Tin Woodman (5 page)

For now, they would simply detain the Talent under guard in her quarters. These little cabins of the
Pegasus
could change into jails so easily . . . perhaps they were jail cells all the time, really.

But what was happening with
Tin Woodman?
With Mora EIbrun seen to, that was the prime question.

“Mora—do you know why Harlthor disobeyed the captain and has done this thing?”

“No,”
said Mora. “I only know that it was the right thing.”

Coffer was inclined to agree. What to do now, though . . . send another spider ship out? Wait? Command was infinitely harder with so many options present.

Lieutenant Genson at the sensor board solved that problem rapidly with an announcement.

“Commander!
Tin Woodman
is breaking orbit!”

Coffer hesitated for a part of a second before realizing that the report had been addressed to her. She nodded curtly. “Carry on, Genson. At this point there is little we can—”

“It’s on a collision course with us!”

In the vu-tank, the image of
Tin Woodman
had begun to grow rapidly. “Take evasive measures!” Coffer ordered, knowing even as she said it that the order was senseless. The
Pegasus
was too far within this system’s gravitational field to use its Null-R drive, and at least a minute was needed to prepare the other engines. The starship could not take evasive action swiftly enough in normal space to avoid destruction . . .

And the alien bore down relentlessly upon the vessel, speed constantly increasing—then simply disappeared at the last possible instant.

Something electric passed through Coffer. She leaned on the command desk to support herself. It was as though an angel’s wing had brushed her—she had felt a feathery touch of the numinous—emotions beyond previous experience. It was beyond words—and Coffer could not re-create even a shadow of the sensation from memory. It was there in the instant that the
Tin Woodman
had faded incredibly from view—and now it was gone. She felt, in her soul, a deep hunger for its return.

Her gaze swept the bridge. The crew appeared similarly shaken—awe-struck, disoriented, frozen in their position as though by a spray of fairy dust. And Mora Elbrun . . .

Mora stood there between the security officers, transfixed, her mouth slack—and her eyes seemed to glimmer and sparkle briefly as though they were glass eyepieces focused into a bright and mysterious moment within her. She spoke. “Div!” As though it were the secret name of God himself.

“—just gone.” Norlan from the communications console. “What?” he asked, vocalizing the question that was heavy in them all. His voice seemed to rise up from a great murk . . . a great distance.

Coffer went to Mora. “What
happened,
Mora? What
was
that?”

Mora began to smile. “He’s safe now . . . safe from all of you.” Her vision seemed to lose its glaze as she stared at Coffer. “You can’t hurt him now.”

“But what happened? Is the alien coming back? You seem to have
seen
something . . . with your Talent, Mora?”

But the woman only smiled a secret smile, and Coffer knew that they would get no explanation. Not now, at least. Christ, what a
mess
of things—the alien had slipped away, and they had
nothing
to show for the weeks they had loitered here, ignoring the duties of their interstellar run. The authorities would be furious.

Then suddenly Mora seemed to be loosed from her daze . . . and she tried to speak. “I saw . . .” she repeated several times, but did not seem to be able to form words to describe
what
she saw, despite Coffer’s encouragement.

Finally, Coffer gave up. There were other things to be attended to.

She said, “Take her down to her cabin, as previously ordered. Have Dr. Kervatz give her a mild sedative. Darsen will no doubt want her rested when he decides what he wants done with her.”

FIVE

Leana Coffer’ s Journal

(Vocoder transcription)

It’s been rough lately—frayed nerves all over, especially mine. We’ve got to stay in this sector of space until we get new orders. There will doubtlessly be a long inquiry into this
Tin Woodman
affair when we reach a Triunion base—but that certainty seems almost preferable to the limbo we find ourselves in now.

Darsen’s recovering quite well—so well that he gave me his first order today. Thank God he’s not totally well yet; I’ll be acting captain for a few days more, and the crew can rest awhile.

I visited Darsen after a tedious duty shift today. He seemed to be resting comfortably. He’s still a little weak, but as ever sees
himself as the Caesar of this ship, Bellerophon to this
Pegasus.

