The Sunborn (14 page)

“Yes, and Lightgiver shrank to Its smallest size—I assume, for, of course, I could not watch during the frozen time. Then Lightgiver began to grow again, to the point at which It could again give us warmth and zest. But as the second cycle began, fewer of us awoke.
How many zand are there today?
”

The daily Rendezvous ensured that all of them knew. “Yesterday there were 3,441.”

“
Half
what there were before the last long freeze. And Lightgiver bestows less warmth and light every day. Your personal experience is that of other zand: Self-merge leads to Birthing only when our world is most warm.”

“So we do not grow in numbers sufficient to replace ourselves?”

“Yes, and then the long cold time takes a further toll. If three thousand of us live until the next great freeze begins, far fewer still will wake for the start of the next warming cycle. Fewer still will see its end. A dark day will come, therefore, when no zand at all will meet at Rendezvous, ever again.”

Terror shook the younger zand. “And if
none
of us wake and feed, who will be here to sing Lightgiver’s praises?”

“The flappers and the borers, perhaps,” Old One savagely replied. Then, more gently: “Go, youngling; I have told you. Go to Rendezvous! Tell the others! May you have good Self-merge, with a Birthing and many young. Salute!”

With a hiss the young zand deflated, dropped into the sea, and began almost desperately to swim. In moments Younger was gone into the pink dawn mists.

Old One had felt the warming, kindling steady and true through the long turns of the world. The past was cold, the future warm. Why? What did those who ruled this world, the gods of darkness, mean by all this? Why the Darksiders, who came to kill so many?

Heat was good, bringing life to the world.

Warmth was the Good.

The Darksiders came always in from the night sky and, once here, killed without mercy. From the Dark came Evil. Why?

Buoyed by lifegas, the Old One floated and pondered the many seasons of joy and pain it had seen.

A
RED LIGHT WINKED ON
:
she’s here.

John Axelrod crushed out his cigar stub, hurriedly shoved it and the ashtray into a bottom desk drawer, and turned up the air circulator. Position had its perks.

In a few moments Dr. Jensen would be walking in, and there was no point in adding to the psychiatrist’s expectable irritation. To the traditional medical and moral arguments against smoking had lately been added a snob objection as well: tobacco use had come to be associated by Euro-Americans with the tropical world’s urban hells, where people still smoked because it was the only pale pleasure they could afford.

The sealable double door swung open and Hilge Jensen stepped over the threshold. She was in her hospital whites, not her office wear. As usual, she started in as though they had been only momentarily interrupted, even though it was fifteen minutes since he told her to come talk this out in person.

“Look,” Hilge said in her quick, flat tones, “consider her personality profile. Smart as a whip, and she paid for it in the usual coinage—isolated with the elite in school, socially a bit slow. Raised by a grandmother because neither of her own parents could be bothered—”

“Need I remind you that we are speaking of my own daughter here?” Axelrod kept his voice flat and objective, he hoped. “That’s a very inexact description of my family situation to boot.”

“Well, of course—” Hilge blinked, recalculated. “But I am trying to be analytical—”

“Proceed.”

“Well, she has a problem with authority—”

“A mild way to put it.” Axelrod kept his face calm, but he sure as hell didn’t feel that way. Shanna was his daughter by his second wife—he’d had four wives before realizing that a workaholic life that involved commuting to the moon was incompatible with having a family. Wife number three was a gold digger without motherly instincts, and number four was a beautiful ice queen (what had he been thinking?) who couldn’t deal with such a headstrong child. Shanna had ignored both of them, he knew, recognizing that they were likely to be temporary. His mother, the imperious Norma, was the most constant person in Shanna’s early life, and eventually she’d gone to live permanently at his childhood home with her. And managed to grow up.

No, don’t relive that again. Focus.
“Very…mild.”

She read his expression and hurried on. “So she learned early to live alone, after her parents divorced, the usual problems—live with others and like it.”

“I know, this.” Still objective.
Faster to let her run on than challenge everything she says.

