by Janet Morris
He needed to see that gate again. See those lions, or whatever they were. Shake those dragons by the clawed hands and come up with some kind of report. . . .
Report on what?
Everywhere? Nowhere.
He saw a man in a space suit floating in the heavens. He saw a sky of violet fleeced with salmon clouds, and himself silhouetted against them.
Okay. Clouds. He hit his forward thruster. What was beyond the clouds?
He hit that thruster harder than he'd meant to, or else gravity was slight here.
The white temples below began to run together. Circular shapes darted up from them and danced around him. Amoebas in the sky. Plasma creatures cavorting with him in midair.
If they touched him he'd sputter out of existence like a match head when struck.
He wanted to cry out, but he knew Birdy couldn't hear him.
The clouds were all around him now. Cotton candy on a summer afternoon at the county fair looked like that, once it had begun to melt in the sun.
He was afraid he'd get stuck in it.
Then he was through the clouds, facing the portals again. Lions as large as moons, with open maws.
One lion yawned, and the suction nearly sent him spinning down its gullet.
Between them there was a wavery space and he headed for it, cursing under his breath the whole time and barely hearing himself.
Mickey Croft, I hope this does you some good.
He hit the wavery stuff and bounced. Madness might have brought him to these invisible trampolines, strung between jungle animals sunning themselves under an infrared starscape.
He was spinning again. He hit his thruster reverse manically, slowing himself in jolts.
And there it was again, as he slowed: the controls of heaven. The flight deck of eternity. An empty cockpit whose windscreen looked out on a thousand starscapes.
Curving inward, the flight deck was folding back on itself, toward its center and the spot where the portal of lions led to the dragons of spacetime.
What the hell could he tell them, if he ever found his way out of here?
Out of here. Out of here seemed like a good idea. He could see the curve of the Ball itself now. This was where the hardware was. The rubber met the road here, curving around infinitely and creating itself into reality as it did so.
He followed the curve of the inner edge of the Ball. In places he could almost see through it. It was latticed with lines that resembled laser beams seen through dusty air. He saw a dark spot and he liked it.
It resembled a familiar sky. It looked as if it could lead him home. It had that been-away-too-long, welcome-home feel to it.
So he headed for it. The navel of existence. The belly of the Ball. The doorknob of creation.
You couldn't get to it in a straight line. That had been his mistake—thrusting straight ahead. You had to circumnavigate; slide along the sides; slip down into wherever you wanted to go.
He was nearly there, nearly at the black spot that promised peace and a relief from all this color, when he remembered he was trying to get out.
He gritted his teeth and powered up the black box, aiming it straight for the spot into which he was sliding as if he were sliding down into a gravity well.
Round and down; round and down.
The spot began to stretch. It got tall. It got long. It spread itself wide and it opened up.
It split. It spit him out. Straight out. Not on a vector. Not around and around.
But out.
Out past the walls of the Ball, which were as thick as an atmosphere. Out past the place where machines hummed and vistas were screened on walls that curved too many ways.
Out into his nice, calm spacetime.
He was gasping for breath and spinning again. As he spun, emanations from the black box in his hand sprayed the Ball. Once. Twice. Three times.
He shut off the box and everything stopped.
He stopped as if he'd used his thrusters. The Ball stopped spewing colors.
It was only a silver Ball, closing. Closing on color. Closing on somewhere else.
He heard a pinging in his ears and it was Birdy, trying to reestablish contact.
"Yeah, Birdy, I'm okay." He let her dump the two messages he had waiting while she fussed over him, tweaked his life-support, and coaxed him back toward the ship.
If he'd been unconscious she'd have remote-controlled his thrusters and brought him inside that way. Nice retrofit, Sling.
Birdy was bossy, overriding his manual control, but he didn't argue. He was too tired to try asserting man's primacy over machine.
His AI brought him back to STARBIRD unerringly, as gently as you please.
He had the black box hooked on his belt. Ought to call and tell Sling it had worked. But he didn't. STARBIRD's lock was open and waiting.
For an instant it scared him: another black maw with red strobing colors inside. But it was just Birdy, wanting to mother him so bad she was pushing the air lock's limits to get him home quicker.
Inside, a green light lit so fast he couldn't quite remember how long it ought to take that lock to cycle.
Birdy wanted him out of the suit so she could spec it. He obeyed. Safety precautions were something he was lucky to be able to think about.
Once he'd racked the suit for Birdy to examine, he sat naked on his bunk with his head in his hands and tried to sort it out. Mickey Croft's message said, "Check in and report, ASAP."
ASAP. As Soon As Possible. He rolled all the way onto his bunk and pulled his knees up to his chest. The doubly safe life-support partition came down. The bunkside astronics came to life. Birdy knew what he needed. He needed to be safe a little while.
Then he could call Croft and tell the SecGen, "Yes indeed, that sure is a portal out there. A gate to somewhere, no doubt of it. Just what the aliens said it was, sir, for sure."
That was what Croft needed to hear. What he wanted to be able to claim as verified intelligence.
As for the Ball being something more than just a gate, well . . . they wouldn't want to hear that, back on Threshold.
