by Janet Morris
A grille crackled to life. A voice said, "Who?"
"Rick Cummings. You don't know me, but—"
'Then I don't want to know you. Go away."
The speaker grille grated to silence.
Rick pounded again. He released Dini's hand and she rubbed both her arms. It was dank here, chilly.
Eventually, the speaker grille responded to Rick's persistent demands. "Okay, okay, Sport. You and the lady can come in for a minute or two, stop making a scene."
The door slid open to reveal a human person with no shirt on. Dini nearly covered her eyes, then realized she must be brave and brought her hand away from her mouth where it had come to rest.
"This way," said the man with no shirt, an earring, and a long braid like a woman's down his back.
In they went, following the naked back and the braid.
"Watch your step."
She tried but tripped anyway over cables and pieces of metal strewn over the ill-lit floor.
"What was it you wanted, Sport?" said the half-naked man, lounging on a piece of derelict spacecraft, his navel undulating like a bellydancer's as he breathed.
"I heard you have a box that does funny things," said Rick in a voice she'd never heard him use.
"I got a bunch a boxes do a bunch o' things, Sport. Got some that don't do squat, that's why they're here—for repair. Somethin' I can fix fer you?"
"I heard you made a box that opened the Ball out at Spacedock Seven," said Rick.
"Yeah? Who told you that?" The half-naked man's navel stopped undulating. He stopped breathing, then began again, very shallowly. He crossed his arms over his chest.
"Let's just say we have it on good information," said Rick.
Dini said, "We know the fabricators—"
The half-naked man stared at her, leaning forward. "No shit?" he breathed.
"Shut up," Rick said, whirling on her with a glare, and then back to the half-naked man. "You made a box for someone named Joe South, a pilot. It opened the Ball. I'd like you to build me a similar box. Or rent me one you've got."
"If I had any such box, buying one would be way above your paygrade, Sport." The man took his braid in his fingers, put the end in his mouth, and twirled it with his tongue. His earring gleamed in the dim light, and as his eyes met hers, Dini felt a deep and penetrating curiosity and a predatory acquisitiveness behind it.
Her husband retorted, "Try me, Sport. Name a reasonable price, or maybe I'll decide I've got the wrong aftermarketeer."
What was Rick doing this for? They had a toolbox of their own, given them by the Unity aliens—to be used only if needed. She wasn't sure, until this moment, that Rick knew she'd brought it. Or perhaps he didn't know she'd brought it.
That was it. He didn't know. She'd assumed he'd known. There hadn't been time to discuss it, with all the preparations for coming here that were made so fast and simultaneously. Tense, again: past, present, future.
Future. Perhaps Rick truly was changed by contact with his father. Perhaps all of his Earthly riches, and his father's other wealth, were too much to give up for love. Perhaps he wanted his own toolbox because he was going to stay with his father's people.
Perhaps that was why Rick had brought her here; perhaps he did not love her and wanted his own toolbox to use for his own purposes. Perhaps this was his way of telling her that everything between them was over.
She nearly fled. But the two men were deep in discussions of price and purpose, technical talk. And all the while, the half-naked man kept staring.
She took a step backward, uncomfortable under the scrutiny of the half-naked man and the possibility of her husband's betrayal. Oh, why had they ever come back here?
"So, we have a deal. You take us where we want to go and bring your box. We'll pay for the rental of the ship, your time, and the box."
The half-naked man said, "As long as the little lady comes along, and the price is as we agreed, you got yourself a deal, Sport" He straightened up, strode past Rick, and held out a hand to her. "Name is Sling, Ma'am. Good to meetcha."
The smell of him was overwhelming. The intrusion of his flesh into her personal space made her retreat from the hand as if it were a desert snake ready to strike.
She couldn't touch the hand. Know the man. She wouldn't.
Rick understood. He interposed himself between her and the half-naked man called Sling. "My wife." said Rick, 'is from Medina. Medinan women live sheltered lives."
