Berserker - Earth Descended Part 9

The stuff of the landscape, all those mathematical shapes and the plain they rise from, is comparatively common matter. Its atoms are docile and workable, at least here in this region of mild gravity and pressure. The explorers realized from the start that this mild region needed only air and water and food, to provide men with more habitable surface than a planet...there, your diver's gear is stabilized about you.

Let's walk to Old Town, where we may find an explorer."

Sometimes above ground and sometimes below, they walked, armored in the strange suits and connected to the year of their own visit by um-bilical cables as fine and flexible and unbreakable as artists' lines on paper. Adjusting his gear for maximum admittance, Hagen nervously scanned the faces of all pa.s.sing settlers. Now some features were discernable in even the oldest of them.

"And the other kind of matter, Hagen, the other physical reality. What about the veils?"

"Ah, yes. The material between the stars, gathered up as this triple system advances through s.p.a.ce.

What is not sucked into the black hole is sieved through nets of the pulsar's radiation, squeezed by the black hole's hundred billion gravities, shattered and transformed in all its particles as it falls toward Azlaroc through the belts of s.p.a.ce that starships must avoid. Once every systemic year conditions are right and a veil falls. What falls is no longer matter that men can work with, any more than they can work in the heart of a black hole. Ailanna, are you tuned to maximum? Look just ahead."

They were out on the surface again. A human figure that even with the help of diver's gear appeared no more than a wavery half-image had just separated itself from an equally insubstantial dwelling. A hundred and thirty years before, someone had pointed out a similar half-visible structure to Hagen as an explorer's house. He had never spoken to an explorer, but he was ready now to try. He began to run. The gear he wore was only a slight hindrance.

Close ahead now was the horizon, with just beyond it the golden globe they had earlier observed. No telling how far away it was, a thousand meters or perhaps ten times that distance. Amid glowing dunes-here the color of the land was changing, from yellow to a pink so subtle that it was effectively a new color-Hagen thought that he had lost the explorer, but then suddenly the wavery stick-figure was in his path. Almost, he ran through or collided with it. He regained his balance and tried to speak casually.

"Honorable person, we do not wish to be dis-courteous, and we will leave you if our inquiries are bothersome, but we would like to know if you are one of the original explorers."

Eyes that one moment looked like skeletal sockets, and the next as large and human as Ailanna's own, regarded Hagen. Or were they eyes at all? Working with the controls of his sensory input he gained for one instant a glimpse of a face, human but doubtfully either male or female, squinting and intense, hair blown about it as if in a terrible wind. It faced Hagen and tried to speak, but whatever words came seemed to be blown away. A moment later the figure was gone, only walking somewhere nearby, but so out of focus that it might as well have flown behind the golden sphere somewhere.

Question or answer, Hagen? Which had it offered you?

Ailanna's hands clamped on his arm. "Hagen, I saw-it was terrible."

"No, it wasn't. Only a man or a woman. What lies between us and them, that can be terrible sometimes."

Ailanna was dialing her admittance down, going out of focus in a different way. Hagen adjusted his controls to return fully with her to their own year. Very little of the land around them seemed to change as they did so. A chain of small pink hills, hyperbolic paraboloid saddles precisely separating members, seemed to grow up out of nothing in the middle distance. That was all.

"Hagen, that was an explorer, that must have been. I wish he had talked to us, even though he frightened me. Are they still sane?"

He looked around, out over the uninhabited region toward which they had been walking, then back toward the city. In the city was where he would have to search.

He said: "The first veil that men ever saw falling here caught them totally by surprise. They described it as looking like a fine net settling toward them from an exploding sky. It settled over the first explorers and bound itself to the atoms of their bodies. They are all here yet, as you know. Soon it was realized that the trapped people were continuing to lead reasonable human lives, and that they were now protected against aging far better than we on the outside. There's nothing so terrible about life here. Why shouldn't they be sane ? Many others have come here voluntarily to settle."

"Nothing I have seen so far would lead me to do that." Her voice was growing petulant again.

"Ailanna, maybe it will be better if we separate for a time. This world is as safe as any. Wander and surprise yourself."

"And you, Hagen?"

"I will wander too."

He had been separated from Ailanna for a quarter of a day, and searching steadily all the time, before he finally found her.

Mira.

He came upon her in a place that he knew she frequented, or had frequented a hundred and thirty years before. It was one of the lower sub-terranean corridors, leading to a huge pool in which real water-diving, swimming, and other splashy sports were practiced. He was approaching her from the rear in the corridor when she suddenly stopped walking and turned her head, as if she knew he was there even before she saw him.

"I knew you would be back, Hagen," she said as he came up.

