Across the Sea of Suns

One

Nigel spun slowly in the Sleepslot. It was not true sleep, but rather a drifting, aimless dreaming. He felt faint tugs and ripples as the fluids moved him—massaging leathery muscles, caring for soft wrinkled tissues, ensuring a regular flow of blood and oxygen. The fluids kept his metabolic level a fraction above the shutoff point that would bring on death.

It was like an achingly labored swimming, clutched in currents one could only dimly sense. He rested in the wetness, free of the labor of breath, lungs filled with a spongy stuff that fed healing fluids and sparkling oxygen directly into him. His skin shed a snow of flakes and grime, a torrent of impurity. Inside, cellular police searched for renegades.

Dying, it had turned out, was often merely an inept response to the universe.

The simplest way for the body to defend itself against invaders was by making antibodies. If that failed, evolution had forged a deeper response. It made killer lymphocytes, white cells that attached themselves to the invaders and made a template of them. They excreted specific, short-range toxins, varying the poison until it destroyed the invader. Long after the battle, the lymphocytes carried the template of this intruder, to recognize and kill on sight any returning enemy.

But this immune response can err. That was why eating meat was dangerous. Unless the meat was well cooked, some raw portion would inevitably get into the body cavity, through holes in membranes. The lymphocytes then developed a killing response to animal protein, since it was a nonhuman cell.

The problem was that animal protein is very similar to human protein. As the lymphocytes drifted through the rivers of blood, finding and killing invaders, they sometimes changed. Radiation or heat could damage them. If the random changes made the animal-protein template resemble human protein, the lymphocytes could become confused. They would attack the body’s own cells. Cellular suicide. Cancer.

With age the body developed more and more templates. The chances of a catastrophic error increased. To combat this, the body tried to develop so-called suppressor lymphocytes, which could control the killers and stop them from multiplying. Often this failed.

No matter how many technical fixes could be arranged for heart troubles or organ failures, this irreducible knot of a problem remained. It was rooted in the very nature of the body’s age-old defenses.

Evolution did not care if a preventive measure ran amok, once childbearing age passed. In fact, all the better. It was a simple way to clear the stage, once the actors had played their parts.

The medicine of the twenty-first century was preoccupied with runaway immune response, with bodies that had become strangers to themselves.

Nigel dimly felt fluids slosh within him, seeking lymphocytes gone awry. Outside, the grasshopper world clacked on, Lancer edged close to light speed, and he thought of the cold world an intelligent machine must know: brittle, arid, a labyrinth of logic and careful design, stale space and geometric rigidities. Quite unlike the milky world that nurtured him here, smoothing the skin now crinkled like old butcher paper.

This treatment would stretch his life-span, free oxygen to swarm through parts of his brain that now ebbed. But it meant years of nothingness, blunted by drugs, telescoped down to a mere self-perceived few days. Years subtracted from the pace of events.

It was deeper than sleep, that great eraser. Like any new technology, it eased you through life, insulated you for a time from a brutal fact, and left you with a disquieting vision: that nature engraved mortality on its children by making them attack themselves.

Two

Carlotta led them into the huge cavern where nothing was real. “This is it,” she said excited. “Surprised?”

“Moderately,” Nigel said, though he wasn’t sure what moderation was any longer. Five days out of the Sleep-slots, and he still carried the wispy, dislocated air of not quite being fully present. An expected side effect, to be sure, but what he had seen around the ship had enhanced the effect. “Ted and the rest actually approved this?”

Carlotta shrugged: “We aren’t getting much advice from Earth. There were signs of real morale problems, and the psych types thought—Look, Earthside predicted some fast sociocultural rates shipboard, fax?”

“In five years?” Nikka asked quietly.

“Can you fashion things change just for, you know, change itself? But look, you’ll get the mix. Come on.”

They followed her. A couple took a tumble slide through purple ice crystals above. A hollow gong; the fine crystals dissolved into a rain of acrid fire. People passed by, rippling, and Nigel saw they had faces that shifted like holograms. Carlotta polarized herself into fundamentals and blended instantly with the dank, humid jungle that was forming around them. They sat at a table. A panther snarled. Nigel saw cat eyes gleaming beneath the folds of a wet elephant ear leaf.

“Shows what a pack of smart lads can do when they’ve nothing to distract ’em,” Nigel said. Carlotta reappeared, wearing a pair of enhanced gloves. She casually lifted the table and the gloves glowed amber. “I was scanning the Earthside briefs,” he began, “and they—”

“Amazing, isn’t it? That they can’t find out anything. Makes you wonder,” Carlotta said.

Nigel nodded. The ocean invasion dominated the reports, but there were many political ramifications. There had been the customary Western tut-tutting over the latest purges in the Socialist African Union. Steam was leaking, with a shrill howl, from the New Marxism, which was getting encrusted with the same old blemishes—flagging zeal, increasingly brutal suppression of dissent, no economic miracles. Astonishingly, even the French intellectuals had abandoned them. A century or more of theory, from Fascism through worn-out Marx to PseudoCap, was finally yielding to the sociometric savants, surrendering the Grand Era of sweeping Theory to the comforting rule of Number.

“I gather from the summaries that you’ve found no life sites, then?” Nigel asked.

“Not yet. Hundreds of planets, either on the grav-lens or by probe, and—nothing.”

“Um.” He glanced at Nikka. “Think I’ll take a walk.”

“I’ll order drinks for us. Nikka, there’s a lot to catch up on, and …”

Nigel passed through private iridescent clouds of yellow and pink and ruby. He became a flitting intruder in a stone courtyard; then a sandy beach; a star cluster; a swirling, tangled struggle between bronze, winged demons; a nineteenth-century office. He met a grinning panda bear with a tennis racket and waved away the animal’s whispered proposition. Someone offered him a drink; he slid it into his wrist and felt its tang.

When he returned, three mugs of dark, odoriferous beer sat on the table. At the edge of their cloud sphere, a shabby trio played trumpet, bass, and drums. The air now held the flat, oily memory of yesterday’s fried food. The bartender held his post at a crude oak bar and glowered at them. Behind him, taped to a cloudy mirror, a stained sign read: WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE.

“Do you suppose they mean us?” Nigel asked, trying to go along with matters.

“I thought you’d like an old Earth locale. Look, I can update it if you—” She tapped her wrist and a 3-D sprang into life at Nikka’s elbow. The bar faded. A fat man was admiring a pile of eggs, delicately scrambled with cream sauce. He began ingesting them, sucking them up through a straw. Nigel looked closer and saw the man himself was made of garlicked spinach, oiled strands of tagliatelli, and his trousers were of pâté.

“Gluttony chic?” he asked, and turned to Nikka. “M’love, you’ve been out of the Slots for two months—how long does it take to get used to this?”

“The point is,” Nikka explained slowly, “to not get accustomed. It’s supposed to add endless variety.”

“This was Earth’s idea, too?”

“Shipboard and Earthside worked it out together. There’s a new theory of variance-interaction—”

“Spare me. This looks like a bloody amusement park.” Carlotta frowned and reached up to tune her hair from black to white. Nigel glanced around. Cloud spheres hung everywhere in the great gallery. Carlotta got up to greet a passing couple. She stood to one side, clutching one elbow, aloft on some new platform sandals like a frail, hoofed animal. Women standing that way seemed to feel more poised, but he reflected that to him it looked just the reverse.

In the crowds Nigel saw men with hair grown all down their backs and in swirling spirals around their bodies; women with patchy skin pigment that shifted as he watched; men with breasts; women without hair.

He shook his head. Carlotta introduced a couple and Nigel nodded, barely remembering them. There was some conversation he could not follow and they left. “Uh … I didn’t quite catch … ?”

“That was Alex and David,” Carlotta said.

“But … Alex …”

“Well, he’s had the Change, of course.”

