Starfarers (46 page)

Kilbirnie took her parleur, to make sure Colin understood.

“Now will you abort?” demanded Nansen.

“We’ll decide,” she answered. “I think not. We’re too nigh victory”

She recomputed. “(This adds thrust time,)” she said to her partner. “(In twenty more minutes we can let go, if all goes well, which it may not. What do you think?)”

“(It is a risk,)” the physicist replied. “(I have noticed in the past, from the ship, that flares and the forces they carry reach a peak shortly before they cease. However, in my opinion it is worth continuing.)”

“(Agreed.)”
How I wish I had the language to say what this means and what you are, Colin. But maybe I couldn’t anyhow. We humans are too often shy about speaking such
things
. “Skipper, we are not going to quit. We’d leave our hearts behind with the station.”
Tahirians don’t exactly have hearts. But they have spirit
“Please keep quiet. We’ve work to do.”

The injured vessels struggled on together. The flare streamed invisibly around them.

And—“Harroo!” Kilbirnie shouted. The prosaic readouts before her spelled glory. “We’ve done it!”

She inactivated and retracted the grapnels. A nudge of impulse sent the boat drifting clear of the station. It appeared in her screen, a lumpy globule, now under command of its own computer, retreating against the Milky Way.

“This is—is wonderful,” Nansen stammered. “Praise be to God.” His tone steadied. “You still have to secure your escape, of course.”

“Of course,” Kilbirnie caroled. “And drink and dance and be outrageous. Well, that’s for back aboard
Envoy.
”

The two spacecraft were not yet completely free. They had reached a point where either one, even with a lamed motor, could assume any orbit—essentially, go anywhere. But they must
go
. Their present paths remained cometary. If they did not act, they would fall into the nearness of the black hole and it would wreck them.

The station was boosting. Eventually it could stop and coast into the region where it belonged.
Herald
should linger until then, in case of further trouble. First, though,
Herald
had better liberate herself, climbing to a track of much lower eccentricity much higher in the gravity well.

“Gang awa’, lassie,” the pilot said, and wakened the jet. Weight seized. The boat sprang.

The alarm shrieked. Readings and readouts went crazy. She floated in her harness, falling free, and heard: “An extraordinary magnetic surge has caused the destruction of coils nine through five and the disablement of coil four.”

The words tolled away into silence.

“Oh, damn and damn,” Kilbirnie said through it. “I’m sorry, Colin.”

“What is this?” Nansen called across space. “Your jet, your acceleration—”

“Hold on till I can tell you.”

Her fingers, running over the keyboard, and her brain, interpreting what came out, might as well have been machines themselves. She had not yet had time for feelings.

“Bad news,” she said flatly. “Our drive is blown. We don’t have but a wisp of thrust, not near enough to break loose. If we rejoined the station, it couldn’t help, either. We’d simply force it to ruination with us. Whatever we tried, we’re bound through the inner part of the disk.”

They had already passed apastron and were downward bound.

“No,” Nansen pleaded. “Ruszek is ready. He’ll come take you off.”

“The numbers say he can’t reach us till way too late. Wait a minute, darling dearest. I have to talk with my partner.”

And presently: “We’re agreed. We’ll no hae yon thing raddle us wi’ radiation and pluck us apart bit by bit. We’ll use what’s left us to dive straight in.”

Kilbirnie swung her boat around and took aim.

“Oh, Jean, Jean.”

“Hush. I’m not glad to leave this life, but I’m glad for what it gave me. Fare ye all well, shipmates. I love ye, skipper.”

Kilbirnie switched the outercom off. She restarted the motor. The acceleration, the weight, was low and erratic. Yet if a magnetic nexus did not strike
Herald
again—and, really, that was unlikely—speed would mount In about an hour she and her friend would pass through the gate of death, too fast to sense it.

They joined hands and looked forth at the stars.

The station
took final orbit without requiring further assistance. It began activating its systems, to receive, explore, and relate.

Nightwatch laid
stillness on the corridors of
Envoy
. When Nansen’s door chimed, he looked up in surprise.

