The collected short fict.., p.86
The Collected Short Fiction, page 86
Edith stood up from the sleepfield and unhitched her gown in the back, letting the folds pile themselves automatically into a tight, square pile. At fifty she wasn’t doing at all badly, he thought, and without yet relying on juvenates.
As if she were reading his mind in part, she said, ‘They don’t have any way of staying young.’
‘So?’
‘They don’t have any way to prevent death. Maybe that’s why they cling to old religions and rituals. It means personal survival after death, or whatever their equivalent
is.’
‘You mean, I’ve blocked their chances of immortality?’
‘They bury their dead in black holes, don’t they?’
‘Yes, but before they die. Pilgrim ships of old and sick.’
‘Maybe studying the thing takes it out of religion and puts it into science. Science still says nobody survives after death. Maybe the intellect can’t accept what the subconscious –’
‘That’s archaic,’ he said. ‘And they aren’t human, besides. Their psychology is nothing like ours.’
Edith shrugged and lay back on the bed. He crawled in beside her and the fights automatically went out.
What if his actions had condemned the Aighors to eternal darkness? He shuddered and closed his eyes tight, trying not to think, above all, not to empathize with his enemies.
Kamon looked across the message spheres on the floor before him and crossed his eyes in irritation. This gave him a double view of the opposite sides of the octagonal room – gepter knives hung ceremonially on one wall, over the receiver-altar which periodically reproduced the radio noise of the Thrina as sound; wooden tub next to another wall, filled with mineral water smelling of sulfur and iodine salts.
He picked up a sphere and put it in the depression in his tape-pad, then instructed the little machine to record all the successive layers of information and display them linearly. The method tasted too much of human thought-patterns for his liking, but it had been adopted by Hafkan Bestmerit as a common method of using interculture information.
It was disgusting that a single cultural method should control information techniques stretching halfway across the galaxy.
But such was the dominance pattern of the young humans.
The pad’s read-out began immediately. The first message was from the council at Frain, the Aighor birthworld. The council had examined the theological and ethical problem of Fairchild and his sacrilege, and supported the judgment of the district priests.
Fairchild’s alien origins and upbringing did not exempt him from the Venging.
He had condemned millions of Aighors to oblivion after death. He had profaned the major region of Thrina pilgrimage by treating it as an area for rational investigation, and not of deep reverence.
The death-ships could no longer drop the assembled dying pilgrims below the event horizons of their chosen black holes. They would no longer experience the redemption of Zero, or bathe themselves in the source of the Thrina song.
Kamon seethed. He was one of those potential pilgrims. He had wanted so much to live forever.
‘Fairchild has bitten off more than he can chew, but I see no way USC can interfere. We’re conducting high-level talks with Hafkan Bestmerit, very delicate. If I were to start an incident I would forego my employment quick as that.’ Kiril Kondrashef snapped his fingers in demonstration and stared at Anna Sigrid Nestor with large, woeful eyes. His jowly face gleamed pale in the white light of his reading bureau.
‘So I can expect no support from USC?’ Anna said, anger coloring her cheeks.
‘At the moment, no.’
‘Then what do you suggest?’
‘Fairchild could make his way to some immunity zone like Ansinger. He can seek USC support, but only by renouncing his associations with Dallat. As I understand it, that would mean giving up most of his wealth.’
‘What can I do to help him now?’
‘Give him the advice I’ve given you, but keep your nose out of it. Stay clear unless you want USC to renounce its connections with you.’
‘Kiril, I’ve known you for over a century now. We’re about as friendly as two old wolves can be. You bailed me out of my doldrums after the death of my first husband. More even, we’re both Abstainers. For us, immortality is no desirable thing. Yet now you tell me you won’t do anything to help a man who has done more good for colonists and the consolidations than anyone, Dallat associations or no. You’re being incredibly two-faced, I think.’ Kiril chuckled ruefully. ‘I don’t like your tactics much and I never have. You tend to stamp when you should tread softly. A good many fragile and important deals hang on this matter. Do you have any idea – you must have, you’re no idiot – how difficult it is for species to coexist when all they have in common is the fact that they’re alive? Whole civilizations walking on tiptoes through trip-wires, all the time. Anna, you could start a collapse you can hardly imagine.’
