In the Ocean of Night (45 page)

Nigel smiled.

Too casually she interested herself in the details of geography. He watched her in the growing silence of the cabin as she tucked a strand of her polished black hair back, forming a new layer in the polished cap that was secured at the nape of her neck. With an elegant touch of her middle finger she pushed the pencil deep into the bun of strands, distracted. At this absentminded gesture Nigel’s heart leaped into a high new place.

He arched a speculative eyebrow at Mr. Ichino, who sat with hands folded on the table.

“You can talk to
me
about it, too,” Nigel said with a warm amusement.

Mr. Ichino said uncertainly, “Ah…I…”

“What happened, I mean.”

“I heard nothing in the news.”

“Infinitesimal chance you would.”

“The NSF hasn’t decided how to handle it,” Nikka said. She folded the map and tucked it away.

“I’ve made it quite precisely clear that they can rumi-nate on handling data, but they can’t handle
me,
” Nigel said. He put one boot on the table’s bench and leaned on it, arm resting on his raised knee.

“Perhaps because it is so unclear,” Mr. Ichino said delicately.

“True enough.” Nigel smiled. “How did it…”

“Feel?”

“Yes. I suppose that is what I wish to know.”

“At first there was a, a sensation of going
away.
”

“To something new.”

“In a sense.”

“But now you are back.”

“No. I never have come back.”

“Then you …” Mr. Ichino stopped, puzzled.

“What I knew is scrambled. Or
thought
I knew.” “And …” Mr. Ichino struggled with some inner inhibition. “… what did you come away with that”—he added hurriedly—“that you can tell us?”

“Oh. You mean facts?” He wiped his hands on his rough trousers and stood erect, leaning backward, peering at the roofbeams and the vaulted space of the cabin above them, at the shadows there. “Delicious facts.”

“Tell him about the aliens,” Nikka said. She had been sitting perfectly still at the table and he saw in her absolute lack of motion a tension she would have to grow through, a private set of concerns he saw now as totally transparent but, for her, entirely necessary, a web of concern for him that, cast wide, enfolded more than she needed to and more than she understood. But that, too, would evaporate with time and leave her bare, the old Nikka, the brisk and urbane, her conversations a smart rattle of wry insights, insider’s jargon, an occasional epigram. The slim and springy Nikka, as he sometimes remembered her, standing in muted phosphor light, hipshot, the cradle of her abdomen tilted, jaunty.

“The aliens,” Nigel said, as if to refresh himself, return himself to this linear world.

“You’ve targeted their origin, I gather,” Mr. Ichino said, prompting, and Nigel wondered at the choice of words. Targeted? That word? For things gone and dead and vacant? He remembered Evers and that fellow, Lewis, with their phrases like
combat mission
and their ultimately absurd sense of the reality of things, the
trunk
of departing missiles, the oddly soundless
crump
as the orange blossom was born, behind the poor puzzled fleeing Snark.

Targeted?

Alien. So alien.

“I found their home star,” he said.

“By figuring out their coordinate system?”

“Yes.”

“How did
they
find
us
?”

“A survey craft, I suppose. Automated. They were casting about at random.”

“They couldn’t find anything in the radio spectrum? The same as with us?”

“Yes—it checks with what the Snark said.”

“There were no other—organic races?—alive at the time.”

“Not with technology. So these fellows set out to find what they could—maybe to colonize, who knows? But it didn’t work—and stumbled on us.”

“Created the Bigfoot.”

“No. Made use of him. But that didn’t work very well, either, I gather.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. But Bigfoot was a forerunner, anyway.” “Of what?”

“Of
us,
” Nigel said, surprised. “We’re the point, you see.”

“The… programming?”

“Ah.” Nigel chuckled, leaned over and put his arm around Nikka. “I see you’ve been talking to my little friend, here.
Programming
—it misses the whole thing.”

“Why did they do it?” Mr. Ichino narrowed his eyes, as though at a loss.

