by Janet Morris
A gust of acceleration pushed him back into his couch, even as a thunder and a shudder came forward from the rear of the cruiser. Ahead of them a devil’s eye of fire purified the hatch-bay just before Hassid lunged through it, all her alarms ringing.
Shechem Authority’s channel squawked and stuttered. Marada silenced it. The damage bells rang. Around the waist of the circular control room indicators seared toward red. All else was darkness. He breathed a deep, shaky sigh, assessing the damage.
“Seal the storage bay off. I will go in there and plug things up later.”
No answer.
“Hassid?”
“They . . . fired . . . on us,” the cruiser said incredulously.
“I know, baby, believe me.” He flicked his eyes around ruefully. “Nothing that cannot be fixed. Just get me home and I’ll have you gold-plated.”
“I slated that,” she warned. Then: “We are receiving a good deal of verbal abuse. I assume you do not want it through the speakers. It is quite foul, the usual outboards’ overstatement. . . . By my calculations they cannot catch us—”
“Why do I ever leave you?”
“I am sure I do not know, Marada, Are you hurt?”
“No, why?” He was feeding a request for recircuiting of his air purification equipment through to her as he talked. The colored lights made his hands ephemeral as they passed over them in the dark.
“Your metabolism is upset. We are speaking aloud: you do not want me close to you.”
“Not right now,” he admitted. “Outboards’ troubles. I am not fit for your company, not yet. Is there any way we can get into sponge a little earlier?”
“As I was saying when you interrupted me: they cannot catch us, but they could be there when we come out into spacetime; our ETA is prelogged. If we went in now, we could shake off any possible pursuit—” A screen flashed, lurid with her impatience that he would not open his mind to her, showing her proposed flight plan.
He had never seen anything quite like it before.
He checked it against his instinct, complemented her, and got ready to step out of his human person and into the great racing fish that cut the waters of space and time. When he was almost fit to navigate, he opened up to her, letting his body slump and his mouth go slack, trusting her sparkling touch to do the rest.
He looked out at spacetime through her “eyes” which knew it as a grid of glowing forces, waves and densities, tides and courses, straits dark and pulsing, narrows cold and sharp like thorns. He shivered and felt the numbness that marked her injured tail. Amputation phantoms whispered where hull used to be. Her sadness was salt, chalybeate, popping like blue sparks in the mouth/skin that was both their outer hull and their inner. Her joy at receiving him nuzzled close, sweet-breathed, warm. Every magnetic caress coursing around her was for him. Her power; the sparkle/thrill/heat/taste of ambient space sizzling in her wake: these were his also. They dove and dipped, wriggling, one creature racing, its own exhilaration spurring it on. The subtle speed/tickle quickened. Burning needles sluffed off their armor; they shot spongeward at nearly light-speed, then jackknifed, spun and leapt.
Green is sponge and cool like nightbreeze, going everywhere and nowhere, the birth of time not even warming it, no chaos warning it, more eternal than our little wriggle of a universe no greater to it than the explosion of a single impulse toward thought in the godhead’s brain.
Sponge smiled her cool, marble smile, taking them to her bosom, carrying them with giant soundless strides across the ages. Everywhen rolled like landscape below, some fields plowed and some heights virgin. Marada and Hassid cuddled in the embrace of the eternal traveler. What more could be asked by mind than to meet its mother? Neither looked beyond their comfort, both suckled the penultimate teats. From the same womb, man and machine; from the same mind, life and death. From the same song are sprung the waves that wash the universe up onto eternity’s beach, and those that will lave it back again.
What more might man and machine wish?
We wish a place in space and time, far from near, they answered the mother together.
Ah, yes. Here we are . . . the mother sighed, amenable, but regretful that her children wandered so.
There was the hard moment of passing through a place where men were known to begin their lives clawing their way up out of the ground, toothless and wrinkled and blindly groping into the celebration of the event by their relatives. They grew hair progressively colored; real teeth replaced the false ones in their jaws. Their eyes cleared and their skins unwrinkled and their limbs untwisted, and they grew ever younger until that awful, inevitable morning when they must bunt and thrust their tiny way up into some screaming woman’s womb, where they became smaller and smaller until their fathers drew them back up into the place all sperm must go.
