Picnic on Nearside (16 page)

You didn’t ask.

“What kind of answer is that?”

An honest one.

Parameter simmered. She knew it was honest. She knew she was belaboring the child, who couldn’t tell a lie any more than she could. But she clung to her anger with the sinking feeling that it was all she had left of herself.

You hurt me. You are angry. I’ve done nothing to you. Why do you hate me? Why? ????? I love you. I’m afraid you’ll leave me.

“I . . . I love you. I love you, godhelpme, I really do. But that’s not me. No! It’s something else. I don’t know what yet, but I’ll hang on. Hang on to it. Hang on to it.”

Where are you?

Parameter?

“I’m here. Go away.”

*   *   *

“Go away.”

“You have to eat something. Please, try this. It’s good for you. Really it is. Try it.”

“Eat!” She turned in the air with sudden cramps of hunger and revulsion. She retched up stale air and thin fluid. “Get away from me. Don’t touch me. Equinox! Equinox!”

The figure touched her with its hand. The hand was hard and cold.

“Your breasts,” he said. “They’ve been oozing milk. I was wondering . . .”

“Gone. All gone.”

*   *   *

Parameter.

“What is it? Are you ready to try again with that picture?”

No. No need. You can go.

“Huh?”

You can go. I can’t keep you. You think you are self-sufficient; maybe you’re right. You can go.

Parameter was confused.

“Why? Why so sudden?”

I’ve been looking into some of the concepts in your memory. Freedom. Self-determination. Independence. You are free to go.

“You know what I think, what I
really
think about those concepts, too. Unproven at best. Fantasies at worst.”

You are cynical. I recognize that they may indeed be real, so you should be free. I am detaining you against your will. This is contrary to most ethical codes, including the ones you accept more than any others. You are free to go.

It was an awkward moment. It hurt more than she would have thought possible. And she was unsure of whose hurt she was feeling. Not that it mattered.

What was she saying? Here was what might be her one and only chance, and she was acknowledging what the kid had said all along, that they were already fused. And the kid had heard it, like she heard everything.

Yes, I heard it. It doesn’t matter. I can hear your doubts about many things. I can feel your uncertainty. It will be with you always.

“Yes. I guess it will. But you. I can’t feel much from you. Not that I can distinguish.”

You feel my death.

“No, no. It isn’t that bad. They’ll give you another human. You’ll get along. Sure you will.”

Perhaps. Despair. Disbelief.

Parameter kicked herself in the mental butt, told herself that if she didn’t get out now, she never would.

“Okay. Let me out.”

Fade. A gradual withdrawal that was painful and slow as the tendril began to disengage. And Parameter felt her mind being drawn in two.

It would always be like that. It would never get any better.

“Wait, kid. Wait!”

The withdrawal continued.

“Listen to me. Really! No kidding, I really want to discuss this with you. Don’t go.”

It’s for the best. You’ll get along.

“No! No more than you will. I’ll die.”

No you won’t. It’s like you said; if you don’t get out now, you never will. You’ll . . . all right . . . bye . . .

“No! You don’t understand. I don’t want to go anymore. I’m afraid. Don’t leave me like this. You can’t leave me.”

Hesitation.

“Listen to me. Listen. Feel me. Love. Love. Commitment, pure and honest commitment-forever-and-ever-till-death-us-do-part. Feel me.”

“I feel you. We are one.”

*   *   *

She had eaten, only to bring it back up. But her jailer was persistent. He was not going to let her die.

“Would it be any better if you got inside with me?”

“No. I can’t. I’m half gone. It would be no good. Where is Equinox?”

“I told you I don’t know. And I don’t know where your children are. But you won’t believe me.”

“That’s right. I don’t believe you. Murderer.”

She listened groggily as he explained how she came to be in this room with him. She didn’t believe him, not for a minute.

He said he had found her by following a radio beacon signaling from a point outside the plane of the Rings. He had found a pseudosymb there; a simplified Symb created by budding a normal one without first going through the conjugation process. A pseudo can only do what any other plant can do: that is, ingest carbon dioxide and give out oxygen from its inner surface. It cannot contract into contact with a human body. It remains in the spherical configuration. A human can stay alive in a pseudosymb, but will soon die of thirst.

