MacRoscope (43 page)

“No! You don’t understand what I’m—”

“Junior, are you trying to lecture
me
on—”

A cold shock hit him, reminding him of the original plunge into the Mediterranean. Ivo looked up to find Afra standing before him, the bucket in her hands. “Yeah, that did it,” he said, shaking himself. She had doused him with icewater: three gallons over his head.

“Are you going to be trapped every time you use the scope?” she demanded. “You were talking in Phoenician again, but I got the bit about two minutes, not that I waited that long. What did he want?”

“He wants out,” Ivo said, shivering. He began to strip off his clothing. “But he can’t
get
out until I let him.”

“What about the destroyer?”

“He doesn’t seem to know about that, or want to hear it. I couldn’t make him listen.”

“He
must
know about it. What about that message — ‘My pawn is pinned’? He knew then.”

Ivo, bouncing up and down to warm up, halted. The wet floor was slippery under his bare toes. “I didn’t think of that. He must be lying.”

“That doesn’t make sense either. If he knew the destroyer would get him, why should he expose himself to it? And if he knows it
won’t
, why not say so? This isn’t a game of twenty questions.”

“Now that I think of it,” Ivo admitted, “he didn’t sound much like a genius to me, I’ve never actually talked directly with him before, but — it was more like a kid bargaining.”

“A child.” She brought a towel and started patting him dry, and he realized that for the first time he had undressed unselfconsciously before her. They had all seen each others’ bodies during the meltings, but this was not such an occasion. Barriers were still coming down unobtrusively. “How old was he when — ?”

“I’m not sure. It took some time to — to set me up. I remember some events back to age five, but there are blank spots up until eight or nine. That doesn’t necessarily mean
he
took over then—”

“So Schön never lived as an adult.”

“I guess not, physically.”

“
Or
emotionally.
You
matured, not he. Is it surprising, then, that he appears childish to us? His intelligence and talent don’t change the fact that he is immature. He likes to play games, to send out mysterious messages, create worlds of imagination. For him, right and wrong are merely concepts; he has no devotion to adult truth. No developed conscience. And if the notion of the destroyer frightens him — why, he puts it out of his mind. He no longer admits its danger. He thinks that he can conquer anything just by tackling it with gusto.”

Ivo nodded thoughtfully, looking about for some dry shorts. “But he’s still got more knowledge and ability than any adult.”

She brought the shorts. “A sixteen-year-old boy has better reflexes than most mature men, and more knowledge about automotive engineering — turbo or electric or hydraulic — but he’s still the world’s worst driver. It takes more than knowledge and ability; it takes control and restraint. Obviously Schön doesn’t have that.”

“If he began driving — what a crash he could make!”

“Let’s just defuse the destroyer first,” she said, smiling grimly. “You were right all along: we’re better off without Schön.”

“We have made,” Afra announced as though it were news, “five jumps — and we are now farther removed from the destroyer source than we were when we started.”

“Schön says he can get us there within another six,” Ivo said. “He has been figuring the configurations.”

“How does he
know
them? I thought he didn’t have access to — no, I see he does. He’s there when we pinpoint our distance by Earth history, and he probably picks up everything you hear when you’re on the scope. Though how he can figure anything meaningful from the pitiful information we have—”

“Let’s review,” Harold said. “Obviously there is something we have missed — unless Schön is lying.”

“He
could
be lying,” Ivo said. “But he probably wouldn’t bother. He wouldn’t be interested in coming out unless he were sure he could accomplish something — and he wouldn’t have the patience to go through many more jumps.”

“Our first jump was about fifty years, to 1930,” Harold said. “Our second was almost three thousand years, to 930 BC as we make it. A 2,860 year difference, but actually a larger jump because it landed us on the opposite side of Earth, spacially. Then another fifty-year jump to 890 BC, slantwise. This could get confusing if it were not so serious! Finally, jumps to 975 and 975 BC — just sliding around the arc, getting nowhere. But apparently Schön can make something of it.”

Afra turned to Ivo. “You have his computational ability. Can’t you map the pattern he sees?”

“No. He’s using more than mathematics, or at least is making use of more factors than I know how to apply. He can be a lot more creative than I can; his reasoning is an art, while mine is conventional.”

“Maybe he’s using astrology,” Afra said sourly.

Harold shook his head. “Astrology doesn’t—”

“Chances are he knows it, though,” Ivo said. “So it’s no joke. If it is possible to make a space-curvature map of the galaxy by astrological means, Schön can do it. He—”

“Forget it,” Afra snapped.

But Harold was thoughtful.
He believes
, Ivo thought, having this come home to him personally for the first time, though of course he had known it intellectually before.
He really believes
.

And suppose Schön believed too?

How was any one person to know what was valid and what was not? Even if astrology were a false doctrine, Harold had already applied it to better effect than Afra had her doctrines.

