A Voice in the Night

OCULUS

The cockpit was illuminated by the instrument panel, and by the soft glow from Autumn’s rings. As we climbed toward orbit, George Blasingame sat quietly in the righthand seat, utterly absorbed by the knowledge of what we were carrying. The ultimate cargo. “You know, Kellie,” he said at last, “we already have the critical information about them. Even if we didn’t have the books, we have the window.” I knew he was talking about the oculus, the big circular window in the main room of the long-dead alien base below. From its mountaintop perch it looked out over the craggy moonscape, and provided a matchless view of the spectacle in the skies. But I had no idea what he meant.

He was, I think, about to explain what it must have been like when the lights went off. When everything went off. Whatever the problem was, I never saw it coming. It ripped through the electronics, killed the AI, took out the thrusters and the spike, shut down life support, blew communications, and knocked out almost every onboard system we had. Delta slowed and staggered. We were still going up, but we were losing momentum and if nothing changed we’d soon be on our way back down.

“What the hell was that?” George gripped the arms of his chair and looked wildly around at me.

We were twenty-some clicks above the surface.

“Kellie—” he howled, his expression suggesting that I was responsible.

“We’ll be fine,” I told him smoothly while I tried to get my systems back on line.

“The cargo,” he reminded me. Yes. Don’t lose the cargo. Whatever else happens.

We had four hundred and some odd books stashed in Delta’s storage, frozen in packs after centuries of being exposed to the void. Property of whoever had owned and lived on this moon. That was a long time ago, maybe when Charlemagne was running things. We’d brought them out of the house and placed them carefully in specially prepared containers. When we got them up to orbit, a scenario that was beginning to look problematical, George was going to thaw them out, scan them, and produce copies. The copies would eventually, it was hoped, be translated. He was going to scan them because George doubted we’d ever be able to get the pages apart without damaging the individual volumes. But he’d arranged to have one of the techs remove a navigational scanner from the hull of the Bromfield and adapt it for ultra-short-range work. He was especially proud of that bit of jury-rigging. I doubted it would work. Navigational scanners just don’t lend themselves to that kind of close-in effort. But what did I know?

The books constituted, the authorities were saying, the most valuable payload that had ever been moved in from offworld. For the first time we were going to get an insight into how other minds think. Who knew what the books might contain? The Academy director herself had overseen the operation, had taken a moment to remind me what I was carrying. All you have to do, Kellie, is get them to the Bromfield. So Kellie had become Columbus discovering the new world. Don’t be Carlyle landing on Mars. Don’t fly into a mountain.

Ha ha ha.

“Kellie, do something!” demanded George.

When the spike fails, the best thing, according to the manual, is to give it some time. Status lamps started to blink on. Backups were trying to activate. The fans squealed and a cool draft whispered out of the air ducts. The thrusters came to life and gave us a kick. I rotated them down so they could supply a bit more push.

That helped. But we still didn’t have enough to reach orbit. George’s eyes got big and round.

Fortunately, we hadn’t lost hull integrity. But the spike showed zero lift. The thrusters would never be enough to keep us from getting smeared across the landscape. And anyhow I’d exhaust the fuel if I had to keep burning it at its current rate. We needed the spike. I tried to reactivate it. The needles quivered, settled back to nil. I tried again. “We might have a problem,” I said.

Let me dispel any preconceptions at this point by mentioning that I’d known George Blasingame almost five years. He was no coward. I’ve seen him face down bureaucratic bullies, and I watched him go into a temple on Quraqua during a major earthquake to salvage a couple of pots. So when he started looking terrified I knew what the problem was.

“The books,” he said.

“I’m doing everything I can, George.”

“I don’t believe this. I’ve been riding these damned things for twenty years. And today of all days—.” He said it as if having any of the earlier landers go down with him in it would have been a small matter.

I told him to turn on his e-suit and grab his air tanks. I activated my own and shut down everything except the thrusters and the controls. Then I tried the spike again. The needles jumped, took hold, and climbed a bit. Some of our weight drained away. I got it up to about thirty percent. Not good. Not nearly enough. But it would buy time.

It looked as if we would get around the moon a couple of times before we hit a mountain.

I kept trying to raise the Bromfield while George urged me on. “Tell them we need help,” he said, as though I hadn’t noticed we had a problem. After a couple of minutes, we got a burst of static. And then Jimmy Amir’s voice. Jimmy was one of the technicians on the Bromfield. “—You okay?” he said. “Kellie, please answer up.”

“I hear you, Jimmy. We’ve got an emergency here.” I tried to sound as if I were reporting a plumbing problem. “Spike’s at thirty percent.”

