The Stalk

by Janet Morris

  He could almost dare to hope that this was truly real, really real, and not a phantasm of his tortured soul.

  It smelled real. It felt real. His skin, which was privileged skin that on occasion knew the touch of an Earthly breeze, knew what a real breeze felt like, what treasures of nature it carried, what promises it made when it was salty from a sea nearby, fruited from the berries growing on the shore, piney from the woods that broke the seawind's force and tamed it, and perfumed from the flowers in the meadows sheltered from the storm.

  Only as he looked back again, ahead, and to the morning star, did he finally realize that this place, this fine and welcoming place, was not his own beloved Earth, but some other world as natural to man as breathing.

  The sky above was glowing with promises of day, and the morning star was fading. As it faded, rings appeared, golden, glowing rings with clouds among them. The vault above turned violet, then lilac, and finally lavender as day came rolling in like thunder.

  Rick squeezed his hand. "Dad! Dad, isn't it beautiful? Isn't it grand?"

  "It is that, son." It wasn't Earth. It wasn't a place that Cummings had ever heard discussed among all the colonies of man.

  The hill before them stretched gently up, its green grass full of flowers. Atop the hill, as the sun arose in earnest, Cummings could see a white portico, columns, and wide stairs on which a small, human figure stood and waved.

  "It's Dini," said his son, and Cummings let go of Ricky's hand.

  "I see it is," he meant to say, but nearly growled. "What is this place?"

  "Our home," said Rick, all the glorious light running down his cheek as if he were in a shower of it.

  The words hit the elder Cummings like a slap. "Where is this place?" said Richard, determined now to know what was happening.

  "Far from harm. Close at hand." The boy shrugged. "Home. Don't you recognize it?"

  "Son, your home is with ..." Cummings wanted to shake Rick by the shoulders, but as he turned, scowling, the sky above his son's head was filled with darting, glowing spheres that soared and dipped and floated along, then stopped stock-still in the middle of the air.

  "Dini's waiting, Dad." Daddaddaddaddad.

  Rick's face was happy, proud, and eager to share all this with a father who was not too much a fool to know what he was saying.

  Richard Cummings had allowed himself to become many things, but never a fool. The spheres above their heads were nearly magical: no bird or plane could move that way, among the clouds, down low to the ground, then up until they disappeared among the ringed heavens' arch.

  Cummings walked up the hill with his son, to meet his daughter-in-law, wondering how the boy had brought him here and what the future would hold for humankind if lives could be lived in such idyllic harmony.

  The girl ran down the hill to meet them, and the radiance of her face nearly shook Cummings' faith in his own senses.

  Had his son found the Garden of Eden? The Promised Land? Or had Rick simply come home, the way he'd said?

  It didn't matter. The girl was running toward them, nearly floating down the hill. In the shadow of the gleaming columns, up the stairs, figures darted—not quite human, strangely dressed.

  But Cummings was not afraid. He knew the future when he saw it. Nothing he could offer could rival what Rick and his wife had here. Nothing any man could offer another could be weighed against these scales and win.

  His son had come home. A Cummings had found a world more beautiful than words could say, a mode of travel beyond price, and a deep contentment that Richard envied.

  He was old. His son was young. The girl flinging herself into the dale to meet them was full of life and health and promise. And on the hill above, among the columns of a temple or a house, unearthly beings shyly waited.

  High above his head, glowing spheres did arabesques in fleecy clouds, and their shadows touched his son's face, so proud, so calm, so happy here.

  He'd tried to keep Rick from this. He'd used every power at his command to trap the boy, the girl, to make them as unhappy as everyone else he knew. He was infinitely sorry he had done so.

  When Dini reached them, he took her hands and said gravely, "Your home is very lovely."

  She smiled. "It's your home, too. Can't you feel it? We're so glad that you could come."

  How had he come here? He asked, but Dini tugged him onward, up the hill, and Rick was saying, "Wait until you see the house, meet our friends. Then you'll understand it."

