Tides of Light, Page 3

  Ling invariably recommended the strict discipline necessary in the Chandelier Age. Superimposed on that, though, was an older theme. The original, living Ling had come from the fabled Great Times, or possibly even beyond. The Aspect’s memory flattened time distinctions, so it was hard to tell which facet of Ling was speaking. The sensation of having at the back of his head a voice from an unimaginably grand past, when humans had lived free of mech dominance, made Killeen uneasy. He felt absurd, maintaining the persona of a confident Cap’n when he sensed the supremely greater power of lost ages.

  As he climbed up the axis, saluting crew as he passed, he was uncomfortably aware of the scuffs and dings the walls had suffered. Here a yellow stain covered a hatchway. There someone had tried to cut away a chunk of hardboard and had given up halfway through, leaving a ragged sawtooth slash. Random chunks of old servos and electronics packages had been chucked aside and left, once they proved useless for whatever impulse had made crew yank them out of some locker.

  Argo’s systems could handle nearly any threat, but not the insidious barrage of ignorance that Family Bishop served up. Their lifelong habits told them to strip away and carve up, haul off and make do, confident that mech civilizations would unthinkingly replenish everything. Scarcely the talents appropriate to a starship crew. It had taken Killeen quite a while, and some severe public whippings, to get them to stop trying to harvest random gaudy bits from the ship’s operating parts.

  He would have to order a general cleanup again. Once clutter accumulated, crew slid back into their old habits. The last week, distracted by the mech escort, he had let matters slide by.

  Breakfast was waiting in his cramped quarters. He slurped a hot broth of savory vegetables and gnawed at a tough grain cube. The day’s schedule shimmered on the tabletop, a 3D graphic display of tasks to be done about the ship.

  He did not know how this was done, nor did he care to learn. These last years had so saturated him with the Byzantine lore of the Argo that he was content to master what he had to, and leave much else to the crew. Shibo had ferreted out this particular nicety; she had an unerring instinct for the ship’s control systems. He wished she were here to share breakfast, but she was on watch already at the helm.

  A knock at the door proved to be Cermo. Killeen had to smile at the man’s promptness; on Snowglade he had been called Cermo-the-Slow. Something in Argo’s constrictions had brought out a precision in the man that contrasted wildly with his muscular bulk. Cermo now wore an alert expression on a face which Killeen had for so long seen as smooth and merry. Short rations had thrust the planes of his cheeks up through round hills of muscle.

  “Permission to review the day, Cap’n?” Cermo asked snappily.

  “Certainly.” Killeen gestured to a seat across the table.

  Killeen wondered idly if one of Cermo’s Aspects had been a starship crewman. That might explain how naturally the man adjusted to ship life. Cermo’s round, smooth face split with a fleeting grin of anticipation whenever Killeen gave an order, as though it summoned up pleasant memories. Killeen envied that. He had never gotten along well with his Aspects.

  Cermo launched into a summary of the minor troubles that each day brought. They were all hard-pressed, running a huge star-sailing machine bequeathed to them by their ancient forefathers and foremothers. Though each crewman carried Aspects of former Family members—which could help with some of the arcane ship’s lore—vexing problems cropped up daily.

  As Killeen talked with Cermo his left hand automatically tapped his cube of baked grain on the shiny ceramic table. Two years before, a crop-tending crewmember had been browsing among the agricultural storehouse. She had mistakenly read a label wrong and not bothered to consult with one of her Aspects to get it right. Blithely she had accidentally released a self-warming vial of frozen soil-tenders. They were ugly, slimy things, and the woman had been so badly startled that she dropped the vial. Some had inched their way to freedom before the crewwoman raised the alarm. In the rich loam of the gardens, carrying with them not only their own genes but also an anthology of lesser mites, the worms wreaked havoc.

  Killeen’s rapping brought two small, squirming weevils wriggling from the tan grain cube. He swept away the tiny things and bit into the hard, tasty knot. It was hopeless to try to wipe them out now that they had spread. As well, he still objected to harming living things. Machines were their true enemy. If lesser life got out of its rightful place, thanks to human fumbling, that was no excuse to strike against the fabric of living beings. To Killeen this was not a moral principle but an obvious fact of his universe, of unspoken Family lore.

