by Joan Vinge
“Wristwatch.”
She gave a small sigh of vexation and relief, seeing it stuck to a double star in the lower half of the screen. The images of the stars drained inward toward the center of the screen; the black hole wore a starry crown, symbol of its power over light itself… Careless! Something larger than her watch left unsecured might have torn a hole through the hull in its urge to suicide. “I just got that watch! I’ve endured this trip too many times; I don’t carry the years lightly, alone. TJ was my strength, Silky… and he’s gone.” She sensed a faint tremor through the fiber of the ship; looking up again she saw no starfield before them now, but only the film of reddening hell shine lighting their way to doom. “She’s controlling the field stabilizers, Silky, or we’d be turning somersaults by now. I knew she could hold us!”
But what if it destroys her mind? If anything happened to the girl because of this, she would never forgive herself. Never. In the bare few days the girl had spent with them she had reaffirmed by her sun pie presence the things TJ had always believed. Flexible and independent, she had begun to recover from the shock of her abrupt transplanting, begun reaching out to the possibilities they offered in propitiation. In a cheerful, eye-stimulating jump suit instead of drab handmade clothing, there was no way a stranger could have known her for a second-class citizen of the Hegemony, one judged undeserving of a full share of its knowledge. And the sibyl-machinery of a civilization far more knowledgeable than their own had judged her and found her worthy.
TJ’s dream had always been that all intelligent beings would someday have an equal chance to fulfill their potential. That was why he had begun running contraband shipments to Tiamat, against her own futile protests that he was becoming a common smuggler. “There are smugglers and smugglers, my heart,” he had said, grinning; and by then she knew that no human protest could shout down the inner voice that drove him… not even hers.
The Hegemony held Tiamat back from developing a technological base of its own by restrictions and embargoes (she still remembered how his lectures rang through their cramped apartment); kept the inhabitants at a level where they were only pampered children, given selected toys their parent-masters could later render harmless. And all for the sake of that precious obscenity, the water of life, that seduced the Hegemony’s privileged and powerful with the hope of eternal youth.
If Tiamat developed a technologically-based world society of its own, if it were left to mature untended during the century that it was cut off from the Hegemony, who knew what they would find when they returned? A world able to stand up to them, one which no longer craved their technological toys because it could make its own — a world which had decided that it preferred to keep immortality to itself, and was tired of exploitation? Or a world which had decided that its own exploitation of mers was immoral… worse yet, one which had turned itself into a radioactive cinder the way Caedw had done. Tiamat had something that no other world could offer, and what it had was more of a curse than a blessing.
It was a situation that TJ had found intolerable. Knowing she couldn’t stop him, she had gone with him again, as she had always gone with him, always been unable to refuse him any desire. And as always, she had been caught up in his passion in the end… and after his death, she and Silky had carried on his crusade, the only thing in her life that had seemed to have any purpose after he was gone.
And now chance had swept the girl Moon into her life, as if to prove that it had all been worthwhile — the image of the child that she and TJ had never had. He would have been proud. It would be no burden to be guardian to Moon’s new life; it would be a privilege…
Elsevier felt a sickening vertigo as the irresistible force of the tidal stress sucked at her immobile body. Even with the protective fields functioning, the ship could not protect them entirely. She looked toward the glowing heart of blackness once again. Oh, heaven, I’m not ready; it happens too fast, and lasts too long. At least Moon was free of the heat and pain, with her mind held captive somewhere halfway across the galaxy… 7 wouldn’t have done it, except for Cress… It wouldn’t have happened, except for Cress… Oh, gods, let him be all right. He still lay in the emergency prism; they hadn’t dared to move him to a safer spot. But the whole of the ship and all its equipment had been designed to survive this passage; surely he would survive, too — if any of them did…
She felt the sockets of her bones loosen and shift again, felt the less acute but growing discomfort as the temperature inside the ship rose. She imagined the outer hull incandescent now with stress as it plummeted toward the black hole’s horizon, a part of the flaming distress call endlessly broadcasting as the damned were gathered in to then: final reckoning. The ship was constructed of the strongest, most resilient materials known to man, and equipped with counter fields to protect and stabilize its descent into the maelstrom.
