A Maze of Stars

by John Brunner

  DURING THE MOMENT OF SILENCE THAT FOLLOWED THE DENSENING smoke at last began to overwhelm the filters, so that the stench of burning reached their nostrils. Eventually Ezar whispered, “Oh, no!”

  “Why not?” Sohay barked.

  Recovering, though unable to tear his eyes from Dya’s screen, Hesker said, “Because no one ever dreamed it might be necessary! And I still want to know how come you claim to know so much! You never saw a forest like this one before because there are no others!”

  Brusquely Sohay countered, “You’d waste time squabbling and sacrifice your family rather than admit you made a terrible mistake? Do something to get us out of here!”

  “And do it quickly,” Dya whispered. She sounded on the verge of panic. “The flames will be all around us in no more than thirty minutes!”

  From outside came another whinny of fear, then the sound of drumming hooves.

  “That settles the matter of my horse,” Ezar said with ghastly humor; making a visible effort to pull himself together. “He’s broken his hobble and fled. I can’t help wishing I were in his saddle… Right! Hesker, open your communicators, all channels! There may be airlifts they can divert to pick us up.”

  “With a bit of luck,” Sohay offered, “a satellite may already have spotted the fire. Rescue may be on the way.”

  Ezar shook his head. “No guarantee, brother, that there is a circuit capable of cross-connecting the news with the fact that a house lies in its path. Hesker, do as I say!”

  The forester shrugged numbly and made no other move.

  With a look of total contempt Adeen uttered the necessary commands, then, as soon as the channels were open, began to describe their location and predicament.

  “While Adeen’s searching,” Shay said, “we’ve got to figure out what we can do in half an hour to save ourselves. Coth, what about linking your fliers?”

  “I’m working on it,” the boy said over his shoulder. He had abandoned voice input for more rapid manual commands. “Unfortunately, they don’t have cooperation circuits.”

  Dya uttered a tiny gasp.

  “Then patch them through your base gear!” Ezar cried. “That must be feasible—how else could they conduct coordinated surveys?”

  “It’s possible, but …” The boy turned a wan face to the others. “But what if I do that, and they’re carrying us across the forest, and the fire gets here and destroys the circuitry connecting them?”

  “They’d drop us,” Dya said. “And we’d be just as dead.”

  Once again there was silence. Not even Adeen was speaking; she had recorded her message, and now it was being repeated automatically on one channel after another, compressed and flagged for emergency attention. They stared at one another, scenting the smoke, fancying they could hear the crackle of flames—though in fact, as the screens reported, they were still two kilometers away.

  But, Sohay reflected grayly, the wind remained strong, and the fire might crown at any moment …

  “Rope!” he said suddenly.

  “What?”—from Ezar.

  “Your horse’s hobble gave me the idea. We can physically tie the fliers together, so even if the circuitry at the base breaks down, they won’t separate. Then all we need to do is program them to keep going until they reach the far side of the Grace-and-Favor Hills. Coth, you can set them individually to follow a common course?”

  “Yes!” The boy brightened. “But—”

  “But what?”

  “Do we have enough rope?”

  “Maybe not enough rope,” Adeen said, pushing herself to her feet. “But we have wire and cable and even some monofilament we use for flying kites with sensors on. Hesker!”

  Her husband’s face was like a plaster mask. Violently she slapped him on the cheek.

  “Hesker, move! It’s to save your wife, our children, and our guests! If you don’t move, then even if we get out of here alive, I swear I’ll never want to see or hear of you again! Rope, d’you hear me? Rope, cable, wire!”

  “All right,” he said dully. “Coth, call back the fliers—leave just Ezar’s Scout on watch—and land them by the main entrance. They ought to have plenty of power left.”

  I profoundly hope so, Sohay said under his breath, and followed Adeen from the room.

