Beyond Heaven's River (14 page)

Beyond Heavens River

Twenty-Four

Kawashita lay in the dark, watching Anna sleep, watching the play of lights on the ceiling — designed to soothe warping passengers — and thinking about his fiancée’s family. He closed his eyes and tried to picture his first fiancée — an eighteen-year-old girl from Nagasaki, with smooth, pale skin and eyes like a flinching doe’s. But there were only bits and pieces left. At any rate, there was no comparison. Anna, if less beautiful to a Japanese, was certainly more dynamic and suited to him now.

But what price her energy? Born in the Greater Magellan, tens of thousands of parsecs from the nearest human outpost, she’d been raised among her family and the crews of the exploratory ships. Her mother, Juanita Sigrid, a cultural biologist hired by Anna’s grandfather, had fit into the unusual family as well as could be expected. Anna had assumed some of her traits: empathy, a certain cynical view of things, which masked uncertainty, and a touch of bitterness. For when the family broke up, Anna’s father and mother went separate ways, and Juanita Sigrid got the worst of everybody’s opinions. Traicom Nestor, Anna’s grandfather, regarded her as a traitor to the son he didn’t quite trust himself. When she remarried, she broke all ties with the past — including her daughter.

Anna’s father was now head of an independent consolidation. He seldom communicated with Anna, but she felt a great deal of affection for him. Her mother she felt less regard for.

Behind them all, like the background of a complex painting, was the Greater Magellan. Juanita Sigrid had found her job cut out for her.

On the near side of the cloud of stars they’d discovered an abandoned artifact — the largest structure ever found. It interconnected three stars a parsec distant from each other and contained the mass of seven rocky planets. Like an old spiderweb strung across the light-years, spun from carbon and silicon and coated with a thin film of metal, it had been abandoned long before. Without extensive energy to hold it together, it had separated into a fine cloud of debris. But that cloud still retained a haunting shape — a cupped disk with three triangular wings, aimed at the center of the Milky Way — or where the center had been forty million years before. Two worlds in the area had once supported life, and there was ample evidence that beings on both worlds had supported each other in the project. They’d apparently never developed warp technology. Their greatest effort had been spent on easing their loneliness, trying to communicate with unknown beings, for unknown reasons.

Beneath the shallow seas of one world, in ruins scattered by geological forces, the expedition managed to piece together glimpses from the distant past. Then, in a near miraculous find, they rescued a few metal tetrahedrons from deep trenches that had once been the coast of a continent. Stored in the atoms of the tetrahedrons were the histories of both civilizations.

The Nestors selectively sold the information for a dozen years after their return.

But the financial angle didn’t interest Kawashita. He wondered how the two species had felt, locked in by the agonizingly slow means of traveling between their three stars. He wondered if they’d succeeded. If they had, where did they go? And if they hadn’t, did they die a natural death or commit suicide?

He couldn’t sleep. His head was filled with visions. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t dispel the notion that all of space and time was haunted, that every centimeter of every parsec, in all directions, was filled withkami ,watching and listening.

And at this moment, stretched through some higher space that was making his deepest thoughts scatter back and forth like rain in a storm, they were traveling to see the creations of still morekami .

Everyone was foolish not to see it. Everything was wrapped in plan and deceit. He couldn’t begin to guess where he fit in, but he knew his role was far from minor. And he had failed. Once he knew why, he had two choices — the same choices he projected onto the builders of the Web as they faced their success or failure. He had lived a very long time. Not even his love for Anna could color his decision.

For that reason he stayed very quiet now and put on the masks of knowledge, acculturation, matrimony. He hoped they would come off easily when the time came.

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Beyond Heavens River

Twenty-Five

Ships went into the Ring Stars and, if they survived the outer fields, were swept out of existence just beyond. Sometimes, light-years away, like the cast-out debris of a carnivore’s lunch, bits and pieces of them would return. Sometimes the emergency signal beacons were still working. Ships outside the fields would pick up the signals, intercept the debris, and find nightmares, things from other universes mixed with the fragments of the lost ships.

Ostriches with large heads, gelatinous blobs with chunks of crystalline seawater adhering to their bristled skin. And worse. Ship fragments that were alive. Everything had been mixed into a cosmic grab bag, and samples had been plucked out.

The Aighors didn’t deny that they were responsible, in the beginning. The theory of the moment was that they had developed probability disrupters, weapons that could exchange mass-for-mass with world-lines slightly askew from status geometry.

Then the supernova spread its shell of light out through the fields, through the anomalies, following with a tag-along shell of particles. The flower bloomed in deep space, deadly and timeless.

