Thousandstar (#4 of the Cluster series) (20 page)

"It was still failure. The penalty is—"

'You take failure pretty seriously, don't you.'

"It is more than that. To fail in this competition is doom for me. To fail to kill the Squam—" He let his taste dilute into amorphous suggestion.

'I don't see why,' she persisted annoyingly.

"It was not merely personal failure. It was treason to my species."

'That's nonsense! How can it be treason, when you tried as hard as you could?'

"Because no successful reseeding of Morningmist Valley could occur, while Slitherfear was there, or while he could return."

'Of course it couldn't. You were quite right about that. But you didn't want to seed the valley anyway.'

"Therefore, treason—and now at last I pay the penalty." He tasted ahead, admiring the looming blot of the Hole. "Soon, now, we will spiral into the range of the killer tide, and be torn apart. Already I feel the first twinges."

'This is ridiculous!' she cried. 'You can't equate the black hole to some prior failure! You can't accept death just because you were unable to do the impossible!'

"Equate it as you will. It is the end."

'But
I
didn't fail! Why should I die too? I have a right to fight for my life!'

Heem considered. "There is a certain alien justice in your view. But how can you save yourself, if I perish in the Hole?"

'I can't!' she admitted, suppressing waves of anger, frustration, and terror. 'But at least if I must die, I want to know why. You haven't said anything that makes sense to me.'

"It is clear enough. I refused to reseed the valley. Then I failed to kill the Squam."

'That is as clear as homogenized mud!'

"Any creature of my culture would comprehend."

'I am not of your culture! I'm an alien thing! Your rationale is insanity to me!'

Again, she had some justice. But there really was nothing he could do to alleviate her situation.

They watch-tasted the looming Hole. Already they were beyond the ship's propulsive recovery; even if he turned the ship and expended all their remaining fuel in a jet, going straight out from the Hole, it would not suffice. The doom had been committed. Increasingly he felt the nag of the tide within his body.

'Do you know,' she said after a time, 'I have had a recurring nightmare, like yours, only mine isn't a bad memory, it's a bad anticipation. You know how I've been masquerading as a man, to match my clone-brother, keeping our secret?'

"I know," Heem agreed. At least she wasn't screaming.

'I hate that masquerade. Yet I understand it. I must maintain it, until the time is right. Yet I keep wishing I could end it, or have it ended for me, so I would not be guilty. So in this dream—'

"A dream of ending it would be a good dream."

'No. Because of the social situation. To end it at the wrong time, in the wrong manner—that would be disaster and shame. In my dream, I'm attending one of these damn clone balls, those masterworks of frivolity and waste, and this strange, huge yet handsome man comes up and rips off my dress and exposes my nakedness, and everyone sees me for a female, and they all laugh and I'm so mortified I want to die.'

"Ridicule before your peers," Heem agreed. "This I comprehend. Violation of cultural mores."

'But the strange thing is, now that my nightmare wish is being granted and I know I am going to die, really going to die, that dream doesn't frighten me anymore. Here I've told it to you, and it doesn't bother me at all. You could laugh, and I'd just laugh too. Because showing or not showing my natural body is a pretty silly thing to get tight about. Because I don't really want to die. I'd be happy to suffer such shame, if only I could live."

Then she was crying, and now Heem comprehended this too, and her alienness diminished in his perception. She seemed less like a Squam and more like Moon of Morningmist, whom he had wronged by his denial, until her death made it too late. Now he wished he could spare this feeling female, even at the price of shame. But he could not. The abyss was absolute. All he could hope to do was to make her understand. Heem made a special effort. "My kind must seed any suitable habitat. This is how we propagate our kind. Any isolated region of sufficient size is suitable—when it is vacant. When Meen and I were the only remaining HydrOs in Morningmist, we had to seed the valley and depart. She was ready. I refused."

'I've got that,' Jessica said.

"But there was an exoneration. The presence of Slitherfear made the valley unsuitable. I had therefore to eliminate him. Then the valley would be suitable. But I failed. Thus I neither seeded the valley nor enabled anyone else to seed it in my stead."

