The Shadow of the Ship, page 29
As they focused again, along with Whitnadys, on the pool of meadow-tea, she dallied no more with ornate passes of the hands, but pulled them out with a rush, droplets shaken off her fingers and vanishing. Instinctively Rheinallt, and the other meadow hands in the closer rows, made a motion toward the pool to preserve it. Yet it was clear that the pool would have to go its own way. The tea-maker’s action was too quick to counter: before another of them could touch the water, it had vanished like a popped bubble.
Rheinallt blinked. Whitnadys stood briskly; the ceremony was over.
* * * * *
Some while later, after Rheinallt and Arahant had shared a meal in his compartment, they discussed the probable fortunes of their breakaways, Glenavet and Susannilar.
“I wonder what their reception will be,” Arahant said, “when they arrive back in the Nation minus the rest of the Special Caravan.”
‘They’ll have some explaining to do.” Rheinallt ran a brush over his hair and beard, enjoying the sensuous feel. He tossed it to Arahant, who instead of plucking it out of the air batted it into a corner.
‘That’s what a certain new vibrant partnership is going to be doing to whole worlds pretty soon,” Arahant said. “Figuratively, anyway. Trailwise, I won’t hazard a guess yet. The two of them have suffered a ship-change, and I fear a lot of heads will roll in atonement.”
Rheinallt dredged up a sentiment from distant memory. “A godless woman is a good match for a lawless husband.”
“Look who’s talking,” Arahant said with an affectionate sneer. “You, who fear neither God nor man nor beast, deriding a match that scarcely can fail to help both people.”
“I’m not deriding what their match may do for them,” he said mildly. “It’s the combining of their mutual lacks that makes me worry for the rest of us. We’ll have to follow them now.”
“At least for a while, to see the results of their mutual powers,” Arahant agreed. “What mutual lacks?”
“In a way, they’re now musclebound. Susannilar is like two halves of a critical mass looking for each other. Glenavet is the barrel down which her force has started to speed. They may not be whole people, but in the paring away of some qualities we liked, they’ve shaped themselves into very powerful forces.”
“Hendrik, do you recall the time I inflated, when you were interrogating Glenavet right after Starved Rock?”
“Sure. In Glenavet’s compartment.”
“I had it in mind then to test a couple of things. One, his knowledge: if Glenavet had encountered a catadrome previously, that made it more likely that he also could have encountered an energy weapon.”
He nodded. “And used it for the telescope deaths.”
“Two,” Arahant continued, “his imagination. I was curious if he would realize that I wasn’t a product of any of the worlds of the Trails society. Without giving away my advantage of presumed animal dumbness.”
“So he failed both tests.”
“Right, but there’s a ringer.” Arahant twitched his whiskers. “He still knows nothing about energy weapons. That part of the test conveyed no new information. The imaginative part is bearing slow fruit: after Susannilar binocularized his mind and gave him introspection, or whatever she did, he’s been thinking.”
“I don’t think she—”
“Well then, poured perfume on his brain to grease the ratchets. Whatever she did to or for him, Hendrik, you know he’s no longer a second-string union organizer. He’s loaded for bear, and he knows there are new worlds to conquer.”
“You don’t think they’ll head for Fleurage? Surely that’s what Susannilar wants most. It’s what her grandfather sent her out for, to find help for Fleurage before it’s too late.”
Arahant shook his head. “Susannilar and anyone would make a powerful pair. Susannilar’s been hurt, though, psychically and emotionally, and she’s not quite the same girl who barely escaped from Fleurage. Glenavet never had an interest in Fleurage except for any he’s picked up from her. The two together mean that Glenavet’s going to use the power he now holds as her partner.
“That’s where I let the cat out of the bag: he now can surmise the existence of the Earth-based society—between my demonstrated alienness and your fixation about wanting a starship.”
Rheinallt let out a long breath, “Yeah. He won’t be satisfied with Fleurage. He’s a trail-oriented person, accustomed to thinking in terms of as many planets as are reachable. Besides, Fleurage is an agricultural world: not helpful as a base.”
