Space Eater (16 page)

“Attention—“ and the string of gibberish we’d memorized, Wui’s password to the system. The button lit up green. “Query evasive action.”

“TEST EVASION ATTEMPTED. UNSCHEDULED OBJECT ALTERED COURSE. REVISED

ORBIT INTERSECTION—“

So much for the wandering rock theory. “Query object carries r/a material.”

“R/A NOT DETECTED: RANGE MAKES ANY INFERENCE INVALID.”

More time wasted.
You
try thinking straight with an arm in boiling water like a court of justice in the Middle Ages. “Record on three for broadcast. Umm...” I tried to knock together a message that was friendly and threatening at the same time. “One two
three
. Attention, attention. This is a manned craft from Earth on a friendly mission of contact. You are warned to avoid hostile action. Please reply if you can. Message ends. Cut after ‘message ends,’ loop until further notice on standard comm bands and listen for response. Endit, endit.” I hit the OVERRIDE again and the green light died. Now to get the case with our “demonstration” continent-buster—that had to be put somewhere safer before the Unscheduled Object decided to come aboard with guns blazing and take all our toys away. Yo-ho-ho.

By this time Rossa had finished her message home to Birch and keeled over in a dead faint, her lotus spilling across the deck. She could just be sleeping, but it didn’t look comfortable. I straightened her out as gently as I could and wished I could fall over next to her. Even at secondhand, that mode of communication took it out of you. Now: tools. The machinery was FACTOTUM-built for FACTOTUM’s use, where it wasn’t a direct comp peripheral; I found a spare sawblade, though, and cut the printed plastic case into strips, which I fed down the toilet. The sample board and specs went behind an access plate on what looked like a stamping press halfway around the curve of the station from tanks and console: I’d hardly stowed the stuff away when fussy FACTOTUM came whirring overhead snapping its manipulators. It grabbed the fiberglass plate and locked it back into place with jerky motions that made it seem irritated; and even then it hung over me like a deformed metal-and-plastic spider until I thought it wanted to pick me up too and tidy me away somewhere, such as through the airlock. I made my way back in short slow-motion leaps before FACTOTUM could maybe decide that wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

“ATTENTION. UNSCHEDULED OBJECT ORBIT INTERSECTION IN THIRTY HOURS...”

I supposed the comp would be calling off every one of the hours now, until someone beat in its little moronic brains. When I first heard we were on a vitally important mission to save everyone and everything from what uncontrolled Anomalous Physics effects could do to the universe, I’d got the idea that it would be all big, clear-cut issues and big, important events from the time we started. OK, anything after that outward trip had to be anticlimax, but somehow we kept getting bogged down in plain boredom. It’s not the huge tragedies that break people, it’s the weight of little annoyances that stack up till they hide the sky.

Sitting thinking thoughts like that didn’t seem to take too long, but suddenly the speaker called the twenty-nine-hour mark and Rossa woke, stretching and blinking. “Has anything ... happened that I should know about?”

“Not a lot.” I was still dishing out a summary, trying to let it take time, when the speaker whistled and then started a wild
krak-kak-kak-kkk!
“It can’t be an hour yet—“

“—cut your broadcast, please. I repeat, cut your broadcast. This is a war zone and you will attract unwelcome attention. We respect your neutral status. Please cut your broadcast and await rendezvous on present course. I repeat, cease broadcasting as soon as—“

The urgent male voice with the screwy accent had got that far because I’d jumped up in too much of a hurry and wasted time drifting down and slewing around in the air; and Rossa was still cramped from her collapse. We dead-heated to the OVERRIDE, Rossa pushing it carefully with one finger and sing-songing the password
twll d’un bob saes
, a devil to pronounce. Then I chimed in:

“End broadcast loop. Repeat, end broadcast loop at once, damn it, I mean endit.”

“AFFIRMATIVE,” the machine said, and this was most definitely not the time for what came from the speaker next, when one of Wui’s cute little subprograms came alive and had his own voice calling out,

“Now, now, children, don’t you know it’s rude to swear?”

Then the funny accent was back, “—cut your broadcast. I repeat that you have entered a war zone and will—“ A short pause full of inaudible mutters. “Thank you, Earth vessel. Please maintain radio silence and await rendezvous on present course. Over.”

