Thousandstar (#4 of the Cluster series)

by Piers Anthony

  'Now you don't have to die,' Jessica said. 'You have no guilt to expiate.'

  Heem was still sifting through his gratified amazement, but he had not lost the taste of reality. "I may have no guilt to expiate. Therefore I can die satisfied."

  'You could save yourself, if you really wanted to. I'm sure of it.'

  Foolish female! "The Hole can not be escaped—and if it could, there would remain the problem of the competition, whose cut we have missed, and the incarceration that awaits me at home. I still prefer the Hole."

  'I've been thinking about that, Heem, while I worked on the problem of vision, while you fought the Squam in memory. I think we just might win that contest.'

  "I have accepted the inevitable. You evince grandiose hopes." Yet there was an insidious lure to it. The fact that a single sapient creature believed in his decision not to seed the valley—this had an extraordinary effect on his will to live. If one believed, wasn't it possible that others might also believe?

  'This black hole—it's really a shortcut to Planet Eccentric. We are cutting across the Holestar System disk, instead of orbiting around it the way the other ships are. And the combined pull of Star and Hole is giving us tremendous velocity. If we could just zip through and come out the other side, we'd be first there, wouldn't we?'

  "We are already within the point of no return for this spaceship. We cannot—"

  'But we can loop between Hole and Star! Don't you see, Heem—the point of no return would be much closer to the Hole, when opposed by the Star, since the Hole is really orbiting the Star. And if we go on through, all our present velocity counts for us, not against us, and will translate into velocity away from the Hole on the other side. We have not really been captured at all! We can thread the needle through!'

  Heem was amazed at the audacity, simplicity, and naivete of this proposal. "To attempt such a thing is almost certain death!"

  'You forget where we are. For us not to attempt it is certain death!'

  She was, of course, correct. At this stage there was absolutely nothing to lose.

  "Still, it is hopeless," he sprayed. "The interaction of tides and stellar wind and radiation, velocity vectors— this is beyond my power to assimilate and control, in a ship of this simplicity."

  'You only think it is beyond your power. You have more resources than you appreciate. Think of it as a huge Squam to be challenged: you can beat it if you only try hard enough.'

  "I am an experienced pilot, among the best of my species," he sprayed. "I am not modest about my abilities in this regard. I may no longer be able to defeat a Squam in fair combat, but my piloting ability is undiminished. No HydrO could navigate clear of the Hole from this point; therefore I cannot."

  'Well, a Solarian could!' she retorted. 'And I think that your piloting is diminished, because if you lost talent in personal combat, you must have lost it generally, if only in little ways you aren't aware of. And you know what you lack? It is sight. Vision. If you could see what you're doing, you could pilot this ship right between the Hole and the Star, balancing their gravity wells against each other so we don't fall into either.'

  "For a species who sees, you evince little respect for radiation. To pass that close to the Star would be to be blasted by intolerable levels. Even if the ship were precisely on course, we would emerge dead."

  She pondered that. 'I'm not so sure. There's a lot of gas and dust spiraling between Star and Hole. It could act as a radiation shield, preventing the ship from getting too hot or absorbing too much in the lethal ranges. It would not be a long passage. Maybe a little key maneuvering. All you'd need to do is watch for suitable clouds, and go through them.'

  She was so foolishly determined! "It is theoretically possible. But I cannot see, so—"

  'But I can! I can show you how. I can do it for you. I'm your transfer half of the team; together we can do it!'

  Her ridiculous enthusiasm burgeoning along his nerves was contagious. His new urge to live caused him to consider even such an extreme. "Such a thing—it would be an extremely long roll."

  'Versus the short roll of dying without fighting!'

  Heem yielded to her encouragement. "We have nothing to lose by making the attempt."

  'Oh, Heem, I'm so proud of you, I could kiss you!' And she sent an oddly stimulating impression of physical contact through his awareness.

  "What was that?" he demanded, astonished.

