The Starry Rift Page 9

  He slaps his helmet hard and stamps back into Mira to inquire whether there’s anything special he should know about her tanks.

  “No, I don’t think so,” bar Palladine says. “The combinations.” He hands over a slim ivory sliver with a suit-hook.

  Combination locks on your fuel tanks? Marina life all right!

  “Then I’ll just pop out your emergency hatch here.” Raven swivels and tips the copilot’s couch to reveal a circular crawl-through on the side opposite the main port and Blackbird. “It’ll save uncoupling. You don’t mind a short draft?”

  “So long as it’s short.”

  “I never knew that was there!” the girl exclaims.

  Raven shakes his head. “And it needs grease something fierce.” He unhooks a container and starts working on the hatch.

  “I’m going out there!” the girl announces suddenly. “Please, Myr Raven, I won’t get in your way, truly.” She moves pleadingly to bar Palladine. “Pavel, oh, please—I have cabin fever so badly, so badly—I need to be out in space—” The murmur ends in something inaudible to Raven.

  Bar Palladine looks thunderous, but all he says is, “Wear your tether. And keep it fastened.”

  “Oh, I will, I will, I promise! Thank you, Pavel—” She kisses him lightly behind one ear and snaps open a privacy-cocoon fastened against the hull at one end of the bench. In an instant she’s hidden in it.

  Raven is cursing his gods. This is the last thing he wants.

  He has a wild impulse to pull out of there and leave them dry—thirty days is nothing... But he knows he won’t, for two reasons. One is his conscience, and the other comes out of the privacy-cocoon in a kind of suit he’s never seen before.

  It’s heavy, ultraclear plastic, with glossy silvery designs over strategic spots. As far as he can see, that’s all she has on.

  “Where’s your air?” he blurts.

  “Here.” Smiling, she taps a tiny canister at her tiny waist.

  “That sprays a special strain of oxygenating bacteria under the helmet,” bar Palladine explains. “Good for twenty-four hours. Then you refresh the can.”

  “My, my.” Raven knows his voice doesn’t sound quite right.

  “I won’t charge you with her safety, because she’s virtually uncontrollable,” bar Palladine says. “Let’s just say that if she doesn’t come back in good shape, you’ll have that fire.”

  “Not to worry too much,” Raven tells him. “I’ve had good friends who got space-happy... And I know a few fancy knots,” he adds privately to the older man, grinning.

  “What did you say?” the girl demands.

  “Time to close up and go. Here, let me fasten this.” Gloved, helmeted, he secures her tether to his belt, feeling as if her waist might snap, feeling as if he were tying fire to himself. He double-checks her almost invisible helmet-clamps against all that hair, which seems to be trying to writhe out.

  “Test commo,” he says through his suit radio.

  “Testing,” he hears her say to his ears alone, and then suddenly she sings a bar or two from an old, old song. Raven staggers backward, saves himself on the bench. Her speaker doesn’t have the usual tinny sound, but conveys a voice delicate and sweet and rich.

  “All right, all right,” Raven snaps, and bends to complete unscrewing the emergency hatch, cautious because it must be a long time since the outer bag was used.

  The cabin air jolts; outside, the bag snaps open solid and true. No leaks he can detect. “Now follow me and do exactly what I do.”

  He crawls out into the bag, grasping a hand-hold on one side, and motions her to the other. Then he slides the temporary hatch-cover over the opening from outside; when it’s secure, he turns and unzips the bag. Air exits with a whoosh. He reels it in around them one-handed. An awkward job; she helps him timidly. When he has it stowed away in its circular slot, ready for reentry use, he pulls his legs in and lets his mag soles engage. She does the same, but he continues to hang on to a hand-hold until she is solidly on her feet. Then he rises beside her, with her tether looped under the hold.

  They are free, standing among the stars.

  It’s glorious, the alien suns bright and close enough to touch. He wants to stand there peacefully a minim or two, the mag soles holding him lightly, his soul refreshed by space. But he has—has this ship to fuel. This girl to tend. She’s standing very close to him now, looking up. Stop staring at me, stranger woman... That suit must be warmer than it looks, he observes neutrally. Even more neutrally, he registers that she is really very beautiful.

