The Stalk

by Janet Morris

  "That's why I made you ambassador to Unity space," Croft said, almost kindly, as he showed her the door.

  CHAPTER 23

  A New Home, A New Hope

  South was nearly sick with worry when Riva Lowe showed up By then he was all but barricaded in STARBIRD, curled up on his bunk with the life-support barrier down, letting Birdy take care of him so that the ship's AI could get used to the changes in her pilot and stop trying to retrofit South’s body into an antiquated template of "normal.”

  If he was going to fly STARBIRD into another dimension, the ship and he were going to have to work off their rough edges and be a better team than ever before. Bringing STARBIRD into Unity space wasn't going to be a piece of cake. even then But he'd come here to do just that, and he was trying to get the job done, despite all the problems he hadn’t anticipated.

  He had a firm promise from Croft's office that Riva Lowe would receive his message, and an escort to his slipbay. as soon as Mickey was done with her. So when Birdy told him that his visitor had arrived, he assumed she'd just come aboard when she was ready.

  He retracted the bunk’s life-support barrier, shook off Birdy’s demands that he not move too fast or get too excited, and put on his boots. Touching them reminded him that they were plasma surrogates of UNE issue, and that wiped the last of the cobwebs from his brain.

  Birdy had probably surreptitiously doped him when she ran his pharmakit recalibration. He didn't blame the ship's AI for wanting a baseline and a template for somebody about half as jacked up as South was when he'd finished talking to Croft's Secretariat office.

  Damned bureaucrats never took anything at face value. He clumped his way forward and nearly passed the lock before he realized it was open.

  "Jesus, Birdy, don't we want some minimal security around here anymore?"

  The ship's voice said, "Waiting for passenger Lowe to board, as instructed."

  Then he looked out the lock and there she was, sitting on the apron, her back to him, head on her knees.

  Just like in the alltime vision he'd had.

  He didn't want to make things any worse. He said, "Leave the lock open, Birdy, and get me a flight window out of here, just a shake-out cruise around local area and back."

  "Will do," said the ship's AI in Birdy's sweet, confident voice.

  He wished he felt as confident, approaching Lowe on the apron. His boots thwacked loudly on the synthetic tarmac. She had to hear him coming. She didn't raise her head.

  So he sat down beside her, assumed a similar position, and put one hand tentatively on her shoulder.

  She was quivering, or shivering, or crying softly. Her flesh twitched when his touched it.

  "Hey, Riva, what's the matter? Tough day?" Keep it light.

  "Awful," came her muffled voice. Then she raised her head, but she didn't look at him. She looked straight ahead, staring at the nothing. "Croft is completely against the move out to Pluto's orbit."

  "What? What the hell happened?" All the testing he'd gone through, all the pushing and prodding he'd endured, and now this. "They didn't like my psychometrics, or what?"

  "I don't know," she said. "Mickey's so tired. You should see him. He looks terrible. He can't be thinking clearly. And he doesn't seem to have a good conceptual grasp of what's happening."

  "Come on aboard," he said. "You need something to eat, maybe a drink. A little rest."

  "Soontime. I just want to sit still and think. He wants a written report, detailing the benefits to the UNE from contact with the Unity—and the dangers, of course. Positive and negative. Problem and solution. Recommendations." She shook her head. 'Tin in no shape to do that."

  "Come on, we can handle it. I'll help you. Birdy will, too. We can do it all on board. I want to take STARBIRD for a little shake-out ride. It'll do you good to get out of here.*' It would do her good to get off the damned slipbay apron. Somebody was going to see them and then people would start wondering how come the UNE's ambassador was spending her time in a half-fetal position on the apron.

  •'Get up. That's it. Birdy did a good pharmacomp on me. I'm feeling a lot more ... compatible than I was before. You ought to try it." Say anything, just get her into the ship.

  Riva leaned on him the whole way. She weighed a ton, more than she should, almost like dead weight. He got her into STARBIRD and slammed the lock's close mode hard, before Birdy could.

