Strider's Galaxy (11 page)

He cued his musibot with a couple of jabs of a finger. Music filled the cabin. Then Lan Yi made a further manipulation and the sound began to boom out almost deafeningly. O'Sondheim, almost forgotten by the other two, recoiled, but the blast of noise seemed to bring him to his senses. He drew the back of his hand across his eyes, and then looked around alertly.

Lan Yi glanced at the First Officer. Was it possible that O'Sondheim could help them? No: there wasn't a third belt-rope. He gestured to O'Sondheim that the man should stay where he was, and by a miracle the First Officer understood what he was trying to say.

Back at the door, Lan Yi found the wall of sound was more tolerable. He hitched his own belt-rope on.

"We go one after the other between the cabins," he shouted into Strauss-Giolitto's ear. "Never let go of the rope, even when you're inside a cabin. If the g comes back suddenly, we could be killed if we weren't secured."

She nodded. It was tempting just to "swim" through the free fall to the next cabin but if either of them were halfway between cabins when an abrupt rearward force of 2g was reintroduced . . . No wonder Strider had been so insistent over the intercom that people stay indoors.

He raised his grav-grapple and shot it towards the wall of the cabin nearest to them. Then, to her surprise, he moved not towards it but in the opposite direction, instead leaping towards the
Santa Maria
's stern, paying out his belt-rope as he went. Almost immediately she saw the sense of what he was doing. They should start with the rearmost cabin and work their way forwards.

She followed suit, swinging in a long loop, carefully adjusting the control at her belt so that there was never too much of the rope paid out slack at any one time. If the gees were suddenly restored, the tautening of a slack rope could break her back. Even a taut rope would probably do so anyway, but at least this way they were reducing the risks.

She arrived beside Lan Yi at the rearmost cabin, panting slightly.

"That is the end of the most dangerous part of the exercise," he said, as calmly as if he were discussing the weather. The noise of the music he had started playing was far quieter here but still perfectly audible.

"What did you do that for?" she said, nodding towards his distant cabin as he shoved open the door of the one they'd arrived at. "It's a beastly racket."

"It's Telemann," he said. "Get inside."

She obeyed, finding herself confronted by a woman and a terrified child. The woman was holding herself and the child down on to the larger of the room's two forcefield beds. There was a stench of urine in the enclosed space. She knew the child, of course, from having taught him. "Hello, Hilary," she said, smiling. "There's nothing to be afraid about."

"Well," continued Lan Yi, pulling himself through the door behind her and shutting it firmly, "it's
melded
Telemann. Variations on a tune by another composer of roughly the same epoch, but whose name has been forgotten. If you are so very interested, Maria Strauss-Giolitto, the tune is called 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands'. I prefer the Telemann melding best of all, but my musibot has produced some other interesting combinations based on it. The Mozart version is over-fussy, however."

"It sounds beastly to me," said Strauss-Giolitto. Her own tastes ran to randomusic, where the musibot was programmed to produce randomly selected series of tones and rhythms.

The woman was looking at the two of them as if they were insane. "What the hell are you people talking about?"

"Quite right," said Lan Yi, with a little formal nod. "We are checking the cabins to ascertain the extent of any casualties there may have been, and to see if we can help. I played the Telemann piece because I always find it most soothing, and I thought that it might calm others. But it seems"—he shrugged towards Strauss-Giolitto—"that I may have been wrong."

Strauss-Giolitto silenced him with a raised hand. "Are you and Hilary the only people here?" she said, trying to make her voice sound friendly but unconcerned. "This cabin has sustained no casualties?"

"Just us two are here," said the woman. "We're OK."

Strauss-Giolitto's apparent calmness was infecting the child, who for the first time since they'd come through the door was beginning to look less frightened. "Hello, Maria," he said, forcing a smile. "I was doing my homework when this thing happened, so I . . ."

"I think we'll allow you to be late with your homework this once," said Strauss-Giolitto, grinning desperately.

