Then he sang:
Ninety light-years from home,
Lord, you gotta pay your dues.
Ninety light-years from home,
I got nuthin’ to lose.
My spaceship's a junker, and I'm out for a cruise,
I gotta bad ol’ case of the Galaxy Blues.
All right, so maybe it wasn't Jelly Roll Morton. All the same, it gave me a reason to smile for the first time in days. “I thought you said music doesn't need words,” I said, reaching for the bearshine again.
“Changed my mind,” Ash muttered, then he went on:
Stars all around me,
And I got nowhere to go.
Stars are all around me,
And light moves too slow.
I got planets in my pocket and black holes in my shoes,
It's another phase of the Galaxy..."
Wham! Something hit the door so hard that Rain and I both jumped an inch. My first thought was that there had been some catastrophic accident, such as the main fuel tank exploding, yet when it repeated a moment later—wham! wham!—I realized that someone was hammering at the door.
Ash was the only one who wasn't perturbed. Although he stopped singing, he continued to strum at his guitar. “Yes, Mr. Goldstein, you may come in,” he said, as calm as calm could be.
The door slammed open, and there was Morgan, bleary-eyed and wearing only his robe. “All right, you punks, that's enough!” he snarled. “Some of us are trying to sleep here, and you three are keeping us..."
“Mr. Goldstein ... Morgan...” Ash sighed, still not looking up at him. “If you don't shut up and leave, I'm going to tell my friends how you earned your first million dollars.” He paused, then added, “How you really earned your first million dollars."
Morgan's face went pale as all the bluster and fury of his entrance suddenly dissipated. He started to open his mouth, but then Ash lifted his eyes to gaze at him, and he abruptly seemed to reconsider whatever he was going to say. The two men stared at each other for another moment ... and then, without so much as another word, Morgan stepped out of the cabin and quietly pulled the door shut.
For a second or two, no one said anything. I finally looked at Ash. “Y'know,” I murmured, “I want to be just like you when I grow up."
Rain was similarly impressed. “How did you do that?” she whispered, just as awestruck as I was.
Ash only shrugged as he went on playing his guitar. “If there's one thing that scares guys like Morgan, it's having people find out the truth about them.” A secretive smile. “And believe me, he's got some pretty nasty skeletons in his closet."
I remembered the last time Ash had told Morgan to shut up, back on Talus qua'spah. I'd thought then that it was some sort of psychic trick ... and perhaps it was, to the extent that the Order knew things about Morgan that he'd rather not be made public. But the fact of the matter was, all Ash had to do was verbally remind Morgan that he had the boss by the short hairs.
“Oh, do tell.” Rain inched a little closer. “I'd love to know what..."
“Sorry. My order prohibits me from talking about things like that.” Ash gave her a wink. “Not that Morgan knows this, of course. Now pass me the jug, and I'll tell you about a sweet young girl from Nantucket...."
And it pretty much went downhill from there. In deference to anyone besides Goldstein who might be trying to sleep, we tried to keep it down ... but nonetheless, as the jug made its way around the circle, the songs became ruder, the jokes more coarse, as the three of us laughed and sang our way long into the perpetual night.
The irony wasn't lost on me that, only this morning, I'd sworn I'd never drink again. Nor did I have any illusions about why we were doing what we were doing. It was all too possible that, come tomorrow, we'd all die a horrible death, consumed by a monster black hole. But there was little we could do about that at the moment except celebrate what might be the last hours of our lives.
Eventually, though, there came a point when the jug was empty. By then, Ash's voice was nothing more than a slur, his fingers clumsy upon the strings. I was seeing double and Rain had collapsed against my shoulder; it was plain that none of us would be able to stay awake much longer. Wincing against the dull throb in my head, I stumbled to my feet, pulling Rain with me. Ash was falling asleep in his hammock as we found our way to the door.
Half-carrying Rain, I hobbled down the corridor, heading for my cabin. Rain woke up a little as I opened the door. “Uhh ... hold it, this's where I get off,” she muttered. “Gotta go thataway ... my room."
