Heaven's Reach u-6

by David Brin

  Emerson wasn’t quite sure of the connection, but apparently those reverted creatures had something to do with the huge, blobby star vessel that escorted Streaker here.

  He was proud when a word came floating to mind. Zang.

  Except to prevent Streaker from leaving, the great globule seemed indifferent at first, concentrating on the repair task, directing mechanical hirelings to weave vast nets of black fiber, bandaging cracks in the huge edifice. But after a day or so, the Zang were forced to pay attention when mysterious objects drifted toward the Earthship, approaching from various parts of the immense inhabited shell, nosing close to investigate.

  The Zang drove each snoop away, keeping a cordon around the Terragens’ cruiser. Yet, Streaker’s exotic guardians showed no interest in acknowledging Gillian’s frequent messages.

  Emerson recalled one of the few definite facts known about the mighty hydrogen breathers — they had different ways of viewing time. Clearly, the Zang felt their business with Streaker could wait.

  Now he listened as Gillian consulted with the Jijo natives, trying to form a plan.

  “What if we just herd the glavers onto a shuttle and send it over? Do we have a clue whether that would satisfy the Zang? Or if the glavers would be safe?

  “Suppose the answer to both questions is yes. What does Galactic law say about a situation like this? Are we supposed to ask the Zang for a receipt?”

  Out of the flood of words, only “Zang” had any solid meaning to him. The rest floated just beyond clear comprehension. And yet, to Emerson, the rich sibilance of her voice was like music.

  Of course he had always nursed a secret passion for Dr. Gillian Baskin, even when her husband, Thomas Orley, lived aboard Streaker — the sort of harmless infatuation that a grown man could control and never show. At least not crudely. Life wasn’t fair, but he did get to be around her.

  Alas the infatuation started affecting his judgment after Tom vanished heroically on Kithrup. Emerson started taking risks, trying to emulate Orley. Attempting to prove himself a worthy replacement in her eyes.

  A foolish quest, but natural. And it paid off at Oakka, where minions of the Library and Migration Institute betrayed their oaths, conspiring to seize Streaker’s cargo to benefit their birth clans instead of all civilization. There, Emerson threw himself into a wild gamble, and his boldness paid off, helping win a narrow victory — another brief deliverance — enabling Streaker to flee and fight another day.

  But here …

  He shook his head. In viewing tapes from Streaker’s departing point of view, Emerson now realized that his sacrifice in the borrowed Thennanin scout had made very little difference. Streaker’s escape path had begun opening even as he charged ahead, ignoring Gillian’s pleas to return. He would have gone to Jijo anyway, and in more comfort, if he had just stayed aboard this ship and never fallen into the clutches of the Old Ones.

  Scanning the near edge of the torn Fractal World, he immersed himself in the fantastic task of preservation. Numbers and equations were no longer trustworthy, but he still had an engineer’s instincts, and these thrilled as he watched machines bolster vast constructions of ice and carbon thread. He had never seen cooperation on such scale among hydros, oxies, and machines.

  That thought made the cosmos seem a nicer place somehow.

  Time passed. Emerson no longer thought in terms of minutes and hours — or duras and miduras — but the uneven, subjective intervals between hungers, thirsts, or other bodily needs. And yet, he began feeling tensely expectant.

  A bedeviling sense that something was wrong.

  For a while he had difficulty placing it. The dolphins on duty in the bridge seemed unconcerned. Everything was calm. None of the display screens showed any obvious signs of threat.

  Likewise, in the Plotting Room, Gillian’s meeting broke up, as people dispersed to workstations or else observed the awesome vista surrounding Streaker. Nobody appeared alarmed.

  Emerson conveyed to the little holo unit his desire to tap the ship’s near-space sensors, scanning along its hull and environs. As he went through the exercise twice, the creepy feeling came and went in waves. Yet he failed to pin anything down.

