23
When Julie came into the control room, Stan was still seated in the big, padded command chair. He had taken an ampoule of royal jelly from a dozen that were nested in the padded box on the nearby worktable. He was holding the ampoule up to one of the arc lights, twirling it between his fingers and admiring its bluish glow in the light.
As usual, Julie was both attracted and repelled by the liquid and what it could do to Stan. Yet she had been hoping they could spend this evening together, doing things together instead of thinking about them. Sometimes she thought Stan allowed himself to have real experiences only for the pleasure of reliving them later, as he was able to do with the royal jelly.
Why did he love that stuff so much? She knew it eased the pain of his disease. But it was more than just a remedy: he was using it as a drug. And Julie didn't approve of taking drugs.
She hadn't tried the stuff herself. A well-trained thief allows nothing to dull her senses. Shen Hui and life itself had taught her this lesson. And yet, much as she missed him when he launched himself into the unknown regions that the drug brought him to, a part of her went with him, because she knew how Stan felt about her.
Returning the ampoule to its case, Stan asked, “What did you think about Norbert's performance?”
“He's ready,” she said. “You've done an amazing thing, Stan. Created a robot alien good enough to fool the real ones.”
“Except for the pheromones,” Stan pointed out.
“You've taken care of that, too. With the short-range zeta fields you've developed, plus the pheromone- altering qualities of the royal jelly, the aliens will think Norbert is one of them.”
Stan nodded. “Just like it was with Ari.” Stan was referring to how his cybernetic ant, Ari, had been programmed to enter the colony of a similar-looking ant species, where the other ants accepted him as the real thing.
“How close are we now, Stan?” Julie asked.
Stan punched up the computer screen in front of him. Numbers flowed across it, and lines weaved in and out and then held firm.
“We're nearing the vicinity of AR-32,” Stan told her. “It's time to get the crew out of hypersleep.”
“The adventure begins,” Julie said softly.
“That's right.” Stan took out the ampoule of royal jelly again. “We need a lot more of this stuff, and AR-32 has it for us. It's funny how a single substance can be both more valuable than diamonds and more necessary for life than water. More necessary for my life, anyhow.”
He swirled the little glass tube and watched the liquid flow. Then he looked at Julie.
“You look very lovely tonight.”
She smiled back mockingly. “Pretty as a shot glass, as they'd say in the Old West.”
“No, I really mean it,” Stan said. “You know how I feel about you, don't you?”
“Maybe I do,” Julie said. “But it's not because you ever talk about it.”
“I've always been shy,” Stan said. Abruptly he swallowed the ampoule. “I'm going to go lie down now, Julie. Let's talk more later.”
Without waiting for her answer, Stan shambled off to his small office just to the right of the main control- room entrance. Within it a folding cot was built into the wall. He lay down on it now, without bothering to take off his glasses.
With Xeno-Zip there was no habituation. Each time was like the first. It always amazed him just how quickly the stuff took effect. It was like no other drug he had ever tried, neither medicinal nor recreational, and Stan had tried them all. Alien royal jelly was neither a stimulant nor a soporific, though it had effects similar to both. Primarily it was a way of gaining instant access to all parts of your own brain, a royal road to your own dreams and memories. With royal jelly you could zoom in on your past like a skilled photographer zooming in on a detail, readjusting focus to bring up those images that had faded out You could freeze the frame on what seemed like reality. You could see what you wanted to see, as often as you liked, and then step outside the frame and watch yourself in the act of seeing. Nor was that all it did. Royal jelly was a painkiller, too, relieving the throb of the cancer that was shattering his life.
The vial dropped from his fingers. It fell to the floor, taking no more than a fraction of a second to shatter on the deck. And in that microsecond, Stan watched it all happen again.
24
First came the rush. It seemed to move along his arteries, and Stan pictured himself, a tiny man in a canoe adrift on the great red waters of his bloodstream. The vision exploded into a thousand fragments, and in each fragment the scene was repeated. The fragments of his vision came together, like millions of diamond particles striving to become a diamond, and then exploded outward again like firework displays arcing in all directions. He could hear a sound that was accompanying this, and he couldn't tell what it was at first, a deep-throated roar that could have come from no human source. At first he thought it was the gods singing, great choruses of ancient gods wearing strange headdresses, some with the heads of ducks and turtles, some jaguars, some foxes. And near them, suspended in shining space, were other choirs of women-gods, full-breasted Brunhildes and slender Naiads, and their song was full of sorrow and promise.
As the ampoule fell to the floor, Stan was already dozing fitfully. Tiny muscles in his eyelids jerked and twitched: REM sleep, but of a previously unheard-of intensity. Dream sleep, but with awareness. Blue-green lights played across his face. It was a broad face, with the beginning of a double chin. Light glinted off his glasses and threw a shadow on his small chin. He looked far younger than his twenty-eight years; like a schoolboy again, coming back to the big old house where he had lived with his parents before the devastation wrought by the aliens. Again he saw his stern father, the scholar, always with an ironic little Greek or Latin phrase on his lips; and his mother, with her high forehead, flinty gray eyes, and hastily pinned-up mass of dark blond hair.
Then he seemed to be walking down a long corridor. On either side, standing in niches like statues, were replicas of his parents at every age and in every mood. Stan could, in his imagination, freeze the frame, stop his parents in midtrack, and walk around them, inspecting them from every angle, and then start the tape of memory running again. All this while the ampoule was in midair.
The ampoule was still falling from his hand, and he could segue instantly from where he was to another memory, himself after class in high school, walking along beside the little brook that ran behind his home, thinking about everything under the sun except his homework assignments. Stan looked down on the work given him by his teachers. He thought it was beneath his intellectual level, unworthy of his efforts. So disdainful was he of school that his parents feared he would not graduate. But he did graduate — there he was at his own graduation, wearing an English schoolboy's suit his parents had bought him while they were attending a seminar in London. He had always hated that suit; he had looked damned silly next to the casual attire of the other boys.
There were many scenes like that, ready for him to step into, but Stan wasn't in the mood for childhood memories. There were other things he wanted to look at. Other times. Other people, places, things.
And so he moved, the ampoule still falling, moved as a spiritual presence, down the spiraling, faintly glowing corridors of the years. And now he was a man, in his twenties, already a well-known scientist, and he was in the doctor's office, buttoning his shirt, listening dumbly as Dr. Johnston said, “I might as well give it to you straight, Dr. Myakovsky. You were correct in your surmise about those black marks on your chest and back. They are indeed cancers.”
“Is my condition terminal?”
“Yes.” The doctor nodded gravely. “In fact, you don't have much time left. The condition, as I'm sure you know, is incurable. But its progress can be slowed, and we can ease some of the symptoms. You already have the medicine we prescribe for such cases. And there is also this.”
The doctor held out a small plastic box. Within it, packed in foam rubber, were a dozen ampoules of a bluish liquid.
“This is royal jelly. Have you heard of it?”
