The Stardance Trilogy (26 page)

“Dr. Chen,” I said, when I could get my breath, “let’s go see Commander Cox.”

Chen listened with total absorption to eighteen hours’ worth of instruction, most of which he already knew, and asked infrequent but highly insightful questions. I’m willing to bet that before the instruction he could have disassembled any subsystem in his suit in the dark. By the end I’d have bet he could
build
’em in the dark, starting with free-floating components. I have been exposed to a rather high number of extraordinary minds, and he impressed me.

But I
still
wasn’t sure I trusted him.

We held the party to three, on the less-to-go-wrong theory—in space, trouble seldom comes in ones. I was the obvious Scoutmaster; I had logged more EVA hours than anyone aboard except Harry. And Linda had been Chen’s Alien 101 instructress for the past year; she came along to maintain classroom continuity. And to dance for him, while I played Mother Hen. And, I think, because she was his friend.

The first hour passed without incident, all three of us in the Die, me at the con. We put a few klicks between us and
Siegfried
, trailing a suspenders-
and
-belt safety line, and came to rest, as always, in the exact center of infinity. Chen was reverentially silent rather than isolated. He was, I believed, capable of encompassing that much wonder—it was almost as though he had always known the universe was that big. Still he was speechless for a long time.

So were Linda and I, for that matter. Even at this distance Saturn looked unbelievably beautiful, beyond the power of words to contain. That planet must unquestionably be the damndest tourist attraction in the Solar System, and I had never seen anything so immensely moving in my life.

But we had seen it before in recent days—the whole ship’s complement had been glued to the video tanks. We recovered, and Linda told Chen some last thoughts about the way we danced, and then she sealed her hood and went out the airlock to show him some solo work. By prearrangement we were all to remain silent for this period, and Bill too maintained radio silence on our channel. Chen watched with great fascination for three quarters of Linda’s first hour. Then he sighed, glanced at me oddly, and kicked himself across the Die to the control panel.

I started to cry out—but what he reached for was only the Die’s radio. He switched it off. Then he removed his helmet in one practiced-seeming move, disconnecting his suit’s radio. I had my own hood off to save air, and grabbed for it when I saw him kill the radio, but he held a finger to his lips and said, “I would speak with you under the rose.” His voice was high and faint in the low pressure.

I considered the matter. Assuming the wildest paranoid fantasy, Linda was mobile and could see anything that happened in the transparent cube. “Sure,” I called.

“I sense your unease, and understand and respect it. I am going to put my hand in my right pouch and remove an object. It is harmless.” He did so, producing one of those microcorders that looks like a fancy button. “I wish there to be truth between us,” he added. Was it low pressure stridency alone that gave his voice that edge?

I groped for an appropriate response. Beyond him, Linda was whirling gracefully through space, sublimely pregnant, oblivious. “Sure,” I said again.

He thumbnailed the playback niche. Linda’s recorded voice said something that I couldn’t hear, and I shook my head. He rewound to the same cue and underhanded it gently toward me.

“That’s what I mean,” Linda’s voice repeated. “Their interests and ours may not coincide.”

The tape record I spoke of a while ago.

My brain instantly went on computer time, became a hyperefficient thinking machine, ran a thousand consecutive analysis programs in a matter of microseconds, and self-destructed.
Hand in the cookie jar. Halfway down the Mountain and the brakes are gone. I’d have sworn I closed that airlock.
The microcorder hit me in the cheek; instinctively I caught it on the rebound and shut it off as Tom was asking Linda, “Aren’t we human?”

And
that
echoed in the Die for a while.

“Only an imbecile would find it difficult to bug an unguarded pressure suit,” Chen said tonelessly.

“Yeah,” I croaked, and cleared my throat. “Yeah, that was stupid. Who else—?” I broke off and slapped my forehead. “
No
. I don’t want to ask any stupid questions. Well, what do
you
think, Chen Ten Li?
Are
we
Homo novis
? Or just gifted acrobats? I’m God damned if I know.”

He jaunted cleanly back to me, like an arrow in slow-motion flight. Cats jaunt like that. “
Homo caelestis
, perhaps,” he said calmly, and his landing was clean. “Or possibly
Homo ala anima
.”

“Allah who? Oh—‘winged soul.’ Huh. Okay. I’ll buy that. Let me try a whammy on
you
, Doc. I’ll bet a cookie that you’re a ‘winged soul’ yourself. Potentially, at least.”

