In the Ocean of Night (28 page)

Nigel chuckled. “They’re cowering out there.”

“And learning. They sent me. I learned much from you, in the desert.”

“And from Alexandria,” Nigel said in a whisper. “Yes.”

“Where… where is she? You were with her in a way no one ever has been when, when she…”

“The machine civilizations—I have visited some by accident, though not the vaster complex that must have made me—have shown that disintegration of structure equals information loss.”

“I see.”

“But that is only for machines. Organic forms are in the universe of things and also reside in the universe of essences. There we cannot go.”

Nigel felt an odd trembling in his body, a sense of compressed energies. “Universe of essences…?”

“You are a spontaneous product of the universe of things. We are not. This seems to give you… windows. It was difficult for me to monitor your domestic transmissions, they fill up with branches, spontaneous paths, nuances…”

“The damned speak frantically.”

“No.”

“But we
are
damned. Compared to you.”

“By duration? Eight hundred thousand of your years— so much as I have counted—are still not enough. Your time is short and vivid, colored. Mine…I scream, sometimes, in this night.”

“Good God.” He paused. The voice had shifted to a deeper bass and now seemed to echo in the cabin. “I would like to have those years, whatever you say. Mortality—”

“Is a spice. A valued one.”

“Still—”

“You are not damned.”

“Damned lucky, maybe.” Nigel laughed airily, transparent. “But still damned.”

“What was that sound?”

“Uh, laughter.”

“I see. Spice.”

“Oh.” Nigel smiled to himself. “Is your palate so flat?” After a long moment the voice said, “I see that it might be. Each of you laughs differently—I cannot recognize or predict the pattern. Perhaps that is significant; much hides from me. I was not made for this.”

“They designed you to—”

“Listen. Report occasionally. I awake at each new star. I perform my functions. But the sum is not greater or lesser than the parts, merely
different
… I, I cannot say it in your words. There, there are dreams. And what I gathered in from you is mine. The flavors. Your art and the set of your minds; only
I
am interested in those. Essences? They did not want it; perhaps the world-minds did not need it. But I…it is for my times in darkness.”

The pearl was dwindling, drawing up unto itself.

“I wish you well out there.”

“If I functioned as my designers intended, I would not need your blessing. I would go through that night blindly. I—the part who speaks to you—am an accident.”

“So are we.”

“Not of the same oblique cast. I have received a recognition signal… but you will discover them soon enough. For the moment I see that other men will exact much from you, for this.”

Nigel smiled. “I’ve let the quail take wing. Right. They’ll lay me out, I expect.”

“They cannot rob the essences from you.”

“The experience itself, you mean? Well, no, I suppose not. It’s good-bye then?”

“I think not.”

“Oh?”

“I am versed in many… animal theologies. Some say you and I are not accidents and that we shall meet again in different light. You are membrance. Perhaps we are all mathematics, everything is, and there is only one whole… sum. A self-consistent solution. That implies much.”

Nigel felt a chuckle burbling out of him.

“I must study that sound, laughter. There is your real theology. The thing you truly believe.”

“What?”

“When you make that sound you seem to have a brief moment of what it is like to live as I do, beyond the press of time. Then you are immortal. For an instant.”

Nigel laughed.

Above the pitted moon a bright Earth was rising, a gleaming crescent. The space around him resolved into geometries. He stared at the Snark’s disk. Its roundness seemed to conflict with the rectangular viewport, the two elements clashing. He frowned and tried to catch at something that flickered up within him and then was gone, an idea, a feeling…

Ahead the Snark plunged into night. Behind him spun the Earth, swimming in brawling life.

His board danced with insistent calls. Houston. Evers. Questions. Nigel wondered if he could explain this brief flicker of time. It would be like Icarus, perhaps worse. A great public piss-up. He shrugged.

It happened to me then, my friend

And here we go

Once more

Again.

PART FIVE

2038

ONE

I
t came in an instant, neatly dividing her life.

A moment before she had been serenely gliding over the crumpled, silvery moonscape. She was distracted, plotting her next course and chewing sugary raisins. Her sled was coasting through a series of connected ellipses, bound for nearside. Earth was rising, a glinting crystal globe above the warped moon.

There was a
thump
she felt more than heard. The horizon tilted crazily. She slammed forward into her harness and the sled began to fall.

Her clipboard spun away, there was the shriek of metal on metal; the sled was tumbling. She snatched at the guidestick and thumbed on the maneuvering jets. The right was dead. Some on the left responded. She brought them up to full impulse. Something was rattling, as though working loose. The sled lurched again, digging her harness into her.

The rotation slowed. She was hanging upside down, looking at the blunted peak of a gray-brown mountain as it slid by, uncomfortably close. She was still falling.

The sled was rectangular, all bones and no skin. She could see the forward half and it seemed undamaged. Everything she had heard came literally through the seat of her pants, conducted along the struts and pipes of the sled’s rectangular network. The damage, then, was behind her.

She twisted around, got a partial view of tangled wires and a fuel tank—and then realized she was being stupid. Never try to do a job upside down, even if there are only a few seconds left. And she had minutes to go before impact, certainly. Whatever had happened behind—a tank rupture? pipe blowout?—had thrown her into a new ellipse, an interception course with the low mountain range near the horizon.

She pulsed the maneuvering jets again and the sled rotated sluggishly. Something was forcing the nose down as she turned. She stopped when the forward bumper was nearly parallel to the horizon. She unbuckled automatically and turned.

Impossibly, the right rear corner of the sled gaped open. It was simply gone—tanks, braces, supplies, hauling collar, a search light.

