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PART THREE:
THE PATH TO GULF CITY

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Peron was drowsing when the alert sounded. For a couple of minutes he struggled against awakening, trying to merge the soft, blurred tones into the fabric of his dreams.

roomb . . . roomb . . . roomb . . . roomb . . .   

He had been back on Pentecost, back when the idea of competition in the Planetfest had itself been like a dream. Twelve years old; the first tests, part of the State-wide evaluation of every adolescent. The blindfold maze was presented to them as no more than a game, something that they could all enjoy. He had scrupulously obeyed the rules, mapping his path by ears alone, following the soft, purring will-o'-the-wisp tone of the muted bell.

It was seven more years before he understood the hidden purpose of the maze test. Sense of direction, yes. But more than that. Memory, courage, honesty, and a willingness to cooperate with other competitors when single talents could not provide a solution. It was direct preparation for Planetfest, though no one ever admitted it.

So how was Sy performing in the maze? That was a mystery. Sy was a loner. He didn't seek partners, even when the task looked impossible for a solo performer.

Peron, hauled back to full consciousness, realized that he had been confusing past and present. Sy was here, now, on the ship. When Peron took the maze test, he had never heard of Sy.

But it was still a good question. How had Sy found his way through the preliminaries for Planetfest? That was a puzzle to be filed away and addressed later. Meanwhile, that insistent tone was continuing, summoning Peron to action.

 . . . roomb . . . roomb . . . roomb.  

He sighed. So much for sleep. He had been trying to push the S-space sleep requirement down to its lower limit, to less than one hour in twenty-four. But he had been overdoing it. He stood up unsteadily, noticing that Elissa had already left their living quarters, and made his way to the central control chamber.

Olivia Ferranti was already there, gazing out of the port. Elissa and Sy were at her side, staring out into the formless sea of milky-white that sat outside the ship in S-space.

Except that it was no longer formless. Dark, complex shapes were there, drifting past the window. Peron saw a tracery of wispy rectangles, joined by braided lines of silver. Attendant on them, although not connected to them, were veined doublet wings like giant sycamore seeds.

Olivia Ferranti acknowledged Peron's arrival with no more than a brief nod.

"Remember what I told you when we were heading for Sector Headquarters?" she said. "I'm not sure you believed me. There's one of the reasons why Rinker didn't want you messing with his ship. Look at the power drain."

On the main console, every readout showed energy consumption up near the danger level. Peron glanced at the indicators for only a moment, then his attention was irresistibly drawn back to the shapes outside the port.

"What are they?" he said. "Are they taking our power?"

Olivia Ferranti was keying in a signal to the communications module. "They certainly are," she said. "That lattice shape is a Gossamere—one of the surprises of interstellar space. You'll never find one within a light-year of a star. The strangest thing about them is that they're quite invisible in ordinary space, but so easy to see here in S-space." She indicated the screen to the left of the port where a frequency-shifted image was displayed, allowing them to see outside the ship at the wavelengths of normal visible radiation. It showed only the star field of deep space. Sol was the nearest star now, nearly three light-years ahead and no more than a faint point of light.

"We don't know how the Gossameres do it," went on Ferranti. "But they maintain themselves at less than one degree absolute, well below cosmic background temperature, without emitting radiation at any frequency that we've been able to detect. And they suck up all the power that a ship can give out. If you didn't know that and were in charge of a ship, you could get into terrible trouble."

"But what are they?" repeated Peron. "I mean, are they intelligent?"

"We don't know," said Ferranti. "They certainly respond to stimuli. They seem to interpret signals we send them, and they stop the power drain on us as soon as they receive a suitable non-random message. Our best guess is that the Gossameres are not intelligent, they're no more than power collection and propulsion systems. But the Pipistrelles—those bat shapes that you can see alongside the Gossamere—they're another matter. They ride the galactic gravitational and magnetic fields, and they do it in complex ways. We've never managed a two-way exchange of information with them—they never emit—but they act smart. They really use the fields efficiently to make minimum time and energy movements. That could be some kind of advanced instinct, too, the way that a soaring bird will ride the thermals of an atmosphere. But watch them now. What does this mean? Are they saying goodbye? We've never been sure."

