Outward Bound

by Juanita Coulson

  After what seemed like an interminable wait, Morgan responded. "I've ordered three more test frames and a full-scale Prototype. They'll deliver the frames to FTL Station in January, the Prototype in April."

  Money. A lot of it. Time. A lot of that, too, and that was even more precious. Terran Worlds Council's deadline was an angry red calendar date in Brenna's mind's eye. So was Derek's March departure date aboard Hiber-Ship's New Earth Seeker.

  "I'm paying," Morgan said. Talking was an obvious strain. His voice wasn't as close to normal-sounding as it had been. He was losing ground there. And breathing was an effort. The extra breath required for speaking taxed him visibly. Brenna felt guilty that she had said so much earlier. Morgan behaved as if he were obligated to answer her unspoken questions about the funding. It didn't take telepathy to guess that Breakthrough Unlimited was hanging on by its fingertips, financially!

  "That's not important," Brenna said and meant it. She had lost sight of the goal. FTL at any price.

  And what a price Morgan had paid!

  A year ago, Morgan would have had a cute comeback: "Sure. What do we care? It's only money. So sell a few more asteroid ore cargoes. What do you think you're my partner for? Just to look beautiful?"

  Now he said nothing. Another aching silence dominated both rooms. Brenna could hear the hyperbaric chamber's machinery operating beneath the floor. The mannequin form that was Morgan lay in the chair. When Brenna thought he had lost interest in seeing or talking to her, his chest rose and fell rapidly several times. "The oscillator redesign is underway," he finally said. "I hired Tobiyah's firm to do it for us."

  Brenna exclaimed, "A redesign? But... that's a major update! Why didn't you tell me? How long will it take?"

  This time he answered her almost at once. "Till April." If he had been able to show facial expression, he would probably have grinned and then reminded her that he had already told her the Prototype wouldn't be delivered until April. The new oscillator, a new test ship. He sucked in air for a few moments, then added, "The mini-models will be ready in January, for the unmanned tests. I didn't consult you because you were busy. We have to get it ordered now."

  April. Derek would be in cryogenic stasis by April. On his way to the stars.

  "It'll work," Morgan said simply. "I've got the data matching now." He didn't say anything else. He rolled his head back, looking at the screen once more, a man-sized doll, barely capable of movement. Only his brain still worked the way it used to. Better, perhaps.

  Quol-Bez was almost as motionless as Morgan, standing there in one place for hours. A man dependent on machines for his every breath and for his eyesight and voice and movements, and an alien being who came from an entirely different evolution and culture than Homo sapiens. But they seemed to be on each other's wavelength, and no one else had a receiver. Everyone else—including Brenna—was out in the cold.

  Brenna was Morgan's arms and legs. Manage the test rims. Take a trip out to FTL Station. Take a trip to Earth and stroke-the-sycophants and kowtow to Terran Worlds Council. Be the front-office partner, cope with the supply problems and scut work, accept resignations tendered. She was like Morgan's servo mechanisms, a workhorse, not a partner who could sit down and talk to him as she used to. Even a few months ago, they had had more conversation than this!

  Those strange eyes looked toward her, impaling her. Lifeless and artificial eyes, but controlled by a keen, passionate intelligence. He didn't speak. But she understood. "No, you're not a robot. You're my cousin. You're here. That counts, Brenna. You still come to see me, when most of my old friends don't." Involuntarily, Brenna took a step back, frightened by the intensity of that stare.

  Had she been angry at the silent rapport between Morgan and Quol-Bez? Or speculating about telepathy? Well, what if it were true? Wouldn't that be wonderful for Morgan? What did he have in the way of friendship now? Not very damned much at all. Brenna and her parents. Loving people, separated from him by immeasurable difficulties in communication. The family tried to keep operating on the old basis. Baby-sitting Morgan, trading off schedules so that one of its members was always at the residence. Yet they couldn't really touch him or give him what he needed and wanted. Brenna glanced at Quol-Bez again, fascinated, envious, even a bit jealous.

  Her jaw ached. She had been gritting her teeth, hating herself for her selfishness. "Morgan? It's okay. About the oscillator."

