MacRoscope (47 page)

The journey via melting and ten-G acceleration had reduced the problems of deceleration and docking to elementary ones; maneuvering was nothing after distance had been conquered. Afra piloted them into a companion orbit — the destroyer-sphere five light-minutes distant, small as it was, was the primary for both — and let Joseph drift. None of them had conjectured how an object two miles in diameter could have a gravitational field about it equivalent to that of a small star. Galactic technology had done it, utilizing gravity as a tool, and that was explanation enough.

“Someone should stay on the ship,” Groton said. “We can’t be sure what is waiting — there.”

“Ivo should stay,” Afra said. “If anything happens, he’s the only one who can get the ship out. Neptune, rather.” She said it as though he were a fixture, a commodity; she hadn’t asked his opinion. “Give me one companion, though; I’m afraid of the dark.”

“I’ll stay,” Beatryx said. “You go, Harold.”

Ivo could find no legitimate objection to make.

The two got into their suits and departed via the airlock at the appropriate time. Ivo was alone with Beatryx for the first time since their last conversation on satellite Schön, seemingly so long ago. In the interim he had traveled into Earth’s historic past, and into its geologic past, and beyond the fringe of the galaxy. His body had run through the astonishing liquefication and reconstitution so many times that the process had become routine, even tedious. He had lived many lifetimes, and many of his basic certainties had been annulled.

Why, then, did it bother him so much that Afra and Groton should be together?

He tried to say something to Beatryx, but realized that he could not ask her advice without undermining her own framework. She had proper faith in her husband.

He looked at her, realizing in this isolated moment of association and reflection how much she had changed. She had been plump and fortyish when he met her at age thirty-seven; in the period of the Triton trouble she had become emaciated and fortyish. Now she was thirty-eight — and had regained her health without her former avoirdupois. She looked thirtyish. Her hair had brightened into full blonde, her limbs were sleek, her torso reminiscent of the goddess she had been momentarily during the first re-constitution. It had happened gradually, this change in her; the surprise was that it had taken him so long to recognize it.

“You have changed, Ivo,” she said.

“
I’ve
changed?”

“Since your visit to Tyre. You were so young at first, so unsure. Now you’re more mature.”

“I don’t
feel
mature,” he said, flattered but disbelieving. “I’m still full of doubts and frustrations. And Tyre was nothing but violence and intrigue — not my type of life at all. I don’t see how it could have changed me.”

She only shrugged.

He glanced at the screen again, reminded that half their party was in the alien structure. Groton and Afra—

“She has let go of Bradley Carpenter,” Beatryx said. “Have you seen the difference? She’s changed so much. Isn’t it wonderful?”

Was there such a thing as being too generous? True, the two were risking their lives by attempting personal contact with aliens likely to be powerful and hostile; but the human interaction could not be entirely ignored. “I’ve noticed the difference, yes.”

“And she gets along so much better with Harold. I’m sure he has been good for her. He’s very steady.”

Ivo nodded.

“She’s such a lovely girl,” Beatryx said. There was no malice in her tone; nothing but concerned pleasure.

“Lovely.”

“You look tired, Ivo. why don’t I keep watch while you rest?”

“That’s very kind of you.” He went to his hammock and strapped himself in. It was an anchor rather than a support, in this weightlessness.

It was this about Beatryx, he thought: she was happy. There was no place in her philosophy for jealousy or petty conjecture. She did not worry about her husband because she had no internal doubts.

How much could the group have accomplished, without her? The ingredients of strife had been abundantly present, particularly with the strong personalities of Groton and Afra clashing at the outset, and the background specter of Schön, but somehow every flareup had been diverted or pacified. Beatryx had done it… and profited in the doing. Intelligence, determination, skill — these would have come to nothing without that basic stability.

He must have slept, for he was Sidney Lanier again: poor, ill, his aspirations unrecognized. He did some more teaching, but the pupils were unruly, the employers exacting. It was the Reconstruction, and it was bad; the carpetbaggers corrupted everything. “Dumb in the dark, not even God invoking,” he wrote, “we lie in chains, too weak to be afraid.”