The pyrotechnics had ended long ago. An expanding nebula of gas and hard radiation surrounded the remnant of the Alpha star.

Leaving higher spaces within the small solar system of the Delta star, thePeloros immediately began absorbing data. Beneath a faintly silvered energy shield, robots normally deployed for cleaning the warp nodes were installing new equipment in the sensor clusters of the outer hull.

Anna supervised everything with obvious enjoyment. The first few hours out of warp, she was in constant motion, giving orders and making decisions. Jason DiNova followed a few steps behind, grinning. This was the Nestor he was used to working for. Domesticity seemed as ill suited to her as a wool comforter on a star.

Then, as if on cue, Nestor withdrew from the activity and sat down in an unused corner of the cargo bay, chin in hand, brows together, deep in concentration. Two yeoman spheres hovered nearby. DiNova stood to one side, leaning against a bulkhead.

“All right,” she said. “Bring the chapel furniture down from inner C, manufacture a few runners of white linen, clone some flowers in Special Projects. I’ve recorded plans and designs in my notes. Look them up. I want it all down here in six hours. Send invitations to all ship’s personnel, and special dispensations to watch-holders. ThePeloros can run without supervision for a few hours, right?” She looked at DiNova. He nodded.

“Fine. Pardon me for a moment,” she said. “I have some apologies to make.”

Kawashita was in her cabin, exercising with four light metal poles he’d borrowed from Materials Dispensary. She watched him set to a pattern of moving abstract hologram images, wiping them away with intricate swings. When the exercise was over, she interrupted.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Kawashita looked up. “For running off like that. But I can’t promise I’ll mend my ways.”

“So? We both took chances, no?”

“But I know you’ve still got quite a bit of masculine pride. I shouldn’t go out of my way to tread on it.”

“You have work to do, obligations. Any discomfort they cause me is minimal.”

“What are we going to do when you find a place you want to settle?”

“I know what I will do but not what you’ll do.”

“Most of this is in my blood. So I tell myself, anyway. Without it I might be a different person. But —”

“You shouldn’t give it up, then.”

“I was going to say, I need some time to decide what I’m going to do, how I’m going to be. I don’t want to traipse across the Galaxy after every will-o’-the-wisp of potential profit — not for the rest of my life. I saw what that did to my family. After this I want to put it away for a while, try something else.” She sat in a desk field. “Do you believe me?”

“Not completely,” he said.

“Willing to take a risk?”

“Yes.”

“We’re both idiots, you know,” she said.

“You, who take risks every day of your life — risks that can decide the future of everything you’ve done — you worry about one small chance?”

“I’m a coward. I have soft underbellies that can be ripped open. I’ve never let anyone get at them before. When I commit myself to you, you’ll have all the road maps to them, and a set of claws.”

He put the poles down and held out his arms. She stood and came to him. She was sweating and her back was stiff. “If I knew I had any soft parts left, I’d tell you where they are,” he said. “Fair exchange. But I don’t know where they are myself. I have only one goal, and there’s no reason anyone would try to set me on a different course — not even you. We’ll give each other more freedom, not less, if only because we provide points of rest for each other — sea anchors in a storm.”

She pulled back from him and smiled. “Talk about May–December marriages,” she said.

“Is everything ready?”

“Will be shortly. Kondrashef has agreed to be your best man. And DiNova will give me away, which is symbolic, I suppose. I can hear him worrying about all the projects we’ll pass up after I’m married. I have friends in the entourage who’ll act as maids of honor, flower girls, and the like.”

“I’m not familiar with this kind of wedding.”

“Nor am I, believe me. But you told me to design it as I saw fit.”

“I’ve never been much at remembering lines.”

“It’ll be simple. A short walk, a ceremony, witnessings.”

“And a working honeymoon. It does seem crowded.”

Anna sighed. “I couldn’t pass this one by. Too much at stake.”

“To the Japanese, a wedding means a great deal.”

“It means a lot to me, too. Still, I see … it would have been nice to have time to ourselves right away.” She put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “Are we getting off to a bad start?”

“You were worried about knowing what you want. Do you really want this?” His face betrayed nothing. His tone was reasonable, and Nestor couldn’t tell if he was expressing dissatisfaction, or if she was merely fighting her own guilt. “Yes. I do.”

He smiled. “The only thing I ask is that you know what you want. I’m flexible. I can do what I wish almost anywhere.”

“I wish I knew what you really thought” she said. “You seem too damned reasonable.”

“Your risk,” he said, smiling.

