ENGINES SING TO HIM IN A LANGUAGE HE STILL UNderstands.
When he works the calibrators, it seems almost as if he were his old self. Master of machines. Boy mechanic. The man who makes starships fly.
Then something reminds him. A written status report flashes, or a robot voice runs down a list of parameters. Prity can’t interpret for him — sign language cannot translate subtleties of hyperwave transformatics.
Emerson’s crew mates respect his efforts. They are pleased and surprised by his ability to help.
But, he now realizes, they are also humoring him.
Things will never be the same.
His long shift ends. Suessi orders him to take a break. So he goes up to the hold with Prity and visits the glavers, sensing something in common with the simple creatures, nearly as speechless as himself.
Alvin and Huck trade insults and witticisms in Anglic, his own native tongue, but he can only follow the general tone of camaraderie. They are kind, but here, too, Emerson finds no solace.
He searches for Sara, and finds her at last in the plotting room, surrounded by Gillian’s staff. Fiery representations of a bloated giant star fill the center of the room, with varied orbits plotted through its flaming shell. Some paths slip close, using slingshot arcs to fling Streaker toward the transfer point — a twisted funnel in space. The tactics look challenging, even to a pilot like Kaa. Yet that approach is the obvious one.
No doubt the enemy expects just such a maneuver.
Other orbits make no sense, skirting the red giant to strike away from the bolt-hole. Farther from the only way to exit this dangerous part of a forbidden galaxy.
Letting the enemy reach the transfer point first would seem suicidal.
On the other hand, at the rate the Jophur battleship is catching up, Streaker will have little choice. Perhaps Sara and Gillian plan to head for deep space and hide amid the seared rocks that were planets, before Izmunuti burgeoned and consumed its children.
Emerson watches Sara, immersed in work. No one seems to note the presumption — of a Jijo-born savage directing the endeavors of starfaring sophisticates. At times like these, an idea can count for much more than experience.
The incongruity makes him smile at last, recovering some of his good mood. His accustomed optimism.
After all, what have the odds ever mattered before?
There is an observation dome tucked behind the bridge, accessible only by a twisty ladder with rungs set much too close together. The small room is a leftover from whatever race once owned Streaker, before Earthclan bought the hull, converting it for dolphin use. It takes some agility to worm into the odd-shaped cubby. Emerson’s secret place.
At one end, a thick bubble of adamantine quartz provides a view outside, where the starry vault is bare, unimpeded, nearly surrounding him with everlasting night. Izmunuti is occulted by the ship’s bow, but vast sweeps of the local spiral arm sparkle like diamonds. Globular clusters are like diatoms, phosphorescent on a moonlit sea. Since waking on Jijo, he never expected to experience this again. The naked confrontation. Mind and universe.
It pours through him, a surfeit of beauty. Too much. Agonizing.
Of course, Emerson spent half a year learning about all kinds of pain, until it became a sort of friend. His ally at dislodging memories. And as he ponders stellar fire, it happens again.
He recalls the stench, just after he crashed into Jijo, clothes aflame, quenching the blaze in murky water, dimly aware of having recently fought a battle. A diversion — a sacrifice to win escape for his friends.
But that wasn’t the truth.
It was a planted cover story.
Actually, the Old Ones took him from that old Thennanin fighter. They probed and palped him. Over a period of days, weeks, they reamed his mind, then shoved him in a little capsule. A tube that squeezed …
Emerson moans, recalling how that passage ended in a blazing plummet down to Jijo and the horrid swamp where Sara found him.
He envisions the Old Ones. Or one faction of them. Cold eyes. Hard voices, commanding him to forget. To forget … and yet, sentenced to live.
I. know … your … lie.…
The command fights back. For a moment, the pain is greater than he ever knew.
Pain that is elemental, like the black vacuum surrounding him.
Like sleeting cosmic rays.
Like all the myriad quantum layers propping up each quark and every lepton in his shaken frame.
Through it all, his eyes can barely focus, squinting past distilled anguish, turning countless stars into slanting needles.
But then, out of those jagged motes there comes a shape. Weaving, thrashing … zigging, zagging.
Swimming, he now realizes. Pushing toward him, as if upstream, against the swell of a strong tide. A shape from memory, but instead of bringing more woe, this recollection sweeps all agony before it. Pushed by stalwart flukes, a soothing current washes over him.
A dolphin’s face swims into focus.
Captain…
… Creideiki…
It is a scarred face, deeply wounded behind the left eye. A wound too much like Emerson’s to be coincidence. The explanation encircles him in sound.
Emerson comprehends the Trinary haiku at once. The Old Ones must have read his mind somehow and learned of Creideiki’s injury. It seemed to fit their needs, so they copied it in their captive human. What better way to release him, yet be certain he would tell no tales?
But that still left open the question of why? Why release him at all, if it meant consignment to a twilight existence? What motive could they have?
All … in … good … time …
The phrase brings a smile, for he grasps it in a way he might never have before.
A simple, purified meaning.
… good … time …
Emerson looks back across the galaxies, now cleansed free of pain. Pain he now recognizes to have been illusion, all along. The product of an exaggerated sense of self-importance that his enemies used against him.
In fact, the ocean of night is too vast, too busy to be involved in his agony. An evolving universe can hardly be bothered with the problems of a single individual, a member of one of the lower orders of sapient life.
And why should it?
What a privilege it is, to exist at all! On the great balance sheet, he owes the cosmos everything, and it owes him nothing.
Emerson manages to share a final moment of communion with his captain and comrade — not caring whether the grinning dolphin is a ghost, a mirage, or some miraculous true image. Knowing only that Creideiki’s lesson is true.
There is no setback — no wound or blow of cruel fate — that cannot be turned into a song.
For an instant, Emerson can sense music in every ray of starlight.
When the winter’s
Typhoon pounds you,
Onto sand grains,
Sharp and gleaming,
And creation
All-conspiring,
Breaks you on a
Time of Changes,
At the moment