  Birdy grumbled and started the pressurization cycle, getting ready for the flight he'd ordered. He felt a whole lot safer in his customized environment, with the lock cycle engaged. Nobody got in here now without asking permission.

  In the red light of the cycling lock, he let go of her. She leaned back against the bulkhead and looked at him with all the hopelessness of a trapped animal. She didn't say a thing. When the red light turned green and the inner lock opened, he moved inside and told her. "Go lie down on my bunk. Let Birdy make you feel better. I'll get us something hot to drink and be back soontime."

  He left her to find her way. You couldn't get lost on STARBIRD. The galley was just forward of his quarters. He moved to the right, and she squeezed past him without a word of argument.

  Not a good sign.

  He'd known something was wrong. Croft should have known better than to push her like that, though, after the strain of the trip back here.

  But the Secretariat hadn't made it easy for either of them, and now their reasoning was beginning to make sense. So Croft wasn't in favor of moving the habitat, after all. Nice going, asshole. UNE policy was made in Mickey Croft's office. There was no higher authority to appeal to. There was just somebody in that UNE Secretariat driver's seat who wasn't up to it when a hard decision came along.

  All the fury that had come over South when he'd seen the alltime vision of Riva sitting on that apron flooded over him, so that his hands were shaking as he made her some hot tea. "Birdy, give her a mood stabilizer and then take some baseline readings. We need Riva in top form."

  When he went the few steps aft, tea in hand, her color was a little better. Birdy retracted the life-support barrier between them, and he sat down beside her on the bunk. As he did, the pharmakit strap on her upper arm came loose, signaling that Birdy was finished with her baseline evaluation.

  She sipped the tea he gave her, and said, "I didn't realize how thirsty I was. I'm sorry for the scene out there. But I never expected Mickey Croft to have some secret agenda—"

  "It's not a secret if he told you. He's just behaving like a typical, reactive bureaucrat. We need to feed the right information into the system, that's all. Then it'll come to the conclusion we want." He wished he were as sure as he sounded. He'd been so angry a few minutes previously, he'd have torn the Stalk and everyone on it apart to get to her. And the irony of that was, nowtime, he probably could. Things had changed for Joe South since the days when the UNE could squash him as if he were a bug and not even notice. Croft was right to be a little bit worried.

  If you weren't a little bit worried, went the adage, you didn't understand what was happening to you. So South figured that Croft understood damned well what was happening—to himself, if not to anybody else. And the changes which human beings underwent subsequent to exposure to Unity entities weren't insignificant.

  Maybe Croft had good reason, from his viewpoint, for putting on the brakes. South had never been convinced that the human race as a whole was ready for contact with any beings more significant than they. Sometimes he wasn't sure they were ready for contact with one another. A history of bloodshed attested to how humans dealt with culture clash.

  "It's hardly your fault, whatever happens," he told her. You had to start somewhere. "You're not responsible for Croft's ability to think his way through a complex situation."

  "I'm responsible for our first official contact with the Unity. If it fails, then who else is responsible?"

  "Come on, Riva, what did he do to you up there?"

  "Nothing. He just froze me out. He's got his mind made up. He thinks the Unity
Embassy and the Ball are an infringement on UNE sovereignty in the local spacetime. With that attitude, how can we make any progress?"

  "There's one thing we can do—we can remove the Ball from play." He winked at the astonished eyes regarding him over her tea cup. "I was planning to take that sucker for a test drive sometime soon, anyhow."

  "I'm not sure that's the answer," she said, but now her mind was engaging the problem.

  "Not by itself. Let's do your report, and I'll help you deliver it. We'll tell Croft what's waiting at Pluto's orbit. He has a right to know. But we'll deliver it, hardcopy, so that what we say is on the record, retrievable, and not completely subject to interpretation by somebody who's overtired and maybe a bit paranoid. Okay? You up to it, soldier?"