  Cermo sat uncomfortably in a small chair, cheerfully jawing on about the woman’s punishment and all the supposed benefits of discipline that would unfold from it.

  He should be the one carrying Ling, not me, Killeen thought. Or maybe it was easier to take a hard line when final responsibility wasn’t yours.

  He had seen that years before, when Fanny was Cap’n. Her lieutenants had often favored tough measures, but Fanny usually took a more moderate, cautious course. She had kept in mind the consequences of decisions, when an error could doom them all.

  It occurred to Killeen that his own hesitant way in those days might have been what made Fanny advance him up the Family’s little pyramid of power. Maybe she had mistaken that for a wary sense of proportion. The idea amused him, but he dismissed it; Fanny’s judgment had been far better than his, better than that of anyone he had ever known except for his father, Abraham. Killeen had enjoyed some success, due mostly to outright luck, but he knew he could never equal her abilities.

  “The Rooks ’n Kings always grumble ’bout a whipping if it’s one their folk,” Cermo said. “But they get the point.”

  “Still bitching over how I chose my lieutenants?”

  He had made Cermo and Jocelyn, both Bishops, his immediate underofficers. Lieutenant Shibo was both Chief Executive Officer and Pilot. She was the last survivor of Family Knight. Though she had lived with the Rooks, everyone considered her a Bishop because she was Killeen’s lover.

  Of such Byzantine issues was policy made. In the difficult days following liftoff from Snowglade, Killeen had tried using Rooks and Knights as Lieutenants. They simply didn’t measure up. He had wondered if their time living in a settled village had softened them. Still, he saw that his decisions had not been politically wise. Abraham would have finessed the matter in some inconspicuous way.

  “Yeasay,” Cermo said, “but no worse than usual.”

  “Keep your ear on the deck. Let me know the scuttlebutt.”

  “Sure. There’s some who talk more’n they work.”

  “That’s private Family business.”

  “Could use a touch of the crop, I’d say.”

  Experience told him that it was best to let Cermo go on for a while, exhaust the subject of crew discipline. Still, he wished he were breakfasting with Shibo, whose warm, sure silences he found such a comfort. They understood each other without the endless rattle of talk.

  “—train ’em, get ’em savvy out the techtalk in ship’s computers.”

  “You think the younger ones’ll do better at it?” Killeen asked.

  “Yeasay. Shibo, she says—”

  Cermo was always coming up with another scheme to get more of the Family trained. The simple fact was that they were hardened people and didn’t learn technical matters easily. Families traded knowhow, but their ageold tradition was as craftsmen and craftswomen, not as scientists.

  He nodded at Cermo’s enthusiasm, half-listening, his attention focused all the while on the incessant ship noises. The muffled thud of heels, a gurgle of fluids in pipes, a subtle creaking of decks and joints. But now there was a lower note, coming from the rub of interstellar dust against the giant balloonlike lifezones.

  The strumming sound had gathered over the last weeks, a deep voice that spoke in subliminal bass notes of the coming of the beckoning yellow star. Decelerating, Argo swooped among
thickening dustclouds that shrouded this side of the coming sun. Mottled dustlanes, cinder-dark, cloaked their view of the inner planets.

  The low, resonant bass note kept its unnerving, constant pitch. Sometimes in his sleep he imagined that a slow, solemn voice was speaking to him, the words drawn into a dull moan that forewarned doom. Other nights it was a giant’s drunken boom hurling slurred words at him, the tones shaking his body.

  He had immediately shrugged off these rough visions; a Cap’n could not afford to harbor such gloomy and irrational thoughts. Still, the hum now came creeping into his hands as they rested on the table. As a boy he had not known the stars were other suns. The spilling fluid flow of gas and smoldering dust about Galactic Center had seemed inconsequential, forever silent and distant.

