In the Ocean of Night (19 page)

“Shirley …” he began, to break the pressing silence between them.

“I saw the ambulance leaving when I came back from my walk.”

“Walk?”

“I got to the apartment early. Alexandria and I had a talk. An argument, really. Over you, your working late. I, I got mad and Alexandria shouted at me. We were fighting, really fighting in a way we never had before. So before it got any worse I left.”

“Leaving her there. Wrought up. Alone. When Hufman had already said she couldn’t take stress in her condition.”

“You don’t have to…”

“Rub it in? I’m not. But I’d like to know why you harp away on my taking time for JPL.
You
work.”

“But you’re her, well, she leans on you more than me, and when I got to the apartment and she was so weak and pale and waiting for you and you were late I—”

“She could lean on
you.
That’s what we three are all about. Extended sharing, isn’t that the proper jargon?”

“Nigel—”

“You know what I think? You don’t want to face the fact that you’ll lose Alexandria and you’re blaming me in some buggered-up way.”

“You’re so damned independent. You don’t
share,
Nigel, you—”

“Can that
shit.
” He took a convulsive, mechanical step toward her and caught himself. “That’s, that’s your own illusion.”

“A pretty convincing one.”

“I’ve tried—”

“When you
do
let go it’s something seamy. Like getting drunk that night.”

Nigel held his breath for a moment and let it out in a constricted, wheezing sigh. “Maybe. It all stacked up on me there. Alexandria, I mean. And this New Sons, I couldn’t—” He stared directly at Shirley. In the bleached light her skin seemed translucent, stretched thin over the bones of her face. “We’ve never supported each other, have we? Never.”

She studied him. “No. I’m not sure I’d want to, now.” Silence. A clink of glassware from down the corridor. “Me either,” he said across the pressing space that had formed between them.

“It shouldn’t be that way.”

“No.”

“We weren’t, weren’t growing together. Ever.”

“No.”

“Then…no matter what happens to Alexandria, I think…”

“It’s finished. You and me.”

“Yes.”

With each exchange he had felt a pane of glass slide snugly into place between them. There was no going back from this.

“There’s some, some
knot
in you, Nigel. I couldn’t reach it. Alexandria could.”

She closed her trembling eyelids, tears swelling from under them. She began to cry without a sound.

Nigel reached out toward her and then a soft, padding shuffle caught his attention. Several people were coming down the corridor.

“Oh,” Shirley said, the word coming from her like a thick bubble. “Oh.” She turned, arms straightening to her sides, and went to the door.

Two robed men entered. Each held an arm of His Immanence. The small browned man between them moved with arthritic slowness but his yellowed eyes moved quickly from Shirley to Nigel, judging the situation.

“Alexandria may want to see him again,” Shirley said to Nigel. “I called from the apartment and asked him to come.”

“You can tell him to clear off,” Nigel said tightly. “
No,
” Shirley said. “She needs him more, more than she needs you—”

“Bugger that. Th—” and something clutched at his throat, stemming the words. His mind spun. He dimly sensed Alexandria lying nearby somewhere, near death, and Shirley here, these men, the awful sagging flesh of the old one. Pressing at him. Pressing. He turned, a hand out to steady himself. Sit down. Rest.

But he knew they would wear him down if he sat there meekly and listened to their droning talk. The room suddenly was a clotted, airless place, thick with the sweet incense of the New Sons coiling into everything. He swayed on his feet and gulped for air. Something tugged at his memory. The Snark. Venus. The shallow curve he’d plotted, now coming to its apex. Time ticking, the Snark—

“No.” He raised his hands, palms outward. He pushed the cloak of air away from him. Pushed at Shirley and the men, who now receded in the watery light. Swerved away and lurched out the door. A destination formed in his mind. The shiny plastiform walls of the corridor slid past. The dense antiseptic air of the hospital parted before him and closed behind, his passage a spreading ripple.

