At last (and the search took him an uncomfortably long time) Michel found an open line of sight through which he could just distinguish a few degrees of a curving spiral arm that he judged must be a thousand parsecs distant. That arm, Michel decided after he had looked at it for a while, embodied a great curve that was centered truly on the invisible Core. At least, the three-thousand-year-old light of those far stars brought into his/Lancelot's eyes a description of how that arm had curved three thousand years ago. From that information it was obvious at least at what angle the plane of the galaxy lay—that would not have changed much in a mere three thousand years—and also in which direction was the Core.
Quite near the Core, he knew, lay Blackwool Nebula. Michel looked in that direction now, with eyes that stung, and presently he began to move. Impatiently he dodged the wisps and specks of matter that flickered past him, impeding his progress by preventing Lance from reaching anything like his best true speed. Home. Alpine. . . .
And almost before he had dared to begin to hope for it, he could see the dark mass of Blackwool outlined plainly before him. His home sun was still invisible, of course, inside, but Michel knew that it would be there, a single bright jewel in a black velvet pouch, and round it the fragile ring of Alpine's orbit. In another moment tears had blurred his/Lance's vision totally.
"Mother," he murmured, stretching out his arms. Lance needed no conscious orders now. The specks of matter in his pathway thinned; the last fringes of an obstructing nebula were being left behind, in an eye-blink of speed.
When Michel's vision cleared again, he beheld an altering universe. The stars before him were gradually clustering together, in a formation centered on the dark nebula he sought. At the same time their light was shifting into the blue. When he glanced back he saw that the remaining stars and nebulae were clustering there, this time redly. All around Michel and at right angles to his flight, a belt of blackly deserted sky was widening. And now his own body began to appear distorted. His fingers were foreshortened when he stretched out a hand; his shoulders seemed to be set far below a slowly elongating neck.
He knew these were illusions, and he thought about them vaguely, and in time a vague sort of understanding came: ride a fast flyer through a rainstorm, and the drops must appear to come from almost nowhere but straight ahead. So with light quanta if your flyer approached the speed of light.
Other effects had to be involved as well, but they did not matter, he thought. The point was that he had to be approaching lightspeed. Still the dark nebula with its false halo of blue suns remained apparently as far away as ever. He could not detect growth in its size at all. He was still crawling across a lifetime of black utter emptiness.
He stretched his hands out, far ahead of him, toward his home where mother would be waiting. The middle portions of his arms ceased to exist, disappeared into his equatorial belt of nothingness. His/Lancelot's hands were distorted into a tight, dark ring, almost lost in blue starlight, encircling Blackwool nebula.
It seemed to Michel that he could hear a sound, the whistle of a heavy log-hauler late at night. Some tame machine signaling its need for human help, stuck somewhere on a winding road that threaded Alpine's glacial deserts and deep forests.
Oh, Lance, I've got to close my eyes. You've got to—somehow—get me home. Where I can sleep.
Lance would take care of it. Somehow. And sleep of a kind did come at last.
TWELVE
"Just like old times, El. Or Almost."
Come to think of it, she had recently heard those same words, or some very like them, several times. The voice they came in was rather mechanical, but most definitely human and achingly familiar. And this time, at last, the meaning of the words and voice had penetrated.
It was, oh God, it was truly Frank.
This time Elly awoke in no civilian passenger's berth, nor was she bound. She was wearing a service spacesuit, and rested in a scoutship's right-side combat couch. And once her eyes had opened properly she found that she was looking at the interior of a scoutship. Here and there her gaze lighted on an item of unfamiliar gear, but the basic outlines and colors had hardly changed in the ten years . . . no, it had to be more than ten years now . . . in all the time since she had served.
"Oh, Frank. Frank?" Looking through the comfortably open hatch into the opposite cabin compartment she could see him there as usual, boxed for combat, his armored personal hardware no more and no less changed than that of the modified ship around them. The scoutship that, when he was in it, seemed always to Elly to have become little more than an extension of Frank's self.
Unless . . . oh, God, this couldn't all be some kind of a berserker trick. Could it?
"Frank?" she called again, and tried to move. Though unbound, she was too weak, and too well secured by the neatly fitting couch, to get out of it quickly and easily. Also, the attempt made her body hurt in several places, and she now became aware of several medirobot tubes that were patched into her suit and presumably into her body as well. Giving up the attempt to rise immediately, she lay back in the couch, not minding the mild pain at all; it authenticated reality.
"El?" came the familiar voice from the other compartment. "I think you're really with me, this time. Welcome aboard."
She muttered something hopelessly inadequate.
"I pulled you out of a civvie lifeboat back there. Remember that?"
From the feel and the faint sounds of the scout around her she could tell that they were making good sublight time. "Not being pulled out, no."
"But getting into it? From that goodlife ship? The important thing I've got to know is, were there any other survivors? That could be vital."
"There was a boy. He helped me into the boat. I don't know if he got clear himself or not. He had—he was wearing Lancelot. If you know what Lancelot—"
"That's him. Michel. Where is he now?"
"I don't know, Frank. I don't know where I am."
