Starburst

27

WITHOUT DARIEN McCULLOUGH'S HELP THE ALPHA-ALEPHS would never have made it to the spacecraft, much less succeeded in sneaking past the dozing guards, but even so by the time they got there they were pitiably exhausted. Eve Barstow's Earth-born muscles were beginning to come back into shape and she was the least damaged, but even Eve plopped herself into a seat and croaked, "Let's get away from here, Bill."

Darien looked around. "—Five, six, seven," she counted. "Is that all of you?"

"Close enough. Go!" grunted Jeron, and Darien barely had time to seat herself when little Jeromolo Bill expertly whipped the ship off the ground and up.

The kind of thrust involved was entirely out of Darien's experience. She weighed twice, three times what she had ever weighed before, and when she turned her head as it leaned against the back of her seat she thought her eyes would be twisted out of their sockets. She knew in theory that sharp acceleration produced G-thrusts, but theory did not persuade her body that everything was proceeding normally. For a moment she thought she would throw up— but couldn't—and then the pressure eased and she could, but didn't any longer need to.

There was a shrill gabble of children's voices to celebrate the fact that they could now get up again. Darien winced at the noise, and then realized that the reason she could hear it was that there was no noise from the ship itself. No roar of motors, not even a scream of air passing around the ship itself. How very strange! She was near enough to the white cylinder that held the power plant to reach out a hesitant finger to touch it. Cool. Also strange. Everything strange; and strangest of all the people, who did not know how strange they were.

Although they had some very grownup ways, most of them were still children, and you could see that in the strain on their faces, the pouting lips, the way they flew at each other. The youngest of all was the child who seemed to be flying the ship! Not yet three feet tall, with sweet, plump skin and eyebrows almost invisibly blond—how could he be trusted with such a thing?

Perhaps it was good for him. He seemed calm enough, whereas the two youngest of the girls—their names seemed to be Ringo and Tudeasy—were shrieking at each other, and close to tears. The older girl, Molomy, and the boy called Quittyyx were trying to quiet them down, while Jeron cursed them all impartially.

It was Eve Barstow who restored order, with a simple, "Shut up, everybody." They obeyed. "Bill, where are we going?" she asked.

"North Pole, Aunt Eve," said the six-year-old.

"Why?"

"Want to see what it looks like," he offered. He hesitated, baby teeth nibbling at baby lip, then grinned. "Also it's the only place I could think of that I know how to go to."

"That's ridiculous," said Jeron scornfully, and the hubbub broke out again until Darien McCullough called over it:

"I have a suggestion. Come stay with us in Puget for a while."

Silence, with everyone looking at her, then another burst of raucous noise until Jeron quelled it. "I think that sounds interesting," he said, and his eyes said why he thought so.

"Hell with that," cried Molomy strongly. "You can get sex anywhere, Jeron, you don't have to go among the savages to get it. You! Darien-McCulloughl You're not supposed to be here in the first place, so be quiet."

There was enough truth in that to slow Darien down. She'd sneaked them through the sleeping city of Washington, but when they got to the ship there was no invitation to come inside. It wasn't until the argument threatened to wake the guards that Jeron pulled her in and shut the door. Eve quieted the new outbreak and said, "I don't want to be offensive, but how do we know we won't get into the same problem in Puget?"

"Well, you don't," Darien conceded. "But you can leave one person in the ship all the time if you like— Or maybe just one or two come out with me at a time until you get a look at us— Or you could just trust me? Listen. I knew you were coming, and that's why I made that whole damned long trek to Washington. It's important!"

"Trust you!" sniffed Molomy; but the little pilot piped up:

"I trust her." Everybody was talking at once again until Eve's deeper, slower voice cut through.

"The best way to make up our minds," she said, "is to roll the bones."

There was a silence. Then Molomy said, "We don't do that anymore, Aunt Eve. Only the old folks do it."

"The old folks made some pretty good decisions with the I Ching, Molomy. I say let's read the hexagram and see what it says."

