Strings

by Dave Duncan

  Now Cedric understood why nobody called back after leaving Meadowdale. Either they had been butchered and used for autografts, or they had discovered the truth about that and could never bear to talk to the ghouls again. And obviously they would never be allowed to talk to the kids. He shivered and tried to put it out of his mind.

  Which left Alya.

  “System, where is Princess Alya?”

  “No such person on file,” the nasal voice said sniffily.

  Gran had said Cedric was to play host for Alya, so she was business. “Override.”

  “She is in the command room for David Thompson Dome.”

  “Am I allowed to go there?”

  “Grade One rating allows physical access to all parts of the complex except—one: the personal offices of staff members ranking higher than Grade Three; two: those parts of the stellar…”

  The list unrolled for a while, until Cedric told System to shut up and send him a golfie. He would try it and see.

  When small, Cedric had almost killed himself a few times by putting a plastic bag over his head and pretending it was a bubble suit. Most boys did that, and some were less fortunate than he. Growing older, he had come to understand that bubble suits were not especially glamorous garments. They were not designed for real exploration; they were lab clothes, overpressured to prevent invasion by gas or dust or microbes, the last line of defense against accidental contamination. Yet they were still not much more than plastic bags, fitting closely over shoes and hands, and usually belted at the waist, but otherwise ballooning everywhere else. They were not elegant.

  Nevertheless, he felt a satisfying little thrill as he was assisted into a real bubble suit for the first time. The technician who helped him muttered darkly about how old that one must be, speculating that it might not be safe after so long in storage. No demand for that size, he explained, and he insisted on testing it to well beyond the required pressure.

  But the seals held, and Cedric’s irresistible authority as a deputy director won his way past successive layers of sullen guards until at last he was ushered into the command room of David Thompson Dome. It was large and dim, with many people sitting around muttering at coms. Voices wove in and out of the red darkness in a basketwork of sound, while a spectators’ corner of comfortable couches held Devlin Grant and the man with the turban—and Alya.

  Cedric’s deputy-directorship was not going to frighten anyone very much with Dr. Devlin there.

  But Alya gave a shout of joy. She ran forward to meet him and threw herself into his arms. He had thought a princess would keep her love affairs secret, but apparently that was not so. Kissing through two thicknesses of crysfab would be low in satisfaction, so he just swept her off her feet and hugged her mightily. The bubble suits bulged and rippled and made little squeaky noises.

  Then he took a harder look at her through the plastic. “What’s wrong?” he demanded.

  She laughed breathlessly and made ashamed sort of sounds. “I’m being silly, I think.” She seemed to draw a deep breath. “Oh, God, but I’m glad to see you, darling.” Then she hugged him again.

  Darling? Much more of such royal appreciation would do terrible things to his lovable boyish humility.

  “Don’t start sniveling inside there,” he told her. “You can’t wipe your nose.” And he led her over to the corner, where Dr. Devlin and the Jathro man were standing and watching blackly.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Dr. Devlin snapped.

  “What the hell have you been doing to Her Highness?” Cedric countered. There was a brief silence marked by astonishment all around. Cedric himself was as surprised as any.

  Devlin’s moustache writhed. The day before, he had been unexpectedly friendly. Obviously that policy had been revised. “Get out of here! Operations are my turf, sonny, and you’re trespassing.”

  Cedric could not argue with that. He looked down at Alya and decided that she was frightened about something. “We’ll go, then,” he said. “Come along, sweetheart.”

  But apparently that was not what Dr. Devlin had in mind, nor Dr. Jathro. They choked, then both tried to speak at once.

  Alya grinned up rather wanly at Cedric and then turned to the others. “If Cedric can come with me, then I’ll do it.”

  “Do what?” he asked.

  Devlin looked blacker than ever in the reddish glow. “Your Highness, the director herself warned you—”

  “But I already know what you’re up to,” Cedric said loudly. “You’re looking for Class One worlds, and Alya’s helping you.” He felt her start, and then she hugged him comfortingly.

