by Jerry
Gould greeted her, handing her his helmet. He stripped off his flyingjacket and ushered her into the hangar.
He pointed across the canal. ‘We’ll have a drink in your bar.’ He led the way diagonally across the car park, ignoring the painted pathways. ‘I think there’s enough on us for Carmen to know where we are. It gives her a sense of security.’
‘How long have you been herding the cattle?’ Forrester asked when they were seated behind the bar.
‘Since the winter. Somehow one herd escaped the farmers’ machetes. Flying down from Perpignan through the Col du Perthus, I noticed them following the aircraft. In some way they could see me, using a different section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Then I realized that I’d sprayed some old landing-light reflector paint on the plane—highly phosphorescent stuff.’
‘But why save them? They couldn’t survive on their own.’
‘Not true—in fact, they’re extremely hardy. By next winter they’ll be able to out-run and out-think everything else around here. Like Carmen—she’s a very bright girl. She’s managed to keep herself going here for years, without being able to see a thing. When I started getting all this paint over me I think I was the first person she’d ever seen.’
Thinking again of Judith’s baby, Forrester shook his head. ‘She looks like a mongol to me—that swollen forehead.’
‘You’re wrong. I’ve found out a lot about her. She has a huge collection of watches with luminous dials, hundreds of them, that she’s been filching for years from the shops. She’s got them all working together but to different times, it’s some sort of gigantic computer. God only knows what overlit world nature is preparing her for, but I suppose we won’t be around to see it.’
Forrester gazed disagreeably into his glass of brandy. For once the Fundador made him feel ill. ‘Gould, are you saying in effect that the child Judith is carrying at this moment is not deformed?’
Gould nodded encouragingly. ‘It’s not deformed at all—any more than Carmen. It’s like the so-called population decline that we’ve all accepted as an obvious truth. In fact, there hasn’t been a decline—except in the sense that we’ve been slaughtering our offspring. Over the past fifty years the birth-rate has gone up, not down.’ Before Forrester could protest, he went on, ‘Try for a moment to retain an open mind—we have this vastly increased sexuality, and an unprecedented fertility. Even your wife has had—what—seven children. Yet why? Isn’t it obvious that we were intended to embark on a huge replacement programme, though sadly the people we’re replacing turn out to be ourselves. Our job is simply to repopulate the world with our successors. As for our need to be alone, this intense enjoyment of our own company, and the absence of any sense of despair, I suppose they’re all nature’s way of saying goodbye.’
‘And the runway?’ Forrester asked. ‘Is that your way of saying goodbye?’
* * *
A month later, as soon as Judith had recovered from the birth of her son, she and Forrester left Rosas to return to Geneva, After they had made their farewells to Señora Cervera and his wife, Forrester drove the car along the beach road. It was 11 a.m., but Gould’s aircraft still stood on the airstrip. For some reason the doctor was late.
‘It’s a long drive—are you going to be well enough?’ he asked Judith.
‘Of course—I’ve never felt better.’ She settled herself in the seat. It seemed to Forrester that a kind of shutter had been lowered across her mind, hiding away all memories of the past months. She looked composed and relaxed again, but with the amiable and fixed expression of a display-window mannequin.
‘Did you pay off the practicante?’ she asked. ‘They expect something extra for..
Forrester was gazing up at the faades of the Venus hotels. He remembered the evening of the birth, and the practicante carrying his son away from Señora Cervera. The district nurse had taken it for granted that he would be given the task of destroying the child. As Forrester stopped the Spaniard by the elevator he found himself wondering where the man would have killed it—in some alley behind the cheaper hotels at the rear of the town, or in any one of a thousand vacant bathrooms. But when Forrester had taken the child, careful not to look at its eyes, the practicante had not objected, only offering Forrester his surgical bag.
Forrester had declined. After the practicante had left, and before Señora Cervera returned to the lobby, he set off through the dark streets to the canal. He had put on again the silver jacket he had worn on the day when Gould had flown him into the mountains. As he crossed the bridge the young woman emerged from the hangar, almost invisible in her dark shawl. Forrester walked towards her, listening to the faint clicking and murmurs of the strong child. He pressed the infant into her hands and turned back to the canal, throwing away his jacket as he ran.
While they drove along the line of hotels to the Figueras road Forrester heard the sounds of the aircraft. Gould was climbing into the cockpit, about to warm up the engine before take-off.
‘I never really understood him,’ Judith commented. ‘What was he up to in the mountains?’
‘I don’t know—some obsession of his.’
During a brief storm two nights earlier another section of the runway had collapsed. But Forrester knew that Gould would go on flying to the end, driving his herd higher into the mountains, until they no longer needed him and the day had come to take off for the last time.
THE BLACK HOLE PASSES
John Varley
John Varley’s third story for F&SF (“Picnic On Paradise,” Aug. 1974; “Retrograde Summer,” Feb. 1975) is an inventive and suspenseful tale about the inhabitants of two space stations, who are faced with the terror of loneliness, until something worse comes along . . .
