The collected short fict.., p.16
The Collected Short Fiction, page 16
Maday identified herself and passed the request on. She looked at Green with a faintly bitter expression.
“We will never reveal those things to beings not made to accept them,” H-Arrow replied.
“This is Stumble-Speaker. There’s every chance the Ones Who Hide will try to break your wills to get any information you have. How can you guarantee they won’t succeed?”
There was silence for a moment. “No effort was made the last time.”
“No, because you were far from any sort of solution. Now we know you’re very close. To get the solution from you, the Perfidisians might do anything.”
Another pause. “Our memories do not give us the same impression.”
Green removed a sheet of paper from his breast pocket and passed it down to Maday. “Read that to them,” he said. “Look at the seal—it’s official, and secret to all but top clearance Astry and Combine officers. You recognize the seal?”
Maday nodded. “Thin Hand speaking,” she said. “I have a record of what happened to a group of non-human, intelligent beings known to us as Aighors. Their spaceship was disabled and captured by the Ones Who Hide.” She read through the gory details quickly and sharply. The pause in translation was even longer this time.
“Why did they do that?” Neps asked.
“Because the Perfidisians were interested in an Aighor weapon system. The Aighors used the weapon to protect their home systems, but a few decades ago they became more belligerent and started expanding. The Perfidisians didn’t get the secret, but they were up against beings a hell of a lot tougher than setties.”
“What was the weapon?” Fromm asked. Green looked askance at him.
“Do you have evidence they are desperate enough to do such things to us?” H-Arrow finally responded.
“I do,” Green said.
“But the information is not easily translated, and it does not come in the form of a compact solution. Nor is it technologically oriented. How could it be, when we feel it is addressed to our kind alone?”
Green thought that over for a moment, then decided the Execustaff would still be unsatisfied. “It’s imperative for us to know the impact your findings might have on mental attitudes. When the attitudes of technological beings change, so do their technologies. In the long run, the purest of philosophies and theoretical sciences can be turned into tools, and these tools can be used as weapons.”
There was a silence of about a minute. “This is H-Arrow. We understand your difficulty, and we hope you understand ours. We are under a sacred obligation to keep our findings within the circle of our kind. Our obligation to humans is great, but we firmly believe neither you nor the Ones Who Hide could have any use for what we have learned. We cannot serve you. We will be just as adamant with any other species.”
The dark shapes began to move away from the tuberider.
“That’s it,” Maday said.
“How in hell do they know what we can and can’t use? They h-haven’t any idea—”
The sky brightened and the humans shielded their eyes against the glare. The effect was unmistakable—Green recognized it immediately. When the glow subsided. he looked up and saw four bright blue crescents surrounding the speck of Koestler. The light was four to eight hours old. The ships wouldn’t be far behind.
“That’s the receiving end of a Perfidisian warp,” he said. “We’ve got two or three hours before their reconnaissance ships go into orbit around Sun-Planet, and perhaps three days before the main cruisers arrive. That gives us very little time. Fromm, put a tight-band signal into the coder and send it to the Station, Mister Berker’s eyes only. I want the evacuation of Home Field expedited, and I want the big ships away from Sun-Planet in sixteen hours. That’ll mean doubling up on the shuttles, but it can be done within reasonable safety margins.” Fromm went below to handle the transmission.
“As for the rest of us,” Green said, “there’s more work to do. M-Maday, advise our setties that we’re going into Wormways. I want them to stay within hailing distance. Korliss, brief me on the sounder and analyzer. Neps, will you take the con?”
“Yes, sir.” They went below and sealed the hatch. Korliss moved out of the bubble and sat across from Green, helping him fix himself in his chair. Her face was grim, but her hands—almost grudgingly, he thought—were gentle and soft.
“This is Berker,” the transceiver sputtered. “Final message from Myriadne indicates no action will be taken to prevent Perfidisians from occupying Sun-Planet. Your message received and acknowledged. Good luck.” The tuberider submerged, slow, tiny bubbles moving past the ports.
