Nova

by Samuel R. Delany

  "What's the explanation?"

  Dan shrugged. "They came up with a lot of suggestions when Alkane got hold of us. They got these bubbles, see, exploding on the surface of any sun, two or three times the size of medium-sized planets, where the temperature is as low as eight hundred or a thousand degrees. That sort of temperature might not destroy a ship. Perhaps we were caught in one of those and carried on through the sun. Somebody else suggested perhaps the energy frequencies of a nova are all polarized in one direction while something caused the ship's energies to polarize in another so that they sort of passed through one another just like they didn't touch. But other people came up with just as many theories to knock those down. What seems most likely is that when time and space are subjected to such violent strains like you got in a nova, the laws that govern the natural machinery of physics and physical happenings as we know them just don't work right." Dan shrugged again. "They never did get it settled."

  "Look! Look, he her down has!"

  "One, two— no, she away pulls— "

  "No! He her has! He her has!"

  On the trampoline the grinning mechanic staggered over his opponent. Half a dozen drinks had already been brought for him; by custom he had to finish as many as he could, and the loser drink the rest. More officials had come down to congratulate him and stake wagers on the next match.

  "I wonder ..." Lorq frowned.

  "Captain, I know you can't help it, but you shouldn't look like that."

  "I wonder if the Alkane has any record of that trip, Dan."

  "I guess they do. Like I say, it was about ten years ...

  But Lorq was looking at the ceiling. The iris had shut under the wind that wracked Ark's night. The clashing mandala completely covered the star.

  Lorq raised his hands to his face. His lips fell back as he hunted at the roots of the idea pushing through his mind. Fissured flesh translated his expression to beatific torture.

  Dan started to speak again. Then he moved away, his gristly face filled with puzzlement.

  His name was Lorq Von Ray. He had to repeat it silently, secure it with repetition; because an idea had just split his being. As he sat, looking up, he felt totally shaken. Something central had been parted as violently as Prince's hand had parted his face. He blinked to clear the stars. And his name

  Draco (Roc transit), 3172

  "Yes, Captain Von Ray?"

  "Pull in the side vanes."

  The Mouse pulled in.

  "We're hitting the steady stream, side vanes in completely. Lynceos and Idas, stay on your vanes and take the first watch. The rest of you can break out for a while," Lorq's voice boomed over the sounds of space.

  Turning from the vermilion rush, in which hung the charred stars, the Mouse blinked and realized the chamber once more.

  Olga blinked.

  The Mouse sat up on the couch to unplug.

  "I'll see you in the commons," the captain continued. "And Mouse, bring your ..."

  Chapter Four

  The Mouse pulled the leather sack from under the couch and slung it over his shoulder.

  " ...sensory-syrynx with you."

  The door slid back and the Mouse stood at the top of three steps above the blue carpet of the Roc's commons:

  A stairway spiraled in a fall of shadows: tongues of metal twisting under the lights on the ceiling sent flashings over the wall and the leaves of the philodendrons before the mirrored mosaic.

  Katin had already seated himself before the layered gaming board for three-D chess and was setting up pieces. A final rook clicked to its corner, and the bubble chair, a globe of jellied glycerin contoured to the body, bobbed, "All right, who's going to play me first?"

  Captain Von Ray stood at the head of the spiral steps. As he started down, his smashed reflection graveled down the mosaic.

  "Captain?" Katin raised his chin. "Mouse? Which one of you wants the first game?"

  Tyy and Sebastian came through the arched door and across the ramp that spanned the lime-banked pool filling a third of the room.

  A breeze.

  The water rippled.

  Darknesses sailed in over their heads.

  "Down!" from Sebastian.

  His arm jerked in its socket, and the beasts wheeled on steel leashes. The huge pets collapsed about him like rags.

  "Sebastian? Tyy? Do you play?" Katin turned to the ramp.

  "It used to be a passion with me, but my game has gone off a bit." He gazed up the steps, picked up the rook again, and examined the black-cored crystal. "Tell me, Captain, are these pieces original?"

