A Different Light (10 page)

Russell asked, "Do you think you can cheat the luck?"

Jimson shook his head. "I know better. I've known that all my life."

Russell said, his voice rising in the dim light, "Then I don't understand!"

Jimson thought, I'm not running away from death, Russ. I'm going to it. I must. All the roads I travel will take me there. But he did not say it. He kept his eyes fixed on Russell's face.

Russell said, "You have to promise not to die on me, Jim." His voice was somber.

Jimson's voice shook slightly. "You'll take me with you?"

Russell sighed. "How the hell can I say no? You never asked me for anything before. You wanted me to stay a little longer on New Terrain, but you never asked me to. I don't know, any more, what I would have done if you had." He leaned forward and touched his fingertips gently to the bruise on Jimson's right cheek. "And even when we were children, Jimson, you never said no to me, to anything. So I can't say it now."

Chapter 9

The second day out from Nexus, Russell started making yellow lines on the floor.

Jimson sat at the table by the food unit. In front of his nose he'd piled a small heap of objects from Ysao's workbench, chosen at random; he didn't know what they were called or what they were for. He was trying to give them the quality of a classical still life, as if they were organic. It was an interesting exercise, and the results were pretty poor, he decided.

It was nice to look at something else. "What the hell are you doing?" he asked as Russell passed him, methodically laying down tape. As far as he could tell, it made no regular patterns.

"I'm stretching my mind," Russell said. He finished, and laid the tape to one side.

"Very decorative," commented Ysao. He was sitting in his favorite place, cross-legged on top of his worktable.

Russell walked to the outer end of the tape. "I'm ready."

"Go ahead, then," said Ysao. Leiko swiveled her pilot's chair around to watch.

Russell began to walk along the path of the tape; very carefully, not trying to place his feet exactly on the yellow line, but obviously trying to stay close to it. He was having trouble. His mouth was tight with strain, and there were tension lines along his neck, where the muscles were pulled taut. Once he stopped and shook his head. Ysao's eyes bored darkly at him, like two augers. Jimson began to guess. At the inner end of the tape line, when Russell's shoulders relaxed with relief, Jimson raised an eyebrow at Ysao. "You were trying to stop him?"

Ysao nodded. "He's doing well."

"Doing
what
well?" demanded Leiko.

"Shielding," Ysao said. "Elementary exercise. Concentrate on walking the line while blocking interference. Pirate, you've gotten strong. That was everything I've got."

"How can Russell do that?" Leiko asked. "He isn't a telepath."

"Anyone can learn to shield," Ysao said. "It isn't psi at all, it's just a very directed mode of concentration. Most people never need to, so they never bother to learn. You could, if you wanted to."

Leiko shook her head cheerfully. "Thanks, but no thanks. Who's going to take care of the ship, while you play around? I'd rather sit and watch you." She twirled her chair lazily, like a child on a merry-go-round. "Are you going to do it again, Russ?"

"Jim, want to try?" Russell suggested.

"How do I do it?"

"With you, probably a visual block would work best," Ysao said. "Is there a picture or a piece of art you know especially well, so that you could visualize it at any time? One of your own?"

"I forget about
my
pictures as soon as they're done," Jimson said. "But—I can think of one...."

"Close your eyes," said Ysao. "Think of it."

Jimson closed his eyes, and hung the
Polish Rider
in a mental frame in his mind. He felt pressure. Steadily he looked at the picture. After a while the pressure went away. "Was that right?" he asked Ysao.

"That was exactly right. If you practice that, ultimately it'll get automatic. The minute your subconscious feels the presence of another mind, it will block for you. With enough practice you'll get so you can concentrate on something else, like walking lines, and still keep up a block."

"You know," Jimson said, "I think artists learn to do that without practicing. You almost have to, to keep from being disturbed. Unless you live on top of a mountain, like Yamaguchi."

"Could be," said Ysao thoughtfully. "Could be." He looked at Leiko. "You sure you don't want to try?"

"I'm sure." She twirled her chair back once more to face the vision screen. "I do this better. Someone want to bring me a food bar? I'm hungry."

Jimson, who was closest to the food unit, punched out a food bar. He brought it to her. She took it from him, closing her fingers round his for a moment. Now there was no anger left in the distance between them; there was only the distance itself, and it was getting smaller. They were friends, but he did not think they would be lovers again. Certainly not on the ship, where there were two other people to overhear each whisper and each word: one of them a telepath, and one of them Russell.

Leiko said, "I wish they could find a way to make these taste like something." The bars satisfied appetite and diet requirements, but esthetically they were about as satisfying as chewing up paper. She munched, frowning at the vision screen. He leaned on the back of her chair. The screen was black, the black emptiness of Hyperspace that sucked at the mind. "See the dust?" Leiko said. Jimson squinted. There was a film of red across the upper right quadrant of the screen, delicate as the tracery in a spider's web.

"We have to go through that?"

"Near it. Not through it." Leiko rubbed her eyes. "There's not very much of it. It's an easy course till we get to the Maze."

"Bored?" Russell spoke softly from behind them. "Don't worry; there'll be plenty for you to do when we hit the Maze." His hand fell idly on Jimson's neck, a light, absent-minded caress. Jimson willed himself not to feel the soft touch. He stared instead at the vision screen. The red dust was a lot more visible than before.

"Is it a proto-star?" he asked.

"It might be," Leiko said. "I don't think there's enough of it, though. It's probably just a cloud. Russ?"

Russell went over to the computer keyboard and did something that brought figures marching across the bottom edge of the vision screen. "Definitely not a star; it isn't massive enough."

"Are there stars in the Hype?"

