Baby Is Three (6 page)

Six thousand times around Sol, with Sol moving in a moving
galaxy, and that galaxy in flight through a fluxing universe. That all amounts to a resultant movement of Earth through nine Möllner degrees around the Universal Curve. For six thousand years Curbstone flings off its tiny ships, its monstrous power plant kicking them into space-time and the automatics holding them there until all—or until enough—are positioned. Some will materialize in the known universe and some in faintly suspected nebulae; some will appear in the empty nothingnesses beyond the galactic clusters, and some will burst into normal space inside molten suns.

But when the time comes, and the little ships are positioned in a great spherical pattern out around space, and together they become real again, they will send to each other a blaze of tight-beam energy. Like the wiring of a great switchboard, like the synapses of a brain, each beam will find its neighbors, and through them Earth.

And then, within and all through that sphere, humanity will spread, stepping from rim to rim of the universe in seconds, instantaneously transmitting men and materials from and to the stars. Here a ship can be sent piecemeal and assembled, there a space station. Yonder, on some unheard-of planet of an unknown star, men light years away from Earth can assemble matter transceivers and hook them up to the great sphere, and add yet another world to those already visited.

And what of the Outbounders?

Real time, six thousand years.

Ship’s time, from second-order spatial entry to materialization—
zero
.

Fort and Mariellen. Nice kids. Memories now; lights on a board, one after another, until they’re all accounted for. At Curbstone, the quiet machinery says, “Next!”

Fort and Mariellen. Clinging together, they press down the launching lever. Effortlessly in their launching, they whirl away from Curbstone. In minutes there is a flicker of gray, or perhaps not even that. Strange stars surround them. They stare at one another. They are elsewhere … else
when
. Lights glow. This one says the tight-beam has gone on, pouring out toward the neighbors and, through them, to all the others. That one cries
“emergency”
and Fort whips to the
manual controls and does what he can to avoid a dust-cloud, a planet … perhaps an alien ship.

Fort and Mariellen (or George and Viki, or Bruce, who went Out by himself, Eleanor and Grace, or Sam and Rod—they were brothers) may materialize and die in an intolerable matter-displacement explosion so quickly that there is no time for pain. They may be holed by a meteor and watch, with glazing freezing eyes, the froth bubbling up from each other’s bursting lungs. They may survive for minutes or weeks, and then fall captive to some giant planet or unsuspected sun. They may be hunted down and killed or captured by beings undreamed of.

And some of them will survive all this and wait for the blessed contact; the strident heralding of the matter transceiver with which each ship is equipped—and the abrupt appearance of a man, sixty centuries unborn when they left Curbstone, instantly transmitted from Earth to their vessel. Back with him they’ll go, to an unchanged and ecstatic Earth, teeming with billions of trained, mature humans ready to fill the universe with human ways—the new humans who have left war and greed behind them, who have acquired a universe so huge that they need exploit no creature’s properties, so rich and available is everything they require.

And some will survive, and wait, and die waiting because of some remotely extrapolated miscalculation. The beams never reach them; their beams contact nothing. And perhaps a few of these will not die, but will find refuge on some planet to leave a marker that will shock whatever is alive and intelligent a million years hence. Perhaps they will leave more than that. Perhaps there will be a slower, more hazardous planting of humanity in the gulfs.

But fifty-four per cent, the calculations insist, will establish the star-conquering sphere and return.

The weeks went by. A chime: Bark and Barbara. Damn it all, no more of Barbara’s banana cream pie. The filing, the sweeping, the recording, the lights. Marriage recorded.

When a man and woman go Out together, that is marriage. There is another way to be married on Curbstone. There is a touch less speed involved in it than in joined hands pressing down a launching
lever. There is not one whit less solemnity. It means what it means because it is not stamped with necessity. Children derive their names from their mothers, wed or not, and there is no distinction. Men and women, as responsible adults, do as they please within limits which are extremely wide.
Except.…

By arduous trial and tragic error, humanity has evolved modern marriage. With social pressure removed from the pursuit of a mate, with the end of the ribald persecution of spinsterhood, a marriage ceases to be a rubber stamp upon what people are sure to do, with or without ceremonies. Where men and women are free to seek their own company, as and when they choose, without social penalties, they will not be trapped into hypocrisies with marriage vows. Under such conditions a marriage is entered gravely and with sincerity, and it constitutes a public statement of choice and—with the full implementation of a mature society—of inviolability. The lovely, ancient words “forsaking all others” spell out the nature of modern marriage, with the universally respected adjunct that fidelity is not a command or a restriction, but a chosen path. Divorce is swift and simple, and—almost unheard of. Married people live this way, single people live that way; the lines are drawn and deeply respected. People marry because they intend to live within the limits of marriage. The fact that a marriage exists is complete proof that it is working.

