Picnic on Nearside (34 page)

“Are you concerned with the answer?”

The more Xanthia thought about it, the less she liked it. If she really was not hallucinating this experience, then she was contemplating the capture and imprisonment of a sentient being. An innocent sentient being who had been wandering around the edge of the system, suddenly to find him or herself . . .

“Do you have a sex?”

“No.”

“All right, I guess I’ve been kind of short with you. It’s just because you
did
startle me, and I
didn’t
expect it, and it was all a little alarming.”

The hole said nothing.

“You’re a strange sort of person, or whatever,” she said.

Again there was a silence.

“Why don’t you tell me more about yourself? What’s it like being a black hole, and all that?” She still couldn’t fight down the ridiculous feeling those words gave her.

“I live much as you do, from day to day. I travel from star to
star, taking about ten million years for the trip. Upon arrival, I plunge through the core of the star. I do this as often as is necessary, then I depart by a slingshot maneuver through the heart of a massive planet. The Tunguska Meteorite, which hit Siberia in 1908, was a black hole gaining momentum on its way to Jupiter, where it could get the added push needed for solar escape velocity.”

One thing was bothering Xanthia. “What do you mean, ‘as often as is necessary’?”

“Usually five or six thousand passes is sufficient.”

“No, no. What I meant is
why
is it necessary? What do you get out of it?”

“Mass,” the hole said. “I need to replenish my mass. The Relativity Laws state that nothing can escape from a black hole, but the Quantum Laws, specifically the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, state that below a certain radius the position of a particle cannot be determined. I lose mass constantly through tunneling. It is not all wasted, as I am able to control the direction and form of the escaping mass, and to use the energy that results to perform functions that your present-day physics says are impossible.”

“Such as?” Xanthia didn’t know why, but she was getting nervous.

“I can exchange inertia for gravity, and create energy in a variety of ways.”

“So you can move yourself.”

“Slowly.”

“And you eat . . .”

“Anything.”

Xanthia felt a sudden panic, but she didn’t know what was wrong. She glanced down at her instruments and felt her hair prickle from her wrists and ankles to the nape of her neck.

The hole was ten kilometers closer than it had been.

*   *   *

“How could you
do
that to me?” Xanthia raged. “I trusted you, and that’s how you repaid me, by trying to sneak up on me and . . . and—”

“It was not intentional. I speak to you by means of controlled gravity waves. To speak to you at all, it is necessary to generate an attractive force between us. You were never in any danger.”

“I don’t believe that,” Xanthia said angrily. “I think you’re doubletalking me. I don’t think gravity works like that, and I don’t think you really tried very hard to tell me how you talk to me, back when we first started.” It occurred to her now, also, that the hole was speaking much more fluently than in the beginning. Either it was a very fast learner, or that had been intentional.

The hole paused. “This is true,” it said.

She pressed her advantage. “Then why did you do it?”

“It was a reflex, like blinking in a bright light, or drawing one’s hand back from a fire. When I sense matter, I am attracted to it.”

“The proper cliché would be ‘like a moth to a flame.’ But you’re not a moth, and I’m not a flame. I don’t believe you. I think you could have stopped yourself if you wanted to.”

Again the hole hesitated. “You are correct.”

“So you were trying to . . . ?”

“I was trying to eat you.”

“Just like
that?
Eat someone you’ve been having a conversation with?”

“Matter is matter,” the hole said, and Xanthia thought she detected a defensive note in its voice.

“What do you think of what I said we’re going to do with you? You were going to tell me, but we got off on that story about where you came from.”

“As I understand it, you propose to return for me. I will be towed to near Pluto’s orbit, sold, and eventually come to rest in the heart of an orbital power station, where your species will feed matter into my gravity well, extracting power cheaply from the gravitational collapse.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

“It sounds ideal. My life is struggle. Failing to find matter to consume would mean loss of mass until I am smaller than an atomic nucleus. The loss rate would increase exponentially, and my universe would disappear. I do not know what would happen beyond that point. I have never wished to find out.”