“Sure, sure.” Yet I was reluctant to let her go. Perhaps I was stinking drunk, but nonetheless I was all too aware that there was a pretty girl draped across my shoulders. “But, y'know, y'know ... I mean, y'know...."
That seemed to wake her up a little more. “Oh, no,” she said, gently prying herself away from me. “Don't you start. Not th’ ... this's not th’ time or th'..."
“Place,” I finished, and that gave her the giggles. “Whatever, sure, but...” I stopped and gazed at her. “If not now, then when ...?"
“'Nuther time, maybe, but not...” She shook her head. This nearly caused her to lose her balance, so she grabbed my arm to steady herself. Somehow, my hands fell to her hips, and for a moment there was a look in her eyes that seemed as if she was reconsidering my unspoken proposition. But then she pushed herself away from me again.
“Definitely not now,” she finished.
Despite all the booze I'd put away, I was still sober enough to remember the definition of the word no. “Yeah, s'okay...."
Rain leaned forward and, raising herself on tip-toes, gave me a kiss. Her mouth was soft and warm, and tasted of bearshine. “Get us through this,” she whispered, “and maybe we'll see about it."
And then she wheeled away from me. I watched her go, realizing that I'd just been given another reason to live.
* * * *
SEVENTEEN
Eye of the monster ... a fine time ... nice place to visit, but et cetera ... root hog or die.
* * * *
IV
Fourteen hours later, Rain and I were on our way to Kha-Zann.
By then, I'd sobered up enough to climb into Lucy's cockpit. Knowing that he'd have a drunk aboard his ship, Ted had made sure that the med bay was stocked with plenty of morning-after pills, eye drops, and antioxidant patches; finally I knew why Ash had been able to recover from his binges so quickly. Two each of the former and one of the latter, along with hot coffee and a cold sponge bath, and I was ready to fly.
Rain met me in the ready room. She didn't mention the inebriated pass I'd made at her the night before, but I couldn't help noticing the way she blushed when I suggested that we save time by suiting up together. She declined with the polite excuse that she wanted to double-check her gear before putting it on. I didn't argue, but instead suited up by myself. I worried that I might have damaged our friendship, but there were more important matters to deal with just then.
Over the course of the last sixteen hours, Aerik had steadily grown larger. Through the starboard portholes, the superjovian appeared as an enormous blue shield, its upper atmosphere striated by thin white cirrus clouds. By the time I'd slugged down my third or fourth cup of coffee, Kha-Zann had become visible as a reddish-brown orb in trojan orbit a little less than a million miles from its primary. We couldn't make out Kasimasta just yet, though; it was still on the opposite side of Aerik from the Pride, and no one aboard would be able to see it until the ship initiated the maneuvers that would swing it around the planet's far side.
Yet we were all too aware that the Annihilator was coming. I had just put on my headset when Ted informed me that the sensors had picked up a slight disturbance in Aerik's gravity well, coming from an unseen source approximately twelve million miles away. That sounded too far away to worry about, until the skipper reminded me that Kasimasta was traveling at four hundred miles per second. According to Ali's calculations, the black hole would reach Kha-Zann in
little more than eight hours ... which meant that Rain and I hadn't much time to waste.
Fortunately, we didn't have to cycle through the airlock on the way out. Doc was waiting for us at the shuttle airlock; he insisted on giving our suits a quick check-out, but I think he'd really come down from the bridge to wish us good luck. Just before I climbed through the hatch, he produced a rabbit's foot on a keychain, which he claimed had been in his family for three generations. I really didn't want the mangy thing, but Doc was adamant about me taking it along, so I let him clip it to the zipper of my left shoulder pocket. A solemn handshake for me, a kiss on the cheek for Rain, and then the chief pronounced us fit to travel.
Doc had just shut the hatch behind us when we heard the muffled clang of two bells. Ali was about to commence the rollover maneuver that would precede the deceleration burn. So Rain and I hustled into the cockpit; we'd just strapped ourselves into our seats when we felt the abrupt cessation of g-force, signaling that the main engine had been cut off. As I began to power up the shuttle, there was the swerving sensation of the Pride doing a one-eighty on its short axis. Emily's voice came over the comlink; a quick run-through of the checklist, and when everything came up green we went straight into a thirty-second countdown.