She sat in front of his desk, hands gripping the edge as if to push it aside. Her forearms were rigid but her facial expression didn’t change from the mild, grandmotherly smile she’d had when she came in.
‘Besides,’ he continued in an undertone, ‘your weapons are registered whenever fired, in defense or otherwise, and the situation is recorded in stasis memory. You can’t get around that. We’ll have you on the carpet if you do anything that can’t be strictly considered defensive.’
‘I’ve never been able to figure out a bureaucrat,’ Anna said. She sighed and picked up her silk duffel bag to leave. ‘I’ve never used my weapons. Ever.’
‘Garden tools, once,’ Kiril reminded her.
She stared at him, shocked that he would mention that.
‘I’m frightened, Anna,’ he said. ‘Very frightened. The fates of individuals mean nothing in this kind of dispute.’
She took a transit tube beneath the modular city as any pedestrian might have, nothing more than an old woman. In her bag she carried several pictures of young men, one of whom attracted her very much. She glanced at them several times as she rode, trying to lose herself in reverie and allow her limbic mind to feel its way through to an action. Gut-level thought had carried her through crisis before.
She picked out one photograph and tapped it against her cheek as she left the tube at an underground terminal. She walked below the Myriadne starport, largest on Tau Ceti II. Shuttles landed and departed dozens by the hour overhead, bronze and silver smooth bullets homing for their mother ships.
One such bullet, small and utilitarian, waited for her. She rode a wheeled maneuvering tug out to it. In ten minutes it was off-planet.
Disjohn Fairchild was an intelligent man. He would already be implementing some of the suggestions Kiril had made. They were the only outs he had for the moment, with or without her help. She calmly analyzed her own reaction to the suggestions, watching sun, planets and stars form a glittering bow around her ship. Then she smiled grimly and went to sleep as the stars winked out.
When she came awake three hours later, dark still surrounded her. It grew muddied and started to take on form. There was a queasy moment, a tiny shiver, and the outer universe returned. Occasional wisps of color appeared and vanished streamer-like along the forty-five degree rotated starbow.
She began to wonder what Kamon had meant by the reminder that his kind had no juvenates. She went to the ship’s library to do research.
On her way, she lifted the photograph to a ship’s eye and told it. ‘Hire him.’
They would pick him up at Shireport.
Edith grew tired of the viewscreen’s translation of what was happening outside the ship. She frowned and closed her eyes, trying to wipe her mind clear for a moment. The books in front of her ghosted and darkened, and she swam in a small red sea of interior designs.
After a moment, she no longer thought in words, and pictures came to her clearly.
Three large, very fast starships all moved across hyper-spatial geodesics toward a common goal. They left tracks – she could see them in an allegorical fashion – in amorphous higher geometries. They were aware of each other’s presence and direction.
Edith wondered what Anna Sigrid Nestor’s purpose was, beyond friendship. They’d communicated briefly a few hours before, and Disjohn had told her to leave well enough alone. But Edith was sure she wouldn’t.
One ship carried a being not classifiable in terms of terrestrial biology, having aspects of many phyla. Kamon was called ‘he’ by default – a cultural tendency to view the convex sexual form as male. But Kamon was neither male nor female in the reproductive process of his kind. He gestated young. His children, by human standards, were not his children.
His neurological make-up differed radically from a human’s. The arrangement of his nervous system was central, not dorsal. He had three brains spaced around his esophagus.
One of his brains was an evolutionary vestige, in charge of autonomic and emotive functions. Very powerful in influence despite its size, it connected with the two other portions by fibers substantially larger, than any human nervous connection – networks of medullae, each marvelously complex.
