Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (60 page)

“Watch it!” He slapped her head so that her vision spun. “Excuse, seh.”

“You’re getting a bit long in the tooth, Sosi.” He meant that literally: mature Joilani teeth were large. “You better start training a younger
moolie.
Or have ‘em pulled.”

“Yes, seh.”

“You scratch me again and I’ll pull ‘em myself—Holy Jebulibar, what’s that?”

A flash from the window lit the room, followed by a rumbling that rattled the walls. The commander tossed her aside and ran to look out.

It had come! It was really true!
Hurry.
She scrambled to the chair.

“Good God Almighty, it looks like the transmitter blew. Wha—”

He had whirled toward his communicator, his clothes, and found himself facing the mouth of his own weapon held in Sosalal’s trembling hands. He was too astounded to react. When she pressed the firing stud he dropped with his chest blown open, the blank frown still on his face.

Sosalal too was astounded, moving in a dream. She had killed. Really killed a Terran. A living being. “I come to share,” she whispered ritually. Gazing at the fiery light in the window, she turned the weapon to her own head and pressed the firing stud.

Nothing happened.

What could be wrong? The dream broke, leaving her in dreadful reality. Frantically she poked and probed at the strange object. Was there some mechanism needed to reset it? She was unaware of the meaning of the red charge dot—the commander had grown too careless to recharge his weapon after his last game hunt. Now it was empty.

Sosalal was still struggling with the thing when the door burst open and she felt herself seized and struck all but senseless. Amid the boots and the shouting, her wrist glands leaked scarlet Joilani tears as she foresaw the slow and merciless death that would now be hers.

They had just started to question her when she heard it: the deep rolling rumble of a ship lifting off. The
Dream
was away—her people had done it, they were saved! Through her pain she heard a Terran voice say, “Juloo-town is empty! All the young ones are on that ship.” Under the blows of her tormentors her twin hearts leaped with joy.

But a moment later all exultation died; she heard the louder fires of the Terran cruiser bursting into the sky. The
Dream
had failed, then: they would be pursued and killed. Desolate, she willed herself to die in the Terrans’ hands. But her life resisted, and her broken body lived long enough to sense the thunderous concussion from the sky that must be the destruction of her race. She died believing all hope was dead. Still, she had told her questioners nothing.

Great dangers came to those who essayed to lift the
Dream.

“If you monkeys are seriously planning to try to fly this ship, you better set that trim lever first or we’ll all be killed.”

It was the Terran pilot speaking—the third to be captured, so they had not needed to stop his mouth.

“Go on, push it! It’s in landing attitude now, that red one. I don’t want to be smashed up.”

Young Jivadh, dwarfed in the huge pilot’s chair, desperately reviewed his laboriously built-up memory engram of this ship’s controls. Red lever, red lever . He was not quite sure. He twisted around to look at their captives. Incredible to see the three great bodies lying bound and helpless against the wall, which should soon become the floor. From the seat beside him Bislat held his weapon trained on them. It was one of the two stolen Terran weapons which they had long hoarded for this, their greatest task: the capture of the Terrans on the
Dream
. The first spacer had not believed they were serious until Jivadh had burned through his boots.

Now he lay groaning intermittently, muffled by the gag. When he caught Jivadh’s gaze he nodded vehemently in confirmation of the pilot’s warning.

“I left it in landing attitude,” the pilot repeated. “If you try to lift that way we’ll all die!” The third captive nodded, too.

Jivadh’s mind raced over and over the remembered pattern. The
Dream
was an old unstandardized ship. Jivadh continued with the ignition procedure, not touching the red lever.

“Push it, you fool!” the pilot shouted. “Holy mother, do you want to die?”

Bislat was looking nervously from Jivadh to the Terrans. He too had learned the patterns of the
amlat
freighters, but not as well.

“Jivadh, are you
sure?
”

“I cannot be certain. I think on the old ships that is an emergency device which will change or empty the fuels so that they cannot fire. What they call
abort
. See the Terran symbol
a
.”