“Changed sex?”

“Just as an experiment. It’s completely reversible. About six months in the Slots, rearranging body mass and growing new glands and so on.”

“But Alex … was such …”

“Look,” Carlotta said, “he had a lot of personality facets he’d suppressed. That was clear, wasn’t it, from the stiff kind of way he went around?”

“I thought he was simply disciplined, well organized.”

“Look, a lot of engineers seem that way, but if you pry them open, take a look at the guts—”

“Doesn’t seem possible, somehow, I …” Confused, Nigel came halfway out of his seat, intending to go after Alex and … And what? he thought. Ask him how in God’s name he could come to do such a thing? Nigel stopped himself. It was a deeply personal matter, after all. He shouldn’t barge into what was undoubtedly a difficult time for Alex. He sat back down.

“You look a little rocky,” Carlotta said sympathetically. He nodded mutely. Moments passed. Discordant music filtered in from other zones. The air became flavored with ozone and perfume. Nikka and Carlotta began to talk about crew members who were in new jobs, had new lovers, or otherwise had done something in the last five years worth chewing over. To Nigel this conversation sounded much like a catching-up over lukewarm gossip such as one might hear in any large office building. The ordinariness of it struck him. Who would have guessed that a starship plowing across the light-years would come to resemble, in its human dimension, any other bureaucratic barge? He let most of the detail slip by him and thus was brought up short when Nikka casually remarked that she had moved into Carlotta’s small cabin. She had lived there since she came out of Slotsleep, two months before.

“Then you’ve done no work on getting our apartment back into order?” he asked.

Nikka pursed her lips. “There’s been so much to see, to understand—Lancer is much more exciting now, Nigel, since all these changes.”

“Indeed,” he said wryly.

“And, I don’t know why, but Carlotta and I have had so much fun together. Of course, I was sad that we were not slated to come out of the Slots at the same time. But it did give me a chance to adjust to, to all this.” She waved a hand at the chasm.

Carlotta smiled winningly. “And it’s been great to have you back.” She squeezed Nikka’s hand. “Both of you.”

“I still can’t see why Lancer should need to have such, such …” Nigel let his voice trickle away. Carlotta went into a psychosocial explanation, in part the bounty of the last two decades of work Earthside, which had caught up to Lancer. He listened attentively, all the while wondering if his British background made it impossible for him to appreciate fully these rapid-fire swervings of the social matrix. His past was not merely a learned liking for afternoon tea, cold baths, cricket, a certain level of domestic discomfort, and the occasional patrician accent. There were currents in society that ran deeper and, he felt instinctively, could not be so casually deflected by a bit of dewy-eyed technology. You need not be a master of the Snow-called two cultures to see that.

More couples stopped at their table, recognized them, and shook hands warmly. Nigel could remember most of their names; their odd clothes or hair or altered faces seemed not so important after he’d heard the customary didja-have-a-good-sleep, how’s-tricks-with-Nikka, say-let’s-have-y’all-ovah-foah-dinner-real-soon style of conversation. They were people he still knew pretty well. Displaced in time a bit, yes, and caught up in a novelty-first social air he could not comprehend, quite. In time, no doubt …

And yet, and yet—

Many more of them now worked in Interactive Mode, computer-linked to the vast machines that churned in Lancer’s bowels. They maintained the fusion fire aft, repaired the life-support apparatus, sensed the flow of water and gas that kept the biosphere regulated. Over the years this had changed them. They talked as though they were always listening for a distant voice, half-heard, that murmured just beyond the hearing of the moment. They rubbed the big raw sockets at hip and elbow and shoulder, where the constellations of motor nerves gathered. They thought differently, talked little, seemed to lean on each word as though it should have more significance than it possibly—to Nigel—could. He discovered that when they wished to learn something, they exchanged cerebral templates with someone who knew the material. The technique had been transmitted from Earth three years before. A techno-summary package came in over the radio link each four months, now, to bring up to parallel specs with Earth.

Nigel smiled and laughed and filed it all away for future pondering. The chasm vibrated with clashing holo-audio fantasies, competing gaudy beams of light, raw scents in the breeze. Nikka and Carlotta mingled with the increasing crowd. Bob Millard came by, an unaltered face Nigel was glad to see. Whatever he might think of Bob’s handling of the Isis exploration, the man’s easy hospitality was welcome. They both made passing jokes about the fads around them and then Bob put in casually, “Been lookin’ over your medmon specs jess t’day. Pretty good.”

“Um. They spruced up my detoxifying mix, cleaned out the ol’ bloodstream. Seems to’ve helped the muscles and ligaments and so on.” Nigel kept his voice light, airy.

“Your motor response is back up. Surprisin’. You lookin’ to do manual work again?”

A suitable pause. “Would like to, yes.”

“Got a job down the drive throat. Scrapin’ off the accumulated crud, freein’ up the fluxlife.” He raised an eyebrow.

Nigel nodded. “I’m on.” This still moment passed, and the party swept on around them.

Later, Nigel said pensively, “Must say, I hadn’t expected that.”

“A manual job?” Carlotta nodded. “I told Ted you wanted to get your hands dirty again. There’s plenty of scutwork to go around. Older this ship gets, more it takes. Ted must’ve put it through the Work Council.”

“Without my asking, even?”

“Look, it’s been years since you two were picking at each other. Ted’s bighearted.”

Nigel nodded to himself, trying to come to terms with the erased years. Time had blurred and softened everything. He had to remember that these were different people and he could not carry over the old emotions. “Anachronistic thinking,” he muttered.

“Yeah. Fresh start, Nigel. You did real well in the Slots—you look great.”

“I hope I can handle the work.”

“Sure, you can. Bob wouldn’t sign you on if the med reports weren’t okay.”

Nigel nodded again. Fresh start. He felt a vivid surge of joy. “So bring me up to date. What else is new?”

Three

Procyon was a gleaming white F5 star with an insignificant dull binary companion. The flyby ship tallied the planets and tasted the stellar wind, before plunging close to the only interesting Earth-size world. It was mottled and cloud-speckled. An ocean wrapped the planet from pole to pole, there was no land. The vast sea showed odd chemical emission lines. The probe checked and rechecked and, in a cybernetic storm of confusion, relayed the answer: This world was awash in oil. Had the reserves in the rock been pressed out onto the surface? Or did organic chemicals in the air condense this way? It was low-quality crude, brackish and high in sulfur. It ran in tides and twisted into funnels beneath furious storms. Evaporation of water ran the weather cycle, but oil was the important surface fluid.

Nothing lived in that sea.

No stony sphere orbited the world.

But battered, worn craft circled it. The probe raced by one and glimpsed a tin-colored, boxy thing. It had solar sails, partly unfurled. None of the grimy ships gave the slightest sign that they had noticed the passing intruder.

There were thousands of them in orbit. A few descended to the surface as the probe watched. A few fought up from launch pads floating on the sea. When these finished their arc up, they deployed immense, tear-shaped bags. They assumed long-lived orbits and their engines’ orange plumes ebbed into nothing.

Parking orbits. From the rate of launch it was simple to estimate how long the thousands of craft had been accumulating: several centuries. Their cargo was clearly oil; the probe resolved spidery pumping stations afloat below.

The convoy was waiting, perhaps until each ship was filled. But where would they go? There was nothing else in the Procyon system except gas giant planets and dead moons. How long would it take them to reach any further destination?

Nigel lies mute and blind and pinned in his couch and for a moment feels nothing but the numb silence. It collects in him, blotting out the dim rub of the snouts which cling like lampreys to his nerves and muscles, amplifying every movement, a pressing embrace, and—

—spang—

—he slips free of the mooring cables, a rush of sight-sound-taste-touch washes over him, so strong and sudden a welter of senses that he jerks with the impact. He is servo’d to a thing like an eel that swims and flips and dives into a howling dance of protons. His body lies three hundred meters away, safely behind slabs of rock. But the eel is his, the eel is him. It shudders and jerks and twists, skating across sleek strands of magnetic plains. To Nigel, it is like swimming.

