“What does that mean?”
“Trace efforts continue as requested, sir. But we have not detected the location of the missing matrix.”
“No clues? Not even a hint?”
“No data at all, sir. There’s essentially no way to isolate the minute electromagnetic pulse of a free matrix from the background noise of the ship’s entire electrical system.”
I believed it. 612 Jason Jason had told me that in nearly the same words.
I said, “I have reason to think that the matrix is no longer on the ship, 49 Henry Henry.”
“Do you, sir?” said 49 Henry Henry in its usual aloof, half- mocking way.
“I do, yes. After a careful study of the situation, it’s my opinion that the matrix exited the ship earlier this day and will not be heard from again.”
“Shall I record that as an official position, sir?”
“Record it,” I said.
“Done, sir.”
“And therefore, 49 Henry Henry, you can cancel search mode immediately and close the file. We’ll enter a debit for one matrix and the Service bookkeepers can work it out later.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Decouple,” I ordered the intelligence.
49 Henry Henry went away. I sat quietly amid the splendors of my cabin, thinking back over my starwalk and reliving that sense of harmony, of love, of oneness with the worlds of heaven, that had come over me while Vox and I drifted on the bosom of the Great Open. And feeling once again the keen slicing sense of loss that I had felt since Vox’s departure from me. In a little while I would have to rise and go to the command center and put myself through the motions of overseeing spinaround acquisition; but for the moment I remained where I was, motionless, silent, peering deep into the heart of my solitude.
“I’m not gone,” said an unexpected quiet voice.
It came like a punch beneath the heart. It was a moment before I could speak.
“Vox?” I said at last. “Where are you, Vox?”
“Right here.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Inside. I never went away.”
“You never—”
“You upset me. I just had to hide for a while.”
“You knew I was trying to find you?”
“Yes.”
Color came to my cheeks. Anger roared like a stream in spate through my veins. I felt myself blazing.
“You knew how I felt, when you—when it seemed that you weren’t there any more.”
“Yes,” she said, even more quietly, after a time.
I forced myself to grow calm. I told myself that she owed me nothing, except perhaps gratitude for sheltering her, and that whatever pain she had caused me by going silent was none of her affair. I reminded myself also that she was a child, unruly and turbulent and undisciplined.
After a bit I said, “I missed you. I missed you more than I want to say.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, sounding repentant, but not very. “I had to go away for a time. You upset me, Adam.”
“By asking you to show me how you used to look?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand why that upset you so much.”
“You don’t have to,” Vox said. “I don’t mind now. You can see me, if you like. Do you still want to? Here. This is me. This is what I used to be. If it disgusts you don’t blame me. Okay? Okay, Adam? Here. Have a look. Here I am.”
14.
There was a wrenching within me, a twisting, a painful yanking sensation, as of some heavy barrier forcibly being pulled aside. And then the glorious radiant scarlet sky of Kansas Four blossomed on the screen of my mind.
She didn’t simply show it to me. She took me there. I felt the soft moist wind on my face, I breathed the sweet, faintly pungent air, I heard the sly rustling of glossy leathery fronds that dangled from bright yellow trees. Beneath my bare feet the black soil was warm and spongy.
I was Leeleaine, who liked to call herself Vox. I was seventeen years old and swept by forces and compulsions as powerful as hurricanes.
I was her from within and also I saw her from outside.
My hair was long and thick and dark, tumbling down past my shoulders in an avalanche of untended curls and loops and snags. My hips were broad, my breasts were full and heavy: I could feel the pull of them, the pain of them. It was almost as if they were stiff with milk, though they were not. My face was tense, alert, sullen, aglow with angry intelligence. It was not an unappealing face. Vox was not an unappealing girl.
From her earlier reluctance to show herself to me I had expected her to be ugly, or perhaps deformed in some way, dragging herself about in a coarse, heavy, burdensome husk of flesh that was a constant reproach to her. She had spoken of her life on Kansas Four as being so dreary, so sad, so miserable, that she saw no hope in staying there. And had given up her body to be turned into mere electricity, on the promise that she could have a new body—any body—when she reached Cul-de-Sac. I hated my body, she had told me. I couldn’t wait to be rid of it. She had refused even to give me a glimpse of it, retreating instead for hours into a desperate silence so total that I thought she had fled.
All that was a mystery to me now. The Leeleaine that I saw, that I was, was a fine sturdy-looking girl. Not beautiful, no, too strong and strapping for that, I suppose, but far from ugly: her eyes were warm and intelligent, her lips full, her nose finely modeled. And it was a healthy body, too, robust, vital. Of course she had no deformities; and why had I thought she had, when it would have been a simple matter of retrogenetic surgery to amend any bothersome defect? No, there was nothing wrong with the body that Vox had abandoned and for which she professed such loathing, for which she felt such shame.
Then I realized that I was seeing her from outside. I was seeing her as if by relay, filtering and interpreting the information she was offering me by passing it through the mind of an objective observer: myself. Who understood nothing, really, of what it was like to be anyone but himself.
