A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist (9 page)
Read A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist Online
Authors: Ron Miller
“I’m sorry about the mess. I felt so dizzy.”
“Don’t give it another thought.”
“Easy for you to say,” grumbled Hughenden from above.
“I remember what you told me about free fall now,” the princess admitted. “I just had no idea what it’d be like. It took me completely by surprise. I think that I’m going to be all right now.”
“Here,” the professor said, handing her a piece of bread. “Eat this slowly, it’ll help settle your stomach.”
“I certainly hope so,” said Hughenden ungraciously, as he deposited the bag into a waste receptacle. “We’re going to be finding bits of her breakfast for the rest of the trip. What a fool thing to do: eating before the launch.”
“It was just the shock,” she repeated. “Before I opened my eyes, I was dreaming about floating, like a, a fish. It was a very pleasant sensation.”
“I rather like it myself,” agreed the professor, whose elongated body wavered bonelessly above her like a pennant or a strand of kelp. “If weightlessness is not otherwise proving a handicap to anyone, then I propose that we dispense with any attempt to create gravity artifically by rotating the cabin.”
“Good,” said Hughenden. “I’ve maintained all along that the Coriolis forces in such a confined space would be disorienting at best and debilitating at worst. Our heads would be travelling at a substantially different speed than our feet. Every time we moved or bent over, we’d suffer severe attacks of vertigo or disorientation.”
“Then please leave the cabin the way it is,” Bronwyn urged. “Where are we, anyway?”
“Good question,” replied Wittenoom. “Somewhere about five hundred miles above the earth, I imagine.”
“That’s a useful answer,” sneered the doctor. “That only limits us to being somewhere on the surface of a rapidly expanding imaginary sphere with an area, presently, of some 254,340,000 square miles.”
“Did all of the rockets work as they should have?” Bronwyn asked. “I don’t remember hearing all of the stages firing.”
“You wouldn’t have,” answered Hughenden. “We were travelling faster than our own sound.”
“If the outer carapace fell away as it was supposed to, we can open the ports and see what we can see,” said Wittenoom.
There were fifteen portholes: twelve spaced around the compartment’s circumference, just above the level of the couches, and three larger ports near the apex of the dome. Bolts held protective plates over the thick quartz windows. These were attacked with wrenches by the three astronauts; the panels fell into slots designed to receive them, where they locked into place. Immediately half a dozen dazzling, parallel beams of light cut diagonally across the interior of the compartment. Half a dozen brilliant circles or ellipses (depending upon the angle at which a particular beam struck the curving interior) were projected onto the opposite wall. These drifted almost imperceptibly as the spacecraft slowly rotated on its axis.
“We’d best regularize the motion of the ship,” said Hughenden, “and get dark filters over the ports facing the sun. The crystal is opaque to infrared but it’s virtually transparent to ultraviolet. We don’t want that much radiation pouring into the cabin.”
“Nor anyone accidentally looking at the sun,” agreed Wittenoom.
“Oh! Look!” cried Bronwyn, pushing herself toward the ceiling. She caught hold of one of the many leather loops that decorated the interior of the spacecraft, something like the straps that adorn subway cars, and anchored herself beneath one of the large portholes. A portion of her mind amazed itself at how rapidly its owner had become accustomed to the almost moment-by-moment changes in orientation. As soon as she had grasped the handhold and placed her feet on either side of the port, squatting over the crystal disk, she no longer thought of herself as being on the ceiling but rather near the center of a dish-shaped floor. She had no difficulty in imagining that she was now looking
down
through the quartz-plugged opening.
“Professor! Come look!”
The three overhead portholes were each nearly eighteen inches in diameter and with her face pressed close to the almost invisible quartz surface, Bronwyn felt as though she were suspended in space like a fixed star.
This must be what it feels like to be a constellation, with stars for eyes and comets for fingers and toes.
The sky was black and, to her surprise, starless; even the brightest of the stars were lost as the glare of the nearby moon dazzled her eyes.
The smaller of the earth’s two moons hovered before her face like a pan of milk, seeming so close that if she had been a cat she could have lapped up every phosphorescent drop.
The lactescent disk seemed to rotate slowly, like the plate of a lazy susan, as the spacecraft turned slowly on its axis. Gradually even this slight motion ceased as Hughenden halted the spin; Bronwyn heard the short, hissing bursts of the attitude jets.
