The Infinity Link (69 page)

Hathorne nodded, hoping that his face showed sympathy. It had been a terrible gamble, but this was exactly the public outcry he had counted on, to create pressure, at least in the short term, for restraint. He thought he had judged this president correctly—that his susceptibility to pressure and public opinion might outweigh his own resolve. "If I may suggest, Mr. President—it might be better to hold off on a major statement until after my exploration with the Talenki. The news
might
be good."

The President's scowl was more of a grimace. "And if it's
not
?"

"We're still in a position of strength—even General Armstead agrees with that. We have the strongest near-Earth fleet—"

"But the Russians and the
Gandhi
are in the best position to intercept right now," the President pointed out.

Hathorne shrugged. "They're not as well equipped, and they don't have the benefit of our tracking experience—"

"But we could share that with them."

"Mr. President, I would urge you not to do that—yet."

"Why?" Impatiently.

Hathorne was on a delicate balance, and he knew it. "Because—" he cleared his throat "—it is possible . . . that after our experience with the Talenki, we will find ourselves opposing those other forces . . . if we determine that the Talenki are friendly. If not, then we could share our findings." He paused. "Mr. President. I need to know—"

"Yes?" The President's voice was barely under control.

Hathorne hesitated. "The Committee has given me a tacit commitment that they'll base their decision upon my evaluation of the Talenki. I need to know:
Do you intend to accept the Committee's judgment?"

The President studied him warily.

Hathorne quickly added, "When I address the Talenki, whom do I represent? You? The Committee? Whom may I tell the Talenki
they
are dealing with?" He turned his palms up.

The President nodded, and for a long moment had a tired, faraway look in his eyes. "Yes, Mr. Hathorne, I see your concern," he said finally. "You may rest assured, and assure the Committee, that this administration will abide by the Committee's decision."

Hathorne silently registered his relief.

"But you just be damned sure about your judgment,"
the President added, his gaze sharpening to a glare.

Hathorne felt his brow knotting, and said nothing.

(Hathorne? Can you hear me?)

There was no answer, only a whisper of wind through the fog, and beneath it a gentle strumming, a music that gave him an urge to walk, to move. Except . . . to where? Jonders and Hathorne had entered the link together and found a physical image of a pathway in a blank landscape, and Mozy's voice echoing somewhere in the distance. Images of their own bodies had coalesced around them. They'd glanced at one another in surprise and set off down the path. And then a fog had swirled in around them, and that was the last he had seen of Hathorne.

(Leonard?) Silence. Jonders looked around in puzzlement. The fog seemed to be dissipating ahead of him, so he ambled in that direction. He noticed an unusual lightness in his step; his body felt slim and in good tone, more like the body he
remembered
than the one he presently owned. It felt as though he were walking on solid ground—but whether this was an image of the real Talenki world, or merely a Talenki dream, he wasn't sure. Either way, the Talenki seemed once more to have taken control of the link.

(Hathorne? Mozy?) There was only silence in answer. Before him was the path, through what now appeared to be a meadow, half shrouded with mist.

What the hell, he wondered.

He reached back along the thread connecting him with the other world, where his real body sat motionless before a console. Tendrils of information brushed across him as he extended his awareness . . . just a bit further, across the checkerboard of indicators . . . .

Hathorne, he discovered, was still in the link, but something had so captured his attention that he appeared unaware of Jonders's presence, and scarcely aware, judging by his telltale indicators, of his own existence outside of the link. Jonders probed a little further, back along his own sensory pathways . . . and without quite letting go of the one world, he peered out of his half-closed eyes into the other, at the dim silhouette of a man seated nearby, the link helmet not concealing a posture of intense, almost painful concentration. Had something gone wrong?

He dared not terminate; and the only other way to find out was to retrace the link forward, to find the object of the other man's focus. Without giving any external sign to those who might be watching, he left the operations center behind again and moved back along the twists and turns of the link, tracing Hathorne's connection like a spidery silver wire. It was simple enough at first, until he reentered the Talenki world; and then the mists returned, and Hathorne's presence slipped away from him like a thread into the sea. When he walked forward out of the mist, he found himself once more in the middle of a sunny and rather Earthlike meadow.

