Starfarers (43 page)

“I hope not.”

“It seemed like—like I might lose you, Hanny—”

She thawed. “I did act recklessly. It won’t happen again! Shall we leave it at that?”

“If you want,” he mumbled.

She had not said that she might have lost him.

He guessed that she didn’t appreciate how close the brush with death had been, as quickly as she calmed. Helping Colin rise, she led the Tahirian over to their parleurs to inquire about the cause of the trouble. Ruszek heard later that ens line, floating about, had gotten in the way of delicate manipulations, until en unsnapped it. Then when en tried to shift a loosely secured cabinet—weightless, but with inertia unchanged—and didn’t take proper care about footgrip, reaction flung en free.

Nansen could not give en a suitable tongue-lashing in Cambiante, but Dayan got one, and the captain suspended work while further precautions were devised.

At the moment, the mate struggled to regain his own equilibrium. Thereafter he resumed the relatively unskilled task she had assigned him.
I do still have her
, he thought.

Three little
Tahirians seemed lost in the wide, high human gymnasium. Several of the machines outbulked them. And yet to Cleland they dominated the space, filled it from end to end and deck to overhead with their alienness.

And with what they stood for?

He stopped in the doorway. “I don’t understand, I tell you,” he protested. “Why this rush?”

Hand to elbow, Brent urged him onward. “It’s a chance that won’t come again. The other three are playing in their gym. Ivan fixed that; he’s a clever customer. And I’ve been watching, listening, made sure all our breed are elsewhere. We can talk privately. If somebody does happen to see us, it won’t seem as odd as if we were crowded together in a cabin.”

Cleland shuffled ahead. “Talk? What about?”

“What do you suppose?”

Cleland stared at the trio who waited. Leo, Peter, and the—social technologist?—they called Ivan gave him back his gaze out of their multiple eyes. Ripples went through their manes, antennae trembled, he caught metal-sharp odors.

Stopping in front of them, he said, “Uh, yes. The … opposition,” agents of that party on Tahir which did not want a revival of starfaring to trouble their world’s millennial calm.

“Right,” Brent replied. “Now that we know how the situation is shaking down here, we can start planning.”

“Planning?” Cleland asked.

“Contingency plans, of course,” the crisp voice told him. “Nothing’s certain. But we can lay out ideas, arguments, tactics, whatever might bring an early end to this dangerous misery.”

Hesitation yielded to bleakness. “I see. Our ship does seem to have become a Flying Dutchman, doesn’t she?”

“And not even guaranteed eternal punishment. That thing out there can
kill
us, Tim.”

“All right.” A flick of humor twitched Cleland’s mouth. “The loyal opposition will please come to order.”

Brent remained grim. “Loyalty can be misplaced.”

“I’m thinking of, well, survival. Everybody’s.”

“Me, too. I wish Nansen and his gang would.”

Brent unslung his parleur and addressed the Tahirians: “(Our common purpose is to stop this undertaking, bring you home, and ourselves turn homeward. Let us consider ways and means.)”

Ivan responded. “(If no signs of intelligent beings become manifest, presumably the effort will cease before long.)”

Peter spoke in ens body language and harshened tones. Perhaps Leo translated, perhaps en commented: “(That is nothing we can count on.)”

“(I have been considering how we could see to it,)” Ivan said.

Cleland tautened, shocked. “Sabotage?”

“Would it be so bad a thing to do?” Brent demanded. “Against the scientific ethic, no doubt. But wouldn’t it be better, more moral, to get us home alive, and soon, not after five more years in orbit around that hole into hell?”

The Tahirians had been conferring. Peter spoke for them. “(It scarcely seems feasible.)”

“(I cannot think of a way, either,)” Brent admitted. “(But we can give thought to it, among other approaches. Something may occur to us.)”

“P-persuasion,” Cleland said. “Maybe, whatever happens, we can … persuade the rest.”

“I doubt that. Christ knows we tried, back on Tahir.”

“Conditions, events, they, uh, they may make people change their minds.”

“Maybe.” Brent spoke to the Tahirians again. “(What about Simon?)” He did not use the human-bestowed name for the linguist who replaced an Indira too old to travel, but the Cambiante symbol set identifying en.

“(Simon is only mildly in favor of this venture,)” Ivan said.

