Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  They landed within a few score meters of the trench, and with the help of powered hand-lifters soon emptied the vehicle of all their gear, including the great slab, which Sorokin discovered now was stone. Not the beaten, homogenized world-stuff of Azlaroc, matter with all the fight seemingly knocked out of it, but textured, beautiful material from somewhere out in the broad cosmos. It was white stone marbled with subtle veins and streaks of varying shades of brown. And when Ramachandra casually pulled the covers aside, Sorokin saw that the stone was carved in the form of a gisant, a mortuary sculpture somewhat larger than life, depicting a man and woman supine in death, their tightly draped bodies both of heroic mold. The man was Ramachandra, the woman unknown to Sorokin, but beautiful.

  Ramachandra treated the statuary as if it were any other mass of a few hundred kilograms, about to be used as a kind of ballast. With Sorokin’s help he positioned it near the lip of the purple-floored subduction trench. As soon as it was settled on the ground it began to creep perceptibly toward the place where it was going to disappear.

  “Let’s get the suits on,” Ramachandra said. He was watching his partner closely now, as if he thought some last-minute reluctance possible. But Sorokin was moving to get ready.

  “So you are using that,” Callisto said from the television screen. Her eyes appeared to be turned toward the gisant. Its stone had evidently been brought to Azlaroc within a few years of Sorokin’s own arrival, for he could see the details of the carving with almost perfect clarity.

  Ramachandra grunted. “Any reason why we shouldn’t use this?”

  “From my scientific point of view? No.”

  “You said heavy stone would be ideal. All right. Callisto, we’re just leaving the flyer here. When you make your announcement of our departure you can send someone to get it, or do as you like.”

  “I’ll see that it’s picked up. Ramachandra, you have about one minute to stand in the trench.”

  “Time to get into the suits.”

  The suits were giant-sized on the outside, with servo-powered mechanical limbs. The internal space for the wearer, or occupant, was well protected and relatively small.

  They got into the suits and then it was indubitably time to go. The huge sculpture had tipped on end into the trench, and the man and woman were going down side by side, headfirst, looking ludicrous rather than heroic now with their giant marble feet sticking up into the air. As Sorokin watched, the stone seemed to accelerate in its downward passage, like a doomed ship sinking into water.

  Looking at each other steadily, the two men marched to the trench and stepped into it with their mechanical feet.

  “Do you feel fear, wanderer?”

  “No more than you do, man of power.”

  “I think I have guessed right about you, Sorokin. You are going toward the same goal that I am, but for different reasons.”

  “According to our agreement, my pay continues until this is over ”

  It was the first time that Sorokin had heard his employer laugh. “Very well. Until you are back on the surface of Azlaroc, one way or another. See to it, Callisto.”

  “Very well, sir.”

  The stone carving was now completely gone. The lips of the trench made a grating sound as they sagged closed again above it. Ramachandra’s suit was now submerged to its knees, and Sorokin was in somewhat deeper. He had no unusual sensations so far, but it was disconcerting and at the same time rather elating to realize that he was going to lead the way. Now the level of the trench’s bottom reached his suit’s crotch. The last moment at which he might have changed his mind and scrambled out had probably gone by. But it was all right. For the immediate future his suit was very probably capable of protecting him, and beyond that he did not try to think.

  He was sinking faster.

  Ramachandra looked down with apparent irritation at being made a follower. “Sorokin, I would suggest you dose yourself with Chronotran before imprisonment in the rock”—it wasn’t really rock, of course, and here for the first time Sorokin thought he had caught his employer in an error brought on by nervousness—” has bored you seriously. The experts say the drug is more effective when taken before the time of real need.”

  “I’ll take some soon, then. Thank you for the suggestion. See you down below. Or up above.”

  If either Ramachandra or Callisto had any more advice for him just then, he could not hear it. The purplish bottom of the trench flowed up like water around his faceplate, and he was going down.

