Across the Sea of Suns (35 page)

Section leaders this is Ted I’m reviewing ExoBio’s request you people got any further input shoot it in now

Y’know it’s a good idea to keep the reaction goin’ just in case I mean the biggest malf probability is in the start-up phase

Yeah keep that in mind Ted we got risk every time we shut down

Look—damn!—we can’t make a balls-up of this because of some sodding engineering constraint

Quiet Nigel—look, any more input before I

Yeah shut up the old crock and get us out of this pisshole

Seems to me it’s pretty clear we seen plenty systems like this already from the probes

The grav-lens told us most of this already, point is to look closer—

Okay this is Ted after reviewing the systems board I can see the logic of picking up some time on our outbound

Alex is there any new

Throw in the towel Nigel for Chrissake

Hey I’ve lost the reflection

What’s ’at?

No radio reflection at all from that moon now, just gone out

Check for detuning of the antenna Alex that’s pro’bly it

No I’m still bringing in good radio images of the gas giant, no degrading of the system—I’d say the thing’s just plain gone

Musta been a ghost image jest forget it

No possibility of that, I had it dead for sure, big as your mouth ‘n’ twice as wide, even got a spectrum ’fore it vanished

How fast is that moon spinning Alex?

Lessee, nothin’ much—no, too slow, it’s tide-locked, that can’t explain it

Then it was something in orbit around the Moon, that’s the only way it could go out that fast. It simply fell below the horizon from our angle of view

Possible I guess but

Possible
hell
you think of something else

Well ah I

Ted you’ve got to let us have a look at whatever that was

Hell he does! We don’ have to do anything unless a majority

No time for that

Damn—look, this is Ted—I’m asking for a quick vote

Don’t give bugger all for a vote this is a scientific issue man not a

Alex here look I think he’s got you there Ted our mandate is to study not just survey and could be the thing did drop out of sight which makes it a damned funny configuration in its own right, never mind if it’s an artifact or not

Listen, we skip this radio blip, we can pick up months, not have to worry about the drive start-up routine

Yeah, who wants to be the one goes in there an’ scrapes the throat walls while rest you guys are playin’ astronomer

Quiet look this is Ted and I—well, the directives don’t leave me much choice

Damn

We’ve got to take a look at that site

Alex this turns out to be a screw-up I’m gonna

And I want a rendezvous orbit near that gas giant

Bang on that’s it

Yeah.

THREE

Rain had brought out the scents of the gardens—loquats, crisp grains, roots, fresh-turned earth, blending and subduing them. Nigel paused in his creaking labors and looked toward the nose of the ship, where the life sphere tapered into a bare point. It was like peering into the underside of a silagree of stone, an inverted spire spun by some huge spider.

He stretched to ease his back muscles.
Ah
. He could barely manage an hour of this labor now. He told Nikka it was for the appearance of the thing, to defuse comments about his general incompetence at things physical, to derail a close inspection of his medical situation. But in fact he liked this turning of the soil, this 6CO
₂
+ 6H
₂
O, in turn giving forth starchy C
₆
H
₁₂
O
₆
+ oxygen to burn anew, onboard as it is in heaven. With the drive off there was no ready ultraviolet for the engineers to step down into the optical region, so they had gone back to using phosphors strung along the zero-g axis. These luminous ropes gave off a harsh glare he found unpleasant, but the plants grew well; a leaf is indifferent to where it gets its photons.

Lancer
was taking a long loop through the Ross 128 system, coming around to rendezvous with the gas giant and its interesting moon. He preferred to pass the time away from the clatter of the Operating Net.

He bent back to plucking tomatoes free of their vines. To his mind the prime virtue of artificial biospheres was the lack of weeds, for otherwise it’d be a sore job to—

“I could hear the grunting from a hundred meters away,” Ted Landon said.

Nigel straightened as quickly as he could without wincing, and smiled. “Like to work up a sweat.”

“The fellas missed you on the net this morning.”

“Figured you could do without my mumbling.”

“Latest scans on that moon came in.”

“Really?”

“Standard gas giant satellite. Funny purple coloring, some ice tectonics making ridges. Heavily cratered, too.”