Brent nodded. “Ha, yes, I know,” he muttered. “That
must’ve been real sweet politicking they did, to get en aboard instead of another gung-ho dreamer.” He went on as if to himself, retracing a well-worn trail. “And Mam and Selim aren’t much for it. Nor Lajos, though now that Hanny’s got this new toy—” His throat thickened. “Maybe the toy will turn out not to be such fun,” he spat “Damn near didn’t, already.”

“We don’t know,” Cleland said. “We can’t foretell.”

“No, we can’t That’s why I want us to think what we
can
do, plan for every possibility we can imagine.”

Cleland winced. “We may find … when the reality comes along, we can’t d-do anything about it”

“I am not going to take that attitude,” Brent stated. “Nor should you. Men, real men and women, they don’t tamely whine, ‘Thy will be done.’ They fight back.”

After their many talks through the years, Cleland heard the implication. “Fight—literally?” cried horror. “Out of the question!”

“Quiet” Brent glowered at him. “I didn’t mean that. I certainly hope never. But I can imagine extreme emergencies, when nothing but quick action will save us. One thing we can do here and now is work out a drill for getting at the guns.”

“No!”

“I agree, it’d be a desperate act But you said it, we can’t foretell. Maybe we will suddenly find ourselves desperate, with no time for arguing with fools. Survival knows no law.”

Cleland’s fists clenched at his sides. “It does. It can be too dearly bought—”

Brent’s tone softened. The resolution within it did not. “Yours, maybe. Or mine, or any individual’s. But not everybody’s. Nor this whole ship and the treasures in her, what they’ll mean at home in the way of power. Tim, we’re responsible for the future of the human race.”

“That’s far-fetched—”

Brent gestured for silence. Cleland glanced back at the entrance. Nansen and Kilbirnie passed by, hand in hand.

“Damn,” Brent said low when they were gone. “I thought
they were already in bed screwing.” He paused, made a thin smile, and went on in a normal voice, “Well, they don’t seem to have noticed us. I guess they wouldn’t Let’s continue our session while we can.”

Cleland’s face had blanched. “Yes,” he said. “Let’s.”

The robot
in its spacecraft plunged toward doomsday.

At slightly less than five thousand kilometers out, instruments perceived the black hole as a disk of total darkness, a third again the width of Luna above Earth. X-ray fires blazed around it, from it. To a human the inrushing gas was only luminous from afar, seen as a whole through its entire thickness. Here he would have sensed merely the death that it dealt him. But to the robot it was an incandescent storm, shot through with sudden savage riptides. Magnetic field lines writhed like snakes millions of kilometers long. Gusts of plasma raged by, alive with lightning. There was no sound, but receivers heard hiss and shriek so loud that they must tune themselves down lest the noise shatter their circuits. Every protection, armor, insulation, field, came under attack. Metal members began to bend. Tidal force had reached four Earth gravities and was mounting ever faster with every inward centimeter.

The robot was seeking a stable orbit. The path it had won to was excessively eccentric. It fought to circularize at an endurable distance. Flung through a circuit of thirty thousand kilometers in a pair of minutes, buffeted, blinded, the orbit more and more crazily precessing and nutating, it failed. Each swing brought it nearer, and metal groaned under the stresses.

Still the spacecraft transmitted, sending the data it gathered
on beams that could pierce the chaos. Null-one-null-null-one … forces, gradients, energies, densities, compositions, velocities, such stuff as reality is made on. It would report until the black hole destroyed and devoured it.

Abruptly the sendings changed. Responsive no more to their computer programs but to mind and will, electronics shuttled in new dances, weaving new signals—messages.

Nansen and
Kilbirnie lay in his cabin, pillow-propped against the headboard. The bed was expanded to double width and the bedclothes rumpled. Odors of love lingered. On the bulkhead opposite them a screen played a view from Earth, of a summer sea rolling blue and green to lap around a great rock that Monet knew, beneath a summer sky where gulls and curlews winged. Mendelssohn’s “Violin Concerto in E Minor” was reaching its joyous conclusion.

They had shared a beer, and lapsed into companionable silence while the restfulness flowed out of them and a new tide flowed in. As often, his thoughts wandered widely.

“I wish—” he sighed at last. The words trailed off.

Kilbirnie turned her head toward him. “You wish what?” she asked. “Maybe I can oblige.”

“
Nada
. Nothing.”

