“Where are we going, anyway?” the Mouse asked.
Lorq pointed coordinates on the static matrix and the Mouse read them against matrix movable.
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 Tyÿ’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’ve talked to some of them. 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 starship 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 partner bought food and clothes for him and his family. But there was no direct connection between where they worked and how they ate and lived the rest of the time. They weren’t paid with buttons. As farming, hunting, and fishing became occupations of a smaller and smaller percent 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’d 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 thus 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. There was a revolution in the concept of labor. 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 woman or a man is going to change jobs, you send Ashton Clark, or his spirit, along with them.”
The Mouse gazed across the stars. “I remember that sometimes 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 men and women 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 wholly fragmented around itself. There’s only a gaudy, meretricious interplanetary society, which has no real tradition beh
ind 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? 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! My novel should be your life story. 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—”
“—tell it’s going to go nova?”
“Because of the buildup 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 computer. “What about the study stations the Alkane has set up?”
“They’re drifting as lonely as we are. We’ll hear from them in due time. But for now we don’t need them and they don’t need us. Cyana has warned them we’re coming. I’ll point them on matrix movable. There, you can follow their locations and their movements. That’s the major manned station. It’s fifty times as far out as we are.”
“Are we within the danger zone when she goes?”
“When that nova starts, that star is going to eat up the sky and everything in it a long way out.”
“When does it begin?”
“Days, Cyana predicted. But such predictions have been known to be off by two weeks in either direction. We’ll have a few minutes to clear if she goes. We’re about two and a half light-hours from her now.” All their views came in not by light, but by etheric disturbance, which gave them a synchronous view of the sun. “We’ll see her start at exactly the instant she goes.”
“And the Illyrion?” Sebastian asked. “How we that get?”
“That’s my worry,” Lorq told him. “We’ll get it when the time comes to get it. You can all cut loose for a while now.”
But no one hurried to release cables. Vanes diminished to single lines of light, but only after a while did two, and two wink off.
Katin and the Mouse lingered longest.
“Captain?” Katin asked after a few minutes. “I was just wondering. Did the patrol say anything special when you reported Dan’s … accident?”
It was nearly a minute before Lorq said: “I didn’t report it.”
“Oh,” Katin said. “I didn’t really think you had.”
The Mouse started to say “But” three times—and didn’t.
“Prince has access to all official records coming through the Draco patrol. At least I assume he has. I’ve got a computer scanning all those that come through the Pleiades. He is certainly programmed to trace down thoroughly anything that comes in vaguely connected with me. If he traced down Dan, he’d find a nova. I don’t want him to find it that way. I’d just as soon he didn’t know Dan was dead. As far as I know, the only people who do know are on this ship. I like it that way.”
“Captain!”
“What, Mouse?”
“There’s something coming.”
“A supply ship for the station?” Katin asked.
“It’s in too far. They’re sniffing along after our faery dust.”
Lorq was silent while the strange ship moved across the coordinate matrix. “Cut loose and go into the commons. I’ll join you.”
“But, Captain—” The Mouse got it out.
“It’s a seven-vaned cargo ship like this one, only its identification says Draco.”
“What’s it doing here?”
“Into the commons I said.”
Katin read the name of the ship as its identification beam translated at the bottom of the grid: “The Black Cockatoo? Come on, Mouse. Captain says cut loose.”
They unplugged, and joined the others at the pool’s edge.
At the head of the winding steps, the door rolled up. Lorq stepped out on the shadowed stair.
The Mouse watched Von Ray come down and thought: Captain’s tired.
Katin watched Von Ray and Von Ray’s reflection on the mirrored mosaic and thought: He moves tired, but it’s the tiredness of an athlete before his second wind.
When Lorq was halfway down, the light-fantasia in the gilt frame on the far wall cleared.
They started. The Mouse actually gasped.
“So,” Ruby said. “Nearly a tie. Or is that fair? You are still ahead. We don’t know where you intend to find the prize. This race goes by starts and stops.” Her blue gaze washed the crew, lingered on the Mouse, returned to Lorq. “Till last night at Taafite, I’d never felt such pain. Perhaps I’ve lived a sheltered life. But whatever the rules are, handsome Captain—” contempt resonated now—“we too have been bred to play.”
“Ruby, I want to talk to you …” Lorq’s voice faltered. “And Prince. In person.”
“I’m not sure if Prince wants to talk to you. The time between your leaving us at the edge of Gold and our finally struggling to a medico is not one of my—our pleasantest memories.”
“Tell Prince I’m shuttling over to The Black Cockatoo. I’m tired of this horror tale, Ruby. There are things you want to know from me. There are thin
gs I want to say to you.”
Her hand moved nervously to the hair falling on her shoulder. Her dark cloak closed in a high collar. After a moment she said, “Very well.” Then she was gone.
Lorq looked down at his crew. “You heard. Back on your vanes. Tyÿ, I’ve watched the way you swing on your strings. You’ve obviously had more experience flying than anyone else here. Take over the captain’s sockets. And if anything odd happens—anything, whether I’m back or not, take the Roc out of here, fast.”
The Mouse and Katin looked at each other, then at Tyÿ.
Lorq crossed the carpet, mounted the ramp. Halfway over the white arc, he stopped and gazed at his reflection. Then he spat.
He disappeared before ripples touched the bank.
Exchanging puzzled looks, they broke from the pool.
On his couch, Katin plugged in and switched on his sensory input outside the ship to find the others were all there already.
He watched The Black Cockatoo drift closer to receive the shuttle.
“Mouse?”
“Yeah, Katin.”
“I’m worried.”
“About Captain?”
“About us.”
The Black Cockatoo, beating vanes on the darkness, turned slowly beside them to match orbits.
“We were drifting, Mouse, you and I, the twins, Tyÿ and Sebastian, good people all of us—but aimless. Then an obsessed man snatches us up and carries us out here to the edge of everything. And we arrive to find his obsession has imposed order on our aimlessness—or perhaps a more meaningful chaos. What worries me is that I’m so thankful to him. I should be rebelling, trying to assert my own order. But I’m not. I want him to win his infernal race. I want him to win, and until he wins or loses, I can’t seriously want anything else for myself.”
The Black Cockatoo received the shuttle boat like a cannon shot in reverse. Without the necessity of maintaining matched orbits, she drifted a ways from them. Katin watched her dark rotations.
“Good morning.”
“Good evening.”
“By Greenwich time it’s morning, Ruby.”
“And I do you the politeness of greeting you by Ark time. Come this way.” She held back her robe to let him pass into the black corridor.