Thousandstar (#4 of the Cluster series) (22 page)

'Correct.'

"Later on, he covered for me at a clone's party. We got along better after that; we understood each other better. You'd think that clones would understand each other from the outset, but our experiences were diverging, and the sexual difference..." She faded off.

'I wish I could see—you,' Heem said.

"Why Heem!" she exclaimed, flattered. "Even though you think of me as a Squam?"

Heem rolled away from that. He now thought of her as a person; actual vision of her would merely confirm her alienness. He had thought to set her back, knowing her aversion to being perceived without her apparel, but he had set himself back. He
did
want to see her, and not as a Squam. He had little interest in alien sex, so her episode was not important, but to perceive her more clearly as she was—why did the notion attract him?

He retreated to his own memory. As he left the valley of Morningmist and came up over the mountain ridge to a broad highland of distinctive flavors, and perceived the traces of unfamiliar HydrOs, he suffered disorientation. He slowed the flatfloater, then rolled off it. What was wrong? He was unable to concentrate, to function, but it was an internal rather than external malaise. He rolled to a halt.

For a long time he lay where he had stopped, his awareness fading in and out. His mind pulsed with strange concepts. What... why...? 'Heem—what's the matter? Are you ill?' He did not respond to the nagging thought. His whole past seemed to be swirling about him, vaporizing and coalescing confusingly. His youth in the valley of High-falls, the deaths of his siblings, his entry to Morningmist, Slitherfear...

'Heem, that nebula is getting awfully close! If we don't achieve vision and put the ship under power soon—'

Moon of Morningmist, the joyous discovery of copulation, tragedy, the campaign against the dread Squam...

'I can't do it myself! I'm no pilot, Heem. You've got to snap out of it!'

Heem tried to marshal his thoughts. Increasingly it seemed to him that he had been operating on too immediate a basis, dealing with the details instead of the whole. He had fought a single Squam, physically, when he should have nullified the entire framework that brought such an enemy to a HydrO valley. He had refused to seed the valley, because that would have repeated the horror of his own development; he should have sought the origin of the Squam, so as to halt all such invasions. There could be some parent-of-Squams somewhere, sending the creatures out in myriads to decimate valleys;
that
was the place to strike! In fact, immediate personal action seemed generally futile; understanding had to come first. Had he understood the nature of the Squam at the outset...

At last he was discovered by other HydrOs. "This tastes like a recent metamorphosis," one sprayed. "Verify it," the second jetted.

The first jetted directly at Heem. "What is your identity?"

"Heem of Highfalls," Heem jetted weakly, remembering a taste that had almost faded out.

"What is your purpose?"

Purpose? Heem strove to remember. There had been something about a deadly enemy, killing—but it faded as he sought it. "My purpose—" Somehow, everything seemed irrelevant. Formulate, formulate! "My purpose—is to facilitate understanding." Was that right? Somehow he was unable to orient on anything specific. He couldn't remember...

"Welcome to adult status, Heem of Highfalls," the HydrO sprayed. "Roll with us, and we shall introduce you to civilization."

'Metamorphosis!' Jessica exclaimed. 'Yet—'

"That's it!" Heem sprayed. "I must metamorphose again. Into awareness of sight!"

'But I don't understand. In our Sphere, caterpillars metamorphose into—'

"All HydrOs metamorphose into adult stage, forgetting the events of their juvenile stage. Thus no mature HydrO has any subjective awareness of youth or age, of inception or destruction. At metamorphosis he enters a new universe: civilization. Now I must enter the universe of sight."

'But you
do
remember—'

Abruptly, he was into her. His awareness coursed through her aura. She made a little scream of violation, but stifled it. For this was what she had been urging him to do.

And he could see. The immediate tastes of the little ship became immediate sights. The control buttons had elevations and shadows and depths, highlighted by the glow from the ambient-radiation-detection port, the glow of the light of the Star. The walls had nozzles and irregularities and—

'Color, too. See it in color, Heem!'

And shades of gray, with patches of green, left by the receded acceleration bath.

'I meant outside. Look at the cup-nebula.'