  At the bottom of the steps Von Ray raised red eyebrows.

  Katin grinned. "Oh."

  "What are they?" The Mouse came across the carpet and looked over Katin's shoulder. "I've never seen pieces like that before."

  "Funny style for chess pieces," Katin observed. "Vega Republic. But you see it a lot in furniture and architecture."

  "Where's the Vega Republic?" The Mouse took up a pawn: inside crystal, a sun system, a jewel in the center, circled a tilted plane.

  "It isn't anywhere any more. It refers to an uprising in twenty-eight hundred when Vega tried to secede from Draco. And failed. The art and architecture from that period have been taken up by our artier intellectuals. I suppose there was something heroic about the whole business. They certainly tried as hard as they could to be original-last stand for cultural autonomy and all that. But it's become sort of a polite parlor game to trace influences." He picked up another piece. "I still like the stuff. They did produce three gold musicians and one incredible poet. Though only one of the musicians had anything to do with the uprising. But most people don't know that."

  "No kidding?" the Mouse said. "All right. I'll play you a game." He walked around the chessboard and sat on the green glycerin. "What do you want, black or yellow?"

  Von Ray reached over the Mouse's shoulder for the control panel that had surfaced on the chair arm and pressed a micro-switch.

  The lights in the gaming board went out.

  "Hey, why ...?" The Mouse's rough whisper halted on chagrin.

  "Take your syrynx, Mouse." Lorq walked to the sculptured rock on the yellow tiles. "If I told you to make a nova, Mouse, what would you do?" He sat on a stone outcrop.

  "I don't know. What do you mean?" The Mouse lifted his instrument from its sack. His thumb ran the finger board. His fingers walked the inductance plate; the pinky staggered on its stilted nail.

  "I'm telling you now. Make a nova."

  The Mouse paused. Then, "All right," and his hand jumped.

  Sound rumbled after the flash. Colors behind the afterimage blotted vision, swirled in a diminishing sphere, were gone.

  "Down!" Sebastian was saying. "Down now ...

  Lorq laughed. "Not bad. Come here. No, bring your hell-harp." He shifted on the rock to make room. "Show me how it works."

  "Show you how to play the syrynx?"

  "That's right."

  There are expressions that happen on the outside of the face; there are expressions that happen on the inside, with only quivers on the lips and eyelids. "I don't usually let people fool with my ax." Lips and eyelids quivered.

  "Show me."

  The Mouse's mouth thinned. He said: "Give me your hand." As he positioned the captain's fingers across the saddle of the image-resonance board, blue light glowed before them. "Now look down here." The Mouse pointed to the front of the syrynx. "These three pin-lenses have hologramic grids behind them. They focus where the blue light is and give you a three-dimensional image. Brightness and intensity you control here. Move your hand forward."

  The light increased— "Now back."

  — and dimmed. "How do you make an image?"

  "Took me a year to learn, Captain. Now, these strings control the sound. Each one isn't a different note; they're different sound textures. The pitch is changed by moving your fingers closer or further away. Like this." He drew a chord of brass and human voices that glissandoed into uncomfortab
le subsonics. "You want to smell up the place? Back here. This knob controls the intensity of the image. You can make the whole thing highly directional by— "

  "Suppose, Mouse, there was a girl's face that I wanted to re-create; the sound of her voice saying my name; the smell of her too. Now, I have your syrynx in my hands." He lifted the instrument from the Mouse's lap. "What should I do?"

  "Practice. Captain, look, I really don't like other people fooling with my ax— "

  He reached for it.

  Lorq lifted it out of the Mouse's reach. Then he laughed. "Here."

  The Mouse took the syrynx and went quickly to the chessboard. He shook the sack and slipped the instrument inside.

  "Practice," repeated Lorq. "I don't have time. Not if I'm to beat Prince Red to that Illyrion, hey?"

  "Captain Von Ray?"