It was as small in size as possible, and shaped like a coin; the stabilizers kept its flat broad face always aligned with the gravitational gradients as it fell. Because the walls of the black hole’s gravity well in space were so steep, if the ship ever lost its stability and began to tumble it would be ripped apart in seconds by tidal stresses. Death would come to them all in an instant’s blazing agony, and their death scream would echo in that well forever. Passage through the Black Gate taxed human and mechanical endurance, and the limits of Kharemough’s technology. Only the symbiosis of a computer and the astrogator’s human brain could hold them together and guide them down to the precise point of entry at the horizon.
And what if Moon held them together, but they missed the tiny opening to the hyperspace conduit that would spit them out two light-years from Kharemough? Kharemough had redeveloped the principle of Black Gate travel over a millennium ago, working from the Old Empire knowledge given to them by sibyls. The Old Empire had had a hyper light star drive that let it extend its control across distances still impossible for the Hegemony; but even it had used the Black Gate as a local center for its far-flung communications. The Hegemony had used its cosmic shortcut to reestablish this small part of the Empire’s network of worlds, and used its fossil wisdom to get them safely through. But they still had no real understanding of the forces they manipulated… If this ship did not pass through the horizon at the proper coordinates, it might emerge in an entirely unexplored sector of space, with no system nearby and no coordinates for their return… or it might never emerge anywhere in the known universe. Ships had been lost before; and they had been lost forever.
Elsevier felt her eyes bulging against her closed lids, no longer able to watch the coruscating fire of the black hole’s surface swallow her universe. She heard the ship groan, and her own groan as she felt herself coming apart at the seams. The rippling bright blackness echoed inside her as her consciousness gave way; she let all her doubts and fears fly up like a shower of sparks and surrendered herself at last, gladly, to oblivion.
The Black Gate opened.
17
It doesn’t happen like that. Jerusha stood in the elegant den of the upper city townhouse, staring out through the diamond-patterned window, hands behind her back. Children danced among circles scrawled on the timeworn pavement, caught in some inscrutable childhood fantasy — children of wealthy Winters and wealthy off worlders together, oblivious to the distances of space-time and outlook that separated their parents. She tried not to think about the distances, the differences, the terrible-It just doesn’t happen like that!
But even the furious denial couldn’t keep it out of her mind, keep her from reliving the unexplained summons that had taken her away from the night duty desk at police headquarters, up into the darkened corridors on the second level. She couldn’t keep from remembering the sounds that had drawn her — not human sounds but the sounds of some tortured thing — to open the final door and turn on the light.
She had not screamed in half a lifetime, but she had screamed that night. One raw cry of denial: that she did not see the bleating, bleeding animal that lay teari
ng at itself on the floor of that stinking room… the filthy, raving ruin of what had been a human being. Not just any human being, but the Commander of Police for all of Tiamat — who had burned out his brain with an overload of k’spag. Gods, if she lived to see the New Millennium she would never forget that sight! She blinked fiercely as the children swam out of focus. No matter how hard she tried to put it out of her mind, it clung like the odor of death, corrupting every emotion, every thought. She had seen enough ugliness in this job to harden the weakest woman; but when it happened to one of your own… She had not liked much about LiouxSked, but no man deserved to suffer such degradation before the eyes of an entire world. Though he would probably be beyond caring, forever.
But that left his family. It had been her duty, devolved upon her by Mantagnes, the new Acting Commander, to help LiouxSked’s wife make the arrangements for the family’s departure from Tiamat. “Marika needs another woman’s presence at a time like this, Jerusha,” Mantagnes had said, quite sincerely. She had bitten her tongue. Well, damn it, maybe she does.
