The Stalk

by Janet Morris

  Remson sprang to his feet and went to assist the UNE Secretary General. Mickey seemed as old as creation. Or as drunk as a lord. Riva nearly got up to move when she realized Remson was guiding Mickey to the vacant seat next to her.

  Uncertain, she hesitated, trying to catch Vince's attention.

  Croft was saying, "So glad you all could be here today for this awesome occasion. Mankind's future is in our hands, my friends. Let's handle her gently. Easy as she goes." He waved his free hand about, casting spells of patronage with his long, spidery fingers.

  Mickey must be drunk. Had to be. Riva got up. removing the com bead from her ear, to make a place for Vince to sit while he babysat his boss.

  The count, coming through the speaker grilles now was 'Two minutes, forty-three seconds."

  One of the astrogators said, "Ambassador Lowe, can you come over here a sec?"

  She was so relieved to be asked to move somewhere, to attend to something, she didn't give the astrogator's purpose a second thought.

  "What is it, Colonel?" she asked the orange-coveralled ConSpaceCom officer, bending down over his station. He had hair cut barely two millimeters from his skull. He was so scrubbed his skin shined. His clear blue eyes met hers as he held up a wire headset. "Call for you. ma'am. Secure Comm Three—that's your Unity preset, isn't it?" His voice was so low she found herself nearly head to head with him to hear.

  She took the headset, with its throatpad mike, without straightening up. Cupping the beadmike. she said, "Lowe here."

  Static spit in her ear, as if the transmission were coming from very far away. "Say again?" she whispered.

  The colonel tapped her wrist. "Magnetic storms," he mouthed. "May I?"

  He wanted to listen in, tune the transmission.

  She nodded. He hooked a com bead in his ear. palmed it, and played with his equipment.

  Static spat again, and then she heard. "Riva? Riva Lowe? This is NAMECorp XIA. Rick Cummings commanding. Do you read? We are about to make visual contact with your outboard escort. The Unity wants you to sync to our powerplant for the jump. South will take a handoff from us once the jump is under way. Do you copy? You've got a full-time escort, space timers plus. Inform your astrogators. We need to feed them some new data. Do you copy, Ambassador Lowe?"

  "I hear—yes, I copy. I understand." Eyes closed to hear better, she was whispering into the bead she held to her lips with perspiring fingertips. "Let me give you to someone more qualified."

  She opened her eyes and met the cool gaze of the ConSpaceCom astrogator, who had one eyebrow questioningly I raised.

  "Please, Colonel. Do what he says. It's the Unity help we've been expecting. I'll inform the Secretariat staff."

  "Yes, ma'am," said the squeaky-clean colonel with a quick jab of a thumb in her direction, before he forgot her completely, hunched down over his console.

  She laid the colonel's second headset gently on the console and made for the integration station dazedly. She told J Richard Cummings first, "Your son is out there, in a Unity vehicle, providing assistance for the jump."

  Cummings cursed, "Damned fool kid." But he was smiling slightly as he started dialing in a monitoring frequency.

  Remson was next. Vince already had his hands full. Mickey was sitting stretched out, ankles crossed, sprawled expansively at Remson's station. All the SecGen needed was a drink in one hand and a cigar in the other to seem like some ancient politician posing for a candid portrait.

  The clock intoned, "One minute, three seconds."

  Rick Cummings to the rescue? In a Unity vehicle he was j designating as a NAMECorp X-class craft? Joe South taking a handoff? When? How?

  She didn't want to think about it. "Vince, the Unity support we were promised is on-line," she said softly enough, she hoped, that Remson would hear but Croft would not.

  Remson flicked a miserable glance her way. "Thanks. Let's hope it's enough."

  Meanwhile, the Secretary General was dispensing campaign rhetoric full of all-purpose clichés and didn't notice her. Drunk he was, from the smell of him.

  She wouldn't have had Vince Remson's job for anything in the world. But right now she had no job. There was no place for her to sit. She didn't want to disturb anyone with work to do, and she had none. She found herself a quiet corner and leaned there.