“Uh, yes. She takes on a late-teenage persona under pressure because that’s the mode she used before she started astronaut training. Solitary tech interests, which she covers in social settings with a jaunty air, exuberance masking anxiety—again, fairly standard personality strategy—”

“I do remember your reports,” he said dryly, still hoping to short-circuit the lecture.

Hilge’s eyes jittered. “Uh, sure, but we knew she could fit well into that crew. Plenty of leadership skills, well demo’ed in earlier flights—”

“And now she’s reverted to an old pattern, the bright-eyed-kid personality—I caught it, just listen to that broadcast. Loaded with false voice signatures!” He liked the quick blink Hilge always gave when he used her own jargon back on her. Did she think he’d made billions without having instinctive people-reading skills?

“Uh, yes—and along with it comes the early idealism. She
wants
to find life on Pluto. There aren’t any green men or red princesses on Mars, just a mat. So she’s bound there’ll be something like them on
her
planet. And when people start acting out their fantasies—”

He flared. “You think she’s hallucinating?”

“She’s a long way from home, rest of crew asleep, talking away, tired—”

“She’s a trained astronaut.” He tried to keep his voice flat.

“But these descriptions—” Hilge spread her hands, raised eyebrows. “The astronomers say nothing like this is—”

“Well, they haven’t been there, have they?” He made himself be mild and steady again. “So what’re we supposed to do? You can’t give her word-association tests when it’s five hours between the first word and her response, and another five hours before you can throw her the next word.”

“Uh, her medication—”

“I know you snuck some of your pharm stuff into some of the mission foods.”

“It was recommended—after long flights—”

“So we suggest some menu changes? She’ll smell that right away.” A pattern he had heard before, drugs as panacea, even the new smart drugs that everybody said were precision, zero side effects. Some damn doctor had even suggested some for himself. He’d stormed out of the office, of course. Alcohol, small doses at the end of the day—that was all the chemical help he needed, thank you.

“Mr. Axelrod…”

He held a hand up to give himself time to get back to equilibrium. In Hilge’s blank look—yep, that’s what she was going to suggest next—he saw he would get no help from her. Pluto, he mused, sighing. The name conjured up either horror—the stern, just, and unforgiving Roman god of Hell—or else low humor: Mickey Mouse’s floppy-eared dog.

Yet Shanna had wanted to go there for so long. Other little girls’ idols included holomovie hunks and vid-song stars. His daughter’s started and ended with Clyde Tombaugh, the gangly farm kid from Kansas with his homemade telescope who had gone out to the Lowell Observatory early in the twencen and found Pluto within a few years…with a high school education.

Dr. Jensen was only the latest in a long line of psychosnoops who had pestered Shanna all her short life with their
why
questions. Who knew? Axelrod’s decades as an executive had taught that there would never be any clear answers to the deepest motivations, including his own. Maybe
especially
his own. The rational carapace everybody wore was a shell, and should be left that way. Intact.

The problem for those skeptical therapists and soul-probers had been that Shanna was not, and never had been, unfriendly or antisocial. A quick, lithe athlete, she had played on school teams, easily made friends—but on her own terms and not because she couldn’t bear to be alone. So the “psychodynamicists” skipped “Why Pluto?” and went directly to “Why do you want to be away for so long?”

“She is not following cooperative methods,” Hilge said flatly. “She had the rest of the crew dancing to her tune at first. Now some barely tolerate her.”

Axelrod grinned. People had been barely tolerating him for most of his career. “My daughter! Maybe she’s dancing to the music of the spheres.”

“We must do something.”

“I repeat: Shanna may be right. Ever think—”

The red light came on again. “Hell. That damned new press secretary. He insisted on seeing me before we go on the air.”

Hilge shifted gears; her voice became low, slow, and grim. “I know. I asked him to be here. Shanna’s actions are also, unfortunately, part of a much larger problem. I’ll let him fill you in.”

