Nova (13 page)

"Suppose, Mouse, there was a girl's face that I wanted to re-create; the sound of her voice saying my name; the smell of her too. Now, I have your syrynx in my hands." He lifted the instrument from the Mouse's lap. "What should I do?"

"Practice. Captain, look, I really don't like other people fooling with my ax— "

He reached for it.

Lorq lifted it out of the Mouse's reach. Then he laughed. "Here."

The Mouse took the syrynx and went quickly to the chessboard. He shook the sack and slipped the instrument inside.

"Practice," repeated Lorq. "I don't have time. Not if I'm to beat Prince Red to that Illyrion, hey?"

"Captain Von Ray?"

Lorq looked up.

"Are you going to tell us what's going on?"

"What do you want to know?"

Katin's hand hung on the switch that would reactivate the chessboard. "Where are we going? How are we going to get there? And why?"

After moments, Lorq stood. "What are you asking me, Katin?"

The chessboard flicked on, lighting Katin's chin. "You're in a game, playing against Red-shift Limited. What are the rules? What's the prize?"

Lorq shook his head. "Try again."

"All right. How do we get the Illyrion?"

"Yes, how we it get?" Tyy's soft voice made them look around. At the foot of the bridge, beside Sebastian, she had been shuffling her deck of cards. She stopped when they looked. "Into the blasting sun, plunge?" She shook her head. "How, Captain?"

Lorq's hands capped the bone knots of his knees. "Lynceos? Idas?"

On opposite walls hung two six-foot gilt frames. In the one just over the Mouse's head, Idas lay on his side under his computer's lights. Across the room in the other frame, hair and eyelashes glittering, pale Lynceos was curled on his cables.

"While you sail us, keep an ear on."

"Right, Captain," Idas mumbled, as a man talks in sleep.

Lorq stood up and clasped his hands. "It's been a good number of years since I first had to ask that question. The person who answered it for me was Dan."

"Blind Dan?"— the Mouse.

"Dan who jumped?"— Katin.

Lorq nodded. "Instead of this hunk of freighter"— He glanced up where simulated stars hurled on the high, dark ceiling to remind them that, among pools and ferns and shapes of rock, they sped between worlds— "I had a racing boat that Dan was studding for. I stayed out too late at a party one night in Paris, and Dan got me home to Ark. He flew me there all the way by himself. My other stud, some college kid, got scared and ran off." He shook his head. "Just as well. But there I was. How could I get hold of enough Illyrion to topple Red-shift before they toppled us? How many people would like to know that? I mentioned it to Dan one evening when we were drinking around the yacht basin. Get it out of a sun? He stuck his thumb in his belt and looked at one of the wind irises dilating over the bar and said, 'I was caught in a nova once,'" Lorq looked around the room. "It made me sit up and listen."

"What happened to him?" the Mouse asked.

"How come he was around long enough to get into another one? That's what I want to know." Katin returned the rook to the board and lounged back on the jelly. "Come on— where was Dan through all the fireworks?"

"He was in the crew of a ship that was bringing supplies to one of the Alkane Institute's study stations when the star blew."

The Mouse glanced back at Tyy and Sebastian, who listened from the steps at the end of the ramp. Tyy was shuffling her cards again.

"After a thousand years of study, from close up and far away, it's a bit unnerving how much we don't know about what happens in the center of the most calamitous of stellar catastrophes. The make-up of the star stays the same, only the organization of the matter within the star is disrupted by a process that is still not quite understood. It could be an effect of tidal harmonics. It could even be a prank of Maxwell's demon. The longest build-ups observed have been a year and a half, but these were always caught after they were under way. The actual time a nova takes to reach its peak intensity from the time it blows is a few hours. In the case of a super-nova— and there have only been two on record in our galaxy, one in the thirteenth century in Cassiopeia, and an unnamed star in twenty-four hundred, and neither of those could be studied up close— the blow takes perhaps two days; in a super-nova the brightness increases by a factor of several hundred thousand. The resultant light and radio disturbance of a super-nova is more than the combined light of all the stars in the galaxy. Alkane has discovered other galaxies simply because a super-nova occurred inside them and the near-total annihilation of a single star made the whole galaxy of several billion stars visible."