“No way. I doubt he’ll even visit it, lest he be sucked into a struggle with the local fascists.” Arahant paused. “At least he’ll be confined to the Trails society, and maybe the Nation will be too tough for them.”
“So they’ll just hassle less-defensible places? Arahant, that’s no solace to the worlds that get hassled.”
“Still it gives us time to get back to the Nation, rub their noses in the danger we’ve helped set up. Before our vibrant pair builds an organization which allows them to take on the Nation itself.”
“Sounds like the least damaging scenario,” Rheinallt agreed. “We’ll see. Did you think about what I just said about their being confined to the fifty-four worlds along the trails? Is that a safe assumption?”
“I think it is. I don’t believe Susannilar got anywhere near as much as I did from the Detenebrator’s final attempt at structural transfer. After all, we’re not planaria, and luckily enough I have experiential and structural advantages over her.”
“You mean you had more, so you gained more?”
“That’s right. At the lowest level, transfer of knowledge is virtually transfer of infrastructure.” He grinned. “Haven’t had much chance to check it out yet, but I will shortly.”
Arahant looked at him with slitted eyes. “Mentation is more than just an analogy of potential, it’s an activated structure of potential?”
“Yes.” Rheinallt stood, looked around for his airsuit.
“You’re going out now? To experiment?” Arahant couldn’t keep the worry out of his voice.
“To meditate awhile, at least.”
“Now, Hendrik, you just said that was almost the same thing.”
Rheinallt’s grin was slightly strained. “Well, isn’t this what we came for? If not quite what we expected. So infraphysics is dangerous, down to the bottom line. We’ve known that for a long time.”
“We’ve been together a long time, too.” Arahant sighed so heavily that he deflated where he sat. “Be careful?”
“Sure.” He began pulling on the airsuit.
* * * * *
Once outside again with the Blue Trail under his feet, Rheinallt rambled up alongside the caravan’s stretched-out cars toward its head. He felt a heightened calm: whatever was going to happen would be something he made happen himself.
Whitnadys waved from among the squeakers, a happy wave easily recognizable. With a warm feeling he waved back and moved on, away from the trail and into even purer darkness. Out he walked, farther and farther.
Was he ready yet to try the channeling techniques for interspatial movement that had fallen to him from the dying Detenebrator?
In a sense, one could say that all of matter and energy, lizards and flowers, starspace and subspace, were projections from the universal creation down the depths of time to their creature present. If the steady-state theory was correct, then the projection was local, and continuous.
What did the Falling Angel have in common with that elusive infrastructure passed by the Detenebrator? A lens for a projection? Now the Ship was only a ghost: the flower of consciousness still recognizable but eternally fading, the flower forever blown. Rheinallt did not want to become a shadow, glowing or not.
Could he make the energy flows in his brain match the complexities that Ytrenath had discovered while in the fibrous complexity of the Detenebrator—but had not had the energy to use? The Detenebrator’s neurosonics had affected Rheinallt like the insertion of a key. To realize the potential of this structural change he had to turn the key, open the door.
Trying to back up to that door metaphorically, Rheinallt used his conceptions of the Falling Angel to tighten his grip on his own mentational functioning. He could not quite hear the key clicking, but he could feel the Ship glowing, in his mind. How many pins could one stick in the head of an angel?
If the Ship ever had flowered, it was essentially dead now, the desert detritus of generative energy. As a faded bloom the Falling Angel was useless. One might find value in a tombstone, historic or nostalgic according to one’s purposes, but Rheinallt had not risked his life for such. A few members of the expedition could go home satisfied with the experience as adventure, and let it go at that. But for Rheinallt, as for most of them, traveling long and dangerously to reach a Ship that one could not touch, a tombstone that one could not read… a gravestone rubbing was a gold mine by comparison.
Susannilar and Glenavet had found each other, or each had found more of themselves in the other, for good or ill. They had left to wreak whatever their mutually strengthened natures now allowed and encouraged.