She snapped her fingers. “Oh, foosh, I had hopes about your wish.”

“I didn’t mean—”

The narrow, vivid face laughed into his eyes. “I ken vurra well wha’ ye didna mean, laddie. And, truth, ye’ve no had a reasonable time to rest, yet.” She snuggled close. “What is it you wish?”

He looked away again, at the image without seeing it, a furrow between his brows. “I’ve said it before. I wish we were home”

“Already?”

“Yes, yes, everything we knew as home is gone. But Earth—or any planet fit for human beings, even Tahir—”

“Aye, Tahir has grand sentimental value,” Kilbirnie murmured
reminiscently. “But Earth will be better. Whatever’s happened meanwhile, we’ll make our home there when we’re ready to settle down, and, by God, make it the way we want it to be. Children—and I’m not a bad cook, skipper. You’ll find I have as good an idea of breakfast as a Scotchwoman. Not surprising, that. But I’ll wean you from your miserable coffee and French roll in the morning, see if I don’t.”

He wanted to fall in with her mood, but could not. “Until then, however, you, locked in this metal shell for no one knows how long.”

She ruffled his hair. “Locked in wi’ you, wha’s wrong wi’ that?”

“And I with you—”

He ended the kiss.

“But you are a free spirit, Jean,
querida
,” he said unhappily.

“And you’re too serious,
querido.
”

“I was thoughtless. I should have foreseen. Now that we are here, in—in this everydayness, I worry about how you’ll come to feel, how much it will hurt you, being always idled and confined.” His fist doubled on the sheet.

“D’you suppose I gave the matter no beforehand thought myself?” she retorted. “I knew how badly you wanted to go—”

“Should I have wanted it? I could have swung the decision the other way.”

She laid her palm over his mouth. “And you know how I wanted it,” she finished. “Who says I’ll be idled? We’ve a whole system to explore.”

“No planets. If the star ever had any, it lost them when it blew up.”

Passion leaped. “The beings, the life!”

He bit his lip. “I’m afraid the contact will be purely intellectual, if we make it.” Quickly: “Of course you’ll be as interested as everybody else, yes, and have suggestions for it. But is it enough for you, month after month, perhaps year after year?”

“Why, there’ll be missions to fly regardless,” she said. “You know that What robots can do is limited. For a beginning, we’ll put the command station in orbit. That will be a tricksy little devil!” Her tone and glance sparkled.

He sat straight and glared at her. “Wait! Not a job for you.”

She took it coolly. “Indeed? Why not?”

He had avoided bringing the subject quite out into the open. Soon he must. He might as well start now “It’s too hazardous,” he said as calmly as he could. “Ruszek is ready, willing, and able.”

“Me, too.”

“We can’t risk both our pilots. He will take that mission”

“You have spoken?” she purred.

He nodded stiffly. “I have.”

She smiled and fluttered her eyelashes. “Aweel, ’tis sweet o’ ye, if misguided. Maybe I can get ye to unspeak.”

Her hand went under the covers and roved shamelessly.

“You realize,” Nansen said with difficulty, “you cannot change my mind.”

“Belike not. Ye’re a stubborn gowk.” Kilbirnie slid her free arm under his neck. “But I can have fun trying.”

In a
room crammed with the disorder that gathers when concentration is complete, Sundaram and Simon stared at a screen.

Nothing moved there but dots and dashes, white on black. A screen alongside flickered through mutable figures as a computer program applied scheme after scheme—mathematical relationships, prime-number arrays, stochastic formulas, anything, anything that might give the binary inflow a pattern, the germ of a meaning.

Sundaram heard a whistle from the Tahirian. Unwashed, disheveled, he bent his head around and read on the parleur: “(Undoubtedly contact. The ancient databases record signals like these. Minds have taken over Probe Three and are calling to us.)”

“This early,” the human croaked.

“(It happened thus before, equally fragmentary. As you know, the ancestors never succeeded in extracting much intelligibility.)”

And so at length, for that reason among others, they gave up
, Sundaram thought for the hundredth time.
I don’t believe we will. This abstract kind of communication suits the human mind better than the Tahirian.

Half vision, half anguish:
What might we do together, all we different thinking beings in the universe, if we could find the will to keep traveling until we have bridged the distances between, to learn from and inspire each other, to reach and achieve what none of us alone can imagine?