The Ophiuchi Hotline (25 page)

The communicator fell to the floor and the elevator door opened. The nude woman stepped out and hurried down the corridor. There was much to do.

The cafeteria was filled to capacity and a little beyond the safe limits, though Lilo found it hard to believe. The place didn’t look crowded.

There was no large meeting area in Poseidon. Vaffa
had discouraged groups of more than ten people at a time. There were large areas in the dead spaces but there had not yet been time to reclaim them. One meeting had been tried in an abandoned room, but no one liked it with everyone’s suit turned on. It was impossible to read faces.

So the cafeteria had been chosen, but it was almost as disconcerting. People had to be evenly spaced around the rotating cylinder, and they had to sit all around its inner circumference, with the result that the speaker could be standing directly overhead. It made for a lot of sore necks.

“But I was promised two weeks,” Vejay was saying. “I’ve done the best I can. If you can just give me another four days, even
three
days, I—”

“We all understand your desire to give us the best possible drive, Vejay,” Cathay said. “But you just told us that what you have
will
function—”

“But I can only guarantee a couple months, at best, then I’ll have to—”

“—if you’ll just listen to me—”

“I still have the floor, don’t I?”

Lilo slumped further down into her chair. Meetings bored her. Why couldn’t Cathay just tell him to pipe down and set a time for the burn? But then, she conceded, that’s why he was a better president than she would have been. She recognized it; when her name was put into nomination she had quickly withdrawn it. And Cathay had handled it well. So far he had been able to do just what his advisors had said must be done if they were to have a chance, and had made it seem as if it was fair to everyone. If that wasn’t the definition of a good leader, Lilo did not know what was.

But she had never expected that getting a group of eighty people to agree on anything would be tougher than beating Tweed in the first place.

The drive was ready, no matter what Vejay said. He was a lover of fine machinery, and the thing he had cobbled together on the other side of Poseidon offended his sense of beauty. But it would work. It would work long
enough to get them beyond any possible pursuit. And that was the critical thing, as Cathay was pointing out once more.

“Tweed must have known that if we gave him a month, we’d give him two months, and forever for that matter. We have no advantage to gain by exposing him. I know there’s a minority who want to do just that, but I’ll remind you again that we’re not out of the woods. You people who hate him that much should be the very ones to know that if there’s a way he can get to us by treachery, out of sheer spite, he’ll do it. That’s why we planned to move in ten days from the very beginning. I know it’s been hard…” There was a chorus of loud comment greeting the statement. “…but we’ve just about arrived. We’re within hours of being able to boost, and once we get started, our chances improve by an order of magnitude.”

Lilo let her attention wander again. She scanned the crowd restlessly. She had not had time to get to know many of the people present, though a lot of them had a maddening habit of assuming friendship based on their acquaintance with her dead clone. She smiled when she spotted Cass sixty degrees around the curve of the floor. So far, he had been one of the few not to presume on his previous friendship with her clone. He seemed willing to start from scratch. In this case, she approved of her sister’s judgment.

Sitting in front of her, in a tight group, were the Vaffas. There were eight of them; not as many as had been feared, but more than anyone was comfortable with. There had been nine. The death of one of them at the hands of what had to be called a lynch mob was the first crisis the community had faced. The other Vaffas, already fearful, had occupied a room and vowed to fight to the death. It had taken careful work by Cathay to get them out again. They had stuck to their end of the bargain, not raising a hand against anyone. It remained to be seen how they would fare in the long run. There were many long-standing grudges to settle. Already they were regarded as second-class citizens, which they did
not seem to mind as long as people left them alone. But they were going to be a problem.

“Now we’ll hear from the ecology committee,” Cathay said. “Krista, will you report?”

Krista was one of the few people Lilo knew well. With work going on around the clock to get Poseidon ready to move, Lilo had been with her for marathon sessions devoted to repairing damage to the hydroponic gardens caused by the crash. Krista was a hard worker, one of the kidnapped scientists Tweed had put on the station when he couldn’t find what he wanted in prison. Lilo liked her, except for the tendency she displayed to be interested in what Lilo had done to land in jail.

