by Janet Morris
The two half-brothers eyed each other until a tone indicated that Parma was off the Hassid, and security reinstated.
Chaeron raked fingers through his auburn curls. “You might as well come with me. Even arbiters have to eat; my suite is as safe a place as this to discuss whatever we might choose.” It was difficult to offer even that much.
The length of the pause before Marada’s reply indicated a similar difficulty in his acceptance: “I suppose I must. Wait until I power Hassid down. Two ships are plenty to lose in one day.”
“You are sure, then, that Bucephalus and Marada are lost to us?”
“You are not?”
“I would hate to think that I went to all that trouble to find Shebat, only to lose her so quickly.”
“My condolences. But the alternative is that the Marada is mad, and that I know to be untrue. Perhaps you have not lost her. We will consider it over a meal.”
“Shall I take that as an affirmation that you accept Parma’s dictum? Have we a truce?” grinned Chaeron ingenuously.
“I would be a fool to take you at face value. But we have, temporarily, a truce.” He waved a hand and all but the standby lights in Hassid’s control room winked out.
It was not until the pair had ensconsed themselves in the consul’s tower that word came up that Julian Antigonus Kerrion was not anywhere in Draconis.
Chapter Thirteen
The mighty Bucephalus sped toward those inter-fenestrations in spacetime which opened into sponge at a hundred fifty million meters per second, half the speed of light.
Effortlessly, but not happily, Marada followed, an exact half-kilometer behind, in Bucephalus’s evacuated wake. No solar wind tickled his skin; they had passed from the valley of its mastery. No hunched, crunched, recurved magnetic fields slowed them with treacherous topography: they were headed away from the sun/black hole pair and its rigorous spacetime, into the gentler void.
Though the sparkling sea surrounded, though all his sensors reveled, Marada was not content: Shebat Kerrion was not aboard him, but preferred the company of Bucephalus, yet. The Marada craved his pilot, craved the freedom to drive point into eternity, rather than ignominiously following along behind the Bucephalus, who all knew was ill with the compromises his pilot had forced on him, was in fact no longer the command cruiser he once had been, though the outboards refused to recognize that truth. Or could not recognize it . . . could that be true? Could the outboards not know? Could they not care? Spry certainly cared for Bucephalus: a part of him rocked like an old woman keening beneath an ashen shroud, deep in his cavernous emotions so that when his mind touched the cruiser’s, echoes of it rebounded screeching through the Marada’s soul.
Marada felt a certain empathy for Spry, but less for Bucephalus, knowing that in the end the ability to survive catastrophe unscathed tested the individual. Bucephalus had survived the intrigues of his pilot somewhat less than unscathed. All of Spry’s remorse could not put back even the tiniest increment of what had been lost. Bucephalus, facing inarguable evidence of his senility, had taken on its burden. Irresolute, he pondered himself endlessly, wondering what it was he might have forgotten. Like the desultory stirrings of an invalid on the first day of spring, Bucephalus would sigh, then He back once more, either unable to take hold of himself, or unwilling. Tentative, endlessly maundering, quadruple-checking every order and redundantly relaying them back to Marada, Bucephalus sailed point toward sponge.
Marada was hard put to believe that Softa Spry was actually intending to lead him into sponge behind lame Bucephalus when he himself was sound, and Shebat Alexandra Kerrion was sitting idle beside Softa while Marada must make do without a pilot.
He was considering what sort of emergency he might concoct to jog the outboards’ wits enough to secure him his Shebat’s company through sponge, when he realized with crackling discomfort that he was considering it: no cruiser had ever spoken what was not, since the arcane beginnings of their shared consciousness.
Self-respect, Marada knew, was without seat in his circuitry; yet without it, he would face dolorous evils as did Bucephalus. Marada was not frightened, but his newly acquired selfness was unique and he highly prized it. It, also, had no seat of materiality anywhere that he could discern. Therefore, those dangers to it might also be without substance, yet have substantial effects. Therefore, he did not search through his probabilities for one with which to frighten the outboards. Rather, he reached out to Shebat in a way he had not hazarded previously, a function of his determination to keep his actions within known referents for cruiser-consciousness until Shebat was safe within his protections.