"We don't have any bones," Jeron objected. "Could use a coin, I guess, if we had a coin. Have you got a coin?" he asked Darien. Talk about strange—! But she found a coin, or at least a Puget retail token that had both heads and tails, and Molomy was elected to flip it. First flip: Heads. Jeron drew two short lines with his thumbnail on the skin of his knee. Second flip: Heads again. Jeron nodded. "Pride stirred up because of somebody else's transgressions," he said, making the same mark just below the first. Third flip: Heads again. Fourth flip: Heads. "You walk in the midst of others, but you return alone," Molomy sighed. Fifth flip: Heads. Darien was watching in fascination. "In Puget," she said, "when they do that, they do it the other way. From bottom to top." "On our ship," Jeron said, "we do it our way. Shut up." Sixth flip, tails—and the hexagram was complete as Jeron drew a solid line at the bottom:

Eve straightened up. "It's K'un over Chen," she said. "It's The Turning Point.' " Jeron rubbed at his knee and nodded, but Molomy cried indignantly, "Same old garbage! You can read it either way —see why we don't cast the hexagrams anymore?" Eve sat down in her chair and began to belt herself in. "Dear Molomy, that's the nature of the hexagram. But the nature of important decisions is that you have to decide them. One way or the other. If we don't go to Puget we haven't made a decision, we've just postponed one." "But—" "But, but, butt out," Jeron interrupted. "We cast the hexagram and it's over. Bill! Take us to Puget."

By the time they had made their decision the craft, according to Jeromolo Bill's built-in navigation aids, was somewhere over Lake Erie. He studied a map for a moment —strange map, north was not at the north and it had no political markings at all, only coasts and mountain ranges— and then nodded negligently. "Belt up," he piped, and barely gave them time to settle in before he whipped the ship around in a sharp left-hand turn. Then he unstrapped himself and began to play a game with his chief pilot, Quittyyx, using Darien's coin. He didn't need to guide the ship anymore; it was going in the right direction. It was not a difficult sum—there were no relativistic factors to be considered—but it made Darien nervous. She didn't want to criticize the boy's piloting, so she said instead, "Isn't that an awfully wasteful way to travel?"

He looked up. "Wasteful of what? Oh, I see. Energy." He laughed, and called: "Aunt Eve, is there anything to eat?"

That started another battle, Eve insisting that he really should sleep instead, since they had, by his own calculations, an hour and fifty minutes before they reached the Pacific Ocean and it was well past his bedtime. Darien withdrew from the discussion and tried to reconcile herself to the bumpy ride. Shef's landing craft was not an aerodynamic shape, and so the buffeting was considerable. It did not seem to bother anyone but Darien—was not, in fact, a patch on the turbulent landing they had had a few days earlier. It was simply what you had to expect when you were moving fast in air, and all the spacefarers had learned to accept it.

Darien divided three thousand-odd kilometers by an hour and fifty-five minutes in her head and realized that they were traveling at nearly twice the speed of sound. Then she understood why there was so little noise. The noise was there; they were simply moving too fast for it to catch up. All across the continent no doubt people were waking from sleep and jamming their fists in their ears and running out into the open to see what catastrophe was splitting their skies, but inside the ship the greatest noise came from its occupants, now squabbling over which ones got the ripest fruits Eve Barstow was unwrapping.

Darien McCullough was old enough to remember jet planes, and all the other resources of the great age of technology, but it had been a very long time since she looked down on a continent. It puzzled her that, as they crossed what must have been Lake Michigan, it seemed to be growing lighter; and then, minutes later, she saw the Sun rising—queerly in the west! They were outracing it! The rest of the crew had no preconceived ideas of where sunrise should occur and did not understand what she was exclaiming at, but all of them clumped around the viewing angles to see the marvelous light. The rising Sun illuminated the sky from the top down. Just below them clumps of altocumulus floated at forty thousand feet like luminous pink and white cotton candy, with tiny white cumulus clouds floating in the shadows far below. Even Jeron thought it was beautiful.

In his own surroundings Jeron did not seem quite as arbitrary and scornful as he had in the sphere of the President of the U.S. (Washington). He was not a handsome boy —man, she corrected himself; regardless of calendar age. Too skinny, too dark, and above all, even on his best behavior, too belligerent. But inside that belligerence was the person who had bred a flower with a portrait etched in its chromosomes, and as he stood silent beside Darien McCullough she discovered that he was holding her hand.

The clouds were thickening up, but she could see mountaintops. She shivered. "I think that's Blackfoot Country," she said.