“I wish I could offer more solid guarantees,” Krista said. “Tweed deliberately tried to keep us dependent on the monthly shipments. He knew what he was doing, I guess. We’re short on some trace elements that are being lost in the secondary recyclers. Lilo and I are working on a tertiary system to recover what we have, but unless we can find larger amounts by mining the rocks, we could be in trouble in a few years.”

“But what’s the outlook on the new system?” Cathay asked.

“Well, I’d hate to say for sure, but—”

“We can do it,” Lilo shouted. “We have to do it, so we will. Sit down, Krista.”

The rest of the reports said much the same thing. Damage was not completely repaired in several areas, but the work was progressing. Everyone wanted more time, but finally agreed there was nothing preventing a fast takeoff.

Cathay heard them all to the end, then banged his gavel.

“You people elected me; you gave me the power to assign a time for the starting of the drive. I’m going to exercise that power now. We move in eighteen hours.”

How can I summarize a trip that lasted ten years? To say that it was dull and that nothing much happened would be at the same time a terrible understatement and untrue.

I’m sure Javelin began to regret it within the first month. She had taken us on as a lark, as something to break the routine she had lived under for such a long time. But she would not have lived that way for so long if it wasn’t, in reality, a very good routine for her. We saw little of her after the first month. Her quarters were accessible only to her. When we entered the solarium she would go to her own parts of the ship.

Vaffa opted out early. She had no great desire to sleep the trip away, being frightened of suspended animation, but in her own words, “If I don’t do something soon I’m gonna kill something.”

Cathay and I grew close. Several times. In between, we scarcely spoke to each other. I recall one blistering row over whose turn it was to feed the fish. It wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t mine. In a different situation we might have evolved something lasting, but there was no one else, for loving or for hating, or for petty anger. Part of it was sheer stubbornness on my part, I admit it. I didn’t wish to love him simply because there was no one else; I needed more reasons than that. He saw this

as insane, and he was probably right. But there was no help for it.

We kept coming back together mainly because of my sexual needs. I’ve always found my hand an unsatisfactory sex partner. I’ve never been able to stay angry at a lover for too long; I begin to need him. Javelin was no alternative. I copped with her once—which was a great surprise to me, since I had thought she was actually neuter. Her solution to the problem of female genitals without a crotch to put them in was ingenious, functional, and fascinating, but ultimately disappointing. She was an indifferent lover, too self-centered to be concerned with satisfying me.

I ended up holding out two weeks longer than Cathay. Javelin looked relieved when she administered the injection that put me under for eight years of sleep.

They had been decelerating for three weeks.

Javelin had been right; there was something out there. It showed up on the radar screen as an object the size of a large asteroid. It was impossible as yet to look at it directly because the light of the ship’s drive interfered with the telescope. Javelin had carefully aimed for a point a hundred kilometers away from the object, so that her drive would not be seen as a weapon.

But no one had yet seen Javelin. Cathay, Lilo, and Vaffa had been awake four weeks, exercising every day to get back in shape from the long sleep, but Javelin had stayed in her room. They could talk to her, but only over the audio circuits. Lilo assumed the woman was by now even more acutely aware of their presence on her ship, and even more unhappy about it.

When she did make an appearance, it was after first cutting a door from the inside of her room. She now had two arms and legs, and could no longer fit through the tiny entrance she had used. It was not the sort of surgery she could have accomplished by herself; Lilo assumed she had mechanical aids in her room.

Javelin seemed self-conscious about it. Lilo was going to make a comment, but when she saw how awkwardly

Javelin moved in the one-gee acceleration—tending to forget about her left leg and right arm—she said nothing. There had been some neural rewiring done, Lilo felt sure. It was as if Javelin had suddenly donned glasses that inverted everything she saw; it would take a while for her brain to accept the change.