“It looks close enough to touch,” she said.
“I only wish that were so,” replied Wittenoom. “We have tens of thousands of miles yet to go.”
“So far?”
“Only in distance. In time, only a day or two.”
“It doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong with it. It’s so pretty.”
“No. We’re still too far to see anything with the naked eye. And of course, meteors would be invisible in the vacuum around us. That the moon is full doesn’t help, either. Hughenden, see if you can find the telescope.”
The sour little scientist did as he was asked and propelled the instrument toward the professor as though he were launching a torpedo, adding ungraciously: “As soon as you’re finished sightseeing, I believe that there is work to do.”
Beneath Bronwyn’s enhanced gaze, the surface of the moon was transformed. What had to her unaided eye appeared as smooth and featureless as soft, white cheese was now revealed as a confused mass of pits, craters and cracks, making the magnified moon resemble more a very old plate that had just been dropped onto a floor or, to maintain the original analogy, a dessicated and moldy wheel of cheese that had been allowed to sit forgotten too long on a shelf.
“Professor!” she suddenly cried.
“What is it?”
“The moon just cracked! I saw it! A crack . . . it must be miles wide! It looked like someone had just broken a cookie!”
“Let me see,” the professor replied, taking the telescope from her hands and peering into its lens. “Dear, dear . . . I hope that we will not be arriving too late.”
“Too late for what?” she asked warily.
“I hope that there’ll be still be a moon when we get there.”
“And what happens if there’s not?”
“Then our return to the earth becomes a highly complex problem in celestial mechanics.”
“Not too complex, I hope.”
“Well, it is a branch of mathematics that is somewhat outside my field.”
“What about you, Doctor Hughenden?” Bronwyn asked.
“What about me?”
“How’s your celestial mechanics?”
“Do I
look
like a mechanic?”
“You
look
like a tick, but what does that have to do with my question?”
“Princess!” admonished the professor.
“I asked him a simple question and he knew perfectly well what I was talking about!”
“All that I can tell you,” smirked the doctor, “is that I agree with Wittenoom: if the moon is destroyed before we arrive, then our return to the earth becomes problematical in the extreme.”
“But why would that be? Why couldn’t we just turn around and go back?”
“Things just aren’t that simple out here, Princess,” answered Wittenoom. “Everything is moving, nothing is still, and all of these motions are curved, ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas, that sort of thing. Orbits are something like railroad tracks, you see. We’ve put ourselves on one that intercepts the moon. If the moon disintegrates, we will still continue on our track just as if it were still there. Unfortunately, we were counting on the presence of the moon and its gravity to alter our course, switch us to onto a spur, as it were, curving our path into a circle. From that new orbit we could easily arrange our descent onto the moon’s surface. Without the moon to deflect our path, we would simply continue to fly off into space.”
“Why can’t we use our rockets to change our orbit? The ones we would have used to land and take off?”
“Oh. Hm. I suppose that would be possible, but that’s where the problem of celestial mechanics comes in. How many of our rockets do we fire off? In what direction? How often? After all, we don’t want to sail off into the void in just any old direction, we specifically want to return to the earth. Nor do we want to reenter the atmosphere at the wrong angle, or too fast, or without enough spare rockets to brake our fall.
“As I say, everything is curved out here, Bronwyn. You simply can’t go from one place to another and back again in a straight line, like sailing a boat or riding a bicycle. The curves are immutable and we must choose the proper ones.”
“This is a stupid discussion in any case,” offered Hughenden sourly. “The moon’s still there. We’ve got better things to do than tutor a beginning course in elementary astronomy. At least
I
have something better to do.”
“You’re going to bathe?” asked Bronwyn.
“Now, now, Princess,” said Wittenoom. “He’s right. There are endless observations we must make. This is a unique opportunity. We’re the first people to ever rise beyond the atmosphere of the earth and we must make the best of it.”
“What can I do?” she offered.
“Think you could make lunch?” asked the doctor. “I’m starving.”
“I don’t consider that any incentive.”
Nevertheless they ate, an experience that Bronwyn found both exasperating and exhilirating; she spent more time experimenting and playing with her food then eating it. And, it must be fairly recorded, so did Professor Wittenoom. Only the dour Hughenden glumly followed the proper and tedious procedures for eating weightless food.
