Infinite Stars

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  Underhill felt the words coming out of him slowly. Words were such a lot of trouble compared with the speed and the joy of thinking, fast and sharp and clear, mind to mind! But words were all that could reach ordinary people like this doctor.

  His mouth moved heavily as he articulated words. “Don’t call our partners cats. The right thing to call them is partners. They fight for us in a team. You ought to know we call them partners, not cats. How is mine?”

  “I don’t know,” said the doctor contritely. “We’ll find out for you. Meanwhile, old man, you take it easy. There’s nothing but rest that can help you. Can you make yourself sleep, or would you like us to give you some kind of sedative?”

  “I can sleep,” said Underhill. “I just want to know about the Lady May.”

  The nurse joined in. She was a little antagonistic. “Don’t you want to know about the other people?”

  “They’re okay,” said Underhill. “I knew that before I came in here.”

  He stretched his arms and sighed and grinned at them. He could see they were relaxing and were beginning to treat him as a person instead of a patient.

  “I’m all right,” he said. “Just let me know when I can go see my partner.”

  A new thought struck him. He looked wildly at the doctor. “They didn’t send her off with the ship, did they?”

  “I’ll find out right away,” said the doctor. He gave Underhill a reassuring squeeze of the shoulder and left the room.

  The nurse took a napkin off a goblet of chilled fruit juice.

  Underhill tried to smile at her. There seemed to be something wrong with the girl. He wished she would go away. First she had started to be friendly and now she was distant again. It’s a nuisance being telepathic, he thought. You keep trying to reach even when you are not making contact.

  Suddenly she swung around on him.

  “You pinlighters! You and your damn cats!”

  Just as she stamped out, he burst into her mind. He saw himself a radiant hero, clad in his smooth suede uniform, the pin-set crown shining like ancient royal jewels around his head. He saw his own face, handsome and masculine, shining out of her mind. He saw himself very far away and he saw himself as she hated him.

  She hated him in the secrecy of her own mind. She hated him because he was—she thought—proud and strange and rich, better and more beautiful than people like her.

  He cut off the sight of her mind and, as he buried his face in the pillow, he caught an image of the Lady May.

  “She is a cat,” he thought. “That’s all she is—a cat!”

  But that was not how his mind saw her—quick beyond all dreams of speed, sharp, clever, unbelievably graceful, beautiful, wordless and undemanding.

  Where would he ever find a woman who could compare with her?

  Set just before the novel Brother In Arms, our next story—about the namesake character of Lois McMaster Bujold’s hit Miles Vorkosigan series—first appeared in 1987 and tells the story of Miles leading a snatch-and-grab raid to rescue a military genius from under the nose of the Cetagandans, so he can organize a new Marilacan resistance movement. One of the few full novellas in our book, this story well demonstrates both why Bujold’s work has topped award nominations and critics’ rankings throughout her career, and why Miles Vorkosigan has become one of the most beloved space opera characters of the last thirty years.

  THE BORDERS OF INFINITY

  LOIS MCMASTER BUJOLD

  How could I have died and gone to hell without noticing the transition?

  The opalescent force dome capped a surreal and alien landscape, frozen for a moment by Miles’s disorientation and dismay. The dome defined a perfect circle, half a kilometer in diameter. Miles stood just inside its edge, where the glowing concave surface dove into the hard-packed dirt and disappeared. His imagination followed the arc buried beneath his feet to the far side, where it erupted again to complete the sphere. It was like being trapped inside an eggshell. An unbreakable eggshell.

  Within was a scene from an ancient limbo. Dispirited men and women sat, or stood, or mostly lay down, singly or in scattered irregular groups, across the breadth of the arena. Miles’s eye searched anxiously for some remnant of order or military grouping, but the inhabitants seemed splashed randomly as a liquid across the ground.

  Perhaps he had been killed just now, just entering this prison camp. Perhaps his captors had betrayed him to his death, like those ancient Earth soldiers who had lured their victims sheeplike into poisoned showers, diverting and soothing their suspicions with stone soap, until their final enlightenment burst upon them in a choking cloud. Perhaps the annihilation of his body had been so swift, his neurons had not had time to carry the information to his brain. Why else did so many antique myths agree that hell was a circular place?