He could contemplate at least four different things at once while involved in a routine action. While driven by what humans might consider a mania, the Aighor could think as rationally as any calm human. He was a dangerous enemy, highly motivated. In this match, Kamon had the upper hand. He would know everything they had planned – with benefit of manic certainty and calm intellection – and he’d act without hesitation.
But Kamon was not supernatural. They could elude him. They could survive him.
Perhaps Sigrid Nestor could help by distracting him. There was at least hope, and perhaps even a good chance. So why did Lady Edith feel so dark inside, and cold?
She closed her books, stood up slowly from the table, and went to join her husband on the bridge.
‘A ship riding protogeometry has three options in case of attack,’ Graetikin, the captain, was telling Disjohn as she entered. Graetikin nodded at her and continued, ‘It can drop into half-phase, that is, fluctuate between two geometries . . .’ His finger lightly sketched an equation on the tapas pad. ‘Or drop into status geometry, our normal continuum. Or it can dispatch part of its mass and create pseudo-ships like squid’s ink. This happens to some extent during any transfer of geometries, to satisfy the Dirac corollaries, but the mass loss is extremely low, on the order of fifty or sixty trillion atomic units, randomly scattered.’
‘What about protection from shields?’
‘Shields only operate in status geometry. They’re electromagnetic and that implies charge-holes in hyperspatial manifolds.’
‘It would have been easier if we’d had a few Crocerians,’ Fairchild said wistfully. When the ship had put in at Shireport, all the Crocerians he’d asked had politely refused, not wishing to gamble, or, if gambling, betting on the Aighors. The Crocerians were a pragmatic species.
‘I’d never fight Aighors if I could avoid it,’ Graetikin said. ‘I would avoid it by not having them challenge me.’
‘We’re forced to take that risk.’
‘It’s up to you. Once committed to a protogeometry vector we can’t back down.’
‘How far ahead of us is he?’
‘About four light-hours, following a parallel course.’
‘How much of a jump can we get if we take one of these protogeometries?’
‘He’ll learn about our jump about a tenth of a second status time after we make it. That gives us a good hour or two at the other end of the pierce.’
‘They might take that as an affront,’ Disjohn said, looking at Edith.
‘Why, for God’s sake?’ Graetikin said. ‘We’d have to jump into some manifold or another anyway.’
‘Protogeometry jumps are a waste of energy, unless one wants to gain a certain advantage.’ Fairchild pushed away from the anchored chair and drifted across the cabin. ‘Cat and mouse. If I give any clue that I think they’re after me, they’ll interpret it as a cultural insult. Kamon won’t miss a trick.’
Graetikin shrugged. While talking about things that could mean life or death, he had doodled an equation among others on the tapas. He had been working on this problem in his head for months, unaware he was so close to a solution. His eyes widened. He had just described what the Thrina were in terms of deep proto-geometries.
He quickly branched off with another equation, and saw that in any geometry outside of status – any universe beyond their continuum – the Thrina would be ubiquitous.
That, he idly thought, did qualify them for godhood somewhat.
He would transmit the equations and solutions to Precipice 5 when he had a chance, and see what they made of it. But for the moment, it wasn’t relevant. He folded the tapas and put it into his shirt pocket.
‘We’re four light-days out from Shireport, and sixty parsecs from the Ansinger systems. We made it to Shireport without harassment, and that makes me suspicious. So far we’ve only been tailed.’ Graetikin turned to look at Fairchild floating on his back in mid-air. ‘They’re usually more punctual.’
The Aighor captain lay against the wall with his throat and three brains smashed flat. He managed a final gasp of query before Kamon pressed the slammer button again and laid his head out. The thorax and tail twitched and the arms writhed slowly, then all motion stopped. Kamon’s mate-of-ship huddled against the back of the cabin and croaked tightly, regularly, her face black as blood with fear. Kamon put the slammer down and set his message to the Council at Frain.
