“We don’t know how the Gossameres do it,” went on Ferranti. “But they maintain themselves at less than one degree absolute, well below cosmic background temperature, without emitting radiation at any frequency that we’ve been able to detect. And they suck up all the power that a ship can give out. If you didn’t know that and were in charge of a ship, you could get into terrible trouble.” “But what are they?” repeated Peron. “I mean, are they intelligent?” “We don’t know,” said Ferranti. “They certainly respond to stimuli. They seem to interpret signals we send them, and they stop the power drain on us as soon as they receive a suitable non-random message. Our best guess is that the Gossameres are not intelligent, they’re no more than power collection and propulsion systems. But the Pipistrelles — those bat shapes that you can see alongside the Gossamere — they’re another matter. They ride the galactic gravitational and magnetic fields, and they do it in complex ways. We’ve never managed a two-way exchange of information with them — they never emit — but they act smart. They really use the fields efficiently to make minimum time and energy movements. That could be some kind of advanced instinct, too, the way that a soaring bird will ride the thermals of an atmosphere. But watch them now. What does this mean? Are they saying goodbye? We’ve never been sure.”
She had completed the signal sequence. After a brief delay, one of the Pipistrelles swooped in close toward the ship. There was a flutter of cambered wings, a dip to left and right, and a final surge of power drain on the meters. Then the panels and filaments of the Gossamere began to move farther off. The silver connecting lines shone brighter, while the whole assembly slowly faded. After a few minutes, the winged shapes of the Pipistrelles closed into a tighter formation and followed the Gossamere.
“We had ships drift helpless, with all power shut down for months, until we learned how to handle this,” said Ferranti. “We even tried aggression, but nothing we did affected the Gossameres at all. Now we’ve learned how to live with them.”
“Can you bring them back?” asked Sy.
“We’ve never found a way to do it. They appear at random. And we encounter them far less often now than when our ships first went out. We think that the ‘power plant failure’ on Helena when the arcologies first set out was probably an encounter with a Gossamere. When the colonists turned off the plant to repair it, they couldn’t find anything wrong. That’s typical of a Gossamere power drain. They certainly don’t seem to need our energy, but they like it. The science group in the Jade sector headquarters argue that we’re a treat for the Pipistrelles, a compact energy source when they are used to a very dilute one. We’re like candy to them, and maybe they’ve learned that too much candy isn’t a good thing.”
She switched off the display screen and rose from her seat at the port. “Stay here if you like, and play with the com link. Maybe you can find a way to lure them back. That would certainly please our exobiologists and communications people. I wanted you all to see this, and absorb my message: you can’t learn all about the Universe crouching in close by a star. You have to know what’s going on out in deep space.”
“What else is going on?” asked Elissa. She was still peering out into the milky depths of S-space, watching as the final traces of the Pipistrelles slowly faded from sight.
“Here?” said Ferranti. “Nothing much. On the other hand, we’re not in deep space. Sol is less than three light-years — we’ll be there in less than a week. Now, if we were in deep space, with no star closer than ten light-years…” Olivia Ferranti stopped abruptly. She had seemed about to say more, but thought better of it. With a nod at the others, she turned and left the control room. * * *
“So what do you make of that?” said Elissa. Sy merely shook his head and offered no comment.
“She’s telling us there are more surprises on the way,” said Peron. “I like Olivia, and I think she’s doing her best for us. She knows there are still things she’s not supposed to reveal to us, so she gives us hints and lets us work on them for ourselves. That was another one — but I don’t know how to interpret it. Damn it, though, I wish that the others were here. I’d like Kallen’s comments on the Gossameres. Do you think we made a bad mistake, splitting up like that?”
Peron had been asking himself and the other two that question ever since they left Sector Headquarters. It had seemed like a small thing at the time. Given their experiences after they left Whirlygig, the briefings from the Immortals had been boring rather than thrilling. They had learned about S-space for themselves, the hard way, and what should have come as revelations came merely as confirmation of known facts. The personnel at Sector Headquarters were minimal, little more than a communications and administrative group, and almost all the information was provided through education robots and computer courses — neither of which had been programmed with interest as a dominant factor. As Rosanne had put it, after a long and tedious series of humorless computer warnings about the physiological dangers of frequent movements to and from S-space: “You mean they had to bring us a whole light-year for this? Maybe when you’re an Immortal you don’t live longer — it just seems longer.”
One of their negotiated conditions with Captain Rinker for return of ship control to him had been a freedom to travel after their training and indoctrination. At first he had indignantly refused to consider such a thing. Unprecedented! He at last grudgingly agreed, after Kallen had sent several thousand service robots to Rinker’s living quarters. They cluttered up every available square foot of space, moved randomly about, refused to obey any of Rinker’s orders, and made eating, walking, or even sleeping impossible. When the indoctrination was finally over, each of them was bored and restless. And when they learned that two ships would be arriving at Sector Headquarters within one S-space day of each other, one bound for Earth directly, and the other proceeding there via Paradise, they had split into two groups. Kallen wanted to visit the investigating group of Immortals orbiting Paradise, while Lum and Rosanne were curious to take a trip down to the surface of the planet itself. The computer had contained a brief description of events that led to the extinction of the colony on Paradise, but as Lum had pointed out, that stark recitation of facts was unsatisfying. A healthy, thriving population of over a million humans had died in a few days, with no written or natural record to show how or why. If it could happen so easily on Paradise, why couldn’t it happen on Pentecost, or anywhere else?