Bronwyn had completely forgotten the unpleasantness of her awakening and introduction to free fall; so completely, in fact, that it took the meteorite that bulleted through the cabin like a red hot needle to spoil her enjoyment.
CHAPTER SEVEN
RYKKLA’S SURPRISE
After she had absorbed the initial surprise, Rykkla quite enjoyed her evening in the Baudad’s harem, though most of her fellow inmates were a little aloof, regarding the newcomer not so much with unfriendliness as with a kind of wary superciliousness, rather like the old time members of an exclusive club faced with a novice applicant. She scarcely noticed, since there were simply too many other women; she was too tired to care and, in any case, she could out-superciliate anyone.
As soon as the chamberlain left, Rykkla was approached by an enormous balloon that introduced itself, in a high, fluting voice, as Bobasnyda, the chief eunuch. This much interested Rykkla, who had heard of such people, but had never thought to meet one. He was nearly as big as Thud had been, at least volumetrically, though he did not look nearly as substantial. Bobasnyda looked as soft as a loaf of waterlogged bread and she was convinced that she could push her arm up to the shoulder into his bloated, puddingy stomach, though Musrum alone knew what would ever possess her to try such a repulsive experiment. For all of the eunuch’s mass, his face was pinched and small-featured, with the eyes of a suspicious pig. He was costumed in a perfunctory vest, which did nothing to disguise his bulk, and loose, baggy trousers. The latter garment disappointed Rykkla, who had hoped to be able to be able to discover some evidence of what she had heard to be true.
The eunuch perfunctorily introduced Rykkla to two or three of the other women, chosen apparently only by reason of their proximity. He pointed to them, barely glancing their way, and with a crook of his finger, drew them to where he and Rykkla stood. They came as docilely as the members of a dog act and bobbed their heads to Bobasnyda, careful not to look directly at Rykkla, though she could see their eyes slyly darting toward her. One was an Amazon of prodigious proportions who, Rykkla thought, could have been Gyven’s big sister; the other was reduced to a miniature, though in reality the top of her head came nearly to Rykkla’s shoulders, as she stood next to the giantess, whose square hips were almost in a line with the smaller girl’s eyes. She was small but not as small as she appeared.
“These,” tootled the eunuch, “are Gravelinghe [here the big woman gave a bizaare curtsey toward Rykkla, like a towering minaret tottering on the verge of collapse] and Thursby [whose curtsey looked a great deal more congruous and was far more naturally and gracefully performed]. They’ll see to your needs. Should there be anything else, call one of the assistant eunuchs. Don’t ever bother
me
.”
With those curt words, he turned and sloshed off with all of the insubstantiality of a jellyfish but none of the grace. Rykkla was left to examine the two women, who stood silently and expectantly. Neither seemed now to have any compunction about staring at the newcomer with disconcerting, but not unfriendly, frankness. The monster was, except for her great height, not ill-proportioned at all; in fact, not seen in context, such as next to such a small woman as Thursby in particular, or even a human of normal stature, for that matter, would not seem at all unusually large. Only her musculature marked her as outside the ordinarily accepted norm, yet she had not abandoned her sex’s subcutaneous fat, which glossed and sleekened muscles that would have otherwise been as boldly chisled as Gyven’s. Her tapered, columnar legs comprised more than half of her height. Her breasts were as round and perfectly matched as a pair of cobblestones, her nipples made of terra cotta, her stomach as smooth, hard and rippled as a fossil beach. Above broad shoulders that were surely more than six feet above the floor was a handsome, broad face with high, level cheekbones and large, slanting eyes that glittered like slivers of obsidian beneath their heavy lids. Her hair was black and cropped close to her scalp so that it seemed as though she were wearing a skullcap made of lacquered teak. Her pubes looked like an obsidian spearhead: she was absolutely unadorned, not so much as a tattoo or freckle, and Rykkla for the life of her could not imagine what could possibly improve such magnificence, other than perhaps a plinth with the name of the master sculptor tastefully engraved.
Rykkla made a mental note to ask the giantess if she would ever consider working in a circus.