Lan Yi had opened the door, and was fiddling at his waist. His belt-rope wound itself in swiftly until the grav-grapple finally appeared. "Please that you do the same," he said to Strauss-Giolitto.

She did so, at the same time thinking that Lan Yi must be very much more worried than he was letting on. His Argot, although habitually a little stiff and uncolloquial, was normally flawless.

"We will leave you now," said Lan Yi to Hilary's mother, patting Hilary's head. "I suggest that you retain your current position until instructions are given otherwise."

He nodded to Strauss-Giolitto, and she launched her grav-grapple towards the next bow-ward cabin, then let her belt-rope reel her towards it.

This time they had to manoeuvre themselves over the cabin's roof before they could reach the door. It was a terrifying few moments before they found themselves safely inside—only to discover that the cabin was empty.

They reached the fifth cabin before they found their first casualty. Strauss-Giolitto vaguely recognized him as a junior biochemist who had made a few amiable passes at her between Phobos and Jupiter. Now she felt embarrassed, because she couldn't even remember his name. He floated near the ceiling, his neck obviously broken. There might have been a chance, had a medbot got to him quickly enough, that he could have been saved, even yet; but she and Lan Yi had no means of summoning a medbot—besides, from what had been going on, it seemed very likely that the Main Computer was out of action, and the medbots were dependent on it, their own small puters being just sufficient to manipulate the various devices they employed. Maybe, if you were lucky, one of them could diagnose and splint a fractured leg. If you were unlucky, you could find your broken leg helpfully crammed down your throat.

"There's nothing we can do," said Lan Yi with a shrug, his face unperturbed. "We must speed on our way, Maria Strauss-Giolitto."

She felt guilty, just leaving the biochemist floating there, but Lan Yi was right: there
was
nothing they could do.

A few cabins later, however, they were able to make themselves useful. An agronomer had broken his wrist, and the darkness and the pain of the injury—plus the shock of finding that, unlike at home on the blisters of Mars, no medbot had arrived within minutes—had virtually sent him out of his wits: he was just staring at his limp hand as if it were some rare and valuable objet trouvé.

Lan Yi found a vest in a drawer and ripped it efficiently into strips, then began applying an emergency bandage. The agronomer made no protest, even when his bones ground together. Strauss-Giolitto tried her best to get through to him, speaking softly to him, forming words that didn't mean very much but attempting to make an encouraging pattern of sentences. She didn't know if she was having any success: in the end they had to leave him there, now strapped to his bunk, and carry on their nerve-racking survey.

They must have worked their way through over half the cabins—repairing lesser injuries and finding only one more fatality—when the gees came back on.

Despite all their precautions, they were slammed against an inner cabin wall, Strauss-Giolitto on top of Lan Yi.

She gave a shriek of surprise. He gave a yip of pain. As the cabin slowly swivelled to right itself, they slid to the floor together.

Strauss-Giolitto picked herself up wearily. One grew grudgingly half-accustomed to 2g in time—rather a long time, if you had spent much of your life on Mars—but it took only a few hours in free fall to realize quite what a burden the acceleration put on one's body.

She reached out a hand to the elderly Taiwanese.

"I think not," he said crisply, lying there. "You are a big person, Maria Strauss-Giolitto, and that was a heavy impact. You have broken my arm and at least one—no, certainly it is two—of my ribs."

He tried and eventually managed to sit up. Then he fainted.

#

"Holy Umbel!" shouted Leander, suddenly forced deep into her chair.

"You called," said Nelson. It was an old joke between them, and he spoke it automatically. He was as stunned as she was by what had just happened. Neither of them noticed Strider hauling her once-more ponderous body across the deck to assure herself that Pinocchio was securely moored.

The resumption of acceleration was shock enough in itself.

The view through the fore-window above them was something else.