“The ball is in your court, Commander,” Maday said.
“Our court,” Green countered. “We have perhaps six hours to find out what the Osko Sea setties are hiding from us, and whether it has any bearing on what our setties already know.”
“What are the odds?” Korliss asked.
“For what?”
“Genocide.”
Green winced, then muttered something unintelligible.
“I would like to know, also, Commander,” Maday said.
“At the moment,” Green replied grimly, “about ninety per-cent.”
“If I thought it would do any good—if I didn’t know Berker would carry out your orders anyway—I’d kill you right now,” Maday said, “or scuttle this vessel. That’s my feeling, Green.”
“If I thought it would d-do any good, I’d let you.”
“Wormways, fifteen kilometers ahead on present course,” Neps said quietly.
“Did Mr. Krutch tell the Execustaff what he expected us to find?” Maday asked.
“No.”
“What do you expect?”
“I’m not the expert,” Green replied. “Perhaps nothing at all. This is a last-ditch effort.”
“It would all be rather silly, you know, if the solution were something trivial,” Fromm said. “An intergalactic shopping list.” Green turned in his seat to watch the bubbles gliding by his port. The memory which had gnawed at him for a day surfaced sharp and distinct, and he remembered where he’d been the last time he’d felt so isolated and unimportant.
Six years ago, he had stood on the bridge of the United Stars Warper Ship Changeling, a quarter of a million kilometers above a thick haze of dust and stones circling a foggy red star. He had watched boulders several kilometers wide colliding with each other, striking bright sparks in the haze every few seconds, throughout the thirty flat rings which would be planets in an eon or so. He had come then to understand something about time scales and human lives. Some of the larger chunks—already several thousand kilometers wide, but by no means permanent—floated in broad gaps between the ring, wrapped in thick fogs of hydrogen, ammonia and methane. Surveys indicated that in the few million years these chunks had existed, lifeforms of a sort had already established beach-heads in the infant solar system. There was no way of knowing how many such beachheads would arise, and be destroyed as new equilibria were established in the rings. Against such forces, even the most advanced living things were nothing.
He tried to remind himself he didn’t believe that. How many times had students, in and out of Combine and Consolidation schools, been warned by their teachers about the paralyzing effects of awe? Whole philosophies of cosmic ennui, of “The stars are so great and man is so small,” had risen and died and been resurrected to taunt people and add to the general misery of being alive, powerless, and ignorant.
But Green was not powerless, not by any human scale of things—and he was not directly concerned with vast forces. The decisions he would make would unleash not the blundering, chaotic grind of a birthing solar system, but a mere few watts of energy—the growth of pulmonary chancre virus in host tissue. The missiles were simple vectors, not very powerful in themselves—not even essential. He could reach into the warheads and scatter the crystals across the Ganset Sea by hand, and in a few weeks all the setties would be dead. No, the missiles were simple increasers of efficiency, savers of time. Their launching would not be the result of millions of years of natural forces, but of a few decades of organic interaction—social scuffles, bureaucratic decisions, various small fears and conglomerate distrusts, all measurable in the smallest units of power.
He was wrestling with scattered thoughts, and the thoughts were like tiny virus crystals, capable of initiating snowball reactions, made efficient by such vectors as the bodies they moved, the sound and energy waves they communicated across . . . all of them, all of the energies he was dealing with, all the myriad sparks in myriad brains, human and Perfidisian and settie, measurable in brief and ridiculously weak figures, magnified by the vectors which made them very slightly more efficient.
There was no comparison between the tiny, tight-packed energies of thought and the patient accretion of natural power, and never would be. Living things would always be outranked. Then why was he reminded of his littleness? Out of some masochistic urge to rub wounds?
