Nova (4 page)
"What's heterotropic?"
"Mouse," said Katin, "by the end of the twentieth century mankind had witnessed the total fragmentation of what was then called 'modern science.' The continuum was filled with quasars and unidentifiable radio sources. There were more elementary particles than there were elements to be created from them. And perfectly durable compounds that had been thought impossible for years were being formed left and right like KrI4, H4XeO6, RrF4; the noble gases were not so noble after all. The concept of energy embodied in the Einsteinian quantum theory was about as correct, and led to as many contradictions, as the theory three hundred years earlier that fire was a released liquid called phlogiston. The soft sciences— isn't that a delightful name?— had run amuck. The experiences opened by psychedelics were making everybody doubt everything anyway and it was a hundred and fifty years before the whole mess was put back into some sort of coherent order by those great names in the synthetic and integrative sciences that are too familiar to both of us for me to insult you by naming. And you— who have been taught what button to push— want me— who am the product of a centuries-old educational system founded not only on the imparting of information, but a whole theory of social adjustment as well— to give you a five-minute run— through of the development of human knowledge over the last ten centuries? You want to know what a heterotropic element is?"
"Captain says we got to be on board an hour before dawn," the Mouse ventured.
"Never mind, never mind. I have a knack for this sort of extemporaneous synthesis. Now let me see. First there was the work of De Blau in France in two thousand, when he presented the first clumsy scale and his basically accurate method for measuring the psychic displacement of electrical— "
"You're not helping." The Mouse grunted. "I want to find out about Von Ray and Illyrion."
Wings gentled the air. Black shapes settled. Hand in hand, Sebastian and Tyy came up the walkway. Their pets scuttled about their feet, rose. Tyy pushed one away from her arm; it soared. Two battled above Sebastian's shoulder for perch. One gave, and the satisfied beast pulled his wings now, brushing the Oriental's blond head.
"Hey!" the Mouse rasped. "You going back to the ship now?"
"We go."
"Just a second. What does Von Ray mean to you? You know his name?"
Sebastian smiled, and Tyy glanced at him with gray eyes. "We from the Pleiades Federation are," Tyy said. "I and these beasts under the Dim, Dead Sister, flock and master, born."
"The Dim, Dead Sister?"
"The Pleiades used to be called the Seven Sisters in ancient times because only seven of them could be seen from Earth" Katin explained to the Mouse's frown. "A few hundred B.C. or so, one of the visible stars went nova and out. There are cities now on the innermost of its charred planets. It's still hot enough to keep things habitable, but that's about all."
"A nova?" the Mouse said. "What about Von Ray?"
Tyy made an inclusive gesture. "Everything. Great, good family is."
"Do you know about this particular Captain Von Ray?" Katin asked.
Tyy shrugged.
"What about Illyrion?" the Mouse asked. "What do you know about that?"
Sebastian squatted among his pets. Wings shed from him. His hairy hand went soothingly from head to head. "Pleiades Federation none have. Draco system none either have." He frowned.
"Von Ray a pirate some say," Tyy ventured.
Sebastian looked up sharply. "Von Ray great and good family is! Von Ray fine is! That why we with him go."
Tyy, more softly, her voice settling behind the gentle features: "Von Ray fine family is."
The Mouse saw Lynceos approaching over the bridge. And ten seconds later, Idas.
"You two are from the Outer Colonies?"
The twins stopped, shoulder brushing shoulder. Pink eyes blinked more than brown.
"From Argos," the pale twin said.
"Argos on Tubman B-12," specified the dark.
"The Far Out Colonies," Katin amended.
"What do you know about Illyrion?"
Idas leaned on the rail, frowned, then hoisted himself up so that he was sitting. "Illyrion?" He spread his knees and dropped his knotted hands between. "We have Illyrion in the Outer Colonies."