He’s ordered that Mora Elbrun be turned over to the MedSec surgeons.

He wants her Doped.

No one aboard ever suspected that Mora had the power to attack Darsen the way she did. I’m still not sure she does—perhaps the alien had something to do with that. But having harmed Darsen, she’s given that maniac the excuse to do what he’s always wanted to do. In this instance his orders, though given for vicious personal reasons, are backed up by regulations. Were I the permanent commander of the
Pegasus,
I could bend the rules; they leave room for personal judgment. But if I defy Darsen’s orders now I’ll be called to account for it when he reassumes full command of the ship.

I told him about what appeared to be happening to Mora just before
Tin Woodman
vanished. That it seemed as though there was some sort of communication between them, so strong that the members of the bridge crew felt it too. I suggested that Mora is our best witness to this phenomenon, and that if we Dope her we’ll lose it. But in his fury, Darsen isn’t at all concerned with the negative consequences of blanking Mora. He wants his revenge.

So in my own self-interest and for the welfare of everyone who serves under Darsen, I have to allow the treatments to begin. Hopefully, my strongly worded advisory to the Triunion Council will stop them before it’s too late for Mora. For the good of everyone . . . that’s really an unworthy excuse. It’s
my
career that I want to protect. I’m ashamed of myself, but it takes more than moral courage to commit suicide—it takes a little craziness too. I’m too sane. So I just work out my feelings talking into this little mike—Down with Caesar! Death to the captain! How easy to say . . . how hard to even try to oppose the imperious bastard.

Death to . . . God!—I’d better put this recorder on voice-lock from now on, or be more careful what I say.

Her wheat-colored hair was reaped, and the useless harvest placed in a disposal unit.

They hadn’t bothered to put her out, and she watched with detachment the cold and glistening ceremony that would end in her oblivion. Her head was clamped to an operating table. Her open eyes gazed up, fixed on the face of the surgeon who hovered, Charon-like, surveying the tool-oars about him with which he would row her across the Styx. two nurses, gloved hands poised, flanked him. An anesthesiologist sat by her side, his attention devoted to a bank of meters which monitored her pain levels and vital signs. A painless death-that-was-not-death would be hers.

The murmur of voices, the whirs and hums of the omnipresent machinery, the antiseptic lack of scents; all were familiar to Mora, and yet simultaneously unreal. It seemed so far away, so unimportant. She’d given them no struggle. Paralyzed by a swift injection, swiftly wheeled into this MedSec operating cubicle, head shaved, connected to these padded clamps, electrodes affixed to her flesh; all of it had been a slow, soft blur lacking significance.

They were turning her over to the machines, but it didn’t matter because she’d been caught up in the cogs and gears all her life, and this was the logical end.

No. It didn’t matter at all.

“Bring up the sterile field,” Wald Kervatz directed Nurse Vandez. She obliged with a delicate twist of a dial, which resulted in a blue nimbus of radiation suffusing the cubicle walls. A brain injection was not a complex operation, but regulations classified it as major surgery. Observation by a full surgical team was therefore required.

I could turn this over to any of them,
Kervatz thought.
Let someone else watch the machines
do
their work.

A surgical laser moved into place next to the subject. “First, an incision will be made in the left parietal bone, just above the temporal suture,” Kervatz explained, his voice pedantic, trying to separate himself as much as possible from what was really happening. Trying not to feel as though his hand were on the lever of a guillotine . . .

He activated the laser, and it drilled into Mora Elbrun’s head. Vaporized flesh and bone condensed quickly into carbon dust, glowing red in the path of the laser’s light. Kervatz looked up at the acoustical hologram suspended over the operating table. Floating there was an image in carnival colors, segmented in three dimensions by a graph marked with numbered co-ordinates, of the patient’s brain.

The laser drew back, was replaced by a machine which held a hair-fine needle. “The point of injection is controlled down to the micro-millimeter,” Kervatz said. “Psychemicidian is released only into the angular gyrus.” He turned to the anesthesiologist. “Scandon, where did you study medicine?”

