Nova (17 page)
The world?
Vorpis.
A world has so much in it, on it—
"Welcome, travelers ..."
— while a moon, Katin thought as they left the spacefield by dawn-blazed gates, a moon holds its gray glories miniatured in rock and dust.
" ... Vorpis has a day of thirty-three hours, a gravity just high enough to increase the pulse rate by point three of Earth normal over an acclimating period of six hours ..."
They passed the hundred-meter column. Scales, burnished under the dawn, bled the mists scarfing the plateau: the Serpent, animated and mechanical, symbol of this whole sequined sector of night, writhed on his post. As the crew stepped onto the moving roadway, an oblate sun rouged away night's bruises.
" ...with four cities of over five million inhabitants. Vorpis produces fifteen per cent of all the dynaplasts for Draco. In the equatorial lavid zones, more than three dozen minerals are quarried from the liquid rock. Here, in the tropic polar regions, both the arolat and the aqualat are hunted by net-riders along the inter-plateau canons. Vorpis is famous throughout the galaxy for the Alkane Institute which is located in the capital city of its Northern Hemisphere, Phoenix ..."
They passed the limit of the info-service voice, into silence. As the road buoyed them from the steps, Lorq, among the crew, gazed-on the plaza.
"Captain, where we now go?" Sebastian had brought only one of his pets from the ship. It swayed and stepped on his ridged shoulder.
"We take a fog crawler into the city and then go to the Alkane. Anyone can come with me who wants, wander around the museum, or take a few hours leave in the city. If anybody wants to stay back on the ship— "
"— and miss a chance to see the Alkane?— "
"— doesn't it cost a lot to get in?— "
"— but the captain's got an aunt working there— "
"— so we can get in free then," Idas finished.
"Don't worry about it," Lorq said as they jogged down the ramp to the slips where the fog crawlers moored.
Polar Vorpis was set with rocky mesas, many of them several square miles in area. Between, heavy fogs riled and slopped, immiscible with the nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere above. Powdered aluminum oxide, and arsenic sulfate in vaporized hydrocarbons expelled from the violent floor, filled the space between mesas. Just beyond the table that held the spacefield was another with cultivated plants, indigenous to a more southern latitude of Vorpis but kept here as a natural park (maroon, rust, scarlet); on the largest mesa was Phoenix.
The fog crawlers, inertial-drive planes powered by the static charges built up between the positively ionized atmosphere and the negatively ionized oxide, plowed the surface of the mist like boats.
On the concourse, the departure times drifted beneath the transparent bricks, followed by arrows directing the crowds to the loading slip:
ANDROMEDA PARK— PHOENIX— MONTCLAIR
and a great bird dripping fire followed through the multi-chrome beneath boots, bare feet, and sandals.
On the crawler deck Katin leaned on the rail, looking through the plastic wall as white waves crackled and uncoiled over the sun to shatter by the hull.
"Have you ever thought," Katin said as the Mouse came up to him sucking on a piece of rock candy, "what a difficult time a man from the past would have understanding the present. Suppose someone who died in, let's say, the twenty-sixth century woke up here, Do you realize how totally horrified and confused he'd be just walking around this crawler?"
"Yeah?" The Mouse took the candy out of his mouth: "Want to finish this? I'm through with it."
"Thanks. Just take the matter of"— Katin's jaw staggered as his teeth crushed crystalline sugar from the linen thread.— "cleanliness. There was a thousand-year period from about fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred, when people spent an incredible amount of time and energy keeping things clean. It ended when the last communicable disease finally became not only curable, but impossible. There used to be an incredibility called 'the common cold' that even in the twenty-fifth century you could be fairly sure of having at least once a year. I suppose back then there was some excuse for the fetish: there seemed to have been some correlation between dirt and disease. But after contagion became an obsolescent concern, sanitation became equally obsolescent. If our man from five hundred years ago, however, saw you walking around this deck with one shoe off and one shoe on, then saw you sit down to eat with that same foot, without bothering to wash it— do you have any idea how upset he'd be?"