  “I didn’t tell him that,” she said. “He’s a lot smarter than he—than you might have expected.”

  Dr. Devlin made an angry growling sound.

  “What’s more,” Alya said sternly, “if you value my opinions at all, then you must value all of them. Tiber I don’t mind—I’ve told you what I think of that. But I’ll look at the other if Cedric is with me. Else not.”

  “We’re wasting precious time,” Dr. Devlin shouted. “Would you feel happier doing Tiber first, Princess?”

  She nodded quickly, and Cedric thought she looked relieved. “Good idea!” she said.

  “Right! Message Baker Abel. Abel, we’ll head along to de Soto and do Tiber first. Com end. Let’s go!”

  Back out in a main corridor, Alya urged Cedric over to a golfie and slid in beside him. Devlin and Jathro had to settle for each other as company, and neither looked very pleased. The two carts hummed off together, with the men’s leading.

  “Now…” Cedric said.

  Alya chuckled and hugged him. “I was having another attack of the jimjams. I’m better if I’m with you, somehow.”

  “It’s mutual!”

  She shook her head and leaned her head against his shoulder as the golfie cornered. Obviously Devlin had ordered top speed. “Not the same, I think. Cedric darling, you do understand why I’m here, don’t you?”

  “You have second sight.”

  “Well, not quite. I have a special sort of intuition. Most of my relatives have it. It runs in the family. It warns me, that’s all, warns me of danger. In English you’d call it ‘intuition.’ We have a couple of words we use. The gift itself we call the buddhi. That’s a very old word, and a presumption. It means ‘enlightenment.’ Buddha was the Enlightened One. We say that so-and-so has the buddhi—not everyone in the family has it, but most do. The other word is Japanese: satori. It means much the same, a flash of understanding, but I say I’ve had a satori. Right? A premonition, a warning from the buddhi? That’s all. In English you might call it a ‘hunch.’ It’s not really second sight. It’s just that if something is dangerous for me, I get bad vibes about doing it. That’s all it is.”

  “It’s no great secret, Alya. System has pix of it.”

  “The ritual isn’t secret. What is secret is that it’s for real.”

  “I expect it is. I can’t see you cheating.”

  She glanced up at him oddly. “You don’t get creepy feelings? Some people react like I was a witch or something.”

  “You give me lots of creepy feelings, but not that sort. You have no idea how much I want to kiss you! Do you suppose they have bubble suits for two?” He was getting all hot again, just being near her.

  “Later—I promise.”

  He felt very creepy then. Lordie, but she was gorgeous! How could he have ever been so lucky? He remembered playing with all that hair on the bed, and the way she had trailed it over him a couple of times. Down, boy! he told himself. “And this intuition can warn you about worlds?”

  She agreed with a nod as they cornered again. “Yes, it even seems to work on that. You know how many things can be wrong with a world, like too much of this element or not enough of that. People evolved here on Earth. We’re very well-adjusted to this planet, and not many others will do instead.”

  “But the robbies and gadgets—”

  “Yes, but there’s so little time,
ever. Windows of a few hours at most, and not very much of those, and then they’re gone. The planetologists can measure everything, but it takes time, and there’s always the chance that nature’s found a new trick to play and they’ve overlooked it. My…hunches…are quicker.”

  The golfie slowed down to climb a long ramp.

  “Of course, the scientists pull their tricks, too,” Alya said. “I’m just a backup. But none of us has ever been proved wrong.”

  “Us?”

  She winced slightly. “My brothers and sisters all had the gift also.”

  “But—you mean there have been—Class One worlds?”

  She nodded, looking puzzled.

  “You mean,” Cedric said, unable to take it all in, “there really have been other Class One worlds, kept secret? I mean, I know that some people say…I thought that was just crazy talk. Kept secret?”

  “That’s right.”

  Incredible! “So Gran has been using you—your family—to find Class One worlds—”

  “No, not quite,” Alya said. “We don’t find them, we just inspect. My buddhi’s completely selfish. It only works for me, my own safety. Same with them.”