  “All right now, let’s take a minim to see how you do in space. Myr, uh—”

  “I’m Illyera,” she says absently. “Iliya.”

  A memory bell chimes faintly. He frowns. “I don’t see many grid-shows... but I seem to recall—”

  She makes a moue. “Oh, devils take it! You’d think, way out here—please can’t I be just me?”

  He has it now, and a great relief it is. Of course, Illyera. One of the immortals, one of the Galaxy’s great grid-queens, the queen of all men’s hearts—and women’s, too. That mysterious, supernatural beauty, that smile that seemed to promise the secret of secrets—Illyera. Her face, a shot of her leaning on her naked elbows, had been plastered everywhere in FedBase 900, a few of his long sleeps ago. No elbows had ever looked so naked, so vulnerable... He had cut short that visit, he recalls. He supposes half the Federation would change places with him now.

  As for Raven, he has to fill up Mira’s tanks. No more need for his cold-backbone tremors.

  “Very well, Myr Illyera. If you don’t mind, would you go over to that hold there and circle around me? Take it slow, any way you like.”

  A trill of real laughter comes in his ears as he gathers the tether in his hand. “I feel like a pet poonta!”

  She’s grinning like a girl now, first shuffling carefully in her mag soles, then more and more freely, until at last she takes off, dives for a farther hold, and completes the circle walking on her hands, her feet prettily pointed.

  “Green, green,” he says. “Wait there, we’ll cross over the top of the hull and get Blackbird’s hose.”

  “Is that your ship—Blackbird?Raven—and Blackbird!” She’s panting more than she ought to be. Heart?

  “Yes, but no more jumping around. I’ll get roasted alive, your friend promised.”

  “Oh, Pavel. He’s sweet. He keeps them all off me.” They’re shuffling sedately, he has her arm. But every time he glances down at her, she’s staring straight up into his eyes, with an odd, expectant look. What gives? Does she think she has some strange hypnotic effect? Is she waiting for him to throw himself at her feet? It’ll be a long wait, he thinks, his eyes refusing hers, going instead to Blackbird nestled by the fat yacht. When they reach the ship he finds himself giving it an odd pat, as though he’d deserted a living creature.

  “Oh, I wish I could see in,” the girl says. Raven has tied her tether not to Blackbird,but to Mira’selaborate rails, and is busy unreeling fuel hose to reach the first of Mira’s loading caps. Iilyera looks incandescent, lit by the rays of two close blue-green suns.

  “Nothing much to see,” Raven tells her. “Come over here and look in if you want.”

  And then, as she bends close beside him in the dazzling starlight, he sees—not only two on her neck and shoulders, but on nearly every, decimeter of exposed skin, flanks, thighs, upper arms to the elbows, and elbows to the wrists—everywhere is a network of fine scar-lines, planned, symmetrical, invisible save for this trick of the light. And he knows, though he can’t believe it, what accident has struck her so cruelly.

  The most drastic, irrevocable, supreme blow:

  Old age.

  He is looking at a masterpiece of cosmetic surgery such as he’s never imagined; the woman before him is not merely an older woman, but a very old woman indeed. How long ago was it really that he’d seen her face about? Forty, fifty years?

  Raven would be staggering were they in gravity; a
s it is, his hands have been working by themselves, connecting Blackbird’shose to Mira II’sintake valves. He shakes himself, checks his work. It seems green. Meanwhile Ilyera has been looking into Blackbird, exclaiming something—oh, yes, about the absence of a copilot’s couch. He answers something, seeing, when he dares to look back at her, that the trick of lighting has gone. The lines have disappeared again.

  But they were there—and with them, undoubtedly, is all the most elaborate inner work of replacement, regeneration, restoration. A total and ferocious holding-on to youth, a total refusal of age. And he sees, too, now that he dares look more coolly, that all the exquisite tucks and tightenings have been—ever so slightly—wrong. A shade too much here, a tiny lump or curve there, so that the result, while a beautiful woman, is not the same woman.

