Maelstrom (3 page)

When her hands moved to Sparta’s chest and ribs, Sparta’s eyes opened in involuntary fright. There were structures under her diaphragm, artificial structures that were sensitive to touch. Sparta willed herself to relax, to allow Masumi’s hands to travel over the oblique muscles of her abdomen, trying not to betray her invisible, internal strangeness.

Masumi’s knowing hands sensed her tension and brushed lightly over the surface of Sparta’s belly, working on down to her thighs. Sparta allowed a soundless sigh to escape her lips and closed her eyes on the view of whirling planets and suns, the trees of the gardens growing upside down and sideways.

Many minutes later Masumi’s hands left her body. Masumi flipped the end of the sheet gently over Sparta’s closed eyes and said, “Relax a while before you get up. Sleep if you like.”

Sparta listened to Masumi gather her things and walk quietly away. She lay peacefully, feeling a current of cool air flow down from the windows as the sun fell gradually away to the side and the disk of Venus became a crescent. Port Hesperus was approaching the terminator.

She saw the spinning universe in her imagination. The stars became bits of colored glass, whirling, jerking into new patterns as they wheeled and fell, as regular and as infinitely variable as snowflakes or the patterns of a kaleidoscope. The colors became brighter and brighter, whirled faster and faster. . . .

Sparta slept. The whirling colors faded, and the spinning shards of glass became dancing leaves, an autumn cyclone, sucking her deeper into the vortex. She clung dizzily to the falling raft. The swirling tunnel walls were streaks of green light and black shadow, not watery and slick but infinitely open, a million blackbirds coursing against the apple-green sky of a winter dawn.

She peered down, was forced to peer down into the funnel by the leaning of the raft to which she clung. The eye of the vortex was vanishing as fast as she fell toward it; there was a blackness at infinity into which the infinitely numerous blackbirds were descending, accompanying themselves with an echoing chorus of shrill screams, their blackness blending to black and their cries echoing among their own soft bodies.

The blackness warmed, and the cries rounded.
“Rrrr, rrrr, rrrr, rrrr, rraa rrre, rree . . .”

The swirling blackbirds began to disintegrate, their bits to coalesce. The blackness below was purple, throbbing like a heart. An infinity of bits of black curve flew past, bits of black slash, bits of black spot, sliding down the nautilus spiral into the heart, which now began to glow like a hot brick.

And the boom of the hieratic choir: “RRRREH, RRRREH . . .”

And the swirling signs, forming strings of black light, and beading themselves. The infinite heart below shifted upward through the color scale as the throats of the choir swelled: “UHHHHH, SSSSSS, EEEEEE, YUHHHH, MMMMMM, JUHHHH, THEHHH. . . .”
The swirling signs
were
signs, and the beaded strings gave off sounds, as they were swallowed and made ash by the heart that had become a fiery eye the color of the sun, an eye into whose mouth she was streaking like a meteor.

The choir of signs was everywhere, each sign falling to be consumed like a spring snowflake on the swelling white field of the beating sun, giving off its essence in vibration as it expired: “AAUWWW, BBBEEE. . . .”

She plunged into the fire. It was icy cold. From the groans and meaningless plosive bellows, meaning suddenly spurted: “HOW BEAUTIFUL ART THOU.” A mass of voices sang the hymn. “HOW BEAUTIFUL ART THOU, UPON THE EASTERN HORIZON. . . .” A pounding drumbeat roared and drowned the chorus.

Sparta woke up startled, her heart racing.

A galaxy of colored lights surrounded her in the arching darkness; Port Hesperus was soaring across the dark hemisphere of Venus. A darker mass loomed out of the twilight in silhouette, moving toward her, hand outstretched–

–then Sparta, seized with fear, was off the table, crouching naked on the planks behind it, poised to fight.

 

“Oh, miss, I’m terribly sorry.” It was Masumi, in a dark blue cotton wrap. “I told them you could not be disturbed, but they say it is an emergency.”

 

Sparta straightened; her heart continued to pound. She took her commlink from Masumi, which she had left in the dressing room, and slipped it into her ear. “This is Troy.”

 

“Board dispatch–we’ve got a problem on the surface. Mount Maxwell is erupting. Get over to Azure Dragon, ASAP.”