His reaction astonished me. I had expected a sudden poker face. Instead naked grief splashed his face, stark loss and hopeless yearning, etched by Saturnlight. I never saw such wide-open emotion on his face before or since; it may be that no one but his aged mother and his dead wife ever had. It shocked me to my socks, and it would have shocked him too if he had been remotely aware of it.

“No, Mist’ Armstead,” he said bleakly, staring at Saturn over my shoulder. His accent slipped for the first and last time, and absurdly reminded me of Fat Humphrey. “No, I am not one of you. Nor can time or my will make it so. I know this. I am reconciled to this.” As he got this far, his face began relaxing into its customary impassivity, all unconsciously. I marveled at the discipline of his subconscious mind, and interrupted him.

“I don’t know that you’re right. It seems to me that any man who can play three-D chess is a prime candidate for
Homo
whateverthehell.”

“Because you are ignorant of three-D chess,” he said, “and of your own nature. Men play three-D chess on Earth. It was designed under one gravity, for a vertical player, and its classic patterns are linear. I have tried to play in free fall, with a set that is not fixed in that relationship to me, and I cannot. I can consistently beat the Martin-Daniels Program at flat chess” (world class) “but in free-fall three-D Mr. Brindle could easily defeat me, if I were unvain enough to play him. I can coordinate myself well enough aboard the
Siegfried
or in this most linear of vehicles. But I can never learn to live for any length of time without what you call a ‘local vertical.’”

“It comes on slow,” I began.

“Five months ago,” Li interrupted, “the night light failed in my room. I woke instantly. It took me twenty minutes to locate the light switches. During that entire time I wept with fear and misery, and lost control of my sphincters. The memory offended me, so I spent several weeks devising tests and exercises. I must have a local vertical to live. I am a normal human.”

I was silent a long time. Linda had noticed our conversation; I signaled her to keep on dancing and she nodded. After I had thought things through I said, “Do you believe that our interests will fail to coincide with yours?”

He smiled, all diplomat again, and chuckled. “Are you familiar with Murphy’s Law, Mr. Armstead?”

I grinned back. “Yeah, but is it
probable
?”

“I don’t believe so,” he answered seriously. “But I believe that Dmirov would believe so. Possibly Ezequiel. Possibly Commander Cox. Certainly Silverman.”

“And we must assume that any of them might also have bugged a suit.”

“Tell me: Do you agree that if this conference generates any information of great strategic value, Silverman will attempt to establish sole possession of it?”

Chatting with Chen was like juggling chainsaws. I sighed. We were being honest. “Yeah—if he got a chance to pull it off, sure. But that’d take some doing.”

“One person with the right program tapes could bring
Siegfried
close enough to Terra for retrieval,” he said, and I noticed that he didn’t say “one man.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I am presently jamming any possible bugs in this vehicle. I believe Silverman will attempt this thing. I smell it. If he does, I will kill him at once. You and your people react quickly in free fall; I want you to understand my motives.”

“And they are?”

“Preservation of civilization on Terra. The continued existence of the human race.”

I decided to try throwing
him
a hot one. “Will you shoot him with that automatic?”

He registered faint distaste. “I cycled that out the airlock two weeks after departure,” he said. “An absurd weapon in free fall, as I should have realized. No, I shall probably break his back.”

Don’t give this guy strong serves: his return is murder.

“Where will you stand in that event, Mr. Armstead?”

“Eh?”

“Silverman is a fellow Caucasian, a fellow North American. You share a cultural matrix. Is that a stronger bond than your bond with
Homo caelestis
?”

“Eh?” I said again.

“Your new species will not survive long if the blue Earth is blown apart,” Chen said harshly, “which is what that madman Silverman would have. I don’t know how your mind works, Mr. Armstead:
what will you do?
”

“I respect your right to ask the question,” I said slowly. “I will do what seems right to me at the time. I have no other answer.”

He searched my face and nodded. “I would like to go outside now.”

“Jesus Christ,” I exploded, and he cut me off.

“Yes, I know—I just said I couldn’t function in free space, and now I want to try.” He gestured with his helmet. “Mr. Armstead, I anticipate that I may die soon. Once before that time I must hang alone in eternity, subject to no acceleration, without right angles for frames, in free space. I have dreamed of space for most of my life, and feared to enter it. Now I
must
. As nearly as I can say it in your language, I must confront my God.”

