“Take what you want of fleshly comfort. It is one of the prerogatives of pilots forced apart from their cruisers. It does not matter.”
“Oh,
Marada
. . .” Shebat’s voice was husky, her mind filled with thoughts of pilots’ promiscuity and the odd, hungry look they all carried in their eyes. “. . . It does matter. It matters so very much. . . . I understand now. Spry, even Valery, maybe—” But she could not finish that last part, about Marada Kerrion, who surely looked at her, had always looked at her, through the veil of his relationship with his cruiser
Hassid
, next to whose charms Shebat’s would ever sum a poor second. . . .
This time, when Shebat wept in earnest, there was nothing the cruiser
Marada
could do.
When she had sobbed a final sob for her rent humanity, the cruiser was waiting, attentive, every mechanism in both himself and
Bucephalus
readied to eject them into normal space, if space can be said to be normal at space-end.
Julian felt as if he were trapped in a gigantic die tossed by the Jesters in some obscure gamble.
He was watching the hieratic landscape of colored lights before him: piles of them stacking and unstacking, changing color, going out; lines of them jumping and undulating, writing indecipherable messages on his retinas which were the more awful for the knowledge that if he had merely understood their language, he would have been other than a helpless victim of fate.
For at least the fiftieth time, he tried to reason it out: this panel before him consisted of a number of modules, long and thin, whose constituent parts repeated—to learn one from top to bottom would be to learn them all. But the tiny letters beside each subgroup were ambiguous, coded:
mode; att.; pan; zm; 30/60/90
. . .
Thirty, sixty, ninety
what?
He could not ask
Bucephalus
, had been warned specifically not to arouse the cruiser. He pushed back from the auxiliary console, stared across the wasteland of quiescent terminal. Only this small patch bay was still operative, and since he had no idea what the . . .
But then, it struck him what the panel might be: if
“zm”
were
“zoom!”
then at least he could push one button, do one thing to alter his situation on his own.
Julian shook flopping tow hair out of his eyes, depressed
mode’s
first stud. On his left, around the curve of the board, and on his right, by his cheek, screens leapt to life. Julian had found the visual scanners.
Once the purpose of the module had been decoded, the capabilities represented by the labeled studs and lights fell to reason’s decipherment.
It was as he was congratulating himself on having given sight to the blind hulk in which he rode (with Spry’s unknowing form lolling in the command couch, only an occasional fart to recall it to mind), that
Marada’s
voice cracked his isolation:
“Julian, sit down and touch nothing else. We are about to enter your native spacetime.”
As usual,
Marada’s
inhuman, confident orders both chilled and rankled the youth’s nerves.
“Thank Chance,” he whispered, settling his long-muscled frame into the rightmost acceleration couch, reflecting that hereafter, at least, food might be palatable and his stomach more disposed to accept it. Space-end surely boasted better than the cold rations from Bucephalus’s darkened galley.
“Thank Shebat,”
the cruiser amended.
Julian turned his face away, as if the
Marada’s
voice could be avoided. His tongue flickered out, catching a strand of blond hair fallen close, twisting it round and round in an unconscious, habitual grooming. The one thing he liked least of every unfortunate occurrence recently was this penchant of the
Marada’s
for talking out of turn. Face it: for talking like some bondkin uncle, or friend of his father’s or teacher at University. This pilotry was not so glamorous as he had supposed, nor so noble. He detested long periods of inactivity, and mysteries of any sort. He abhorred following instructions. Trusting his well-tested capacity to improvise in any situation, he was incensed by the cruiser’s treatment of him. After all, it was his plight, was it not? His ass on the line, true enough. Yet he was not consulted about anything concerning his welfare. He was not a part of the struggle, even when the struggle’s outcome concerned him most of all. Shebat and
Marada
hoarded control, cogitation, commiseration: Julian might have been as inert as Softa, for the use that was being made of his insight, his intelligence, his bravery. Just like in Lorelie, or in Draconis, he was a hothouse plant, succored and pruned to other’s standards. Only this time, his safety was not assured.
That was something, anyway: the acceleration of his pulse, which could not be fooled, told him that this was crisis, come to call.
In the visual monitor, sponge was glittery, suddenly; changing color, growing diaphanous, blowing away. A dark speck appeared, growing wider, then pale in its middle, as the black-without-relief ring expanded to show normal space speckled with bluish stars thick as cream. Julian knew he was seeing a great volume of space not as it was, but blueshifted and compressed, an entire universe compacted and ringed with impenetrable blackness.
