“Ruby?”
“Yes?” Her voice was just behind his left shoulder.
“I’ve always wondered something, each time I’ve seen you. You’ve shown me so many hints of the magnificent person you are. But it gleams from under the shadow Prince throws. Years ago, when we talked at that party on the Seine, it struck me what a challenging person you would be to love.”
“Paris is worlds and worlds away, Lorq.”
“Prince controls you. It’s petty of me, but that’s what I can least forgive him. You’ve never shown your own will before him. Except at Taafite, that once beneath the exhausted sun on the other world. You thought Prince was dead. I know you remember it. I’ve thought of little else since. You kissed me. But he screamed—and you ran to him. Ruby, he’s trying to destroy the Pleiades Federation. That’s all the worlds that circle three hundred suns, and how many billions of people. They’re my worlds. I can’t let them die.”
“You would topple the column of Draco and send the Serpent crawling off through the dust to save them? You would pull the economic support out from under Earth and let the fragments fall into the night? You would bowl the worlds of Draco into epochs of chaos, civil strife, and deprivation? The worlds of Draco are Prince’s worlds. Are you really presumptuous enough to think he loves his less than you love yours?”
“What do you love, Ruby?”
“You are not the only one with secrets, Lorq. Prince and I have ours. When you came up out of the burning rocks, yes, I thought Prince was dead. There was a hollow tooth in my jaw filled with strychnine. I wanted to give you a victory kiss. I would have, if Prince had not screamed.”
“Prince loves Draco?” He whirled, caught her upper arms, dragged her against him.
Her breath surged against his chest. With eyes opened their faces struck. He mashed her thin mouth with his full one till her lips drew back, and his teeth and tongue ground teeth.
Her fingers grappled his rough hair. She made ugly sounds.
He held her, astonished, bewildered, horrified at the intensity of this desire for it all to be over, now, here. But it was not over. She pushed, twisted, jerked.
The instant his grip relaxed, she was away, eyes wide. Then her lids veiled the blue light till fury widened them again.
“Well …?” He was breathing hard.
Ruby drew her cloak around her. “When a weapon fails me once—” her voice was hoarse as the Mouse’s—“I discard it. Otherwise, handsome pirate, you …” Did the harshness lessen? “We would be … But I have other weapons now.”
The Cockatoo’s commons was small and stark. Two cyborg studs sat on the benches. Another stood on the steps beside the door to his projection chamber.
Sharp-featured men in white uniforms, they reminded Lorq of another crew he had worked. On their shoulders they wore the scarlet emblem of Red-shift, Ltd. They glanced at Lorq and Ruby. The one standing stepped back into his chamber and the plate door clanged in the high room. The other two got up to go.
“Will Prince come down?”
Ruby nodded toward the iron stair. “He’ll see you in the captain’s cabin.”
Lorq began to climb. His sandals clacked on the perforated steps. Ruby followed him.
Lorq knocked on the studded door.
It swung in, Lorq—with Ruby following—stepped inside, and a metal and plastic gauntlet on a jointed arm telescoped from the ceiling and struck him across the face, twice.
Lorq reeled back against the door—it was covered in leather on the inside and set with brass heads—so that it slammed.
“That,” the corpse announced, “is for manhandling my sister.”
Lorq rubbed his cheek and looked at Ruby. She stood by the jade wall. The draping valences were the same deep wine as her cloak.
“Do you think I don’t watch everything that goes on on this ship?” asked the corpse. “You Pleiades barbarians are as uncouth as Aaron always said you were.”
Bubbles rose in the tank, caressed the stripped and naked foot, caught and clustered on the shriveled groin, rolled up the chest—ribs scored between blackened flaps of skin—and fanned about the burned, bald head. The lipless mouth gaped on broken teeth. No nose. Tubes and wires snaked the rotten sockets. Tubes pierced at belly, hip, and shoulder. Fluids swirled in the tank and the single arm drifted back and forth, charred fingers locked with rigor mortis in a claw.