  Outside, the first fliers were swooping back at maximum velocity from their patrol, while high overhead Scout was darting back and forth in the mechanical counterpart of anxiety tremor. Sohay and Ezar had to cancel manually the alarm signals it was triggering from their wristlets, but it remained distinctly unhappy with the excuse they offered—that they were already well enough informed about the crisis.

  How, though, could they not be? In the open the air was acrid with the sharp-pointed microscopic granules due to wood combustion that made the eyes sting until they ran with tears and tormented the membranes of the nose and mouth. A gritty bitter taste made them spit and then renewed itself a moment later while at the same time being drawn through their collars and cuffs so that itching crawled gradually down their necks, up their arms and legs. It was as though the power of the fire had already touched them, distant though it still remained …

  Sohay’s lungs warned him how tempted they were to choke. Patience! he begged as he sought constructive action.

  And was distracted for a precious moment, long enough to let them double him up with coughing, because he had caught sight of what was happening to the baska. Always protean, now it had no shape at all—or no more, at any rate, than a lump of mud cast up on a riverbank. It was pulsing in random directions, settling back to stillness, convulsing, calming …

  The shocking possibility crossed his mind: It could have been a dangerous mistake to bring it here, worse even than what he had charged Hesker with.

  But there was no time to worry about that. Coth and Dya had found ample supplies of wire and cable, and they were all feverishly contriving lashes from flier to floater, from scanner to flitter. The children, Sohay thought, were responding with amazing competence, even though Hesker had denied them the wristlets that would have kept them in touch with their own metabolism. Coth’s voice in particular was crisp and authoritative as he announced the capacity of the machines: “This one is low on power, and we don’t have time to recharge it, so we need to tie it to those two, and between them they should bear the weight ...”

  They had spent two-thirds of their precious time on the task, and the baska had finally subsided into immobility before Adeen spoke with sharp authority.

  “It’s no good.”

  They checked in midmovement, turning horrified eyes on her.

  “It’s no good!” she repeated, louder. “The fire’s outrunning the machines’ prediction! Listen!”

  Indeed, under the soughing of the wind they could discern the crunching of its greedy jaws.

  “We’ve got enough linkages for you and Dya, Coth! You use them—now!”

  Seizing her children by the hands, she dragged them towards the jury-rigged fliers.

  “But, Mother—” they protested as one.

  “Go! Scout can take Ezar and come back for Sohay—there will just be time and power if he starts to run right now and gets picked up a little nearer to the hills!”

  “But, Mother”—Dya this time, tears streaking her pale cheeks—“what about you?”

  “I’ll take my chances with your father,” Adeen rasped.

  “You’ll never make it!”

  “And if I don’t, what matter?” Weariness and contempt mingled in the woman’s tone. “My fault for letting him delude me he was right and everybody else was wrong—for letting him persuade me to bring you up without advantages enjoyed by everybody else! How much closer does it put you on the path toward the Perfect if you get scorched to death by fire of a kind he swore was never possible?”

  She rounded on Ezar. In her face were mingled self-possession, shame, and—curiously—pride.

  “You tell them! You’re our lord, you’ve controlled their lives since they
were born. Tell them to get away! Then call down your Scout and go yourself!”

  For the rest of his life Sohay was to recall his memory of that moment, not needing reinforcement from his wristlet. The picture was etched in brilliant relief by the sudden gusting down of sparks, red glowing sparks that touched their clothes and skins with specks of black and set the fallen leaves alight around them. The fire, he knew without the need to look toward it, must have crowned. Now it would roar on faster than a man or horse could run.

  Scout signaled desperation on every wavelength it had access to.

  Hesker’s face: a look of mortal wounding and despair.

  Adeen’s: unchanged.

  The boy and girl: shame that they might flee and leave their parents tinged with resentment that they had been brought to such a pass.

  And Ezar’s: a changing chaos of contradictive impulse, from self-hatred to blind rage.

  The first flames flickered in the nearby undergrowth.

