A Voyage To Dari Page 2

  The glowing Castel filled the view crystal.

  Childe Roland was close.

  Greta, frowning down: “Mr. Governor . . . ”

  Croyd: “Madame Chairman?”

  “Don’t call me that. I . . . can’t handle this job. I’m scared.”

  “You can handle it. I’m often scared.”

  “Don’t kid!”

  “But I don’t stay scared, because I know what to do about fear. And you know too, Madame Chairman.”

  “You mean . . . switch off my emotic brain switches?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m not as good at it as you, Croyd. After I’m switched off, I stay scared in my mind. No more trouble with my glands or my brain—but oboy, my mind!”

  “Good. It’s a fun way to be.”

  “It is?”

  “Look at it that way, and you’ll succeed.”

  Greta clutched his lapels. “My friend, my friend—even apart from my figure, Croyd I ain’t! You have five times my brain, and you have more techniques than a salamander! They shoot at you, your midbrain presenses the shot and sets up a field to deflect it. They triple the power to bore through your field, you go uptime and escape it. They set a trap, you go downtime and spring it before you reach it. And if they do get through and chop you down, your mind whips out of your body into another brain or into some damn computer, and from there rebuilds your body. Hell, man, you can’t even be seduced by an alien female menace—you switch off your pyriform cortex and cut out your yen! I ask you, what fun would you be to read about in a stereobook?”

  He armed her shoulders. “Good, sweets. So when you think about me, you won’t worry.”

  “Well, no . . . ”

  “You’ll just be bored. Not worried.”

  “Bored?”

  We were now so close to the Castel Jaloux that her floodlighted flank daylighted our cabin; nevertheless these two clung, staring at the one-third of the ship that filled the view crystal.

  Childe Roland, en route to invade Croyd, brushed a corner of Greta’s mouth, and molecular fields drew him in. Well, magnifique! It would be easy, now, to transfer to Croyd during these moments of farewell intimacy.

  "Croyd . . . ”

  "Greta?”

  “What if you should lose those powers?”

  “How could I lose them?”

  “Dunno. What if you should?”

  “Sort of a thrill, for a change. I’d have to go it on my own resources, like back on my home planet, when you survived with skill and muscle.”

  “But they could kill you, if that should happen.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “There’s a little business of Darian pirates, remember? And they’d be using rayguns, which I don’t think you had on your home planet with your stinky feudalism.”

  “What else would make it a thrill?”

  Shaking off his encircling arm, she grasped both his arms and gazed into his eyes. “Don’t lose them, Croyd!”

  Gently our scouter grounded on the major landing berth of the Castel Jaloux. I stood; so did they. Her hands reached up to grip his shoulders; his big hands gripped her upper arms. They were eye-to-eye, these two; hers were deep green, his deep blue. A decade of intimate interaction.

  Childe Roland tensed himself for the leap. The judgmental conditions were difficult because Croyd’s face was a molecular blur without distinguishable personality. Roland would have to leap on intuition.

  “Croyd . . . how long before I can step down from the chair and join you?”

  “Maybe two years, Greta.”

  “It will seem longer to me than to you. I haven’t lived as long as you. Not nearly as long.”

  “Nevertheless, long years for me too. Do you believe that?”

  “Mind-to-mind, man. Of course.”

  Silent gazing. I was sitting, but my back was toward them.

  “Croyd . . . ”

  “Greta?”

  “Be careful. But have fun.”

  “Is that a green light for targets of opportunity?”

  “From me you never had anything else. But be careful—and bring me there.”

  “I’ll bring you there. By the way, about your green light . . . ”

  “I have one?”

  “Don’t start on it without first checking the cross traffic.”

  Madame Chairman seized him around his arms, pressing her face against his chest.

  Roland, set to leap at skin, held tense; these were cloth-type molecules.

  She stepped back, grinning.

  I said mildly, “You should excuse it, Croyd—I wish to start on the green light.” I took Greta into my arms.