"Mira," he said, and then was silent for a time. Then he said: "You are still as beautiful as ever."

"Of course." They both smiled, knowing that here she could not age, and that change from any sort of accident was most unlikely.

He said: "I knew that, but now I see it for myself." Even without his diving gear he could have seen enough through one hundred and thirty veils to rea.s.sure himself of that. But with his gear on it was almost as if he were really in her world. The two of them might hold hands, or kiss, or embrace in the old old way that men and women still used as in the time when the race was born of women's bodies. But at the same time it was im-possible to forget that the silken and impermeable veils of a hundred and thirty years would always lie between them, and that never again in this world or any other would they touch.

"I knew you would come back. But why did you stay away so long?"

"A few years make but little difference in how close I can come to you."

She put out her hands and held him by the upper arms, and stroked his arms. He could feel her touch as if through layers of the finest ancient silk. "But each year made a difference to me. I thought you had forgotten me. Remember the vows about eternity that we once made?"

"I thought I might forget, but I did not. I found I couldn't."

A hundred and thirty years ago he and Mira had quarreled, while visiting Azlaroc as tourists. Angry, Hagen had gone offstar without telling her; when an alarm sounded that the yearly veil was falling early, she had been sure that he was still somewhere on the surface, and had remained on it herself, searching for him, and of course not finding him. By the time he came back, meaning to patch up the quarrel, the veil had already fallen.

She had not changed, and yet seeing her again was not the same, not all that he had expected it to be.

The reaction to his coming back was growing in her. "Hagen, Hagen, it is you. Really you."

He felt embarra.s.sed. "Can you forgive me for what happened?"

"Of course I can, darling. Come, walk with me. Tell me of yourself and what you've done."

"I...later I will try to tell you." How could he relate in a moment or two the history of a hundred and thirty years? "What have you done here, Mira? How is it with you?"

"How would it be?" She gestured in an old, remembered way, with a little sensuous, un-conscious movement of her shoulder. "You lived here with me; you know how it is."

"I lived here only a very little time."

"But there are no physical changes worth mentioning. The air my yeargroup breathes and the food we eat are recycled forever, more ours than the rooms we live in are. But still we change and grow, though not in body. We explore the infinite possibilities of each other and of our world. There are only eleven hundred and six in my yeargroup, and we have as much room here as do the billions on a planet."

"I feared that perhapsyou had forgottenme."

"Can I forget where I am, and how I came to be here?" Her eyes grew very wide and luminous-not enlarged eyes like Ailanna's, Mira like most other settlers had kept to the fashions of her year of veiling-and there was a compressed fierceness in her lips. "There was a time when I raged at you-but no longer. There is no point."

He said: "You are going to have to teach me how to be a settler here. How to put up with gawking tourists, and with the physical restrictions on which rooms and pa.s.sages I may enter, when more of them are dug out in the future. Do you never want to burrow into the rooms and halls of later years, and make them your own?"

"That would just cause destruction and dis-ruption, for the people of later years to try to mend. They could probably retaliate by diving against us, and somehow disarranging our lives. Though I suppose a war between us would be im-possible."

"Do I disarrange your life seriously, Mira, by diving to you now?"

"Hagen!" She shook her head reprovingly. "Of course you do. How can you ask?" She looked at him more closely. "Is it really you who has come back, or someone else, with outlandish eyebrows?" Then the wild and daring look he knew and loved came over her, and suddenly the hundred and thirty years were gone. "Come to the pool and the beach, and we will soon see who you really are!"

He ran laughing in pursuit of her. She led him to the vast underground grotto of blackness and fire, where she threw off her garments and plunged into the pool. He followed, lightly burdened with his diver's gear.

It was an old running, diving, swimming game between them, and he had not forgotten how to play. With the gear on, Hagen of course did not need to come to the surface of the pool to breathe, nor was he bothered by the water's cold. But still she beat him, flashing and gliding and sliding away. He was both outmaneuvered and outsped.

Laughing, she swam back to where he had collapsed in gasps and laughter on the black-and-golden beach. "Hagen, have you aged that much? Even wearing the drag and weight of diver's gear myself I could beat you today."

Was he really that much older? Lungs and heart should not wear out so fast, nor had they, he believed.

But something else in him had aged and changed. "You have practiced much more than I," he grumbled.

"But you were always the better diver," she told him softly, swimming near, then coming out of the water.

Some of the droplets that wet her emerging body were water of her own year, under the silken veils of time that gauzed her skin; other drops, the water of Hagen's time, clung on outside the veils. "And the stronger swimmer. You will soon be beating me again, if you come back."

"I am back already, Mira. You are three times as beautiful as I remembered you."

