Wheelers

by Ian Stewart

  Maybe he'd just lost the plot completely, buckled under the strain. It was a hell of a job to take on . . . damn it, she was making excuses for him! Stupid. Sir Charles was up to his usual dirty tricks, and this one must be accessing an entire new dimension of dirtiness.

  Now, in his cluttered office, face-to-face for the first time in years, she felt awkward and exposed. She had told herself that it would be a straightforward business meeting, focused solely on their mutual task. Nothing personal.

  All that had gone up in smoke the moment Sir Charles opened his mouth. "List them."

  For a second, she didn't understand. "List what?"

  "The ways I've screwed up your life. And your family's."

  Prudence gave a mirthless laugh. "Okay. Since you insist. First, you stole my archaeological discoveries and used them to make your own reputation. Then you tried to discredit my discovery of the wheelers. You put my sister in jail, and while she was there her young son went missing. She's never been the same person since. For years we all thought Moses was dead; then it turned out he'd been kidnapped and his entire childhood had been an indescribable hell. Oh, and along the way you lied and cheated and sacrificed a hundred promising careers on the altar of your own ego. Then, suddenly—unbelievably—you're indulging in a bout of public breast-beating and I'm being cast as a heroine. What monstrous scheme are you plotting now?"

  "It wasn't sudden," said Sir Charles. "But I agree it's unbelievable. Despite which, everything I said in my broadcast is true. And now I need you to help me put right the mess I've created, and I hope you can bring yourself to do that—because if not, everything we love is going to die.

  "There's no hidden agenda. Prudence. No dirty scheme. I'm tired, very tired. And scared. But now you've given me new hope." His voice faltered. "If we can clear the air between us, it may make it easier for us to work together—if only for a short time, while it's necessary."

  Prudence sighed and perched herself on the edge of a desk, secured in Europa's low gravity by one velcroed toe. "I know. I've known for days. Just don't ask me to like it."

  "I'm not asking anything, except for a few minutes of your attention while I try to explain." Prudence said nothing, and Sir Charles interpreted her silence as encouragement. "This task force exists for one reason, and one only: to get the comet deflected away from Earth. Your theft of the probe achieved more in a few hours than my entire expedition had since it got here. At first I resented that. You took a ridiculous risk and it came off. You got lucky, just as you'd gotten lucky in Giza. I spent years of my life working out the best strategies, steering clear of tempting shortcuts that were bound to fail, arguing and fighting and driving myself until I was exhausted. You sailed in from nowhere, bent only on short-term personal gain, made one crazy, irresponsible plunge into the cloud layer—and came up smelling of roses."

  Part of it hit home. "I started bent only on personal gain," Prudence said. "But when I realized what a pig's breakfast you were making of saving the Earth, I decided I had to hang around and do it for you."

  "I know. I'm just saying what it felt like to me. Do you know what your chance of success was?"

  Prudence shrugged. "Infinitesimal."

  Sir Charles spread his hands. "That was my opinion, too. Until I got my thinking straightened out. The aliens were down there —had been all along. So anyone who took a look was going to find them. Anyone. I could have done it years ago, but I never dared try. Luck? Luck didn't come into it, any more than Columbus got lucky when he set off to find a new route to Japan and ended up discovering Normerica. It was there. What you did was to seize the opportunity. Your chance of success was one hundred percent."

  "It was the same in Giza, too ... I wish I'd realized that then, as clearly as I do now. But let's not— Prudence, we need to seize another opportunity. We have to find a way to cooperate." She couldn't decide if he was being patronizing, sincere, or both. She could feel her anger rising and tried to suppress it. "Back in Giza, I had you tagged as flashy and unfocused—intelligent, but overquick to leap to conclusions."

  The old wounds were starting to reopen. "Charles—I don't think we should discuss this."

  "Got to, sorry. You say I stole your discovery. Guilty. But I didn't intend to, not at first. Everything that followed, yes, that was my fault. But when you went off in a huff, the only person left to face the media was me. I was a victim, too, in a way. I tried to find you, but—"

  "Victim? You were a victim! You got all the accolades and I got nothing! My heart bleeds for you!" Her voice was getting louder; she could feel a shouting match coming.