I had a word about marriage with Tween. Ran into her in the Gate corridor. I think she’d been in one of the ships again. If she was pale, her olive skin hid it. If her eyes were bloodshot, the lustrous ruby of her eyes covered it up. Maybe I saw her dragging her feet as she walked, or some such. I took her chin in my hand and tilted her head back. “Any dragons I can kill?”

She gave me a brilliant smile, which lived only on her lips. “I’m wonderful,” she said bravely.

“You are,” I agreed. “Which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the way you feel. I won’t pry, child; but tell me—if you ever ate too many green apples, or stubbed your toe on a cactus, do you know a nice safe something you could hang on to while you cried it out?”

“I do,” she said breathlessly, making the smile just as hard as she could. “Oh, I do.” She patted my cheek. “You’re … listen. Would you tell me something if I asked you?”

“About certificates? No, Tween. Not about anyone else’s certificate. But—all he has to do is complete his final hypnopediae, and he just hasn’t showed up.”

She hated to hear it, but I’d made her laugh, too, a little. “Do you read minds, the way they all say?”

“I do not. And if I could, I wouldn’t. And if I couldn’t help reading ’em, I’d sure never act as if I could. In other words, no. It’s just that I’ve been alive long enough to know what pushes people around. So’s I don’t care much about a person, I can judge pretty well what’s bothering him.

“ ’Course,” I added, “if I do give a damn, I can tell even better. Tween, you’ll be getting married pretty soon, right?”

Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that. She gasped, and for a moment she just stopped making that smile. Then, “Oh, yes,” she said brightly. “Well, not exactly. What I mean is, when we go Out, you see, so we might as well not, and I imagine as soon as Wold gets his certificate, we’ll … we kind of feel going Out is the best … I seem to have gotten something in my eye. I’m s-sor.…”

I let her go. But when I saw Wold next—it was down in the Euphoria Sector—I went up to him very cheerfully. There are ways I feel sometimes that make me real jovial.

I laid my hand on his shoulder. His back bowed a bit and it seemed to me I felt vertebrae grinding together. “Wold, old boy,” I said heartily. “Good to see you. You haven’t been around much recently. Mad?”

He pulled away from me. “A little,” he said sullenly. His hair was too shiny and he had perfect teeth that always reminded me of a keyboard instrument.

“Well, drop around,” I said. “I like to see young folks get ahead. You,” I added with a certain amount of emphasis, “have gone pretty damn far.”

“So have you,” he said with even more emphasis.

“Well, then.” I slapped him on the back. His eyeballs stayed in, which surprised me. “You can top me. You can go farther than I ever can. See you soon, old fellow.”

I walked off, feeling the cold brown points of his gaze.

And as it happened, not ten minutes later I saw that
kakumba
dance. I don’t see much dancing usually, but there was an animal roar from the dance-chamber that stopped me, and I ducked in to see what had the public so charmed.

The dance had gone through most of its figures, with the caller already worked up into a froth and only three couples left. As I shouldered my way to a vantage point, one of the three couples was bounced, leaving the two best. One was a tall blonde with periwigged hair and subvoltaic bracelets that passed and repassed a clatter of pastel arcs; she was dancing with one of the armor-monkeys from the Curbstone Hull Division, and they were good.

The other couple featured a slender, fluid dark girl in an open tunic of deep brown. She moved so beautifully that I caught my breath, and watched so avidly that it was seconds before I realized it was Flower. The reaction to that made me lose more seconds in realizing that her partner was Judson. Good as the other couple were, they were better. I’d tested Jud’s reflexes, and they were phenomenal, but I’d had no idea he could respond like this to anything.