Mira came to him and he pulled her down on the beach to embrace her with great joy. Why, he thought, oh why did I ever leave?

Why indeed?

He became aware that Ailanna was swimming in the water nearby in her own diver's gear, watching, had perhaps been watching and listening for some time. He turned to speak to her, to offer some explanation and introduction, but she submerged and was gone. Mira gave no sign of having noticed the other woman's presence.

"Do you miss the world outside, Mira?"

"I suppose I drove you away to it, the last time, with my lamenting for it. But no, I do not really miss it now. This world is large enough, and grows no smaller for me, as your world out there grows smaller as you age, for all its galaxies and s.p.a.ce. Is it only the fear of time and age and death that has brought you back to me, Hagen?"

"No." He thought his answer was perfectly honest, and the contrast between this perfectly honest statement and some of his earlier ones showed up the earlier ones for what they were. Who had he been trying to fool? Who was it that men always tried to fool?

"And was it," she asked, "my lamenting that drove you off? I lament no longer for my life."

"Nor for the veil that fell between us?"

The true answer was there in her grave eyes, if he could read it through the stretching, subtle, impenetrable veils.

The red circles held narrow dagger-blades of urgent warning on all the walls, and warning voices boomed like thunder across the golden, convulted plain. The evacuation ship lay like a thick pool of bright and melted-looking metal in the field, with its hundred doors open for quick access, and a hundred machines carrying tourists and their baggage aboard. The veil was falling early again this year. Stretching in a row across the gravity-inversion sky, near one side of the directionless horizon, explosions already raged like an advancing line of silent summer thunder-storms.

Hagen, hurrying out onto the field, stopped a hurrying machine. "My companion, the woman Ailanna, is she aboard the ship?"

"No list of names of those aboard has been completed, Man." The timbre of the metal voice was meant to be masterly, and rea.s.suring even when the words were not.

Hagen looked around him at the surface of the city, the few spare towers and the mult.i.tudinous burrowed entrances. Over the whole nearby land-scape more machines were racing to reach the ship with goods or perhaps even tourists who had somehow not gotten the warning in comfortable time, or who were at the last moment changing their minds about becoming settlers. Was not Ailanna frantically looking amid the burrows for Hagen, looking in vain as the last moments fell? It was against logic and sense that she should be, but he could not escape the feeling that she was.

Nevertheless the doors on the ship were closed or closing now. "Take me aboard," he barked at the machine.

"At once, Man." And they were already flying across the plain.

Aboard ship, Hagen looked out of a port as they were hurled into the sky, then warped through the sideward modes of s.p.a.ce, twisted out from under the falling veil before it could clamp its immovable knots about the atoms of the ship and pa.s.sengers and hold them down forever. There was a last glimpse of the yellow plain, and then only strange flickers of light from the abnormal s.p.a.ce they were traversing briefly, like a cloud.

"That was exciting!" Out of nowhere Ailanna threw herself against him with a hug. "I was worried there, for a moment, that you'd been left behind." She was ready now to forgive him a flirtation with a girl of a hundred and thirty years ago. It was nice that he was forgiven, and Hagen patted her shoulder; but his eyes were still looking upward and outward, waiting for the stars.

VICTORY.

Along with everyone else on the Shearwater interplanetary ship, Nicholas Shen-yang had a bad five minutes or so of waiting to die, not knowing whether the Condamine patrol craft had decided to blast them or board them. Not until they heard and felt the clunk of hull against hull were the would-be blockade runners reasonably certain that the enemy had chosen to capture them and let them live.

Hands behind his head, face to the bulkhead along with the Shearwater crew, Shen-yang got through the next five minutes in silence, even when something that must have been a gun barrel was rammed into his back hard enough to leave a bruise. That was after the first quick personal search and was meant to emphasize an order that he should get the h.e.l.l over there with the others who had been searched and sit down. The voice issuing the order sounded strangely accented to him, but the message was quite understandable. Condamine, Shearwater, and the mult.i.tude of other states making up the so-called civilized galaxy shared at least one common language, in-herited from old parent Earth, which fact tended to make events like this boarding a little less difficult for all concerned.

More minutes pa.s.sed before Shen-yang got the chance to show his diplomatic card when a junior officer of the boarding party came around checking identification. After the officer had glowered at him in suspicious fury for half a minute-only a born trouble-maker would be carrying such a card, to upset the officer's smooth routine-Shen-yang was quickly transferred to the boarding party's launch. His brief pa.s.sage through the flexible tunnel connecting the two craft allowed him a glimpse of s.p.a.ce through its transparent windows. There was Shearwater, the planet he had left yesterday, a full bright dot looking like Jupiter as seen from Earth-except that Shearwater appeared against a backdrop of pearly, soft, faint clouds of whitish nebula, the nebula whose slow drift had cut this solar system off from the galactic world for almost fifty standard years. And somewhere in the dazzle sun-ward must be the crescent of Lorenzoni, the war-torn world that was his goal, but he had no time to try to pick it out.

