The Stalk

by Janet Morris

  When Reice got hold of Joe South, the Relic pilot was going to owe Reice one hell of a "favor" in return for what Reice was about to do.

  Because he was going to do it. You didn't lie to something that could walk through your bulkhead anytime. You didn't break a promise to something that could mess with your clock time. You didn't ask for trouble, ever, in Reice's universe, and to his way of thinking, disappointing the Unity aliens after promising to do them a favor was more trouble than Reice—or maybe anybody in the UNE—could handle.

  He glared out of his real-time monitors at the Ball as he made arrangements to go off-shift early, got a vector to Blue Mid, and set coordinates for home base.

  Then he called Sling, using a couple ConSec priority channels to find the aftermarketeer through the All-Points Locator.

  Sling's scared voice, patched to him through a ConSec ground cruiser, wanted to know, "What the hell do you think you're doing, asshole, sending your cop buddies out to roust me? Or have I committed a crime and just don't know it yet?"

  "You're about to commit a service to your local law enforcement officials." The voice-only channel on which these communications were routed was redundantly secure. Reice began enjoying the moment of total power over the earring-wearing aftermarketeer as soon as he realized how frightened Sling was by Reice's estimable clout.

  Maybe losing two hours and change was a small price to pay for the fun Reice could have with keeping his promise to the Unity alien. "Sling, get whatever gear you need to deliver South's STARBIRD out to a spacedock parking orbit, and meet me in the ConSec Blue Mid docking bay in three hours."

  "She ain't spaceworthy, Reice."

  "You have three hours. Do whatever you have to."

  "Screw you, Reice, you don't have the faintest idea what's involved. I can't—"

  "You can, and you'd damn well better. I'll see you when I dock the TICK. Bring your tools, whatever you're going to need. Oh, and pack a lunch, Sport. You and me are going on a little joyride, ready or not."

  CHAPTER 19

  Reunion

  Joe South had been out of his native space time too long. Everything looked, sounded, and lelt strange to him: his body; Riva Lowe, the woman next to him; and the Unity shuttle itself, once it entered the UNE cosmology, with its warped spacetimes and convoluted energy wells—or gravity wells, as the spacetimcrs thought of them.

  As he should start thinking of them. This whole spacetime was filled with dangers he hadn't had to think about for a long time. They could kill him just as dead as they ever could, whether he acknowledged them or not He was subject to all the laws of the local physics here. More than that, he was born in this special case spacetime. and everything about it had a real affinity for exerting power over his physiology. He had to remember what it was like to be here, before he made some stupid mistake.

  "Riva, how do you feel?" he said with his mouth, moving his lips and tongue and manipulating the air coming out of his lungs to form the sounds he wanted He turned in his cocoon enough to look at her.

  She moved her head jerkily in hers, tilting it toward him so that he could see her face, distorted by the pull of gravity. "S-s-strange." she admitted, using her mouth as well. "Are we there yet?"

  "Why, do you want to go to the bathroom?" He grinned weakly, trying out his face muscles and his old-style humor at the same time.

  "Very funny." She sighed. "Damn, my throat is dry."

  Neither of them had been to the bathroom, or drunk liquid, or used these bodies for what seemed like years. Around them, the Unity shuttle shimmered and hummed softly to itself, its plasma walls undulating in gentle, even rhythms.

  Around South, his cocoon started to vibrate slightly in rhythm with the innards of the plasma sphere as it made the corrections necessary to deposit them at their destination. The vibration would stimulate his body, his skin, his muscles, and through fibroid connections, the organs necessary for his survival. He could feel the tiny electrical impulses surging through him, reminding his heart how fast to beat, his brain how to process temporal stimuli, his nervous system how to answer his brain's command.

  It was going to be all right. He believed it would because he'd programmed the cocoon and the plasma shuttle himself. He still trusted his ability to adjust to circumstances, even after so long a time of making circumstances adjust to him.

  Underneath him, his cocoon started to shift, bringing the upper part of his body into a sitting position. Riva's cocoon was lagging a little behind his, which meant it wasn't getting the responses it needed from her physiology as fast.

