The Diamond Moon (29 page)

 

“Meaning if nobody comes to our rescue, we sail on forever,” said McNeil.

 

“ ’Fraid so.”

 

For a moment their suitcomms were filled with nothing but Jupiter static; then Mays spoke. “You’ve got my suit fuel. Just get rid of me. Perhaps you can still save yourselves.”

 

“Not the sort of thing that’s usually done,” said Groves.

 

“And of course you’re the sort who always does the
usual
thing,” Mays said spitefully.

 

“I think he’s trying to provoke us, Angus,” Groves said.

 

“Won’t do him any good. All
déjà vu
to me,” said McNeil. “Sure, kill off the odd inconvenient fellow and you may live a bit longer. Then try living it down.”

 

Groves clucked his tongue. “I say, was that a pun?”

“Clever you.” They sailed on into space, their suit rockets pushing them toward the diamond moon that now almost filled their sky—knowing that they would have no way of stopping, or even of turning, once they reached it.

“Frankly,”
said Mays, “it doesn’t really matter to me whether you two live or die. I would like to make a state-ment before
I
die.”

 

“We’re listening,” said McNeil.

 

“Not to you two. To . . . to Forster, I suppose. To that woman Troy, or whatever she calls herself these days.”

 

McNeil keyed his suitcomm. “Can you still pick us up, Professor?”

 

The answer came back so clear that Forster might have been in a suit next to them. “I’ve been listening in, Angus. Say what you have to do, Sir Randolph.”

 

“I’m listening too, Sir Randolph,” Sparta said, as clearly as Forster.

Mays sighed deeply, and took a deep breath of his suit’s cold air. “My name is not Randolph Mays,” he said. “You may know me by other names. William Laird. Jean-Jacques Lequeu. I am none of these. My name does not matter.”

“That’s right, your name doesn’t matter,” Sparta said, her voice as close as if she were inside his head— and to him the sound of her must have been like the hissing of a lizard, for he had been foolish enough to believe she really did not know him. “You thought you had killed my parents. You thought you had
created
me. But nothing you did made any difference. None of it mattered, Mr. Nemo. Neither do you.”

“We
do
want to hear what you have to say,” Forster said hastily.

“Well, you will hear it,” Mays said wearily. “The cursed woman is right: I don’t matter anymore. But we
prophetae
were not mad.
We
preserved the Knowledge, the Knowledge that made her what she is . . . that brought all of us to this place.”

We committed horrible crimes in the name of the Knowl edge.

Perhaps you think it strange that I can admit this so plainly. Conventional thinkers—most people— believe that the daring criminal, the outrageous criminal, the man or woman who murders innocents in cold blood, blows them up in some anonymous bombing or slaughters them with a machine gun, never having seen them before, not knowing anything about them, that such an implacable murderer, as opposed to the congenial spouse-killer or child-butcher, could not possibly be possessed of a conscience. How pitifully mistaken
.

Mays flew alone through space, reciting his macabre so-liloquy while the shining bulk of the worldship expanded to one side. McNeil and Groves were alone too, some dis-tance away—not out of any sense of privacy or decorum, but because they had released their grip on him and in the course of several hundred meters had simply drifted way. All three spacesuits were depleted of maneuvering fuel; the men drifted and turned randomly, sometimes facing each other, sometimes staring away into empty space, or at the mirror surface of the thing that had been Amalthea, or into the awesome cloud-cauldron of Jupiter.

We
prophetae
knew well what we did. We ached for those we sacrificed. The ancient primitives who prayed for the souls of the deer they ate were no more devout than we.

We committed horrible crimes and kept our good cheer, as those before us had done for milleniums. In the end, we believed, the sum of history and the fate of humankind would exculpate us; men and women would bless us.

None of us hoped to live forever, and if a few—or a great many—innocents had to die before Paradise arrived, it was all to the good, for Paradise would arrive that much sooner; that many more would benefit in future.

And so, in the name of the Knowledge, to hurry the day when the Pancreator would return, we made another attempt to realize the Emperor of the Last Days, the feast of the gods. We created her.

Or, as my colleagues and contemporaries insist upon re minding me, I created her. But I cannot take all the credit. Her parents—those subtle, lying Hungarians—sold her to me. Under my direction, a few modifications were made. She re fused to cooperate. She, this child, knew the Knowledge bet ter than the knights and elders, she insinuated. Too bad I was unsuccessful in disposing of my failure.

After she escaped, only a fistful of years passed before she showed us that seven thousand years of the Knowledge were, to phrase it mincingly, incomplete. The Venusian tab lets revealed that our translations were in error, especially our translation of the Martian plaque. There would be no signal from the homeworld in Crux. The Doradus, the main stay of what was to be our final assault, was thrown away by that fool Kingman.

The monstrous woman went further, striking at us in our most secret strongholds—I myself came within a hair’s breadth of death at her hands. Then Howard Falcon, who was to have been the new Emperor, failed to rouse the Pan creator on Jupiter; the so-called world of the gods was only a world of elephantine animals. None of us had foreseen the significance of Amalthea; there was not a word of it in the Knowledge. Our plans and our pride were cast in the dust.

We knights and elders of the prophetae—those of us who survived—lost courage at last. We faced the bitter truth, that everything we had worked for and believed was in error. We had earned no privileges by virtue of our false secrets; if Paradise did come to Earth, we were not among the chosen. I refused to enter the suicide pact with the others. They heartily cursed me, but at least I did them the service of scattering their ashes in space.

