Polaris

NINETEEN

It became an interesting evening. The snowstorm renewed itself and turned into a howling blizzard, there was an earthquake warning at about the time we were going to bed, and a few hours later they evacuated the hotel because a yoho got into the building.

The yohos, it turned out, were arthropodic creatures with a taste for people.

Fortunately, they only showed up five days out of the year, which coincided with their breeding season, and on those occasions they rarely left the beach. After an hour standing in the snow, we were informed by management that the yoho had gone, everything was okay, and we could go back in. When we got to our suite, we inspected it carefully and locked the doors.

The quake hit shortly after we got back inside, but it amounted to nothing more than a series of moderate tremors. By then I had no interest in turning off the lights, so I went into the sitting room and spent time with Alex, who was engaged in a VR conversation. He handed me a headband. I put it on, and Chek Boland’s avatar appeared. He was relaxed on a beach in a collapsible chair, wearing khaki shorts and a pullover and a wide-brimmed hat to keep the sun off. There was no ocean visible, or audible, however. The beach went on forever.

“… one son,” he was saying. “ His name was Jon. He was twenty at the time of the Polaris. ”

“What happened to your marriage, Dr. Boland? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“I think Jennifer and I got bored. That’s inevitable in any long-term relationship.”

“You don’t really believe that?”

“I’m a psychiatrist. I see it all the time.”

Alex was nothing if not traditional about such matters. He allowed his expression to reflect his disapproval of the comment, as if he were talking with a real person. “I read somewhere,” he said, “that sixty percent of all marriages endure. That they stay together.”

“They tolerate each other, usually from a sense of duty. To the kids, generally.

To their vows. To an inability to inflict pain on someone they think loves them.”

“You’re pretty pessimistic about the institution.”

“I’m a realist. Long-term marriage is a trap that has survived from our beginnings in the forest, when it was the only way to guarantee species survival. That is no longer the case. Hasn’t been for thousands of years.”

“Then why has it survived?”

“Because we’ve invested it with so much mythology. It’s the sanctum sanctorum of adolescent giddiness. It is the sentence we impose on our lives because we watch too much romantic drama. And maybe because people are too scared of being alone.”

“Okay.”

“Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?” He glanced down at his arm and made a face. “Getting burned,” he said. A new shirt appeared, with longer sleeves.

“Yes. There is something more.” In the background I could see a gathering dust storm. It’s the sort of thing that some folks use not too subtly to suggest they have more important things to do than continue the conversation. But this was an avatar.

Boland, I decided, had had a sense of humor. “You were a crusader,” continued Alex.

“You gave time and energy to all sorts of causes.”

“Nonsense. I made an occasional contribution. No more than that.”

“You supported sweeping changes in education.”

“We’ve never known how to ignite a thirst for knowledge in our kids. Individual parents sometimes figure it out. But the institutions? They’ve been an unmitigated disaster for as long as anyone can remember.”

“You were a spokesman for Big Green.”

“People on Rimway don’t notice yet the damage they’re doing. But spend a few weeks on Earth. Or Toxicon. Now there’s a world that’s well named.”

“You were an advocate for population control.”

“Of course.”

“Is there really a population problem, Doctor? There are hundreds of summer worlds out there, with hardly anybody living on them. Some are empty.”

“Where are we now?”

“Sacracour.”

“Ah. Yes. A perfect example of your point. As of the last census, there are two hundred eighty-eight thousand six hundred fifty-six persons living on Sacracour.

Almost all of them are concentrated along the eastern coast of one of its continents.”

“If you say so.”

“Three other major land masses, including a supercontinent, are virtually empty.”

“That’s exactly my point.”

“The population on Earth is currently eleven billion. Plus or minus a few hundred million. They are pressed very hard.”

“But we could move them elsewhere. We have options.”

“Yes, we do. But moving whole populations to even the friendliest of worlds is not one of them.” His features hardened. “Do the math, Alex. Do the math.”

“You’re talking about resources to move people?”

“Of course.”

“So we dedicate everything we have to the operation.”

It was time for me to break in. “There aren’t enough ships, Alex,” I said. “No matter what, there aren’t enough ships.”

“The young lady is right. There are currently one thousand sixty-four superluminals in the Confederacy, with an average passenger capacity of twentyeight people. Three will accommodate more than a hundred; many, as few as four. In fact, if you use the entire fleet, you still don’t have enough capacity to move thirty thousand people. Assuming you make a round-trip every week with everything you have, which would be pushing it, you might be able to transport one million five hundred sixty thousand people a year. Round it off to one point six million.

