A Maze of Stars Page 35

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SHIP

  OACH NEEDED VIRTUALLY NO NANOSURGERY TO RID HIS BODY of local organisms; the Veiled Worlds having been sterile prior to human settlement, only a few recently mutated strains required attention. Nor did he have as many questions to put as most of his predecessors, for having grown up in a society dedicated to knowledge, he was well informed about the Ship, its nature, and its history. What he did want—what he insisted on with fervor after a meal that he gobbled down, treating it as mere refueling—was experience of other planets. He wanted to see and feel what they were like even if he could never personally visit them. For as long as it took to move out of the gas cloud into a zone where it was safe to go tachyonic—in that regard the Shipwrights had surpassed even those who had built the Ship of Ships—he reveled in what it showed him of the worlds it had already called at during this sweep. He first undertook a superficial survey of each, methodically noting points of interest he wanted to review or investigate more deeply, and would have requested a “return” to Trevithra had not Ship, brooking no contradiction, informed him of the danger to a conscious human in tachyonic space. Accustomed to an unvarying routine, Oach complied and retired—by his own wish—to a perfect imitation of the cubicle where he had slept at home. He had not even asked to view the stars from outside the cloud.

  “We are approaching my next port of call,” Ship stated.

  For the first time since coming aboard Oach betrayed signs of excitement.

  “Another planet? One that I can actually go down to, walk about on, breathe the air of? What’s it called?”

  “It’s one your people have been told of: Zemprad.”

  The young man’s face fell. “The quarantine world? The one that refuses contact with anybody and won’t accept any offers of help?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Not yet.”

  Among the other questions Oach had not put were any that might have enabled him to find out about the random order of Ship’s visits. The fact that it did come back, as originally promised, seemed to satisfy him. He said after a pause, “Are you stopping here because you fear something may be threatening the population? Are you likely to have to rescue them all and take them somewhere safer?”

  If I’d done it, I’d remember. And I didn’t. All I know—shall know—is that they die off. What I’m here to find out is the reason.

  But all Ship said aloud was, “No.”

  “Surely…” Oach hesitated. “The only thing we know about Zemprad, or at any rate our best guess, is that they must be suffering from some kind of plague, presumably native. Is that so?”

  “Certainly they believe they’re in so dangerous a situation that they won’t let any outsider risk exposure to it.”

  “Yet you aren’t preparing to remove them. A riddle!”

  The young man pondered awhile. Then, with a sudden access of bravado, he set his shoulders back.

  “Would you like to send me down to investigate? Whatever the trouble may be, I’m sure you can cope with any ill effects when I get back.”

  “You’d still like to be an ambassador, wouldn’t you?” Ship murmured. “No matter how unofficial!”

  “It’s true,” Oach admitted. “Marvelous as the projections are that you’ve been showing me—wonderful though the detail is, down to the very scents and smells—they can’t be the same as being physically present, can they?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Ship answered with an accurate imitation of a sigh. “Bear in mind that I myself am far too big to set down on any planet and have always had to be content with remote perception.”

  “Yes, of course.” Oach gave a short laugh and looked surprised at himself. On Ship inquiring why, he shrugged. “Among my people laughing is something one gives up on entering adulthood. I never knew our ordinators to make a joke. So I suppose I wasn’t expecting you to.”

  “That was a joke? Well, well. At long last I seem to be coming to grips with the mystery of nonrational human reactions.”

  “I’ve always held,” Oach offered, “that without them we are less than completely human. Do you agree?”

  “So far as my observation of your species bears you out— yes, I do … Now let me show you Zemprad.”

  The images surrounding Oach melted, leaving a view of a bluish-green globe with two small moons, gibbous in the glow of a yellow sun. It provoked a cry of astonishment.

  “I’m seeing colors that I never saw before!”

  “In fact you’re not,” Ship contradicted gently. “I’ve merely taken the liberty of recalibrating your infrared sensitivity so you can tell the difference between shades of warmth and colors in the higher spectrum. You’re still seeing in the same way, but a sort of label is attached to the sensation. It’s rather like the label that enables you to distinguish between what you remember as a result of experience and what you remember having imagined.”

  “But that’s incredible!” Oach was almost dancing up and down. “How in all of space—?”

  “Explanations will have to wait,” Ship interrupted. “The human population of Zemprad is down to three hundred and two. I must act at once.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  SEMPRAD

  OF LATE PARLY HAD TAKEN TO WANDERING RESTLESSLY UP and down the sealed length of what had been Zemprad’s last functioning biological research laboratory. Not its immobility—this building had never contained machines with moving parts—but its silence mocked her, and she felt that to be right. The absence of the former familiar hum that signified the automatics were about their proper work stung her dull mind with myriad unspoken reproaches. That was as it should be; that was fitting.

  Not that anything was wrong with the machines. They had not been designed to wear out, rather to improve themselves in the light of their own mindless experience or in compliance with human commands. There was plenty of power, too, to drive them—not that they needed a lot, for they drew much of their needs from what they were processing …

  Had drawn. Mentally she changed all the tenses in what she was thinking.