He had dimmed illumination in his cabin to a twilight. A stubby candle, one of a number newly made for him by the nanos, burned on his desk below the old crucifix. He sat gazing at the flame, no longer really seeing, though somehow it was like a small sun around which awareness circled through silence, until the door recalled him.

“Come in,” he said. The captain is never free.

For a moment the fluorescence outside dazzled his eyes. He saw the newcomer as a black hole in it. She stepped through, the entrance closed, and the candle cast his shadow vague over Dayan.

She stopped, herself half blinded until vision grew used to the dusk. He rose. “What is the matter?” he asked wearily.

She caught her breath in a gulp. Her words stumbled. “I’m sorry. This is very late. And I knew you’d rather be alone.” As often as possible. “But I thought—at this hour we could talk … privately.”

“Yes, of course. Please be seated.” He resumed his chair at the desk and swiveled it around to face hers.

For a while they were mute. She stared down at the hands clenched together in her lap. Finally she got out: “This is … hard to say, but—” She raised her head toward him and finished in a rush. “Are you planning any kind of service, memorial, anything for Jean? And Colin,” she added dutifully.

“No,” he replied.

“Some of us … expected you would.”

“My fault. I should have made an announcement.”

“We’d like to say good-bye to her.”

His fiat tone gentled. “I understand. But don’t you see, there’s too much emotion, too much bitterness—in certain of us. It would be disruptive to meet this soon for that purpose.”

She regarded him. With the candle behind, his expression was hard to make out. “Do you truly think so?”

“I don’t know,” he sighed. “I can’t read the souls of people. It is my guess. For most of us, me too, a service would be comforting. But I can’t very well tell those who look on me as a murderer that they mustn’t come.”

“Oh, Rico!” She half rose from her seat, reached toward him, and sank back down.

“That is my guess,” he repeated. “I could be wrong, but I dare not risk it. Thank you, though, for reminding me. I’ll tell them tomorrow, everybody is welcome to … pray for her, wake her, whatever feels right, … by themselves, or with their near friends.”

“You are mourning alone, aren’t you?”

“That seems best.”

“You are always alone. In your heart, since she went away. Unless you are with your God.”

“I am not a very good believer, I fear,” he said regretfully. “But one can try.” In haste, not to reveal more: “Why have you come here, Hanny?”

He could see how his use of her first name helped her gather courage. “I have a great favor to ask of you. Maybe too great.”

“Yes?”

“Let me join in saying good-bye to her. In praying for her.”

His eyes widened with surprise. It took him a brief span to respond, most softly, “May I ask why you wish this?”

Tears caught in eyelashes and captured faint flamelight. Her voice harshened. “I need—I am guilty, Rico. I connived with her. She got me to … seduce Lajos into giving her the flight—” She lowered face into crook-fingered hands.

“I wondered about that.”

“If I hadn’t—”

He squared his shoulders. “Then probably Lajos Ruszek would be dead. You could not have known. I did not.” The calm broke. “Over and over I tell myself I did not.”

She looked anew at him. “And you didn’t, Rico.”

“Nor you.”

“But I—what we feel, what I wish had happened—my horrible thoughts—” She swallowed a breath.

Having regained self-control, he gave her a wry smile. “You’re unjust, Hanny. Well, I’ve heard that Jews are too prone to self-accusation.”

“Were,” she corrected him in a whisper. “I suspect I am the last Jew. And a woman and an unbeliever, but the only vessel the heritage has left.”

“And I am the last”—he shrugged—”whatever it may be.”

Dayan became able to speak quietly. “Jean, though, what she was, her kind of spirit, can’t we hope it is still alive at home?”

“Thank you for saying that,” he gave her.

“Could we remember her tonight—just for a few minutes?—we two? It would help me.”

“You do me honor,” he replied.

The candle thew dim, shadow-flickery light up over crucified Christ. Nansen knelt and folded his hands in orison. She stood beside him and said Kaddish.

Cluttered, devoid
of any outside view, the work center seemed closed off from the stars. But as Sundaram and Yu watched what appeared on a screen before them, awe reached in through metal and coursed through marrow.

“Already?” he wondered.

