s trying to destroy the Pleiades Federation. That’s all the worlds that circle three hundred suns, and how many billions of people. They’re my worlds. I can’t let them die.”
“You would topple the column of Draco and send the Serpent crawling off through the dust to save them? You would pull the economic support out from under Earth and let the fragments fall into the night? You would bowl the worlds of Draco into epochs of chaos, civil strife, and deprivation? The worlds of Draco are Prince’s worlds. Are you really presumptuous enough to think he loves his less than you love yours?”
“What do you love, Ruby?”
“You are not the only one with secrets, Lorq. Prince and I have ours. When you came up out of the burning rocks, yes, I thought Prince was dead. There was a hollow tooth in my jaw filled with strychnine. I wanted to give you a victory kiss. I would have, if Prince had not screamed.”
“Prince loves Draco?” He whirled, caught her upper arms, dragged her against him.
Her breath surged against his chest. With eyes opened their faces struck. He mashed her thin mouth with his full one till her lips drew back, and his teeth and tongue ground teeth.
Her fingers grappled his rough hair. She made ugly sounds.
He held her, astonished, bewildered, horrified at the intensity of this desire for it all to be over, now, here. But it was not over. She pushed, twisted, jerked.
The instant his grip relaxed, she was away, eyes wide. Then her lids veiled the blue light till fury widened them again.
“Well …?” He was breathing hard.
Ruby drew her cloak around her. “When a weapon fails me once—” her voice was hoarse as the Mouse’s—“I discard it. Otherwise, handsome pirate, you …” Did the harshness lessen? “We would be … But I have other weapons now.”
The Cockatoo’s commons was small and stark. Two cyborg studs sat on the benches. Another stood on the steps beside the door to his projection chamber.
Sharp-featured men in white uniforms, they reminded Lorq of another crew he had worked. On their shoulders they wore the scarlet emblem of Red-shift, Ltd. They glanced at Lorq and Ruby. The one standing stepped back into his chamber and the plate door clanged in the high room. The other two got up to go.
“Will Prince come down?”
Ruby nodded toward the iron stair. “He’ll see you in the captain’s cabin.”
Lorq began to climb. His sandals clacked on the perforated steps. Ruby followed him.
Lorq knocked on the studded door.
It swung in, Lorq—with Ruby following—stepped inside, and a metal and plastic gauntlet on a jointed arm telescoped from the ceiling and struck him across the face, twice.
Lorq reeled back against the door—it was covered in leather on the inside and set with brass heads—so that it slammed.
“That,” the corpse announced, “is for manhandling my sister.”
Lorq rubbed his cheek and looked at Ruby. She stood by the jade wall. The draping valences were the same deep wine as her cloak.
“Do you think I don’t watch everything that goes on on this ship?” asked the corpse. “You Pleiades barbarians are as uncouth as Aaron always said you were.”
Bubbles rose in the tank, caressed the stripped and naked foot, caught and clustered on the shriveled groin, rolled up the chest—ribs scored between blackened flaps of skin—and fanned about the burned, bald head. The lipless mouth gaped on broken teeth. No nose. Tubes and wires snaked the rotten sockets. Tubes pierced at belly, hip, and shoulder. Fluids swirled in the tank and the single arm drifted back and forth, charred fingers locked with rigor mortis in a claw.
“Weren’t you ever told it was impolite to stare? You are staring, you know.”
The voice came from a speaker in the glass wall.
“I’m afraid I sustained a bit more damage than Ruby back on the other world.”
Above the tank two mobile cameras shifted as Lorq stepped from the door.
“For someone who owns Red-shift Limited, your turn to match orbits wasn’t very …” The banality did not mask Lorq’s astonishment.
Cables for running the ship were plugged into sockets set on the tank’s glass face. The glass itself was part of the wall. The cables coiled over black and gold tiles to disappear into the coppery grill covering the computer face.
On walls, floor, and ceiling, in opulent frames, etheric-disturbance screens all showed the same face of night:
At the edge of each was the gray shape of the Roc.
Centered on each was the star.
“Alas,” the corpse said, “I was never the sportsman you were. Still, you wanted to speak to me. What do you have to say?”
