FOURTEEN.
He was at Blackwool, he was sure of that. He had even been inside the nebula for some unknown time, working his way toward its concealed heart. Toward his home.
Once he had known exactly what he was going to do when he got home. What things he would do, and in exactly what order he would do them-and now, just what had that plan been, again?
While a part of his mind worried at that question, Michel kept on working his/Lancelot"s way toward the inner depths of Blackwool"s darkness. He no longer had the slightest fear of getting lost, wherever Lance might take him. By now he thought he could determine, from samples of the matter and the flow taken inside any nebula, approximately how big it was and in what ways it might be moving, and also which way he could proceed to reach his goal. This nebula, he was sure now, had at its heart a great hollow s.p.a.ce swept out by the solar wind of one lone sun.
Was the Bottleneck still open, through which t.i.tanic ships had once escorted him in frantic flight? Michel didn"t know and didn"t care. He didn"t need the Bottleneck, and so made no attempt to find it in the ebon labyrinths. Smooth glide amid the molecules of gas, the particles of dust, then microjump when he could, and glide again when matter got too thick. Thinking about it now no more than walking, moving now much faster than any ship could have made this constricted pa.s.sage, he descended to the center of Blackwool.
He expected a bright gleam ahead at any moment now, and presently it came. Then, somehow before Michel had managed to feel quite ready for it, the sun that had lighted his days of childhood was floating in velvet s.p.a.ce before him, a lone jewel set in the almost-perfect dark. To one side of the sun moved a lightspeck of reflection that had to be Alpine.
He supposed that if he waited here just a little while, long enough to watch a segment of the planet"s...o...b..t, it ought to be easy for him to tell just what season of the year it was at home. Instead of delaying like that, though, he ought to be hurrying on . . .
. . . and at just about this point it came back to him, his plan for what to do first when he got home. First he would greet his parents, certainly. Then-and he was no longer sure why this had once seemed so desirable-he had meant to crawl into that little bed of his and go to sleep.
There was some doubt in his mind, now, as to whether he would even fit that bed. He was still tired, yes, in a way. But truthfully he wasn"t sleepy any longer. He hadn"t felt sleepy at all for a long time now.
With a little cold feeling somewhere inside him, he realized that he could no longer remember exactly what his mother looked like. There, he had the picture almost clear again. . . .
When he got home, no doubt about it, the first thing that he would really have to do was change. Lance would have a real job to do. The way Michel was now just-wouldn"t work at home. But with relief he reminded himself again that Lance was sure to be able to change him back. Changes, hormones, Tupelov . . . it was a long time since he had even thought of Tupelov.
Suddenly he didn"t want to look at Alpine any longer. It took Michel a while to remember how to close his eyes, but when he had managed to do so, darkness brought him peace. What next? Go home, of course. Something was holding him back; he wasn"t pushing on for Alpine nearly as fast as he might have.
His mother"s face at last became clear in his mind"s eye. And with that, he had no choice but to go on.
Lately, whenever he was bothered by some upsetting thought, Michel had taken to stroking his unseen chin with an invisible finger. And now on his chin he could feel what must be, well, some sort of a beard.
Tupelov, hormones, change. . . .
Anyway, where else was there for him to go? The sun was much brighter before him now, Alpine much closer in its lonely orbit crossing the velvet sky. The trouble was . . . again he could tell that there was something wrong. So it had been with that berserker base. So with the Core itself. And so it now proved to be with this.
The upper atmosphere of Alpine was all wrong. It was nothing but a great single cloud, glowing on day-side, a lifeless sun-reflecting sh.e.l.l of steam and water vapor and fine dust. It was much hotter than it should have been. All the adventure stories agreed that any once Earth-like planet that suddenly looked like that had been . . .
If any confirmation was needed, he could see that the once strong network of defensive satellites had been entirely removed.
He thought, or tried to think, about his parents. His head seemed to be filled with dull confusion. Yes, he remembered now, his father had been going to join his mother in Sol System. His mother really hadn"t been here at all.
Numbly Michel drifted round the world to night-side. He listened for radio voices, and after a lengthy interval of silence heard one. It was not human; it spoke only briefly, and only in coded mathematics. It had a lot in common with that horde of voices that had once pursued Michel across a broken landscape, when he had been a small boy filled with fear.
He was ahead of Alpine in its...o...b..t, and now he let the bulk of the advancing planet pull him closer to the deathmask of its poisoned air. Had his father really left in time? Had his mother instead come back? He thought from the look of things that all life must be totally expunged by now. The radio message he had intercepted indicated that some machines must have been left behind by the destroying berserker fleet, to make quite sure that the last microorganism was quite dead. But no locator beams came probing toward him.