For a moment she could not think. Where was it? How could it have blown away? She looked back along the sled’s trajectory, half expecting to see a glittering cloud of debris. There were only stars.

Training took hold—she leaned over and punched the override button that glowed red on her console. Now the navigation program was disconnected. Since it had sounded no warning, apparently the circuits still believed they were bound on a selenographic survey, working toward nearside. She started the ion engine, mounted slightly below and behind her, and felt its reassuring purr. She checked the horizon—and found she was spinning again. She turned in her couch, somewhat awkwardly, her spacesuit had caught on a harness buckle.

Yes—at the edge of the gaping hole there was a thin haze. A pipe was outgassing, providing enough thrust to turn the sled. She corrected with maneuvering jets and the sled rightened.

She turned up the ion beam impulse and tried to judge her rate of fall. The jagged, pocked surface rose to meet her. She unconsciously nudged the control stick and brought the sled’s nose up. Reflex made her do it, even though she knew on the moon no craft could delay its fall by gliding. No matter; on Earth she could have banked in with wings, but on Earth she would already be dead; the fall would have lasted only seconds.

The ion engine was running at full, but it could only do so much. She corrected again for rotation. The computer automatically kept the ion engine pointed downward, but it would only operate within a small angle. The out-gassing was getting worse, too. The sled shuddered and yawed leftward.

She looked for a place to go down. The explosion—or whatever—must have deflected the sled downward, not to the side. It was still following its original course down a long, rough valley. The end loomed up ahead, a scarred dirty-gray range of rugged hills. She corrected for rotation, surveyed ahead, then had to correct again.

There was a dull gleam ahead. Something lay buried partially in shadow at the base of the hill line. It was curved, part of a dome crumpled against the hill face. An emergency life station? No; she had studied the maps, she knew there was no installation anywhere near her route. That was why she was here, anyway—to chart some points in detail, study oddities, make borings for the vital water tests. In short, to do the things photographs cannot.

She had been watching her gauges, and was not surprised when the radar altimeter showed she was dropping too fast. The ion engine was not delivering full thrust. Yes, one of the missing tanks from the right rear fed the engine. She did not have enough thrust to stay aloft. It was eerie, sliding along in dead silence, running down the carved valley, narrow and straight as a bowling alley, toward the blunted brownish hills ahead. The random splotching of craters below was sharp, clear; she would have to land soon.

The course took her dead into the hill line. Two seconds ticked by—she was counting them now—before she could decide: drop into the valley, land on the flat instead of crashing into the steep slope above. Once made, the decision liberated her. She corrected for rotation again, checked her harness carefully, surveyed the damage one last time. The ground came rushing toward her. The dome—ah, there to the left. Damaged, broken, glinting rubble at its base. It sat at the base of the hill like a copper decoration.

She picked a flat space and leveled the bed of her craft as well as she could. The damned rotation was too much; she spent all of her time now correcting for it. Suddenly the spot she’d picked was there, almost beneath her, the sled was rotating, the nose went down, too far down, she—

The splintering crash threw her forward, straining so hard into the pinching harness she thought the sled was going to go end over end. It tilted, tail high. Everywhere there was dust, metal twisting. The tail came back down in the slow, agonizing fall of low gravity. There was a sudden, fierce pain in her leg and Nikka lost consciousness.

TWO

It really was the old Telegraph Avenue, Nigel thought. They had actually encased and preserved it.

He ambled slowly down the broad walkway. This nexus point of legendary Berkley was still a broad pedestrian mall, the way he’d known it in 2014. On impulse Nigel hooked his hands into his hip pockets, a gesture he somehow associated with those early earnest days. There were few people on the mall this May afternoon, mostly tourists nosing about the memento shops near Sather Gate. A flock of them had got off the BART car with him and followed him up Bancroft. Chinese and Brazilians, mostly, chattering amiably amongst themselves, gawking, pointing out the sights. They’d all stopped to read the plaque set in concrete where Leary finally died in his desperate bid for hip redemption; some had even taken photographs of it.

A bird coasted in on the prevailing Bay breeze and fluttered to a perch in one of the eucalyptus trees dotting the mall. When Nigel had studied astrophysics here in 2014, Telegraph was still a gray pallor of concrete, greasy restaurants and the faint tang of marijuana and incense. Well, the rich flavor of incense remained, drifting into the street from open shop doors. That scruffy, noisy Telegraph he remembered was now charming and soothing as it basked in the yellow spring sunlight. Nice, yes, but in the worst sense of the word. The zest of the past was missing. The hub of student life had shifted north of the campus, amid the rambling houses of redwood; anyway, Berkeley was no longer the cauldron of the avant-garde. Now Telegraph was an embalmed tribute to its former self.

He checked himself: was Telegraph frozen in the past, or merely Nigel Walmsley? At forty-six such a question was worth pondering. But no—as he passed an open shop door the sounds of antique music filtered out. “White Rabbit.” Gracie Slick,
Surrealistic Pillow.
A genuine collector’s item in the original pressing. The shop was almost certainly using a fax crystal, though, he noted with the purist’s disdain that gave him such an odd, eccentric pleasure. Fully half of a music buff’s delight lay in the careful hoarding of such details. They weren’t playing it right, either; that particular number should have been so loud he could have heard it a block away. Nigel wondered what the original Airplane would have thought of using their music to promote tourism. The Chamber of Commerce had done the same job on them that New Orleans did on Jelly Roll Morton, decades before.

“Greetings of the day, sir!” a young man said as Nigel turned the corner onto Bancroft.