  Loving me with warm affection, Greta hugged me and nibbled at my big hairy ear.

  Childe Roland leaped.

  From the scouter Greta watched the Castel Jaloux batten up.

  The Castel floodlights were killed, leaving the space night ultrablack except that dead in front it was all red-orange in her visual field where the Castel had been.

  Practiced at sensory self-control, Greta did a yoga relaxation. The afterimage died, leaving the night velvet with (off to the right) the luminous pallor of the convex Neptune wall, and, beginning now to be visible ahead of her, the pale blue-green match flame of the Castel’s idling repulsors.

  “Cut the instrument panel,” she told the pilot. He pointed at a sensor switch, making the pale blue-green instrument lights die, leaving total blackness with no light except the Castel repulsors and Neptune.

  Their scouter drifted back toward Nereid. Had the Castel been visible now, she would have barely filled a third of their view crystal; but she was black except for the firefly-tail repulsors. Wait, no; there were tiny light points all along her flank, the interior lighting glowing through her own mighty and variously distributed view crystals.

  The repulsors grew brighter, longer, broader, creeping forward a little along the tail of her flank.

  The repulsors began to move, leisurely off to her right.

  Croyd would be up there on the bridge with the admiral, close behind that highest viewplate light up forward on the dark tower.

  Childe Roland to the dark tower came.

  “Follow the ship,” she ordered her pilot, “until she outruns us.”

  They fell in behind the Castel's repulsors at a safe three-mile distance—no more than twice the length of the Castel herself.

  The repulsor flames remained the same size, indicating same relative distance, for quite a while, during which her scouter had to accelerate more and more until it had hit 300-G acceleration, uncomfortably noticeable as 3 G’s through their junior-grade inertial shield.

  The repulsor glow began to smallen. They were beginning to be outrun.

  Whish! Glow vanished.

  The pilot cut acceleration. They coasted in freefall along the invisible track of the gone Castel Jaloux.

  Breathing rather heavily, Greta gazed not at the place in the sky where the ship had been, but far into the direction whither Croyd and Tannen were going. What she saw was the utterly unbullish constellation Taurus, fat out toward galactic periphery, looking flat like ail constellations but actually varying in depth from great orange Aldebaran sixty-eight light-years away to smaller blue-white Nath another two hundred and fifty light-years remote—so that the distance from Sol to Taurus was far less than the depth of Taurus. Indeed, there were naked-eye-unspottable luminosities which, by telescope, appeared to be in Taurus only because , they were viewed through Taurus: for instance, the open star cluster still labeled NGC 1817 on the astrogation charts, nearly seven thousand light-years distant—actually on the galactic rim—yet for Croyd on this voyage merely an offshore buoy en route to high space.

  Or, also in Taurus, eye-indistinguishable Messier 1, the Crab Nebula, gaseous remnant of a nova first observed by Chinese astronomers fifteen hundred years before.

  Messier 1. The first oddball celestial object listed by postmedieval eighteenth-century Charles Messier among one h
undred and three astronomical objects that he listed. He had cataloged them merely because they were cluttering up his comet hunt. One of these bits of debris, M 31, had later turned out to be a neighboring galaxy at least as large as Sol Galaxy: a scant million light-years distant via metagalactic space, and a good deal closer across the metagalactic fissure. A few years ago, she and Croyd had won a dandy brush with invaders from this Andromeda. Pan and Freya had been spin-off. Wonder where they are, how they are . . .

  M 31. Highest original number 103. The list had grown a good bit as telescopes and awarenesses had improved; some objects had been subtracted, but a guy named Mechain had added six a mere fifteen years after the Messier publication . . .

  Vaguely she noticed that Nereid was ahead of them now; also, that the instrument panel was glowing again. The pilot had taken matters into his own hands. Croyd and the Castel Jaloux were behind her. Rather far behind.