THIRTEEN

He hunched over in the back of the cab and planned. He rubbed his hands together, each palm momentarily clenching the other in the chilling air. His teeth chattered slightly until he clamped his jaw shut. The past fell away from him and left only a clear, geometrically precise problem. He could not allow Evers and the ExComm to blunder when they tried to communicate with the Snark. Granted they’d had the sense to adopt Nigel’s scheme, a set of primes denoted in binary code. When arrayed in a rectangle the long string of numbers formed pictures: a plot of Snark’s path through the solar system, with circles for the planetary orbits; a breakdown of simple terrestrial chemistry; a recognition code for fast transmission, once the Snark understood that someone was trying to communicate.

But when the Snark responded, how would ExComm answer? Then it would be out of Nigel’s hands. Well, he had a partial answer for that, too. He had made up another message cube, identical to his earlier, ExComm-approved cube, except that it allowed the Snark’s return signal to be routed through the JPL communications board to whatever receiver the board operator selected. And that receiver would be Nigel, through the only private channel he had—his telltale. Simultaneously, the message would be stored and then, when it was finished, replayed for the JPL crew in the Main Bay.

Nigel grimaced. Granted, Evers had accepted Nigel’s message. Granted, getting early reception was a small betrayal, of sorts. But it would give Nigel a few moments to understand before ExComm got into the act—a precious margin of minutes so he could hear the Snark through the telltale, try and guess what the proper response must be. And then, if he could follow what the Snark said, he would have to head off the ExComm reply; those men would almost certainly jump the gun. Any error could be disastrous. The Snark had probably been silent all this time because it was cautious. If the ExComm reply was unclear or seemed unfriendly, the Snark might simply pass through the solar system and away. Gone. Forever.

The yellow sprinkling of lighted windows at JPL made a beacon amid the shadowed hills. Nigel paid the cab, checked through the guards and, instead of going directly to the Main Bay, walked quickly to his office. He unlocked his desk and reached far back in the left drawer. He fished out the second ferrite message cube, identical in appearance to the one ExComm now had. He pocketed it and stopped at the men’s room to check his appearance in the mirror. His eyes were red and his face seemed all angles, stark and sharp. He combed his hair with jittery strokes and practiced looking relaxed. Must be smooth. Calm. Yes.

He froze, breathing shallow gasps as he looked at himself. Back there lay Alexandria, beyond his help but not beyond his caring. And here he stood, dealing an ace from under the deck to the men he’d worked with, not trusting them, a fine film of perspiration cooling the skin below his eyes. If he could step outside his mind he was sure it would all appear stupid, blind. What was the Snark to him, anyway? Round the bend, he was. He curled a fist and pressed it against his thigh. Alexandria was now in their province, the world gnawing away at her. Let it come. Relax, he told himself. Be reasonable, Nigel.
Ping.
It’s gone way past tea, now. Things are well past the realm of pure bloody fucking sweet reason. Oh yes, oh yes.

Outside the Main Bay door he pressed the spot behind his ear. His telltale beeped on. He opened the door.

The Committee was there, and Evers, and Lubkin. Nigel moved among them, consulted, advised. He checked recent developments with the technicians. Lubkin showed him some ExComm work on a second signal to Snark—awkward, ambiguous, too complicated. Nigel nodded, murmured something. Lubkin gave him the ferrite cube with their signal in it and Nigel made a show of logging it into the communications board.

The casual air of the bay had evaporated. The Snark was still on the plotted course. Minutes ticked by. A half hour. The Committee buzzed with speculations and worries. Nigel fielded their questions and watched the Snark approach. Venus Monitor still showed only an unresolved dot of light.

Nigel spoke into his head microphone, ordering Venus Monitor out of the tandem control scheme JPL usually used; now the satellite would respond only to Nigel’s board. He ordered the Monitor’s main radio dish to rotate and fed in aiming coordinates.