Lynceos sat beside him. "Tobias," he said. "We have a brother, Tobias." Lynceos moved on the bar closer to dark Idas. "We have a brother in the Outer Colonies named Tobias." He glanced at Idas, coral eyes netted with silver. "In the Outer Colonies, where there is Illyrion." He held his wrists together, but with fingers opened, like petals on a calloused lily.
"The worlds in the Outer Colonies?" Idas said. "Balthus— with ice and mud-pits and Illyrion. Cassandra— with glass deserts big as the oceans of Earth, and jungles of uncountable plants, all blue, with frothing rivers of galenium, and Illyrion. Salinus— combed through with mile-high caves and canons, with a continent of deadly red moss, and seas with towered cities built of the tidal quartz on the ocean floor, and Illyrion— "
"— The Outer Colonies are the worlds of stars much younger than the stars here in Draco, many times younger than the Pleiades," Lynceos put in.
"Tobias is in ... one of the Illyrion mines on Tubman." Idas said.
Their voices tensed; eyes stayed down, or leaped to one another's faces. When black hands opened, white hands closed.
"Idas, Lynceos, and Tobias, we grew up in the dry, equatorial stones of Tubman at Argos, under three suns and a red moon— "
"-and on Argos too there is Illyrion. We were wild. They called us wild. Two black pearls and a white, bouncing and brawling through the streets of Argos— "
"— Tobias, he was black as Idas. I alone was white in the town— "
"— but no less wild than Tobias for his whiteness. And they say in wildness we, one night, out of heads on bliss— "
"— the gold powder that collects in the rock crevices and when inhaled makes the eyes flicker with unnamed colors and new harmonies reel in the ear's hollow, and the mind dilate— "
"— on bliss, we made an effigy of the mayor of Argos, and fixed him with a clockwork flying mechanism, and set him soaring about the city square, uttering satirical verses on the leading personages of the city— "
"— for this we were banished from Argos into the wilds of Tubman— "
"— and outside the town there is only one way to live, and that is to descend beneath the sea and work off the days of disgrace in the submarine Illyrion mines— "
"— and the three of us, who had never done anything in bliss but laugh and leap, and had mocked no one— "
"— we were innocent— "
"— we went into the mines. There we worked in air masks and wet suits in the underwater mines of Argos, for a year— "
— a year on Argos is three months longer than a year on Earth, with six seasons instead of four— "
"— and at the beginning of our second, algae-tinted autumn, we made ready to leave. But Tobias would not go. His hands had taken up the rhythms of the tides, the weight of ore became a comfort on his palms— "
"— so we left our brother in the Illyrion mines, and came up among the stars, afraid— "
"— you see, we are afraid that as our brother, Tobias, found something that pulled him from us, so one of us may find something that will divide the remaining two— "
"— as we thought the three of us could never be divided."
Idas looked at the Mouse. "And we are out of bliss."
Lynceos blinked. "That is what Illyrion means to us."
"Paraphrase," Katin said from the other side of the walk. "In the Outer Colonies, comprising to date forty-two worlds and circa seven billion people, practically the entire population at one time or another has something to do with the direct acquisition of Illyrion. And I believe approximately one out of three works in some facet of its development or production his entire life."
"Those are the statistics," Idas said, "for the Far Outer Colonies."
Black wings rose as Sebastian stood and took Tyy's hand.
The Mouse scratched his head. "Well. Let's spit in this river and get on to the ship."
The twins climbed down from the rail. The Mouse leaned out over the hot ravine and puckered.
"What are you doing?"
"Spitting into Hell3. A gypsy's got to spit three times in any river he crosses," the Mouse explained to Katin. "Otherwise, bad things."
"This is the thirty-first century we're living in. What bad things?"
The Mouse shrugged.
"I never spit in any river."
"Maybe it's just for gypsies.
"I it kind of a cute idea is think," Tyy said, and leaned across the railing beside Mouse. Sebastian loomed at her shoulder. Above them one of the beasts was caught in a hot updraft and flung into the dark.
"What that is?" Tyy frowned suddenly, pointing.
"Where?" The Mouse squinted.
She pointed past him to the canon wall.