Jordan looked up from the log of the day’s transmissions and noted with annoyance that Treemonisha was lying with her legs half-buried in the computer console. He couldn’t decide why that bothered him so much, but it did. He walked over to her and kicked her in the face to get her attention, his foot sailing right through her as if she wasn’t there, which she wasn’t. He waited, tapping his foot, for her to notice it.
Twenty seconds later she jumped, then looked sheepish.
“You blinked,” Jordan crowed. “You blinked. You owe me another five dollars.” Again he waited, not even conscious of waiting. After a year at the station he had reached the point where his mind simply edited out the twenty-second time-lag. Given the frantic pace of life at the station, there was little chance he would miss anything.
“All right, so I blinked. I’m getting tired of that game. Besides, all you’re doing is wiping out your old debts. You owe me . . . $455 now instead of $460.”
“You liked it well enough when you were winning,” he pointed out. “How else could you have gotten into me for that kind of money, with my reflexes?”
(Wait) “I think the totals show who has the faster reflexes. But I told you a week ago that I don’t appreciate being bothered when I’m reading.” She waved her fac-printed book, her thumb holding her place.
“Oh, listen to you. Pointing out to me what you don’t like, while you’re all spread out through my computer. You know that drives me up the wall.”
(Wait) She looked down at where her body vanished into the side of the computer, but instead of apologizing, she flared up.
“Well, so what? I never heard of such foolishness; walking around chalk marks on the floor all the time so I won’t melt into your precious furniture. Who ever heard of such . . .” She realized she was repeating herself. She wasn’t good at heated invective, but had been getting practice at improving it in the past weeks. She got up out of the computer and stood glowering at Jordan, or glowering at where he had been.
Jordan had quickly scanned around his floor and picked out an area marked off with black tape. He walked over to it and stepped over the lines and waited with his arms crossed, a pugnacious scowl on his face.
“How do you like that?” he spat out at her. “I’ve been v
ery scrupulous about avoiding objects in your place. Chalk marks, indeed. If you used tape like I told you, you wouldn’t be rubbing them off all the time with that fat ass of yours.” But she had started laughing after her eyes followed to where he was now standing, and it soon got out of control. She doubled over, threatened to fall down she laughed so hard. He looked down and tried to remember what it was that the tape marked off at her place. Was that where she kept the toilet . . .?
He jumped hastily out of the invisible toilet and was winding up a scathing remark, but she had stopped laughing. The remarks about the fat ass had reached her, and her reply had crawled back at the speed of light.
As he listened to her, he realized anything he could say would be superfluous; she was already as angry as she could be. So he walked over to the holo set and pressed a switch. The projection he had been talking to zipped back into the tank, to become a ten-centimeter angry figure, waving her arms at him.
He saw the tiny figure stride to her own set and slap another button. The tank went black. He noticed with satisfaction just before she disappeared that she had lost her place in the book.
Then, in one of the violent swings of mood that had been scaring him to death recently, he was desolately sorry for what he had done. His hands trembled as he pressed the call button, and he felt the sweat popping out on his forehead. But she wasn’t receiving.
“Great. One neighbor in half a billion kilometers, and I pick a fight with her.”
He got up and started his ritual hunt for a way of killing himself that wouldn’t be so grossly bloody that it would make him sick. Once again he came to the conclusion that there wasn’t anything like that in the station.
“Why couldn’t they think of things like that?” he fumed. “No drugs, no poison gas, no nothing. Damn air system has so goddam many safeties on the damn thing I couldn’t raise the CO2 count in here if my life depended on it. Which it does. If I don’t find a painless way to kill myself, it’s going to drive me to suicide.”
He broke off, not only because he had played back that last rhetorical ramble, but because he was never comfortable hearing himself talk to himself. It sounded too much like a person on the brink of insanity.
“Which I am!”
It felt a bit better to have admitted it out loud. It sounded like a very sane thing to say. He grasped the feeling, built steadily on it until it began to feel natural. After a few minutes of deep breathing he felt something approximating calm. Calmly, he pressed the call button again, to find that Treemonisha was still not at home. Calmly, he built up spit and fired it at the innocent holo tank, where it dripped down obscenely. He grinned. Later he could apologize, but right now it seemed to be the right course to stay angry.
He walked back to the desk and sat down before the computer digest of the three trillion bits that had come over the Hotline in the last twenty-four hours. Here was where he earned his salary. There was an added incentive in the realization that Treemonisha had not yet started her scan of her own computer’s opinions for the day. Maybe he could scoop her again.
Jordan Moon was the station agent for Star Line, Inc., one of the two major firms in the field of interstellar communication. If you can call listening in on a party line communication.
He lived and worked in a station that had been placed in a slow circular orbit thirteen billion kilometers from the sun. It was a lonely area; it had the sole virtue of being right in the center of the circle of greatest signal strength of the Ophiuchi Hotline.
About all that anyone had ever known for sure about the Ophiuchites was the fact that they had one hell of a big laser somewhere in their planetary system, 70 Ophiuchi. Aside from that, which they couldn’t very well conceal, they were an extremely close-mouthed race. They never volunteered anything about themselves directly, and human civilization was too parsimonious to ask. Why build a giant laser, the companies asked when it was suggested, when all that lovely information floods through space for free?