  Now the thick churn sang against Argo, a quickening wind driven by the galactic wheel. The Argo had somehow tapped this gale, he knew, harnessed its unseen dynamics. The massive, dusty currents smothered suns and silted planets with grime, so his Arthur Aspect said. The moaning that ranged and stuttered through Argo seemed to wail of dead worlds, of silted time, and of the choked-off visions of lost races he would never know.

  The tabletop between them flickered abruptly. Shibo’s chiseled features appeared, flattened and distorted by the angle. “Pardon,” she said when she saw Lieutenant Cermo. “We have clear view now, Cap’n.”

  “You see more inner worlds?”

  “Aye, a new one. Dust hid it before.”

  “Good detail?”

  “Aye, sir,” Shibo said, her glinting eyes betraying a quick, darting enthusiasm. If it had been just the two of them, she probably would have thrown in a dry joke.

  Killeen made himself take his time finishing the bowl of green goulash and then savored the last dregs of his tea. He spoke slowly, almost casually. “Take a sure sighting, using all the detectors?”

  “Course,” Shibo said, a small upturning of the corners of her lips showing that she understood that this show was for Cermo’s benefit.

  “Then I’ll be along in a bit,” Killeen said with unexcited deliberation. He had seen his father use this ruse long ago in the Citadel.

  Cermo shifted impatiently in his chair. They all wanted to know to what world two years of voyaging had brought them. Many still felt that the Mantis had sent them toward a lush, green world. Killeen was by no means convinced. He trusted no mech. He still remembered with relish their obliteration of the Mantis in Argo’s exhaust wash at liftoff.

  He took his time with the tea, using it to consider the possible reactions of the Family if their expectations were not met. The prospect was sobering.

  He debated having another cup of tea. No, that would be too much torture for Cermo—though the man had certainly seemed to like handing it out to the Radanan woman earlier.

  Forgoing the tea, he nonetheless put on his full tunic and walked rather more slowly than usual around the ship’s axis and up one level.

  His officers had already assembled in the control vault when Killeen arrived. They were staring at the big display screen, pointing and whispering. Killeen realized that a proper Cap’n would not allow such milling in the confines of the control vault, despite the fact that this was a completely natural reaction to years of long voyaging.

  He said sharply, “What? Nobody’s got jobs? Lieutenant Jocelyn, how’s the patching going in the dry zone? Faldez, those pipes still clogged in the agro funnel?”

  His stern voice dispersed them. They left, casting quick glances back at the display screen. He wanted them to see that he had not deigned even to look at the image there, but had tended to ship’s business first.

  They could not know that he kept his neck deliberately turned so that temptation would not slide his eyes sideways to catch a glimpse. He exchanged a few words with several departing officers to be sure his point was made. Then he turned, pursing his lips to guard against any expression of surprise that might cross his face, and stared directly into their destiny.

  FIVE

  Two years before, Cap’n Killeen had flinched when he saw the ruined brown face of his home planet, Snowglade, as Argo lifted away.

  Now, with heady relief, he saw that the shimmering image before him did not resemble that worn husk. Near its poles small dabs of bluewhite nestled amid gray icecaps that spread crinkled fingers toward the waist of the world. But these features came to him only after a striking fact:

  “Wrong colors,” he said, startled.

  Shibo shook her head. “Not all. Ice is dark, yeasay. But middle is green, wooded—see the big lakes?”

  “Pale areas in between look dead.”

  “Not much vegetation,” Shibo conceded.

  “What could cause…?” Killeen frowned, realizing that he would need to know some planetary evolution, in addition to everything else.

  Shibo said, “Could be these clouds did that? Dust killed plants, dirtied up the ice, turned it gray.”

  Killeen sensed that it would not be wise to admit complete ignorance in front of Cermo, who had remained.

  “Might be. Plenty dust still around. That’s why we’re coming in at a steep angle.” Killeen studied the planet’s crescent for signs of human life. The nightside was utterly dark, though even if he had seen lights they might easily have been cities built by mechs.

  Cermo said hesitantly, “Sir, I don’t understand….”

  Normally it was a bad idea to explain the basis of your decisions to underofficers, his Ling Aspect had said. But it was also a good idea to train them; the days ahead would be dangerous, and if Killeen fell, his replacement would need to know many things.

