Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (11 page)

“No,” he said. “What’s Santa Claus?”

“Oh, Wan!”

So she explained Santa Claus to him, and Christmas, and then had to explain winter and snow and gift-giving. His face smoothed, and he began to smile; and curiously, as Wan’s mood improved Janine’s grew worse. Trying to make Wan understand the world she lived in made her confront the world ahead. Almost, she thought, it would be better to do what Peter proposed, pack it all in, go back to their real lives. All the alternatives were frightening. Where they were was frightening, if she let herself feel it-in some kind of an artifact that was doggedly plowing its way through space to some unknown destination. What if it arrived? What would they confront? Or if they went back with Wan, what would be there? Heechee? Heechee! There was fear! Janine had lived all her young life with the Heechee just outside it-terrifying if real, less real than mythical. Like Schwarze Peter or Santa Claus. Like God. All myths and deities are tolerable enough to believe in; but what if they become real?

She knew that her family were as fearful as she, though she could not tell that from anything they said-they were setting an example of courage to her. She could only guess. She guessed that Paul and her sister were afraid but had made up their minds to gamble against that fear for the sake of what might come of it. Her own fear was of a very special kind-less fear of what might happen than of how badly she might behave while it was happening to her. What her father felt was obvious to everyone. He was angry and afraid, and what he was afraid of was dying before he cashed in on his courage.

And what did Wan feel? He seemed so uncomplicated as he showed her about his domain, like one child guiding another through his toy chest. Janine knew better. If she had learned anything in her fourteen years, it was that nobody was uncomplicated. Wan’s complications were merely not the same as her own, as she saw at once when he showed her the water fixture that worked. He had not been able to drink the water, but he had used it for a toilet. Janine, brought up in the great conspiracy of the Western world to pretend that excretion does not happen, would never have brought Wan to see this place of stains and smells, but he was wholly unembarrassed. She could not even make him embarrassed. “I had to go somewhere,” he said sullenly, when she reproached him for not using the ship’s sanitary like everybody else.

“Yes, but if you did it the right way Vera would have known you were sick, don’t you see? She’s always analyzing our, uh, the bathroom stuff.”

“There ought to be some other way.”

“Well, there is.” There was the mobile bioassay unit, which took tiny samples from each of them-which had, in fact, been put to work on Wan, once the necessity was perceived. But Vera was not a very smart computer, and had not thought to program her mobile unit to sample Wan until told to do so, a little late. “What’s the matter?”

He was acting uncomfortable. “When the Dead Men give me a medical check they stick things in me. I don’t like that.”

‘It’s for your own good, Wan,” she said severely. “Hey! That’s an idea. Let’s go talk to the Dead Men.”

And there was Janine’s own complicatedness. She didn’t really want to talk to the Dead Men. She just wanted to get away from the embarrassing place they were in; but by the time they had propelled themselves to the place where the Dead Men were, which was also the place where Wan’s dreaming couch was, Janine had decided to want something else. “Wan,” she said, “I want to try the couch.”

He tilted his head back and narrowed his eyes, appraising her over his long nose. “Lurvy told me not to do that any more,” he stated.

“I know she did. How do I get in?”

“First you tell me I must do what you all say,” he complained, “then you all tell me to do different things. It is very confusing.”

She had already stepped into the cocoon and stretched out. ‘Do I just pull the top down over me?”

“Oh,” he said, shrugging, “if you’ve made up your mind-yes. It snaps shut, there, where your hand is, but when you want to come out you just push.”

She reached for the webby top and pulled it toward her, looking up at his petulant, concerned face. “Does it-hurt?”

“Hurt? No! What an idea!”

“Well, what does it feel like?”

“Janine,” he said severely, “you are very childish. Why do you ask questions when you can see for yourself?” And he pushed down on the shimmery wire covering, and the catch midway down the side rustled and locked. “It is best if you go to sleep,” he called down to her, through the shining blue network of wire.

