Across the Sea of Suns

by Gregory Benford

  He sagged against a bulkhead. Under pressure he had been dealing adequately with the inverted vision, but the strain was beginning to tell. Turning his head rapidly brought on nausea. Upside down, people’s expressions were alarming, grotesque, usually impossible to decipher.

  “Y’know, I am rather a bastard. Surely it’s not escaped your notice.”

  Nikka grinned and looked determined. “They don’t—”

  “Wait,” Nigel held up a palm. “Listen. Shipcomm.”

  —I’ve just been handed an emergency signal from Earthside. I’ll read it: “Nuclear weapons were used today in a military confrontation off the coast of China. The combatants are China, the USSR and USA, as well as smaller fleet forces of Japan and Brazil. Damage is unknown. Satellite recons shows the engagement is continuing and spreading, with apparently all major forces engaged. Cause is unknown. May have been triggered by attempt to inhibit Swarmer landings on sea coasts. Will advise shortly on possible implications for space communications net.” Well, I don’t know what to say—

  Nigel smacked his fist against the bulkhead. “That’s it.”

  “Wh-what?”

  “They’ve bitten into the apple. Not much good our information’ll do ’em now.”

  “This, this may be a mistake—”

  “No mistake. All quite predictable, I expect. If any of us had been half swift …” He sighed.

  “Well …” She blinked, confused. “Let’s, let’s go home. We can forget about our problems …”

  He nodded grimly, putting his arms on her shoulders, peering into her lined, coppery face. “But don’t you see? That message is years old! We can’t influence events there. We’re on our own.”

  “Well, yes, but …”

  “Whatever happens, ol’ friend Ted will still carry out his precious policy. So we might as well do as we like, too. Earth’s another issue.”

  “I, I don’t know … everything’s … so fast.”

  “Look, it’ll be awhile before we learn more from Earth. The big satellite transmitters have got other things to do than beam to us.”

  “Yes, I suppose …”

  “So Ted’s going to go on with business. And so should we.”

  “Let’s go home.”

  “Right. For a bit. But there’s really only one place left for us now, luv.”

  NINE

  They crouched together in the freight elevator, hemmed in by crates.

  “Are you all right? Your eyes?” Nikka asked.

  “I think I’m integrating the change. Resting helped.”

  “I’ve heard something about that medtech error. It’s a common one, easy to make.”

  Nigel chuckled. “Gratifying to know.”

  “I don’t think I can fix it.”

  “Not without microsurgery tools, no.”

  “I remember that the brain adjusts, though. Eventually you’ll see upright images.”

  “How long?”

  “A few days.”

  “Um. I say, it seems that long since I went merrily off with smiling Ted. How long was I gone?”

  “Half a day,” Nikka said. “They came and told me. I argued with Ted but he was busy. Carlos was there.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  “Sad. He went down to Pucks on the morning shuttle, just after you left. Reporting for his new job. A chance to put his training into action. I think he wants to—”

  “Wash his hands of it all. Quite so. There’s still you, waiting here, after he’s done.”

  “Nigel, that’s not fair.”

  “Who said I was fair? Carlos is confused, but he’s not dumb.”

  “Can’t we forget that? With all that’s happening—”

  “No, we can’t. Might have to use it.” He slapped the portable medfilter resting between them. The elevator whine reverberated in the sheet-metal floor. It had taken over an hour for Nikka to strip Nigel’s jury-rigged device down to essentials, and then wedge it into a carrying case. Their apartment was no longer a candidate for House Beautiful.

  He hoped the filter would still work. It was touch and go getting out of the apartment, too—Ted hadn’t put guards on their door, but Nigel was sure someone would lay hand on him if he showed his face in public.

  “You’re going to have to keep the dockmen busy while I get this on,” he said.

  She nodded. “Our chances aren’t good.”

  “So what? Haven’t any choices left. Ted will nab us in hours if we stay.”

  The elevator groaned to a stop in near-zero gravity. The door lurched open, revealing the aft ship’s lock. No one in view.

