Nova

  "Will you shut up! I swear, Katin, if I did all the brain-hacking you did, I'd go nuts!"

  Katin sighed, and flipped off his recorder. "Ah, Mouse, I'd go nuts if I did as little as you."

  The Mouse put the instrument back in his sack, crossed his arms on the top, and leaned his chin on the back of his hands.

  "Oh, come on, Mouse. See, I've stopped babbling. Don't be glum. What are you so down about?"

  "My syrynx ..."

  "So you got a scratch on it. But you've been over it a dozen times and you said it won't hurt the way it plays."

  "Not the instrument." The Mouse's forehead wrinkled. "What the captain did with ..." He shook his head at the memory.

  "Oh."

  "And not even that." The Mouse sat up.

  "What then?"

  Again the Mouse shook his head. "When I ran out through the cracked glass to get it ..."

  Katin nodded.

  "The heat was incredible out there. Three steps and I didn't think I was going to make it. Then I saw where Captain had dropped it, halfway down the slope. So I squinched my eyes and kept going. I thought my foot would burn off, and I must have got halfway there hopping. Anyway, when I got it, I picked it up, and ... I saw them."

  "Prince and Ruby?"

  "She was trying to drag him back up the rocks. She stopped when she saw me. And I was scared." He looked up from his hands. His fingers were clenched; nails cut the dark palms. "I turned the syrynx on her, light, sound, and smell all at once, hard. Captain doesn't know how to make a syrynx do what he wants. I do. She was blind, Katin. And I probably busted both her eardrums. The laser was on such a tight beam her hair caught fire, then her dress— "

  "Oh, Mouse ..."

  "I was scared, Katin! After all that with Captain and them. But, Katin ... " The whisper snagged on all sorts of junk in the Mouse's throat. "It's no good to be that scared ..."

  "Queen of Swords."

  "King of Swords."

  "The Lovers. My trick is. Ace of Swords— "

  "Tyy, come in and relieve Idas for a while," Von Ray's voice came through the loud speaker.

  "Yes, sir. Three of Swords from the dummy comes. The Empress from me. My trick is." She closed the cards and left the table for her projection chamber.

  Sebastian stretched. "Hey, Mouse?"

  Chapter Seven

  Outer Colonies (Roc transit) 3172

  "What?"

  Sebastian walked across the blue rug, kneading his forearm. The ship's medico-unit had fixed his broken elbow in forty-five seconds, having taken somewhat less time over the smaller, brighter wounds. (It had blinked a few odd-colored lights when the dark thing with a collapsed lung and three torn rib cartilages was presented to it. But Tyy had fiddled with the programming till the unit hummed efficiently over the beast.) The creature waddled now behind its master, ominous and happy, "Mouse, why you not the ship's med your throat let fix?" He swung his arm. "It a good job would do,"

  "Can't. Couple of times they tried when I was a kid. Back when I got my plugs they gave it a go." The Mouse shrugged.

  Sebastian frowned. "Not very serious now it sounds."

  "It isn't," the Mouse said. "It doesn't bother me. They just can't fix it. Something about neurological con-something-or-other."

  "What that is?"

  The Mouse turned up his palms and looked blank.

  "Neurological congruency," Katin said. "Your unattached vocal cords must be a neurologically congruent birth defect."

  "Yeah, that's what they said."

  "Two types of birth defects," Katin explained. "In both, some part of the body, internal or external, is deformed, atrophied, or just put together wrong."

  "My vocal cords are all there."

  "But at the base of the brain there's a small nerve cluster which, if you see it in cross section, looks more or less like a template of a human being. If this template is complete, then the brain has the nervous equipment to handle a complete body. Very rarely the template contains the same deformity as the body, as in the Mouse's case. Even if the physical difficulty is corrected, there are no nerve connections within the brain to manipulate the physically corrected part."

  "That must be what's wrong with Prince's arm," the Mouse said. "If it had been torn off in an accident or something, they could graft a new one on, connect up the veins and nerves and everything and have it just like new."

  "Oh," Sebastian said.

  Lynceos came down the ramp. White fingers massaged the ivory clubs of his wrists. "Captain's really doing some fancy flying— "

  Idas came to the rim of the pool. "This star he's going to, where is— ?"

  "— its co-ordinates put it at the tip of the inner arm— "

  "— in the Outer Colonies then— "

  "— beyond even the Far Out Colonies."

  "That a lot of flying is," Sebastian said. "And Captain all the way himself will fly."

  "The captain has a lot of things to think about," Katin suggested.

  The Mouse slipped his strap over his shoulder. "A lot of things he doesn't want to think about too. Hey, Katin, how about that game of chess?"

  "Spot you a rook," Katin said. "Let's keep it fair."

  They settled to the gaming board.

  Three games later Von Ray's voice came through the commons. "Everyone report to his projection chamber. There's some tricky crosscurrents coming up."

  The Mouse and Katin pushed up from their bubble chairs. Katin loped toward the little door behind the serpentine staircase. The Mouse hurried across the rug, up the three steps. The mirrored panel slid into the wall. He stepped over a tool box, a coil of cable, three discarded frozen-coil memory bars— melting, they had stained the plates with salt where the puddle had dried— and sat on the couch. He shook out the cables and plugged them in.

