The Starry Rift Read online

  As he clambers swiftly into his spare suit, two other thoughts occur to him. First, in all likelihood the women believe he’s dead. They couldn’t possibly have seen Blackbird come free from the falling booster. They may not even believe it had been possible—in fact, it barely was.

  So they’re probably mourning him right now, up there in that half a nose-cone, uncomfortably waiting for the Patrol or bar Palladine to reach them. The thought gives Raven a violent urge to drop all this and rush to them, to end the misery that was needlessly tormenting his love; but it fades.

  The work lock secure, he goes aft to crawl down the access shaft to where the trail assembly sits. It’s on the way that he has the second thought—not a thought, really, but just a flash of profound realization; how very hard it is to find a ship silent in space, especially if the ship’s pilot doesn’t care to be found. Not a new reflection, of course, but one that comes with peculiar urgency now. Hmm.

  As he approaches the tail camera he hears a click—So the time-lapse record has been functioning all through the tow! And the cassette has not run out! Which means that the missing piece is in his grasp—he could start from here, right now, and follow the guidance back to where he met Mira and New Hope—and then follow New Hope’s, record all the way to that monstrous what-is-it Laine and Bobby described!

  Just as he reaches to open the cassette holder, the camera gives a chime and sets up the buzz that means the record has run out.

  Whew! If he’d been a few minutes later in looking back here, all he’d have found would be a used-up record that had ended gods knew when and where, of no use at all to him.

  With slightly shaky fingers, he extracts the old cassette and drops in a new... Have the gods of chance been speaking to him?

  But as he returns to the pilot area, bearing his two priceless trail tracks, he seems to hear—what is it? laughter? Sweet laughter in the stars. Are his ghost-girls laughing at him? Are they so sure of his heart? Or are they merely laughing to be on their way, to the glitter of FedBase and the glamour of Fed Central? Raven stares out into the starfield, seeing smoky eyes that change to far suns... and back to eyes again.

  Freedom and love, love and freedom, wrestle in his brain. And he must soon get some sleep or risk falling asleep on a course to nowhere. Random thoughts veer about in his mind as he clears the panel.

  How long would two beautiful women wait for a man they’d all but seen die? And that terrible eternity when he thought he would have to choose which one would have the suit... What would he really have done, whom chosen? But wait—that wasn’t entirely a dead question. By what right does he assume that he, Raven, now “has” both his loves, or both versions of his loves? With one a Galactically famous beauty, and the other her inheritrix? Isn’t it more likely that those halcyon moments when he sat with them on the observer’s seat, were it? Were the culmination and fulfillment of Raven’s lost love, the love that Rehab had stolen to save his silly young life? And in fact, the mists of Rehab are stealing back, are perhaps some fraction of the overpowering need to sleep. The trouble is, there are too many of her.

  Far away, yet so near, the echo of a Mayday trills, like the voices of long-ago Lorelei calling. Ghost-girls, their slender fingers tenderly reaching for the bonds of Raven’s heart... Positively, he must act now.

  One hand lingers by the small green lever, the other holds the trail cassette ready to drop into the guidance comp. Ghost-eyes glow in the starfield, a star sweetly, richly hums an old, old tune. Raven’s heart gives a lurch in his chest, like a newborn animal struggling to rise, in the closing mists of oncoming sleep.

  He decides.

  Long years later, a contented, still-young salvage officer taps out a little jingle on Blackbird’s keyboard:

  The night has a thousand eyes,

  So fine to see;

  What use is the heart’s sunrise,

  If you are not free?*

  * With apologies to Francis William Bourdillon.

  The library Desk

  “Well, well, well!” says Moa Blue as the young Comeno couple approach. “And how did you like our second tale? Different, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh, my yes. Why, Humans have so many various facets, just like us. There was even some humor!”

  “Yes, Humans are known for that. If a situation permits a laugh, they’ll have it. And now”—he drags up a heavy sheaf—”the treat! I only hope it new to you. Were you aware that the Human-Ziello First Contact was written up as a living tale? And you Comenor are in it—not as copiously as I could wish, but there, and at a tragic moment of your history, too. Some of your very words!”

