Wheelers

by Ian Stewart

  The cruiser was in radio contact with Tiglath-Pileser now, but both vessels kept their messages concise—the last thing Nagarjuna needed was extra distractions. It was good to know that Prudence Odingo's ship had them on its screens, though, and that several OWLs were being readied to make the pick up. Without doubt Skylark also had them in its sights, and Europa Base, but the Way of the Wholesome had already warned the Jovian Task Force to expect the arrival of one of their craft. Testing, so they said, an experimental rapid-response technique. Nobody expected Skylark to be fooled by this excuse, but it might stop them from interfering. And the operation had been timed to place Europa around the back of Jupiter at the crucial moment.

  Moses knew what he had to do now, and without protest he climbed into the empty space at the pods center. He almost seemed eager.

  Nagarjuna sedated the boy and instructed the ship to glue the foam ball together around him. To get him out, Prudence's crew would have to saw a hole. The pilot checked the pod release system, then checked it again, and hoped that it wouldn't be needed. Then he began the delicate task of spreading his net, hoped that the computer could handle what was coming, and worried about a possible buildup of oscillations in the elastic cables of the tether.

  On Tiglath-Pileser, Prudence Odingo and her crew could do nothing but wait.

  Moses slept.

  The tugs bustled around the Pitching Machine like worker ants around their queen, nudging the rocks into place, lining them up in sequence ready to be hurled toward the distant gas giant. Engineers checked rocket mountings, fuel supplies, communications antennas.

  In all that bustle and haste, something was bound to go wrong.

  The first dozen rocks had rounded Jupiter, slammed into Nagarjuna's net, bled off some of his momentum, and been sent on their way with a kiss and a pat on the head. The cruiser's speed was now appreciably reduced, for which Nagarjuna would have given thanks if he weren't so busy trying to ensure that this desirable state of affairs continued.

  Reset, spread, ready, catch, wait (but not for long), release . . . The procedure had acquired its own rhythms, and the little Buddhist wondered if he would ever be able to get them totally out of his mind.

  The comm's warning light flashed. "Transmitting new schedule." He made no attempt to reply—the two-way delay time in communications was already over an hour. The Cuckoo's Nest would assume he had received whatever it was that they had sent. What Tiglath-Pileser made of it was up to them—he didn't have time to explain it.

  He brought the new schedule up on screen and swore.

  One of the rocks had gone AWOL. An intermittent circuit fault, which had gone unnoticed in the rush to prepare the active rocks for mass-driving, had disabled its antenna. Unable to receive instructions from Euphrosyne or transmit its own position, it had deviated from its intended course. The error would be magnified when it hurtled around Jupiter, and it would emerge from the encounter a long way off track. That created a gap in the stream of rocks, requiring some on-the-fly reprogramming of the capture schedule and some tricky piloting to compensate for changes in the projected velocity.

  As long as nothing else got snarled up, he reckoned he would probably manage.

  This was life being lived on the edge. He had heard about such things in some unapproved entertainment media that one of the novices had smuggled in, and had sometimes wondered what it would be like. Now that he knew, he would have preferred not to. He had joined the Way of the Wholesome for quiet contemplation, not life in the fast orbit.

  Time passed. Rocks slammed into the net and were discarded. The gap caused by the errant rock was safely bridged, but the result left him little room to maneuver when it came to the final stages of the deceleration process. It all came down to tolerances, and now there were none.

  Four rocks to go. It was starting to get easy . . . The cruiser had slowed down considerably now, and the technique was becoming routine.

  The next rock should be coming up on the radar any moment now . . .

  Any moment. . .

  Any . . .

  Nagarjuna felt an icy shiver run along his spine. Where was the rock? Was the radar malfunctioning? No, he could see the last three, lined up like ecologically permissible targets in a fairground shooting gallery. But the next rock was missing.

  There must have been another failure. Unknown to Nagarjuna, one of the rocks' engines had been damaged by material in Jupiter's ring, which extended from just inside the orbit of Metis, all the way down to the planet itself. The Way of the Wholesome would shortly find out, but their message would not reach him in time. It didn't matter. He'd known all along that from here on he was on his own.