  Olga winked solicitously above, around, beneath him.

  Crosscurrents: red and silver sequins flung in handfuls. The captain wielded them against the stream.

  "You must have been quite a racer, Captain," commented Katin. "What kind of yacht did you fly? We had a racing club at school that leased three yachts. I thought of going out for it one term."

  "Shut up and hold your vane steady."

  Here, down the galaxy's spiral, there were fewer stars. Gravimetric shifts gentled here. Flight at galactic center, with its more condensed flux, yielded a dozen conflicting frequencies to work with. Here, a captain had to pick at the trail wisps of ionic inflections.

  "Where are we going, anyway?" the Mouse asked.

  Lorq pointed co-ordinates on the static matrix and the Mouse read them against matrix moveable.

  Where was the star?

  Take concepts like "distant," "isolate," "faint," and give them precise mathematical expression. They'll vanish under such articulation.

  But just before they do, that's where it lay.

  "My star." Lorq swept vanes aside so they could see. "That's my sun. That's my nova, with eight-hundred-year-old light. Look sharp, Mouse, and swing her down hard. If your slapdash vaning keeps me a second from this sun— "

  "Come on, Captain!"

  "— I'll ram Tyy's deck down your gullet, sideways. Swing her back."

  And the Mouse swung as all night rushed about his head.

  "Captains from out here," Lorq mused when the currents cleared, "when they come into the inflected confusion of the central hub, they can't ride the flux in a complicated cluster like the Pleiades to save themselves. They go off beams, take spins, and go headlong into all kinds of mess. Half the accidents you've heard about were with eccentric captains. I talked to some of them once. They told me that here on the rim, it was us who were always piling up ships in gravity spin. 'You always fall asleep on your strings,' they told me." He laughed.

  "You know you've been flying a long time, Captain," Katin said. "It looks pretty clear. Why don't you turn off for a while?"

  "I feel like diddling my fingers in the ether for another watch. You and Mouse stay tied up. The
rest of you puppets cut strings."

  Vanes deflated and folded till each was a single pencil of light. And the light turned off.

  "Oh, Captain Von Ray, something— "

  "— something we meant to ask you— "

  "— before. Do you have any more— "

  "— could you tell us where you put— "

  "— I mean if it's okay, Captain— "

  "— the bliss?"

  Night grew easy about their eyes. The vanes swept them toward the pinhole in the velvet masking.

  "They must have a pretty high time of it in the mines on Tubman," the Mouse commented after a while. "I've been thinking about that, Katin. When the captain and me moseyed down Gold for bliss, there were some characters who tried to get us to sign up for work out there. I started thinking, you know: a plug is a plug and a socket is a socket, and if I'm on one end, it shouldn't make too much difference to me if there's a star-ship vane, aqualat net, or an ore cutter on the other. I think I might go out there for a time."

  "May the shade of Ashton Clark hover over your right shoulder' and guard your left."

  "Thanks." After another while he asked, "Katin, why do people always say Ashton Clark whenever you're going to change jobs? They told us back at Cooper that the guy who invented plugs was named Socket or something."

  "Souquet," Katin said. "Still, he must have considered it an unfortunate coincidence. Ashton Clark was a twenty-third-century philosopher cum psychologist whose work enabled Vladimeer Souquet to develop his neural plugs. I guess the answer has to do with work.— Work as mankind knew it up until Clark and Souquet was a very different thing from today, Mouse. A man might go to an office and run a computer that would correlate great masses of figures that came from sales reports on how well, let's say, buttons— or something equally archaic— were selling over certain areas of the country. This man's job was vital to the button industry: they had to have this information to decide how many buttons to make next year. But though this man held an essential job in the button industry, was hired, paid, or fired by the button industry, week in and week out he might not see a button. He was given a certain amount of money for running his computer; with that money his wife bought food and clothes for him and his family. But there was no direct connection between where he worked and how he ate and lived the rest of his time. He wasn't paid with buttons. As farming, hunting, and fishing became occupations of a smaller and smaller per cent of the population, this separation between man's work and the way he lived— what he ate, what he wore, where he slept— became greater and greater for more people. Ashton Clark pointed out how psychologically damaging this was to humanity. The entire sense of self-control and self-responsibility that man acquired during the Neolithic Revolution when he first learned to plant grain and domesticate animals and live in one spot of his own choosing was seriously threatened. The threat had been coming since the Industrial Revolution and many people had pointed it out before Ashton Clark. But Ashton Clark went one step further. If the situation of a technological society was such that there could be no direct relation between a man's work and his modus vivendi, other than money, at least he must feel that he is directly changing things by his work, shaping things, making things that weren't there before, moving things from one place to another. He must exert energy in his work and see these changes occur with his own eyes. Otherwise he would feel his life was futile. Had he lived another hundred years either way, probably nobody would have heard of Ashton Clark today. But technology had reached the point where it could do something about what Ashton Clark was saying. Souquet invented his plugs and sockets, and neural-response circuits, and the whole basic technology by which a machine could be controlled by direct nervous impulse, the same impulses that cause your hand or foot to move. And there was a revolution in the concept of work. All major industrial work began to be broken down into jobs that could be machined 'directly' by man. There had been factories run by a single man before, an uninvolved character who turned a switch on in the morning, slept half the day, checked a few dials at lunchtime, then turned things off before he left in the evening. Now a man went to a factory, plugged himself in, and he could push the raw materials into the factory with his left foot, shape thousands on thousands of precise parts with one hand, assemble them with the other, and shove out a line of finished products with his right foot, having inspected them all with his own eyes. And he was a much more satisfied worker. Because of its nature, most work could be converted into plug-in jobs and done much more efficiently than it had been before. In the rare cases where production was slightly less efficient, Clark pointed out the psychological benefits to the society. Ashton Clark, it has been said, was the philosopher who returned humanity to the working man. Under this system, much of the endemic mental illness caused by feelings of alienation left society. The transformation turned war from a rarity to an impossibility, and— after the initial upset— stabilized the economic web of worlds for the last eight hundred years. Ashton Clark became the workers' prophet. That's why even today, when a person is going to change jobs, you send Ashton Clark, or his spirit along with him."