  Sir Charles bowed his head, acknowledging the criticism. Suddenly he changed the subject. "Prudence: have you enjoyed your life?"

  There was something about his manner that made her take the question at face value. "It's been hard, Charles, bloody hard. But. . . since you ask, yes. I've had freedom, companionship, excitement—and fulfillment."

  "I wish I could say the same. Do you think you'd have been able to hack it as an academic?"

  That did it. "You fucking hypocrite! You think that just because it worked out all right in the end, what you did to me was justified? That's like slapping someone in the face and claiming you did it to bring some color to their cheeks!"

  "Sorry, I didn't mean—" Charles began. Why did all discussions with Prudence end up like this? Prudence wasn't listening. She was thumping her fist on the desk and yelling at him.

  The force of the banging jolted her toe loose from the floor. With a ripping sound, the tenuous velcro link parted, and she began to execute a slow backward cartwheel, still shouting. The sudden loss of dignity silenced her. For an experienced space-hound, this was embarrassing. The silence gave her time to get a very accurate mental image of what she had just done. Upside down, still spinning slowly backward and heading for the ceiling, she started to giggle.

  Sir Charles reached up a hand and pulled her back to the floor. By the time she got herself stable again, they were both laughing uncontrollably.

  "Sorry," said Prudence. "I never have learned to control that temper of mine." She sobered. She had a sudden vision of herself sitting on all those committees, refereeing research proposals, revising scientific papers for the dozenth time because some pedant disapproved of how she had stated her conclusion . . . It would have been a disaster. It worked out all right in the end . . . To tell the truth, it had.

  Sir Charles responded to her changed mood. "How does space affect you? When you're in it for months on end?"

  "It makes me feel very small. . . yet I also feel like an essential cog in a gigantic, vital machine. Like a microbe and a god at the same time."

  "Me, too. Before we left Earth, I was too busy to really think. But as I watched my home world, and all it contained, shrink from a blue and white disk to a tiny, bright speck of light, I began to feel terribly alone. The planet looked so fragile—and it was up to me to protect it. Everything about my former life began to take on a new perspective. My schemes and desires seemed silly and trivial. I visualized that speck of light being snuffed out, and I shuddered to the core of my being. But when I thought of the destruction of all the things that I had previously valued . . . my presidencies and honors and money and high living ... I found that I didn't give a damn. I was better off without them.

  "That's what space did to me. It changed my vision of myself. But I kept the changes hidden until you turned up with a communicative alien. Then—I couldn't keep the changes hidden anymore."

  Nice try. "People don't change," said Prudence. "Not fundamentally. Deep down inside, Charlie Dunsmoore, you're the same conniving bastard that I knew in Giza. Even if you have changed, you'll revert to type."

  Sir Charles shook his head. "The person you knew in Giza was an idealistic young scientist—dull, unimaginative, but a decent person. He was placed in a position he couldn't handle, and it changed him, for the worse. So you're wrong. Or else you're right, and deep down inside that original Charlie Dunsmoor
e still exists. I think that's what's really going on. I'm regaining what I thought I'd lost forever."

  Prudence gave him a long and thoughtful look. "Maybe. Don't ask me to swallow too much. I'll judge you by what you do, not by what you say.

  "I think we may be able to work together, for long enough: we'll see. But I'll make one thing clear right now, Charlie. You ever try to screw me or mine again, and I'll kill you."

  Sir Charles grinned. "I'm glad we can end this discussion on such a positive note."

  ... As the days passed, they settled into a routine that was almost comfortable. It was hard to believe that Sir Charles really had changed. But he was asking for advice, he seemed to be listening to it, and more than once he acted on it. He was delegating tasks and leaving people to get on with them unsupervised, he wasn't always going for the safe option, and he was occasionally revealing glimpses of imagination. Once in a while he even smiled, and it was a cheerful, carefree smile—not easy when a world-wrecking comet is only eight months from its target. Moses, who had always found it very difficult to get along with other people—even his mother, for heaven's sake—inexplicably seemed to like the man: they were often to be seen together, talking in low voices, usually with smiles on their faces. Prudence wondered if Sir Charles was taking on the role of father figure and tried to suppress a horrible feeling that Moses was heading for yet another betrayal.