Anyway, South couldn't figure out, for the life of him, how to even begin to tell them about that ship out there. Ship. Gate. Portal. Spacetime bubble. Dragons, all the way down.
You go out to do a job and you find yourself at the well-spring of eternity. You see secret things, things that maybe have to do with the mystery of reality—or existence—itself.
Except there weren't any words for what he'd seen. What was he going to tell Croft? "I saw the boundary conditions of perception. I saw the substructure of the universe, sir. I saw what's holding everything together. And let me tell you, sir, it's dragons all the way down.
"That is, once you get past the lions."
Report that, and he'd earn himself a lifetime of therapy. So he'd better come up with a cogent report, and fast.
He straightened out, sat up in his bunk, and said, "Birdy, what did you make of that exploratory?"
STARBIRD was an X-class ship. She was meant to explore the unknown and keep a running log of what she found.
He looked at the record the ship had made and eventually he chuckled. "Okay, let's send that. With this additional message: 'Ball confirmed as non threatening. Inside devoid of weapons. Emerged unharmed.' "
He put his hands over his eyes. Birdy's record showed South floating into and around the inside of a featureless space, while the Ball opened and then closed. Then nothing but a closed-up Ball. Then the Ball opening, South jetting out, and the Ball closing again. Mostly her log showed an empty space inside the Ball, its expanse broken only by South playing with a black box while he used his MMU to do lots of three-sixties on different orbital planes and axes.
Wouldn't you know it?
Once he'd verified that Birdy had sent the message, he said, "Okay, Birdy, let's go home."
He meant Threshold, but Birdy knew what he meant. Curled up on his bunk, he let the AI do the piloting. He was way overdue for a little nap
.
Birdy would wake him if she needed him. He needed to sort out what had happened to him. He'd been there before, to that place with the lavender skies and the rings you could see through the clouds even in daylight.
He hadn't realized it was so easy to get there. Or so easy to come back alive.
He kept seeing visions of the Ball and what was inside, but this time he wasn't afraid of the memories.
After all, he'd just done one hell of a test flight. Never mind that he hadn't taken a ship with him. Next time he would. Once he found a way to make sure that where he'd gone was a place and where he'd returned to was the same universe he'd left.
Birdy thought everything was nominal. He got back into his suit once it had checked out, and ran a self-test through his physiomonitors, just to be sure.
According to every available readout, Joe South was as normal as could be.
When he was convinced that Birdy was right, he returned Riva Lowe's call, to see if he could conduct a sequential conversation.
She looked as perturbed as the local spacetime, when he popped up in her monitor.
He tried to pretend he didn't notice, and made a dinner date.
Maybe he'd tell her about the lions and the dragons. But he didn't think so. She and Mickey Croft and the Threshold bureaucracy had their hands full with the Council of the Unity, three teardropshaped ships, and the Ball.
One thing South knew was that you couldn't run away from change—not this kind.
He'd tried. And look what had happened.
He said to her, "How's the everyday world, back there?"
She knew what he meant. She said, "Survivable."
He'd settle for that. He always had. He said, "Hey, anything you walk away from's okay, right?"
"Right," she told him. "I'm glad you walked away from this one."
But they both knew there was no walking away from the Ball or anything else the aliens had brought.
So there was something she wasn't telling him.
When he gave up trying to find out what, he broke the circuit and tried to get some more sleep. But he couldn't.
There were all sorts of things in his dreams now. Things that made sad-eyed aliens seem run-of-the-mill.
When he got back there'd be plenty of time to find out what Riva Lowe was hiding. One thing about Threshold these days was that you had all the time in the world—to make a decision—
Or a mistake.
The trick was figuring out which was which.
CHAPTER 30
Follow Your Dreams
Mickey Croft was choosing volunteers to accompany the Scavenger to Unity space. His office had never felt so empty as it did while he looked over the roster of qualified personnel.
He'd never felt so ambivalent about a task in his life. He was sad for himself, that he couldn't go. Relieved that he didn't have to try to justify going personally.
He was happy for humankind, that representatives of a better quality than Keebler would be going as guests of the Council. He was unhappy that Keebler, Valued Friend, Pioneer, couldn't be dissuaded.
The Council couldn't be convinced to break their word to Keebler. Their word was their bond. Croft had become convinced of that.
After the effect of the message from the missing children had rippled through the diplomatic community, almost everyone else had become convinced of it as well. Even Cummings was now content that his son was alive.
The NAMECorp CEO was busy making preparations for the return of the runaways. Mickey had already been invited to a gala reception in their honor.
By then the Council would be gone. He hadn't been able to dissuade them from that either. So he should count his blessings that he was being allowed to send a skeleton staff— the beginnings of a diplomatic corps.
He flipped through the roster desultorily. He was waiting for the arrival of his preferred choices. If they turned down the mission, refused their appointments, then he'd go to his designated backup team.
Croft had had a long time to weigh the pros and cons of sending Remson. In the end, Mickey simply couldn't bring himself to spare Vince.
You didn't cut off your right hand.