But the love of Mary Day, now Mary Day Lanier, sustained him. She was as ill as he, and as hard put upon, but their marriage was an unqualified blessing. His son Charles delighted him, for he loved children though he did not really understand them.

In 1869 James Wood Davidson published a survey of two hundred and forty-one Southern writers. Lanier was listed, though largely for completeness; much more space was devoted to others considered more notable.

But you were the greatest of them all!
Ivo cried.
If only your contemporaries had opened their minds
—

But nothing changed. The mind of Ivo was prisoner to the situation of another person; he could watch, he could know, but he could not influence.

As Schön was watching him even now…

At Macon they spoke of Sidney Lanier as “A young fool trying to write poetry.” They paid no attention to his dialect poems — a form whose origin was later to be credited to another man — or his cautions against the shiftless, shortsighted Georgia Cracker ways. Cotton was destroying the land; wheat and corn were far better crops, but the farmers refused to change.

He put his sentiment at least into a major poem, “Corn,” and sent it off to the leading literary magazine of the day, Howells’ Atlantic Monthly.

Howells rejected it.

Lanier was crushed by this response. He believed in his work, yet the unambitious efforts of others achieved readier acceptance. “In looking around at the publications of the younger poets,” he was later to remark, “I am struck with the circumstance that none of them even
attempt
anything great. The morbid fear of doing something wrong or unpolished appears to have influenced their choice of subjects.”

Not only in poetry!
Ivo thought.
The entire society is governed by mediocrity. We never learn
.

Several other prominent magazines rejected “Corn.”

Were they absolutely blind?

At last Lippincott’s Magazine accepted it. Publication made Lanier’s poetic fame; henceforth he was known, though still poor and ill.

The year was 1875, and he was thirty-three years old. He would not live to forty.

Ivo must have slept, for the exploratory party was back already.

“What a bomb!” Afra exclaimed. “There’s enough armament there to blast a fleet. Chemical, laser, and things we won’t invent for centuries! All of it on standby.”

“I don’t understand,” Beatryx said.

“It’s a battlewagon, dear,” Groton explained. “But somebody turned it off. All but the sensory equipment.”

“It could have blasted Neptune to bits!” Afra said. The potential violence seemed to fascinate her. “It has — I think they’re gravity-bombs. Devices that would throw the fields associated with matter into complete chaos. Whoever built that wagon really knew how to fight a war!”

Ivo decided to get into the conversation. “It must be there to protect the destroyer. But why would they deactivate it? If enemies had boarded it and turned it off, they would have gone on to squelch the destroyer too.”

“And why
build
such an arsenal, if not to be used?” Groton said. “I can’t make sense of it either.”

Afra was not fazed. “We know where the answer is.”

“Did it occur to you that we may not much
like
the answer, when and if we find it?” Groton, at least, seemed to be taking the matter seriously.

“It’s in the stars. Who am I to object?”

The two-mile bulk of the destroyer itself seemed more like a small planet, compared to the satellite. Though the gravitic field about it was monstrous, intensity had not increased proportionately as they approached its surface, and the weight of the ship was only a quarter what it would have been on Earth. This still made for tricky maneuvering, since the macroscope housing was vulnerable in gravity. But indentations in the sides of the sphere resembled docking facilities, so they piloted Joseph in instead of establishing a tight orbit. The builders had evidently expected visitors, and had made the approach convenient.

Ivo gave up counting the incongruities of the situation. Better simply to accept what offered, as the others were doing.

The dock was a tubelike affair open at each end, as though a missile had passed cleanly through the rim. The gravity was minimal inside — just enough to hold Joseph in place at the center of the tube. The macroscope housing thus never had to rest in an awkward position; the ship was able to “land” with it attached.

Groton and Afra donned their suits again and went out first. Ivo watched him boost her into the lock with a familiar hand on the rear.

Three minutes later their cheerful reports began coming in. “Very well organized,” Groton remarked. “Very businesslike. There seem to be magnetic moorings we can attach to the hull. Why not?”

