Shipstar (41 page)

Tananareve said, “You think of your unconscious as like, say, bacteria? Sanitize it, problem solved?”

Bemor and Asenath looked at each other and exchanged fast, complex fan-signals with clacking and rustling. Bemor had Memor in a restraining hold and the big creature was slowly becoming less restive.

“Not knowing your desires renders them more potent,” Bemor said. “They then emerge in strange ways, at unexpected moments. Your greatest drives lie concealed from your fore-minds. So the running agents and subsystems of your immediate, thinking persona can be invaded, without knowing it, by your Underminds. Quite primitive.”

“Which defeats control, right?” Cliff said.

“And so stability,” Tananareve added.

Asenath said, “You mean, Late Invaders, that notions simply
appear
in your Overminds?”

“You mean do we have ideas?” Tananareve considered. “Sure.”

“But you have no clue where the ideas came from,” Asenath said.

Bemor added, “Worse, they cannot go find where their ideas were manufactured. Much of their minds is barred to them.”

“Astounding!” Asenath said. “Yet … it works in a way. They did get here on their own starship.”

“There are many subtle aspects,” Bemor began, and then paused. “We must keep to task.” He turned and gestured. Attendants rolled forward a large machine.

“I don’t like the look of that,” Tananareve said. “Is this the same machine you put me in before? That Memor used to study my mind?”

“No,” Bemor said. “This enables you to communicate with other minds, specifically those who need you to serve as an intermediary.”

“Who?” Tananareve turned to Irma and Cliff. “I hated that suffocating box with its foul smell. And the feeling—like snakes swarming over my skull. Then fingers in my head. I’d think something, then it slipped away, as if something was … running greasy hands over it.”

“We require you to enter this device,” Asenath said. She turned to Bemor and said in Folk—but not so fast that Tananareve could not translate it—“Do we need the others? They are trouble.”

Bemor rattled suppressing signals with his hind feathers.
Not now.

Cliff and Irma had caught none of this. She said, “Look, I can’t square that Great Shame history of yours. You came back from star-voyaging to see the old place, Earth. So why haven’t we found Folk artifacts on other planets in the solar system?”

“There were stages. There was the era, after the Great Shame, that earlier Folk forms called the Dusting. It was a rain of small fragments into the solar system. An aftereffect of the Shame, in ways known to orbital specialists, arising from multiple iceteroid collisions far out from Sol. A sad era. Mere high-velocity dust destroyed much space-based technology. It etched whole cities out of existence on worlds not protected by atmospheres.

“But enough of this!” Bemor said. “Into this device you go now, Late Invader. We are ordered to send you thus, for reasons opaque to me. The Ice Minds would have it so. Welcome to this”—a broad sweeping gesture with a final feathered flourish—“a singular machine which we term a Reader.”

She had no choice. The assistants looked nasty and they moved swiftly, closing in on her. She turned and embraced the people near her. “Damn, we’ve just reunited and, and—”

“We’ll still be here when you come out.”

The others gave murmuring reassurances. She turned to follow the assistant, some nervous little form of robot, and suddenly a loud thunderclap hammered through the room. The fleshy walls of the skyfish rippled with it, and the floor lurched beneath her. She staggered, caught herself on Irma’s shoulder, stayed standing. “Damn!”

“A shock wave,” Cliff said. He turned to the Folk. “From what?”

Bemor looked out the transparent wall. “Disaster.”

PART XIII

T
HE
D
IAPHANOUS

It appears that the radical element responsible for the continuing thread of cosmic unrest is the magnetic field. What, then, is a magnetic field … that, like a biological form, is able to reproduce itself and carry on an active life in the general outflow of starlight, and from there alter the behavior of stars and galaxies?

—E
UGENE
P
ARKER
,
C
OSMICAL
M
AGNETIC
F
IELDS

THIRTY
-
NINE

Karl said, “It’s a standing kink.”

Beth looked at the screen showing the jet, its plasma and magnetic densities highlighted in color. “This is a snap of it?”

“No, it’s real-time. The sideways movement of the jet in the Knothole region is hung up, lashing against the mag bumpers meant to keep it away.” A side excursion had forked over against one of the life zones, penetrating the atmospheric envelope of a pie-shaped wedge.