  He took advantage of the gap created by the missing rock to see what the biosensors could tell him about Moses. Heartbeat slow and regular, breathing much the same . . . Brain waves showing heavy theta-wave rhythms, and the characteristic bursting patterns of sleep spindles . . . safely unconscious. That was good—if anything went wrong now, the boy would never know.

  While the monk was making this brief medical examination, the computer was determining the best modification to their deceleration strategy, for even this contingency had been planned for. As he had hoped, there was a solution. Moses might yet reach Tiglath-Pileser safely.

  Time to go for broke. There would be no room for error.

  The cruiser's main rockets fired, once more pinning Nagarjuna to his seat. Fuel unused was a luxury now—loss of momentum was the only currency that mattered. He would keep only the bare minimum that would offer him necessary options in the final seconds.

  Two successive rocks hit the net and were released. The flimsy ship was back to normal operational velocities now—pity there wasn't any spare fuel left to take advantage of that.

  One rock to go. The momentum equations were neat, precise, and inescapable. One rock could not kill the cruiser's speed.

  It could kill the speed of something lighter.

  Nagarjuna whispered a short prayer—not to anything or anyone, but because it helped to calm his nerves. He suddenly realized that he had never entirely accepted the neo-Zen beliefs, and he wasn't going to start now . . .Not that it mattered. He knew what he had to do, and why His duty was to humanity, not to the Dharma of the Bya chos as espoused by the Way of the Wholesome ... or were those really the same? Was that what the Cuckoo had meant when it said, Deep thoughts about death will conduct one to the unique and holy Dharmal How deep were his thoughts—

  The last rock was approaching. The emergency pod was attached by strong cables to the net's elastic tether. Nagarjuna pushed the button that exploded the bolts securing the tether to the hull. Net and pod separated from the cruiser, drifting away to one side, dropping gradually behind. Then the final rock smashed into the net and whisked them away.

  The screen's zoom facility was automatic. He watched the pod dwindle and vanish.

  At a predetermined moment, the net split open for the last time, and the rock continued its indifferent path. The pod hung in space, its velocity relative to Callisto now negligible. Tiglath-Piksefs OWLs ought be able to make rendezvous with ease.

  The wiry little neo-Zen monk sat back in his pilot's seat and reflected for a moment on a job well done. Then, with an air of resignation, he selected a view in which Jupiter loomed in the screen, a thing of breathtaking beauty. Might as well enjoy the view while it lasted. His eyes were damp. It was so beautiful. Awe welled within him, and in one corner of his mind he was thinking: I am the best.

  The cruiser was heading toward Jupiter's equator, close to the Great Red Spot. With no fuel and no more rocks to hitch a lift from, that would be its last trajectory. The planet's fearsome gravity was already increasing its grip.

  The computer told him exactly when the craft would hit the atmosphere, and where, and how fast. Nagarjuna knew what the numbers meant.

  At least it will he quick.

  17

  Tiglath-Pileser, Callisto Orbit, 2222

  Prudence Odingo had br
oken one of her self-imposed rules for survival in space and had decided to get very high indeed. She had also decided to do so without company, which broke none of her rules. Right now she was feeling pleasantly light-headed and her mind was warm and muzzy. Everything shone with flickering iridescent colors. She was in fairyland.

  Temporarily forgetting the day's events wasn't so hard ... remembering anything much was. That was good, she knew, though she could no longer recall why . . .

  She suspected that if she got to her feet (Feet? Where were her feet?) she would drift uncontrollably about her private cubicle, which was pretty difficult, actually, since there wasn't room in there to swing a cat. Nonetheless, she had a feeling that she would contrive to drift anyway, and probably do serious damage to the furniture and fittings. So she had fixed herself to the wall with a couple of velcro straps.

  She swallowed another capsule of dipsy liberated from the medical supplies. It had been a harrowing day.