  Only a few moments later, when it came to him that this was just the kind of darkness he would have experienced out at the nadir of blacksky, did fear begin to take hold of him. With a curling of his limbs he brought himself entirely inside the central chamber of his suit, and then he took some Chronotran. The drug did not kill fear, but gave one control over the subjective sense of time; moments of joy or tranquility might be tremendously prolonged, while times of dreary boredom or pain could be as much compressed.

  It seemed to Sorokin that the blackness around his suit, and the sense of overwhelming pressure whenever he tried to use its servo-powered limbs, lasted only a little while. Never mind that the figures on his trip recorder added up to scores of days, or that his body went again and again through routines necessary to maintain health. Almost before he had time to anticipate a change, change was around him, in the form of the same bands of blue-white radiance that he had seen in the hologram. A glance at instruments showed him that the pressure and the radiation flux outside his suit had both climbed enormously. He was surprised to see that the temperature, so far at least, was going down.

  He gave himself the antidote for Chronotran, wanting to be ready for action when required. Shortly afterward he caught sight of the gisant moving ahead of him through bluewhite space, in the direction from which the transverse bands of light seemed to flow. Spinning very slowly as it moved, it trailed something like a shockwave, within the boundaries of which his suit of armor rode.

  Working the suit’s legs and arms again, he found he could maneuver amid this medium of light like a swimmer in thick water. Turning his suit with paddling motions, he saw another like it, Ramachandra’s, come tumbling slowly after him from the direction in which the bands of light marched off to disappear. One thing that surprised Sorokin was that he continued to maintain an “up” and “down,” not only as a matter of visual orientation, but as if his suit had an actual artificial gravity of, its own like a large spaceship, “down” being permanently toward its feet. Ramachandra had discussed the suit’s systems with him thoroughly, and no artificial gravity had been mentioned. It must, therefore, be some effect of the environment.

  The speeding bluish stripes of light that formed his visual world were now repeating the sequence Sorokin had witnessed in the hologram, narrowing and widening, with what seemed to be different layers of stripes making moire patterns that had not been visible in the recording—patterns that jarred and jumped with each measured gigantic heart-throb of the pulsar. And now with somehow unexpected suddenness the singular contraction came, to pinch his whole world down to a mere point of light . . .

  “By ail the veils!”

  Sorokin was standing upon the starry universe of bluish arcs, and holding the neutron star above his head. Then he realized that he had come out onto the star’s surface upside down, while the gravity inside his suit maintained its orientation toward his feet. He moved his arms and legs and tipped the world around him until his feet were down. Wrapped and shielded within all forty million veils of Azlaroc, he stood untouched, unharmed, upon the spinning pulsar’s surface. In a moment he understood that he had been brought to one of the poles of its rotation, for the star-circles lay all parallel to the horizon.

  A few paces away, the gisant drifted almost buoyantly, only one corner of it dragging on the mirror surface that was a neutron solid with billions of times the rigidity of steel. The surface was seemingly as smooth as if machined, all the way out to the horizon. The highest mountain on t
he star should be just big enough for a man to stub his toe on it and trip, and to climb that mountain, to move a human’s mass upward a few centimeters in this gravity, should take a lifetime’s effort from a long-lived Azlarocean settler. Not that a human should be standing here at all. If the tidal forces did not shred him into atoms, and the gravity haul his particles indistingutshably into the proton mass, then the electrical forces generated within the spinning, superfluid core should blast him outward as a cloud of X rays, melded with the pulsar’s searchlight beam of radiation as focused by its incredible magnetic field.

  Ramachandra was coming toward him over the surface now, suit enclosed in a vaguely visible, transparent bubble, walking like a man underwater or in low gravity as he worked inside his suit with the instruments that were supposed to find the fold in their year-veil. His lips were moving, but no sound or signal came through the multiplex communication system to Sorokin.

  “I can’t hear you,” he said when Ramachandra looked at him, and lip-read the other’s answer: Nor I you.

