Catch the Lightning

by Catherine Asaro

  Each time he overextends himself, it exacerbates the damage. Until repaired, his human/psiber interface should be usedfor no more_ than amplification of his link with you.

  Why only with me?

  The interaction between the two of you is not synthetically created, the Jag thought. It would exist without his web. Enhancing that link should not further corrupt his systems. It may aid his repair processes.

  Why?

  You are a healer. You can exert biofeedback control over your own body and to some extent, through your Kyle centers, over those of others.

  Like my mother. How much can I help him?

  I do not have enough data to quantify your Kyle rating.

  My rating?

  I am unable to determine a numerical value.

  Oh. I wondered if Althor had suffered brain damage from what happened in the lattice.

  Yes, the Jag thought.

  How bad is it?

  He can function. With proper treatment, he will heal.

  If you reboot him, will it damage him any more?

  No.

  Do it.

  The lattice reappeared around me. Then it blanked completely. No grid, no Earth, no sky, no nothing. Just black.

  Althor groaned, stirring against my legs. Hieroglyphs scrolled through the blackness in my mind, white on black. The Jag murmured in Iotic; apparendy Althor had made it the system default The lattice reappeared, along with Earth. The displays again poured through the lattice in a confusing flood of symbols rather than the pictorial input I understood better. Althor’s violet image shimmered into view, this time facing me, directly in front of my cube.

  Are you all right? I asked.

  He spoke in his own language.

  Resetting language mod, the Jag thought.

  I blinked. Who was I talking to, Althor or the Jag?

  We are the same, Althor said. With the Jag translating, his English was perfect, or at least as perfect as the odd English the Jag used. How did you repair the shroud?

  I guessed, I thought. It did most of the work itself.

  That’s an impressive “guess,” Tina. His image rippled with violet light. You should never have been subjected to that battle. I’m sorry.

  What about you? I didn’t want to think what it must be like when he fought people instead of machines. Did he feel them wanting to kill him? Did he feel them die?

  Althor’s image dulled. Yes.

  How do you bear it?

  There was a time when I wanted so much to be a Jag pilot I could almost touch it. He exhaled. I fast learned there was no glory in it. But it is necessary.

  I spread my hand across his chest, blending my blue with his violet. I have to believe a better way exists to protect what we love than by killing people.

  He answered softly. Perhaps someday we will find it.

  The attack left us subdued. For the rest of the trip, Heather, Joshua, and Daniel floated quietly at a holoscreen, watching space reel by outside the ship. As Althor worked on repairs, I monitored the lattice, letting him see it through my mind. Earth continued to search, but for the time being the shroud managed to camouflage us.

  Eventually Althor stopped working. As he put away his tools, I said, “Did you fix the problem that brought you here?”

  He shook his head. “I need to do more work. But I want to move away from Earth, find somewhere safer. First, though, I return my hostages.” He touched the exoskeleton surrounding my body and it opened, freeing me to leave the chair. “You can ride in the cocoon on the way down. Once we’re away from here, I’ll fix the co-pilot’s seat for you.”

  I pushed out of the seat. Daniel, Heather, and Joshua were floating in the cabin behind us, listening.

  “You’re going to let us go?” Joshua asked. Althor nodded and relief flashed across their faces. After the way he had changed the “rules”' of our deal at Yeager, I understood their wariness.

  “Your military will debrief you,” Althor said. “Tell them I threatened to kill you if you didn’t cooperate. And that I’ve kept Tina as a hostage. This should protect you.”

  Daniel spoke uneasily. “Joshua could never pull it off. He’s a terrible liar.” Joshua scowled at him, but didn’t refute the statement. Anyone who knew him knew it was true.

  “It’s not a lie.” Althor spoke quiedy. “If necessary, I would have killed any of you.”

  I knew he had never intended to kill them. But they believed him, and that was what mattered. If they believed it, whoever questioned them would as well.