The signal faded, and then came back: “—Orbit?”

“Negative,” I said.

George knew exactly what that meant and he did a desperate look toward the cargo door at the rear of the cabin. “Can we go back down?” he suggested. “Back to the Retreat?” That was the name we’d given the house on the mountain. The refuge constructed by a previously unknown race.

“We can’t. We wouldn’t make it.”

“Kellie, this thing has spike technology. We can just float down.”

I had to hand it to him. Most people would have been yelping about maybe getting killed, but he wasn’t even thinking about himself. “We don’t have enough lift,” I said.

“Then we have to salvage the cargo. That has to be our first priority.” And then, in case I wasn’t getting the point: “It doesn’t matter what happens to us.”

Speak for yourself, Champ. Anyhow, none of it mattered. All the priorities were going down together. He saw it in my eyes. “I’m sorry, George.”

Jimmy was reading my status reps. “Not good, Kellie.”

“Looks like.”

“Okay. Tod’s on his way. Figure about fifty minutes. Can you stay up that long?”

“Yes.” Firm. Voice steady. Hand on the stick. All for the good of the passenger. In fact it would be touch and go. “Jimmy?”

“Yes, Kellie?”

“What was it?”

“An EMP.” An electro-magnetic pulse.

“But we’re shielded.”

“Double dose. Both Twins let go at once. We’ve got problems here, too. Not like yours,” he continued helpfully. “But it’s a hassle.” The Twins were a pair of gas giants running around one another in a tight orbit. They pumped out EMP’s on a fairly regular basis. But what were the odds against simultaneous blasts?

George was shaking his head. “What’s going to happen when he gets here? Can he repair us?”

“Not underway. You and I are going to transfer over to Alpha.” Tod’s lander.

He looked as if I’d hit him with a stick. For a moment he said nothing. Then: “What about the cargo?”

I met his eyes and shook my head. The patient’s not going to make it, George.

“We can’t just abandon it,” he said.

I don’t get irritated easily, but I wondered what he expected me to do. “George,” I said, “I hate to put it to you this way, but the cargo’s the reason we’re going down.” The simple truth was we were hauling too much mass. Without the books, we might still have made it into orbit. If I’d been able to do it, I’d have jettisoned every last one of them.

And okay, I know what you’re thinking. But my first obligation is to the ship. And my passenger’s life. Not to mention my own.

In case anybody out there was in Tibet at the time, the moon’s name was Vertical. They called it that because it moves around the Twins in a perpendicular orbit.

The two gas giants in the system are pretty much identical in mass and size, and both have rings. They’re close together, only about three million klicks, and they’re caught in a gravitational dance. If you watch them from the Retreat, you can see them rise every twenty-some hours, circle each other, and set. It’s a hell of a show. I understand, when they reconstruct the place in Arlington, they’ll be able to recreate the effect in the oculus.

Their equatorial diameters measure 65,000 and 63,000 kilometers. Cobalt is the smaller of the two, and the brighter. It’s a jewel of a world, with silver and blue and gold belts. The blue is the result of methane slurry and ice crystals on the outer shell of the atmosphere. Cyclonic storms float deeper down, swirls of yellow and red with golden eyes. It’s gorgeous.

The companion world, Autumn, is darker. It also has a collection of storms, which appear to be larger and less well defined. Naturally they named the system Gemini.

At the center of mass, between the Twins, there’s a cloud larger than either. It’s dark and heavy, lit with internal fires, a cosmic thunderstorm marking the point around which everything else, planets, rings, and moons, orbits. It looks like a planet, creating the illusion of three worlds in a line.

To complete the symmetry, there’s a third ring, circling the entire system. It’s enormous, less well-defined than the individual planetary rings, a shining highway that, seen from our position near Vertical, passed into infinity in one direction and dipped below the horizon in the other. Earlier, George had laughed while he admitted he couldn’t begin to pin down the local directions. Who knew which way was east when the sun was lost amid all the moving lights?

Vertical’s orbit was extremely unstable, and the experts said the chances of its having happened naturally were remote. Almost nonexistent. Most of them thought that within a few thousand years it would lose its unique position, which lifts it away from everything else and provides it with extraordinary views of the Twins.

The Retreat was perched on a ledge near the top of a mountain in some of the roughest terrain I’ve ever seen. It’s got drapes and carpets, all pretty much washed out. And beds and chairs and sofas. All the furniture’s too big by half for humans. And there’s something else about it, something dark and gloomy in the design that tells you right away it wasn’t designed for us. It gave me the chills, for reasons I couldn’t explain. Brownstein, who specializes in these sorts of things, says that the symmetries are slightly off, and that the equivalences don’t quite match up. I don’t understand yet what he means, but he says it’s visceral. And it is.