  Ramachandra turned away then, briefly, and approached the sculpture, which was also enclosed in an almost imperceptible bubble of some force. When he reached out one of his suit’s metallic hands toward the carven woman, the entire gisant with its bubble instantaneously disappeared at the first touch. Part of Ramachandra’s suit-hand vanished at the same moment, and from the metal stump there sprang a sudden glow, more intense than any of the flares that occasionally appeared on the surrounding surface of the star. The brightness of the flaring metal, which was probably undergoing some thermonuclear reaction, slowly declined.

  Now bearing a coruscating firework in one hand, Ramachandra turned imperturbably back to Sorokin. Don’t try to touch helmets for communication, he mouthed.

  “I won’t. What are your plans now?”

  The fold isn’t here, so I’m going on. The black hole will be rising soon, and I intend to follow the lines of force of the veils in its direction. It seems the suit’s drive will easily carry me. Whatever kind of a balance of forces we’re riding here . . .

  Nearby, the star flared, brighter than before. Then again far off, then farther still, and yet again beyond the near horizon. A shudder of the starscape came and went, that Sorokin saw but could not feel. Perhaps a quake had brought a mountain down, and speeded up the pulsar’s rotation by some fraction of a microsecond.

  “I’m not going on, Ramachandra. Not into a black hole. Even if we can survive here . . .” Sorokin ended with a gesture of hopeless pessimism.

  I know you’re not. My second reason for bringing you along. All I ask is that you take back word of what you see me do. You need only wait here a few more minutes and the forces that brought us here will bear you back again, to somewhere on Azlaroc. If you’re lucky you’ll survive. Ramachandra smiled. And collect your pay.

  Sorokin could think of nothing to say. An impassable gulf had opened between him and the other man.

  Ramachandra was consulting his instruments. Black hole’s rising now. He nodded in the direction over Sorokin’s shoulder but when Sorokin turned he found that the ultimate abyss offered almost nothing to see. Maybe a momentary squiggle in the blue arcs of one or two stars.

  If Ramachandra had had anything more to say, Sorokin had missed it. He stood watching now as the other man’s suit, moving now under its own power, rose past him . . .

  No, there were some last words coming after all, for Ramachandra delayed enough to turn. If I go into it—for good—

  “Yes?”

  Well, I’ll be joined by quite a crowd, eventually. That’s all. The holes are going to coalesce and eat the rest of the universe, you know. In a few billion years.

  His suit was soon out of sight amid the starstreaks of the sky.

  Four minutes later the return tide came, and bore Sorokin into the striped space of blue light that bent abnormally between the worlds.

  “Then do you think he actually went into it?” Miletus Millbrae asked. He had some time ago forgotten cautious incredulity and was asking questions without hesitation.

  Sorokin drained a drink, and gestured for another. “I think he went on into it, yes. Unless he found a folded edge of veils before he got that far. My recorder’s in my suit outside; ! don’t know how much it’ll show in support of what I say. But the suit is working fine, it carried me back to town from Ruler Ridge. This is my first stop. I’ve got to find Callisto. I thought she was going to have some kind of watch posted along Ruler Ridge in case we—either of us—came back that way.”

  “You were with him, with Ramachandra,” said a woman who had come into the place sometime during Sorokin’s recital. “And this is your first stop, coming back.”

  He looked over at her. “Yes.” The rest of the people were attentively silent.

  “Then you don’t know.”

  He started two questions and aborted them both before they reached his lips. Then he said: “Ramachandra’s back.”

  “For almost ten days now.” But there was more to be told.

  “Callisto and her group won’t let out much information,” a man offered, “but it’s known that they dug something out of the ridge ten days ago, and supposedly it has been at least tentatively identified as him. His suit, at least, presumably with him inside. Enlarged, somehow, and holding what looks like a small bright light in one hand.”

  “Dead?”

  The woman made a gesture difficult to read. “I’ve heard there’s movement.

  Life, perhaps. But wrapped in a loop of forty-nine times forty-nine, twenty-four hundred and one veils.”