"No kidding?" Katin nodded.
Fog broke at a shaft of rock, sparking.
"The idea of paying a visit to the Alkane has inspired me, Mouse. I'm developing an entire theory of history. It's in conjunction with my novel. You don't mind indulging me with a few moments? I'll explain. It has occurred to me that if one considers— " He stopped.
Enough time passed for a handful of expressions to subsume the Mouse's face. "What is it?" he asked when he decided nothing in the moiling gray had Katin's attention. "What about your theory?"
"Cyana Von Ray Morgan!"
"What?"
"Who, Mouse. Cyana Von Ray Morgan. I've had a perfectly oblique thought: It just came to me who the captain's aunt is, the curator at the Alkane. When Tyy gave her Tarot reading, the captain mentioned an uncle who was killed when he was a child."
The Mouse frowned. "Yeah ..."
Katin shook his head, mocking disbelief.
"Who what?" the Mouse asked.
"Morgan and Underwood?"
The Mouse looked down, sideways, and in the other directions people search for mislaid associations.
"I guess it happened before you were born," Katin said at last. "But you must have heard about it, seen it someplace. The whole business was being sent out across the galaxy on psychoramics while it happened. I was only three, but— "
"Morgan assassinated Underwood!" the Mouse exclaimed.
"Underwood," Katin said, "assassinated Morgan. But that's the idea."
"In Ark," the Mouse said. "In the Pleiades."
"With billions of people experiencing the whole business throughout the galaxy on psychoramics. I couldn't have been more than three at the time. I was at home on Luna watching the inauguration with my parents when that incredible character in the blue vest broke out of the crowd and sprinted across Chronaiki Plaza with that wire in his hand."
"He was strangled!" the Mouse exclaimed. "Morgan was strangled! I did see a psychorama of that! One time in Mars City, last year when I was doing the triangle run, I experienced it as a short subject. It was part of a documentary about something else, though."
"Underwood nearly severed Morgan's head," Katin elucidated. "Whenever I've experienced a re-run, they've cut out the actual death. But five billion-odd were subjected to all the emotions of a man, about to be sworn in for his second term as Secretary of the Pleiades, suddenly attacked by a madman and killed. All of us, we felt Underwood land on our backs; we heard Cyana Morgan scream and felt her try to pull him off; we heard Representative Kol-syn yell out about the third bodyguard— that's the part that caused all the confusion in the subsequent investigation— and we felt Underwood lock that wire around our necks, felt it cut into us; we struck out with our right hands, and our left hands were grabbed by Mrs. Tai; and we died." Katin shook his head. "Then the stupid projector operator— his name was Naibn'n and thanks to his idiocy he nearly had his brain burned out by a bunch of lunatics who thought he was involved in the plot— swung his psychomat on Cyana— instead of the assassin so we could have learned who he was and where he was going— and for the next thirty seconds we were all a hysterical woman crouching on the plaza, clutching our husband's streaming corpse amid a confusion of equally hysterical diplomats, representatives, and patrolmen, watching Underwood dodge and twist through the crowd and finally disappear."
"They didn't show that part in Mars City. But I remember Morgan's wife. That's the captain's aunt?"
"She must be his father's sister."
"How do you know?"
"Well, first of all, the name, Von Ray Morgan. I remember reading once, about seven or eight years back, that she had something to do with the Alkane. She was supposed to be quite a brilliant and sensitive woman. For the first dozen years or so after the assassination, she was the focus for that terribly sophisticated part of society always back and forth between Draco and the Pleiades; being seen at the Flame Beach on Chobe's World, or putting in an appearance with her two little daughters at some space regatta. She spent a lot of time with her cousin, Laile Selvin, who was Secretary of the Pleiades Federation herself for a term. The news-tapes were always torn between the desire to keep her at the edge of scandal and their respect for that whole horror with Morgan. Today if she appears at an art opening or a social event, it's still covered, though the last few years they've let go of her a little. If she is a curator of the Alkane, perhaps she's gotten too involved in it to bother with publicity."