She had completed the signal sequence. After a brief delay, one of the Pipistrelles swooped in close toward the ship. There was a flutter of cambered wings, a dip to left and right, and a final surge of power drain on the meters. Then the panels and filaments of the Gossamere began to move farther off. The silver connecting lines shone brighter, while the whole assembly slowly faded. After a few minutes, the winged shapes of the Pipistrelles closed into a tighter formation and followed the Gossamere.

"We had ships drift helpless, with all power shut down for months, until we learned how to handle this," said Ferranti. "We even tried aggression, but nothing we did affected the Gossameres at all. Now we've learned how to live with them."

"Can you bring them back?" asked Sy.

"We've never found a way to do it. They appear at random. And we encounter them far less often now than when our ships first went out. We think that the 'power plant failure' on Helena when the arcologies first set out was probably an encounter with a Gossamere. When the colonists turned off the plant to repair it, they couldn't find anything wrong. That's typical of a Gossamere power drain. They certainly don't seem to need our energy, but they like it. The science group in the Jade sector headquarters argue that we're a treat for the Pipistrelles, a compact energy source when they are used to a very dilute one. We're like candy to them, and maybe they've learned that too much candy isn't a good thing."

She switched off the display screen and rose from her seat at the port. "Stay here if you like, and play with the com link. Maybe you can find a way to lure them back. That would certainly please our exobiologists and communications people. I wanted you all to see this, and absorb my message: you can't learn all about the Universe crouching in close by a star. You have to know what's going on out in deep space."

"What else is going on?" asked Elissa. She was still peering out into the milky depths of S-space, watching as the final traces of the Pipistrelles slowly faded from sight.

"Here?" said Ferranti. "Nothing much. On the other hand, we're not in deep space. Sol is less than three light-years—we'll be there in less than a week. Now, if we were in deep space, with no star closer than ten light-years . . ."

Olivia Ferranti stopped abruptly. She had seemed about to say more, but thought better of it. With a nod at the others, she turned and left the control room.

* * *

"So what do you make of that?" said Elissa. Sy merely shook his head and offered no comment.

"She's telling us there are more surprises on the way," said Peron. "I like Olivia, and I think she's doing her best for us. She knows there are still things she's not supposed to reveal to us, so she gives us hints and lets us work on them for ourselves. That was another one—but I don't know how to interpret it. Damn it, though, I wish that the others were here. I'd like Kallen's comments on the Gossameres. Do you think we made a bad mistake, splitting up like that?"

Peron had been asking himself and the other two that question ever since they left Sector Headquarters. It had seemed like a small thing at the time. Given their experiences after they left Whirlygig, the briefings from the Immortals had been boring rather than thrilling. They had learned about S-space for themselves, the hard way, and what should have come as revelations came merely as confirmation of known facts. The personnel at Sector Headquarters were minimal, little more than a communications and administrative group, and almost all the information was provided through education robots and computer courses—neither of which had been programmed with interest as a dominant factor. As Rosanne had put it, after a long and tedious series of humorless computer warnings about the physiological dangers of frequent movements to and from S-space: "You mean they had to bring us a whole light-year for this? Maybe when you're an Immortal you don't live longer—it just seems longer."

One of their negotiated conditions with Captain Rinker for return of ship control to him had been a freedom to travel after their training and indoctrination. At first he had indignantly refused to consider such a thing. Unprecedented! He at last grudgingly agreed, after Kallen had sent several thousand service robots to Rinker's living quarters. They cluttered up every available square foot of space, moved randomly about, refused to obey any of Rinker's orders, and made eating, walking, or even sleeping impossible.