  The clock counted, "Forty-eight seconds," and continued to talk its way to zero as she watched the nearly motionless room.

  They were all in this together, she told herself, as the time to jump decreased to single digits.

  She closed her eyes, trying to find South, if he was really out there, with her inner sight. What could possibly be gained by risking everyone? Young Cummings? The pilot from humanity's past?

  Perhaps the Unity was not as benign as she'd believed. A shiver ran over her.

  "Ma'am?" said a young lady in a white coat. "The colonel over there sent this comm unit over for you. He said you'd want to be in the loop." Anxious young fingers helped her potentiate the unit. "I've got to go. Five seconds and counting," the girl breathed, and fled back to her station.

  Riva pressed the com bead to her ear with inexpressible relief. The chatter in it was at first difficult to separate. Then she could make out what was happening as six or seven men furiously made last-minute recalibrations.

  Five voices spoke nearly simultaneously:

  "Correction, entered. This damn well better work, Control."

  "Outboard Three confirming Go on sync mode, over."

  "Outboard Six, all stations reporting ready, over."

  "Engineering, full up and RWA. over."

  "Task Force leader, you good to go? Control, over."

  And then, one more: "On your mark, Control."

  Only then did Riva realize that Control was the colonel who had given her the headset.

  "X-Craft, with me. Five ... Four,"

  Then the voice of Ricky Cummings joined the colonel's, and two voices said together: "Three ... Two .. . One ... MARK."

  The wall behind Riva's back bucked, seemed nearly to buckle, and pushed her violently forward. Unprepared, she went to her knees. The deck shuddered under her.

  Then everything stopped.

  She couldn't hear a thing. Nothing moved. Total silence reigned. Not even the com bead in her ear was producing static.

  She couldn't move. She couldn't budge. She was frozen in place. Her mind wouldn't function. She couldn't think. She didn't feel anything but one unending instant of panic, a sensation of falling endlessly.

  It seemed to her that the universe was holding its breath.

  Then she saw something, not in the control station, but in her mind's eye. She saw the Ball. The bright, spinning, glorious, multicolored, silver-hulled Ball was right in front of her, inhaling her, enveloping her and everything around her.

  Silence broke like a soapbubble. Engines roared around her. Men scrambled, shouting, from station to station. In her ear, she heard a distant voice saying, "That's a wrap, Control, X-Craft. Handover complete. You're relieved, Ricky. Have a nice flight. Next stop, Pluto orbital zone."

  "This is Threshold C&C Control. What the hell's happening? Commander South, that you? You got sync and helm contact with us, or what? Request confirmation. Control, over."

  "No sweat, C&C Station. We got clocktime commencing on my mark, as promised: seventeen thirty hours, fourteen minutes, fifty-three seconds and counting: Two .. . One ... Mark. All your outriders are on my scope, safe and sound—"

  Riva Lowe took the com bead out of her ear and got to her feet, brushing off her knees. She hadn't known what she'd expected, but not this. Not an instant suspended between worlds with overlaid omniscience. She put her hand to her forehead. You shouldn't be able to remember anything from notime. You shouldn't remember anything at all.

  So maybe superior Unity science is magic to the savage spacetimer, she told herself. But South was a spacetimer, and so was Ricky Cummings.

  The astrogators were laughing nervously and congratulating ea
ch other. Monitor scans were coming up of all the outboard craft, who were in turn sending real-time images of Threshold, undamaged, her spiderweb veil of critical external hardware unrent, gleaming in the pale light of a far-distant sun and the nearer glow of external, manmade arc lights. And beyond the Stalk, off the starboard bow of an outriding destroyer, hung the Ball. The imported scan of Threshold, seen through the sensor net that had made the Stalk into a simulacrum of a single spacegoing vehicle, made the Ball look like a Christmas ornament covered with angel hair.

  "Spaceworthiness check, all stations, sound off," chortled somebody, and Riva cast a look backward long enough to ascertain that it was the colonel in the control position who had spoken.

