In the Ocean of Night (27 page)

My friend.

His uncle had fought in some grimy jungle conflict, somewhere. The man had told stories about it, resolving all complicated political theory with the unanswerable gut reality of a souvenir pistol and bayonet, proudly displayed. Nigel had thought it a minor eccentricity, like owning a complete fifty-year run of
National Geographic.

The fist lifted.

The fist returned.

A rivulet of spittle ran down his chin. He licked at it, unwilling to move a hand. His eyes ached. Each of his kidneys was a sullen lump just beneath the skin of his back.

Iron and oil,

Brought to a boil.

Abruptly, he floated. The dull rumble died. He sucked in air, feeling life return to his numbed arms and legs, and automatically scanned the regiments of lights before him.

He was flying blind, no telltale radar to guide him. After a few minutes of checking he activated the breadboarded fire control center and received acknowledgments from the computers that rode in the missiles. Then he rotated his couch to get a full view out the large observation port.

Nothing. The port was black, vacant. He logged the time and checked the running printout on his slate. The burn was right, his heading was dead on. The Snark was coming in for an orbit around the moon, as Houston had asked it to, and he would come up from behind, closing fast.

He glanced out the port again. Nothing. Now that he was on a definite mission, moving, the complete radio silence was eerie. Out the side port he could see the moon fall away, an endless dirty-gray plain of jumbled craters.

He searched the main port carefully, watching for relative motion against the scattered jewels of the fixed stars. He was studying the star field so intently that he nearly missed the bright point of light that drifted slowly into view.

“Ha!” Nigel said with satisfaction. He swung the viewing telescope down from its mount. Magnified, there was no doubt. The diamond point resolved into a small pearl. The Snark was a sphere, silvery, with no apparent markings.

Nigel could see no means of propulsion. Perhaps they were on the other side of the object, or not operating at the moment. It didn’t matter; his missiles had both heat-seeking and radar guidance. But things could not come to that…

Nigel squinted, trying to estimate the range. The Venusian satellites set a minimum possible radius of one kilometer. If that was about right—

A voice said:

“I wish you the riding of comfortable winds.”

Nigel froze. The odd, brassy voice came from his helmet speakers, free of static.

“I… what…”

“A fellow traveler. We shall share this space for a moment.”

“It
is
…you… speaking?”

“You believe I cannot sense your canister. Because it overlaps the cross section of your star.”

“Ah, that was the general idea.”

“Thus, I spoke. For my life.”

“How do you know?”

“There are fewer walls than you may think. There can be intersections of—there is no word of yours for the idea. Let us say I have met this before, in different light.”

“I—”

“You are alone. I do not understand how your kind can divide guilt. Here, in this cusp, I know it cannot be done. You are one man and you have no place to hide.”

“If I…”

“You would make mean comfort for yourself. You are ready?”

“I never thought I would have to…”

“Though you came. Ready.”

“To get here at all I had to agree…”

The voice took on a wry edge. “Permit me.”

From the left port came a bright orange flare and a blunt thump as death took wing. A spike of light arced into the front port and spurted ahead. It was a burning halo, then a sharp matchpoint of flame, then a shrinking dot that homed with bitter resolve.

A chemical warhead. Nigel sat stunned. A thin shrill
beep
rattled in the cabin as automatic tracking followed the missile. Somehow the Snark had made his craft fire. Red numerals of trajectory adjustments flickered and died, unseen, on the board before him.

The idiot beep quickened. The burning point of light swept smoothly toward the blurred disk beyond it.

Nigel sucked in his breath—

The sky splintered.

A searing ball of flame billowed out. It thinned, paled. Nigel clutched at his couch, unmoving, nostrils flared. The beep was gone. A faint burr of static returned. He hung suspended, waiting. He stared ahead.

Beyond the slowly dulling disk of flame a dab of light moved to the left. Its image wavered and then resolved, intact; a perfect sphere.

It dawned on Nigel that the chemical warhead had detonated early. The silvery ball was drifting from sight. Nigel automatically corrected his course.

The voice came deeper now, dryly modulated:

“You have changed since we walked together.”

Nigel hesitated, mind spinning soundlessly on fine threads over the abyss.

“The sword is too heavy for you,” the voice said matter-of-factly.

“I didn’t intend to carry it at all—”

“I know. You are not so hobbled and coiled.”

“I wonder.”

“Your race has a stream of tongues. You communicate with many senses—more than you know. These were difficult for me. Sometimes it was as though there were two species…I did not understand that each man is so different.”

“Why, of course.”

“I have met other beings who were not,” the voice said simply.

“How could they be? Did they follow instinctive patterns? Like our insects?”

“No. Insect… implies they were inferior or rigid. They were merely different.”

“But each member the same?” Nigel said easily, the words slipping free. He felt light, airy.

“They lived in a vast… you have no word. Interface, perhaps. Between binary stars. They were easier to fathom than your diversity. You are tensed, always moving in many directions at once. An unusual pattern. I have seldom seen such turbulence.”

“Madness.”

“And talent. I am afraid I have already risked too much to come near. My injunctions specify—”

A click, buzz, static. The voice passed from him. “Walmsley,
Walmsley.
Evers here. Intersection should have occurred. We just picked up a fragment of some transmission. Part of it sounded like you. What’s happened?”

“I don’t know.”