“But I’m not sleepy,” she objected reasonably. “I’m not anything. I don’t feel a thing. . . .”

And then she did.

It was not what she had expected out of her own experience of the fever; there was no obsessive interference with her own personality, no point source of feelings. There was only a warm and saturating glow. She was surrounded. She was an atom in a soup of sensation. The other atoms had no shape or individuality. They were not tangible or hard-edged. She could still see Wan, peering worriedly down at her through the wire when she opened her eyes, and these other-souls?-were not at all as real or as immediate. But she could feel them, as she had never felt another presence. Around her. Beside her. Within her. They were warm. They were comforting.

When Wan at last wrenched open the metal wire and pulled at her arm, she lay there staring at him. She did not have the strength to rise, or the desire. He had to help her up, and she leaned on his shoulder as they started back.

They were less than halfway back to the Herter-Hall ship when the other members of the family interrupted them, and they were furious. “Stupid little brat!” Paul raged. “You ever do anything like that again and I’ll paddle your pink little ass for you!”

“She won’t!” her father said grimly. “I will see to that, right now; and as to you, little miss, I will see to you later.”

They had all become so quarrelsome! No one paddled Janine’s bottom for trying out the dreaming couch. No one punished her at all. They all punished each other, instead, and did it all the time. The truce that had held for three and a half years, because each of them enforced it for himself, the alternative being mutual murder, dissolved. Paul and the old man did not speak for two days, because Peter had dismantled the couch without consultation. Lurvy and her father spat and shouted at each other because she had programmed too much salt in their meal, and then again, when it was his turn, because he had programmed too little. And as to Lurvy and Paul-they no longer slept together; they hardly spoke; they would surely not have stayed married, if there had been a divorce court within 5,000 A.U.

But if there had been a source of authority of any kind within 5,000 A.U., at least the disputes could have been resolved. Someone could have made their decisions. Should they return? Should they try to overpower the Food Factory’s guidance? Should they go with Wan to explore the other place-and if so, who should go and who should remain behind? They could not agree on grand plans. They could not even agree on the decisions of every hour, to take a machine apart and risk its destruction, or to leave it alone and give up the hope of some wonderful discovery that could change everything. They could not agree on who should talk to the Dead Men by radio, or what to ask them. Wan showed them, willingly enough, how to try to tempt the Dead Men into conversation, and they put Vera’s sound system in linkage with the “radio”. But Vera could not handle much give and take; and when the Dead Men did not understand her questions, or did not want to participate, or were simply too insane to be of any use, Vera was beaten.

All this was awful for Janine, but worst of all was Wan himself. The squabbling made him confused and indignant. He stopped following her around. And after one sleep, when she sat up and looked around for him, he was gone.

Fortunately for Janine’s pride, everyone else was gone, too- Paul and Lurvy outside the ship to reorient the antennae; her father asleep, so that she had time to deal with her jealousy. Let him be a pig! she thought. It was stupid of him not to realize that she had many friends, while he had only her; but he would find out! She was busy writing long letters to her neglected correspondents when she heard Paul and her sister returning; and when she told them that Wan had been gone for at least an hour she was unprepared for their reaction. “Pa!” Lurvy cried, rattling at the curtain of her father’s private. “Wake up! Wan’s gone!”

As the old man came blinking out, Janine said disagreeably, “Now, what’s the matter with all of you?”

“You don’t understand, do you?” Paul asked coldly. “What if he’s taken the ship?”

It was a possibility that had never occurred to Janine, and it was like a blow in the face. “He wouldn’t!”

“Would he not?” snarled her father. “And how do you know that, little minx? And if he does, what of us?” He finished zipping his coverall and stood up, glowering at them. “I have told you all,” he said-but looking at Lurvy and Paul, so that Janine understood she was not a part of their “all”-“I have told you that we must find a definite solution. If we are to go with him in his ship, we must do it. If not, we cannot take the risk that he will take it into his foolish little mind to go back without warning. That is assuredly certain.”