Michel used Lance"s senses to probe beneath the slowly seething, overheated clouds. Down there he could find the outline of a flattened landscape, but no remaining seas. Nothing to indicate that the berserkers" job had not been completed.
"Michel."
Round the limb of the slain world a small artificial satellite had appeared, moving in low orbit. It was revolving in Michel"s general direction, and from it had come the radio voice speaking his name. The voice was familiar and unchanged-not Tupelov"s, the other one.
"Michel."
He made himself wait, motionless relative to the planet, to see if the satellite would change course.
Activating a comparatively feeble drive, the berserker device pulled itself out of free orbit and decelerated, coming finally to a stop within ten meters of Michel. Its diameter was about the same distance, and it was roughly spherical in shape. In the gloss of its surface metal he could see himself reflected, a long-tailed s.p.a.ceborne figure of living flame, his glowing body almost featureless except for striations like those of muscle tissue.
"Michel, I am your friend."
"How do you know me?"
"Your present appearance has been predicted." It was the Co-ordinator"s voice, Michel felt sure of that.
The Co-ordinator somehow, against all odds, found and salvaged from the smashed goodlife ship, the Co-ordinator"s memory installed in this new hardware. That memory, then, was still something on which the berserkers placed great value.
"Come aboard, Michel." Only now did he take notice of the surprising fact that the satellite really did have a hatch on its side, of a size to accommodate a human. A casual probe of the interior confirmed that there was a warm, cell-sized chamber within, even now being filled with breathable air.
"Come aboard," it repeated, "and we will talk. I will convey you to a place where you can get the help you need."
"I need-" His own voice, so long unused, startled him with its harsh roar. Controlling it consciously, he tried again: "I need no help."
"But come aboard and we will talk. I have information that you will want to hear."
"My father?" When Michel waved an arm at the cloud-surfaced world below, a reflected glow from the movement came and went across the faceless surface of the machine that faced him. "What happened to him?"
"Come aboard and we will talk."
"Sixtus Geulincx. Where is he?"
"Sixtus Geulincx is quite safe. He was taken from this world before it was purified of life. The Directors now have him in their care, against the time of your return."
"And my mother, what about her?"
"Come aboard, and we will help you search for her."
"Liar!" The radio echoes of the shout rebounded from the lifeless clouds below.
"I was left here to be a guide for you when you returned."
"You"re lying." But it just might be true, or halfway true at least. The cell inside might not be meant for goodlife after all. What must have happened, Michel realized now, was that the Co-ordinator"s somehow-rescued memory had been replicated and grafted into a hundred or a thousand berserker brains scattered across an unknown volume of s.p.a.ce. Each such machine was effectively the Co-ordinator now, besides serving whatever other functions it might be programmed for. Should Michel, or news about Michel, ever turn up, each one would be ready to deal with the event as the Directors wished.
Michel demanded, "Where have you taken Sixtus Geulincx? And what of Carmen Geulincx, and Elly Temesvar, and Frank Marcus? Which of them are still alive, and where?"
"I know only that Sixtus Geulincx is still alive. And well cared for, as I have said. He is with the Directors, and they are somewhere near the Core. My programming does not allow me to be more specific at this time. Come aboard, and we will talk more."
The physical form in which the Co-ordinator now confronted Michel had been built for several purposes. For orbital movement, for limited communication, to house goodlife or desirable prisoners if need be, to observe a purified planet and seed it with additional destruction if required. It had not been built for real fighting. When Michel reached out an unhurried hand toward it now, it had time to compute what the gesture meant, and then to lash back at him with energies intended to be murderous. But Michel/Lance"s right hand went straight in through its nominal armor, to the key parts that Michel had chosen. In Lance"s fist he squeezed them to something less than matter. It was done before the destructor charges lining the satellite"s memory could be made to discharge.
Lance sipped at the satellite"s power supplies, like some odd new lifeform imbibing electronic blood, gaining new strength in the process. Then, after some study, Michel removed more parts, deftly and with great care. The Co-ordinator"s memory banks were open to his scanning now.
He scanned them and learned what he could; and when he had done learning, he seized what remained of the satellite in one fist and hurled it down into the clouds, where a new fireball bloomed suddenly and disappeared. The radio voices of other berserkers began questioning s.p.a.ce around him.
Michel Geulincx, drifting over the world that once had been his home, came slowly to believe what he had learned.
Despite all that had transformed him, he was Michel Geulincx. After he had hunted down the berserkers still remaining in the Alpine system, he meant to go on looking for his father.
FIFTEEN.
