Collected Short Fiction, page 827
He sighed and let his thin body sag as if from long exhaustion.
“There’s no way to know. I’ve found no common point of reference. The quantum nature of the singularity upends all our commonsense ideas of space and time.” He saw me start to rise. “Sandy, please! Give me a few more minutes.”
“Can’t we talk on the ship?”
“We’re talking now.” Impatiently, he beckoned me back to the chair and limped across the room to uncover the easel. “You’ve got to see this.”
His painting held me for a moment. No scene from the asteroid or anywhere on Earth, it was a seascape. Waves foamed in the foreground. Blue water stretched to a far horizon beyond, with no land in sight. Above them the frame was almost filled with something that took my breath.
I had to stare. It was an island, flying high above the sea. A forest of green plumes like giant bamboo grew along the shore. Inland, red-roofed buildings surrounded a spiral dome the color of gold. It floated on an enormous platform streamlined like the hull of an ocean liner. Tiny mirror-bright globes swarmed around it.
“A glimpse of their world, as I’ve seen it from there.” He pointed to a chalked circle on the floor in front of the easel. “I know nearly nothing of its history, but it was one that NBH swallowed. Its people had no way to save anything material, but a few of them were able to preserve their minds.”
He reached to touch the chessboard.
“The individual who reached me has told me all he can. I call him Mr. Other. We’ve worked out a language for math and physics, but found no words for such complexities as gender—”
I was on my feet.
“One more minute!” He raised his hand to hold me. “Mr. Other has given me a warning you must hear. NBH may be quiescent now, but it’s the ultimate bomb.”
“Father, please!”
His voice sharpened, the way it did when he had to scold me long ago.
“Here’s my news for Earth. As a black hole grows, it contracts. Pressure and temperature in the singularity rise toward infinity. In NBH, they are still contained in the magnetic web woven by increasing spin. The capture of another stray sun could rupture that web at the poles of rotation. Superluminous plumes and bursts of beamed radiation could explode, strong enough to burn the nearer planets and even sear the Earth—”
He stopped at last, frowning at my face.
“I see you don’t believe.”
“I can’t.” At the door, I had to turn back. “You’ve put me in an impossible spot. The pilot will be taking off, with me or without me. I can’t leave you here alone.”
“You’d better go.” He gulped and wiped at his hollow eyes. “I must stay to learn what I can, and hope to get that warning back to Earth.” He limped around the easel to give me a quick embrace. “I always loved you, Sandy. It’s great that I know enough to solve that problem for you.”
He gestured me away from the easel. When I looked back, he was standing on that white-chalked circle. He waved a quick farewell. I caught a glimpse of some object in his hand. I heard a click, and he was gone.
I searched and failed to find him anywhere. I ran back to the ship and got there gasping for breath, with nine minutes to spare. We took off at once. The first long skip brought us in sight of the sun. The second let us pick out Jupiter and Saturn. The third revealed the tiny point of Earth. The last brought it close enough to let us see the whole blue globe, the bright lace of clouds, the familiar continents.
“It looks too green.” McKane made a sour face. “I see no cities. I think we’ve been gone too long.”
My own eagerness to see the fruit of change was edged with pain as I recalled all I’d known and loved that the centuries must have erased. He called Earth from low orbit. Watching as he listened, I saw him frown and shake his head, frown and listen again. At last he passed the headphones to me.
“We’re expected,” he said. “A Director Ivor Cheung wants to talk to you.”
I heard a snatch of strange music and then a woman’s voice.
“Sir, will you hold for just a moment?”
In only a moment I heard a hearty boom.
“Sandor Fenway! I speak for the Arkwood-Fenway Foundation.” Accents had changed, and I begged him to slow his speech. “Your father told us to expect you.”
“My father? How? When?”
“After his return from NBH, two hundred years ago.”
I felt dazed. “With no ship?”
