The Avatar (3 page)

Ultimate reality is easier to understand, yes, to be a part of, than we are, we flickers across the Noumenon
.

“Are you ready, Joelle?” Langendijk asked mildly, well-nigh contritely.

“Oh!” She started. “Oh, yes. Any time.”

“I’ve signalled
Faraday
our intent to start blasting at one gee at fifteen thirty-five hours, and they concur. They’ll pace us; they are maneuvering for that right now. Interlock of autopilots will be made at one hundred kilometers from Beacon Charlie. Do you have assembled the information you need? …
Ach,
you’re bound to, I’m a forgetful idiot to ask.”

Herself wishful of reconciliation, Joelle smiled a smile he couldn’t see and answered, “It’s easy for you to forget, Willem. I’m holding down Christine’s job”—Christine Burns, regular computerman, who died in Joelle’s arms a bare few months before
Emissary
started home.

“Navigation is yours, then,” Langendijk said formally. “Proceed upon signal.”

“Aye.”

Joelle got busy. Information flooded her, location vectors, velocity vectors, momenta, thrusts, gravitational field strengths, the time and space derivatives of these, continuously changing, smooth and mighty. It came out of instruments, transformed into digital numbers; and meanwhile the memory bank supplied her not only what specific past facts and natural constants she required, but the entire magnificent analytical structure of celestial mechanics and stress tensors. She had at her instant beck the physical knowledge of centuries and of this unique point in space-time where she was.

The data passed from their sources through a unit that translated them, in nanoseconds, into the proper signals. Thence they went to her brain. The connection was not through wires stuck in her skull or any such crudity; electromagnetic induction sufficed. She, in turn, called on the powerful computer to which she was also linked, as problems arose moment by moment.

The rapport was total. She had added to her nervous system the immense input, storage capacity, and retrieval speed of the electronic assembly, together with the immense mathematico-logical capacity for volume and speed of operations which belonged to its other half. For her part, she contributed a human ability to perceive the unexpected, to think creatively, to change her mind. She was the software for the whole system; a program which continuously rewrote itself; conductor of a huge mute orchestra which might have to start playing jazz with no warning, or compose an entire new symphony.

The numbers and manipulations did not stream before her as individual things. (Nor did she plan out the countless kinesthetic decisions her body made whenever it walked.) She felt them, but as a deep obbligato, a sense of ongoing r
ightness, function
. Her awareness went over and beyond mechanical symbol-shuffling; it shaped the ongoing general pattern, as a sculptor shapes clay with hands that know of themselves what to do.

Artist, scientist, athlete, at the brief pinnacle of achievement… thus had linkage felt to Christine Burns.

It did not to Joelle. Christine had been an ordinary linker. Joelle was a holothete who had transcended that experience. Perhaps the difference resembled that between a devout Catholic layman at prayer and St. John of the Cross.

Besides, this present work was routine. Joelle had merely to direct, by her thoughts, equipment which sent the ship along a standard set of curves through a known set of configurations.
The unaided computer could have done as well, had it been worth the trouble of readjusting several circuits. Brodersen’s robot performed the same kind of task.

Christine, the linker, had been signed on because
Emissary
was heading into the totally unknown, where survival might turn on a flash decision that could never have been foreseen and programmed for. She herself, had she lived, would have found this maneuvering easy.

Joelle found it soothing. She leaned back in her chair, conscious of regained weight, and enjoyed her oneness with the vessel. She could not hear and feel, but she could sense how the drive whispered. Migma cells were generating gigawatts of fusion power, to split water, ionize its atoms, hurl the plasma out through the jet focuser at a speed close to that of light itself. But the efficiency was superb, a triumph as great as the cathedral at Chartres; nothing appeared but the dimmest glow streaming aft for a few kilometers, and the onward motion of the hull.

Motion—it would last for several hours, at ever-changing orientations and configurations, as
Emissary
wove her way through the star gate between Phoebus and Sol. However, at present there was only a straightforward boost toward the first of the beacons. Joelle stirred and scowled. With less than half her attention engaged, she could not for long dismiss her fear of imprisonment ahead.

But then the viewscreen happened to catch the T machine itself, and she was lifted off into a miracle which never dulled.

