Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (10 page)

 
          
“I’m
cutting the engines now, before we boost too far apart. No sweat. We’re leaving
Pilgrim
fast enough. We can coast a
while. Okay, there. At least we’re headed in the right direction. I’ll jockey
us over to inspect your damage presently. Then I’ll slave your positioning
motors to trim the course, and we can lock on again to boost together. Cut your
autopilot, will you?”

 
          
“Right,”
hesitantly.

 
          
“Let’s
get out of our helmets to save the air cans.”

 
          
*
* *

 
          
“Will
you call
Pilgrim
before the reactor
goes? Please, Ritchie. There can’t be much time left.”

 
          
He
glances irritably at me. “What for? There are only those insects there now.”

 
          
“Please.
To say goodbye. Even if nobody hears it. Goodbye to Earth.”

 
          
“A
sort of salute?” Ritchie reaches for the radio. “This is shuttle
Alpha
calling
Pilgrim Crusader.
Do you read me?”

 
          
The
radio crackles, but no one reads us.

 
          
“This
is shuttle
Alpha.
We’re safe.
Beta
likewise. Goodbye. Goodbye.”

 
          
We
sit with helmets off now, to wait the last minutes out, watching the small rear
viewscreen.
Pilgrim
and even the
asteroid are too far away to see by now, but the explosion will be bright at
ten times that distance.

 
          
And
we wait.

 
          
“It
hasn’t happened,” says Ritchie finally. “It hasn’t blown. What did Kamasarin
say? If those things understand it they can stop it? My God, they did too. Pray
Heaven they can’t psych their way through High Space! ”

 
          
“Heaven?
This
is
Heaven, Ritchie! Look,
there’s God’s World ahead, sailing in its Heaven. And what was waiting for us?
Devils. Filthy things. With stings to stick in us and claws to tear us apart.
Things that couldn’t communicate. Wouldn’t. Didn’t bother.” (Peter squeezes my
glove.) “They were waiting. If Ritchie hadn’t got on board none of us would
even be here. We’re just some specks of dust that blew away.”

 
          
“The
broadcasts warned about a battle, love. We still don’t know what that battle
is. Maybe the insects are
their
enemy, trying to stop us getting there. Well, they failed, damn it. We got
away.”

 
          
“I
don’t think we even saw the enemy. We didn’t see what directed them. We were
just swept aside, right at the start.”

 
          
“Don’t
be so bloody defeatist.”

 
          
Ritchie
coughs. “I must get back to Rene. They’ll be going nuts, drifting all alone.”

 
          
Before
long we’re staring down at the tail of
Beta
,
hanging below us some forty metres off, apparently motionless. The twin port
elevons are visibly bent, the outer one badly.

           
“That sure can’t re-enter!” Ritchie
laughs bitterly. “Re-enter, eh? When we’ve never been near that world in all
our lives! I guess slaving her down to a landing would be kind of crazy at the
best of times. Okay, you three down there, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll line us
up, then you can re-engage your autopilot, and we’ll get on course for a moon
orbit. Once we’re in orbit you’ll all transfer over here for re-entry. Shit, I
mean for landing dirt- side. You can’t transfer any earlier than that. Too
crowded, and we’d run through
Alpha
's
consumables. We’ll leave
Beta
parked
aloft.”

 
          
“One
little point,” comes Zoe’s voice. “Just how do we transfer?”

 
          
“Oh,
life-line. I’ll rig it. No sweat, you can pull yourself over with your eyes
closed. You’ll be weightless. (Maybe they’d better do just that,” he mutters to
us. “Keep their eyes shut.) Okay, we have six million flicks minimum to travel.
That’s to the close point of its orbit. The gas giant’s pull will speed us up,
but we’ll have to kill that later on or we’ll be coming in too fast to get into
orbit. I’ll get the approximate path angle and initial velocity out of the
computer in about an hour. We’ll fine it down with course corrections
tomorrow.”