No. It was much simpler. Green himself, within the scale of living things, was completely powerless. Green the Commander could destroy the setties, and finally the entire ecosystem of Sun-Planet, which was delicately balanced on a tripod any leg of which was essential. But personally, inside, the ur-Green, child-Green, living and believing and non-Military Green, was a wandering chip of rock about to be ground out. He would make “his” decision and then drop away into scattered ash, the detritus of selfdisgust and quiet.
There was no respect, no pride in the kind of power which could destroy him, used or unused, with either guilt or the end of his entire career. He suddenly realized why the haze of planetoids came back to him. As a child, he had stuttered, then been cured, and for thirty years he had talked as clearly and assuredly as anyone else. But four days after leaving the birthing solar system, he had started stuttering again. He had been so mortified at the outbreak—like an attack of acne in an old man—that he’d resolved to solve the problem without aid. Now he had some insight, but no resolution. He wrapped his arms.
He wrapped his arms around himself as if to ward off cold, and sank his chin into his chest. He had a spastic tick in his foot now. And there had been tiny chains of spots in his vision for the last two or three hours, not caused by fatigue—he’d have been long familiar with them by now if that were true—but by something else. Perhaps it was gravitation-related. Sun-Planet, heavy and dark, demanded something superhuman from him, and neither his physique nor his mind was ready to stand up to the challenge.
The tick worsened. He clenched his leg muscles to stop the shaking.
“Wormways ahead,” Neps said.
Green welcomed the chance to move about. He unhitched himself and walked forward. The tuberider’s lights switched on and Neps directed them across the sea bottom ten meters below the vessel. Chasms and holes mottled the level terrain, smaller than the tubes in Water but otherwise similar. A band of bright red surrounded the lip of each hole, the same polyps which provided nutrients for the jelly-bean plankton. Neps stopped the tuberider above a particularly wide hole and shined the underside lamps directly into it. Ports along the bottom showed the walls of the tunnel were pocked. Just around a bend, silver flashes coruscated.
“There’s a skipperjack down there,” Korliss said.
“Sonar indicates the water is thick with them,” Neps said. “I suppose it’s a sanctuary. Setties don’t come around to bother them.”
“Can we send a lateral sounder into this hole? We should chart the pock configurations.”
“Will do,” Fromm said. He squeezed past Green to pull up a piece of deck plating midships. A small cylinder with fins, like an old bomb, was lodged in a padded corner of the small compartment. Fromm hooked a cable onto it and slipped it through an equipment airlock. It dropped a few meters below the tuberider. Neps maneuvered with one eye on the sonar display and deftly slipped the sounder into the hole. The sounder, equipped with a small motor and selfguidance equipment, took itself deeper, chasing the skipperjack a hundred meters before the cable ran out. Fromm reeled it back in.
“We’ll need taste analysis of the material making up the sea bottom,” Green said.
“Already doing that, Commander,” Neps said. “We’ve been making taste recordings since entering the tabu zone. I used the boundary signals to trigger the instruments.”
“It’ll be useless trying to record even a fair sample of these holes,” Green said. “B-but if I’m any judge, our setties are missing out on a great deal here. This place may be as extensive as Water.”
Neps drew a sharp breath and Green looked up. A ribbon of color like a spectrum chart signified a large shoal of skipperjacks, he couldn’t tell how far ahead. It reached across the bubble’s field of vision.
“Skipperjacks don’t herd,” Maday said pointlessly.
“They d-do here,” Green said, glad to see her discomfitted.
“They’re big ones,” Neps said. “Sonar indicates they may be as much as fifty meters long. These holes are probably filled with them. If this is a nesting site, we’re in trouble.”
“Commander, I suggest we back out beyond the boundary,” Korliss said.
“They’re approaching in formation,” Neps said.
“Reverse us,” Green ordered. “And bring us to the surface. I want to contact the Station.”
The tuberider skimmed over the field without turning around, reversing its turbine flow. The band of colors ahead rippled and silvered like an aurora in a compacted sky.
“We’re through the boundary,” Neps said. “Skipperjacks are scattering.”
