Wheelers

by Ian Stewart

  Now Charity understood, too. "He always did have an amazing way with animals." It was the understatement of the year.

  "Moses: is it—she—intelligent?" Angle asked.

  "She can think real thoughts," Moses responded. "They're not like our thoughts, but she knows she's thinking them."

  A moment to digest this . . . "Then why doesn't she respond to the pictures?"

  "The pictures are moving too fast," said Moses. "She's slower than a human. Before she recognizes anything, it's changed. Aunt Pru must slow down, keep the pictures the same for many seconds, if she wants the alien to understand them."

  The screen faded to black and Prudence's face reappeared. "And that's when it switched off. We have no idea why."

  No, hut we certainly do. Charity thought. The implications struck home, and she began to realize just how much this was going to change everybody's lives. Angle, too, had begun to understand.

  She wondered what Prudence was going to make of the next monologue.

  "Charity, I'm so sorry."

  "Can't be helped. Angle. Like you said, Gooma Facility is no place for Moses."

  "I know. But I hadn't envisaged anything quite so extreme. A safe little hidey-hole somewhere in Normerica, where my people could keep an eye on him—that was what I had in mind."

  Charity discovered she could smile. In fact, she was feeling a quiet pride, in Moses and in herself. Sometimes it's not as hard to do the right thing as you expect it to he.

  "Charity—you almost seem happy."

  The smile faded. "Not happy, Angle. But it's very clear to me what I must do, and what Moses must do, and I feel no anger and no pain. This is how it was meant to be."

  "I wish I could be as fatalistic. I think that life has played yet another dirty trick on the poor little chap."

  Charity disagreed. "On the contrary, Angle: Moses has come into manhood. He has a marvelous talent, and now is the time for him to use it. And the place—"

  "Is not on Earth. I know. He's the only person on the planet who can comprehend what that alien is saying and doing, but he can't communicate effectively with the creature when there's a ninety-minute time lag. If only the aliens had been on the Moon ..." The thought trailed off, because you can't rewrite the universe.

  "He belongs out there with Prudence, Angle. In the thick of it."

  Angle nodded and became very matter-of-fact. "You do realize there's a problem? The comet will be passing through the Jovian system nine months from now. Somehow, we've got to get Moses out to Jupiter well before that. But the usual journey time is two years. I have a horrible feeling we're too late."

  Charity shook her head. "Angle: I have no idea how I know this, but I am certain. This is what Moses was born to do. There mil be a way."

  Angle didn't voice her skepticism: proud mothers "know" many things about their children, nearly all of which are rubbish. However, Charity could be right. Angle knew that before the Pause many different methods of space travel had been under discussion by Earth's scientists, engineers, and pilots . . . Could anything have remained from those times? It was worth finding out. And Carver Enterprises had many, many contacts who might know of secret prototype spacecraft, or entirely different methods of propulsion . . .

  In fact, she'd already thought of an organization that might be able to help.

  The Cuckoo hated it when he had to do this kind of thing. Confound Angela Carver! And Prudence Odingo! It was unethical, immoral, and unfair.

  Also: necessary.

  He picked up an inscribed slab that lay amid the litter of his desk, a resin cast of the order's most precious relic. Only the most senior lamas even knew of its existence. He ran his eyes over the proto-hieroglyphs ... Its translation had been a bargain, nothing more than a secondhand cruiser; Prudence Odingo had done a remarkably competent job and deserved her reward. But Odingo had been told only what she needed to know—

  His train of thought ceased as Nagarjuna the Thrush shuffled into the office, head bowed, posture humble, anxious to acquit himself well, desperately willing to serve.

  The Cuckoo remained silent for a time. To Nagarjuna's experienced eye he seemed troubled. Then, visibly drawing breath, he spoke. As always, the approach was indirect. "I am mindful of one of the many sayings of the Great Bird."

  Nagarjuna kept his head bowed.

  " 'Your happiness will increase if. . .' Tell me, Nagarjuna, how does it continue?"