Loose Lucy detached from the docking collar, and for a few moments the Pride seemed to hang motionless just outside the cockpit windows. Then I fired the RCS to ease us away from the ship, and our respective velocities changed; in the blink of an eye, the big freighter was gone, with little more than a last glimpse of its forward deflector array. From the seat beside me, Rain sighed; a couple of tiny bubbles that might have been tears drifted away from the open faceplate of her helmet, but I didn't say anything about them.
As soon as the Pride was gone, I used the pitch and yaw thrusters to turn Lucy around. Once she was pointed in the right direction, I switched to autopilot and fired up the main engine. A muted rumble pushed us back in our seats; a few seconds of that, then the engine cut off and we were on the road to Kha-Zann.
Rain and I had decided we'd remain on cabin pressure until just before we were ready to make touchdown, at which point we would close our helmets and void the cabin. That way we'd save a little time by not having to cycle through the airlock once we were on the ground. We'd also been careful not to have any solid food for breakfast or lunch; our suits’ recycling systems would get a good workout, but at least our diapers would remain clean. And we'd stuffed our pockets with stim tabs and caffeine pills; maybe we'd be too wired to sleep once we returned to the Pride, but at least we wouldn't doze off on this mission.
So she and I had thought of everything. Or at least we believed we had. Even so, nothing could have prepared us for our first sight of Kasimasta.
I had just removed my helmet and was bending over to stow it beneath my seat when Rain gasped. Looking up, I noticed she was staring past me out the windows. I turned my head, and for a moment all I saw was Aerik, which by then had swelled to almost fill the portside windows. Impressive, but...
Then I saw what she'd seen, and felt my heart go cold. Coming into view from behind the limb of the planet was something that, at first glance, resembled an enormous eye. Red-rimmed, as if irritated by something caught in the cloudy white mass of its pupil, it wept a vast tear that seemed to fall away into space. Altogether, it resembled the baleful glare of an angry god.
So this was Kasimasta: a cyclops among the stars. Although still several million miles away, it was awesome, and utterly terrifying. The black hole at its nucleus was invisible to us, surrounded by the ionized gas that made up its ergosphere, but we knew that it was there, just as we knew that nothing could survive an encounter with the ring of dust and debris that swirled at sublight velocities around its outer event horizon.
As we watched, Kasimasta slowly moved toward the cockpit's center window ... and stayed there. Loose Lucy was taking us straight toward the moon that lay between us and it. I had an impulse to disengage the autopilot, turn the shuttle around, and flee for ... well, anywhere but there. An insane notion; there was no way Lucy could catch up with the Pride, just as it would be impossible to outrun the monster before it caught up with us. Like it or not, we were committed.
For a minute or so, neither of us said anything. Then we found ourselves reaching out to take hold of each other's hand. Despite the fact that I hadn't wanted her to come along, I suddenly realized I was glad Rain was here.
Yeah. I'd picked a fine time to fall in love.
* * * *
V
For a moon on the verge of destruction, Kha-Zann was strangely beautiful. As Lucy closed in upon it, we looked down upon a world that somewhat resembled a miniature version of Mars, save for a noticeable lack of polar ice caps. A reddish-brown surface, streaked here and there with dark grey veins, whose cratered terrain was split and cracked by labyrinthine networks of crevices, fissures, and canyons. Early morning sunlight reflected off a thin, low-lying haze that quickly dissipated as the day grew longer, with shadows stretching out from crater rims and bumpy hills. Probably an interesting place to explore, if one had time to do so.
But we weren't there to take pictures and hunt for souvenirs. In fact, all I really wanted to do was drop in, drop off, and drop out. So once we were a couple of hundred miles away, I picked out what looked like a low-risk landing site near the daylight terminator—a broad, flat plain just north of the equator, away from any valleys and relatively clear of large craters—then switched off the autopilot and took control of my craft again.