  She went over to the integration console and sat on its edge. "So we made it," she said generally, dully, remembering the one instant that she had no right to remember, when Threshold came apart, when the bulkhead behind her back buckled, when all had been lost in the notime.

  She scanned faces. Nobody at the integration console— not Remson, trying to make the best of a bad situation; not Mickey Croft, more sober now and shamefaced; not Richard Cummings, trying to cover his exultation at his son's performance, and NAMECorp's—not any of them gave her any reason to suspect that they'd experienced what she'd experienced.

  Had they really lived through this, all systems go?

  Or had they failed, broken apart, died and been reborn in the notime, reconstituted without a glitch on the other side of oblivion? Without a glitch, except that she remembered.

  The bucking, crumpling, bulkhead, the floor hitting her knees, and then—nothing.

  Nothing until Commander Joe South, resurrected pilot from humanity's ancient past, announced a handover complete. Handover from where? From beyond death itself?

  She shivered, walking aimlessly among the busy staff. When she was called upon to do so, she murmured congratulations to the triumphant, relieved command staff who all had irrepressible smiles. You wandered around, approving, nodding, glancing at meters proclaiming perfect performance and scanners displaying one hundred percent systems integrity.

  The United Nations of Earth, ConSpaceCom, and Con-Sec had a lot to celebrate. Maybe they had more than they realized. Or maybe she was just dazed, overtired, and a foolish woman who hadn't had a place to sit when the jump jolt had hit.

  Remson found her, after he'd gotten Mickey off to bed. He said, "So, it'll be an hour or so before we're finished with our afteraction reports and fine-tuning. Another day or two to reach the designated coordinates. What are you going to do now?"

  "I don't know," she said dully. "Breathe. Sleep. Try to be ready if and when you need me."

  "South's coming aboard."

  "Is he?" she said icily.

  "And he has Reice with him."

  "Does he?"

  "He does. Let's go finish our chat before they get here, shall we?"

  "Is that an order, Mr. Remson?" Did Remson remember something? suspect something? Or was she simply unsettled by the sponge-jump? Jumping through the underlying fabric of creation had a habit of playing tricks on puny human minds.

  "It's a suggestion," Remson said.

  She went with him, back up to the observation lounge. When she first topped the spiral stairs, she thought she saw a great crack in the Stalk's new glassed-in dome. Shards of glass on the rug and bodies everywhere, bloodied and bent. Mangled. Sucked against the glass. Floating.

  Then she blinked and everything was fine. The observation lounge was being readied for a late meal for the C&C crew: a table was set with a stack of plates and drinks on a gay paper runner. Chafing dishes were warming food whose smell filled the room. Somewhere behind the far door, cooks and waiters talked in low voices.

  "What is it you want to chat about?" she said. "I need to go lie down, now that we're safe."

  "Mickey wasn't drunk. Just overreacting."

  "Absolutely right. I never thought differently." She nodded reassuringly.

  "We've done a wonderful thing, today. The UNE and the Unity."

  "Performed a miracle, more likely," she muttered, watching him closely for any sign of doubt or distress.

  "Your appointment as ambassador will become permanent, of course."

  "That's nice to hear." So she'd imagined it. The jump had been flawless, or at least within survivable limits. There had been no momentary destruction on the Stalk, no intermittent loss of Threshold in the interstitial realm between dimensions, no course correction by Unity Interpreters—no death in the notime.

  Of course there hadn't. Instead, there'd been Joe South, cocky and wild as ever, dragging the Cummings boy into his mad stunt to grandstand his way back into the limelight. "We probably didn't need any help from the Unity. From what I saw, the command and control system worked just fine."

  "Probably did," Remson said gravely, looking out at the heavens. "You were telling me about the Unity's perceptions of time, and I want to finish that conversation before I encounter any more Unity Council members."

  She thought she could see just the edge of the damnable Ball, over Remson's shoulder, through the observation window.

  Music was coming from somewhere, softly playing a Bach piece she thought was "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," She said to Remson, "You never give up. do you?"

  "Nope. We've got a lot to learn in a very short time. The sooner we get started, the better."

