by Janet Morris
Marada was her staff and her salvation. Without the cruiser, even as tentative a resolution of her difficulties as she was attempting could never have been begun.
The cruiser remained under her command, as she had feared he might not. The two space-enders were gone, Valery having convinced their dispatcher that their presence on board was useless, even ludicrous.
Softa was given into her care, at last, while Marada the cruiser maintained contact with Valery and Julian in Bucephalus and a wide-range sweep of the space between their space-anchor, far off the space-ender’s wheel of satellites, and the sponge-hole through which they had come.
Marada was sure (because Danae was sure) that Valery expected pursuit ships to pop out of there at any minute. He had mentioned something to Shebat about the deployment of her ship “in case of attack,” but nothing so specific as the Marada’s intelligence had passed his lips.
Shebat detested Valery; her skin crawled in his presence; he made her feel unclean.
But Valery was busy trying to fix Bucephalus, even while Shebat was trying to fix Spry. Perhaps he had just forgotten that he had not alerted her previously. And perhaps he did not want her to be distracted by a danger so near, when she must concentrate totally on the task at hand.
She tossed her head, kneeling down by Softa’s knee, forcing herself to expect movement from the inert form, to expect response from the enquieted mind she strove to contact.
She had checked in with Julian, mere moments before.
He knew no more than she, could not judge the effectiveness of Valery’s ministrations in Bucephalus.
Shebat knew that Julian shared her worry, unvoiced, that Valery might be so anxious to regain use of Bucephalus that he would sacrifice Softa in the bargain, wiping the cruiser’s individuality while David Spry’s was still linked to it.
She must hurry. This might be Softa’s last chance.
He lay sprawled in Marada’s epicentral command couch, tubes attached to various portions of his anatomy for life-support.
A tube-feeder pinched his nose. She withdrew its white length, secured it in its clamp. It had worn red, angry spots below each of his nostrils.
“Softa, Softa David,” she called, leaning so close that her breath blew among the hairs of the beard grown on Spry while he slept, stirring the ashy hairs, as she must stir the sleeping mind behind his countenance, flat and so mild in sleep.
She had made a dream for him: whole with his friends, standing at space-end. She would not accept that the dream could not ever come to be. She would not.
She should not, something deep in her spoke with ringing voice, a voice she had heard far too seldom since she had come among the people of the Consortium. Another time, she would have welcomed its return, thrilled to its reverberations in her head.
Now, she had no time, no time at all:
Deep within her searching mind and deep within his sleeping one a shared moment came to be. A stretched-out hand, a whispered tease-title, a name known from birth touched Spry, coiled tenaciously among the silicon castles where Bucephalus dwelt. Deep down those corridors the name rang unending and he knew that it was his.
He must catch it up, to silence it. He must catch the starlight, rising over his shoulder, to stay its glare. He must catch himself before he remembered too much, or he/Bucephalus would be alone once again, each one lost to the other. The place where Bucephalus was, was complete. Outside it lay want and strife and all the disquiet of man. He/Bucephalus stirred, rolled restlessly, drifted apart. A sad, lonely whisper pealed among the resonant spires of their inner-space interface. In its wake they were split asunder like Siamese twins under a surgeon’s knife. Agony lanced through someone who remembered once having been called Softa David Spry. Anguish plumbed some depths called Bucephalus, alone in quandary once again.
The Spry-comfort was fading, faded, gone away. All hope was lost like that last clutch upon sanity Spry had been to him. Bucephalus shuddered and faced the horror of Valery Stang within his hull, purposefully striding toward the bank of fail-safes that would end even the terror within which Bucephalus howled and flailed.
Into that maelstrom of loss, tightening Bucephalus’s desperate hold on consciousness, straight to the need to survive which had sustained him, sped the final, most horrific stimulus:
“Run!” came Hassid’s scream of warning. “Run or face eternity! The outboards war!”