We looked at each other. “That explains everything,” I said bitterly. “The satellites got smeared in their blasted war. The last thing I expected, I mean, Christ, a little bunch of folks on what’s supposed to be an easygoing planet and just for us they manage to start a war. Who the hell are they fighting with?”

“People, plural, always have someone to fight with,” Rossa said. “It only takes two.”

Fifteen

The thick voice from the speaker kept calling off the hours. We had some idea that we should be getting ready for “first contact” with our long-lost relatives, or some stuff like that—not up to the thrill of meeting someone altogether alien like in the old fiction Rossa mentioned, but still a chrome-plated occasion when you broke out the brass bands and the best juice. But the best we could manage for the event, short of total fumigation, was a quick sluice-down with some of the hoarded water. I handed myself an initiative star, third class, for discovering how the male connectors for fifty-gang ribbon cable make pretty good combs, stubby but OK when there’s nothing else. I draped plastic seats over the minigate’s plinth, which stuck up like a pillbox in the cleared area across the cylinder; and since we had sense enough not to try and dust all of Corvus Station for our visitors, the rest of the preparations meant getting more skimpy rations of sleep where the dreams, good or bad, never had time to settle into clear images because along would come the next “ATTENTION. EIGHTEEN HOURS TO RENDEZVOUS—“ The predicted time had started to shrink faster than real time when, I guessed, the others had put on some acceleration.

In what ought to have been dawn—when were we ever going to see the sky again? -- I saw Rossa’s face had locked completely into the old pattern. It had been that way in Tunnel, a cold china mask without any lines to give you a foothold. Like some sort of camouflage rig; it was her public face for strangers. I liked her better for the thought that in the time while we were pulling the pieces of ourselves together, we hadn’t been strangers.

“I was dreaming again,” she said when she’d wiped the thick sleep from her eyes. “Or perhaps it was not precisely a dream, more an image, a vision on the edge of sleep. There was the war under Corvus, and we were telling a commander who looked like Birch that we had brought him a weapon too terrible to use, a weapon that could break worlds, and we had brought it to ... prove to him that he must not use it. I remember he didn’t say anything, but broke into this great toothy smile...”

“Ouch,” I said while the part of me that worked strategy problems wondered if she had put it as a dream so as not to take responsibility for the notion. “That’s too damn logical for dreamland. You think better half-asleep than some people on Benzedrine --
Hell
, then we’re tied hand and foot really. Shouldn’t have needed all that time to figure it out: if we throw nullbomb data into a local war below it might be like handing phosphorus grenades to a crowd of kids playing gangs and squaddies.”

“The threat alone might end the war. Perhaps.”

“Which side gets smeared? How d’you choose?”

Rossa waved across all that waste of space to the big airlock in the half-dark. “One side has chosen us, Ken. We may never reach the other.”

I could feel cogs shifting inside my head, blocks of strategy moving and falling into sudden patterns like colored bits in a kaleidoscope. “No. We can still choose if we want to change our minds—either hand the thing to whoever comes through that lock, or ... switch back to original instructions. We
could
do that.”

That ghostly little smile. “What, after all our high-minded resolutions? How fickle. If we follow the Operation Kraz line, I grant you that the war and the information on this unpleasant AP perversion should be disposed of in a single clean flash. Unfortunately, so will we.”

“Maybe not. Anyway, you’re the one who signed up looking for something to dispose of _you --

_what’re you complaining about?”

She took a deep breath and let it out again, staring down at where one of her fingers was skating in figure-eights over the slick plastic wadding we sat on. “One of the things I have learned ... There is a difference between escape and oblivion. Standing this far back from the problem, I can see that now. I’m happy to be anywhere far removed from CommAux: I would be happier if I could be allowed a little life on this side of all the pain. Perhaps that renders me quite unfit to make a decision about all this.”

A side issue caught my mind like a trailing thorn branch: I was looking for excuses to avoid any decisions myself, just then. “If you’re away from all your bad times in Comm and that’s all you wanted, how come you did it to yourself, signaled back?”

“Have you ever squeezed a pimple, Ken? Eased out a loose tooth?”