"Hey!" Katin said. "That's the blind man!"
"The one who busted up your playing!"
Lynceos pushed between them. "He's sick." He narrowed his blood-colored eyes. "That man there is sick."
Demoned by the flickering, Dan reeled down the ledges toward the lava.
"He'll burn up!" Katin joined them.
"But he can't feel the heat!" the Mouse exclaimed. "He can't see— he probably doesn't even know!"
Idas, then Lynceos, pushed away from the rail and ran up the bridge.
"Come on!" the Mouse cried, following.
Sebastian and Tyy came after, with Katin at the rear.
Ten meters below the rim, Dan paused on a rock, arms before him, preparing an infernal dive.
As they reached the head of the bridge— the twins were already climbing the rail— a figure appeared at the canon's lips above the old man.
"Dan!" Von Ray's face flamed as the light fanned him. He vaulted. Shale struck from under his sandals and shattered before him as he crabbed down the slope. "Dan, don't— "
Dan did.
His body caught on an outcropping sixty feet below, then spun on, out, and down.
The Mouse clutched the rail, bruising his stomach on the bar as he leaned.
Katin was beside him a moment afterward, leaning even further.
"Ahhh!" the Mouse whispered and pulled back to avert his face.
Captain Von Ray reached the rock from which Dan had leaped. He dropped to one knee, both fists on the stone, staring over. Shapes fell at him (Sebastian's pets), rose again, casting no shadow. The twins had stopped, ledges above him.
Captain Von Ray stood. He looked up at his crew. He was breathing hard. He turned and made his way back up the slope.
"What happened?" Katin asked when they were all on the bridge again. "Why did he ...?"
"I was talking with him just a few minutes before," Von Ray explained. "He's crewed with me for years. But on the last trip, he was ... was blinded."
The big captain; the scarred captain. And how old would he be, the Mouse wondered. Before, the Mouse had put him at forty-five, fifty. But this confusion lopped ten or fifteen years. The captain was aged, not old.
"I had just told him that I had made arrangements for him to return to his home in Australia. He'd turned around to go back across the bridge to the dormitory where I'd taken him a room. I glanced back ... he wasn't on the bridge." The captain looked around at the rest of them. "Come on to the Roc."
"I guess you'll have to report this to the Patrol," Katin said. Von Ray led them toward the gate to the take-off field, where Draco writhed up and down his hundred-meter column, in the darkness.
"There's a phone right here at the head of the bridge— "
Von Ray's look cut Katin off. "I want to leave this rock. If we call from here, they'll have everybody wait around to tell his version in triplicate."
"I guess you can call from the ship," Katin suggested, "as we leave."
For a moment the Mouse doubted all over again his judgment of the captain's age.
"There's nothing we can do for the sad fool."
The Mouse cast an uncomfortable glance down the chasm, then followed along with Katin.
Beyond the hot drafts, night was chill, and fog hung coronas on the induced-fluorescent lamps that patterned the field.
Katin and the Mouse were at the group's tail.
"I wonder just what Illyrion means to handsome there," the Mouse commented softly.
Katin grunted and put his hands under his belt. After a moment he asked, "Say, Mouse what did you mean about that old man and all his senses having been killed?"
"When they tried to reach the nova the last time," the Mouse said, "he looked at the star too long through sensory input and all his nerve endings were seared. They weren't killed. They were jammed into constant stimulation." He shrugged. "Same difference. Almost."
"Oh," Katin said, and looked at the pavement.
Around them stood star-freighters. Between them, the much smaller, hundred-meter shuttles.
After he'd thought awhile, Katin said: "Mouse, has it occurred to you how much you have to lose on this trip?"
"Yeah."
"And you're not scared?"
The Mouse grasped Katin's forearm with his thin fingers. "I'm scared as hell," he rasped. He shook his hair back to look up at his tall shipmate. "You know that? I don't like things like Dan. I'm scared."
Some stud had taken a black crayon and scrawled "Olga" across the vane-projector face.