  She acted like a soldier half the time, in some sort of volunteer army of do-gooders. He wanted to show her that he was cooperating, doing his best to help her make her case. Then, when Croft did what any good bureaucrat would do and backburnered the whole issue of humanity's chance for an evolutionary upgrade for the next administration to deal with after he retired, then South would be able to convince Riva Lowe to stop trying to drag the whole UNE along with her on an adventure meant for two.

  "Okay, South, you're right," she said after due consideration. "We'll put it all down and deliver it. If I can get another meeting. It's not so easy to get a meeting with the Secretary General, except when he wants to see you."

  "He asked for the report, didn't he?"

  She put down her tea and grimaced. "It's not that easy."

  "Want to bet? Watch. Birdy," he said in a slightly louder voice, "get me an appointment with Croft in the Secretariat, for myself and Riva Lowe, urgent priority, anytime after sixteen hundred hours. Purpose is to deliver requested report, ASAP."

  "South—"

  "What, you think we can't write this up in notime? Come on, Madam Ambassador. You haven't seen what my flight deck has to offer in the way of transcription amenities."

  "South, we're not ready to just bully our way back in there and deliver some off-the-cuff assessment. Maybe the SecGen's just having a bad day."

  "If he is, he's not going to have any better days soontime. Come on. If we need to, we'll cheat a little, get some help from the Unity delegation." He knew how she'd hate to ask for help.

  "I can do it. I'm just ..."

  "Ready. You're as ready as you'll ever be."

  And she was ready enough. So was he. They had assets she wasn't counting on, but then, Riva played fair. South played to win.

  In the best of human circumstances, with the best of human technology, it was going to take so long to tow Threshold to Pluto's orbit that Croft's hesitancy could harden into true intransigence if left to fester.

  That was an easy case to make to the Unity, even though Riva was horrified that South would reveal what she considered to be "sensitive Secretariat intelligence" to the Unity monitors at the embassy site.

  "Don't worry," he told her. "Nobody on Threshold will ever realize that any such conversation even took place." It wouldn't take place in UNE space time, so it couldn't be monitored by UNE devices.

  South took a grim pleasure in end-running the Secretariat, especially for its own good.

  STARBIRD's shake-out cruise was just going to have to wait.

  He went aft to his bunk, put his head in his redundant command and control helmet, hooked himself up to life support, and ordered the barrier down so that Riva couldn't accidentally interfere with his body while he was moving it dimensionally, rather than linearly, and kill him in the process.

  He dialed in the requisite coordinates using the command and control grid on his helmet's heads-up display and the life-support matrix around him, using STARBIRD's sponge-jump capability to provide him with the necessary bolthole into another universe. If he understood what he'd been taught, he just had to cross two scalar beams at the apex of his physical and temporal coordinates, and pump enough A-potential energy into that spot to push himself through the resulting hole. His bioenergy would be ported to the new dimensional coordinates he'd dialed in, just the way a ship's hull would be.

  As for his body, it would be occupying two spacetimes simultaneously—or spreading itself between them. He hoped.

  He had one last spacetime-sequential thought that when he'd signed up for pilot training, years ago and centuries away, he'd never thought he'd be flying without a ship, let alone a safety net.

  Then he was wrenched through a fine mesh by a cyclonic vacuum, strained to the texture of baby food, and semi-reconstituted in a soft warm topology full of nine-cornered objects projecting into eleven-dimensional spaces with vortices ending at a contact point inside the Unity Embassy construct. It hurt like hell.

  The Unity monitors at the embassy contact point weren't happy about the energy expense involved. "Spacetimers laws apply, Friend South. Being careful with body human, please. Not stressing person to point of breakage/'

  He promised he wouldn't, said he knew his limit but when he was done moving electromagnetic components of his "person" through a few more dimensions than was recommended by the manufacturer, without the benefit of a plasma cocoon, he was cold and weak and Riva was telling him mournfully that he was going to kill himself pulling stunts like that.