  “I’ll nip across,” Nigel said. He slipped into the darkness of the shuttle’s hold. Nikka drew a deep breath and went in search of the crew.

  Pocks was gunmetal gray. Long white filaments stretched across it, rays of debris from ancient meteors. Crusts of rock blotched the dirty purple ice fields.

  Nigel could feel the chill through his servo’d suit. He moved carefully across the crumpled plain. Nikka pointed to the spherical submarine berthed at the edge of an orange-green lake. “That’s where the log says Carlos is on duty.”

  Nigel picked up the pace. Between them they carried the portable medfilter.

  They began to puff with the effort. Boots crunched on the purple ice. Nigel stepped up his opticals to see what the surface looked like unaugmented. It was barren, lit by an angry red dot. High up he caught the gliding gray smudge of the Watcher. The Lancer analysis net had stopped calling the moonlet by that name, but he refused to. Was there a shifting glimmer where the weak sun struck the ancient hull? He blinked. Perhaps a facet catching the light. Or more probably, he reminded himself, a trick of his eyes. He was catching, seeing better, but there were still illusions, distortions.

  They were five hundred meters from the descent craft. As yet no one had tried to stop them. There had been questioning looks from the shuttle crew, but Nikka had made up some apparently plausible story. They had counted on the fact that aboard Lancer there were no security measures, any more than there were guards on an ordinary naval vessel. But once Landon and that lot worked out where they must have gone—

  “Hey!” Nigel stopped dead still, startled by the shout. He turned. No one behind them. It came from a figure trotting toward them from the submersible. His helmet overlay winked a color-coded ID: Carlos.

  “What’s this about you coming down? Nigel shouldn’t be out—”

  “Explain inside,” Nikka said roughly, and pushed Carlos back toward the submersible. “Quick!”

  Nigel panted hard beneath the black sky. It was difficult going and something about it satisfied him. He did not ask Carlos to help.

  Bubbles bulged and popped on the lake and then it went glassy and smooth again beneath the ember glow of Ross 128. Near the lake a sulfurous yellow muck sucked at their boots. “Outflow,” Carlos said. “Like a tidal flat, only worse. The lake’s all liquid ammonia, but every few days it belches. Potassium salts, sulfur, have to wash it off at the lock—”

  Nikka waved him to be silent. She glanced behind them; no one following. Nigel felt secure; she looked as though she could handle anyone.

  It took over ten minutes to shuck their suits and get to the cranny where Carlos slept. He turned on them, blocking the doorway, and said, “Now let’s hear it. After I got your message I checked the shuttle manifest. You two weren’t on it.”

  “Last-minute holiday,” Nigel said. “Simply caught the first thing out of town.”

  Nikka smiled tolerantly. “You can tell when things are desperate,” she said. “He always makes a joke.”

  “That’s what jokes are for,” Nigel said, stretching out on Carlos’ bunk. He rested while Nikka sketched in the jumble of events. He enjoyed hearing it all played back from another perspective. It was particularly pleasant to relax utterly and let someone else take charge, as Nikka had been doing ever since they nonchalantly walked aboard the shuttle. She had done marvelously well at persuading the pil
ot. However this might come out— and he had few delusions on that score—it was delicious to be moving and acting again. The worst part of age was the feeling of helplessness, of being disengaged from life. The middle-aged treated the old with the same serenely contemptuous condescension they used for children. That unthinking attitude was what lay behind Ted’s actions.

  “You’re stupid,” Carlos said bluntly. “Stupid. Whatever you think Landon was doing, you’re building a great case for him by—”

  “Shove off that, eh? If we’d stayed on Lancer we’d be swimming in a slot by now.” Nigel stretched lazily, though he did not feel tired.

  “You, maybe. Not her.”

  “We’re together,” Nikka said simply.

  “Not necessarily,” Carlos said carefully.

  “I would protest Nigel going into the Slots. If I failed to get him revived, I would follow. So that we will lose no time together.”