  How can one, Sohay thought with the last vestige of clarity remaining to him, resolve this kind of paradox?

  Do I save myself? Or save the children? Or my brother? We inhabit ancient history come to life. In olden times ...

  With all the power at its disposal, Scout overrode its counterorders. Loud enough to hurt the ears, it screamed.

  “Get back inside the house! Take shelter—NOW! Or you are sure to die!”

  How extraordinary! Surely we’re bound to die inside or outside—

  Sohay was still too caught up in his previous train of thought to react. The children were faster. Jumping up and down, shrieking, pummeling, they forced the adults to comply, slammed doors, battened shutters, and headed for the “business end” of their home, where they dropped into their customary seats and opened communicator circuits that had been preempted by resource analysis during what—Sohay now dimly realized—was their futile attempt to lash together enough fliers to carry them out of danger.

  A calm, reassuring voice was saying, “Your Scout reports that you’re all under cover. Fine. Keep your mouths wide open and don’t try to talk. Sorry we didn’t explain what we’ve been doing sooner, but the contract I have with my biochron indicated that there wasn’t time both to do the job and let you know the details.”

  Around their dutifully open mouths, their faces showed vast relief and the suspicion of comprehension.

  “There was a delay—for which I apologize—between the observation of your forest fire from orbit and notification that it could become hot enough to threaten your house, especially given the direction of the wind. As soon as the projected C02 levels were extrapolated, we realized you’d be running short of oxygen, but by then it was too late for anything except emergency measures, and of course we didn’t have the faintest idea how to set about those. I mean, if you insist on creating the one and only major forest since the birthworld—!

  “So we wasted a bit of time searching birthworld records, but what we have is nothing like complete, and anyway, this doesn’t seem to have been much of a problem back then. Which left us with the need to improvise. So that’s what we’ve done. I’m sorry if it proves a trifle rough, but our predictions indicate it ought to work—or hold the fire, at any rate, long enough for your lot to be rescued.”

  Coth risked a question.

  “So what in all of space—?”

  “Sorry. I’m still not back in total rapport with my subconscious. It’s been doing some heavy analysis this past half hour. What are we doing… ? Ah, it’s coming clear. Yes! We’re going to materialize twenty thousand tons of supercooled ice directly above the leading edge of the fire.”

  “But that’s impossible!” Ezar blurted. “You can’t emerge from tachyonic space inside an atmosphere—”

  “No it isn’t!” Sohay countered. “It’s a Shipwright technique! How else do you think they bring starships right into the middle of their gas cloud? I’ve heard of it, though never seen it work. But it isn’t likely to be pleasant!”

  The distant voice said, “Ambassador Sohay, I believe! Glad to be of service— Scrap the politeness! You’re going to feel like a flidget between clapped hands, now!”

  The world turned white: the white of ice, the white of intolerable noise, the white of pain, the white of staring at a star from its inside.

  Kilometers long, a cylinder of water frozen far below the temperatures found on any habitable world, fetched from a distant moon at fifty or a hundred times the speed of light, slammed back the air above the blaze.

  It had already blown out the flames, as a puff of human breath might douse a burning straw, before it cracked apart from thermal shock and fell to ground, disrupting with the force of an explosion. Trees to a kilometer distant were uprooted, thousands beyond were stripped of leaves and boughs. The house withstood the impact—just. It shuddered on its foundations; windows shattered; doors flew wide; the roof was lifted half a meter and fell back askew.

  Yet those inside, though bruised, though battered, sick with shock and terror, were still alive when rescue reached them.

  On the way home it occurred to Sohay to ask those tending him, “Did anybody notice what happened to my baska?”

  But naturally no one recognized the name.

  FOR THAT TO BE COINCIDENCE—NO. IT’S INCREDIBLE, ( I COMPREHEND another aspect of my doom.) It can’t be chance that brought me to Sumbala exactly at the juncture when the Being of Ekatila launched its first successful off-world counterblow against humanity.