Sling pulled back his hand and wiped it on his trousers. "Sorry, Ma'am." His jaw was stubbled. When he grinned, white teeth showed. "But you just relax, now. You're safe with me. I done more of this black box work than anybody else on Threshold. In fact, I done all of it. Want a beer?"
The beer was blue and she declined. Alcohol was not a Medinan drink. But Rick partook, and he and the man called Sling soon were laughing together.
She sat in a corner, listening, waiting, wondering, trying not to worry, until Sling left the room and returned with a shirt over his nakedness and a black box in his hand. "Okay, guys, we're cleared for departure on a good-as-gold vector. Have your tickets ready."
She didn't understand what was happening until Rick saw her consternated face and said, "Come on. Dini. We're leaving. Now. Mr. Sling is going to take us out to the Ball site. We can make it from there. No one will think to try stopping us. We're as good as home."
As good as home. He did love her.
She was nearly faint with relief. She didn't care whose toolkit they used to make the crossing, or whether Rick had first come here to do otherwise and then changed his mind when his temper cooled. She didn't even bother asking why he wished to leave by way of the Ball.
The sooner she was off Threshold, and back home in Unity space with her pets and her husband close by, the happier she would be.
Secretary Croft would be disappointed in her. She had given her word. But he had everything he needed, now, to make good decisions. She and Rick had made theirs. She was sure of that, at last.
CHAPTER 9
Vanished
The children were gone. Disappeared. Vanished into nowhere. Or vanished into Unity space, which might be one and the same, for all Mickey knew for certain.
So said Remson over the comlink from Spacedock Seven that Mickey had ordered patched through to him in the modeler bay.
"It's not anything that could have been anticipated, Vince." said Croft kindly but briskly. Nothing was so demoralizing to a first-dais trouble-shooter such as Remson as the unequivocal evidence of failure.
The tiny replica of Remson's face in the palm-sized monitor on the modeler console betrayed no sign of distress.
"We should have been prepared (or something like this, sir. and we weren't. I should have kept Reice with them. Somebody else could have handled the task force evaluation."
"And what would Rent have done, made a recording of unexplainable phenomena, as he did the last time? I'm coming out there. Vince. As soon as I do something about the uproar in the Cummings camp. Stay put. If you come across any phenomenological evidence that will show that the Secretariat in no way colluded, abetted, supported, or facilitated the Cummings couple's disappearance, it would be helpful."
"I'll come up with something, sir."
"No. Vince, I don't mean 'manufacture.'" Croft had to be sure that Remson understood. "It's not crucial to disprove accusations that haven't been made yet." But would be made, would be made soon—and at full voice. "Stay with your primary priority. I need you focused on the task force. Task the phenomenology of the children's—" He must stop calling them that! "—disappearance to ConSec here. Have the point of contact for that investigation report to my office for further instructions. And, Vince.. .."
"Yes, sir?" said Mickey's executive officer.
"Have a good day."
The image shrank to a tiny dot, then that faded away altogether.
Croft sat back in his chair and stared up at the model of the Interstitial Interpreter, slowly pivoting befor
e him, as the modeler refreshed itself in standby mode.
One way or another, fate was pulling Mickey Croft inexorably out. into space, toward the Ball—and perhaps beyond.
He knew he should exit the modeler bay and face straight on the uproar caused by the disappearance of the Cummings boy and his wife. He was hiding in here, playing with his toys, some would say.
Putting off the moment of confrontation with Richard the Second. Staving off the necessity of getting into yet another spacecraft and personal life-support helmet and suit and confronting his fears at the Ball site. Why did custom dictate that the egregiously restrictive helmet and suit be called a Manned Maneuvering Unit? To Mickey Croft, the term seemed like an oxymoron. Wrapping oneself in an MMU was an experience most like therapy in a sensory deprivation tank. Maneuvering in one was confounding to one of Croft's limited technical ability.
But another junket to the Ball's accursed coordinates was in Croft's future as ineluctably as yet another confrontation with Richard Cummings the Second.
Croft reached out to touch a control on his com system and hesitated. Then he stabbed a button that forwarded his incoming calls to his Secretariat office.