“I wonder whether we haven’t taken too naïve a view of jumpspace,” Afra said after a pause. “We’ve been thinking of a simple string-in-circle analogy — but a four-dimensional convolution would be a system of a different order. We can’t plot it on a two-dimensional map.”

“I could build a spatial-coordinates box,” Harold said. “Intersecting lines and planes of force to hold the items in place, the whole thing transparent so we can study any section from any angle. If we plotted our five known points of tangency and looked for an applicable framework, we might be able to begin deriving equations—”

Afra grabbed his arm, abruptly excited. “How soon?”

The sixth jump was a large one, but that was the least of it.

They contemplated the figures and could not deny them.

“It
is
a different destroyer,” Afra said.

They were another five thousand light-years slantwise from Sol, and Earth history stood at approximately 4,000 BC. The destroyer signal that bathed Earth in 1980-81 was gone — but sixteen thousand light-years down a divergent azimuth was the point source of a second emission virtually identical to the first.

“I suspect,” Harold said, “that we are up against a genuine galactic conspiracy. A paranoiac’s delight.”

“I’m ecstatic,” Afra said.

He cocked a finger at her warningly, as though she were a child of five. “It cannot be coincidence that similar broadcasters of this nature are set up thirty-thousand light-years from each other, the range of each about eighteen thousand miles, presumably expanding in all directions at light velocity. Note how both skirt the middle edge of the galaxy. Six so placed, with a seventh in the center, would cover the vast majority of the stars available.”

“Which seems to prove that their target is
all
civilization, Earth’s being incidental,” Afra agreed.

“Which may also mean that those sources are armed,” Ivo said. “Physically, I mean. They couldn’t have stood up for all these millennia, against all the species we know exist, otherwise.” He paused. “Do we go on?”

“Yes we go on!” Afra said so fiercely it alarmed him. Every so often she still furnished such a reminder of her personal involvement in this mission. Her memory of Brad — the god-prince who had died and not returned to life.

They were becoming blasé about galactic travel, or at least inured; but the tenth jump amazed them all. It was about thirty-five thousand light-years — and it placed them entirely outside the Milky Way Galaxy by approximately thirty thousand. They had jumped almost vertically out of the great disk.

There were no destroyer sources in evidence.

The party gathered to look at their galaxy on the “direct vision” screen. This was actually an image relayed from sensors set into orbit around Neptune. Harold had not been idle during the intervals of recuperation between hops, and he had sophisticated machinery to play with. The mini-satellites even survived the jumps without disturbance, once the anchor-field had been modified to account for such motion.

Below them it lay, filling well over a ninety-degree arc: the entire galaxy of man’s domicile, viewed broadside
by
man for the first time. The pallid white of the stars and nebulae deflowered by Earth’s atmosphere existed no more; the colossal fog of interstellar gas and dust had been banished from the vicinity of the observer. The result was a view of the Milky Way Galaxy as it really existed — ten thousand times as rich as that perceivable from Earth.

Color, yes — but not as any painter could represent, or any atmosphere-blinded eye could fathom. Red in the center where the old lights faded; blue at the fringe where the fierce new lights formed. A spectrum between — but also so much more! Here the visible splay extended beyond the range for which nomenclature existed, and rounded out the hues for which human names did exist. A mighty swirl, a multiple spiral of radiance, wave on wave of tiny bright particles, merged yet discrete. The Milky Way was translucent, yet mind-staggeringly intricate in three, in four dimensions.

At the fringe it was wafer-thin, sustained largely by the masses of cosmic dust that smeared out thousands of stars with every hideously compelling wisp and whorl. Within this sparse galactic atmosphere, nestled in tentacles of gas, floated Sol and its solar debris: hardly worthy of notice, compared to the main body; indeed, invisible without magnification.

And, clear from this exquisite vantage, the pattern of the stellar conglomeration that was the galaxy emerged: the great spiral arms, coiling outward from the center, doubled bands of matter beginning as the light of massed stars and terminating as the black of thinning dust. Not flat, not even; the ribbons were twisted, showing now broadside, now edgewise, resembling open mobius strips or the helix of galactic DNA.

And yes, he thought, yes — the galaxy was a cell, bearing its cosmic organelles and glowing in its animation; motile, warm-bodied, evolving, its life span enduring for tens of billions of years.

Ivo felt a physical hunger, and realized that he had been looking at the galaxy for many hours. He had been stupefied by it, as a worshiper was said to be blessedly stupefied by confrontation with his god.

He broke the trance and looked about him. Afra stood nearest, lovely in her mortal fashion, her eyes encompassing a hundred billion stars, her lungs inhaling cubic par-sees of space.

Harold turned to face him, and he noticed with a shock that the man, like the women, had lost weight sometime in the past few months. Everyone was changing! “Did you observe the globular clusters? Hundreds of them orbiting the galaxy, a million stars in each. Look!” He pointed. “That one must be within ten thousand light-years of us.”