Again Lorq looked at Ruby. “I’ve said most of it to Ruby, Prince. You heard it.”
“Somehow I doubt you’d drag us both out here to the brink of a stellar catastrophe just to tell us that. Illyrion, Lorq Von Ray. Neither you nor I have forgotten your major purpose for coming here. You will not leave without telling where you intend to get—”
Then the star went nova.
The inevitable is that unexpected.
In the first second the enhanced images about them changed from points to floodlights. And the floodlights got brighter.
Ruby backed against the wall, arm across her eyes.
“It’s early!” the corpse shouted. “It’s days early …!”
Lorq took three steps across the room, yanked two plugs from the tank, and fixed them in his wrists. The third plug he twisted into his spinal socket. The play of the ship surged through him. Sensory input came in. His vision of the room was overlaid with the night. And night was catching fire.
Wresting control from the studs, he swung the Cockatoo around to point her toward the node of light. The ship plunged forward.
Twin cameras swiveled to focus him.
“Lorq, what are you doing?” Ruby cried.
“Stop him!” from the corpse. “He’s flying us into the sun!”
Ruby leaped at Lorq, caught him. They turned together, staggered. The chamber and the sun outside fixed on his eyes like a double exposure. She caught up a loop of cable, flung it around his neck, twisted it, and began to strangle him. The cable housing chewed his throat. He locked his arm behind her and pushed his other hand against her face. She grunted, and her head went back (his hand pushed at the center of the light). Her hair slipped, came loose; the wig fell from her burned scalp. She had only used the medico to return health. The cosmetic plasti-skin with which she had restored her face tore between his fingers. Rubbery film pulled from her blotched and hollowed cheek. Lorq suddenly jerked his hand away. As her ruined face screamed toward him through fire, he ripped her hands from his neck and pushed her away. Ruby went backward, tripped on her cloak, fell. He turned just as the mechanical hand swung down at him from the ceiling.
He caught it.
And it had less than human strength.
Easily he held it at arm’s length as the fingers grasped from the raging star. “Stop!” he bellowed. At the same time he willed the sensory input off all over the ship.
The screens went gray.
The sensory input had already been clamped off on all six of the ship’s cyborg studs.
The fires went out in his eyes.
“What in heaven are you trying to do, Lorq?”
“Dive into hell and fish Illyrion out with my bare hands!”
“He’s insane!” the corpse shrieked. “Ruby, he’s insane! He’s killing us, Ruby! That’s all he wants to do—kill us!”
“Yes! I’m killing you!” Lorq tossed the hand away. It grasped at the cable hanging from his wrist to jerk the plug. Lorq caught the arm again. The ship lurched.
“For God’s sake, pull us out, Lorq!” the corpse cried. “Pull us out of here!”
The ship jerked again. The artificial gravity slipped long enough for liquid to break on the tank face, then bead the glass as gravity righted.
“It’s too late,” Lorq whispered. “We’re caught in gravity spin!”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Just to kill you, Prince.” Lorq’s face raged till laughter spilled it. “That’s all, Prince! That’s all I want to do now.”
“I don’t want to die again!” the corpse shrieked. “I don’t want to flash out like an insect burning!”
“Flash?” Lorq’s face twisted about the scar. “Oh no! It’ll be slow, slower than before. Ten, twenty minutes at least. It’s already getting warm, isn’t it? But it won’t be unbearable for another five.” Below the gold blaze Lorq’s face darkened. Spittle flecked his lips with each consonant. “You’ll boil in your jar like a fish—” He stopped to rub his stomach beneath his vest. He looked around the chamber. “What can burn in here? The drapes? Is your desk real wood? And all those papers?”
The mechanical hand yanked from Lorq’s. The arm swung across the room. The fingers seized Ruby’s hand. “No, Ruby! Stop him! Don’t let him kill us!”
“You spoke of love, Lorq,” Ruby cried, gripping the hand. “And this is what it brings you? My death, and the death and destruction of all I’ve ever loved, all I might have loved, even you—?”