  He didn't move his head, but his eyes were on her. She watched him marshaling his strength, breathing heavily. "It'll work. Don't worry. I won't let anyone else be killed." A pause. An unspoken addition: And no one else will be condemned to a living hell such as I'm in. His words were raspy with the effort of talking. "I said I'd put the pieces back together and make it work. I will. When the new oscillator's ready, will the pilot be ready? FTL doesn't forgive mistakes. You have to make up your mind, to go with it or not."

  Implications hammered at her. Somehow, he knew about her doubts. As long as her feelings were torn, she would be risking herself and the ship. Morgan realized Brenna would demand the right to pilot the next Prototype. He was setting her an ultimatum. He had the key. And he was a partner with full voting rights. He could cancel out her vote, legally. Besides, the other pilots idolized him, trusted the conclusions Morgan was reaching on his data studies. Brenna wouldn't be able to go against them and Morgan.

  He was silent again. Brenna sensed the rapport between him and Quol-Bez. It all but shimmered in the air, penetrating the pli-wall. Human and alien. Sharing something no one else could. "Rest," Quol-Bez said. Brenna was startled at hearing him speak. The Vahnaj swiveled his head and looked at her kindly. "You know he speaks harshly out of stress. You must not think he does not love."

  "Of course," Brenna replied uneasily. "I understand how it is..."

  The tall figure swayed. Quol-Bez's long tunic and cape rustled. "You Saunder-kin do under-stand. You com-mun-i-cate. This is the ... your craft. What is the word? Ah! Your com-pan-y. Breakthrough. Todd has told me of his male parent and the de-vices he created. In-ven-tions. Ah! These advanced your species. My friend Todd em-ploys these de-vices. So do you and Saunder-kin Dian and Stu-art and Ca-rissa. And Morgan. This is all com-mun-i-ca-tion. Touch-ing."

  Sunset was falling across Valles Marineris, outside Morgan's room. The dying fire in the sky reached past the dim lighting in the isolation chamber and limned Quol-Bez's tall form. The effect made Brenna blink, seeing the Vahnaj as a supernatural creature.

  Communication. Touching. That was what faster-than-light travel would mean, too. Interstellar touching between species, touching on a mass scale. Hundreds, then thousands, of humans would travel to the stars. They would meet thousands of Vahnaj and other beings. Quol-Bez wouldn't be an intriguing oddity among humans anymore.

  If only Quol-Bez had let humans examine his FTL-equipped Vahnaj ship before the accidents.

  I cannot give the ship to you. And you cannot take it. Do not risk such a thing. It would end in terrible catastrophe.

  Had she imagined that warning? Or had Quol-Bez been reading her mind and putting his thoughts into her brain without speech? And just what did the warning mean? Morgan had hinted at the same thing. A booby trap on board the Vahnaj ship? The Vahnaj might not think of a protective device in such crude terms. But that could be the situation. Morgan had pointed out the logic to her, when he was still indulging in what passed for normal conversation.

  "Morgan has left de-ci-sions to you, Brenna," Quol-Bez said suddenly. "You do not see this, but it is so. He cannot reach."

  "He reaches you." Brenna hadn't meant that to sound accusing, but it did. "And you reach him."

  Quol-Bez made no reply. He bowed politely and turned back toward the transparent wall. For a moment he was silhouetted by the sunset. Then the light winked behind a distant peak and the effect diminished.

  Brenna waited for a while to see if either of them would say anything further to her. They didn't. She gave up and stalked out past the monitor station, moving on d
own the corridor and out into Morgan's living quarters. She stood in the darkened main room, in the fading sunset, clasping her arms tightly about herself, shuddering. Without realizing she was doing so, she whispered, "Damn, damn, damn..."

  "It is deep pain, is it not?" A voice came from the shadows. Brenna jumped and turned toward the hidden figure. Chin Jui-

  Sao touched a light relay, revealing herself. The glow from the nearby panel was muted, not competing with the red fire outside the balcony window. Sao was sitting in a corner, her feet curled up beneath her. "I did not mean to intrude on your privacy," she said. "It is apparent you are disturbed. If you would wish to be alone..."

  Brenna waved her hand tiredly. "It doesn't matter. I don't care, not about anything. Not right now." She walked toward Sao and perched on the edge of a divan, facing the Chinese woman. For the first time, Brenna realized Sao had been crying. Her cheeks were still wet. "What's happening to Morgan?" Brenna was talking to herself as much as to Sao. "I'm losing him, and I don't know how to stop it. How can you lose someone you've known all your life? We were babies together, kids together."

