*
The threading field was so dark now that the windows were effectively shuttered. But Bandicut could see the sun in his mind’s eye as vividly as if he were staring at it through the clear quartz-plex window. The sun roiled and fumed, like some terrible volcanic cloud churning over his head in the blazing glow of sunset. It was like some astonishing drug-induced hallucination, and in fact it was a hallucination—he was in full-blown silence-fugue now. But he was also locked in a bewildering feedback embrace with the translator-stone; he sensed its vast power glimmering and flickering, just out of his reach; and it seemed that the clearer the solar image grew in his mind, the more powerfully hallucinatory it became, reverberating back and forth between his mind and the stone’s. The quarx did not interrupt the fugue; maybe he was content to let it run, or maybe he was no longer capable of intervening.
In Bandicut’s mind, a great solar prominence crested, erupting downward out of the sun to lash into the dark emptiness of space. Somewhere beyond that prominence was the comet that it had become his destiny to destroy, or destroy himself in the attempt. Earth wasn’t visible from here, but he knew that she was watching, with all the other planets, as he flew to her defense. He rode the wave of the translator’s energy, and the marching flames of the sun saluted his passage.
They were arrowing straight past the sun’s rotating horizon.
He noted almost casually that they were now at perihelion, and he thought he heard the applause of the planets.
Then they were past perihelion, arcing back out of the sun’s gravity well. It would be just a fleeting breath of time before they shot out past the other side of Mercury’s orbit. Time flowed like a fine wine, intoxicating him as he bobbed his head, watching the movements of the planets like the fabulous, dancing movement of balls on an enormous EineySteiney table.
As the sun shifted out of his view to the stern, he grinned savagely and unshuttered the forward windows and unlimbered the telescope. He pointed the thing where the computer, using the last known orbital data, said the comet would be; and in his mind, the coruscating near-consciousness of the translator-stones whirled and followed his focus like a swarm of fiery bees.
Neptune Crossing Page 74