They were heading right into its center, like an arrow toward a target. The target, as they grew near, began to jiggle and roll. Julian knew he could be seeing up to seven (man’s irritation had put a ceiling on creation) universes, only one of which was his native one. As the black ring widened, the star-field began to roll apart, differentiating itself, losing the blue tinge of “before,” taking on the redshifted lengthening of “behind.”
Then the event horizon was gone, past his view since
Bucephalus
was inside and then outside it, and all the cornucopia of stars had sped away but one miasmic ring laced with bright clouds of dust.
And so, two Kerrion children came to space-end, each filled with woes and thinned by burdens, bringing Softa’s sleeping self and
Bucephalus
, too, where they had given so much to be.
Shebat thought: Parma, you never bothered to take me aside to explain, not even to offer an apology for what fate you caused to befall me. . . . You have no claim on me.
Julian thought: Now, I will be free of it, taken at face value, treated as a man.
But Softa, sleeping with
Bucephalus
, did not think at all.
One thing they had not expected was a cold welcome: to be laconically assigned a space-anchor, nothing more than a set of coordinates to be maintained, and ordered to wait there for a medical team to arrive.
Shebat was incensed, Julian suspicious.
Marada
reminded them that facilities here were limited, referred them to their visual scanners for proof, snapping up identical views of the poor antiquated cylinders like gigantic fuel drums and the no-shape angly catching stations and the bristly solar collectors, laced together with outmoded cables from whose segmented length trains depended, crawling from dock to dock to dock.
The planet around which space-end was slung was sour and worn, a place of churning dust into which no spacecraft, not even a space-to-ground shuttle like the one in
Marada’s
belly, would choose to descend.
But it was the only planet around the tired old G-type star; it was the only planet with heavy metals in the whole of the explored ring which had once been a most ancient galaxy but was being sucked inward, ever inward, by the gobbling dark mass in its middle.
Because of the sink in the center of space-end, no one had ever cut across the featurelessness that sat, squat and incomprehensible, drawing all its star-prey ever closer. Because heavy metals were absent except upon the nameless planet dubbed “Scrap” by those who saw it in their sky, some said the planet was a captive, a hostage taken in the collision that had lost the galaxy the bulk of its stars. Whatever the nature of its history, whatever the details of its fate, the planet Scrap was not alone anymore.
The space-enders had come, sinking cables into its bedrock and mines into its face, making jokes about the “vagina of the universe” darkly beckoning above their heads.
All space-enders were obliged to spend a certain portion of their year laboring upon Scrap’s surface. Their “down-time” was the nadir of their lives, but essential to life’s continuance: space-end was alone.
She had no trade agreement with the Consortium; her products were embargoed, now that she had products to spare; she was the leprosarium of space time, her few children likewise tainted and unclean. Every so often, new folk were dumped there, but those vessels took no passengers back to civilized Consortium space.
Space-end was forever, they said, smiling wolfish smiles in hard, small-eyed faces.
The prison frigates that dropped new exiles never came closer than the most distant space-anchors, casting their cargo of unfortunates adrift in lifeboats with beacons but no thrusters.
There was a price exacted by the “rescuers” who picked up the new settlers.
In the case of the arrival of two cruisers under power, one of which had been anchored before and had disappeared, the rescuers deferred to the pirate’s guild, the only institution, space-enders claimed, they had modeled after the Consortium’s example.
Once, more than a century ago, the Consortium had attempted to police space-end. A disastrous massacre had ensued, the only fit punishment for which was exile. But how to exile the exiles? The Consortium had deliberated, and begun the policy that obtained at space-end to the present day: arbiters traveled tours of duty on the ring, gave judgments when so petitioned.
Otherwise, there were no rules to be broken or laws to be disobeyed: space-enders tolerated no higher authority than themselves, save the pirate’s guild, who were, everyone knew, pilots in disguise.
The guild promised mobility. If it could not yet produce it, it provided hope that someday it could. After all, the universe was unthinkable in its extent: a new colony could be planted in more fertile ground. But cruisers were essential: sponge-traversing ships were the fulcrum of plans to foresake Scrap for some fine solar system full of metals and wealth. In the meantime, piracy salved the space-enders’ ire, perpetrated utilizing seven cruisers stolen over the years, maintained by rote and two fallen engineers, eunuchs in their fifties, who scratched their heads over the advances incorporated in the
Marada’s
design when the space-end guild ship finally drew alongside.