  One hundred three Messier-objects in 1771. But the Messier-object that was Croyd’s destination was M 1531, and it was another galaxy nearly two billion light-years distant via intrametagalactic routes, and its dominant interplanetary people called their galaxy Djinn, and its number 1531 was low in the modern catalog . . .

  Croyd, of course, would not be lazing along the roundabout route that light always took. Croyd instead would use the shortcut outside the metagalaxy through metaspace—where one is totally free because nothing definite ever happens there; where consequently anything can happen. Anything at all—like the abrupt birth of a galaxy right where one is traveling.

  Croyd was going very far indeed.

  “Uh-huhhhhh!” strangulatedly uttered Greta, startling the pilot; but when he looked around, she smiled strainedly and said, “Bad cold. Forget it.”

  He turned back to his instruments, murmuring sympathetically in this year 2506: “No real cure, you know, except bed and whiskey.”

  This time, what a hell of a long way Croyd was going!

  Much later, pinging his way past the Deiters cells in my organ of Corti, Childe Roland still confidently assumed (or rather, still did not question) that he had entered the Dark Tower of Croyd and was driving down in toward the Croyd brain.

  An ear was an ear.

  H-Hour minus 57 hours:

  Working his way back out through my ear orifice, Childe Roland was much too intent on making bruising progress through a cataract of sound waves cross-ruffed by bone vibrations to pay attention to our conversation. The sound waves were Croyd’s voice; the bone vibrations, mine. Having discovered, in my brain, that my mind contexture did not at all correspond to Croyd specifications, Roland had comprehended the probable reason for his error and (being a knight of action) instantly had started on the long way back out.

  Clinging precariously now to a tip molecule on a wildly oscillating ear hair, Roland activated his telesensors and saw that Croyd lounged in a chair nearby, his ear not six feet from my ear. Without hesitation, Roland launched himself; there was no third human present, so that sort of mistake was now obviated.

  “THE VOYAGE IS LONGISH, the program light,” Croyd remarked; he was wholly at ease, arms and hands laxly extended on the resilient arms of his forcefield chair. “I am committing my staff to six hours training daily, but you or I won’t often need to be present. Both of us will have private work, of course; nevertheless, Tannen, you and I are going to have a good deal of end-to-end leisure. How much of it should we enjoy together, do you think?”

  “Training staff in what?”

  “Official operations. Djinn protocol. Djinn psychology . . . and biology, for that matter. Djinn history. The geologies, ecologies, and politics of their two dominant planets—obviously, with prime emphasis on Dari, but with high secondary stress on Moudjinn. Their galactic astronomy. Stuff like that. Honing, ready; my staff is experienced and pretrained.”

  “How about military emergency?”

  “That too, natch. I am conscious of pirates. I am also conscious that the armament of the Castel Jaloux can destroy a planet and age a star.”

  “So pirates can’t lick us?”

  “So pirates won’t attack us. I doubt that we’ll see pirate one before we reach Dari, and for an indefinite while after that. They just aren’t armed heavily enough, Tannen, and they know it; the Moudjinn warships that they captured were designed for interfief warfare just on the planet Moudjinn, using space for surprise. There isn’t any other humanoid life in the galaxy, except on Dari, which is primitive. All the pirate crossings into Sol Galaxy have been aboard Moudjinn interplanetary space freighters fitted out with guns.”

  “So pirates you don’t worry about.”

  “So pirates I do worry about.”

  Luxuriating over a fat cigar, I was oddly inattentive to the cigar; its long, fine ash was beginning to droop. “You are not a worrier. Why?”

  “I am puzzled by Darian piracy. It shouldn’t be.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “Think about it. Eleven years ago Dari was totally docile under the iron thumb of Moudjinn; Dari has always been nice guys, Moudjinn for a thousand years has been bastards. Ten years ago mutiny erupted among the largely Darian crews of precisely nineteen Moudjinn space freighters and nineteen Moudjinn warships, all at practically the same instant. Then the victorious Darian crews with their thirty-eight Moudjinn ships went into a sophisticated team play that got them nineteen home islands on Dari in one week and three major industrial enclaves on Moudjinn inside of three months; and no more than five years later, they began crossing the metagalactic fissure in force to prey on Sol Galaxy shipping. Get it, Tannen? All this violent progress in a single decade, exploding out of millennia of peace and two centuries of subjugated desuetude . . . ”

  My cigar ash was enormously long and detumescent, but my aged hand held it steady. “You are about to say something.”