  Calling for a close-up of Gillian herself, he saw that she looked uncomfortable too — as if some thought were scolding away, just below consciousness. A holo image stood before her. Emerson saw she was examining the area around Streaker’s tail section.

  Signaling with a grunt and a pointed finger, Emerson ordered his own viewpoint taken that way. As the camera angle swept along the ship’s outer hull — coated with its dense star-soot coating — he felt a growing sense of relief. If Gillian was also looking into this, it might not be just his imagination. Moreover, her instincts were good. If there were a serious threat, she would have taken action by now.

  He was already feeling much better as the holo image swept past Streaker’s rear set of probability flanges, bringing the stern into view.

  That was Emerson’s first clue.

  Feeling better.

  Ironically, that triggered increased unease.

  Back on Jijo — ever since he had wakened, delirious, in Sara’s treehouse with a seared body and crippled brain — there had always been one pleasure that excelled any other. Beyond the soothing balm of secretions from the traeki pharmacists. Beyond the satisfaction of improved health, or feeling strength return to his limbs. Beyond the wondrous sights, sounds, and smells of Jijo. Even beyond the gentle, loving company of dear Sara. One bliss surpassed any competitor.

  It happened whenever the pain stopped.

  Whenever the conditioned agony, programmed into his racked cortex, suddenly let go of him — the abrupt absence of woe felt like a kind of ecstasy.

  It happened whenever he stopped doing something he wasn’t supposed to do. Like trying to remember. Any attempt at recollection was punished with agony. But the reward was even more effective, at first. A hedonistic satisfaction that came from not trying anymore.

  And now Emerson sensed a similarity.

  Oh, it wasn’t as intense. Rewards and aversions manifested at a much subtler level. In fact, he might never have noticed, if not for the long battle he had fought on Jijo, learning to counter pain with obstinacy, by facing it, like some tormented prey turning on its pursuer … then transforming the hunter into the hunted. It was a hard lesson, but in time he had mastered it.

  Not … there … he thought, laboriously forming the words one at a time, in order to lock in place a fierce determination.

  Go … back.…

  It felt like trying to fight a strong wind, or swimming upstream. Each time the holo scene made progress toward the ship’s bow, he felt strange inside. As if the very concept of that part of Streaker was peculiar and somehow improper, like trying to visualize a fifth dimension.

  Moreover, it apparently affected computers, too. The instruments proved balky. Once his view passed forward of the first set of flanges, the camera angle kept wandering aside, missing and curving back around toward the stern again.

  A torrent of cursing escaped Emerson. Rich and expressive, it flowed the way all speech used to, before his injury. Like songs and some kinds of poetry, expletives were fired from a part of the brain never touched by the Old Ones. The stream of invective had a calming, clarifying effect as Emerson turned away from all artificial tools and images. Instead, he pressed his face close to the bubble window, made of some clear, incredibly strong material that Earth’s best technicians could not imitate. He peered forward, toward Streaker’s bow.

  It felt like trying to see through your own blind spot. But he concentrated, fighting the aversion with all the techniques he had learned on Jijo.

  At last, he managed barely to make out glimmers of movement amid the blackness.

  Sensing his strong desire to see, the rewq symbiont slithered downward, laying its filmy body over his eyes — translating, amplifying, shifting colors back and forth until he grunted with surprised satisfaction.

&
nbsp; Objects swarmed around Streaker’s prow. Robots, or small shiplike things. They darted about, converging en masse near a part of the ship that everyone aboard seemed to have conveniently forgotten!

  Emerson glimpsed a small, starlike flare erupt. Glints of actinic flame.

  He wasted no more time cursing. On hands and knees, he scuttled out of the little observation dome, built by some race much smaller than humans that had once owned this ship long before it was sold, fifth-hand, to a poor clan of ignorant wolflings, freshly emerged from an isolation so deep they used to wonder if, in all the universe, they lived alone.

  He had no way to report his discovery. No words to shout over an intercom. If he went to the Plotting Room, grabbed Gillian’s shoulders, and forced her to look forward, she would probably respond. But how long might that take?

