The Ophiuchi Hotline (29 page)

Lilo-Diana hung on to the harpoon while the animal headed for the deep ocean. It reached the bottom and leveled out, still swimming strongly.

The adrenalin slowly began to wear away, and Lilo was left with the bitter dregs of defeat. She had not killed the beast, and was not likely to. She was not sure if she had even hurt it.

Eventually she let go and the whale vanished in the blue water in front of her. She floated, neither rising or sinking.

Where did she go from here? Her hand touched the intake valve on her chest. She could turn off the suit and drown quickly. Or she could rise to the surface and strike out for shore. She would probably make it with the suit lung feeding her air, but did she want to?

There was something above her.

Without knowing why, she kicked upward to meet it.

It grew rapidly—(
below me now, still falling
)—and made no attempt to get away from her. The shape hurt her eyes. Yellow? No, many colors—(
a deeper yellow than the billowing clouds that now came into view around me, below me, another of the things like the one I had fallen into so many years before
)—all colors and all shapes, contained in one shape.

Her stomach lurched, and she was falling.

I don’t know how long I fell, but the question probably has no meaning. I was falling through space and time, and through my own life.

It became no longer possible to know who or where I was. Every second of my life existed simultaneously. I was

standing on a rocky plain beneath a bright light, and knew I was on the world that used to be called Poseidon, but was now two light-years from the sun.

crying, hopelessly, with a depth of feeling never to be equaled in my life, holding the head of a dead man in my lap.

falling through the Jovian atmosphere.

facing the man called Vaffa, watching his weapon rise in slow-motion, hearing an explosion.

holding a knife in my hand, thinking about suicide.

looking at fish in a spinning, circular tank.

running through trees beneath a burning blue sun, laughing.

talking with a man named Quince in the public bath on Pluto.

sitting in a conference room at the hub of a seventy-kilometer wheel, watching a presentation from an alien race.

feeling an erect penis enter my body, with lights flashing around the walls of my room.

facing Vaffa, his gun coming up to kill me.

coming to life in a pool of yellow fluid.

five years old, holding my mother’s hand as we followed the transporter carrying our possessions to a new home.

sitting in the green glow of my computer terminal, studying an interesting interpretation of Hotline data.

docking with a huge colony ship orbiting 82 Eridani. The planet was inhabited, and we would have to move on.

fording a stream in America, white water rushing around my knees.

giving birth to Alicia, my second child, on the way to the core.

holding Alicia’s hand as she gave birth to my grandson.

facing Vaffa.

dying. Dying again. And again.

I recoiled from it helplessly. All moments had been
now.
They all vanished, leaving me confused images and almost no memory. The things I remembered were as often in my future as in my past.

It returned, that vertiginous feeling of inhabiting all my past, present, and future at one time. Again I recoiled, and this time rebounded along the four-dimensional length of that long pink worm with a million legs that was my life, from my birth to my many deaths. I was one entity, one viewpoint, one now, I traveled the whole length of my existence, backward and forward, into the future and the past.

I fell back again, disoriented, confused. I had been shown something my mind could not contain, and I felt the memories of it fading already. I existed in too many ways at the same time for me to comprehend it. My eyes would not function, or they presented me with images that my brain could not assimilate.

I don’t know how long I rested in that quiet, black place I had come to. There was no time, but all my sisters were there with me. We began to see, a little. Something swam into my detached consciousness, a strange thing that I perceived without actually seeing it. Strange as it was, it was closer to familiarity than anything else around me. Suddenly I knew it was a valuable thing. It was something I had to have. (Someone was telling me I had to have it?) It belonged to them, to the Invaders, and I had to possess it.

I reached
—

She remembered Cathay leaning over her, shaking her shoulders. Her head bobbed back and forth, loosely. Her eyes focused.

“…all right? What happened?”

“Did they do something to you?” It was Vaffa’s voice, and Lilo smiled when she saw the genuine concern
in her face. Vaffa, Vaffa, there’s hope for you yet.

“Who
is
that?”

“That’s me,” Lilo said, and sat up. It was Javelin who had asked the question, and Lilo had known what she was talking about. She had seen this moment during the kaleidoscope that had overcome her while the Trader siren wailed. She looked at the new occupant of the room—a tall, brown woman, dripping wet—and they nodded at each other. There was no need for any words between them. They had both been here before.

She was holding something in her hand, a silvery cube five centimeters on a side.

“Who are you?” Vaffa asked.

The woman looked curiously at Vaffa.

“I guess you can call me Diana, to avoid confusion. It’s what everyone else called me.”

The word sparked a fresh cascade of memories in Lilo’s mind. She tried to hold them, but they were fading like a dream. A long trip, a fantastic trip, ten years of walking…hardships met and conquered…tall trees, huge trees that reached to the ceiling—no, that was from her own lifeline. She tried again to remember. There was another Lilo out there, on the runaway moon. She had been forced forward in time to her own death, three deaths and backward to many more…hadn’t she? She was no longer sure. But something was guiding her steps still, some knowledge of how things would be, of how they
had been.

“Let’s get out of here,” Lilo said.

“What?” Javelin couldn’t believe what she heard. “I’ve got a lot of things I want to—”

“No. It’s no use. Just one question,” she said, looking at William. “What’s that thing in my…in her hand?”

William looked sad.

“That,” he said, “is a singularity. Things are going faster than we expected.”

“And what is a singularity?”

