Iron mw-1 Page 3

  Ryan and Laurinda halted. “I am showing our passenger around the ship,” he said stiffly.

  Carita cocked her head. “Are you, now? That isn’t all you’d like to show her, I can see. Better get back to the galley, lad. You did promise us a first-meal feast.” To the Crashlander: “He’s a master chef when he puts his mind to it. Good in bed, too.”

  Laurinda dropped her gaze and colored, Ryan flushed likewise. “I’m sorry,” he gobbled. “Pilot Fenger’s okay, but she does sometimes forget her manners.”

  Carita’s laugh rang. “I’ve not forgotten this nightwatch is your turn, Kam. I’ll be waiting. Or shall I seduce Commissioner Markham—or Professor Tregennis?” To Laurinda: “Sorry, dear, I shouldn’t have said that. Being coarse goes with the kind of life I’ve led. I’ll try to do better. Don’t be afraid of Kam. He’s harmless as long as you don’t encourage him.”

  She trudged off with her burden. To somebody born to Jinx gravity, the weight was trifling. Ryan struggled to find words. All at once Laurinda trilled laughter of her own, then said fast, “I apologize. Your arrangements are your own business. Shall we continue for as long as you can spare the time?”

  The database in Rover contained books as well as musical and video performances. Both the Saxtorphs spent a considerable amount of their leisure reading, she more than he. Their tastes differed enough that they had separate terminals in their cabin. He wanted his literature, like his food, plain and hearty; Dorcas ranged wider. Ever since hyperwave made transmission easy, she had been putting hundreds of writings by extrasolar dwellers into the discs, with the quixotic idea of eventually getting to know most of them.

  The ship was a few days into hyperspace when she entered the saloon and found Tregennis. A couple of hours workout in the gym, followed by a shower and change of coverall, left her aglow. The Plateaunian sat talking with Markham. That was unusual; the commissioner had kept rather to himself.

  “Indeed the spectroscope, interferometer, the entire panoply of instruments reveals much,” Tregennis was saying. “How else did Miss Brozik discover her star and learn of its uniqueness? But there is no substitute for a close look, and who would put a hyperdrive in an unmanned probe?”

  “I know,” Markham replied. “I was simply inquiring what data you already possess. That was never made clear to me. For example, does the star have planets?”

  “It’s too small and faint for us to establish that, at the distance from which we observed. Ah, I am surprised, sir. Were you so little interested that you didn’t ask questions?”

  “Why should he, when he was vetoing our mission?” Dorcas interjected. It brought her to their notice. Tregennis started to rise. “No, please stay seated.” He looked so fragile. “No offense intended, Landholder Markham. I’m afraid I expressed myself tactlessly, but it seemed obvious. After all, you were are a busy man with countless claims on your attention.”

  “I understand, Mme. Saxtorph,” the Wunderlander said stiffly. “You are correct. Feeling as I did, I took care to suppress my curiosity.” Tregennis shook his head in a bemused fashion. He doubtless wasn’t very familiar with the twists and turns the human mind can take. Dorcas recalled that he had never been married, except to his science though he did seem to regard Laurinda as a surrogate daughter. The computerman sat down. “In fact,” she said conciliatingly, “I still wonder why you felt you could be spared from your post for as long as we may be gone. You could have sent somebody else.”

  “Trustworthy persons are hard to find,” Markham stated, “especially in the younger generation.”

  “I’ve gathered you don’t approve of postwar developments on your planet.” Dorcas glanced at Tregennis.

  “That’s apropos the reason I hoped you would be here, Professor. I’m reading The House on Crowsnest—”

  “What do you mean?” Markham interrupted. “Crowsnest is an area on top of Mount Lookitthat.”

  Dorcas curbed exasperation. Maybe he couldn’t help being arrogant. “I understand it’s considered the greatest novel ever written on Plateau,” she said.

  Tregennis nodded. “Many think so. I confess the language in it gets too strong for my taste.”

