by David Brin
Culla could have been waiting just beyond the door, but there was another reason he had to leave his rear undefended. He had only a limited amount of time before the Sunship reached a high orbit. After they got into free space the humans would be safe from the tossing of the chromospheric storms, and the tough, reflecting physical shell of the ship could deflect enough of the heat of the Sun to keep them alive until help came.
So Culla had to finish them, and himself, off quickly. Jacob felt sure the Pring specialist was by the computer input, ninety degrees around the dome to the right, using his laser eyes to slowly reprogram past the machine’s safeguards.
Why he was doing it was a question that would have to wait.
Hughes picked up the knives. With the bag, some liquitubes, and Helene’s little stunner, they composed their armory.
Classically, since the alternative was death for all of them, the answer would be for one man to sacrifice himself so the other could finish Culla off.
He and Hughes could carefully time their approach from different directions to surprise Culla at the same moment. Or one man could come in front and the other, aim the stunner from over his shoulder.
But neither plan would work. Their opponent could literally kill a man as fast as he could look at him. Unlike the faked “adult” Sun Ghost projections, which were continuous output, Culla’s killer bolts were discharges. Jacob wished he could remember how many he’d fired off during the fight on topside . . . or at what repeat frequency. It probably didn’t matter. Culla had two eyes and two enemies. One bolt each would probably suffice.
Worst of all, they couldn’t be sure that Culla’s holographic imaging ability wouldn’t enable him to locate them the instant they stepped out onto the floor, from reflections off the inner shell. He probably couldn’t hurt them with reflections, but that was poor compensation.
If there weren’t so damned much attenuation during the internal bouncing of the beam they could have tried to disable the alien with the P-laser, by letting it sweep the entire ship while the humans and Fagin crowded into the gravity-loop.
Jacob cursed and wondered what was keeping them with the P-laser. Next to him Hughes mumbled softly into a wall intercom. He turned to Jacob. “They’re ready!” he said.
Thanks to their goggles they were spared most of the pain when the dome outside burst with light. Still it took a few moments to blink away tears and adapt to the brightness.
Commandant deSilva had, presumably with Dr. Martine’s help, dragged the P-laser to a new position near the rim of the upper deck. If her calculations were right the beam should hit the side of the dome on flip-side exactly where the computer input was. Unfortunately, the complexity of the figure needed to go from point A to B, through the narrow gap at the edge of the deck, meant that the beam probably wouldn’t harm Culla.
It did startle him though. At the instant the beam came on, while Jacob was squeezing his eyes shut, they heard a sudden chattering and sounds of movement far to the right.
When his vision cleared, Jacob saw a thin tracery of bright lines hanging in the air. The passage of the P-laser beam left a track in the small amount of dust in the air. That was fortunate. It would help them avoid it.
“Intercom on max?” he asked quickly.
Hughes gave thumbs up.
“Okay, let’s go!”
The P-laser was randomly putting out colors in the blue-green. They hoped it would confuse reflections from the inner shell.
He gathered his legs and counted, “One, two. Go!”
Jacob dashed out across the open space and dove behind one of the hulking recording machines at the rim of the deck. He heard Hughes land hard, two machines clockwise from him.
The man waved once when he glanced back. “Nothing over here!” he whispered harshly. Jacob took a look around the corner of his own machine, using a mirror from the aid-kit, which had been smeared with grease. Hughes had another mirror, from Martine’s purse.
Culla wasn’t in sight.
Between them, he and his partner could survey about three-fifths of the deck. The computer input was on the other side of the dome, just out of Hughes’ view. Jacob would have to take the long way around, darting from one recording machine to another.
The Sunship’s shell glowed in spots where the P-laser beam glanced off it. The colors shifted constantly. Otherwise, the red and pink miasma of the chromosphere surrounded them. They had left the big filament minutes before, and the herd of toroids with it, by now a hundred kilometers below.