Parameter had been inside the pseudo, bruised and bleeding from the top of her head and from her genitals. But she had been alive. Even more remarkable, she had lived the five days it had taken to get her to the Conser emergency station. The Consers didn’t maintain many of the stations. The ones they had were widely separated.

“You were robbed by Engineers,” he said. “There’s no other explanation. How long have you been in the Rings?”

After the third repeat of the question, Parameter muttered, “Five years.”

“I thought so. A new one. That’s why you don’t believe me. You don’t know much about Engineers, do you? You can’t understand why they would take your Symb and leave you alive, with a beacon to guide help to you. It doesn’t make sense, right?”

“I . . . no, I don’t know. I can’t understand. They should have killed me. What they did was more cruel.”

No emotion could be read on the man’s “face,” but he was optimistic for the first time that she might pull through. At least she was talking, if fitfully.

“You should have learned more. I’ve been fighting for a century, and I still don’t know all I’d like to know. They robbed you for your children, don’t you see? To raise them as Engineers. That’s what the real battle is about: population. The side that can produce the most offspring is the one that gains the advantage.”

“I don’t want to talk.”

“I understand. Will you just listen?”.

He took her lack of response to mean she would.

“You’ve just been drifting through your life. It’s easy to do out here; we all just drift from time to time. When you think about the Engineers at all, it’s just a question of evading them. That isn’t too hard. Considering the cubic kilometers out here, the hunted always has the advantage over the hunter. There are so many places to hide; so many ways to dodge.”

“But you’ve drifted into a rough neighborhood. The Engineers have concentrated a lot of people in this sector. Maybe you’ve noticed the high percentage of red rocks. They hunt in teams, which is not something we Consers have ever done. We’re too loose a group to get together much, and we all know our real fight doesn’t begin for another thousand years.

“We are the loosest army in the history of humanity. We’re volunteers on both sides, and on our side, we don’t require that individuals do anything at
all
to combat the Engineers. So you don’t know anything about them, beyond the fact that they’ve vowed to paint Ring Beta red within twenty-five thousand years.”

He at last got a rise out of her.

“I know a little more than that. I know they are followers of
Ringpainter the Great. I know he lived almost two hundred years ago. I know he founded the Church of Cosmic Engineering.”

“You read all that in a book. Do you know that Ringpainter is still alive? Do you know how they plan to paint the Ring? Do you know what they do to Consers they catch?”

He was selective in his interpretations. This time he took her silence to mean she didn’t know.

“He is alive. Only he’s a she now. Her ‘Population Edict’ of fifty years ago decreed that each Engineer shall spend ninety percent of her time as a female, and bear three children every year. If they really do that, we haven’t got a chance. The Rings would be solid Engineers in a few centuries.”

She was slightly interested for the first time in weeks.

“I didn’t know it was such a long-term project.”

“The longest ever undertaken by humans. At the present rate of coloring, it would take three million years to paint the entire Ring. But the rate is accelerating.”

He waited, trying to draw her out again, but she lapsed back into listlessness. He went on.

“The one aspect of their religion you don’t seem to know about is their ban on killing. They won’t take a human or Symb life.”

That got her attention.

“Equinox! Where . . .” she started shaking again.

“She’s almost certainly alive.”

“How could they keep her alive?”

“You’re forgetting your children. Five of them.”

*   *   *

The last thing anyone said to Parameter for two years was, “Take this, you might want to use it. Just press it to a red rock and forget about it. It lasts forever.”

She took the object, a thin tube with a yellow bulb on each end. It was a Bacteriophage Applicator, filled with the tailored DNA that attacked and broke down the deposits of red dust left by the Engineers’ Ringvirus. Touching the end of it to a coated rock would begin a chain reaction that would end only when all the surface of the rock was restored to its original color.

Parameter absently touched it to her side, where it sank without a trace in the tough integument of Equinox’s outer hide. Then she shoved out the airlock and into fairyland.

“I never saw anything like this, Equinox,” she said.

