Nova

by Samuel R. Delany

  Lorq looked at his knee, his thumb, his other knee. "You're asking me questions and you're not answering mine, Dad,"

  His father took a breath. "I'm trying to. Before there was any settling in the Pleiades at all, expansion throughout Draco was carried on by national governments on Earth, or by corporations, ones comparable to Red-shift— corporations and governments that could afford the initial cost of transportation. The new colonies were subsidized, operated, and owned by Earth. They became part of Earth, and Earth became the center of Draco. At that time another technical problem that was being solved by the early engineers of Red-shift Limited was the construction of spaceships with more sensitive frequency ranges that could negotiate the comparatively 'dusty' areas of space, as in the free-floating interstellar nebulas, and in regions of dense stellar population like the Pleiades, where there was a much higher concentration of sloughed-off interstellar matter. Something like a whirlpool nebula still gives your little yacht trouble. It would have completely immobilized a ship made two hundred and fifty years ago. Your great-great-grandfather, when exploration was just beginning in the Pleiades, was very much aware of what I've just told you: the cost of transportation is the most important factor in our society. And within the Pleiades itself, the cost of transportation is substantially less than in Draco."

  Lorq frowned. "You mean the distances ...?"

  "The central section of the Pleiades is only thirty light-years across and eighty-five long. Some three hundred suns are packed into this space, many of them less than a light-year apart. The suns of Draco are scattered over one whole arm of the galaxy, almost sixteen thousand light-years from end to end. There's a big difference in cost when you only have to jump the tiny distances within the Pleiades cluster as compared with the huge expanses of Draco. So you had a different kind of people coming into the Pleiades: small businesses that wanted to pick up and move themselves lock, stock, and barrel; co-operative groups of colonists; even private citizens— rich private citizens, but private nevertheless. Your great-great-grandfather came here with three commercial liners filled with junk, prefab hot and cold shelters, discarded mining and farming equipment for a whole range of climates. Most of it he'd been paid to haul away from Draco. Two of the liners had been stolen, incidentally. He also had gotten hold of a couple of atomic cannons. He went around to every new settlement and offered his goods. And everyone bought from him."

  "He forced them to buy at cannon point?"

  "No. He also offered them a bonus service that made it worthwhile to take the junk. You see, the fact that transportation costs were lower hadn't stopped the governments and big corporations from trying to move in. Any ship that came bearing a multimillon-dollar name out of Draco, any emissary from some Draco monopoly trying to extend itself into new territory— Grandfather blew them up.

  "Did he loot them too?" Lorq asked. "Did he pick over the remains?"

  "He never told me. I only know he had a vision— a selfish, mercenary, ego-centered vision that he implemented in any way he could, at anyone's expense. During the formative years of its existence, he did not let the Pleiades become an extension of Draco. He saw in Pleiades' independence a chance to become the most powerful man in a political entity that might someday rival Draco. Before my father was your age, great-grandfather had accomplished that."

  "I still don't understand what that has to do with Red-shift."

  "Red-shift was one of the mega-companies that made the most concerted efforts to move into the Pleiades. They tried to claim the thorium mines that are now run by your school friend's father, Dr. Setsumi. They attempted to begin harvesting the plastic lichens on Circle IV. Each time, Granddad blew them up. Red-shift is transportation, and when the cost of transportation goes down compared to the number of ships made, Red-shift feels its throat throttled."

  "And this is why Prince Red can call us pirates?"

  "A couple of times Aaron Red the first— Prince's father is the third— sent one of his more uppity nephews to head his expeditions into the Pleiades. Three of them, I believe. They never got back. Even in my father's time the feud was pretty much a personal matter. There'd been retaliation, and it had gone on well beyond the declaration of sovereignty that the Pleiades Federation made in 'twenty-six. One of my personal projects as a young man your age was to end it. My father gave a lot of money to Harvard on Earth, built them a laboratory, and then sent me to the school. I married your mother, from Earth, and I spent a lot of time talking with Aaron— Prince's father. It wasn't too difficult to effect, since the sovereignty of the Pleiades had been an accepted fact for a generation, and Red-shift had long since stopped teetering under any direct threat from us. My father purchased the Illyrion mine out at New Brazillia— this was back when the mining operations were just beginning in the Outer Colonies— mainly as an excuse to have some reason to deal formally with Red-shift. I never mentioned the feud to you, because I thought there was no need to."