  Worse, could it even risk her life? Whatever means was being used to cast this spell, it bore similarities to his own prior conditioning and Emerson recognized a special brand of ruthlessness. Those responsible might sense Gillian’s dawning awareness, and clamp down harshly through her psi talent.

  He could not risk exposing her to that danger.

  Sara? Prity? They were his friends and dear to him. The same logic held for the other Streakers. Anyway, there was too little time to make himself understood.

  Sometimes you had to do things yourself.

  So Emerson ran. He dashed forward to the cavernous hangar — the Outlock — that filled Streaker’s capacious nose. All the smaller vessels that once had filled the mooring slips when they departed Earth were now gone. The longboat and skiff had been lost with Orley and the others at Kithrup. Even before that, the captain’s gig had exploded in the Shallow Cluster — their first terrible price for claiming Creideiki’s treasure.

  Now the docks held rugged little Thennanin scout-boats, taken from an old hulk the crew had salvaged. It felt all too familiar, slipping into one of the tiny armored vessels. He had done this once before — turning on power switches, wrestling the control wheel built for a race with much bigger arms, and triggering mechanisms to send it sliding down a narrow rail, into a tube that would expel it.…

  Emerson quashed all memory of that last time, or else courage might have failed him. Instead, he concentrated on the dials and screens whose symbols he could no longer read, hoping that old habits, skills, and Ifni’s luck would keep him from spinning out of control the moment he passed through the outer set of doors.

  A song burst unbidden into his mind — a pilot’s anthem about rocketing into the deep black yonder — but his clenched jaw gave it no voice. He was too busy to utter sound.

  If it were possible to think clear sentences, Emerson might have wondered what he was trying to accomplish, or how he might possibly interfere with the attackers. The little scout had weapons, but a year ago he had not proved very adept with them. Now he could not even read the controls.

  Still, it could be possible to raise a ruckus. To disrupt the assailants. To dash their shroud of illusion and alert the Terran crew that danger lurked.

  But what danger?

  No matter. Emerson knew his brain was no longer equipped to solve complex problems. If all he accomplished was to draw the attention of the Zang — bringing their protective wrath down on the trespassers — that might be enough.

  The wounded Fractal World turned before him as the airlock closed and he gently nudged the boat’s thrusters, moving toward the interlopers. Waves of aversion increased in strength as he drew nearer. Pain and pleasure, disgust and fascination — these and many other sensations washed over him, rewarding Emerson each time his eyes or thoughts drifted away from the activity ahead, and punishing every effort to concentrate. Without the experience on Jijo, he might never have overcome such combination. But Emerson had learned a new habit. To seek discomfort — like a child pressing a loose tooth, attracted by each throbbing twinge, teasing and probing till the old made way for the new.

  The little rewq helped. Sensing his need, it kept ripple-shifting through various color spectra, conveying images that wavered elusively, but eventually resolved into discernible shapes.

  Machines.

  He realized at least a dozen spindly forms had already latched themselves to Streaker’s nose. They clambered like scavenging insects probing the eye of some helpless beast. If the goal were simple destruction, it would all be over by now. Their aim must be more complex than that.

  He recognized the hot light of a cutting torch. Either they were trying to burn their way into the ship, to board her, or …

  Or else their effort was aimed at cutting something off. A sample, perhaps. But of what?

  Emerson pictured Streaker in his mind, a detailed image, unimpaired by his aphasia with sentences. The memory was wordless, almost tactile, from years spent loving this old salvaged hull in ways a man could never love a woman, supervising so many aspects of its transformation into something unique — the pride of Earthclan.

  All at once he recalled what lay beneath that bitter, flickering glare.

  A symbol. An emblem supposedly carried by all ships flown by oxygen-breathing, starfaring races.

  The rayed spiral crest of the Civilization of Five Galaxies.

  Incongruity stunned Emerson. At first he wondered if this might be yet another trick, deceiving his perceptions once again, making him think that was their target. All this seemed an awful lot of effort to expend simply defacing Streaker of its bow insignia.