Jordan Moon had always thought that an extremely good question, but he turned it around: why did the Ophiuchites bother to build a giant laser? What did they get out of it? No one had the slightest idea, not even Jordan, who fancied himself an authority on everything.
He was not far wrong, and that was his value to the company.
No one had yet succeeded in making a copyright stand up in court when applied to information received over the Hotline. The prevailing opinion was that it was a natural resource, like vacuum, and free to all who could afford the expense of maintaining a station in the cometary zone. The expense was tremendous, but the potential rewards were astronomical. There were fifteen companies elbowing each other for a piece of the action, from the giants like Star Line and HotLine, Ltd., down to several free-lancers who paid holehunters to listen in when they were in the vicinity.
But the volume of transmissions was enough to make a board chairman weep and develop ulcers. And the aliens, with what the company thought was boorish inconsideration, insisted on larding the valuable stuff with quintillions of bits of gibberish that might be poetry or might be pornography or recipes or pictures or who-knew-what that the computers had never been able to unscramble and had given a few that chewed it over too long the galloping jitters. The essential problem was that ninety-nine percent of what the aliens thought worth sending over the Line was trash to humans. But that one per cent . . .
. . . the Symbiotic Spacesuits, that had made it possible for a human civilization to inhabit the Rings of Saturn with no visible means of support, feeding, respirating, and watering each other in a closed-ecology daisy chain.
. . . the Partial Gravitational Rigor, which made it possible to detect and hunt and capture quantum black holes and make them sit up and do tricks for you, like powering a space drive.
. . . Macromolecule Manipulation, without which people would die after only two centures of life.
. . . Null-field and all the things it had made possible.
Those were the large, visible things that had changed human life in drastic amounts but had not made anyone huge fortunes simply because they were so big that they quickly diffused through the culture because of their universal application. The real money was in smaller, patentable items, like circuitry, mechanical devices, chemistry, and games.
It was Jordan’s job to sift those few bits of gold from the oceans of gossip or whatever it was that poured down the Line every day.
And to do it before Treemonisha and his other competitors. If possible, to find things that Treemonisha missed entirely. He was aided by a computer that tirelessly sorted and compared to dump the more obvious chaff before printing out a large sheet of things it thought might be of interest.
Jordan scanned that sheet each day, marking out items and thinking about them. He had a lot to think about, and a lot to think with. He was an encyclopedic synthesist, a man with volumes of major and minor bits and pieces of human knowledge and the knack of putting it together and seeing how it might fit with the new stuff from the Line. When he saw something good, he warmed up his big laser and fired it off special delivery direct to Pluto. Everything else—including the things the computer had rejected as nonsense, because you never could tell what the monster brains on Luna might pick out of it on the second or third go-round—he recorded on a chip the size of a flyspeck and loaded it into a tiny transmitter and fired it off parcel post in a five-stage, high-gee message rocket. His aim didn’t have to be nearly as good as the Ophiuchites; a few months later, the payload would streak by Pluto and squeal out its contents in the two minutes it was in radio range of the big dish.
“I wish their aim had been a little better,” he groused to himself as he went over the printout for the fourth time. He knew it was nonsense, but he felt like grousing.
The diameter of the laser beam by the time it reached Sol was half a billion kilometers. The center of the beam was twice the distance from Pluto to the sun, a distance amounting to about twenty seconds of arc from 70 Ophiuchi. But
why aim it at the sun? No one listening there. Where would the logical place be to aim a message laser?
Jordan was of the opinion that the aim of the Ophiuchites was better than the company president gave them credit for. Out here, there was very little in the way of noise to garble the transmissions. If they had directed the beam through the part of the solar system where planets are most likely to be found—where they all are found—the density of expelled solar gases would have played hob with reception. Besides, Jordan felt that none of the information would have been much good to planet-bound beings, anyway. Once humanity had developed the means of reaching the cometary zone and found that messages were being sent out there rather than to the Earth, where everyone had always expected to find them, they were in a position to utilize the information.
“They knew what they were doing, all right,” he muttered, but the thought died away as something halfway down the second page caught his eye. Jordan never knew for sure just what he was seeing in the digests. Perhaps a better way to make cyanide stew, or advice to lovelorn Ophiuchites. But he could spot when something might have relevance to his own species. He was good at his work. He looked at the symbols printed there, and decided they might be of some use to a branch of genetic engineering.
Ten minutes later, the computer had lined up the laser and he punched the information into it. The lights dimmed as the batteries were called upon to pour a large percentage of their energy into three spaced pulses, five seconds apart. Jordan yawned, and scratched himself. Another day’s work done; elapsed time, three hours. He was doing well—that only left twenty-one hours before he had anything else he needed to do.
Ah, leisure.
He approached the holo tank again and with considerable trepidation pressed the call button. He was afraid to think of what he might do if Treemonisha did not answer this time.
“You had no call to say what you said,” she accused, as she appeared in the tank.