  Lorq looked up.

  "Are you going to tell us what's going on?"

  "What do you want to know?"

  Katin's hand hung on the switch that would reactivate the chessboard. "Where are we going? How are we going to get there? And why?"

  After moments, Lorq stood. "What are you asking me, Katin?"

  The chessboard flicked on, lighting Katin's chin. "You're in a game, playing against Red-shift Limited. What are the rules? What's the prize?"

  Lorq shook his head. "Try again."

  "All right. How do we get the Illyrion?"

  "Yes, how we it get?" Tyy's soft voice made them look around. At the foot of the bridge, beside Sebastian, she had been shuffling her deck of cards. She stopped when they looked. "Into the blasting sun, plunge?" She shook her head. "How, Captain?"

  Lorq's hands capped the bone knots of his knees. "Lynceos? Idas?"

  On opposite walls hung two six-foot gilt frames. In the one just over the Mouse's head, Idas lay on his side under his computer's lights. Across the room in the other frame, hair and eyelashes glittering, pale Lynceos was curled on his cables.

  "While you sail us, keep an ear on."

  "Right, Captain," Idas mumbled, as a man talks in sleep.

  Lorq stood up and clasped his hands. "It's been a good number of years since I first had to ask that question. The person who answered it for me was Dan."

  "Blind Dan?"— the Mouse.

  "Dan who jumped?"— Katin.

  Lorq nodded. "Instead of this hunk of freighter"— He glanced up where simulated stars hurled on the high, dark ceiling to remind them that, among pools and ferns and shapes of rock, they sped between worlds— "I had a racing boat that Dan was studding for. I stayed out too late at a party one night in Paris, and Dan got me home to Ark. He flew me there all the way by himself. My other stud, some college kid, got scared and ran off." He shook his head. "Just as well. But there I was. How could I get hold of enough Illyrion to topple Red-shift before they toppled us? How many people would like to know that? I mentioned it to Dan one evening when we were drinking around the yacht basin. Get it out of a sun? He stuck his thumb in his belt and looked at one of the wind irises dilating over the bar and said, 'I was caught in a nova once,'" Lorq looked around the room. "It made me sit up and listen."

  "What happened to him?" the Mouse asked.

  "How come he was around long enough to get into another one? That's what I want to know." Katin returned the rook to the board and lounged back on the jelly. "Come on— where was Dan through all the fireworks?"

  "He was in the crew of a ship that was bringing supplies to one of the Alkane Institute's study stations when the star blew."

  The Mouse glanced back at Tyy and Sebastian, who listened from the steps at the end of the ramp. Tyy was shuffling her cards again.

  "After a thousand years of study, from close up and far away, it's a bit unnerving how much we don't know about what happens in the center of the most calamitous of stellar catastrophes. The make-up of the star stays the same, only the organization of the matter within the star is disrupted by a process that is still not quite understood. It could be an effect of tidal harmonics. It could even be a prank of Maxwell's demon. The longest build-ups observed have been a year and a half, but these were always caught after they were under way. The actual time a nova takes to reach its peak intensity from the time it blows is a few hours. In the case of a super-nova— and there have only been two on record in our galaxy, one in the thirteenth century in Cassiopeia, and an unnamed star in twenty-four hundred, and neither of those could be studied up close— the blow takes perhaps two days; in a super-nova the brightness increases by a factor of several hundred thousand. The resultant light and radio disturbance of a super-nova is more than the combined light of all the stars in the galaxy. Alkane has discovered other galaxies simply because a super-nova occurred inside them and the near-total annihilation of a single star made the whole galaxy of several billion stars visible."

  Tyy flicked cards from hand to hand.

  Sebastian asked, "What to Dan happened?" He reined his pets closer to his knees.

  "His ship overshot and was funneled through the center of the sun in the middle of its first hour of implosion— and then funneled out the other side," Yellow eyes fixed Katin. On the ruptured features it was hard to read subtleties in Lorq's emotions.