"Okay," the Mouse said to the machine. "You're Olga."
Purr and blink, three green lights, four red ones. The Mouse began the tedious check of pressure distribution and phase readings.
To move a ship faster than light from star to star, you take advantage of the very twists in space, the actual distortions that matter creates in the continuum itself. To talk about the speed of light as the limiting velocity of an object is to talk about twelve or thirteen miles an hour as the limiting velocity of a swimmer in the sea. But as soon as one starts to employ the currents of the water itself, as well as the wind above, as with a sailboat, the limit vanishes. The starship had seven vanes of energy acting somewhat like sails. Six projectors controlled by computers sweep the vanes across the night. And each cyborg stud controls a computer. The captain controls the seventh. The vanes of energy had to be tuned to the shifting frequencies of the stasis pressures; and the ship itself was quietly hurled from this plane of space by the energy of the Illyrion in its core. That was what Olga and her cousins did. But the control of the shape and the angling of the vane was best left to a human brain. That was the Mouse's job— under the captain's orders. The captain also had blanket control of many of the sub-vane properties.
The cubicle's walls were covered with graffiti from former crews. There was a contour couch. The Mouse adjusted the inductance slack in a row of seventy microfarad coil-condensers, slid the tray in to the wall, and sat.
He reached around to the small of his back beneath his vest, and felt for the socket. It had been grafted onto the base of his spinal cord back at Cooper. He picked up the first reflex cable that looped across the floor to disappear into the computer's face, and fiddled with it till the twelve prongs slipped into his socket and caught. He took the smaller, six-prong plug and slipped it into the plug on the underside of his left wrist; then the other into his right. Both radial nerves were connected with Olga. At the back of his neck was another socket. He slipped the last plug in— the cable was heavy and tugged a little on his neck— and saw sparks. This cable could send impulses directly to his brain that could bypass hearing and sight. There was a faint hum coming through already. He reached over, adjusted a knob on Olga's face, and the hum cleared. Ceiling, walls, and floor were covered with controls. The room was small enough so that he could reach most of them from the couch. But once the ship took off, he would touch none of them, but control the vane directly with the nervous impulses from his body.
"I always feel like I'm getting ready for the Big Return," Katin's voice sounded in his ear. In their cubicles throughout the ship, as they plugged themselves in, the other studs joined contact. "The base of the spine always struck me as an unnatural place from which to drag your umbilical cord. It better be an interesting marionette show. Do you really know how to work this thing?"
"If you don't know by now," the Mouse said, "too bad."
Idas: "This show's about Illyrion— "
"— Illyrion and a nova": Lynceos.
"Say, what are you doing with your pets, Sebastian?"
"A saucer of milk them feed."
"With tranquilizers," Tyy's soft voice came. "They now sleep."
And lights dimmed.
The captain hooked in. The graffiti, the scars on the walls, vanished. There were only the red lights chasing one another on the ceiling.
"A shook up go game," Katin said, "with iridescent stones." The Mouse pushed his syrynx case beneath the couch with his heel and lay down. He straightened the cable under his back, beneath his neck.
"All secure?" Von Ray's voice rang through the ship. "Open the fore vanes."
The Mouse's eyes began to flicker with new sight—
— the space port: lights over the field, the lavid fissures of the crust fell to dim, violet quiverings at the spectrum's tip. But above the horizon, the 'winds' were brilliant.
"Pull open the side vane seven degrees."
The Mouse flexed what would have been his left arm. And the side vane lowered like a wing of mica. "Hey, Katin," the Mouse whispered. "Ain't that something! Look at it—"
The Mouse shivered, crouched in a shield of light. Olga had taken over his breathing and heartbeat while the synapses of the medulla were directed to the workings of the ship.
"For Illyrion, and Prince and Ruby Red!" from one of the twins.
"Hold your vane!" the captain ordered.
"Katin look— "
"Lie back and relax, Mouse," Katin whispered. "I shall do just that and think about my past life."
The void roared.
