In the Ocean of Night (10 page)

“I realize it,” he said stiffly.

“Then act like it!”

“How?”

Shirley’s mood changed abruptly. “If you become more flexible, Nigel, she will, too. You’re so absorbed in that damned laboratory, those rockets, you can’t see it.” Her lips parted slightly, puckering outward infinitesimally. “I love you both, but you’re so fucking blind.”

Nigel put his chopping knife aside. He was breathing in quick little gasps, he noted, and wondered why. “I… I simply can’t throw it all over—”

Shirley’s eyes moistened and her face seemed to draw downward. “Nigel… you think all this space research is so important, I
know
that. I’ve never said anything until now. But now your obsession can hurt Alexandria, damage her terribly in ways you may never even
see.
”

He shook his head dumbly, blinking.

“If the work was so vastly important, I wouldn’t say anything. But it isn’t. The real problems are here on Earth—”

“Buggering nonsense.”

“They
are.
You slave away at this business, after all they’ve done to you, and act as though it’s somehow crucial.”

“Better that, than a job handing out the daily dole.” “Is
that
what you think I do?” she said, voice teetering between acid and genuine curiosity.

“Well…”

“No backing and filling. Is it?”

“Not quite. I
do
know it’s not my sort of thing.” “With your intelligence, Nigel, you could make real contributions to—”

“Human problems, as you call them, are seldom accessible to intelligence alone. It takes patience. A warm touch, all that. You’ve got it. I don’t.”

“I think you’re very warm. Below that surface, I mean.”

“Uh,” he said wryly.

“No. You are. I, I know you are in some ways, or else you and I and Alexandria wouldn’t be possible, it couldn’t work.”

“
Does
it work?”

“I think so,” she said in almost a whisper.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean that. Just lashing out.”

“We need people in the project at Alta Dena, in Farensca. It’s not easy, creating a sense of community after all that’s happened. Those sociometricians—”

“Haven’t a clue about making it work, I know. Good for diagnostics and precious little else.”

“Yes.” Her fine-boned face took on a bleak, introspective look.

“I think you should stay over tonight.”

“Yes, of course.”

The front door clicked open then, Alexandria returning with lean cuts of flank steak. The mere presence of so much meat implied that the occasion was festive, and Nigel resumed chopping, silent, pondering the details of whether to open a bottle of red wine before the cooking began. Without having time to absorb the meaning of what Shirley had said, he slipped into the routine and ritual of evening.

Each time with Shirley he found some new depth, some unexplored flavoring, a sea change. The revelation always came at that place where all parts of her converged; his head cradled between her thighs, the salt musk aswarm in his nostrils. Alexandria’s presence was a warm O sliding on him. He was an arched segment of their ring. His hands stretched toward where Shirley and Alexandria intersected, Shirley’s black hair mingling with Alexandria’s pubic brown. His arms made an unsuccessful chord to the circle, too short; he turned his hands and felt the puckering of Shirley’s nipple. His tongue worked. Shirley was moist and cool under his massaging hand. The equilibrium between the three shifted and resolved: Alexandria’s tongue fluttered him to new heat; Shirley drew down Alexandria’s breasts, cupping them and rolling the perked nipples between her long fingernails, like marbles. Here they were at their best, he knew. Here the machinery of their bodies spoke what words could not or would not. He felt Shirley’s edgy tension in her hip which trembled with concealed energy. He sank into Alexandria’s encased calm, her mouth fluid and impossibly deep. He felt his own knotted confusion focus in a thrusting jerk, battering against her slick throat. Yes, here was their center. Loving, they hauled each other’s bodies as though they were sacks of sand, stacking them against the waters that surrounded Alexandria, and thus now enveloped all three of them. Shirley moved. Her legs released him and her hand caressed the back of his neck where two rigid bands of muscle formed a valley between. She smiled in the dusky light. Their bodies moved to a new geometry.

