Limits (5 page)

“Oh, but I have. We’ll sell the traveling stone to the barbarian king in Beesh. From that moment on the Movement will know everything he does.”

“Can you think of any reason why I should care?”

Karskon made a sound of disgust. “So you support the Torovans!”

“I support nobody. Am I a lord, or a soldier? No, I feed people. If someone should supplant the Torovans, I will feed the new conquerors. I don’t care who is at the top.”

“We care.”

“Who?
You, because you haven’t the rank of your half-brothers?
The elderly Lady Durily, who wants vengeance on her enemies’ grandchildren?
Or the ghosts?
It was a ghost who told me you were down here.”

Beyond Rordray, Karskon watched faintly luminous fog swirling in the corridor. The war of ghosts continued. And Durily was tiring. He couldn’t stay
here,
he had to pry out the jewel. He asked, “Is it the jewel you want? You couldn’t have reached it without Durily’s magic. If you distract her now you’ll never reach the air, with or without the jewel. We’ll all drown.” Karskon kept his sword’s point at eye level. If Rordray was a were-lion—

But he didn’t eat red meat.

“The jewel has to stay,” Rordray said. “Why do you think these walls are still standing?”

Karskon didn’t answer.

“The quake that sank Atlantis, the quake that put this entire peninsula under water.
Wouldn’t it have shaken down stone walls? But this palace dates from the Sorcerer’s Guild period. Magic spells were failing, but not always. The masons built this palace of good, solid stone. Then they had the structure blessed by a competent magician.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. The walls would have been shaken down without the blessing and some source of
mana
to power it. You see the problem. Remove the talisman, the castle crumbles.”

He might be right, Karskon thought.
But not until both emeralds were gone, and Karskon too.

Rordray was still out of reach. He didn’t handle that kitchen knife like a swordsman, and in any case it was too short to be effective. At a dead run Karskon thought he could catch the beefy chef…but what of Durily, and the spell that held back the water?

Fool! She had the other jewel, the spying-stone!

He charged.

Rordray whirled and ran down the hall. The ghost-fog swirled apart as he burst through. He was faster than he looked, but Karskon was faster still. His sword was nearly pricking Rordray’s buttocks when Rordray suddenly leapt over the bannister.

Karskon leaned over the dark water. The ghosts crowded around him were his only light source now.

Rordray surfaced, thirty feet above the ballroom floor and well out into the water, laughing. “Well, my guest, can you swim? Many mainlanders can’t.”

Karskon removed his boots. He might wait, let Rordray tire himself treading water; but Durily must be tiring even faster, and growing panicky as she wondered where he had gone. He couldn’t leave Rordray at their backs.

He didn’t dive; he lowered himself carefully into the water,
then
swam toward Rordray. Rordray backstroked, grinning. Karskon followed. He was a fine swimmer.

Rordray was swimming backward into a corner of the ballroom. Tra
p
ping
himself
. The water surface rose behind him, curving up the wall. Could Rordray swim uphill?

Rordray didn’t try. He dove. Karskon dove after him, kicking, peering down. There were patches of luminosity, confusing…and a dark shape far below…darting away at a speed Karskon couldn’t hope to match. Appalled, Karskon lunged to the surface, blinked, and saw Rordray clamber over the railing. He threw Karskon’s boots at his head and dashed back toward the King’s “secret” bedroom.

The old woman was still waiting, with the King’s ghost for her co
m
panion. Rordray tapped her shoulder. He said, “Boo.”

She froze,
then
tottered creakily around to face him. “Where is Karskon?”

“In the ballroom.”

Water was flowing down the walls, knee-high and rising. Rordray was smiling as at a secret joke, as he’d smiled while watching her savor her first bite of his incredible swordfish. It meant something different now.

Durily said, “Very well, you killed him. Now, if you want to live, get me that jewel and I will resume the spells. If our plans succeed I can offer Karskon’s place in the new nobility to you or your son. Otherwise we both drown.”

“Karskon could tell you why I refuse. I need the magic in the jewel to maintain my inn. With the traveling jewel Karskon brought me, this structure will remain stable for many years.” Rordray didn’t seem to notice that the King’s ghost was clawing at his eyes.

The water was chest high. “Both jewels, or we don’t leave,” the old
woman said, and immediately resumed her spell, hands waving wildly, voice raspy with effort. She felt Rordray’s hands on her body and squeaked in outrage, then in terror, as she realized he was tickling her. Then she doubled in helpless laughter.

The water walls were collapsing, flowing down. The odd, magical bu
b
ble was collapsing around him. Clawing at the stone bannister, Karskon heard his air supply roaring back up the stairwell, out through the broken windows, away. A wave threw him over the bannister, and he tried to find his footing, but already it was too deep. Then the air was only a few silver patches on the ceiling, and the seawash was turning him over and over.

A big dark shape brushed past him, fantastically agile in the roiling currents, gone before his sword-arm could react. Rordray had escaped him. He swam toward one of the smashed ballroom windows, knowing he wouldn’t make it, trying anyway. The faint glow ahead might be King N
i
hilil, guiding him. Then it all seemed to fade, and he was breathing water, strangling.

Rordray pulled himself over the top step, his flippers already altering to hands. He was gasping, blowing. It was a long trip, even for a sea lion.

The returning sea had surged up the steps and sloshed along the halls and into the rooms where Rordray and his family dwelt. Rordray shook his head. For a few days they
must needs
occupy the next level up: the inn, which was now empty.

The change to human form was not so great a change, for Rordray. He became aware of one last wisp of fog standing beside him.

“Well,” it said, “how’s the King?”