  Katin, used to hard readings; dropped his shoulders and tried to sink into the chair.

  "They only had seconds' warning. All the captain could do was switch off all incoming sensory inputs in the studs."

  "They blind flew?" asked Sebastian.

  Lorq nodded.

  "This was a nova Dan was in, before he even met you; the first," confirmed Katin.

  "That's right."

  "What happened in the second?"

  "One more thing that happened in the first. I went to the Alkane and looked up the whole business. The hull of the ship was scarred from bombardment with loose drifting matter at about the time it was in the nova's center. The only matter that could break off and drift into the area of protection around the ship must have been formed from the almost solid nuclear matter in the sun's center. It would have to be formed of elements with immense nuclei, at least three or our times the size of uranium."

  "You mean the ship was bombarded with meteors of Illyrion?" the Mouse demanded.

  "One of the things that happened in the second nova"—

  Lorq looked at Katin again— "was that after our expedition was organized in complete secrecy, after a new nova had been located with my aunt's help from the Alkane Institute without letting anyone know why we wanted to go there, after the expedition was launched and under way, I was trying to re-create the original conditions of the first accident when Dan's ship had fallen into the sun, as closely as possible, by flying the whole maneuver blind; I gave an order to the crew to keep the sensory input off in their perception chambers. Dan, going against orders, decided he wanted to take a look at what he hadn't seen last time." Lorq stood up and turned his back to the crew. "We weren't even in an area where there might have been any physical danger to the ship. Suddenly I felt one vane of the ship flailing wild. Then I heard Dan screaming." He turned to face them. "We pulled out and limped back to Draco and took the tidal drift down to Sol and landed on Triton Station. The secrecy ended two months back."

  "Secrecy?" Katin asked,

  The twisted thing that was Lorq's smile rose in the muscles of his face, "Not any more. I came to Triton Station in Draco rather than shelter in the Pleiades. I dismissed my whole crew with instructions to tell as many people as they could— all they knew. I let that madman stagger around the port babbling till Hell3 swallowed him. I waited. And I waited till what I was waiting for came. Then I picked you up right off the port's concourse. I told you what I was going to do. Who did you tell? How many people heard me tell you? How many people did you mutter to, scratching your heads, 'That's a funny thing to do, huh?'" Lorq's hand knotted on a spike of stone.

  "What were you waiting for?"

  "A message from Prince."

  "Did you get it?"

  "Yes."

&
nbsp; "What did it say?"

  "Does it matter?" Lorq made a sound nearly laughter. Only it came from his belly. "I haven't played it yet."

  "Why not?" the Mouse asked. "Don't you want to know what he says?"

  "I know what I'm doing. That's enough. We'll return to the Alkane and locate another nova. My mathematicians came up with two dozen theories that might explain the phenomenon that lets us enter the sun. In all of them, the effect would reverse at the end of those first few hours during which the brightness of the star rose to peak intensity."

  "How long a nova to die takes?" Sebastian asked.

  "A few weeks, perhaps two months. A super-nova can take up to two years to dwindle."

  "The message, the Mouse said. "You don't want to see what Prince says?"

  "You do?"

  Katin suddenly leaned over the chessboard. "Yes."

  Lorq laughed. "All right." He strode across the room. Once more he touched the control panel on the Mouse's chair.

  In the largest frame on the high wall the light fantasy faded in the two-meter oval of gilded leaves.

  "So. That's what you've been doing all these years!" Prince said.

  The Mouse watched the gaunt jaws and his own jaws clamped; his eyes raised to Prince's thin, high hair, and the Mouse's own forehead tightened. He pushed forward in the chair, his fingers twitching to shape, as on a syrynx, the bladed nose, the wells of blue.

  Katin's eyes widened. His sandal heels grabbed the carpet as involuntarily he pushed away.

  "I don't know what you think you're going to accomplish. Nor do I care. But ..."

  "That Prince is?" Tyy whispered.