  Dagoola IV Top Security Prison Camp #3. This was it? This naked… dinner plate? Miles had vaguely visioned barracks, marching guards, daily head counts, secret tunnels, escape committees.

  It was the dome that made it all so simple, Miles realized. What need for barracks to shelter prisoners from the elements? The dome did it. What need for guards? The dome was generated from without. Nothing inside could breach it. No need for guards, or head counts. Tunnels were a futility, escape committees an absurdity. The dome did it all.

  The only structures were what appeared to be big gray plastic mushrooms evenly placed about every hundred meters around the perimeter of the dome. What little activity there was seemed clustered around them. Latrines, Miles recognized.

  Miles and his three fellow prisoners had entered through a temporary portal, which had closed behind them before the brief bulge of force dome containing their entry vanished in front of them. The nearest inhabitant of the dome, a man, lay a few meters away upon a sleeping mat identical to the one Miles now clutched. He turned his head slightly to stare at the little party of newcomers, smiled sourly, and rolled over on his side with his back to them. Nobody else nearby even bothered to look up.

  “Holy shit,” muttered one of Miles’s companions.

  He and his two buddies drew together unconsciously. The three had been from the same unit once, they’d said. Miles had met them bare minutes ago, in their final stages of processing, where they had all been issued their total supply of worldly goods for life in Dagoola #3.

  A single pair of loose gray trousers. A matching short-sleeved gray tunic. A rectangular sleeping mat, rolled up. A plastic cup. That was all. That, and the new numbers encoded upon their skins. It bothered Miles intensely that their captors had chosen to locate the numbers in the middle of their backs, where they couldn’t see them. He resisted a futile urge to twist and crane his neck anyway, though his hand snaked up under his shirt to scratch a purely psychosomatic itch. You couldn’t feel the encode, either.

  Some motion appeared in the tableau. A group of four or five men approaching. The welcoming committee at last? Miles was desperate for information. Where among all these countless gray men and women—no, not countless, Miles told himself firmly. They were all accounted for here.

  The battered remnants of the 3rd and 4th Armored All-Terrain Rangers. The ingenious and tenacious civilian defenders of Garson Transfer Station. Winoweh’s 2nd Battalion had been captured almost intact. And the 14th Commandos, survivors of the high-tech fortress at Fallow Core. Particularly the survivors of Fallow Core. Ten thousand, two hundred fourteen exactly. The planet Marilac’s finest. Ten thousand, two hundred fifteen, counting himself. Ought he to count himself?

  The welcoming committee drew up in a ragged bunch a few meters away. They looked tough and tall and muscular and not noticeably friendly. Dull, sullen eyes, full of a deadly boredom that even their present calculation did not lighten.

  The two groups, the five and the three, sized each other up. The three turned, and started walking stiffly and prudently away. Miles realized belatedly that he, not a part of either group, was thus left alone.

  Alone and immensely conspicuous. Self-consci
ousness, body-consciousness, normally held at bay by the simple fact that he didn’t have time to waste on it, returned to him with a rush. Too short, too odd-looking—his legs were even in length now, after the last operation, but surely not long enough to outrun these five. And where did one run to, in this place? He crossed off flight as an option.

  Fight? Get serious.

  This isn’t going to work, he realized sadly, even as he started walking toward them. But it was more dignified than being chased down with the same result.

  He tried to make his smile austere rather than foolish. No telling whether he succeeded. “Hi, there. Can you tell me where to find Colonel Guy Tremont’s 14th Commando Division?”

  One of the five snorted sardonically. Two moved behind Miles.

  Well, a snort was almost speech. Expression, anyway. A start, a toehold. Miles focused on that one. “What’s your name and rank and company, soldier?”

  “No ranks in here, mutant. No companies. No soldiers. No nothing.”

  Miles glanced around. Surrounded, of course. Naturally. “You got some friends, anyway.”

