Gods of the Greataway (10 page)

Earth loved
the ship. She was the symbol of the final conquest. She was big enough to be unaffected by gravity storms up to the maximum violence recorded. She carried not one but five Navigators, whose chromosomes had been enriched at birth by genes derived from pigeons — noted for high psy content. Three Captains ruled over all this: Captain Pounce, a muscular, tawny man with the slitted eyes of a mountain lion; Captain Albo-Dey, a woman of recent derivation and supreme intelligence, said to have certain alien genes in her make-up; and Captain Steady, noted for caution, the perseverance very necessary on long voyages, and an oddly reptilian blink. All of Earth knew their names and their faces. In the eleven years it had taken to build the ship, the officers — selected at the outset and publicized so much that their names had become synonymous with the glory of Space — had become legends. Probably one name, and one only, was more intimately associated in the public mind with technical brilliance and human mastery of High Space: the name of K. Isaac LeBrun, designer of the
Star Kingdom
.

*

LeBrun was no dilettante architect who drew pictures and left other men to fill in the details. From the initial laying of the spine of the
Star Kingdom
to the imminent launch, he had never left the Starshell, that man-made satellite of Earth where the ships docked and were maintained, and from which they set off on their voyages through Space. He supervised every moment of building, and personally hired — and fired — senior technicians in charge of the various aspects of construction. He had designed the giant engines, all eighteen of them slightly different to allow for differing needs and gravities. He had designed the control layouts, the recycling equipment, the very pattern on the fifteen million pieces of genuine chinaware. He had designed the Starshell itself. It was rumored, even, that he had designed Captain Albo-Dey.

Now
he sat in his private suite in the great control tower that rose from the interior surface of the Starshell. He could see the people crowded and staring, pale faces upturned in a concave panorama as if seen through a wide-angle lens. In the center of everything, the
Star Kingdom
floated in zero gravity, dwarfing three freighters and the multitude of shuttles and tugs that swarmed around the inside of the Starshell like bees in a hive. Fifteen kilometers away, the constellation Leo glittered in the aperture of the Starshell through which the great ship would depart. That opening had been enlarged to accommodate the
Star Kingdom,
at a cost that did not bother Isaac LeBrun one iota.

He was a man of medium height and casual appearance, eighty-seven years old and athletic. (This was before the discovery of the Inner Think, which extended the human life immeasurably.) At this moment he was lounging against a pillar, watching his grandson play with a scale replica of the
Star Kingdom,
zooming it around the room with chubby arm held high, small feet dancing over the thick fur of the living carpet.

The child brought the toy to a neat, if impractical, landing on a table. “Waah …” he said, his voice fading in imitation of engines being shut down. He stood back from the model, measuring it with his eyes against the immensity of the prototype on the other side of the window. “Clever Gramps,” he said happily. This toy was his favorite at present, having replaced the magniblox that lay in untidy heaps on the other side of the room, where the living carpet was ineffectively trying to clean them away.

Now a woman entered, tall, considerably younger than LeBrun, with a shock of silver hair and yellow eyes curiously dead. She glanced at him, then followed his gaze out the window. After a long pause she said, “So what’s next, Isaac?”

It was uncanny how she could read his thoughts — despite her terrible accident. “Next? Give me today, will you, Taha? At least give me that.”

“Today
is yours, Isaac,” Her voice was as dead as her eyes. “After all, you’ve bought it. You’ve bought it with the lives of twenty-three technicians who died during the third engine test last year.”

“The inquiry found a manufacturing fault. The design was good.”

“You’ve bought it with forty thousand passengers scattered through High Space when the Jason came apart. Forty thousand lives, Isaac. That’s big money.”

She wanted him to make excuses, to keep on making excuses while she blamed him for every death in the history of galactic transport. Ignoring her, he walked over to a console and touched a button. The screen showed a busy scene inside
Star Kingdom’s
bridge. All three Captains were there, and four of the Navigators. Captain Albo-Dey towered above them like a mountain, her face a network of tiny lines where the scalpels had transformed her into something acceptable for publicity purposes. LeBrun said into the voicebox, “What’s happening? Is something wrong?”