“Weren’t you ever told it was impolite to stare? You are staring, you know.”
The voice came from a speaker in the glass wall.
“I’m afraid I sustained a bit more damage than Ruby back on the other world.”
Above the tank two mobile cameras shifted as Lorq stepped from the door.
“For someone who owns Red-shift Limited, your turn to match orbits wasn’t very …” The banality did not mask Lorq’s astonishment.
Cables for running the ship were plugged into sockets set on the tank’s glass face. The glass itself was part of the wall. The cables coiled over black and gold tiles to disappear into the coppery grill covering the computer face.
On walls, floor, and ceiling, in opulent frames, etheric-disturbance screens all showed the same face of night:
At the edge of each was the gray shape of the Roc.
Centered on each was the star.
“Alas,” the corpse said, “I was never the sportsman you were. Still, you wanted to speak to me. What do you have to say?”
Again Lorq looked at Ruby. “I’ve said most of it to Ruby, Prince. You heard it.”
“Somehow I doubt you’d drag us both out here to the brink of a stellar catastrophe just to tell us that. Illyrion, Lorq Von Ray. Neither you nor I have forgotten your major purpose for coming here. You will not leave without telling where you intend to get—”
Then the star went nova.
The inevitable is that unexpected.
In the first second the enhanced images about them changed from points to floodlights. And the floodlights got brighter.
Ruby backed against the wall, arm across her eyes.
“It’s early!” the corpse shouted. “It’s days early …!”
Lorq took three steps across the room, yanked two plugs from the tank, and fixed them in his wrists. The third plug he twisted into his spinal socket. The play of the ship surged through him. Sensory input came in. His vision of the room was overlaid with the night. And night was catching fire.
Wresting control from the studs, he swung the Cockatoo around to point her toward the node of light. The ship plunged forward.
Twin cameras swiveled to focus him.
“Lorq, what are you doing?” Ruby cried.
“Stop him!” from the corpse. “He’s flying us into the sun!”
Ruby leaped at Lorq, caught him. They turned together, staggered. The chamber and the sun outside fixed on his eyes like a double exposure. She caught up a loop of cable, flung it around his neck, twisted it, and began to strangle him. The cable housing chewed his throat. He locked his arm behind her and pushed his other hand against her face. She grunted, and her head went back (his hand pushed at the center of the light). Her hair slipped, came loose; the wig fell from her burned scalp. She had only used the medico to return health. The cosmetic plasti-skin with which she had restored her face tore between his fingers. Rubbery film pulled from her blotched and hollowed cheek. Lorq suddenly jerked his hand away. As her ruined face screamed toward him through fire, he ripped her hands from his neck and pushed her away. Ruby went backward, tripped on her cloak, fell. He turned just as the mechanical hand swung down at him from the ceiling.
He caught it.
And it had less than human strength.
Easily he held it at arm’s length as the fingers grasped from the raging star. “Stop!” he bellowed. At the same time he willed the sensory input off all over the ship.
The screens went gray.
The sensory input had already been clamped off on all six of the ship’s cyborg studs.
The fires went
out in his eyes.
“What in heaven are you trying to do, Lorq?”
“Dive into hell and fish Illyrion out with my bare hands!”
“He’s insane!” the corpse shrieked. “Ruby, he’s insane! He’s killing us, Ruby! That’s all he wants to do—kill us!”
“Yes! I’m killing you!” Lorq tossed the hand away. It grasped at the cable hanging from his wrist to jerk the plug. Lorq caught the arm again. The ship lurched.
“For God’s sake, pull us out, Lorq!” the corpse cried. “Pull us out of here!”
The ship jerked again. The artificial gravity slipped long enough for liquid to break on the tank face, then bead the glass as gravity righted.