Jeron studied the ground thoughtfully, then leaned back and regarded the map. "Aunt Eve? What's this part here?" he asked, pointing.

She got up from where she was stroking Jeromolo Bill's sleeping head and came over. "South Dakota?" she said doubtfully.

Darien shook her head. "That was when there used to be states, when there used to be a United States. It's all Blackfoot now. Cornbelt south of us, Prairie Confederation up in what used to be Canada, Rocky Mountain Republic just ahead—but that's Blackfoot. We detoured all clear up through Saskatchewan on the way East, just to miss them."

"There must be roads that go straighter," Eve offered, frowning at the map.

"Probably are. But you'd be crazy to use them. Two hundred years ago the Blackfoot were the meanest bastards in the West. Never did get along with settlers—not that you can blame them. Now they're coming back."

"Indians? Oh, wow!" Jeron's youth showed in his awed face. "I thought they were all extinct!"

"Not a bit of it—especially since the Blackfoot let other Native Americans immigrate. Not to be citizens, you know. They don't go that far. But the Blackfoot have plenty of food, they've even got the buffalo coming back, and it's not so good in, for instance, the Desert Countries. People can't really survive there. They could for a while, when there was plenty of power and they could import everything they needed, but you folks showed them the error of their ways."

Eve fell silent, and Darien was aware she had been tactless. Jeron gave her no opportunity to think what she could do about it, because he was tracing the map with his thumb. "Huh," he grunted. "You came all that way on horses?"

"Oh, Jeron, what do you think we are? Not on horses. By car— alcohol fueled—as far as the lakes, then down by water to the New York Thruway." She sat for a moment, remembering, and then conceded, "It wasn't always that comfortable, of course, but we had a good reason." He looked a question at her. "To see you people, of course," she explained. "We didn't think Jimbo Tupelo would have got your message—and if he had God knows what he would have done—so I brought it to him in person. There're still a few observatories going, you know, though not of course in the East. So—I decided to take a little trip."

He scowled at her. "It is not a 'little' trip and you didn't do it just to give that man the message."

Darien looked at him for a moment. "I never know how to take you," she observed. It was true. He was startlingly self-confident for someone barely out of his teens; most of the people she knew did not get that self-assured manner until middle age. It was not really an attractive trait. "Well," she said unwillingly, "I never meant to lie to you, I just haven't had a chance to tell you everything. We've been having a few problems in Puget. Volcano problems; we've had two bad ash eruptions in the last five years, and both of them hit when the crops were vulnerable. That's not too serious—I mean, if it doesn't happen every year it won't be—but it leaves us a little exposed. We've had to make deals with our neighbors for food. Even the Blackfoot. And Jimbo's a problem."

"Him? So far away?"

"He doesn't want to stay so far away, Jeron. He wants to be President of everything anybody else has ever been President of, and maybe a little more. He's making deals and alliances, and if he had this ship— If he had whatever else you people can give him— He'd get smashed, of course, because he's just a pipsqueak tyrant, but if he started a real war everybody else would start maneuvering too, and while his neighbors were eating him up the SoCals and the Rocky Mountain boys and a few others might get the fever. It's been pretty chancy ever since the sneak attack."

Eve looked up from her thoughts. "The sneak attack? Is that what you call what Shef did?"

"Oh, God," said Darien penitently, "nobody's blaming you."

"I'm blaming me."

"No, really! You folks did us a kind of a favor."

Eve frowned and shook her head.

"No, really," she said again. "I don't think you know what shape the Earth was in. Talk about armed camps! There were missiles under every front porch, and it was only a question of time until they went off. You messed us up, sure. But there were plenty of survivors—and if you people hadn't wiped out the worst of the weapons, I'm not sure there would have been any."

Jeron said, almost apologetically, "I do not think we meant to do you any favor."

"We certainly did not," Eve said bitterly, with a look of decision in her eyes. "Maybe we can now, though. I think we owe you something, and. ... I wish I could talk to Uncle Ghost."

There was something worrying about the way she said it, Darien thought. "Who? Someone you left back on Alpha Centauri?"

"Not exactly," said Eve Barstow, and then, suddenly, "Oh, look! That must be the Pacific Ocean! We'd better wake Bill up to land us!"