“Toxicon’s population growth is less than one percent. That shows restraint. But it still comes to five million births annually. So the population of Toxicon produces people three times faster than the entire fleet could haul them away.”

Alex could see he’d lost that argument. “You’re also opposed to reconstructing personalities.”

“Yes.”

“But that’s what you did for a living. For almost eight years. And not just for criminals.”

“I believed in it at first.” He stopped, as if to think what he wanted to say. “Alex, some of my patients were so fearful of the world around them that they couldn’t get through their lives.”

“Fearful of the world around them? What does that mean?”

“It means they were afraid they’d fail. Or be rejected. They thought they might simply be inadequate. Drugs could be made to work for some. But there were others whose psyches were too delicate, and some, too twisted.”

“Suicides waiting to happen?”

“Or criminal or other types of antisocial behavior.” His eyes closed, and for a moment he said nothing more. Finally, he looked up. “I wanted to give them decent lives. I wanted to take away the fear, to give them reason to respect themselves. I wanted them to be proud of who they were. So I changed them. Made them better.”

“Except-”

“Except that I came to realize that the person who emerged from the treatment was not the person who came to me for help. The old memories were gone. The former life was gone. The person behind the eyes was a stranger. I could have given my patients new names, and they would not have known the difference.”

“But if these people were miserable-”

“I did not have license to impose a death sentence!” His voice shook. “But that was what I did. In more than a hundred cases. And that doesn’t count the assorted killers, kidnappers, thieves, and thugs I was called on to treat.” He delivered the final word with venom. “There has to be a way to untangle even the most diseased psyche.

To keep the essence of the individual while softening the more abrasive qualities.”

“But you never found it.”

“No.”

“Why did you make the flight on the Polaris?”

His mood changed. “How could I not? Who’d want to miss a show like that?

Moreover, if you want the truth, I was pleased to be associated with Mendoza and White and Urquhart and the others.”

The records showed that Boland had kept his avatar current. The last update had been from Indigo, just before the Polaris left on the final leg of the mission. So I felt free to ask how things had gone up to that point.

He smiled. “On the first leg of the flight, we were like kids.”

“You mentioned kidnapping a moment ago. Did you and your colleagues plan to kidnap Tom Dunninger?”

“Ridiculous.”

“Had he planned such a thing, would Dr. Boland have informed you?”

“No,” he said. “It would have been imprudent.”

We left Sacracour, as we came, in the dark. It would be another nine hours before Gobulus rose, and eleven or twelve before the sun showed up. We were loaded with local treats, more desserts than I should have been eating. We were still getting snow and strong winds. The local authorities put out a traffic advisory, suggesting everyone stay put, but we didn’t want to miss the ride up to the orbiter, or we’d be stuck another thirty hours. So we left the hotel on schedule. The flight was uneventful, and we caught the shuttle with time to spare.

It was a fifty-minute run up to the orbital dock, where we got our departure time (which would be four hours later), boarded the Belle-Marie, unloaded the bags, showered, and went back to the concourse for dinner.

We ate too much and finished off with a couple of drinks. By then it was almost time to go. We returned to the ship, and I went onto the bridge to do my preflight. I can’t tell you that I actually saw a problem, but Belle seemed to be slow posting the status for some of the systems. I wasn’t sure whether it was my imagination at work.

But I asked her if anything was wrong.

“No, Chase,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”

Well, okay. The numbers all checked out, and I informed operations that we were ready to leave. “At your discretion,” as the line goes.

They told me to stand by. There’d been a delay of some sort getting a freighter loaded. “You’ll be a few minutes late,” they said.

I went back and talked to Alex. I don’t remember what about. He was distracted, and I knew he was thinking about Shawn Walker and the Peronovski. We waited a half hour before Ops cleared us for departure.

“Lock down, Alex,” I told him. Moments later the green light came on, signaling he was secure. “Okay, Belle,” I said. “Let’s head out.”

I always enjoy casting off the umbilicals and getting under way. Don’t ask me why.

It’s not as if I’m anxious to get to the next port, but I like the feeling of leaving things behind. First it’s the station, then the blue globe of the world itself starts getting smaller. And eventually even the sun winks out. I tied the engines into the quantum generator so it would begin charging. We’d need nine hours to store sufficient energy to make the jump to Rimway.

Quantum technology had taken the tedium out of long-range flight. But it had also eliminated most of the romance. It was all very simple now. And almost too quick. You wanted to go from Rimway to East Boston, you ate a couple of meals, watched a VR, maybe napped a bit, and when the lamps came on indicating the system was sufficiently charged, you pressed a button. And there you were. You needed a few days after you got to the target system to make your approach. But basically, it was an eyeblink. The range was limited only by the strength of the charge you could pack into the system.