The torrent gusts around him and he feels its pinprick breath—autumn leaves that burn. In a blinding orange glare Nigel swoops, feeling his power over the servo’d robot grow as he gets the feel of it. The shiny craft is wrapped in a cocoon of looping magnetic fields that turn the protons away, sending them gyrating in a mad gavotte, so the heavy particles cannot crunch and flare against the slick baked skin.

Nigel flexes the skin, supple and strong, and slips through the magnetic turbulence ahead. He feels the magnetic lines of force stretch like rubber bands. He banks and accelerates.

Streams of protons play upon him. They make glancing collisions with each other but do not react. The repulsion between them is too great, and so this plasma cannot make them burn, cannot thrust them together with enough violence. Slapping together mere nude protons is like trying to burn wet wood. Something more is needed or else the ship’s throat will fail to harvest the simple hydrogen atoms, fail to kindle it into energy.

There—In the howling storm Nigel sees the blue dots that are the keys, the catalyst: carbon nuclei, hovering like sea gulls in an updraft.

Split-image phosphors gleam, marking his way. He swims in the streaming blue-white glow, through a murky storm of fusing ions. He watches plumes of carbon nuclei striking the swarms of protons, wedding them to form the heavier nitrogen nuclei. The torrent swirls and screams at Nigel’s skin and in his sensors he sees and feels and tastes the lumpy, sluggish nitrogen as it finds a fresh incoming proton and with the fleshy smack of fusion the two stick, they hold, they wobble like raindrops—falling together—merging—ballooning into a new nucleus, heavier still: oxygen.

But the green pinpoints of oxygen are unstable. These fragile forms split instantly. Jets of new particles spew through the surrounding glow—neutrinos, ruddy photons of light, and slower, darker, there come the heavy daughters of the marriage: a swollen, burnt-gold cloud. A wobbling, heavier isotope of nitrogen.

Onward the process flies. Each nucleus collides millions of times with the others in a fleck-shot swirl like glowing snowflakes. All in the space of a heartbeat. Flakes ride the magnetic field lines. Gamma rays flare and sputter among the blundering motes like fitful fire-flies. Nuclear fire lights the long roaring corridor that is the ship’s main drive.

Nigel swims, the white-hot sparks breaking over him like foam. Ahead he sees the violet points of nitrogen and hears them crack into carbon plus an alpha particle. So in the end the long cascade gives forth the carbon that catalyzed it, carbon that will begin again its life in the whistling blizzard of protons coming in from the forward maw of the ship.

With the help of the carbon, an interstellar hydrogen atom has built itself up from mere proton to, finally, an alpha particle—a stable clump of two neutrons and two protons. The alpha particle is the point of it all. It flees from the blurring storm, carrying the energy that fusion affords. The ruby-rich interstellar gas is now wedded, proton to proton, with carbon as the matchmaker.

Nigel feels a rising electric field pluck at him. He moves to shed his excess charge. To carry a cloak of electrons here is fatal. Upstream lies the chewing gullet of the ramscoop, where incoming protons are sucked in, their kinetic power stolen from them by the electric fields. There the particles are slowed, brought to rest inside the ship, their streaming energy stored in capacitors.

A cyclone shrieks behind him. Nigel swims sideways toward the walls of the combustion chamber. The nuclear burn that flares around him is never pure, cannot be pure because the junk of the cosmos pours through here, like barley meal laced with grains of granite. The incoming atomic rain spatters constantly over the fluxlife walls, killing the organic superconductor strands there. Nigel pushes against the rubbery magnetic fields and swoops along the mottled yellow-blue crust of the walls. In the flickering lightning glow of infrared and ultraviolet he sees the scaly muck that deadens the magnetic fields and slows the nuclear burn in the throat. He flexes, wriggles, and turns the eellike form. This brings the electron beam gun around at millimeter range.

He fires. A brittle crackling leaps out onto the scaly wall. The tongue bites and gouges. Flakes bubble up like tar, blacken, and finally roast off. The rushing proton stream washes the flakes away, revealing the gunmetal blue beneath. Now the exposed superconducting threads can begin their own slow pruning of themselves, life casting out its dead. Their long organic chain molecules can feed and grow anew. As Nigel cuts and turns and carves he watches the spindly fibers coil loose and drift in eddies. Finally they spin away into the erasing proton storm. The dead fibers sputter and flash where the incoming protons strike them and then with a rumble in his acoustic pickup coils he sees them swept away.

Something tugs at him. Ahead lies the puckered scoop where energetic alpha particles shoot by. They dart like luminous jade wasps. The scoop sucks them in. Inside they will be collected, drained of energy, inducing megawatts of power for the ship. The ship will drink their last drop of momentum and leave them behind, a wake of broken atoms.

Suddenly he spins to the left—Jesus, how can—he thinks—and the scoop fields lash him. A megavolt per meter of churning electrical vortex snatches at him. Huge, quick, relentless, it clutches at his shiny surfaces. The scoop opening is a plunging, howling mouth. Jets of glowing atoms whirl by him, mocking. The walls near him counter his motion by increasing their magnetic fields. Lines of force stretch and bunch.

How did this—is all he has time to think before a searing spot blooms nearby. His presence so near the scoop has upset the combination rates there. If the reaction gets out of control it can burn through the chamber vessel, through the asteroid rock beyond, and spike with acrid fire into the ship, toward the life dome.

A brassy roar. The scoop sucks at his heels. Ions run white-hot. A warning knot strikes him. Tangled magnetic ropes grope for him, clotting around the shiny skin.

Panic squeezes his throat. Desperately he fires his electron beam gun against the wall, hoping it will give him a push, a fresh vector—

Not enough. Orange ions blossom and rage and swell around him—another death.

“Pretty bad,” Ted Landon said. Nigel tried to focus. Therapy devices nuzzled and stroked him like mechanical lovers. He could make out Ted’s scowl, and he said in the direction of the blurred image, “What … I tried to … get back to mooring …”

“You didn’t make it.”

Nigel lay back and let feelings seep into consciousness. His body felt worn and numb. “The … ”

“Destroyed, lost. Tracer shows it hit the wall. Thing is, you got a big retrofeed shock to your central nervous system when it blew.”

“I can’t … body doesn’t feel the same.”

“It won’t, for a while. So say the medics, anyway. Thing is, we never had this exact injury before. The other guys got out of those surges. You should’ve been able to get away from it. Nothing special about that surge.”

“It … got by me, I suppose. I won’t let it happen … ”

“I’m afraid this takes you permanently off manual tasks, Nigel. No way I can let you stay on the roster.”

He could think of nothing to say, and in any case he could hardly sort out the confusion of distorted impulses his senses brought him. He gazed out the exop door. People were clustered around, listening as a medic talked in a low whisper. He felt tears trickling down his face. He had lost something, some inner equilibrium; his body was not the same tuned instrument he had come to take so easily. A wracking sob came from him. He searched among the people and in the back, a point of calming rest in the bunched faces, he found Nikka. She smiled.

Four

Nigel’s recovery was slow. It was a long time before he could work again in the fields, harvesting, grunting with the effort and trying not to show it. But he liked the work and kept at it. It reminded him of moments in his past when, intent on some worrisome task, he would by chance press a finger to his wrist and feel, like a sudden reminder, the patient throb of his pulse, a steady note that lifted him out of fretful details.

But his internal confusion did not go away. He was enough of a mechanistic thinker to see that sudden jolts to the entire body could act on the mind in unknown ways. The glacial steadiness and resolve he had had since Marginis was now faltering, leaving him with strange, drifting anxieties.