The place looks almost like a Victorian mansion. Lots of windows, a tower at one end, and a courtyard. It was perched on a shelf high up one of the taller needle peaks. And it had apparently been abandoned for over a thousand years. We had the remains of its two occupants. They were humanoid, but definitely not human. Not someone you’d have invited over for dinner.

Tall, with gray flesh, dark eyes, fangs, long narrow hands that ended in claws. We even had a portrait of one of them. The thing was wearing a robe and looking every bit like the grim reaper.

At the time, they were just beginning to take the Retreat down. The plan was to move it to Arlington and put it back together along the Potomac. George had had a big argument about that with Sylvia, the director. He thought the Retreat should be left where it was. He’d been grumbling for weeks. It was sacrilege, he thought. I think it was the convenience store that really got him. “Tee-shirts and monogrammed whiskey glasses. Is there anything we won’t do for money?”

I’m not sure how he thought the Academy got its funds, or whether he’d have been upset if they’d held up a couple of his paychecks because no cash was available. I myself saw no problem with it, but the idea sure had him lit up.

After a while, we reached apogee and started to fall. That was a bad moment. We were moving fast, and that put us in a kind of lopsided semi-orbit, soaring out and then cutting back in fairly close to the ground, and getting closer with each pass around the moon. Somewhere in the middle of all this my sensors came to life and it became a little easier to judge our flight parameters. But it was tricky because the ground ahead kept rising and I never knew where perigee was.

“Mountains,” said George, who must have thought I was blind.

He’d been quiet for several minutes while we moved across a wide corrugated plain. I’d been watching the peaks grow and kicking the thrusters to get more altitude. Fuel by then was getting scarce. “We’ll get over them,” I told him.

“Kellie,” he said, “we’re so close to the ground. Why not try to land?”

If we’d had a set of wheels and a runway it might have been possible. “We’d hit too hard,” I explained. “There’d be no chance.”

“You’re talking about us. What would happen to the cargo?”

“Everything back there is frozen, George. Brittle. It would shatter.”

I could see his mind working, trying to come up with something to save the payload. I wished he would give it up. “What happens after the other lander takes us off?”

“We go back to the Bromfield.”

“I mean—.” He nodded at the cargo door.

I knew what he meant. “It’ll go down.”

“Can we set it to try for a soft landing?” It was a cry for help and I felt sorry for him, sorry I’d come aboard, sorry I had anything to do with this.

“If we could get Bill up and running, yes, we could make the effort.” Bill was the AI. “But he doesn’t respond. I’ve been trying.”

“Try again, Kellie.”

I did. Bill wasn’t even a blip.

“There must be something we can do,” George said.

The Retreat had at one time been protected by a Flickinger field, or something very much like it. But when it failed, the individual volumes had frozen. After the initial attempts, no one had tried to open them. Or even to remove them from their shelves.

George was the expert. He’d come with some heat lamps, had used them to break the books free so they could be loaded and taken to orbit, where a team of specialists waited anxiously to begin probing their secrets. He was a little guy, thick brown hair, bushy mustache, a bit overweight. Not the sort of person you’d meet and remember. He had a wife somewhere but he never talked about her. I suspected she’d broken his heart. Don’t know why I thought that, he never said anything that I can recall. Still, there it was.

He’d been positively glowing while he separated the volumes and we began storing them into shipping containers and stacking the containers in Delta’s cargo hold. “Here,” he’d said, rapping on the cargo hatch after we’d sealed it, “with a little luck, we should have their heart and soul. For the first time, Kellie, we’ll see what the universe looks like through someone else’s eyes.”

We were on internal air. I started to depressurize the cabin.

The Delta cleared the mountains, close enough that I could have put a foot out and dragged it across a couple of the peaks. Somewhere in there we must have hit perigee—I really had no way to know exactly where. But Tod told me we were gaining altitude again. That we’d be okay and he would get to us in time.

I looked back for him. Our telescopes weren’t working, but it wasn’t hard to find Alpha, which kept getting brighter. It had gotten close enough that I could almost make out its shape.

“How you holding out?” Tod asked.

“Okay. We’re packed and ready.” I tried not to sound too relieved. “What’s your TOA?”

“Twenty-one oh-seven.” Eleven minutes. “I’m going to let you make your turn, and then I’ll pick you up on your way back in.”

Sylvia broke in from the Retreat: “Kellie, I’m sorry to hear you had a problem.”

“We’re going to lose the cargo.”