“You’re in liquid, Prince, so you’ll see them afire before you go. Ruby, the places where you’re already burned won’t be able to sweat. So you’ll die first. He’ll be able to watch you a few moments before his own fluids begin to boil, the rubber runs, the plastic melts—”
“No!” The hand jerked from Ruby’s, swung across the room, and smashed into the tank face. “Criminal! Thief! Pirate! Murderer! No—!”
The hand was weaker than it had been at Taafite.
So was the glass.
The glass broke.
Nutrient fluids splashed Lorq as he danced back on flooded sandals. The corpse crumpled in the tank, netted in tubes and wires.
The cameras swung wildly out of focus.
The hand clattered to the wet tile.
As the fingers stilled, Ruby screamed, and screamed again. She flung herself across the floor, scrambled over the ragged hem of glass, caught up the corpse, hugged it to her, kissed it, and screamed, and kissed it again, rocking back and forth. Her cloak darkened in the fluid.
Then her scream choked. She dropped the body, hurled herself back against the tank wall, and clutched her neck. Her face flushed deeply beneath burns and wrecked makeup. She slid slowly down the wall. Her eyes were closed when she reached the bottom.
“Ruby …?” Whether or not she had cut herself climbing over the glass, it didn’t matter. The kiss would have done it. So soon after severe burns, even with what the medico could do, she must have been in a hyperallergic state. The alien proteins in Prince’s nutrient fluid had entered her system, causing a massive histamine reaction. She had succumbed in seconds to anaphylactic shock.
And Lorq laughed.
It started like a rearrangement of boulders in his chest. Then it opened to a full sound, ringing on the high walls of the flooded chamber. Triumph was laughable and terrible and his.
He took a deep breath. The ship surged at his fingertips. Still blind, he urged The Black Cockatoo into the bursting sun.
Somewhere in the ship one of the cyborg studs was crying …
“The star!” the Mouse cried. “She’s blown nova!”
Tyÿ’s voice shot through the master circuit: “Out of here we go! Now!”
“But the captain!” Katin shouted. “Look at The Black Cockatoo!”
“The Cockatoo, my God, it’s—”
“—Lord, it’s diving toward—”
“—falling into the—”
“—the sun!”
“All right, everybody, vanes spread. Katin, I your vanes spread said!”
“My God …” Katin breathed. “Oh, no …”
“It too bright is,” Tyÿ decided. “Off sensory we go!”
The Roc began to pull away.
“Oh my God! They—they really are, they’re really falling! It’s so bright! They’ll die! They’ll burn up like—they’re falling! Oh, Lord, stop them! Somebody do something! The captain’s on there. You’ve got to do something!”
“Katin!” the Mouse shouted. “Get the hell off sensory! Are you crazy?”
“They’re going down! No! It’s like a bright hole in the middle of everything! And they’re falling into it. Oh, they’re plunging. They’re falling—”
“Katin!” the Mouse shrieked. “Katin, don’t look at it!”
“It’s growing, it’s so bright … bright … brighter! I can hardly see them!”
“Katin!” Suddenly it came to him, and the Mouse cried out: “Don’t you remember Dan? Turn your sensory input off!”
“No! No, I’ve got to see it! It’s roaring now. It’s shaking the whole night apart! You can smell it burning, burning up the darkness. I can’t see them anymore—no, there they are!”
“Katin, stop it!” The Mouse twisted beneath Olga. “Tyÿ, cut off his input!”
“I can’t. I this ship against gravity must fly. Katin! Off sensory, I you order!”
“Down … down … I’ve lost them again! I can’t see them anymore. The light’s turning all red now … I can’t—”
The Mouse felt the ship lurch as Katin’s vane suddenly flailed wild.
Then Katin screamed. “I can’t see!” The scream became a sob. “I can’t see anything!”
The Mouse balled up on the couch with his hands over his eyes, shaking.
“Mouse!” Tyÿ shouted. “Damn it, we one vane have lost. Down you sweep!”
The Mouse swept blindly down. Tears of terror squeezed between his lids as he listened to Katin’s sobs.
The Roc rose from and The Black Cockatoo fell into it.
And it was nova.
Sprung from pirates, reeling blind in fire, I am called pirate, murderer, thief.
I bear it.