Russell shrugged. "I don't think anyone has ever seen one. We're likely all wrong in calling them proto-stars, anyway. That was out of the older theories, which said that the Hype has less matter and a slower rate of entropy than our universe, and so the clouds we see are gas condensations that might, but probably won't, condense further. The present theory suggests that the Hype once resembled our space, and is now in that stage which our universe will come to, where all matter recedes from all other matter constantly and infinitely. The dust is debris that once was stars, and to any observer anywhere it appears red because of the Doppler effect. And there's another theory that entropy in the Hype is really faster than—"

Leiko interrupted. "Stop! Faster or slower is irrelevant. And I intend to keep on calling them proto-stars."

"Call them what you like," said Russell.

"It doesn't matter," said Ysao, not looking up. "They aren't listening."

Leiko yawned as she laughed. "I think that's the oldest joke in human space," she said. "It's too hard to stay awake; I'm going to bed. Call me in six hours, somebody." She stretched and reached for the lowest rung of the nearby arch of steel bars: the monkey bars, Russell called them. Hand over hand she went up them, across the dome of the ceiling wall, and down the other side. She slid directly from the bars into the topmost bed in the second tier. Jimson found himself yawning, too, and wondered if it was time for him to sleep. The sleep pattern on the ship was staggered so that someone was always awake, ready to wake the others if they were needed. Leiko liked to sleep six hours, work ten, sleep two more, and then work six. Russell functioned best on sixteen hours work and nine hours sleep. Jimson had no idea what Ysao's pattern was; he seemed to be always awake. And his own pattern—he hadn't found it yet. It didn't count when
he
slept. He was passenger, not crew. He could not be trusted to recognize a crisis if it exploded in his face.

Ysao, Leiko, and Russell never said it. But he was aware of it—as aware of it as he was of the hypnotic blackness of hyperspace, or of the pain in his leg that nudged him, like a clawed hand, when he was late to take his pill, or of Russell's eyes on him or presence near him, a physical cognizance as clear and almost as demanding as the pain. He pulled his sketchbook towards him, trying to concentrate on the ugly little things on the food table. Damn it, there was nothing organic about them, they were stiff and lifeless and he was an idiot.

Hands fell on his shoulders and he stiffened up. "You ought to go to bed, too," said Russell. "Sling that scrap away and go to sleep."

"I haven't been up very long."

"What has that got to do with going to bed?" Russell sat on the table, bending over him.

Jimson felt helpless. "Russ—" A finger touched his lips, prisoning the words.

"On the other hand, you haven't had much to eat lately, have you? That's the hassle with concentrates; they don't feel like meals, so it's easy to forget to eat them." He slapped a food bar in front of Jimson. "Eat." Grinning, he ambled back to the navigator's chair, as if he had never suggested or intended to be anywhere else.

They were ten days from Nexus when Leiko said, "There's the Maze."

Ysao was asleep. Russell woke him, and they gathered behind Leiko's chair to watch the ship move closer and closer to the red dust.
Danger, danger,
Jimson thought. Like monster tentacles reaching for the ship, a huge cloud of red dust was spreading spiral arms into the black of hyperspace. It sparkled and glittered, a splendid whirling storm. Jimson looked away from the vortex. He had learned, over ten days, not to stare at it too long. "It's so beautiful," Leiko said.

The patterns on the navigator's screen were flashing frantically. Russell walked to his chair and sat over the keyboard. Leiko's right hand was loosely closed over the stick. In theory, Jimson knew, there was no necessity for her ever to use it. The ship could travel under computer direction for as long as there was a navigator to direct the computer. But within the red dust, things changed. The dust distorted the normal congruencies between spacetime normal and hyperspace. The computer could correct for this. A human pilot, with the proper training, developed a special gift, a feel for the congruencies of the two spaces; it was akin to the spatial perception of the Verdians. Leiko could sense where the original mapping went wrong and correct for it directly, immediately. Her skill insured that, when they Jumped back into spacetime normal, they would be near the planet Demea, where they needed to be.

Jimson went to the food unit. It was now one of his self-appointed functions—trivial, but useful—to make sure that everybody ate, at least when he was awake. He punched for a food bar, and tossed it to Ysao. He punched out another one and brought it to Russell.

"Brought you food."

Russ reached for it, not lifting his eyes from the reeling figures on his screen. "Thanks." The lines of his face stood out, as if someone had run a grease pencil over them to highlight them.

"How long do we have to travel through this stuff, before we can Jump?"

"About four hours." Russell took a bite from the bar, and then laid it down to send his hands blurring on the keyboard, instructing the computer. "Four long hours."

But Jimson was just sitting at the table, not watching and unready, when he heard Leiko call: "Jumping now!" The red telltales spotted around the ship glowed their scarlet warning—and then the screens filled with light. Sunlight. They were out of the Hype, in spacetime normal, with the white-brown curve of a planet swelling in the screens. Leiko pounded a fist on the arm of her chair. "Done it!"

Chapter 10

There was a large brown and blue butterfly with a few orange spots spread out in the vision screen.

"We're looking at the whole planet," said Russell. "The light brown is desert. The dark brown is mountain. There are small poles, largely icecap. There are two small continents in the northern hemisphere, and three large ones in the southern hemisphere. We're going to this one. The one with the lake." He put his finger on a blue spot.

"Salt water lake," said Ysao.

"What are the orange spots?" Jimson asked.

"Heat emissions," said Russell.

Jimson had to think a moment. "Cities?"

Russell shook his head. "De Vala said there are no cities here. They could be volcanoes, or hot springs, or some other form of natural heat. De Vala was adamant: there are no civilized beings on this planet at all."