“Hey!” the Mouse rasped. “You going back to the ship now?”
“We go.”
“Just a second. What does Von Ray mean to you? You know his name?”
Sebastian smiled, and Tyÿ glanced at him with gray eyes.
“We from the Pleiades Federation are,” Tyÿ said. “I and these beasts under the Dim, Dead Sister, flock and master, born.”
“The Dim, Dead Sister?”
“The Pleiades used to be called the Seven Sisters in ancient times because only seven of them could be seen from Earth,” Katin explained to the Mouse’s frown. “A few hundred B.C. or so, one of the visible stars went nova and out. There are cities now on the innermost of its charred planets. It’s still hot enough to keep things habitable, but that’s about all.”
“A nova?” the Mouse said. “What about Von Ray?”
Tyÿ made an inclusive gesture. “Everything. Great, good family is.”
“Do you know this particular Captain Von Ray?” Katin asked.
Tyÿ shrugged.
“What about Ulyrion?” the Mouse asked. “What do you know about that?”
Sebastian squatted among his pets. Wings shed from him. His hairy hand went soothingly from head to head. “Pleiades Federation none have. Draco system none either have.” He frowned.
“Von Ray a pirate some say,” Tyÿ ventured.
Sebastian looked up sharply. “Von Ray great and good family is! Von Ray fine is! That why we with him go.”
Tyÿ, more softly, her voice settling behind the gentle features: “Von Ray fine family is.”
The Mouse saw Lynceos approaching over the bridge. And ten seconds later, Idas.
“You two are from the Outer Colonies …?”
The twins stopped, shoulder brushing shoulder. Pink eyes blinked more than brown.
“From Argos,” the pale twin said.
“Argos on Tubman B-12,” specified the dark.
“The Far Out Colonies,” Katin amended.
“What do you know about Ulyrion?”
Idas leaned on the rail, turned, frowned, then hoisted himself up so that he was sitting. “Ulyrion?” He spread his knees and dropped his knotted hands between. “We have Ulyrion in the Outer Colonies.”
Lynceos turned and pushed up to sit beside him. “Tobias,” he said. “We have a brother, Tobias.” Lynceos moved on the bar closer to dark Idas. “We have a brother in the Outer Colonies named Tobias.” He glanced at Idas, coral eyes netted with silver. “In the Outer Colonies, where there is Ulyrion.” He put his wrists together, but with fingers opened, like petals on a calloused lily.
“The worlds in the Outer Colonies?” Idas said. “Balthus—with ice and mud-pits and Ulyrion. Cassandra—with glass deserts big as the oceans of Earth, and jungles of uncountable plants, all blue, with frothing rivers of galenium, and Ulyrion. Salinus—combed through with mile-high caves and canons, with a continent of deadly red moss, and seas with towered cities built of the tidal quartz on the ocean floor, and Ulyrion—”
“—The Outer Colonies are the worlds of stars much younger than the stars here in Draco, many times younger than the Pleiades,” Lynceos put in.
“Tobias is in … one of the Ulyrion mines on Tubman,” Idas said.
Their voices tensed. Eyes stayed down, or leaped to one another’s faces. When black hands opened, white hands closed.