“With Arkwood science, he required no ship.” I heard a genial chuckle at my confusion. “We’re here to welcome you home. A briefing has been prepared. It will cover Dr. Fenway’s return and its historic aftermath. A pilot craft is now on the way to guide you in.”
The pilot craft was a little silver globe that spoke in a crisp robotic voice. It guided us down, but not to the shabby old brick-and-mortar building my father had leased for it on the outskirts of Atlantica. We landed on a flying island like the one my father had shown me on his easel. It floated over the Gulf Stream, a hundred miles off Sandy Hook. A final skip brought us low above it.
McKane held us there, staring. Its sleek white hull was a full mile long. Green parkways edged its decks. It had no funnels, but a gold-hued spiral dome towered out of its superstructure. Tiny silver globes whirled like birds around it. Our pilot craft brought us through them, down to an open platform.
McKane opened the lock. Rousing music greeted us, tantalizingly half familiar. A little group of men and women stood waiting. All wore neat white jackets with red-black patches on the breasts. Smiling, a tall, dark man advanced to greet us.
“Mr. Sandor Fenway? Captain McKane?” He paused to see which was which. “I am Director Cheung.” He turned to gesture at those behind him. “These are fellow foundation officials, all members of the Black Light Society.”
McKane muttered a question.
“You’ll be learning,” he said. “The society is devoted to the study and teaching of what Dr. Fenway knew of Ark-wood science and culture. Their mastery of space and time may surprise you. They were even conquering gravity, but too late to save themselves.”
He turned to me.
“We’ll be briefing you on the historic consequences of his return. Before we go in, however, we have a gift left for you.”
He stepped aside. A slender young woman came forward, holding a white plastic box. She lifted it toward me, checked herself, and stepped back, flushing pink.
“Mr. Sandor—” She stopped to take a breath, and I had time to note how well the white jacket became her. “Your father left this message with his gift.” She read it from a strip of yellow plastic.
“ ‘Dear Sandy,
“ ‘I understood your doubts. Don’t brood about them. You’ll learn to like Mr. Other. You’ll find him a great science teacher and a master at the game.’ ”
She held the box for me to open. The lid snapped back at my touch, and I saw the jade-and-jet chessmen I had last seen on my father’s desk at Black Hole Station.
“Shall we take care of them for you?” she asked. “The update is ready for you now.”
Director Cheung took us through a little park where he showed me a statue of my mother, and on to the Lily Arkwood Hall. He spoke to us there, from a stage where the whole wall behind him became an enormous window that could look out on another city, a ship in space, another planet, even Black Hole Station.
Through the first centuries since we left, the skipships had carried colonists out to terraform new planets while Earth itself was in decline. With resources depleted and opportunities rare, it had been almost abandoned. Back from NBH, my father had been its savior.
“The Arkwood legacy.” Cheung turned to gesture at a strange-shaped spacecraft dropping out of an orange-red sky. “Arkwood science has reshaped human history. The science of truly instant flight has bypassed the relativity limit and unified the scattered and isolated planets into our great galactic civilization.”
He paused to let us watch the spacecraft landing in a city of golden spiral towers.
“The richest gift, however, has been the Arkwood philosophy. Our own evolution had left us driven by herd instincts, forever fighting for survival. We strove to be leaders, but most of us had to follow the winners. Chiefs and priests and prophets. Patriarchs, pharaohs, presidents. Captains of industry and heads of the house. When men were not enough; we invented autocratic gods.”
He bowed toward me.
“We honor your father, Mr. Fenway, most of all because he declined to become a god. Instead he helped us grow up. We had aspired to conquer nature and rule the universe. With NBH, he showed us the folly of such infantile illusions.
“The omnipotent destroyer! Itself a dark god, it has taught us our true place in the universal process. The cosmos has neither master nor slaves. It is simply a river of energy where we are droplets of life, or better the climbers of an infinite stair that can take us up forever.”
He touched the black circle on his jacket.
