Those Of My Blood Part 36

Trooping after H'lim, the humans jockeyed for position, vying for attention. Finally one physicist won out, a gruff-voiced barrel of a man with a slight limp even under lunar gravity. "You handle that suit as if you know what you're doing," the physicist observed, "but this ship didn't carry a full complement of vacuum suits. Nor does it have escape pods. Is that the height of arrogance, the depths of depravity, or simply bad design?"

Amused, H'lim answered, "Try flawless workmanship."

"Ah, but you crashed. Not so flawless."

"It's an old ship," answered H'lim.

"Ah, broken down, then."

"Oh, no. It was flawlessly designed for conditions other than encountered."

"And what conditions were encountered?"

"You've got me there." H'lim's command of idioms t.i.tus seldom used had grown rapidly. He seemed to have mastered English, but that, t.i.tus reminded himself, was an illusion.

H'lim led them to what had been identified as a crew dormitory-until they'd discovered that orl were animals. "You've cleaned up in here."

"I've told you," said Colby, "that we've saved every shred of orl tissue we found. Most of it was in here and the adjacent room. You've seen what explosive decompression did to the tissues."

The room had been twisted off-true only a little. H'lim toured the place, touching wall fixtures and the fittings where bed frames had been stapled to the floor, lingering wistfully at the broken lighting panels.

Someone noticed, and prompted, "Perhaps with a little data, we could duplicate those lighting panels."

H'lim shook his head. "If I knew how to make them, I'd made some by now." Then he led the way on a whirlwind tour through the rest of the ship, identifying for them the captain's office, the crew's quarters, the orl feed lockers, the water recycling plant, the air scrubbers, and the room where he'd been found, which had retained some pressure.

"I was preparing to-dine," he explained delicately. t.i.tus hung on H'lim's every word, but his eyes roved down each cross corridor seeking Abbot, worrying about what his father was up/to now. Had he discovered his transmitter missing? If so, how long ago? Was there any way to get word to Inea? He saw the opening where Brink's had their security checkpost. It had a line into the station. He toyed with the idea of cutting away just for a moment to leave Inea a message that it wasn't all over yet.

Remembering the look on her face when H'lim had put the purple fluid, the precious booster, away, he took a few steps, but Colby called him back. "This way, t.i.tus!"

Nearby was H'lim's living quarters. Inside, he opened wall panels n.o.body had suspected existed, found a dead computer terminal, shook out some liquid containers long since boiled empty, collected a set of grooming tools, a couple of suits of clothes, and the rest of the pieces to his Thizan set, stuffed it all into a small bag and presented it to Colby. "Do I have to beg or fight to keep these?"

"Neither, but I suspect someone will ask to examine them." She gestured to the open compartments. "Is the whole ship equipped with these?"

"I suppose, though I doubt they'll open the way the ship's frame is twisted. And don't ask me where they are, what they have in them, or how they ought to open. I was just a pa.s.senger. I actually didn't expect these to open."

She hefted the bag. "You do travel light."

"One learns."

"Ma.s.s limits?" asked someone eagerly.

"No. Regardless of what has been dragged along, it's never what's needed. Much simpler to acquire items appropriate to the local conditions."

A woman at the rear laughed ruefully.

When asked about the still minimally operational work stations along the central corridor, H'lim said, "They have to do with running the ship, but I don't know how to operate them." Having seen how quickly H'lim picked up the station's programs, t.i.tus thought the luren might figure these out, if he wanted to. Abbot had broken into some of the ship's systems that Cognitive and Technical didn't know about.

They came to an intersection where H'lim swung right, and t.i.tus stopped him. "There's a gap in the hull and the sun's coming from that direction."

"Let's go down this way," suggested someone, "and we can circle back to Biomed without going outside." She led the way confidently down into the nearly flattened underside of the ship. t.i.tus recognized her as an engineer who'd been studying the propulsion system, and his interest quickened. Though he hadn't revealed anything important so far, H'lim was more helpful now than he'd ever been. Ora" t.i.tus stopped dead in his tracks, then shuffled forward as people pressed up behind him. No, he couldn't be creating a diversion for Abbot. On the other hand, Abbot might have arranged the timing of this tour to get t.i.tus out of his way.

t.i.tus squeezed back beside Colby and made small talk while he inspected her for any trace of Abbot's renewed Influence. "Do you really think," he asked her, "that our study of this ship will be stopped when the war is over?"

Since the suitphones were all on the same channel, everyone listened to Colby. "Even if the W.S. wins, public support for our work may have dwindled by appropriations time. It's important that we come up with results very soon."

"I heard," said someone else, "that W. S. might just fold up, in order to stop the war. It could easily just scratch the whole program, and then the secessionists' organization would fall apart leaving W. S. in power as always. After all, with the probe gone, what's to fight about really?"

"Us," said a woman with Brink's markings on her suit and an Australian accent. "The secessionists think we're a plague station even though there hasn't been so much as a cold here in Months. Even if we could build duplicates of this ship and fly them, we wouldn't be accepted again on Earth."

"We don't need your gloom-and-doom, Irena. We may never drum up enough support for the probe again, but this station will be operating long after we die of old age."