“Like Ganymede.” He did not mention that he’d tapped into the map subroutines and gotten the drift direct, some hours before the net did.

“Yeah, looks that way. You were right about the asteroid orbiting it, though.”

Nigel kept harvesting tomatoes. Ted squatted and pulled a few ripe ones. “Big durosteel hull on one side of it,” he said casually.

“A Watcher, then.”

“Looks like it. Kind of gives the fork to Walmsley’s Rule.”

“Ummm. A Watcher, yet not a prayer that this moon was ever a life site?”

“Going to lower your stock on the net. First clear case we get to check your rule, it fails.”

“Glad I wasn’t on the net, then.”

“Yeah.”

“Rather like being at a posh reception and finding you’ve caught your cock in your zip.”

Ted laughed.

“It’s a case worth studying, though, eh?”

Ted straightened and studied a tomato reflectively. “That’s not what I came about.” He looked soberly at Nigel.

“Oh?” Nigel stood up, too, glad that they had at last gotten through the opening moves.

“Carlos tells me you’re taking this thing of his pretty hard.”

“Perhaps for Americans it’s easier. Priests of high tech, no matter where it leads, and all that.”

“Think you’re overdoing it, maybe?”

“Possibly.” It was always best to leave some area of uncertainty, for later compromise once the man had made his point.

“You’re not the first ever faced this, y’know.”

“True.”

“Think I’d like to see you try some of the therapy environments. We got some fresh ones on tightbeam from Earthside, just last year.”

“Well,” Nigel said brightly, “that seems quite possible.”

“Not just possible,” Ted said quietly, putting weight on each word. “You know I don’t like to do more than make suggestions, but the numerical sociometric people say this kind of thing can get out of hand.”

“I scarcely think—”

“I’ve cleared a spot for you.” Ted smiled broadly. “Can’t have our number one citizen waiting, huh?”

Nigel made himself smile, too. “Quite so.”

Ted clapped him on the back. “C’mon, have a drink.”

“I should finish up—”

“Forget it. You’ve already put in your hour.”

Nigel smiled wryly. So Ted kept track of that, too. “Quite so.”

Nigel allowed himself to be sealed into the sum-sense pod. He had tried to argue them out of the medical sensors and transducers, but the attendants cited his age as cause for taking precautions. Therapy sessions were confidential, he knew, so after thinking it over he decided the medical data would do him no harm. They merely wanted to ensure that he did not suffer over-stimulation.

He felt himself floating, free of sensation. This would take only a few hours, and then he could be back working. He felt the splice-ins activate, tapping directly into the sensory zones of his cerebrum. He fell—faster, faster, into something far below—

—Sitting. Sitting in a wicker chair. A sluggishness filled him. Added weight, a paunch at his middle, clothes tight. An itch on the right thigh. Gradually the room filled in, emerging from a fog.

Glazed glass walls, tiles, a ceramic clatter as waiters removed plates from nearby tables. Pale yellow light. Garlic butter taste in his mouth. A slick, imitation-elegant tablecloth under his left palm. Background murmur of conversation. Humidity adding weight to each breath he took. A woman across the table, attractive, talking (he suddenly realized) to him—

“We’re not
doing
anything,” Helen said.

“We’ve seen a lot,” her husband murmured defensively.

“The Berkeley ruins, the Monument of Bones, the arroyos,” she said. “Then we have dinner and go to bed. That’s all. And the bed part is no great attraction, is it?”

“Just last night we went to Casa Sigma—”

“If you weren’t with
me
you’d find some, you know, places.”

Robert had to admit this was true. He pretended to concentrate on draining the last of his drink and studied her expression through slitted eyes. She had made her hair blue and rather longer than usual today and the soft moonlight gave it a lush cast. He did not like it very much. She had tuned her skin to a fashionable pallor for the evening, but here in sun-baked California it was unconvincing because one knew it had to be artificial. On the other hand, perhaps that was largely immaterial these days. The thin lines of irritation around her mouth set the tone of her whole expression. There seemed to be little she could do about that. An hour after a facial tuning they returned, as deep as before.