But Frank was muttering to himself: "I wonder if I can get a scrambled beam through . . ." At the controls he displayed even less physical movement than was required of a pilot in a body of whole flesh, but Elly knew the subtle signs that meant that he was working. The idea that all this could be some berserker deception was fading from her mind, rapidly and gratefully.
"Secretary Tupelov direct," Frank was ordering. "Urgent from Colonel Marcus."
"Tupelov?" she asked in wonder.
"He's out here with the task force. Stand by one, El, let me get this into the pipe." Frank began spouting detailed galactic co-ordinates, which in their very remoteness from any she had been expecting to hear were somehow all the more convincing. " . . . and I'm bringing her straight back to the Big K. Towing the lifeboat on a cable beam, about fifty klicks behind me, just in case the bad machines tried any funny business with it." He interrupted his transmission to turn part of his attention back to her. "What do you know for sure about what's happened to the kid?"
She went into more detail about her last minutes aboard the goodlife ship; Frank sent off a little more information.
"So there's a task force," Elly said, when he seemed to have completed his transmission.
"Yeah. Well. I don't know how much of the story you know. If you were on that ship when we hit it, you must have been on it at the proving grounds. Don't tell me you've turned goodlife, though; I'm not going to believe that."
"No. No, I was taken along by force." She stumbled through an attempted explanation of her abduction from the Temple.
"Okay, if you say so. Good enough for me."
Quite possibly, Elly realized, not good enough for some others. But even to be accused of being goodlife seemed like a very minor problem at the moment. "There were goodlife on the ship, of course. Three of them still alive, at my last count. I don't know what happened to them when you people hit us. You've been chasing us, all the way from Sol?"
"More than a standard year now. More trying to intercept than chasing, and we finally did it. Tupelov's gathe
red a regular bloody armada as we've come along. Every system we've put in at, people have been ready to contribute a ship or two.
"Then we found a berserker base near here—I guess the brass on several worlds have known about it for some time, at least that it was in this general region, but nobody could get up the nerve to hit it. Marvelous what a crisis can do sometimes. After we hit the base we left the hulk of it in place, with some fake devices to respond to signals. Parts of our force went home again after that, but the Sol System people stayed; we've been on ambush station for the better part of a standard month. And then you—the goodlife ship and escort—finally showed.
"Tupelov's good at his job, you've got to give him that. He even brought the kid's mother along, just in case we might be able to get Michel back without wasting him. I admit I never thought there was a chance of that."
"Frank. I'm his mother."
There was a silent pause. Then: "You're wandering, El. They've done things inside your head."
"No. Why do you suppose they kidnapped me? He represents my terminated pregnancy—it must be thirteen years ago now, or thereabouts. It has to be that long."
"Terminated pregnancy—I never knew you had one. Lady, I still think the bad machines must have stuffed all that into your head."
Elly shook her head, which felt quite clear. "Of course Michel must have had an adoptive mother somewhere, too. It might be her that you've brought along with your task force. But I don't know her name."
"Name's Carmen Geulincx. But I never heard anything about her being adoptive. That doesn't prove she's not, of course." Frank's voice became slow and doubtful. "But . . ."
"She comes from Alpine, doesn't she?"
A few seconds passed, in which Frank's boxes gave no sign of being any more than inert machinery. Then his speakers commented, "I guess you had some time aboard that ship to talk to him."
"A lot. But I wouldn't have had, unless I were his mother. The berserkers knew it. And Tupelov knows it, too."
"Well, when I get you back to the Big K you can talk all this over with him. . . . Hey, wait. Alpine, almost thirteen years ago? That's when you and I put in there. That was just shortly after—"
Again the boxes apparently went dead, this time so abruptly that some main power switch might have been thrown on them. Elly waited. At last Frank asked, "A very early pregnancy?"
"Very early. That's right, Frank. Michel is your son."
* * *
"You were ready and willing to kill him. You ordered him to be killed. Didn't you?" Carmen's voice hadn't quite broken yet, but any moment now. Her face was transformed into a stage mask of rage and hate.
Tupelov was watching her warily from across the big cabin, almost a luxury stateroom, that made up part of flag quarters aboard the Johann Karlsen. He was thinking that Carmen was certainly entitled to some kind of a blowup, after all she had been through. But at the same time he felt he had to correct the exaggeration.
"Not exactly, Carmen. That's not fair. I just ordered that his ship and its escort be stopped at all costs."
"Not exactly," she echoed in a weak shout, and with that her voice gave way. Suddenly Carmen was looking about her as if for something to throw at him. There was of course nothing worth the throwing, since furniture, decorations and objects in general on warships had to be secured in place against sudden shifts of gravity or acceleration.
As she turned away from him and back again he had to listen hard to understand the rest of what she said: "For a year you've been trying to kill my son, chasing after him to kill him, ever since they took him away. And even now when that woman reports he's still alive, you give more orders that we're going to chase him on all the way across the galaxy if necessary, to shoot . . ." She broke down momentarily.
"To shoot if necessary, I said. If there's no other way to keep the berserkers from having him. Carmen, he's been with them more than a year now. How do you know he wouldn't be better off dead?"