  “Oh, my—how wonderful. But why didn’t we find it? I’m sure we looked,” the boy says.

  “It turns me blue to say so,” Moa replied, “but I found this whole text filed under ‘History of Exploration.’ You’ll see why. But there were no fact/fiction refs leading in. Somebody has got to give those files a good shake-out.”

  “Oh, how kind of you to do all that looking,” the little Comeno girls says admiringly. Moa notices that her gaze keeps straying to one of her upper hands, which she has pushed forward. He looks at it and sees why—a handsome Comeno mateship coronet is set on her wrist. The boy has one, too, Moa sees now, though he’s holding it less conspicuously.

  “Well, my goodness, I see congratulations are in order!” And Human history is temporarily forgotten as they go through the pleasant ceremonial phrases. Moa is genuinely pleased—in addition to his weakness for romance in general, he has developed a strong liking for this young couple who study so harmoniously together.

  “I wish you could meet our third,” the girl says shyly. “He’s my godfather. You’d like him, he’s a real scholar. In Xeno-arts. Myr-and-Ser Carricklee.”

  “Why, of course, I know him by reputation,” says Moa, thinking to himself that his instincts were right; these young ones come of very good family.

  “It’s a pity you aren’t Comeno,” the girl says mischievously, “or we’d have asked you! Because you’re partly responsible.”

  At that, Moa really does turn blue, his racial equivalent of a violent blush. Not only is he in neuter mode, but the Comenor, for all their gentle decorum at most times, are renowned for letting go with great fervor at their rare biological rituals.

  “Oh, ah, why, thank you,” he stutters.

  “I was just teasing.”

  “But you, or rather the last tale you gave us, are partly to blame.” The boy smiles, his snowy muzzle looking very handsome and hearty. “I—I found some echo of my feelings in the Human Raven’s love for his Ilyera, and it woke me up to the awful possibility that I might lose her when we graduate.” His upper arms clasp those of his bride-to-be.

  The girl laughs musically. “So I must be very careful never to have myself cloned, or he’ll run off and leave the two of us!”

  “Never say that,” the boy says sternly, and hugs her again. Then he turns to the new sheaf. “So we’re really in this? Funny—I can’t recall what our first Human Contact was.”

  “I do,” says the girl soberly. “It was with Black World Humans.” She shudders.

  “But how loathsome!”

  “Yes,” says Moa. “It just shows you what the wrongly socialized Human is capable of. I’ve always considered them extraordinarily malleable and pliant. And as you’ll see, many Humans are profoundly conscious of this and the dangers it creates. The story is set so soon after the Human Last War... And it’s in the same Rift area as the others, but earlier; it’s the oldest of the three.

  “But you can have confidence in it—most of it was taken straight from messages and newscasts and other records of the events, and the final Human-Ziello section was most carefully reconstructed from depth-interviews with the survivors. And there’s three or four sections set entirely among the Ziellor on Zieltan, with whom you’re so familiar. The writers had extensive help from a Ziello participant on on these—in fact, she was the young female referred to in the text. Th
ey will give you a test for estimating the true-to-lifeness of the Human parts.”

  “Of course! How great.”

  “She had quite a sense of humor, too; it comes straight across the ages.”

  “They all do,” said the boy, carefully wrapping the bulky sheaf of the third tale in their waterproof carry-all. “All the feelings, I mean. People were certainly—people, weren’t they? I must say it was a great idea, writing up slices of history like this. I’ll never look at a star-map again without thinking of the real, quirky, emotion-beset people who filled it all in, star by star.”

  “Was it a Human idea?” the girl asks.

  “That’s the supposition. They’ve certainly done a vast deal more of it than any other race. But you could probably find other antecedents, if you looked hard enough. As with almost everything.”