“New York Medical College,” the young man replied.

Kervatz nodded. He thought he’d seen that on the lad’s readout. The doctor had studied there himself, some twenty years before.

“Was Chips still there?”

“Yes, sir. Used him in surgical training. We did have newer models—”

“Watch the dials, Scandon.” Chips had been a perfect patient; it was a prosthesis. Chips bled, reacted to pain, vomited. Kervatz remembered the first time he’d seen Chips die. It had been in the midst of an arterial implant Kervatz had been performing. He was given a failing mark, the technicians cranked old Chips back up again, and the next student had taken his turn. There’d been no guilt, then; only the humiliation of failing a test. “This is a human being, Scandon.”

“Of course, sir.”

As if that mattered,
he thought. They were all machines to one another on this ship, in this universe; fleshy constructs of society. Sometimes Kervatz fancied he saw the thin little wires running out of people’s heads, out of his own cranium: metallic puppet strings.
A little tug, and watch us dance. Watch us destroy the mind of someone who refused to dance. Watch a more substantial bit of metal drive downward into the rebel’s soul . . .

The moment: a click, a hiss. On the holograph, a snail-slow black line moved inward, downward, penetrating the cerebral cortex: the needle.

I’m sorry, Mora. The wires are too strong.

“On target,” Vandez said.

Reality twisted about her, pretzeling into moebus strips of moments that turned inside out, revolved her about. She seemed to be gazing down on it all from a spot on the ceiling, and then inconstant reality did a double flip and she was back on the table, growing fuzzy at the edges. Her body dissolved into a little cloud that began to dissipate into the sterile, odorless air, sucked up by intake ducts, cleansed from the starship’s systems, ejected into space like so much worthless flotsam.

The stars, the stars—how dull, lusterless they were—marbles on the black pavement of the sky to scoot about, click into foolish games of the circular logic of a child . . . child . . . child . . .

The stars melted, congealed into the image of Kervatz’s face, wet with perspiration that should not exist in the temp-controlled operating theater. It loomed before her, gigantic, close to hers. His body trailed out behind him to a tiny point—a place far away, a place she wished she were, A place of cool luster, sun-dappled snow . . .

. . .
trees stark green against glittering white.
A
fairy dream, pixie . . . dancing its pleasant cold that didn’t hurt against her heart as she peered down from the safe, warm skimmer, her friend driving.

Karen’s voice broke the sweet crystalline silence. “Tell me about your father, Mora.”

Father. So long ago. On Earth, so strange.
His face was like father’s wrapped up in hospital walls.
Mora. Mora. I’m so sorry.

Father, hospital, all white like silent snow . . .

. . . the room was bone-white. Gauzy curtains about a window framed a piece of outside: gray sky, roofs of other buildings, an occasional aircraft cutting through the smog. Mother holding her hand. Clammy, her hand . . . uncomfortable, like all of her felt now. On a high bed with a plastic cover was Father, much too high to see. But she saw the machines. The wires and the tubes. The things running into the sickly green sheets lumped up on the bed. Father was there, yes . . . she felt him there.

Not good . . . sick . . . ill . . . not good. The pain . . . it scared her like nothing she had ever felt before . . . not like Mother being angry, or falling down, clump. It was a pain that went places so deep, so scary; that fell into holes without bottoms.

“. . . I understand . . .” The doctor speaking
to
Mother, who looked so desolate. “We should
go
into the lounge.
A
shame you didn’t have enough insurance
. . .”

Mother pulled her behind, clutching her hand hard, walking too fast. Don’t be sad, Mother. Don’t hurt. I hurt too when you hurt.

“I understand,” the doctor continued, when they were in another room. “The financial burden—keeping him that way.”

Mother lit a cigarette, which made Mora feel better; it was a part of Mother—better than the hospital smell. “You’d think with all advancements medical science has made—” Mother said in a choking voice.

“It was a terrible accident,” said the doctor. “No one could have been prepared .
. .”