People had once complained that the Armstrong engines, with their ability to tunnel through linear space, had resulted in our losing track of how truly big the Orion Arm was. And how far from home the Veiled Lady really was. Now, you were in and out. Virtually teleported, with no sense of having gone anywhere. Distance, range, deep space, the light-year, had all gone away. And as it always seems to be with progress, you pay a price. The price might be in reduced safety, or in social dislocations, or, as was the case with the quantum drive, in losing touch with reality.

I turned the conn over to Belle and wandered back into the common room with Alex. That’s a joke, really. Belle did pretty much everything in flight. I was there in case of emergency.

I wasn’t looking forward to going home. It had been nice to be away from Rimway and feel safe again. Given my way, I’d have opted for an old-fashioned long flight this time. I felt secure inside the metal cocoon. I’d even have considered staying on at Sacracour, despite the blizzards and the quakes and the yohos. At least you could see the yohos coming.

Alex settled in for the evening, reading more about Madeleine English. “She left no avatar,” he said, tapping the display. “She was an ordinary pilot with an adequate work record.”

“ Adequate is about the best you can do,” I told him. “It means you always got where you were going with a minimum of fuss, and you never lost either people or cargo.”

She’d been running missions for Survey six years by then. Her biographersthere were four-noted that she’d had several lovers, including the best-selling novelist Bruno Shaefer. She’d been born in Kakatar and shown an early interest in spacecraft. Her father was quoted as saying somewhere that it was her love for the superluminals, and the intervention of Garth Urquhart, that saved her. “Otherwise,” he commented, apparently not entirely kidding, “it would have been, for her, a life of crime.”

She’d piloted the T17 Nighthawk against the Mutes and qualified for superluminals at twenty-three. That wasn’t the record for youngest certification, but it was close.

There were pictures of her in uniform, in evening gowns, in workout gear. (She’d apparently been a fitness nut.) There were pictures of her at the beach, at various monuments, at Niagara Falls, at Grand London Square, at the Tower of Inkata, at the Great Wall. Here she was in cap and gown. There, in the cockpit of her T17. She stood with various groups of her passengers after she’d joined Survey.

There were pictures of her with Urquhart, with Bruno Shaefer beside a publicity still for one of Shaefer’s books, and with Jess Taliaferro at a banquet somewhere.

She’d never married.

Usually, when people talked about the Polaris, they talked about the Six, Dunninger and Mendoza, Urquhart, Boland, White, and Klassner. But I suspected, when they thought about it, they fixated on Maddy. Of them all, she was the one who came away seeming unfulfilled.

“What do you think about her?” Alex asked.

That was easy. “She was okay. Apparently Survey thought so, too. They trusted her with six of the most celebrated people in the Confederacy.”

Alex was looking at the picture of her in uniform. Blonde hair cut short, startling blue eyes, lots of intensity. “She took out a Mute destroyer,” I said. “Riding a fighter.”

“I know.” Alex shook his head. “I don’t think I’d want to fool around with her.”

“Depends what you mean.”

He sighed. “Women are all alike,” he said. “You think we’re all obsessed.”

“Who? Me?” We were still almost eight hours from jump. And we were figuring four and a half days from home. We sat and talked for a bit, then I decided I’d had enough for the day. I took the reader to bed, but I was asleep fifteen minutes after I crawled in.

I’m not sure what woke me. Usually, if there’s any kind of problem, Belle won’t hesitate to let me know. The result is that the pilot of a superluminal can sleep soundly, secure in the knowledge that the helmsman will not doze on duty. But Belle hadn’t spoken; nevertheless, I lay staring up at the overhead, listening to the silence, knowing something had happened.

Then I became aware of the engines. They were becoming audible. And changing tone. The way they did when running through the last moments before making a jump.

AIs do not make jumps on their own. I twisted my head and looked at the time.

We were back on ship time, which was Andiquar time. It was a quarter to four in the afternoon, but the middle of the night to me. And two hours before we were scheduled to transit.

“Belle,” I said, “what’s going on?”

“I don’t know, Chase.” She appeared at the foot of my bed. In her Belle-Marie work uniform.

“Belay the jump.”

“I don’t seem to have control over the displacement unit.” She meant the quantum engines, which were continuing to rev up. We hadn’t had time to take on enough of a charge to get to Rimway, but that wouldn’t prevent us from leaving the immediate area and going somewhere. It just limited the options.

“Try again, Belle. Belay the jump.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m unable to do so, Chase.”

I was out of the sack by then, charging into the passageway. I banged on Alex’s door and barged into his compartment. It took a moment to get him awake.

