by Janet Morris
Birdy hadn't been able to stop the dreams, or hallucinations, or the visitation—if that was what they were—that had plagued him throughout the spongespace test flight and after. STARBIRD had taken South where South and U.S. Space Command had dictated, and shown him what he wanted to see. The experimental spacecraft had made measurements and collected data and brought him back alive.
Five hundred years after he'd left. To a world of strangers, where STARBIRD was an antique and South was a Relic. He'd busted his ass to prove himself capable in contemporary terms and to get STARBIRD the retrofits she needed if she wasn't to end up as a museum piece or the butt of infinitely cruel jokes.
And now here was the Ball. And the teardropshaped Leviathans From Outer Space. Now everybody out at Spacedock Seven was seeing things they couldn't understand. The terrible sense of familiarity that was making South sweat was probably nothing compared to what the local government was feeling.
All the reactions he was fighting might be nothing more than a flashback to a similar circumstance.
But it felt like more. It felt . . . connected.
If his sense of familiarity was really an artifact of connectedness, maybe he could remember what he needed to know. The automated "psychotherapist" that he'd brought along and stashed beside his bunk thought he could.
Maybe he was better qualified than the locals, for once, to evaluate a situation. Maybe he had, finally, some experience that could come in handy. Or maybe the therapist was wrong. After all, the therapist might be state-of-the-art, but it hadn't been on the X-3 flyby the way Birdy had.
Memories could help South only if he could access them. Knowledge was useful only if he could find it. If he could just remember what he thought he knew—what itched in the back of his brain where he couldn't seem to scratch—then maybe he could do some good out here.
Otherwise, he wasn't going to be any more help than crazy old Keebler or Sling. Maybe less.
They weren't scared shitless of the Ball the way he was.
His suit hummed and began pinging. Birdy wanted him to put down his visor, close the system so that its climate-control would have a shot at bringing his body temperature down.
He said, "Come on, Birdy, talk to me. Evaluate the Ball data." He should have remembered that Birdy didn't like to answer the question "What do you think?"
The AI was still pretending to observe the parameters of its manufacture.
But South knew better.
This time, in response to the right question, Birdy spoke. In her automated voice, which had been his only link to sanity and humanity for so long on that interminable journey—and afterward.
The ship's AI said: "Captain, systems checks complete and all systems nominal. Proceeding with caution to specified coordinates." And Birdy clucked protectively.
Birdy never let on that her AI components had grown into a benign intelligence that cared for him in any way someone not intimate with the consciousness of STARBIRD could discern.
STARBIRD and the man/machine interface that South called "Birdy" were the only artifacts of any civilization that South didn't find alien, now that he was living in his culture's future.
So what's to sweat, really? "Gimme the Ball, all available scans," he said through his yet-open faceplate—he didn't want to shut himself away from the flight deck. Not just yet.
Birdy hummed and . . .
There it was. The Ball. A dozen Balls. Or a dozen views of the Ball, with its scaffold-nest that men had built around it, and the science station where so recently Keebler had gone berserk.
The Ball was quiescent, silver. It seemed to South that it was asleep.
He'd barely managed to control himself the last time, so close to it. And now Birdy was nosing STARBIRD's hull right up alongside the sphere. Just the way he'd asked.
He watched the sphere grow and grow until he had to get Birdy to do tricks so that he could still see all of it, and not just a curve of enveloping size that blocked out everything, all the stars, all of time and space.
He could hear his hoarse breathing. His lips were dry. Birdy tweaked him in the wrist and he felt a little better.
In his ears, he heard the "Close Helmet" signal.
This time, he obeyed. His faceplate gave him a redundant heads-up display of the main monitor and an approach grid. He knew where he was. He knew where Sling and Keebler, in Sling's ship, were.
He kept telling himself he was safe. His pulse rate was climbing. He knew how to evaluate the data streams he was getting. Simply because he wasn't looking at realtime displays didn't mean he couldn't evaluate that data as realtime data.
Leave me alone. Get away from me. Don't open up. Don't change color. Don't even threaten to do anything strange. Go away. I don't want to know. ...
He caught himself. That was the problem, the one his digital therapist had pinpointed: He didn't want to know.
He still didn't. He remembered the Ball opening. But nobody else did. He'd seen inside it, but he couldn't evaluate what he'd seen. There weren't places like that inside finite spheres of that size.
There wasn't a place in there. It wasn't a door to somewhere. It was a ship. He knew that. He didn't know how he knew that, except that he remembered that there were ships like that.
He didn't want to know how he remembered that there were ships like that.
There were sad-eyed aliens with big, mobile mouths who had ships like that; ships that cavorted under lavender skies and darted among rainbow rings of glorious hue—and he didn't want to know that either.
He wanted to go home—back to Earth.
He still hadn't managed that.
You don't get what you want, just because you want it. Life forces you onward, toward death, through trial and toward understanding, by way of . . . what?
Not by way of aliens.
There was no need for aliens in Joe South's life. Everyone around him was an alien. He couldn't understand humans, let alone aliens. He couldn't be comfortable with the alien beings who looked just like him. So what was he doing here, looking for more trouble?