  "You care?" he croaked, prone on his bunk, with Riva leaning over him and Birdy clucking disapprovingly in the background.

  She held a glass of water for him, because he couldn't hold it himself without spilling it all over his lap, STARBIRD'S pilotry suite, and her, too.

  "Of course I care," she flared.

  "Nice to know," he managed. He drank slowly and it hurt his throat to swallow. "Let's go see the ogre in the castle."

  "What?"

  He sometimes forgot she was a twenty-fifth-century citizen, who'd grown up without fairy tales or nursery rhymes.

  "Never mind." He groaned as he swung his legs over the bunk's edge.

  "Promise me you'll never do that again," Riva said.

  "No sweat," he replied. "If people had been meant to be in two places at once, we'd all have been born twins."

  Now he was nearly as enervated as she was, but he had what he needed. The sorry pair of them made their way up to Croft's office by public transportation, a foolish choice that took even more of their depleted energies. He resolved to ask for a UNE car to take them back.

  But when Croft greeted them, the Secretary General was curt and hurried, not in the mood for granting favors.

  "This is urgent? Let's have it." Croft held out his hand impatiently and took the disk from South's hand without touching his flesh.

  "And hello, how are you, how was your trip to you too, sir," South said. Croft's office was disheveled, filled with empty cups and plates and projectors and the other detritus of a long meeting.

  "I'm sorry," said the SecGen stiffly, not sorry in the least. "What am I supposed to expect from this report of yours, Commander South, Ambassador Lowe?" Croft said as he went to sit behind his desk.

  A tone sounded, and he held up a hand to take the call. Not a good sign. The caller was Remson, but that was all South could make out.

  Croft put down the handset. "Summary?" he snapped.

  Riva looked at South almost pleadingly, so he said, "The size and nature of the Unity itself requires a huge contingent of interacting species be present to greet human representatives if any real cooperative association is to begin. They can't do that inside somebody's solar system. Not only does convention and protocol preclude it, special conditions here are hazardous to the health of many of the species involved. So either you make yourselves available to meet a trade delegation from the rest of the civilized universe, or you don't. They ain't comin' here on your terms, that's for sure."

  "You say 'you,' Commander South, as if you no longer consider yourself part of the human race."

  "I'm no longer considering myself part of the scared part, that's true. I know old Richard the Second would like NAMECorp to have a swat at some of
the trade opportunities the UNE could deliver, if it moves this habitat. But maybe you don't want relations with higher intelligence. Maybe humans just want to keep on exploiting and enslaving lower life-forms in a sliver of the galaxy with a fence around it that's posted: warning: vicious humans inside.

  "ENTER AT OWN RISK."

  If that wasn't clear enough. South didn't know what was.

  Riva Lowe said, "Mr. Croft, we've collected data on both the species of the Unity and the types of trade opportunities possible. We also have a verbal promise from the Unity to provide auxiliary power at the Pluto orbit, if you request it, and help in transit if you request that. There's no problem for the Unity in moving the habitat for the UNE. if the UNE wants massive aid or logistical support. Of course, there will be some coordination difficulties, and technology matching would be required to make sure that the Unity understands the special problems you have in moving Threshold."

  "That's enough. I'll read your report, people. All of it."

  Croft's face was masklike and very grave. He got up stiffly to herd them to the door.

  "I hope you'll feel better when you've looked over the data," Riva added. "If there're any more questions we can answer, don't hesitate to ask."

  "I won't, Madam Ambassador. After all, you're our expert on Unity aliens. Thank you for coming. And you too. Commander South. Good job."

  Mickey Croft closed the door in their faces as if he couldn't get them away from him quick enough.

  CHAPTER 24

  Hardwired Reaction

  Mickey Croft was scared to death by what Ambassador Lowe and Commander South had told him. So scared that, despite his loathing of space travel, he went out to Spacedock Seven to confer with the military in their redundantly secure crisis management stronghold.