Heem concentrated—and in another vertigo of sensation he perceived the nebula,
saw
the bowl. The thing was opaque, cloudy, nebulous—as of course it should be!—but he perceived it with a clarity impossible to taste. He saw depth; the near side really did seem larger than the far side, yet this distortion lent a grandeur he could not otherwise have appreciated. He saw convolutions of gas and dust strewn out by the opposing forces of the gravity wells, ranged in partial orbits about the Star and Hole. Their Star sides were bright, their Hole sides dark, and they seemed to be roiling like the bodies of monstrous, deformed Squams, their motion frozen in this moment of his looking.

"I see it," Heem jetted. "It is a new dimension of perception, alien, horrible, beautiful."

'Now you can navigate it!' Jessica exclaimed. Her voice lacked the definition it had once had, for he had taken over much of her aura, but her diminished presence was encouraging. 'Just as you navigated the concept-pattern to get this ship! You can steer this vessel right through the twilight zone and out the other side.'

Heem almost believed he could. Certainly it was a worthy challenge! Still, he had to caution her: "This will be an extremely difficult passage. It has never before been accomplished by my kind."

'Because your kind never had sight before!' she said enthusiastically. 'Vision is the language of astronomy. Even when you're tasting the sprays of the ship's instruments, you're really seeing—because the ship's sensors are optical. They have to be. In my own body I could see the stars directly. So now we're doing a double translation, from sight to taste and back to sight. And we can do things with sight you just can't do with taste, because it is virtually instant. So I know we can—'

"Enough," Heem needled. "The odds remain unfavorable."

But now he had his chance and his challenge. Heem concentrated, using her vision, making it his own. He saw the glints of planetary fragments orbiting about the Hole; in fact there were great rings of it, illuminated on the Star side, crystalline faces sparkling prettily. There were perceptible currents within these rings, bands of discolor that reflected the stresses acting on them. Well out from the Hole, the rings were rough and bright, as of large fragments; in toward the horror-sphere of non-light, the rings were fine powder, their rocks ground to minute particles by the catastrophic force of the tide. For the law of the tide dictated that the closer to the primary an object orbited, the faster it had to move, and in a gravity well as intense as this, the near sides of rocks had to move faster than the far sides, sundering the whole.

And the ship, too, would be sundered by that dread force, if the ship got anywhere near that radius. Might be torn apart anyway, it the conflict between Star and Hole was too great. Unless they passed the critical zone rapidly. Rapidly enough.

They were falling in toward the Hole, accelerating in a free-fall spiral. Heem oriented his jets and put the ship under power. First, he had to correct the direction of fall, so as to intercept the bowl-nebula of the interaction zone. Second, to pass as fast as possible. Even if the tide were not devastating, the radiation would be. He could see it now, that intense, burning brightness from the Star. This was no region for living creatures! Fortunately, a little power went a long way, when the merging gravity wells of two stellar objects were drawing the ship in.

Now the great rings of matter began to shift, as the ship's motion changed the angle of view. Perspective—the marvel of changing view, suddenly doubling the reality of the sight. The rings wound about like monstrous pythons—Jessica's image of a Squamlike Solarian monster—seeming to take on life. Both Star and Hole expanded ominously. But so did the nebula-storm. It was apparent that Heem could score on it. With perception like this, guidance was no problem at all. But now that turbulence seemed more formidable. Could they survive those awful forces of interaction?

'Of course we can!' Jessica replied to his doubt, her voice faint but hearty. 'Goose it up to top speed and thread the needle, Heem!'

She certainly had confidence! This was flattering but foolish; that needle was needling through colossal opposition.

The radiation was growing worse. Much of it, Jessica clarified, was not in the visible spectrum, so her awareness of it was no greater than Heem's. But it was there, heating the ship, hurting his body. He would have to select a course that put as much dust and gas as possible between the ship and the Star—and that meant skirting perilously close to the Hole. The smallest misjudgment would lock them into the Hole, where not even the proximity of the Star could cancel its power.

As they approached the critical nexus, the view changed more rapidly. The turbulence nebula, dwarfed by the monstrous blinding disk of the Star, in turn dwarfed the tiny Hole. But it was the Hole that was their greatest danger. Heem nudged the ship slightly toward it, to skirt it as closely as he dared, driven by the intolerable radiation.