“The—what did Snark say?—the universe of essences. Organic life can have it, machines can’t. The aliens came to be sure we got it, in time for the—well, the Aquila thing. Whatever’s moving toward us.”

“They knew about it then!” Mr. Ichino rapped a knuckle on the hardwood finish. “When you sent me that star chart I wondered if you’d gone off entirely.”

Nigel gave him a crinkling of the eyes, a merry smile. “How are you sure I haven’t?”

To the look of momentary consternation on Mr. Ichino’s face Nigel gave a barking laugh. “No, no, old friend—I haven’t. What
has
happened to me I can’t quite say.”

“You seem different.”

“I am different.”

“And the Marginis wreck—they came to give us this? For defense?”

“I don’t know,” Nigel said. “You mustn’t think I understand everything. They came for contact, knowing about Aquila. Knowing all organic life is fragile. But hoping there was some kinship, yes.”

“And something stopped them.”

“Themselves, I expect.” Nigel sighed, shifted his feet, stood with hands in hip pockets. “War. Wasco had weapons. There was probably some conflict within them that eventually caused all that. Why bring nuclear death from the stars?”

“A defense against Aquila?”

“Maybe. Or against some other faction of themselves.”

“We can find that out, perhaps.”

“Can we? I wonder. And anyway—who cares? The causes are dead—we have only the results.”

“The results?”

Mr. Ichino frowned and Nikka lifted her head in interest. The chill of the room had dulled as the diffuse glow of the sun sent shafts of light through the two southern windows. Nigel relaxed. He now needed to be out of this place, beyond this unsatisfying round of explanations, so he tried to compress it.

“It’s really a lot of learned tricks, you know, our past. We learned pair bonding, social mechanisms. Then big game hunting. When that ran out—all planets are finite— there was agriculture. From that came technology, computers, an information rate to match our storage rate. But the world isn’t just that—there’s where the computer civilizations run aground. They’re right, really—we
are
unstable. Because there’s a tension in us that comes out of how we evolved. Computers don’t evolve, they’re developed. Planned—to be certain, safe, secure. That’s the way they stay, if they survive the suicides of their organic forefathers. But the thing in Aquila is a computer society that opted for the preemptive strike—to stop organic forms before they can spread among the stars, find the domesticated computer worlds, and inevitably destroy them.”

Nigel paused. The cabin held an airless expectancy. “Then we …” Mr. Ichino began.

“We have to become better than we are,” Nigel said. “But, hell, that’s really not it. We
can
have more power than that blundering bunch of robots in Aquila. By entering into …” Nigel laughed, shrugging. “You’ll see it, you will. The universe of essences. The place where subjects and objects dissolve.”

“The New Sons …” Nikka began. “They talk about…”

Nigel raised his hands, chuckled. “They’re the flip side of an old record—fear of death plus the accumulation of things.”

He turned and looked at the yawning fireplace. “We need more wood,” he said.

As he feels in his pocket for his gloves he finds a coin. Elated, he tosses it up, carving the air. He catches it between his fingers adroitly and lifts it, a brassy circle. The coin, held to the yellowing sun, eclipses it. Perspective defies the innate order. The handiwork of man blinds even this awesome furnace that hangs in the sky.

Nikka said, when the cabin door closed behind him, “What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“You knew him before. Has he changed?”

“Of course.”

“He says he can’t really communicate it.”

“No one has ever been able to.”

She frowned. “I don’t follow.”

“When I knew him before there was a tension. That’s gone now,” Mr. Ichino said. “Before, he was always looking for something. Some answer.”

“Has he found it?”

Mr. Ichino’s face relaxed, became smooth and unwrinkled about the eyes.

“I think he has found that the looking is better than the finding,” he said.