  The Mouse gazed across the stars. "I remember that sometimes the gypsies used to curse by him." He thought a moment. "Without plugs, I guess we would."

  "There were factions who resisted Clark's ideas, especially on Earth, which has always been a bit reactionary. But they didn't hold out very long."

  "Yeah," the Mouse said. "Only eight hundred years. Not all gypsies are traitors like me." But he laughed into the winds.

  "The Ashton Clark system has only had one serious drawback that I can see. And it's taken it a long time to materialize."

  "Yeah? What's that?"

  "Something professors have been telling their students for years, it seems. You'll hear it said at every intellectual gathering you go to, at least once. There seems to be a certain lack of cultural solidity today. That's what the Vega Republic was trying to establish back in 2800. Because of the ease and satisfaction with which people can work now, anywhere they want, there have been such movements of peoples from world to world in the past dozen generations that society has fragmented around itself. There is only a gaudy, meretricious interplanetary society which has no real tradition behind it— " Katin paused. "I got hold of some of Captain's bliss before I plugged up. And while I was talking I just counted in my mind how many people I've heard say that between Harvard and Hell3. And you know something? I think they're wrong."

  "They are?"

  "They are. They're all just looking for our social traditions in the wrong place. There are cultural traditions that have matured over the centuries, yet culminate now in something vital and solely of today. And you know who embodies that tradition more than anyone I've met?"

  "The captain?"

  "You, Mouse."

  "Huh?"

  "You've collected the ornamentations a dozen societies have left us over the ages and made them inchoately yours. You're the product of those tensions that clashed in the time of Clark and you resolve them on your syrynx with patterns eminently of the present— "

  "Aw, cut it out, Katin."

  "I've been hunting a subject for my book with both historical import and humanity as well. You're it, Mouse. My book should be your biography! It should tell where you've been, what you've done, the things you've seen, and the things you've shown other people. There's my social significance, my historical sweep, the spark among the links that illuminates the breadth of the net— "

  "Katin, you're crazy!"

  "No I'm not. I've finally seen what I've— "

  "Hey there, keep your vanes spread taut!"

  "Sorry, Captain."

  "Yes, Captain."

  "Don't go chattering to the stars if you're going to do it with your eyes closed."

  Ruefully the two cyborg studs turned their attention back to the night. The Mouse was pensive. Katin was belligerent.

  "There's a star coming up bright and hot. It's the only thing in
the sky. Remember that. Keep it smack in front of us and don't let her waver. You can babble about cultural solidity on your own time."

  Without horizon, the star rose.

  At twenty times the distance of Earth from the sun (or Ark from its sun) there was not enough light from a medium G-type star to defract daytime through an Earth-type atmosphere. At such distances, the brightest object in the night would still look like a star, not a sun— a very bright star.

  They were two billion miles, or a little over twenty solar distances, from it now.

  It was the brightest star.

  "A beauty, huh?"

  "No, Mouse," Lorq said. "Just a star."

  "How can you tell— "

  "— it's going to go nova?"

  "Because of the build-up of heavy materials on the surface," Lorq explained to the twins. "There's just the faintest reddening of the absolute color, corresponding to the faintest cooling in the surface temperature. There's also a slight speed-up of sunspot activity."

  "From the surface of one of her planets, though, there would be no way to tell?"

  "That's right. The reddening is far too faint to be detected with the naked eye. Fortunately this star has no planets. There's some moon-sized junk floating up a bit closer that may have been a failed attempt at a world."

  "Moons? "Moons!" Katin objected. "You can't have moons without planets. Planetoids, maybe, but not moons!"

  Lorq laughed. "Moon-sized is all I said."

  "Oh."

  All vanes had been used to swing the Roc into its two billion-mile-radius orbit about the star. Katin lay in his projection chamber, hesitant to release the view of the star for the lights of his chamber. "What about the study stations the Alkane has set up?"