At the other extreme, Thursby could not have been a better-chosen counterpoint. Scarcely five feet tall, her minikin proportions were nevertheless as unobvious as Gravelinghe’s. Seen unaccompanied, she would simply have appeared to be a woman of almost perfect figure standing perhaps a little further away than she really was. Her body was as sleek, smooth and faultless as a plaster souvenir figurine. Her face was round, small-nosed, bright-eyed, with a rather large, full-lipped mouth that when relaxed fell easily into a natural smile. Her hair was dark blonde and hung in thick waves over shoulders and breasts that were like cantaloupe halves. She even had an artistic sprinkling of freckles across her cheeks and snub nose. There was no way Rykkla had of estimating Gravelinghe’s age, no more than she could put a date to a geological formation, but Thursby appeared to be no more than sixteen or seventeen.
There was a long silence before Rykkla realized that she was expected to speak first.
“My name is Rykkla Woxen.”
Silence.
“I’m pleased to meet you.”
Silence.
“I just arrived, only an hour or so ago.”
Silence.
This is embarrassing,
she thought, then decided to try asking something of the patiently waiting women that absolutely required a response. “Is there anything to eat? Can I change clothes or take a bath?”
She was relieved to see that this worked, and Thursby was the first to speak in a voice that was unsurprisingly sweet, child-like and friendly.
“Of course! Is there anything you’d particularly like?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I feel as though I haven’t eaten in a week;”, in fact, it had been less than fifteen minutes, though she would hardly have given that credence; perhaps the fruit and canapés should rightly be only considered appetizers, “any large animal would do; and I could drink a gallon of anything wet.”
“You’re from the deserts?”
“Is there anywhere else to be from in this country?”
“I don’t know; I’ve never seen the deserts, I’ve only just heard about them.”
“You’re not from Ibraila, then?” Rykkla asked, not that she doubted this, after all, the girl’s appearance and coloring were distinctly non-Ibrailan, she wanted to fan these first, smoldering sparks of conversation.
“No. I’m from Crotoy. I came here directly. I’ve never been outside the palace. I was even taken from the ship in a sealed coach.”
“Never? Well, you’re not missing much, if that comforts you any. How long have you been here, then?”
“Years and years. So long ago that I really don’t remember. I was just a little girl. Are you Ibrailan, then, since you’re from the desert?”
“Me? No, Musrum forbid. I’d rather be a sea cucumber than an Ibrailan. I came here via Londeac and Tamlaght, but if you want to know where I’m from
originally
,
I’m not certain I can answer that.” Which was true since Rykkla’s earliest memories were of trundling along a dusty road in a wagon and she had, for all that she knew, been born in transit, between one village and another, so that her birthplace was no isolated locus but had instead been stretched out into a long, meandering line. Not born in a city, which is a place, a point, a terminus, she had been born on a highway, a linearity, which occupies no single place but rather a multitude, that embraces infinity. Her birthplace meandered, branched and rebranched until it covered a continent; any road that she happened to be on was no doubt ultimately connected with the very road that had seen her birth. In truth, she had never thought of her birthplace as being someplace as static as a town or village; rather, her hometown was the jangling, rocking, pitching, fragrant, crowded, smokey, cozy interior of a gypsy caravan. To such a question as Thursby’s, Rykkla would have normally responded with the curt truth: she had been born in a circus wagon, without thinking it important that the event have any particular, fixed geographic location.
“Oh,” said Thursby, her eyes brightening, “you’ve travelled, then? You’ve been places?”
“I’ve been here and there. My uncle ran a circus, several circusses in fact, and until recently I’d spent most of my life with him. I couldn’t name a tenth of the places I’ve been, I’m sure, but most of them get to look a-like after awhile, just one more vacant field or empty lot to set up the tents in. But just now, lately, I was running my own show, with my . . . partner . . . “ To Rykkla’s infinite surprise and inexpressible embarrassment, she found herself beginning to cry, an act so strange, so unexpected, so alien that it genuinely frightened her, as though she had discovered an inexplicable hemorrhage.
Thursby, tactfully, changed the subject.
“If you’ll follow Gravelinghe and me we’ll take you where you can eat and clean up if you want to.”
“I’d love that. Those. Both. You lead, I’ll be right behind.”