"Yeah. Here."

"Game's not over "til it's over," said a Thai accent.

Colby cut in, "That's the spirit. Watch your heads everyone!" They had to duck low and scramble down a newly cut makeshift ramp.

The lower area was a maze of squashed and buckled corridors propped up by stanchions where the lower hull had been torn away and they'd had to excavate into the lunar rock to create a walkway. As he went, t.i.tus became convinced that Colby had not been Influenced by Abbot recently, except to smooth over some of the memories Abbot wanted to stay buried. Dangerous but not reckless.

Still, Abbot could have controlled the timing of this jaunt simply by delaying completion of H'lim's suit.

H'lim stopped to examine an area where the broken hull was curled and buckled. The woman who led them had to stop him from touching the torn metal. "It could cut suit fabric."

H'lim looked at his gloved hand with trepidation and t.i.tus could see his opinion of humans' vacuum suits plummet. Oblivious of this, the engineer commented, "You know, the pilot of this ship should be decorated, even if posthumously. He almost made a soft landing, dead stick and all. And there was no subsequent explosion."

t.i.tus had asked H'lim about the absence of explosion before, recounting the story of his ancestors' arrival, and H'lim had told him there were older ships than Kylyd still in service, not very well-built ones that did carry escape pods and vacuum suits because they had a lamentable tendency to explode. As far as t.i.tus had been able to gather, newer ships, ships built within the last century or so, also carried more safety equipment, for some obscure reason.

H'lim ignored the engineer's bait and corrected, "She.

"What?"

"The pilot. She."

"Did you know her?"

"No."

"Did you know you were about to crash?"

"No. Else why would I have been-dining."

"But the ship's approach was long and slow enough."

H'lim repeated the answer he'd always given Cognitive. "I understood they intended to orbit-a star or a planet, I'm not sure-recalculate our position, and proceed to our scheduled destination. We were lost, not broken down. n.o.body aboard expected the disaster."

"That seems clear from the evidence," said someone.

A little farther on, the engineer squatted before a wide but low opening that had been cut, t.i.tus was sure, by Gold's magnetic shears. The room beyond was several feet lower than the corridor floor but there were no steps. There were some lumpy casings strewn about inside.

"This is one of the things that's puzzled us," said the engineer. "Have you any idea what this room was for?"

He peered inside. "I think you know very well, young lady, what a power plant looks like."

She flashed a grin from ear to ear. "Well, that's what we thought, but we weren't sure." She stood up, aborting a dust-off gesture, as she added pleasantly, "It wasn't the only power plant, though. It's barely adequate to handle the environment and internal power requirements. And we've never found any fuel. What does fuel this ship, anyway?"

As always with that question, H'lim answered, "I don't know. It's not my field."

"But everybody knows what fuels airplanes!"

"Of course. They call it jet fuel." H'lim could be maddening when he wanted to be. But this time, he relented. "Actually, I don't know what this particular ship used for fuel. Almost anything you can name is used by someone. If we were carrying anything dangerous, it was likely discarded in a stellar dump when the crash became inevitable. They don't tell pa.s.sengers about fuel dumps. Tends to upset us."

Mollified, the engineer grunted, "I see," then led them off down a slope toward the rear section of the ship.

"Oddly enough," she lectured, "this is where we found the only intact lighting panel." t.i.tus remembered the room, but much more radical dissection had been done on everything in it, walls and floors included. "Possibly another power plant was in here, but the two plants couldn't have driven this ship-certainly not anywhere near lightspeed."

"I've never been in this area before," said H'lim.

"Step carefully," she warned, leading them through the grid pattern of the debris, "and I'll show you something we found back here that's got us really stumped."

In a far wall, a hatch stood open. It was thick, like a bank vault's door. They had cut the cowling out of the wall and jacked the whole thing aside. "We thought the ship might blow up when we did this. That door-and this wall-seem to be the most heavily insulated. But even here, the seams were sprung and there was no radiation leakage."

She paused, faceplate swinging toward H'lim, who made no comment. t.i.tus thought he was reading the labels on or around the door. Politely, the luren looked over the engineer's shoulder and t.i.tus edged around to see too.

It was a large, totally empty room, with a fantastical floor that might have come from a sultan's palace. Precious metals and colored stones which had to be gems were patterned around a large, dark area in the middle of the floor. The dark area" was gold-rimmed, and the rim was marked like the points of a compa.s.s.

"Now logic," said the engineer, "dictates that this must be the interstellar drive. The walls and floor are thick, the floor is overlaid with heavy metals and stone like marble and granite and n.o.body knows what all else in tiny chips. Ma.s.s-wise, this room accounts for almost a third of the ma.s.s of the entire ship. You don't carry something like that around unless it's useful, and the only use that could justify it would be power-generation. But the room's hardly damaged, and I don't see any drive, just a ruddy dance floor! Or is it just a dance floor?"

"No," answered H'lim.

"A temple?" asked Cognitive's photographer.

"No. Were there any bodies found in here?"

"What would it mean if there were?"

"Not a whole lot. But I knew the people who worked in here. I'd like to know what happened to them."