Rheinallt needed more. He felt strengthened too, and not compensatingly diminished.
Soon it would be time to turn the caravan around, to head back to Blueholm and the Nation. There he could warn whoever wanted to hear that Susannilar and Glenavet made a dangerous combination. Also, he could consider outfitting another, smaller expedition, to convey Arahant and himself back toward realms they knew better, along with a few from the Trails culture who were dearest to them: Whitnadys, and their infant son, and whoever felt like another adventure. And he would use the Detenebrator’s breakout technique, to escape the trails’ limitations—if he could make it work.
He stopped walking to look back through the darkness at the tiny investigators with sparks of headlamps moving in and around the Ship. As he watched, one or two entered hopefully, another emerged again on the black plain. The distant person standing there probably was looking upward into that bulging curve, studying the red wraith awesome in its passionate loneliness.
Rheinallt knew what he had to try to give them, the only reason they would accept for concluding the expedition. What Susannilar had found, in her draining, once-in-a-lifetime effort, could neither be repeated nor shared.
He looked among the far, still ranks of Squeakerville, seeking Whitnadys. He could not spot her. Human sparks moved restlessly only toward the long towering sides of red glow, the merging of Ship and meadow in violent repose.
Wait—one of those sparks was moving in a peculiar pattern. It had to be Whitnadys, with her long-distance lamp, and she was aiming it into the darkness where she knew he must be. It was a signal not of particular content, but just of acknowledgment, of presence. She was thinking of him, and signaling, and he flushed with the love he felt across the distance.
Idly Rheinallt held out both gloved hands in front of him, fingertips touching, and let a tiny electrical flow trickle from right fingers to left. He reversed it, arid the darting sparks leaped back. He let this go on for the benefit of the distant Whitnadys until the tingle in his fingers slacked to numbness with the effort of discharge and reception. The golden-yellow flicker was bright between the gloves.
What was energy, anyway? A movement, not necessarily of a material substance, along a route.
He felt a tingle of excitement deep within, and he knew he was moving toward the decision. He began walking outward again, hammering at the dividing line where concepts became infraphysics.
How much does an artifact stand out in the wilderness, or a living being in the desert? Like a beacon. In a city among crowds we notice neither artifacts nor lives: trappings and decorations and counterfeits cover natures and functions. The Falling Angel was visible here precisely because this was the meadow; evidence not of death but of life, but such ephemeral evidence as was visible only against a background as harsh as death itself—this flattening deep upon which a mind might move, precariously. He had come to the Ship and learned, from it and from other pathfinders. All that remained of that challenge was movement along the route he had seen. That was what he had come for, if he could grasp the energic infrastructure and live through it.
The Detenebrator had given him new patterns, in those dying pulses. It had illumined nooks of his own inner structure which previously he had not been able to explore. The cortian fibers were within him, with their potential patterns, and a few of them he had used all his life.
Was this the place? No. He continued walking.
The Falling Angel was stripped clean, the glowing minimum anything could be reduced to and still be something.
Be reduced to, or begin with?
What was in the mind of that first baby who could be called human, when that baby took its first steps? What a blinding sensation, in those first human eyes, in that first terrible conscious grasping at the tree of life. The black sink of gravity defied: the fear, the gamble, the exultant step; the fall and the pain. But the memory remained of that momentary elevation, that height of vision. And now a little bit of the bound earth had partaken of a viewpoint that had belonged only to the sky.
What terrible spark burned red in that infant mind? How could anyone label a spark so kindling harsh as to make flesh get up and walk? Along what paths must one move to face that spark within oneself?
So dark is death by failing, what could prevail against it?
Rheinallt crossed a random tiny billow of darkness, and began the pilot’s enhancement of his mentational Field. He could feel that he was descending into a very small gravity well. Twisting, over his shoulder he saw the tiny pseudohorizon blocking the glowing Ship from view.