When the indoctrination was finally over, each of them was bored and restless. And when they learned that two ships would be arriving at Sector Headquarters within one S-space day of each other, one bound for Earth directly, and the other proceeding there via Paradise, they had split into two groups. Kallen wanted to visit the investigating group of Immortals orbiting Paradise, while Lum and Rosanne were curious to take a trip down to the surface of the planet itself. The computer had contained a brief description of events that led to the extinction of the colony on Paradise, but as Lum had pointed out, that stark recitation of facts was unsatisfying. A healthy, thriving population of over a million humans had died in a few days, with no written or natural record to show how or why. If it could happen so easily on Paradise, why couldn't it happen on Pentecost, or anywhere else?

Since the whole detour would amount to no more than a week of S-space travel, Elissa, Peron and Sy had taken the ship direct to Sol. Kallen, Rosanne, and Lum went to Paradise; And as Lum had cheerfully pointed out as they were leaving, they would never be more than an S-day apart through radio communications. They could talk to each other any time. Except that their ship's equipment seemed to be in continuous higher priority use . . . 

Now, Peron at least was regretting their decision to separate. And Sy was looking unusually thoughtful and withdrawn, even for him.

"Perhaps I have everything backwards," he said at last. "When I said that I wanted to visit the galactic center, I assumed that it would be the place to find new mysteries. Maybe not. Perhaps the true unknown is elsewhere. Should I be looking at nothing, at the regions between the galaxies?"

He stood up abruptly and followed Olivia Ferranti out of the control chamber, leaving Peron and Elissa looking at each other uncertainly.

"More questions," said Elissa.

"I know. And nobody willing to provide us with answers. I'll tell you the biggest mystery of all. The society of Immortals has a complicated structure. They have the network of ships linking all the inhabited worlds, they have an elaborate recruiting system to bring people like us into S-space, and they have definite rules for encounters with other societies—even human ones. Lord knows what they'd do if they met aliens who were obviously intelligent and lived close to stars. But with all that, we never seem to get any closer to the Immortals who are in charge of the whole organization."

"Maybe their society doesn't operate like that—perhaps it's a true democracy."

"I don't believe it." Peron leaned across and put his arm around Elissa's shoulders. "Just think about it for a minute. Somebody has to develop rules and procedures. Somebody has to monitor them. Somebody has to arrange for food supplies, and energy, and travel, and construction. You have to have leaders. Without that you don't have democracy—you have anarchy, and complete chaos. Where is their Government?"

Elissa was absently rubbing the back of Peron's right hand, as it lay across her shoulder. "Didn't we conclude that it's on Earth, or at least in orbit somewhere in the Sol system?"

"We did. But I don't believe it any more. I told Olivia Ferranti that we want to meet the leaders of the Immortals. She won't talk about that, but she insists we'll really enjoy the visit to Earth. How could she possibly say that, if we might be heading for a confrontation there?"

Elissa shook her head. She did not speak, and after a couple of minutes moved out of Peron's embrace and quietly left the control cabin.

Peron was left alone, gloomily staring out into the pearly blankness of the S-space sky. It felt like only weeks since he was walking through the sticky marshes of Glug, or contemplating the dangers of a landing on Whirlygig. To him, and to Sy and Elissa, it was weeks.

But back on Pentecost, new generations of contestants had won and lost at Planetfest. By now, Peron's name, along with Kallen, Lum, and the others, was no more than a footnote in an ancient record book. And Wilmer, or some newly trained Immortal, would be down on the planet's surface, observing the new contestants and reporting back on their behavior.

And everyone they had known on Pentecost, except for Wilmer, was now long dead. Peron wondered about the great centuries-long project to reclaim the southern marshes of Turcanta Province. Was that finished now, with real-life agricultural developments replacing the futuristic artists' drawings that had illustrated a geography lesson when he was back in school? And what other planet-shaping projects had been developed since then?

He and Elissa had talked of their decision, and there were no regrets. With what they had learned, there could have been no turning back to a planet-bound "normal" life on Pentecost. The idea of visiting Earth had filled them all with energy and enthusiasm; and he and Elissa were ridiculously happy together. And yet . . . 

Peron had a premonition of other travels and troubles ahead, before the true secret of the Immortals was revealed.

 

 

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