  Not the same as what?

  He almost cries it in terror, pushing the words away from him, slamming shut the tank valve as if he could crush the thought he will not think. And at the same time hearing her ask:

  “Look. Are you a clone?”

  It would have seemed as reasonable to him if she had asked if he were a hippogriff. From the whirl of his thought he says, “No...”

  “But I’ve got to know! What it? Why don’t you recognize me, Raven? Am I that changed? You saw my hair bleached. You can’t be the Raven I—”

  And then the only answer he can make is really to throw himself at her feet, one arm clenching her legs, the other on a hold-bar, weeping in his helmet, crying incoherently, “Oh—oh—oh—oh—No! Stop! Oh!—Iliya, my darling, my girl Iliya—”

  And she crouches over him, sobbing “Oh, my gods,” over and over, until his storm passes. And then, “But how, Raven? How?... That’s why I asked if you were a clone.”

  Slowly, he answers, “I’ve been asleep... a lot. I’ve been asleep all my life, since.” Then, still incredulous, insanely: “Look—you are,you were at FedTech, on Fairhaven? At Fairhaven U?”

  “I was at FedTech on Fairhaven,” she says gravely. “With you—you were a couple of classes behind me.”

  “And you left—”

  She nods, sadly.

  “ ‘The night has a thousand eyes, and the day but one; yet the light of a whole life died when—you—were gone.’ You went to the grid-shows...”

  A shrill alarm has been in his ears; it’s the fuel-up alarm ringing. With a start Raven comes partially to himself and transfers the nozzle to an auxiliary input. But his eyes won’t stay away from her, they’re so dilated that she sees their dark blue almost black. The light has changed again, he’s seeing a girl now, the right girl; her eyes that had held his soul glowing up at him in their great smudge of lashes, the long lush lips with their secret smile, the perfect throat and shoulders, and the impossibly high, full, wide-pointing breasts, the hand-span waist rising like a stem from her sumptuous hips and thighs. Even her hair is back smoky black again, in this instant of shadow.

  “Rehab must have wiped part of you out... anything painful.” He remembers now; the war seemed the most respectable way of getting himself killed fast. Evidently it didn’t work.

  “I hurt you... Oh, Raven—”

  Without knowing how he got there, he’s holding her right now, terribly tight through his awkward suit, caressing the soft curves of hers. Rehab stole the details, but not the pain. “You’re the first, I think you’re the only woman I ever loved.” She’s holding him, too, he can feel her tenderness, as if he were a hurt child.

  But across the hull another fuel alarm is going; it brings back the bleak impossibility of everything.

  “Oh, gods, the tanks. Look, I better carry you.” He swoops her up by the waist, goes loping over the hull like some kind of animal.

  “My looks,” she says when he sets her on her feet and turns to the valves. “My cursed godlost looks. They ruined everything... That’s why my girl, I mean, my clone, why she—”

  “You had yourself cloned?”

  “Yes. A thousand years ago. She wanted to go, go out to a colony. I got her out before Gridworld ever saw her.”

  “What colony?”

  “Fleetdown. But she’s moved since, something happened.”

  Fleetdown is in the next sector. Out there someplace is a middle-aged woman, the pearly skin tanned, the long fingers work worn. Sending home a hologram of herself on a tractor... He doesn’t care.

  Somewhen in those moments, Raven has become two men.

  One is the superficially normal Raven, who completes the topping-off of Mira’stanks and finally leads Illyera back to the emergency lock, brings the bag up around them, and zips it. Then he unscrews the temporary port, feeling the rush of Mira’s air filling the bag. He slides the emergency cover away and turns to help her through to where bar Palladine must be getting impatient.

  The other is a Raven who knows his whole life has changed, who cannot take his eyes off her between every task, who feels Rehab-blotted scenes of memory wheeling and shifting inside his head, becoming almost—but not quite—clear. It’s this Raven who can’t help asking her, at the port, “Do you remember the roses?”