“Nothing we can’t handle.” The big Captain turned away from the camera.

In a moment of irritation — after all, LeBrun was under considerable strain — he very nearly shouted: “You owe me some respect, Albo-Dey!”

Owe. Give. Build. Bought.

There is a tiny race of benevolent aliens known as kikihuahuas who travel all through High Space in living Spaceships, helping people for no reason other than their genes dictate it. One of them had once said to K. Isaac LeBrun, “We often call human beings the Benders. When we set out to build something like a house or a Spaceship or a beacon hydra, we sit down and guide it into shape, gently, from organic matter. Human beings tear and twist and melt and freeze metal, which is one of the most difficult substances to work in, second only to rock. They do it the hard way. They don’t let things build themselves — they bend them instead.

“You, Isaac LeBrun — you are the greatest Bender of them all.”

And Taha was
saying, “You bought today with the souls of your Navigators — poor kids who enter your Space College full of life and fun and psy and who come out zombies, dedicated to furthering the glory of K. I. LeBrun.”

The screen showed one of the Navigators at that moment, a pretty girl, smiling, brown-haired, slightly altered … And why not? “There was a time when service was compulsory for anyone with powers,” snapped LeBrun.

“Did
I
have any choice?”

He said quietly, “You married my son. That was your choice.” It hurt, still, the way his son had died — a passenger in a ship that Taha had been Navigating, which had come under severe gravitational stress when Taha’s mind was captured by an insane Flunnulf, or Space Guide …

“At least David has no LeBrun blood in him.”

She was trying hard to hurt him, really hard. David had stopped playing with the model
Star Kingdom
and was assembling his magniblox into a convoluted structure, maybe a Space station. He’d ignored his mother since her entrance; indeed, he seemed slightly uneasy with her presence.

Maybe he sensed what LeBrun suspected: that Taha, despite the best treatment money could buy, was permanently insane, half her mind burned away by contact with that Flunnulf … Imagine it, out there in High Space and responsible for fifty thousand souls, relying on your fitful psy powers to make contact with the next human Flunnulf in a network of them scattered among the stars on beacon hydras — and then to find, too late, that the next one in line is mad.

Taha saved the ship, at the cost of her own sanity. How she did it is another story, but her hair turned white, and she kept it that way to punish LeBrun.

LeBrun asked casually, “Whose child is David, then?”

“I don’t really know. Does it matter? Some young fellow down Old Argentina way — a little place called Puerto Este.”

“Did he have … psy?”

“Did he ever!” Her enthusiasm was like a knife.

“It doesn’t show in David.”

“I should hope not!” And now she snatched the child up, peering at LeBrun cunningly from behind the fair curls. “You won’t get your hands on my son, Isaac!”

“I
have plenty of Navigators — take a look at the college enrollments.”

Realizing that he was being drawn into argument, he turned back to the screen. Captain Pounce was smiling back at him, all suppressed energy, sharp teeth and high cheekbones. “Everything under control now, Isaac.” He checked a bank of dials, a fleeting glance with slitted pupils. “Just some kind of emanation that was troubling one of the Navigators. All these people, I guess …” He shrugged, a supple movement. “I sometimes wonder if the Starshell acts as a kind of lens, with the
Kingdom
at the focus … Two minutes to launch. Counting.”

The image shifted, picking up the First Navigator lying back in his seat, helmet on, wired into the initial guidance system that would take the giant ship beyond the Solar System and into the unchartable whorls of High Space, where the Flunnulfs took over.

The massed spectators were waving, and the sound of cheering came faintly to LeBrun.

He glanced at Taha, who had put David down and who now, despite herself, was standing at the window, her expression intense.
You can’t take this away from me,
he thought. The child picked up his model again. Had it really been four years since Jack had died? LeBrun had thrown himself into his work; the time had passed so quickly.

And now the ship was moving, and Taha’s words came back to him like an echo above the cheers of the crowd and the bursting of rockets.
So what’s next, Isaac … ?

The ship was moving. The masterpiece, the ultimate triumph of human technology. It looked so huge out there, gliding slowly toward the disk of the exit. What next? A bigger one? Little bits of publicity statistics came to him.