How much could she trust this thing? Could it move very rapidly? She toyed with the idea of backing off still further. The two of them were now motionless relative to each other, but they
were both moving slowly away from the location she had given Zoe.

It didn’t make sense to think it could move in on her fast. If it could, why hadn’t it? Then it could eat her and wait for Zoe to arrive—Zoe, who was helpless to detect the hole with her broken mass detector.

She should relay the new vectors to Zoe. She tried to calculate where her twin would arrive, but was distracted by the hole speaking.

“I would like to speak to you now of what I initially contacted you for. Listening to Pluto radio, I have become aware of certain facts that you should know, if, as I suspect, you are not already aware of them. Do you know of Clone Control Regulations?”

“No, what are they?” Again, she was afraid without knowing why.

The genetic statutes, according to the hole, were the soul of simplicity. For three hundred years, people had been living just about forever. It had become necessary to limit the population. Even if everyone had only one child—the Birthright—population would still grow. For a while, clones had been a loophole. No more. Now, only one person had the right to any one set of genes. If two possessed them, one was excess, and was summarily executed.

“Zoe has prior property rights to her genetic code,” the hole concluded. “This is backed up by a long series of court decisions.”

“So I’m—”

“Excess.”

*   *   *

Zoe met her at the airlock as Xanthia completed the docking maneuver. She was smiling, and Xanthia felt the way she always did when Zoe smiled these days: like a puppy being scratched behind the ears. They kissed, then Zoe held her at arm’s length.

“Let me look at you. Can it only be three months? You’ve
grown
, my baby.”

Xanthia blushed. “I’m not a baby anymore, Mother.” But she was happy. Very happy.

“No. I should say not.” She touched one of Xanthia’s breasts, then turned her around slowly. “I should say not. Putting on a little weight in the hips, aren’t we?”

“And the bosom. One inch while I was gone. I’m almost there.” And it was true. At sixteen, the young clone was almost a woman.

“Almost there,” Zoe repeated, and glanced away from her twin. But she hugged her again, and they kissed, and began to laugh as the tension was released.

They made love, not once and then to bed, but many times, feasting on each other. One of them remarked—Xanthia could not remember who because it seemed so accurate that either of them might have said it—that the only good thing about these three-month separations was the homecoming.

“You did very well,” Zoe said, floating in the darkness and sweet exhausted atmosphere of their bedroom many hours later. “You handled the lifeboat like it was part of your body. I watched the docking. I
wanted
to see you make a mistake, I think, so I’d know I still have something on you.” Her teeth showed in the starlight, rows of lights below the sparkles of her eyes and the great dim blossom of her hair.

“Ah, it wasn’t that hard,” Xanthia said, delighted, knowing full well that it
was
that hard.

“Well, I’m going to let you handle it again the next swing. From now on, you can think of the lifeboat as
your
ship. You’re the skipper.”

It didn’t seem like the time to tell her that she already thought of it that way. Nor that she had christened the ship.

Zoe laughed quietly. Xanthia looked at her.

“I remember the day I first boarded my own ship,” she said. “It was a big day for me. My own ship.”

“This is the way to live,” Xanthia agreed. “Who needs all those people? Just the two of us. And they say hole hunters are crazy. I . . . wanted to . . .” The words stuck in her throat, but Xanthia knew this was the time to get them out, if there ever would be a time. “I don’t want to stay too long at Pluto, Mother. I’d like to get right back out here with you.” There, she’d said it.

Zoe said nothing for a long time.

“We can talk about that later.”

“I love you, Mother,” Xanthia said, a little too loudly.

“I love you, too, baby,” Zoe mumbled. “Let’s get some sleep, okay?”

She tried to sleep, but it wouldn’t happen. What was
wrong?

Leaving the darkened room behind her, she drifted through the ship, looking for something she had lost, or was losing, she wasn’t sure which. What had happened, after all? Certainly nothing she could put her finger on. She loved her mother, but all she knew was that she was choking on tears.

