Orbitsville Departure o-1

by Bob Shaw

  Brave new world! Another indication that humans bad turned their hacks on spate travel, that the dispersal of whole cultures could he followed by pointing telescopes into the night skies of the Big O interior, charting the firefly glows of their caravans and camps…

  As the minutes went by Jean's fear increased. A normal reaction would have been to scan the band of sky close to the Orbitsville horizon in the hope of seeing marker lights drawing near, but she was unable to drag her gaze from the spurious depths below. How far away was the shell now? Could the altimeter have been as haywire as everything else on the Atkinson Grimshaw, giving an inflated reading? Would the capsule's flashing beacons produce even the faintest smudge of reflection in the instant before the collision? Mesmerised, unblinking, Jean stared into the crawling darkness, trying to penetrate screens of after-images to reach the terrible reality beyond.

  She had been that way for some time, her lips drawn into a unconscious grimace, when wonder intervened.

  First appearing on the extreme left, a thin line of green radiance swept across the vastness of Orbitsville, moving so quickly from east to west mat it crossed her entire field of view in less man a second.

  Jean gave a sharp scream, keyed up to believe that any change in the unvarying blackness ahead signalled the final impact, men as quietness and stillness returned — as life continued — it began to dawn on her that she had witnessed the unthinkable. The fleeting green meridian had been a genuine phenomenon, an objective reality.

  There had been a change in the enigmatic material of the Orbitsville shell.

  Facing imminent death though she was, Jean felt a near-blasphemous excitement. Spherology was the name given to the science which had been born two centuries earlier when teams had first begun to study the shell material, and it was a discipline which was characterised by total lack of success. Even when viewed through a quark microscope the material appeared continuous — an embodiment of the pre-Democritus concept of matter — and in two-hundred years of concentrated effort no researcher had been able to make the slightest scratch on it or to alter it in any way. After millions of man-hours of study, spherologists knew the material's thickness, its albedo, its index of friction, and very little more.

  It was, however, a basic tenet of their calling that the shell was immutable. And Jean Antony — swinging ever closer to it in the lonely darkness of her collision course — had seen a strange and transient stirring of life, like the first pulse of an embryo heart.

  The attendant awe — for one who had spent half a lifetime flying that illusory black ocean — almost transcended the fear of death.

  Chapter 6

  In five weeks, with some medical assistance, Cona Dallen had learned to walk and to feed herself, and had almost completed her toilet training. According to Roy Picciano, senior physician for the community, her progress had been excellent — at least as good as would have been achieved had she been in full-time care at the Madison clinic. But as the sheer physical burden of looking after an adult-sized baby had gradually eased, the mental wear and tear on Carry Dallen had increased.

  At first he had been too numbed by exhaustion and delayed shock even to consider Picciano's prognostication and advice. There had, for example, been no room in his mind for the monstrous suggestion that Cona might never again be able to speak. Her brain and nerve connections and muscles were all there, intact, and he — Carry Dallen, the man who never made a mistake — knew that by sheer perseverance and the force of his own will he would induce that delicate apparatus to function properly again.

  The simple mind-filling truth which seemed to elude all doctors was that their science was based on studies of generalised humanity, on what had happened to anonymous masses of commonplace people, whereas in this case the subject was a unique and special entity who was central to Dallen's unique and special existence. Ordinary rules could not apply. Not this time.

  The first unmanning blow had been the discovery that it was necessary for Cona and Mikel to live separately, because she was a real threat to the boy's safety. Cona is a baby again, had been the gist of Picciano's comments. She's locked in the true psychosis of the first weeks of infancy, unable to distinguish between herself and the outside world, with a feeling range which is limited to anger, pleasure, pain and fear. All babies react with violent anger when frustrated, especially where food is concerned. Given the necessary size and strength any infant would kill the mother who withdrew the teat too soon or who thwarted any other infantile desire. Cona is big and strong, particularly in comparison to Mikel, and one moment of rage is all it would take.