“I know.” She sounded sympathetic. “Don’t worry about it. They’re only books.” George closed his eyes and said something deep in his throat. “Your priority is to save yourself and George.” She paused, apparently uncertain what to say next. “Can he hear me?”

“I hear you, Sylvia.”

“George, I’m sorry. I know what this means to you.”

“She hasn’t a clue,” George told me. Then he spoke into the link. “Horrible thing to happen.”

“Nothing to be done.”

“Syl, I’d give my life—.”

“Not today, George. Not on my watch. I’ll see you topside for a late dinner.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“It’s okay. We’ll salvage what we can.” Then back to me: “Kellie, take care of him.”

“We’ll be okay, Sylvia. Tod’s on the scene.”

“All right. Let me know when you’re safe.” She signed off.

“Damned old bat,” said George. “She has no clue what we’re about to lose.”

A few minutes later we rounded apogee and began sinking again. We were coming in lower this time, approaching high country. We weren’t going to have much more than a thousand meters clearance above some of the higher peaks. Alpha drew alongside. “Time to go, George,” I said.

He nodded and slipped silently out of his restraints.

I wouldn’t have you think I was unsympathetic, but I was delighted to be getting out alive. I thought he could have been a bit more grateful. “George,” I said, “for all you know, they’re nothing more than a collection of thrillers. Or sociology texts. Or cook books.” The way he looked at me shut me down. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish we could save them.”

“You said we can’t ride it down. But we’ve gotten pretty low. Why not try? We aren’t going down that fast.” Beyond the crags the ground was leveling out.

“It only looks that way,” I said.

Alpha was gray and boxy. Its windows were lit up and I could see Tod at the controls. We were on the side away from the Twins and the cloud, but parts of the big ring were always in the sky, casting an ethereal glow over the landscape.

“You ready to go, Kellie?” Tod was a big, freckle-faced kid just out of school. Flirted with everybody and thought the world would open up to him any time he wanted it to. So far, I guess it had. He also had the happy trait of inspiring confidence. I knew he’d do whatever was necessary to get us out.

“On our way.”

I activated the airlock but it didn’t open. It was on George’s right, out of reach for me.

“What’s wrong?” George asked.

“No problem. But I need your help.”

“Sure. What can I do?”

I released my harness, held onto the stick with one hand, and edged out of my seat. “Here,” I said “hold this.” I put his hand over mine and then withdrew, leaving him with control of the spacecraft. “Just keep it steady.”

“Okay,” he said uncertainly.

“No, don’t try to change seats.”

“Okay.” He looked at the controls and then out at the onrushing peaks and I knew he wasn’t happy.

I showed him what I needed. Keep this down. The stick stays here. If this light turns yellow, call me. The spike was staving off free fall, but that was about all you could say for it. It was like being in a damaged parachute.

I hurried over to the airlock, opened the inner door manually, gave George an encouraging pat on the shoulder, and released the outer hatch. It opened and I looked out at the void. Tod closed to within a few meters. His own airlock opened, and he appeared and waved.

“Good to see you, Kellie,” he said. His e-suit glimmered in the light from the ring. He held a lanyard. “Ready?”

“Not yet, Tod. Wait one.”

Looking back now, I have the impression I was vaguely aware of movement behind me. Maybe not. I can’t be sure. But I caught the lanyard on the first toss. It was a pair of cables, actually. I clipped them to my belt, and turned around. My intention was to attach one of them to George, loop the other one around something, and reclaim my chair until he’d jumped to safety. Then I’d recover my cable and follow him out the door. Shouldn’t be a problem.

But the inner airlock hatch was shut.

At first I thought there’d been a systems failure and the electronics had closed it. Then I realized what had happened. “George, what are you doing?”

“Get clear, Kellie. I’m going to do what I can for the books.” His voice was strained on the link.

“That’s crazy.”

Not too far ahead, another mountain range was approaching. I pulled the handle out of the housing and tried to open the inner door, but it wouldn’t turn. The son of a bitch was holding the hatch shut.

“George, let go.”

“Kellie, please. The longer you stand there the worse my chances.”

“You’re not even a pilot.”

“I’ve been riding these things all my life. You think I don’t know how they work? It isn’t rocket science, Kellie.” He laughed, but the sound bordered on hysteria. “Please go.”

“Kellie,” said Tod, “what’s going on?”

“Damn you, George. Listen, open up and I’ll stay.” Like hell. I’d pop him one and drag him out.

“No,” he said. “No reason for that. Get out of here—.”

I could have argued. But there was no time and I wasn’t going to throw my life away because somebody else didn’t know when to toss in his cards.