  "Uh— you act for others. Disseminate the word of the —'"

  "Correct. . . though on this occasion it is not the word of the Dharma that we must disseminate . . . Many times I have acted for others, Nagarjuna, and many times have I received happiness in return. But sometimes . . . very seldom ... I have almost come to doubt the advice of the Great Bird."

  Nagarjuna's face showed his bewilderment: surely the Cuckoo could never doubt the Fount of All Wisdom!

  "On a few occasions, my Thrush—very few, and I am thankful of it—I have acted for others without my happiness increasing. How can this be?"

  The monk cast around desperately for something sensible to say. "Uh—because future happiness was temporarily unavailable to you, Master?"

  "You speak well, and so it may have been. Though I wonder if perhaps the sacred writings speak of generalities and omit the occasional exception. Be that as it may, the time has come for me to act on behalf of others by asking whether you are ready to act on behalf of others. Are you?"

  "Whatever task you have for me, Master, I am ready."

  "Then no doubt my happiness shall eventually increase as a consequence." The old lama took a step toward the young monk and put his hands on the youths shoulders as he knelt before his master. "It is a vital task, and a dangerous one. So dangerous, my son, that I fear that you may never return—even if you succeed. Do you still wish to accept the task?"

  Nagarjuna didn't hesitate. He had trained all his life in the hope of something like this. " 'All birth is hut a dream-birth, all death a dream-death.' Master: whatever task you ask of me, I accept with joy."

  "And I receive that acceptance with sorrow. However, I can do no other, for there is little choice. A volunteer is needed, one who is skilled in the piloting of small cruisers. I am told you are the best pilot we have. Is that so?"

  Jardmaranal The Death Comet! It had to be! Nagarjuna knew that self-aggrandizement was frowned upon within the order and chose his words with care. This one would be too good to miss. "Master, every pilot thinks himself to be the best. It is necessary for confidence. In this I am no exception."

  "I suspect that you may be. The White Grouse thinks highly of your skill." This was news to Nagarjuna, who had received nothing but criticism from the acerbic, elderly lama known as White Grouse. Still, if the Cuckoo said it, it must be true. Despite himself, he felt a glow of pride.

  " 'Our habitual passions spring from wicked deeds of our past,' " quoted the High Lama,

  " 'Our thoughts, provoked by diverse apparitions, — All are like trees in autumn, clouds in the sky. A delusion, if you have thought them permanent.' "

  It was, in its way, a remonstrance. The glow died back to a pale flicker of suppressed emotion.

  "Nagarjuna, my Thrush, my son, my supreme pilot—your task is one that, should you succeed or fail, will be spoken of for as long as humans remain in this universe and do not break the fragile thread of their history. You will therefore understand when I counsel you: do not accept this task out of pride!"

  "I am willing to serve," the young monk affirmed, his voice wavering for an instant, "but only out of humility and respect."

  "Perhaps," replied the Cuckoo. "Make it so, if you can. It remains only to describe your task to you. That, I am obliged to warn you, will take some time—especially when you ask questions, as you must ..."

  After he had finished and the monk had taken his leave, the Cuckoo once more picked up the resin slab.

  Odingo had translated a bizarre, garbled tale, a myth of gods and demons and vengeful suns,
a close parallel to the one she claimed to have found inside the Sphinx; later stolen, so she said, by that tedious Dunsmoore person . . . The two tales overlapped, complemented each other, yet often contradicated each other.

  The Cuckoo thought he knew why.

  What Prudence had not seen was the picture that had been carved next to the text, possibly a forerunner of the sun-disk-and-horns symbol of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, who guarded the passage between this world and the next. But in this glyph the horns were inverted to form a shallow arc, and the disk was not the sun, for there were faint spindly lines scratched within it. At first glance they appeared meaningless, but when turned upside down it was difficult not to interpret them as crude outlines ... To the right, the coast of Westafrica. To the left, a convincing representation of the Americas—North and South.