 
          
“An
hour?"
protests Rene. “Shouldn’t
we be getting out of here as fast as possible?”

 
          
“Don’t
worry, Monsieur. We
are
getting out
of here, and fast, right now. We have been, ever since we left
Pilgrim.
And one hour
is
soon, you’d better believe it. The
computer isn’t updated and navigational stars have all shifted. I’ve got our
computer and a Hewlett-Packard, a sextant and a few other things, and what I
know in my brain. One per cent difference in initial velocity makes one hell of
a difference in flight time. We’ve got to arrive when that moon’s round our
side, and at the right speed.”

 
          
“I’m
sorry. I apologize.”

 
          
“That’s
okay. If you want to fill in the time, figure out how to use your radar and
keep watch behind.”

 
          
“I
am familiar with radar sets,” comes Wu’s voice.

 
          
“You’re
quite a lady.” Ritchie sounds as though he means it.

 
          
An
immense ripe
peach, banded pink and
orange, gold and chrome, cleft by night. The bright crocus sash around the gas
giant’s midriff is fringed by a darker bronze braiding. Yet that sash is no
portly cummerbund, and its belly is far from serene or autumnal; hurricanes of
rushing roiling colour, scallops and shearings of jet-streams and planet-sized
spots, are at war there.

 
          
To
port, our windows are filled by the satellite world we orbit now, below us. Its
caul of air breathes a faint violet fog against the black space-horizon.

 
          
We
rush over barren brown high plateau, waterless and desolate, indented with
rugged basins. These old impact craters from earlier times have never been
wholly softened by wind erosion. Here the world distends, egg-like, towards its
master; here the air is thin.

 
          
Ice-fretted,
bumpy gatherings of mountains arise, resembling crumpled lace-work or the
frosted skeletons of leaves. In reality these mountains are somewhat lower than
the high plateau. As the gas giant sets below the horizon behind us, so sinks
the land down till eventually we are over cloud-dappled blue ocean. From here
the giant world is never seen. Quite a shock for the first mortals of this
other hemisphere who first climbed the mountains and saw that in the sky, where
it had always been! (If there are mortals . . .Yet there are supposed to be
immortals . . .)

 
          
Ritchie
floats by the airlock in his suit, checking thermostat and gas pistol while I
hold his helmet for him. Loops of strong thin wire hang out from his waist. (A
noose . . .
Why think of a noose?)

 
          
Fifty
metres to port,
Beta
flies
upside-down so that both our airlocks face each other across the intervening
space.

 
          
Down
below on the watery backside of the world there spreads a triple ocean, divided
by an irregular, inverted ‘Y’ of archipelagoes. Two of the three sub-oceans,
southern and eastern, contain large isolated islands too, though the western
ocean we’re over now is empty of land. Unfortunately the high-resolution
cameras are left behind on
Pilgrim.

 
          
As
the south-westerly archipelago comes in view, with the terminator drawing a
dark frayed blanket over the waters beyond, Ritchie dons his helmet and ducks
into the airlock. As the shoulder of the world cuts off the radiance of 82
Eridani, he jets out gently ...

 
          
Easy
as he goes.

 
          
Twenty
minutes remain till we round the bend of the world into dawn and Ritchie,
wearing only a planet suit, is blinded and his thermostat hit by rapid unequal
heating. He floats slowly, correcting with puffs of gas.

 
          
At
last he bumps against
Beta's
open
airlock and secures himself by a short tether to the inside, then leans out to
pull the belayed wire nearly, though not quite, taut through the belay clasp
there. Ducking inside, he cycles the airlock behind him.

 
          
“Excellent,
Ritchie,” purrs Wu’s voice over the radio. “Very good indeed. Smart mouse.”

 
          
Laughter.
“Bravo!” (Not so much for Ritchie’s performance as for Wu’s? What on earth is
she doing, hugging him?)

 
          
Shortly,
the sun blooms in the east.