Let Cummings wait. Let the task of finding fault and apportioning blame in the disappearance of Romeo Cummings and Juliet Forat-Cummings wait, as well. Mickey Croft was Secretary General of the United Nations of Earth and he had certain prerogatives.
He didn't feel like talking to Cummings now, therefore he would not talk to him. The uproar over the children's disappearance would be waiting for him whenever he left here. Which he was not going to do until he was ready.
When he was ready, he would plunge back into the tempest and let himself be drawn by life's currents out to the Ball and what awaited him there.
Now, he would stubbornly refuse to be hurried, or distracted from the task at hand, or allow his schedule to be made by events, no matter how critical. This was just another crisis in an unending stream of crises. What was the point of being SecGen if you couldn't control your own time?
The model of the Interstitial Interpreter spooled slowly around to face him, and Mickey Croft halted its progress with a touch. "Tell me, Your Excellency, why the site of the Ball is not suitable for a Unity embassy, as we once agreed it was."
The model responded, "Mickeycroft, to be making a new link between worlds forever, there must be some reciprocal moving of things in time. Discontinuities affect possibilities, for humans and their universe shape. In clearer space, determinate time is possible."
"But, concretely, what purpose is served by this?" Mickey asked, still going carefully, still half-convinced that the model he spoke to in his private modeling bay was no less a representative of the Unity than the manifestation of Unity power he had spoken to aboard a teardrop ship in a dreamlike spacetime out by the Ball.
"Proof of commitment. Intent. Realization of possibility. Coming to meet," hissed the apparition that had come like a wraith in the wake of Dini Forat-Cummings and stayed behind like a ghost that had finally found the perfect castle to haunt.
The model was more than a model, this Mickey had already determined. But what was it? The children had been more than children, and where were they? Gone as they had come, Vince Remson thought, vanished without a trace to prove they'd ever been here, except a swathe of diplomatic wreckage left behind and this model, which was some incomprehensible channel to a race whose phenomenal now was nothing like the simple, four-dimensional domain of human beings.
The model of the Interstitial Interpreter regarded Croft with the same sad-eyed look that had mesmerized him aboard the teardrop flagship of the Unity, and the eyes left the head of the Unity being and seemed to float inches from his, the way the eyes of the actual Interpreter had then.
Mist seemed to fill the modeler bay as it had filled the teardrop ship, and unseen pots of smoking incense held by an invisible honor guard filled the air with a scent like gardenias and jasmine.
The smell brought back too many memories and broke too many natural laws. Croft was filled with fear, apprehension, foreboding. Perhaps "ghost" was the synonym for this model, but not the ghost of poor Yorick or any other spirit of departed humanity, real or fantastical. Rather, a ghost in the machine. A virus in the computer. A secret invasion underway that the Secretariat was not prepared to fight because he, Michael Croft, had refused to recognize the enemy when first confronted by it.
Was the Stalk's artificially intelligent memory core being infected by the model before him? Was it too late to do anything but follow the Unity's direction?
All of Threshold depended on computer power for survival. Without redundantly integrated and self-replicating, self-correcting systems, no habitation of space was possible, not on so grand a scale.
The model began rotating again, since Croft was no longer questioning it. To see what would happen, Croft posed a question while its back was to him.
"Where are the Cummings boy and the Forat-Cummings girl?"
If this manifestation was a real link to a Unity intelligence, not just a model of one, it could give him many answers to many plaguing questions.
He held his breath, conscious of the smell that filled his nostrils but couldn't be real: smells were artifacts of bits of matter entering the nose. Real smoke with real molecules of odor-producing pheromones could not be generated by a computer model.
The stately progress of the rotating model ceased as, abruptly, it faced him to answer his question.
That shouldn't happen, either.
The model responded, "Our children have come home to us."
Note the syntax, Croft: our children—possessive. Have come: a fait accompli. Home to us—
Croft couldn't deal with the implications.