“Jump coming,” I said. “Heads up.”

“What?” He rolled over and tried to look at the time. “Why the short warning?

Isn’t it too early?”

You could feel the pressure building in the bulkheads. “Get hold of something!”

I told him. Then the lights dimmed. Quantum jumps are accompanied by a sense of sudden acceleration, only a few seconds long, but enough to do some serious damage if you’re caught unawares. I heard Alex yelp, while I was thrown back against a cabinet. I saw stars and felt the customary tingling that accompanies passage between distant points.

The lights came back up, full.

Alex had been tossed out of bed. He got to his feet with a surge of intemperate remarks and demanded to know what we were doing.

“I don’t know yet,” I told him. “You okay?”

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “The bone’ll set in a few days.”

I scrambled onto the bridge. “What happened, Belle?”

“I’m not sure, Chase,” she said. “The clock seemed to be running fast.”

“And you weren’t aware of it?”

“I don’t monitor the timers, Chase. There’s never been a need to.”

Alex appeared at the hatch.

“Okay, Belle,” I said. “I want to know precisely what’s going on. And while you’re trying to figure it out, let’s open up and see where we are.”

Somewhere, thrusters fired. The ship moved. Began to rotate. I grabbed hold of the side of my chair. Alex was thrown off-balance, staggered across the bridge, and finally went down in a heap. “Belle,” I said, “ what are you doing?”

There were more bursts. The prow was rising, and we were swinging toward starboard.

“Belle?”

“I don’t know,” the AI said. “This is really quite extraordinary.”

Alex got to the right-hand seat and belted in. He threw a desperate look at me.

“Belle,” I said, “open up. Let’s get a look at the neighborhood.”

Still nothing.

“Okay, how about the monitors then?” I was striving to keep my voice level.

Don’t alarm the passengers. Never sound as if you’ve lost control of events. “Let’s see what the telescopes have.”

The screens remained blank.

“Belle. Give us the feed from the scopes.” I dropped into my chair and belted down.

“There’s a break in the alignment, Chase.” Her voice was flat. Detached. “I can’t get a picture.”

“Where?”

“Main relay.”

“Damn you, Belle,” I said, “what’s Walt Chambers’s real name?” Walt Chambers was a client we’d carried a couple of years earlier while he was researching ruins on Baklava. He’d been with a group of academics, and his name was Harbach Edward Chambers. But he didn’t like Harbach. He looked a lot like Walter Strong, the old horn player. He’d claimed the name Walt during adolescence, and it stuck. He’d traveled with us, and Belle knew him.

“Searching,” she said.

“Search, hell.” I opened the data flow panel. System status seemed normal.

“Belle,” I said, “take yourself off-line.”

The main engines fired a short burst, then shut down. There followed a series of volleys from the attitude thrusters. Up, down, port, and back to center. We were aligning ourselves on a new course.

“I’m sorry, Chase. I don’t seem to be able to do that.”

“Hey,” said Alex, “what’s going on?”

“I’m working on it.” The port thrusters fired. “She’s changing our heading.”

“Why?”

“Damn it, Alex, how do I know?”

I was suddenly aware I was floating. My hair drifted up, and I was rising against the seat belts. The ship’s rotational motion stopped, and the main engines came back on. We began to accelerate. At maximum thrust.

“Gravity’s off,” Alex said. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” I tried to take Belle off-line, but nothing happened.

“You’re giving us a hell of a ride, Chase.”

“It’s not me.” The engines shut down again and the gee forces went away. The ship became dead quiet, and a series of status lamps began to blink. “Son of a bitch,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Belle’s dumping our fuel.”

“My God,” he said. “All of it?”

I tried again to wrestle control away from her. The fuel status lamp went to amber, then to red, then to bright scarlet.

I released my harness and got over to the maintenance panel.

“What are you going to do?” Alex demanded.

“For a start, we’re going to disable her.” I opened the panel.

“I’m sorry, Chase,” said Belle. “Nothing personal.”

Yeah. Right. It didn’t even sound like Belle anymore. And what chilled me most was that I detected a sense of genuine regret. I twisted the handle, punched her buttons, and her lights went out. “Good-bye,” I said.

“She gone?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to her?” Alex asked. “Are we okay?”

“It wasn’t Belle,” I said. “Hang on, I’m going to restore gravity.”

“Good,” said Alex. “If you could make it quick-”

“I’m working as fast as I can.” Artificial gravity is normally controlled by the AI. To reset it, I had to switch over to manual, and punch in more numbers. Our weight flowed back.

Alex sat quietly, looking stunned. “What’s our situation?” he asked, finally.