  He felt a sudden chill. “So?”

  “The Earth is very sick, Cedric dear. We’ve poisoned it. It may be dying—at least as far as people are concerned. Life will go on, and in a million years or so everything will be back to normal again, but all the predictions now are that a big part of the human race is going to die very shortly. No one knows how many. The numbers are dropping fast already. It’s snowballing, too—look at the Cancer Curve! We’ve even polluted our own germplasm.” She stared up at him solemnly, as though doubting his comprehension. “And my family intuition tries to make us go to other worlds. That means it thinks—not thinks, really—oh, damn—it says that this world is unsafe for us!”

  “Floods, famine, disease, storms—Bagshaw Barney told me.”

  “Right. Dangerous. But other worlds may be even worse, you see? There are some real horrors hiding out there. And that’s where I come in. I can tell a world that looks like a better bet than this one.”

  “Oh!” Now it made sense. “Pilgrim clubs? Ecology and nutrition and—”

  She smiled, he thought rather wistfully. “That’s right!”

  “But…” He thought his brain would overload. “But if it’s better for one of you, then why not all? Why don’t you all choose the same world?”

  She squeezed him. “Clever man! It does work that way, but your grandmother made a rule: only one of us for a world. Kas—he’s my brother, the king—he feels the same way I do, but she’ll still only let one of us go. And the buddhi seems to know that. Only one of us gets the full satori each time. It’s quite complicated, really.”

  “And then you inspect the world?”

  “Yes, but you see, it’s purely subjective. I have to be involved. I can’t just say, ‘Yes, that’s a nice little planet you have there.’ I can’t just walk around for twenty minutes and put a seal of approval on it. My buddhi would only worry about those twenty minutes, and some dangers may not show up for years. I have to be going myself—to live there for the rest of my life. The gift only works if I’m in danger—me, myself.”

  “I want to come with you!”

  The words were out before he had time to think about them, but he knew that he meant them with all his heart. He had no desire to be media flunky for Gran, with no chance of doing any good in the job. His grandfather had offered him help—but Hastings was not his grandfather. Cedric was Hastings’s clone. The Secretary General might be the deadliest danger of all, and Cedric had not had time yet to think about that problem. What rights or choices did a clone have? Legally he did not even exist. He had wondered earlier if Alya might be able to give him employment—not as a lover, obviously, although he planned to be available for that as long as she wanted him, and he also hoped they could stay friends afterward—but he had hoped that perhaps she could find him a living somewhere in Banzarak. He was not qualified to do much more than rake leaves off the palace lawn—not here, in this world—but on a frontier planet…

  Then there was an interruption, as the golfie reached a checkpoint. The concern was not over identity, but safety. Once both bubble suits had been tested for pressure again, and their air supply inspected, Cedric and Alya were waved through.

  “Last night,” he said, “you found my room. Was that intuition? And if it was—”

  She squeezed his hand. Crysfab squeaked on crysfab. “We don’t know exactly how it works. In fact, nobody has any idea. I tried to analyze it with superstring theory once—switching one of the unexpressed dimensions with time—and all I got was a headache. Two or three hundred years ago one of my ancestors fancied himself a philosopher. He said it was like a spinning a yarn. Have you ever seen a spinner at work?”

  “No,” he said. The golfie was slowing down for another ramp. Cedric did not care if it took forever to go where it was going. He could sit there forever very happily. Except, of course, that she had promised later…

  “Well, think of it this way. The past is fixed, right? The future we can’t tell. There’s one me in the past, and lots of mes in the future. There’s a me who invites Hubbard Cedric into her bed tonight. There’s a me who doesn’t. And a me who—”

  “I like the first one much better.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I would make that one very happy.”

  “Yes! Now, stop that! I promised you—later. But all those future mes somehow become just one present me. You understand? The future has lots of mes, like all the threads that are to be spun into the string. The present is the point where they all come together. In that past, there’s one me, one rope.”

  He nodded, thinking of the feel of her nipples against his tongue in the night.