“Furious,” Rordray said. “But after all, what can he do? I thank you for the warning.”

“I’m glad you could stop them.
My curse on their crazy rebellion.
We’ll all f-fade away in time, I guess, with the magic dwindling and dwindling. But not just yet, if you please!”

“War is bad for everyone,” said Rordray.

There are always people
who want to revise history. No hero is so great that someone won’t take a shot at him. Not even Jack Halfey.

Yes, I knew Jack Halfey. You may not remember my name. But in the main airlock of Industrial Station One there’s an inscribed block of industrial diamond, and my name is sixth down: Cornelius L. Riggs, Metallurgist. And you might have seen my face at the funeral.

You
must
remember the funeral. All across the solar system work stopped while Jack Halfey took his final trek into the sun. He wanted it that way, and no spacer was going to refuse Jack Halfey’s last request, no matter how expensive it might be. Even the downers got in the act. They didn’t help pay the cost, but they spent hundreds of millions on sending reporters and cameras to the Moon.

That funeral damned near killed me. The kids who took me to the Moon weren’t supposed to let the ship take more than half
a gravity
. My bones are over a hundred years old, and they’re fragile. For that young squirt of a pilot the landing may have been smooth, but she hit a full gee for a second there, and I thought my time had come.

I had to go, of course. The records say I was Jack’s best friend, the man who’d saved his life, and being one of the last survivors of the Great Trek makes me somebody special. Nothing would do but that I push the button to send Jack on his “final spiral into the sun,” to quote a downer reporter.

I still see TriVee programs about ships “spiraling” into the sun. You’d think seventy years and more after the Great Trek the schools would teach kids something about space.

When I staggered outside in lunar gravity—lighter than the 20% gravity we keep in the Skylark, just enough to feel the difference—the reporters were all over me. Why, they demanded, did Jack want to go into the sun? Cremation and scattering of ashes is good enough for most spacers. It was good enough for Jack’s wife. Some send their ashes back to Earth; some are scattered into the solar wind, to be flung throughout the universe; some prefer to go back into the soil of a colony sphere.
But why the sun?

I’ve wondered myself. I never was good at reading Jack’s mind. The question that nearly drove me crazy, and did drive me to murder, was: why did Jack Halfey make the Great Trek in the first place?

I finally did learn the answer to that one. Be patient.

Probably there will never be another funeral like Jack’s. The Big Push is only a third finished, and it’s still two hundred miles of the biggest linear accelerator ever built, an electronic-powered railway crawling across the Earthside face of the Moon. One day we’ll use it to launch starships. We’ll fire when the Moon is
full,
to add the Earth’s and Moon’s orbital velocities to the speed of the starship, and to give the downers a thrill. But we launched Jack when the Moon was new, with precisely enough velocity to cancel the Earth’s orbital speed of eighteen miles per second. It would have cost less to send him into interstellar space.

Jack didn’t drop in any spiral. The Earth went on and the coffin stayed behind, then it started to fall into the Sun. It fell ninety-three million miles just like a falling safe, except for that peculiar wiggle when he really got into the sun’s magnetic field. Moonbase is going to do it again with a probe. They want to know more about that wiggle.

The pilot was a lot more careful getting me home, and now I’m back aboard the Skylark, in a room near the axis where the heart patients stay; and on my desk is this pile of garbage from a history professor at Harvard who has absolutely proved that we would have had space industries and space colonies without Jack Halfey. There are no indispensable men.

In the words of a famous American president: Bullshit! We’ve made all the downers so rich that they can’t remember what it was like back then.

And it was grim. If we hadn’t got space industries established before 2020 we’d never have been able to afford them at all. Things were that thin. By 2020 A.D. there wouldn’t have been any resources to invest. They’d have all gone into keeping eleven billion downers alive (barely!) and anybody who proposed “throwing money into outer space” would have been lynched.

God knows it was that way when Jack Halfey started.

I first met Jack Halfey at UCLA. He was a grad student in architecture, having got his engineering physics degree from Cal Tech. He’d also been involved in a number of construction jobs—among them Hale Observatory’s
big orbital telescope while he was still an undergrad at Cal Tech—and he was already famous. Everyone knows he was brilliant, and they’re right, but he had another secret weapon: he worked his arse off. He had to.
Insomnia.
Jack couldn’t sleep more than a couple of hours a night, and to get even that much sleep he had to get laid first.

I know about this because when I met Jack he was living with my sister. Ruthie told me that they’d go to bed, and Jack would sleep a couple of hours, and up he’d be, back at work, because once he woke up there was no point in lying in bed.

On nights when they couldn’t make out he never went to bed at all, and he was pure hell to live with the next day.

She also told me he was one mercenary son of a bitch. That doesn’t square with the public image of Jack Halfey, savior of mankind, but it ha
p
pens to be true, and he never made much of a secret of it. He wanted to get rich fast. His ambition was to lie around Rio de Janeiro’s beaches and sample the local wines and women; and he had his life all mapped out so that he’d be able to retire before he was forty.

I knew him for a couple of months,
then
he left UCLA to be a department head in the construction of the big Tucson arcology. There was a tearful scene with Ruthie: she didn’t fit into Jack’s image for the future, and he wasn’t very gentle about how he told her he was leaving. He stormed out of her apartment carrying his suitcase while Ruthie and I shouted curses at him, and that was that.

I never expected to see him again.

When I graduated there was this problem: I was a metallurgist, and there were a lot of us. Metallurgists had been in big demand when I started UCLA, so naturally everybody studied metallurgy and materials science; by the time I graduated it was damned tough getting a job.