The Avatar (35 page)

Judas priest, this was my worst fear, that Quick’s influence would be strong enough to compel Janigian’s honest crew—

“Missiles!” Those came from
Alhazen,
one, one, one, one, as fast as the tube could launch them.

“Captain,” von Moltke said starkly, “I do not belieff we can strike that many in a flock.”

Granville’s wail: “No, I compute we cannot.
Mon père—

Joelle, like steel striking steel: “We can reach the next beacon and accelerate straight inward before they arrive.”

Brodersen surged against his harness, even as weight returned. “No!” he bawled. “We’ll end up anywhere—” Knowledge smote home. “Carry on.”

The ship blasted. Almost, he imagined he saw the T machine grow before him, whirling and whirling.

He did see the first few splashes of flame, as Frieda parried. Then Sol was gone from its screen. The stars were an altogether different horde. The sun was not white nor yellow nor the blood-orange of Centrum, but ember-hued and shrunken. Tawny beneath colored bands, thrice the width of Luna seen from Earth, stood a planet. Frighteningly close gyred a great iridescent cylinder.

Brodersen let himself tumble for a minute into a night that roared.

Winter fell downward, white around the tower in Toronto.

“Well,” Quick said at last. “They’re gone.”

“You are sure?” Makarov demanded through a choking haze of smoke. He lacked the scientific education to follow each detail of what had just come in.

“Yes,” Quick told him. “Whatever scheme they had—if they did—I suspect they were in fact running off at random, except for trying to… to maximize their probability of—Oh, how can you estimate it?… Never mind. They were forced to make their gate entry from the spot where they happened to be. They are gone, Makarov. I beg your pardon. They are gone, Premier Makarov. Like the thousands of probes our species wasted, searching for new guidepaths. We can forget about them.”

Makarov hunched his bulky frame. “You are quite certain?”

“Yes. Absolutely.” Quick sagged and covered his eyes. Exhaustion shuddered in him.

“Ah.” Makarov puffed. “Good. What a simplification.”

Quick looked back up. “Hm?”

Makarov smiled. He seldom did. “A factor less in the equation, perhaps the least known factor, do you see?”

I
see you’re a mathematical illiterate,
went through Quick.

He gathered strength together. A civilized man had better stay the equal of a barbarian war lord. “Right. We’ll have the personnel of
Alhazen
and
Copernicus
interrogated, of course, but apparently they heard nothing they shouldn’t. This leaves us
Lomonosov
for any special missions we decide on—plus a welcome breathing space, I’d say.”

“We do not sit and pant much,” Makarov warned. “In the bright light of the new situation, we act. First, after notifying our major collaborators, I think we should send
Lomonosov
to the Wheel. If they find no undue complication, they dispose of those
who are there, including Troxell’s group. Afterward we have leisure to make complete arrangements. Is this agreed?”

I’ve had an inferno’s worth of hours to agonize over the moral issues,
Quick thought.
A time finally comes when the civilized man must attack alongside his ally of expediency, or he left behind and have no voice at the peace conference
. “Sir, let’s sleep on it and then talk further, but at the moment I am inclined to believe that in principle you are right.”

C
AITLÍN FLOATED
by herself in the common room. A handclasp on a table edge held her against air currents that made a cloud of her unbound hair. She had turned off lights, the better to see out the viewscreens. Like big windows, they gave her the encompassing universe.

In most, stars crowded as ever before, the same god-hoard of gems in a crystal-black bowl, so many that she could not see how heaven was altered; nor did the argence of the Milky Way pour through channels greatly different from those above Earth or Demeter. In one direction the T machine was visible, but barely, a needle lost among vastnesses.
Chinook
had moved well clear of it before assuming a stable orbit around the planet.

The strangeness stood to right and left of her. Right was the sun disc, one-sixth the width of that which shone upon her birthland. Its red glow needed no stopping down; she could look straight at it, suffer nothing but after-images, and discern a faint, ocherous corona. She found no zodiacal lens, which turned the sight doubly foreign.