  “So what the buddhi does, this old graybeard said, is tug on the strings in the future, and pick the string that’s the longest. The longest lifeline, the longest-living me. Understand?”

  “I understand that I love you very, very much, and I don’t care if you can turn yourself into a black cat.” She had not explained how she had found his room in the night, so she obviously did not want to.

  Alya smiled and squeezed his hand again. “Later, then.”

  She had not said she loved him, either.

  The golfie rolled to a halt beside the other. Jathro was already holding a door open.

  “What’s the rush?” Cedric asked as Devlin handed Alya down.

  And Devlin neatly cut out Cedric on the way in. “Two likely worlds, Tiber and Saskatchewan. Their windows are due at about the same time.”

  They stopped at a second, massive armored door, standing open. Waiting beside it were three men in ranger denims and bubble suits. The two at the back were grizzled-looking veterans holding Beretta 401 torchguns. The other was a stocky, broad-shouldered young man gabbling into his wrist mike. He looked up in surprise at the stranger.

  “You’re Hubbard Cedric!” He grinned, holding out a hand, studying Cedric with obvious interest. “I’m—”

  “You’re Baker Abel!” Cedric was thrilled. First Devlin Grant and now Baker Abel! Baker was only twenty-three, and already he had done some great exploring. “You discovered the man-eating boulders on Marigold!”

  Baker laughed. “They discovered me first! We’re all ready to go, Grant. Why the change of plan?”

  “Her Highness will inspect both NSB’s,” Devlin said pompously. “But she is apprehensive of Saskatchewan.”

  “The name alone scares me,” Alya said.

  “Rightly so!” Devlin’s attempts at humor were ponderous. “I must find out who picked that name, so I can can him.” Apparently, jocularity was back in vogue, now that he had returned to being Alya’s escort. “It should have been something easier, like Susquehanna.”

  “Or Syuyutliyka?” Baker remarked. “That’s a river in Bulgaria.” He got some irritated stares but no answer.

  They filed into t
he airlock and the door clumped shut with satisfying finality. Cedric slid close to Alya and took her plastic-wrapped hand in his to squeeze. She seemed perfectly calm, though.

  A fine decon mist fell from the ceiling, but no odor could penetrate a bubble suit.

  “Activate,” Baker told his wrist. “Window’s open, right on spec, friends. Take her up about five hundred meters if you can, Clem.”

  “Why did we have to come to another dome?” Cedric asked. He knew there were several domes, although only one could be used at time. Two transmensors working at the same time would create interference, even if they were a whole world apart, it was said. Everyone knew that.

  None of the men replied, so Alya said, “Special equipment. They have extra stuff standing by for this one. I’ve told them that this is it, that Tiber’s the one.”

  The far door hissed, the bubble suits crackled, and Cedric’s ears went dead. He swallowed to get his hearing back and noticed how his heartbeat was picking up. This was no holo show, no make-believe for the small fry on a boring afternoon too sunny to play outside. This was for real! Those guns certainly were.

  “Gravity’s a trace lower,” Baker said, “and air’s higher in oxygen. The suits’ll mask that, but this’d be a great world for wild parties. This way to the promised land, lady and gentlemen.” He led them out into de Soto Dome and started down the gentle slope toward the center.

  “Cedric!” Alya exclaimed.

  “What?”

  “You’re hurting me!”

  Hastily Cedric eased the pressure on Alya’s hand and apologized. Idiot! He had been trying too hard to seem calm and relaxed and not babble “Wow!” noises.

  The sheer size of the place was overwhelming. The roof curved far overhead like a metal sky, lit by a bright glow pouring up from the central pit. Most of the dished floor was empty, curving gently down to where the pit itself was hidden by a collection of machinery ringed around it. Motors were revving and crane arms flexing; mechanical spiders rippled along high gantries and lights flickered on and off as the rangers ran through test routines one more time. All that stuff would need an army to run it—Cedric tried to count and ended with a wild guess of at least fifty operators. Clearly Alya’s opinion was valued, and Tiber was going to be investigated very thoroughly.