Picnic on Nearside (35 page)

“As I predicted,” the hole said.

“Why don’t you shut up?” Xanthia sat very still, and trembled.

“I shall, very soon. I did not expect to be thanked. But what you did, you did for yourself.”

“And you, too, you . . . you
ghoul!
Damn you, damn you to hell.” She was shouting through her tears. “Don’t think you’ve fooled me, not completely, anyway. I know what you did, and I know how you did it.”

“Do you?” The voice was unutterably cool and distant. She could see that now the hole was out of danger, it was rapidly losing interest in her.

“Yes, I do. Don’t tell me it was coincidence that when you changed direction it was just enough to be near Zoe when she got here. You had this planned from the start.”

“From much further back than you know,” the hole said. “I tried to get you both, but it was impossible. The best I could do was take advantage of the situation as it was.”

“Shut up, shut up.”

The hole’s voice was changing from the hollow, neutral tones to something that might have issued from a tank of liquid helium. She would never have mistaken it for human.

“What I did, I did for my own benefit. But I saved your life. She was going to try to kill you. I maneuvered her into such a position that, when she tried to turn her fusion drive on you, she was heading into a black hole she was powerless to detect.”

“You
used
me.”

“You used me. You were going to imprison me in a power station.”

“But you said you wouldn’t
mind!
You said it would be the perfect place.”

“Do you believe that eating is all there is to life? There is more to do in the wide universe than you can even suspect. I am slow. It is easy to catch a hole if your mass detector is functioning: Zoe did it three times. But I am beyond your reach now.”

“What do you mean? What are you going to do? What am
I
going to do?” That question hurt so much that Xanthia almost didn’t hear the hole’s reply.

“I am on my way out. I converted
Shirley
into energy; I absorbed very little mass from her. I beamed the energy very tightly, and am now on my way out of your system. You will not see me again. You have two options. You can go back to Pluto and tell everyone what happened out here. It would be necessary for scientists to rewrite natural laws if they believed you. It has been done before, but usually with more persuasive evidence. There will be questions asked concerning the fact that no black hole has ever evaded capture, spoken, or changed velocity in the past. You can explain that when a hole has a chance to defend itself, the hole hunter does not survive to tell the story.”

“I will. I
will
tell them what happened!” Xanthia was eaten by a horrible doubt. Was it possible there had been a solution to her problem that did not involve Zoe’s death? Just how badly had the hole tricked her?

“There is a second possibility,” the hole went on, relentlessly. “Just what
are
you doing out here in a lifeboat?”

“What am I . . . I told you, we had . . .” Xanthia stopped. She felt herself choking.

“It would be easy to see you as crazy. You discovered something in
Lollipop
’s library that led you to know you must kill Zoe. This knowledge was too much for you. In defense, you invented me to trick you into doing what you had to do. Look in the mirror and tell me if you think your story will be believed. Look closely, and be honest with yourself.”

She heard the voice laugh for the first time, from down in the bottom of its hole, like a voice from a well. It was an extremely unpleasant sound.

Maybe Zoe had died a month ago, strangled or poisoned or slashed with a knife. Xanthia had been sitting in her lifeboat, catatonic, all that time, and had constructed this episode to justify the murder. It
had
been self-defense, which was certainly a good excuse, and a very convenient one.

But she knew. She was sure, as sure as she had ever been of anything, that the hole was out there, that everything had happened as she had seen it happen. She saw the flash again in her mind, the awful flash that had turned Zoe into radiation. But she also knew that the other explanation would haunt her for the rest of her life.

“I advise you to forget it. Go to Pluto, tell everyone that your ship blew up and you escaped and you are Zoe. Take her place in the world, and never,
never
speak of talking black holes.”

The voice faded from her radio. It did not speak again.

After days of numb despair and more tears and recriminations than she cared to remember, Xanthia did as the hole had predicted. But life on Pluto did not agree with her. There were too many people, and none of them looked very much like her. She stayed long enough to withdraw Zoe’s money from the bank and buy a ship, which she named
Shirley Temple
. It was massive, with power to blast to the stars if necessary. She had left something out there, and she meant to search for it until she found it again.