At its distance, the cylinder was a tiny streak among hosts and clouds of stars. She magnified and the shape grew clear, though the dimensions remained an abstraction: length about a thousand kilometers, diameter slightly more than two. It spun around its long axis so fast that a point on the rim traveled at three-fourths the speed of light. Nothing on its silvery-brilliant surface told that to the unaided eye, yet somehow an endless, barely perceptible shimmer of changeable colors conveyed a maelstrom sense of the energy locked within. Humans believed that that gleam came from force-fields which held together matter compressed to ultimate densities. There were moons which had less mass than yonder engine for opening star gates.

In the background glowed two more of the beacons which surrounded it, a purple and a gold; and through the instruments, Joelle spied a third, whose color was radio.

This thing the Others had forged and set circling around
Phoebus, as they had set one at Sol and one at Centrum and one at… who dared guess how many stars, across how many light-years and years? What number of sentient races had found them in space, gotten the same impersonal leave to use them, and hungered ever afterward to know who the builders truly were?

Out of those, what portion have crippled themselves the way we’re doing?
Joelle questioned in an upsurge of bitterness.
O Dan, Dan, it’s gone for nothing, your trying to get the word that could set us free
—

And then, like a sunburst, she saw what must have come to him early on. He was bound to have thought of it; she remembered him drawling, “Every fox has two holes for his burrow.” Hope kindled within her. She didn’t stop to see how feeble it was, how easily blown out again. For now, the spark was enough.

D
ANIEL
B
RODERSEN WAS BORN
in what was still called the state of Washington and had, indeed, not broken from the USA during the civil wars, as several regions attempted and the Holy Western Republic succeeded in doing. However, for three generations before him, the family chief had borne the title Captain General of the Olympic Domain and exercised a leadership over that peninsula, including the city of Tacoma, which was real while the claims of the federal government were words.

Those barons had not considered themselves nobility. Mike was a fisherman with a Quinault Indian wife, who had invested his money in several boats. When the Troubles reached America, he and his men became the nucleus of a group which restored order in the neighborhood, mainly to protect their households. As things worsened, he got appeals to help an ever-growing circle of farms and small towns, until rather to his surprise he was lord of many mountains, forests, vales, and strands, with all the folk therein. Any of them could always bend his ear; he put on no airs.

He fell in battle against bandits. His eldest son Bob avenged him in terrifying fashion, annexed the lawless territory to prevent a repetition, and set himself to giving defense and rough justice to his land, so that people could get on with their work. Bob felt loyal to the United States and twice raised volunteer regiments to fight for its integrity. He lost two boys of his own that way, and died while defending Seattle against a fleet which the Holies had sent north.

During his lifetime, similar developments went on in British Columbia. American and Canadian nationalism meant much less than the need for local cooperation. Bob married John, his remaining son, to Barbara, daughter of the Captain General of
`the Fraser Valley. That alliance ripened into close friendship between the families. After Bob’s death, a special election overwhelmingly gave his office to John. “We’ve done okay with the Brodersens, haven’t we?” went the word from wharfs and docks, huts and houses, orchards, fields, timber camps, workshops, taverns, from Cape Flattery to Puget Sound and from Tatoosh to Hoquiam.

John’s early years in charge were turbulent, but this was due to events outside the Olympic Peninsula and gradually those too lost their violence. With peace came prosperity and a reheightening of civilization. The barons had always been fairly well educated, but men of raw action. John endowed schools, imported scholars, listened to them, and read books in what spare time he could find.

Thus he came to understand, better even than native shrewdness allowed, that the feudal period was waning. First the federal military command brought the entire USA under control, as General McDonough had done in Canada. Then piece by piece it established a new civil administration, reached agreement of sorts with the Holy Western Republic and the Mexican Empire, and opened negotiations for amalgamation with its northern neighbor. Meanwhile the World Union created by the Covenant of Lima was spreading. The North American Federation joined within three years of being proclaimed, according to a promise made beforehand. This example brought in the last holdout nations, and limited government over the entire human race was a reality—for a time, at least.