The pilot had caught the words. ‘

“It’s not abort, it’s attitude!
A
for attitude,
attitude
, you monkey. Push it over or we’ll crash!”

The other two nodded urgently.

Jivadh’s whole body was flushed blue and trembling with tension. His memories seemed to recede, blur, spin. Never before had a Joilani disbelieved, disobeyed, a Terran order. Desperate, he clung to one fading fragment of a yellowed chart in his mind.

“I think not,” he said slowly.

Taking his people’s whole life in his delicate fingers, he punched the ignition-and-lift sequence into real time.

Clickings—a clank of metal below—a growling hiss that grew swiftly to an intolerable roar beneath them. The old freighter creaked, strained, gave a sickening lurch. Were they about to crash? Jivadh’s soul died a thousand deaths.

But the horizon around them stayed level. The
Dream
was shuddering upward, straight up, moving faster and faster as she staggered and leaped toward space. All landmarks fell away—they were in flight! Jivadh, crushed against his supports, exulted. They had not crashed! He had been right: the Terran had been lying.

All outer sound fell away. The
Dream
had cleared atmosphere, and was driving for the stars!

But not alone.

Just as the pressure was easing, just as joy was echoing through the ship and the first of his comrades were struggling up to tell him all was well below, just as a Healer was moving to aid the Terran’s burned foot—a loud Terran voice roared through the cabin.

“Halt, you in the
Dream!
Retrofire. Go into orbit for boarding or we’ll shoot you down.”

The Joilani shrank back. Jivadh saw that the voice was coming from the transceiver, which he had turned on as part of the lift-off procedures.

“That’s the patrol,” the Terran pilot told him. “They’re coming up behind us. You have to quit now, monkey boy. They really will blow us out of space.”

A sharp clucking started in an instrument to Jivadh’s right. MASS PROXIMITY INDICATOR, he read. Involuntarily he turned to the Terran pilot.

“That’s nothing, just one of those damn moons. Listen, you
have
to backfire. I’m not fooling this time. I’ll tell you what to do.”

“Go into orbit for boarding!” the great voice boomed.

But Jivadh had turned away, was busy doing something else. It was not right. Undoubtedly he would kill them all—but he knew what his people would wish.

“Last warning. We will now fire,” the cruiser’s voice said coldly.

“They mean it!” the Terran pilot screamed. “For god’s sake let me talk to them, let me acknowledge!” The other Terrans were glaring, thrashing in their bonds. This fear was genuine, Jivadh saw, quite different from the lies before. What he had to do was not difficult, but it would take time. He fumbled the transceiver switch open and spoke into it, ignoring Bislat’s horrified eyes.

“We will stop. Please wait. It is difficult.”

“That’s the boy!” The pilot was panting with relief. “All right now. See that delta-V estimator, under the thrust dial? Oh, it’s too feking complicated. Let me at it, you might as well.”

Jivadh ignored him, continuing with his doomed task. Reverently he fed in the coordinates, the sacred coordinates etched in his mind since childhood, the numbers that might possibly, if they could have done it right, have brought them out of tau-space among Joilani stars.

“We will give you three minims to comply,” the voice said.

“Listen, they
mean
it!” the pilot cried. “What are you doing? Let me up!”

Jivadh went on. The mass-proximity gauge clucked louder; he ignored that, too. When he turned to the small tau-console the pilot suddenly understood.

“No! Oh,
no!
” he screamed. “Oh, for god’s sake don’t do that! You crotting idiot, if you go tau this close to the planet we’ll be squashed right into its mass!” His voice had risen to a shriek; the other two were uttering wordless roars and writhing.

They were undoubtedly right, Jivadh thought bleakly. One moment’s glory—and now the end.

“We fire in one more minim,” came the cruiser’s toneless roar.

“Stop! Don’t! No!” the pilot yelled.

Jivadh looked at Bislat. The other had realized what he was doing; now he gave the true Joilani smile of pursed lips and made the ritual sign of Acceptance-of-ending. The Joilani in the passage understood that; a sighing silence rustled back through the ship.