  “I don’t think you mean that,” Carlos said. “You still have work to do here. And you and I, we need each other too, you have to—”

  “We’ll get bugger-all done if we recycle our stale statements while the clock runs,” Nigel said forcefully. “I need shelter, Carlos. That’s the nub of it. Either you give it to me or you don’t.”

  Nigel watched conflicting emotions in the man’s face. He’d done the classic male-challenge thing, of course—interrupt Carlos, and abruptly shift the subject, to boot. Not wise, generally. But Carlos was a deeply conflicted person, uncertain how to respond to those signals. This was precisely what Nigel had hoped: that the deeply embedded responses of each sex would get tangled, and in his confusion Carlos would yield. Nigel recalled Blake’s notion of the ideal human: Male and female somehow blended in the same body, anima and animus united, entwined. He wished the poet could be here to see the result. Dreams were best when not made concrete.

  Carlos dodged. “I can’t do anything. In a few minutes somebody’ll—”

  “I’ve filed a formal complaint. Put it into shipcomm from our apartment. That has to be heard—even Ted can’t block that.”

  “By the rules,” Nikka added, “it must go on open net for twelve hours. He requested a mandatory vote, so people can’t ignore it.”

  Carlos nodded. “Then you have nothing to worry about.”

  “Don’t be thick. If Ted can pop me back in the soup before the vote’s resolved, nobody’ll take the small risk of reviving me unnecessarily. Possession’s nine-tenths of the game here.”

  Nikka asked thoughtfully, “You truly think he would?”

  “More’s the fool he, if he doesn’t. Ted sees me as a kernel for opposition forces. Why not eliminate me? This expedition’s turning out stale as old beer. He wants something dramatic to pin his name on, is my guess.”

  Carlos frowned. “Like what?”

  “It may’ve occurred to him that Lancer’s a damn ferocious weapon.”

  “How?” Carlos seemed to be regaining his equilibrium. He stood up, clearly feeling his heft and strength in comparison with these other two. “Look, you’re sounding more and more—”

  Carlos! They with you?

  The voice came over general audio, filling the small cabin. “Well, it didn’t take them long,” Nikka said.

  “He’s got you,” Carlos said.

  “Depends,” Nigel said. “Everybody’s fretting about Earthside, granted—that gives him freedom of maneuver with us. No one’ll give a frap if we—”

  Carlos! Then, fainter, Where in hell is he? I thought you saw him go in there with the two of them.

  “I’ve got to answer him,” Carlos said.

  Nigel nodded. He went to a spot mike and tuned it in. “We hear you.”

  Nigel? Just what the hell you think you’re—

  “Fairly obvious, I should think.”

  Don’t give me that arched-eyebrow shit. You left medical without a release, you ignored the directive approved by shipwide congress, then you—

  “Please, no boring list of sins.”

  The council orders you to march over to HQ there and—

  “Give it a rest,” Nigel said sourly.

  You sneaky bastard! You slipped by once but damned if we’ll let you take up any more of our time now, when—

  “Stop playing to the gallery, can’t you?”

  Stop playing! Yeah, that’s what we’re going to do. I’ve got men all around that submersible. They’re coming in after you unless you pop that hatch and walk out. You’re just a sick old man, and we don’t want to be rough. But this is a crisis. You’ve got three minutes.

  Nigel switched off his personal transmitter. “Sounds earnest.”

  “Damn right he is,” Carlos said. “Let’s go. There’s no way out.”

  Nigel said hurriedly, “Course there is. Take us down.”

  “Into the vent?”

  “Right. You’re set to do a bit of snagging soon anyway—the Task Schedule says so.”

  “My, my copilot’s not on board.”

  “We won’t be down long,” Nikka said reasonably. “Those ones outside will back off fast when you rev up.”

  “But I …” Carlos looked from one to the other.

  Nigel waited, knowing this was the crucial moment. The plan he’d worked out on the way down hung on what Carlos would do. Nigel was not above using the man’s devotion to Nikka, either. Carlotta had worked her way into this strange triangle and then changed the vectors abruptly. So be it; each coin had two faces.