About his own mental states he had never had any theories. He had refused to endorse mystical savants back Earthside. That lot had quite neatly done a job on Alexandria, thank you. More to the point, he could not speak for anyone else. Things happened to you and you learned from them whether you knew it or not but a pretense of a common interior landscape which could be described, a bloody touring book of the soul—that was a lie. No flat formulas could capture the human interior. Kafka, that gnarled spirit, was right: Life is defined by the closed spaces of the self.

That was why he had all along declined to become a savant figure himself, interpreter of the long-dead aliens of the Marginis wreck. He would have lost himself that way, when the whole point was to remain a man, to stay in the gritty world and experience it directly, avoiding abstractions. He knew that this made him appear increasingly isolated, cranky, out of step with the younger crew. But he did little to temper this, and used what pull he could when Nikka drew an assignment working on Lancer’s skin, to repair the ramscoop fields. Ted Landon made the quite reasonable point that he could not run a ship according to the loves of the crew. Nigel retorted that with the frequency of sex changes in the crew, it was bloody difficult to tell who was inclined to do what, and to whom. It came to him, then, why Ted smiled benignly on all the self-alteration that was so fashionable in Lancer.

“He’s got the game down, clean and simple,” Nigel said to Carlotta one evening. “People cloning new tissues, people socketed into machines more and more to up efficiency—so’s they can have more time off for their pursuits, preoccupation. My God! In a fad-driven society like Lancer, Ted looks reassuringly steady. Marvelous, ol’ Ted—let him keep a hand on the helm while we go off and console ourselves for the long voyage.”

Carlotta shook her head. “Makes no sense. The directives on involution therapy—that’s the term, don’t wrinkle your nose—came from Earthside. Ted had nothing to do with—”

“Nonsense. Look at that thing you’re drinking. Carbonated cherry frappé, seething along with microicebergs of orange floating in it. Where’d the resources for that come from?”

She stirred the silky drink. “Chem section, I guess.”

“Fine old Ted could stop such diversions if he wanted, never mind Earth. No, he’s in favor of a holiday air, a regression into—”

“Regression! Look, You may think—”

“Yes, I do. Surely we needn’t go into it?”

“It’s hard for me to see how you can deny a person a right to, a chance to … to find new definitions of themselves.”

“I’m simply trying to understand friend Ted. I’m aware that sex change became common Earthside as a method of helping adolescents with their sexual adjustments. And that the pursuit of variety has made it much the fashion back there. But here—”

“I think it’s pretty great of Ted and the others to allow use of ship’s resources for it. That certainly shows him in a, a fair-minded light.”

“Or alternatively, in an engagingly frank and surprisingly open-minded light. It’s always one light or another with him, you’ll find.”

“You’re just being cynical,”

“Um. ‘Cynical’ is a term invented by optimists to describe realists.”

“You’re impossible.”

“Um. Usually.”

A month passed without his particularly noticing it. One evening when Carlotta came by he muttered a greeting and went back to watching a three-dimensional color-factored Fourier picture of the EMs signals. They still remained damned nearly opaque to him. He was getting a hint of some earlier history, of their brief flirtation with spaceships and astronomy. There was something like poetry here, a suggestion of a fractured time, glimmers of the beings who had mustered the strength to remake themselves.

“How do you think we should vote on this case coming up?” Nikka asked.

—fragmented sprockets in the signal there— “Uh, what?”

“This woman who stole all those shipcredits.”

“How?”

“False indexing, of course.”

“What do you say, Carlotta?”

“She’s guilty as sin.”

“Um. Always wondered what that meant. What’s sin supposed to be guilty of?”

—made one wonder if the pre-EM culture had ever gotten out of its own solar system, these images here, could mean outward-stretching limbs or tracers to other stars or a whacking great blowoff of dandelion seed for that matter—

“Take it from me, she did it.”

“Um. So the tribunal said.”

“The whole crew has to decide what to do about her, though,” Nikka said.

—crew’s rattled more than they know with this continual stream of bad news from Earth, Swarmers everywhere, even the chemicals don’t seem to work on them, and meanwhile the work goes on in orbit above the blighted oceans, building the starships, using self-programmed machines to do the scutwork, mankind getting ready to burst out like dandelion seeds among the stars, a runaway effect—

Carlotta said, “I think she should be stored away in the Slots.”

“That’s no punishment,” Nikka said.

“Course it is,” Nigel mumbled. “She’ll wake up Earth-side, discredited, having accomplished nothing.”

—an unstoppable exodus now, at just the right moment—

“I think she should be ostracized,” Carlotta put in.

“A collective solution?” Nikka pursed her lips. “I wonder …”

—which might just be what leaving the ancient Mare Marginis wreck was meant to accomplish, a vault of the ages lying there in lunar pumice, and the Snark had “accidentally” activated it, ol’ boojum renegade Snark, too long gone from its masters, traitor to the lathe that bore it, knew there were only decades left to us once it had relayed what it found, knew something was up the sleeve of its Lords of Antiquity and gave us a slim chance of getting round it, if we could only understand—

They were having a fight.

Nigel realized this slowly. It began with Carlotta saying, “You know, it’s been weeks since I’ve been over here,” just casually in the flow of conversation. But Nikka took something in it wrong and sat up stiffly in the couch and replied, “What do you mean?”

“Well, only that I haven’t seen very much of you two, that’s all.”

“We’ve been busy.”

Carlotta was not going to be put off with a bland generality. “You two don’t have me over the way we once did.”

“Well, you don’t have us over at all.”

“My apartment is crowded and, you know, yours is so much better.”

Nigel spoke up. “True enough.”

“One of my roomos has rotated, Doris, and this Lydia, the new one, isn’t cooperative at all. I think that’s why she was put in with us by the Block Council. She needs some socializing after her blowup with some lover, I don’t know who, but—”

“Carlotta, that’s not what you wanted to talk about,” Nikka said with an edge in her voice.

“It wasn’t?”

“You’ve been coming up to me at work, leaving messages—plucking at my sleeve, nagging me for attention.”

“Well, I need it.”

Nigel said, “Don’t we all.”

“I don’t think you understand.”

Nikka observed, “The one who doesn’t understand is over there.”

Nigel raised his head. He had just finished the damned dishes and felt he deserved a moment’s break. Apparently it was not to be. “What?”

“Well, at least he’s said something germane,” Nikka said.

Nigel murmured, “Sorry, fresh out of gossip.”

“Gossip? Not gossip! I want you to say something, not sit there and pore over those goddamn transcripts.”

“Not transcripts. Logs. Of—”

“Yes, yes, Alex dutifully points our deployed antennas backward each day, so you can get your ration of EM gabble-gabble. But that doesn’t mean you have to ignore me.”

Stiffly: “I didn’t realize I was.”

Carlotta: “Look, of course you are.”

Defensively: “I work hard. My concentration isn’t that good anymore. Things slip by me. I—”

Carlotta: “You’re not responding.”

Nigel: “What is this, groupthink?”

Nikka: “If this is a threesome we have to talk.”

Nigel: “Of course. But I’m explaining—”

Carlotta: “How you’ve been neglecting the relationship.”

Nigel: “That’s how you see it?”

Nikka: “Unfortunately, yes.”

Nigel: “It’s harder to keep three balls in the air than two.”

Carlotta: “That’s a cliché. What’s that mean?”

Nigel: “I’m dead pushed and fagged, that’s what.”

Nikka: “No, it’s deeper than that.”

Nigel: “To borrow a phrase, what’s that bloody mean?”

Nikka: “It means I don’t like being treated like an old shoe.”

Carlotta: “You’re aren’t tuned in here.”