Tyy flicked cards from hand to hand.

Sebastian asked, "What to Dan happened?" He reined his pets closer to his knees.

"His ship overshot and was funneled through the center of the sun in the middle of its first hour of implosion— and then funneled out the other side," Yellow eyes fixed Katin. On the ruptured features it was hard to read subtleties in Lorq's emotions.

Katin, used to hard readings; dropped his shoulders and tried to sink into the chair.

"They only had seconds' warning. All the captain could do was switch off all incoming sensory inputs in the studs."

"They blind flew?" asked Sebastian.

Lorq nodded.

"This was a nova Dan was in, before he even met you; the first," confirmed Katin.

"That's right."

"What happened in the second?"

"One more thing that happened in the first. I went to the Alkane and looked up the whole business. The hull of the ship was scarred from bombardment with loose drifting matter at about the time it was in the nova's center. The only matter that could break off and drift into the area of protection around the ship must have been formed from the almost solid nuclear matter in the sun's center. It would have to be formed of elements with immense nuclei, at least three or our times the size of uranium."

"You mean the ship was bombarded with meteors of Illyrion?" the Mouse demanded.

"One of the things that happened in the second nova"—

Lorq looked at Katin again— "was that after our expedition was organized in complete secrecy, after a new nova had been located with my aunt's help from the Alkane Institute without letting anyone know why we wanted to go there, after the expedition was launched and under way, I was trying to re-create the original conditions of the first accident when Dan's ship had fallen into the sun, as closely as possible, by flying the whole maneuver blind; I gave an order to the crew to keep the sensory input off in their perception chambers. Dan, going against orders, decided he wanted to take a look at what he hadn't seen last time." Lorq stood up and turned his back to the crew. "We weren't even in an area where there might have been any physical danger to the ship. Suddenly I felt one vane of the ship flailing wild. Then I heard Dan screaming." He turned to face them. "We pulled out and limped back to Draco and took the tidal drift down to Sol and landed on Triton Station. The secrecy ended two months back."

"Secrecy?" Katin asked,

The twisted thing that was Lorq's smile rose in the muscles of his face, "Not any more. I came to Triton Station in Draco rather than shelter in the Pleiades. I dismissed my whole crew with instructions to tell as many people as they could— all they knew. I let that madman stagger around the port babbling till Hell3 swallowed him. I waited. And I waited till what I was waiting for came. Then I picked you up right off the port's concourse. I told you what I was going to do. Who did you tell? How many people heard me tell you? How many people did you mutter to, scratching your heads, 'That's a funny thing to do, huh?'" Lorq's hand knotted on a spike of stone.

"What were you waiting for?"

"A message from Prince."

"Did you get it?"

"Yes."

"What did it say?"

"Does it matter?" Lorq made a sound nearly laughter. Only it came from his belly. "I haven't played it yet."

"Why not?" the Mouse asked. "Don't you want to know what he says?"

"I know what I'm doing. That's enough. We'll return to the Alkane and locate another nova. My mathematicians came up with two dozen theories that might explain the phenomenon that lets us enter the sun. In all of them, the effect would reverse at the end of those first few hours during which the brightness of the star rose to peak intensity."

"How long a nova to die takes?" Sebastian asked.

"A few weeks, perhaps two months. A super-nova can take up to two years to dwindle."

"The message, the Mouse said. "You don't want to see what Prince says?"

"You do?"

Katin suddenly leaned over the chessboard. "Yes."

Lorq laughed. "All right." He strode across the room. Once more he touched the control panel on the Mouse's chair.

In the largest frame on the high wall the light fantasy faded in the two-meter oval of gilded leaves.

"So. That's what you've been doing all these years!" Prince said.

The Mouse watched the gaunt jaws and his own jaws clamped; his eyes raised to Prince's thin, high hair, and the Mouse's own forehead tightened. He pushed forward in the chair, his fingers twitching to shape, as on a syrynx, the bladed nose, the wells of blue.

