A, B, C: Three Short Novels

  “You can come in now,” he said. Joneny was expecting one of two things to happen. Either the boy would stay put, suspended and immobile. Or he would come drifting in through the door: Joneny rather hoped for the latter. It would correlate with the strange flickering he had seen before on the Sigma-9 that also ignored time stasis. It would be at least a stab in the definition of just what the boy’s lack of humanity was, and his ignorance (in the sense of ignoring) of time would make his disregard of space less strange.

  Joneny expected one of these two things to happen.

  Neither of them did.

  Instead, everything exploded.

  Outside the door a wave of purple light rolled across the girders. The gravity of the cruiser went crazy; he got heavier and lighter in sickening waves. The figure of the boy erupted into a geyser of green sparks, which swept for the door of the cruiser and missed.

  Every loudspeaker in the ship began to moan in different keys. As Joneny stumbled for the controls, something happened to his eyes. The room went double, quadruple, octuple, and his hand, searching for the switch to throw the ship back into normal time, was lost among infinite decisions and choices. Then his head twisted.

  He was falling, orbiting great pulsing luminosities of thought. A white light glowed before him so beautifully he wanted to cry. He turned from it and was confronted by blindingly cool green, which was very funny. He slid toward it and was enveloped in sad heat. A face rolled toward him down a long hall, the face of a man with green eyes, dark hair, high cheekbones. The face rolled over him, and he reached out to push it away, but his hand kept going, for miles and miles, until it fell on the time margin switch.

  And he was standing before the control board, slightly nauseated, but all right. He sank in the hammock and turned to face the door, just in time to see the boy step through.

  “What happened?” Joneny asked.

  “You—you called me in. But I couldn’t…”

  “Couldn’t what?”

  “I couldn’t hear you. So my…father…father?…you don’t have the words. My father told me you called.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Joneny.

  “My…father…but not father. The Destroyer.”

  “What’s the Destroyer?”

  “He’s where—where I came from.”

  “When I asked you where you came from before, you said from this starship, Sigma-9.”

  “That’s right. That’s where my father is.”

  “Whereabouts in the ship is he?”

  The boy frowned. “All over it.”

  Joneny closed the portal. “I’m going over to Beta-2,” he said. “Maybe I can find something there.” He tried to put off the paralysis that the last strange incident had pushed him toward, detached the cruiser, and aimed for the rent in the hull of the Sigma-9.

  The iridium cell computer, which had been humming all this time, suddenly flashed its completion light. Joneny opened the tape case and ran the answer through his fingers. All that the computer had been able to come up with was that the Sigma-9 had been torn open—torn open from the outside, the way one might tear off the skin of an orange!

  “Hey, stop,” the boy said. They were halfway between the two ships.

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop your ship.”

  “For what?”

  “You’ll see. Just stop it.”

  Joneny turned the ship into a slowing spiral.

  “Now put it in time stasis.”

  Warily Joneny put the ship in stasis. Nothing happened.

  “Now look back at Sigma-9 and you’ll see my father.”

  Puzzled, Joneny turned the view screen back toward the wreck they had just left. As before, it glowed and shimmered in complete disregard for their chronological position.

  “The flickering,” the boy said, pointing. “That’s it.”

  “That’s what?”

  “That’s the Destroyer.”

  chapter seven

  Beta-2 was silent. The locks opened without any address from the robot mechanism. Here the corridors, though filled with air, were without gravity. “I’m looking for records,” Joneny told his companion as they threaded the triangular halls.

  “Here,” the boy said.

  They turned into a room that must have been the ship’s library. “These are the rest of the records,” said the boy, going to one wall of books behind glass. Joneny opened the case door. Black tomes ranged along the shelves, logbooks for the duration of the crossing. Joneny took first one out, then another. There were records of the Market, food production; he had absolutely no idea where to begin when the boy picked one and handed it to him.

  “This one was my mother’s.”

  Before the thought sank and bloomed to meaning, the cover fell open and he read: “This is the Logbook of Beta-2 City, the sole property of Captain Leela RT-857.”

  “Mother?” Joneny remembered his new interpretation of the lines:

  Under her arms a green-eyed child.

  The boy nodded. “Turn to when the first ship was attacked.” He reached over Joneny’s shoulder and flipped the pages. It was near the end:

  The report came in this afternoon that we had left the sea and entered light sand. The count from the first half an hour was in the high thirties, which caused me that odd paralytic alarm I have been so subject to lately with all the nonsense over the One-Eyes. But it dropped to three and has been there for the last couple of hours. Any sand is dangerous, but as long as it stays down there, we can sustain it for a few years. The uncertainty of when it will increase or end is unsettling.

  Earlier this evening I left the staff meeting and decided to visit the One-Eye quarter. Passing through the City Concourse, I met Judge Cartrite.

  “What brings you to this part of the ship?” he asked.

  “Just walking,” I said.

  “Taking stock of all your charges, Lee?” He gestured to the people around us.

  “Just walking, Judge.”

  “Well, you seem to be going in my direction. We’ll go together a ways and give a picture of official solidarity.”