  The talker almost smiled. “You don’t.”

  Miles wondered if perhaps he had been premature in crossing off flight as an option. “I wouldn’t count on that if I were—unh!” The kick to his kidneys, from behind, cut him off—he damn near bit his tongue—he fell, dropping bedroll and cup and landing in a tangle. A barefoot kick, no combat boots this time, thank God—by the rules of Newtonian physics, his attacker’s foot ought to hurt just as much as his back. Fine. Jolly. Maybe they’d bruise their knuckles, punching him out…

  One of the gang gathered up Miles’s late wealth, cup and bedroll. “Want his clothes? They’re too little for me.”

  “Naw.”

  “Yeah,” said the talker. “Take ’em anyway. Maybe bribe one of the women.”

  The tunic was jerked off over Miles’s head, the pants over his feet. Miles was too busy protecting his head from random kicks to fight much for his clothes, trying obliquely to take as many hits as possible on his belly or ribcage, not arms or legs or jaw. A cracked rib was surely the most injury he could afford right now, here, at the beginning. A broken jaw would be the worst.

  His assailants desisted only a little before they discovered by experimentation the secret weakness of his bones.

  “That’s how it is in here, mutant,” said the talker, slightly winded.

  “I was born naked,” Miles panted from the dirt. “Didn’t stop me.”

  “Cocky little shit,” said the talker.

  “Slow learner,” remarked another.

  The second beating was worse than the first. Two cracked ribs at least—his jaw barely escaped being smashed, at the cost of something painfully wrong in his left wrist, flung up as a shield. This time Miles resisted the impulse to offer any verbal parting shots.

  He lay in the dirt and wished he could pass out.

  * * *

  He lay a long time, cradled in pain. He was not sure how long. The illumination from the force dome was even and shadowless, unchanging. Timeless, like eternity. Hell was eternal, was it not? This place had too damn many congruencies with hell, that was certain.

  And here came another demon… Miles blinked the approaching figure into focus. A man, as bruised and naked as Miles himself, gaunt-ribbed, starveling, knelt in the dirt a few meters away. His face was bony, aged by stress; he might have been forty, or fifty—or twenty-five.

  His eyes were unnaturally prominent, due to the shrinking of his flesh. Their whites seemed to gleam feverishly against the dirt darkening his skin. Dirt, not beard stubble—every prisoner in here, male and female, had their hair cut short and the hair follicles stunned to prevent regrowth. Perpetually clean-shaved and crew-cut. Miles had undergone the same process bare hours ago. But whoever had processed this fellow must have been in a hurry. The hair stunner had missed a line on his cheek, and a few dozen hairs grew there like a stripe on a badly mown lawn. Even curled as they were, Miles could see they were several centimeters long, draggling down past the man’s jaw. If only he knew how fast hair grew, he could calculate how long this fellow had been here. Too long, whatever the numbers, Miles thought with an inward sigh.

  The man had the broken-off bottom half of a plastic cup, which he pushed cautiously toward Miles. His breath whistled raggedly past his yellowish teeth, from exertion or excitement or disease—probably not disease, they were all well immunized here. Escape, even through death, was not that easy. Miles rolled over and propped himself stiffly on his elbow, regarding his visitor through the thinning haze of his aches and pains.

  The man scrabbled back slightly, smiled nervously. He nodded toward the cup. “Water. Better drink. The cup’s cracked, and it all leaks out if you wait too long.”

  “Thanks,” croaked Miles. A week ago, or in a previous lifetime, depending on how you counted time, Miles had dawdled over a selection of wines, dissatisfied with this or that nuance of flavor. His lips cracked as he grinned in memory. He drank. It was perfectly ordinary water, lukewarm, faintly redolent of chlorine and sulfur. A refined body, but the bouquet is a bit presumptuous…

  The man squatted in studied politeness until Miles finished drinking, then leaned forward on his knuckles in restrained urgency. “Are you the One?”

  Miles blinked. “Am I the what?”

  “The One. The other one, I should say. The scripture says there has to be two.”