TheJohann Karlsenwas a great grayish pearl, set firmly now in a rich jeweler"s mounting of pearl-gray loops and bands, with the lesser roundness of a disgorged but immovable scoutship frozen at its side.
When Tupelov at last emerged from the flagship, alone, he could see the vast, curved cagework of the Taj soaring away from him in at least three spatial dimensions. If he let his perception and his fancy get away from him, now with only his suit"s faceplate between him and the Taj, he could easily become subject to the impression that here more than three dimensions were definable, that he was standing in the middle of an Escher solid made real, that he might be able to walk or climb away from the ship on one of these highway-sized, apparently unsupported gray loops and re-emerge from their distant tangles in a direction opposite to that of his departure.
Two days ago, meaning to investigate the Taj, he had ordered the flagship driven close to it. Instinct and what logic he could still muster both urged him that the search for Michel had to lead here ultimately if it led anywhere; and this portion of the inner Core was quite alive with decaying berserker radio signals of indeterminate age. Whether the two previous human expeditions sent to the Taj from Sol System had had any success, or had been able to get back to Earth, he still did not know. Investigation was definitely called for.
He had been able to make the order for investigation stick, though there had been some grumbling.
Some of the crew were whispering that after this last effort it would be time enough and past time to call off his monomaniacal pursuit of one human child who had to be dead and lost long years ago. . . .
The flagship"s captain had driven close to the Taj, not meaning to enter it. They were close to the Taj, and then without apparent transition of any kind they were inside it, the intercoms exploding with the crew"s surprise, the instruments jumping with inexplicable readings and then settling back-in some cases, to steady readings that seemed to make no more sense.
The ship was caught immovably. Two standard days of trying to work it free, using the drive and short-range weapons, had been unsuccessful. Huge gray bands of unknown substance bound it rigidly. In the bottomless s.p.a.ce containing the gray bands, an ocean of weatherless air existed, according to instrumental indications. At last a scoutship was launched, with Command Pilot Colonel Frank Marcus and re-drafted quasi-civilian Elly Temesvar aboard, ready to do their fanciest flying. This attempt aborted at once, with the scout immediately caught in its own newly-formed loop of resistless gray, not ten meters outside the launching hatch.
There was urgent conversation between scout and mother ship, on various communicator systems, all of which seemed to be working well enough, but working as if the air surrounding the ships, an Earth-surface standard atmosphere, were a reality.
After that, there had seemed to be nothing to do but try to get out of the ship on foot and look around-oh yes, external gravity, if the instruments could be trusted, was steady and one-directional. Its value matched that of Earth-surface normal to four decimal places.
Tupelov, maybe feeling a little suicidal, maybe just trying to be fair, nominated himself to be first out. In this he was unopposed, which caused him a disappointment so faint that he hardly recognized it himself.
So as soon as he was suited up, out he went, half expecting an instantaneous gray band to materialize in a loop round his middle as soon as he had cleared the hatch. Well, at least he would be able to come to direct grips with the d.a.m.ned stuff.
Emerging from an auxiliary maintenance hatch, whose door was thicker than it was tall or wide, and which closed itself invisibly back into the thickness of the hull the instant Tupelov was completely out, the Secretary found to his considerable relief that no gray bands had snapped him up. And also that he seemed safe from s.p.a.ce sickness; the gravity felt as normal as had been reported. His booted feet were standing on one of the gray bands wrapped around the ship, anddownwas precisely the direction perpendicular to the band"s surface where he was standing on it.
Other bands and loops ran in every direction, the nearest a few hundred meters distant from him. Gray and largely featureless, they appeared to be rectangular in cross-section for the most part, though already he could notice that a few of them were round. Everything was bathed in a cheerful and seemingly sourceless light, isotropic enough to cast no very noticeable shadows anywhere. The band that Tupelov was standing on-his exit hatch had been chosen for the easy access to good footing that it appeared to offer-was about five meters wide, and when he cautiously approached the edge of it outboard from the ship, he could see that it was about a meter thick. Beyond its thickness a downward glance fell through what might as well have been an infinity of distance. The farthest bands visible in that direction were backed by what appeared to be a very light gray sky, continuous with the "sky" that Tupelov could also see to right and left and overhead.
"Sir, do you read me? Sir, this is the bridge, over."
He shouldn"t have let a radio silence grow. "I read you, Bridge. So far I"ve experienced nothing to indicate that our readings on ship"s instruments were faulty. I"m just standing here on this band, whatever it is. The substance feels just slightly yielding underfoot-about like a good floor. Gravity feels normal.
Also my suit indicators confirm the presence of atmosphere. Colonel Marcus?"