“Can’t be good. We’re adrift in a hot area.”

“Hot?”

“There’s a lot of radiation out there. Let’s get a look.” Despite Belle’s claims, the telescopes worked fine. They aren’t designed to be operated manually, though. I had to turn each on individually, then aim it. There were six of them, so it took a while. I routed the feed into the displays. One by one, the pictures came on.

The Belle-Marie was in the middle of a light show.

Two bright blue lights slashed across the monitors. It was a saber dance, and the sabers were long, twisted beams of light. “What the hell is it?” asked Alex.

It was the sort of effect an ancient lighthouse might have caused had the lamp been bouncing around inside and spinning wildly.

The lamp itself appeared to be a blue star.

Alex was watching me, reading my face. “So what is it?”

“Ramses.”

“The pulsar?”

“Yes. Has to be.” I was pressing my earphones, listening to it. I put it on the speaker, and the bridge filled with a sound like waves of ice and sleet rattling against the hull.

“Doesn’t sound good,” he said.

“We’re headed directly into the lights.”

“What happens when we get there?”

“We’ll fry. If we’re still alive at that point. Radiation’s already going up.”

He didn’t take that real well. There was some profanity, which was rare for him.

And then he told me in a cool level voice that we needed to do something.

I was in a state of near shock myself. “I don’t believe this,” I said. “Leave the damned ship under the supervision of nitwits, and this is what happens.” Someone had re-programmed or replaced Belle. Probably the latter.

His eyes were wide, and there was something accusing in that stare. How could you let this happen?

We were getting more warning lights. External radiation levels were increasing.

I was checking time in flight, the range from Sacracour to Ramses, the status the quantum engines would have attained before transition. It was Ramses. No doubt. A collapsed star. Or maybe the burned-out remains of a supernova. I wasn’t really up on my celestial physics. In any case, I knew it was a beast we wanted to stay well away from.

The beams flicked past, moving so quickly they constituted a blur. I froze one of them. “It’s mostly a slug of gamma rays and photons.”

“Can we get clear?”

It was a cosmic meat slicer, and we were headed into it with no power and no way to change course. “We have no engines,” I said.

“How long?”

“Seven hours. Give or take.”

“What about the jump engines? Can’t we jump out of here?”

“They’re useless without the mains.” I switched on the hyperlight transmitter.

“Arapol, this is the Belle-Marie. Code White. We are adrift near Ramses. Heavy radiation. Request immediate assistance. I say again: Code White.” I added our coordinates, set the message to repeat, and began transmitting.

Help wasn’t going to arrive in time. So I began working on the assumption we’d have to save ourselves. To that end, I pulled up everything we had on pulsars in general and Ramses in particular. I’d never really had any cause to concern myself with pulsars. The only bit of information I thought I needed was pretty basic: Stay away from them. “It has an extremely strong magnetic field,” I told Alex. “It says here that it bounces around a lot, the magnetic field, sometimes close to light speed. It interacts with the magnetic poles, and that’s what generates what you’re looking at.”

“The lights?”

“Yep. They’re cones. ” We still had the frozen image on one of the screens.

“There are two of them. Ramses is a neutron star. It spins pretty fast, and the cones rotate with it.”

“Must be damned fast. They’re a blur.”

“It rotates once in about three-quarters of a second.”

“You mean the star spins on its axis at that rate?”

“Yes.”

“How the hell’s that possible?”

“It’s small, Alex. Like the one that hit Delta Kay. It’s only a few kilometers across.”

“And it spins like a banshee.”

“You got it. This is a slow one. Some of them do several hundred revolutions per second.” The two shafts of blue light both originated on the neutron star. Their narrow ends pointed toward the pulsar.

I’ve discovered since then that, like any superdense star, a pulsar has trouble supporting its own weight. It keeps squeezing down until it achieves some sort of stability. And the more it squeezes, the faster it spins. The point is that as the pulsar gets smaller, its magnetic field becomes more compressed. Stronger. It becomes a dynamo.

“Sons of bitches,” said Alex. “I hope we can get our hands on the people who did this.”

“Consider yourself lucky the quantum drive isn’t too precise. Or they’d have shipped us right into the thing. As it is, at least we got some breathing space.”

We were 60 million klicks from the pulsar. The cones at that range were almost 6 million kilometers in diameter. And they were directly in front of us, dancing all over the sky.

Hull temperature was up, but within levels of tolerance. Internal power was okay. Attitude thrusters had fuel left. The AI was dead. We had some computer power available, off-line from the AI.

So how do you change the course of a starship when you can’t run the engines? “Maybe,” suggested Alex, “we could start heaving furniture out the airlock.”