Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) (39 page)

CP was wholly Noncreative in any normal way, a personality deficit considered valuable, even essential, among nonManagers. Her secret Empire-story and the Voice must be some rudimentary Creativeness leaking out, luckily in a private way.

She took care to memorize every possible Noncreative test response and attitude, and sealed her Secret tighter.

And the Voice only rarely gave her totally new information. On a few occasions it had seemed to pull her from the Empire to tell her about—she was not quite sure what, only that there was often an accompanying large visual impression of blue or lavender, and once, very clear, a gray hand. It was doing something with a complex of fabric. . . . All meaningless, afterward.

What wasn’t meaningless was an indescribable personal-reference “transmission.” The Voice
knew her
. And now and then it repeated, “Come.”

Twice it said very clearly, “Waiting.”

All this concerned space too, she was sure. Well, her one wish in life was to go to space. Projection again, nothing to worry about.

“I will. I will. I will. I will. . . . The Pig Person shall go to the stars,” she told the Voice. “The Pig Person will end among the stars. Soon. Soon.”

Now as she settled to her last days, on
Calgary
, she—or the Voice—composed as usual a succinct account of all that had passed. But it was cast in quite new terms. Gone were the flat hard tones of unutterable sadness, the terse descriptions of the intolerable. She still spoke as the “Pig Person”—but this person had at last found freedom and joy, found her way to the stars. A way that would lead her back to the Empire, could her human life be long enough to reach it. It would not be. But she would at least end on her free way home.

Thinking this, she perceived that her chance-determined course might not be quite right. Perhaps this was even told her. Conscious with most of her mind that she was giving way to real insanity, she carefully scanned the forward field. Empty, of course, save for the faint far stars. And yes—the Voice was right—she was not quite on course. She must correct just a trifle. It was important.

On course for
where?

For the first time she faced her madness abruptly, hard. What “right” course, en route to
what?
To nothing—nothing but icy vacuum and nothingness and dying. She proposed to waste fuel “correcting” to an insane delusion? A delusion she knew perfectly well was born of her human need for support amid ugliness, rejection, and pain?

But if nothing lay ahead, how could the spent fuel matter? Slowly, almost but not quite amused at herself, she gave in. Her fingers played delicately over the thrust-angle keys, her eyes went back to the scope. Where? Where shall I come, show me! She let her eyelids almost close, feeling for it.
Where, where?
And dreamily, but clear, it came to her: there.
Here
. . . Random nonsense, she told herself angrily, almost turning away.

But the shadowy vector persisted dearly in her mind. She peered through her strongest scope, scanned every band of EM radiation. Absolutely nothing lay
there
.

“Come,” the Voice sighed in her head. “Come. I have waited so long.”

“Death calling,” she muttered harshly. But the fact was, she couldn’t be truly comfortable until she turned
Calgary
to head precisely that way.

Carefully, deliberately, she set in the course correction for Nowhere. She punched to activate. The burn was very brief, she had been, as usual, accurate.
Calgary
shuddered imperceptibly, the star field crawled slowly slightly slantwise, then steadied to a rest with almost no braking necessary, pointing exactly
there
.

And as it did so, the Empire died.

For the first time she could remember, the story that had run ceaselessly in her brain, the Voice that was mostly a feeling, fell silent. What had hit her? What had silenced her? Startled, yet somehow accepting, she stared about. Nothing had changed; it was simply gone. There was no Empire, no one to “report” to, ever again. She was alone. Or . . . was she? It didn’t matter. Everything was all right. Had not the Voice been commanding her too, in its way? Now she was truly free of the very last outside orders.

She went back to her quiet routine of gazing, observing, using the scope and other analyzers on interesting objects. Of them all, she preferred the eye. She found an old but serviceable computer-enhanceable high-power scope in a rear locker, left unused in recent years when no one had desire nor time to look at things too far to give promise of gain. To her joy, with a bit of work it proved functional. She pored over star charts, identifying and memorizing. In some peculiar way, this activity was all right too, beyond her own personal fascination.