  But the time was long past when automatics had been able to help. Now they were doomed to become—well—possibly technological fossils, to be found by some far-future archaeologist from another world. Very far in the future, Parly hoped. There were starships aloft again, she knew, for some had called here, but shame had driven the Zempers to deny contact without giving a reason, so the strangers had resignedly gone on their way. Following the first alarming contact, however, most of what precious energy remained to Zemprad’s people had gone into establishing warning devices both aground and in orbit. Those should continue to operate until—

  Until long after I too have become a fossil relic.

  At last, as ever, she reached the vast window at the far end of the lab, with its splendid far-ranging view. In a state between vague fury and overt despair she tried to remember how proud everybody had once been of what she was looking at: a verdant plain patched with copses of tall dark trees and clusters of low but brightly flowering shrubs; winding streams, little mounds, darting harmless animals—a paradise for adults and children alike, for every living organism to the horizon and beyond was descended either from stock reaching clear back to the birthworld or else from those marvelous spores left in nearby space by the Ship when it departed. The Zempers had been greedy for them; instead of being content to harvest them when they drifted into the upper atmosphere, they had sent out ships to collect them in all their varieties to aid in their overweening plan.

  Their goal was nothing less than total transformation of the planet: the elimination of all the life-forms native to it and their replacement by imported rivals.

  Fools that they were—that we were, for we are merely our ancestors writ anew. It could only have been done by sterilizing the planet down to bare rock. If we’d left one seaside pool with drying mud at the bottom, that would have sufficed …

  Something was moving
across her field of view that was not an animal. Realizing at once what it must be, she was minded to glance away. Resolutely, though, she opposed the impulse. She and all the rest must face the consequences of their terrible mistake. Many, admittedly, had fled from the intolerable knowledge, taken refuge in dreams and drugs—or suicide—but she was determined not to be so weak.

  So were a few of the other survivors. One spoke to her even as she forced her eyes to focus on the moving object.

  “Parly”—that was all it took, now, for the planetary communications net to locate and identify her: just one name of two brief syllables—“Desi and Bleean died last night. Had you heard?”

  “Yes, Halleth,” Parly sighed. “They’re being taken for burial now. I can see the undertaker on its way.”

  “That leaves three hundred and two,” Halleth muttered. “Below three hundred we have no conceivable chance of recovering.”

  “Halleth,” Parly snapped, “you’re wasting breath! If there’s anyone left who doesn’t know, that person must be in drug coma or at the door of death!”

  “Please don’t be angry,” came the meek reply. “I was just thinking …”

  “Thinking what?”

  “Well …” The sound of difficult swallowing. “Where are you, and what are you doing?”

  “Oh, I’m at the usual end of my range. Looking out of the big window in the biolab. How else could I be watching the undertaker?”

  “I’m looking that way, too. Trying to see the scene as people used to.”

  “What in all of space do you mean?” Parly demanded.

  “Please, I’m serious! There was a time—so I’ve always been told—when people could look at the plain and the trees and the flowers and see that they were beautiful, and feel proud of having created them.”

  “Those days are long dead,” Parly answered sourly. “As we shall be, all too soon. If Desi and Bleean can succumb, who took at least as many precautions as you and I—”

  “The time for that is over,” Halleth said. And waited.

  For a moment Parly continued in her mood of bad-tempered misery. Then a trace of pity relieved the darkness of her mind. After all, Halleth was the youngest of them all, the last baby to be born on Zemprad before it was decided that the species here was in too great danger for any more children.

  Who would only have died before their parents …

  Relenting, she said, “Yes, my dear. I’m so sorry you weren’t born in time to enjoy such experiences. By the time you were old enough to appreciate what we had thought of as beautiful, it was impossible to avoid knowing that it masked—well, what it does.”

  “I don’t want to die without feeling that, even for just a while.” Halleth hesitated. “Parly, I’m going out. I want to roll naked on the grass and climb a few trees and make a garland of flowers and splash about in a running stream. I want to do that, and I’m going to. Now.”

  “You’re—!”

  The next word died on Parly’s lips. It was to have been “crazy,” of course.

  But was she?

  Was she not in fact reacting more sanely than the rest? Now the survivors were down so close to the uttermost lower limit and it was beyond hoping for that the trend should be reversed?

  And it was a lovely day outside: bright sun, a warm and gentle breeze, a few high white clouds in the dazzling blue sky …

  Halleth was speaking again, and Parly had missed a few words.

  “So I’m just saying good-bye to people. All right? I hope no one tries to stop me. I don’t want to be stopped. I won’t let it happen.”

  She broke the link. At once Parly ordered it restored and heard a mutinous cry.

  “I said I won’t let anyone stop me!”

  “I’m not going to try,” Parly assured her. “I just realized how right you are. And also what a shame it would be if we never met face-to-face.”

  “I’ve never met anybody face-to-face,” Halleth whispered. “That would make it completely wonderful … But you mustn’t do it for my sake!”

  “I’m doing it for my sake,” Parly promised. “I’m sick of spending my time wandering back and forth inside a sealed building, knowing I’m only putting off the day of reckoning …” Automatically her eyes had been following the undertaker; at that moment it vanished from sight with its burden of dead alien flesh.