"I've heard of her." The Mouse nodded, looking up at last. "There was a period when she was probably the best known woman in the galaxy."
"Do you think we'll get to meet her?"
"Hey," Katin said, holding the rail and leaning back, "that would be something! Maybe I could do my novel on the Morgan assassination, a sort of modern historical."
"Oh yeah," the Mouse said. "Your book."
"The thing that's been holding me up is that I can't find a subject. I wonder what Mrs. Morgan's reaction would be to the idea. Oh, I wouldn't do anything like those sensational reports that kept coming out in the psychoramas right afterwards. I want to attempt a measured, studied work of art, treating the subject as one that traumatized an entire generation's faith in the ordered and rational world of man's— "
"Who killed who again?"
"Underwood— you know, it just occurred to me, he was my age now when he did it— strangled Secretary Morgan."
"Because I wouldn't want to make a mistake if I met her. They caught him, didn't they?"
"He stayed free for two days, gave himself up twice and was turned away twice with the other twelve hundred-odd people who confessed in the first forty-eight hours; he got as far as the spacefield where he had planned to join his two wives on one of the mining stations in the Outer Colonies, when he was apprehended at the emigrations office. There's enough material there for a dozen novels! I wanted a subject that was historically significant. If nothing else, it will be a chance to air my theory. Which, as I was about to say— "
"Katin?"
"Eh ... yes?" His eyes, before on copper clouds, came back to the Mouse.
"What is that?"
"Huh?"
"There."
In broken hills of fog, metal flashed. Then a black net rose rippling from the waves. Some thirty feet across, the net flung from the mist. Clinging to the center by hands and feet, vest flying, dark hair whipping from his masked face, a man rode the web into the trough; fog covered him.
"I believe," Katin said, "that is a net-rider hunting the inter-plateau canons for the indigenous arolat— or possibly the aqualat."
"Yeah? You've been here before ...
"No. At the university I experienced dozens of the Alkane's exhibits. Just about every big school is iso-sensory with them. But I've never been here in person; I was just listening to the info-voice back at the field."
"Oh."
Two more riders surfaced in their nets. Fog sparkled. As they descended, a fourth and fifth emerged, a sixth.
"Looks like a whole herd."
The riders swept the mists, doffing, electric, disappearing to emerge further on.
"Nets," Katin mused. He leaned forward on the rail. "A great net, spreading among the stars, through time— " He spoke slowly, softly. The riders disappeared. "My theory: if you conceive of society as a ..." Then he glanced down at a sound beside him like wind:
The Mouse had taken out his syrynx. From beneath dark, and shaking fingers gray lights swiveled and wove.
Through the imitations of mist, gold webs glittered and doffed to a hexatonic melody. The air was tang and cool; there was the smell of wind; but no pressure of wind.
Three, five, a dozen passengers gathered to watch. Beyond the rail, the net-riders appeared once more, and someone, realizing the boy's inspiration, went, "Ohhhh, I see what he's ..." and stopped because so did everyone else. It ended.
"That lovely was!"
The Mouse looked up. Tyy stood half behind Sebastian.
"Thanks." He grinned and started to put the instrument back into the bag. "Oh." He saw something and looked up again. "I have something for you." He reached into the sack. "I found this on the floor back in the Roc. I guess you dropped it?"
He glanced at Katin and caught the frown vanishing. Then he looked at Tyy and felt his smile open in the light of hers.
"I you thank." She put the card in the pouch pocket of her jacket. "You the card did enjoy?"
"Huh?"
"You on each card to gain must meditate."
"You did meditate?" Sebastian asked.
"Oh, yeah. I looked at it a whole lot. Me and the captain."
"That good is." She smiled.
But the Mouse was fiddling with his strap.