Eternity's End

by Jeffrey Carver

  "We'll find things for you to do, don't worry."

  He forced a nervous smile. "Okay—what's next, then?"

  "What's next is I go back to work. And you—you look like you could use some sleep. When you're ready, here's where you can call up the study programs." She stepped over to the desk and showed him the controls. "Why don't I come back later to show you around?"

  He nodded, covering his surprise. He couldn't deny being pleased by the personal attention. "I guess I could stand to sleep a few hours." He was exhausted, actually, and the adrenaline was starting to wear off. "What time is it? When do you sleep?"

  Tiny lights sparkled at the corners of her eyes. "It's third-quarter evening. A lot of people will be on sleep cycle during the next six or eight hours. I'll be working, myself; I don't need much sleep. My programs handle REM processing right in the node, so I can pick up sleep functions while I work."

  Legroeder didn't know whether to be envious or sympathetic.

  "I'll be free in about ten hours. Will that give you enough time? We have to confine you to quarters until your case has been reviewed. But if you get hungry, you can call up some snack pantry items on the com here. Anything else you need?"

  Yes, he thought. The com address of the underground. "I guess not. Is it okay if I play with the com system a little?"

  She gave him a look. "As long as you don't try to access anything that it wants you to stay out of." She touched his arm and moved toward the door. "Bye, then." He couldn't answer; he was mesmerized by the tingle. "Oh—if you need to reach me, use this code." She turned to the desk com and placed an index finger on the reader-plate. "There, it's stored for you."

  As she went out and the door opaqued behind her, he felt a pang of self-recrimination at the pleasure he'd just felt. She's the enemy, remember? What the devil are you thinking?

  Sighing, he tossed his bag off the bunk and lay down. He had no idea how long it had been since he had last slept, but he knew it was way too long.

  * * *

  Sleep, however, did not come easily. When it did, it was a troubled affair, blurred with wakefulness. It felt as if his brain were continuing to fire at a scattergun pace—his dreams and the activities of the implants intertwined with one another, synaptic impulses rocketing up and down in a frenetic series of discharges. Even asleep, he was aware of the intense activity... dreams coming silently and escaping again, pushed out by the next, and the next, in an unending cascade. Images from the flicker-tubes, from his long-ago past, from battle, from the gazing crystals...

  He awoke at one point, exhausted but unable to keep his eyes closed. Without thinking about it, he stumbled to the desk and switched on the com. He glanced briefly at the study programs, but found he was too groggy to concentrate. He idly began running searches. After noodling aimlessly for a few minutes, he narrowed his search. Prisoners... Narseil... Freem'n Deutsch... He wasn't even sure what he was looking for; he just wanted to know if there was reason to hope for their safety.

  The implants flagged him briefly, asking if he really wanted to proceed. He brushed the caution aside irritably; he didn't know why the Kyber trusted him, but Tracy-Ace had said it was okay to play around.

  He wasn't making much progress; but somewhere into his third attempt, he finally woke up to what he was doing. Dear God, what an idiot. Was he giving himself away, showing his concern about the Narseil? He sat back, feeling sick.

  The implants spoke up. // Our monitoring did not show you betraying any incriminating data.//

  (Except my doing the search in the first place. Why didn't you stop me?)

  The answering voice was clearly meant to be soothing. // Our programming does not include interference in personal activities, barring clear and present danger.//

  And I assured you it wasn't dangerous, he remembered, rubbing his forehead. What the hell time was it now? Fourth-quarter two. What the hell did that mean? He didn't understand the time-keeping system here.

  // If you like, in the future we will note such activities as dangerous... //

  (Fine.) He reached to turn off the com.

  The implants stopped him with: // You have a message waiting.//

  (What? Where?)

  And then he saw it, a tiny dingbat at the corner of the comspace. He blinked at it, and it expanded, and he heard Tracy-Ace's voice saying, (Sorry, Rigger Legroeder, that com-search is off limits. But I'll tell you what you need to know, next time I see you. In the meantime, if you can't sleep, why don't you give those study programs a try.)