  She didn't expect an answer, but she got one, of sorts. "It is no less painful when you lose someone you have known only months—when you comprehend you never had that person at all." Anger was in Sao's voice.

  Brenna dragged herself out of her depression, regarding the smaller woman thoughtfully. She leaned forward, putting an arm around Sao. Very gently, Brenna said, "You love him, don't you? Morgan thought you did."

  "I love Morgan, too. But ... yes, I love ... Quol-Bez." Sao pronounced the name timidly, as if fearful of being chastised for such forwardness. "He does not love me ... cannot love me ... not as I would wish."

  Brenna eased herself down beside Sao, cradling the translator's head on her shoulder, wanting to comfort them both. "To love one's ... employer ... is not good form," Sao said, sniffling. "I was trained not to ... I had not wanted to show the Ambassador my ...my feelings."

  "It happens," Brenna replied with a rueful smile. "And sometimes you simply can't shut those feelings off, no matter how hard you try. I know that too damned well. It's hopeless, isn't it? You can't have what you want—and you can't let go. You hang on, and you torture yourself, and you torture the one you love, too. Spirit of Humanity knows why we humans do these things to ourselves!"

  Sao hid her face in her hands, rocking back and forth. "It is worse! You do not know! His ... his superiors ... they entered his being, before ... before he left Vahnaj. His mental capacities and intelligence are intact, but he must not... cannot ... certain vital emotional and glandular functions..."

  Aghast, Brenna demanded, "Are you saying they gelded him, like some sort of animal?" Was that the explanation for the rapport between Quol-Bez and Morgan? Morgan's brutal unmanning was due to the horrible burns he had suffered. But if Quol-Bez had been robbed by his own kind...!

  "No, no! Not that! I do ... I do not think," Sao replied, raising her head. Her expression was desolate. She lowered her already-soft voice to near-inaudibility. "We touch. We have ... made love. But it is ... not complete. There is always an emptiness. Always."

  Brenna wasn't sure what to say. "Maybe it has to do with his alienness, Sao. We're different species, after all. That has to be a very big ... uh ... problem." Prurient curiosity stirred. Brenna was vaguely ashamed of that human weakness. But she wasn't the first to wonder about human-Vahnaj sex. Sensationalist newshunters had gathered large audiences by just such extrapolations, before Terran Worlds Council's diplomatic watchdogs had clamped the lid on those gross programs. From then on, speculation remained private, gossiped about, but not a subject for the media to discuss. Sao had personal knowledge, however. Did Sao's bosses at T.W.C. know? They must. Perhaps they discreetly looked the other way, believing it best not to interfere with the Ambassador's intimate relationships. He was not, after all, theirs to command. Terran Worlds Council was eager to stay on good terms with the Vahnaj and their Ambassador. There could be human empathy in their attitude as well. Humans could imagine themselves the sole member of their species, in an alien culture. Who would blame a being for taking the solace of a sex partner in such a situation, even if the bedmate was of a different species? They might wink and nudge one another—and keep their mouths shut as a diplomatic courtesy to Quol-Bez.

  Chin Jui-Sao was living the fantasy of thousands of human women who had been fascinated by Quol-Bez since he first arrived in the Solar System. Yet Sao was miserably unhappy. For her, the sexual liaison was a tragedy, not a joy. She was suffering far beyond the ordinary disappointments of an inept lover. From her account, there was no physical mismatch at all. The failure was something beyond bodies and orgasms, an indefinable joining of spirit that Sao wanted but wasn't going to get.

  Rapport. Missing. Not there.

  Sao gripped Brenna's arm. "Do you not see? They are the same, Quol-Bez and Morgan. They cannot touch other beings. Not real touching. And ... and even if Quol-Bez returns to his own people, he will now forever be apart from them. What they took is ...is irreplaceable."

  Brenna tried to smother her outrage. The Vahnaj had altered Quol-Bez's ability to relate, not only to humans, but to his own species as well! "Yes, I've seen the rapport between Quol-Bez and Morgan," she said. "It's been going on for weeks now."

  Sao nodded. "It has its roots in Morgan's injuries."