  Abruptly she was diffident. 'Just an expression of—of encouragement. About navigating the channel—'

  "Your memory-dream," he persisted. "The copulation ritual of your species—there was that action therein. Token contact of bodies—"

  'Like your needlejets of greeting between genders. I suppose it is analogous to—to your nonreproductive sex.' There was a warm flush of taste in the background of her thought, an embarrassment that was not unpleasant. 'I think I'm blushing.'

  "What is that?"

  'Never mind. Now I want to get us oriented on vision. Are you with me?'

  Heem let her carry it. "I am with you, alien."

  'Good. Now what we have to do is get your nerve-signals translated into visibility. I am sight oriented. You have piloting ability. We have to merge your pilot reflexes with my sight reflexes, and navigate by sight. It is reflex, not information, that is the key. The mode of interpretation. Because the human hand-eye coordination—well, this should greatly facilitate our maneuverability.'

  'I will humor you,' Heem sprayed. He did not want to admit that he now found life appealing. And that kiss—

  'Good. Now try to look through my perception. You've done it before, some; this is just a bigger dose. Identify with me; think the way I do. And look.'

  Heem tried. He recalled the brief flashes he had had, seeing things. He wanted to succeed. But it was quite fuzzy.

  'Now look ahead to the space between Star and Hole,' she continued brightly. 'Maybe you'd better taste it first, and I'll try to translate. Then you pick up on my perception.'

  Heem tasted the jets of his perception net. Jessica fumbled with them, struggling to reformulate the information in her imagery. 'See, the star tastes bright, uh shines bright, light, beams, hurts eyes there on the left. Oh, you roll, you don't have up or down or left or right so much. Well, I do; orient on mine. Hole is black nothingness, there to right, a gap in the optic. Like heaven and hell, but they're both hell for us, two gross gravity wells and we have to thread the needle—do you know what a needle is? No, of course not. It's a sliver of metal or something that pokes through material, carrying a line along after it, that's the thread, that's our lives in this case—we thread the needle through right where the light impinges upon the night, that shade of gray. Omigosh, that's not just light, that's a storm! Huge swirl of gas or dust or something, marking the no-man's-land zone, and we've got to go through it, it marks our channel, it is the material to be sewn, it will shield us from the killing radiation I hope, I hope...'

  Heem tasted it, trying to shunt through her interpolation. It didn't work.

  'You're resisting, Heem, I can feel it,' she said. 'Are you still upset because I'm female?'

  "Yes. I don't belong in your mind any more than you belong in mine." But again, that kiss...

  'Look at it this way, Heem: how would you rather die, as a private individual, or with a snooping alien female in your mind, knowing your most secret, final masculine thoughts and guilts?'

  "I am already subject to the latter," Heem jetted tightly.

  'But you haven't died yet. Wouldn't you prefer at least to die clean, by yourself?'

  "I would." Yet though she had expressed it well, it was not as true as it had been. He objected to her gender, but now he realized that there could be an intriguing aspect to it.

  'Then you'll have to share my mind in order to get rid of it. I can't say I like this any better than you do, but maybe females are more acclimatized to male intrusion of one sort or another. I want to live—and if that means I have to suffer my mind to be violated,
then so it must be. Maybe I felt otherwise, before I actually faced death and sifted out my realities. Now get in here and use my synapses, my perceptions—or we'll both be stuck with the least private of destructions.'

  Heem could not refute her. He tried again, forcing his perception to mesh with hers, allowing his taste to be distorted into alienness. His whole system revolted, yet the alternative of an unprivate death loomed worse, now that she had pointed it out.

  Yet, oddly, he suspected he would not have been able even to make the effort, if she had not endorsed his fundamental treason. She appalled him—less than before. So he could strive to free himself of her, because his alienation from her had diminished. It might not be total anathema to die with company—

  'Heem, are you paying attention?'

  He oriented on that nebulosity between the extremes of Star and Hole, for that was indeed the region they had to traverse, where the two gravity wells balanced precariously and the storm buffered the terrible radiation. It tasted turbulent, a tidal storm, shifting as the swirling matter of the two monstrous origins shifted.