The frosted land yields itself to him, a clear washed tapestry. He exhales a cloud of smoke into it. Snow crunches, crisp air cuts in his throat, joyful singing love forever, leaping soaring flying dying, he cracks the crusted snow at every footfall, sinking into the cottony embrace below, the supple world obligingly lowering him to itself at the completion of each step, homeward, toward the center of the forgiving earth.

trickle of stinging warm sweat down his wrinkled neck the sun burning behind the veiled sky

a vast blue ocean alive with flapping bird life

—pours over and through him—

“I’m worried for him,” Nikka said. Her knotted hands on the table trembled.

“Don’t be,” Mr. Ichino said. “You’ve already told me that Nigel has done things no one else could fathom. He decoded the star chart. He can see into the patterns that others—”

“Yes,
yes.
If I could only be sure he is all right.” “You know, Nikka, when I was a boy I had a two-stroke scooter. My parents gave it to me. I needed it to get to school.”

“Yes?”

“There is a point to this.” He put out a comforting hand to her. Through the hazed window he saw Nigel hefting the ax and plodding through the deep late-winter snow toward the wood pile. The square window framed it like a depthless Sumaro woodblock print.

“I waited a week before I used it,” he went on. “I was that afraid of the thing. It had 150 cc’s and I was very surprised when I jumped on the kick starter and it chugged into life, the first time. I jumped on and rode proudly up and down my home street, waving at my parents, waving at my neighbors. Then the engine died. I couldn’t restart it for the life of me. I had to wheel it home.”

He lifts the ax and brings it down
swack
clean and true biting into the sectioned log. The wood splinters, splits, and Nigel feels his taut muscles come to completion in the act, converging on the downward curve of his back as he follows through and the blade bites deep toward the singing earth, pins him loving to the day.

It melts.

And he stands on the high shelf, a ledge of folded and grainy rock. Watches the pounding dance of hairy forms in the valley below as the booming cadence coils up to him enfolding him and at once he dances, splitting wood with a glinting piercing ax and coming down into a rhythmic hammering of leaping soaring flying dying, primor-dial plane of wood crashing down as he feels in this one passing instant the connection of the act and the origin of that tensing pleasure at sheer physical work, the joy of movement—

—he lifts the ax, the
thunk
of yielding wood still in his ears and he is into another instant—

It melts.

“So I checked to be sure fuel was reaching the carburetor and the spark plug was working okay. I cleaned the jets and kicked the starter and she took off again, with a nice sputtering roar. So obviously I’d gotten a piece of fluff, from a cleaning rag or something, into a narrow fuel passage.”

Nikka nodded.

“So I took her out again and after about two minutes she sputtered and coughed and stopped again.”

—and yet, and yet he sees that this howling dance and muscular ecstasy is a piece but not all that he is and drawing back on the ax, feeling it loft high into the gravitational potential well of the consuming earth he remembers work of long ago in remote, gray England, erewhonderful isle, of flexing rhythms set up amid the coal gangs who loaded tan sacks of it on chilly bleak mornings, a thin dusting of snow on the immense black piles of coal being gnawed by trucks and men, Nigel working for money alone, to buy him the rare serenity of hours at home, warm and reading in the yellowish light as the brittle mathematics unfolded before him, a fresh tongue with a promise of lifting him up into a new continent of Euclidean joy, the transcendent wedding of economical and clean thought to the underlying rhythms of the world, distilling order from the rough jumble of life, yet in that spinning instant to merge with life, not split the world into subject and object but to clasp it, merge, the ax hyperbolically propelled by the atoms of skin on his hands as they sink into the molecular lattice of the wooden handle, all essences extracted out of the same finespun
stuff,
no interface, the old dualities lapping aimlessly at the granite mass of the yea verily one self-consistent mathematical solution that gives the universe, joyful singing love forever, and through this lens he sees the desert, the Snark riding back behind his pressing eyes and opening him to a fraction of this but poor dim dead Snark not merging it, not simmering in it, no, only frags, splinters knifing through the sea of categories that was the old Boojum Snark and pinned it forever to the pigeonholed world of subjectobjectlivingdying—