  “Well, the author is a Colonist, telling how things were before and during the revolution,” Dorcas said in Markham’s direction. “Oppression does not make people nice. The wonder is that Crew rule was overthrown almost bloodlessly.”

  “If you please,” Tregennis responded, “we of the Crew families were not monsters. Many of us realized reform was overdue and worked for it. I sympathized myself, you know, although I did not take an active role. I do believe Nairn exaggerates the degree and extent of brutality under the old order.”

  “That’s one thing I wanted to ask you about. His book’s full of people, places, events, practices that must be familiar to you but that nobody on any other planet ever heard of, Laurinda herself couldn’t tell me what some passages refer to.”

  Tregennis smiled. “She has only been on Plateau as a student, and was born into a democracy. Why should she concern herself about old, unhappy, far off things? Not that she is narrow, she comes from a cultured home, but she is young and has a whole universe opening before her.”

  Dorcas nodded. “A lucky generation, hers.”

  “Yes, indeed. Landholder Markham, I must disagree with views you have expressed. Taken as a whole, on every world the young are rising marvelously well to their opportunities—better, I fear, than their elders would have done.”

  “It makes a huge difference, being free,” Dorcas said.

  Markham sat bolt upright. “Free to do what?” he snapped. “To be vulgar, slovenly, ignorant, self-centered, materialistic, conman? I have seen the degradation go on, year by year. You have stayed safe in your ivory tower, Professor. You, Mme. Saxtorph, operate in situations where a measure of discipline, sometimes old-fashioned self-sacrifice, is a condition of survival. But I have gotten out into the muck and tried to stem the tide of it.”

  “I heard you’d run for your new parliament, and I know you don’t care for the popular modern styles,” Dorcas answered dryly. She shrugged. “I often don’t myself. But why should people not have what they want, if they can come by it honestly? Nobody forces you to join them. It seems you’d force them to do what pleases you. Well, that might not be what pleases me!”

  Markham swallowed. His ears lay back. “I suspect our likes are not extremely dissimilar. You are a person of quality, a natural leader.” Abruptly his voice quivered. He must be waging battle to keep his feelings under control. “In a healthy society, the superior person is recognized for what he or she is, and lesser ones are happy to be guided, because they realize that not only they but generations to come will benefit. The leader is not interested in power or glory for their own sake. At most, they are means to an end, the end to which he gives his life, the organic evolution of the society toward its destiny, the full flowering of its soul. But we are replacing living Gemeinschaft with mechanical Gesellschaft. The cyborg civilization! It goes as crazy as a cyborg individual. The leading classes also lose their sense of responsibility. Those members who do not become openly corrupt turn into reckless megalomaniacs.”

  Dorcas paled, which was her body’s way of showing anger. “I’ve seen that kind of thinking described in history books,” she said. “I thought better of you, sir. For your information, my grandfather was a cyborg after an accident. Belters always believed it was as criminal to send convicts into the organ banks as any crime of theirs could be. He was the sanest man I’ve known. Nor have I noticed leaders of free folk doing much that is half as stupid or evil as what the master classes used to order. I’ll make my own mistakes, thank you.”

  “You certainly will. You already have. I must speak plainly. Your husband’s insistence on this expedition, against every dictate of sound judgment, merely because it suits him to go, is a perfect example of a leader who has ceased to be a shepherd. Or perhaps you yourself are, since you have aided and abetted him. You
could have remembered how full of terrible unknowns space is. Belters are born to that understanding. He is a flatlander.”

  Dorcas whitened entirely. Her crest bristled. She stood up, fists on hips, to loom over Markham and say word by word: “That will do. We have endured your presence, that you pushed on us, in hopes you would prove to be housebroken. We have now listened to your ridiculous ranting’s because we believe in free speech where you do not, and in hopes you would soon finish. Instead, you have delivered an intolerable racist insult. You will go to your cabin and remain there for twenty-four hours. Bread and water will be brought to you.”

  Markham gaped. “What? Are you mad?”

  “Furious, yes. As for sanity, I refrain from expressing an opinion about who may lack it.” Dorcas consulted her watch. “You can walk to your cabin in about five minutes. Therefore, do not be seen outside it, except for visits to the head, until 1737 hours tomorrow. Go.”