He shrugged. “I wish we knew. If we did, we would be the equals of Invaders. We call it that because it
violates basic laws of the universe. We think it might not exist in our universe, at least not in the normal way. What you see is just a nullfield that covers the thing itself. You’ll never see any more than that.”

“And what does it do?” Lilo felt dizzy. She had known the answers to the questions she was asking.

“It seems to remove the inertia from a body. Don’t ask me how. We’ve studied them for millions of years and we don’t know how it works. We think it might convert inertia to some other property of matter and store it in a theoretical hyperspace, or fifth dimension.”

“Without all the double-talk, you’re saying it’s a space drive,” Javelin said.

“The basis for a space drive. When you learn to use it, which will be very soon, you will be able to reach high speeds very quickly, and with very little fuel. The stars will be in your reach.”

“I stole it,” Diana said, proudly.

“Hmmm?” William glanced at her. He seemed distracted. “Indeed? You stole it, you say? Wonderful. You seem to have put one over on the Invaders.”

Diana looked proud for a moment, then uncertain. Lilo felt sorry for her. She already had some notion of what had actually happened.

“I didn’t, did I?” Diana said.

“No. It’s part of the pattern which will culminate in the extermination of what remains of your species in the Solar System, other than the remnants on your home planet. The singularity will reproduce itself. It may even be a living creature. I won’t pretend that we know much about it, but we use them, like everyone else.”

“But why did they give it to us?”

“I don’t know their motives. But they don’t seem to wish to kill entire species. They didn’t kill anyone on Earth, you remember, not directly. Nor did they hunt down the survivors on Luna. They let you live until you started bothering them. Now they are giving you another chance to spread yourselves to the stars; I don’t think they care if you take it, but the chance is always offered.”

“Then they do care about humans.”

William frowned. “Who knows what they care about? They’ve not seemed unduly concerned about the hardships of my race. That singularity may seem miraculous to you, and to me. To them, it is probably the same level of technology as the chipped-stone cutting tool.”

Cathay was still looking back and forth between the two Lilos.

“Will someone tell me what the hell’s going on?” he said. “Who is she, and where did she come from?”

“You don’t recognize me?” Diana asked. “Can I have changed that much? The last time you saw me, I was falling into Jupiter.”

“But where have you
been
…I mean, how did—”

“She was returned by the Invaders,” William said. “They simply bent her lifeline back on itself. From the strength of our preliminary indications, she went several thousand years into the future, spent ten years on Earth, and was returned here. It was as easy for them as connecting two dots with a line would be for you.”

Lilo was getting impatient.

“Can we go now? I can answer most of your questions when we get back to the ship.”

“Yes, yes,” William said. “If you want to leave, then go. We’ll have to rearrange some of our plans, of course. We expected something like this, but not so soon. And not in our own backyard. It’s very disturbing. Think about what we told you. It still stands, but you don’t have as much time as we thought you did.”

“We never even got to see the inside of their big ring,” Cathay grumbled. “All we saw was an artificial construction.”

“A stage set,” Vaffa suggested.

“Whatever. Something they whipped up to make us feel at home.”

Javelin was looking out
Cavorite’s
glass dome at the wheel. “I think they didn’t want us to see inside.”

Vaffa looked up. She had been brooding since they returned to the ship over an hour ago. She had listened silently as Diana told her story, and as Lilo tried her best to fill them in on the things she had learned, and how
she had learned them. Halfway through her story, Lilo realized she was not getting it across to them. Javelin and Cathay were looking frankly skeptical, though it became plain that neither of them had any better explanation for the events they had observed. Javelin had advanced the theory—as diplomatically as possible—that Diana was an imposter, someone made by the Traders for reasons known only to themselves.

Lilo and Diana had not bothered to refute the accusation, and it soon died of its own weight. No one could think of a reason why the Traders would need to infiltrate humans so obviously. The question that continued to trouble them was, why did the Traders need to
ask
for human culture? Weren’t they strong enough to take it?

The tentative conclusion was reached that they should wait and see. They knew nothing about the process the Traders intended using to obtain human culture. They knew little about Trader capabilities of any kind.

“What are we going to do?” Vaffa asked. “I’ll admit it. I’ve never been as confused as I am right now.”

“What do you mean?” Javelin asked. “Do about what?”

“About…everything! All those things they told us. Do you all believe them?”

Javelin looked helplessly at Lilo and Diana, genuinely puzzled. “What’s got her so upset? Do you know what she’s talking about?”

“Ah…probably she’s concerned about…you know, the trouble that’s going to be coming up.”

“
Trouble?”
Vaffa squeaked. Her voice was getting dangerously shrill. “Trouble? You call the end of the Eight Worlds ‘trouble’? That
is
what’s going to happen, isn’t it? Didn’t I hear it right?”

“Yes,” Lilo said. “That’s what they said.”

“Well…” She froze for a moment, mouth open, her hands suspended in a desperate grasping pose before she slapped them down to her knees. “Am I the only one who cares about it?” She looked around the group, finally settling on Javelin.

“Why pick on me?” Javelin said, slightly uncomfortable.

“Sure, I don’t like the idea of so many people dying. But they’ll have a chance to get away, the Traders said that, too. All they have to do is take it. As for the ‘Eight Worlds’…” She made a rude noise. “Why should I care? I’m not a citizen.”

Vaffa looked to Cathay. He shrugged. “Do something, you said, right? Listen, I’ll go right home and polish up my sword. Then it’s you and me—I can count on you, can’t I?—back to back and shoulder to shoulder against the Invaders—”