Volunteering for trouble.
For risk.
Out here trying to force a confrontation with the one danger he wasn't qualified to face.
So that he could remember, the way his therapist said he Would if he faced his fears.
Well, here were his fears, all housed in a silvery ball a hundred meters in diameter that had ignored every other attempt to penetrate it but had opened its eye and winked seductively at South.
Come on in, big boy, it had taunted him. You know my secret. Here I am. Come get me. Get in. We'll go fly the universal skies. You know what to do.
A test pilot wants to push the envelope, go where nobody's gone, do what can only theoretically be done. Throw his life up into the air and see if God still loves him.
Well, he wasn't sure that God was out there, anymore. And he wasn't sure if the universe needed him to challenge it.
Yet here he was, and he had a collection of circuitry by his bunk that was telling him he was doing the right thing.
He snapped up his helmet, and the smell of Birdy at work invaded his suit, giving him a sense of reality.
"Birdy," he croaked, "patch me through to Keebler on ULD-1001."
He didn't want any time to think. He needed to act.
Or at least, something inside was impelling him to act.
Birdy cleared a com line and started hailing ULD-1001. Vince Remson wanted Keebler kept busy again. Remson didn't expect "any miracles, Commander South. Let's just make sure we know where these two are and what they're doing. If you have any luck with that black box, we'll consider ourselves blessed."
Remson was grasping at straws. Hoping the black box would prove effective in some way with one of these artifacts, but afraid to try anything that might be perceived as aggression against the teardrops.
So he wanted South to try the black box on the Ball. Like the last time. But this time, keep a better record. And keep Kee
bler from pulling any more stunts.
This government was paralyzed. It couldn't handle more than one crisis of this size at a time. Now that the Secretary General was out of contact they were obsessed over there on the Washington. Every move they could make had negative consequences, except not moving.
So they were sitting there in a painful, exaggerated stasis, trying not to breathe until Mickey Croft miraculously reappeared and told them what to do.
South looked at the scans Birdy was showing him and abruptly got up from his command chair.
He'd brought that therapist along. Doing so had caused a lot of trouble. Now he was going to see what it could do.
STARBIRD wasn't roomy inside. Behind the flight deck was a narrow corridor leading to his bunk, with its redundant command-and-control capabilities. The digital therapist looked like an old-time industrial vacuum cleaner. He'd secured it the best he could but there wasn't much room, so it blocked the way to the head.
He reached down and flipped it on. It whirred and said to him, "Ready, Commander South, to continue your session?"
Did the damned thing know he'd turned it off?
Probably not, he decided. His suit whirred again and tried to stabilize the biochemical spike that went through him as he said, "Did I ever tell you about the kids who disappeared in a spongehole that opened up real near here?"
"No," purred the therapist, blinking one red light at him as if it were winking an eye seductively. "Please do."
"Well, see, I was wondering if the disappearance of the kids had anything to do with the appearance of the teardrops, or with the Ball here," he told it.
But his suit got so freaked at the way his body was reacting to his attempt to verbalize those questions that it shot him full of tranqs.
He sat down, abruptly, flat on his butt, shaking his head to clear it.
He wasn't sure if the therapist answered him, at first.
He thought he heard something. He was dizzy and high as a geostationary orbit. Then the suit realized it had overestimated his reactions, and his wrist cuff pricked him three times more.
He merely sat there and breathed until the pharmakit brought him back to sobriety.
Then he said to the therapist, "What was that?"
"What do you think?" it said.
"I think that maybe I need to go out there and find out," he said harshly.
"Why do you think that?" it wanted to know.
It truly did resemble an old-time vacuum cleaner, the canister kind with a nozzle clipped on the top.
He said, "I think that because maybe I remember something being inside the Ball, and because the Ball seems to have started all this."
"Why do you think that?"
"I dunno. Birdy's better at this than you, you know."
"Why do you think that?"
"Because she has more responses than 'Why do you think that,' is why."
"How can you be sure that's the case?" it asked him.
"Got me. Maybe I'll take you out to the Ball and you can ask it dumb questions, okay? I can use the company."
"Whatever seems to help is appropriate," it said.
"Good." The therapist kept a running log, South knew. It was small. It was innocuous. No intelligence could possibly perceive it as threatening. It bore no resemblance to a weapon. And anyway, he wanted to see if he could make it sweat a little. "It's settled. You'll EVA with me, and then if Birdy and I are both destroyed by the Ball, or sucked into it, maybe you'll be left behind. After all, you're not the sort of thing a search for intelligent life would turn up, are you?"
"Why do you think that?" asked the therapist in its soft voice.
He'd forgotten that it had to respond to a direct question. He stood up, and saw that his message cue light was blinking.
"Birdy, you could have patched them through," he told the AI disapprovingly as he flopped onto his bunk and hit the com activation button^
His bunk came alive with redundant command-and-control functions. If the forward flight deck were destroyed and the ship's integrity breached, a clear partition would come down between the bunk and the forward section. He could putatively survive and navigate his way back to safety from here. Sure thing.