  The sun was setting when we reached Caltech. We appeared out of nowhere, hanging next to Milikan Library, washed in a red-gold glow from the sunset. Wind battered the area as we came down, and students ran from the blast, shouting or pointing. Exhaust blistered the grass into oblivion and huge clouds billowed around the craft. Papers and books scattered everywhere, dropped by their owners or torn from their arms.

  As soon as we were down, Althor jumped out of his seat and strode to the airlock. We had little time; even if we hadn’t yet been detected, it wouldn’t be long before fighters were on their way here. As we scrambled out of the cocoons, Althor opened the airlock and warm air flowed into the cabin. Outside, several hundred yards away, a growing crowd of people stood watching the ship.

  Joshua turned to me, and we reached out together, pulling each other into a hug. “Tina—” His voice caught. “Good-bye.” A tear rolled down my cheek. “I’ll miss you.”

  “You take care of yourself.” He squeezed me, then let go and joined the others at the airlock.

  Althor spoke quiedy to them. “I thank you. For my life.”

  “Good luck,” Daniel said. “To both of you.” Heather and Joshua both nodded. They all jumped down from the ship and ran across the cooling ground.

  As we rose back into the sky, I watched them from a holo-screen. They looked up after us, surrounded by a crowd of people, their upturned faces receding in the twilight.

  10

  Inversion Interlude

  Saturn wheeled above us, a golden giant banded by butterscotch stripes. Hundreds of rings circled her, like bronzed grooves on a record. Althor put us in orbit around the moon Rhea. I floated at a holoscreen, staring at Rhea’s mother world, turning my bracelet around my wrist as I thought of my own mother.

  “Got it!” Althor said. His legs and hips were floating in the air. The rest of him was hidden in an open bulkhead.

  “Did you find what’s wrong?” I asked.

  “It’s the engines.” He maneuvered out into the cabin and floated in front of me, his body at an angle to mine. “Both the inversion drives and shroud were affected.”

  “Can you fix them?”

  “I think so.” He smiled as he watched me fiddle with my bracelet. “This is much more attractive as jewelry than as a piece of plumbing.”

  I hesitated. “I always wanted my daughter to have it.”

  He understood what I didn’t say. “Tina, I have wanted for a long time to be a father. But I can’t make promises. It is true, we are similar. But maybe not enough.”

  “Is there a chance?”

  “I think so. We need to ask the doctors.” He touched a square on a bulkhead and a tall panel slid open, revealing two slinky space suits.

  “You’re not going outside, are you?” I asked.

  “The Jag’s self-repair functions are degraded. I need to do some work.” He stripped off his clothes, smiling when I blushed, and hung them in the locker. When he put on one of the suits, it molded to his body, far more svelte than any twentieth-century space shuttle suit.

  In fact, a shuttle space suit was to Althor’s environment skin what a horse and buggy was to an Indy 500 race car. Shuttle suits needed seven layers, starting with nylon lining, then a garment that removed heat and waste gases by circulating chilled water through tubes. From inside out, the actual suit had a Mylar pressure bladder, a Dacron pressure restraint layer, a Neoprene layer for micrometeoroid protection, aluminized insulation, and an
outer protection layer. The helmet was like a fishbowl. Gloves with silicon rubber fingertips made handling tools viable and attached to the suit via metal rings that contained ball bearings to let the wrists rotate. The astronaut wearing it maneuvered using a gas-jet-propelled unit that resembled a big backpack. The suit also had cameras, tethers, lights, solar shield, computer, microphone, and boots. Even without the maneuvering unit, it weighed 113 kilograms.

  In contrast, Althor’s suit was like a second skin. Its power module fit into his belt. The hood hugged his head, except for the transparent glassplex in front of his face. Nano-sized robots packed the skin: multiple bonds made robot arms, chemical groups rotating around single bonds acted as gears, molecular spheres served as ball bearings, aromatic groups formed plates, and so on. A dense mesh of fullerene tubes acted as a muscle system, one far stronger than human tissue. Nano-bots converted energy absorbed from contractions into work needed to stretch the skin. The bots’ picochips formed a web that gave the skin a crude brain. A film on its outer surface acted as a solar collector and also transmitted pressure data to the picoweb, which directed bots to manipulate the inner surface so Althor “felt” what he touched. The picoweb also recycled wastes and directed the bots to perform repairs.