By using all the ports, she had a 360-degree field of view in all directions—the universe—and she scanned at least briefly, but systematically, over it all. A feeling almost like the old voice-in-her-head encouraged her. Habit, she knew. I’m projecting my own pleasure back at myself.

As the early days stretched to weeks—she kept only the vaguest track of time—she experienced only comfort. Small events: one of the regenerator trays she had planted “took,” the other stayed dead. She scraped together a last sprinkle of seeds and tried again. She also arranged a contraption, a doubleinlet tube that would carry her breath from her habitual seat and bunk directly to the trays, which at this time were actually short of CO2. The later buildup to saturation and ensuing degeneration would go fast; she installed a gas sampler and alarm to give ample warning of the rise.

Absurdly, she minded the prospect of dying from simple oxygen lack less than the notion of positive poisoning by her own wastes. This was nonsense, because what she knew of physiology told her that internal CO2 would be an agent of her death anyhow.

Despite her comfort, she made every possible effort at conservation. The possibilities were pitifully few, consisting primarily of minimal use of the waste flusher, which lost air. Even when she had collected quite a pile of the men’s overlooked leavings—including souvenirs of Meich—she denied herself the luxury of flushing them out.

Aside from the star work, and simply indulging in a rest she’d never known, she occupied herself with recalling and writing down such words as had once struck her as wise, witty, or beautiful: sayings, doggerel, poetry, a few short descriptions of old Earth phenomena no one she knew had ever seen—a clear sunrise, a waterfall—the names of a few people, mainly women, she’d respected. Effortfully, she even composed a short account of a striking memory—an eclipse she and other children had been allowed to see in the open.

She mulled unhurriedly over practical matters, such as whether the expenditure of oxygen necessary to bring in that icerock lashed to the hull would repay her in oxygen theoretically extractible from it. Quiet . . . a blissful life.

But one day came disturbance. The lone bow scanner chirped. Doubtless a malfunction; she moved to turn it off, then paused. This might signal an oncoming rock; she didn’t want to die so. She activated another. To her surprise it lit in confirmation. For one horrifying instant fear seized her—could the human world have somehow pursued her here?

She turned on more pickups, was reassured—and then so amazed that she peered out visually to orient the scopes. Not a rock, or a rocket, not small but vast: ahead and slightly “above” her floated something world-sized—no, nearly sun-sized—very dimly lavender, glowing and ringed.

For another sickening instant she feared she had, incredibly, flown a circle and was coming back among Sol’s outposts. But no; the scanners told her that the body occulting the forward field was nothing in Sol’s family. Huge, her sensors told her, but relatively small-massed. The surface gravity, if she was seeing the surface, would be a little less than Earth-normal. It was definitely, though faintly, self-luminous—a beautiful blue-rosy shade she had no name for.

And very highly radioactive.

Was she looking at a dead or dying star? Possible; yet this body conformed to nothing she knew of in the processes of star-death. Perhaps a star not dead, but still below the threshold of interior ignition? A star coming slowly to be born? Or one destined to remain thus, never to ignite to birth at all?

Without even considering it, she had automatically activated thrust and set in a course correction that would fly her straight at the body. Equally automatically, she noted that
Calgary
’s pile was so used out that she hadn’t possibly enough fuel to shed her now tremendous velocity and slow
Calgary
into any kind of close orbit. She ignited thrust.

What was she doing—unconsciously planning to die by crashing into this silent mystery? Or, if it had atmosphere, be roasted to death in the friction of her fall? It was not the quiet death she had intended, among the eternal stars.

Yet approach she must. Approach, see, and know it, orbit closely if only for a last fiery instant.

She lost track of all time, as the mystery grew in the ports, with her terrible speed, from dim point to far disk to closer, larger, port-filling nearness. She was retrofiring repeatedly, trying to get effect from every precious erg, willing
Calgary
to slow as if her naked desire could affect the laws of physics.