'But you tried! You risked your life attacking that monster, twice. No one could ask more of you than that!'

"
I
could."

'And anyway, you weren't going to reseed the valley, even before you fought the Squam, and there was no other male to do it, so your failure to kill Slitherfear made no difference.'

"Therein lies my treason. Had I been willing to seed, but found it necessary to eliminate Slitherfear first, my failure would have been honest. But as it was—"

'I begin to see. You failure may have been because you wanted to fail, just as my nightmare was a reflection of my desire to be exposed. So your failure became an extension of your treason.'

"Now you roll it."

'I wanted to roll it. To grasp it. It is like my own shame. I am not truly afraid of nakedness or exposure of my nature; I'm really sort of proud of my gender and my body. My true shame is in my desire to abrogate my responsibility to my estate.'

"And if you so abrogated,
then
you might truly wish to die."

'So I might. I know my brother wished to die, and he is me.' She was silent a time, her thoughts too complex for Heem to follow. Then she addressed him again. 'I'm glad I understand, Heem. Because now I can say without fear of successful contradiction that your whole death wish is unfounded. You committed no treason.'

"An alien could hardly be expected to comprehend civilized rationale." Yet he was disappointed; he had wanted her to understand, and thought she did.

'I am a civilized alien! You have to understand that the HydrO way is not the way in the universe. What is treason to you could be honorable to me. Honorable to the majority of sapient creatures in the Milky Way Galaxy. Your horizons are too limited.'

"You prevaricate charmingly. But this is my occasion for truth. All my quasi-adult life I have concealed the flavor of my treason; now in death I can finally cleanse myself with the truth. I should have seeded Morning-mist."

'No, you're wrong! I mean you're right! Right not to seed Morningmist!'

Heem issued a confused jet, thinking he had misunderstood her. "Right—to commit treason?"

'It wasn't treason! You suffered terribly in your juvenile state, not knowing where you came from or what your purpose was, all your brothers dying one by one. That's a barbaric way to raise children! You resolved not to perpetuate that horror—as any sapient creature would.
I
would never reproduce in such a fashion. It is the standard of your society that is treasonable, not you.'

Amazing! "You—now that you know the truth—do not condemn me?"

'Condemn you? Heem, I applaud you! Despite all the urgings of your culture, you held to what was right.'

"This cannot be true," he jetted disbelievingly. "You grasp—you roll the wrong, you have a similar horror in your own experience—"

'It cannot be false! How could I lie to you, being resident in your mind? My own horror is not similar; it is a private wish to see my own lot improve at the expense of my estate. A selfish wish. You, in contrast, stood up for what was right despite the pressures of convenience and social opprobrium. You held to what was proper despite personal sacrifice. There's a world of difference!'

She had to be right. She shared his brain, his nerves. He might not understand her nature, but he knew her emotion. She was speaking truth, as she understood it.

Still, it could hardly be. "Because of me, neither Morningmist nor Highfalls was seeded. I violated the cardinal rule of our species."

'You upheld a cardinal rule of
our
species, and of many others, perhaps the majority of all sapient species: not to throw babies to the wolves. I think you acted honorably. Maybe it is against your culture's law or custom, but it remains a fundamentally decent attitude. If I have to die, I'm glad I am dying in support of such an attitude.'

She meant it. She was an alien sapient, and she endorsed his secret shame—as an open virtue. She was not revolted.

'And did it ever occur to you, Heem, that you were not really depriving those valleys of HydrO litters? Meen may have crossed over into Highfalls and found Hiim and seeded it; or two other HydrOs could have come in from elsewhere and seeded both valleys. The future of your species was not at stake; those valleys were bound to be populated. The only question was, by whom? So you elected not to participate; that was the fortune of someone else, not treason. Nothing was changed, except your affirmation of your own morality.'

"This is stupid," Heem needled himself. "What is it to me, what one alien thinks?"

But it was the first such affirmation he had ever had. He cared.