  Moses was in his element. He had a large room all his own, superb flatfilm screens on every wall, and unrestricted access to the alien. They were rapidly building up a common language— a sort of interplanetary pidgin. He had a support team, but for the moment they let him handle all communications. He was aware that several of them were trying to learn alien pidgin, but communication relied so much on his sixth sense for animal intentions that he doubted they'd get very far. Whenever he felt the alien might be receptive to the idea, he had raised the issue of the diverted comet. She sometimes seemed frustratingly close to grasping its importance, but somehow she just couldn't wrap her mind around it.

  Halfholder had come to enjoy her secret trysts with the extrajovian, but her guilt was growing rapidly. Here was proof that the sky diver beliefs were true! The Lifesoul Cherisher existed! Even on tiny, oxygen-rich Poisonblue, hot enough to melt ice— even to vaporize it—a form of life existed! Admittedly it was a poor kind of life—dwarfish, only two eyes, a single mouth, no ability to bureaubond, confined to horizontal surfaces, its trunks a mere four in number and stiff and jointed instead of sinuous and flexible. In place of fractal manipulative trunk-trees the EJs' joints quinfurcated just once, and then subdivided no further . . . and only two out of their four manipulators had any dexterity at all.

  They were quick, though.

  She had known the moment that she cast her eye-ring on the clumsy, ugly little alien creature (she had named it Nosy Dingo of the Ticklish Pleaser, the closest approximation she could come up with) that this was too important to be kept to herself. The Instrumentality must be told: the existence of extra Jovians (Cherisher! She still found it hard to credit that they came from Poisonblue!) was a political flash grenade. Nevertheless, she had kept the secret to herself, unwilling to lose what she had so recently gained. She told herself that she was still too damaged to make the hazardous journey to meet the sky-diver community of Whispering Volve, that she would appear foolish if she did not take steps to ensure the accuracy of her deductions about the extrajovians origins ... a dozen excuses, and none convincing. She knew that something had to be done— and soon.

  Perhaps the guilt had begun to affect her mental attitude, because she was picking up unprecedented nuances from their stumbling exchange—to call it a "conversation" would be to exaggerate its effectiveness at conveying information. This morning, however, she suddenly realized that what she had been lacking was not information, but exformation—the socio-cultural parameters to which the alien's thoughts subconsciously defaulted. She began to think about what it must actually be like to live in the hostile wastelands of Poisonblue, to run the constant risk of accidental immersion in its oceans of molten ice. Then Dingo told her about rain—a downpouring of searing liquid water from the very atmosphere—and everything clicked at once. The astonishing creatures were actually comfortable in such an environment! They had to be: that was where they had evolved. To them, it was the cool hydrogen-helium air of Secondhome that must seem hostile. She felt enormously foolish not to have come to that understanding earlier—but then, it was so hard to take the notion of radically different kinds of life seriously enough to deduce their feelings.

  Dingo and his kind, it seemed, did not live in the melt-ice oceans, but they could survive temporary immersion, even enjoying it for a short time. Submerge them for more than a few millidays, though, and the ridiculous entities would cease functioning/or lack of oxygen. And finally she began to comprehend the alien's attitude to snowstrike, which was astonishingly similar to the misguided fears of the majority of her fellow blimps. The Elders had an exaggerated fear of snowstone impacts—they acted as though snowstrike would be a terrible calamity instead of a necessary inconvenience. They failed to acknowledge that any ecology that had evolved in a snowstrike-prone environment would quickly learn to exploit the phenomenon and eventually to depend upon it. So skydivers knew, almost without thinking, that snowstrike was good for Jovian biodiversity—it cleared away the stifling accumulation of outmoded organisms and cleared the way for improved species to gain a trunkhold. The Elders' unwillingness to redirect a few tens of thousands of cities away from a prospective impact site, and to suffer a brief period of disrupted weather, was ludicrous.