Then, they were through it. The backward universe behind them, they hovered, one being, behind a little dead asteroid over whose rim Draconis, amid the wheel round her anchor-planet, burned brightly, inviting, a tiny ring glowing steadily among more distant stars.
It was his sadness that separated Marada out from Hassid, though it was always something that drew the outboards away into the impenetrable illogic of their human thoughts. So it was that Hassid spoke with her voice:
“Something followed us.”
“Through sponge? Impossible.”
“So it would seem. But nonetheless, something followed us through sponge. It is keeping the bulk of the asteroid between us. I can see its shadow-heat bouncing off the rock.”
“What do you mean: something? What followed us through sponge? A ship?”
“If it is a ship, it is like no ship I have ever met. But it scans as a ship.”
“Never met? Scans as a ship? Hassid, that torching you took did more than subvert the integrity of your seals.”
“Ship,” said the Hassid, dreamily. “Cruiser, But like no cruiser I have ever met.”
“Hassid! Is it Labayan? Hostile? What do you mean?”
“No, definitely not . . . hostile.” She screened her scans for him, in outboard frequencies.
“Why do you keep saying ‘met’? What is so different? It seems a regulation cruiser to me.”
A sound like static, or a giggle, set his teeth on edge. “If you will look closely, you will notice that there is no one, no outboard on board.”
No outboard on board: why did these things always happen to him?
Marada Seleucus Kerrion did not admit coincidence into his world view. He had been a pilot too long for that. He was aware that everything he had formerly regarded as urgent—the subcurrents in the pilots’ guild; his marriage; his potency; the Kerrion/Labayan Alliance; the elections—all were reduced to microscopic importance by two events: his flight through what he had already named the Hassidic Corridor; and the fact that a cruiser had followed him, unpiloted and on its own initiative, out of sponge.
When he roused himself enough to ask Hassid the identity of the cruiser waiting on the far side of the Apollo-type asteroid’s jagged bulk, he was forced to add a third consideration: it was Shebat Kerrion’s ship, the Marada, his namesake, which wanted to speak with him.
Marada, meet Marada—he did not laugh, or even smile. Shebat, again: insinuating herself into all things numinous like some ancient enchantment newly waked and gone awry. He remembered her eyes: like leaden sky, filled with compulsion. The little girl who had thought him an enchanter had herself enchanted his family in its entirety, taking their attention from the stuff of life and holding them immured, fantasy’s thralls. It was somehow fitting and rhythmic that the cruiser which had done something no cruiser should be able to do would bear her license, her imprint, his name that she had given it.
One more impossibility in an impossible situation tithed a short bark of laughter from him that made Hassid remind him, nervously, that the Marada yet awaited his pleasure.
But it had been his need to release tension that had pushed the harsh chuckle out of him, and no humor. He
had been the subject of humor too often to add his own voice to the chortling crowd watching his every move.
Shebat would have made a pilot, Spry had said to him on Shechem, lofty praise from a master’s master.
What else was she making? And why was the little ragged Earth girl—whose potential could never be expected to cancel out the handicap of her first fifteen years in Bolen’s town—thrust again and again to the forefront of Kerrion concerns?
He lived in seconds an eternal nightmare in which his name was cursed down the ages for having fallen under her sway and delivered her into their midst. He shook it off, as he had often before. Genetics could not portend consequences, only predispositions; the child could not be blamed.
It came to him that a dead pilot would read like no pilot at all. On the heels of that thought followed a surety—such was the true nature of the situation: Shebat Kerrion was dead aboard the cruiser, no matter how unlikely all intelligence prognosticated her presence there to be.
He had to find out. Yet there was something stopping him, something old as the caves of man’s misty youth and frightful as a dog in a temple; something about meeting mind-to-mind with the cruiser Marada, which had done what no ship could do. . . .