Wisps of dust passed to the starward side, putting the ship in shadow; even so, the heat was oppressive. His body really had no adequate way to dissipate that heat, since it penetrated from the outside. The tide, too, half-neutralized by the conflicting pulls, added its subtle discomfort. His body was not being torn apart, but he well knew that an intensification of this sort of stress could do it. More likely, it would break the rigid ship apart, exposing Heem's soft body to the rigors of unshielded space. That made the sensation more uncomfortable than it was, objectively. Subjectively. The little ship was not designed to withstand stresses of this type.

The nebula loomed. Now Heem saw every detail of its ominous configuration. It was virtually still, on this scale, but his motion helped him to perceive it as if it were in motion on his own scale. Matter and energy were leaking out from the Star and swirling into the Hole; the nebula was merely the region of indecision, with material piling in on one side, but also falling back to the Star. But more of it fell into the Hole, leaving the hollow of its loss. What was it like, inside that bowl? 'Oh, the heat!' Jessica cried. 'Maybe it's cool in there!' Then they plunged inside the bowl, still accelerating. Abruptly the light was gone. Heem, so recently introduced to vision, suffered momentary shock. "I can't see!"

'I know the feeling,' Jessica agreed. 'But you can still taste your other indicators. It's just a cloud, blocking off the external radiation, but nothing inside the ship has changed. Meanwhile, the cloud is shielding the ship, letting us cool, cutting off the deadly radiation.'

The ship shuddered and rocked. "A storm-cloud!" Heem sprayed.

'We won't be in it long,' she said reassuringly. She was amazingly calm.

And they were out. But not in light. They were in the great shadow of the cup. On one side the turbulent clouds reigned; on the other side a ring of stars showed. In the center of that ring the stars turned reddish, pale, fuzzy, and finally disappeared. Their light could not pass closer than a certain range, so there was nothing. Just a great black blot. The Hole.

Heem drew his attention away from that dread well and focused on the stars. He had never seen them before. Not this way, with direct vision. They scintillated in their myriads, mostly whitish, some bluish or reddish, some bright, many dim. They filled the universe—

They were gone. The nebula had closed in about the ship again, cutting off everything, for his arc was broader than that of the bowl. Again a storm current shook the ship, and Heem had to look to his controls. The balance between Star and Hole remained precarious.

Then he became aware of something else. Something missing. "Jessica?"

As from a distance, she answered. 'I am here, Heem.'

"Are you well? Your presence seems marginal."

'I—think so. When you entered my aura, I—there's nothing of me here except aura, so—I think I'm suffering sacrifice of identity.'

"Alien, I did not intend to destroy you! I understood you wanted me to—"

'Yes, yes, I did, Heem. I urged you to use my perception, all of it, right through to the color. I just didn't realize—how thorough it would be.'

"I will withdraw."

'No! You must see! You must guide the ship out of here before the opposing gravity wells and tides and radiation and storm currents destroy us!'

The ship emerged from the nebula. There was external sight again. "I will try," Heem agreed. "We remain under acceleration. Now I must maintain the balance, far enough from the Star to avoid destruction by radiation, far enough from the Hole to retain escape velocity. If I do that accurately, and the fuel lasts—"

'Oh, you can do it!' she cried. 'I know you can. I'll just get out of your way and let you pilot.'

"Agreed." This was remotely similar to column maneuvering, but the alternatives were more deadly. If he did not perform within tolerance, one menace or the other would engulf them.

The key, now, was fuel. He needed to win free of the well of the Hole and still be able to close and land on a planet. It depended on the accuracy with which he had threaded the needle. There was no safe side; Star and Hole were waiting to claim him, depending on the side he veered to. Now that he was no longer driving in, he would not fall in immediately; there would be a decaying orbit about Star or Hole, but the end would be inevitable.

Now he had to discover just how accurately he had navigated, utilizing his new sense of sight. He cut the drive. The ship continued on in free-fall, moving away from the nebula but losing velocity. Soon his instruments would indicate deviation, and the bad news would be in. The damage had already been done, either by his misjudgment or by the turbulence of the nebula. He was waiting for the extent of it to manifest.