So Vince was off troubleshooting Richard the Second's plans for a gala banquet and the announcement of NAMECorp's primacy in relations with the Unity—all based on his son's prior contact.
Better Vince than he. Croft was having trouble with both his temper and temporal effects. He was too stressed to deal directly with Cummings, after what Cummings had tried to do to him.
Croft looked at his hands on his desk top. White hands, wrinkled and aging. Beneath the hands was the hematite of the desk top, where a school of fossils darted forever.
Sometimes he saw the tiny organisms move. Sometimes they had flesh on their petrified skeletons. Sometimes he didn't know how he was going to carry on.
But he would. This was too important a moment for mankind. A step forward, surely. But a step into what?
He still wasn't certain that the provisional permission he'd gotten for the Unity Embassy out at the Ball site was wise.
But when had mankind been wise? When did he get anything worth having without risk? And when had man ever been able to turn back the clock?
No new world, opening up, was without its dangers for the explorers. He felt his kinship with ancients who'd opened trade routes and continents. Terrible things and wonderful things come in the same package. You found a new land, or a new world, and you brought cultural upheaval, plagues, social unrest, conflict, technological pressure, disruption of every kind.
Progress was disruption. Chaos had a methodology. It could be modeled. The result of that modeling showed that things tended to get complicated, and that progress often occurred through the abrupt destabilization of norms.
The destabilization of the norms of reality as they were known in a pre-Unity cosmos would lead humans into great discoveries. And there was no way to avoid those discoveries. There was no way to avoid the truth.
The fossils that intermittently swam fully fleshed in the hematite on Mickey's desk proved that.
"Send them in," he said, when his receptionist told him that the candidates had arrived.
Riva Lowe was ashen, scrubbed and prim. Commander South was recovered from his trip inside the Ball, as far as Mickey could see—except, perhaps, for the dark circles under the test pilot's eyes.
"Sit down," Croft told them. "I assume you've guessed why I called you here?"
The woman said, "No," but Mickey saw the word "yes" come slipping off her lips.
South didn't sit. He hovered behind the woman, looking as if he wished he were somewhere else.
So Croft said, "Then I'll be blunt: We wish to send a contact team with some official standing along with Keebler—to the Unity. Director Lowe, how would you like to be our first Ambassador to the Unity?"
"Secretary Croft ..." The woman's face went even whiter. "Yes," she said. "I guess I thought it would be this. I mean, I'm honored. . . ."
South was looking at his feet.
"Commander, we want you to take this mission as Ambassador Lowe's Deputy. Can you see your way clear to accepting?" Hit them hard and fast. No time for second thoughts.
South was moving very slowly, very cautiously, toward Mickey's desk. And then his face flew up to Croft's. Their eyes were inches apart. South said, "You want me to watch Keebler, is that it?"
"We want someone experienced," Mickey said, and a deep sadness drenched him. It was all he could do not to embrace the younger man.
Croft's best choices for this remarkable adventure had turned out to be a test pilot from the distant past and a woman whose main qualifications were a certain amount of physical . . . resiliency, and an affinity for change.
His reasons for choosing them didn't seem to matter so much, now that Croft's cards were on the table.
South turned his head and said to Lowe, "Don't go because of me."
So he was going to accept.
And L
owe said, "I wouldn't miss it for anything. I might as well go where . . . the action is," she finished lamely.
Maybe she'd meant to say, "go where I'm normal." Or perhaps that was Croft's own emotional spin, laid on her words.
He said, "Thank you." He could never have ordered anyone to step into one of those alien teardrops. He could never ask anyone else to go through what he'd been through. Or to live with the aftereffects.
So these two, who were each somewhat changed already from contact with the aliens, had been the obvious choices.
Still, when Croft raised his eyes to say something more eloquent, they'd already left.
Or they'd left long ago.
And when he found himself sliding and floating through a ceremony of minimal pomp, out in a parking orbit parallel to the Interstitial Interpreter's teardrop of a ship, he wanted more than anything in the world not to go aboard the alien vessel. Not again.
Not ever again.
And his wish was granted. The Interstitial Interpreter knew how he felt. Those huge black eyes that floated before him told him to be calm. Everything would be fine. The Valued Friends would soon be home again.
Then the II receded and Croft saw Keebler, strutting around with his wand and his gift box, telling bad jokes and pumping hands before he stepped into the air lock, helmet under his arm.
Riva Lowe stared at Mickey as she came by and said, "Thank you, Mickey. I won't disappoint you."
He kissed her cheek, and her flesh was scalding hot.
Then South shook his hand. The contact made the Washington disappear. Suddenly Mickey was floating toward the center of the Ball, where all the threads of the universe came together.
South dropped Mickey's hand. The ship around him reappeared as contact faded.
"I'll bring her back safe and sound, sir," said the test pilot from the past.
Mickey Croft, looking at South, believed without doubt that the pilot would do exactly that.
Keebler's voice called from the air lock, "Ain'cha comin'? Southie, get yer butt inta this lock. History's awaitin'."
Remson, coming to take Mickey by the arm, said, "I guess nobody'll argue with that."