  He half rose himself, sank back down, and exclaimed, “This is impossible! Professor Tregennis, I call you to witness.”

  “Yes,” Dorcas said. “Please witness that he has received a direct order from me, who am second in command of the ship. Shall we call Captain Saxtorph to confirm it? You can be led off in irons, Markham. Better you obey. Go.”

  The commissioner clambered to his feet. He breathed hard. The others could smell his sweat. “Very well,” he said tonelessly. “of course I will file a complaint when we return. Meanwhile we shall minimize further conversation. Good day.” He jerked a bow and marched off.

  After a time in which only the multitudinous low murmurings of the vessel had utterance, Tregennis breathed, “Dear me. Was that not a… slightly excessive reaction?”

  Dorcas sat down again. Her iciness was dissolving in calm. “Maybe. Bob would think so, though naturally he’d have backed me up. He’s more good-natured than I am. I do not tolerate such language about him. This hasn’t been the only incident.”

  “There is a certain prejudice against the Earthborn among the space-born. I understand it is quite widespread.”

  “It is, and it’s not altogether without foundation—in a number of cases.” Dorcas laughed. “I shared it, at the time Bob and I met. It caused some monumental quarrels the first couple of years, years when we could already have been married. I finally got rid of it and took to judging individuals on their merits.”

  “Forgive me, but are you not a little intolerant of those who have not had your enlightening experience?”

  “Doubtless. However, between you and me, I welcomed the chance to show Markham who’s boss here. I worried that if we have an emergency he could get insubordinate. That would be an invitation to disaster.”

  “He is a strange man,” Tregennis mused. “His behavior, his talk, his past career, everything seems such a welter of contradictions. Or am I being naive?”

  “Not really, unless I am, too. Oh, people aren’t self-consistent like the laws of mechanics—even quantum mechanics. But I do think we lack some key fact about Landholder Markham, and will never understand him till we have it.” Dorcas made a gesture of dismissal. “Enough. Now may I do what I originally intended and quiz you about Plateau?”

  While Rover was in hyperspace, all five of her gang stood mass detector watch, six hours a day for four days, fifth day off. It was unpopular duty, but they would have enjoyed still less letting the ship fly blind, risking an entry into a gravity well deep enough to throw her to whatever fate awaited vessels which did not steer clear. The daydream was becoming commonplace among their kind, that someday somebody would gain sufficient understanding of the psionics involved that the whole operation could be automated.

  It wasn’t torture, of course, once you had schooled yourself never to look into the Less Than Void which filled the single port necessarily left unshuttered. You learned how to keep an eye on the indicator globe while you exercised, read, watched a show, practiced a handicraft. On the infrequent occasions when it registered something, matters did get interesting.

  “And I’ve decided I don’t mind it in the least,” said Juan Yoshii after Kamehameha Ryan had relieved him.

  “Really?” asked Laurinda Brozik. She had met him below the flight deck by agreement.

  He offered her his arm, a studied, awkward gesture not used in his native society. She smiled and took it. He was a young Sol-Belter. Unlike Dorcas Saxtorph, or most folk of his nation, he eschewed spectacular garb. Small, slim, with olive-skinned, almost girlish features, he did wear his hair in the crest, but it was cut short.

  “I have just heard complaints about the monotony,” Laurinda said.

  “Monotony, or peacefulness?” he countered in his diffident fashion. “I chafed, too. Then gradually I realized what an opportunity this is to be alone and think. Or compose.”

  “You don’t sound like a rockjack,” she said needlessly. It was what had originally attracted her to him.

  He chuckled. “How are rockjacks supposed to sound? We have the rough, tough image, yes. Pilot the boat, find the ore, wrench it out, bring it home, and damn the meteoroids. Or the sun-flare or the fusion generator failure or anything else. But we are simply persons making a living. Quite a few of us look forward to a day when we can use different talents.”

  “What else would you like to do?”