  "Prince is just crazy then, breaking out an old grudge that you and Aaron settled before we were born."

  "I can't comment on Prince's sanity. But you have to bear in mind: what's the biggest factor affecting the cost of transportation today?"

  "The Illyrion mines in the Outer Colonies."

  "There's a hand around Red-shift's throat again," his father said. "Can you see it?"

  "Mining Illyrion naturally is much cheaper than manufacturing it."

  "Even if it takes plugging in a population of millions upon millions. Even if three dozen competing companies from both Draco and the Pleiades have opened mines all over the Outer Colonies and subsidized vast migrations of labor from all over the galaxy. What strikes you as different about the set-up of the Outer Colonies as opposed to Draco and the Pleiades?"

  "It has, comparatively, all the Illyrion it wants right there."

  "Yes. But also this: Draco was extended by the vastly monied classes of Earth. The Pleiades was populated by a comparatively middle-class movement. Though the Outer Colonies have been prompted by those with money both in the Pleiades and Draco, the population of the colonies comes from the lowest economic strata of the galaxy. The combination of cultural difference— and I don't care what your social studies teachers at Causby say— and the difference in the cost of transportation is what assures the eventual sovereignty of the Outer Colonies. And suddenly Red-shift is striking out at anyone who has their hands on Illyrion again." He gestured toward his son. "You've been hit."

  "But we've only got one Illyrion mine. Our money comes from the control of how many dozen different types of businesses all over the Pleiades, a few of them in Draco now— the mine on Sao Orini is a trifle— "

  "True. But have you ever noticed the businesses we don't handle?"

  "What do you mean, Dad?"

  "We have very little money in shelter or food production. We are in computers, small technical components; we make the housing for Illyrion batteries; we make plugs and sockets; we mine heavily in other areas. The last time I saw Aaron, on this past trip, I said to him, jokingly of course: 'You know, if the price of Illyrion were only at half the price it is now, in a year I could be making spaceships at less than half the price you manufacture them.' And do you know what he said to me, jokingly?"

  Lorq shook his head.

  "'I've known that for ten years.'"

  His mother's image put her cup down. "I think he must have his face fixed. You're such a fine-looking boy, Lorq, it's been three days since that Australian brought you back home. That scar is just going to— "

  "Dana," his father said. "Lorq, can you think of any way to lower the price of Illyrion by half?"

  Lorq frowned. "Why?"

  "I've figured that at the present rate of expansion, in fifteen years the Outer Colonies will be able to lower the cost of Illyrion by almost a quarter. During that time, Red-shift is going to try to kill us." He paused. "Knock everything out from under the Von Rays, and ultimately, the whole Pleiades Federation. We have a long way to fall. Th
e only way we can survive is to kill them first; and the only way we can do that is to figure out a way to get Illyrion down to half price before it goes down to three quarters, and make those ships." His father folded his arms. "I didn't want to get you involved in this, Lorq. I saw the termination of the whole affair coming in my lifetime. But Prince has taken it on himself to strike the first blow at you. It's only fair you be told what's happening."

  Lorq was looking down at his hands. After a while he said, "I'll strike a blow back."

  "No," his mother said. "That's not the way to handle this, Lorq. You can't get back at Prince; you can't think of getting back at— "

  "I'm not." He stood up and walked to the curtains. "Mom, Dad, I'm going out."

  "Lorq," his father said, unfolding his arms, "I didn't mean to upset you. But I just wanted you to know ... "

  Lorq pushed back the brocade curtains. "I'm going down to the Caliban. Good-bye." The drape swung.