Bucephalus heard, like every other cruiser at space-end. Bucephalus shuddered; roused; ran. Instantaneously, with all his might and a surety he had thought escaped long since, the cruiser leapt, knocking Valery Stang off his feet and away from the panel which would immure Bucephalus forever in unknowingness. As he lurched, Bucephalus sprang every portal wide. Every hatch and three ejection ports gaped open, spewing air into vacuum, spewing out Julian Antigonus Kerrion struggling into space.
It had been Valery whom Bucephalus had hoped to spit spinning into the void. It was Valery he yet faced, staggering toward the panel that would wipe life and mind from Bucephalus forever.
Bucephalus shuddered, spun round.
Valery, mil filling his lungs, grimly held his grip upon the console. Raising his arm, he brought it down upon the controls even as Bucephalus’s maddened blind flight brought them directly into the path of the lethal particle beams preceding the Kerrion cruisers out of sponge.
Bucephalus never felt them: Bucephalus was already dead.
Julian wheeled, helpless, tumbling amid the stars. A scream had torn out of him.
His last breath had borne it into a deaf cosmos. There was naught but plasma pervading the dark to replace it.
He fought unconsciousness, counting silently since he could not hear himself sob. His lungs throbbed, filled with mil. All the stars grew long, red tails and blue Medusa heads. He fought not to know he was going to die. He fought death as he had fought the evil shudder that had sucked him into soulless obsidian space. He would not die.
His fists clenched, the red sear of muscular strain his bulwark against unfeeling death. He knew that he was losing: around his sight’s edge, green snakes and black mist were creeping inward. He did not, could not, would not die.
He cartwheeled, head over foot, unable even to stop his spin.
He tasted choking, bloated tongue. His eyes wide to the universe, he tried to make out cruisers glinting among its lights. But the lights were glowing, growing, already vanquishing the dark, as if every centimeter of his skin had learned to see. It came to him, in the distended time that crises offer as their single amelioration, that theoretically any skin cell could develop into an eye.
Was it happening? Was he all eyes? Was he dead, without the grace to know and keep still? In the gray-green glowing space of semiconsciousness, while the mil within him and without him pulsed and tingled and seemed to swell, he was suffocating, kept apart from the healing light. Hardly knowing that he did so, he stripped off his Kerrion red-and-blacks, and went naked to the void. There was a sizzling trill, climbing his flesh, echoing within him in every crevice.
He touched his chest: it was still. It neither rose nor fell.
Why was he not cold? For he was not cold, but somehow seemed to be basking like a sunbather in warm, loving light. No, he was not cold.
And though his lungs were choked up with mil, unmoving, his heart beat. He could feel his pulse, warm like the kiss of space on the mil that transduced his skin, so that it lapped up energy from the surrounding plasma, photosynthesizing and transferring that energy directly into him.
He wriggled, feeling space suddenly thicker, no longer like vacuum to his metamorphosing awareness. His new epidermal layer sensed the currents around him, stopped his spin by aligning itself with the flux of the cosmos. The phosphorylization of light into energy had a by-product that seemed to fill his intestines, stream out between his legs through transmuted orifices he had never before used in such a way.
He forgot his name, he forgot his phylum. He kicked his feet and laughed silently amid
the stars.
No one saw the siren gliding away from the battle save the cruiser, Marada, who watched with interest but did not interfere. He had orders to follow. He had not been asked the question: what happened to Julian?
What had happened to Bucephalus, and to Valery Stang, was clear, ugly and final. They were no more, their component particles dispersed through local space.
Shebat, on board the Marada, wept heartbroken sobs in David Spry’s arms.
Danae, though she was Kerrion Five, Chaeron’s own cruiser, keened a dirge for her pilot that raised the hackles of every intelligence privy to cruiser-consciousness. The Marada could not blame her. She would be wiped before many moments passed: the remaining rebels already discussed it, on board her, in the same breath as they discussed surrender.
Other than himself and Danae, there was not one cruiser at space-end undamaged, save for the attackers’ ships which had come out of sponge.