Nikka: “Three-way relationships are hard, but each member must give as much of themselves as—”

Nigel: “Sounds like a flamin’ sociology textbook.”

Carlotta: “Empathize.”

Nigel: “I am. I really am.”

Nikka: “You sit around, reading the astrophysical updates, but I never hear you as an ordinary man anymore.”

Nigel: “There’s the possibility that I’m not.”

Carlotta: “Don’t go all stiff on us again.”

Nigel: “Am I imagining this, or have we gone from Carlotta to me?”

Carlotta: “Maybe it’s the same problem.”

Nikka: “No, it’s not. We all help each other. But Nigel has been burrowing into these neuro-anthropological matrix studies of his and, and shutting the world out.”

Nigel: “Admittedly.”

Carlotta: “Not so fast. My feeling is that you two are revolving around each other so much that I can’t get in edgewise.”

Nikka: “I admit that I’ve been concerned with him. Perhaps less easy to, to reach, for you. But he is getting more distant from me. And from you.”

Carlotta: “Sometimes I think it’s just a tactic.”

Nigel: “Winning through withdrawal?”

Carlotta: “Not exactly, but—”

Nigel: “Then what? I’m a renegade, I’ve admitted that. And I sop up great gouts of time plugging away at my obsessions. But they’re my obsessions. Haven’t I buggering well earned the right to—”

Nikka: “Not in this relationship, you haven’t. You’ve got to participate.”

Carlotta: “Look, I think you ought to consider what you’re doing with, or doing to Nikka. She isn’t the same person now that she was when we left Earthside. She doesn’t respond to people, to me, the way she did then and I think it’s—”

Nikka turned to Carlotta. “Why don’t you just do what you want? What you really feel, instead of echoing and reacting to us, to me, to—”

Nigel said slowly, “Yes, I should think—”

“And you—!” Nikka cried. “We’re supposed to tiptoe softly around you while you’re muttering deep thoughts about who knows what!”

Carlotta began, “Look—”

Nikka whirled to her. “We each have to have our own lives. Don’t you see that? Three-sided things are harder. They only work if one pair is no more important than the other.”

Carlotta said, “But you and Nigel are more important than you and me, or Nigel and me.”

Nigel: “Give it time.” Though he didn’t really feel that way.

Nikka sighed. She said quietly to Carlotta, “Do what you really want. That’s the answer. It’s the only way you’ll be happy.”

Nigel nodded, a bit dazed. The storm of the two women had washed over him suddenly and he was not sure what it meant. “And I, in turn, shall try not to withdraw so much,” he said formally. He was damned if he could see how, though.

He was doing therapy when Bob came by, sweating from running.

“Still gettin’ inna box, uh?” Bob asked. He thumped the gray metal. “This’s the neurotiming one?”

“Right.” Nigel grimaced. “Not my favorite. Sends prickly feelings up your nerves, like chilled mice running toward your heart.”

Bob shuddered. “Me, I stay away from this stuff.”

“Do, yes.”

“Ever’ time I have to come in for some med work I feel like I’m puttin’ my balls in a grinder. Somethin’ goes wrong—poof.”

“No choices left for me. Afraid I won’t be working for you again. In fact, I was surprised when you let me onto the throat-scraping team.”

Bob leaned against the massive cabinet and mopped sweat from his face, grimacing. “Wasn’t me. Ted overrode my judgment. Wish I haddna let him.”

“Not your fault. My medical was good, after all.”

“Marginal. Just marginal.”

“Oh.”

“Thing was, I rejected you right off. Ted came and leaned on me—really leaned. Called in some obligations, had Sanchez over in Medical sweet-talk me. The works. I finally caved in.”

“Ah.”

“Wish I haddna.”

It was, of course, the sort of thing you could never be sure of. Still, from Ted’s point of view; the calculation was simple enough: How could Ted lose? If Nigel did well in the job, things would have gone on as before. When he failed, instead, his long recovery reduced his political effectiveness.

Or was this paranoia? Hard to tell. He decided to keep his thoughts to himself. After all, there was always the possibility that this was merely an opening move.

Carlotta said, “I still don’t buy it,” and sipped at her drink. It was another fizzing orange thing, filling the air with a tingling sweetness.

Nigel persisted. “Machines can evolve, just as animals do.”

“Look—those things we’ve found, orbiting god-awful messed-up worlds. Sure, they’re automated artifacts. But intelligent? Self-reproducing, okay. The time needed to make a really smart entity is—”

“Enormous. Granted. We haven’t dated most of those worlds—can’t, with just one flyby. They could be billions of years older than Earth.”

There was the rub. It was difficult to think of what the galaxy might be like if organically derived intelligence was a mere passing glimmer, if machine evolution dominated in the long run. The ruins Lancer and the probes were finding seemed to say that even societies which had colonized other worlds could still be vulnerable to species suicide. Complex systems in orbit would have the best chance to live. A war would be a powerful selection pressure for survival among machines which had, in whatever weak form, a desire for survival. Given time …

That was the point. Events on a galactic scale were slow, majestic. That fact had been written into the structure of the universe, from the beginning. In order for galaxies to form at all, the expansion energy of the Big Bang had to be just the right amount. To make stars coalesce from dust clouds, certain physical constants had to be the correct size. Otherwise, ordinary hydrogen would not be so widespread, and stellar evolution would be quite different. If nuclear forces were slightly weaker than they are, no complex chemical elements would be possible. Planets would be dull places, without a variety of elements to cook into life.

The size of stars, and their distances from each other, were not arbitrary. If they were not thinly spread, collisions between them would have soon disrupted the planetary systems orbiting them. The size of the galaxy was set, among other things, by the strength of gravity. The fact that gravity was relatively weak, compared to electromagnetism and other forces, allowed the galaxy to have a hundred billion stars in it. This same weakness let living entities evolve which were bigger than microbes, without being crushed by their planet’s gravity. That meant they could be big enough, and complex enough, to dream of voyaging to the distant dots of light in a black sky.

Those organic dreamers were doomed to a poignant end. Evolution worked remorselessly in a cycle of birth, begetting, and death. Each life-form had to make room for its children, or else the weight of the past would bear down on any mutation, smothering change. So death was written into the genetic code. Evolution’s judicial indifference selected for death as well as life.

The coming of intelligent entities meant the birth of tragedy, the dawning realization of personal finiteness. Given the distance of habitable planets from a star, deducing the surface temperature, factoring in the physical constants that predicated chemistry—it was not hard to work out the approximate lifetime that evolution would ordain for human-sized intelligent life: a century or so. Which meant there was barely time to look around, understand, and work for a few frantic decades, before the darkness closed in. At best, an intelligent organism could make its mark in one or two areas of thought. It came and vanished in a flicker. Through its lifetime the night sky would not appear to move at all. The galaxy seemed frozen, unchanging.

Unmoving stars, distant targets. The organic beings, knowing of their own coming deaths, could still dream of going there. Yet on their voyages they were subject to the speed limit set by light. If light’s velocity had been higher, allowing rapid flight between stars, there would have been a huge price to pay. Nuclear forces would be different; the stars’ slow percolating of the heavy elements would not work. The long march upward that led to human-sized creatures would never have gotten started.

So it all knitted together: To arise naturally out of this universe meant a sure knowledge of impending death. That foreshortened all perspectives, forcing a creature to think on short time scales—times so truncated that a journey between stars was a life-devouring odyssey.

“—doesn’t explain the Swarmers, doesn’t account for the EMs adequately,” Carlotta was saving. “Your explanation has too many holes. Too many unjustified assumptions.”

“He hasn’t had help with a detailed analysis, remember that,” Nikka put in.

“No,” Nigel said, “Carlotta’s right. It needs work. Conceptual work.”