  For several heartbeats he sat absolutely still, neither moving nor breathing. And then he realized that she hadn't sounded angry or suspicious. Maybe, after all, it was okay for him to wonder what had become of his former shipmates—even if they theoretically were the enemy.

  Tracy-Ace wasn't done. (Someone I know's going to want to talk to both Deutsch and the Narseil crew, by the way. So don't worry about their being executed in the near future.) She chuckled. (Now, get some sleep.)

  The message dingbat closed.

  Legroeder stared in dumb amazement at the com for a full minute. Then he sighed, rose, and went back to the bunk to try to follow her suggestion.

  * * *

  It was no use, he thought after a half hour of tossing fitfully in the bunk. Once more, he went to the com console. This time, he brought up the orientation programs, and sat for over an hour listening to droning voices and watching images of station layouts and command hierarchies as the workings of everyday life and lines of authority were explained to him. He was aware, as he followed in a semi-daze, that much more was being conveyed through the augments, and that they were going to be even busier digesting the new load of data than any of them would have guessed possible.

  As he threw himself back onto the bunk for one more attempt at sleep, it occurred to him that he had just been given, with almost no effort on his part, some of the very information he had come here hoping to steal.

  * * *

  Amazingly, he did sleep, though not peacefully. He dreamed of mysterious machineries relentlessly thrumming, surrounding him and filling him with incomprehensible activity.

  At one point he stirred to the piping of a com signal and he half-woke with the memory of the frenetic dreams fading like a half-forged, coded message. But he didn't quite make it to wakefulness before he drifted back under and this time was swept up by a wave of images and sounds like a breaker crashing in from the sea.

  Memories of Golen Space. The Fortress of DeNoble. Barracks of the captives, more a warren than a human habitation. The bunk on which he rotated shifts with three other men, the mattress that smelled of things he tried not to think about. The raider flights. And between missions, days spent working on weapons arrays and flux-modulation reactors. Days spent dreaming of work stoppage, of suicide. And each day, walking past the window of the punishment center...

  Stop... please... he whispered, struggling to wake; but the memories were like a surround-holo, relentless. He couldn't move, couldn't shut his eyes or his ears. Prisoners who tried a work stoppage? They were only tortured for a few days with electrosynaptic shock. But those who tried suicide or sabotage? They were strapped into chairs, gnawed by alien parasites, condemned to a lifetime of screaming agony, dying slowly... only to be resuscitated by robot life-support systems. They were the examples: suffering the boss's eternal wrath for defying the law of the fortress. According to rumor, the boss had once led a bizarre religious splinter sect, inspired to ever-higher standards of torture by ancient legends of purgatory.

  Why do I keep remembering...?

  And one other memory: he never knew her real name, but among the prisoners she was known as Greta the Enforcer. A woman of exquisite beauty and deadly malice. What her actual position was in the DeNoble hierarchy, Legroeder never knew, either; but in his one encounter, begun as a seeming invitation to special "favors," he'd been left shaken, dizzy, heart pounding with fear and humiliation. It was rumored that she used pheromones and charm eq
ually as weapons, and just as no man could resist her appeal, neither did any escape the pain that she enjoyed inflicting.

  Legroeder, in the depths of sleep, groaned, wondering how he had survived as long as he had at DeNoble, wondering how he'd ever found the courage—or madness—to escape.

  And now, to return voluntarily to it all, to new punishments... torture and incentive, reward and punishment... all in a blur that he could only imagine, shivering... struggling to awaken... visions of Tracy-Ace/Alfa and the pirates of Ivan strapping him into a chair alongside his Narseil comrades...

  Bzzzz... bzzzzz... bzzzz...

  What was that noise, like killer bees swarming—?

  Bzzzzzzzz...

  He sat upright in bed, shaking. "What—what—?" he stammered.

  The door paled and Tracy-Ace strode in.

  He shuddered, the aftershocks of the final dream-quakes still rocking back and forth in his mind.