  This was already remarkable, enough to overturn five centuries of archaeology. What was even more remarkable—and again Odingo had not been informed—was where the stone had been found.

  With reluctance, the Cuckoo tucked the relic away in a drawer.

  There would be time for such speculations later, perhaps. First, he must ensure that all had been made ready for Nagarjuna.

  The Way of the Wholesome had been in the rock trade for more than a hundred years, and they had perfected it. The rocks that they traded were asteroids, or sometimes parts of asteroids that had been deliberately broken up—though that was a somewhat dangerous procedure, complicated by the need to avoid ejecting debris that might enter the customary flight lanes. The Way of the Wholesome traded its rocks with Earth and had become rich beyond any meaningful measure. It owned, and was able to exploit, resources exceeding those of an entire planet; and those resources were comparatively accessible and portable. Nearly all of Earth's vast store of iron, for example, was locked away as silicates in its mantle and oxides in its molten core. The Way of the Wholesome owned iron aplenty, and it floated around in lumps. All you had to do was help yourself.

  Not that this was easy. The technology needed to mine the asteroid belt was extremely expensive. It centered on sixty-six mass-drivers, the newer ones made in the New Tibet Habitat— giant modern relatives of the medieval siege engine, linear trebuchets powered by magnetic induction motors, whose fast-moving slings could throw very big rocks very fast and very, very accurately There were a dozen mass-drivers in lunar and terrestrial orbit, for close-up delivery work near the neo-Zen monks' main customer base; there were as many again near Mars, spearheading the development of what in the long term would be a second major market—revival of the defunct Mars Colony whose destruction had set off the Pause. Others were poised at Mars' Trojan points—sixty degrees ahead of and behind the planet in the same orbit, where simple models of the cosmos predicted zero gravity, and the real thing was close enough for some clever control engineering to do the rest.

  The majority of the mass-drivers, though, were deployed within the asteroid belt. Some floated free, artificial asteroids positioned in stable resonant orbits, where instead of being disturbed by the changing force of Jupiter's gravity as it circled the Sun, their position would be sustained by it. Others were in orbit around the larger bodies, such as Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Euphrosyne . . .

  From Euphrosyne the Sun was visibly a disk, but only just. A keen eye could also pick out the glinting surfaces of a mass-driver. This particular device—the Pitching Machine, as it was colloquially known—was one of the most powerful of all the mass-drivers deployed throughout the Belt, the pride of New Tibet Habitats workshops. In essence it was little more than a giant rail-gun with a seventeen-mile barrel and a stubby stock that housed its electrical capacitor banks. Around the long, hollow tube formed by the rails, however, the engineers had woven an intricate framework of active struts, designed to keep the rails from flexing as the slings accelerated along them. Ugly electromagnetic coils were spaced along the rails in a complex progression, designed to transfer as much momentum as possible while using the least amount of electrical power.

  The Pitching Machine would be powerful enough for the delicate task that was required of it, and it was also in the right place at the right time. A considerable stockpile of rocks had been lined up in orbit beside it, ready for tugs to bulldoze them into the waiting jaws of the slings. Solar power surged into its electrical storage chambers. Attitude thrusters aligned it with minute precision.

  At the moment, it was aimed almost at right angles to Jupiter. Over the next week it would turn, increment by carefully calculated increment, until the gas giant loomed in its sights. But before it could act, supporting acts would have to warm up the cosmic audience. The Euphrosyne Pitching Machine would be the star of the show—but without other, lesser contributors, there would be no show for it to star in.

  The opening act was a lone mass-driver in lunar orbit, normally used to ferry load from the open-cast copper mines at the edge of the Mare Moscoviense to Earth's factories. That mass-driver had now been spun on its axis until it pointed in the general direction of Jupiter. Three tugs acting in concert, a tricky maneuver but one they practiced almost every day, herded a large rock inside the mass-driver's central box of parallel rails and into Sling 4, which happened to be the one that had arrived at the driver's rear end when the machine's previous burst of action ceased. This particular rock was a rough sphere about fifty yards across, about twenty percent palladium. It had spent the last three years working its way in toward Earth from the asteroid belt, and the last week being diverted to the Moon by a fleet of tugs, and it was worth rather more than the gross domestic product of a small country.