  “Uh”—Miles hesitated in caution—“what exactly does the scripture say?”

  The man’s right hand wrapped over his knobby left wrist, around which was tied a rag screwed into a sort of rope. He closed his eyes; his lips moved a moment, and then he recited aloud, “…but the pilgrims went up that hill with ease, because they had these two men to lead them by the arms; also they had left their garments behind them, for though they went in with them, they came out without them.” His eyes popped back open to stare hopefully at Miles.

  So, now we begin to see why this guy seems to be all by himself… “Are you, perchance, the other One?” Miles shot at a venture.

  The man nodded shyly.

  “I see. Um…” How was it that he always attracted the nut cases? He licked the last drops of water from his lips. The fellow might have some screws loose, but he was certainly an improvement over the last lot, always presuming he didn’t have another personality or two of the homicidal loonie variety tucked away in his head. No, in that case he’d be introducing himself as the Chosen Two, and not be looking for outside assistance. “Um… what’s your name?”

  “Suegar.”

  “Suegar. Right, all right. My name is Miles, by the way.”

  “Huh.” Suegar grimaced in a sort of pleased irony. “Your name means ‘soldier,’ did you know?”

  “Uh, yeah, so I’ve been told.”

  “But you’re not a soldier…?”

  No subtle expensive trick of clothing line or uniform style here to hide from himself, if no one else, the peculiarities of his body. Miles flushed. “They were taking anything, toward the end. They made me a recruiting clerk. I never did get to fire my gun. Listen, Suegar—how did you come to know you were the One, or at any rate one of the Ones? Is it something you’ve always known?”

  “It came on me gradually,” confessed Suegar, shifting to sit cross-legged. “I’m the only one in here with the words, y’see.” He caressed his rag rope again. “I’ve hunted all up and down the camp, but they only mock me. It was a kind of process of elimination, y’see, when they all gave up but me.”

  “Ah.” Miles too sat up, only gasping a little in pain. Those ribs were going to be murder for the next few days. He nodded toward the rope bracelet. “Is that where you keep your scripture? Can I see it?” And how the hell had Suegar ever smuggled a plastic flimsy, or loose piece of paper or whatever, in here?

  Suegar clutched his arms protectively to his chest and shook his head. “They’ve been trying to take them from me for months, y’see. I can’t be
too careful. Until you prove you’re the One. The devil can quote scripture, y’know.”

  Yes, that was rather what I had in mind… Who knew what opportunities Suegar’s “scripture” might contain? Well, maybe later. For now, keep dancing. “Are there any other signs?” asked Miles. “You see, I don’t know that I’m your One, but on the other hand I don’t know I’m not, either. I just got here, after all.”

  Suegar shook his head again. “It’s only five or six sentences, y’see. You have to interpolate a lot.”

  I’ll bet. Miles did not voice the comment aloud. “However did you come by it? Or get it in here?”

  “It was at Port Lisma, y’see, just before we were captured,” said Suegar. “House-to-house fighting. One of my boot heels had come a bit loose, and it clicked when I walked. Funny, with all that barrage coming down around our ears, how a little thing like that can get under your skin. There was this bookcase with a glass front, real antique books made of paper—I smashed it open with my gun butt and tore out part of a page from one, and folded it up to stick in my boot heel, to make a sort of shim, y’see, and stop the clicking. Didn’t look at the book. Didn’t even know it was scripture till later. At least, I think it’s scripture. It sounds like scripture, anyway. It must be scripture.”

  Suegar twisted his beard hairs nervously around his finger. “When we were waiting to be processed, I’d pulled it out of my boot, just idle-like, y’know. I had it in my hand—the processing guard saw it, but he just didn’t take it away from me. Probably thought it was just a harmless piece of paper. Didn’t know it was scripture. I still had it in my hand when we were dumped in here. D’you know, it’s the only piece of writing in this whole camp?” he added rather proudly. “It must be scripture.”

  “Well… you take good care of it, then,” advised Miles kindly. “If you’ve preserved it this long, it was obviously meant to be your job.”