  “These little black blotches—see them?” Killeen pointed as the scale of the viewing screen enlarged, bringing in the hot disk of the parent star. Beyond it, the broad, banded grins of two silvery gas giant planets hung against a speckled tapestry of molecular clouds. Tiny smudges freckled the image, motes that ebbed and flared from day to day.

  “This star, it’s ripped apart a passing cloud. There’s lots of these blobs in the plane of the planets.”

  Killeen paused. The three-dimensional geometry had been easy for him to see in Aspect-provided simulations, but now it was hard to make out in a flat grid projection like this.

  So I directed us in at a steep angle,” he said, “cutting down into that plane. That’ll avoid running into small clouds that we might not detect. Argo won’t hold up if we get blind-sided by one of those.”

  He watched fondly as Shibo’s exoskeleton whirred as her hands passed over the control boards. Its polycarbon lattice made swift, sure movements. For Killeen one of the many delights of Argo’s slow spin was that she seldom needed her mechanical aid except for quick precision. In Snowglade’s heavy gravity she had used it continually just to keep up. A genetic defect had given her only normal human strength, which was much less than the Families’ level.

  Still, the simple sight of her made him smile. Momentarily the day’s weight lifted.

  She brought up wildly different views of the planetary system, images colored in splashes of violent reds, tawny golds, cool blues. Killeen knew these arose from different spectra, but could not say how. They showed grainy specks orbiting between the planets—small knotty condensations that hailed incessantly in toward all the stars at Galactic Center. These had been caught by Abraham’s Star and now pelted its planets unmercifully.

  “Bet it makes for a dusty sky down there,” Shibo said reflectively. She thumbed up a speckled orange display which highlighted five cometary tails. They lay above and below the plane of the planetary orbits, gaudy streamers that pointed inward like accusing fingers.

  Killeen caught her meaning. “I don’t believe, though,” he made himself go on with casual assurance, “that the dust could snuff out life. This planet’s suffered infalling grime before. You can see the forests have survived. It can still shelter us.”

  Shibo gave him a wry sidelong glance. She sometimes fed him hints like this, enabling him to seem to have tho
ught problems through before they came up. It was a great help in slowly building a crew, Killeen thought, if the Cap’n happened to love the Chief Executive Officer. He resisted the temptation to smile, sure that Cermo would guess his thoughts.

  “Any moons?” he asked stonily.

  “None I can see so far,” Shibo said. “There’s something else, though….”

  Her slender arms stretched over the controls, calling forth functions Killeen could scarcely follow. Far out he saw a nugget of bronzed hardness.

  “A station.” She answered his unspoken question.

  Cermo gasped. “A…a Chandelier?”

  “I can’t make it out well enough. Could be.”

  Killeen asked, “Can’t we see better? If we wait till we’re closer, could be dangerous.”

  She thought, punched in an inquiry. “No, not this way. There’s another lensing system, though. Needs be hand-deployed on the aft hull.”

  “Do it,” Killeen ordered. Of Cermo he asked, “Who’s got suit duty?”

  “Besen,” Cermo said. “But she’s young. I’d—”

  “Use the assigned crew. Besen’s quick and smart.”

  “Well, still, Cap’n—”

  “They’ll never learn if they don’t face problems.” Killeen could remember his father saying exactly the same, refusing to shield Killeen from tough jobs when he was a boy.

  He studied the small bronze speck for a long moment, then asked Shibo to give the natural light view. In true human spectrum the thing glittered with jewellike warmth, but under maximum magnification he could make out no structure.

  Quite possibly this was a human outpost. Perhaps—Killeen felt a racing excitement—it was indeed an ancient Chandelier, those legendary edifices of crystalline perfection.

  He had once seen one through a ’scope on Snowglade, so far away that he could make out no detail. He had caught only the strange glimmering presence of it, the suspicion of beauty lying just beyond perception. The possibility of finding something manmade, hanging in this roiling vault of troubled sky, was enough to summon up his profound respect and awe for the ancient masters who had made Argo and the even older Chandeliers. That he might see one closely—the thought made him lean toward the screen, as if to force answers from it.