Somehow—it was one of those automatic, unconscious adjustments—I altered the focus of my perceptions. All old frames of reference fell away and I let myself lose any sense of the separateness of our identities.
I was her. Fully, unconditionally, inextricably.
And I understood.
Figures flitted about her, shadowy, baffling, maddening. Brothers, sisters, parents, friends: they were all strangers to her. Everyone on Kansas Four was a stranger to her. And always would be.
She hated her body not because it was weak or unsightly but because it was her prison. She was enclosed within it as though within narrow stone walls. It hung about her, a cage of flesh, holding her down, pinning her to this lovely world called Kansas Four where she knew only pain and isolation and estrangement. Her body—her perfectly acceptable, healthy body—had become hateful to her because it was the emblem and symbol of her soul’s imprisonment. Wild and incurably restless by temperament, she had failed to find a way to live within the smothering predictability of Kansas Four, a planet where she would never be anything but an internal outlaw. The only way she could leave Kansas Four was to surrender the body that tied her to it; and so she had turned against it with fury and loathing, rejecting it, abandoning it, despising it, detesting it. No one could ever understand that who beheld her from the outside.
But I understood.
I understood much more than that, in that one flashing moment of communion that she and I had. I came to see what she meant when she said that I was her twin, her double, her other self. Of course we were wholly different, I the sober, staid, plodding, diligent man, and she the reckless, volatile, impulsive, tempestuous girl. But beneath all that we were the same: misfits, outsiders, troubled wanderers through worlds we had never made. We had found vastly differing ways to cope with our pain. Yet we were one and the same, two halves
of a single entity.
We will remain together always now, I told myself.
And in that moment our communion broke. She broke it—it must have been she, fearful of letting this new intimacy grow too deep—and I found myself apart from her once again, still playing host to her in my brain but separated from her by the boundaries of my own individuality, my own selfhood. I felt her nearby, within me, a warm but discrete presence. Still within me, yes. But separate again.
15.
There was shipwork to do. For days, now, Vox’s invasion of me had been a startling distraction. But I dared not let myself forget that we were in the midst of a traversal of heaven. The lives of us all, and of our passengers, depended on the proper execution of our duties: even mine. And worlds awaited the bounty that we bore. My task of the moment was to oversee spinaround acquisition.
I told Vox to leave me temporarily while I went through the routines of acquisition. I would be jacked to other crewmen for a time; they might very well be able to detect her within me; there was no telling what might happen. But she refused. “No,” she said. “I won’t leave you. I don’t want to go out there. But I’ll hide, deep down, the way I did when I was upset with you.”
“Vox—”I began.
“No. Please. I don’t want to talk about it.”
There was no time to argue the point. I could feel the depth and intensity of her stubborn determination.
“Hide, then,” I said. “If that’s what you want to do.”
I made my way down out of the Eye to Engine Deck.
The rest of the acquisition team was already assembled in the Great Navigation Hall: Fresco, Raebuck, Roacher. Raebuck’s role was to see to it that communications channels were kept open, Fresco’s to set up the navigation coordinates, and Roacher, as power engineer, would monitor fluctuations in drain and input-output cycling. My function was to give the cues at each stage of acquisition. In truth I was pretty much redundant, since Raebuck and Fresco and Roacher had been doing this sort of thing a dozen times a voyage for scores of voyages and they had little need of my guidance. The deeper truth was that they were redundant too, for 49 Henry Henry would oversee us all, and the intelligence was quite capable of setting up the entire process without any human help. Nevertheless there were formalities to observe, and not inane ones. Intelligences are far superior to humans in mental capacity, interfacing capability, and reaction time, but even so they are nothing but servants, and artificial servants at that, lacking in any real awareness of human fragility or human ethical complexity. They must only be used as tools, not decision-makers. A society which delegates responsibilities of life and death to its servants will eventually find the servants’ hands at its throat. As for me, novice that I was, my role was valid as well: the focal point of the enterprise, the prime initiator, the conductor and observer of the process. Perhaps anyone could perform those functions, but the fact remained that someone had to, and by tradition that someone was the captain. Call it a ritual, call it a highly stylized dance, if you will. But there is no getting away from the human need for ritual and stylization. Such aspects of a process may not seem essential, but they are valuable and significant, and ultimately they can be seen to be essential as well.
“Shall we begin?” Fresco asked.
We jacked up, Roacher directly into the ship, Raebuck into Roacher, Fresco to me, me into the ship.
“Simulation,” I said.
Raebuck keyed in the first code and the vast echoing space that was the Great Navigation Hall came alive with pulsing light: a representation of heaven all about us, the lines of force, the spinaround nodes, the stars, the planets. We moved unhinderedly in free fall, drifting as casually as angels. We could easily have believed we were starwalking.
The simulacrum of the ship was a bright arrow of fierce light just below us and to the left. Ahead, throbbing like a nest of twining angry serpents, was the globe that represented the Lasciate Ogni Speranza spinaround point, tightly-wound dull gray cables shot through with strands of fierce scarlet.