FOUR

Since having an auto available was an unusual treat, Nigel took Alexandria to work the next morning. Shirley had waved away the invitation to drop her in Alta Dena; it would be wasteful, and anyway she had her motorbike with her. She coasted down the street for a block, started the engine with a preliminary rattle, rounded a corner and was gone.

Alexandria was intent on the Brazilians, getting ready for the second day of negotiations. The employees’ committee was divided on the terms American Airlines should ask, afraid that control would slip out of the country and into hands they didn’t understand. Alexandria’s job was to soothe their fears without endangering the course of the bargaining. She still didn’t know whether she agreed with the deal or not.

Nigel took his time driving up the gentle sloping hills. He took a route shaded by long stands of eucalyptus, and rolled down the window to breathe the fresh, minty smell. To his surprise he found that the subject of Alexandria and lupus did not float unbidden to the surface of his mind, again and again. Somehow the night had washed him free of it, for the moment.

This area was unfamiliar; he passed by several blocks of gutted ruins. Only the blackened corners of buildings remained, jagged spires thrusting from a sea of lush weeds. He slowed to study them, to determine whether they were remnants of the earthquake, or the result of one of the “incidents” that had raged over the last two decades. The quake, he guessed; there were no obvious, yawning craters, and the flaking walls were unpocked by heavy-caliber fire.

By the time the craft entered the system it knew the planetary population. Of the nine planets, four held promise. All but the farthest inward could be resolved into a disk now. There was a completely clouded world near the star. Next outward came the smaller radio-emitter; it showed sharp oxygen lines and an occasional blue glint hinted at oceans. A smaller world came next, dry and cold, with odd markings.

But for now the craft’s attention focused on the fourth possibility, the huge banded giant. Its radio emissions were broad, covering much of the spectrum, as though the source were natural. But they seemed keyed to an amplitude pattern that repeated nearly identically, at a constant period.

The pinkish-brown world seemed an unlikely site for a technological society. Other considerations entered here, however: time and energy. The craft’s engines worked inefficiently at these low speeds. Yet it needed to alter momentum and flatten its trajectory into the plane of the ecliptic. A flyby of the large planet could save engine strain and time. Looping through its gravitational field, picking up momentum from the vectoring forces, would allow a detailed study while the ship was launched sun-ward along a more desirable course.

Its higher functions debated.

With a mild rumble it altered the timbre of its engines. Gas giant or no, the radio pattern could not be ignored. It swung smoothly toward the waiting world.

“The aft camera nailed it,” Nigel said.

“What? You found the trouble?” Lubkin got up with surprising agility and walked around his desk.

“No malfunction. Those echoes were real, the engineers pegged it right. We’ve got a Snark.”

Nigel tossed a shelf of fax sheets on the desk. They were shiny even in the muted office light, yellow squiggles on green stripping.

“Snark?”

“Mythical English creature.”

“Something’s really out there?”

“These are optical and spectroscopic analyses. Telemetry errors already corrected and numerically smoothed.” He pulled one sheet from the pile and pointed at several lines.

“What is it?”

“Our Snark gives off all the lines of a fusion torch burning pretty bright. Nearly a billion degrees.”

“Come
on.
” Lubkin gave him a skeptical look, eyes screwed up behind his pale glasses.

“I checked it with Knapp.”

“Damn,” Lubkin said. He shook his head. “Funny.” “J-Monitor got one clear look at it before Callisto came into the way again. Couldn’t avoid that, even with the new orbit we put it into.”

He slid a glossy optical photograph out of the stack. “Not much to see,” Lubkin said.

Near one corner was a tiny orange splotch against a dead black background. Lubkin shook his head again. “And this was through the
small
-angle telescope? Must be pretty far away.”

“It was. Almost all the way diagonally across the Callisto orbit. I don’t think we’ll be able to spot it again on the next pass.”

“Any radio contact?”

“None. No time. I tried when I first came in this morning, registered something—didn’t know what, right away—couldn’t get a good enough fix on it, with that photo. The narrow radio beam that Monitor’s main dish puts out needs a better fix.”