He shifted in his seat, felt the wet fabric beneath him pull away from his buttocks. A moment excerpted from his wedding night flashed before him: Madel’s sad mouth smiling sourly, her cripple’s crutch put by her, curled on his bed in Hassid:
“Come lie with me, husband.”
He had stripped down with his face turned away, bereft of words, feeling more naked and less in control than he had ever before felt with a woman, more unsettled even than he had been during his first boyish grope of a body servant. Who ascertains that a man cannot be raped is a fool. Feeling awkward, foolish, fearing mostly that he would not even be rapable, he had slid onto the bed where once long ago he had lost his virginity.
Should he be unable to take Madel’s, the marriage would be annulled on the spot.
Only later had Madel admitted to him that she had been thinking that very thing.
Then, while the bed-satins slid smirking beneath his thighs, she had reached out an arm feathered with hair. Her fingers had touched his cheek, run down it while she smiled:
“My father has never given me a gift so fine as you before. You will be a welcome weapon against the loneliness of night.”
He snatched her hand, held her wrist so that the leer was chased from her face by a grimace of pain. “Speak to me that way once more, and I’ll shove that crutch up your slit so far that you’ll walk without a limp.”
He should have known better than to treat her so roughly. But he had been relieved that he was capable of treating her any way at all. He embraced his wrath, performed his duty, not noticing until too late that he had so thoroughly breached her defenses that she had capitulated. Labaya’s daughter fell hopelessly in love with her husband against all reason . . . hence the naturally conceived child; hence him . . . hiding . . . here.
How in all Chance could a cruiser go through sponge with no pilot?
“Sling a message through to Draconis authority, Hassid: where we are; how many we are. Tell them we’ll bring the Marada in tandem. Use a no-delay priority. They’ll have some questions I don’t want to wait to answer. . . .” And some questions he could not answer. . . . “Be forceful. We have invoked our diplomatic immunity, left Shechem on our own authority, etcetera. Show your flight-path, tell them it’s called the Hassidic Corridor—”
“Marada, I am touched,” purred Hassid.
“I am trying to make sure you won’t be touched. . . . Let’s see, give your damage report, but no information as to how or why it occurred. Make sure they inform Chaeron, wake him if they have to—”
“You could do this better than I,” she reproved.
“I want you on a separate circuit when I link with that empty cruiser. No matter what happens, follow these orders.” He punched up a course. “Even if I should later give instructions to the contrary. Handle this like a Class-1 emergency.”
Class-1 was invoked in case of pilot incapacitation, madness or death. Hassid could make her own course corrections. To the traffic center it would be as if Marada were temporarily unconscious, beyond reach. To the ship, it was distasteful in the extreme.
“But you are not incapacitated!”
“Outboard politics. I am not asking you to lie. This is a Class-1. I have no idea what I am walking into over there—”
“You are not leaving my bulkhead!” Seals lit. He would have to defeat her manually.
“A figure of speech.” He slid out of his seat, not feeling anywhere near so assured as he wished to seem. “I’ll just stroll over there, a short visit. You are not going to make me any additional difficulties. . . .” He crossed to a manual-override panel, stood over it threateningly, knowing that she could see, but could not stop him.
“Hassid, I have to see for myself. Someone might be dead in there—”
“There is no outboard on board that ship. No ex-outboard, either.” But despite the vehemence of her tone, the seal-indicators returned to normal, all but the rupture-flasher for Hassid’s cargo bay.
“I have to fix your leak, sweetheart. Tell the Marada I am on my way.”
He heard her objections; her voice followed him through the corridors and her mind scratched at the door to his. But he closed his ears and refused to open his mind, and when he had donned a three-mil suit with an eight-hour air pack in its pressurizer and a monitoring com in its helmet, he was feeling almost normal. He unfolded the gravity-sled stored by the emergency hatch until it was as wide as his chest and half as long as his body, and stepped into the lock while he was still checking its function. In his pocket was a can of liquid solder for Hassid’s hold. Around his waist was a coil of glass-line long and strong enough to serve as a tow if he felt he needed it. He latched the helmet, isolating himself from Hassid’s pleading. The lock sighed its air out, the space-door opened. . . .