“That’s the Arkwood way, the gospel of the Black Light Society. We are not a religion, though our message may reflect ancient faiths. We follow no doctrine and enforce no commandments. All we preach is understanding as your father gave it to us, truth instead of illusion, altruism instead of aggression, love instead of hate, peace instead of terror.”
The Arkwood way has made sense to me. Though this altered Earth often seems as alien to me as our old one must have been to my father four centuries ago, I’ve found contentment here. Loving friends have asked me to join the Black Light Society. At the foundation academy, I have begun to learn Arkwood science and Arkwood culture.
I want to discover more. The foundation has restored Black Hole Station. When my studies here on Earth are finished, I plan to go back there and try to reach my father’s Mr. Other. NBH has no sun in its ravenous grasp, and that old dread of high places has left me. Looking down from the skyship’s rail at the Atlantic whitecaps a mile below, I can hardly recall my terror of falling toward that baleful red star at the bottom of its dark pit.
Devil’s Star
My mother had chronic bad luck, and a secret shield against it. On no evidence at all, she clung to a stubborn belief that she was the great-grandniece of an illegitimate son of President Cleon Starhawke I, who had won fame for the interstellar conquests that added half a thousand planets to the Terran Republic, and notoriety for the beauty and fertility of his numerous mistresses.
“Never forget that we have presidential blood,” she used to urge me. “Live up to it, Kiff, and it will make you great.”
With no proof of the myth, I grew up proud of my Starhawke blood, loyal to the Republic and dreaming of a chance for some signal service to the President. My father abandoned us before I was five, migrating to a newly opened planet with a younger woman. My mother spent the next few years working as a domestic servant before she found another husband and skipped out with him, leaving me alone on Earth.
My own luck ran better. Both husbands left funds toward my education. She enrolled me in the Starhawke Space Academy. I came of age and earned my commission there, swearing eternal allegiance to the Terran Republic and Cleon III.
Graduating as a military historian, I begged for the chance to make my name with some active force out on the Rim frontier. Instead, I found myself still stuck on Earth, the freshman member of a little research team in the library at the Presidential War College near New Denver. Our project was to produce an updated history of Devil’s Star. On my first day there, a discontented senior officer tried to shatter my illusions.
“You’ll find no career here.” He looked around and dropped his voice. “The library was founded to glorify the Starhawkes, but they won no wars on Devil’s Star. The planet may justify the name, but it has no history.”
I asked for facts about it.
“None worth knowing.” He shrugged. “Sea level air pressure nearly twice Terra’s. Surface mostly too hot and too hostile to be terraformed. No resources worth attention. The explorers had labeled it Lucifer and passed it by.”
“Wasn’t it once a penal colony?”
“A death pit.” He shrugged again. “Called the Black Hole. Infested with hostile life and strange disease. Prisoners sometimes sent down in old landing craft, with no fuel to take off again. Public outrage stopped that when the truth got out. No landings since.” He made a bitter face. “We’re in the same fix here, condemned to our own hopeless hole.”
“The convicts did survive?”
“A disappointment to the executioners.” He grinned. “A hardy few climbed out of the heat, to a high mountain ridge that runs down the middle of the main continent. A cooler corner of hell. Some are likely still alive.”
Trapped there, with nothing to do and no future in sight, I was feeling as hopeless as another maroon until the day an officer in the uniform of the Presidential Guard caught me in my little cubicle with the news that Space Admiral Gilliyar wanted to see me at once. Astonished and a little alarmed, I asked why.
“He’ll tell you why.”
A luxury aircar carried us across the base to the Space Command Tower. We found the admiral in a huge corner office that looked across a great field of silver-bright skip-ships. A big man with a bulldog chin, his bright red hair cut short, he was in shirt sleeves, his uniform jacket flung over the back of a chair behind a huge bare desk.
He stood up when the orderly brought me in. My heart thumping, I saluted.
“So you are Starman Kiff McCall?” He returned the salute, studied me with keen gray eyes, nodded abruptly. “You look fit for the job. Let’s sit.”