In the water closet, wrapped in the shower bag with warm water misting around her, she glanced in the mirror.

*   *   *

“Why? Why would she do a thing like that?”

“Loneliness. And insanity. They appear to go together. This is her solution. You are not the first clone she has made.”

She had thought herself beyond shock, but the clarity that simple declarative sentence brought to her mind was explosive. Zoe had always needed the companionship Xanthia provided. She needed a child for diversion in the long, dragging years of a voyage; she needed someone to talk to.
Why couldn’t she have brought a dog?
She saw herself now as a shipboard pet, and felt sick. The local leash laws would necessitate the destruction of the animal before landing. Regrettable, but there it was. Zoe had spent the last year working up the courage to do it.

How many little Xanthias? They might even have chosen that very name; they would have been that much like her. Three, four? She wept for her forgotten sisters. Unless . . .

“How do I know you’re telling me the truth about this? How could she have kept it from me? I’ve seen tapes of Pluto. I never saw any mention of this.”

“She edited those before you were born. She has been careful. Consider her position: there can be only one of you, but the law does not say which it has to be. With her death, you become legal. If you had known that, what would life have been like in
Shirley Temple?
”

“I don’t believe you. You’ve got something in mind, I’m sure of it.”

“Ask her when she gets here. But be careful. Think it out, all the way through.”

*   *   *

She had thought it out. She had ignored the last three calls from Zoe while she thought. All the options must be considered,
all the possibilities planned for. It was an impossible task; she knew she was far too emotional to think clearly, and there wasn’t time to get herself under control.

But she had done what she could. Now
The Good Ship Lollipop
, outwardly unchanged, was a ship of war.

Zoe came backing in, riding the fusion torch and headed for a point dead in space relative to Xanthia. The fusion drive was too dangerous for
Shirley
to complete the rendezvous; the rest of the maneuver would be up to
Lollipop
.

Xanthia watched through the telescope as the drive went off. She could see
Shirley
clearly on her screen, though the ship was fifty kilometers away.

Her screen lit up again, and there was Zoe. Xanthia turned her own camera on.

“There you are,” Zoe said. “Why wouldn’t you talk to me?”

“I didn’t think the time was ripe.”

“Would you like to tell me how come this nonsense about talking black holes? What’s gotten into you?”

“Never mind about that. There never was a hole, anyway. I just needed to talk to you about something you forgot to erase from the tape library in the
Lol
- . . . in the lifeboat. You were pretty thorough with the tapes in
Shirley
, but you forgot to take the same care here. I guess you didn’t think I’d ever be using it. Tell me, what are Clone Control Regulations?”

The face on the screen was immobile. Or was it a mirror, and was she smiling? Was it herself, or Zoe she watched? Frantically, Xanthia thumbed a switch to put her telescope image on the screen, wiping out the face. Would Zoe try to talk her way out of it? If she did, Xanthia was determined to do nothing at all. There was no way she could check out any lie Zoe might tell her, nothing she could confront Zoe with except a fantastic story from a talking black hole.

Please say something. Take the responsibility out of my hands
. She was willing to die, tricked by Zoe’s fast talk, rather than accept the hole’s word against Zoe’s.

But Zoe was acting, not talking, and the response was exactly what the hole had predicted. The attitude control jets were firing,
Shirley Temple
was pitching and yawing slowly, the nozzles at the stern hunting for a speck in the telescope screen. When the
engines were aimed, they would surely be fired, and Xanthia and the whole ship would be vaporized.

But she was ready. Her hands had been poised over the thrust controls.
Lollipop
had a respectable acceleration, and every gee of it slammed her into the couch as she scooted away from the danger spot.

Shirley
’s fusion engines fired, and began a deadly hunt. Xanthia could see the thin, incredibly hot stream playing around her as Zoe made finer adjustments in her orientation. She could only evade it for a short time, but that was all she needed.

Then the light went out. She saw her screen flare up as the telescope circuit became overloaded with an immense burst of energy. And it was over. Her radar screen showed nothing at all.