“It’s too late,” Lorq whispered. “We’re caught in gravity spin!”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Just to kill you, Prince.” Lorq’s face raged till laughter spilled it. “That’s all, Prince! That’s all I want to do now.”
“I don’t want to die again!” the corpse shrieked. “I don’t want to flash out like an insect burning!”
“Flash?” Lorq’s face twisted about the scar. “Oh no! It’ll be slow, slower than before. Ten, twenty minutes at least. It’s already getting warm, isn’t it? But it won’t be unbearable for another five.” Below the gold blaze Lorq’s face darkened. Spittle flecked his lips with each consonant. “You’ll boil in your jar like a fish—” He stopped to rub his stomach beneath his vest. He looked around the chamber. “What can burn in here? The drapes? Is your desk real wood? And all those papers?”
The mechanical hand yanked from Lorq’s. The arm swung across the room. The fingers seized Ruby’s hand. “No, Ruby! Stop him! Don’t let him kill us!”
“You spoke of love, Lorq,” Ruby cried, gripping the hand. “And this is what it brings you? My death, and the death and destruction of all I’ve ever loved, all I might have loved, even you—?”
“You’re in liquid, Prince, so you’ll see them afire before you go. Ruby, the places where you’re already burned won’t be able to sweat. So you’ll die first. He’ll be able to watch you a few moments before his own fluids begin to boil, the rubber runs, the plastic melts—”
“No!” The hand jerked from Ruby’s, swung across the room, and smashed into the tank face. “Criminal! Thief! Pirate! Murderer! No—!”
The hand was weaker than it had been at Taafite.
So was the glass.
The glass broke.
Nutrient fluids splashed Lorq as he danced back on flooded sandals. The corpse crumpled in the tank, netted in tubes and wires.
The cameras swung wildly out of focus.
The hand clattered to the wet tile.
As the fingers stilled, Ruby screamed, and screamed again. She flung herself across the floor, scrambled over the ragged hem of glass, caught up the corpse, hugged it to her, kissed it, and screamed, and kissed it again, rocking back and forth. Her cloak darkened in the fluid.
Then her scream choked. She dropped the body, hurled herself back against the tank wall, and clutched her neck. Her face flushed deeply beneath burns and wrecked makeup. She slid slowly down the wall. Her eyes were closed when she reached the bottom.
“Ruby …?” Whether or not she had cut herself climbing over the glass, it didn’t matter. The kiss would have done it. So soon after severe burns, even with what the medico could do, she must have been in a hyperallergic state. The alien proteins in Prince’s nutrient fluid had entered her system, causing a massive histamine reaction. She had succumbed in seconds to anaphylactic shock.
And Lorq laughed.
It started like a rearrangement of boulders in his chest. Then it opened to a full sound, ringing on the high walls of the flooded chamber. Triumph was laughable and terrible and his.
He took a deep breath. The ship surged at his fingertips. Still blind, he urged The Black Cockatoo into the bursting sun.
Somewhere in the ship one of the cyborg studs was crying …
“The star!” the Mouse cried. “She’s blown nova!”
Tyÿ’s voice shot through the master circuit: “Out of here we go! Now!”
“But the captain!” Katin shouted. “Look at The Black Cockatoo!”
“The Cockatoo, my God, it’s—”
“—Lord, it’s diving toward—”
“—falling into the—”
“—the sun!”
“All right, everybody, vanes spread. Katin, I your vanes spread said!”
“My God …” Katin breathed. “Oh, no …”
“It too bright is,” Tyÿ 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 plunging. 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 anymore—no, there they are!”
“Katin, stop it!” The Mouse twisted beneath Olga. “Tyÿ, 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 anymore. 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!” Tyÿ 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.
Darkness.
Silence.
Nothing.
Then thought shivered:
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 windowsill, shoulders and the left side of his face lit with copper. The sky behind him was purple.
Katin closed his eyes, pushed his head 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 other end of the synchronous ion spectrum that does the things like happened to Dan. Tyÿ 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.”