  On the steps, Cummings saw furry mammals, like raccoons, that purred and hopped up into the arms of the young couple.

  The pets pulled at their hair and climbed on their shoulders, as Dini said, "This way," and led him through the portal.

  Richard Cummings knew the pets were called Brows, telempathic creatures, rare and strange. His son had named them, found the species, brought them with him. They weren't local animals. But they were clearly at home here, and a part of this place in a way that Cummings didn't understand.

  Nor did the aliens he met inside, sad-eyed, soft-spoken beings of infinite patience, belong here any more than he. They welcomed him gravely home and walked with him around the hill's crest, their heads bowed, their crowns gleaming.

  When it was time for him to leave, Cummings knew it as much by the sadness in his heart as by the setting of the sun. His son said. "Dad, you must return, nowtime. Home is always here, when you want it."

  Strange turn of phrase, doubtless picked up from talking with the aliens. Cummings was overcome with love for his son and sadness at parting, but there was much to do, now that he had met the aliens and begun to understand the Unity.

  His son walked him down the hill, into the dale, and over the crest of the hill beyond, alone. ,4 Dad, we can go back whenever you need us. But we don't want to.'*

  "I see why." Cummings felt, with every step away from the hilltop where Dini watched them go, as if he were losing something. A connection. A chance. A lifetime. A soul. His son. Again. i4 Come back with me, just for a little while. Rick." He hadn't meant to say it. It slipped out somehow.

  "A later time. I'll come. Spacetimers need to talk to you, not me. And you'll stay longer, nexttime. With us, at home. See the sunset?" The youth raised a pointing finger on a straight arm.

  Cummings sighted along it, into the ring-lit sky. Flaring clouds rayed the light into a prism of pink and gold and green. The plasma spheres danced and swooped, spinning out the end of day.

  No place such as this existed but in man's memory. Cummings was about to say that to Rick, to make one more clear entreaty, when he blinked. An instant of total darkness enveloped him. His lids would not open for a heartbeat. And when they did, his feet were on his Heriz rug and his bedroom all around him.

  He rubbed his eyes. He'd gone on a long journey, wearing pajamas, barefoot, with his son as his guide and his soul on his sleeve. It had happened. It was no artifact of stress, no dream, no hallucination.

  There was grass between his toes, green grass stains on the bare soles of his feet, and even a small bug that had ridden from somewhere else to here on the big toenail of his left foot. He leaned down and coaxed it onto his thumbnail.

  He stood and brought his thumb up to eye level. The bug was red, with tiny black spots and a hooded head. It resembled an Earthly ladybug. He must get a plant for it to live on. It was his proof that he'd gone somewhere, done something—in case Threshold drained his certainty away.

  He would not forget. He would not convince himself that he'd been mad for an evening. He would not succumb to fear. He would not fail his son. Or his daughter-in-law. Or the human race.

  He would not.

  And that day, he did not. After finding the ladybug a fern, a rose, some daisies, and a vase, he began his work.

  He called the Secretariat and told an astonished Mickey Croft that he, Richard Cummings, was implacably in favor of open trade with the Unity aliens, and he expected the Secretariat to do its job—facilitating the welfare of its citizens—by
supporting the opening of complete diplomatic relations with the Unity worlds as soon as possible.

  The tiny Croft in Cummings' monitor wanted to know, "What's up, Richard? Why are you taking such a hard line all of a sudden?"

  "I've heard from my son. He's safe and well. That's all I needed to know. Now, you do your job, Croft, and I'll do mine—in lockstep. Or I'll find somebody else to work with, somebody who can handle a transition of this magnitude."

  "Mr. Cummings," Croft began, but Cummings ended the transmission with a deep feeling of satisfaction. Croft had once ended a discussion between the two of them as abruptly. What goes around, comes around, Mickey. The old saying was as true today as it had been centuries ago. And many other century-old truths might be proven before the UNE and the Unity had developed a working relationship. That was fine with Cummings. He had seen the future in his son's eyes.