Ten minutes later she stood in the control room of the Azure Dragon Mutual Prosperity Mining Endeavor, peering at videoplate screens that should have been displaying views of the surface of Venus, but were filled with electronic snow instead.

“What’s your reading?” she asked the man at the console.

 

“We had just reestablished contact when everything cut out on us. At first we thought lightning from the eruption–but it’s more than just atmospherics. We can’t rouse them on any channel.”

 

“The HDVM?”

 

“Ditto. We get nothing.” “How long have you been in LOS?”

 

“Loss-of-signal occurred thirteen minutes ago.”

 

“What have you done about it?”

 

“Additional HDVMs have been scrambled from Dragon Base.”

“That’ll take too long.” Sparta’s answer was instantaneous. The HDVMs–Heavy Duty Venus Miner robots, self-propelled and remotely directed from Port Hesperus–were huge metal beetles that even at their considerable top speed over the rough surface of the planet would take hours to cover the distance. “We’ve got to go down.”

“I can’t make that decision,” said the controller.

 

“You don’t have to,” Sparta said. “Load Rover Two into the manned shuttle and tell launch control to stand by.”

 

The controller turned to protest. “the CEO has given explicit orders. . . .”

 

“Tell your CEO I’ll meet him at the shuttle launch bay. I want a rover pilot standing by and I want the prelaunch sequence to be underway by the time I get to the ready room, is that understood?”

 

“As you say, Inspector Troy. But even the Space Board can’t order a rover pilot to go down involuntarily.”

 

“There will be a volunteer,” she said.

 

As she swam through the weightless central corridor of Port Hesperus toward the space station’s shuttle docking complex, her commlink chimed softly. “Troy here.”

 

“Board dispatch, Inspector. We have just received a faxgram addressed to you. Do you want it now?”

 

“Go ahead.”

 

“After the code block the text reads, ‘Let’s play hide-and-seek again, if you’re in the mood and promise to play fair.’ That’s all. No signature. The originating block is encrypted.”

“Okay, thanks.” Sparta did not need to know where the faxgram had originated. With his usual lousy timing, Blake Redfield had chosen this moment to resurface. He wanted to play. Just now she had no time for hideand-seek.

II
“Let’s play hide-and-seek again, if you’re in the mood and promise to play fair. . . .”

Blake Redfield and the woman who called herself Sparta, though others knew her as Ellen Troy, had been playing hide-and-seek a long time. She’d done most of the hiding, like the time more than two years ago that she’d led him into the Grand Central Conservatory in Manhattan and vanished into a tame tropical forest. That was the first time he had seen her since both of them were teenagers, and he’d recognized her immediately even though she had thoroughly disguised herself. It was also the moment when he’d begun seeking her in earnest.

Trying to retrace her hidden past, he began at the beginning, with the program known as SPARTA. The Specified Aptitude Resource Training and Assessment project had been the dream of two psychologists, Sparta’s mother and father–Sparta’s name was Linda then–who believed that every person possessed a wide range of innate “intelligences,” or talents, which could be developed to a degree that many people would consider evidence of genius. But to Linda’s parents there was nothing magical about genius or the processes that led to it; it was a matter of trained supervision and a carefully controlled learning environment. For a long time the SPARTA project had only Linda herself to demonstrate its goals and methods. So spectacular were the little girl’s achievements that her parents attracted funding and more applicants. Blake, while still a small child, had been among the first of the new students.

But the SPARTA project was dissolved a few years later when its founders were reportedly killed in a helicopter crash. By then Blake and most of the others were teenagers, and they went their separate ways to colleges and universities around the world. Linda, however, had vanished, leaving behind only vague rumors of a crippling mental disorder.

Blake grew up to be a handsome young man, inheriting from his father the strong jaw and wide mouth of the Black Irish, and from his Chinese mother the high cheekbones and liquid brown eyes of a Mandarin. A sprinkle of freckles across his nose and a glint of auburn in his straight black hair saved him from too-devilish good looks.

His interests were varied, but even as a youth he had gained a reputation for his knowledge of old books and manuscripts. So valued was his expertise that he was often retained as a consultant by libraries, auction houses, and dealers. While still in his early twenties, he accepted an offer from the London office of Sotheby’s.