  "Riva, we've got to concentrate on syncing this reentry. You need to be helping the system a little more. Talk to me. Think about what you want to do when we get there. Who you want to see. What you want to say. What you want to wear—" His last remark was designed to get a rise out of her.

  It did. She made a face at him, and her cocoon surged colors as it began to react to her realtime actions and contemplated activities. Soon enough, she would be thinking linearly and acting linearly all the nowtime.

  Soon enough, they both would. South's cocoon was shifting into a control bolster under his arm. That meant he could resume manual control whenever he wanted.

  He wasn't ready. His head ached. His eyes were pulsing. He could only see straight ahead and slightly through peripheral vision. He needed to remember what it was like to direct a physical self that was pointed forward, not only in time, but in space, and do so where those two concepts could be separated phenomenologically.

  Riva Lowe groaned and sat up, her hands over her eyes. "I hate this." Her cocoon was pulsing red and gold, and her crooked elbows stuck out of it. 'The sooner we get on the ground—into the spacetime manifold—the better. I can't bear feeling so ... rusty."

  "Yeah, I know." South flexed his hand and watched the movement of ligaments under skin and across bone. The hand was pale, greenish, bluish, and flushed in places as he moved it. It was working fine. He balled a fist and extended one finger at a time from the fist. It hurt to straighten each finger out separately, in turn, but fine motor control was about to become a factor of his survival. "Have you thought out what you want to say to them?"

  To the ones they'd left behind. To all their kind, through Mickey Croft, Remson, and the rest, when finally they had a chance to do so without Unity monitors present, without worrying about misunderstanding because of spacetime incongruities, or timeslip, or what might be misunderstood. When Croft and Remson had visited the Unity Embassy, the interaction had taken place in Unity spacetime. This meeting would be on the humans' home turf.

  "I just want to see if I can stand up, okay, South? One goddamned thing at a time." Riva Lowe was elevating her cocoon and trying to step out of it. The physioshield plasma swathing her looked like cobwebs drenched in dew. She took one tottering step and stood on her own, her arms outstretched and waving wildly, the swathing hanging off her arms and torso like some fairy cape or gossamer wings. Suddenly, she moaned and fell back into the cocoon. "This sucks," she said. "I'm as weak as a baby."

  "Take it slower, Madam Ambassador, and you'll get more for your calories." They hadn't worried about calories for a long time, either. South felt as if he'd been ejected from the Garden of Eden, but then, you could argue that people had felt that way for thousands of years.

  A soft pinging sound reminded him of his linear place in sequential time. "We'll be actually inside the Ball very soontime—very soon now." He made the shift in terminology with an almost savage emphasis: they had to think the way their bodies moved, the way their brains worked, the way local physics demanded, or they would fail here. Perhaps die here. And he couldn't bear the thought of that.

  "I'm not ready," wailed Riva Lowe softly.

  "Sure you are. You were born for this—born to it, and chosen for this moment, out of how many possible others?

  Come on, hotshot, show me what you're made of. Sit up, get dressed like a good ambassador should, and face the music."

  He wa
s trying to arrange his own clothing requirements: space suit, underliner, power-driven helmet, gloves, the whole UNE package. The gossamer lining of his cocoon gave him the best reproduction it could manage, from his memory, the program he'd written, and the sample he'd encoded.

  Still, the clothes felt restrictive, heavy, scratchy, and somehow stifling.

  He turned the helmet in his hands, watching the plasma around his feet harden into spaceworthy boots with fifth-force soles. Coming here with the intention of leaving the Unity space of the embassy, of the Ball, and moving through his native spacetime was harder than he'd expected. But he'd volunteered for this when he'd agreed to go in the first place. Neither he, nor Riva Lowe, had realized how hard it would be to come back.

  His lungs were fighting for air, burning, having trouble remembering what to do. Or else the air wasn't right. He had full instrumentation under his hand, now. He asked for a life-support reading and it was perfect.