Ivo saw what he had somehow missed before: a glob of light near at hand and about as far out from the galactic disk as they were. It resembled a small galaxy except that it was shapeless, a Rorschach blob of brilliance. It was as though some of the cotton had drifted free when the fabric of the main tapestry was woven. At its fringe, as with the main galaxy, the stars were sparse, but they thickened at the center, converting from blue to mid-range. This cluster was younger than the main body.

There were many others in sight, most closer in toward the galactic nucleus. Each, perhaps, was a cosmos in itself, possessing lifebearing planets and stellar civilizations. The overall pattern of the entire group of clusters was spherical — or at least hemispherical, since he could not see what lay on the far side of the main disk. Though he could not perceive individual motion, it struck him that the clusters were in fact orbiting the center of the galaxy — elliptical orbits, brushing very near to its rim and riding higher over its broad face. Some even seemed to be colliding with the galactic fringe, though that was so diffuse that it was a matter of interpretation.

Almost, he could picture the original ball of gas and dust, turning grandly in space and throwing out gauze and sparks. The majority of the material remained in the plane of rotation, to become the spiral arms and the overall disk-shape; but a few mavericks took separate courses, and were the clusters.

How did the universe appear to a creature looking out from a planet aboard one of these island systems? Did any cultures aspire to descend to the mighty mother complex? Was their god a whirlpool thirty thousand parsecs in diameter?

Beatryx emerged from the kitchen area, and Ivo realized that it had been the smell of cooking that had first brought his attention to his stomach. She was typically the bringer of nourishment. It was good that
someone
was practical!

At last Afra came out of it. “We are within the traveler field, but beyond the destroyer,” she said musingly. “We are thirty thousand light-years toward the traveler — so it will be passing Earth and the galaxy for at least that period in the future. Obviously it preceded the destroyers, too, or they would have started earlier and reached out this far. And that suggests—”

“That the point of the destroyer may be merely to suppress the alien beam,” Harold finished for her. “Since myriad local stations come through nicely, they cannot have incited the destroyer.”

“Talk of xenophobia!” she exclaimed. “Just because it proved that there was superior technology elsewhere — !”

Harold cocked his head at her. “Is that the way you see it? I might have reasoned along another line.”

“I am aware of
your
—”

“Soup’s on!” Beatryx called, once more abridging the discussion appropriately.

Because there was no destroyer here, they turned on the main screen to watch Ivo work. Afra could have used the macroscope herself, but there was now a certain group recognition that this was Ivo’s prerogative, and that practice had brought him to a level of proficiency no other person could match without a similar apprenticeship. It was his show.

He had stage fright.

He avoided the routine programs, now offered in such splendor and multiplicity that it would require years to Index them by hand. Their several language coding families were of course unfamiliar to the others; Ivo had mastered the basics only after intense concentration, though all were to some extent similar to the technique of the destroyer itself. He also avoided the traveler signal (when had that term come into use?); that would come in its own time. Instead he concentrated on the nonbroadcast band and searched for Earth: the world of Man as it was thirty thousand years ago.

And couldn’t pick it up.

He rechecked the coordinates derived from their telescopic sightings of the Andromeda Galaxy and selected Population II Cepheids of the Milky Way, and made due allowance for galactic rotation and the separate motions of the stars in the course of 30,000 years. Everything checked; he knew where to find Earth.

Except that it wasn’t there.

“Either I’ve lost my touch, or Earth didn’t exist thirty thousand years ago,” he said ruefully.

“Nonsense,” Afra said. “Let me try it.” She seemed eager.

Ivo gave place to her, feeling as though he had been sent to the showers.

Afra played with the controls for twenty minutes, focusing first on the Earth-locale, then elsewhere. The screen remained a mélange of color; no clear image appeared. At last she swung around to focus on one of the globular clusters outside the galaxy — and got an image.

She had set the computer to fix on any planetary surface encountered in a routine sweep of the views available, and it had done that. The picture was of a dark barren moon far from its primary. In the night sky above the horizon individual stars could be made out, and even the light band of massed distant stars.

“That’s no cluster!” Groton exclaimed. “You wouldn’t find a band like that in a spherical mass of stars.”

Afra fussed with the controls, adjusting the scene clumsily and finally losing it. She returned to the computer sweep, while Ivo chafed internally at the loss of the only picture they had landed, and such a mysterious one. The picture would not come in again. She began to show her temper.

“Something strange here,” Harold said. “The alignment of that image doesn’t check with the direct view of the cluster. And the scene was typical of a planet within the galaxy. That light band was the Milky Way!”

Afra set the computer for Earth-type planet selection, leaving the azimuth where it was, and waited while it filtered and sorted the crowded macrons. Ivo was anxious to take over again, but held himself back. The situation certainly
was
strange, and Afra obviously lacked the expertise necessary to solve the contradictions. But it would not be diplomatic to point this out.

A green landscape appeared, Earthlike but not Earth. Afra jumped to manual — and lost it. She swore in unladylike manner.