And then he saw something new. There were footprints behind him, golden soft footprints on the meadow, trailing back to where he had begun enhancement. The footprints were obviously his, as if he had debarked with wet feet from the Ship like a honeybee converting its own pollen. The footprints trailed lesser glimmers between, wet-honey drippings as feet wet from a pool will cast little rivulets before and behind the greater squish and splat of the wet footfalls themselves.
He could feel the energy drain of enhancement, faint tingles within his body like circulation returning to cramped muscles. His reserves were draining into footprints in vacuum, footprints on the pure pseudosurface.
Tracks, the definitive sign of conscious motion. Their color was golden, the mellowness with depth of fine spun gold.
Rheinallt spiraled slowly down the small but steepening cone of the tiny gravity well until he spread solid legs on the single flat square yard, a truncated apex, wondering what an ant feels like in an ant-lion trap. The ant’s discovery of the Schwarzchild radius was usually fatal.
So far Rheinallt had been too integrated to age to death, and as a pilot he had done meadowspace breakthrough only with machine enhancement: Orpheus with water wings. Calmly he faced the prospect of kicking death’s dark fence in a new way, here in this black cone of nothing. He turned up his oxygen valve, took a few deep breaths to ventilate previously stale corridors of his brain.
He pushed his own energy down the newly learned paths of mind, watching dry channels flood into vibrant color. Like an oxygen-starved muscle blooded and reviving, his head ached with new strength.
Flexing muscularly, his mind reached for a different grip.
Barely did he have time to notice the coruscation in his mind, did not have time to mark the resemblance to the coruscation of breakout, before he found himself in free fall. The stars pricked his vision from all directions, the beautiful, distantly hard lamp points of starspace.
He drank in the sight of the skyfull of yellow and white stars like the faces of old friends. The band of the galaxy was a smear of milk beyond his shoulder. By any man’s measure, civilization was a long way off, but this was the way.
Grinning with the joy of breakthrough, he found himself floating near a small rugged boulder, a few cubic yards of temperature-fractured granite. Affectionately he ran a gloved palm over the coarse, lonely surface, then broke off a thumbsized outcropping which he tucked in an outside pocket.
A heated ache in his head was increasing rapidly, along with an inner-ear pounding. He had not toned down the enhancement, the new flows of blood, oxygen, and energy; obviously this high level was not sustainable indefinitely. Before restoring his normal levels he wanted to break into subspace again, lest he should prove to be exhausted—beyond recharging to this pitch again—and float here forever.
Again, his mind reached for the grip on meadowspace.
Another rainbow in his mind, and he was back in the dark conical hollow. Quickly, smoothly, he throttled back the rush of internal energies. Manually, he turned the suit oxygen valve to only slightly above normal, so he would not hyperventilate just walking back to the caravan.
His facial muscles felt strained too, which puzzled him until he realized he had been grinning continuously so hard it hurt.
In sheer happiness, he climbed up out of the cone and looked down into it. New footprints had appeared where he had touched the meadow. They were of the same golden quality as the first. Not bright in the sense of shiny or glossy, neither did they show signs of a quick fading, the very first he had made continuing to glow serenely.
Rheinallt began walking outward again, faster, until he was in an easy near-lope as fast as a man could move on the meadow. The glowing golden track stretched behind him. The footprints a little way back appeared as small fiery points, and farther back seemed to merge as a thin but solid golden trail.
He stretched his legs and lengthened his pace, and the Ship receded. He sped over a low rise in the meadow, down into the suggestion of a gravitically shallow valley, and then up another rise.
Halting, he breathed deeply, panting with the physical side of his exertion, and having to pull hard with his lungs to snatch the air at a higher rate through the regulator valve. He spun slowly on his heel, looking all around.
Beautiful. A reserve of oxygen, advanced neurological discipline for channeling his own energy flows, and he could be his own starship. His helmet echoed with laughter at the wonder of being able to touch the deathly nothingness, pass into and along it and safely out again. And neither a lumbering squeaker nor a steel cacophony of screaming electronics would be needed for his song to flower.