  Althor’s lips moved inside the helmet. “I’ll be back soon.” He took his diagnostic equipment and went to the airlock. The inner door irised, leaving behind a glimmer, as if a soap bubble hung in the opening. The outer door hissed open as the inner one closed. The timing was wrong; it sounded like the outer opened before the inner closed. Yet I neither heard nor felt any loss of air pressure?

  When Althor was outside, I said, “Jag?”

  Attending.

  I had expected a verbal response. “How do you link to my mind so easily?”

  The quantum probability distribution of your brain is currently maximized in the same spatial location as that of my processors. As a result, our overlap function is large.

  I tried “thinking” to it. What does that mean?

  Our effect on each other gets stronger as we get closer together. Right now you are inside of me.

  Then why does Althor need to plug into you? I asked.

  His system allows far more extensive interactions than can be achieved without a physical or electromagnetic link.

  Is he all right out there?

  Yes. Watch. A holo of Althor appeared on the screen showing him skimming along the hull. His suit glittered as he changed direction. The sparkles are my representation of gas-jet spurts made by his suit, the Jag thought. The suit plugs into his sockets and he directs it by thinking where he wants to go.

  I thought of what it had said about Althor using his biomech links. Is that safe?

  It may aggravate his neural injuries. However, the audio and manual controls were deactivated by the specialists at Yeager. The neural link works because they had no idea it existed.

  Althor attached his equipment to the hull and went to work, bathed in Saturn’s golden light. When I concentrated, I could “hear” the Jag monitoring his mental conversation with his suit, as if the ship considered Althor a valuable piece of apparatus.

  Yes, the Jag thought. He is mine.

  Its? I had no idea how to interpret that. Did the Jag see me as a rival?

  The word “rival” has no meaning in this context, the Jag thought. He has a need for you. It is in your best interest to treat him in a manner humans consider appropriatefor the mutually agreed upon mating of your species.

  Don’t worry. I will.

  Good. We are understood.

  After what felt like eons, Althor headed back. As soon as he was inside the cabin, I floated across the cabin and plowed into him, my momentum sending us into a spin. Grabbing me around the waist, he opened his helmet and pushed it back, laughing the whole time.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  He grabbed a handhold and stopped our spin. “Will I get this reaction every time I come in an airlock?”

  I laid my head against his chest. “Just don’t go out there again.”

  “If I did my work right, I won’t have to.”

  He put away his suit and dressed, then went to the cockpit and ran more tests. I floated nearby, watching him.

  Jag, can you bring the co-pilot’s chair up again?

  Yes. The seat rose out of the cockpit deck, squeezing in next to the pilot’s seat as bulkheads shifted position to make room. Its exoskeleton lay open like butterfly wings; when I slid into the seat, the mesh folded around me, molding to my limbs to allow freedom of movement “Do you know Heather’s last name?” Althor asked. “MacDane, I think.”

  A holo about six inches high appeared on the flat shelf in front of his seat, a fiftyish woman with gray-streaked hair. Hieroglyphs scrolled along a reflective strip on the bottom edge of the holoscreen.

  “Entry,” the Jag said. “Heather Rose MacDane James. Nobel Prize in Physics, a.d. 2027 Developed James Reformulations of relativistic theory, making possible Allied development of the inversion stardrive.”

  “Hey,” I said. “That’s Heather.”

  “Full entry,” Althor said.

  More people appeared: a slender man with an achingly familiar face and three girls ranging from about four to twelve. The Jag'reeled off data about Heather’s birth, life, education, and work. Then it said, “Husband, Joshua William James. Children: Caitlin MacDane James, Tina Pulivok James, Sarah Rose James.”

  As I put my hand over my mouth, Althor smiled. “A good name they gave their daughter.” He leaned forward, concentrating, and at first I thought he meant to bring up another holo. Then an odd look passed over his face, as if a spirit walked over his grave. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “What?” He glanced at me. “Nothing We just need to go.”