Clearly this was no accident. But why did the Talenki want Hathorne alone? And where was Mozy?

With a sigh, he continued along the path. It led across the meadow, over a knoll, and eventually to the edge of a narrow, winding river. He stood on the riverbank, in still air, and looked down and saw his reflection quivering on the dark water. A feeling came to him that someone or something was looking up out of the river at him. Bending low, he heard a peculiar whistling sound. Almost like a voice . . . .

* * *

The promontory overlooked a fog-shrouded seashore. Hathorne listened to the surf hissing against the rocks below. He peered cautiously over the edge. All he could see was boulders rising from the mist; the water itself was lost to view. It was much like the New England seashore where, as a young man, he had passed endless hours gazing out to the horizon, watching the toss and tumble of the waves and the inexorable movement of the tides. The sea had always seemed to him an appropriate symbol of the apparently endless contradictions of human life—on the surface constantly changing, but in its deeps bound by the movements of the great, slow currents, which reflected continuity, and a kind of changelessness in the Earth itself.

But why here? Why now?

He turned to look behind him, and was startled by the sight of a hedged meadow, stretching away toward a stand of trees. Had that been there before?

Scratching his chin, Hathorne tried to recall what he
did
know.

There was a great sense of discontinuity.

There had been a man with him. Jonders. They had come here for a purpose; but it was all a little muddled in his mind right now. The salt air was not clearing his thoughts. How had he come to stand looking at the ocean? There was a path through the meadow. Perhaps Jonders had gone that way.

Making up his mind suddenly, he strode off through the grass, leaving the seashore behind. The mist soon burned off, presenting him with a bright sun in a lemon-lime sky. Except for the color of the sky and a few oddities of detail among the flora, this might have been the Connecticut countryside of his youth. The air was silent; there was no buzzing of insects, no birds, no sound even of his own footsteps. As he reached the trees, he finally heard the wind, rustling leaves over his head.

Passing among the trees, he thought he heard a voice, just a whisper on the wind. When he stopped to listen, all he heard was silence. He resumed walking, but wondered if there might be eyes in the treetops, noting his passage. The voice, if there was a voice, was softly, wordlessly urging him to keep moving.

The path joined an ascending ridge, and the trees gave way to close-cropped grasses and mountain shrubs. The landscape began to change, silently and quickly, in blinks of an eye. Time took on a dreamlike quality, passing in waves and ripples. None of this disturbed him; he experienced no fatigue, and in fact felt younger than he had in years. When last had he walked among mountains—among towering, stony peaks that brooded over a world? Still, there was something about this that reminded him more of stories than of real lands.

He was in a high country now, with a starkly barren ridge squatting over his right shoulder, and valleys laid out in tortuous geometry far below. Iron grey peaks pierced the clouds, reaching to hidden altitudes. There was something nearby, perhaps just a little higher, through a tight pass . . . the image leaped into his mind so clearly that he pushed straight onward without pause. The air was clear and bracing; the sun and wind burned his cheeks as he climbed.

He came to a natural archway, where a shoulder of the ridge provided a prop for a massive, fallen slab of stone. He passed beneath the slab, rounded the elbow of the ridge, and smiled inwardly as the path opened out into a long mountain dell—a tongue of grass and wild mountain flowers carpeting a gently sloping bowl-shaped formation in the side of the mountain. The sun shone from a perfect angle, setting the tiny vale aglow with its light. At its upper reaches, the vale delved deep into the mountainside, ending in a shadowy crevasse. At the lower end of the dell was a sudden drop-off.

Hathorne laughed and spun around, drinking in the sight of the slopes above and the tumbled terrain below, and the dim distant plains that merged with a blue grey sky under a bright, blazing sun. The mountain range stretched to infinity to the north and south.

The beauty of the view was stunning. He sank down onto the grass, first sitting, then lying supine, gazing up into the sky, watching the dizzying movements of the clouds. He raised himself back up onto his elbows and turned his head, absorbing every detail from one end of the vista to the other. There was something about this place that was so familiar that it sent shivers up and down his spine; and yet, what was it? He sank back again, and closed his eyes, and relaxed with the warmth of the sun on his face, and felt the weariness of his age melt away.