Not one of the space-end cruisers could so much as determine its name. Bucephalus and another had been totally razed. The rest, paralyzed, might never again speak with the same voices they had once used to whisper into the wind that brushed all cruisers’ thoughts alike. Who knew what other atrocities the outboards were capable of perpetrating? They had done this awful thing . . . what worse might yet transpire? The cruisers waited for whatever outcome must eventually befall them.
Eventually, Spry calmed Shebat, who had seen Bucephalus flare into a tiny sun; nova; subside.
Eventually, he calmed himself, and thought to turn Marada, who sped still toward the far side of dusty Scrap, back toward the coordinates of confrontation. He mumbled to Shebat, who huddled against him, to her heaving shoulders, to her raised and disbelieving eyes:
“Don’t think about it,” he advised, “not any of it. Later, maybe, we’ll think about it. Now, I thank you for my life. . . .” He saw the horror dancing behind her stare and knew that he, too, would have to waltz with the specter, when he dared. Bucephalus! “Now,” he continued, adamant, “we must turn Marada and head back there.”
“Why?” she husked bitterly, in a voice unbecomingly wise for one of paltry years.
“To save what we may, for the others.”
“I don’t know if Marada will—”
Spry almost slapped her, managed to only shake her fiercely instead. “Never talk that way: we are in control. We are always in control. What communion we feel with the cruisers is part myth, part mirage. I know. I have been long within their realm. Do not ever let me hear you speak that way again.”
“I’m sorry,” Shebat mewled, shrinking back from Softa’s intensity.
“Don’t be. Be a pilot, or step aside. If you’ve lost your nerve, I’ll take Marada back for you. . . .”
“No!”
“Then get to it. I want you to put me in touch with the command cruiser of the enemy.”
“Of the enemy? You do not know?” Shebat shook herself, as if she could shake off the paralyzing emotions still clutching at her reason. Again, watching her, Softa shivered inwardly, half with disquiet and half with delight. The child was veritably indestructible—and hardly a child except in his memory. Her next words chased the welcome humanity of simple emotion away, perhaps forever:
“You don’t know. It was the arbiter Marada’s cruiser, the Hassid, which gave direction to the assault.”
“Jester’s luck,” he chuckled, rather than face the ice those words caused to encase him. He recollected the dream he had had, wherein Marada sharpened his cutlery over Spry’s helpless form . . . Marada Seleucus Kerrion!
But she was not content with his open-mouthed bark of dismay.
She had to add: “And my husband, too, is with him. The Marada says they came seeking what they have lost: the arbiter, his son; the consul, his wife. Must I return with him?”
He wanted to say: “Not if you do not wish it.” He could only manage: “I don’t know, Shebat, truly. I don’t know.”
Her lip plumped out, her silvered eyes accused him: traitor. But she slipped wordlessly from his grasp and into her couch.
Watching her pilot Marada, he knew pride. He had done his work well. She was more than adequate. But then, she had been a natural. And he had been a pawn in the Jester’s game, once again.
This time, he was not so sure he could maintain his stance on the periphery of disaster, but might be drawn into its very center. Already, he could feel the pull of Fate’s handmaidens, hanging onto his ankles, drawing him down into a sucking whirlpool which had no end.
Softa David Spry examined his hands, found them trembling and speckled with jewels of perspiration. He could count on the fingers of one of them the times in his life that he had been afraid. This was one of those, and he would have to face his fear and face it down, or be vanquished by it.
He set about composing himself while waiting for Shebat to give him a channel through to the Arbiter Kerrion and the Consul Kerrion.
When she had almost secured it, he realized that first he would have to get hold of someone among the space-enders who could delegate him the authority to negotiate a truce.
Before he did that, he had need to make certainty out of supposition: he turned his hand to the task, first getting Shebat’s permission to activate the Marada’s copilots displays.
She gave it, almost coquettishly.