A thrill crawled over him, looking out at the winking pupil of creation. He gave a push with his knees, bellying onto the sled, which sailed out toward the rim of the asteroid. A turn of head gave him visual corroboration of Hassid’s damage: she had lost her rear infrared camera, the outer hull was penetrated in three places, scarred and seared and melted into strands crisscrossing a hand’s-breadth hole.
His earlier assessment that only the inner hull was reparable confirmed, he turned back to see what rose over the horizon as the sled reached the apex of its arc. Breathing the mil-tangy air, simply waiting, helmet pressed to sled, he felt almost as if he were a child again, racing with his cousins off Lorelie’s skywall.
Then the Marada came into view, floating in vast Kerrion splendor at a short space-anchor. Damn Parma for a braggart; the Marada was as good, if not better, than Hassid, and ten years younger, when each season saw refinements undreamable a year before. . . .
He spat three short bursts from his sled’s attitude thrusters, came alongside the great silver fish where his name was stenciled by its lock. Only then did he check his com-line. It was silent. Hassid had given up trying to dissuade him.
He let the sled bump against the Marada’s hull, grabbed a handgrip, pressed for entrance.
To his rehef, the port slid back. By his handhold he swung inside, his sled under his arm.
The outer port hissed closed, but the inner did not immediately open. He refolded the sled and hung it from his belt, where it bumped back and forth about his knees.
“Greetings, Namesake,” came the voice on his open com-channel. “I have been waiting for you,” The little, dark space in which he was imprisoned began to hiss as air rushed in to fill its vacuum.
He added his own hiss of relief before he answered, as the inner port drew back and he stepped into a semidark of running-lights and flashing indicator lights. “Greetings,
Marada,” he responded, not moving to unlatch his helmet, his eyes racing around, searching for
anything not standard.
“Second left, Outboard.”
“I want the grand tour.” He opened the wider-than-usual cargo port. Within was a space-black mantis, poised for flight—a ground-to-space shuttle, two-passenger at best: empty. His satisfaction issued forth: a wry grunt. He retraced his steps, going left and left again until he had come to the control room. He peered into the open cabins as he passed them. There was no sign of a body, or of violence, nor anything to show that someone other than the designated owner had been aboard. Nothing except the little shuttle-craft, painted like a bandit’s smirk.
“Are you, too, in search of Shebat?”
The tall, suited outboard started, raised a hand to his helmeted head in some characteristic gesture aborted by the clear dome glowing in the semidark, as his entire pressure suit glowed with a soft argent gleam.
In it, the outboard Marada seemed darker and leaner than he was. In it, he was trembling. It was a comfort to him that the suit would mask whatever evidence of his discomfort the cruiser would otherwise have been able to gather. He began a slow, expository circuit of the control room’s circular waist, seeking a particular panel set into every cruiser ever built, man’s safety-belt in a runaway juggernaut. By the time he had come once fully around and knew where the panel was, the Marada had repeated its question and the pilot had thought of an answer:
“Among others.”
“She summoned me; I must respond.”
The cruiser’s voice was like any other cruiser’s voice. Why had he expected it to be different?
“Is that why you followed me through sponge?”
“I followed you out of sponge. I was — lost. Sit down . . . ‘Marada’ . . . Would you refresh yourself? I can provide all the amenities.”
He hesitated. Not to be lost thereby, he found it necessary to buttress his pretenses. The Marada’s ultra-modem helm had a pair of couches before the screen consoles, which were standard; and a third set back from those on an epicentral dais, which was far from standard, with an entire redundant control center microminiaturized on its flaring arms. He half-sat on it, letting his eyes roam down its insides, identifying odd tubes flush in their housings as food, water and elimination, emergency air . . . a man could work days at a time in that couch without having to move. . . . A part of him itched to settle in it, rather than lean against it. He resisted.