  Croyd spat it. “To me it sounds like some kind of external and extravagantly powerful mind influence.”

  I considered him. Cautiously I brought my cigar around 180 degrees and eased the ash into a basalt tray. I sucked, spumed, and suggested: “That idea is metaphysical enough to suggest how we should spend our time en route. Want to talk metascience?”

  “Sure.” Croyd drew up his feet and leaned forward. “More fun than data science. More inclusive. More facile.”

  The squawk box squawked: “ALL HANDS AND PASSENGERS ON DECK IN THE BALLROOM FOR LIFEBOAT DRILL!”

  I laid my cigar in the deep ashtray, and we got promptly to our feet and left his cabin.

  Roland paused, frustrated, between two hostile molecules. He had been less than a meter from Croyd’s ear.

  H-Hour minus 56 hours:

  REAR ADMIRAL GORSKY, placing herself in a posture that was little more than accentuation of her customary chunky erectness, addressed the ship’s company from the orchestral dais of the slender balcony that surrounded the circular ballroom. Nearly three hundred people were assembled below her: President Tannen, Governor Croyd, the thirty-nine members of Croyd’s pilot staff who would remain with him on Dari (to be joined by more later, but to be augmented mainly by Darians), and all members of the crew who could be spared from their stations (which meant, in a lifeboat drill, the ones who had least seniority). The crew was small because the automation was large.

  Admiral Gorsky stiffly asserted, “This lifeboat drill is required by the manual. During much of the journey, in metaspace, it will be useless because our lifeboats cannot handle metaspace. Before we hit metaspace, and after we break out of metaspace in the vicinity of Djinn, it could be useful, though I doubt it. Many captains observe only the minimum requirements by giving only theoretical instruction. Aboard the Castel Jaloux, however, we supplement theory with practice. Accordingly, please be prepared to enter lifeboats and be launched. Naturally, there is some hazard involved. I now turn over the proceedings to Captain Czerny.”

  A cadaverous four-stripe Czech, in his forties took over from the admiral and gave the company a precise book recital of th
e necessity for lifeboat drill, mentioning such possible catastrophes as meteor puncture, electrostatic storm, internal explosion, and power loss while falling into a star. These, he observed, were only the most obvious possibilities.

  Czerny then went into the various procedures at the command’s disposal for coping with such eventualities without resorting to lifeboats, mentioning among them the Van Vogt dispersal technique whereby the ship would break into many components to weather a storm and rejoin later. He did not omit to state where life masks could be obtained swiftly in case of simple depressurization; and he stepped primly back while a curvaceous yeowoman gave them a demonstration of that. Czerny then subjected the company to a period of spot questioning; if it served no other purpose, it reawoke them. Admiral Gorsky watched and listened impassively—except that occasionally her brows went down a trifle, causing Croyd and Tannen to exchange amused glances; that was when she would have said it differently.

  “We now come,” intoned Captain Czerny, “to the case where all hope for the ship is lost and it becomes necessary to launch lifeboats. For convenience, each of your cabins is numbered with the number of your lifeboat: Cabins 3-1, 3-2, and so on use Lifeboat 3, and so on. These lifeboats are embedded in the hull at convenient intervals along both flanks at all deck levels; each has a capacity of ten passengers plus crew, so that all our lifeboats together have much more than enough capacity for all aboard.

  “The signal for entering lifeboats is the broadcast command ‘Enter lifeboats.’ If the intercom is dead, the signal will be a series of five or more honks on the ship’s horns, like this . . . ” He activated the dismal sound. “Are there any questions?”