At the start of these events, John decided that his call was to preserve for his people enough home rule that they could continue to live more or less according to their traditions and desires. Over the years he gave way to centralization, step by step, bargaining for every point, and did achieve his wish. In the end he was nominally a squire, holding considerable property, entitled to various honors and perquisites, but a common citizen. In practice he was among the magnates, drawing strength from the respect and affection of the entire Pacific Northwest.

Daniel was his third son, who would inherit little wealth and no rank. This suited Daniel quite well. He enjoyed his boyhood—woods, uplands, wild rivers, the sea, horses, cars, watercraft, aircraft, firearms, friends, ceremonies of the guard, rude splendor of the manor until it became a mansion, visits to
his mother’s relatives and to cities nearer by where both pleasure and culture grew steadily more complicated—but restlessness was in him, the legacy of a fighting house, and in his teens he often got into brawls, when he wasn’t carousing with low-life buddies or tumbling servant girls. Finally he enlisted in the Emergency Corps of the World Union Peace Command: That was very soon after its formation. The Union itself was still an infant that many wanted to strangle. A Corpsman hopped from place to place around the globe—later, off it as well—and most of them were full of weapons seeing brisk use. For Brodersen, here began a series of careers which eventually landed him on Demeter.

His latter-day acquaintances assumed that that youth was far behind him in space and perhaps, at fifty Earth-years of age, farther yet in time. He himself seldom thought about it. He kept too busy.

Settling his bulk into a chair, he drew forth pipe and tobacco pouch. “Damn the torpedoes,” he rumbled. “Full speed ahead.”

The Governor General of Demeter blinked at him across her desk. “What?”

“A saying of my dad’s,” Brodersen told her. “Means you asked me to come to your office in person, because you didn’t want us gabbing about whatever ’tis over the phone; and now you’re tiptoeing around the subject as if ’twere a cowbarn that hadn’t been cleaned lately.” He grinned to show he meant no harm. Actually, he suspected he did. “Let’s not keep me here, mixing up my figures of speech, longer’n we must. Lis expects me home for dinner, and she’s unforgiving if I cause the roast to be overdone.”

Aurelia Hancock frowned. She was a sizeable woman, rather overweight, with blunt features and short gray hair. A cigarette smoldered between yellow-stained fingers; smoking had hoarsened her voice, and rumor was that she took an uncommon lot of cancer booster shots. As usual, she wore clothes which were Earth-modish but conservative, a green tunic with a silver-trimmed open collar above bell-bottomed slacks and gilt sandals. “I was trying to be pleasant,” she said.

Brodersen’s thumb tamped the bowl of his briar. “Thanks,” he replied, “but I’m afraid that nohow can this be a nice subject.”

She bridled. “How do you know what I want to talk about?”

“Aw, come down off that ungainly platform, Aurie. What else’d it be but
Emissary?”

Hancock dragged on her cigarette, lowered, and said: “All right! Dan, you have got to stop spreading those tales about the ship returning. They simply are not true. My staff and I have our hands full as is, without adding unfounded suspicions that the Council itself is lying to the people.”

Brodersen raised his shaggy brows. “Who says I’ve been telling stories out of school? I haven’t made an appearance on any broadcast, or mounted a box and orated in Goddard Park, have I? Four or five weeks ago, I asked if you’d heard about
Emissary,
and I’ve asked you a couple of times since, and you’ve answered no. That’s all.”

“It isn’t. You’ve been talking—”

“To friends, sure. Since when have your cops been monitoring conversations?”

“Cops? I suppose you mean police detectives. No, Dan, certainly not. What do you take me for? Why would I want to, even, with only half a million people in Eopolis and the way they gossip? Word gets to me automatically.”

Brodersen regarded her with fresh respect. She was a political appointee—prominent in the Action Party of the North American Federation, helper and protégée of Ira Quick—but by and large, she hadn’t been doing a bad job on Demeter, mediating between the Union Council and a diverse lot of increasingly disaffected colonists. (A tinge of pity: Her husband had been a high-powered lawyer on Earth, but there was little demand for his services here, and in spite of his putting on a good show, everybody knew he was far gone into alcoholism, without wanting to be cured of it. If anything, though, that made Aurelia Hancock the more formidable.) He’d better play close to his vest.