  He shouldn't have worried. The Unity plasma system wouldn't let him down. His physical body, however, was beyond Unity control. And only partly under his. Some things never changed.

  When he looked at Riva again, she was sitting smugly in a good replica of an acceleration couch, smartly attired in the latest of fashionable spacegoing UNE gear, and her fingernails were drumming soundlessly on her helmet's faceplate.

  She saw him looking at her. "Ready, Columbus?"

  "Maybe you mean that," he frowned, "but don't think that way. I'm going to get my old ship, see a few friends, make an appearance, answer some questions. Period."

  "Yes, yes. I know," she replied. "Give the spacetimers a reference point. Help them adjust." Her face crinkled, as if it might fall in upon itself. Then she took control and said in a husky voice full of suppressed emotion, "How long do you think this will take?"

  "Notime. It's going to take notime. They promised us. We agreed to try this not because we had a choice, but because it's our job. We weren't invited to live alltime, forever, not like Keebler. We're the diplomatic contingent, such as it is. So we had no choice. Remember what you want to achieve. Why you came. Who you are. What you were." He shrugged and he felt the muscles of his mouth pull down in an expression that seemed so far in his past he was surprised he remembered it. But his body remembered. His body remembered everything. Muscle memory was going to be his salvation on this mission. He'd been through more displacement than any other human being. He'd flown the first mission to a Unity world, although he hadn't know r n it then. He'd felt this awful sense of loss before, and now he even understood why.

  So he ought to be thankful for the favor the Unity had done him. He wasn't crazy. He wasn't mad from experimental flybys with developmental hardware that might have deleterious effects on the human brain. He'd learned everything he needed to trust his sanity and his heart.

  Except that he'd lost everything he'd cared about. Again. First his century. His family. His culture. His career. His sense of self. He'd built it all up again, from scratch. Now this.

  "You think we'll go back?" asked Riva Lowe, quavering like a child.

  "I will. You've got to get your green card punched, your visa extended, and volunteer for another tour of duty out there."

  "And you don't?"

  "Immaterial," he snapped. "You care whether the UNE makes the right choice. I don't. I just care that I do."

  Ambassador Lowe told him where to put his self-centered attitude, and he told her she'd better remember more about the mechanics of living in a past-to-future society, where some things just weren't physically possible.

  Then he got real busy doing what he did: piloting. The plasma shuttle was extremely responsive, agreeable, and easy to manage. Its inboard intelligence was so far beyond the capabilities of South's beloved old ship, STARBIRD, that the two weren't in the same class. STARBIRD was an experimental vehicle of ancient parameters, with a primitive artificial intelligence shoehorned into her inert hull. The plasma shuttle was bred for speed, courage, resilience, and stamina. It aimed to please.

  Still, bringing a plasma shuttle into a docking module inside the Ball, which resided in UNE space, was so tricky no Unity pilot had tried it successfully. The Unity had been forced to build the Ball to establish a beachhead close to the spacetimers. You lost less plasma shuttles that way.

  South didn't want to lose this one. He concentrated on being in two continua at once, on obeying two sets of physical laws—his native ones and his adopted ones—and let the task roll over him.

  All the way to the final docking coordinates inside the Ball, he never heard a thing Riva might have said, or even remembered that he was carrying a passenger. He existed in a plasma mode, a physical mode, and a sliding temporal mode that he couldn't allow to harden into a forward moving arrow of time until he'd put the shuttle in its berth.

  When he heard the soft bump and felt the slight deformation that meant success, he was drenched in sweat and more tired than he'd ever been. But they'd made it.

  Riva said, "It's okay, isn't it."

  "Yep. Suit up. Debarkation in—" he turned to grin at her "—six minutes, Threshold Standard Time. Want to synchronize our watches?"

  Minutes. Time. Here they were, for better or worse. Home where it all began. The shuttle under them thrummed softly, happy to be in a cocoon of its own, being carefully reconfigured from the outside in, before it was extruded in the local spacetime.

  By the time the Ball opened up and sent them on their way through its portal with a soft kick in the collective pants, everything inside the plasma shuttle looked contemporary to the universe they were entering.