They would scratch their heads the more when they learned that both magnificent cruisers had been tandem’d here by two (
unsterilized!
) children, one of whom claimed this trip as his apprenticeship and demanded pirate’s privilege; the other of whom staunchly affirmed that she was master both of the blond youth and the remarkable
Marada
; both of whom were Kerrions!
That Softa David Spry lay insensible in
Bucephalus
, once flagship of Kerrion space, was news met with open mouths and shaking heads, news that traveled like light into the farthest crannies of space-end, stopping work and play wherever it went: everyone knew Softa. He was the embodiment of their hopes. Women wept and students were let out early from school.
There might have been babies named after Softa, had not the only children at space-end been illegal Consortium children, shipped off with their parents into exile. There might have been clones named after him, if space-end’s limited facilities had been capable of producing perfect ones.
There were the “sirens,” it was true. Sirens were said to be fertile, potent by the same numinous miracle that provided them life. But as far as anyone knew, sirens had no names.
Shebat Kerrion was staring glumly out a zero-magnification porthole near
Marada’s
cargo bay when a siren glided up to the embrasure, pressing its pale, compassionate face against the glass.
It was scintillating; womanlike; ethereal, with its silver hair waving about its head and its lucent palms flattened against the porthole’s surface, blue veins showing through, humping with pulse. Its mouth moved: not red but blue-gray; within the mouth, tongue and gums were purplish.
Shebat Kerrion screamed.
The thing beyond the
Marada’s
portal wriggled, moued, pushed away like a spacefish, a last flash of foot waving adieu.
The pirate who came to see what caused the screaming chuckled when Shebat, hands cupping her temples, blurted out what she had seen.
“Hee, hee. They don’t talk about ‘em in the Consortium. No, they don’t.” The man’s face was nearly as white as his three-mil suit, as his sparse hair, as the flowing beard which made up for it. “That’s a ‘siren.’ Some say they’re people who went over the one-minute vacuum limit fully mil’d. ‘Stead of dying, they become . . . sirens. Phosphorylization in animal forms . . . mil acts like a proton pump, converts the epidermis once it’s filled the lungs. Possible, y’know, but not likely. Still, there’s lots of bodies unaccounted for in space. . . . Guys gone a minute and ten seconds have been brought back to air-breathing, say it’s real rough. Consortium says nothing. Some folks die, that’s sure. Maybe, like they say, some don’t. Maybe they do live on like that; strip off their clothes and breathe vacuum and don’t have much to do with us regular air-breathers. Beats me. Anyhow, they’re harmless. They hang around to tow in lifeboats, sometimes. Don’t want nothin’ for it, just pop up now and again. . . . Feeling better?”
Shebat mumbled something, and turned away from the pirate’s leer: they all looked at her like that; at Julian, too.
She raised her eyes from her boots and saw Julian’s pale head ducking through the doorway.
“If you beheve that, Shebat, you’ll believe that I’ve started to sprout wings.” He turned his back to her and, reaching his hand around, patted himself on the shoulderblades. “See? Here’s proof.” Twisting his head around, he winked at her. The young Kerrion had been increasingly lighthearted. It would have been soothing if he had not been determined to present himself so because of their obvious detention.
“Quarantine,” the space-enders had explained.
“When are you going to let us out of here?” Julian demanded.
“Some folks coming up to talk to y’both. After that, I’d guess. Maybe tomorrow.”
Shebat had tried to silence Julian. She did not want to leave
Marada
, She could not have said why, but she trusted her instinct. She had been distressed when Julian had left Spry alone in
Bucephalus
, though a team of pirates and space-end physicians labored over him.
Shebat made a motion to Julian to follow, and headed for a cabin.
There, where she had often tried in vain to reach Julian, she tried again: “Will you
stop
insisting that we be allowed to debark! I have no intention of leaving my ship.”
“Of course, what else?” sneered Julian, then squeezed his eyes shut. “I am sorry. It is different for you, I understand. But you cannot stay in here forever.”
“Why not?” Shebat grated, not parting her teeth.
“Because . . . well, there’s only the two of us. You’re my master pilot.”
“You do not act like any apprentice I have ever seen. You do what you want. I am staying with
Marada
.”
“Marada!”
, a pejorative. Then: “Shebat, is it what happened between us that night your marriage was announced? If it is, I assure you, I have forgotten it totally—”