Below was actually right over Jacob’s head. The photosphere, with the Big Spot in the center made a great, flat, endless, fiery ceiling above him, spicules hung like stalactites.
He gathered his legs beneath him and took off, bent over and facing away from any possible ambush.
He leapt over the P-laser beam where its path was traced in floating dust particles, and dove behind the next machine. Quickly he eased the mirror out to look at the territory now exposed.
Culla wasn’t in sight.
Neither was Hughes. He whistled two short notes in the brief code they’d agreed upon. All clear. He heard one note, the fellow’s reply.
He had to duck under the beam the next time. All the way across the narrow distance his skin crawled, anticipating a searing bolt of light along his flank.
He stumbled behind the machine and caught hold of it to steady himself, breathing heavily. That wasn’t right! He shouldn’t be so tired already. Something was wrong.
Jacob swallowed once then began to slide the mirror out along the counter-clockwise edge of the machine.
Pain lanced into his fingertips and he dropped the mirror with a cry. He stopped just short of popping the hand in his mouth, and held it, instead, a few inches away, his mouth open in agony.
Automatically, he started to lay over a light pain relief trance. The red pokers started to fade as the fingers seemed to grow more distant. Then the flow of relief stopped. It was like a tug of war. He could only accomplish so much; a counter pressure resisted the hypnosis with equal strength no matter how hard he concentrated.
Another of Hyde’s tricks. Well there was no time to dicker with him . . . whatever the hell he wanted. He looked at the hand, now that the pain was barely bearable. The index and fourth fingers were badly fried. The others were less damaged.
He managed to whistle a short code to Hughes. It was time to put his plan into effect, the only plan with any real chance of success.
Their only chance lay in getting into space. Time-compression was frozen on automatic—the first thing Culla took care of after the maser link—their subjective time would pretty closely match the actual time it took to leave the chromosphere.
Since assaulting Culla was almost certainly futile, the best way to delay the alien’s murder-suicide would be to talk to him.
Jacob took a couple of breaths as he leaned back against the holo-recorder, careful to keep his ears awake. Culla was always a noisy walker. That was his best hope against out and out attack by the Pring. If Culla made too much sound out in the open, Jacob might get a chance to use the stunner he clutched in his good hand. It had a wide beam and wouldn’t take much aiming.
“Culla!” he shouted. “Don’t you think this has gone far enough? Why don’t you come out now and we’ll talk!”
He listened. There was a faint buzzing, as if Culla’s mashies were chattering softly behind the thick prehensile lips. During the fight topside, half of the problem facing him and Donaldson had been avoiding the flashing white grinders.
“Culla!” he repeated. “I know it’s stupid to judge an alien by your own species’ values, but I really thought you were a friend. You owe us an explanation! Talk to us! If you’re acting under Bubbacub’s orders, you can surrender and I swear we’ll all say you put up a hell of a fight!”
The buzzing grew louder. There was a brief shuffle of footsteps. One, two, three . . . but that was all. Not enough to get a fix on.
“Jacob, I am shorry
,” Culla’s voice carried softly across the deck.
“You musht be told, before, we die, but firsht I ashk that you have that lasher turned off. It hurtsh!”
“Culla, so does my hand.”
The Pririg sounded woebegone. “I am sho, sho, shorry, Jacob. Pleash undershtand that you are my friend. It ish partly for your shpeciesh that I do thish.
“Theshe are neceshary crimesh, Jacob. I am only glad that death ish near sho that I may be free of memory.”
Jacob was astonished by the alien’s sophistry. He had never expected such sophomore whinings from Culla, whatever his reasons for what he’d done. He was about to frame a reply when Helene deSilva’s voice boomed over the intercom.
“Jacob? Can you hear me? The gravity thrust is deteriorating fast. We’re losing headway.”
What she didn’t say was the threat. If something wasn’t done soon they’d begin the long fall toward the photosphere, a fall from which they’d never return.