In the Bucephalus, Shebat Kerrion dropped her stylus from numb fingers.
“Softa!” came out of her on a gasp.
“He’s in the head,” a voice from behind reminded her, “dream dancer.” It was Julian’s sneer that brought back time and place to her. Spry had set the youth on an optical tracking monitor to watch for pursuit ships, with a wink to Shebat to forestall her mentioning the obvious: they had achieved a measurable fraction of the speed of light within four minutes of clearing Draconis; time dilation shielded them from pursuit: should a cruiser come after them, they had merely to accelerate, then turn, and it would seem to the pursuing ship that they had disappeared. As for Draconis-controlled guidance, like a cloak of invisibility, time dilation intervened. Its sum, that of the difference of the square of the sums of an angle whose base was distance and whose height was the time elapsed, obscured all, could be cast off only by the mechanism of entering and exiting sponge. Should they not choose, or not be able to do so, they would be forever stranded in Draconis’s future, drawing farther and farther ahead each second they remained in normal-space acceleration. Shebat shivered, rose up in the semidark of the control room.
Julian’s head was white-gold in the indicator spill, bent to his task, not knowing it useless.
Marada, Marada, echoed in Shebat’s mind, so that she could find no retort for Julian, so that she could not have said which “Marada,” man or cruiser, she meant.
She passed by Julian without a word, into the corridor where Spry must be, leaving the youth to his own devices. Spry could have used the elimination facilitator in his command console. He had not. Therefore, something else had drawn him out of their company.
She found him press-sealing the wrists of a three-mil suit in the corridor, ghostly with the luminescent white suit throwing back the half-light the pilot preferred. The helmet bulked between his boots, a pale spheroid. He reached down and picked it up, spied her, and instead of donning it, shifted it under his arm.
“Seems like I’m always camping on disaster’s periphery with a picnic lunch and a pair of field glasses.” In the shadows pierced by running-lights, his flat face was unreadable.
“So you have been watching me all this time? Voyeur!” she accused, teasing.
He chuckled humorlessly, “You caught me, dream dancer. Don’t give me any trouble.”
“The Marada wants me, not you. He is my cruiser; this is my responsibility.” She inclined her head to indicate his form readied for space. “Softa, he called me. Not by Bucephalus’s aegis, but despite it. He spoke in my head as if I were not within another cruiser!”
“Smart ship. Shebat, I’m going to—”
“You are not surprised!”
“I told you before: that cruiser is too much for you. I’m going to put a tow, glass-line with a laser substrate, into effect between the two of them.” Such was done only when a cruiser’s ability to execute tandem maneuvers was suspect; or when one cruiser was powered down; or if the course included an entry into sponge.
“No you are not. I am. You cannot leave Julian alone with an ex-apprentice in Bucephalus!”
Spry shook his head sharply, as if he could silence her by that means, and stepped back through the open hatch into his cabin, Shebat following.
There, in a less diffused illumination which showed her a spare and depersonalized habitat, she real
ized that something was wrong with Spry’s face. Something as artificial and colorless and blank as the pilot’s billet had come to reside on his countenance.
“David—”
“Shebat, I am sorry.” He stopped, just within the portal. Behind her back, the doors smacked shut. They stood an arm’s length apart. “I am sorry for all the mendacity of which your husband doubtless accused me. Everything you have heard about me is true. But I—”
“Softa,” she demurred, taking a step closer, then another, until she could count the pale hairs bristling his chin, “do not apologize. You have secured me my freedom.”