She had wondered how she would be able to face Lesu Marika LiouxSked and the two little girls, with the knowledge of what she had seen that night still branded on her memory. But she had kept control of her emotions with a success born of long practice, and it had seemed to have a good effect on the distraught and grieving woman.
Lesu Marika had always been distant and disapproving during their previous encounters — usually when LiouxSked had made her play glorified nanny on family expeditions into the Maze. But, like most of the force stationed here — like herself — LiouxSked and his family had come from Newhaven; and so now they spoke together in their own language of home, like strangers met in an alien land. Marika and the children were returning home to family and friends (and the Commander was returning with them, to spend the rest of his life in an institution; but they did not speak of that). Jerusha encouraged safe, nonspecific recollections of the world they had all longed to see again: the sun bleached heat of the days; the vital, quicksilver people; the star port metropolis and trade center of Miertoles lo Faux — where she had first seen the glory of the Prime Minister’s visitation, and been awed by its splendor. Where she had dreamed her own dreams of other worlds…
Jerusha felt someone come to stand silently beside her; glanced over and then down at ten-year-old Lesu Andradi, the younger of LiouxSked’s two daughters. She was a bright, eager girl, very unlike her simpering older sister, and Jerusha had grown fond of her. And the gradual realization that the child hanging on her hand looked up at her uniform with the same near-awe that she had always felt toward her own uniformed father and brother had made the humiliation of her nursemaid duty bearable.
Now Andradi imitated her own pose at the window unthinkingly — a small, forlorn figure in a shapeless gray robe, her forehead smudged with ash. The family dressed for mourning, as though
LiouxSked had actually died. But the gods weren’t that kind… Gods, hell! Jerusha’s mouth thinned. The gods had nothing to do with it; this stank of human treachery.
Andradi rubbed her eyes surreptitiously with her fist as she watched the other children play, part of the world that she had suddenly been cut off from. “I wish I could say good-bye to Scelly and Minook. But Mama won’t let us, because — because of Da.”
Jerusha wondered whether it was simply that her mother considered it inappropriate to mourning, or whether Marika was afraid of what the other children might say to her own. But she only said, “They’ll understand.”
“But I don’t want to go away and not see them any more! I hate Newhaven!” Andradi had been born on Tiamat, and her image conscious parents affected a pretentiously Kharemoughi lifestyle; her homeworld was nothing to her but a name, the symbol of all that had abruptly gone wrong with her life.
Jerusha put an arm out, circled the girl’s narrow shoulders, glancing over her head at the sterile sophistication of the room behind them. She heard muffled echoes from the upper stories, where Marika and the servants were gathering together the last of the family’s belongings. They were leaving behind most of the furniture-not because of the expense of shipping it, she suspected, so much as the painful associations of this place. “I know, Andradi. You hate Newhaven now. But when you get there you’ll find new friends, and they’ll show you how to climb up into prong trees, and weave the bark into hats. They’ll take you out with a lamp to find flowers that only bloom at night; and in the rainy season water falls out of the sky like a warm shower, and all the vines in your courtyard will be covered with sweet berries. You can catch shiny wogs in a pool…” Although she doubted very much that Marika would let her daughters catch wogs.
Andradi snuffled. “What — what are those?”
Jerusha smiled. “Little things like fish that live in the winter rain pools. In the summer they burrow down into the mud and sleep there until the rains come again.”
“For a hundred years?” Andradi’s eyes widened. “That’s a long time.”
Jerusha laughed as comprehension caught up with her. “No, not a hundred — just a couple. Winter and summer don’t last as long there as they do here.”
“Oh, double luck!” Andradi clapped her hands. “That’ll be like living forever. Just like the Snow Queen!”
Jerusha winced, pushed the thought aside and nodded her encouragement. “There you go. You’ll like growing up on Newhaven. I know I did.” She was aware that she was ignoring the things she had come to hate once she was grown. “I wish I was going back myself.” The words slipped out, unintended.
Andradi abruptly was clinging like a burr, her small face buried against Jerusha’s tunic. “Oh, yes — oh, yes, Jerusha — please come! You can show me everything, you know everything; I want you to come with me.” She trembled. “You’re a good Blue.”