He was calmly unresisting as burly marines aboard the launch shoved him intoa s.p.a.ce that must have been meant as a closet and locked the door on him. Capture meant nothing essential to Shen-yang, as far as the success of his mission was concerned. He had been going to visit both sides of Lorenzoni anyway, and if fate insisted that he drop in on the aggressors first, so be it.

He had just been beginning to know and like the Shearwater crew, a half-dozen experienced blockade runners whose swaggers still had some-thing self-conscious about it, and he hoped they would manage to come through this in good shape. Likely they would remain as prisoners aboard their own ship, while a Condamine prize crew brought her in. From what Shen-yang had heard of the war so far, there was some hope that they might get home later in a prisoner exchange....

At last he heard the sounds of separation, as the launch departed from the captured smuggler. A minute later came the solidchunk of her arrival at her berth in what must be a sizable war vessel.

When Shen-yang was brought off the launch, the Condaminer captain was there to introduce himself, in stiffly correct style, and treat him to another penetrating glare. A minute or two later, in a room or cell almost big enough to be called a cabin, the captain-naturally enough wondering just what sort of diplomat he had bagged so accidentally and what the effect was going to be upon his own career-came to talk with him a little more.

"Your government does know I'm coming, Captain, though they'll no doubt be surprised when I show up in your custody. By the way, I hope the crew of the ship you just captured are being cared for properly?"

"Better than they deserve, in my opinion."

"What did they really have aboard as cargo? They told me it was only medical supplies, and I'd like to know if you found anything else."

The captain frowned, and his heavy jaw twitched, as if he might be having a hard time trying to re-program "himself for diplomacy. "From the little bit I've seen so far," he admitted finally, "it looks as if that might be so. On this particular ship."

"n.o.body denies that Shearwater ships bring in military cargo too. At least once in a while."

"Once in a while, huh?" And that ended the con-versation for the present.

Faster-than-light travel being impossible this deep inside the gravitational well of a solar system, the approach to Lorenzoni took the patrol ship two more days. Free to spend a good deal of his time out of his tiny cabin, Shen-yang during this time got a good look at the nearing planet. It was an Earth-type ball circling a Sol-type sun, and it had been colonized, directly from Earth, a good many centuries ago.

With the slight magnification available from a viewport, he studied the land ma.s.s of Condamine when it was on nightside and drew the immediate conclusion that the Condaminers feared no attack from s.p.a.ce.

The glow of a thousand cities and towns shone forth with open cheerfulness.

Some ten hours later he took another look, at considerably closer range, and caught Ungava, the other sizable continent, in darkness. The blackness enfolding it was eerie-it was not a cloud cover, for there was the ghostly reflected sparkle of the nebula off the great poisoned lakes, and the coastline showed distinctly. But there was not a sign of human civilization, under conditions where the light sparks of every town of twenty thousand or more should have been visible. Shen-yang was a traveled man, and this reminded him of Stone Age worlds and worlds where mindless creatures ruled supreme.

Even as he meditated upon the meaning of this darkness, there came a sudden pinpoint dazzle right in the middle of it. The flash was over in a moment, but he knew it had been there. Yet another nuclear strike from Condamine, he thought, as if they still feared the very s.p.a.ce where their enemies' cities had once stood-feared that in that deep night one building stone might still be raised upon another.

The captain later confirmed his thoughts about the flash. "Yeah, we still hit 'em that way from time to time, when recon confirms some kind of buildup that would make a worthwhile target."

The captain drank some coffee and seemed not about to say more; so Shen-yang prodded him: "But isn't it obvious that the war is really over? I mean you hit them, as you put it, forty-six years ago, with everything you had. That's the way I've heard it." The captain's eyes flicked over at him, but not denying anything, and Shen-yang went on: "Their cities are all wiped out-right? Your cities are untouched. Their casualties in the first strike were more than one hundred million-isn't that so? G.o.d knows what they've been since or how many people are still alive inside Ungava."

A little snort. "Too b.l.o.o.d.y many."

"Your casualties in the whole war are nowhere near that figure. Condamine has a population of between two and three hundred million people. Your industry is intact-"

"There's the terrorists." The captain's voice was milder than his looks. "Every week something is blown up."

"So? Maybe there's more of that than I've heard about. Look, I'm here trying to learn, to under-stand.