“Before we came on this trip you said we would take a spice bath.”

“Not here, Helen. It’s illegal. Wait until Japan.”

“There must be, well,
places
here.”

“Filthy ones, yes. The Americans would stare at us. Especially at you. They don’t take women to them here. The Americans are rigid. It’s comic, I know, but—”

“You’re the rigid one.”

He played his hole card. “Those spots are full of insects. The Americans don’t mind them.”

She blinked. “If I was alone in as exotic a place as this you can be sure I’d go to all sorts of these spots.”

“The motorbike dances …”

She scoffed. “Clumsy. Those are for tourists.”

He began to notice his anger. He had spent a good deal of money to bring her along on this business trip. He had left her behind so often before. Lately his conscience had begun to bother him about it. Decades before, their marriage had been the central fact in his life, a fulfillment. Those feelings had ebbed away. He had gotten caught up in the raw competitive world of men. And he had relished that sense of rasping conflict, of heady victories after strenuous effort.

Still, he felt a duty to her. But traveling with a woman you don’t love was proving worse than living with her.

He finished his drink and slammed the glass down on the marble tabletop. “My,” she said archly.

He stood up. His chair scraped harshly and a waiter, startled, came quickly. Robert waved the man away. “All right,” he said loudly. “I’ll find something. Your kind of
place
.” He spat out the last word.

Robert left the ornamented hotel and walked down Ashby. He was feeling warm from the meal or from the anger and he moved quickly. He did not noticed the thin man who came up alongside him and said in an oily way, “Something?”

Robert stopped. “I’ve got my own woman,” was all he could immediately think to say.

“An appetizer, then?”

“What?”

“A boy?”

Strong, confusing emotions swept through him. He pushed the man aside and made a rough, incoherent noise.

He walked away swiftly, his steps bringing a harsh slap from the damp paving stones. He went two blocks without seeing the neon jumble around him or noting the sleazy shops.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and saw the same gaunt man, this time standing at a safe distance. There was a look of bland, wise confidence on the man’s face.

“Senso?” he asked.

Robert paused and was surprised to find he had no anger left. The walking had leached it from him.

“How much?”

With the taxi and the thin man as guide it came to over a thousand yen. Robert knew the man had hiked the price over the usual street value, from the look on his face, but that did not matter. This would provide a simple way to stop Helen’s prattle about “places” and it might even be enjoyable. Better than the real thing had been for quite a long while, at least. He turned back to fetch Helen.

The three of them took a route north into Richmond, over a slimy canal crusted with salt from the deadlands to the north. The taxi wheezed through twisting streets and stopped outside a sprawling bungalow with dim orange lights outside. “Perfectly ghastly,” Robert muttered to himself, but Helen did not reply.

They went up creaking wooden stairs and beneath a punctured solar heating panel that had slid halfway off the roof. “Is this a commercial one?” Helen asked and reached for his arm.

“Of course not,” he said stiffly, pulling away from her. “It’s illegal here.”

They clumped across linoleum floors and through two empty rooms. The guide slipped a key into a door-plate and a wall swung free. This let them into a red-lit room with two glossy, molded chairs perched among a tangle of electronics. A bored-looking attendant stood up from a couch where he had been watching a 3-D. He helped the two of them into the chairs. The equipment looked reasonably new. It had the comfortable cerebral lead-ins Robert had seen in the European advertisements. His opinion of the place rose. Helen made a fuss about getting the attachments settled at her neck and wrists and then quieted down for the first run.

The first was a warm-up, an erotic hors d’oeuvre. A middle-aged man met a younger woman in a restaurant. After a few perfunctory bits of social back-and-forth, they went to her apartment. The senso consisted of extensive foreplay and some fantasizing, though the graphic parts were convincing and strong. He felt the languid satin rub of the woman’s skin, the delicious pull of young muscles, the musky smell, a red lust building in the young man. Robert liked the piece overall, though the woman’s hairdo reminded him of someone he knew and that rather spoiled the associations for him. He guessed that their guide had picked this particular one because the man rather resembled himself, and using a younger woman would cater to the self-images of both parties. He smiled at the calculation.