He'd spent plenty of time holed up in here on the trip back from X-3. Lying here, he remembered everything he'd felt then, and wished he'd gone forward.
Well, he was a whole hell of a lot better off than he'd been when he'd jumped out of sponge and found himself facing Threshold. He hadn't realized how far he'd come until this moment.
The old reactions were still there: the anger, the fear, the rest. But he was better than he had been. Lots better.
And Keebler was demanding to know, "What is it ye want, sonny? Are ye tryin't' tell me they pulled the plug on our li'l mission? Cause if ye are, ye c'n fergit it. Me and Sling is goin' out there with our box, and this time, Southie, ye ain't pullin' no bait and switch on us. Hear?"
"I hear you, Keebler. Keep your pants on. I just want an update. We've got to coordinate our EVAs. You guys should be parking by now."
"We're right behind you," said Sling's voice. "We'll be up alongside in . . . three minutes, fifteen seconds. That quick enough for you?"
South could have had video, but he didn't want it. He lay back on his bunk and slapped his faceplate down. "That's soon enough, friend. I'll be right here, waiting."
He toggled off. Then he had Birdy bring up a full scan of the Ball on his heads-up and lay there, rubbing his arms through his suit, face-to-face with the Ball.
Or face-to-face with one of his own nightmares.
He kept waiting for the Ball to start doing its rainbow display. When it did, this time, he'd be ready.
He'd promised himself that much.
And now that he was here he wasn't going to back down, or turn tail and run.
Mickey Croft was facing these aliens, somewhere. If worse came to worst and South got lost somehow, separated from everything, even from Birdy, maybe he'd find Croft there waiting for him.
In his dreams, his parents and everything he loved had been right there with those sad-eyed aliens, under their majestic, coruscating skies.
But he didn't want to lose touch with Birdy. He didn't want to go out there. He didn't want to get sucked into his past, where everything was so much harder than it was now; where he was less in control; where the unknown was inimical, and he couldn't trust anything outside his suit.
He really didn't.
So if worse came to worst, he'd throw Keebler into the maw of the Ball if it opened. Keebler could be his sacrifice to the god of the Ball. He grinned at that thought, and his face was stiff.
Birdy and he and STARBIRD had come this far. No matter how hard his tattered psyche was taking this, he couldn't turn back now.
Once a test pilot, always a test pilot.
He was going to get out there on a tether, fire up that black box of Sling's, and see if the same thing he remembered happened again.
And this time, he'd have witnesses: Sling, Keebler, Birdy— and his therapist.
The Ball that hovered before his face on his heads-up display didn't seem to give a damn. Or at least it wasn't doing its color dance.
Yet.
CHAPTER 16
Promenade
Mickey Croft shook the hand of the Council's Interstitial Interpreter and looked longingly into its huge, sad eyes. "You'll follow?" he said, and was vaguely aware that he sounded like a child seeking reassurance.
"We will follow, Mickeycroft, as agreed," said the Interpreter, with a bob of his conical head.
With that the mist around Croft's perceptions cleared a bit, as the honor guard of slit-eyed beings manifested to lead him back to the bubble.
Or another bubble. He kept looking over his shoulder, into the swirling pink and gold and green mists that surrounded the Interstitial Interpreter.
Every time Croft looked back the way he'd come the Interpreter would wave the light ball in his hand, as if he were standing on a b
luff waving a lantern while one of Croft's ancestors pulled out to sea from a rocky shore.
This feeling of leaving home was so intense that Croft's throat closed up and ached.
And ached. And ached more. Then his ears started aching and he looked around again.
Now he couldn't see the Interpreter any longer, only a small, bright light in the strange geometry of the ship's farther recesses.
But ahead, on either side, were two honor guardsmen— perhaps the same two. Long skirts. Conical hats. Slitted eyes, and a way of sliding authoritatively through the eye-teasing space around him that kept Croft from breaking down in great, wracking sobs.
He was a child again, leaving home for private school. He was walking the lunar regolith on his tenth birthday, because he'd had to have his puppy put to sleep. He was wandering through Threshold's lower reaches, because his mother had died and there wasn't anyplace to go that her memories didn't linger. He was being made Secretary General today, but his fiancée of twelve years had finally told him she couldn't marry him: there was no one alive in the whole world who cared about him.
Nevertheless, even then, there had been everyone. As now, there was everyone. Around him were ceilings that didn't lie flat, or curve in a way that a human eye could follow. There were pulsating expanses reminiscent of walls that met and twisted and breathed so that he could almost hear them sighing. Everything was lit from within with soft colors, some of which he could recognize as colors only because they made his eyes tingle when he looked at them.
Sometimes he thought he could feel the photons exciting his optic nerves. Sometimes he could taste the colors he saw. Sometimes he could almost see the feet of the two honor guards moving slightly ahead of him.
Sometimes he could sense the skirts they wore, as if those skirts were dragging at his own knees, brushing his own ankles.