  "You're alive," she said, looking as if she were surprised to find him still breathing. "Rings—you look awful! I've been trying to call you for hours. Why didn't you answer? Are you sick?"

  He rubbed his forehead, struggling to fight his way out of the dream fog. "Uh—I guess I was really asleep," he said thickly, sounding as if he had marbles in his mouth. "How'd you get in?"

  "I overrode the lock." Tracy-Ace squinted at him. "You don't look like you slept very well." She got him a glass of water. "Should I come back later?"

  He took a few sips, choking, as he tried to process her question. He thought of his dream and wondered: Are you the one who orders the tortures here?

  // Hold, please. We're working to compile relevant information for you... //

  His head reeled. But indeed, some of the information he'd gained was starting to swarm into focus. This outpost was different; they used different methods of persuasion here. He knew more about Outpost Ivan than he'd have guessed possible in such a short time. In the midst of all that dreaming chaos, his implants had been processing the info-dumps that the flicker-tube and the study programs had given him, half a lifetime ago.

  // We've been comparing past and present... //

  (Wait a minute,) he thought with sudden bitterness, (are you saying that I dreamed all that stuff just so you could analyze it?)

  // It helped us to establish a perspective, yes.//

  Perspective, he thought, shaking his head. Christ.

  Tracy-Ace was frowning. "Does that mean yes or no?"

  He blinked. "Huh? What did you ask? Give me a minute here, I, uh—"

  Tracy-Ace cocked her head. "Are you having a flicker-tube hangover, or do you always wake up this way?"

  "Flicker-tube... hangover," he mumbled. "That must be it." He squinted, looking around for the time. "How long was I asleep?"

  "About fourteen hours. Look, I'll give you a few minutes to get showered. Then I think we'd better go get some breakfast into you."

  He nodded, rubbing his eyes. He suddenly realized that she'd changed clothes since he'd last seen her. She looked more than a little sexy, dressed in a short gold skirt over black tights, and a patchwork black-and-gold blouse. Her temple implants were flickering, drawing his eye. Now why did he think that made her look good? He drew a sharp breath, thinking of... Greta. This is the face of the enemy. Remember that.

  "Great," he said huskily. "Thanks."

  After she was gone, he tossed off the thin blanket and stepped into the mist-shower, aware of his nakedness as he wondered vaguely: what was one supposed to wear while touring a raider compound with a lady pirate, anyway?

  * * *

  Walking with Tracy-Ace, later, he discovered that the implants had done a pretty thorough job of organizing his headful of new information. He found himself with a silent guide in his head, producing tiny captions for him as they passed through the station.

  // ...To your nine o'clock, note the flicker-tubes leading to the new docking port construction site. Just under a thousand workers there... //

  He glanced left. (New docking port? You mean they're expanding this place?)

  // And further to your left, a departure portal to the location of Outpost Ivan's contribution to the Free Kyber colonizing fleet... //

  Legroeder staggered a little, his heart pounding. He turned to peer back at the flicker-tube portal they had just passed. The colonizing fleet. He had managed to put that out of his mind.

  "Something wrong?" Tracy-Ace asked, pausing. She'd been talking all this time, he had no idea about what.

  He drew a slow breath. "No," he said, forcing himself to rejoin her. "Nothing wrong."

  They continued walking.

  Colonizing fleet. He was dying to ask her about it. Terrified of what she might say.

  He hardly noticed as Tracy-Ace tugged him faster along the promenade, while he contemplated the thought of the Kyber worlds moving out of Golen Space, colonizing... the Centrist Worlds? No, that didn't make sense.

  It must be something else...

  * * *

  He only gradually became aware of the tingling in his arm, mostly after Tracy-Ace took her hand away to gesture toward a food-plaza. "Breakfast," she said.

  Breakfast. Legroeder tried to think what he had been feeling a moment ago. She'd been touching his arm—but as a polite gesture, or a personal touch—or was she making a data connection? He cocked his head at her. "Were you reading my mind a moment ago?"

  Was that a twinkle in her eye? "And if I was?"