He sat back while the women discussed the latest gravlens images, his mind still wandering. He watched Carlotta’s quick, deft movements. She spent a lot of time on her dress, making artful concoctions from the skimpy supplies available. He was losing touch with her. She saw more of Nikka than of him, and knew a lot of the crewmen who were multisocketed now. Those people spent not only their working hours but their recreation as well, plugged in, taking part in—what was the phrase?—“computer-assisted socialization.” Meanwhile, Theory Section was producing no new hypotheses, nothing beyond a bland compiling of data. As the light-years piled up, the crew was turning inward, away from the awful emptiness that lay beyond Lancer’s stone buffers. Few went outside anymore, to gaze upon the relativistically Dopplered rainbow unaided. Weeks went by without his hearing even a mention of Earthside in casual conversation. In the face of immensity, something ingrained in humans made them reduce matters to the local, the present, the specific.

Admittedly, Lancer was packed with ambitious, intelligent folk. Given the years in flight, social diversions had undoubtedly been on from the start. But this … No, something rang wrong. Something beyond his curmudgeon’s distrust. Ted Landon and the rest could tune down this sort of thing if they desired. But a crew distracted was a crew easily misled, easily manipulated. And from such a muddle, a strong leader often eventually emerged when a crisis finally came.

He watched Carlotta stirring the orange ice shards in her noisy drink. He thought of Magellan, voyaging with thin hopes and not enough oranges to stave off scurvy. And of the Titantic, which sailed with absolute certainty and oranges galore.

“—wouldn’t they?” Carlotta was asking him a question.

“I don’t catch the drift,” he said to cover his day-dreaming.

“I mean, what’s going to force them to evolve higher intelligence?”

“Self-replicating machines can forage for raw materials anywhere. Lord knows they work better in space than we do—we’re hopeless, messy sods. But resources always run out. That will ensure competition.”

“It takes so long to exhaust a whole solar system,” Nikka said.

“Um. Yes. Hard for us to think on that time scale, isn’t it? Perhaps a reasonably bright machine needn’t wait around for evolution to do its work, though. It can augment its intelligence by adding on units, remember. Manufacturing, then delegating tasks to its new subsystems. Boosts the thinking speed, which is at least a step in the right direction. Simpler than willing yourself to have more brain cells, which is what we’d have to do.”

“Look, I’m the computer hack here,” Carlotta said. “I say artificial intelligence isn’t that easy. Earthside’s huge machines are sharp, sure, but it’s not just a question of adding more capacity.”

“Granted. But we’re talking about millions of years of evolution here—perhaps billions.”

“That’s a big, glossy generalization you’re making,” Carlotta said.

“So it is. I suppose I ought to think matters through better.”

“Listen,” Carlotta pressed him, “this is science. You’ve got to make a prediction if you want people to listen.”

“Right. Here it is. A Watcher will appear around every world where technology is possible. Or where it once was and might come again. They’re cops, you see. But they only police spots where technology might come from a naturally arising species. An organic one.”

Carlotta frowned. “Let’s see … That fits—”

Nigel broke in eagerly, “The robots which were shuttling ice at Wolf 359, for example. No Watcher there, because those patient little fellows are an early form of a machine society. Give ’em a few million years of exposure to cosmic rays, a shortage of materials—they’ll evolve. Become a member of the club.”

“Club?” Nikka asked.

“A network of ancient machine civilizations. They sent the Watchers.”

“I still don’t understand why the concentration on machines versus us,” Nikka said.

“Partly I’m relying on what the Snark said, and events afterward.”

“Well, Nigel,” Carlotta said diplomatically, “most people think you were, you know, off the deep end back then… .”

“I never claimed to be a conservative Republican. But there’s good reason to believe machines left over from a nuclear Armageddon won’t be friendly as lap dogs.”

“Why?”

“They started off with a genocide. One we caused. They’ll remember that.”

He wrote up his theory and duly gave a seminar for ExoBio and Theory sections. It was politely received.

The Watcher around Epsilon Eridani, he said, was there to be certain that no organic form arose again (or returned from nearby stars—there might be colonies). Something—the Watcher?—had destroyed the native organic civilization. It had incinerated the planet in such a way that the Skyhook remained.

Why leave the Skyhook? Most likely, because the Watcher wanted an economical way to send expeditions to the surface, where remnants could be sought out and exterminated.

He reviewed the observations of the oil haulers of Pro-cyon. At highest magnification the machines looked well-designed, sprouting antennas and hatches. Nigel deduced that they were perhaps a bit further advanced beyond the Wolf 359 ice luggers. Still carrying out mechanical tasks, but not running on instructions left over from a long-dead society. Instead, they seemed to be integrated into some interstellar economic scheme. An ocean of oil was a great boon, of course—but not merely for making energy. Anything that could cross between stars would not be hobbled by a chemical-energy economy. They might well need plentiful lubricants, though.

Isis was harder to explain. The EMs had engineered themselves to use radio as their basic sense. Was this to deceive the two Watchers into considering them a protomachine society?

That would imply a certain rigidity and literal-mindedness in those Watchers. Maybe they were old, decaying? Or else biding their time, studying the EMs. The fact that one Watcher attacked any attempt to inspect it tended to support the second point of view.

Nigel used all the data he could muster. He compared spectra and diagnostics of the various Watchers, estimated their ages (all gave billion-year upper bounds), and correlated as many variables as he could plausibly justify. There was no clean way to show a common origin for the Watchers. On the other hand, he pointed out, there was no reason to believe the Watchers had been constructed at the same place or time.

His theory did not muster much support. He had not expected it to.

The prevailing notion in Theory Section was the simplest—Occam’s razor triumphant. All these worlds, Theory said, were the husks of war-obliterated cultures. They proved that intelligent life was plentiful but suicidal. The Watchers were simply a common form of weapon, reinvented again and again in separately evolving societies. Battle stations. By the time a race developed one, it was close to annihilation.

As for Isis—the specifics of the great war that doomed that world were now mired in the EM legends. And legends were notoriously unreliable sources of hard facts. The EMs had modified their own bodies to survive, pure and simple, in the ruin they had made.

Neither side could explain the Swarmers and Skimmers. Nigel stood before the audience and countered arguments as best he could. He had a vague sense that the Skimmers and the EMs were somehow similar, but knew enough not to venture such an idea without an underpinning of hard explanation.

Someone from ExoBio pointed out that the Swarmers atleast demonstrated the prevalence of violence and warfare in other life-forms. There was applause after this remark. Nigel stood silent, not knowing how to counter it.

He saw the polite, well-concealed disbelief in their faces and accepted it. He merely hammered home again his prediction: Whatever they found ahead at Ross 128, if a world could possibly bring forth organic life—or had—it would have a circling Watcher. Walmsley’s Rule, someone called it.

His point made, he sat down to moderate applause. The seminar turned on to other topics in astrophysics and biology. No one, he noted, brought up the obvious exception to Walmsley’s Rule: Earth.

Five

Nigel stayed in their apartment much of the time. Nikka was quite fit, and did a variety of jobs around the ship. He participated in seminars and helped with assembly nets, all done over the apartment flatscreen. He liked the isolation and peace, but in fact it was forced on him by the need to tie into the blood filter four times daily. He and Nikka had put the rig together using gear from ship’s surplus; medical engineering was as easy as auto repair, most of it modular and plug-in. Still, they were tinkering with his life; Nikka checked the flow patterns every day. Of course, bypassing the medmons was a violation of shipregs, but that didn’t cause them any fretting.