  She still couldn't be sure that Remson didn't remember some of what she remembered. Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe nothing mattered but success. "All right. Consider this: the Unity thinks about time differently. Their brains, their biology, are adapted to multidimensional experience. They exist in an eleven-space manifold—that should have told us something, but we didn't come to terms with the implications. Not at the beginning, anyway." She was coming to terms with those implications now. "Their reality-wraps around ours, not just in space, but in time as well. Their phenomenological past is a living part of their present. Their present is multiplex, not just because they recognize more than one dimension of time intellectually, but because they live in a physically different reality that obeys different laws. Their future is intimately connected with both their past and their present through their experience of a second dimension of time, in which everything is happening at once—in one undifferentiated instant of 'now.' So, we should keep in mind," she finished, very carefully, "that they can control a lot more of what happens—of what we think of as reality—because they have access to what they call the alltime, where every moment is equally available."

  They're omniscient, like gods," said Remson levelly, and then she was sure he did know, or at least suspected that in one reality, all of them—herself, himself, Cummings, the Secretary General, and the whole of Threshold—had been destroyed in their attempt to cross n-space.

  But not in this reality. Hold onto what you got, Vince. Grab the reins and pull real hard. We've got a real opportunity here. Don't panic. Life is the big prize, and we've won it "Not in the way that you mean," she replied aloud. When you can access the alltime, you'll be just as omniscient, if that's the word, as they are. The Unity doesn't think about themselves that way. They're accustomed to living multitemporally. They've been looking in on us, evidently, over the millennia."

  "I figured that out."

  "We were at far greater risk before we became technologically competent. If they wished us harm, they had all of our evolutionary life to play with us or destroy us or whatever. Now we count for something. We're grown up enough to be interesting. All we have to do is take things as they come."

  "That's all?"

  "That's all."

  From behind her, another voice said, "Attagirl, Riva, give him all four barrels."

  She spun on her heel. "South, where did you come from?"

  The Relic pilot smirked. "Ain't that just like a woman, Remson? You bust your butt to come riding to the rescue on a silver steed and all she can do is demand a full afteraction report. I came from the Ball, honey. So
rt of like coming down the chimney once a year. You wouldn't like it. Get your pretty self all dirty."

  "I think I'll leave you two to it," Remson said.

  "No, Vince—" she objected.

  On his way out, Remson slapped South on the shoulder. "Nice job, Commander. You have the Secretariat's gratitude for actions above and beyond. We'll make if official as soon as things calm down." And Croft's chief of staff strode away.

  She glared at South. "What did you think you were doing?"

  "Saving your pert ass."

  "Involving the Cummings boy? And, for all I know, the Forat girl? They could have been killed!"

  "They wanted to be here to greet their parents." South shrugged. "Nobody got killed. Everybody's safe and sound. No harm done. Let it go, Riva."

  "I—I'm sorry. I was frightened. I saw things during the jump—"

  "Everybody sees disturbing stuff in spongespace jumps.

  Don't let it bother you, okay?" he said quietly. His face was in shadow; only his eyes showed, sparkling in some errant beam of light.

  "Okay." she said. "Truce. You must be very proud of yourself. You flew the Ball. You wanted to do that from the very beginning, didn't you? Fly the Ball? From the first time you saw it. You had to prove you were right about—everything."

  "Yep," he said. "About everything. From the very beginning."

  CHAPTER 31

  The Party

  Threshold sat smugly at her designated coordinates half a million miles beyond Pluto's aphelion, glimmering in starlight and the soft glow of the Unity Embassy in its matching orbit nearby. Beside the embassy, and almost as large, a huge, teardrop-shaped Unity mothership was parked, radiating multispectral pulses and colored lights that chased each other along its length like the lights of a theater marquee on a gala opening night.

  The carnival of color and starshine reflected from the tracery of antennae and wire that still wrapped the Stalk like a lace mantilla and gleamed from the ConSpaceCom hulls of the outriding flotilla of freighters, tugs, and destroyers of Threshold's honor guard.