With shame in her voice, the engineer told him, "No, there weren't any bodies. Would they normally work with the door locked?"

"Of course."

"Then you know what they did in here?"

"Of course not. Astrogation is a very tight union, and besides the math is way too difficult for me. Only those who enter the pool ever learn it, and that naturally is a very private business." He said this as if it made perfect sense.

"Astrogation?" The engineer latched onto the word. "This is a guidance center? Then where are the computers?"

"Oh, that kind of math is too hard for computers."

t.i.tus was holding his breath, afraid his respirator would drown out H'lim's soft voice, reminding himself that H'lim, for the first time, felt stuck here and obliged to make long-term accommodations. He wouldn't by lying, or even kidding. But he couldn't be serious. Unaware of the effect his words had on the scientific minds around him, H'lim added in genuine relief, "But at least there were no bodies. They must have gotten out." There was an odd tone in his voice.

"And left the door locked? From the inside?"

He examined the door mechanism, everyone crowding back out of his way. "Yes, it does appear to have been locked from the inside. Good." He sounded serious.

Suddenly the engineer threw her head back and laughed. "Oh, you almost had me!" she gasped. "That's good, Dr. Sa'ar, that's very good!"

Others joined in as they realized that H'lim had to be joking. There was no way out of the bare room with the bank vault walls. And what sort of math could a living person do that would be too much for a computer?

At length, the chuckles died down, and the engineer said "Well, you did warn us that you wouldn't answer all our questions. But now this room is going to get more attention than you'd ever believe. Dr. Shiddehara, if this is astrogation, not the interstellar drive room, it's in your department. Would you care to ask some questions? Perhaps walk inside? The designs could be" a map of some sort. We've made records of them, of course, for study after we tear up the floor. But it's not the same as the real thing." Over her shoulder, she said to a colleague, "Martha, the computers have to be under that floor, and the central area must be the display tank. It just can't be any other way."

"Lack of imagination will prevent you from solving the puzzle," warned H'lim. "It is another way. You won't find any computers or other equipment inside that room. That's the reason the walls are insulated-for silence."

As H'lim gestured for the engineer to precede him into the room, t.i.tus thought the luren was finally giving them something new, but the other engineer, Martha, said, "So! I win! It is insulation for the luren senses. But why, if it's not a temple?"

"Not luren senses," corrected H'lim. Then in an odd tone, he added, "There are no luren astrogators, at least not yet." He paused at the door and looked back at t.i.tus with that same distant gaze he'd had in the lab a while ago, speculating, weighing, looking into a distant future while simultaneously groping for something only dimly remembered.

And he did say that a genetic code could be the key to a giant leap forward in s.p.a.ce-faring technology. For the first time, t.i.tus recalled how H'lim had lumped the study of the relationship of s.p.a.ce to time in with human will, vision, and the life force. By "life force" he might have meant genetic code. Genetic codes and s.p.a.ce technology.

And he remembered the time when H'lim had dealt with the pain of a woman's broken bones and explained that Earth's customary divisions of disciplines were not his own. In that kind of a science, could astrogation and interstellar drive be one and the same thing?

Unbearably excited, t.i.tus stepped up to the threshold to stand at H'lim's side. He felt the subtle resistance of a mild threshold effect, something like a hotel room, and recalled all his attempts to prove mathematically that Influence could not exist. Yet it did.

"H'lim," he asked, "why would the room be insulated like this, if luren don't use it?" He was almost afraid of the answer.

"I really don't know. I told you, Astrogation is a very tight union."

"Well, come on in," said the engineer, "and tell us what you can of all this. Please."

H'lim gracefully stepped across the threshold. "Come, t.i.tus, you may want to look this over." To the engineer and everyone else, he said, "I don't know how astrogation is done, but I can guess that from the time the collision course with your moon was known, they must have been in here trying to alter our course to prevent the crash. They must have been the first to know that our situation was hopeless."

"And they would have bailed out?"

From the tilt of H'lim's body, t.i.tus thought the luren was struggling with the idiom. Since H'lim hadn't had time to look at any fiction, it was small wonder he'd never heard the term. "To abandon ship," supplied t.i.tus.

"Ah! Yes, I suppose they would have tried. I can only hope they succeeded. Just hope. Please believe me, I know nothing about the exercise of their skills, or the way they use this room. Such matters are a specialty for the talented and trained. I couldn't begin to a.s.sess their chances of getting out alive. I can only hope they did."

Talented. Genes reveal talent?

"And if they did survive," prompted t.i.tus, "they'll send help for you."

"No. If they survived, they'd a.s.sume total destruction." He gestured at the ship. "Hardly an unwarranted a.s.sumption."

"I hate to be a killjoy," said the engineer, "but except for the door which was locked from the inside, there's no way out of this room."

"Not at the moment, no."

Ah! "So the motion of the ship through the galactic fields creates something in this room-a vortex, an anomaly, a singularity which interfaces with-what?" For that moment t.i.tus forgot about Abbot, messages, threat of exposure to humans, and Inea's diabolical self-determination. He felt tremendously alive for the first time since the takeoff from Quito!