“And how do we do that?” Lurvy demanded. “You’re preposterous, Pa. We can’t guard the ship day and night.”

“And your sister cannot guard the boy, yes,” the old man nodded. “So we must either immobilize the ship, or immobilize the boy.”

Janine flew at him. “You monsters!” she choked. “You’ve been planning this all out when we weren’t around!” Her sister caught and held her.

“Calm down, Janine,” she ordered. “Yes, it’s true we’ve talked about it-we had to! But nothing’s settled, certainly not that we will hurt Wan.”

“Then settle it!” Janine flared. “I vote we go with Wan!”

“If he hasn’t gone already, by himself,” Paul put in.

“He hasn’t!”

Lurvy said practically, “If he has, it’s too late for us to do anything about it. Outside of that, I’m with Janine. We go! What do you say, Paul?”

He hesitated. “I-guess so,” he conceded. “Peter?”

The old man said with dignity, “If you are all agreed, then what does it matter how I vote? There is only the question remaining who is to go and who is to stay. I propose-“

Lurvy stopped him. “Pa,” she said, “I know what you are going to say, but it won’t work. We need to leave at least one person here, to keep in contact with Earth. Janine’s too young. It can’t be me, because I’m the best pilot and this is a chance to learn something about piloting a Heechee ship. I don’t want to go without Paul, and that leaves you.”

They took Vera apart, component by component, and redistributed her around the Food Factory. Fast memory, inputs, and displays went into the dreaming chamber, slow memory lining the passageway outside, transmission still in their old ship. Peter helped, silent and taciturn; the meaning of what they were doing was that further communications of interest would come from the exploring party, via the radio system of the Dead Men. Peter was helping to write himself off, and knew it. There was plenty of food in the ship, Wan told them; but Paul would not be satisfied with the automatic replenishment of God knew what product of the Food Factory, and he made them carry aboard rations of their own, as much as they could stow. Whereupon Wan insisted that they stock up with water, and so they depleted the recycling stocks in the ship to fill his plastic bags and loaded them, too. Wan’s ship had no beds, None were needed, Wan pointed out, because the acceleration cocoons were enough to protect them during maneuvers, and to keep them from floating around while they slept in the rest of the voyage-suggestion vetoed by both Lurvy and Paul, who dismantled the sleeping pouches from their private and reinstalled them in the ship. Personal possessions: Janine wanted her secret stash of perfume and books, Lurvy her personal locked bag, Paul his cards for solitaire. It was long and hard work, though they discovered they could ease it by sailing the plastic waterbags and the softer, solider other stores along the corridors in a game of slow-motion catch; but at last it was done. Peter sat sourly propped against a corridor wall, watching the others mill about, and tried to think of what had been forgotten. To Janine it seemed as though they were already treating him as though he were absent, if not dead, and she said, “Pop? Don’t take it so hard. We’ll all be back as soon as we can.”

He nodded. “Which comes to,” he said, “let me see, forty-nine days each way, plus as long as you decide to stay in this place.” But then he pushed himself up, and allowed Lurvy and Janine to kiss him. Almost cheerfully, he said, “Bon voyage. Are you sure you have forgotten nothing?”

Lurvy looked around, considering. “I think not-unless you think we should tell your friends we are coming, Wan?”

“The Dead Men?” he shrilled, grinning. “They will not know. They are not alive, you know, they have no sense of time.”

“Then why do you like them so much?” Janine demanded.

Wan caught the note of jealousy and scowled at her. “They are my friends,” he said. “They cannot be taken seriously all the time, and they often lie. But they do not ever make me feel afraid of them.”

Lurvy caught her breath. “Oh, Wan,” she said, touching him. “I know we haven’t been as nice as we might. We’ve all been under a great strain. We’re really better people than we must seem to you.”

Old Peter had had enough. “Go you now,” he snarled. “Prove this to him, do not stand talking forever. And then come back and prove it to me!”