Neptune Crossing

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  *

  There was a frantic desperation to their lovemaking this time; and when it ended they fell, entwined together, into silence. Within minutes, Julie had fallen asleep, and he found himself alone with his thoughts, musing over the woman at his side.

  Would he ever see her again? he wondered. He was astonished by how powerfully he felt drawn to her. The thing was, he genuinely liked her, and not just because of pheromones or hormones or raw animal passion. He liked the way she talked and walked, the excitement with which she seized upon thoughts, the way her eyes blazed, the way she looked when she made love. When was the last time he had felt that way about a woman? Maybe never. It was a wonderfully satisfying feeling—and it was about to be ripped from him, probably forever, if he did what Charlie asked. What would Julie think, if she learned that the man she had just made love to had, hours later, gone out and stolen a multimillion-dollar spacecraft, in some insane messianic pursuit? Would he return a hero or a criminal? Would he return at all? He wondered if Charlie even cared about the price that he would be paying for this crazy mission . . .

  This mission to save the Earth.

  He felt a disjointed sense of urgency, as he was brought back to the decision he had to make. It was almost as if the quarx had reminded him with a stern warning; but it wasn’t the quarx’s voice, it was his own. He knew that if he didn’t make his decision tonight, it might be too late to make it at all. How far did he trust the quarx? What he had seen of the translator’s powers suggested that it all could be true, and probably was.

  But what if . . . Charlie were lying, for some unfathomable reason? What possible motive could he have for tricking Bandicut into stealing a ship? To get to Earth? There were easier ways to do that. Besides, Charlie wasn’t even talking about flying to Earth, merely to its defense, on the far side of the sun.

  No, the lying scenario just didn’t make sense. Even as he contemplated it, he waited for the quarx to leap forward with an indignant defense. When he heard only silence, he grunted to himself and turned his head to study Julie’s sleeping form again, silhouetted against the flickering flames. What a thing to think about, so soon after making love! But there was no stopping the train of thought; Charlie had set it in motion, and there would be no stopping it until he had made his decision. But it seemed unlike the quarx not to be right there trying to convince him.

  Still there was no response—and in fact, no stirring of the being at all. Charlie seemed to have completely isolated himself, leaving Bandicut to work things out for himself. Which was okay, except that with Julie asleep, it seemed a little lonely just now. Lonely . . .

  Just himself and the flames, flickering . . .

  And EineySteiney balls careening through space, and colliding, and flames consuming them . . .

  He felt the silence-fugue creeping over him like a whispering fog, obscuring his vision of the world that lay before him, and superimposing another view, a sense of invisible shapes and presences and forces. He felt a great awareness of gravity, of the shaping of space by the presence of mass and gravimetric fields; he felt as though he were becoming space, his mind and spirit stretching out into emptiness, but that emptiness was being warped and twisted by the presence of objects hurtling through it. Then, moments later, he felt himself transformed into one of the objects, a comet, and ahead of him now was the fantastic blue and green and white form of the Earth, and he was plummeting toward it . . . there was no stopping him, the Earth was growing, swelling before him . . . he saw death rising up to greet him like a leering specter, not just his own death, but the death of a planet’s civilization . . .

  The feeling of horror within him swelled like the Earth, until he could no longer breathe—

  And then the fugue-nightmare snapped away, and he was floating in darkness, gasping for breath. A broad array of information slowly came into focus surrounding him. Elements of it gleamed faintly in the darkness like toy soldiers creeping silently out of hiding in the night to surround and capture him. His heart beat rapidly, anxiously, until he realized what it was. It was a summation, awaiting his inspection.

  He had warned the quarx not to trouble him about it anymore tonight, and Charlie had obligingly vanished inward. But he had left behind the answers to many of the questions that Bandicut might ask, if he were of a mind to.

  He wanted to flee, to avoid the questions. But he was penned in by an army of information: gleaming datapoints that revealed the evolution of the quarx’s plan. He saw, without real comprehension, the threading of space that would speed him across the solar system; and he saw the breathtaking simplicity of the translator’s power to intercept the comet and destroy it. He even saw the numbers, the probability that the maneuver would cost him his life, the one-in-two chance that he would buy Earth’s life with his own. And he saw what was perhaps the greatest uncertainty in the plan: the actual theft of the ship, because that involved human unknowns that even the quarx and his translator’s science could not clearly fathom.

  Not for the first time, he found himself wondering, what’s in this for Charlie? Why does he care so much? Why’s he willing to take this risk for Earth?

  And the questions floated away over a windswept plain, and he caught glimpses of Charlie’s past lives like luminous ghosts in the night, trying to help hosts with whom Charlie had found himself partnered. And he glimpsed Charlie himself at times wondering, how did this come to pass? There again was that murky sense of loss in Charlie’s past, the sense that he was somehow in search of . . . what? Answers? Redemption?

  Bandicut felt a heady, rushing dizziness as the fugue-images vanished back into the darkness; and he struggled for breath again, and found a moment of quiet and peace, a feeling that he was floating on calm, lapping waters in the gentle darkness. He gathered his thoughts there, thinking of Earth, thinking of obligations and responsibility, thinking of young Dakota hunched over edu-sims beyond her age level because she so desperately wanted to go to space, thinking of a rain of death that only he had the power to stop. And he thought of Julie, with a bitter ache, almost wishing that he were angry with her instead of feeling what he felt, because if he were angry, it would be so much easier to leave . . .