"My God ..." Katin breathed. "Oh, no ..."
"It too bright is," Tyy decided. "Off sensory we go!"
The Roc began to pull away.
"Oh my God! They— they really are, they're really falling! It's so bright! They'll die! They'll burn up like— they're falling! Oh, Lord, stop them! Somebody do something! The captain's on there. You've got to do something!"
"Katin!" the Mouse shouted. "Get the hell off sensory! Are you crazy?"
"They're going down! No! It's like a bright hole in the middle of everything! And they're falling into it. Oh, they're falling. They're falling— "
"Katin!" the Mouse shrieked. "Katin, don't look at it!"
"It's growing, it's so bright ... bright ... brighter! I can hardly see them!"
"Katin!" Suddenly it came to him, and the Mouse cried out: "Don't you remember Dan? Turn your sensory input off!"
"No! No, I've got to see it! It's roaring now. It's shaking the whole night apart! You can smell it burning, burning up the darkness. I can't see them any more— no, there they are!"
"Katin, stop it!" The Mouse twisted beneath Olga. "Tyy, cut off his input!"
"I can't. I this ship against gravity must fly. Katin! Off sensory, I you order!"
"Down ... down ... I've lost them again! I can't see them any more, The light's turning all red now ... I can't— "
The Mouse felt the ship lurch as Katin's vane suddenly flailed wild.
Then Katin screamed. "I can't see!" The scream became a sob. "I can't see anything!"
The Mouse balled up on the couch with his hands over his eyes, shaking.
"Mouse!" Tyy shouted. "Damn it, we one vane have lost. Down you sweep!"
The Mouse swept blindly down. Tears of terror squeezed between his lids as he listened to Katin's sobs.
The Roc rose from and The Black Cockatoo fell into it.
And it was nova.
Sprung from pirates, reeling blind in fire, I am called pirate, murderer, thief.
I bear it.
I will gather my prizes in a moment and become the man who pushed Draco over the edge of tomorrow. That it was to save the Pleiades does not diminish such a crime. Those with the greatest power must ultimately commit the greatest felonies. Here on The Black Cockatoo I am a flame away from forever. I told her once that we had not been fit for meaning. Neither for meaningful deaths. (There is a death whose only meaning is that it was died to defend chaos. And they are dead ... ) Such lives and deaths preclude significance, keep guilt from the murderer, elation from the socially beneficent hero. How do other criminals support their crimes? The hollow worlds cast up their hollow children, raised only to play or fight. Is that sufficient for winning? I have struck down one third the cosmos to raise up another and let one more go staggering; and I feel no sin on me. Then it must be that I am free and evil. Well, then, I am free, mourning her with my laughter. Mouse, Katin, you who can speak out of the net, which one of you is the blinder for not having watched me win under this sun? I can feel fire churn by me. Like you, dead Dan, I will grasp at dawn and evening, but I will win the noon.
Outer Colonies, New Brazillia II, 3172
Darkness.
Silence.
Nothing.
Then thought shivers:
I think ... therefore I ... I am Katin Crawford? He fought away from that. But the thought was him; he was the thought. There was no place in here to anchor.
A flicker.
A tinkle.
The scent of caraway.
It was beginning.
No! He clawed back down into darkness. The mind's ear recalled someone shrieking, "Remember Dan ..." and the mind's eye pictured the staggering derelict.
Another sound, smell, flicker beyond his lids.
He fought for unconsciousness in terror of the torrent. But terror quickened his heart, and the increased pulse drove him upward, upward, where the magnificence of the dying star lay in wait for him.
Sleep was killed in him.
He held his breath and opened his eyes— Pastels pearled before him. High chords rang softly on one another. Then caraway, mint, sesame, anise— And behind the colors, a figure.
"Mouse?" Katin whispered, and was surprised how clearly he heard himself.
The Mouse took his hands from the syrynx ...
Color, smell, and music ceased.
"You awake?" The Mouse sat on the window sill, shoulders and the left side of his face lit with copper. The sky behind him was purple.
Katin closed his eyes, pushed his bead' back into the pillow, and smiled. The smile got broader, and broader, split over his teeth, and suddenly verged against tears. "Yes." He relaxed, and opened his eyes again. "Yes. I'm awake." He pushed himself up. "Where are we? Is this the Alkane's manned station?" But there was landscape through the window.
The Mouse shoved down from the sill. "Moon of a planet called New Brazillia."
Katin got up from the hammock and went to the window. Beyond the atmosphere-trap, over the few low buildings, a black and gray rock-scape carpeted toward a lunar-close horizon. He pulled in a cool, ozone-tainted breath, then looked back at the Mouse. "What happened, Mouse? Oh, Mouse, I thought I was going to wake up like..
"Dan caught his on the way into the sun. You caught yours while we were pulling out. All the frequencies were dopplering down the red shift. It's the ultraviolets that detach retinas and do things like happened to Dan. Tyy finally got a moment to shut your sensory input off from the master controls. You really were blind for a while, you know. We got you into the medico as soon as we were safe."