Three times as long as the Amsterdam Building is high …

Broad enough to bridge the Great Sahara Canal …

Food enough for all eternity …

Suddenly, LeBrun shivered. The great ship slid on. She was so vulnerable against the majesty of the stars. She was going, away from him, out into the vastness of High Space, with its twists and warps and its stars hotter than a thousand reactors. He didn’t want her to go. He wanted to abort the launch. A few more checks, a few more safeguards …

“Isaac,
we have a problem.”

And Captain Steady blinked at him from the screen with lizard composure. Behind him, somebody was struggling with the First Navigator, fumbling with the fastenings, ripping the helmet from his head, leaving the
Star Kingdom
rudderless, a great blind whale blundering toward the tiny exit into Space. The Secondary Navigator waited, twitching with urgency, for the seat to be vacated. They carried the First Navigator away. He was jerking in the throes of some kind of fit. Little bubbles of foam beaded his lips. The Second Navigator pulled the helmet on. “Okay now, Isaac,” said Steady in his monotone.

The
Star Kingdom
glided on, the course correction imperceptible to the onlookers.

LeBrun let his breath go, hearing his own gasp, and remembered Taha. He didn’t look at her. He waited for her comment on the incident.

She was silent.

LeBrun whirled round. David had built a big wall with his magniblox, with a hole in the middle. He held his model aloft. He was simulating the launch. He was a stranger — not a grandchild at all. He looked at LeBrun and smiled, as always, as though nothing had changed.

Taha was looking out of the window.

Her expression was fierce, a concentrated stare as though she were willing the ship — all ships — to disintegrate, to cease to exist, to never have been. Her lips were moving.
This for you, Jack
…

And on the screen, the Second Navigator jerked, as though in sudden pain.

“Stop that!” LeBrun threw himself at the woman, hurling her to the floor too fast for the tendrils of the living carpet, which had no time to rise and check her fall. She bounced and yelped. Her concentration was broken.

The Second Navigator, released, relaxed. The
Star Kingdom
moved into the circle of black Space, glowing in the light of a thousand spotlights and a million bursting starshells. Taha ran from the room. For an instant, LeBrun wished she’d taken the other door, the one into the vacuum …

But she was gone,
and the moment was his again. Today was his — and as for tomorrow, so what? There would be more challenges, another ship. It was just a question of size. The next ship would be bigger and better, and the cheers would be louder. In his mind, that next ship began to take shape, even as the
Star Kingdom
eased its vastness through the circular exit, as accurately as a laser scalpel, and as cleanly. That next ship … Earth didn’t have the resources. He would have to move the Starshell, set up camp in the rings of Saturn, nearer the raw materials. Camp? A city, he’d build. A city of workers, self-contained like a starship, living and giving birth and dying while they built the greatest ship of all time. A ship to move a billion people to new worlds, a ship to …

Isaac Lebrun — you are the greatest Bender of them all
.

Smiling at his thoughts, he took his gaze from the departing masterpiece, needing another human being to share his dreams, and having one nearby: David, who was not his grandson, but who was the child of the mad Taha and some unknown Argentinian. That fact could not affect him today.

“David …”

David sat near the exit hatch — too near. Once a fool mechanic had opened the hatch from the other side, unthinking, and sucked the wiring diagrams for the
Star Kingdom
into Space.

And David smiled at him, proudly. David was simulating the launch of the
Star Kingdom,
all on his own, for the benefit of his clever Gramps.

Just like the real thing, the model starship was gliding through the center of the circular hole in the magniblox. Unsupported.

Bereft of the wires, strings, rails, or chubby hands. All by itself. Suspended in Space.

“Clever David,” said David, child of mad Taha and some unknown Argentinian with powers, leaning back against the exit hatch.

*

It was, in fact, the
very last day of the Great Age of Space, and one person knew it instantly. Dreams evaporated. Cheers sounded like jeers. The Space city, the rings of Saturn, the generations of workers, the LeBrun
Star Kingdom,
the LeBrun College for Navigators, this very LeBrun Starshell, seemed suddenly insubstantial, unrealized — obsolete. As did LeBrun.