Blake’s avocation gave him an excellent base from which to research any number of topics, not just old books, so when he unexpectedly encountered Linda in Manhattan–and saw that she had no wish to be recognized–he decided to find out more about the origins of the SPARTA project he had taken for granted. He found himself faced with too many interesting coincidences to ignore. . . .

On Blake’s last night in Manhattan before moving to London, his parents threw a party in his honor. That was the excuse, anyway; Blake didn’t know any of the people who came although he recognized them from the society strips and viddie propaganda spots. It was perhaps his parents’ not-too-subtle way of saying they’d expected more of him than a passion for old books.

Blake rarely drank alcohol, but as a gesture to his parents he carried a full glass of the very expensive Chardonnay they’d broken out in his honor. He spent much of the evening standing at the windows staring out at the night, while the party guests cooed and chattered behind him. The Redfields owned an eighty-ninthfloor penthouse condo-apt in the Battery, with a wall of glass looking south over Old New York Harbor. Far below, the dark harbor was spotted by clusters of lights on the giant harvesters that floated on a swelling carpet of algae that stretched to the Jersey shore; the matte surface of the algae was scored by ruler-straight lanes of black water.

“You are Mr. Redfield. The younger?”

 

Blake turned and said pleasantly, “The name is Blake.” He carefully shifted the wine glass to his left hand and offered his right.

 

“I’m John Noble. Call me Jack.” The squarebuilt man had a sandy crewcut and wore a pinstriped suit. As they shook hands he said, “I’ve looked forward to meeting you, Blake.”

 

“Why’s that?”

“SPARTA. Your mother and father were certainly proud when you were admitted. I used to hear a lot about your spectacular progress.” Noble’s black eyes were hard bright buttons above the ledges of his cheekbones. “Frankly, I wanted to see how you turned out.”

“
Ecce
”–Blake spread his arms–“Hope I’m not too much of a disappointment.”

 

“So you’re in the book business.”

 

“So to speak.”

 

“Plan to make a lot of money that way?”

 

“Hardly.”

 

“Did the SPARTA program turn out other scholars like yourself?”

 

“I haven’t kept in touch with the others.” Blake studied Noble a moment and decided to take a risk; he interrupted before Noble could speak. “But why don’t you tell me, Jack? You’re a Tapper.”

Noble grimaced reflexively. “You’ve heard of our little organization.” The Tappers were a philanthropic group that met once a month for dinner at private clubs in both Washington and Manhattan. They never admitted guests and never publicized their activities.
“You sponsored several of us SPARTA kids, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t realize that was general knowledge.”

“You sponsored Khalid, for example,” Blake said. Blake’s parents and their friends belonged to some of the same clubs–only the first of the coincidences Blake had uncovered–so he knew that the Tappers’ aim was ostensibly to discover and encourage young talent in the arts and sciences. Encouragement took the form of scholarships and other, unspecified support. No aspiring youth could apply for Tapper aid, however. Discovery was a Tapper prerogative. “What’s Khalid up to these days?”

“In fact he’s a rising young ecologist with the Mars Terraforming Project, of which I’m one of the directors.”

 

“Good for Khalid. Why do I get the sense you’re needling me, Jack? Don’t you approve of book collecting?”

“You are a blunt young fellow,” said Noble. “I’ll be just as blunt. SPARTA was a noble undertaking, but it seems to have produced few like Khalid, people with an interest in public service. I wondered about your perspective on that.”

“SPARTA was intended to help people live up to their potential–so they could make choices for themselves.”

 

“A recipe for selfishness, it would seem.”

“We also serve who only sit and read,” Blake said flippantly. “Let’s face it, Jack, you and I don’t have to worry about the roofs over our heads. You made your fortune selling water on Mars; short of some disaster, I’ll inherit mine. Books are my hobby. Do-gooding with the Tappers is yours.”

Noble shook his head once, sharply. “Our purpose is a bit more serious. We believe the world, all the worlds, will soon be confronted with an unprecedented challenge. We do what we can to prepare for that event, to search out the man or woman . . .”

Blake leaned imperceptibly closer, his expression relaxing into frank interest. It was one of those tricks known to the socially adept, one of the tricks one had been apt to pick up at SPARTA.

 

And it almost worked, before Noble recovered himself. “Well, I was about to bore you,” he said. “Please excuse me, I really do wish you the best of luck. I’m afraid I must run.”