“How in hell did that happen?” Redwing asked from over Beth’s shoulder.

Karl grimaced. “We’ve been driving our fusion burn pretty hard, trying to get some distance from the fliers that are coming up at us in the jet—”

“And failing,” Redwing added.

“—so that added our plume to the plasma already forcing the kink instability. Nonlinear mechanics at work. The kink has gotten into some mode where it snags against the mag defenses and just stays there.” Karl shrugged, as if to say,
Don’t blame me, it’s nonlinear.

“So it’s getting worse down there,” Beth said. Her eyes were always on the shifting screens as they powered away from their pursuers. In the howling maelstrom of the jet, there were always vagrant pressures, sudden snarling knots of turbulence, shifts in
SunSeeker
’s magscoop configuration. Now
SunSeeker
had Mayra Wickramsingh and Ayaan Ali as backup navigator/pilot, since Clare Conway had died in an instant’s sudden lightning flash through the excited air above the bridge deck.

That had been only an hour ago, but the sharp terror of it was already fading in memory. There was too much to do
now,
to think of what had happened. Beth had helped carry away the charred corpse, holding Clare by the arms, seeing the face that was swollen and already darkening. Only hours ago, she had seen that mouth smiling, laughing.

Beth heard her own voice rattling out, “Those flitters, as you call ’em, Cap’n, are coming up fast.” Her eyes studied the slim, quick shapes, just barely defined in size by their microwave radars. They had spread into a triangle, centered on
SunSeeker
’s wake.

Redwing stood in the middle of the bridge and said to everyone, “We’re plainly about to go into battle. Those flitters are fast. We can’t outrun them. So we’ve got to engage them with a ship not designed to do battle at all.”

Silence. Jampudvipa usually said little, but now she said quietly, “Is there any advantage in leaving the jet?”

Beth knew Redwing should answer that, but she seethed with anger now and could not stop herself. “I don’t want to maneuver against craft that fast, with our only fuel the star’s solar wind. Or what’s left of it—the jet gets over ninety percent of the plasma that leaves the star. I can’t fly hard with no mass coming through the scoop.”

Karl Lebanon asked, head bowed, “What do the flitters fly on?”

“Not plasma, right?” Redwing turned to Beth.

“Their plume shows fusion burners, but they’re running on boron-proton. They carry their fuel and reaction mass.”

“They’re flying upstream, which costs them in momentum,” Karl said. “For us, it’s gain. We get more charged mass down the magscoop gullet. So—”

“What do we do when we get to gunplay?” Redwing asked. “We got no guns aboard, Dr. Lebanon.”

Beth said, “You’ve got the big gun, Cap’n—the torch.”

Redwing nodded somberly. “You think it can make that much difference?”

Karl said, “Whatever’s flying the flitters, Artilects or aliens, it has to be vulnerable to the jet. They have magnetic screens for sure. They must’ve been engineered to take care of problems in the jet.”

Beth turned her back on Karl, irritated that he had jumped in when Redwing clearly addressed his question to her. “
So
—if we push them harder, give ’em some twist, maybe we can keep them at a distance, dodge them. Not like there’s not room to play out here in the jet.”

Redwing scowled, his face more lined than she had ever seen. “It’s ten light-seconds across. Room to dodge, but—can we keep them far enough away?”

“Depends on what their weaponry is.” Karl wore a dispassionate expression, staring into space. “Nuclear, sure, we can see hardware coming and hit it with our scoop-policing lasers. But if they have gamma ray lasers, like those big domes on the Bowl rim, we’re done.”

Beth sat back and watched the flitters edge up from behind. She bit her lip, adjusted for a vortex plasma knot, felt it surge them to starboard, and said, even and controlled, “Cap’n, we don’t have much choice.”

Redwing was silent, pacing, frowning. More silence. And suddenly Beth found herself on her feet, speaking in a flat, hard voice. “
You
ordered us into the jet,
you
wanted to press the Folk, Clare got killed right here, and
you
now have
no idea
what to do?”