  Next on Cummings' list was Beni Forat, father of Dini, and mullah of the Medinan colony. Cummings intended to make sure that Forat knew that he, Richard Cummings, was no longer opposed to his son's marriage to the Medinan girl, and that all manner of benefits would accrue to Medinan citizens if Forat could find a like sentiment in his heart.

  That thought reminded him to reinstate his son in his will, which he did immediately. There was no reason to delay. He had seen something so mysterious, so full of promise, and so undeniably appealing that no human could resist it. His son had found a world on which NAMECorp could build a new empire, far greater than before. Or so he told himself as he ordered his priorities.

  After the mullah, he would start private negotiations with the Unity aliens on acquiring the transportation system that Rick had used. The aliens had a construct near the Ball site. They must have representatives there.

  Lobbying was something that Richard Cummings did better than any man living. Getting what he wanted was never difficult. Determining what he should want was always the problem.

  First he would convince Beni Forat that the imam of Medinan culture should want an infidel for a son-in-law. Then he would convince the Unity aliens that NAMECorp was its best hope of controlling the access of humanity to its vast resources. That would not be difficult for a man of Cummings' stature, especially since Richard's son and heir was already inhabiting a Unity world and sharing Unity secrets.

  Cummings had never had a better day, or a harder one. When he came into his sanctum after five meetings in a row, he was whistling. The gay mood stayed with him until he saw the vase of flowers he'd ordered for the Unity ladybug.

  The flowers were dead, shrivelled, their petals strewn on the carpet. The ladybug was nowhere to be found.

  CHAPTER 16

  Politics

  ". . . so we just give 'et a little push. Secretary Remson, and oil we go," the two-star general from ConSpaceCom Logistics Agency said dryly. ConSpaceCom's General Granrud was short, stocky, with faded red hair thinly sprinkled atop a pear-shaped lace. He looked older than he was, perhaps because of his pale and hooded eyes, and a thin skin that showed every vein around his nose and in his high forehead—or perhaps because of the responsibility loaded onto his rounded, heavy shoulders. Everyone in the Secretariat had begun calling him The General, spoken as if there were no other. He had taken control of this mission early on because of his Logistical Agency's primary responsibility for organizational redeployment of forces and had maintained a complete stranglehold on the operational side ever since. "If the stresses caused by the initial acceleration of an asymmetric mass like Threshold don't set up so much vibration that the Stalk shakes apart." the general continued, "then we don't have any problems we can't handle—until deceleration, when we find out how badly we've fatigued the superstructure."

  Remson rubbed his jaw and stared at the rotating display, which hovered in midair between them, holographically protected from a deskpad unit that the Logistics general had brought to Remson's Y Ring office. The miniature Threshold could be rotated 360 degrees, viewed from any angle, and put through a simulation of the stresses involved in accelerating a basically cross-shaped object with unevenly distributed concentrations of mass to a good fraction of the speed of light across a complexified spacetime.

  The miniature Threshold seemed suspended in a conical tube of distorted ellipses, some of which traveled with it, some of which did not, as it "moved" across the topologically-mapped graphic which represented the intervening spacetime, with its interacting gravity wells, toward Pluto, whose solar orbit varied from 2.8 billion miles at perihelion to 4.6 billion miles at aphelion.

  The ConSpaceCom Logistics Agency staff had spent a lot of time and money creating the projection which hovered over Remson's desk. The least he could do was sit through the entire program and appear impressed when it had run its course.

  The tiny Stalk, with its adjoining and cross-beamed habitats and modules, reminded Remson of a piece of ancient Chinese calligraphy, and the embedding graphic seemed like the warp and woof of the rug into which some unseen hand was weaving an indecipherable message. Threshold had never been meant to move.

  The Stalk had fifth-force generators, which had provided artificial gravity for three hundred years, precluding the necessity of axial spin as a consideration when expansion modules were designed.

  If the local solar spacetime were truly empty, the vacuum that ancients had imagined, moving Threshold up to speed would have presented no real-time problem. But the local spacetime was not empty. It was filled with bits and grit, plasma, gases, particulate matter, human-made space junk, meteoroids, meteorites, and the occasional eccentrically orbiting asteroid.