  Anyway, the machines were clearly having more trouble than they had bargained for. The dense carbon coat burdening the Earthship was obdurate and resistant to every attempt by Hannes Suessi and the dolphin engineers to remove it. As he drew closer, Emerson saw that only a little progress had been made, exposing a small patch of Streaker’s original hull.

  He almost laughed at the aliens’ discomfiture.

  Then he looked beyond, and saw.

  More machines. Many of them, swarming darkly, converging from the starry background. Almost certainly reinforcements, coming to make short work of the job.

  It was time to act. Emerson reached for his weapons console, choosing the least potent rays, lest he damage Streaker by mistake.

  Well, here goes nothing, he thought.

  I sure hope this works.

  So intent was he on aiming — carefully adjusting the crosshairs — that he never noticed what had just happened within his crippled mind.

  His use of two clear sentences, one right after another, smoothly expressing both wryness and hope.

  Gillian

  REALIZATION CRACKLED THROUGH HER consciousness like pealing thunder. She cried out a shrill command.

  “Security alert!”

  Klaxons echoed down the Earthship’s half-deserted halls, sending dolphins scurrying to combat stations. The ambient engine hum changed pitch as Suessi’s crew increased power to shields and weapon systems.

  “Niss, report!”

  The spinning hologram spoke quickly, with none of its accustomed snideness.

  “We seem to have been suborned by a combined psi-cyber stealth attack, with an aim toward distracting Streaker’s defenders, both organic and machine. The fact that you and I roused simultaneously suggests the emitter source has been abruptly destroyed or degraded. Preliminary indications suggest they used a sophisticated logic entity whose memic-level was at least class—”

  “What’s our current danger?” Gillian cut in.

  “I detect no immediate targeting impulses or macroweaponry aimed at this vessel. But several nearby automatons show latent power levels that could turn dangerous at close range.

  “So far, it seems they are content to fire away at each other.”

  She stepped toward the display showing a camera view of the ship’s bow … exactly opposite from the region she had been inspecting, suspicious of some unknown menace. Her heart pounded as she saw how close it had been. All might have been lost, if the intruders had not fallen to fighting among themselves. Sharp flashes surged and fl
ared as spiderlike shapes lashed at each other, casting battle shadows uncomfortably close.

  “Where the hell are the Zang?” Gillian murmured under her breath.

  Scanning the area of space where the hydrogen entities had been, her instruments showed no sign of the big globule-vessel … only a disturbing, elongated cloud of drifting ions. Perhaps it’s only backwash from their engines, when they departed on an errand. They may be back at any moment.

  Her mind quailed from the other possibility — that some weapon had removed the Zang from the local equation. A weapon powerful enough to leave barely a smudge of disturbed atoms in its wake.

  Either way, the psi attack kept us from noticing our guardians were gone. Someone went to a lot of trouble making sure we’d sit still for a while.

  She felt Suessi’s engines dig in as Kaa started backing away from the combat maelstrom. But the pilot only made a little headway before the swarm of conflict followed, as if tethered to Streaker by invisible cords.

  “Do you have any idea who—”

  “None of the combatants has identified itself.”

  “Then what were they trying—”

  “It appears that some group was attempting to steal Streaker’s WOM archive.”

  “Streaker’s …?”

  Her question froze in her throat. Gillian’s mouth closed sharply as she understood.

  By law, each Galactic vessel was supposed to carry a “watcher” … a device that would passively chronicle the major features of its travels. Some units were sophisticated. Others — the sort that a poor clan could afford — were crude mineral devices, capable only of recording the ship’s rough location and identifying any ships nearby. But all of them fell into the category of “write-only memories” … designed to store knowledge but never be read. At least never within the present epoch. Eventually, each was supposed to find its way into the infinite archives of the Great Library, to be studied at leisure by denizens of some later age, when the passions of this one had faded to mere historical interest.