“Fire one,” the cruiser voice said briskly.

Jivadh slammed the tau-tumbler home.

An alarm shrieked and cut off, all colors vanished, the very structure of space throbbed wildly—as, by a million-to-one chance, the three most massive nearby moons occulted one another in line with the tiny extra energies of the cruiser and its detonating missile, in such a way that for one micromicrominim the
Dream
stood at a seminull point with the planetary mass. In that fleeting instant she flung out her tau-field, folded the normal dimensions around her, and shot like a squeezed pip into the discontinuity of being which was tau.

Nearby space-time was rocked by the explosion; concussion swept the moons and across the planet beneath. So narrow was the
Dream
’s moment of safe passage that a fin of bright metal from the cruiser and a rock with earth and herbs on it were later found intricately meshed into the substance of her stern cargo hold, to the great wonder of the Joilani.

Meanwhile the rejoicing was so great that it could be expressed in only one way: all over the ship, the Joilani lifted their voices in the sacred song.

They were free! The
Dream
had made it into tau-space, where no enemy could find them! They were safely on their way.

Safely on their way—to an unknown destination, over an unknown time, with pitifully limited supplies of water, food, and air.

Here begins the log of the passage of the
Dream
through tauspace, which, although timeless, required finite time. . . .

Jatkan let the precious old scroll roll up and laid it carefully aside, to touch the hand of a co-mate. He had been one of the babies in the
amlat
containers; sometimes he thought he remembered the great night of their escape. Certainly he remembered a sense of rejoicing, a feeling of dread nightmare blown away.

“The waiting is long,” said his youngest co-mate, who was little more than a child. “Tell us again about the Terran monsters.”

“They weren’t monsters, only very alien,” he corrected the child gently. His eyes met those of Salasvati, who was entertaining her young co-mates at the porthole of the tiny records chamber. It came to Jatkan that when he and Salas were old, they might be the last Joilani who had ever really seen a Terran. Certainly the last to have any sense of their terror and might, and the degradations of slavery burned into their parents’ souls. Surely this is good, he thought, but is it not also a loss, in some strange way?

“—reddish, or sometimes yellow or brownish, almost hairless, with small bright eyes,” he was telling the child. “And big, about the distance to that porthole there. And one day, when the three who were on the
Dream
were allowed out to exercise, they rushed into the control room and changed the—the
gyroscope
setting, so that the ship began to spin around faster and faster, and everybody fell down and was pressed flat into the walls. They were counting on their greater strength, you see.”

“So that they could seize the
Dream
and break out of tauspace into Terran stars!” His two female co-mates recited in unison: “But old Jivadh saved us.”

“Yes. But he was young Jivadh then. By great good luck he was at the central column, right where the old weapons were kept, that no one had touched for hundreds of days.”

A co-mate smiled. “The luck of the Joilani.”

“No,” Jatkan told her. “We must not grow superstitious. It was simple chance.”

“And he
killed them all!
” the child burst out excitedly. A hush fell.

“Never use that word so lightly,” Jatkan said sternly. “Think what you are meaning, little one.
Jailasanatha
—”

As he admonished the child, his mind noted again the incongruity of his words: the “little one” was already as large as he, as he in turn was larger and stronger than his parents. This could only be due to the children’s eating the Terran-mixed food from the ship’s recycler, however scanty. When the older ones saw how the young grew, it confirmed another old myth: that their ancestors had once been giants, who had diminished through some lack in the planet’s soil. Was every old myth-legend coming true at once?

Meanwhile he was trying once more to explain to the child, and to the others, the true horror of the decision Jivadh had faced, and Jivadh’s frenzy of anguish when he was prevented from killing himself in atonement. Jatkan’s memory was scarred by that day. First the smash against the walls, the confusion—the explosions—their release; and then the endless hours of ritual argument, persuading Jivadh that his knowledge of the ship was too precious to lose. The pain in Jivadh’s voice as he confessed: “I thought also in selfishness, that we would have their water, their food, their air.”

“That is why he doesn’t take his fair share of food, and sleeps on the bare steel.”