I will gather my prizes in a moment and become the man who pushed Draco over the edge of tomorrow. That it was to save the Pleiades does not diminish such a crime. Those with the greatest power must ultimately commit the greatest felonies. Here on The Black Cockatoo I am a flame away from forever. I told her once that we had not been fit for meaning. Neither for meaningful deaths. (There is a death whose only meaning is that it was died to defend chaos. And they are dead …) Such lives and deaths preclude significance, keep guilt from the murderer, elation from the socially beneficent hero. How do other criminals support their crimes? The hollow worlds cast up their hollow children, raised only to play or fight. Is that sufficient for winning? I have struck down one-third the cosmos to raise up another and let one more go staggering; and I feel no sin on me. Then it must be that I am free and evil. Well, then, I am free—mourning her with my laughter. Mouse, Katin, you who can speak out of the net, which one of you is the blinder for not having watched me win under this sun? I can feel fire churn by me. Like you, dead Dan, I will grasp at dawn and evening, but I will win the noon.
Darkness.
Silence.
Nothing.
Then thought shivered:
I think … therefore I … I am Katin Crawford? He fought away from that. But the thought was him; he was the thought. There was no place in here to anchor.
A flicker.
A tinkle.
The scent of caraway.
It was beginning.
No! He clawed back down into darkness. The mind’s ear recalled someone shrieking, “Remember Dan …” and the mind’s eye pictured the staggering derelict.
Another sound, smell, flicker beyond his lids.
He fought for unconsciousness in terror of the torrent. But terror quickened his heart, and the increased pulse drove him upward, upward where the magnificence of the dying star lay in wait for him.
Sleep was killed in him.
He held his breath and opened his eyes—
Pastels pearled before him. High chords rang softly on one another. Then caraway, mint, sesame, anise—
And behind the colors, a figure.
“Mouse?” Katin whispered, and was surprised how clearly he heard himself.
The Mouse took his hands from the syrynx.
Color, smell, and music ceased.
“You awake?” The Mouse sat on the windowsill, shoulders and the left side of his face lit with copper. The sky behind him was purple.
Katin closed his eyes, pushed his head back into the pillow, and smiled. The smile got broader, and broader, split over his teeth, and suddenly verged against tears. “Yes.” He relaxed, and opened his eyes again. “Yes. I’m awake.” He pushed himself up. “Where are we? Is this the Alkane’s manned station?” But there was landscape through the window.
The Mouse shoved down from the sill. “Moon of a planet called New Brazillia.”
Katin got up from the hammock and went to the window. Beyond the atmosphere-trap, over the few low buildings, a black and gray rock-scape carpeted toward a lunar-close horizon. He pulled in a cool, ozone-tainted breath, then looked back at the Mouse. “What happened, Mouse? Oh, Mouse, I thought I was going to wake up like …”
“Dan caught his on the way into the sun. You caught yours while we were pulling out. All the frequencies were dopplering down the red shift. It’s the other end of the synchronous ion spectrum that does the things like happened to Dan. Tyÿ finally got a moment to shut your sensory input off from the master controls. You really were blind for a while, you know? We got you into the medico as soon as we were safe.”
Katin frowned. “Then what are we doing here? What happened then?”
“We stayed out by the manned stations and watched the fireworks from a safe distance. It took a little over three hours to reach peak intensity. We were talking with the Alkane’s crew when we got the captain’s signal from The Black Cockatoo. So we scooted on around, picked him up, and let all the Cockatoo’s cyborg studs loose.”
“Picked him up! You mean he did get out?”
“Yeah. He’s in another room. He wants to talk to you.”
“He wasn’t fooling us about ships going into a nova and coming out the other side?” They started toward the door.
Outside they walked down a corridor with a glass wall that looked across broken moon. Katin had lost himself in marvelous contemplation of the rubble when the Mouse said, “Here.”
They opened a door.
A crack of light struck in across Lorq’s face. “Who’s there?”
Katin asked, “Captain?”
“What?”
“Captain Von Ray?”
“… Katin?” His fingers clawed the chair arms. Yellow eyes stared, jumped; jumped, stared.
“Captain, what …?” Katin’s face furrowed. He fought down panic, forced his face to relax.
“I told Mouse to bring you to see me when you were up and around. You’re … you’re all right. Good.” Agony spread the ruptured flesh, then faltered. And for a moment there was agony.