Once in the grip of the convection cells, the ship would be pulled downward into the stellar core. If there was a ship left, by then.
“You shee, Jacob,” Culla said. “To delay me will do no good. It ish already done. I will shtay to make shertain you cannot correct it.
“But pleashe, let ush talk until the end. I do not wish to die ash enemiesh.”
Jacob stared out into the wispy, hydrogen-red atmosphere of the Sun. Tendrils of fiery gas were still floating ‘downwards’ (up, to him), past the ship, but that could be a function of the motion of the gas in this area at this time. Certainly they were going by much less quickly. It could be that the ship was already falling.
“Your dischovery of my talent and my hoax wash most ashtute, Jacob. You combined many obshcure cluesh to find the anshwer! Tying in the background of my race wash a brilliant shtroke!
“Tell me, although I avoided the rim detectorsh with my phantomsh, didn’t it throw you off that they shometimesh appeared on topshide when I wash on flip-shide?”
Jacob was trying to think. He had the cool side of the stun gun against his cheek. It felt good, but it wasn’t helping him come up with ideas. And he had to spare some of his attention to talk to Culla.
“I never bothered to think about it, Culla. I suppose you just leaned over and beamed through the transparent deck-suspension field. That’d explain why the image looked refracted. It was actually reflected, at an angle, inside the shell.”
Actually that was a valid clue. Jacob wondered why he’d missed it.
And the bright blue light, during his deep trance in Baja! It happened just before he awoke to see Culla standing there! The Eatee must have taken a hologram of him! What a way to get to know somebody and never forget his face!
“Culla,” he said slowly. “Not that I’m one to hold a grudge or anything, but were you responsible for my crazy behavior at the end of the last dive?”
There was a pause. Then Culla spoke. His lisp was getting worse.
“Yesh, Jacob. I am shorry, but you were getting too inquishitive. I hoped to dishcredit you. I failed.”
“But how . . .”
“I lishtened to Dr. Martine talk about the effect of glare on humansh, Jacob!”
The Pring almost shouted. For the first time in Jacob’s memory, Culla had interrupted somebody.
“I ekshperi-mented on Doctor Kepler for months! Den on La-Roque and Jeff . . . den on you. I ushed a narrow diffracted beam. No one could shee it, but it unfocushed your thoughtshl
“I did not know what you would do. But I knew it would be embarrasshing. Again, I am shorry. It wash neceshary!”
They had definitely stopped rising. The big filament that they had left only a few minutes before loomed over Jacob’s head. High streamers twisted and curled up toward the ship, like grasping fingers.
Jacob had been trying to find a way, but his imagination was blocked by a powerful barrier.
All right! I give up!
He called on his neurosis to offer its terms. What the hell did the damned thing want of him?
He shook his head. He’d have to invoke the emergency clause. Hyde was going to have to come out and become part of him, like in the bad old days. Like when he chased down LaRoque on Mercury, and when he broke into the Photo Lab. He got ready to go into the trance.
“Why Culla. Tell me why you did all this!”
Not that it mattered. Maybe. Hughes was listening. Perhaps Helene was recording. Jacob was too busy to care.
Resistance! In the non-linear, non-orthogonal coordinates of thought he sifted feelings and gestalts through a sieve. To whatever extent the old automatic systems still worked, he set them off to do their jobs.
Slowly, the window dressing and camouflage was stripped away and he came face to face with his other half.
The battlements, unscalable in every past siege, were even more formidable now. The earthen breastworks had been replaced by stone. The abatis was made of sharpened needles, slender and twenty miles long. At the top of the highest tower a flag rippled. The pennant read “Loyalty.” It flew above two stakes, on each of which a head was impaled.
One head he recognized at once. It was his own. The blood that, dripped from the severed neck still glistened. The expression was one of remorse.
The other head set him shivering. It was Helene’s. Her face was streaked and pockmarked, and as he watched the eyes fluttered weakly. The head was still alive.