  So. This was it. “Okay.”

  We moved away from Saturn smooth and steady. Althor activated a holomap to show our progress. It couldn’t show the actual ship; instead the Jag rendered an image based on its data about itself, one essentially indistinguishable from a genuine record of our progress.

  Then I noticed a strangeness. The Jag was becoming less streamlined. “We’re squashed.”

  Intent on his controls, Althor spoke in his own language and the Jag translated. “A blunter design is better after we invert.”

  I hesitated, wanting to ask more but concerned about interrupting his work.

  “It’s all right to ask,” Althor said. “I’m swapping.”

  Although I had felt his mind swapping among different nodes in the Jag’s web, I hadn’t yet realized I had become another node, one he switched to when resources freed up. As Althor worked, the Jag answered my questions. It told me that if subluminal observers could record our flight, they would see our length shorten as we approached light speed. After we inverted, our length would increase, until at 141 percent of light speed it would have the same magnitude as when the Jag was at rest relative to its observers. At greater than 141 percent, length extended past its resting value.

  “On this jump,” the Jag said, “we’ll probably reach thousands of kilometers.”

  I whisded. “You mean, I’ll see Althor as thousands of kilometers long?”

  Althor smiled, and the Jag spoke. “Relative to you, I am at rest. So you 'see no change. I alter my shape to minimize my area relative to other reference frames.” .

  I wondered why the Jag was speaking instead of using a neural link. I know now it was because Althor couldn’t join our mental conversation until he healed. At the time it didn’t occur to me that a computer would have its responses programmed—or would program itself—to take its primary user’s feelings into consideration.

  I motioned at the holomap. “The constellations look like they’ve shifted.”

  “We’re speeding up,” Althor said.

  The Jag spoke. “Forty-two seconds ago, we accelerated at one hundred times the force of gravity for a period of thirty seconds. We are now traveling at 10 percent of light
speed.”

  I laughed. “You’re kidding.”

  “Why would I ‘kid’?” the Jag asked.

  “Wouldn’t acceleration like that kill us?”

  “We went into quasis.”

  “What?”

  It described how the ship and everything in it formed a system, a collection of particles described by a quantum state, or wavefunction. If even one particle changed one property—position, momentum, spin, and so on—its state changed. Quasis, or quantum stasis, prevents all state changes. The Jag didn’t freeze; its particles continued to vibrate, rotate, and otherwise move' as they did during the instant quasis went into effect. But they couldn’t make transitions. In theory, a system in quasis becomes infinitely rigid on a macroscopic scale. In practice, the process isn’t 100 percent effective; extreme or rapidly changing forces can weaken it.

  We had, survived the missile hit at Earth because the Jag put us in quasis. A missile can tunnel through an object in quasis, that is, pass through without affecting it, by going into complex space. Often, though, the projectile detonates, its momentum going into electromagnetic energy, complex space, or its own debris, which may or may not tunnel through the quasis object. No quasis is perfect, so particles in the object may also absorb momentum, causing damage.

  Althor indicated a red star on his holomap. A gold halo appeared around it—and the star “jumped.” In fact, all of the stars moved, converging toward a point in front of the ship. The color of the one Althor had highlighted changed from red to green.

  He glanced at me. “We just came out of stasis. We’re at 40 percent of light speed now.”

  The stars jumped again, and again, converging toward a single point. The highlighted star had turned a deep violet, almost too dark to see, and the display read 60 percent of light speed.

  “How close do we have to get to light speed before we can invert?” I asked.

  “It’s a balance,” Althor said. “Entering complex space is like detouring around an infinitely tall tree by leaving the road and entering an unfamiliar forest. The less time we spend in the forest, the better. So we go as near to the tree as we can before we leave the road; that is, we push as close to light speed as possible. Too close, though, and our increased mass uses too much fuel. It’s like trying to ride up the trunk of the tree. So we don’t go that close.”