  “Well, we certainly feel we’ve had a whole education since the day we first came in to bother you. We pictured like a paragraph or two, some colorful incident. Not like meeting whole, rounded-out people of those far-off days. I’ll remember them long after the dates and places and who-had-FTL notes have disappeared! And”—she takes his scaly hand shyly—”we’ll remember you. Won’t we?”

  “We certainly will.” The boy smiles. “You’ve brought this great impersonal library alive for us, as well as Human history.”

  Moa snuffles ferociously, trying to control both his sinuses and his heart. He loves his job, and at moments like this he loves the whole university, and Deneb, too. With relief he sees the Moom astrophysics student stalking in upon them; in a moment he would surely have heard his own scales rattle with unseemly emotion.

  “Well, now, wait till you read this last before too many thanks are in order,” he tells them, showing the glittering array of teeth that had carried his remote ancestors to dominance on his home planet of Hard Eggs. “And meanwhile, my dears, accept my very warmest wishes for your happiness. I come from a long-lived race, you know—maybe I’ll have the joy of guiding one of your progeny to some reading of his own.”

  “Oh, how wonderful!” the girl exclaims. “Oh, I do hope so! And now good-bye, good-bye, dear Myr Blue, until our next return!”

  Third Tale

  Collision

  The space-worn message pipe, looking like a tiny spaceship, noses its way up the incoming chute. Finally its sensor cap touches the communications antenna that has called it across the light-years to Human FedBase 900.

  When it makes contact a beep sounds, far down below in the Communications office, where the extensive facilities of the Base are housed inside a great crystalline asteroid. Nine hundred is an old frontier base, and accordingly is fitted out with every convenience and luxury that can keep life functioning happily in the immense isolation of space.

  At the beep, Pauna, the Commo officer, sighs resignedly. It’s been a busy day. She waits for the Commo aide in the surface bubble above to detach the sensor cap and send the incomer down the chute to her.

  While she waits she finishes sorting the routine p.m. intake: five for Navigation and Charts; two nonurgent for Medical; two for Terraforming; three long ones for Colony Services; and a personal commendation to Maintenance from a touring commander. Plus a late info-special to Exec, from FedBase 300, way out on the far northeast end of the Rift.

  She glances over it. Some suspected Black Worlds activity there. The Black Worlds are a largely Human group of planets who refused to come in the Federation after the Last War. They give refuge to a lot of bad actors, and their cultures are pretty unsavory. They’re outside Fed boundary, and no regular space routes run there, but they manage a small traffic in gemstones from their native mines. This message is of no concern to 900, but Exec will post it as a news item.

  When the new message pipe thumps down, Pauna’s eyes are drawn to its heavy space patina and the freckling of dents and scratches. This thing has been a long time en route. Is it from deep in the Rift? Or has it only spent time bumping its blind way around some enormous planet?

  No telling. In Commo you get used to receiving strange things—even junk pipes built by kids back in Central to surprise a Far Base and bearing weird notes: “The storm is coming!” or, “Hass and Dahlia send love.”

  But this is no prank. It’s an old, old realie, maybe from some mission that set out before her tour of duty. She pulls out its cassette—it’s stuck in crooked, probably in haste—and threads it on her voder to sample for distribution and urgency.

  A man’s voice announces, “Message one, R-R-One to Base, at Beacon Alpha, Navigator Torrane recording.” Which means nothing to Pauna.

  He goes on to give the Standard date—why, that’s over twenty years ago!—and rattles off their space coordinates. Pauna doesn’t need her ephemeris to know that those specs are deep in the Rift. Whoever can this be from? It isn’t a Charts mission, the pipe didn’t carry Charts’ bright black-and-yellow belly stripe. Maybe a lost ship?

  “We have just established Beacon Alpha,” Torrane goes on. “It’s in orbit around the tenth planet of a big blue sun, mass approximately four point five Sol, luminosity two fifty. We are about to make a thirteen-degree course change to the Galactic northeast because our computer shows a concentration of electromagnetic transmissions in that direction. It should be a center of activity for whatever life-form systems lie across the Rift.”

  Across the Rift!