“Kellie, it’s getting late out here.”

Idiot.

I called his name one last time, listened to my heartbeat. And jumped.

My weight soared momentarily as I cleared the dampers, and then all but vanished as I came under the influence of Alpha’s systems. It was the only time I’ve done that, passed from one antigrav field to another, and it was a little like getting punched simultaneously front and rear. Tod hauled me in and we stood looking helplessly at the sinking lander.

“Not your fault, Kellie,” Tod said. “There wasn’t anything you could do.”

“Tod.” It was Jodie, Tod’s AI. She spoke with a Brooklyn accent. “If you and Kellie will shut the hatch and hang on, we can at least gain some altitude.”

Tod closed up and started to pressurize. Meanwhile we both grabbed hold of a support rail and he signaled Jodie. The deck rose.

“George,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

“I hear you, Kellie.”

There didn’t seem much point in recriminations. “Are you still in the chair?”

“Yes.”

“Restraints?”

“—Are already on.”

“Point the thrusters down.”

Pause. “How do I do that?”

Yeah. You know how to operate it. “Red levers on your left. Push full forward.”

I heard him grumbling to himself. Then: “Done.”

“Now turn on the thrusters. Full. You know how to do that?”

“Explain it to me, please.”

While I told him how, the inner airlock door opened and we took our seats. Tod watched him going down and shook his head.

His thrusters fired and his rate of descent slowed. But it wasn’t going to be enough, and even had it been he was moving forward too quickly. The ground was about to become a hopeless tangle of rock and metal.

“Kellie.”

“I’m here, George.”

“I’m sorry. I know this will create a problem for you.”

“Forget it. Just hang on.”

“Okay.”

And pray.

Tod set up a clock. I saw thirty-six seconds begin to tick down.

“Looks too fast, Kellie. I don’t think it’s going to work.”

I didn’t say anything. Didn’t know what to say. He’s watching the ground rush up at him, what am I going to do, tell him everything’s going to be fine, have a nice day?

The last few seconds drained away. And without a sound Delta ripped into the ground. There was a brief flare in the darkness—not enough fuel left for a real explosion—, and he was gone.

They didn’t exactly blame it on me, although the muscles in Sylvia’s jaw did funny things when she saw me again, that night and during the investigation and later at the memorial service. We all said nice things about George, how he always found time for others, how he loved his work, how he was extraordinarily patient. None of it was true. Most of the time his work was fairly routine and he endured it. Now and then it turned up something that seriously engaged his interest, like the books at the Retreat. But that wasn’t the same thing at all.

He did succeed in saving most of them. So he became the hero of the hour, and we all drank to him. A few people looked down their noses at me, visibly grateful that someone had had the guts to stay with the payload.

In the end, though, it didn’t matter, at least as far as translations were concerned. The print—the ink—was smeared beyond recovery. Nobody’s sure yet whether it was that the force field that guarded the Retreat had stayed on for a longer time than anyone had expected, blocking out the preserving vacuum, or whether the occupants of the Retreat had needed a moist environment. Whichever it was, there’d been too much humidity over an extended period. The specialists had enough to conclude that they could detect only one language, that the language used upper and lower case, that it read from right to left, that it used punctuation, and that individual words were separated by spaces.

And that was it. Whatever scientific or philosophical ruminations might have existed therein, whatever timeless novels, whatever observations on the state of the universe, it was all lost.

So when I ventured to suggest to Sylvia that George’s sacrifice had consequently been pointless, she drew herself up in righteous indignation. We were standing in the main room, in front of the oculus, looking out at the spectacle of worlds and rings. The sofa and one of the armchairs had not yet been moved up to the Bromfield. They were huge pieces of furniture, the way everything looked when you were four years old. One of the side walls was in the process of being taken down and prepared for shipment back to Arlington. “Don’t even think it,” she said. “The books are invaluable artifacts, even if we can’t read them.”

Well, maybe there’s something to that. But it didn’t seem like much consolation for what we’d lost. And I couldn’t help recalling George’s comment just before it all started. “We already have the critical information about them. Even if we didn’t have the books, we have the window.”

What critical information?

I related the remark to Sylvia.

She frowned, considered it, and nodded. “Well,” she said, “I guess it’s a reference to the esthetic sense of their owners. And their creators. I suppose that’s significant. Considering what they looked like,”—she managed a smile,—“that comes as something of a surprise.” She turned away to caution one of the technicians to use more care in lifting a section of wall.

I thought there must have been more to it. But it didn’t occur to me until later that, if you stood in front of the oculus at the right angle, you could see your own reflection.