  'No, you're tasting it,' Jessica protested. 'You've got to see it. Here, follow me. I have two eyes, so I can see depth—at least I could when I had eyes—never mind. I'm not seeing too well myself, yet, but I know it can be done. What counts is that I have the mind for it, for visual perspective and detail. You can see depth—fix that in your mind. What is further away looks smaller, though you know it isn't. There's debris ringing the Hole, because there's no solar wind to waft it out; a comet would have no tail, coming in here. So a lot of gas is pushed out from the Star, and crowds in around the Hole; it can't just fall in, see, because of the angular momentum, just as we can't fall in. We have to spiral in—and therein lies our salvation, because if there's one thing that can counter the power of a black hole, it's the power of a larger star. That Hole is really quite small, only a few kilometers across, I'm sure, could we but see it as it is, smaller than a mere planet, smaller than a moon, but intense, yes, oh, yes, intense, while the star is thousands, maybe millions of times as large. The gravity well of the Star is bigger, much bigger, it actually surrounds that of the Hole, in fact the whole Hole is in orbit about the Star, or at least they orbit a common center—am I repeating myself?—and we must pass through that center in a straight line—'

  "Not a straight line, babbling female," Heem corrected her. "A parabolic curve, perhaps, balancing the forces. See, the interstitial nebula curves partly about the Hole, enclosing it in a—"

  'In a quarter moon—'

  "We have to navigate that curve at high velocity."

  'You saw it!' she cried in a delayed reaction. 'You said "See"!'

  "I—saw it," Heem agreed dubiously. He had been distracted by her patter and he had jetted carelessly. Yet he had used her mode of communication.

  'Concentrate, Heem! Make it come clear! You're so close—oh, I could kiss you again!'

  "Don't do that!" Heem sprayed. But not as forcefully as he might have.

  She laughed. 'I'm teasing you. I wouldn't really do anything as awful as that. See—see that moonshell area, that sort of bowl cupping the Hole—if you can see it, you can navigate it, because you are an expert pilot. All you need are information and reflexes. You can do it, I know you can!'

  Heem tried, but the momentary flash he had had, had faded. "I am not certain I really—whatever it was, is gone."

  'But you did have it, Heem! I'm sure! Try again!'

  He did, but got nowhere.

  'Very well—we'll have to approach this obliquely,' she decided. 'Let's—I'll tell you what, we can exchange images. You were beginning to see in the memory passages; you can take it further now.'

  "First allow me to orient the ship," Heem jetted. He maneuvered carefully, aligning the ship with the nebula-bowl taste, then let it drift. He was conserving fuel, now that he might have need of it.

  'Now—I'll visualize key scenes from my past, and you taste scenes from yours, and we'll try to get them both aligned with sight,' she said. 'I don't know if this is scientific, but I have a gut feeling about it. Once you can see your own past, you should be able to see anything, and there's our key to survival. Maybe I'll be able to taste my own past too, and get some idea what is entailed.'

  "It must be accomplished before we reach that cup-nebula," Heem jetted. "Once there, I shall have to guide this ship through, and prevent it from falling into either gravity well. Small adjustments will be critical. If I fail, all else is for nothing."

  'How much time do we have?'

  Heem did some translating. "I judge two chronosprays—about an hour, as you reckon time. We have been approaching steadily, and are now accelerating in free-fall; our approach will be extremely rapid, compared to our past velocity."

  'An hour!' she exclaimed. 'Well, let's get right on it, then!' She delved into her first vision, rolling him along.

  Jessica faced her brother defiantly. "Jesse, I absolutely refuse to go through that ever again! That awful cow—how could you?"

  Her clone-brother spread his hands placatingly. He was a slight but handsome young man, with dark blue hair falling in curls to his light blue neck, his eyes a matching blue. His features were even, almost nondescript in their regularity. There was nothing typically aggressive or masculine about him. Which was, of course, a blessing, for her facial features were identical. Yet when she donned a feminine wig, she was fully female.

  "That cow is quite a conquest, Jessica. If you were a man, you'd understand. Not the sort I'd care to stay with, but hoo-hoo! What a place to visit!"

  "Well, I'm not a man, and I don't understand! Why should I have to cover for your slumming? I've got a life of my own to lead, you know!"

  "Not as my clone, you don't."