 

 

 

Chapter 5:

Threading the Needle

 

 

'Now you don't have to die,' Jessica said. 'You have no guilt to expiate.'

Heem was still sifting through his gratified amazement, but he had not lost the taste of reality. "I may have no guilt to expiate. Therefore I can die satisfied."

'You could save yourself, if you really wanted to. I'm sure of it.'

Foolish female! "The Hole can not be escaped—and if it could, there would remain the problem of the competition, whose cut we have missed, and the incarceration that awaits me at home. I still prefer the Hole."

'I've been thinking about that, Heem, while I worked on the problem of vision, while you fought the Squam in memory. I think we just might win that contest.'

"I have accepted the inevitable. You evince grandiose hopes." Yet there was an insidious lure to it. The fact that a single sapient creature believed in his decision not to seed the valley—this had an extraordinary effect on his will to live. If one believed, wasn't it possible that others might also believe?

'This black hole—it's really a shortcut to Planet Eccentric. We are cutting across the Holestar System disk, instead of orbiting around it the way the other ships are. And the combined pull of Star and Hole is giving us tremendous velocity. If we could just zip through and come out the other side, we'd be first there, wouldn't we?'

"We are already within the point of no return for this spaceship. We cannot—"

'But we can loop
between
Hole and Star! Don't you see, Heem—the point of no return would be much closer to the Hole, when opposed by the Star, since the Hole is really orbiting the Star. And if we go on through, all our present velocity counts
for
us, not against us, and will translate into velocity
away
from the Hole on the other side. We have not really been captured at all! We can thread the needle through!'

Heem was amazed at the audacity, simplicity, and naivete of this proposal. "To attempt such a thing is almost certain death!"

'You forget where we are. For us
not
to attempt it is certain death!'

She was, of course, correct. At this stage there was absolutely nothing to lose.

"Still, it is hopeless," he sprayed. "The interaction of tides and stellar wind and radiation, velocity vectors— this is beyond my power to assimilate and control, in a ship of this simplicity."

'You only think it is beyond your power. You have more resources than you appreciate. Think of it as a huge Squam to be challenged: you can beat it if you only try hard enough.'

"I am an experienced pilot, among the best of my species," he sprayed. "I am not modest about my abilities in this regard. I may no longer be able to defeat a Squam in fair combat, but my piloting ability is undiminished.
No
HydrO could navigate clear of the Hole from this point; therefore I cannot."

'Well, a Solarian could!' she retorted. 'And I think that your piloting
is
diminished, because if you lost talent in personal combat, you must have lost it generally, if only in little ways you aren't aware of. And you know what you lack? It is sight. Vision. If you could see what you're doing, you could pilot this ship right between the Hole and the Star, balancing their gravity wells against each other so we don't fall into either.'

"For a species who sees, you evince little respect for radiation. To pass that close to the Star would be to be blasted by intolerable levels. Even if the ship were precisely on course, we would emerge dead."

She pondered that. 'I'm not so sure. There's a lot of gas and dust spiraling between Star and Hole. It could act as a radiation shield, preventing the ship from getting too hot or absorbing too much in the lethal ranges. It would not be a long passage. Maybe a little key maneuvering. All you'd need to do is watch for suitable clouds, and go through them.'

She was so foolishly determined! "It is theoretically possible. But I cannot see, so—"

'But I can! I can show you how. I can do it for you. I'm your transfer half of the team; together we can do it!'

Her ridiculous enthusiasm burgeoning along his nerves was contagious. His new urge to live caused him to consider even such an extreme. "Such a thing—it would be an extremely long roll."

'Versus the short roll of dying without fighting!'

Heem yielded to her encouragement. "We have nothing to lose by making the attempt."

'Oh, Heem, I'm so proud of you, I could kiss you!' And she sent an oddly stimulating impression of physical contact through his awareness.

"What was that?" he demanded, astonished.

Abruptly she was diffident. 'Just an expression of—of encouragement. About navigating the channel—'