  “I’m turning off shortly,” I told him. But he accompanied me across the walkway.

  “Have you heard anything about the new ritual group they’ve started over in Quadrant Two? They’re evolving some elegant complexities on some of the rituals I initiated back ten years ago. It makes a man feel he’s accomplished something. You know”—and the tone of his voice dropped—“I hardly ever hear of any of the City’s officers attending the ritual groups. You ought to encourage them to go, Lee. Solidarity again.”

  I smiled at him. “We’re a busy bunch, Judge. And let’s face it, the rituals are mostly time consumers.” I smiled—to avoid spitting, I think.

  “They mean a great deal to a lot of people.”

  “I’ll put up a notice,” I said. I’d like to paste it over his face.

  Judge Cartrite grinned. “Can’t ask more than that.” As we reached the other side of the concourse, he stopped. “Do you turn off here?”

  “I’m afraid I do.” I left him at the lift to the administrative sphere.

  The tall corridor was empty. My feet echoed. Then the hall ended at the web, spreading out in front of me, dim and huge, run through with catwalks and free corridors. It’s such a tangle that you can’t really see more than a hundred yards into it. I remembered as I stood on the edge of that spreading gulf how as children we had played near the exit. We were always terrified of getting lost inside. But now I took a short breath and pushed off. Gravity left me and I was floating toward the tangle of beams that was the web. It takes skill to leap from normal gravity into free fall. A lot of people never learn to. More than one body has gone into the Death’s Head with its neck broken from a head-on crash with anything from a bus bar to a plate wall. I caught myself against a ground sheet and pulled around on the handholds. It’s pointedly obvious that this section of the ship was not intended to be lived in; certain repairs
for the rest of the ship must be made here, but the hidden ways and mechanical caverns, niches and paths of the center are never used by people of the City. Nevertheless, it holds some six or seven hundred inhabitants. From the other side of the plate I could see the housing for the little detractor gyro, a riveted sphere of metal seventy-five feet in diameter. I launched for one of the guy cables. It sailed up to me. I caught it and pulled myself down to the surface. Just from playing at the very edges of the web with other children of the City, I had learned that one magnetic boot was useful. Two were a nuisance. So now I stood, anchored by one foot to the housing.

  I beeped a few times on my belt communicator, just to let them know I was there, when a soft, familiar voice behind me said, “What are you doing that for?”

  I avoided the impulse to whirl—and perhaps tear loose from my position. The voice chuckled, and I tried to look over my shoulder. “Every time I come here, Ralf tells me you know I’m here as soon as I leave gravity; but just in case, I like to let somebody know. I haven’t got time to stand around on one leg all day.”

  The voice chuckled again.

  “That is you, Timme?” I was turning slowly; and he, who could maneuver five times as fast as I could, was keeping out of my field of vision.

  “Here I am,” he said.

  I turned quickly the other way and he was floating in front of me, still chuckling.

  Timme is maybe seventeen or eighteen. He’s a dark boy, his hair uncut, black, his clothes nondescript rags. Timme is missing an arm and his left sleeve is just knotted at his shoulder. “You want to go to Ralf’s?”

  “That’s what I came here for.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain Lee.” He nodded slightly with his vaguely mocking smile.

  With his one hand he untied a coil of rope from his waist and threw me an end. I made a loop in it, slipped it around my back and under my arms, and held on in front.

  Timme looped the rope a couple of times around his wrist—which always struck me as a trifle insecure—and said, “Kick free!” I let go my hold with my boot. “We go that way,” he said, pointing off between two large columns with a ten-foot space between them; then, crouching like a frog, he leapt off from the housing—in the entirely wrong direction! This is the thing that always confuses me about free-fall travel: how can they calculate the whole business? The rope went taut, I was pulled along (nearly three times as fast as I’d ever dare go myself), but when Timme reached the end, the rope made him swing around, and our whole trajectory changed. The two of us on the ends of the rope were a complex rather than a simple weight, and together we were spiraling directly toward the space between the bars.

  The trip into the web probably beats what our ancestors called a roller-coaster ride hands down. Every five or six seconds Timme would kick off from another plate or strut, and we would shoot in another direction.

  Then we were in the clear again. Rotating before us was the Ring. Amidst the confusion of the web, a circular path three hundred feet in diameter had been discovered that would admit objects throughout its circumference of thirty or forty feet. In it the One-Eyes had constructed a metal ring, rotated by the City’s excess power, on which were attached small dwellings where four fifths normal gravity was maintained. The houses themselves, terribly flimsy contraptions that occasionally broke loose and caused a bit of damage, flung out like seats in the old pictures of a Ferris wheel. I’m sure boarding a moving train was no more difficult than getting into the Ring. I always did it with my eyes closed and simply let myself be pulled.

  Timme launched himself toward the whirling sheet-metal shacks, and I held on and closed my eyes. A moment later I was hauled, pulled, pushed into gravity again. In general the One-Eyes, even those who are physically deformed like Timme, have developed a physical dexterity that leaves the less adventurous majority of the City’s population aghast. I’m sure that’s one reason for so much of the fear.