  "Damn you! You always bring that up! Suppose you had been my clone? It's easier to delete an X chromosome than to add one."

  He raised one eyebrow. "That depends, clone-sister dear, on the technology. In this case they found it more feasible to merge the X factor from another sperm cell in the same bank with the cloned embryo, so—"

  'I don't see it,' Heem complained. 'I taste the dialogue, but the color of fur—of hair—it isn't working.'

  "It's just the beginning," Jessica told him. "Just the initial alignment. Go into your memory, and I'll try to—to make it visible. We'll keep switching back and forth, until we connect."

  The arena was in neutral territory: the tropic region of the Erbs. Erbs filled the spectator section, their roots twining eagerly into the supportive soil. They enjoyed watching Squams battle HydrOs.

  Heem rolled out to encounter his opponent. The dispute concerned five valleys along the boundary: were they to be controlled by HydrO or Squam? Squams had been surveying the region, presuming they would possess it; Heem had experienced part of that effort. Which was why he was here; he had a very special motive. This match would decide whether Slitherfear's labor paid off for the Squams.

  It was not, unfortunately, Slitherfear who was to fight this duel, but another Squam champion. The creature slithered forward with confidence, almost disdain, knowing that no HydrO could hurt a Squam. But no Squam had encountered a HydrO with the motive and experience Heem possessed.

  'No, not that memory; that's too much action and not enough scenery. We need strong visual imagery, color, texture. Go back to Highfalls.'

  Heem went back to Highfalls, though he would have liked to show off his victory over the Squam champion—the event that had made Heem a hero among his kind. For a while.

  He recalled the taste of his awakening under water, realizing that he had survived his encounter with Slitherfear, but had failed to kill the Squam. The taste of the surrounding water was soured by his awareness of that failure.

  'But water can be seen, too,' Jessica said. 'It's greenish, sometimes blue—'

  "Tastes green," Heem jetted.

  'No, no! Looks green. Like this.' And she conjured the vision of the small lake on her human estate. "Green.
" She made an annoyed mental headshake. "Oh, now I've taken over the memory! This is supposed to be your vision. I'm just the observer." She concentrated. "Here, I'll retreat to the background—ah, like this.'

  That was an interesting effect, that shifting of taste nuance. "Like this?' Heem repeated, imitating her retreat.

  'Get back to your memory!' she snapped.

  He rolled clear of the water, trying to taste its greenness or see its wetness. He returned to Slitherfear's camp. As he had feared, the Squam was gone, along with all his equipment except for the broken machine Heem had knocked over. The cave was empty.

  But perhaps he could find the Squam again, and kill him. Heem now knew other valleys existed, and knew how to make flatfloaters carry him there. And, perhaps, he knew how to fight a Squam. Maneuver the creature to an awkward place, where a fall could occur, and disable his appendages, then shove—

  'The scenery, Heem—what does it look like?'

  Heem concentrated on the taste of the ground, water, and plants. Some oil substance had leaked from the fallen machine, flavoring the dirt.

  'Look at it. Like this!' The taste of purple pines with green-scented needles came, superimposed over the valley of Morningmist. Or purple needles with green-flavored wood.

  But when he tried to see it, he merely slipped into that scene. Jessica and her brother were going through the forest of their estate, garbed as females. Jesse was honoring his deal with her, covering for her in the guise of a female. However, it was evident that he was far from appalled at the prospect; he regarded the episode as a game.

  "No, I don't want to go into that!" Jessica protested.

  'But I think I am beginning to see—'

  "No!"

  'For one who needled me to sacrifice my mental privacy—'

  "Oh—I suppose I deserved that. All right, Heem, if you can see it, you can watch it. My first sexual tryst, as a female."

  'I can't see it,' Heem admitted. 'There are strong currents of taste, but—'

  "It wasn't much, anyway," she said, relieved. "Jesse teased me for months after that about cows and bulls, geese and ganders, sauce and saucy. He had a point. I did it, but I didn't enjoy it. Casual sex—it just isn't my—I mean, there should be some depth of emotion—oh, you're a male, you wouldn't understand!"