Finally the time came when she felt uncomfortably upside down to the great surface; she expended a precious minimum of energy slowly righting
Calgary’
s attitude. On crazy impulse, she suited up, leaving only the faceplate open, and strapped herself in the pilot’s cocoon. It was all futile madness—despite everything she could do, her velocity was impossibly too great. Still she retrofired intermittently, trying to judge exactly optimum angles of thrust, fighting the temptation to torch everything once and for all, straining back in the cocoon, willing, commanding, imploring aloud to
Calgary
to slow—slow—slow—slow—

And luck, or something logically nonexistent, was with her. She was still moving lethally, hopelessly too fast, but
Calgary
seemed to have shed more velocity than the computer predicted possible. The thing must be faulty; she took over completely from it, and against all calculated chance, achieved a brief quasiorbit in what seemed to be the equatorial plane.

She could see the “surface” now—a smooth, softly glowing, vast-dappled racing shield, which the sensors told her was cloud. Two hundred kilometers beneath that lay solid “ground,” some of which registered as liquid. Expecting nothing but nitrogen-methane at best, CP glanced at the spectroscope—and lunged against her straps to slap on the backup comparators.

Same readings!

That cloud cover was oxygen-hydrogen: water vapor. And the basic atmosphere was twenty-five percent oxygen on a nitrogen base. She was looking at an atmosphere of Earth-normal quality.

Hastily she ran through the tests for various poisons; they, were not there. This was preindustrial, prewar air such as CP had never breathed on Earth!

Except, of course, for its appalling radioactivity, which apparently emanated from ground level. It would quickly destroy her or any Earth-born living thing. To walk on this world, to breath its sweet air, would be to die. In days, perhaps only hours.

Her orbit was decaying fast. The visible cloud was no more than a few thousand kilometers below her now. Soon she would hit the upper atmosphere—hit it like a skipped rock, and perhaps break open before
Calgary
burst to flame. The ship’s old ablatives had been designed only for Mars, and deteriorated since. Slower; slow down, she pleaded, using the last full thrust of the pile. In her mind was a vivid picture of her oncoming doom at her present inexorable speed. Only moments of life remained to her—yet she was content, to have found, in freedom, this great wondrous world.

Belatedly recalling that Don’s scout capsule was still on umbilical, she managed to reverse-drain its small fuel supply into two of Calgary’s back boosters that weren’t operated off the pile. Slow down—slow! she willed, firing.

The small backfire did seem to slow her a trifle. She had abandoned the instruments, which foretold only her death, and was watching the cloud tear by below.
Slow down, slow down!
She pushed herself back so hard she ached, sensing, dreaming that the death clouds were rushing imperceptibly slower. The atmosphere that would kill her extended, of course, far above them. She was all but in it, the molecule counter was going red.

Then, while she noticed they were over “land,”
Calgary
seemed actually, undeniably, to slow further. The clouds below changed from a featureless stream to show perceptible dark-light gradients flashing by. Still far too fast, of course; but it was as if she was passing through the backward tug of some unknown field. Perhaps the effect of the denser molecules around her? But
Calgary
wasn’t heating up. Some utterly alien energy was at work. Whatever it was, she needed more. Slow, much more. Desperately she urged it.

And
Calgary
slowed.

What mystery was helping her kill velocity? It had to be physical, explicable. But CP, knowing with part of her mind that she had gone crazy, gave herself over to a deep conviction that this was no impersonal “field.” She
knew
it was connected in some way with her need, and with her visualizing—“broadcasting” mentally—her plight. Mad, she was. But she was being helped to slow.

Perhaps I’m already dead, she thought. Or perhaps she would come to, drugged and manacled, in Base Detention. What matter? She had reached her Empire’s power, it was saving her at last.

Over and over again she “showed” the unknown her needs, her vulnerability, the onrushing terrors of impact and heat, all the while draining every tiniest output from the dying pile, which seemed to have regenerated slightly while she’d rested it.

And
Calgary
slowed, slowed, slowed as if flying through invisible cold molasses—so that the first wisps of atmosphere came past her at little more than common supersonic speeds. A miracle. There were no smashing impacts, only a jostling of loose objects, and very little heat. And then she was down to where the first visible tendrils of cloud rushed by.