“No, you certainly haven’t.” The Symb had only Parameter’s experiences to draw on.

“Where should we go? What’s that line around the sky? Which way is it to the Ring?”

Affectionate laughter. “Silly planteater. We’re
in
the Ring. That’s why it stretches all around us. All except over in that direction. The sun is behind that part of the Ring, so the particles are illuminated primarily from the other side. You can see it faintly, by reflected light.”

“Where did you learn all that?”

“From your head. The facts are there, and the deductive powers. You just never thought about it.”

“I’m going to start thinking a lot more. This is almost frightening. I repeat: Where do we go from here?”

“Anywhere at all, as long as it’s away from this awful place. I don’t think I want to come back to the Ringmarket for about a decade.”

“Now, now,” Parameter chided her. “Surely we’ll have to go back before that. Aren’t you feeling the least bit poetic?”

The Ringmarket was the clearinghouse for the wildly variant and irresistibly beautiful art that was the byproduct of living a solitary life in the Rings. Art brokers, musicmongers, poetry sellers, editors, moodmusic vendors . . . all the people who made a living by standing between the artist and the audience and raking off a profit as works of art passed through their hands; they all gathered at the Ringmarket bazaar and bought exquisite works for the equivalent of pretty-colored beads. The Ringers had no need of money. All exchanges were straight barter: a fresh gas bottle for a symphony that would crash through the mind with unique rhythms and harmonies. A handful of the mineral pellets the Ringers needed every decade to supply trace elements that were rare in the Rings could buy a painting that would bring millions back in civilization. It was a speculative business. No one could know
which
of the thousands of works would catch the public taste at high tide and run away with it. All the buyers knew was that for unknown reasons the art of the Rings had consistently captured the highest prices and the wildest reviews. It was different. It was from a whole new viewpoint.

“I can’t feel poetic back there. Besides, didn’t you know that when we start to create, it will be music?”

“I didn’t know that. How do you know?”

“Because there’s a song in my heart. Off-key. Let’s get out of here.”

They left the metallic sphere of the market and soon it was only a blue vector line, pointed away from them.

They spent two years just getting used to their environment. The wonder never wore off. When they met others, they avoided them. Neither was ready for companionship; they had all they needed.

*   *   *

She was sinking, and glad of it. Every day without Equinox was torture. She had come to hate her jailer, even if his story was true. He was keeping her alive, which was the cruelest thing he could do. But even her hatred was a weak and fitful thing.

She stared into the imaginary distance and seldom noticed his comings and goings.

Then one day there were two of them. She noted it dispassionately, watched as they embraced each other and began to flow. So the other person was a female; they were going to mate. She turned away and didn’t see, as the two Symbs merged in their conjugation process and slowly expanded into a featureless green sphere within which the humans would couple silently and then part, probably forever.

But something nagged at her, and she looked back. A bulge was forming on the side of the sphere that was facing her. It grew outward and began to form another, smaller sphere. A pink line formed the boundary between the two globes.

She looked away again, unable to retain an interest as the Symbs gave birth. But something was still nagging.

“Parameter.”

The man (or was it the woman?) was floating beside her, holding the baby Symb.

She froze. Her eyes filled with horror.

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Maybe. I can’t force it on you. But it’s here. I’m going now, and you’ll never see me again. You can live or die, whichever you choose. I’ve done all I can.”

It was a warm day in the Upper Half. But then it was always a warm day, though some were warmer than others.

Ringography is an easy subject to learn. There are the Rings: Alpha, Beta, and the thin Gamma. The divisions are called Cassini and Encke, each having been created by the gravitational tug-of-war between Saturn and the larger moons for possession of the particles that make up the Rings. Beyond that, there is only the Upper Half and the Lower Half, above and below the plane, and Inspace and Outspace. The Ringers never visited Inspace because it included the intense Van Allen-type radiation belts that circle Saturn. Outspace was far from the traveled parts of the Rings, but was a nice place to visit because the Rings were all in one part of the sky from that vantage point. An odd experience for children, accustomed from birth to see the sky cut in half by the Rings.