It was a marvelous place . . . except that he was alone, and had no one to share the feeling with.

Or was he?

Jonders? He blinked his eyes open and looked around again. No. Not Jonders. But somehow he felt certain that someone was watching him. Sharing his feelings. Sharing his memories.

* * *

He wasn't sure how it had happened, but Jonders felt
connected
again. It wasn't that he could see the Talenki or feel their presence directly; he couldn't, nor was he aware of Mozy. But he could feel other connections, other branchings. He could sense a fragment of the Talenki . . . network.

He was aware of the whispering music of the dizzies as they spun out their tachyons in a silent stream; and he was aware of a curious twisting of his time sense, a feeling that he was seeing and absorbing at a rate that made time meaningless. Images of worlds flickered before him, only dimly comprehended.

Jonders heard the whales now, and the songs of the Talenki, echoing out of different oceans on different worlds, the songs weaving and interplaying like strands of hair. The whale songs and Talenki songs were so similar, so
compatible
, that they might almost have been created by a merging of their hearts and minds.

He heard a terribly lonesome wind crying through the crevasses of a twisted landscape, and caught an image of whipping fog . . . and ice . . . and weariness and pain . . . a body that thirsted for methane and hydrocarbon soup . . . a soul that labored in a journey, but paused, hearing a song from the sky.

There were others: the tense lowing of looping magnetic flux; the crackle of transmuting plasmas; the chiming of metal crystals in a cavern . . . somewhere. And in another corner . . .
guitars
, for godsakes, crying and wailing, and thumping drums, and humanlike voices raw and bluesy. It was vaguely familiar, that music; but
how
, he wondered, had the Talenki come to know rock-and-roll music from the last century?

* * *

Someone or something was approaching, from the upper end of the sward. Hathorne rose and shaded his eyes. It looked like an animal of some kind, an oversized version of a prairie dog or marmot. The creature moved through the grass with a slight limp; it seemed old, its movements purposeful. Hathorne walked up the slope to meet it, and felt a flutter of recognition. Was this a . . .?

He could not remember the name.

They met halfway. The creature paused and peered up at him with alert eyes and tiny, twitching ears. It sat up in greeting. Its head barely reached Hathorne's waist.

Hathorne met the creature's dark-eyed stare.

"You don't remember me, do you?" it asked.

"Excuse me?"

"You don't remember me."

"Well—" Hathorne felt paralyzed by confusion. "I've seen you before. I just can't place where."

The creature closed its eyes to slits, and seemed to nod. It dropped to all fours and scratched at the grass. When it sat up again, it had a weed stem sticking out of its mouth. "Mmph," it said. "One might think that you would remember. After all—"

Hathorne's mind reeled backward through the years. "You're a—"

"Right," the creature said. "I'm a
bedu
. The only one of my kind." It blinked, plucked the weed from its mouth, and blew a long, twittering whistle.

Hathorne trembled with dizziness. His vision wavered and shifted oddly, then steadied. He drew a sharp, shallow breath. He was standing, eye to eye, now, in front of the bedu. He could see flecks of gold in the bedu's brown eyes. His eyesight seemed keener than it had been a moment ago, and his hearing more acute. He was aware of the wind whispering in the grass. His arms swung with energy, and there was a newfound spring to his stance. His hands were slim and smooth—the leathery texture of age gone. Astonished, he gazed at the bedu, and a joyful laugh came out of him, from nowhere.

"You remember," said the bedu solemnly.

"Of course!" he cried. "I was—what—five? Seven?" The bedu Larry was his imaginary friend, for a year or more his childhood companion, of whom he had been intensely proud and fiercely protective. He had never spoken of Larry's existence, not to a soul—not after telling his father, who had sternly advised him to "grow up" and forget such foolishness. But they were inseparable, Larry and he, for that one oddly happy year. And then one day—just when or why, he didn't know—Larry was no longer there. The bedu had gone out of his life, slipped away silently and without regret to . . . wherever it was that imaginary creatures went when their companionship was no longer needed.