Those were no longer vague, short pulses. Sharp and clear, a curve undulated through changes of form while simple-looking symbols altered correspondingly but kept the same basic array. The adjacent screen showed its computer’s quick interpretations, equations rendered in Arabic numerals, Greek and Roman letters, international signs for mathematical
operations. Through analytical geometry, a language was beginning to unfold.

“Yes,” Yu said hushedly, “I assumed they would need time to trace out our circuits. Now I think they can … move electrons, alter quantum states, directly”—and thus use the enormous bandwidth of the station’s transmitters to send pictures … and what else, later?

“Intelligence speaking to us. Out of where, out of what?”

“Surely not from the black hole or its immediate environs”—its hell. “But perhaps they … draw on those extreme conditions … somehow … to make something possible.”

“Something too strange for us to imagine.”

She touched his brow. “We will, in time. You will.”

“We shall want Hanny’s advice, above all, at this stage. How to interpret, how to respond. Later, as we grow beyond mathematics and physics, Simon’s. And at last, everyone aboard?”

From the
ship’s data hoard Mokoena had summoned some of the music Kilbirnie loved. She was leaning back, eyes closed, listening to “The Flowers of the Forest” and trying to understand that idiom, when Zeyd entered her cabin. She heard, rose to greet him, and signaled the player for low volume. Pipes and drums became background, like wind wailing along a seacoast.

“You look grim,” she said.

Her tentative smile died before his face. “I feel grim,” he said. “I have been talking with Al Brent.”

“Must you?” She attempted a little humor. “I have learned to dodge aside when I see him coming.”

“Yes, he is obsessive. But what he has to say, right or wrong, we cannot continue hiding from.”

“I suppose not,” she said dully. “Hiding, that may be why the mess and the common room are so cheerless”—with strained silences broken by intermittent conversation about meaningless matters.

“Then should we not bring it into the open and have done?”

“Of course. It’s only—we’re afraid to. The wound is too fresh.”

“To stay here in spite of everything, or give it up and go home. A simple question.”

“It isn’t. Even between you and me.” This was in fact their first recent touching on it. “Scientific values versus—what?”

“Survival, perhaps. And the science isn’t yours or mine.”

She rallied from sadness. “How can you be sure? Those beings, or that being—not life as we know it, but … maybe we’ll learn things about our own kind of life, too, that we never knew.”

“And maybe not. In either case, there’ll be nothing for a chemist to do.”

Her eyes implored him. “How can you be certain? Besides, you’re more than a chemist, Selim. And as for going home, what does that mean any longer?”

“Enough,” he snapped. “You’re talking general principles again. We have been over that ground until it’s trampled bare.”

“But Jean’s death—”

“Yes, that has changed things.” Zeyd began to pace, up and down before her. The music ended. Without it, his tones sounded machinelike. “Doubtless this isn’t logical. But people aren’t. Al is right. We must meet soon and decide. I will put it to the captain.”

“And others will,” she foresaw. Pause. “If it comes to a vote, will you be for leaving?”

“Yes.”

“And I will be for staying.” She drew close to him. “We mustn’t let this divide us.”

“You are too late,” he said. “The crew is already divided.” He took her hands. Tenderness welled up. “But we two, Mam, we will not let that happen, will we?”

In Ruszek’s
cabin the same disagreement took another turn.

“If you hadn’t honeyed me into giving her the mission—” he grated.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but how could I have known?” Dayan cried.

They had left their seats and stood stare against stare in the middle of the room. Apart from the furnishings, it was well-nigh empty; he had few possessions. A vase of flowers she had brought was withering. With several drinks under his belt, blood flushed his cheeks, sweat sheened on the bare scalp, the mustache bristled.

“Sorry? Would you rather it was me dead?”

Her glance fled from his. “No, oh, no.”

“I can’t feel thankful to you. It was blind luck.”

“Of course.”

“
Evil
luck. For me also.”

“Then why are you angry?”

“The senselessness of it.”

“Your God—”

He ignored her essay at peace. “And the senselessness of hanging here. You know Nansen won’t let me fly. He’ll cancel the other manned explorations we planned. Mustn’t risk the last boat. But the pilot can sit and rot, after you get your way.”

“Please, Lajos, no.” She met his eyes afresh and spoke levelly. “We will find work for you, outside observations, interior refitting—”