  When the OWLs got to Moses' abandoned foam pod, they had found it hopelessly entangled in torn strands of elastic webbing which had come loose when the final rock had dragged it to a reluctant halt. It was a good thing that there hadn't been further rocks to catch, because the equipment had been damaged by the heavy impacts required to slow the cruiser down, and the change in strategy occasioned by the missing rock hadn't done anything to help. The thick foam rind was crisscrossed with deep whiplash marks where flailing cables had slashed into it, causing them to worry that perhaps the pod had been opened to the vacuum. Moses' oxygen supply came from compressed air tanks through tubes and a face mask, but more than a few minutes' exposure to vacuum would kill him all the same.

  She had felt a terrible foreboding as they began to saw a hole in the foam ball, having towed it back to Tiglath-Pileser and maneuvered it on board through a cargo door. She knew, as vividly as she knew her own name, that Moses was dead.

  He wasn't, of course. Her mind was acting out her fears and then responding to its own actions in an unstable emotional feedback loop.

  Even though the boy was alive, he was in a bad way Prudence had gasped when she saw the massive bruises that decorated his body and the caked blood around his mouth where the air mask had crushed his lips. Successive impacts with rock upon rock, even though they had been cushioned to some extent by the elastic webbing and tether, had taken their toll, and the final wrenching deceleration and the flailing ropes had bounced him around inside his foam cocoon like a Ping-Pong ball in a wind tunnel.

  He had been unconscious, but that was probably the result of the drugs that Nagarjuna had administered. She wouldn't be able to tell for sure until—if—Moses woke up and they could test his responses and reflexes to make sure the journey hadn't left him brain-damaged. They consulted Tiglath-Pilesefs medical database at every step as they hooked him up to life-support equipment, rigged up a pressure drip of saline mixed with more sedatives, a dose that would gradually be reduced as the computer decided it was safe to do so . . .

  The boy's heartbeat pulsed across the monitor window . . . comfortingly strong, though not terribly steady. His breathing was labored and erratic. His brain waves made no sense.

  The worst part—with one exception—was the waiting. She knew that it had been necessary for Moses to join them out near Jupiter. She knew that it hadn't even been her decision, in the end, but her sister's. She had no idea how difficult that decision must have been for Charity, even though the alternative would almost certainly have condemned Moses to death along with everybody else on Earth, but she could guess.

  The exception was poor Nagarjuna—the worst moment of all. While they waited for Moses to recover from the drugs, they watched the neo-Zen monk's flimsy cruiser hurtling toward the Great Red Spot, out of control, out of fuel, spinning slowly end over end. They had come to respect the wiry little man, to love his broken English and his palpable concern for his passenger. It was heartbreaking to have to listen to him reciting verses from the By a chos, verses he had laboriously learned by heart, verses that now became a kind of dirge, a death poem . . .

  Later, they learned from the Xnet that it had been the speech of the Thrush:

  . . . hcud Ion, hcud Ion — profit from, profit from . . . Profit from the holy teachings when you have acquired human

  form! Profit from the holy Dharma, and achieve your goals! Profit from your possessions, and give all of them away! Profit from the unsullied doctrine, and choose a lowly place! Profit from what you know, and meditate upon the guardian gods! Profit from your unhappiness, withdraw from this samsaric world! Profit from the Buddha, awaken to —

  On the screens, shaky and wavering at the limit of their telescope's resolution, the cruisers sleek form turned in an instant into a ball of fire, then a curling, smoky trail, puffy and shapeless, spinning off smaller trails that writhed and dispersed in the eternal winds of Jupiter's upper atmosphere . . .

  Within a few minutes, all trace of it was gone, blown away on those selfsame winds.

  She wondered whether the aliens had noticed . . . whether they had considered diverting the tiny craft with the feather-light touch of a gravitic repulsor . . . The awful thing was, they could have saved him—had they been aware of any need to, or even of his presence . . .

  Faint hope. Aliens are alien. Their concerns are not those of humans. Anyway, they probably hadn't noticed a thing. Why should they? It was just one more tiny, insignificant meteorite: they were plunging into Jupiter all the time.