“Enter approach mode,” I said. “Activate receptors. Begin threshold equalization. Begin momentum comparison. Prepare for acceleration uptick. Check angular velocity. Begin spin consolidation. Enter displacement select. Extend mast. Prepare for acquisition receptivity.”
At each command the proper man touched a control key or pressed a directive panel or simply sent an impulse shooting through the jack hookup by which he was connected, directly or indirectly, to the mind of the ship. Out of courtesy to me, they waited until the commands were given, but the speed with which they obeyed told me that their minds were already in motion even as I spoke.
“It’s really exciting, isn’t it?” Vox said suddenly.
“For God’s sake, Vox! What are you trying to do?”
For all I knew, the others had heard her outburst as clearly as though it had come across a loudspeaker.
“I mean,” she went on, “I never imagined it was anything like this. I can feel the whole—”
I shot her a sharp, anguished order to keep quiet. Her surfacing like this, after my warning to her, was a lunatic act. In the silence that followed I felt a kind of inner reverberation, a sulky twanging of displeasure coming from her. But I had no time to worry about Vox’s moods now.
Arcing patterns of displacement power went ricocheting through the Great Navigation Hall as our mast came forth—not the underpinning for a set of sails, as it would be on a vessel that plied planetary seas, but rather a giant antenna to link us to the spinaround point ahead—and the ship and the spinaround point reached toward one another like grappling many-armed wrestlers. Hot streaks of crimson and emerald and gold and amethyst speared the air, vaulting and rebounding. The spinaround point, activated now and trembling between energy states, was enfolding us in its million tentacles, capturing us, making ready to whirl on its axis and hurl us swiftly onward toward the next way-station in our journey across heaven.
“Acquisition,” Raebuck announced.
“Proceed to capture acceptance,” I said.
“Acceptance,” said Raebuck.
“Directional mode,” I said. “Dimensional grid eleven.”
“Dimensional grid eleven,” Fresco repeated.
The whole hall seemed on fire now.
“Wonderful,” Vox murmured. “So beautiful—”
“Vox!”
“Request spin authorization,” said Fresco.
“Spin authorization granted,” I said. “Grid eleven.”
“Grid eleven,” Fresco said again. “Spin achieved.”
A tremor went rippling through me—and through Fresco, through Raebuck, through Roacher. It was the ship, in the persona of 49 Henry Henry, completing the acquisition process. We had been captured by Lasciate Ogni Speranza, we had undergone velocity absorption and redirection, we had had new spin imparted to us, and we had been sent soaring off through heaven toward our upcoming port of call. I heard Vox sobbing within me, not a sob of despair but one of ecstasy, of fulfillment.
We all unjacked. Raebuck, that dour man, managed a little smile as he turned to me.
“Nicely done, Captain,” he said.
“Yes,” said Fresco. “Very nice. You’re a quick learner.”
I saw Roacher studying me with those little shining eyes of his. Go on, you bastard, I thought. You give me a compliment too now, if you know how.
But all he did was stare. I shrugged and turned away. What Roacher thought or said made little difference to me, I told myself.
As we left the Great Navigation Hall in our separate directions Fresco fell in alongside me. Without a word we trudged together toward the transit trackers that were waiting for us. Just as I was about to board mine he—or was it she?—said softly, “Captain?”
“What is it, Fresco?”
Fresco leaned close. Soft sly eyes, tricksy little smile; a
nd yet I felt some warmth coming from the navigator.
“It’s a very dangerous game, Captain.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do,” Fresco said. “No use pretending. We were jacked together in there. I felt things. I know.”
There was nothing I could say, so I said nothing.
After a moment Fresco said, “I like you. I won’t harm you. But Roacher knows too. I don’t know if he knew before, but he certainly knows now. If I were you, I’d find that very troublesome, Captain. Just a word to the wise. All right?”
16.
Only a fool would have remained on such a course as I had been following. Vox saw the risks as well as I. There was no hiding anything from anyone any longer; if Roacher knew, then Bulgar knew, and soon it would be all over the ship. No question, either, but that 49 Henry Henry knew. In the intimacies of our navigation-hall contact, Vox must have been as apparent to them as a red scarf around my forehead.
There was no point in taking her to task for revealing her presence within me like that during acquisition. What was done was done. At first it had seemed impossible to understand why she had done such a thing; but then it became all too easy to comprehend. It was the same sort of unpredictable, unexamined, impulsive behavior that had led her to go barging into a suspended passenger’s mind and cause his death. She was simply not one who paused to think before acting. That kind of behavior has always been bewildering to me. She was my opposite as well as my double. And yet had I not done a Vox-like thing myself, taking her into me, when she appealed to me for sanctuary, without stopping at all to consider the consequences?
“Where can I go?” she asked, desperate. “If I move around the ship freely again they’ll track me and close me off. And then they’ll eradicate me. They’ll—”
“Easy,” I said. “Don’t panic. I’ll hide you where they won’t find you.”
“Inside some passenger?”
“We can’t try that again. There’s no way to prepare the passenger for what’s happening to him, and he’ll panic. No. I’ll put you in one of the annexes. Or maybe one of the virtualities.”
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