Juggler of Worlds (4 page)

“Eerie, don’t you think?” Without waiting for an answer, Trisha Schwartz cranked the bridge telescope’s holo to max magnification. Her voice brimmed with curiosity and impatience.

Nessus marveled. Their ship was not even a minute out of hyperspace. Curiosity explained why she and her colleague were here; there was much to be learned in this place. Their impatience explained why
he
was. Someone had to show judgment.

She
should
be eager. This was, theoretically, a rescue mission. Nessus kept his pessimism to himself.

Distorted and curdled starlight rushed at him and vanished, replaced by… nothing. Vertigo washed over him. Nessus braced himself against the nearest bulkhead and sought meaning in the amplified hologram display.

Trisha said, “It shows in the mass pointer. Its magnetic field is enormous. It’s unmistakable on deep radar. And here”—she poked a hand into the center of the projection—“nothing.”

Beside her, a crash couch creaked as Raul Miller shifted his considerable bulk. “Just wait,” he said. A tiny circle of light flashed and disappeared. Seconds later a second halo flickered.

Trisha was delighted. “See? Gravity lensing as stars pass directly behind it. We’re still not seeing
it
. It’s eerie, I tell you. Don’t you agree, Nessus?”

Nessus was a label of convenience. His real name was only reproducible by paired throats or a wind ensemble. Unaware he was in listening range (why reveal how acute his hearing truly was?), Trisha had once described his name as an industrial accident set to waltz time.

That was no worse, Nessus supposed, than what humans called all his race: Puppeteers.

“I sense nothing supernatural here,” Nessus said, choosing his words with caution. He did everything with caution. “Scary, I’ll grant you.”

That got the chuckle Nessus knew it would. Puppeteers were widely seen as cowards—which, essentially, was why this ship flew with a human crew.

Alas, Nessus thought, I’m just crazy enough to be assigned to lead them.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. On that all intelligent species concurred.

Species differed on how best to acquire knowledge. Among Nessus’ kind, it was agreed that exploration was madness. It could not be otherwise, when to leave home world and herd was insanity.

Hence these humans.

Trial and error had shown humans made excellent explorers. Humans didn’t know about the experiments, of course. Nessus had no intention of revealing them. He didn’t dare. No Puppeteer would.

The invisible
it
they distantly orbited was a recently discovered neutron star, designated BVS-1. Like every neutron star, BVS-1 was the extremely compressed remains of a supernova. Implosion had crushed the stellar slag, more massive than many a normal star, into a sphere just 17 kilometers in diameter. Its own gravity kept it that small. A film of ordinary matter coated a slightly thicker layer of free-ranging subatomic particles, which covered—no one knew what, exactly. That inner orb approached the density of an atomic nucleus. Physicists called the core material neutronium or neutron-degenerate matter. Engineers called it unobtainium. Both argued heatedly about its properties.

Most neutron stars shouted their presence across light-years, transforming cosmic dust and gas into cataclysmic X-ray blasts or gamma bursts. But it wasn’t radiation that kept explorers away from neutron stars and a close look at the mysterious neutronium. It was those in-spiraling clouds of dust and gas themselves, accelerated to relativistic speeds as they were sucked in. No matter how impervious the hull, the pummeling would be fatal to instruments or crew.

And then there was BVS-1, cold and dark, its presence recently revealed by a gravitational anomaly.

BVS-1 had long ago devoured its accretion disc and ceased to pulse. Its surface temperature, scarcely warmer than empty space itself, implied it had been a neutron star for at least a billion years. That made it approachable—

Or so the theory went.

THEY CIRCLED BVS-1 at the presumed safe distance of two million kilometers. Nessus tried not to dwell on that presumption. Peter and Sonya
Laskin had monitored BVS-1 for days from a closer orbit, reporting regularly by hyperwave radio, before swooping in for a close look.

The
Hal Clement
had not been heard from since.

“Any signs of them?” Nessus asked. His calm tone was a lie. Every instinct demanded that he flee—if not from the astronomical enigma, then at least from the unpredictable humans. He wanted to lock himself into his cabin, to curl into a ball, his heads tucked tightly inside, and hide from the universe.

Trisha shook her head. “No response to our broadcasts. Nothing on radar.”

“Could be interference,” Raul said hopefully. “Or simple equipment breakdown.”

True, the Laskins’ comm gear might have failed. That didn’t explain the lack of a radar sighting. “Keep trying,” Nessus ordered. He fought the urge to pluck at his already-disheveled mane. Something had gone badly wrong here.

This
was why his people didn’t explore.

Raul broke the lengthening silence, his manner apologetic. “Still nothing.”

Nessus settled astraddle the Y-shaped padded bench that was his post on the bridge. With his lip nodes, far nimbler than human fingers, he operated a human computer console. The Laskins’ planned course was as he remembered. Their hyperbolic plunge would have them skim within two kilometers of BVS-1’s mysterious surface. If their autopilot had erred only slightly and they had somehow impacted…

If he could contemplate
that
malfunction, why not others? Nessus contemplated the planned hairpin turn, the ship hurled back into space. It had been days since the Laskins went missing. “What if the autopilot didn’t resume orbit after the dive? How far would they coast?”