T
HIS IS THE STORY
of how I went to the Nearside and found old Lester and maybe grew up a little. And about time, too, as Carnival would say.

Carnival is my mother. We don’t get along well most of the time, and I think it’s because I’m twelve and she’s ninety-six. She says it makes no difference, and she waited so long to have her child because she wanted to be sure she was ready for it. And I answer back that at her age she’s too far away from childhood to remember what it’s like. And she replies that her memory is perfect all the way back to her birth. And I retort . . .

We argue a lot.

I’m a good debater, but Carnival’s a special problem. She’s an Emotionalist; so anytime I try to bring facts into the argument she waves it away with a statement like, “Facts only get in the way of my preconceived notions.” I tell her that’s irrational, and she says I’m perfectly right, and she meant it to be. Most of the time we can’t even agree on premises to base a disagreement on. You’d think that would be the death of debate, but if you did, you don’t know Carnival and me.

The major topic of debate around our warren for seven or eight lunations had been the Change I wanted to get. The battle lines had been drawn, and we had been at it every day. She thought a Change would harm my mind at my age. Everybody was getting one.

We were all sitting at the breakfast table. There was me and
Carnival, and Chord, the man Carnival has lived with for several years, and Adagio, Chord’s daughter. Adagio is seven.

There had been a big battle the night before between me and Carnival. It had ended up (more or less) with me promising to divorce her as soon as I was of age. I don’t remember what the counterthreat was. I had been pretty upset.

I was sitting there eating fitfully and licking my wounds. The argument had been inconclusive, philosophically, but from the pragmatic standpoint she had won, no question about it. The hard fact was that I couldn’t get a Change until she affixed her personality index to the bottom of a sheet of input, and she said she’d put her brain in cold storage before she’d allow that. She would, too.

“I think I’m ready to have a Change,” Carnival said to us.

“That’s not fair!” I yelled. “You said that just to spite me. You just want to rub it in that I’m nothing and you’re anything you want to be.”

“We’ll have no more of that,” she said, sharply. “We’ve exhausted this subject, and I will not change my mind. You’re too young for a Change.”

“Blowout,” I said. “I’ll be an adult soon; it’s only a year away. Do you really think I’ll be all that different in a year?”

“I don’t care to predict that. I hope you’ll mature. But if, as you say, it’s only a year, why are you in such a hurry?”

“And I wish you wouldn’t use language like that,” Chord said.

Carnival gave him a sour look. She has a hard line about outside interference when she’s trying to cope with me. She doesn’t want anyone butting in. But she wouldn’t say anything in front of me and Adagio.

“I think you should let Fox get his Change,” Adagio said, and grinned at me. Adagio is a good kid, as younger foster-siblings go. I could always count on her to back me up, and I returned the favor when I could.

“You keep out of this,” Chord advised her, then to Carnival, “Maybe we should leave the table until you and Fox get this settled.”

“You’d have to stay away for a year,” Carnival said. “Stick around. The discussion is over. If Fox thinks different, he can go to his room.”

That was my cue, and I got up and ran from the table. I felt silly doing it, but the tears were real. It’s just that there’s a part of me that stays cool enough to try and get the best of any situation.

Carnival came to see me a little later, but I did my best to make her feel unwelcome. I can be good at that, at least with her. She left when it became obvious she couldn’t make anything any better. She was hurt, and when the door closed, I felt really miserable, mad at her and at myself, too. I was finding it hard to love her as much as I had a few years before, and feeling ashamed because I couldn’t.

I worried over that for a while and decided I should apologize. I left my room and was ready to go cry in her arms, but it didn’t happen that way. Maybe if it had, things would have been different and Halo and I would never have gone to Nearside.

Carnival and Chord were getting ready to go out. They said they’d be gone most of the lune. They were dressing up for it, and what bothered me and made me change my plans was that they were dressing in the family room instead of in their own private rooms where I thought they should.