"You really feel like that, Katin?"
"You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough."
"You two, look up," from Von Ray. They looked.
"Cut in stasis shifters."
A moment Olga's lights pricked his vision. And were gone; winds swept against him. And they were cartwheeling from the sun.
"Good-bye, moon," Katin whispered.
And the moon fell into Neptune; Neptune fell into the sun. And the sun began to fall.
Night exploded before them.
Pleiades Federation, Ark, New Ark, 3148
What were the first things?
His name was Lorq Von Ray and he lived at 12 Extol Park in the big house up the hill: New Ark (NW. 73), Ark. That was what you told somebody on the street if you should get lost, and that person would help you find home. The streets of Ark were set with transparent wind shields, and the evenings from the months of April to Iumbra were blasted with colored fumes that snagged, ripped free, and writhed above the city on the crags of Tong. His name was Lorq Von Ray and he lived ... Those were the childish things, the things that persisted, the first learned. Ark was the greatest city in the Pleiades Federation. Mother and Father were important people and were often away. When they were home they talked of Draco, its capital world Earth; they talked of the realignment, the prospect of sovereignty for the Outer Colonies. They had guests who were senator this, and representative that. After Secretary Morgan married Aunt Cyana, they came to dinner and Secretary Morgan gave him a hologram map of the Pleiades Federation that was just like a regular piece of paper, but when you looked at it under the tensor beam, it was like looking through a night window with dots of light flickering at different distances, and nebulous gases winding. "You live on Ark, the second planet of that sun there," his father said, pointing down where Lorq had spread the map over the rock table beside the glass wall. Outside, spidery tilda trees writhed in the evening gale.
"Where's Earth?"
His father laughed, loud and alone, in the dining room. "You can't see it on that map. It's just the Pleiades Federation."
Morgan put his hand on the boy's shoulder. "I you a map of Draco next time bring." The secretary, whose eyes were almond-shaped, smiled.
Lorq turned to his father. "I want to go to Draco!" And then back to Secretary Morgan: "I some day to Draco want to go!" Secretary Morgan spoke like many of the people in his school at Causby; like the people on the street who had helped him find his way home when he had gotten lost when he was four (but not like his father or Aunt Cyana) and Mommy and Daddy had been so terribly upset ("We were so worried! We thought you'd been kidnapped. But you mustn't go to those cardplayers on the street, even if they did bring you home!"). His parents smiled when he spoke like that to them, but they wouldn't smile now, because Secretary Morgan was a guest.
His father humphed. "A map of Draco! That's all he needs. Oh yes, Draco!"
Aunt Cyana laughed; then Mother and Secretary Morgan laughed too.
They lived on Ark but often they went on big ships to other worlds. You had a cabin where you could pass your hand in front of colored panels and have anything to eat you wanted any time, or you could go down to the observation deck and watch the winds of the void translated to visible patterns of light over the bubble ceiling, flailing colors among stars that drifted by— and you knew you were going faster and faster than anything.
Sometimes his parents went to Draco, to Earth, to cities called New York and Peking. He wondered when they would take him.
But every year, the last week in Saluary, they would go on one of the great ships to another world that was also not on the map. It was called New Brazillia and was in the Outer Colonies. He lived in New Brazillia too, on the island of Sao Orini, because his parents had a house there near the mine.
Outer Colonies, New Brazillia, Sao Orini, 3149
The first time he heard the names Prince and Ruby Red it was at the Sao Orini house. He was lying in the dark, screaming for light.
His mother came at last, pushed away the insect netting (it wasn't needed because the house had sonics to keep away the tiny red bugs that occasionally bit you outside and made you feel funny for a few hours, but Mother liked to be safe). She lifted him. "Shhh! Shhh! It's all right. Don't you want to go to sleep? Tomorrow is the party. Prince and Ruby will be here. Don't you want to play with Prince and Ruby at the party?" She carried him around the nursery, stopping to push the wall switch by the door. The ceiling began to rotate till the polarized pane was transparent. Through the palm fronds lapping the roof, twin moons splattered orange light. She laid him back in the bed, caressed his rough, red hair. After a while she started to leave.