 
          
Reunited
in
Alpha
, we six consider where to
land. It
is
crowded. The shuttle
smells. But we don’t mind. Not now. We can stand it for a day or so, or three.

 
          
Our
Polaroid cameras have yielded a jigsaw mosaic of the central areas of the
world. Many pieces are still missing or blotted with cloud. The mosaic is
pasted all over the roof with blobs of jelly-glue. From this, and from our
sketches, Wu has produced— with exquisite penmanship—a world-scroll that looks
anything but tentative. Wu’s craftsmanship is a side of her character that
rather surprises us. But I guess it’s in keeping with her role as
historiographer—keeper of official history, who imposes the ideal grid upon
events. Ultimately her world-scroll is an ideal grid too. The planet below only
approximates to it.

 
          
“So
we’ve got enough fuel for three hours’ scouting before

 
          
we
must set down,” calculates Ritchie. “Alternatively, we have enough for fifteen
minutes if we want to boost this bird back to orbit. Not much point, though, is
there? So we can cover about nineteen hundred klicks. With VTOL capability it
doesn’t much matter where we set down. Though, like the man said, the rest of
your life begins from that moment on.” He smiles at Wu, shyly. Over the past
three days in this confined space, as he snapped pictures and Wu sketched from
them, an accord has been emerging between our young American and the older
Chinese woman. It is as though, with him as pilot and her as navigator and
charter of this new terrain, she is destined to occupy a similar role in his
own future life—the cartographer of that too.

 
          
“I’m
sorry they named me Ritchie,” he apologized once, jokingly. “Makes me sound,
well, over-privileged. Rich.”

 
          
She
smiled at that. “Oh, there are always hierarchies of privilege—even in the best
People’s Democracies. Perhaps even more so.” Curious admission ...

 
          
In
the emotional equations of our group we four earlier lovers dance a psychic
foursome. Wu and Ritchie are thrust, perforce, into a waltz of their own. Wu
seems to have made her mind up to dance it with style and subtlety.

 
          
“Obviously
we should come down somewhere over the ocean hemisphere,” Rene is saying. “The
dry side’s dead. Even its fringes look very barren. There may be something
magnificent and godlike to look at in the sky, but we must seek life. The
question is, though, do we opt for the shores of an ocean or for one of the big
islands somewhere along the chains? I’d prefer to rule out any isolated islands
in mid-ocean, even if they are the size of countries.”

 
          
“We
don’t want to get stuck on any damned island,” agrees Ritchie.

 
          
“Even
if it is the size of Sumatra. No, if there’s trade, commerce, civilization, it
has to be along these island chains. Down here near the equator, where the
three chains meet, should be a centre of activity. Also, where the
archipelagoes meet the mainland.”

 
          
Ritchie
defers to Wu as higher authority.

 
          
“The
north is too cold, and where the western chain meets the mainland,” she points
to her scroll, “this large river flows out—

 
          
or
the sea flows in. Anyway, the result is a very swampy area. I vote for one of
the bigger offshore islands over here in the far east. Not,” she smiles, “from
any sense of identification. We’ll be between two oceans here, with major
islands in both of them, and near the main land mass too.”

 
          
“If
only they’d answer a radio signal! It would make life a lot easier. I guess the
pyramid was meant to take care of that.”

 
          
“Maybe
God doesn’t use radio sets?” teases Zoe. “No more than God is a historian.
After all, they did
prophesy
to us.
Now we have come through timelessness to a place where radio sets may be as
irrelevant as . . .” She leaves her sentence dangling in the air beside her.

 
          
“It’s
a perfectly normal physical world down there,” snaps Ritchie. Another few days
of this intense closeness, and perhaps our camaraderie might flip into its
opposite. We must go down. “Does anyone disagree? With Wu’s proposal, I mean.”

 
          
No
one disagrees.

 
          
His
index finger dabs the scroll. “Right, so I’ll take her down here.”