“Death is like life, isn’t it?” Mother said. “Nobody is
ever
prepared for either.”

“We’ll let you know,” the doctorsaid. “Again, I’m sorry.”

It was all so confusing. She was frightened. Inside, she ached.

The doctor stood, left. It was like he had never been there.

“Mom,” she said plaintively. “C’mon. Let’s go home. I don’t like to be here. I don’t like to be around Dad this way. Can we take him home?”

And Mother grabbed her arm so hard, shook her till her teeth rattled. Her face was like a monster’s. “Don’t you understand, you little shit? You’ll never see Dad again! Never! Can’t you feel that with your goddamned Talent your goddamned father insisted we keep? Damn you, Mora.” Her teeth were clenched; tears were running out of her eyes. “If you weren’t here, maybe I’d have the money. But oh no. He wanted a little girl, no matter what the cost is these days. And he didn’t know it, but it cost him his life. Damn you to hell!”

At first all she felt was numb shock. And then the pain began, fiercer than she’d ever felt before, even worse than when they took her to the special doctors to have her tested. It slipped into her mind like a hot knife: her flash of hatred, barbed with her words. Never see Dad again? Never? Never? And Mother seemed so very distant, running away . . . leaving her alone . . . separated . . . so all alone.

Mother let
go,
and she found herself falling onto the carpeted floor—falling and screaming, it hurt so much.

Suddenly, her mother was pulling her up again, clutching her hard, and she felt waves of sorrow and self-hate from her. “I’m sorry, baby. Oh, God, Mora, I didn’t mean it, darling. Forgive me.”

Other people were around them now, their alien feelings crowding her, making her feel closed in. She threw her little arms around Mother’s neck, and sheltered herself in familiarity . . . but Mother seemed so strange now, so distant.

She didn’t understand . . . she didn’t understand at all.

A finger. The tip of a finger grew before her eye. The finger was holding up an eyelid, and it moved away enough for her to see the vague shapes of ghostly people-things before her.

“She’s fighting it,” said a voice.

An angry voice responded, “Well, what do you expect?”

It was all so white. So very white. She felt the pressure of the finger ease and her eyelid slid slowly back.

But it was still so white
. . .
so very white
. . .

“He died when I was four,” she says, looking at the silver-white snow as it slides by beneath the skimmer. “I don’t want to talk about it now.”

“Sure,” Karen says. “Fathers usually mess up a girl’s mind, in some way. I understand. How about your mother?”

“Right now, she’s on a colony. A planet circling Fomalhaut. She went there when I was six. I’ve not seen her since. She sent money and letters.”

“Around Fomalhaut? What’s the name of that planet—can’t remember. I’ve heard about it. Warm. Always warm. Not like here—right now it’s anything but warm.”

“I like the winter,” she responds. “It’s so peaceful.”

“And are your thoughts peaceful?” Karen asks.

Mora turns around in the passenger seat of the skimmer, looks at her friend steering wildly over the drifts, like waves on a white sea. “You don’t know?”

“Wasn’t sure you wanted me in your head, just now. You look so somber. Oh hell, that damned wind.” She takes her hands away from the controls, catches at her long red hair. “Hey—hand me my hat.” It is tucked down below the seats. Mora hands it to her, and Karen pulls it down over her ears, pushing her hair up under it.

I wish she wouldn’t be so reckless, Mora thinks.

And you worry too much, you know? Relax, Karen thought-casts. Enjoy the scenery.

The landscape is beautiful. Though the skimmer isn’t enclosed and the heating stasis-bubble isn’t working well, and the wind at eighty-nine kays an hour is fierce, it is worth it. The pale blue crystal dome of the sky in these mountains is like no place else Mora has ever been. Karen is keeping the skimmer down low, almost grazing the tops of trees. Some are tall white cones, their branches alive with foliage laden with ice and snow. Others stand stark, gray, solitary—like sentinels guarding some precious unknown. Looking behind them, she sees the path of the skimmer—how the white powder has been whipped into whirlwinds by their passage.