  "Lorq— "

  His name was Lorq Von Ray and he lived at 12 Extol Park in Ark, the capital city of the Pleiades Federation. He walked beside the moving road. Through the wind shields, the winter gardens of the city bloomed. People looked at him. That was because of the scar, He was thinking about Illyrion. People looked, then looked away when they saw him look back. Here, in the center of the Pleiades, he himself was a center, a focus. He had once tried to calculate the amount of money that devolved from his immediate family. He was the focus of billions, walking along by the clear walls of the covered streets of Ark, listening to the glistening lichens ululate in the winter gardens. One out of five people on the street— so one of his father's accountants had informed them— was being paid a salary either directly or indirectly by Von Ray. And Red-shift was making ready to declare war on the whole structure that was Von Ray, that focused on himself as the Von Ray heir. At Sao Orini, a lizard-like animal with a mane of white feathers roamed and hissed in the jungles. The miners caught them, starved them, then turned them on one another in the pit to wager on the outcome. How many millions of years back, those three-foot lizards' ancestors had been huge, hundred-meter beasts, and, the intelligent race which had inhabited New Brazillia had worshiped them, carving life-sized stone heads about the foundations of their temples. But the race— that race was gone. And the offspring of that race's gods, dwarfed by evolution, were mocked in the pits by drunken miners as they clawed and screeched and bit. And he was Lorq Von Ray. And somehow Illyrion had to have its price lowered by half. You could flood the market with the stuff. But where could you go to get what was probably the rarest substance in the universe? You couldn't fly into the center of a sun and scoop it out of the furnace where all the substances of the galaxy were smelted from raw nuclear matter by units of four. He caught his reflection in one of the mirrored columns, and he stopped just before the turnoff to Nea Limani. The fissure dislocated his features, full-lipped, yellow-eyed. But where the scar entered the kinky red, he noticed something. The new hair growing was the same color and texture as his father's, soft and yellow as flame,

  Where do you get that much Illyrion (he turned from the mirrored column)? Where?

  "You're asking me, Captain?" From the revolving stage in the floor Dan lifted his mug to his knee. "If I knew, I wouldn't be bumming around this field now." He reached down, took the handle of the mug from his toes, and drank half. "Thanks for the drink." With his wrist he scrubbed his mouth, ringed with stubble and mustached with foam. "When are you going to get your face put back together ..."

  But Lorq was leaning back on the seat, looking through the ceiling. The lights about the field left only the hundred brightest stars visible. On the ceiling, the kaleidoscopic wind-iris was shutting. Centered among the blue, purple, and vermilion vanes was a star.

  "Say, Captain, if you want to go up in the balcony ..."

  On the second level of the bar, visible through falling water, the freighter officers and some of the liner crew mixed with the sportsmen discussing currents and cosmic conditions. The lower level was crowded with mechanics and commercial studs. Card games progressed in the corner.

  "I got to get me a job, Captain. Letting me sleep in the back chamber of Caliban, then getting me drunk every night doesn't help much. I've got to turn you loose."

  Wind passed again; the iris shuddered about the star. "Dan, have you," Lorq mused, "ever realized that every sun, as we travel between them, is a furnace where the very worlds of empire are smelted? Every element among the hundreds is fused from their central nuclear matter. Take that one there— " He pointed at the transparent roof. "— or any one: gold is fusing there right now, and radium, nitrogen, antimony, in amounts that are huge— bigger than Ark, bigger than Earth. And there's Illyrion there too, Dan." He laughed. "Suppose there were some way to dip into one of those stars and ladle out what I wanted." He laughed again; the sound caught in his chest, where anguish, despair, and fury fused. "Suppose we could stand at the edge of some star gone nova and wait for what we wanted to be flung out, and catch it as it flamed by— but novas are implosions, not explosions, hey, Dan?" He pushed the stud's shoulder playfully. Drink sloshed from the mug's rim.

  "Me, Captain, I was in a nova, once." Dan licked the back of his hand.

  "Were you now?" Lorq pressed his head against the cushion. The haloed star flickered.

  "Ship I was on got caught in a nova— must be about ten years ago."

  "Aren't you glad you weren't on it."

  "I was. We got out again too."

  Lorq looked down from the ceiling.

  Dan sat forward on the green bench, knobby elbows on his knees; his hands wrapped the mug.

  "You did?"