Thursby walked beside Rykkla while Gravelinghe followed. The small woman chattered freely, though Rykkla scarcely listened, so distracted was she by the luxuriant and exotic wonders of the seemingly limitless chamber. Thursby took her to an adjoining room, almost as large as the first, where there were a series of large, tile-lined pools. The nearest one was fed streams of steaming water in startlingly imaginative ways from sculptures whose explicitly erotic nature managed to penetrate even Rykkla’s fatigue. Clouds of warm, scented vapor seduced and bewildered her. Her languor leached to the surface, where, relunctant to dissipate, it surrounded her like a malignant fog. Marble benches circled the pool and Rykkla fell heavily onto one of these and allowed Thursby to pull the dusty boots from her sore feet, which almost audibly groaned at their release. Gravelinghe took a place alongside, with a silence that Rykkla realized was characteristic, it obviously had nothing to do with shyness; she helped Thursby remove the clothing that Rykkla had not had off her body for days, stirring up odors which in no way made Rykkla feel any less disgusting.
The heat and fragrance of the room was mesmerizing and Rykkla found herself incapable of either aiding or hindering her friends’ actions. Led by one hand, she allowed the small woman to lead her into the steaming pool. As her foot broke the surface of the scented water it felt as though it were being scalded. But the girl persisted and, wincing, she lowered herself until only her head remained unsubmerged. The pool was only thigh deep and she sat on the hot porcelain tiles with the water lapping at her chin. She felt as though she were dissolving, like a sugar cube in a cup of hot coffee. Her chin rested on the surface of the water and tendrils of fragrant steam curled around her face, caressing it with curious and insubstantial fingers. Thursby waded alongside, seemingly unmindful of the scalding water, and, taking a handful of soft, perfumed soap from an ornate container attached to the rim of the pool, worked it into Rykkla’s matted hair. The girl’s practiced fingertips massaged the scalp and Rykkla allowed an involuntary moan to escape her relaxed lips. With her head still covered with a dome of foamy lather, she was asked to stand. At the moment this was the last thing she wanted to do, or thought herself capable of doing, but complied hypnotically, willessly. With a fat, soft sponge and the same soothing soap, Thursby scrubbed Rykkla’s body from neck to knees. All that Rykkla wanted to do was to lie back down in the hot pool, but Thursby took her by one hand and led her, still covered with lather, up the steps at the farther end of the pool, where Rykkla discovered a second basin, separated from the first by only a few feet of tile. Descending into this, she found the water a few degrees cooler than the first bath. Above the basin was a greater-than-life-sized statue of a flamboyantly male nude of un-likely proportions holding a giant, coiled seashell. From its curved lip poured a cascade of tepid water and while standing beneath this shower Rykkla rinsed herself of the perfumed soap.
Once again Rykkla was taken to another pool, this one deeper than the others and filled with even cooler water. The water, which in reality was but little less than room temperature, was a deliciously icy shock. She was allowed to drift lazily while elaborate scale models of paddlewheel steamers chugged and clattered and hissed around her, stirring soporific emollients into the water all the while pouring soporific vapors from their funnels. She complained and resisted, if feebly and ineffectively, when Thursby came to call her away. This time she was taken not to another bath but to a relatively small chamber featuring a dozen hip-high platforms like narrow tables. They were covered with clean, white linen and she was directed to lay prostrate on one, on her stomach, with a small pillow to support her head. This she did, allowing her weary, overcooked muscles to go limp. She thought very seriously that they may be in real danger of slipping from her bones like the tender flesh of a fricaseed chicken. After a moment or two, one of the almost indistinguishable, interchangeable eunuchs entered bearing a tray of colored glass bottles and jars. Although the bloated creature wore only a brief loincloth, Rykkla still was unable to definitively answer her question. Almost anything could, or could not, have been contained within that discrete if not overlarge swelling.
Setting his tray on a small table, the eunuch dribbled warm, scented, tickling oils down the length of her body and began a massage as vigorous as though he were dressing and tenderizing a marinated steak. At first she cried out from the sudden pain as surprisingly powerful fingers dug deeply into sore muscles, ligaments and tissue. The eunuch started working from her extremities, beginning with individual toes and fingers and working inch by inch, muscle by individual muscle, none too small or insignificant to overlook, up feet, up the powerful gymnast’s calves and thighs, up hands, forearms and upper arms. Then, beginning with her buttocks, which he kneaded like loaves of freshly risen bread dough, he manipulated the overlapping slabs of muscle of her back and shoulders. Gradually they became gelatinous, as pliable as warm plasticine, and the pain drained from them, as though it were being wrung out of damp sponges. The eunuch expertly flipped her limp, resistless, boneless body over onto its back and began the process all over again.