For me, three things remained. I would gaze upon the face of the Pancreator. I would bring death to the terrible woman I had helped create. Then I would die myself. To this end I resurrected the useful personality of Sir Randolph Mays and did all that you know about and can infer.

I have seen the Pancreator. What you call the Ambas sador is the being for whom seven thousand years of my tradition had prepared me. I was not even prepared for the inevitable disappointment. He, or she, or whatever it is, is not an ugly thing, but neither is it a god
.

At last Mays fell silent. If he was done, he had timed his speech well, for the three drifting men were passing as close to the world-ship as they were likely to come. They were no more than half a kilometer from the still-gaping opening of that equatorial hold into which the
Ventris
had settled, but helpless to stop or turn in their onward rush.

Mays could not resist adding a final, unnecessary com-ment. “My hopes for revenge have also been disappointed. At least I will not be cheated of my own death.”

“Think again, Nemo.” Sparta shattered any dignity which might have clung, mold-like, to Mays’s selfpity. “The Am-bassador has a name. Thowintha is many things—the pilot of this ship, among them—but not what you choose to call the Pancreator.” She laughed, low in her throat. “And you aren’t dead yet.”

A second later the three men understood her. From the cavity of the world-ship’s enormous hold, three almost invisibly fine silvery tentacles had emerged and were rapidly feeling their way through space. They moved unerringly, with the quickness of rattlesnakes, as if with their own per-ception and intelligence.

“
Ahh
. . . easy there!” McNeil cried out, as one of the ten-tacles hooked his leg and jerked him upside down.

 

“Whoops!” Groves exclaimed at almost the same mo-ment—a boy’s gleeful shout; a tentacle had him by the arm.

 

Mays merely grunted in surprise as the third tentacle wrapped itself around his middle.

Immediately the silvery fibers were taut, although they were still playing out of the hold faster than a fishing line spinning off a reel. The total difference in velocity between the ship and the men was that of a well-thrown skipping stone on Earth, and the ship’s smart tentacles did not mean to dismember their prey by taking up the slack all at once. But within three hundred meters the men were momentarily motionless with respect to the ship; the ship instantly started reeling them in.

Sparta’s calm voice came into their suitcomms: “You are going to be put into the airlock of the
Ventris
— it’s open for you. You will have very little time to prepare for accelera-tion, a few seconds at most. Don’t stop to take off your suits, just head for the wardroom and lie flat on the floor. I can’t say how many gees we’re going to pull. Regard any delay as potentially fatal.”

The tentacles seemed to have a very precise knowledge of how much acceleration and deceleration a human’s body could be expected to withstand without serious injury. They pulled hard and fast, stiffened within a couple of dozen me-ters of the hold, and dragged the men in through it as the dome was already knitting itself back together. Side by side, the men cleared the dome just as it snapped shut, only a little more than the height of their helmets above them.

The
Ventris
appeared ridiculously tiny where it lay inside the kilometer-wide lock. Within seconds the whiplike ten-tacles had shoved the men through the
Ventris
’s open equipment bay—one, two, three, they were deposited and released—and the tentacles snatched away out of their sight. Even Randolph Mays, who had so recently recited his own funeral oration, scurried through the double hatches and sought a flat place to lie down.

The world began to move even before they had gotten down on their knees. But Sparta—who surely had known what she was doing, intending to hurry them along—had exaggerated the awesome capabilities of Culture X. Even the alien vessel did not have the capacity to translate itself—an ellipsoid thirty kilometers long and filled with water—with an instant acceleration of one Earth gravity.

No, the incredible column of fire that burst from its “north” pole, pointed directly at Jupiter, moved the world-ship slowly at first, just enough to make the floor of the
Ventris
’s wardroom feel more like a floor than a wall. Indeed, after a few seconds, Angus McNeil got up to make himself more comfortable, unlatching his helmet and throw-ing it aside, struggling out of his suit.

He moved prematurely. By the time he’d gotten his top half off, the world-ship was accelerating at one gee; by the time he’d gotten the bottom half halfway down his legs it was moving at five, and he could no longer support his own rapidly increasing weight. He crashed to the padded floor and lay there, his bulk crushing the fabric.

Sparta’s voice came into the helmets of Tony Groves and the man who had called himself Randolph Mays. “I’m given to understand that acceleration will continue to increase for five more minutes and then cease. By then we will be well on our way to our destination.”

Groves, the navigator, forced a question out of his col-lapsing chest. “Where might that be, Inspector?”

“I don’t know. However, I take it we are going to meet Sir Randolph’s Pancreator after all.” On the bridge of the world-ship—what the explorers had mistaken for an art gallery—little Sparta and big Thowintha studied the living, shining murals and charted their course thereby. They floated close to each other, turning and glid-ing through the waters of the control space, communicating with the schools of myriad helpers, as if they had known each other for a billion years and were waterdancing to celebrate their long-delayed reunion.

But even as she danced with the alien, an unimaginable event which she had imagined countless times in her dreams, she thought of Blake, her true mate. . . .

He brooded in the hold of the
Ventris
. He thought he must be getting old, very old. And it was true, he’d changed: the older he got the more like a responsible adult he became. In this whole trip he hadn’t found an excuse to blow anything up.