He regularly tapped into the ExoBio seminars, mostly to use the interactive data bases and 3-D choice-theory-outcome representations. These last were visualizations of the overall consequences of any theory of extraterrestrial life, tracing the many strands of planetary evolution, biology, and socioeconomics. Earthside’s spotty flow of news on the Swarrners and Skimmers had to be folded into what Lancer and the independent probes found. There were competing schools of thought, led by specialist analysts among the crew. Nigel seldom met these savants. They existed for him as disembodied constellations of theory in the seminar representations, ways of organizing the data. Their command of interconnections was formidable. They could relate the structure of the Marginis wreck to the swim patterns of the Swarmers, fold it into a theory of universal languages, and come up with (a) an estimate of the probability that most galactic lifeforms still lived exclusively in oceans, (b) a best-choice scheme for achieving radio contact through use of gigawatt-level radio beacons, (c) a recalculated optimum-search strategy for probes to stars within a hundred light-years. Nigel recalled Mark Twain’s remark that the wonder of science was how vast a return of speculation you got for such a trifling investment of fact.

The snag was that you had to have some initial premise to fit it all together. Shipboard, the running consensus was that all earlier alien contacts—the Snark craft that Nigel spoke to briefly, and the Marginis wreck—had been feelers. Something, probably the Swarmers and Skimmers themselves, had probed Earth for a long time, sizing up its suitability as a biosphere. The conventional wisdom of the past, that no species would bother to invade another world, seemed no longer true. Lancer had found that most planets were blasted relics. It would be far easier to adapt to an existing biosphere like Earth, than to start at zero with a smashed, barren planet. So the Swarmers had probably been bioengineering themselves to adapt to Earth’s oceans, ever since they discovered it in the expedition that left the Marginis wreck.

The theory even explained Walmsley’s Rule. The Swarmers—or the civilization they represented, the technology that built the starships they came in—made the Watchers, to keep track of other possible life sites, other developing societies. Some Watchers survived the final war that scraped some worlds free of life; others didn’t. Man was coming late upon the galactic stage; he should expect to find some props from earlier acts—most of them tragedies. Thus went the conventional wisdom, new edition.

Nigel’s point of view was duly heard, discussed, footnoted in later work—and then the stream of theories and models and self-consistency cheeks flowed on around it, a consensus river skirting an island. He did not know enough about analysis to integrate his model with the wealth of data. He thought it probable that the Marginis wreck had died while destroying Earth’s Watcher. Over half a million years after its crash, the crumpled eggshell vessel had demonstrated powerful weapons—which was how Moon Operations found it. At full capability, the wreck could have blown apart whole asteroids—and Nigel suspected that was precisely what it was designed to do. Many of the worlds they’d seen by probe—and Isis, too—had been pulverized by bombardment. It was the cheapest way to damage a planetary surface in terms of energy invested. So the Marginis wreck had laid there as man evolved up from apes. The wreck could detect and smash any large asteroid falling toward the biosphere. But its strength ebbed. It had stood up to battering attacks, only to fade slowly as time wore it down.

Now humanity could defend itself against asteroids or even worse weapons. As long, Nigel thought to himself, as we can recognize them as weapons.

Six

Luyten 789–6 had only one world, circling near one of the two small suns, and it was devoured by fire.

As the probe swung near it, the spectral traces and photometry showed a pall of smoke and sheets of flame. The planet was Earth-size, comfortably warm, 80 percent ocean. Above the seas the oxygen content of the air was 25.4 percent, and over the continents, 23.7 percent.

It did not take much analysis to see what had happened. Warm surface temperatures made sea life abundant. Microorganisms there exhaled large amounts of oxygen. On Earth the same process ran, too, but oxygen was only 21 percent of the air.

The probability of forest fire nearly doubles with each 1 percent rise in oxygen. On the sole world of Luyten 789–6, the sea life poured oxygen into the forever burning tropical forests. Even Arctic tundra ignited. In the planet’s winter season plants grew despite the cold, driven by the high chemical reaction rates, and by processes in the soil. With summer came worldwide fires.

On Earth, methane belched up from mud ponds soaks oxygen from the air, keeping a stable balance. Somehow that mechanism had failed here. There was evidence from the chem sampling that this world was older than Earth; the grow-and-burn cycle had been running for billions of years. No animal life moved on the land; none could survive the fires. Yet a Watcher circled the world—impassive, scarred, and ancient.

“Carlotta!”

She turned. Nigel walked faster with obvious effort and caught up at a Y in the corridors. “Time for some talk?”

She grinned. “Sure. I’ve been wanting to bring something up myself. Just haven’t had an opportunity.”

They made their way to a viewpod that looked out on the base of the ship’s axis. Here the centrifugal gravity was low. Nigel’s face showed relief at the lessened strain. Beyond, they could see a globe of water ejected at the axis. People swam in it as it wobbled and flowed along the axis in free fall. They had thin rubber bands fixed to their ankles, in case they broke the surface tension and fell outward, Few did; they were adept fish, showering droplets and laughter.

“I miss that,” Nigel mused. “Haven’t done it for years.”

“Well, soon you’ll be able to again and we can—”

“No. I’ve been putting off my medical, but I can tell matters aren’t improving.”

“Chem?”

“Right. Radicals in the blood, so the body leaps to my defense”—a wry shrug—”and overcompensates.”

“Cancer.”

“That’s the homey name for it, yes. I’ve been doing a lot of blood filtering on my own—don’t look so shocked, it’s a simple trick, really—but I can’t get past the med-mon sniffer anymore.”

“Some therapy—”

He shook his head. “I know what Medical and Ted will say. I’m too much a bloody precious relic to risk. They’ll pop me into a Sleepslot until we’re Earthside.”

“Look, landfall at Ross is nearly a year away. I’m sure they’d let you last through that.”

“Um. Risk me dying from inadequate treatment? Unlikely.”

“You’re valuable to us, too. Didn’t Luyten 789–6 prove Walmsley’s Rule?”

“The first law of management is: Cover your ass. This shall ye honor before all else. Ted doesn’t want to haul me back to Earth a corpse.”

“You don’t want that either. There’s nothing you can do except take the luck you’re handed. Look, you know time in the Slots isn’t so bad. I’m going in myself for four months, next Friday.”

“What for?”

“I … A tune-up, sort of. I … We all three should talk about it, I guess …” She paused and then went on briskly. “You have no choice.”

“I’ve ducked by Medical before.”

She saw what he meant. “Uh-oh …”

“Right.” He grinned. “You took me out, put me on self-serve, remember, years ago? Do it again. Please.”

“I … You know I care for you, I still do, even if we aren’t … together now … but …”

“Please.”

“Do you really care that much about making landfall?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.” He surged up from his hammock chair and winced at sudden pain. He had not yet acquired all the habits of the elderly, the perception of unbalanced forces acting through fragile, brittle axes, in ankles, knees, elbows, spine. Carlotta studied him and sighed.

“Monitoring systems are better now,” she said. “The programs and data bases trigger decision algorithms fairly high up in the sentience pyramid. I would have to …”

He hung on her next words. She bit her lip. “Look, I’m not saying it’ll work. I can get close, but—”

“I appreciate that, luv. But close counts only in horseshoes and hand grenades. I need to get out from under them for sure. Something they can’t trace.”

She sighed. “The things you ask for, Jesus, I didn’t know you were this bad off. Thought you were skimming a fra-poff, sure, but real cancer—Lord, that’s supposed to be fixable.”

He blinked wearily. “The older the body, the more rickety the immune response gets. That’s what all the aging diseases are, I suppose. Inappropriate response. The easiest way to kill a living thing is to get it to do most of the damage to itself. Merely add the right outside irritant …” His voice trailed off. Silently Carlotta rose to embrace him.

“Y’know, you said once that intelligence is the ability to learn from other people’s mistakes.” Carlotta studied him gravely. “You sure as hell aren’t. Why not pack it in, eh?”

He smiled defiantly. “I paid my admission. I want to see how the movie ends.”