Katin frowned. "Then what are we doing here? What happened then?"
"We stayed out by the manned stations and watched the fireworks from a safe distance. It took a little over three hours to reach peak intensity. We were talking with the Alkane's crew when we got the captain's signal from The Black Cockatoo. So we scooted on around, picked him up, and let all the Cockatoo's cyborg studs loose."
"Picked him up! You mean he did get out?"
"Yeah. He's in another room. He wants to talk to you."
"He wasn't fooling us about ships going into a nova and coming out the other side?" They started toward the door.
Outside they passed down a corridor with a glass wall that looked across broken moon. Katin had lost himself in marvelous contemplation of the rubble when the Mouse said, "Here."
They opened the door,
A crack of light struck in across Lorq's face. "Who's there?"
Katin asked, "Captain?"
"What?"
"Captain Von Ray?"
“... Katin?" His fingers clawed the chair arms. Yellow eyes stared, jumped; jumped, stared.
"Captain, what ...?" Katin's face furrowed. He fought down panic, forced his face to relax.
"I told Mouse to bring you to see me when you were up and around. You're ... you're all right. Good." Agony spread the ruptured flesh, then faltered. And for a moment there was agony.
Katin stopped breathing.
"You tried to look too. I'm glad. I always thought you would be the one to understand."
"You ... fell into the sun, Captain?"
Lorq nodded.
"But how did you get out?"
Lorq pressed his head against the back of the chair. Dark skin, red hair shot with yellow, his unfocused eyes, were the only colors in the room. "What? Got out, you say?" He barked a laugh. "It's an open secret now. How did I get out?" A muscle quivered on the wrack of his jaw. "A sun— " Lorq held up one hand, the fingers curved to support an imaginary sphere "— it rotates, like a world, like some moons. With something the mass of a star, rotation means incredible centripetal force pushing out at the equator. At the end of the build-up of heavy materials at the surface, when the star actually novas, it all falls inward toward the center." His fingers began to quiver. "Because of the rotation, the material at the poles falls faster than the material at the equator." He clutched the arm of the chair again. "Within seconds after the nova begins you d
on't have a sphere any more, but a ...
"A torus!"
Lines scored Lorq's face. And his head jerked to the side, as if trying to avoid a great light. Then the scarred lineaments came back to face them. "Did you say torus? A torus? Yes. That sun became a doughnut with a hole big enough for two Jupiters to fit through, side by side."
"But the Alcane's been studying novas up close for nearly a century! Why didn't they know?"
"The matter displacement is all toward the center of the sun. The energy displacement is all outwards. The gravity shift will funnel everything toward the hole; the energy displacement keeps the temperature as cool inside the hole as the surface of some red giant star— well under five hundred degrees."
Though the room was cool, Katin saw sweat starting in the ridges of Lorq's forehead.
"The topological extension of a torus of that dimension— the corona which is all the Alkane's stations can see— is almost identical to a sphere. Large as the hole is, compared to the size of the energy-ball, that hole would be pretty hard to find unless you knew where it was— or fell into it by accident." On the chair arm the fingers suddenly stretched, quivered. "The Illyrion— "
"You ... you got your Illyrion, Captain?"
Again Lorq raised his hand before his face, this time in a fist. He tried to focus on it. With his other hand he grabbed for it, half missed, grabbed again, missed completely, then again; opened fingers grappled the closed ones. The doubled fist shook as with palsy.
"Seven tons! The only materials dense enough to center in the hole are the trans-three-hundred elements. Illyrion! It floats free there, for whoever wants to go in and sweep it up. Fly your ship in, then look around to see where it is, and sweep it up with your projector vanes. It collects on the nodes of your projectors. Illyrion— nearly free of impurities." His hands came apart. "Just ... go on sensory input, and look around to see where it is." He lowered his face. "She lay there, her face— her face an amazing ruin in the center of hell. And I swept my seven arms across the blinding day to catch the bits of hell that floated by— "He raised his head again. "There's an Illyrion mine down on New Brazillia.
Outside the window a mottled planet hung huge in the sky. "They have equipment here for handling Illyrion shipments. But you should have seen their faces when we brought in our seven tons, hey, Mouse?" He laughed loudly again. "That's right, Mouse? You told me what they looked like, yes?
Mouse?"
"That's right, Captain."
Lorq nodded, breathed deep. "Katin, Mouse, your job is over. You've got your walking papers. Ships leave here regularly. You shouldn't have any trouble getting on another one."
"Captain," Katin ventured, "what are you going to do?"
"On New Brazillia, there's a home where I spent much pleasant time when I was a boy. I'm going back there ... to wait"
"Isn't there something you could do, Captain? I looked and— "
"What? Speak louder."
"I said, I'm all and I looked!" Katin's voice broke.
"You looked going away. I looked searching the center, The neural distortion is all the way up into the brain. Neurocongruency." He shook his head. "Mouse, Katin, Ashton Clark to you."
"But Captain— "
"Ashton Clark."