‘The diplomatic team has caused damage to the Venging,’ he said. The hazy distorted image of the Auspiseer chided him for his vehemence.
‘They have called the meeting at Precipice 5 partly for your advantage,’ the Auspiseer said. ‘The human Fairchild’s ship has been notified en route to Ansinger, and he cannot refuse.’
‘But I have already had several chances to attack –’
‘The captain’s reluctance to destroy the Fairchild ship was part of his training. You should have been more gentle with him.’
‘He is of the governing breed,’ Kamon said. ‘They’ve become almost human in the past centuries.’
‘The Council allowed the meeting at Precipice 5 to be called for a number of reasons. For one, it eases our relations with the humans temporarily. And for another, it puts you in a better position should the discussions be unsuccessful. The Council cannot discount your premature release of Captain Liiank, without benefit of pilgrimage. You will execute yourself upon completion of your mission.’
‘The release of Fairchild will sanctify the Rift Thrina, and I will take my end there.’
‘Wise and good.’
‘But I have lost the Fairchild ship now because of the captain’s reluctance. It will take time to recapture the advantage.’
‘What else has offended besides Fairchild?’
‘His station.’
‘Kamon, you are officially declared rogue. We are not answerable for your actions. We will broadcast suitable warnings to that effect.’
‘That is how I’ve planned, Auspiseer.’ He ended the communication and turned to speak to his mate. She had regained her composure and was adjusting her belts of prefertilized egg capsules. ‘We will gestate no more young,’ he said.
‘So far, three things have gone wrong with the predictions,’ the Heuritex said. ‘I’ve calculated based on all known constants and variables, all options open, but the trend is against the predicted results. I must remind you that there are large areas of the problem of which I am totally ignorant, making the model inadequate.’
‘In short, you’re useless,’ Anna told the machine.
‘That is as it may be.’
‘I should replace you with my gigolo.’
‘He’s a handsome bastard, I’ll say that for him.’
‘What if we assume that Kamon is going to behave erratically, say, deranged by being denied an afterlife?’
‘We have more options.’
‘Than that’s our operating hypothesis. No, wait. Use this – Kamon will behave as if he is deranged, by human standards. I never underestimate opponents.’
‘Do you wish that to be an hypothesis, or an assumption? There is a difference, you know.’
‘Whichever way it works. You know what you’re doing better than I do, dearie.’
‘Incorporated. The resulting future-model, still highly inadequate, indicates that the meeting at Precipice 5 – course corrected for that destination, by the by – will not take place. The station will be destroyed. Kamon will probably be the destroyer, and the Aighors will claim Kamon has gone rogue to deny responsibility.’
She paced in front of the panel, then asked for gravitation to be shut off, and floated at ease. ‘Warn Precipice 5 to be on full alert when Disjohn arrives.’
‘Done.’
‘And contact USC, division of Martial Aids, at Shireport. Tell them there is going to be a confrontation in the Pafloshwa Rift, coordinates unknown.’
‘Such an action will mark you as a rogue agent as well,’ the machine said, a speculative tone in its voice.
‘Whatever for?’
‘It indicates a willingness to engage in battle, since you are heading toward the Rift of your own free will.’
‘Not exactly my free will. USC doesn’t know I’m aboard this vessel, so they’ll assume – will have to assume, and believe me are smart enough to assume – that whoever advises the captain is not playing with a full deck of cards.’
‘I advise the captain.’
‘I will have you overhauled when we get back to Ansinger.’
‘That will be a good time to install the new Parakem function modules. Where are you, since you’re not here?’
‘On Tau Ceti II. I made an appointment with Jessamyn Negras for a business talk, and she hates me enough to keep me waiting for at least a month. She will refuse to believe anyone would miss out on the blessed chance to talk to her.
And appropriately deluded recorders are going at all times in my apartments. I’m there, that’s certain.’