Katin's eyes widened. His sandal heels grabbed the carpet as involuntarily he pushed away.

"I don't know what you think you're going to accomplish. Nor do I care. But ..."

"That Prince is?" Tyy whispered.

"You'll fail. Believe me." Prince smiled.

And Tyy's whisper became a gasp.

"No. I don't even know where you're going. But watch. I'll get there first. Then"— he raised his black-gloved hand— "we'll see." He reached forward so that his palm filled the screen. Then the fingers flicked; there was a tinkle of glass- Tyy gave a little scream.

Prince had snapped his finger against the lens of the message camera, shattering it.

The Mouse glanced at Tyy; she had dropped her cards.

The beasts flapped at the leash; the wind scattered Tyy's cards on the carpet.

"Here," Katin was saying, "I'll get them!" He leaned from his seat and reached about the floor with gawky arms. Lorq had begun to laugh again.

A card overturned on the rug by the Mouse's foot. Three-dimensional within laminated metal, a sun flared above a black sea. Over the sea wall the sky was alive with flame. On shore two naked boys held hands. The dark one squinted at the sun, his face amazed and luminous. The tow-headed one looked at their shadows on the sand.

Lorq's laughter, like multiple explosions, rolled in the commons. "Prince has accepted the challenge." He slapped the stone. "Good! Very good! Hey, and you think we'll meet under the sun afire?" His hand went up, a fist. "I can feel his claw. Good! Yes, good!"

The Mouse picked up the card quickly. He looked from the captain to the viewing screen where the multichrome's shifting hues had replaced the face, the hand. (And there, on opposite walls, were dim Idas and pale Lynceos in their smaller frames.) His eyes fell back to the two boys beneath the erupting sun.

As he looked, his left toes clawed the carpet, his right clutched his boot sole; fear pawed behind his thighs, tangled in the nerves along his backbone. Suddenly he slipped the card into his syrynx sack. His fingers lingered inside the leather, becoming sweaty on the laminate. Unseen, the picture was even more frightening. He took his hand out and wiped it on his hip, then looked to see if anyone watched.

Katin was looking through the cards he had picked up. "This is what you've been playing with, Tyy? The Tarot?" He looked up. "You're a gypsy, Mouse. I bet you've seen these before." He held the cards up so the Mouse might see.

Not looking, the Mouse nodded. He tried to keep his hand from his hip. (There had been a big woman sitting behind the fire— in the dirty print skirt— and the mustachioed men sat around under the flickering overhang of rock, watching while the cards flashed and flashed in her fat hands. But that had been ...)

"Here," Tyy said. "You to me them give." She reached.

"May I look through the whole set?" asked Katin.

Her gray eyes widened. "No." Surprise was in her voice.

"I'm sorry," Katin began, confused. "I didn't mean to ..."

Tyy took the cards.

"You do you read the cards?" Katin tried to keep his face from freezing.

She nodded.

"Tarot reading is common over the Federation," Lorq said. He was sitting on the sculpture. "Of Prince's message, your cards anything have to say?" As he turned, his eyes flashed like jasper, like gold. "Perhaps your cards of Prince and me will speak?"

The Mouse was surprised how easily the captain slipped on the Pleiades dialect. The expression inside was a quick smile.

Lorq left the stone. "What the cards about this swing into the night say?"

Sebastian, gazing from under thick blond brows, pulled his dark shapes closer.

"I their patterns want to see. Yes. Where Prince and myself among the cards fall?"

If she read, he would have an opportunity to see more of the cards: Katin grinned. "Yes, Tyy. Give us a reading on Captain's expedition. How well does she read them, Sebastian?"

"Tyy never wrong is."

"You for a few seconds only Prince's face have seen. In the face the lines of a man's fate mapped are." Lorq put his fists on his hips. "From the crack across mine, you where those lines my fate can tell will touch?"

"No, Captain— " Her eyes dropped to her hands. The cards looked much too big for her still fingers. "I the cards only array and read."