“Idas, Lynceos, and Tobias, we grew up in the dry, equatorial stones of Tubman at Argos, under three suns and a red moon—”
“—and on Argos too there is Illyrion. We were wild. They called us wild. Two black pearls and a white, bouncing and brawling through the streets of Argos—”
“—Tobias, he was black as Idas. I alone was white in the town—”
“—but no less wild than Tobias for his whiteness. And they said, in wildness we, one night, out of heads on bliss—”
“—the gold powder that collects in the rock crevices and when inhaled makes the eyes flicker with unnamed colors and new harmonies reel in the ear’s hollow, and the mind dilate—”
“—on bliss, we made an effigy of the mayor of Argos, and fixed him with a clockwork flying mechanism, and set him soaring about the city square, uttering satirical verses on the leading personages of the city—”
“—for this we were banished from Argos into the wilds of Tubman—”
“—and outside the town there is only one way to live, and that is to descend beneath the sea and work off the days of disgrace in the submarine Illyrion mines—”
“—and the three of us, who had never done anything on bliss but laugh and leap, and had mocked no one—”
“—we were innocent—”
“—we went into the mines. There we worked in air masks and wet suits in the underwater mines of Argos, for a year—”
“—a year on Argos is three months longer than a year on Earth, with six seasons instead of four—”
“—and at the beginning of our second, algae-tinted autumn, we made ready to leave. But Tobias would not go. His hands had taken up the rhythms of the tides, the weight of the ore became a comfort on his palms—”
“—so we left our brother in the Illyrion mines, and came up among the stars, afraid—”
“—you see, we are afraid that as our brother, Tobias, found something that pulled him from us, so one of us may find something that will divide the remaining two—”
“—as we thought the three of us could never be divided.” Idas looked at the Mouse. “And we are out of bliss.”
Lynceos blinked. “That is what Illyrion means to us.”
“Paraphrase,” Katin said from the other side of the walk. “In the Outer Colonies, comprising to date forty-two worlds and circa seven billion people, practically the entire population at one time or another has something to do with the direct acquisition of Illyrion. And I believe approximately one out of three works in some facet of its development or production his entire life.”
“Those are the statistics,” Idas said, “for the Far Out Colonies.”
Black wings rose as Sebastian stood and took Tyÿ’s hand.
The Mouse scratched his head. “Well. Let’s spit in this river and get onto the ship.”
The twins climbed down from the rail. The Mouse leaned out over the hot ravine and puckered.
“What are you doing?”
“Spitting into Hell3. A gypsy’s got to spit three times in any river he crosses,” the Mouse explained to Katin. “Otherwise, bad things.”
“This is the thirty-second century we’re living in. What bad things?”
The Mouse shrugged.
“I never spit in any river.”
“Maybe it’s just for gypsies.”
“I it kind of a cute idea is think,” Tyÿ said, and leaned across the railing beside the Mouse. Sebastian loomed at her shoulder. Above them one of the beasts was caught in a hot updraft and flung up into the dark.
“What that is?” Tyÿ frowned suddenly, pointing.
“Where?” The Mouse squinted.
She pointed past him to the canon wall.
“Hey!” Katin said. “That’s the blind man!”
“The one who busted up your playing—!”
Lynceos pushed between them. “He’s sick.” He narrowed his blood-colored eyes. “That man there is sick—”
Demoned by the flickering, Dan reeled down the ledges toward the lava.
“He’ll burn up!” Katin joined them.
“But he can’t feel the heat!” the Mouse exclaimed. “All his senses are dead! He can’t see—he probably doesn’t even know!”
Idas, then Lynceos, pushed away from the rail and ran up the bridge.
“Come on!” the Mouse cried, following.
Sebastian and Tyÿ came after, with Katin at the rear.
Ten meters below the rim, Dan paused on a rock, arms before him, preparing an infernal dive.
As they reached the head of the bridge—the twins were already climbing the rail—a figure appeared
at the canon’s lips above the old man.
“Dan!” Von Ray’s face flamed as the light fanned him. He vaulted the rail. Shale struck from under his sandals and shattered before him as he crabbed down the slope. “Dan, don’t—”
Dan did.
His body caught on an outcropping sixty feet below, then spun on, out, and down.
The Mouse clutched the rail, bruising his stomach on the bar as he leaned.
Katin was beside him a moment afterward, leaning even further.
“Ahhh—!” the Mouse whispered and pulled back to avert his face.
Captain Von Ray reached the rock from which Dan had leaped. He dropped to one knee, both fists on the stone, staring over. Shapes fell at him (Sebastian’s pets), rose again, casting no shadow. The twins had stopped, ledges above him.
Captain Von Ray stood. He looked up at his crew. He was breathing hard. He turned and made his way back up the slope.
“What happened?” Katin asked when they were all on the walk again. “Why did he …?”