“Shebat, let me finish. Though I took money from Jebediah, Parma’s secretary, to deliver you into dream dancers’ hands, you were never in danger from me. I used the money I got from it to pay your way into Harmony’s troupe, who are friends of the guild and not Labayan sympathizers. I have not in any way abrogated my responsibilities as our mutual oath delineates them—not until now.”
She put out a hand, felt it land upon his shoulder. She could not take her eyes from his, brown as deepest earth and as endless. There was something wrong behind his eyes, something cornered and desperate. Her hand squeezed his shoulder, her lips said all was well, that she was here upon her own initiative.
“Are you? It did not sound like it when you ran in crying that you could not leave.”
“Marada . . . Marada wants me to come aboard, David. David!”
But Spry was not listening. He spoke on: that her time with dream dancers was not the scandal her family must proclaim it; that he would have gotten her out and safely on her way to space-end, regardless of difficulty, this very week; that—
“David, what is the matter?” she interrupted in a coldly controlled snap. “I know all of this. So do you, and you know I know.”
“I—” he fell silent, bit his lip, looked away.
Shebat moved another step inward, letting one hand slide to touch his face, bringing the other up to parallel it. Somehow, she had become almost as tall as he. With gentle pressure she forced his head up, until his eyes met hers. “Softa, it is obvious that since I have come this far, I have forfeited second thoughts. I must have no regrets; you must help me.”
He reached up and drew her hands down, holding them in his own. “Shebat, I can barely help myself. Bucephalus . . .” Horror spat from deep in his pupils, biting her volition, numbing it. “Bucephalus has suffered greatly. He is . . . this is . . . may be his last flight.”
“We will retire him at space-end,” Shebat soothed, not understanding. “He can train pilots, tell tales . . .”
“I am not at all sure that he, or I, will make it that far. And it is for that I apologize, in advance. For taking you from small peril into great danger. But I did not know . . . I did not realize, you must believe me—”
“I believe you, Softa,” she assured him, crooning to mask her fear. “I believe you. We’ll be safe and sound at space-end—”
Softa David Spry shook his head very slowly, unblinking. “Shebat, Bucephalus and I have a deep bond. So deep that his—difficulties—are to some degree my own. . . . Things are vacuous, at times. It was that second investigation that convinced the cruiser it was malfunctioning. I could not tell him . . . it,” he corrected himself savagely, “the truth. Larger things were at stake than the sanity of one cruiser and one man. Now, with the guild safe from incrimination by what we, Bucephalus and I, knew and what we have done, there comes the accounting. Bucephalus is in no shape to enter sponge. I could not assess the damage, earlier: I had to do this. Do you see? I risked your life in the bargain. Now, I cannot promise that Bucephalus, or myself, are going to make it; or making it, continue to resemble in any way the personalities you have known. . . .”
“Oh, Softa, no. No! You are wrong; I mean, you are all right . . . just sit.” She pulled at his hands, entwining hers. They seemed frozen in her grip, like dead things.
“Oh, Softa, yes!” He laughed abruptly, then swallowed, then said:
“I dare not point out the various proofs of what I am saying; I do not want to look so closely. I will do the best I can. I am going to secure the tow, I am not sure why . . . I would be better off to get you two aboard Marada and take the Bucephalus to a more fitting end. We’ve both always wondered where that black hole off Draconis’s star comes out. . . . Ssh, ssh. I’m drifting a little, but I know it. . . .”
Shebat reached out to him another way. Some hybrid, fear inspired, built half of dream dancing, half of what was left of her enchanter’s gift, she found and hefted and cast over him. He calmed. His hands released hers. His short nose wrinkled at the tingle of ozone upon the air. Into his roiling thoughts she thrust with a dream of well-being and surety, a scene built of the memories she found in him to resemble space-end’s port and him standing there, before Bucephalus, with a smile and an outstretched hand. . . .
“I have one thing left to try,” he admitted after an interval, when the dream was gone. “I shall replace what I may of the stolen memories, explain to the cruiser what occurred, and why. I could not, before, lest they probe him and come upon it.”