I wanted to say yes. “Do you know how much that can resemble sensory deprivation?” I argued. “How’d you like to lose your ego in a space suit? Or even just your lunch?”

“I have lost my ego before. Someday I will forever. I do not get nauseous.” He began putting his helmet on.

“No, dammit, watch out for the nipple. Here, let me do it.”

After five minutes he switched his radio back on and said, shakily. “I’m coming in now.” After that he didn’t say anything until we were unbuttoning in
Siegfried’s
shuttlecraft bay. Then he said, very softly, “It is I who am
Homo excastra
. And the others,” and those were the last words he said to me until the first day of Second Contact.

What I replied was, “You are always welcome in my home, Doctor,” but he made no reply.

Deceleration brought a horde of minor disasters. If you move into a small apartment (and never leave it) by the end of a year your belongings will have tended to
spread out
considerably. Zero gee amplifies the tendency. Storing
everything
for acceleration would have been impossible even if all we’d had to contend with was the twenty-five hours of a hundredth gee. But even the straightest, laser-sighted pipeline has some kinks in it, and our course was one of the longest pipelines ever laid by Man (over a billion klicks). Titan’s gravity well was a mighty small target at the end of it, that we had to hit just precisely right. Before Skyfac provided minimicrochip computer crystals the trick would not have been possible, and we had had small corrections en route. But the moon swam up fast, and we took a couple of one-gee burns that, though mercifully short, made me strongly doubt that we could survive even a two-year return trip. They also scattered wreckage, mostly trivial, all over the ship: Fibber McGee’s closet, indoors. The worst of it, though, appeared to be a ruptured water line to the midships shower bags, and the air conditioning handled it.

Even being forewarned of an earthquake doesn’t help much.

On the other hand, cleanup was next to no problem at all—again, thanks to zero gee. All we had to do was wait, and sooner or later virtually all of the debris collected on the air conditioning grilles of its own accord, just like always. Free-fall housekeeping mostly involves replacing worn-out velcro and grille screens.

(We use sleeping webs and cocoons when we sleep, even though
everything
in a free-fall domicile is
well
padded. It’s not as restful—but without any restraints, you keep waking up when you bump in to the air grille. One idiot student had wanted to nap in Town Hall, which has no sleeping gear, so he turned off the air conditioning. Fortunately someone came in before he could suffocate in the carbon dioxide sphere of his own exhalations. I paid for an unscheduled elevator and had him dirtside twenty hours later.)

And so nearly everyone found time to hang themselves in front of a video monitor and eyeball Titan.

From the
extensive
briefing we all studied, this abstract:

Titan is the sixth of Saturn’s moons, and quite the largest. I had been expecting something vaguely Luna-sized—but the damned thing has a diameter of almost 5,800 klicks, roughly that of the planet Mercury, or about four tenths that of Earth! At that incredible size its mass is only about .002 that of Earth’s. Its orbital inclination is negligible, less than a degree—that is, it orbits almost precisely around the equator of Saturn (as does the Ring), at a mean distance of just over ten planetary diameters. It is tidally locked, so that it always presents the same face to its primary, like Luna, and it takes only about sixteen days to circle Saturn—a speedy moon indeed for its size. (But then Saturn itself has a ten-and-a-quarter-hour day.)

From the time that it had been close enough to eyeball it had looked reddish, and now it looked like Mars on fire, girdled with vast clouds like thunderheads of blood. Through them lunarlike mountains and valleys glowed a slightly cooler red, as though lit by a gobo with a red gel—which, essentially, they were. The overall effect was of hellfire and damnation.

That preternatural red color was one of the principal reasons why Cox and Song went into emergency overdrive the moment we were locked into orbit. The world scientific community had gone in to apoplexy when its expensive Saturn probe had been hijacked by the military, for a diplomatic mission, and into double apoplexy when they understood that the scientific complement of the voyage would consist of a single Space Command physicist and an engineer. So Bill and Col. Song spent the twenty-four hours we remained in that orbit working like fishermen when the tide makes, taking the absolute minimum of measurements and recordings that would satisfy
Siegfried’s
original planners. Led by Susan Pha Song, they worked from taped instructions and under the waspish direction of embittered scientists on Terra (with a transmission lag of an hour and a quarter, which improved no one’s temper), and they did a good, dogged job. It is a little difficult to imagine the kind of mind that would find chatting with extrasolar plasmoids
less
exciting than studying Saturn’s sixth moon, but there are some—and the startling thing is, they’re not entirely crazy.