Jerusha stroked the dark, curly head, speechless with the sudden comprehension of what she meant now to this child, whose rightful symbol of firm stability and trust had suddenly destroyed himself. She let herself realize, at last, how deeply Andradi’s bewildered grief had penetrated her own defenses and tightened its grip around her heart.
She pried the girl’s arms loose where they wrapped her waist above her equipment belt, and took the slim, warm hands in her own. “Thank you, Andradi. Thank you for asking. I wish I could go with you; but my job here isn’t done. Your father… your father didn’t do this thing to himself, Andradi. No matter what anybody says, don’t you ever believe he did. Somebody did it to him. I don’t know who yet but I’m going to find out. I’m going to make sure that person pays. And when I do, you’ll get a message from me, so that you’ll know he has — or she has. Maybe after that I’ll be ready to go home myself.”
“All right…” The curly head bobbed once, and then the somber, up slanting eyes found her face again. “When I’m grown, I’m going to be a Blue too.”
Jerusha smiled, without irony or condescension. “Yes, I think maybe you will.”
They glanced up together as Marika entered the den, veiled in gray; she gestured her daughter to her side, and Andradi moved away reluctantly. “Everything is ready, Jerusha.” Her voice was as dreary and gray as she was. “You may see us to the star port now.”
Jerusha nodded. “Yes, Madame LiouxSked.” She followed them gladly out of the abandoned room.
* * *
Jerusha left the hovercraft to an attendant whose presence she barely registered, walked toward the heavy windowed doors that separated the cavernous garage from police headquarters on the other side. The whole of this alley was taken up by offices and detention cells and the court buildings, a drab stain of moral rectitude on the crazy quilt of the Maze. Officially it was the Olivine Alley; but everyone, including its inhabitants, knew it as Blue Alley.
She barely remembered to pause for the second it took the sluggish doors to snap open and let her pass through, into the anonymous hallway beyond. Her mind still lay on the trip she had just made, the reason for it, the whole incredible, u
gly chain of events that had shaken everyone in this’ Excuse me, patrolman. Excuse me, patrolman. Excuse me, patrolman.”
Something clutched at her uniform sleeve as she pushed into the crowded ward room. She looked up distractedly into the faceless plastic shielding a head full of mechanical brains — a pol rob blocking her way with mindless urgency. “Inspector,” she said, with something of the same robot monotony. Someone jostled her from behind.
“Excuse me, Inspector. I must make my report and return to work. Please authorize me.” There was a hint of desperation in the mechanical inflections. “A man from Number Four has been making seditious remarks about the Hegemony in the Stardock Bar. He is also telling locals that sibyls have access to forbidden knowledge. He appears to be under the influence of drugs.”
“Yeah, all right, authorization 77A. File an ident on him and we’ll pick him up.” Drugs. Don’t think about drugs. She moved on across the room, concentrating on not looking toward what had been LiouxSked’s private office until a month ago.
“Excuse me, Inspector!” This time from an apologetic patrolman as he backed into her with an armload of holo files.
“My fault; I wasn’t watching.” Already the inundation of paperwork that marked the end of their stay on Tiamat was beginning to mount. Merchants and other resident aliens had already begun to worry about the future, or the lack of it; begun to plague the bureaucracy about the hundred different permits and forms and regulations it demanded of them before the final departure. And if she thought they were busy now, just wait another four years… Yes, busy, busy, have to keep busy; too busy to think about it…
But nothing kept her mind clogged with interference loud enough to drown the images of horror and grief for long. She had not lied when she told Andradi that her father didn’t make himself into a drooling vegetable. It made no sense — she knew that man, and whatever he might have been, or done, he was not the kind of man to play with drugs. Hell, he wouldn’t touch a pack of iestas! But there were half a hundred dealers in Carbuncle who could arrange to have an overdose dropped into a cup of tea or a bowl of soup.