  The surfaces around South were hard and unyielding, as they should be. Light was white and cast shadows, or colored and restricted to instrumentation. A monitor in front of him confirmed the exit of the shuttlecraft, past the portal, and South had just a glimpse of something his human eyes read as great lions rampant at the gate.

  Then the shuttle was out in UNE space, the Ball was closing on all the radiance within, and South set a course for the agreed-upon coordinates.

  Only then did he have time to check on Riva. "Lookin' good," he told her encouragingly.

  "Feeling queasy," she shot back, but nodded: they were both back in the rhythm of their bodies. If they could make the rest of this journey as flawlessly as they had negotiated the most dangerous part, then they'd be just fine.

  The unremarkable looking shuttle headed smoothly for the two ships parked at the designated coordinates. To make certain that the trigger-happy Reice didn't panic and start shooting, South put out a standard hail and gave his call-signs.

  Reice's voice came to them through the plasma surrogate of human-built communications gear with no deviation from the template. "I guess it's really you, South. Who made up those designators for your unlicensed vehicle, anyhow?"

  South said, "Reice, don't get bureaucratic. Ambassador Lowe was with me, and she assigned the designator US-0001, for Unity Space Number One, with her authority. You want to argue with the ambassador, she's right here?"

  "Naw," Reice's voice answered. "It's just that every time I see you, South, you're in some new unregistered spacecraft or other."

  "Speaking of spacecraft, how's my STARBIRD1 And Birdy? Is Sling there?" Birdy was his ship's AI. He hadn't realized how much he wanted to be reunited with his ship and her artificial intelligence. They'd been through ten hells together.

  "Right here, South. What's the damned hurry with this retrofit, anyhow?" Sling complained. "Reice is all over me about making that bucket of junk of yours spaceworthy."

  "When I get there, okay?" Something seemed different about the two men. Something was slightly wrong with their banter and the tones of their voices. But that might have been due to the plasma shuttle's communications capability, or just an artifact of time having passed.

  South asked for docking sync and then broke the transmission, using the shuttle's forward monitor to take a good look at the embassy near the Ball.

  Coming alon
g fine.

  No need to worry.

  Riva said, "South, are you okay? Is it—"

  "Fine," he said aloud. "They're just tense. No problem." In this spacetime, she could just about read his mind. "Don't worry. Look at the embassy. No wonder these folks are sounding stressed. Next thing on their agenda is the ride out beyond Pluto."

  Reice and Sling had every right to sound different, he reasoned. Joe South was a little different, himself.

  CHAPTER 20

  Up to Your Neck in Alligators

  "The alien never touched me. I want to make that real clear before I start hearin' about contamination problems." Reice said to the effigy of Remson giving orders from the BLUE TICK'S central monitor. "I didn't have much time to decide and 1 figured a little initiative was in order." Reice was uncomfortably conscious of the fact that Sling was lounging just out of Remson's view at the copilots station.

  "That may be so. Mr. Reice. but your unilateral decision making in this case is worrisome " Remson didn't look worried He looked like he was enjoying the privilege of rank to make life miserable for the lower classes. "Let me be equally clear. Since you're so certain that our prodigal ambassador and Commander South are reporting to you to collect South's ship before they report to us at the Secretariat, then you make sure they do report to the Secretariat. Immediately Give them a police escort, personally. And don't take no for an answer. I want you to have South in an AIP/PDE evaluation chamber in Blue-Mid and Ambassador Lowe in the SecGen's Stalk office by thirteen hundred hours sharp. Mr. Reice. No sidetrips, no improvisation—and no excuses just do it."

  Remson broke the comlink abruptly and Reice was left staring at a blank screen South wasn't going to like being remanded into the custody of an AIP/PDE (Artificially Intelligent Preprogrammed/Pilotry Digital Evaluator), an AI shrink, any more than Riva Lowe was going to like being hustled off to the SecGen's office before she could set her own itinerary. Remson knew he was handing Reice a punitive assignment and it sucked....