Since the whole detour would amount to no more than a week of S-space travel, Elissa, Peron and Sy had taken the ship direct to Sol. Kallen, Rosanne, and Lum went to Paradise; And as Lum had cheerfully pointed out as they were leaving, they would never be more than an S-day apart through radio communications. They could talk to each other any time. Except that their ship’s equipment seemed to be in continuous higher priority use…
Now, Peron at least was regretting their decision to separate. And Sy was looking unusually thoughtful and withdrawn, even for him.
“Perhaps I have everything backwards,” he said at last. “When I said that I wanted to visit the galactic center, I assumed that it would be the place to find new mysteries. Maybe not. Perhaps the true unknown is elsewhere. Should I be looking at nothing, at the regions between the galaxies?”
He stood up abruptly and followed Olivia Ferranti out of the control chamber, leaving Peron and Elissa looking at each other uncertainly.
“More questions,” said Elissa.
“I know. And nobody willing to provide us with answers. I’ll tell you the biggest mystery of all. The society of Immortals has a complicated structure. They have the network of ships linking all the inhabited worlds, they have an elaborate recruiting system to bring people like us into S-space, and they have definite rules for encounters with other societies — even human ones. Lord knows what they’d do if they met aliens who were obviously intelligent and lived close to stars. But with all that, we never seem to get any closer to the Immortals who are in charge of the whole organization.”
; “Maybe their society doesn’t operate like that — perhaps it’s a true democracy.” “I don’t believe it.” Peron leaned across and put his arm around Elissa’s shoulders. “Just think about it for a minute. Somebody has to develop rules and procedures. Somebody has to monitor them. Somebody has to arrange for food supplies, and energy, and travel, and construction. You have to have leaders. Without that you don’t have democracy — you have anarchy, and complete chaos. Where is their Government?”
Elissa was absently rubbing the back of Peron’s right hand, as it lay across her shoulder. “Didn’t we conclude that it’s on Earth, or at least in orbit somewhere in the Sol system?”
“We did. But I don’t believe it any more. I told Olivia Ferranti that we want to meet the leaders of the Immortals. She won’t talk about that, but she insists we’ll really enjoy the visit to Earth. How could she possibly say that, if we might be heading for a confrontation there?”
Elissa shook her head. She did not speak, and after a couple of minutes moved out of Peron’s embrace and quietly left the control cabin.
Peron was left alone, gloomily staring out into the pearly blankness of the S-space sky. It felt like only weeks since he was walking through the sticky marshes of Glug, or contemplating the dangers of a landing on Whirlygig. To him, and to Sy and Elissa, it was weeks.
But back on Pentecost, new generations of contestants had won and lost at Planetfest. By now, Peron’s name, along with Kallen, Lum, and the others, was no more than a footnote in an ancient record book. And Wilmer, or some newly trained Immortal, would be down on the planet’s surface, observing the new contestants and reporting back on their behavior.
And everyone they had known on Pentecost, except for Wilmer, was now long dead. Peron wondered about the great centuries-long project to reclaim the southern marshes of Turcanta Province. Was that finished now, with real-life agricultural developments replacing the futuristic artists’ drawings that had illustrated a geography lesson when he was back in school? And what other planet-shaping projects had been developed since then?
He and Elissa had talked of their decision, and there were no regrets. With what they had learned, there could have been no turning back to a planet-bound “normal” life on Pentecost. The idea of visiting Earth had filled them all with energy and enthusiasm; and he and Elissa were ridiculously happy together. And yet…
Peron had a premonition of other travels and troubles ahead, before the true secret of the Immortals was revealed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Deceleration: procedures, Part I.
The deceleration phase of an interstellar journey is normally passed in cold sleep. While the human passengers are unconscious, on-board computers perform the task of matching velocity and position with the target. They awaken the sleepers only upon final arrival.
The alternatives to cold sleep are limited: a move to normal space, followed by full consciousness during lengthy deceleration and final maneuvers; or an immobilized and dizzying ride in S-space. Neither is recommended.… Without discussion, Sy had chosen cold sleep during their approach to Sol. He was planning on using suspended animation techniques extensively in his future travels, and he was keen to gain more experience with them as soon as possible. Peron and Elissa had far more difficulty making a decision. After dreaming for so long of a return to Sol and to Earth, the idea that they would close their eyes, then suddenly find themselves there, was not at all attractive. It missed the whole point of the trip. Earth was a legend, and every experience connected with it should be savored. They had studied the Solar System during the journey from Sector Headquarters, and now they wanted to witness the whole approach. But that meant over a month of subjective travel time during deceleration, or a nauseating hour of slowing and orbit adjustment, tightly strapped in and unable to move a muscle…
They had discussed it over and over, and at last made their decision. Now they lay side by side, tightly cocooned in restraining nets. As a special favor, Olivia Ferranti had placed screen displays so that Peron and Elissa would have frequency-adjusted views both ahead of and behind the ship as it neared Sol. They had entered the nets before deceleration began, when they were still nearly fifty billion kilometers from Sol and the Sun was nothing more than an exceptionally bright star on the displays.