Katin stopped breathing.
“You tried to look too. I’m glad. I always thought you would be the one to understand.”
“You … fell into the sun, Captain?”
Lorq nodded.
“But how did you get out?”
Lorq pressed his head against the back of the chair. Dark skin, red hair shot with yellow, his unfocused eyes, were the only colors in the room. “What? You’re going to have to speak louder when you talk to me. Otherwise … Get out, you say?” He laughed sharply. “It’s an open secret now. How did I get out?” A muscle quivered on the wrack of his jaw. “A sun—” Lorq held up one hand, the fingers curved to support an imaginary sphere “—it rotates, like a world, like some moons. With something the mass of a star, rotation means incredible centripetal force pushing out at the equator. At the end of the buildup of heavy materials at the surface, when the star actually novas, it falls inward toward the center.” His fingers began to quiver. “Because of the rotation, the material at the poles falls faster than the material at the equator.” He clutched the arm of the chair again. “Within seconds after the nova begins you don’t have a sphere anymore, but a …”
“A torus!”
Lines scored Lorq’s face. And his head jerked to the side, as if trying to avoid a great light. Then the scarred lineaments came back to face them. “Did you say torus? A torus? Yes. That sun became a doughnut with a hole big enough for two Jupiters to fit through, side by side.”
“But the Alkane’s been studying novas up close for nearly a century! Why didn’t they know?”
“The matter displacement is all toward the center of the sun. The energy displacement is all outwards. The gravity shift will funnel everything toward the hole; the energy displacement keeps the temperature as cool inside the hole as the surface of some red giant star—well under five hundred degrees.”
Though the room was cool, Katin saw sweat starting in the ridges of Lorq’s forehead.
“The topological extension of a torus of that dimension—the corona which is all the Alkane’s stations can see—is almost identical to a sphere. Large as the hole is, compared to the size of the energy-ball, that hole would be pretty hard to find unless you knew where it was—or fell into it by accident.” On the chair arm the fingers suddenly stretched, quivered. “The Illyrion—”
“You … you got your Illyrion, Captain?”
Again Lorq raised his hand before his face, this time in a fist. He tried to focus on it. With his other hand he grabbed for it, half missed, grabbed again, missed completely, then again; opened fingers grappled the closed ones. The doubled fist shook as with palsy.
“Seven tons! The only materials dense enough to center in the hole are the trans-three-hundred elements—not the Schwarzschild object that more than a millennium of quantum mathematics would have predicted. But Illyrion! It floats free there, for whoever wants to go in and sweep it up. Fly your ship in, then look around to see where it is, and sweep it up with your projector vanes. It collects on the nodes of your projectors. Illyrion—nearly free of impurities.” His hands came apart. “Just … go on sensory input, and look around to see where it is.” He lowered his face. “She lay there, her face … her face an amazing ruin in the center of hell. And I swept my seven arms across the blinding day to catch the bits of hell that floated by—” He raised his head again. “There’s an Illyrion mine down on New Brazillia …” Outside the window a mottled planet hung huge in the sky. “They have equipment here for handling Illyrion shipments. But you should have seen their faces when we brought in our seven tons, hey, Mouse?” He laughed loudly again. “That’s right, Mouse? You told me what they looked like, yes? … Mouse?”
“That’s right, Captain.”
Lorq nodded, breathed deep. “Katin, Mouse, your job is over. You’ve got your walking papers. Ships leave here regularly. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting on another one.”
“Captain,” Katin ventured, “what are you going to do?”
“On New Brazillia, there’s a home where I spent much pleasant time when I was a boy. I’m going back there … to wait.”
“Isn’t there something you could do, Captain? I looked and—”
“What? Speak louder.”
“I said, I’m all right, and I looked—!” Katin’s voice broke.
“You looked going away. I looked searching the center. The neural distortion is all the way up into the brain. Neurocongruency.” He shook his head. “Mouse, Katin, Ashton Clark to you.”
“But Captain—”
“Ashton Clark.”
Katin looked at the Mouse, then back at the captain. The Mouse fiddled with the strap of his sack. Then he looked up. After a moment they turned and left the lightless room.