At first Lilo wondered why Javelin had done it. In the past she had accepted the brief periods of immobility enforced by the boost of the ship; they never lasted more than a month, and were a small price to pay for ten years of easy movement in free-fall.

But now every day brought them closer to the Ophiuchite outpost, and Javelin’s reason became obvious. There was no way of knowing what they would find. It could be anything from weightlessness to many gravities, and Javelin had thought it best to be prepared.

The Hotline station was a torus, a thick, dark doughnut with an outer diameter of seventy kilometers, spinning slowly.

“It looks like a tire,” Cathay said, staring over Javelin’s tiny shoulder at the telescope screen. “See how it’s flattened?”

“That would give them more flat surface on the inside,” Javelin pointed out. “Flat on the bottom, and an arched roof overhead.” She hit a few switches on her console. “They’re pulling three quarters of a gravity on the inside. You know, it’s pretty big for that kind of rotation. And the density fooled us. It’s about twice as dense as water, which isn’t much. There’s not much metal in it.”

“What do you think it’s made of?” Vaffa asked. Nobody answered.

There was a tower growing from the inner edge of the wheel. It was massive at the base, but tapered quickly into a needle as it rose toward the center. There was a module at the hub of rotation. Javelin did some more computations.

“There must be something heavy inside, just opposite the base of the tower,” she announced. “Otherwise the
mass of the tower would throw the rotation off balance.”

“And that’s where we have to go, right?” Cathay asked. “To the top of the tower?”

“I don’t know where else we could go,” Javelin said. “Everything else is moving too fast. You’d better all strap in. I’m going to have to do some maneuvering.”

“Shouldn’t we try to contact them first?” Lilo asked. “They must know what frequencies we use. I imagine they’ve been listening to us for centuries.”

“You’re right. But what should we say?” Javelin looked uncertain for the first time since Lilo had known her. They all looked at each other, and no one seemed anxious to make the first contact. Javelin turned the dials on her screen and made the scope zoom in on the docking module in the center of the wheel. They had all noticed a faint light on one side of it; now Javelin brought it into focus.

No one said anything for a while. The light was actually several lights, and looked like nothing so much as tubes of ionized neon gas. They spelled out a word:
WELCOME
.

“We’ve been waiting,” said a voice over the radio. “If you’ll come in to about five hundred meters, we’ll throw you a line. See you in about twenty minutes?”

How can I summarize our life on Poseidon?

The news programs we monitored during the first days called us “The Runaway Moon.” There was great consternation from Mercury to Pluto. The departure of Poseidon was seen as the precursor of some disastrous turn of events in connection with the Invaders. There were calls for armament of all human peoples in the system to prepare for the coming fight.

It didn’t come, of course, and gradually all the fuss died away. Much later we heard someone suggest that Poseidon could have been moved by technologies known to humans, and that indeed it might have been human outlaws who had done it. The idea did not seem to go over well, and in any case we were by then too far away and moving too fast for anything to be done about it.

We worked frantically for a year. The impact of
Vengeance
had caused a lot of damage to the tunnels and rooms. A power overload had caused failures in the heating system which powered the hydroponic farms; all the plants died. For a while we lived on stored food, in the darkness. There was not enough air to pressurize the corridors—many of which would have leaked badly if we did—so we lived in our suits and observed strict oxygen rationing.

There had been no way for me and Cathay to know if

the impact of
Vengeance
would cause irreparable damage to a vital installation on Poseidon, one that we would need to survive after taking control. Cathay said Vejay was certain everything was already there to make the planetoid self-sufficient. In the end, we had to gamble with the lives of everyone on Poseidon.

In the first flush of victory, everyone was glad we did. Cathay was swept into office as our first president. Even I was admired. It didn’t last. In six months Cathay was out of office and we were both avoiding the faces of people we met in the dark, airless corridors.