“What? ... Teeth, sure.” (Those wobbly teeth right back when I was a kid: jiggle them with your tongue and they flashed up this clean, interesting-shaped ache/tingle that made you come back for more, see how far you could push it.) “Pimples I don’t get.”

“Then you must know that being hurt is not the same when you’re doing it to yourself. Thus spake von Sacher-Masoch. When you know that you can stop at will, there’s no need to stop. I can tolerate a slow code sequence with my own finger on the button; the strain which breaks people in CommAux is the rapid sequencing with a machine in charge. Have you ever tried to tickle yourself? It’s nothing: but somebody else tickling you can break you up.”

“I’ll stay with the teeth. In the Force you don’t get tickled a whole lot.”

“Nor in my section of it, as it happens ... But we
are
broken up. It’s a rare Comm talent who lasts a full five-year term of operation—the section is down to six people, perhaps five now, which was why they couldn’t devote two of us to Tunnel despite Tunnel’s requests ... You’d understand my choosing death if you’d seen the drooling things they carry away every once in a while. I’m talking my way away from that decision again.”

I was poking with my tongue at a tooth that had been loose once, but I couldn’t tell whether it was really giving way a bit or just seemed to. There wasn’t any pain. “All right. We haven’t got to make any decisions yet. We can leave the stuff right where it is and play it by ear for a while. Maybe we can still get by on bluff number one. Whoever was broadcasting sounded pretty reasonable.”

“That’s sheer nonsense, Ken. Switchboard staff always sound polite until they know who they’re speaking to. And generals never sound polite when you ask them to abandon their new equivalent of the Manhattan Project.”

I chewed that over—Christ, yes, they really could be doing all the rush MT work, the stuff Tunnel had detected, as a kind of weapons project. Altering the switchboard settings of the universe for
that:
and did they know what was waiting at the end of the road? The sunbeam: the core of a star spilling through the 1.9-centimeter minigate. The nullbomb: total mass/energy conversion that made the fusion in stars look puny, a white-light fireball smashing at Earth’s crust as though you were hitting a melon with a hammer.

And worse things waiting, like the old, wide gate that opened the door to a galaxy full of novas, or the theoretical horrors of an infinite energy burst, a shift of fundamental constants to the point where there wasn’t any place left for life in the universe, a hole that ate space and time ... All this stuff I’d known before had crept deeper into me, in that lonely space between
here
and
there
, until I couldn’t kid myself anymore with big numbers and safety-in-numbers. An MT lab was a small place like here or the vault room in Tunnel; but with MT the room was big enough to hold everything there was. Until some fool dropped it all on the floor. Tinkle, tinkle, clatter, bang.

“We still have to play it by ear,” I said, tired. “Try and sell them on the big horrors before they sell themselves any more on the ones little enough to use against someone else on the same planet.” I tried, too, to put over my feeling about AP/MT as a gaping mouth ready to gobble everything, but the words were hard to put in the right order. Rossa said: “Eating planets is a quite sufficient unpleasantness. I don’t propose to worry about everything else as well. Speaking of—“

“ATTENTION. THREE HOURS TO RENDEZVOUS. REPEAT, THREE HOURS.”

“Speaking of ‘eating’ things always reminds me that our dear polysyllabic friend Cathy Ellan dropped some hints about black holes—you know—such a huge gravity even light doesn’t escape. That would be just the sort of experiment they’d love to try. Imagine: open one end of a minigate pair inside a black hole and the other in the laboratory, and everything is dragged into the gateway irresistibly. A planet eater!

Didn’t Cathy say ... a devourer?”

“Yeah, maybe, until the MT gadgetry gets sucked into the hole too. As you said, we got horrors enough to worry about without making up new ones of our own.”

She gave a tiny shrug. “I’m
trying
to consider all this in an exhaustive, intellectual manner. I don’t want to take it in emotionally. Not now. Not yet.”

A lot of use that was. I saw with a sort of surprise that I could think intellectually enough about how to run a war—Force training had given me that much—but there was just an endless blank when I tried to think about reasons for the fighting, or rather what I was looking for now and wanted to take to Pallas: reasons for not fighting. There was one place only in all the universe where maybe I could do something about fighting. I went to the console again and hit the OVERRIDE, feeling Rossa’s eyes on my back.