She had taken off her feet and replaced them with peds, which struck me as foolish, since peds only make sense in free-fall. But Carnival wears them every chance she gets, prancing around like a high-stepping horse because they are so unsuited to walking. I think people look silly with hands on the ends of their legs. And naturally she had left her feet lying on the floor.

Carnival glanced at her watch and said something about how they would be late for the shuttle. As they left, she glanced over her shoulder.

“Fox, would you do me a favor and put those feet away, Please? Thanks.” Then she was gone.

*   *   *

An hour later, in the depths of my depression, the door rang. It was a woman I had never seen before. She was nude.

You know how sometimes you can look at someone you know who’s just had a Change and recognize them instantly, even though they might be twenty centimeters shorter or taller and mass fifty kilos more or less and look nothing at all like the person you knew? Maybe you don’t, because not everyone has this talent, but I have it very strong. Carnival says it’s an evolutionary change
in the race, a response to the need to recognize other individuals who can change their appearance at will. That may be true; she can’t do it at all.

I think it’s something to do with the way a person wears a body: any body, of either sex. Little mannerisms like blinking, mouth movements, stance, fingers; maybe even the total kinesthetic gestalt the doctors talk about. This was like that. I could see behind the pretty female face and the different height and weight and recognize someone I knew. It was Halo, my best friend, who had been a male the last time I saw him, three lunes ago. She had a big foolish grin on her face.

“Hi, Fox,” she said, in a voice that was an octave higher and yet was unmistakably Halo’s. “Guess who?”

“Queen Victoria, right?” I tried to sound bored. “Come on in, Halo.”

Her face fell. She came in, looking confused.

“What do you think?” she said, turning slowly to give me a look from all sides. All of them were good because—as if I needed anything else—her mother had let her get the full treatment: fully developed breasts, all the mature curves—the works. She had been denied only the adult height. She was even a few centimeters shorter than she had been.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“Listen, Fox, if you’d rather I left . . .”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Halo,” I said, giving up on my hatred. “You look great. Fabulous. Really you do. I’m just having a hard time being happy for you. Carnival is never going to give in.”

She was instantly sympathetic. She took my hand, startling me badly.

“I was so happy I guess I was tactless,” she said in a low voice. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come over here yet.”

She looked at me with big brown eyes (they had been blue, usually), and I started realizing what this was going to mean to me. I mean, Halo? A female? Halo, the guy I used to run the corridors with? The guy who helped me build that awful eight-legged cat that Carnival wouldn’t let in the house and looked like a confused caterpillar? Who made love to the same girls I did and compared notes with me later when we were alone and helped me out when the gang tried to beat me up and cried with me and
vowed to get even? Could we do any of that now? I didn’t know. Most of my best friends were male, maybe because the sex thing tended to make matters too complicated with females, and I couldn’t handle both things with the same person yet.

But Halo was having no such doubts. In fact, she was standing very close to me and practicing a wide-eyed innocent look that she knew did funny things to me. She knew it because I had told her so, back when she was a boy. Somehow that didn’t seem fair.

“Ah, listen, Halo,” I said hastily, backing away. She had been going for my pants! “Ah, I think I need some time to get used to this. How can I . . . ? You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?” I don’t think she did, and neither did I, really. All I knew was I was unaccountably mortified at what she was so anxious to try. And she was still coming at me.

“Say!” I said, desperately. “Say! I have an idea! Ah . . . I know. Let’s take Carnival’s jumper and go for a ride, okay? She said I could use it today.” My mouth was leading its own life, out of control. Everything I said was extemporaneous, as much news to me as it was to her.”

She stopped pursuing me. “Did she really?”

“Sure,” I said, very assured. This was only a half lie, by my mother’s lights. What had happened was I had meant to ask her for the jumper, and I was sure she would have said yes. I was logically certain she would have. I had just forgotten to ask, that’s all. So it was almost as if permission had been granted, and I went on as if it had. The reasoning behind this is tricky, I admit, but as I said, Carnival would have understood.