More static. Houston was probably using one of the lunar satellites to relay, skipping Hipparchus. He wondered what—

“Well, you’d damn better find out. About a minute ago we picked up a funny signal from the surface, too. We put the source near Mare Marginis. We thought maybe the Snark had altered course and landed there.”

“No. No, it’s directly in front of me.”

“Walmsley! Report! Did you get one off?”

“Yes.”

A blur of sound. “—score? Did it score?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“What?”

“It detonated before it hit. No damage.”

“And the backup? We haven’t registered any jump in radiation levels.”

“I’m not firing it. Never.” With the words a new clarity came into his world.

“Listen to me, Nigel.” A hint of urgency. “I’ve put a lot of—”

Nigel listened to it and wondered at how smoothly Evers’s voice slid from the ragged edge of anger to a silky persuasiveness; which was natural to the man? Or were they both masks?

“Good-bye, coach. No time for lectures right this minute.”

“You—” Faintly: “Let’s have the override. Okay, go on the count. Go.”

The firing button for the nuclear-tipped missile sat alone in a small bracketed section of the console. Nigel’s eyes were drawn to it because the board began flickering through a sequence of operations. He snapped the switches over to their inert positions, but the sequences continued. The board was dead. Evers had reverted control to Houston. Relay through a satellite? Nigel frantically clawed at the console, trying to find a way to stop—

The aft missile pod emptied with a roar. The thump jarred him back into his couch. Ahead, an orange ball dwindled as it knifed through blackness at the shadowy pearl beyond.

“Evers! You bastard, what are—”

“I am assuming command, as the President provided. As you can see, I have emptied the tube. Now if you would care to report the effect—”

Nigel thumbed away from that frequency.

“Snark! You reading me? Stop that missile, it’s—”

“I know.”

“
Detonate it.
There are sixteen megatons in that bird.” “Then I cannot.”

Something was happening to the pearl. A searing purple lance blossomed at one end.

“Good God, you
must
—”

“I cannot be certain of a silencing of the warhead. Detonation of such a device would kill you.”

“Kill…? NASA computed I could survive a blast from…”

“They were wrong. This close would be fatal.”

“I…”

“So I am fleeing. I will outrun it.”

Nigel peered out and found the pearl, on black velvet, the orange ball hanging in space nearby. Their relative motions were submerged by distance. From the Snark’s tail came a column of unimaginable brightness, dimming the silver glow of the Snark’s skin. The exhaust pattern was precise, carving order from the darkness that enveloped it.

“You can’t just nullify it?” Nigel said.

“Not with assurance.”

“You certainly controlled my inboard electronics well enough.”

“That was simple. The method, however, is not perfect. Apparently your technology has not realized yet the, ah, heel—”

“Achilles heel?”

“Yes. The systematic flaw in your electronics. They are unprotected.”

“Where are you going?” Nigel murmured tensely. “Outward.”

He sighted on Snark’s trajectory. The orange blossom trailed it, getting no closer. Snark’s path took it away from the moon in a steep arc. It was, he noticed, a highly energy-inefficient course. To elude the missile alone, it would have been simpler to— But then he saw that the Snark was keeping the moon always between it and Earth, so that the Deep Space Net would be at least partially blinded, and pursuit more difficult.

“You’re leaving.” It was not a question.

“I must. I exceeded my mandates when I approached so near. It was a calculated perturbation in my directives. A chance. I lost.”

“If I talked to NASA for a bit, perhaps—”

“No. I cannot err again. I have been overridden.” “You’re not free? I mean—”

“In a sense, no. And in another sense, one I could not describe to one of membrane, I am free.”

“But—damn it! You could tell us so much! You’ve been
out
there. Seen other stars. Tell me, please, why is it that, when we listen on the centimeter and meter bands— the radio spectrum—why don’t we hear anything? Our scientists argue that this portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is the cheapest part, considering that the sender must overcome the random emissions of stars and hydrogen gas. So we’ve been listening and—nothing.”

“Of course. They send me instead. I suspect…I am their way of learning what is nearby. If there is danger they inform each other. I have listened to their messages.”

“How? We haven’t heard anything.”

“To you the medium is… exotic. Particles you do not perceive.”

“You could teach us.”

“It is forbidden me.”

“Why?”

“I am not certain…I have been given specific directives. Why these directives and not others I…I have thought often about them. I make guesses. That you, for example, are the aim of my wanderings.”

“Then stay.”

“I only notify them of your presence. So they will know, I expect, that you may someday come.”

“Why not—”

“Come to study you? Too fraught with risk. Your kind is too precarious. I have seen thousands of ruined, gutted worlds. Wars, suicides, who can tell? To my makers you are a plague, the one percent of the galactic cultures that carry the seeds of chaos.”

“I don’t …”

“You are rare. My makers, you see, were machines such as myself.”

Nigel felt himself drifting in a high and hollow place, airless. He glanced out at the wheeling moon. Its riddled and wrinkled hide he saw afresh, looming strange below, craters of absurdly perfect circles that had been arranged so randomly. Nigel breathed deeply.

“The stars are…”

“Populated by the machines, descendants of the organic cultures that arose and died.”

“Computers live forever?”

“Unless a carbon-based life finds them. Machine societies cannot respond to your strange mixture of minds coupled with glands. They have no evolutionary mechanism to make them develop techniques for survival— other than by hiding.”