watched machines bolster vast constructions of ice and carbon thread. He had never seen cooperation on such scale among hydros, oxies, and machines.
That thought made the cosmos seem a nicer place somehow.
Time passed. Emerson no longer thought in terms of minutes and hours — or duras and miduras — but the uneven, subjective intervals between hungers, thirsts, or other bodily needs. And yet, he began feeling tensely expectant.
A bedeviling sense that something was wrong.
For a while he had difficulty placing it. The dolphins on duty in the bridge seemed unconcerned. Everything was calm. None of the display screens showed any obvious signs of threat.
Likewise, in the Plotting Room, Gillian’s meeting broke up, as people dispersed to workstations or else observed the awesome vista surrounding Streaker. Nobody appeared alarmed.
Emerson conveyed to the little holo unit his desire to tap the ship’s near-space sensors, scanning along its hull and environs. As he went through the exercise twice, the creepy feeling came and went in waves. Yet he failed to pin anything down.
Calling for a close-up of Gillian herself, he saw that she looked uncomfortable too — as if some thought were scolding away, just below consciousness. A holo image stood before her. Emerson saw she was examining the area around Streaker’s tail section.
Signaling with a grunt and a pointed finger, Emerson ordered his own viewpoint taken that way. As the camera angle swept along the ship’s outer hull — coated with its dense star-soot coating — he felt a growing sense of relief. If Gillian was also looking into this, it might not be just his imagination. Moreover, her instincts were good. If there were a serious threat, she would have taken action by now.
He was already feeling much better as the holo image swept past Streaker’s rear set of probability flanges, bringing the stern into view.
That was Emerson’s first clue.
Feeling better.
Ironically, that triggered increased unease.
Back on Jijo — ever since he had wakened, delirious, in Sara’s treehouse with a seared body and crippled brain — there had always been one pleasure that excelled any other. Beyond the soothing balm of secretions from the traeki pharmacists. Beyond the satisfaction of improved health, or feeling strength return to his limbs. Beyond the wondrous sights, sounds, and smells of Jijo. Even beyond the gentle, loving company of dear Sara. One bliss surpassed any competitor.
It happened whenever the pain stopped.
Whenever the conditioned agony, programmed into his racked cortex, suddenly let go of him — the abrupt absence of woe felt like a kind of ecstasy.
It happened whenever he stopped doing something he wasn’t supposed to do. Like trying to remember. Any attempt at recollection was punished with agony. But the reward was even more effective, at first. A hedonistic satisfaction that came from not trying anymore.
And now Emerson sensed a similarity.
Oh, it wasn’t as intense. Rewards and aversions manifested at a much subtler level. In fact, he might never have noticed, if not for the long battle he had fought on Jijo, learning to counter pain with obstinacy, by facing it, like some tormented prey turning on its pursuer … then transforming the hunter into the hunted. It was a hard lesson, but in time he had mastered it.
Not … there … he thought, laboriously forming the words one at a time, in order to lock in place a fierce determination.
Go … back.…
It felt like trying to fight a strong wind, or swimming upstream. Each time the holo scene made progress toward the ship’s bow, he felt strange inside. As if the very concept of that part of Streaker was peculiar and somehow improper, like trying to visualize a fifth dimension.
Moreover, it apparently affected computers, too. The instruments proved balky. Once his view passed forward of the first set of flanges, the camera angle kept wandering aside, missing and curving back around toward the stern again.
A torrent of cursing escaped Emerson. Rich and expressive, it flowed the way all speech used to, before his injury. Like songs and some kinds of poetry, expletives were fired from a part of the brain never touched by the Old Ones. The stream of invective had a calming, clarifying effect as Emerson turned away from all artificial tools and images. Instead, he pressed his face close to the bubble window, made of some clear, incredibly strong material that Earth’s best technicians could not imitate. He peered forward, toward Streaker’s bow.
It felt like trying to see through your own blind spot. But he concentrated, fighting the aversion with all the techniques he had learned on Jijo.
At last, he managed barely to make out glimmers of movement amid the blackness.
Sensing his strong desire to see, the rewq symbiont slithered downward, laying its filmy body over his eyes — translating, amplifying, shifting colors back and forth until he grunted with surprised satisfaction.
Objects swarmed around Streaker’s prow. Robots, or small shiplike things. They darted about, converging en masse near a part of the ship that everyone aboard seemed to have conveniently forgotten!
Emerson glimpsed a small, starlike flare erupt. Glints of actinic flame.
He wasted no more time cursing. On hands and knees, he scuttled out of the little observation dome, built by some race much smaller than humans that had once owned this ship long before it was sold, fifth-hand, to a poor clan of ignorant wolflings, freshly emerged from an isolation so deep they used to wonder if, in all the universe, they lived alone.
He had no way to report his discovery. No words to shout over an intercom. If he went to the Plotting Room, grabbed Gillian’s shoulders, and forced her to look forward, she would probably respond. But how long might that take?
Worse, could it even risk her life? Whatever means was being used to cast this spell, it bore similarities to his own prior conditioning and Emerson recognized a special brand of ruthlessness. Those responsible might sense Gillian’s dawning awareness, and clamp down harshly through her psi talent.
He could not risk exposing her to that danger.
Sara? Prity? They were his friends and dear to him. The same logic held for the other Streakers. Anyway, there was too little time to make himself understood.
Sometimes you had to do things yourself.
So Emerson ran. He dashed forward to the cavernous hangar — the Outlock — that filled Streaker’s capacious nose. All the smaller vessels that once had filled the mooring slips when they departed Earth were now gone. The longboat and skiff had been lost with Orley and the others at Kithrup. Even before that, the captain’s gig had exploded in the Shallow Cluster — their first terrible price for claiming Creideiki’s treasure.
Now the docks held rugged little Thennanin scout-boats, taken from an old hulk the crew had salvaged. It felt all too familiar, slipping into one of the tiny armored vessels. He had done this once before — turning on power switches, wrestling the control wheel built for a race with much bigger arms, and triggering mechanisms to send it sliding down a narrow rail, into a tube that would expel it.…
Emerson quashed all memory of that last time, or else courage might have failed him. Instead, he concentrated on the dials and screens whose symbols he could no longer read, hoping that old habits, skills, and Ifni’s luck would keep him from spinning out of control the moment he passed through the outer set of doors.
A song burst unbidden into his mind — a pilot’s anthem about rocketing into the deep black yonder — but his clenched jaw gave it no voice. He was too busy to utter sound.
If it were possible to think clear sentences, Emerson might have wondered what he was trying to accomplish, or how he might possibly interfere with the attackers. The little scout had weapons, but a year ago he had not proved very adept with them. Now he could not even read the controls.
Still, it could be possible to raise a ruckus. To disrupt the assailants. To dash their shroud of illusion and alert the Terran crew that danger lurked.
But what danger?