Left was the giant world. The ship happened to have emerged opposite the dayside, and at her distance would need a pair of Terrestrial years to swing once around. Hence the globe stayed nearly at full phase, broad and bright enough to shine all else out of the screen which revealed it. Unaided vision noticed how spin had flattened the disc. Tones of amber shaded subtly into each other, below cloud belts that were deep or pale orange streaked by blue-green and auburn. The shadow of a moon was like the pupil of an eye. Where night sliced off a crescent, it was not wholly dark, but a faint sheen wavered.

Mingled luminances turned the room into a cavern of soft lights and lairing shadows, a place of mystery and silence.

The stillness did not break the moment Martti Leino entered.
He checked his flight in the doorway when he spied Caitlín and hung for a minute, staring at the slender, frosted form, before he almost barked, “Hello.”

Tresses swirled in radiance and darkness as she pivoted on her arm. The free hand brushed a lock aside to clear sight for her. “Oh. The top of the morning to you,” she hailed, though in a hushed voice.

“Morning—well, yes, our clocks do say eight hundred—as close to a morning as we’ll ever know,” he blurted. Immediately: “I was looking for you.”

“Were you that? Why?”

He shoved from the doorframe, arrowed across to the table, caught it and let his body stream free like hers, directly across from her. This close to him, her face was clear in the shinings from outside, while shadows brought forth the sculpturing of it. His speech stumbled: “I noticed what trouble you were having at breakfast—”

“Aye, weightlessness is grand until one must clean up and stash things, then it becomes a polka-dotted bitch.” While supplies did include plenty of squeeze-tube rations and other materials intended for these conditions, housekeeping for nine humans and a nonhuman got complicated even when the quartermaster was experienced. “Well, my ancestors outlived worse. Only think, I might have been a maidservant in a Victorian Protestant home! I’ll be learning the way of this.”

“You shouldn’t have to cope alone, now that Su will be too busy. I—I can help, Caitlín.”

“What? Will yourself not be in hourly demand?”

“No. I’ll get jobs, of course, but—Oh, true, every spaceman’s trained to assist in some kind of research, and when we’ve no proper scientists along—Well, the studies that our best qualified people can carry out won’t need much support from me. Phil Weisenberg can generally handle the setting-up and so forth. I’ve talked with him and he agrees I can probably be more useful, most of the time, helping you … if you want,” Leino finished, dropping his glance.

“Why, that’s dear of you and I thank you.” She reached to clasp his shoulder. “May the roads you take be always soft beneath your feet.”

“We, we have to help each other… be as kind to each other…as we can,” he mumbled. “Don’t we? While we live? There will never be any roads really for us, roads we can walk on, ever again.”

She smiled. “Sure, and you’re not losing heart already, are you, Martti, lad? When we’ve only just snatched our lives back to us and won free?”

“Free?”
His gaze swung wildly about, he gripped the table edge with needless force, till his nails whitened. “Locked in a metal shell, blundering blind through space as long as our food holds out, no longer, if we don’t go crazy first—” He wrestled for control.

She stroked his head and made comforting noises low in her throat. At last he could say with simple despair, “You do know, don’t you, we’re lost? Fidelio’s confirmed his folk have never been here. We’ll grope from T machine to T machine—In a thousand years, spending billions of probes, the Betans found how to go between a couple of score stars… and no Others, nobody to help… Caitlín, we’re done for.”

She shook her head, still smiling through the hair that streamed athwart stars, and answered quietly, well-nigh merrily, “I’ll believe that of me when they lay the coppers on my eyes, and maybe not then. But suppose the thing that you say is the worst, Martti, darling.”

He jerked violently. “Och,” she breathed, “you’re in bad shape, so you are. If you’re to help me, let me help you first. Hold still.”

In a deft maneuver she released the table, drew alongside him and slightly behind, caught his left arm in her left hand and pinned his legs between her knees. He uttered amazement. “Easy, lad, easy,” she said. “I must be anchoring myself if I’m to give you the good strong back rub you need.” Her right hand went over him. “Aye, a rat’s nest of Charlie horses, as my father would say were he less dignified and more Irish. Peel down your coverall to the waist.”