  When I opened my eyes, Timme was closing the trapdoor. I was sitting on the floor, and Merril was standing over me, saying, “Well, Captain Lee, what brings you here this evening?”

  “I wanted to talk to you and Ralf about a number of things. Do you know about the desert we’ve entered?”

  She gave me her hand as I stood up. “Yes. But there’s nothing that can be done. Would you have come all the way out here just to tell us something our instruments show as well as yours?” There was the same slightly mocking tone that Timme used.

  “There’s more than that,” I said. “Is Ralf here?”

  Merril nodded. The two of them, Ralf and Merril, were more or less the leaders of the One-Eyes, though the fabric of their society was so amorphous, vertically and horizontally, that perhaps the term was too—precise.

  “Come with me,” she said. “He got your beeps; we were expecting you.”

  We went down a low-ceilinged corridor. Through a window, light from outside shifted across the far wall to remind us of the whirling frame we were on. As we stepped into the next room, Ralf looked up from his desk, smiled, and rose.

  “Captain Leela, what can I do for you?”

  We were in an informal office with a few filing cabinets along the walls. Two paintings hung in the office. One was Assumption of the Virgin by the old earth painter Titian. The other was done by a second-generation artist of the City: abstract, troubling darknesses lapping one another, full of blacks and greens.

  “What can you do for me?” I asked. “Talk to me like intelligent people, in sentences I can put in logical order. Maybe even say a few funny things about the more ludicrous stupidities of the City, maybe drop some advice my way.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  I sat down in the hammock suspended across the office. Merril took a seat near the filing cabinet. Timme, I saw, had sat quietly in a corner on the floor, though nobody had invited him to stay. But then, neither Ralf nor Merril seemed to want him to go, either.

  “While I was coming here, I ran into Judge Cartrite. He suggested that the official staff start attending the rituals. Hell, it’s all I can do to keep them away now.”

  “What do the rituals do?” Timme asked from the corner.

  “Fortunately you’ll never have to be bothered with them,” Ralf told him. “That’s one of the advantages of living out here with us. You came here when you were only three. But some of us who took a little longer to get here know a little too much about what they do.”

  Timme—Ralf told me this last time I visited him—had fallen into the web as a child and floated around for more than thirty hours before he was discovered. He had eventually been sucked to one of the great ventilator ducts that drew in air at seventy miles an hour. His arm had been squeezed between two grill blades and chewed off by the fan above his elbow. Instead of sending him back to be persecuted by the Norm, which was going through a particularly rigid enforcement on children that year, they kept him among the One-Eyes and nursed him back to health.

  “A lot of people get together and do perfectly meaningless things for hours at a time, for which impossible reasons have been calculated: standing on their heads for five minutes in the corner and then drinking a glass of pink-colored water seventeen times in succession, in honor of the seventeen times an hour the Poolroom revolves to maintain gravity, and the pink liquid in honor of the red shift of Sol—”

  Timme laughed. “No, I know what they do, or some of the things. But I mean, what do they do it for?”

  “Damned if I know,” I said.

  “Is that true?” asked Merril.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why do you think they have the rituals?”

  “Because they have nothing better to do. They need something to occupy their minds, and they haven’t got the guts to come out here in the web and struggle for themselves.”

  Ralf laughed now. “If they all migrated out here, Leela, there would be no struggle. We’d all die. In our own way we live off you people in the official quarter of the City. We struggle, do perhaps a little
unofficial stealing from the surplus farm stores, bargaining with your people when there’s some specialized knowledge we have that you don’t. All we are, Lee, is the people rituals couldn’t work for, the ones who’d go a little crazy if we didn’t reconstruct the City’s radar sector in miniature—for a hobby; make improvements on a model hydroponics garden—not for food but for fun; or put colors and shapes on canvas simply as an organization of forms. Maybe it’s just different rituals.”

  Just then Timme stood up. “Isn’t it about time for Hodge to come over?”

  “That’s right,” Merril said. “He’ll make it to the edge of the track. Just go out to bring him over to the Ring.”

  Timme bounced out the door.

  “Hodge?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh.” Merril nodded.

  “Does he come to visit you too?”

  “He gets lonely,” she said. “Probably lonelier than you do.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “Sometimes I’ve seen him walk in the concourse. Nobody talks to him, everyone backs away. But he walks around looking at things, at people…I don’t think anyone talks to him. But if that’s true in the official quarter, I’m surprised anyone even allows him in here.”

  “Why?” Merril asked, with the slight smile again.

  I shrugged. “Well…because he’s been responsible for so many of your people’s…I mean, whenever the legal department takes it into its head to start enforcing the Norm—” I stopped.

  “Responsible?” questioned Merril.

  I shrugged. “I see what you mean. He’s only carrying out orders.”

  “Hodge is a very lonely man,” Ralf said. “Most of us are lonely out here in the web. Yes, maybe there should be that sort of fear, but we’re also a pretty suicidal bunch as well.”

  “Hodge comes out here twice a week,” Merril said. “He spends the evening with us, eats here, plays chess with Ralf.”

  “Twice a week?” I said. “I’m surprised when he comes to the official sector twice a year.”