Press Secretary Harvell Swain walked in with the air of one on a mission. Axelrod hid his grimace behind a palm, faking a small cough. NASA had forced Swain on him in return for clearing away bureaucratic logjams. Axelrod longed for the grand old days when Mars was there for the taking, when NASA was glad to be out of the spotlight because they had muffed their own programs so badly. Mere interplanetary exploration was easy compared with the nasty art of political infighting…

Tripping over the threshold on his way through—he was a recent Earthside import, not yet used to lunar doors or the lunar energy-saving walk—he stumbled up to the desk, nodding formally to both Hilge and Axelrod. “I have come here to tell you that the press conference this evening must be called off.”

“Something the matter technically?” Axelrod countered.

“No. But we can’t air that report from Astronaut Shanna.”

“What do you mean, can’t?”

“Listen—years we’ve been sweating out this mission. Some politicians are still calling the whole thing a boondoggle, that the Pluto mystery is just scientists playing games. So now the captain says they’ve found life. In a single-person broadcast!”

“Great find, I’d say.”

“That’s exactly the point!” Swain shot back. “So aliens turn up just now? Just when Congress is wondering if the whole issue is a hoax?”

Axelrod had seen the usual skeptics making a lot of noise in the media, as excitement grew with
Proserpina’s
approach to Pluto. There had never been data that couldn’t be read several ways. The welfare lobby eyed NASA’s ballooning budget and made a few phone calls and
presto,
there were perfectly reputable scientists who didn’t believe the solar pause point was moving inward. No threat there, they said. So why all these dollars “sent out beyond Saturn”—as though
Proserpina
carried tanks full of cash, not water?

“You don’t really believe any of that hoax stuff, do you?” Axelrod asked with slow calm.

“It’s too neat! They aren’t going to believe her. And if you try to back her up, they won’t believe you, either.”

Axelrod knew the uses of being a hedgehog. He let the clock run.

The press secretary subsided, winded. Then he wound himself up for another try. “Look, Mr. Axelrod. I’ve given this thing all I’ve
got.
I laid a lot of groundwork on Earth before coming up here. Human-interest stories about the project, the works. ‘Outer darkness defied for a dream by plucky girl and loyal crew’—the works.”

“Young woman,” Hilge automatically corrected.

“Sure, but she looks like a girl, face it. And we all know why she got on this mission at all.”

An uncomfortable silence. Axelrod thought of saying,
Sure, the whole world does
—
because she’s Axelrod’s daughter.
“Saying it aloud here could still be dangerous, y’know.” The new robotic microbugs could fly in through the ventilator ducts, crawl in along walls, stow away on an incoming briefcase or trouser cuff. So even in his own office he had to keep his mouth circumspect. Modern times!

Swain said nothing, just nodded. Copying the hedgehog strategy?

“Okay,” Axelrod allowed, “intrepid explorer of our last frontier, check. In the horse race for Truth, Science comes way behind Perceptions.”

“Exactly. That’s what you pay me for.”

“The taxpayers pay you, not me.”

“But you can fire me. They can’t.”

“Touché. But you realize, don’t you, that we have here more than an oral report? Shanna sent us data, pictures. Plenty of which I have already begun sending down to the
New York Times
database. Also to the BBC.”

To Axelrod’s surprise the press secretary stood his ground. “And
you
realize, don’t you, sir, that data nowadays can very effectively be faked? That’s what they will think down there.”

So much spunk all of a sudden? What,
Axelrod wondered,
does he know politically from Earthside that I don’t?

Time to take the offensive. Axelrod stood up to his full height, which was considerable; a ploy he rarely had to use. “Look, there’s this religion that broke away from my own a couple of thousand years ago. It and mine haven’t always gotten along. But its founder once said, Ye shall
know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
Free! Hell, if we can’t stick with that, civilization—scientific civilization—might as well go out of business. We are going on this evening as scheduled, and take our chances with whatever Shanna says.”

“But it’s only, how can I—”

“Do it.” He stood there and gave them the long, firm look, knowing it would sink in. But he was thinking of years before, when all this had started.

Appropriately the desk announced, “Ten minutes.”

“Dad, I need your help to get on the Pluto mission.” Shanna looked at him with that direct way she had, mouth pursed.

Objections instantly crowded his mind. God, he was so glad to see her. How long had it been? How many months this time? And now she wanted to do…
what?