The caller threw the solo light to the first couple. There was a wild burst of music and the arc-wielding blonde and her arc-wielding boy friend cut loose in an intricate frenzy of disjointed limbs and half-beat stamping. So much happened between those two people so fast that I thought they’d never get separated when the music stopped. But they untangled right with the closing bars, and a roar went up from the people watching them. And then the same blare of music was thrown at Jud and Flower.

Judson simply stood back and folded his arms, walking out a simple figure to indicate that, honest, he was dancing, too. But he gave it all to Flower.

Now I’ll tell you what she did in a single sentence: she knelt before him and slowly stood up with her arms over her head. But words
will never describe the process completely. It took her about twelve minutes to get all the way up. At the fourth minute the crowd began to realize that her body was trembling. It wasn’t a wriggle or a shimmy, or anything as crude as that. It was a steady, apparently uncontrollable shiver. At about the eighth minute the audience began to realize it was controlled, and just how completely controlled it was. It was hypnotic, incredible. At the final crescendo she was on her tiptoes with her arms stretched high, and when the music stopped she made no flourish; she simply relaxed and stood still, smiling at Jud. Even from where I stood I could see the moisture on Jud’s face.

A big man standing beside me grunted, a tight, painful sound. I turned to him; it was Clinton. Tension crawled through his jaw-muscles like a rat under a rug. I put my hand on his arm. It was rocky. “Clint.”

“Wh—oh. Hi.”

“Thirsty?”

“No,” he said. He turned back to the dance floor, searched it with his eyes, found Flower.

“Yes, you are, son.” I said. “Come on.”

“Why don’t you go and—” He got hold of himself. “You’re right. I am thirsty.”

We went to the almost deserted Card Room and dispensed ourselves some methyl-caffeine. I didn’t say anything until we’d found a table. He sat stiffly looking at his drink without seeing it. Then he said, “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“I was about to be real uncivilized in there.”

I just waited.

He said truculently, “Well, damn it, she’s free to do what she wants, isn’t she? She likes to dance—good. Why shouldn’t she? Damn it, what is there to get excited about?”

“Who’s excited?”

“It’s that Judson. What’s he have to be crawling around her all the time for? She hasn’t done a damn thing about getting her certificate since he got here.” He drank his liquor down at a gulp. It had no apparent effect, which meant something.

“What had she done before he got here?” I asked quietly. When he didn’t answer I said, “Jud’s Outbound, Clint. I wouldn’t worry. I can guarantee Flower won’t be with him when he goes, and that will be real soon. Hold on and wait.”

“Wait?” His lip curled. “I’ve been ready to go for weeks. I used to think of … of Flower and me working together, helping each other. I used to make plans for a celebration the day we got certified. I used to look at the stars and think about the net we’d help throw around them, pull ’em down, pack ’em in a basket. Flower and me, back on Earth after six thousand years, watching humanity come into its own, knowing we’d done something to help. I’ve been waiting, and you say wait some more.”

“This,” I said, “is what you call an unstable situation. It can’t stay the way it is and it won’t. Wait, I tell you: wait. There’s got to be a blow-off.”

There was.

In my office the chime sounded. Moira and Bill. Certificates denied to Hester, Elizabeth, Jenks, Mella. Hester back to Earth. Hallowell and Letitia, marriage recorded. Certificates granted to Aaron, Musette, n’Guchi, Mancinelli, Judson.

Judson took the news quietly, glowing. I hadn’t seen much of him recently. Flower took up a lot of his time, and training the rest. After he was certified and I’d gone with him to test the hand-scanner by the gate and give him his final briefing, he cut out on the double, I guess to give Flower the great news. I remember wondering how he’d like her reaction.

When I got back to my office Tween was there. She rose from the foyer couch as I wheezed in off the ramp. I took one look at her and said, “Come inside.” She followed me through the inner door. I waved my hand over the infra-red plate and it closed. Then I put out my arms.

She bleated like a new-born lamb and flew to me. Her tears were scalding, and I don’t think human muscles are built for the wrenching those agonized sobs gave her. People should cry more. They ought to learn how to do it easily, like laughing or sweating. Crying piles up. In people like Tween, who do nothing if they can’t smile and
make a habit-pattern of it, it really piles up. With a reservoir like that, and no developed outlet, things get torn when the pressure builds too high.