“You do that, I will take the towline out and secure it.”
“Sorry.”
“I am a pilot, am I not? You have so declared me. It is my place. Yours is with Bucephalus, who needs you. We must hurry, you well know.” She turned to go.
“Shebat, I cannot allow it.”
“Softa, you are in no shape to disallow it. You yourself have said it.”
He grunted, a soft guttural, half a moan, half a challenge.
She walked deliberately toward the threshold.
“I am coming with you,” he said, as the doors drew back. “Suit up, little one, while I slow us down a bit. No use testing a three-mil suit at these speeds.”
She hugged him, a spontaneous expression of fellowship that slid into something more, stretching time with its own pall of forgetfulness, so that her lips found his and all her flesh flared where she touched him.
He pushed her away abruptly. “Don’t revenge yourself upon Marada with me,” he muttered, as from behind in the empty corridor a pair of hands clapped thrice in hollow applause.
“Good for you. Pilot,” Julian approved. “And now, if you two are quite finished, there is something I think Spry should see.” The casual tone was belied by Julian’s posture when Shebat whirled to regard him: straight and tense, with his belly sucked in tight.
Then the three of them dashed the ten meters to the control room at sprinters’ pace.
Bucephalus looked like a creature aflame, all his displays humping and bucking from yellow to red. That no alarm had sounded, that no word had been whispered from cruiser to pilot, was a measure of the ship’s debility. Alone and friendless, Bucephalus fought the demons of silicon nightmare.
Shebat sat at her console only a moment after Softa, who cursed and ordered in an undifferentiated tone, so that Shebat found herself squinting at nothing, concentrating on the sense of his words, while her hands of their own accord took David Spry’s direction:
“Ready Mode B, autosynchronous phasing. Sponge entry ten seconds from NOW!”
“What about me going aboard Marada? The towline? There’s no sponge-way here!”
“No time to explain. Magnetic grapples, on! Marada’s path-coordinates on your scope, now!”
An insane, impossible torus of a course blipped on Shebat’s screen, a hole to be carved from spacetime at nearly light-speed. She had time only to draw a breath before B-mode lit and the Marada began to institute his programmed functions in perfect accord with Bucephalus, to whom the empty cruiser was welded by invisible grapples which made of him the inner wheel of an axle whose path only the Hassid had ever dared describe before.
“But—” Shebat cried, objecting equally to the course and the grapple-mode, proscribed for entering sponge.
Then there was the Marada’s shiver/touch/reassurance. And there was sponge.
If Spry had not been
the most underrated pilot in the guild while holding first mastership, Bucephalus would have been lost in those initial instants. With all his years and all his might Spry fought to bring his irrationally struggling cruiser under control. In so doing, he had to dive deep into the paranoid deluge of unassignable data flowing forth from its every sensor. The Bucephalus was not built to handle multiple paradoxical inquiries simultaneously. Spry was not built to exist in the subconscious of silicon-based intelligence. During that time, when both systems exceeded their tolerance, identities melted, evaporated, blew away on gravity’s wind.
Shebat Alexandra Kerrion sat straight up in her couch: all the red was gone from her copilot’s instrumentation. She had turned her head, smiling, then frowning, then vaulting from her seat to prove with her hands what her eyes knew to be true and her mind knew to be true, what even Julian, hovering helplessly behind Softa’s head, knew to be true so that his skin was pale as his hair:
Softa David Spry was insensible; consciousness was gone from him; his head lolled when Shebat stroked it. Softa was as empty as the helmet cast without notice on the deck beside his feet.
“Well,” said Julian, exhaling like Chaeron did when he sought composure. “Now what, Lady Pilot?”
Though it had been Bucephalus’s console Shebat’s hands had touched, it was to Marada their commands had gone; it was Marada’s solace she needed, his communion that Bucephalus’s plight had interrupted. She said:
“I must get to my ship. Bucephalus cannot be trusted: he cannot trust himself.”