Seven

He went for long walks through Lancer, seeing little of it. Instead, he tried to recall Earth, to forget the rumors of influence peddling and maneuverings on shipboard that might, finally, decide his fate. He remembered the last place he had gone before boarding Lancer: Venice. Nikka was visiting her family so he was left alone, ambling down gray flagstone streets with no footpaths. Men charged along them, pushing barrows and shouting. “Le gambe!”—which Nigel dutifully looked up in his dictionary and found meant “Legs!” a rather abrupt warning. It reminded him of the American “Heads up!” which was used when the appropriate response was precisely the opposite.

He let himself be tugged by crowds into Saint Mark’s Square, amid their chatter and dark round eyes. At the height of Venetian power the square had been named II Broglio, intrigue, because from 10:00 A.M. to noon only the nobles were allowed to meet there and hatch their plots. He thought of Ted and Bob, bland names which hid riddles.

He went inside the vast, hollow spaces of the basilica. From the high bulbous domes gold saints stared down at the masses of working, breathing carbon chemistry below. He climbed. The upper walkways brought these spiritual heroes closer, revealing them to be made of chips of blue and rose and white, a millimeter deep.

The rising spaces reminded him of the small cylinder worlds, just big enough to make a man feel dwarfed. Architects had been trying for that effect for millennia. He remembered that originally the pyramids outside Alexandria—she was lying sprawled, unconscious, the life draining—he cut off the thought.

The basilica walls were encrusted with Constantinople sculptures and Holy Land jewels. Booty of the Crusades. The desire for huge surroundings seemed to run in parallel with the lust for vast voyages, for causes, and for stacks of stone to remember them by. Look, see what I did! Future schoolchildren would goggle, to be sure—and then bow their reverent heads back to their ice creams.

Outside, waves slapped against the quay, playful, throwing spray in his eyes to remind him of how big they had been farther out where the ocean was still deep and blue. He wondered, What drew such crowds to this place? Then, seeing the marble standing luminous before the sea, it was suddenly clear. Here men had come, fleeing barbarism. Once they had tamed the sea and traded on it, they built stone statements, denying that the outcome was ever in doubt. These mobs knew that he saw, and preferred the cool stone, tight streets, and arched bridges that asserted the rule of geometry over the waves. These carved boxes of marble should, must, would, outlast the sea’s random rub.

On Ascension Day the Doge, the Venetian ruler, would sail out from the city in his gilded state galley, to throw a ring overboard, symbolizing the wedding of Venice to the waters. But in the end the marriage was not valid, because it lacked the consent of the bride. Venice clung to its carved rock and waned.

He still did as much manual work as he could, but the jobs seemed harder and the weakness came on him earlier in the day. He did analysis and routine jobs of maintenance, to keep busy and justify his presence, if only to himself. His digestion got worse. His muscles were always sore in the mornings and he felt a general unsteadiness. The worsening was blissfully gradual. He saw, ruefully, that he had reacted to it as most do. First you blame minor illnesses rather than age, and claim that pretty soon you will be up and about and back to tending the crops. He made this observation to Nikka many times and finally, afterward, she would become silent, and he would spend a restless night. He was going to the stars, but evolution’s need for mortality reached him even here.

Slowly he gathered, from slight elevations of eyelashes and side glances of friends, that his birthdays were not seen now as accomplishments, but as postponements. He looked for some weariness with life, with the doing of things, that would make the end less fearsome.

Surprisingly, perhaps gladly, he couldn’t find any.

Nigel looked from the prelim photos of Ross 128. “Pretty blurred,” he said to Nikka.

They’re from the gravitational telescope. Years old, of course—they’re working as fast as they can, but the light-travel delay—”

“Right.” He studied the hazy blobs. “Some Jovians, two terrestrials. Not bad.” Because Lancer had boosted to 0.98 light speed, these images were only a few months older than the first ones they had received, years ago, back at Isis. “Carlotta’s working on reprocessing this stuff, isn’t she? When will we get better—”

“She’s in the Slots.”

“What? I didn’t—How long?”

“Two weeks now.”

Nigel was startled. He hadn’t even noticed her absence. And he disliked abrupt changes like this, friends suddenly disappearing. “When do they uncork her?”

“Six months, I think.”

“We’ll be nearly at landfall then!”

Nikka looked up from her workpad. “Slots are R and R. She’ll come out refreshed, able to relieve somebody who’s been hustling to get ready for Ross.”

“Ummm.” He frowned. “Seems reasonable … but … I don’t like it.” He shook his head and went back to mulling over the prints. But he could not concentrate.

Eight

Warning gongs rang throughout Lancer. Nigel crossed his legs and ignored them. The ship was striking a dense dust cloud, and the ramscoop would either work or not, nothing he could do would matter. He slid a stick into the spine of a book and opened it. The stick overfilled the book, so he thumbed for the second projection and started reading on page 287. And then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le’s all three slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the territory, for a couple of weeks or two; and I says, all right, that suits me, but I ain’t got no money for to buy the outfit, and I reckon I couldn’t get none from home—

“Nigel!” his comm cried. He tapped his fingernail in answer. “Cut into shipspeak—fast.” It was Nikka, gone before he could reply. He punched into his flatscreen and overvocal and listened.

drive tube’s holding okay max’ed on momentum transport

betcher butt we’re gonna sail right through no prob

what’s the sci package picking up I’m gettin’ funny

it’s dropped clear of our wake now pickin’ up samples

look it that absorption line there, big fat one sittin’ at 2200 angstroms thick as your thumb

absorption cross section about 4 tim 10-₁₇ cm₂ yeah

I got the culprit right here, the sampler’s got a slide on now, looks like silicate grains only that’s no silicon line

average size right aroun’ 10-₅ cm I make it

Christ ’at stuff is peptides clear as a bell see those linkages

long chain stuff too all over the outer surface of those grains things are coated with it like an oil slick or somethin’

I don’t get it we’re seem’ amino acids in there too

those’re supposed to be dust particles what’s that stuff doing sticking to

look at that structure like a wall, long chains and the rest it’s a cell barrier got to be

doesn’t make sense

only use for a cell wall is to keep out your enemies

out here that means ultraviolet, UV’d blow those peptide chains to hell except for that li’l membrane there, bet it’s got silicon in it to block the UV

so peptides can stay inside the cell wall an’ link up an’ reproduce ’at’s the only thing logical I can make out

living stuff in clouds I don’t look it’s cold as a hoor’s tit out there what’s the thermodynamic driver for life

lots of IR around that’s how you saw that absorption line, same line that comes in most carbon complexes

see there in the middle that’s a silicate, the original piece of dust this cell started out on I bet

an’ two of ’em stickin’ together right there look the chains are migratin’ to the cell wall that’s it that’s it

my Gawd the density of ’em in here the ram-scoop is nearly chokin’ on ’em and the fluxlife is gettin’ barnacles of this goop all over we’re gonna have to clean up this mess

mess hell it’s reproducing cells man in these big clouds, there’s more mass in these clouds than in the goddamn stars for sure, look at all the dark patches in the night sky for sure it means there’s this peptide chem happenin’ everywhere …

Nigel watched the list of molecules and free radicals stack up: ethanol, cyanoacetylene, carbon monoxide, ammonia, methane, water—and realized that as far as the universe was concerned, this was where chemistry occurred. The planets were negligible. Driven by starlight, here the twisting coils had time to find their mates and build even more complexity. These molecular clouds were the compost heaps where the stars formed. They also swept through solar systems, littering the planets with sticky, hungry cells.

In the tenor of the crew voices he heard a strain of excitement. They had seen dozens of dead worlds and now had stumbled blindly into a caldron of life. The molecular clouds were the most massive objects in the galaxy, and they had been brewing longer than the stars. Lancer surged and burned a hole through this one, leaving fiery remnants. Ahead, glimmering dimly through the smoky fog of chemistry, was the wan glow of Ross 128.