He trembled as he obeyed. “Relax,” she urged. “Let go. We’ll drift loose, but sooner or later we’ll fetch up against a wall—a bulkhead—and meanwhile I can be loosening of that poor latissimus dorsi for you.”

Kneading, she chuckled. “All my own invention. Free fall sex made me wonder about free fall massage, the more so when himself often is tensed—No, easy, I told you, easy.”

Looking about her as she worked: “Suppose we shall indeed go lost for some years, until our food is no more and each of us much choose how to die. I do not admit this is the case, mind you, but suppose it is. What a grand fate!”

“Huh?” he exclaimed. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am that. Oh, it will be hard to give up mountains and seas, sunshine through rain, a hearthfire at evening. But think, Martti, dear. Look. The glory yonder, and we making ready to
know
it—then more Suns, more worlds, more beauties and marvels, maybe at last a new Demeter for us, though if not, why, then at the end our few years out here in the universe will have held more than most centuries ever did before.” Her hold upon him tightened, her working hand grew eager. “Be glad in your life!”

Intended for the unknown,
Chinook
bore a superb panoply of scientific instruments. But save for the two computermen, no specialist in any of their uses was aboard. Sufficient technical knowledge, including the knowledge of how to look things up, existed among the travelers that, largely under Weisenberg’s guidance, they could find ways to learn something about the realm wherein they were stranded. However, that might prove to be fatally little.

Then Joelle made her announcement to captain and engineer: Fidelio had the skill. His race had explored many planetary systems, no two alike. Its professional spacefarers included a cadre trained in making and interpreting an enormous range of observations, against the day when the next robot probe would return with the news that it had found another gateway back. He had been one such, as well as a xenological officer who spoke for his ship when she visited aliens. The combination had gotten him picked for
Emissary
.

“His technique involves holothetics, as you should expect,” she cautioned. “We’ll have to modify a unit for him to use. The way was developed on Beta, and between us we remember fairly well what it is. But you realize a certain amount of cut-and-try is necessary. Furthermore, our equipment is crude by his standards.”

“Could we build him the right kind?” Weisenberg asked.

“If you were thrown back in time to Galileo, could you build him a hundred-meter orbiting reflector?” she gibed. “Oh, I daresay a few minor improvements here and there will be possible for us in due course, especially in software. At present, though, we must get what data we can. You go do the obvious things, determine masses, take spectrograms, et cetera. You have to do them anyway. After Fidelio’s linkage is ready, he can
tell you what kind of additional information he and I will need, particularly information fed into us directly and continuously.

“Let us alone to consult. Go about your business. I’ll tell you what else to do and when.”

Brodersen lifted a brow without saying anything. She recognized his “My, isn’t the air kind of thin on top of that high horse?” expression from of old.
He never used it on
me
before!
went through her like ice.
He was always too respectful of my mind. What’s changed him? The stress of this expedition? That Caitlín
adventuress?

The question persisted in her through the days that followed. Not that she was obsessed: except by work, like everybody else. Nevertheless it came back into her awareness again and again, most sharply when she was trying to sleep.

This was often difficult. She had never taken naturally to weightlessness. To her, the pleasure of floating and flying was slight compared to the tedium of long daily times at the exercise machines lest her blood go stale and her very bones dwindle. (The rest talked or sang or watched shows, that kind of thing. She cared for none of it. Theoretically she could have retreated into her head, where mathematics and the memory of the Noumenon dwelt, as she frequently did at leisure. But the dull, sweaty exertions were too nagging.) Worse, just as she was on the edge of dreams, more and more she would rouse with a gasp from a sense of falling into a fathomless pit. Then she must drift in the dark at the end of her leash and try for calm. Thoughts rolled forth which she did not want.

Why do I care that Dan no longer cares? He was never more to me than an animal, smarter and stronger than most, excellent in bed, yet only an animal, to fill some of those hours when I was being only an animal. If my body wants use, he intimated he’d oblige—probably not now, he’s probably too harassed and uncertain, but eventually. Or I could turn to… Rueda, I suppose. A man of the word like him would see past my postmenopausal gray hair, and doubtless be quite an artist. Never mind dignity. Sex is a mere bodily need, like defecation
.