  Dallen never failed to be dismayed each time that sudden fury asserted itself, usually over matters of thet. Cona had always had a strong appetite, and as a thinking adult had barely managed to control her weight by avoiding sweet and starchy foods. The new Cona, even after she had learned to chew, would have been content to subsist on nothing but chocolate and ice cream, and there were clashes when he tried to persuade her otherwise. Initially she had shown her anger by rolling on the floor and screaming, a sound which daunted him both with its volume and incoherence. At a later stage, when co-ordination and spatial awareness had developed, she had once succeeded in striking him on the face. The blow had stung, but the real pain had come in the swiftness of her transition from rage to crowing happiness as he had relaxed his grip on a disputed candy bar.

  The message had been clear — Cona Dallen doesn't live here anymore — and it had caused him to back away, timorously, shaking his head in denial…

  When Dallen answered the door chimes he was surprised to see Roy Picciano in place of the voluntary worker he had been expecting. It was mid-morning on a Tuesday and he had been planning some necessary shopping before going to the clinic to visit Mikel.

  "Bern has been delayed for a while, so I offered to fill in for her," Picciano said, his smile showing the gold fillings which had again become fashionable. He was a bushy-haired, tanned man of about fifty whose preference for lightweight sports clothes created the impression that all his professional appointments were sandwiched between rounds of golf.

  "Thanks, Roy." Dallen stepped back to let the doctor come in. "I could have walked, you know."

  "It's no trouble. Besides, I wanted to have a look at my patients ‘’

  Dallen noticed the use of the plural. "I'm all right."

  "You look tired, Carry." Picciano appraised him candidly. "How long are you going to go on like this?"

  "As long as it takes. We've been through this before, haven't we?"

  "No! I have been through it — you won't even begin to think about the problem."

  "It's my problem. I'm responsible for Cona being the way she is."

  'That's a perfect example of what I'm talking about," Picciano said, not hiding his exasperation. "You have no responsibilities to Cona, because Cona no longer exists. Your wife is dead, Carry. Your only responsibility now is to yourself. There is always some uncertainty about the progress of erasure cases, but there's one thing I can tell you for sure — the stunted, half-personality which is going to develop in that human shell in the next room will have nothing, nothing to do with your former wife. You've got to accept that, for your own good."

  "For my own good." Dallen made the words sound like a phrase from a foreign language. "How long are we going to stand around here in the hall?"

  Til look at her now." Picciano opened the nearest door and went into the long living room, bis heels clacking on the polished composition floor. In his early attempts to deal with Cona's incontinence Dallen had tried putting her in diapers, but she had disliked them intensely, and he had found their appearance grotesque and degrading. He had then settled for removing all carpets and cleaning up after her, a chore which had almost ceased to exist now that she was using the bathroom. She was lying on a blue pneumat, chin propped on her hands, engrossed in watching the swirl of colours and shapes above a nursery imager. Her legs were bent, bare feet circling aimlessly and sometimes co
lliding. In spite of the loose smock in which Dallen had dressed her she was noticeably plumper than she had been a month earlier. "Look who's come to see you," Dallen said, kneeling beside Cona and putting an arm around her shoulder. She glanced up at him, eyes bright with window reflections, and returned her attention to the glowing airborne patterns. Dallen took a tissue from his pocket and tried to dab a smear of chocolate from her chin, but she whimpered in irritation and twisted away from him.

  "We only got the imager yesterday," Dallen explained. "It's still a novelty."

  Picciano shook his head. "Do you know what you're doing, Carry? You're apologizing because the subject — I refuse to call her Cona, and so should you — didn't greet me with polite chitchat and a choice of coffee or sherry. This is what I've been…"

  "For God's sake."

  T'm only…" Picciano sighed and stared out of the window for a moment. "Did you get her to take all the fifth week medication and tracers?"

  "Yes. No problem."