  “I need time to think. Nikka, do you really want this?” The man bent down, earnestly peering into her eyes.

  “There isn’t time for that,” Nigel said rapidly.

  “Look, this is a pretty serious violation of regs. You might—”

  “Decide,” Nikka said. “We’ve had troubles, but we three are still together. Or are we?” Nigel’s heart swelled at the clear, even-tempered way she said it. Perhaps her perception of Carlos was coming around to his. A bit late, but …

  Carlos straightened. “Okay. Look, I can say I had good personal reasons. And I do. We have things between us, things I haven’t been able to …” His words trickled away. Then he said grimly, “Damned if I’m going to let Ted muscle me around, either.”

  Nikka embraced Carlos. Nigel put a hand on his shoulder. Carlos said gruffly, “Prob’ly get us killed, I bet”

  PART NINE

  2081 EARTH

  ONE

  The guard took Warren down the center of the island, along a path worn smooth in the last few days by the troops. They passed a dozen technicians working on acoustic equipment and playing back the high-pitched squeals of Skimmer song. The troops were making entries on computer screens and chattering to each other, breaking down the problem into bits that could be cross-referenced and reassembled to make patterns that people could understand. It would have to be good because they wanted to eavesdrop. But the way the Skimmers talked to the Swarmers might not be anything like the songs the Skimmers sung among themselves.

  It made no sense that the Skimmers had much control over the Swarmers, Warren thought to himself as he marched down the dirt path. No sense at all. Something had brought them all to Earth and given the Swarmers some disease and the answer lay in thinking about that fact, not playing stupid games with machines in the water.

  The troops were spread out more now, he saw. There were nests of high-caliber cannon strung out along the ridge and down near the beaches men were digging in where they could set up a cross fire over the natural clearings.

  The men and women he passed were talking among themselves now, not silent and efficient the way they had been at first. They looked at him with suspicion. He guessed the missile attack in the night had made them nervous and even the hot work of clearing fields of fire in the heavy humidity did not take it out of them.

  Coming down the rocky ridgeline Warren slipped on a stone and fell. The guard laughed in a kind of high, fast way and kicked him to get him to hurry. Warren went on and saw ahead one of the bushes with leaves
he knew he could eat and when he went by it he pulled some off and started to stuff them into his pockets for later. The guard shouted and hit him in the back with the butt of his rifle and Warren went down suddenly, banging his knee on a big tree root. The guard kicked him in the ribs and Warren saw the man was jumpy and bored at the same time. That was dangerous. He carefully got up and moved along the path, limping from the dull pain spreading in his knee. The guard pushed him into his cell and kicked him again. Warren fell and laid there, not moving, waiting, and the guard finally grunted and slammed the door.

  Noon came and went and he got no food. He ate the leaves. They were a poor trade for the stiffness in his knee. He listened to the shouted orders and sounds of work and it seemed to him the camp was restless, the sounds moving one way and then the other. He did not blame the Chinese for the way they treated him. The great powers all acted the same, independent of what they said their politics was, and it was easier to think of them as big machines that do what they were designed to do rather than as bunches of people.

  Night came. Warren had gotten used to not thinking about food when he was on the raft and he was just as glad the guard did not bring any. Eventually the squat chinless soldier would come all the way into the cell and look behind the table which was overturned and would see the dirt mounds. Warren lay on the rocky ground that was the floor and listened to the snarling surf on the reef. He wondered if he would dream of his wife again. It was a good dream because it took away all the pain they both had caused and left only her smells and taste. But when he dozed off he was in the deep place where clanking came from above, a metallic sound that blended with the dull buzzing he had heard all that afternoon from the motorboat in the lagoon, the sounds washing together until he realized they were the same, but the loud clanking one was the way the Skimmers heard it. It was hard to think with the ringing hammering sound in his head and he tried to swim up and break water to get away from it. The clanking went on and then was a roar, louder, and he woke up suddenly and felt the sides of the cell tremble with the sound. Two quick crashes came down out of the sky and then sudden blue light.