“And pressure-locks,” Afra said, her voice girlishly thrilled. “Harold, you anchor Joseph while I figure out the settings.”

“Right.” The sounds of his exertions came through, and the clank of tools, audible without benefit of earphone. Ivo wondered how this was possible, in the exterior vacuum, then realized that the sonic vibrations were being transmitted through the hardware and into the. ship. Groton was holding on to something, and standing somewhere, so contacts were plentiful.

Then came the knock of another contact with Joseph’s hull. The ship had been secured.

“I’m setting it for Earth-normal pressure and composition,” Afra said. “I don’t even have to remember the oxygen-nitrogen ratio or the fine points; it has a gas-analyzer. One sample puff from my suit—”

“Let’s not trust it too far,” Groton cautioned. “Don’t forget this
is
the destroyer.”

“Don’t get worked up, daddy. If it let us get this far, it isn’t going to trick us with a mickey now. I’m going in.”

Ivo wondered. Wasn’t it possible that the destroyer cared less about infringing individuals than about dangerous species or cultures? This had the aspect of flypaper — or, if occupied, of the spider’s lair.

But if it had them, it had them. No incidental caution could protect them within its bowels, if personal malignance waited. They could be snuffed out in a thousand casual ways. Had they wanted security, they should have stayed well clear of the destroyer. Thousands of light-years clear.

“Removing suit,” Afra said. A pause. “Air’s good. Shall I go on into the interior?”

“Not without checking it!” Groton said. “That’s only the airlock, you know. What’s inside could ruin your delicate complexion. It might be hundred percent ammonia at five degrees Kelvin.”

“No it mightn’t. The system has been keyed to the lock. The entire wing has been pressurized to match my sample. I tell you, these galactics are experienced.”

“What do you think, folks?” Groton asked dubiously.

Ivo remembered that he was on this circuit too. “She’ll have to get out of the lock before anybody else uses it. Might as well go in.”

“You, dear?” Groton inquired.

“Whatever you think, dear,” Beatryx said. She had faith in her husband’s judgment, and Ivo envied her that.

“Come on out, then, both of you. We should take on this particular adventure as a group. I’ll wait here for you while Miss Impetuous shows the way.”

“Goats are naturally inquisitive,” Afra said.

Goat = Capricorn, her astrological sign, Ivo thought. Groton must have showed her her chart, during one of their… private discussions. And did Beatryx know that she was Pisces — a poor fish?

They dressed and climbed out. Ivo assisted Beatryx, but not with any palm on the bottom.

Groton stood on a platform resembling that of a train station. Massive cables reached from the rounded ceiling to Joseph on either side.

“Just swing over on the spare,” Groton recommended. “The gravity increases near the lock. You could jump, but why take chances?”

Ivo wondered again whether the humor were conscious. How much difference could one more chance make, now?

They swung over. This was his first physical contact with an alien artifact, since he had not visited the satellite, and he was vaguely disappointed both at its ordinary substance and at the continuing casualness with which the others adjusted to the situation. This was supposed to be the moment of climax — Alien Contact! — and nobody noticed.

Or was he merely put out because he had become a minor figure in a major adventure? After this, if they survived, Afra would be able to handle the travel signal (at least until they reencountered the existent destroyer field, which would take thousands of years to dissipate even at light speed;) and so she would have no further need of Ivo.

“Okay, I’ll go through and you follow in turn,” Groton said. “No problem with these controls—” He went on to demonstrate.

“Hurry up!” Afra said from the inside. “I’m itching to look about in here.”

Had this degenerated into a child’s game of “Spaceman”? Girl astronaut wanted them to hurry because she was impatient to explore!

He thought he heard Schön laughing. Little Ivo had thought to manage this adventure himself, and only succeeded in making himself unimportant. Ivo was no Lanier, he was not likely to achieve fame on his own. Schön, on the other hand—

They don’t need
you,
either
, he thought furiously at the lurking personality. Schön did not reply.

The interior was, as Afra had claimed, pressurized. He and Beatryx joined the other two in summer clothing, depositing their suits in binnacles provided for them adjacent to the lock. Regular tourist facilities!