  "Yeah." Dan glanced at his shoulder where the broken lace on his vest was clumsily knotted. "We fell in, and we got out."

  Puzzlement surfaced on Lorq's face.

  "Hey, Captain! You look fierce, don't you!"

  Five times now Lorq had passed his face in a mirror, thinking it bore one expression, to discover the scar had translated it into something that totally amazed. "What happened, Dan?"

  The Australian looked at his mug. There was only foam at the bottom of the glass.

  Lorq pressed the order plate on the bench arm. Two more mugs circled toward them, foam dissolving,

  "Just what I needed, Captain," Dan reached out his foot. "One for you. There you go. And one for me.'

  Lorq sipped his drink and stuck his feet out to rest on the sandal heels. Nothing moved on his face, Nothing moved behind it.

  "You know the Alkane Institute?" Dan raised his voice above the cheers and laughter from the corner where two mechanics had begun wrestling on the trampoline. Spectators waved their drinks. "On Vorpis in Draco they got this big museum with laboratories and stuff, and they study things like novas."

  "My aunt's a curator there." Lorq's voice was low, words clearing beneath the shouts.

  "Yeah? Anyway, they send out people whenever they get reports of some star acting up— "

  "Look! She winning is!"

  "No! He her arm watch pull!"

  "Hey, Von Ray, you the man or woman will win think?" A group of officers had come down the ramp to watch the match. One slapped Lorq's shoulder, then turned his hand up. There was a ten-pound @sg piece in his palm.

  "I not tonight wager make." Lorq pushed the hand away.

  "Lorq, I double this on the woman lay— "

  "Tomorrow your money I take," Lorq said. "Now you go."

  The young officer made a disgusted sound and drew his finger down his face, shaking his head to his companions.

  But Lorq was waiting for Dan to go on.

  Dan turned from the wrestling. "It seems a freighter got lost in a tidal drift and noticed something funny about the spectral lines of some star a couple of solars away. Stars are mostly hydrogen, yeah, but there was a big build-up of heavy materials on the gases of the surface; that means something odd. When they finally got themselves found, they reported the condition of the star to the cartographi
c society of the Alkane, who took a guess at what it was— the build-up of a nova. Because the make-up of a star doesn't change in a nova, you can't detect the build-up over any distance with spectranalysis or anything like that; Alkane sent-out a team to watch the star. They've studied some twenty or thirty of them in the last fifty years. They put up rings of remote-control stations as close to the star as Mercury is to Sol; they send televised pictures of the star's surface; these stations burn the second the sun goes. They put rings of stations further and further out that send second-by-second reports of the whole thing. At about one light-week they have the first manned stations; even these are abandoned for stations further out soon as the nova begins. Anyway, I was on a ship that was supposed to bring supplies to one of these manned stations that was sitting around waiting for the sun to blow. You know the actual time it takes for the sun to go from its regular brightness to maximum magnitude twenty or thirty thousand times as bright is only about two or three hours."

  Lorq nodded.

  "They still can't judge exactly when a nova that they've been watching is going to go. Now I don't understand it exactly, but somehow the sun we were coming to went up just before we reached our stop-off station. Maybe it was a twist in space itself, or a failure of instruments, but we overshot the station and went right on into the sun, during the first hour of implosion." Dan lowered his mouth to sip off foam.

  "All right," Lorq said. "From the heat, you should have been atomized before you were as close to the sun as Pluto is from Sol. You should have been crushed by the actual physical battering. The gravitational tides should have torn you to pieces. The amount of radiation the ship was exposed to should have, first, knocked apart every organic compound in the ship, and second, fissioned every atom down into ionized hydrogen— "

  "Captain, I can think of seven more things without trying. The ionization frequencies should have— " Dan stopped. "But none of them did. Our ship was funneled directly through the center of the sun— and out the other side. We were deposited safely about two light-weeks away. The captain, as soon as he realized what was happening, pulled his head in and turned off all our sensory-input scanners so that we were falling blind. An hour later he peeked out and was very surprised to find we were still— period. But the instruments recorded our path. We had gone straight through the nova." Dan finished his drink. He looked sideways at Lorq. "Captain, you're looking all fierce again."