  And this Raven who bleeds a little when she answers, frowning delicately, “Oh, yes...” so that he knows she doesn’t. So many, many men must have given her roses. But it was his quarterly stipend that went, on that extravagant blanket of real Terran roses for their last lovemaking... hands clasping her silken haunches, body weighting hers down on the flowers. The pink tips of her young breasts matching the rosebuds, the great black curly bush on her belly around the brighter pink of her sex, the feel of her...

  The Raven who recalls these things bends at the last moment, whispering, “I’ll come to you... somehow.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” she breathes back with that dazzling smile—he remembers now that it was always as if she knew something, came from some secret place of strange experience...

  They crawl in backward, she first. He hears her exclaiming to bar Palladine about how beautiful it was, and, “What do you think? Myr Raven and I were at the same university!”

  “Quite a few years back,” says the “normal” Raven. “Here’re your combinations,” handing over the ivory chip.

  “She’s old enough to be your grandmother,” bar Palladine grunts as Illyera gets into the cocoon to unsuit. “Now, can we get out of here?”

  Just then Raven hears an instrument giving out the jitter that means it’s just about to chime. But the jitter fades again. He frowns.

  “Has your mass-proximity indicator been doing that much lately?”

  “Ah... yes. Rocks?”

  “Maybe. Also, maybe a ship hanging around just off range.”

  “Oh?”

  “It’s probably nothing. But you’re a long way from Fed Central here, and there are a few bad actors out on the Frontier sectors.”

  “How exciting,” sighs Illyera mockingly. She has stepped from the cocoon wearing a fluffy little short-suit that makes Raven’s heart shiver, it looks so like the things she once wore. But the rational Raven bats down the quiver; that sportsuit is made of pelts of rava-down; it would cost his whole account.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” he tells her lovingly.

  “All the more reason to get going,” says bar Palladine.

  “Exactly. And don’t, repeat, do not let any strangers in here, or let anybody get a beam on you. You represent a godlost bunch of credits flapping around with no protection.”

  Bar Palladine scowls at that but says civilly enough, “Thanks for the warning. And now I think we’ll settle up and be on our way.”

  “Right.” Raven gives him the figures—Mira II was, as he’d been warned, a fuel hog—and bar Palladine produces his credit chips for registry in both their credit computers. Raven gathers up his stuff and is back in his ship fast; he has no wish to watch them leave. His heart has not been able to resist one last look at Illyera; he figures bar Palladine must be used to that. And it effectively insulates him from the Talkers on his route out, aside from the impression t
hat they are running down.

  He boosts out of there before the other ship’s engines start.

  But once at the limit of standard-proximity indicators, he slows and halts, and tunes in his special high-range finder. Yes, there’s the fat echo of Mira II, accelerating away—and there, by gods, is a second echo, large and slick—a sizable strange ship, on an interception course!

  Raven curses. And then curses again, louder. Against his warnings, Mira is slowing, slowing. Slowing to a stop. He watches angrily as the two echoes merge. What in the hells has bar Palladine got himself and Illyera into?

  It could be perfectly all right, Raven tells himself—a Lost Colony ship, for instance. But if so, why hadn’t it signaled? Power too weak? Maybe... What was it doing, nosing around until he left? Well, maybe they were frightened of intercepting two strange ships. Maybe. But odd that they’d go so unerringly to the yacht... None of his business, really, what bar Palladine wants to do.

  But it is his heart’s business. And even as he reasons with himself, his hands have played across the controls, jockeying Blackbird into position to return. And then his reason comes up with a congruent point—here is the ideal opportunity to try out a nice new piece of s equipment he’s acquired and not yet tested—a radar-shield for unobserved approach. Excellent...

  He’s already on course, coming into their range. Now he slows to impellor power and turns on the shield. To use it properly means a dead-center approach: the area of shielding is small. As he purrs toward the linked ships, he steadies Blackbird carefully behind the small circumference of undetectability. He is concentrating so hard that at first he doesn’t hear an odd thing—a high, steady hum from his transceiver. When he finally notices it he sees that it’s mostly beyond audible range. A malfunction of some sort?

  Holding position carefully, he puts the analyzer on it, finds it’s a complex chord of frequencies, absolutely steady. And coming from the ships.