  "In that case I'm going to carry out some tests and make notes." Picciano opened his flat plastic case and began to activate an instrument panel incorporated in the lid. "This is all routine stuff and I don't need any help," he added significantly.

  "Thanks." Dallen pressed his face against Cona's for a moment without getting any response, then stood up and left the room. A minute later he was out on the street, breathing deeply to cleanse his lungs of the smell of chocolate and urine which in his fancy pervaded the house at all times. He lived near the outer edge of the inhabited strip of Madison, an area which straggled northwards for about five kilometres from the city centre to accommodate a population of several thousand Metagov and local administration workers. For the most part the dwellings were large, stone-built and well screened by trees — evidence of the district's former affluence. The far-off drone of a lawnmower served only to emphasise the mid-week, mid-morning stillness, creating the impression he had strayed into one of the thousands upon thousands of deserted suburbs which migrating families had left to dreams and decay.

  Windows and doorways, never aglow, Dallen thought, recalling one of the most popular songs of the last two centuries. Everyone's gone to Big O…

  Dismissing the mawkish lyric, he decided to walk into town and use the time to work on the problem of Derek Beaumont. The tragedy that had befallen Cona overshadowed everything else in his life, but he appreciated a certain irony in the fact that the one man he knew to bear responsibility also provided his only distraction. When not grieving over his wife or coping with the despairing drudgery she now represented, Dallen fantasised about being alone with the young terrorist, about making him name all the relevant names, about hunting and capturing and killing. Part of him, even in lurid visions, drew the line at coldblooded execution, but another understood only too well that confrontations could be manipulated. It was a technique boys learned at school. Give the enemy a gentle push, encourage him to push back, respond with a harder shove, escalate the violence and keep doing it until suddenly all thoughts of guilt can be discarded and it's time to cut loose and go in hard. When it's merely a matter of temperature, Dallen knew, the blood can be very obliging. And the man or woman who pulled the trigger on Cona and Mike! was going to know the same thing… in the final passionate, exultant moment that person was going to know… and that person was going to be sorry… in the end…

  Walking south through slanting prisms of sunlight and green shade, Dallen heard his own footfalls change note as frustration hardened his muscles. Although his job occasioned him to think and act like a policeman, he held no official responsibility for local law enforcement. He was a Grade IV officer in the Deregistration Bureau, and as such his prime concern was with surveying tracts of land that had been declared empty and making sure they remained unoccupied for one full year, after which time Metagov was longer legally accountable. Madison City itself, thanks to the artificial mix of its population, had virtually no crime, and the police department consisted of an executive and a handful of officers who were mainly concerned with regulating tourist accommodation. In spite of the overlap in their jobs, Dallen had always maintained an easy working relationship with Police Chief Lashbrook. Consequently he had been surprised to find himself not only denied access to the terrorist, but made distinctly unwelcome in the downtown police building.

  "It was a sickening thing, what happened to your wife and boy," Cole Lashbrook had said, eyeing him severely over pedant's spectacles. "I'm deeply sorry about it, but I've made every allowance I can. If you persist with your attempts to see Beaumont I'll be forced to take appropriate action against you."

  Dallen's fists clenched as his sense of outrage returned, "Against me" he had almost shouted. "Are you crazy?"

  "No, but sometimes I think you are. Beaumont has made a formal complaint about what you did to him in back of that store, Carry. The dust hasn't settled over that business of the pursuit fatalities a couple of months back, and now there's this… And on top of it all you come round here and expect to be let loose on my prisoner!"

  "Your prisoner?" Dallen had refrained with difficulty from pointing out the police department's past willingness to allow onerous duties to be performed by his own force.

  "That's right. He was in possession of an explosive device and that makes it a criminal matter, and I intend to deliver Beaumont for trial in good health — a condition he may not be in if you get near him."

  "Exactly what does that make me?"