The colors were like those of a skin of oil floating on the surface of a puddle of water—oddly metallic-seeming greens and blues and yellows and pale reds and grays—but all the hazy-edged random shapes were moving with frenetic speed through and around each other. Wherever the two officers looked, the dazzlingly colored forms seemed to be trying to create coherent patterns, but never quite succeeding. The effect was almost impossible to look at; it was almost impossible not to watch.

Strider walked heavily over to stand between them.

"Well, it's different," she remarked lamely. At least the succession of little pinching sensations seemed to have cut out as the acceleration cut back in.

Now there was a background of angry red flames behind the schemes of color, and traceries of hot yellow and white sparks were flitting rapidly through them.

"Do you think we've ended up in somebody's bonfire?" said Nelson drily.

"Seems as likely as anywhere," said Strider. She glanced away from the display of brilliances at the screens in front of the two officers. They were still dead. That meant the Main Computer was still out. She'd suspected as much: Pinocchio hadn't recovered consciousness. She was much more worried about losing the Main Computer than about where the
Santa Maria
might be taking them: even if they found themselves back in the Solar System—or back on course for Tau Ceti
II
—without the Computer they were dead. Pinocchio was able to keep the most basic systems running, but there was no way he could tackle the complex problems of astrogation the Main Computer was designed in part to solve. And who knew how long he could keep even those basic systems functioning?

Her eyes were dragged up to the window again.

There were quite a few electronic brains aboard the
Santa Maria
, of course. She speculated about the possibilities of trying to hook them all up together—or, rather, getting Pinocchio to do it—but she realized even as the thought was passing through her head that it would be impossible. The medbots and most of the others were really hardly more than drones served out of the Main Computer. Aside from that there were the rudimentary bots used for entertainment. Personal puters were limited in their scope, and affected by the speed with which their human operators could act. In fact, speed was another reason why her half-formed crazy scheme could never work: astrogation required a machine that could think
fast
, not just in working out the problems but in coordinating all the various minor rocketry that would alter the
Santa Maria
's configuration in space.

Once more she turned to look at Pinocchio. Still his face was lifeless.

The blaze of colors ahead of them was changing in nature yet again. The illusion of oiliness had returned, but it was now as if the oil were, against a sullen black sheet of water, congealing into droplets, each made up of myriad iridescent shades. They were darting around all over the field of view as if in some hyperactive Brownian motion, their velocity and their constant changes of direction making the eye try to follow individual balls of light, but always unsuccessfully. Strider again felt, despite the insistent tug of the gees on her, that she was dropping from a great height and at fantastic speed. Not for the first time during these past few subjective hours, her gorge began to rise.

"Run a check on casualties, Leander," she said, keeping her voice controlled.

"Yes, Captain," said the officer. She spoke into her throat-mike, but clearly received no answer. Of course, Strider could see Leander realizing, the throat-mikes were linked through the Main Computer; it was hard to remember that the things you'd taken for granted most of your life didn't work any more. Leander prepared to repeat the message through her commline.

"I meant
physically
go and find out," said Strider.

Leander pushed herself up from her chair and made leadenly for the door. With a sense of relief—standing still for any length of time was the most difficult thing of all to do in the accelerative gees—Strider slid herself down to take Leander's place.

She ran her fingers across the keyboard, looking resentfully at the still-blank screen. They'd switched off the banks of sensor screens around the walls of the deck—all except the clock and the one through which Pinocchio had rigged himself, of course—some while back, so that they wouldn't be driven mad by the senseless audio and visual static. In a moment, after she'd rested briefly, she'd try them again. But the static had been as nothing compared to the breathtaking theater of light that was playing all around them now.

#

And then it was over, and they were looking out on a starfield.

The figures on the clock began to move again, but neither Strider nor Nelson realized it at first.

"Well," said Nelson after a while, running a palm nervously across his broad forehead, "it looks like we've
got
someplace at last."

Strider stared at the dead screen in front of her, feeling betrayed. Somehow she'd expected that merely emerging into normal space would reactivate the Main Computer.

"The big question now is," Nelson continued, "where we've actually got
to
."