Then he reran the Marada’s tapes of what had happened at the place where sponge met space near space-end, examining that small sliver of sequential time in which a brace of cruisers went to their deaths on account of man. He ran the displays in the infrared, as magnetic flow. X-ray . . . he ran them—because they were so short and yet their effects so devastating—every way he knew how. When it was done and he could find no more ways to view the event, he still could not believe it, could not make himself understand it: Bucephalus was gone.
The cruisers understood. Their disquiet was something he did not want to know, that he avoided seeking out, but that came to him as if through his fingertips where they touched the console.
Shebat had the space-enders on-line. Without another movement, he received the call. Marada the cruiser took that instant to contact him.
While Shebat spoke his name repeatedly, he blinked away his astonishment at what the cruiser Marada had become. Command cruiser . . . certainly; but much more. A furtive shiver thrilled him: he had told Shebat long ago the Marada was too powerful a ship for her. Then, he was but a shadow of the brooding intellect who greeted Spry, who spoke a few words of caution, who subsided into mere obedience once again.
If Bucephalus had been like that . . . but Bucephalus had not been; Bucephalus was gone from cruiser-consciousness, from his own consciousness, from any possible resurrection. He found himself wishing that it had been Marada who had been eradicated, then hurried to cover his thought.
The smooth, effortless touch of the command cruiser reached him: “We are all of us confused. I take no offense.”
It was only after he had promised the space-enders he would do his best for them, and received from them their word to abide by whatsoever agreement he could make, that Spry thought to wonder why Shebat had been able to raise the space-end committee, a difficult task, quicker than she could contact the Hassid, so much easier an operation.
He thought about it, transiently, but it was pushed away again by the space-enders’ reminder: “We still have a few cards to play,” as it had been obscured by the Marada’s greeting (or was it a warning?).
His mouth was dry and fouled, his lips sticky, reluctant to part. Why should he expect the girlchild to be any better composed?
“We still have the baby, do we not?” had prompted Harmony; “We still have Shebat.” Her dead, cold voice conjured up the nightmare visage even over the static-filled com-line. He had not answered, only made a shushing sound.
Too much, too much to fit into his mind, to integrate when so much of him had so recently been intent on total segregation from his kind. Or was it secession? He wished he knew. Once more,
he did not like the person events were forcing him to become.
“Shebat,” he said softly, gently. “Let’s have that line in to Hassid.” He twisted around to see her, enthroned in the epicentral control central that had been his sickbed so recently.
She avoided his eyes. Her black curls hid her face, tinged warm in the indicator spill. But all around, the Marada’s meters responded to her internal chaos with flares of color.
“Can . . . can you do it yourself? I cannot. I do not feel well.”
“You do not feel well?” he repeated, disbelievingly, making it a taunt.
Then her head came up. Her white teeth flashed, bared. “You cannot expect me to call him, to talk to him as if nothing had ever happened!”
Spry took a deep breath and expelled it, counting slowly. “Shebat, this has got to be a joke.”
“You like jokes! You told me yourself: they are our only life-preservers in this fearful storm.” She stood abruptly. A red light lit behind her. “Do it yourself.”
“Sit down. Run that board or I will.”
She set up the line he had asked for, but her voice was so small and sad that it made Spry wonder if even life was a worthwhile struggle in light of such despair.
The arbiter’s bearded face came up on his right-hand monitor, chiaroscuro.
Finger poised over the transfer button that would exchange Shebat’s picture for his own, he hesitated, transfixed by the play of emotions running over Marada Kerrion like conflicting readouts.
“Shebat?” Between the arbiter’s brows, two parallel lines deepened. “Are you hurt?”
“Kerrion One,” she replied archly, “to your commander, Kerrion Two.”
“We’re not quite sure who that is, right now,” Marada drawled, shifting on the screen, his miniature hands lacing behind his head. The narrowed eyes roved around as if searching for something. “Are you commander of the rebels, then, and not hostage as I have so far presumed?”
“Careful!” It slipped out of Spry unbidden, for he knew Marada well, and the sort of jargon arbiters employed.