Nova (12 page)
"Ship I was on got caught in a nova— must be about ten years ago."
"Aren't you glad you weren't on it."
"I was. We got out again too."
Lorq looked down from the ceiling.
Dan sat forward on the green bench, knobby elbows on his knees; his hands wrapped the mug.
"You did?"
"Yeah." Dan glanced at his shoulder where the broken lace on his vest was clumsily knotted. "We fell in, and we got out."
Puzzlement surfaced on Lorq's face.
"Hey, Captain! You look fierce, don't you!"
Five times now Lorq had passed his face in a mirror, thinking it bore one expression, to discover the scar had translated it into something that totally amazed. "What happened, Dan?"
The Australian looked at his mug. There was only foam at the bottom of the glass.
Lorq pressed the order plate on the bench arm. Two more mugs circled toward them, foam dissolving,
"Just what I needed, Captain," Dan reached out his foot. "One for you. There you go. And one for me.'
Lorq sipped his drink and stuck his feet out to rest on the sandal heels. Nothing moved on his face, Nothing moved behind it.
"You know the Alkane Institute?" Dan raised his voice above the cheers and laughter from the corner where two mechanics had begun wrestling on the trampoline. Spectators waved their drinks. "On Vorpis in Draco they got this big museum with laboratories and stuff, and they study things like novas."
"My aunt's a curator there." Lorq's voice was low, words clearing beneath the shouts.
"Yeah? Anyway, they send out people whenever they get reports of some star acting up— "
"Look! She winning is!"
"No! He her arm watch pull!"
"Hey, Von Ray, you the man or woman will win think?" A group of officers had come down the ramp to watch the match. One slapped Lorq's shoulder, then turned his hand up. There was a ten-pound @sg piece in his palm.
"I not tonight wager make." Lorq pushed the hand away.
"Lorq, I double this on the woman lay— "
"Tomorrow your money I take," Lorq said. "Now you go."
The young officer made a disgusted sound and drew his finger down his face, shaking his head to his companions.
But Lorq was waiting for Dan to go on.
Dan turned from the wrestling. "It seems a freighter got lost in a tidal drift and noticed something funny about the spectral lines of some star a couple of solars away. Stars are mostly hydrogen, yeah, but there was a big build-up of heavy materials on the gases of the surface; that means something odd. When they finally got themselves found, they reported the condition of the star to the cartographic society of the Alkane, who took a guess at what it was— the build-up of a nova. Because the make-up of a star doesn't change in a nova, you can't detect the build-up over any distance with spectranalysis or anything like that; Alkane sent-out a team to watch the star. They've studied some twenty or thirty of them in the last fifty years. They put up rings of remote-control stations as close to the star as Mercury is to Sol; they send televised pictures of the star's surface; these stations burn the second the sun goes. They put rings of stations further and further out that send second-by-second reports of the whole thing. At about one light-week they have the first manned stations; even these are abandoned for stations further out soon as the nova begins. Anyway, I was on a ship that was supposed to bring supplies to one of these manned stations that was sitting around waiting for the sun to blow. You know the actual time it takes for the sun to go from its regular brightness to maximum magnitude twenty or thirty thousand times as bright is only about two or three hours."
Lorq nodded.
"They still can't judge exactly when a nova that they've been watching is going to go. Now I don't understand it exactly, but somehow the sun we were coming to went up just before we reached our stop-off station. Maybe it was a twist in space itself, or a failure of instruments, but we overshot the station and went right on into the sun, during the first hour of implosion." Dan lowered his mouth to sip off foam.
"All right," Lorq said. "From the heat, you should have been atomized before you were as close to the sun as Pluto is from Sol. You should have been crushed by the actual physical battering. The gravitational tides should have torn you to pieces. The amount of radiation the ship was exposed to should have, first, knocked apart every organic compound in the ship, and second, fissioned every atom down into ionized hydrogen— "
"Captain, I can think of seven more things without trying. The ionization frequencies should have— " Dan stopped. "But none of them did. Our ship was funneled directly through the center of the sun— and out the other side. We were deposited safely about two light-weeks away. The captain, as soon as he realized what was happening, pulled his head in and turned off all our sensory-input scanners so that we were falling blind. An hour later he peeked out and was very surprised to find we were still— period. But the instruments recorded our path. We had gone straight through the nova." Dan finished his drink. He looked sideways at Lorq. "Captain, you're looking all fierce again."
"What's the explanation?"
Dan shrugged. "They came up with a lot of suggestions when Alkane got hold of us. They got these bubbles, see, exploding on the surface of any sun, two or three times the size of medium-sized planets, where the temperature is as low as eight hundred or a thousand degrees. That sort of temperature might not destroy a ship. Perhaps we were caught in one of those and carried on through the sun. Somebody else suggested perhaps the energy frequencies of a nova are all polarized in one direction while something caused the ship's energies to polarize in another so that they sort of passed through one another just like they didn't touch. But other people came up with just as many theories to knock those down. What seems most likely is that when time and space are subjected to such violent strains like you got in a nova, the laws that govern the natural machinery of physics and physical happenings as we know them just don't work right." Dan shrugged again. "They never did get it settled."
"Look! Look, he her down has!"
"One, two— no, she away pulls— "
"No! He her has! He her has!"
On the trampoline the grinning mechanic staggered over his opponent. Half a dozen drinks had already been brought for him; by custom he had to finish as many as he could, and the loser drink the rest. More officials had come down to congratulate him and stake wagers on the next match.
"I wonder ..." Lorq frowned.
"Captain, I know you can't help it, but you shouldn't look like that."
"I wonder if the Alkane has any record of that trip, Dan."
"I guess they do. Like I say, it was about ten years ...