Casually he fished his own ferrite cube from his pocket and logged it into the board. He punched in orders and the ExComm cube was retired into storage, while his own came to the fore, ready to transmit.

“What are you doing?” Lubkin said. The men around Nigel’s roller chair fell silent.

“Transmitting,” Nigel said.

He tapped in the crucial part: recognition code. He had memorized his telltale code months before, in Hufman’s office, and now he instructed his board to relay the Snark’s reply to him. The board would transmit directly to the telltale, so that Nigel could hear the reply before it was replayed in the Main Bay for the Committee.

“Here it goes,” Nigel said. He pressed a button and the board transmitted a recognition signal; his telltale beeped in sympathy in his ear.

He ordered Venus Monitor to begin signaling the Snark.

The ship was coasting smoothly when the strong signal found it.

It was a clever code, beginning with a plot of the ship’s own trajectory through this planetary system. So the beings of the third planet had followed all along, waiting. To reveal this now was a clear sign of nonhostile intentions; they could have kept their capabilities secret.

The craft quickly located the source of the pulse, circling this shrouded planet. Was this world occupied, too? It recalled an ancient amphibian race that evolved on a world not too dissimilar, whose inability to see the stars through the blanket of clouds had retarded them forever. And it thought of other worlds, encased in baking layers of gases, where the veined rock itself attained intelligence, laced together by conducting metals and white-hot crystals.

The machines studied the radio pulse for a fraction of a second. There was much here to understand. Elaborate chains of deduction and inference led to a single conclusion: the third planet was the key. Caution was no longer justified.

The computers would have to revive the slumbering intelligence which could deal with these problems. They would become submerged in that vast mind. There was a bittersweet quality to the success of their mission; their identity would cease. The overmind would seek whatever channel it needed to understand this new species, and these more simple computers would be swept up in its currents.

The revival began.

The craft readied itself to answer.

The ferrite cube emptied itself. Nigel heard a blur of stuttered tenor squeals.

“
Hey!
What’re you—”

Lubkin had noticed the switch in cubes. Some indexing error? Lubkin reached over Nigel’s shoulder toward the board controls.

Nigel lunged upward. He caught Lubkin’s arm and twisted it away from the board.

Someone shouted. Nigel swung out of his chair and pulled on Lubkin’s arm, slamming him into another man. Lubkin’s coat sleeve ripped open.

His telltale beeped. The Snark was answering. Nigel froze. The pattern was clear, even though speeded up: the Snark was sending back Nigel’s original message.

Nigel wobbled. In the enameled light the faces of Evers and Lubkin swam toward him. He concentrated on the burbling in his head. There; the Snark had finished retransmitting Nigel’s signal. Nigel felt a surge of joy. He had broken through. They could reply with—

Someone seized his arm, butted into his ribs. He opened his mouth to say something, to calm them. Voices were babbling.

His telltale squealed. Shrieked.

Sound exploded in his mind. The world writhed and spun.

He felt something dark and massive move through him. There was a bulging surge, filling— The torrent swallowed his identity.

Nigel gasped. Clawed the air. Fell, unconscious.

FOURTEEN

Lubkin was talking to him. Meanwhile fireflies of blue-white banked and swooped and stung his eyes. They were distracting. Nigel watched the cloud of singing fireflies flitting between him and the matted ceiling. Lubkin’s voice droned. He breathed deeply and the fireflies evaporated, then returned. Lubkin’s words became more sharp. A weight settled in his gut.

They understood Nigel’s state of mind, Lubkin said. About his wife and all. That explained a lot. Evers wasn’t even very angry about Nigel’s maneuver with J-27. It was a better idea, the committee admitted, once they’d had a chance to study it. What the hell, they could understand…

Nigel grinned dizzily, ironically.

The fireflies sang. Danced.

Evers was pretty pissed at Nigel’s suckering them, Lubkin said, forehead wrinkling. But now J-27 had responded. That made things better. Evers was willing to ignore Nigel’s deception. Considering, that is, Alexandria.