“One part of me says you should stand up and make me back the hell out of the Ring Stars. The other says you’re letting me follow my wyrd, like I was some kind of summer thunderstorm, useless to interfere with. I don’t know which I prefer.”

“What you’ll find here interests me,” he said. “If thekami who call themselves Aighors didn’t have anything to do with these stars, then who did?”

“You think the Perfidisians had something to do with it?” She paused, her lips held tightly together. “Damn you. You’re taunting me. What the helldo you want? Tell me straight, or I’ll cancel the whole thing!”

“Are you angry?”

“Goddamn right I’m angry! You’re playing me like a fish on a line! Tell me straight!”

Kawashita folded his hands behind his back and took a relaxed, at-ease position. “I’ve seen you before when you’re angry. You lose all reason. So — don’t interrupt — listen carefully. You don’t control me. Your circumstances don’t control me. I decide for myself and base those decisions on things you cannot understand — experiences I haven’t told you or anyone else about. I can return to my own world and live well enough. I don’t depend on you for anything but the dubious luxury of traveling all over the Galaxy. It’s a matter of interest, not necessity. It isn’t for myself that I criticize condensing the ceremony, or holding it out here, where its ghost is rooted to nothing, where no one can ever pinpoint its place with any certainty. It’s what you will think later, how you’ll feel about our bonds. I marry you to stay married. I don’t consider it a pact of convenience. I learned that a variety of bed partners doesn’t satisfy me. I don’t want to be alone any more than I have to be. If you wish to wander far from me, at any time, then don’t marry me.”

“That isn’t what you said a few minutes ago.”

“So love makes me inconsistent.”

“I don’t know what I want to do.”

“Then don’t marry me. I know what I want to do — have to do. If I am the anchor, and you’re a far-straying ship on a thin chain, we might as well not marry.”

“No,” Anna said. “It would be a travesty.”

“I might have done that once, if I’d married during the war. I might have left a wife at home and fought far at sea, perhaps died. But I didn’t. That philosophy has stayed with me.”

“We shouldn’t get married?”

It was Kawashita’s turn to be irritated. He turned away from her and squared his shoulders. “I want to.”

“So do I. But I’m not sure I can live up to everything. Shall we compromise?”

“Do we even know the limits within which we can compromise?”

“I think I can set them out. Fidelity.”

“If that is what you want,” Kawashita said.

“I want it. I’ll consult you on all business journeys — all journeys, of any kind. But we can’t make a fixed rule about them. It just wouldn’t work.”

“No.”

“I don’t know how much I have to wander, just to stay sane. But I will let you help me decide.” She held him around his shoulders, laying her head onto the back of his neck. “We’ve both contradicted ourselves. I guess neither of us knows how to work this kind of thing out. Being reasonable isn’t enough.”

“We won’t make lasting decisions now. We’ll work things out as we go along.”

“Wherever I go, I want you with me.”

Kawashita laughed. “We’re both crazy. You more than I. You have everything you want, and you want more — you want to be satisfied with less. I’m willing to put up with anything but not willing to be separated from you.” He turned around in her arms, rolling her chin on his shoulder until she was looking up at him. “The thought of doing without you scares me. I don’t know who else I’d turn to.”

“That’s not fair to you,” Anna murmured.

“So is there anything different about us? We make a contract, just as billions of humans have done for thousands of years — we feel afraid for each other, afraid of living without each other, which is the height of immaturity. Like two adolescents.”

“I’m not that far from adolescence,” Nestor said. “Not compared to you.”

“So? Look at me. My body hasn’t changed since I was twenty-five years old. My needs haven’t changed. I’ve never felt like an old man, even when all those around me thought I was a patriarch.”

“You don’t conjoin like an old man.”

“Until now, I’ve been mating with ghosts. Shadow-fucking. I’ve been asleep four centuries — and now that I’m about to marry you, my life starts up again.”

“I want to please you.”

“Now that we’ve said these things, the wedding is just a formality, a party for the rest of the ship, no?”

“I’ve never been much for formalities, myself.”

“It’s simple. A short walk, the ceremony, witnessings,” Kawashita said.

Nestor tapped her chin on his chest and grinned. “Wish us luck?”

“No wine, for a toast?”

“At the flick of a wrist,” Nestor said. She ordered wine and it rose up from the food table in two long-stemmed glasses. “Vintage,” she said. “Not manufactured. Tapped from kegs in the cargo bays. I bought some on Earth before we left, for the wedding. Let’s sample it before we force it on the guests.”

They drank to each other. “Christ,” Anna said, laughing as she wiped her lips. “It’s green. I’ll have to run it through the processor anyway.”

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