  His smile was stiff. He stared before him, “Prepare yourself to laugh.”

  “Oh, no.” Her tone made naught of the eight centimeters by which she topped him. “How could I laugh at a man who handles the forces that I only measure?”

  He flushed and had no answer. They walked on. The ship hummed around them. Bulkheads were brightly painted, pictures were hung on them and often changed, here and there were pots whose flowers Carita Fenger maintained, but nonetheless this was a barren environment. The two had a date in his cabin, where he would provide tea while they screened d’Auvergne’s Fifth Chromophony. An appreciation of her work was one thing among others that they discovered they had in common.

  “What is your hope?” Laurinda asked at last, low.

  He gulped. “To be a poet.”

  “Why, how… how remarkable.”

  “Not that there’s a living in it,” he said hastily. “I’ll need a groundside position. But I will anyway when I get too old for this berth—and am still fairly young by most standards.” He drew breath. “In the centuries of spaceflight, how much true poetry has been written? Plenty of verse, but how much that makes your hair rise and you think yes, this is the real truth? It’s as if we’ve been too busy to find the words for what we’ve been busy with. I want to try. I am trying, but know quite well I won’t have a chance of succeeding with a single line till I’ve worked at it for another ten years or more.”

  “You’re too modest, Juan. Genius flowers early oftener than not. I would like to see what you have’ done.”

  “No, I don’t think it’s that good. Maybe my efforts never will be. Not even equal to—well, actually minor stuff, but it does have the spirit—”

  “Such as what?”

  “Oh, ancient pieces, mostly, pre-space. ’To follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.’” Yoshii cackled a laugh. “I’m really getting bookish, am I not? An easy trap to fall into. Spacemen have a lot of free time in between crises.”

  “You’ve put yours to good use,” she said earnestly. “Is that poem you quoted from in the ship’s database? I’d like to read it.”

  “I don’t know, but I can recite it verbatim.”

  “That would be much better. Romantic—” Laurinda broke off. She turned her glance away.

  He sensed her confusion and blurted in his own, “Please don’t misunderstand me. I know—your customs, your mores—I mean to respect them. Completely.”

  She achieved a smile, though she could not yet look back his way. “Why, I’m not afraid of you.” Unspoken: You’re not unbearably frustrated. It’s obvious that Carita is your mistress as well as Kam’s. “You are a gentleman.” An
d what we have coming to life between us is still small and frail, but already very sweet.

  Rover re-entered normal space ten astronomical units from the destination star. That was unnecessarily distant for a mass less than a fourth of Sol’s, but the Saxtorphs were more cautious than Markham admitted. Besides, the scientists wanted to begin with a long sweep as baseline for their preliminary observations, and it was their party now. As soon as precise velocity figures were available, Dorcas computed the vectors. The star was hurtling at well over a thousand kilometers per second with respect to galactic center. That meant the ship needed considerable delta v to get down to interplanetary speeds and into the equatorial plane where any attendant bodies were likeliest to be. That boost phase must also serve those initial requirements of the astronomers. Course and thrust could be adjusted as data came in and plans for the future were developed.

  The star’s motion meant, too, that it was escaping the galaxy, bound for the gulfs beyond. Presumably an encounter with one or more larger bodies had cast it from the region where it formed. A question the expedition hoped to get answered, however incompletely, was where that might have happened—and when.

  Except for Dorcas, who worked with Tregennis to process the data that Laurinda mostly gathered, the crew had little to do but housekeeping. Occasionally someone was asked to lend a hand with some task of the research.

  Going off watch, Carita Fenger stopped by the saloon. A large viewscreen there kept the image of the sun at the cross-haired center. Else nobody could have identified it. It was waxing as the ship drove inward but thus far remained a dim dull-red point, outshone by stars light-years away. The undertone of power through the ship was like a whisper of that which surged within, around, among them, nuclear fires, rage of radiation, millennial turmoil of matter, births and funeral pyres and ashes and rebirths, the universe forever in travail. Like most spacefarers, Carita could lose herself, hour upon hour, in the contemplation of it.