Carmen got herself together and stood up straight. There was something new in her eyes. "Tell that to his father. Tell that to Colonel Marcus. After a year in space I've come to know the Colonel, a little bit. He'll kill you if you tell him that."
"He cares nothing about kids, even his own."
"Is that what you think? You never talk to him."
"Well. Regardless. Let him get Michel out of the berserkers' hands, one way or another, and Lancelot too. Then he can kill me if he wants." Not, he thought to himself while speaking, that there was really going to be much likelihood of that.
Carmen was at least listening to him again, and now he added, with concrete patience, "I really do want Michel back alive. Of course. Dammit, why do you think I brought you along—just to keep my bed warm? It was because you might possibly be of use to him and to us, keeping him functional, if and when we ever do get him back alive. Now it looks as if there is a real chance we might. Why do you suppose I've got the whole task force spread out right now in search formation? And if the search fails here, you're right, we're going to go on looking for him across the whole damn galaxy if necessary. Until we find him or we die of old age, or the berserkers learn to use him and they win."
"Why do you do that? Why? Because you want your weapons system back."
"We're fighting a war." Then Tupelov thought to himself that there must have been something better for him to say than that.
THIRTEEN
I'm going even faster than before.
That was his first clear thought, coming as soon as he had begun to be aware of himself again and of the world around him, and for a good long while it was his only thought. The next one, after some interminable time, was a question: Should he open his eyes, or not?
Michel was somewhat afraid of what he might see if he did so. But certain physical discomforts had arisen, and Lancelot for some reason was not coping with them perfectly. They came in the form of unpleasantly constricting sensations on each of his arms and legs, also circling his neck and the middle of his body. Still they did not prevent his moving freely. Grimacing, eyes still closed, Michel turned and stretched in space, almost as though he lay under snug quilted covers upon a carven bed. But he knew that he was still in space, and he sensed something about his speed, something he was not anxious to confirm with eyesight.
The sense of speed was quite internalized. And a similar inward feeling assured him that his flight was straight, in the sense that it was proceeding along the most economical course that Lancelot could find, toward his goal. What their passage might look like in terms of an objective pathway drawn across the sky was of course quite another matter.
It was necessary that he open his eyes soon, but he was really afraid to do so. With lids more tightly closed than ever, he willed first that his flight should slow. And with the willing he felt, as he might have felt aboard a slowing starship, the delicate inward jolt that meant a c-plus jump was ending.
Brought fully awake only now, by that fine jolt, Michel blinked about him at the scenery of the galaxy. With no atmosphere around him to impede vision, he had perhaps half a million stars in view as clearly focused points; only a spoonful out of the galaxy, most of whose suns were as usual obscured behind masses of nebular material, light and dark. And with his first glance he felt sure that the nearer stars were not the same ones that had been closest to him during his last clear look at undistorted space, before his building speed had blurred the universe around him.
The dark nebula that he had seen so clearly as Blackwool, and had yearned toward so desperately, had now disappeared, as completely as a sunset cloud searched for in the sky of dawn.
The bodily discomforts that had helped to wake him nagged at him still. Trying to investigate, he was surprised to discover that he could no longer see his own body at all except in outline. Lancelot had changed markedly, or had been changed by the experience of flightspace. What had been gauzy, tenuous-looking fields were now grown opaque. The whole apparent structure of Lancelot had turned into somethi
ng more like a sheath of vaguely glowing leather than fine draperies, though it still trailed behind Michel in a comet-like tail. The fabric was now molded much more closely around Michel's head and shoulders. His arms and torso and most of his legs were opaquely covered. And it was at the places where Lancelot was fastened to his body that the feelings of irritation had arisen.
He could see out through Lancelot, with Lancelot's eyes, as well as ever if not better. But under the new surface of the protective fields, he could no longer see the fasteners. Groping to adjust them, Michel made the additional discovery that his clothing no longer fit him; in fact the garments were now grossly too small. His unseen shirtsleeves no longer reached much past his invisible elbows, and he could only relieve the pressure round his middle by undoing the waistband of his trousers completely.
No reason for this strange shrinking of his garments suggested itself at the moment, and he made no real effort to understand. Even as he regained his physical comfort by adjusting his clothes and Lancelot's clasps, Michel's mind was drawn back to the seemingly more important problem of the disappearance of Blackwool. Only now did the possibility occur to him that he had simply been mistaken all along about the nebula, that in his fear and confusion the first dark blotch he saw had appeared to him as home.
The more he thought about this the more probable it seemed. Still there remained a chance that he was somewhere in the Alpine region of the Galaxy, and one of the dark puffs presently in view—there was an enormous number of them, scattered in front of starfields and visible against bright emission and reflection nebulae—might be Blackwool after all. It was easy to understand how distance could make the appearance of galactic features change drastically. Apart from the fact that to see a thing at different distances meant seeing it at different times, there was a simple analogy with planetary features as modest as ordinary mountains. Get close enough, and local details could not only change the appearance of the whole, but even prevent awareness of it. He might be now among foothills of brightness or darkness that were hiding behind them the one dark nebula he sought—even as Blackwool, when you were in it or beside it, could hide from sight the Core itself.
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