But Lorq was looking at the ceiling. The iris had shut under the wind that wracked Ark's night. The clashing mandala completely covered the star.
Lorq raised his hands to his face. His lips fell back as he hunted at the roots of the idea pushing through his mind. Fissured flesh translated his expression to beatific torture.
Dan started to speak again. Then he moved away, his gristly face filled with puzzlement.
His name was Lorq Von Ray. He had to repeat it silently, secure it with repetition; because an idea had just split his being. As he sat, looking up, he felt totally shaken. Something central had been parted as violently as Prince's hand had parted his face. He blinked to clear the stars. And his name
Draco (Roc transit), 3172
"Yes, Captain Von Ray?"
"Pull in the side vanes."
The Mouse pulled in.
"We're hitting the steady stream, side vanes in completely. Lynceos and Idas, stay on your vanes and take the first watch. The rest of you can break out for a while," Lorq's voice boomed over the sounds of space.
Turning from the vermilion rush, in which hung the charred stars, the Mouse blinked and realized the chamber once more.
Olga blinked.
The Mouse sat up on the couch to unplug.
"I'll see you in the commons," the captain continued. "And Mouse, bring your ..."
The Mouse pulled the leather sack from under the couch and slung it over his shoulder.
" ...sensory-syrynx with you."
The door slid back and the Mouse stood at the top of three steps above the blue carpet of the Roc's commons:
A stairway spiraled in a fall of shadows: tongues of metal twisting under the lights on the ceiling sent flashings over the wall and the leaves of the philodendrons before the mirrored mosaic.
Katin had already seated himself before the layered gaming board for three-D chess and was setting up pieces. A final rook clicked to its corner, and the bubble chair, a globe of jellied glycerin contoured to the body, bobbed, "All right, who's going to play me first?"
Captain Von Ray stood at the head of the spiral steps. As he started down, his smashed reflection graveled down the mosaic.
"Captain?" Katin raised his chin. "Mouse? Which one of you wants the first game?"
Tyy and Sebastian came through the arched door and across the ramp that spanned the lime-banked pool filling a third of the room.
A breeze.
The water rippled.
Darknesses sailed in over their heads.
"Down!" from Sebastian.
His arm jerked in its socket, and the beasts wheeled on steel leashes. The huge pets collapsed about him like rags.
"Sebastian? Tyy? Do you play?" Katin turned to the ramp.
"It used to be a passion with me, but my game has gone off a bit." He gazed up the steps, picked up the rook again, and examined the black-cored crystal. "Tell me, Captain, are these pieces original?"
At the bottom of the steps Von Ray raised red eyebrows.
Katin grinned. "Oh."
"What are they?" The Mouse came across the carpet and looked over Katin's shoulder. "I've never seen pieces like that before."
"Funny style for chess pieces," Katin observed. "Vega Republic. But you see it a lot in furniture and architecture."
"Where's the Vega Republic?" The Mouse took up a pawn: inside crystal, a sun system, a jewel in the center, circled a tilted plane.
"It isn't anywhere any more. It refers to an uprising in twenty-eight hundred when Vega tried to secede from Draco. And failed. The art and architecture from that period have been taken up by our artier intellectuals. I suppose there was something heroic about the whole business. They certainly tried as hard as they could to be original-last stand for cultural autonomy and all that. But it's become sort of a polite parlor game to trace influences." He picked up another piece. "I still like the stuff. They did produce three gold musicians and one incredible poet. Though only one of the musicians had anything to do with the uprising. But most people don't know that."
"No kidding?" the Mouse said. "All right. I'll play you a game." He walked around the chessboard and sat on the green glycerin. "What do you want, black or yellow?"
Von Ray reached over the Mouse's shoulder for the control panel that had surfaced on the chair arm and pressed a micro-switch.
The lights in the gaming board went out.
"Hey, why ...?" The Mouse's rough whisper halted on chagrin.
"Take your syrynx, Mouse." Lorq walked to the sculptured rock on the yellow tiles. "If I told you to make a nova, Mouse, what would you do?" He sat on a stone outcrop.
"I don't know. What do you mean?" The Mouse lifted his instrument from its sack. His thumb ran the finger board. His fingers walked the inductance plate; the pinky staggered on its stilted nail.
"I'm telling you now. Make a nova."
The Mouse paused. Then, "All right," and his hand jumped.
Sound rumbled after the flash. Colors behind the afterimage blotted vision, swirled in a diminishing sphere, were gone.
"Down!" Sebastian was saying. "Down now ...
Lorq laughed. "Not bad. Come here. No, bring your hell-harp." He shifted on the rock to make room. "Show me how it works."
"Show you how to play the syrynx?"
"That's right."
There are expressions that happen on the outside of the face; there are expressions that happen on the inside, with only quivers on the lips and eyelids. "I don't usually let people fool with my ax." Lips and eyelids quivered.
"Show me."
The Mouse's mouth thinned. He said: "Give me your hand." As he positioned the captain's fingers across the saddle of the image-resonance board, blue light glowed before them. "Now look down here." The Mouse pointed to the front of the syrynx. "These three pin-lenses have hologramic grids behind them. They focus where the blue light is and give you a three-dimensional image. Brightness and intensity you control here. Move your hand forward."
The light increased— "Now back."
— and dimmed. "How do you make an image?"
"Took me a year to learn, Captain. Now, these strings control the sound. Each one isn't a different note; they're different sound textures. The pitch is changed by moving your fingers closer or further away. Like this." He drew a chord of brass and human voices that glissandoed into uncomfortable subsonics. "You want to smell up the place? Back here. This knob controls the intensity of the image. You can make the whole thing highly directional by— "