  Electric current pulsed through the gigantic machine's circuits, and the sling began to move, carrying the rock with it. The two accelerated, speeding along the straight track of the rails.

  With each successive pulse of electromagnetism, the rock's velocity increased. This mass-driver was a short one, a mere five miles long, so the rock's launch velocity was only twice that of Nagarjuna's cruiser. That was no problem—they dared not risk a higher speed at this delicate stage of the operation, anyway.

  It was ironic. If the hitherto untried technique didn't work— or even if it did—there was a chance that the Jovians might think they were being attacked. Unfortunately—well, that was how the military minds saw it—the device was too inaccurate to be used as a weapon of war . . . but it might just make an effective weapon of peace.

  As the palladium-rich rock headed away from the Earth-Moon system. Sling 4 slowed and began to negotiate the sharp bend that would return it along the mass-driver's underbelly. Automatically, without any fuss, Sling 5 slipped into place at the far end, ready for the next rock.

  The tugs were already pushing it into place.

  Moses felt as if he had been fed through a mincer. He had been shoved into a hastily adapted pressure suit, slammed up into low Earth orbit in an elderly OWL that looked as if it might fall to bits at any moment, transferred to a neo-Zen transport that was normally used solely for Moonbound cargo duties, and dragged through vacuum into a small, sleek ship attached to what looked for all the world like a giant coffin.

  He didn't mind. It sure beat moping around on Earth. He missed the Gooma animals, but he was on his way to meet the aliens.

  Nagarjuna, the pilot called himself. He claimed to be a thrush, which was blatant nonsense. And yet. . . despite his natural wariness with strangers, Moses felt drawn toward the diminutive, wild-eyed young man in the sky-blue pressure suit. There was a deep strength there, and he sensed a fundamental honesty that he had never encountered before in a human being. So when the young man told him that the chance of them surviving the mission was negligible, he believed him—and drew strength from him.

  Charity had already impressed upon her son the terrible dangers he would face. And she had explained why it was necessary that he should risk the bizarre, untested technology that was the only known way to convey him to Jupiter in the time available. He had felt the truth of her words, and her poorly suppressed fear
s . . . but he had hardly listened. He had few attachments to the planet of his birth, if the truth be told. He had little affection for the great mass of humanity—why should he? Look what it had done for him ... to him. And now it was using him again, for its own selfish ends.

  Survival.

  Survival he understood, but he didn't really care whether humanity lived or died.

  What he did care about, though, was the animals of Earth. No doubt many of the lower life-forms would rebuild their existence after a collision winter—indeed many would never notice it. But his friends the big cats, the wild dogs, the monkeys and the hippos, the snakes and the meerkats—without his help, they would die.

  He would save them.

  For the animals of Earth, Moses knew he would travel to the end of the universe. With the added bonus of the aliens thrown in, he had agreed to be sent to Jupiter almost before they asked him.

  The normal journey time was two years. This trip would take less than a week. Or forever.

  Nagarjuna bundled Moses into a narrow seat and strapped him in. "Please excusing," he said in flawed English, "but must quick. Wasteful time is none, understand?" Moses did—more than the pilot might have thought—and nodded. "You wish sleepy drug? Or you sleep-wake cycle as normal?"

  Taking sleeping tablets would be the coward's way out, contrary to the culture of the Chinese street children in which he had—if that was the phrase—grown up. Survival dictated the less pleasant choice. "No drugs," said Moses. "I'd like to see what we're doing."

  "Will not pleasant. Much acceleration, big changes in delta-vee." The pilot was on more confident ground with technical jargon. "You will feel many big push, you understand? Gee forces."

  These would be as nothing compared to the violence of the emotional forces that had shaped Moses' brief existence, and he knew it. He nodded again, and the pilot strapped him in.