  Planned or by happenstance? Even with my recollections of the future, I can’t tell.

  (Unwelcome visions of that forest as it would be soon, infected to the horizon and beyond with spores released by the dissolving baska, burst by the heat and wafted by the wind: an alien bridgehead not to be noticed for a decade, by then too deeply entrenched to be eliminated …)

  Sumbala will enjoy no more than brief ascendancy, like Yellick. Now I know why. Only the Shipwrights—

  But Annica and Menlee were aburst with questions.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SHIP

  DURING THEIR TRAVELS BOTH ANNICA AND MENLEE HAD matured. They had been transformed by the reality of the Arm of Stars. No human could comprehend the vastness of interstellar distance or the sheer variety of the planets Ship had seeded—let alone the complexity of the cultures that had arisen on them.

  Yet if in toto such actualities were beyond their grasp, they could at least be recognized. Moreover, fragments that fitted into larger patterns could serve as indicators, clues, landmarks …

  It came as no surprise to Ship that the first question they demanded an answer to concerned the baska.

  “And don’t fob us off with excuses about not being allowed to tell us about Sumbala’s future!” Annica appended. “I don’t have to possess your data banks to figure out that fire must have been one of the challenges the Being learned how to survive on Ekatila! Any world with atmosphere and climate suitable for human beings must have fires, from lightning and volcanic scoria if nothing else.”

  Menlee put in, shaking his head, “It amazes me that this person Hesker could have overlooked the risk of wildfire. Surely the most cursory search of the records would have turned it up.”

  Not glancing at him, Annica said, “He struck me as the know-all type. Witness his refusal to go along with everybody else and enter into contracts with his organs.”

  “That’s something I’ve been wondering about since we watched the rescue of that boy on Ekatila,” Menlee concurred. “By the way, what’s become of him? How did he take to life on a foreign planet?”

  “He hasn’t got there yet,” Ship answered mildly.

  “He—?” Menlee broke off in midword and pantomimed a self-reproving slap on his forehead. “Ah, of course not. No ship of this epoch, even the best the Shipwrights can contrive, can outrun you—correct?”

  “Does that mean”—from Annica, in a doubtful tone— “when we reach the Veiled World, Sohay won’t yet have taken up his post as ambass
ador? Indeed, that he wouldn’t have even if there hadn’t been that setback we just watched?”

  “Yes and yes. Now, which of your other questions, overt or implied, do you wish replies to first?”

  “The baska!” Annica snapped. “Is the Being going to implant itself on Sumbala?”

  “It already did so. But at the risk of making you suspect that I’m ‘fobbing you off,’ I assure you I am forbidden to tell you about any save the most general and foreseeable consequences.”

  Annica scowled but eventually gave a shrug.

  “I think we’re resigned to the fact that you bend your rules when and only when it suits you. Right at the start you said it makes no difference whether you ‘really’ have free will or simply give the impression of it.”

  “I am reminded,” said Ship, “of a joke so ancient, it may well trace back to the birthworld.”

  Menlee and Annica exchanged glances. After a pause Menlee shivered visibly.

  “I’m only just coming to realize,” he muttered, “what it means to be brought face-to-face with a memory as deep as yours. For people like us, references to the birthworld are like—oh—among religious cultures, heaven or hell, or the abode of gods who may or may not exist, only it’s advisable to act as though they do. Talking to you, though …” His voice failed him.

  “Talking to you,” Annica supplied, taking his hand, “is like using communication channels to another star, except they’re not across space. They’re through time.”

  Menlee nodded vigorously. “Worse yet—the worst of all—is that sometimes they operate both ways!”

  And he added, apparently on impulse, “I’m coming to feel very sorry for you, Ship!”

  I shall regret our separation, even though I know it must be soon. Sharing with these two has opened so many—(whatever are equivalents of doors in the universes I inhabit) …