  Isolation. Sensory deprivation. Whatever the Vahnaj had done to Quol-Bez to make him "immune" to emotional involvements with humans—and with other Vahnaj—wasn't working the way it must have been meant to. Their surgery, or telepathic castration, or whatever it was, was being canceled out because of what had happened to Morgan. Brenna imagined an alien organ or a portion of a Vahnaj brain that was vital to communication among the Vahnaj, linking them to other creatures of like emotions. The Vahnaj had cut it away from Quol-Bez, though.

  That made a cruel kind of diplomatic sense. The Vahnaj were still feeling their way into this interstellar cross-species relationship. For all they had known when they assigned Quol-Bez to an embassy in the Solar System, the humans might take him prisoner and try to brainwash or torture him to extract secrets the Vahnaj didn't want revealed. As Morgan had once said, the Vahnaj surely weren't fools. They had anticipated that possible threat and taken steps to prevent it, "altering" their Ambassador. Not castration, Sao insisted. No, it wouldn't be anything so crude or so easily understood by the human mind. Quol-Bez was evidently a functional male, and cross-species problems didn't interfere with that sort of contact. Sex was on a strictly physical level, nothing more, to Sao's grief.

  Yet something else had happened, quite apart from a sexual affair. The Vahnaj hadn't anticipated that Quol-Bez would become good friends with Todd Saunder and his "kin-family," especially Todd's severely injured nephew. They couldn't have predicted the devastating accident and the strange new energies to which Morgan had been subjected. Had those wounds opened avenues in his brain that were normally closed to the rest of mankind? Quol-Bez had hinted at that. A door now open, and a brain now able to accept Quol-Bez's touch? Intimate emotional contact—the very thing Quol-Bez's superiors had sought to prevent—and despite the "surgery," Quol-Bez had retained enough ability to make that contact.

  Telepathy? Two-way telepathy, perhaps?

  The Vahnaj FTL ship was off-limits to them. Probably booby-trapped. But maybe there was another way to plumb its secrets. Had Morgan found that way?

  Mind to mind. A human mind, trapped in a crippled body, but determined to solve the riddle of faster-than-light travel. A Vahnaj mind, forbidden to reveal how his species had developed that technology. Forbidden to reveal it in words, by speech. But what if he—unintentionally—revealed it during the linkup of human and Vahnaj minds?

  Guesswork. All of it. Sheer wishful thinking and speculation.

  But if it were true...

  Morgan was absolutely sure he had figured out the flaw in the Prototype. He just might have, all on his own. A brilliant mind,
a crack space pilot, and no more outside distractions. Total concentration. And maybe the problem-solving included a little help from a Vahnaj friend. That exciting premise might be the one good thing that would come out of so much pain.

  Sao got to her feet, pacing restlessly. Brenna followed the Chinese woman across the room and out onto the enclosed balcony. They stood gazing out over the rim of Valles Marineris and into the evening sky. Sao seemed to be making her peace with herself, drying her tears, withdrawing inside a stoic shell.

  The stars were shining, and the Martian moons reflected a small amount of light. An afterglow lingered from the sunset, an eerie light shrinking toward the horizon. In that pale radiance, Brenna saw Mars' rugged mountains and the steep walls of the rift. Her world. It was one among billions of inhabitable worlds, worlds near enough to Earth's norms for Homo sapiens to call them home.

  The stars—a sky full of jewels, and promise. Sao was looking at the stars, too. The men she and Brenna loved came from the stars, or wanted to go to the stars. Nothing could help Sao's pain. Even on Vahnaj, she and Quol-Bez would never share that special closeness she desired.

  And what was out there, among the stars, for Brenna Saunder? Could she hope for happiness? Morgan had told her to choose. Choose the right road. Hiber-Ship? Breakthrough Unlimited? Forget the stars for years. Join Derek and enter a stasis cubicle and begin a deathlike sleep on the way to a distant world. Or trust Morgan. Believe that the flaw was found, would be corrected. That this time the faster-than-light ship would pierce the barrier and hold the universe captive.

  And if she did that, Derek would go on his slow, steady way to the stars without her. Without Derek, was there any happiness—out there, here on Mars, or anywhere else?

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  New Earth Seeker

  The two Chase ships eased into FTL Station's dock. Tethers and fueling linkups attached. The storage-bay air locks opened, and tech crews began removing the orbiting drones the pilots had retrieved from the test-run area. The pilots clambered out, swimming on their safety lines. Maintenance had their mini-skidders ready, and the four returning pilots rode them over to the Station.