But why! Why this rage against Helene? And why the overtones of suicide . . . this unwillingness to join with him to create the near ubermensch he once had been?
If Culla decided to attack now, he’d be helpless. His ears were filled with the cry of a whistling wind. There was a roar of jets and then the sound of someone falling. . . the sound of someone calling as she fell past him.
And for the first time he could make out her words.
“Jake! Watch that first step . . . !”
Is that all? Then why all the fuss over it? Why the months trying to drag out what turned out to be Tania’s last ironic dig?
Of course. His neurosis was letting him see, now that death was imminent, that the hidden words had been another red herring. Hyde was hiding something else. It was. . .
Guilt.
He knew he carried a burden of it after the affair on the Vanilla Needle, but how much he’d never realized. He now saw how sick this Jekyll and Hyde arrangement he’d been living with really was. Instead of slowly healing the trauma of a painful loss, he’d sealed off an artificial entity, to grow and feed on him and on his shame for having let Tania fall. . . for the supreme arrogance of the man who, on that crazy day twenty miles high, thought he could do two things at once.
It had been just another form of arrogance . . . a belief that he could bypass the normal, human way of recovering from grief, the cycle of pain and transcendency by which the billions of his fellow human beings coped when each suffered a loss. That and the comfort of closeness to other people.
And now he was trapped. The meaning of the pennant on the battlements was clear now. In his sickness he’d thought to expiate part of his guilt by demonstrations of loyalty to the person he’d failed. Not overt loyalty, but loyalty deep within . . . a sick loyalty based on witholding himself from everybody . . . all the while convinced that he was all right since he’d had lovers!
No wonder Hyde hated Helene! No wonder he wanted Jacob Demwa dead as well!
Tania would never have approved of you, he told it. But it wasn’t listening. It had its own logic and had no use for his.
Hell, she’d have loved Helene!
It didn’t do any good. The barrier was firm. He opened his eyes.
The red of the chromosphere had deepened. They were in the filament now. A flash of color, seen even through his goggles, sent him glancing to the left.
It was a toroid. They were back amidst the herd.
As he watched, several more drifted past, their rims festooned with bright designs. They spun like mad doughnuts, oblivious to the
peril of the Sunship.
“Jacob, you have shaid nothing,” Culla’s droning, lisping voice had become background. At the mention of his name Jacob paid attention.
“Shurely you have shome opinion on my motivesh. Cannot you shee that de greater good will come of dish . . . not only for my shpecies but for yoursh and your Clientsh ash well?”
Jacob shook his head vigorously to clear it. The Hyde-induced drowsiness was something he had to fight! The only silver lining was that his hand no longer hurt.
“Culla, I must think about this for a little while. Can we retire a ways and confer? I can pick up some food for you and maybe we can work something out.”
There was a pause. Then Culla spoke slowly.
“You are very tricky, Jacob. I am tempted but now I shee dat it will be better if you and your friend stay shtill. In fact. I will make certain. If either of you movesh I will ‘shee’ him.”
Numbly, Jacob wondered what was so “tricky” about offering the alien food. Why had that idea popped into his head?
They were falling faster now. Overhead the herd of toruses stretched toward the ominous wall of the photosphere. The nearest shone in blues and greens as they swept past. The colors faded with distance. The farthest beasts looked like tiny dim wedding rings, each poised on a tiny flicker of green light.
There was movement among the nearest magne-tovores. As the ship fell, one after another moved aside and “downward” from Jacob’s upside-down perspective. Once a flash of green filled the Sunship as a tail-laser swept over them. The fact that they weren’t destroyed meant that the automatic screens were still working.
Outside, a fluttering shape shot past Jacob, from over his head out, past the deck at his feet. Then another rippling apparition appeared, lingering for a moment outside the shell near him, its body slick with iridescent colors. Then it sped upward, out of sight.
The Sun Ghosts were gathering. Perhaps the Sun-ship’s headlong fall had finally piqued their curiosity.