One's Aspect to the Sun (12 page)

I studied him, cataloguing the slow changes that had been taking place in the week since we'd left the confines of Earth. Not only did he stand straighter, but his walk had lost much of its shuffling quality, and his face had filled out. His breathing was smoother and no longer wheezy. It was as if the faded version of him had been recoloured. Granted, the ship's artificial gravity was only 80% of Earth-normal, and the air a little richer in oxygen, but those things alone wouldn't account for the differences—would they? It seemed an unbelievable change for only seven days.

“Does he have any ideas about it?”

“I don't know—he did ask me if he could run some tests. I think he's going to start them today.”

“What about the virus?”

Hirin shrugged. “I'm going to ask him if he can find out what it's doing now. When I decided to come out here, I wasn't going to worry about it, just let things happen, until I came to the end. But now . . . now I'd like to know what's changed.”

“Me, too.” I finished dressing quickly. I'd managed to sneak into Hirin's room a couple of nights since we left Earth and we'd slept curled against each other in the pure bliss of being together again. If Hirin kept getting stronger . . . well, one of those nighttime visits might turn into something more.

When we left my cabin, Hirin headed down to the galley to join Dr. Ndasa for tea, and I went to the bridge. The rest of the crew was there, an impromptu send-off party for our uninvited visitor.

“He's in a cargo crate in the jettison tube, all set for departure,” Baden said with a grin when I entered.

“Why does everyone think this is so funny?” I snapped. “The man is dead, not going on vacation.”

They went quiet. “Rei, get the calibrations right and just do it. I want this over with.”

“Right you are, Captain,” she said. “It's all set. Do you want me to activate the homing beacon on the crate?”

I considered. It didn't actually seem very likely that we'd ever want to find this particular asteroid again—in fact, I felt like if I never saw it again, I'd be just as happy. But the homing beacon was fairly weak, and you really had to know the calibration codes in order to find it. Cargo crates could go missing from time to time, so the beacon was useful to the vessel that owned them—but it wasn't like any passing vessel was likely to notice it and go to investigate. “Sure, turn it on, Rei. Launch when you're ready.”

It took less than a minute for the image of the nondescript cargo crate to glide onto the viewscreen as it cleared the side of the ship. The asteroid Rei had targeted as a landing spot hung in the distance, a pockmarked, slowly rolling shape with a cluster of smaller followers.

We watched for a few moments as the crate slid silently through the vacuum, on course for its asteroid gravesite. I was about to turn my attention from it when—it vanished.

Someone gasped. I blinked.

Viss said, “What the hell?”

“Rei, scan for that crate,” I ordered.

Her fingers flew over the console for a few seconds, then she said, “I can't get it. It isn't there anymore.”

“It has to be there,” Yuskeya said. “Did you calibrate for the beacon?” She sat down at one of the sensor screens and ran several scans in quick succession. Then she sat back and dropped her hands to her lap, dark eyes puzzled.
“Okej,
it's not there.”

“Wormhole?” Viss suggested, but Yuskeya shook her head.

“We'd know if there was one that close. Hell, we'd be almost inside it. And without a skip field generator the crate would have been spit back out by now.”

Baden snapped his fingers. “But maybe not if it's a pinhole.” He sat down and rapidly fed commands into the communications console.

“I didn't think there were any pinholes out here,” Rei said.

“Neither did I. Neither did anyone else, as far as I know,” Baden answered. He was grinning. “If I've found a new one, I'll get to name it.”

“If it goes anywhere useful,” Yuskeya reminded him. “Communication pinholes aren't much good if they carry your message out to some unexplored system like Zeta Tucanae.”

“Hey, don't ruin this for me, huh? At least wait until we know for sure.”

“Excuse me.” I cleared my throat. “Captain here! Does anyone want to tell me how a cargo crate three meters long could disappear into a pinhole? Because that's what it sounds like you're saying might have happened, and I've never even heard of that possibility before. I thought they were only good for transmitting messages.”

“Mostly they are,” Baden said, not taking his eyes off his screen, “but some of them are large enough that small items or craft can slip inside. You're right, it doesn't happen very often. And they don't work like the big wormholes—they're a different kind of phenomena. They seem to have an internal force that draws from both ends and streams continuously down the length of the tunnel, and they don't need Krasnikov matter to keep them stable. That's why messages can travel so fast and reliably through them, although not as fast as a ship going through a wormhole.”

“Thank you, Baden. Now, can you tell me where the hell this one goes—and where it's taken our unwanted and unlamented visitor?”

He looked up at me with a grin. “Not yet. I've sent out a tracer scan, but it will have to exit the pinhole, pick up data, and bounce off the crate and back into the hole to be picked up again at this end before I'll know anything else.”

“And how long will that take?” It all sounded doubtful to me.

“Anywhere from ten seconds to a week,” Baden said.

“A week? We can't stay here a week!”

Baden shook his head. “No, seriously, I doubt it will take that long. It takes a week to get a return message through the pinhole between MI 2 Eridani and the Keridre/Gerdrice system, but that's because of the insystem distances. I expect we'll hear back from this one much faster than that.”

How badly did I want to know where the crate had come out? It all came down to that. I sighed.

“A day,” I decided. “We can't wait more than a day to find out about this. Rei, hold this position for twenty-four hours. The crate had no identification markings, so it would be almost impossible to trace it back to us anyway. I'll wait a day to see if Baden gets to name a pinhole, but that's it.”

I turned and left the bridge before there was any further comment or complaint. Suddenly I just wanted to get away and think for a bit.