“Try again.”

“I did. Callisto got in the way, then Jupiter itself.” “Shit.”

Both men stood, hands on hips, staring down at the fax sheets. Their eyes traced through the matted patterns, noting details, neither of them moving.

“This is going to be pretty big news, Nigel.”

“I expect.”

“I think we ought to sit on it for a while. Until I get a chance to speak to the Director.”

“Ummm. Suppose so.”

Lubkin looked at him steadily.

“There’s not much question about what this thing is.” “Not one of ours,” Nigel said. “Dead on about that.” “Funny, you discovering it. You and McCauley are the only men who’ve ever seen anything alien.”

Nigel glanced up at Lubkin, surprised. “That’s why I stayed in the program. I thought you knew. I wanted to be where things were happening.”

“You guessed something would?” Lubkin seemed genuinely startled.

“No. I was gambling.”

“Some people are still pretty hot about Icarus, you know.”

“I’ve heard.”

“They might not like your being—”

“
Up
theirs.” Nigel’s face hardened. He had answered Lubkin’s questions about Icarus years before and saw no reason to reopen the past now.

“Well, I was only… I’ll be seeing the Director—”

“I found it. I want in on it.
Remember that,
” he finished savagely.

“The military is going to remember last time.” Lubkin spread his palms open in a conciliatory gesture.

“And?”

“Icarus was dangerous. Maybe this thing is, too.” Nigel scowled.
Politics. Committees.
Jesus.

“Bugger all,” he said. “Hadn’t we best figure where it’s going? Before fretting about what to do if it gets here?”

The gas giant had been a disappointment. The nonrandom radio emissions were natural in origin, keyed to the orbital period of its reddish inner moon. Methodically, the craft analyzed the larger moons and found only ice fields and gray rock.

As it whipped by the giant planet on an artful parabola, it decided to focus on the water world. The signals from there were clearly artificial. But as it did so, a brief radio burst caught its attention. The signal showed high correlations, but not enough to rule out a natural origin; there were many well-ordered phenomena in nature. Incredibly, the source was nearby.

Following standing orders, the ship retransmitted the same electromagnetic signal back at the source. This happened several times, quite quickly, but with no sign from the source that the ship’s transmission had been received. Then, abruptly, the signal stopped. Nothing spiked up from the wash of static.

The ship pondered. The signal might well have had a natural cause, particularly in the intense magnetic fields surrounding the gas giant planet. Without further investigation there was no way to decide.

The source seemed to be the fifth moon, a cold and barren world. The ship was aware that this moon was tidelocked to the gas giant, keeping the same side eternally facing inward. Its revolution with respect to the ship was therefore rather slow. It seemed unlikely, then, that the source of the radiation would have slipped below the visible edge so quickly.

As well, the signal strength was low, but not so weak that the ship could not have detected it before. Perhaps it was another radiation pattern from the belts of trapped electrons around the planet, triggered by the fifth moon rather than the first.

The ship thought and decided. The hypothesis of natural origin seemed far more likely. It would cost fuel and time to check further, and the region near the gas giant was dangerous. Far wiser, then, to continue accelerating.

It moved sunward, toward the warming glow.

Nigel worked late on a search-and-survey program to pick up the Snark’s trail. He hadn’t much hope of it working because Jupiter Monitor wasn’t designed for the task, and the Snark’s departing velocity would carry it out of range soon. But there was a lift to his steps as he left and he hummed an old song in the darkened corridors. As a boy he’d watched the old film cassettes and had an ambition to be John Lennon, to strut and clown and warble and become immortal, launch himself into history with his vocal cords. It had been years since he’d remembered that obsession. The period lasted for a year or so: gathering memorabilia, hiring a guitar by the week, rummaging through a song or two, posing in profile for the mirror (backlighting himself in blue, sporting a cap, fluffing out his hair), learning the surprisingly undated slang. The dream faded when he learned he couldn’t sing.