“I was talking with him just a few minutes before,” Von Ray explained. “He’s crewed with me for years. But on the last trip, he was … was blinded.”
The big captain; the scarred captain. And how old would he be, the Mouse wondered. Before, the Mouse had put him at forty-five, fifty. But this confusion lopped ten or fifteen years. The captain was aged, not old.
“I had just told him that I had made arrangements for him to return to his home in Australia. He’d turned around to go back across the bridge to the dormitory where I’d taken him a room. I glanced back … he wasn’t on the bridge.” The captain looked around at the rest of them. “Come onto the Roc.”
“I guess you’ll have to report this to the patrol,” Katin said.
Von Ray led them toward the gate to the take-off field, where Draco writhed up and down his hundred-meter column in the darkness.
“There’s a phone right here at the head of the bridge—”
Von Ray’s look cut Katin off. “I want to leave this rock. If we call from here, they’ll have everybody wait around to tell his version in triplicate.”
“I guess you can call from the ship,” Katin suggested, “as we leave.”
For a moment the Mouse doubted all over again his judgment of the captain’s age.
“There’s nothing we can do for that sad fool.”
The Mouse cast an uncomfortable glance down the chasm, then followed along with Katin.
Beyond the hot drafts, night was chill, and fog hung coronas on the induced-fluorescent lamps that patterned the field.
Katin and the Mouse, were at the group’s tail.
“I wonder just what Illyrion means to handsome there,” the Mouse commented softly.
Katin grunted and put his hands under his belt. After a moment he asked, “Say, Mouse, what did you mean with that old man about all his senses are dead?
“When they tried to reach the nova the last time,” the Mouse said, “he looked at the star too long through sensory input and all his nerve endings were seared. They weren’t really killed. They were jammed into constant stimulation.” He shrugged. “Same difference … Almost.”
“Oh,” Katin said, and looked at the pavement.
Around them stood star-freighters. Between them stood the much smaller, hundred-meter shuttles.
After he’d thought awhile, Katin said: “Mouse, has it occurred to you how much you have to lose on this trip?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re not scared?”
The Mouse grasped Katin’s forearm with his rough fingers. “I’m scared as hell,” he rasped. He shook his hair back to look up at his tall shipmate. “You know that? I don’t like things like Dan. I’m scared.”
chapter three
SOME STUD HAD TAKEN a black crayon and scrawled “Olga” across the vane-projector face.
“Okay,” the Mouse said to the machine. “You’re Olga.”
Purr and blink, three green lights, four red ones. The Mouse began the tedious check of pressure distribution and phase readings.
To move a ship faster than light from star to star, you take advantage of the very twists in space, the actual distortions that matter creates in the continuum itself. To talk about the speed of light as the limiting velocity of an object is to talk about twelve or thirteen miles an hour as the limiting velocity of a swimmer in the sea. But as soon as one starts to employ the currents of the water itself, as well as the wind above, as with a sailboat, the limit vanishes. The starship had seven vanes of energy acting somewhat like sails. Six projectors controlled by computers sweep the vanes across the night. And each cyborg stud controls a computer. The captain controls the seventh. The vanes of energy had to be tuned to the shifting frequencies of the stasis pressures; and the ship itself was quietly hurled from this plane of space by the energy of the Illyrion in its core. That was what Olga and her cousins did. But the control of the shape and the angling of the vane was best left to a human brain. That was the Mouse’s job—under the captain’s orders. The captain also had blanket control of many of the sub-vane properties.
The cubicle’s walls were covered with graffiti from former crews. There was a contour couch. The Mouse adjusted the inductance slack in a row of seventy-microfarad coil-condensers, slid the tray into the wall, and sat.