One of the biggest problems with Nearspace travel on a far trader is how small the ship seems after the first few days. My cabin was four and a half meters by almost three, the largest of all the crew or passenger cabins, but it still felt mighty confining at times. The galley was bigger, but it never seemed to be empty. I passed by it, hearing Hirin and Dr. Ndasa laughing over their tea, and climbed down the hatchway to the engineering deck.

While that had some more wide-open spaces, it was likely that Viss would be back before too long, so I kept climbing down. This brought me eventually to a metal catwalk vaulted high above the floor of Cargo Pod Four. I came here when I needed to think. The biggest volume of empty space on the ship could surround you here, over six hundred square meters of it, and it was heavenly.

Jettisoning the body of my mysterious assailant had started my mind down the path I'd been avoiding in the days since we'd set out from Earth. What did PrimeCorp really want from me? Well, sure, they wanted to know if my body contained anything they could legally claim. But what could that something be? I thought I might have an answer—at least I had a theory, which recent events had helped me solidify. Here, in the relative vastness and quiet of the cargo pod, I wanted to consider that theory.

What were the facts? First, not aging. I'd had my personal doctor check me over in every imaginable way when I'd turned fifty, and he'd been completely baffled. “You're in wonderful shape for fifty, Luta,” was what he'd said, but we'd both known it for the massive understatement that it was. If it had just been me, I might not have made the connection to my mother, but since Lanar showed the same persistent youthfulness, well, it made sense. That was when I started looking for her in earnest.

Additionally, I didn't get sick. The notebug virus was only the latest example. Hirin and I had suffered exactly the same exposure to the virus that had debilitated him on Vileyra—I'd come through unscathed. No colds, no influenzas, no infections, nothing.

I also seemed, if not impervious to injury, at least somewhat protected. Toxic fumes didn't damage my airways; poisons were flushed from my system with no effect; cuts and bruises healed in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. I'd never tested anything truly severe, like a plasma burn or getting smashed up in a collision, but there had been times I'd been tempted to try something serious, just to see. Luckily, my curiosity had never driven me that far.

So it was undeniable that something was protecting me—internally—something that did not occur naturally in the human body. I had two theories about it. Initially, that it had something to do with childbirth, since I'd seemed to stop aging after Maja was born. But Lanar's similar condition seemed to disprove that one. The second was that my mother had done something—the details of which were beyond my imagination—to effect this protection for both of us. Even so, no blood scans or DNA tests had ever detected anything out of the ordinary, not even the first ones I'd allowed PrimeCorp to conduct.

Now Baden had discovered this strange “entity” when he'd scanned for the virus. An entity that was difficult to detect, that rendered itself somehow invisible immediately after it had been observed, that apparently changed its molecular appearance at will—to avoid detection? Whatever I was carrying around was over sixty years old, but perhaps the tech was finally catching up with a leap my mother had made long ago. Baden's “entity” made me wonder if that leap might have involved those helpful little constructs we called bioscavengers.

They'd been around as early as the middle of the twenty-first century, protein constructs that could counteract the effects of certain toxins, like nerve gases, in the body. The research had grown in leaps and bounds for a while, producing cancer and other disease-specific bioscavengers, then trauma-repair nanobioscavengers. We got that far, and then the Chron war put a stop to everything. Even after it ended, tech made a slow comeback through the thirty-odd years of the Retrogression. First, we were too busy trying to save the species from destruction to worry about how long we could live if the war ever ended, and then we were too busy being thankful and reflective about our salvation. Technology seemed like something that had only gotten us into trouble by catching the attention of the Chron in the first place and was best avoided for a while.

But finally we went back to wondering how we could keep the body going, keep it healthy, fix it up and make it last. That's where my mother came in, and I had to assume that she'd made a breakthrough. A breakthrough that, for some reason, caused her to break with PrimeCorp. A breakthrough that had set our family on the run. A breakthrough that Nicadico Corp and their Longate treatment had attempted to duplicate, with disastrous results.

The intruder who'd made his way aboard the
Tane Ikai
had wanted samples from me: blood and tissue, judging by his techrig. What if he'd been hoping to find, not those things specifically, but something
in addition
to those things, something that might be present
in
them? Like a sixty-year-old nanobioscavenger that could do all the things its many predecessors could do, and more, all at once? Such a construct would be a gold mine to someone who could break it down, perhaps reverse-engineer it, and learn its secrets.

It would answer a lot of questions. It made a lot of sense. It was also pure speculation.

It was more imperative than ever that I find my mother. Because whatever it was, she must have put it in me. And only she could tell me exactly what it could do, and how long it would last.

If I were scheduled to live
forever
, I wanted to start making some plans. If not, I'd like to have some idea just when my expiration date might come up. Neither medicine nor the mirror was telling me anything useful.

Baden's voice over the ship's comm interrupted my musings.

“Captain, you might want to come back to the bridge now. I've got some news about the pinhole.”

I sighed. No matter how much time I spent thinking about things, the answers I needed were simply not in my brain.

“I'll be right there.”

I started the long climb back up to the bridge deck and realized halfway up that I was humming—it echoed eerily down the hatchway. I puzzled for a moment over where I'd heard the tune, and then it came to me. It was the little funeral dirge Rei had treated me to earlier in the day.

I climbed the rest of the way in silence.

Chapter Eight

Holes of the Heart

“It's back!” Baden said as I strode onto the bridge. His face was alight with excitement.

“Your tracer scan?”