  It was too late for such thoughts . . . Nagarjuna was with his guardian gods now. His place in history was assured, assuming there was going to he any more history

  It was cold comfort.

  Prudence knew that at least another twelve hours must elapse before it was safe to let Moses wake up. Her eyes and Jonas's met, and understanding passed between them . . . Not now, not while the child may he dying, that is not the way to ease our own fears and make the endless hours pass ... If Moses died, they'd feel forever dirty. Anyway neither of them felt remotely interested . . .

  Which was why she decided to hide away in her private cubicle and get totally, irredeemably zonked on dipsy Alone.

  Somehow, that was clean.

  Halfholder's near-eyes returned yet again to the stolen object. Its cacophony of sound had made her ears ring, its incredible flashing colors had dazzled her chromatic-eyes . . . but she couldn't keep her mind off it.

  The bedlam and bedazzlement were nothing. Why, she, Bright Halfholder of the Violent Foam, had already mastered its primitive control mechanisms. She knew how to diminish the noise, and she could adjust her eyes to cope with the brilliant glare. She would never be heralded in the annals of legend if she let something so feeble put her off. She was a blimp, not a wimp!

  Feeling very daring, and fearing that she might possibly be very foolish, Halfholder reached out a trunk tip and flipped the switch. She adjusted the sound volume, lowered her visual contrast to a prudent level, and turned the object so that her chromatic-eyes could watch the moving images.

  Interesting . . . the patterns had stopped flashing. As she became accustomed to the funny flat image, a fixed shape became visible. It looked vaguely familiar—

  With a sense of profound shock, she realized that another set of eyes was looking back at her.

  The representation was crude, a two-dimensional projection that failed even to include depth cues. Disarmingly literal, too— absolutely no coding to eliminate unnecessary redundancy. It had the quality of a child's first attempts at constructing a communicant.

  It was difficult not to become amused, but she concentrated and suppressed the urge to huffle. Already she had a strong hunch that this thing was important.

  Focus, analyze, rebalance . . . Only two of the—yes, they definitely were—eyes were visible: presumably the rest of the creature's eye-ring was lost beyond the narrow confines of the tiny image. The two eyes that she could see were obviously eyes, that was never in dispute—but they were eyes unlike any she had ever en
countered before. Oval eyes—no, on closer inspection they were conventional spheres, but partially covered by taut but flexible flaps. Eye-flaps? What creature had eye-flaps? If you wanted to protect an eye, you retracted it! The eye-flaps occasionally flickered, and every so often the whole image jumped around erratically. As far as she could make out, the eyes were pale, but there was a brightly colored region, centered around a small dark circle. The creatures integument was an unremarkable shade of deep brown, like typical dioxide storm clouds. If only the thing would stay still for two seconds at a time — ah, it seemed to freeze, almost as if the creature could read her thoughts. Maybe it could, if it was sensitive to squark wavepackets . . . but no, that was silly: she wasn't bureaubonding, so her mindshield reflex would be in operation.

  Now that the image was more stable, she could see more detail. There were curious lumps and bulges, and what seemed to be three holes. Two small ones, side by side, which vibrated erratically, and a very peculiar slitted hole with rubbery edges that danced through intricate series of shapes—in rough synchrony, she suddenly understood, with the crazy sounds that were burbling forth from the object.

  The eyes grew smaller and closer together . . . No, it just seemed that way— Ah! How ridiculous! The creature had moved away from whatever instrument was forming the image, and the image coding didn't even stop it from shrinking] It was viewpoint-dependent! And that meant—

  It all came together in a rush. First, the object was some kind of portable entertainment device, set in some kind of multiuser mode. Second, the image she was seeing was not an entertainment as such, but a real-time depiction of another user. And third—

  The other user possessed no eye-ring at all. Just two tiny pinpoint eyes on one side of an improbable angular . . . dome? Hardly. It was more like the front end of a severely distorted gulpfang—