  Many of these catalogued objects were represented in the holographic scenario. Obstacles popped into view with ever-increasing frequency as the model moved along its projected flight path. Collisions, near-collisions, vector-clearing explosions, occurred at irregular intervals. Course correction requiring complex realignment of axes was represented in patterned plumes of light coming from a multitude of attitude adjustments from banks of plasma thrusters. Grosser changes were accomplished using ConSpaceCom heavy cruisers, fast ships, and freighters retrofitted to provide each major module with its own integrated life support, propulsion and navigation capability, in case of unintended separation.

  The whole uniquely roboticized mass of ships, drivers, thrusters, and cargo—Threshold—was synchronized through an artificially intelligent network of command and control stations that showed on the holograph as a great spiderweb whenever it was called upon to take action to protect the security or structural integrity of the Stalk and the two-hundred fifty thousand souls who lived on its periphery in Threshold's habitats. Seventy-three color-coded areas newly designated as "fracture zones" on the holographic image must be made completely impervious to stress and redundantly self-sustaining in case of accident, poor planning, or the failure of reality to behave as tamely as it did when simulated.

  Catastrophic failure was a real possibility, but Remson didn't see it characterized in the simulation. The externally propelled unit of Threshold and its auxiliary guidance and propulsion spacecraft managed to avoid radiation sinkholes, multi-spectral magnetic and planetary turbulences, infrared and radio storms and sources, and wandering matter vortexes. In the actual operation, any or all of these dangers could fragment the Stalk, shake Threshold apart, separate her from critical portions of her external command and control suite, or leave whole habitat modules behind in her wake.

  Somehow, the combined and redeployed forces of Con-Sec and ConSpaceCom must move the Stalk and its connecting modules safely past all of the calculable—and incalculable—dangers awaiting. Propelled by auxiliary thruster power modules, space tugs, and primary scalar drive assemblies designed to pull and push and guide Threshold through an increasingly crowded obstacle course toward a rendezvous with destiny, the model looked too unlikely, too fragile, too ad hoc to survive.

  Remson waited until the model popped safely into a custom-drilled hole in spacetime made by crossing two A-potential beams from esco
rt destroyers directly in the model's path. Then he couldn't hold back a comment any longer. "Isn't this just a little too pat, General? A little too perfect, too easy?"

  The general said, "We'll run the disaster simulations after we finish with the operational scenario, Mr. Remson—if you don't mind. It's a lot easier to contemplate what could go wrong with a plan once you have a plan."

  Remson looked away from the holograph purposely, to make the general pause the scenario long enough to take up one or two discussion points.

  The general froze the action and glowered at him, trying every tactic of body-language intimidation short of actually getting up and walking out. The two-star crossed his arms over his chest. He kicked back his chair onto its rear legs and balanced it. He fixed Remson with an unwavering, glittery, and openly pugnacious stare that dared Remson to critique his plan before it had played out in full. His chin doubled as his shoulders rose to protect his neck. His complexion reddened and his nostrils flared as he took deep, rhythmic breaths.

  "I can't imagine," Remson said levelly, "that you expect us to take this sort of risk on faith, without a proof-of-concept demonstration of some sort."

  "There's no alternative to this plan, if you want to move the habitat," the general said through a mouth so dry that Remson could hear the other man's tongue move. "Every technological asset we have is utilized in the best possible way in this scenario. There isn't an alternative, except asking the aliens to help us do the job. Maybe they've got something we haven't. But this is the best, the only, way to do this job with the combined assets at our disposal, without developmental or experimental technology, and with any dispatch. NAMECorp engineers concur. In fact, they've been pressuring us to present this scenario as a finished and single option. If you want—" The general licked his lips. "If the Secretariat wants to look at additional technical options, you'll make fools of yourselves. But go ahead. Request a Plan B. There isn't one, but ask anyway. All you have to lose is your reputation."