"Sir?" The answer sounded faintly surprised.
"Why don"t you and Temesvar climb out of that scout now. See if you can negotiate the band running down in my direction."
"Yes sir."
"Iyenari? Why don"t you come out too? Maybe we can make some start at a.n.a.lyzing what these things are made of."
The Doctor acknowledged; he would be out as soon as he could get suited up. Maybe there was no need for suits. Well, Tupelov wasn"t about to take his own off yet. While he waited to be joined by other people, the Secretary went on talking, for an audience that he was sure must include the whole mystified crew of the Big K.
"Even in the farthest distance, the bands look perfectly clear. There"s no consistent pattern to them that I can see, no beginning or end, no sign of what holds them in position.
"And there"s no indication anywhere of precipitation, or fogging, or clouds, unless the apparent sky surrounding us is something of the kind. Air temperature where I"m standing reads just over eighteen degrees C. No wind perceptible-well, we"re going to have a bunch to do, if we get into research here."
Pausing, he found himself breathing deeply. Even inside his suit it seemed he could detect a trace of ozone, a fresh post-thunderstorm, mountaintop, ionic concentration in the air.
Gray light bathed gray roadways, but somehow the effect was not nearly as dull as he might have imagined. There was rather a pearly richness, as of cleaned air after rain. And the air was clean, as far as his suit"s elementary instruments could tell, and moderately humid.
Elly Temesvar in her suit, approaching at an upright walk along a roadway that, from Tupelov"s point of view, made a wild descent toward him, demonstrated that gravity seemed to be everywhere at right angles to the surface where anyone stood. She crossed athletically from one band to another at an intersection, "down" shifting with her, and was the first person to reach the Secretary"s side. Lombok"s secret report, which Tupelov had just managed to hear before leaving Sol System, had not entirely cleared her of suspicion of goodlife involvement. But Tupelov had accepted her story of forcible kidnapping, and nothing in the years of the long voyage since her rescue had made him change his mind.
After all, he had grabbed one Michel-mother himself, and was not surprised that the enemy should have confirmed his intuition in the matter by trying to grab the other one.
"Ms. Temesvar," he commented now, "you"ve been here before. Or have you?"
"You mean is this the same Taj that I described to you? Oh, I think there"s no doubt of that, although I see what you mean. This doesn"t really match the way things looked to me the other time."
"It doesn"t at all match the picture of the place that I had formed from listening to your descriptions."
"No, no." Chin lifted, she was squinting off into the distance somewhere. "But there"s a feeling-oh, this is the same house, all right. But I"m not in the same room of it this time, if you get what I mean."
" "In my Father"s house are many mansions." "
She turned a puzzled look toward him, but Tupelov looked away. Marcus was approaching, a collection of boxes grappling its cautious way along the edge of a narrow Taj-loop, like some segmented caterpillar. An energy rifle was slung on one small pair of metallic arms. Well, why not? Tupelov hadn"t issued orders one way or the other about sidearms, though the past two days had given no indication that they would be needed here.
"What about you, Colonel? Does this bring back any memories?"
Marcus" answer indisputably came over his air-speakers as well as on radio. "No. Everything on that first mission is still a blank for me. But you"re both right, this has got to be the Taj, and it doesn"t match the mental picture I had formed from hearing her accounts of it."
Elly was turning slowly, seeming to scan the environment with all her senses. She said, "That time we were being actively examined, I"m sure. There was a sense of-pressure, of several kinds. Of confrontation."
Tupelov was intrigued. "I"ve never heard you put it just that way before. Confrontation with what? Or who?"
She gave the impression of trying to find words. Marcus, arriving, had gone right to work on the Taj-loop near Tupelov"s feet with a testing kit of some kind. Presently Elly added, "You"ll all understand what I mean, when things turn that way again."
"You think they will."
"I get the feeling that we"ve just been set here on a back shelf. Things made comfortable for us-air, gravity. Then-activity will come. There"s something we must wait for. What, I don"t know."
"Your Final Savior, after all?" There had been plenty of time for discussion of the Temple.
"Thinking about it that way doesn"t draw me any more."
Looking into the curve-bound distance, Tupelov thought that he could see, after all, some evidence of atmospheric phenomena. Around certain intersections of the curving bands dim, partial rainbow arcs were visible. A few other meeting points had somehow generated faint but perfectly complete halos of refraction. It looked almost rea.s.suring-except that, between blue and green, the halos held bands of at least one color that Tupelov had never seen anywhere before.
Maybe, the wild thought came, that"s what happens when the diameter of the full halo comes out to equal exactly one third of its circ.u.mference. . . .