By then, Rain and I had put our helmets on again; once we were breathing suit air, she vented the cabin. A final cinch of our harnesses to make sure that they were secure, then I turned the shuttle around and initiated the landing sequence. As we'd been told, Kha-Zann didn't have much in the way of an atmosphere; there was some chop as Lucy began to make her descent, and an orange corona grew up from around the heat shield. But it quickly faded, and after a few seconds the turbulence ended and we had a smooth ride down.
Even so, my hands were moist within my gloves as I clutched the yoke. Sure, I had plenty of experience landing on the Moon and Mars, but never had I expected to touch down on a world ninety light-years from home. Even putting down on Coyote in a stolen lifeboat wasn't as butt-clenching as this. Maybe it was because I was landing where no one—or at least no human—had ever gone before. Or maybe it was simply because I was all too aware that, if I screwed up, my life wouldn't be the only one placed in jeopardy.
In any case, my attention never left the instrument panel, and I kept a sharp eye on the aft cams and the eightball all the way down. Rain helped by reciting the altimeter readout, but it wasn't until Lucy was six hundred feet above the ground and I was certain that there were no surprises waiting for us at the touchdown point that I lowered the landing gear and throttled up the engine for final descent.
We landed with little more than a hard thump, but I didn't breathe easy until I'd safed the engine and put all systems on standby. Through the windows, the dust we'd kicked up was already beginning to settle, revealing a barren landscape beneath a dark purple sky. We'd landed in the last hour of the afternoon, on the side of Kha-Zann that still faced the sun; to the east, just beyond the short horizon, Aerik was beginning to rise. Kasimasta was nowhere to be seen, but I knew that the Annihilator would soon make its appearance.
“Okay, no time for sightseeing.” I unbuckled my harness. “Let's do this and get out of here."
“Really? No kidding.” Rain was already out of her seat. “I sort of thought we could look for a nice place to build a house."
If I'd been listening a little more carefully to what she'd just said, I might have given her a double-take. Perhaps she was only being sarcastic, but it might have been a serious proposition. The only plans I had for us were no more than a couple of hours in the future, so my response was nothing more than a distracted grunt as I followed her from the cockpit.
In Earth-normal gravity, the probe probably w
eighed about two hundred pounds; on Kha-Zann, though, it was only one-fifth of that. The case was bulky, though, so it took both of us to load it aboard the elevator. Once it was securely lashed to the pallet, I opened the cargo hatch. The doors creaked softly as they parted, and a handful of red sand, caught upon an errant breeze, drifted into the hold. I used the elevator controls to rotate the T-bar of the overhead crane into position, then I turned to Rain.
“You know how to operate this, right?” I pointed to the joystick. “Up for up, down for down, and it stops in the middle. Take it easy when you lower me, though, because I don't want to..."
“You're not going down there.” She shook her head within her helmet. “I am. You're staying here."
“No, you're not. This is my job. You're..."
“Jules..."
“We don't have time for this. One of us needs to stay behind to run the elevator. You're the cargo master, so that's you. End of discussion.” I paused. “If I get into any trouble down there, I'll tell you ... but I should be able to handle this by myself. Just do your job, and with any luck we'll be out of here before the engines cool down. All right?"
Before she had a chance to argue any further, I stepped into the cage. I suppose I should have been impressed by Rain's willingness to accept the risk, but I was stronger than her, and it would take muscles to manhandle the crate from the elevator and haul it a safe distance from the shuttle. She pouted for another moment or so, but surrendered to the inevitable. Once I'd grabbed hold of the hand rails on either side of the cage, I gave her a nod, and Rain pushed the levers that raised the cage from its resting position and telescoped the T-bar through the hatch.
The breeze was a little stiffer than I'd expected. The cage gently rocked back and forth on its cables, and I held on tight and planted my boots firmly against the pallet. Once the crane was extended to its full length, I told Rain to lower away. The cage shuddered and jerked a bit on the way down, but I didn't worry much about it; the elevator had a load capacity of one and a half tons. It was just the wind giving me a hassle.
Asimov's SF, February 2008 Page 15