The tuberider surfaced and a static-cluttered beep immediately took Fromm’s attention. He adjusted the filters but the static remained. “Sounds like a signal’s being jammed,” he said. “That’s an instrument control tone—what’s it doing on communications frequencies?”
Green reached around Fromm’s arm and adjusted the receiver himself. He could make out the tone-code now. “It’s a signal for Kerith Post,” he said. “But it’s being jammed so strongly the Post won’t accept it. Where’s it coming from?”
“Too much bounce to tell for sure, but it’s too strong to be from anyplace but the Station.”
“Let’s try Home Field public network.”
Fromm switched bands on the radio and listened intently. “Nothing transmitting there.”
“This is a prime wake period,” Maday said. “They have to transmit. It’s required by law.”
“They’re not,” Fromm said testily.
“Put me on the Clear frequency,” Green said. Fromm handed him a microphone and he clipped it to his uniform collar. “This is Commander Kenneth Green, direct message to William Berker at Main Station.”
“This channel’s jammed, too,” Fromm said. He switched on the receiver speaker and pulsing white noise alternated with snaps and crackles. “It isn’t natural.”
“The Perfidisians?” Korliss asked.
“I doubt it,” Green said. “It would take too m-much power from their distance, and serve no purpose. Something’s going on at the Station.”
Fromm switched on a battery of decoding filters and attached the tuberider computer to enhance the signal. The noise was refined into a garble of voices, which after some adjustment became comprehensible.
“We’re receiving your signal, Commander Green. Main Station is under siege and Home Field is jamming on all frequencies—”
The signal dropped below all saving and Green cursed the man for not identifying himself. “Let’s complete our message. Clear frequency again. This is Commander Green, requesting whoever receives this message to relay it to William Berker immediately. Osko Sea setties are adamant, and there appears to be no alternative.”
Maday sighed raggedly. Green saw her fists were clenched. Sooner bash one of her children against a wall, he thought. Or, in effect, all her children—all of Sun-Planet. Two centuries of work.
“We’ve got to let our setties examine the recordings of the tabu zones,” Korliss said, her voice high-pitched and childish.
Fromm growled deep in his throat.
“Launch vectors through cables—” Green began.
“No!” the boy shouted. He slammed his hand against the transmitter button and the microphone went dead. The noise from the receiver stopped and a tiny feedback whine dropped into silence. Then the tuberider was quiet, engines dead, drifting in the jerky wallow of the Osko Sea. “You won’t give that order,” Fromm said, much more than an adolescent now. “We’re going back to the Station to see what’s happened, but this radio will not be used while I’m controlling it.”
Green smiled faintly and returned to his seat, hitching himself in. “Not that it will make much difference, Mister Fromm. The instrument control tone was intended for Kerith Post, and the jamming is a deliberate attempt to block it. Mr. Berker has no alternative but the cables between the Station and Kerith Post’s computers.”
“Somebody’s decided to stay and fight,” Maday said. “Thank God for brave and scrupulous men.”
“Pray God that Sun-Planet is a trivial place,” Green said. “Pray God, Maday. Your f-friends may have lit more candles than they can ever put out.” The tender glared at him and turned away. Tears were running down Korliss’s cheeks, reflecting greenish stars from the controls.
Green felt a wild surge inside, almost an exultation. He laid his head back against the neck brace of his MAS and fought down a lump in his throat. He couldn’t decide if he was angry, or afraid, or simply relieved. Relieved of his duty. No responsibility now. Everything was shot to hell, whether or not Berker was able to launch the vector missiles. Behind closed eyes he saw the relentless grind of billions of planetoids.
Then his anger surfaced and he opened his eyes wide, looking into the dim sea beyond the bubble. His jaws clenched. If Sun-Planet was so important, why not destroy it completely? Why not provide means of fusing it into scattered dust and gas? A few bombs placed at antipodes along the rims of the key crustal shields would break through the mantle and release all the energy of the boundary layer, and it would be all over.