Breathing a little easier, but anxious to know what job, I followed him to chairs at a wide window that looked out west across the starport to snowcapped mountain summits.
“Have you done duty off the Earth?”
“No sir.”
I waited, sweating.
“No matter.” He shrugged again. “What do you know about Devil’s Star?”
“Very little, sir. I doubt that much is known by anybody. All contact was outlawed two centuries ago.” “You’ll soon know more.” My mouth must have gaped; he laughed at me. “If you’re ready to go there?” “I—” I had to catch my breath. “I’m ready.”
“Think before you jump.” He bent toward me, hard eyes narrowed to study me again. “This will be a highly confidential mission, with no official support or public reward. Your career and even your life may be in danger.”
“I’ve sworn an oath.” Feeling like a schoolboy, I put my hand on my heart. “My life is pledged to the Republic and the President.”
He smiled at the quiver in my voice.
“I trust you.” He spoke very gravely. “What I say is for your ears only. Here is the situation. The sanctions against contact with the planet Lucifer have been broken. As you may know, enemies of the Republic were once exiled there. Their descendants appear to have created an outlaw society. The mere rumor of a free society is a hazard to the state. The President has ordered the planet reclaimed as Terran territory. He is sending me there as the first governor.”
Muscles tightened in his jaw.
“It’s been a black hole. The convict transports didn’t all return. We never knew why, but those who got back called it hell. Before any landing is attempted, we’re sending an undercover agent to look the situation over and report what resistance we should expect. That’s your errand.”
I never returned to my library cubicle. Instead I spent a few hectic months in a class for interstellar intelligence officers, a disappointment to me. I’d hoped for training to face the hazards of the star frontiers, but Cleon I had annihilated the alien foes he found there. These future agents were destined for duty here closer to home.
“Worlds gone soft!” a black-mustached instructor shouted at us. “Rotten to the heart! Maybe loyal Terrans once, but turncoats now, corrupted by all that damned Free Space gibble-gabble. Your future duty is to hunt such traitors down and stop their venomous slander against the Starhawke Presidents.”
Admiral Gilliyar’s mission had not been revealed, yet my part in it gave me a thrill of secret pride. His staff invented a cover story for me. Based on my mother’s claims to presidential kinship, it named me the leader of an exposed Free Space plot to overthrow the President. In flight to escape arrest, I was to become a hunted fugitive, my whereabouts unknown.
On my last day at school, I was hustled out of class and escorted to an empty hangar at the skyport. There, equipped with an oxygen mask and a radio, I was nailed into a rough wooden box stenciled electronic sundries. The radio kept me informed while it was tilted, jarred and jolted, finally loaded into the cargo hold of the Star of Avalon .
That was the ship of a suspected smuggler that had been captured, but released with a warning when the captain paid his excise taxes. And no doubt a bribe; I had learned that even the great Terran Republic is not without corruption.
Our first skip was a stomach-churning lurch. The radio went silent. Elated to be off the Earth and on my way, I got out of the box and hammered on a bulkhead. A startled spacehand let me out of the hold and took me to Bart Greenlaw, master and owner of the ship. A fit youthful man in a bright yellow skip suit, he interrupted my cover story.
“So you are Kiff McCall?” His keen eyes scanned me. “I trade with Free Spacers. The price on your head has them wondering about you and your conspiracy. They’d neverheard of you.”
“We try to keep our secrets,” I told him. “I left friends behind, friends I can’t betray.”
“I understand.” He studied me again, and finally smiled as if he believed me. “I know how my own Free Spacer friends feel about the Republic. Or the Terran Empire, they call it. Power corrupts, they say, until it finally rots itself. The Starhawkes hold too much power. They’ve held it too long.”
His gaze sharpened to study my reaction.
“They say Cleon III is sitting on a bomb, armed and ready to blow.”
I nodded, trying not to show too much emotion. Any connection between the Free Space activists and Devil’s Star was something I must report, but my own mission could have ended then and there if he had guessed the truth.