"What will happen if I stop all work on moving Threshold, rescind permission for the creation of a Unity embassy, and recall my ambassadorial staff which I sent back with your first delegation?
"Nothing will happen," said the Interstitial Interpreter's model.
Threat or promise, Croft had had enough.
He cleared the modeler of the image abruptly and hesitated. He could bring up other models, to test the system: Riva Lowe, his ambassador to Unity space, perhaps, or Commander Joe South, whom Croft had sent with her. It had been too long since he heard from them.
But if he brought up their models and found that the models seemed to be communicating with him, not simply responding as a good psychometric model should, as an analog of the person in question, then what?
Before him now was a simple, light-swirled space full of holographic potential, not a mathematically impossible, direct communication to another spacetime or beyond the boundary conditions of the universe as man had always known it.
What possible benefit could there be to either race from commerce across such a gulf of different realities? What did the aliens have to gain from contact? Power beyond man's wildest dreams was clearly at the heart of Unity technologies, but the price ...
And what did the aliens want from humanity in return?
These were questions that the model would answer only in riddles, if Croft were so foolish as to ask them.
He shut off the modeler entirely and brought up the lights in the modeler bay. Clear white light that simulated the daylight of Earth drove away the lingering smell in Croft's nostrils.
If the price to the human race was a loss of control such as Mickey had been experiencing since his first physical contact with the Unity aliens, perhaps the price was too dear by half.
Resolutely, he stood up. He forced himself to stand straight. He walked briskly to the bay door and beyond into the empty control room.
At the anteroom door, he hesitated, looking back through the two line of sight windows of glass beyond which were the modeler and the ghost which had come to haunt his castle.
Then he palmed the plate which opened the door that separated his sanctum from the everyday reality of Threshold, determined to do what needed to be done to re
store order to his world, no matter how desperate the measures.
This uncertainty in the face of change could not be allowed to continue. Inaction ensured only a random result. Most likely the most undesirable one.
As he left the modeler bay's anteroom, Croft found himself in a small crowd: the modeler technicians, waiting for him to leave, were augmented by ConSec staffers and three Assistant Deputy Undersecretaries from the Secretariat with urgent messages for him.
Everyone started talking at once.
Croft held up his hand for silence. Among the gathered faces, there was only one he recognized sufficiently to put a name to it. Croft said, "Mr. Reice, Secretaries, walk with me."
The Assistant Deputy Undersecretaries jostled for position on Croft's right. Reice, on his left, was carrying an ominously full black bag.
"One at a time, gentlemen," Croft said, and pointed at random to one of the Assistant Deputies. There'd been a time when he'd have had their names on the tip of his tongue. He'd prided himself on it.
Never mind. The first, balding and wearing eyeglasses to demonstrate his Conservative bent and serious nature, which cared not at all for cosmetic augmentation, said, "Sir, Mr. Cummings of NAMECorp wishes to see you at your earliest convenience."
'T haven't one, not for him. I'll be in touch with him tomorrow. Pressing business, and all that."
The staffer raised one eyebrow above his mock-tortoise eyeglass frames and scurried away toward a bank of lifts.
"Next?"
The second said, "We have a communique from the Medivan embassy that the Mullah Forat will be docking this afternoon, and is requesting immediate access to his daughter. The Medinans are pulling every stunt from accusing us of holding her against her will despite diplomatic immunity to threatening to request an emergency Security Council session. They've also requested that we facilitate a meeting between the Medinan delegation and Cummings."
The second staffer represented the Medinan desk, then. Croft said, "Tell Beni Forat we don't have his daughter, or any information on her whereabouts. Remind him that he never asked us to monitor her activities. And tell him that we'll be glad to arrange meetings with any Threshold citizens as long as all protocols are observed and the Medinans behave themselves. Then talk to Cummings' private secretary and see if some sort of reception can be arranged. Make sure you're at any meeting you set up for the two of them. I'm officially out of pocket for the next forty-eight hours, so there can't be a Security Council session until I return. Our apologies for any inconvenience, and so forth. Got all that?"