"Don't turn it off, Mommy!"
Her hand fell from the switch. She smiled at him. He felt warm, and rolled over to stare through the meshed fronds at the moons,
Prince and Ruby Red were coming from Earth. He knew that his mother's parents were on Earth, in a country called Senegal. His father's great-grandparents were also from Earth, from Norway. Von Rays, blond and blustering, had been speculating in the Pleiades now for generations. He wasn't sure what they speculated, but it must have been successful. His family owned the Illyrion mine that operated just beyond the northern tip of Sao Orini. His father occasionally joked with him about making him the little foreman of the mines. That's what "speculation" probably was. And the moons were drifting away; he was sleepy.
He did not remember being introduced to the blue-eyed, black-haired boy with the prosthetic right arm, nor his spindly sister. But he recalled the three of them— himself, Prince, and Ruby— playing together the next afternoon in the garden.
He showed them the place behind the bamboo where you could climb up into the carved stone mouths.
"What are those?" Prince asked.
"Those are the dragons," Lorq explained.
"There aren't any dragons," Ruby said.
"Those are dragons. That's what Father says."
"Oh." Prince caught his false hand over the lower lip and hoisted himself up. "What are they for?"
"You climb up in them. Then you can climb down again. Father says the people who lived here before us carved them."
"Who lived here before?" Ruby asked. "And what did they want with dragons? Help me up, Prince."
"I think they're silly." Prince and Ruby were now both standing between the stone fangs above him. (Later he would learn that "the people who had lived here before" were a race extinct in the Outer Colonies for twenty thousand years; their carvings had survived, and on these ruined foundations, Von Ray had erected this mansion.)
Lorq sprang for the jaw, got his fingers around the lower lip, and started scrambling. "Give me a hand?"
"Just a second," Prince said. Then, slowly, he put his shoe on Lorq's fingers and mashed.
Lorq gasped and fell back on the ground, clutching his hand.
Ruby giggled.
"Hey!" Indignation throbbed, confusion welled. Pain beat in his knuckles.
"You shouldn't make fun of his hand," Ruby said. "He doesn't like it."
"Huh?" Lorq looked at the metal and plastic claw directly for the first time. "I didn't make fun of it!"
"Yes you did," Prince said evenly. "I don't like people who make fun of me."
"But I— " Lorq's seven-year-old mind tried to comprehend this irrationality. He stood up again. "What's wrong with your hand?"
Prince lowered himself to his knees, reached out, and swung at Lorq's head.
"Watch— !" He leaped backward. The mechanical limb had moved so fast the air hissed.
"Don't talk about my hand any more! There's nothing wrong! Nothing at all!"
"If you stop making fun of him," Ruby commented, looking at the rugae on the roof of the stone mouth, "he'll be friends with you."
"Well, all right," Lorq said warily.
Prince smiled. "Then we'll be friends now." He had very pale skin and his teeth were small.
"All right," Lorq said. He decided he didn't like Prince.
"If you say something like, 'let's shake on it,'" Ruby said, "he'll beat you up. And he can, even though you're bigger than he is."
Or Ruby either.
"Come on up," Prince said.
Lorq climbed into the mouth beside the other two children.
"Now what do we do?" Ruby asked. "Climb down?"
"You can look into the garden from here," Lorq said. "And watch the party."
"Who wants to watch an old party," Ruby said.
"I do," said Prince.
"Oh," Ruby said. "You do. Well, all right then." Beyond the bamboo, the guests walked in the garden. They laughed gently, talked of the latest psychorama, politics, drank from long glasses. His father stood by the fountain, discussing with several people his feelings about the proposed sovereignty of the Outer Colonies— after all, he had a home out here and had to have his finger on the pulse of the situation. It was the year that Secretary Morgan had been assassinated. Though Underwood had been caught, there were still theories going around as to which faction was responsible.