  "Carry, you're a man who has been known to go too far — even when you weren't personally involved in a case — and I’m not going to help you land yourself behind bars."

  Thanks a lot, Dallen repeated to himself, immune to the blandishments of the placid sunlit warmth through which he was walking. In the two centuries since the discovery of Optima Thule, to give Orbitsville its constitutional name, there had been a general and steady decrease in traditional crime. Most crimes had involved property in one way or another, and as the race had been absorbed by a land area equivalent to five billion Earths — enough to support every intelligent creature in the galaxy — the basic motivations had faded away. Keeping pace with that change, many vast and complicated legal structures had become as obsolete as barbed wire, and progressively fallen into disuse.

  Even on Earth, where there were historical complications, a community the size of Madison operated on a fairly informal basis as far as the law and its enforcement were concerned. In the days immediately following the blanking of his family Dallen had been certain that somehow he would obtain private interview with Beaumont. He had never allowed himself to consider the possibility of his being unable to force the prisoner to talk. He had fuelled himself night and day on the conviction that Beaumont would give him a name, the name, and that events thereafter would take a divinely ordained course. Now he was haunted by a suspicion that the young terrorist would be arraigned at the next session of the regional court and receive the routine sentence of — irony of ironies — deportation to Orbitsville. And once Beaumont reached Botany Bay, the popular name for the area surrounding the N5 portal, he would be beyond the reach of Dallen or any other private citizen. Economics and celestial mechanics had conspired to bring about that particular circumstance. A starship docking at an equatorial port simply went into orbit around Optima Thule's central sun, but only a few vessels — all owned by Metagov — were fitted with the complex grappling equipment which enabled them to ding like leeches to entrances in the northern and southern bands… "What's wrong with your car, old son?" The voice from only a few paces away startled Dallen. He turned his head and found that a gold Rollac convertible had slowed to a craw! beside him without his noticing. The top was down and at the wheel was the buoyantly plump figure of Rick Renard, a man who had started showing up recently at the city gymnasium used by Dallen. Renard had red curly hair and milky skin which was uniformly dusted with freckles. He also had an uncanny ability to needle Dallen and put him on the defensive with just about every remark he made.


  "Why should anything be wrong with my car?" Dallen said, deliberately giving the kind of response Renard was seeking, as if to be wary of his snares would be to pay the other man a compliment.

  Renard's slightly prominent teeth gleamed briefly. "Nobody walks in heat like this."

  "I do."

  "Trying to lose weight?"

  "Yeah — right now I'm trying to get rid of about a hundred kilos."

  "I'm not that heavy, old son," Renard said, eyes beaconing his satisfaction at having provoked an outright insult. "Look, Dallen, why don't you get in the car with me and ride downtown in comfort with me and use the time you save to enjoy a cold beer?"

  "Well, if you put it like that…" Suddenly disenchanted with the prospect of walking, Dallen pointed at the curb a short distance ahead, making the gesture an instruction as to where to halt the car. Renard overshot the mark by a calculated margin and scored back against Dallen by allowing the vehicle to roll forward before he was properly in, causing him to do some quick footwork as the door dosed.

  "Aren't we having fun?" Renard's shoulders shook as he enjoyed a private triumph. "What do you think of the car?"

  "Nice," Dallen said carelessly, slumping into the receptive upholstery.

  "This lady is sixty years old, you know. Indestructible. Brought her all the way fom the Big O. None of your modem Unimot crap for me."

  "You're a lucky man, Rick." Feeling the passenger seat adapt itself to his body, coaxing him into relaxation, Dallen was impressed by the car's sheer silent-gliding luxury. It came to him that its owner had to be wealthy. He vaguely recalled having heard that Renard was a botanist who had come to Earth on some kind of a field trip, which had suggested he was a Metagov employee, but salaried workers did not import their own cars across hundreds of light years. "Lucky?" Renard's narrow dental arch shone again. "The way I see it, the universe only gives me what I deserve."