He reached around to the small of his back beneath his vest, and felt for the socket. It had been grafted onto the base of his spinal cord back at Cooper. He picked up the first reflex cable that looped across the floor to disappear into the computer’s face, and fiddled with it till the twelve prongs slipped into his socket and caught. He took the smaller, six-prong plug and slipped it into the plug on the underside of his left wrist; then the other into his right. Both radial nerves were connected with Olga. At the back of his neck was another socket. He slipped the last plug in—the cable was heavy and tugged a little on his neck—and saw sparks. This cable could send impulses directly to his brain that could bypass hearing and sight. There was a faint hum coming through already. He reached over, adjusted a knob on Olga’s face, and the hum cleared. Ceiling, walls, and floor were covered with controls. The room was small enough so that he could reach most of them from the couch. But once the ship took off, he would touch none of them, but control the vane directly with the nervous impulses from his body.
“I always feel like I’m getting ready for the Big Return,” Katin’s voice sounded in his ear. In their cubicles throughout the ship, as they plugged themselves in, the other studs joined contact. “The base of the spine always struck me as an unnatural place from which to drag your umbilical cord. It better be an interesting marionette show. Do you really know how to work this thing?”
“If you don’t know by now,” the Mouse said, “too bad.”
Idas: “This show’s about Illyrion—”
“—Illyrion and a nova,” Lynceos.
“Say, what are you doing with your pets, Sebastian?”
“A saucer of milk them feed.”
“With tranquilizers,” Tyÿ’s soft voice came. “They now sleep.”
And lights dimmed.
The captain hooked in. The graffiti, the scars on the walls, vanished. There were only the red lights chasing one another on the ceiling.
“A shook up go game,” Katin said, “with iridescent stones.” The Mouse pushed his syrynx case beneath the couch with his heel and lay down. He straightened the cable under his back, beneath his neck.
“All secure?” Von Ray’s voice rang through the ship. “Open the fore vanes.”
The Mouse’s eyes began to flicker with new sight—
—the spaceport: lights over the field, the lavid fissures of the crust fell to dim, violet quiverings at the spectrum’s tip. But above the horizon, the “winds” were brilliant.
“Pull open the side vane seven degrees.”
The Mouse flexed what would have been his left arm. And the side vane lowered like a wing of mica. “Hey, Katin,” the Mouse whi
spered. “Ain’t that something! Look at it—”
The Mouse shivered, crouched in a shield of light. Olga had taken over his breathing and heartbeat while the synapses of the medulla were directed to the workings of the ship.
“For Illyrion, and Prince and Ruby Red!” from one of the twins.
“Hold your vane!” the captain ordered.
“Katin, look—”
“Lie back and relax, Mouse,” Katin whispered. “I shall do just that and think about my past life.”
The void roared.
“You really feel like that, Katin?”
“You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough.”
“You two, look up,” from Von Ray.
They looked.
“Cut in stasis shifters.”
A moment Olga’s lights pricked his vision. And were gone; winds swept against him. And they were cartwheeling from the sun.
“Good-bye, moon,” Katin whispered.
And the moon fell into Neptune; Neptune fell into the sun. And the sun began to fall.
Night exploded before them.
What were the first things?
His name was Lorq Von Ray and he lived at 12 Extol Park in the big, big house up the hill: New Ark (N.W. 73), Ark. That was what you told somebody on the street if you should get lost, and that person would help you find home. The streets of Ark were set with transparent wind shields, and the evenings from the months of April to Iumbra were blasted with colored fumes that snagged, ripped free, and writhed above the city on the crags of Tong. His name was Lorq Von Ray and he lived … Those were the childish things, the things that persisted, the first learned. Ark was the greatest city in the Pleiades Federation. Mother and Father were important people and were often away. When they were home they talked of Draco, its capital world Earth; they talked of the realignment, the prospect of sovereignty for the Outer Colonies. They had guests who were senator this, and representative that. After Secretary Morgan married Aunt Cyana, they came to dinner and Secretary Morgan gave him a hologram map of the Pleiades Federation that was just like a regular piece of paper, but when you looked at it under the tensor beam, it was like looking through a night window with dots of light flickering at different distances, and nebulous gases winding. “You live on Ark, the second planet of that sun there,” his father said, pointing down where Lorq had spread the map over the rock table beside the glass wall. Outside, spidery tilda trees writhed in the evening gale.