Outside they once more gazed across the moonscape.
“So,” Katin mused. “Von Ray has it and Prince and Ruby don’t.”
“They’re dead,” the Mouse told him. “Captain said he killed them.”
“Oh.” Katin looked out on the moonscape. After a while he said: “Seven tons of Illyrion, and the balance begins to shift. Draco is setting as the Pleiades rises. The Outer Colonies are going to go through some changes. Bless Ashton Clark that labor relocation isn’t too difficult today. Still, there are going to be problems. Where’re Lynceos and Idas?”
“They’ve already gone. They got a stellar-gram from their brother and they’ve gone to see him, since they were here in the Outer Colonies.”
“Tobias?”
“That’s right.”
“Poor twins. Poor triplets. When this Illyrion gets out and the change begins …” Katin snapped his fingers. “No more bliss.” He looked up at the sky, nearly bare of stars. “We’re at a moment of history, Mouse.”
The Mouse scraped wax from his ear with his little fingernail. His earring glittered. “Yeah. I was thinking that myself.”
“What are you going to do now?”
The Mouse shrugged. “I really don’t know. So I asked Tyÿ to give me a Tarot reading.”
Katin raised his eyebrows.
“She and Sebastian are downstairs now. Their pets got loose around the bar. Scared everybody half to death and almost broke up the place.” The Mouse laughed harshly. “You should have seen it. Soon as they get finished calming down the owner, they’re coming up to read my cards. I’ll probably get another job studding. There’s not much reason to think about the mines now.” His fingers closed on the leather sack under his arm. “There’s still a lot to see, a lot I have to play. Maybe you and me can stick together awhile, get on the same ship. You’re funny as hell sometimes. But I don’t dislike you half as much as I dislike a lot of other people. What are your plans?”
“I haven’t really had time to think about them.” He slipped his hands beneath his belt and lowered his head.
“What are you doing?”
“Thinking.”
“What?”
“That here I am on a perfectly good moon; I’ve just finished up a job, so I won’t have any worries for a while. Why not sit down and get some serious work done on my novel?” He looked up. “But you know, Mouse? I don’t really know if I want to write a book now.”
“Huh?”
“When I was looking at that nova … no, after it, just before I woke and thought I’d have to spend the rest of my life in blinkers, ear and nose plugs, while I went noisily nuts, I realized how much I hadn’t looked at, how much I hadn’t listened to, smelled, tasted—how little I knew of those basics of life you have literally at your fingertips. And then Captain—”
“Hell,” the Mouse said. With his bare foot he toed dust from his boot. “You’re not going to write it, after all the work you’ve already done?”
“Mouse, I’d like to. But I still don’t have a subject. And I’ve only just gotten prepared to go out and find one. Right now I’m just a bright guy with a lot to say and nothing to say it about.”
“That’s a fink-out,” the Mouse grunted. “What about the captain and the Roc? And you said you wanted to write about me. Okay, go ahead. And write about you too. Write about the twins. You really think they’d sue you? They’d be tickled pink, both of them. I want you to write it, Katin. I might not be able to read it, but I’d sure listen if you read it to me.”
“You would?”
“Sure. After all you’ve put into it this far, if you stopped now, you wouldn’t be happy at all.”
“Mouse, you tempt me. I’ve wanted to do nothing else for years.” Then Katin laughed. “No, Mouse. I’m too much the thinker still. This last voyage of the Roc? I’m too aware of all the archetypical patterns it follows. I can see myself now, turning it into some allegorical Grail quest. That’s the only way I could deal with it, hiding all sorts of mystic symbolism in it. Remember all those writers who died before they finished their Grail recountings?”
“Aw, Katin, that’s a lot of nonsense. You’ve got to write it!”
“Nonsense like the Tarot? No, Mouse. I’d fear for my life with such an undertaking.” Again he looked over the landscape. The moon, so known to him, for a moment put him at peace with all the unknown beyond. “I want to. I really do. But I’d be fighting a dozen jinxes from the start, Mouse. Maybe I could. But I don’t think so. The only way to protect myself from the jinx, I guess, would be to abandon it before I finished the last
—Athens, March 1966
New York, May 1967