Katin looked at the Mouse, then back at the captain. The Mouse fiddled with the strap of his sack. Then he looked up. After a moment they turned and left the lightless room.
Outside they once more gazed across the moonscape.
"So," Katin mused. "Von Ray has it and Prince and Ruby don't."
"They're dead," the Mouse told him. "Captain said he killed them."
"Oh." Katin looked out on the moonscape. After a while he said: "Seven tons of Illyrion, and the balance begins to shift. Draco is setting as the Pleiades rises. The Outer Colonies are going to go through some changes. Bless Ashton Clark that labor relocation isn't too difficult today. Still, there are going to be problems. Where're Lynceos and Idas?"
"They've already gone. They got a stellar-gram from their brother and they've gone to see him, since they were here in the Outer Colonies."
"Tobias?"
"That's right."
"Poor twins. Poor triplets. When this Illyrion gets out and the change begins ..." Katin snapped his fingers. "No more bliss." He looked up at the sky, nearly bare of stars. "We're at a moment of history, Mouse."
The Mouse scraped wax from his ear with his little fingernail. His earring glittered. "Yeah. I was thinking that myself."
"What are you going to do now?"
The Mouse shrugged. "I really don't know. So I asked Tyy to give me a Tarot reading."
Katin raised his eyebrows.
"She and Sebastian are downstairs now. Their pets got loose around the bar. Scared everybody half to death and almost broke up the place." He laughed harshly. "You should have seen it. Soon as they get finished calming down the owner, they're coming up to read my cards. I'll probably get another job studding. There's not much reason to think about the mines now." His fingers closed on the leather sack under his arm. "There's still a lot to see, a lot I have to play. Maybe you and me can stick together a while, get on the same ship. You're funny as hell sometimes. But I don't dislike you half as much as I dislike a lot of other people. What are your plans?"
"I haven't really had time to think about them." He slipped his hands beneath his belt and lowered his head.
"What are you doing?"
"Thinking."
"What?"
"That here I am on a perfectly good moon; I've just finished up a job, so I won't have any worries for a while. Why not sit down and get some serious work done on my novel?" He looked up. "But you know, Mouse? I don't really know if I want to write a book."
"Huh?"
"When I was looking at that nova ... no, after it, just before I woke and thought I'd have to spend the rest of my life in blinkers, ear and nose plugs, while I went noisily nuts, I realized how much I hadn't looked at, how much I hadn't listened to, smelled, tasted— how little I knew of those basics of life you have literally at your fingertips. And then Captain— "
"Hell," the Mouse said. With his bare foot he toed dust from his boot. "You're not going to write it after all the work you've already done?"
"Mouse, I'd like to. But I still don't have a subject. And I've just gotten prepared to go out and find one— Right now I'm just a bright guy with a lot to say and nothing to say it about."
"That's a fink-out," the Mouse grunted. "What, about the captain and the Roc? And you said you wanted to write about me. Okay, go ahead. And write about you too. Write about the twins. You really think they'd sue you? They'd be tickled pink, both of them. I want you to write it, Katin. I might not be able to read it, but I'd sure listen if you read it to me."
"You would?"
"Sure. After all you've put into it this far, if you stopped now, you wouldn't be happy at all."
"Mouse, you tempt me. I've wanted to do nothing else for years." Then Katin laughed. "No, Mouse. I'm too much the thinker still. This last voyage of the Roc? I'm too aware of all the archetypical patterns it follows. I can see myself now, turning it into some allegorical Grail quest. That's the only way I could deal with it, hiding all sorts of mystic symbolism in it. Remember all those writers who died before they finished their Grail recountings?"
"Aw, Katin, that's a lot of nonsense. You've got to write it!"
"Nonsense like the Tarot? No, Mouse. I'd fear for my life with such an undertaking." Again he looked over the landscape. The moon, so known to him, for a moment put him at peace with all the unknown beyond. "I want to. I really do. But I'd be fighting a dozen jinxes from the start, Mouse. Maybe I could. But I don't think so. The only way to protect myself from the jinx, I guess, would be to abandon it before I finish the last
Athens, June '66— New York, May '67
About the Author
SAMUEL R. DELANY was born in New York City on April 1, 1942. He grew up in New York's Harlem district and atten
ded the Bronx High School of Science. At City College he served as poetry editor of the magazine Prometheus.
He composed his first novel at nineteen and, at intervals between novels, worked in jobs ranging from shrimpboat worker to folk singer— in places as diverse as the Texas Gulf, Greece and Istanbul.
Samuel Delany has won the coveted Nebula Award four times, twice for short stories ("Aye, and Gomorrah" and 'Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones") and twice for novels (Babel-7 and The Einstein Intersection).
His other works include The Fall of the Towers, The Jewels of Aptor, Nova, Dhalgren and Triton. In addition, he and his wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker, founded and edited the avant-garde science fiction journal Quark from their base in London, where they presently live with their daughter.
Table of Contents
NOVA
Enter the SF Gateway
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
About the Author
Samuel R. Delany, Nova
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