At first, they both felt that all their studies would be wasted. The Sun had grown steadily bigger and more brilliant, gyrating across the sky as their trajectory responded to the System-wide navigation control system. But it looked disappointingly like any other star. In the last five minutes of travel they caught a glimpse of Saturn, and had one snapshot look at the ring structure; but it was a long way off, and there was little detail to be seen of surface or satellites. All the other planets remained invisible.
They could not talk to each other, but they independently decided that the nausea and discomfort were definitely not worth it. Until, quite suddenly, Earth showed in the screen off to one side. The planet rapidly swung to loom directly ahead for the last stages of their approach.
And their sufferings were suddenly of no consequence.
They had been conditioned by the ship’s stored viewing tapes to expect a blue-green clouded marble and attendant moon, hanging isolated in space. Instead, the whole sphere of Earth shone girdled by a necklace of bright points of light, whirling around the central orb like an electron cloud about the central nucleus. There were so many of them that they created the illusion of a bright, continuous cloud, a glittering halo about the planet’s equator. As they watched, smaller units darted like fireflies between Earth and the orbiting structures.
Space stations. They were at all heights, some almost grazing the atmosphere, an entire dense ring at synchronous altitude, others wandering out beyond the Moon. And to be visible from this distance, many of them must be kilometers across. Peron and Elissa were looking at the result of twenty-five thousand years of continuous development of Earth orbit. The asteroid-moving and mining operations that began at the dawn of Earth’s space age had yielded a rich harvest. Before Peron and Elissa had more than a minute or two to absorb the scene, they were homing in on one of the larger structures. It was in synchronous orbit, hovering above a great landmass shaped like a broad arrowhead. A shining filament extended downward from the station toward Earth, finally to vanish from sight within the atmosphere.
Their final approach was compressed to an anxious few S-seconds of blurred motion, twisting a way in through a moving labyrinth of other spacecraft and connecting cables and tunnels. All at once they were docked, and the ship motionless. They were trying to release themselves from the cocoons when a man materialized in the cabin and stood looking down at them.
He was short, pudgy, gray-haired, and precisely dressed, with elaborate jewelled rings on most of his fingers. He wore a flower in his lapel — the first blossom of any kind that they had seen since they left Pentecost. The stern look on his face was contradicted by a pattern of laughter lines around his button-bright eyes and small mouth.
“Well,” he said briskly, after a thorough inspection of Peron and Elissa. “You look normal enough. I’ve been waiting for your arrival with some interest. Neither of you appears to be quite the degenerate monster that Sector reports suggest, and Olivia Ferranti speaks well of you. So let us proceed on the basis of that assumption. Command. Remove the cocoons.”
The restraining nets vanished, and the little man calmly extended a hand to help Elissa to her feet.
“My name is Jan de Vries,” he said. “It is my melancholy duty to approve — or veto — all trips to and from Earth by certain persons living in S-space. Do you still wish to visit Earth, as you had requested?”
“Of course we do,” said Elissa. “Will you be going down there with us?” De Vries looked pained. “Hardly. My dear young lady, my duties are various and sometimes odd, but they have not to date included the function of tour guide. I can, however, dispose of certain formalities for you that would normally be handled otherwise. W
hen were you last in normal space?”
“Not since we were on the way to Sector Headquarters,” said Peron. He was becoming increasingly uneasy. He had been preparing himself for a great clash with the secret rulers of the Immortals, and instead here he was chatting with some apparent bureaucrat.
“Very good,” said de Vries. “Then you can be prepared at once for your visit to Earth. By the way, you will find that the robot services ignore your commands until we have your voice patterns keyed into the station’s computer. That is part of a larger data transfer. It will be complete upon your return here, and we will talk again then. But for the moment you will need my assistance. Command: prepare them for the standard Earth visit.”
“But we don’t — “ Peron stopped. De Vries had disappeared. Then the walls spun about Peron and he caught a glimpse of a long corridor. As the scene steadied again he felt a sharp pain in his thigh. Suddenly it was as though he were back on Whirlygig, experiencing that familiar and disquieting fall into blackness. His last thought was an angry one. It wouldn’t happen again, he had sworn — but it was happening now! Things were out of control. And he had no idea what came next.
* * *
Peron and Elissa emerged from the suspense tanks together, into a room filled with a noisy, excited crowd. They knew at once that they were again in normal space — S-space couldn’t offer the sharpness of vision or the bright colors. There was an exhilarating taste to the air, and a feeling of well-being running through their veins. They looked around them curiously.
Between the Strokes of Night Page 21