Trisha plopped onto an empty crash couch. Her body blocked whatever she did with her console. “I’ll expand our radar search.”

She found the ship adrift, millions of kilometers from where they had searched. It did not answer hails. Raul brought them alongside.

Through his view port, Nessus studied the
Hal Clement
. It had a ferocious spin. Why had the Laskins spun up their ship like that?

“We can’t board for a look while it’s spinning,” Nessus said. “Any ideas?”

Raul rubbed his chin. “Nessus, are the landing struts on the other ship steel? Ours are.”

Nessus retrieved the specs. “Steel, yes.”

“Then we use our magnetic docking couplers for drag. Like all our
equipment, the couplers are way overengineered. We slow the
Hal Clement’s
spin while our attitude thrusters keep us at a safe distance.”

There were several bursts of keyboarding, and then Raul slapped the console in frustration. “Tanj! It’s going to take a while.”

Of course their systems were overengineered. Nessus would not otherwise have set hoof aboard. “Proceed,” he said.

And so Raul managed the braking pulses, adjusting the pulse rate as spin bled away. Trisha and the nav computer muttered to each other. Nessus… fretted.

Until—

Trisha whistled.
“That’s
why they’re spinning and so far off-course. The rotation of a massive object—tiny though it is, BVS-1 outmasses Sol—warps nearby space. I ran the numbers and it comes down to this. The spin the
Hal Clement
picked up and the kink from its planned trajectory show BVS-1 rotates about every two and a half minutes.”

“Interesting,” Nessus said atonally. In truth, he couldn’t imagine how knowing the spin of the neutron star could possibly matter. If his kind had any curiosity, though, they’d probably be as foolishly brave as these humans.

All that interested Nessus at that moment was the still-silent ship. It had finally slowed down enough for meaningful observation—and cautious boarding. Its landing struts looked
odd
somehow. That had to be in his imagination. Peter and Sonya could not possibly have landed. If they had, they could not have launched.

Trisha and Nessus checked Raul’s suit gauges twice before allowing him into the air lock. Their comm link checked out. So did his helmet cam. Holding a gas pistol, Raul jetted the few meters to the derelict. A dimple of curdled sky, where gravity bent even starlight, showed the general location of BVS-1.

Something was terribly wrong. Nessus could tell Trisha felt it, too. She leaned forward anxiously as Raul disappeared into the air lock of the Laskins’ ship.

“Nessus, Trish, are you there?” Raul’s camera relayed the inner hatch of the air lock. They watched his gloved finger stretch toward the controls. Status lamps flashed. The hatch began to cycle. “Life-support systems all register nominal.”

“We’re here,” Nessus said. “I suggest you keep your suit sealed anyway.”

“Will do,” Raul said.

Nessus watched the inner hatch open. Raul and camera moved inward, panned along a corridor, turned a corner—

The next thing Nessus saw, as his heads whipped uncontrollably to a point of safety between his front legs, was the underside of his belly.

Sigmund sat alone at a small table in the packed ship’s lounge. Beyond his left elbow lay a coat of blue paint, a supposedly impregnable hull, and an unknowable amount of… he didn’t know what.

No one did.

The good thing about hyperspace was hyperdrive. Hyperdrive travel corresponded, in normal space, to a light-year every three days. The bad thing about hyperspace was no one knew what it was. Every so often, a hyperdrive ship disappeared. Scientists declaimed learnedly that the pilot must have flown too close to a mathematical singularity, the warping of space near a stellar mass.

What happened in such cases was unclear. Perhaps the errant ship fell down a wormhole, only to emerge unreachably incommunicably far, far away. Perhaps the ship became trapped forever in hyperspace. Or, just maybe, the ship ceased to exist. The math was ambiguous.

Compared to the less-than-nothingness centimeters away, odd scents and strange constellations were inconsequential. Sigmund yearned for a world. Any world.

He took more comfort from the beer in his drink bulb than in General Products Corporation’s assurances about indestructible-hull technology. Invulnerability hardly sufficed when his whole ship could disappear.

General Products being a Puppeteer company, and Puppeteers being Puppeteers, little was known about the hull material beyond its truly impressive warranty. Die because of a GP hull failure and your heirs would become very rich.

Well, not
his
heirs. Sigmund had none. He expected none. He didn’t take it personally—the Fertility Board felt that way about all natural paranoids. Truth be told, 18 billion people on Earth were several billion too many. He couldn’t fault the board for preferring sane progeny.

That didn’t mean he liked it. He sucked on his beer bulb, hunting for happier thoughts.

The sudden collapse of Nakamura Lines meant ships everywhere were filled to capacity. Every stateroom aboard was taken. Passengers stood three deep at the small bar. Only Sigmund and a battle-scarred Kzin had tables to themselves. Even the Jinxians shared their tiny tables.