  She had known that the aliens, too, had cities. What she had not understood, until this morning, was that their cities were dead constructs, and immobile. They could not choose a new flight path to avoid an impact. They had no flails to propel them contrary to prevailing streamlines. They could not plunge into a contrafluent jet to switch bands.

  If a snowstone hit Poisonblue, its inhabitants' fate would be determined by the fickle machinations of probability.

  Finally, she grasped one other thing. The alien's repeated attempts to raise the issue of snowstrike were not hypothetical. The grotesque little creature believed that a snowstone was even now making its final approach toward its home world. Either the entity was mistaken—which was quite likely, for it had already made many statements that were palpably false—or it was right. If so, the most likely explanation would be that the wheelers on the Inner Moons had been using the Diversion Engines again.

  She was too low in the skydiver hierarchy to be informed of such activities, but the Instrumentality would know. And they would know what to do about it. The guilt fell from her trunk-mass, and she felt rejuvenated and healed. The secret of the extrajovians must be conveyed to higher authority. There was no longer any choice.

  "My God,'" breathed Moses. "She's got it! I think she's got it!" Six Months to Diversion Day. On Earth, people were finally starting to go really crazy.

  «You were right to inform me,» said Brave Defier of the Orthodox Morahty. «It is indeed time to share this information. Indeed, if you will accept a small criticism, it is well past time. Fortunately, I have been aware of the presence of Poisonbluvians for some time, but the Elders have been monitoring their presence via a repauter on Sixmoon. It has been investigating the Poisonbluvians' activities and reporting back to the symbiauts of the Conclave, but the appropriate subcommittees have yet to decide on a response. The Sixmoonian repauter is not yet in our control. And we gather that this symbiaut has made no interactive contact with the Poisonbluvians. It has been no more than a passive observer. Few of its observations have been comprehensible.»

  Halfholder felt deflated (metaphorically). The Instrumentality already knew! Even the Elders knew! But then she realized that knowledge was useless without power. And she owned the power of communication. It resided not in the extrajovian machine, but in her mind.

  She explained her belief that the P
oisonbluvian feared an imminent snowstrike on its peculiar little homeworld. Was the Instrumentality aware . . . ?

  It was. The Diversion Engines had made the necessary adjustment several years ago. The trajectory of the snowstone was a fait accompli. In four hundred Jovian days—the merest cycle of an eye-ring—the snowstone would pass through the ambit of the Inner Moons, swing wildly past Sevenmoon and then Six-moon, and fall sunward until the barren globe of Poisonblue terminated its passage.

  Except that the globe was not barren. It was host to countless forms of extrajovian quasi-life.

  «// only we had known this sooner I » The Defier/Halfholder bureaubond was developing a horrible feeling that the Instrumentality's elegant long-term plans would have to be hurried. It was not so much a case of opportunity presenting itself as fate forcing the issue before they were ready. But the intentions of the Lifesoul Cherisher could scarcely be clearer. Somehow the Poisonbluvians must be saved from what Defier/Halfholder now knew would be annihilation.

  Defier/Halfholder considered the matter carefully and came to a conclusion. The best strategy would be to advance on two fronts. The Poisonbluvians must open communications with the Elders, on the off chance that the latter would be persuaded to redirect the snowstone to an alternative disposal site. Defier/Halfholder was numbingly aware, however, that the timescale upon which the Elders could react was many orders of magnitude longer than the time available for a decision. The only way to deal with that would be to open up a second front.

  "Halfholder: we've been trying to establish communications with the wheeler ever since it turned up at the base!"

  Nosy Dingo of the Ticklish Pleaser appeared exasperated— he was forgetting to slow his movements down, and his image bounced around the screen and made her near-eyes ache. Halfholder could remember with perfect clarity the decisions that she and Defier had jointly taken, and she was doing her best to carry out her part of them—even though she no longer had any idea why they had arrived at those decisions. For once, though, the remembered decisions made good sense. She tried again. "Dingo, how can there be a problem? It is sufficient to bureaubo—" Oh. "Humble apologies: there can be a problem. There is. Poisonbluvians do not bureaubond."