Redwing spun on his heel. “I have over a thousand souls aboard who signed on to go to Glory. I took an oath to deliver them. I didn’t agree to turn them over to aliens riding along in a big contraption.”

“I don’t think—”

“Point is, your job is to
not
think beyond your rank!”

“We all just saw Clare killed by something we don’t understand, that’s got us all terrified, and you—”

“Quiet!” Jam said, rising to her height on the deck, her dark face severe. “The captain commands. We do not question, especially under combat conditions.”

Beth stared at Jam, whom she recalled was a mere petty officer. But … she had to admit, Jam was right. “I…” Beth’s throat filled, choking off her words. “Clare…”

“Enough,” Redwing said, addressing all the bridge crew. “We’re all jumpy. Forget this happened. We are committed and we shall engage.” He turned to Beth. “But you’re lead pilot. You are carrying this ship into a battle we cannot master without you.
Do it.
”

So she did.

FORTY

We have need of your skills with your own kind,
the cool voice said inside her mind. Tananareve felt around her, but no one had entered the narrow, warm envelope that had closed in on her as soon as the Folk sealed up this device. It smelled of dense, fleshy tissues, and indeed, the walls were softly springy, like the skyfish.

“I am certainly willing,” Tananareve said, and waited. She could see nothing and heard no sounds. Yet the voice in her head seemed to be spoken.

We desire you to be quiet of soul.

“I don’t know what that means.”

We can see you churn with emotion. This is to be expected. But calm will come with concentration.

“Uh, who are you?”

The Folk term us Ice Minds. They see us, as shall you, as those of slow thoughts, as our barred spiral galaxy turned upon its axis dozens of times. We have of late examined your species and believe you can be of use to avert the gathering catastrophe that awaits in short time.

“You know us? From Cliff’s team, I suppose?”

Those who stand now outside this reading realm.

“Reading? You’re inside my mind somehow.”

From the Folk termed Memor, we inherited her inspections of your mind. From those primates outside, we learned, again with Memor’s excursions in your selfhood, to convey meaning in your Anglish. Now the Folk at our command immerse you in this fashion, so we can use you.

She didn’t like the sound of this. “To do what?”

To prevent damage to us all. Unite so that the destination we all share can be made coherent with the purposes of the Bowl. To let life call out to life in depths and ranges greater still.

Tananareve had never liked sermons, and this sounded like one. Or maybe sanctimony varied with species. “Why are you Ice Minds? I mean, what do you look like?”

There flashed before her images that somehow blended with
knowing
at the same instant—vision and insight coupled, so that in a few shifting seconds she felt herself understand in a way that simple explanations did not convey. It was less a sense of learning something than of understanding it, gaining an intuitive ground in the flicker of a moment, without apparent effort.

A rumpled night terrain under steady dim stars. Dirty gray ice pocked with a few craters, black teeth of black rock, grainy tan sandbars … and fluids moving in gliding grace across this.

“You’re the ivory stuff sliding on the rocks and ice?”

And you are death to us. We remain a mystery to you myriad warmlife races. To you bustling carbon-children of thermonuclear heat and searing light. We are of the Deep and knew, shortly after the stars formed, of the beauty stark and subtle, and old to you beyond measure. Our kind came before you, in dark geometries beneath the diamond glitter of distant starlight on time-stained ices. Metabolism brims in the thin fog breath of flowing helium, sliding in intricate, coded motion, far from the ravages of any sun.

“And you live
here
?” Still too much like a sermon, but it had an odd feeling of being true.

The Bowl rushed at her, sharp and clear, the rotating great bright wok beneath the hard little red star, its orange jet—and then the point of view swept around, to the hull. It plunged along the metalware—humps and rhomboids and spindly stretching tubes of the outer skin—until it swept still closer and she saw endless fields of parabolic plants, all swaying with the Bowl’s rotation, focused up at the passing stars … while among them flowed that pearly fluid, lapping against odd hemispheres that might—she knew, without thinking about it—be dwellings, of a sort.

“Never thought of that. Shielded from the star, it’s kind of like being on the far outside of our solar system, in what we call the cometary sphere.”