  That startled him; he'd been expecting a denial. "Usually people ask first."

  She gazed appraisingly at him. "What if I said I was letting you read my mind?"

  "Uh?"

  Tracy-Ace raised her chin slightly. The gems around her eyes glittered with reflected light from the ceiling. "I thought it might be helpful," she said. "During the download yesterday, I caught a few things about you—"

  He drew back.

  "Nothing profound. But I sensed you didn't quite trust me. And if we're going to—" she paused "—work together... I thought it might help if you knew more about me."

  Legroeder felt flattered and puzzled at the same time. Why, he started to ask, would you care if I trusted you?

  Before he could voice the thought, he was startled by the appearance, inside his head, of two converging arcs of ruby light signifying new information about Tracy-Ace. She was twenty-seven years old, Free Kyber standard calendar. No immediate family, but a couple of cousins who might have been real biological relatives. Parents, from one of the old Kyber worlds: came to join the Free Kyber alliance, and died in a border dispute when she was four. (Oh.) Raised by the local childcare collective. Adept in the system; rose to the ranks of node administration before most of her contemporaries had even finished school. For three years, Node Alfa.

  She was peering at him, emotions unknown.

  Liked the challenge and the responsibility—and the proximity to power. Socially unattached, but willing to consider unusual liaisons. Had a fondness for rebels.

  He felt his blood rise, wondering if he qualified as an "unusual liaison." Or a rebel.

  // That part of the analysis is ambiguous. Shall we probe further?//

  (No, thank you.) He cleared his throat. But Tracy-Ace was talking—about him—and he'd missed the first part of it. Something about his being useful to the outpost.

  "...have skills we need, and knowledge. Possibly for special operations. I believe my boss will want to talk to you, soon." Tracy-Ace was studying him again. "I see you wondering. But part of my job is to evaluate people and situations, to look for the unexpected. To make judgments for the benefit of the outpost. And the Republic." And the colonizing fleet? At the outer corner of her left eye, a tiny red bead glowed for a moment, as though she were photographing him for a security check. A smile flashed across her face. "Besides—I rather like you."

  He felt a moment of lightheadedness. Was it the implants, fracturing away all of the normal inhibitions? Everything seemed accelerated here. A momentary vision of Gre
ta the Enforcer flickered across his mind, giving him a shiver.

  If she noticed or understood his shiver, she didn't show it. He was still trying to think of a response to her statement that she liked him. The face of the enemy.

  "Let's get some food," she said. "Then there's something I want you to see."

  He followed her through the food-plaza. The choices were some kind of bread, some kind of curd, and some kind of soft cereal. He took a small serving of each, plus a cup of murk. Tracy-Ace led him to a line of tables looking out over a huge balcony. No, not a balcony—a holo.

  Legroeder stared out at an enormous view of the Flux. In the foreground were sprawling structures that he hardly noticed, because behind them were swirling gas clouds that seemed vast, almost galactic in scope. They might have been a bright emission nebula, a star-birthing grounds. But this was something different. His rigger's intuition told him: this was a boundary layer. Not the boundary between normal-space and the Flux, which would have been impressive enough for structures to be anchored against. No, this—he felt with absolute certainty—was the transition zone between the familiar layers of the Flux where starships flew, and another place deeper and more mysterious, and far more perilous.

  "You know what it is?" Tracy-Ace said.

  He opened his mouth, but couldn't speak. The Deep Flux. He knew it by name only. It was an underlying region of the Flux so unstable and unpredictable that riggers avoided it, always. He had never heard of anyone flying in it and returning, though the Narseil Institute had reportedly done some experimenting along the border regions. But the Kyber—? Was this just an impression-image, a work of art?

  "Is it real—this view?" he murmured.

  "Oh yes," she said, gesturing to the lower part of the image, at the indistinct structures in the foreground.

  He couldn't quite make out what they were. Man-made, certainly. A station? Docking ports? Ships? He shivered at the thought of man-made structures hovering on the edge of such cosmic instability.