  Aha, now Pauna gets it—R-R-One stands for Rift-Runner, the first cross-Rift exploration! It had started out while she was a child. And this must go straight to Exec, right now. She’ll take it up herself; that way she just might get to hear some of it.

  Even in her excitement, Pauna’s lips quirk at the folly of Human hurry at the end of the pipe’s slow years of travel. But the pipes are the only means of commo from the Rift—the changing density-gradients out there garble any EM transmission to unintelligibility after a very short distance.

  She calls a messenger to deliver the routines—not without a little twinge of regret; like any good Commo officer, she has a keen ear for gossip, and she enjoys her daily after-work round—and gives a quick briefing to her night relief, who has just arrived. Then she’s hastening up the spiral exercise-ramp she uses as a shortcut to the main view corridor, where Exec’s office is.

  When she gets to the big main view-port she stops for an instant to look out. Oh, how beautiful! Over the bleak surface of the asteroid the starfield is splendid, dramatically cut by the long black river of the Rift. It’s almost all above the horizon and parallel to it, about twenty degrees wide and half the sky long. A very few bright stars stand out in it against the faint haze of starlight from the far side.

  The Rift is not a rent or tear, of course, but only a relatively starless region, of the same nature as the starless regions between the Galactic arms. Many such abrupt local density fall-offs can be seen with scopes, but this rift is special because it serves as the northern border of the slowly expanding sphere of Federation space. The Rift has made Fed space quite lopsided to the north, so that 900, which isn’t really very far from Central, is also a genuine frontier.

  Several explorations have ventured far enough into the Rift to know that the normal starfields of the arm begin again on the far side. And their sensors have picked up definitely artificial transmissions. But all the near stars have proved planetless; it became clear that a complete crossing would have to be made to find sentient life. A generation ago the time was judged ripe, and Rift-Runner One set out.

  It’s nothing unusual as missions go—two women and three men, all multiply skilled, and including a keen Sensitive. And a redundancy of supplies and First Contact gear. The ship is a regular recon model, retrofitted with extra fuel tanks and super-long-range sensors, plus broad-spectrum radiation detectors. They also carry a few beacons to position at course changes, so that others can follow them. The ship is of course taking the regulation time-lapse aft-pointed holography, which can serve as computer guidance on their own trip home.

  The only really
unusual feature of the cross-Rift trip is the very long times spent in cold-sleep. But even that is not a record; longer sleeps have been done, some inadvertently, and no ill effects observed. There is only the incongruous youthfulness of the sleepers on emergency, because you don’t age—or do anything else—in cold-sleep.

  And now comes their first message. Pauna’s pace quickens as she catches sight of the Exec’s deputy at their office door. Like many dedicated specialists, Pauna is quite unaware of the expressions her face is radiating, or that she’s leaving behind her a trail of smiles and curious looks. Fred, the deputy, catches sight of her face and sighs in his turn. He, too, has had a long day, escorting a pod of Sfermini all over the great Base.

  He holds the door open for Pauna.

  “Oh, Fred, thank you. Is Exec in?”

  “And waiting for you. I caught the message as you came.”

  “Oh?” Flustered, she puzzles over this, gives it up. “Fred, the first signal from the cross-Rift mission just came in! I knew you’d want it now.”

  “Cross-Rift...Oh! Yes indeedy.”

  They go in, to be greeted by the Exec, a solidly built gray-haired woman with sharp eyes and a fine smile.

  “You have an info-alert about Black Worlders from FedBase Three hundred coming up by messenger, but I thought you’d want this before closing time.”

  Fred has opened their voder and is holding out his hand for the cassette.

  “May I thread it, please?” Pauna asks. “It wasn’t put in straight. It’s not hurt as far as I can tell, but they’re delicate.”

  “By all means.”

  Exec’s sharp eyes have picked up Pauna’s radiant excitement, and she takes pity on the girl. “Would you like to stay and hear it?”

  “Oh, yes!” The blinding smile makes Exec ashamed of herself for teasing. Funny, she thinks, how much more appealing curiosity is in the young and pretty than in the old and worn.