  Sorokin said eventually: “He’ll go again.”

  BIRTHDAYS

  Each day his charges grew a year older—or was it the other way around?

  One

  LOOKING BACK , Bart could never clearly remember any part of his life before the day when the Ship first woke him from a long, artificially induced sleep, and guided him to the nursery to see the babies. That day and the first few that followed it were very confusing to live through.

  The Ship’s machines, working with paint and glass and light, had made the nursery spacious-looking and cheerful. Bart counted twenty-four cribs. To count babies would have been harder, because only those who happened to be napping were in their beds. The rest crawled or sat or toddled on the soft-tiled deck, sending up a racket and getting underfoot of their attending machines and images. The babies were all the same age, just about a year old the day Bart first saw them. They wore white diapers, and some had on green hospital gowns like Bart’s only, of course, smaller.

  Bart was not tall for almost fourteen, but he could easily lift one bare leg after the other over the low barrier the machines had placed to keep the little kids from tottering or crawling out of the nursery into the corridor. The corridor led in one direction to Bart’s small private room and in the other—so his memory, working in a new, selective way, informed him—to the rest of the habitable Ship.

  The babies squalled, gurgled, blubbered, or took time out to stare at the world in silence. They made nothing much of Bart’s coming in among them. The images that the machines kept projecting and moving around the infants were of solid-looking adult humans speaking and smiling, and they evidently took Bart to be just one more image. The babies reacted more strongly to the machines, which had more effective contact with them.

  “Pick one up, if you wish,” the Ship said in his ear. It was able to project its conversation so there was no way of telling just what direction the words came from. The Ship’s voice sounded human, but not quite man or woman, not quite young or old.

  Like a good obedient boy Bart bent to have a try at picking up a baby. The chubby belly felt cool against his hands above the papery diaper and the head of dark scanty curls turned so that the liquid brown eyes could look at him uncertainly.

  “See how the machines hold them,” counseled the Ship. “Their arms are of basically the same form as yours.”

  He shifted his grip.

/>   “The prime directives under which I operate are very clear. One human parent, adoptive or real, is necessary to the successful maturation of children; images and machines are psychologically inadequate for best results. Therefore, after receiving some elementary preparation for the role, you will serve as adoptive parent for the first generation of colonists.”

  Colonists. The word evoked in Bart the abstract knowledge that the Ship had started from an orbit around Earth, and was outward bound to seed humanity somewhere among the stars. How long ago the voyage had begun, and whether he himself had witnessed that beginning, were questions that his memory could not answer. Nor did he feel any urgency attached to them. Somewhere in Bart’s lost past he had learned that the Ship was to be trusted utterly, and now he could wait patiently for a better understanding of what it meant by its announcement that he was to be a parent. Meanwhile, he watched the infants, played a little with them, and tried to comfort and distract those who cried. It seemed to be the thing to do.

  The machines labored ceaselessly, patting, changing, feeding, washing, wiping up. Twice they dispensed cups of souplike stuff for Bart to drink. There were no clocks to watch, but he was certain that he had been in the nursery for hours. At last one of the machines took him lightly by the arm and pointed back down the corridor whence he had come.

  When he had closed himself into his little plastic-walled bedroom the Ship’s voice said: “You will be given a substantial breakfast when you wake again. That will be one standard year from now.”

  Two

  He awoke as on the first day, as if from a sound night’s sleep, and at once sat up to look over the rim of his bed, which curved around him like a padded bathtub, warm and dry and clean. Just how he was being put to sleep or awakened he didn’t know, but certainly there was more to it than he could see or feel. Somehow his gown had been taken off him while he slept, and he was naked.

  There was a new gown laid out on the room’s single small chair, or maybe the same one, washed clean of baby shit and pablum. He put it on after using the toilet and washing his hands and face. From a panel in the wall he got his promised breakfast, consisting of a warm, milky drink in a plastic cup, and a tray holding chunks of bread. The breadcrust was hot and crunchy and these were pieces of fruit and cheese inside.