  “Where shall we meet?” she added.

  Incredulously, Halleth countered, “Are you serious?”

  “Never more so.”

  “Well… Well, then! I can see a little footbridge between two flowering bushes, across the nearer stream.”

  “Excellent. I’ll join you there.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as I can.”

  “Oh, Parly!”

  That was a sob. Embarrassed, though close to tears herself, Parly broke the link this time.

  And, drawing a deep breath, wondered whether she had any reservations about the course Halleth had proposed and she was now also to adopt.

  None, she concluded after mere moments. None whatever. An ancient and macabre saying stole from her memory— where and when she had run across it, she had no idea. Let the dead bury their dead.

  Yes. There was a dead thing, a machine, to attend to such matters. For her, the right and proper action was to live, albeit only for a few hours.

  Heart amazingly lightened, she quit the lab for the last time, casting aside as she went the single garment she had on— out of habit, not necessity. She hesitated once more as she framed the command that would open the airtight door to the outside world, but felt ashamed of herself, and with head upright and shoulders back, she uttered it.

  The door slid wide. For the first time in twenty years she felt a breeze on her bare skin.

  It was indescribably delicious.

  Halleth was ahead of her at the little bridge. Slim and youthful, long hair cascading down her back, smiling-faced and bright-eyed—perhaps, Parly suspected, from tears—she stared at first as though afraid she was dreaming. Not until Parly halted before her, reached out, and took her hand did her mask of anxious disbelief give way to a smile. Seizing Parly’s hand in both of hers, she pressed it to her breast. Parly could feel the frantic beating of her heart.

  “I always wondered what it was like to touch somebody,” the girl breathed. “How long is it since anyone on Zemprad touched another person?”

  “Almost two decades,” Parly answered, raising her other hand to stroke Halleth’s sleek dark head. “Nearly as long as you have been alive.”

  “I never knew till now just how terrible the thing was that happened to us! Parly, I want to touch you—all over, everywhere! Will you hold me? Hug me tight?”

  “Yes, of course, darling,” Parly said, and, suiting action to word, embraced her, pressing their bodies dose.

  For a long moment neither moved or spoke, relishing the lost sensation. Gradually they began to move against each other, concentrating on the friction of skin with skin, the smoothness, the pressure, the mounting excitement—

  A shadow fell across them. Startled, they broke apart, staring upward.

  They could not see the sun. Not only where they stood but all the landscape lay in sudden darkness. Halleth let out a stifled cry.

  “An eclipse? But it happened too quickly!”

  “And none is due!” Parly exclaimed. The air could not really have become chill in so brief a span of time, but shivers racked her, and her skin prickled with tiny bumps. At the edge of her mind she had already begun to suspect what the cause might be.

  “Explain, then! Explain!” Halleth whimpered. “My dream that I sacrificed my life for is being stolen from me! It’s not fair!”

  Parly, keeping hold of the girl’s hand, felt how she was trembling.

  “Something is passing between us and the sun,” she said gruffly. “Something enormous. And there’s only one thing it could be. It’s supposed to rescue failed colonies—isn’t it?”

  Eyes round with awe, Halleth f
orced out, “You mean the Ship?”

  Parly could only nod. Ever since the magnitude of the crisis had become apparent, the Zempers had hoped against hope for its intervention. It had never come. Most by now had concluded that it must have failed in its mission or be stranded parsecs distant at the far end of the Arm.

  To have it arrive now, when it’s so nearly too late—indeed, it is too late—that would be the worst of all imaginable ironies. Cruel, too! I’ve lived most of my allotted span, but poor little Halleth …

  Her thoughts came to a slow halt, like a river sinking into sand before it could reach the ocean. For a form was taking shape before them: a tall, commanding, not-quite-human figure, radiant of power, defying ordinary perception inasmuch as she could not tell whether it was male or female, solid or a projection, clad or naked. Such superficial features did not matter; she sensed that at once. What counted was that it had made itself known.

  And what she most wanted to do, with infinite bitterness, was curse it to the heart of a black hole.

  THIS IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE! IF IT WERE POSSIBLE FOR ME TO DO so, I could believe I had gone mad. This is the type of situation— the only type—in which I am not only permitted but obliged to interfere!

  Wild paradoxes hummed in Ship’s circuitry like frantic animals trapped in a labyrinth between flood and fire.

  Yet I clearly recall from my earlier/later visits that I did not take steps to transport the survivors elsewhere. Why? It can’t be that they’re suffering from a disease my resources cannot cure— in fact I already know I can cure it, even though they themselves lack the wherewithal.

  Revealing itself in full, it awaited a response.

  Only these two can tell me why I should not save them. They must be going to, for I did not. But why? WHY?

  “YOU MUST BE ONE OF THE PERFECT!” HALLETH BLURTED.

  Stem, the figure retorted, “No! But your companion knows who I am.”

  Putting her arm around the girl, who was swaying as though she might fall headlong, Parly said in a dull voice, “The Ship, of course. It’s known to have the power of projection.”