Encounter With Tiber Page 29

  I was almost out of earshot when I heard Poiparesis say, “Well, it’s a risk that no one thought of. But they’re all twenty years from mating. For right now there’s no harm in their all just being friends. And it happens that our two serious students are Otuz and Zahmekoses, which sort of leaves the other two at loose ends.”

  I froze and leaned back against the wall. It had never occurred to me that things might be that way, that Otuz and I might be excluding Mejox, but as soon as it was mentioned I could see a dozen ways I had done it—I was interested in things that he wasn’t, I pushed on in academic stuff faster than he could go, and I was often off by myself.

  Well, I could fix some of that. I had gotten to enjoy my freedom to learn as fast as I could, and I wasn’t going to pretend anymore that he was the smarter one—he himself wouldn’t have believed it—but I could make some time for him, be a better friend … I turned, headed the other way, and nearly collided with the captain.

  Very softly, she said, “What are they talking about in there?”

  “Mejox,” I said. I couldn’t have lied to the captain to save my life, and just then that was what I thought was at stake.

  She gave me a strange little smile. “Of course. It would be. Has it occurred to you that if you do anything about what you hear, they will know you listened?”

  I gulped. “I wasn’t going to—”

  “That’s right, you’re not going to. Mejox Roupox is your friend. He’s not your job. He needs to find his own way through life. You’ve done nothing wrong and you’ve consistently been a better friend to him than he deserves. Keep being his friend—but if we catch you making yourself his slave, both of you will be sorry.”

  That made me so angry, I actually talked back to the captain. “I’m not anyone’s slave,” I said.

  Her hands landed lightly on my shoulders. She drew a long breath. “No,” she said at last, “you’re right. There are no slaves anymore.” Then she smiled very slightly and added, “But it’s very clear to me that you’re Poiparesis’s student.”

  I didn’t know what she meant by that, but she let me go, so I tried not to worry about it—I already had enough to worry about.

  All the training in the world could not have prepared us for what it was like to round the Sun. This time we had no choice about where to be—acceleration webbing couldn’t possibly have held us against the accelerations we would be taking. Furthermore, passing so close to the Sun, most of the ship itself was going to be uninhabitable; only life support, the ship’s farm, some delicate scientific equipment, and the crew shelter on the inner deck could be kept at a comfortable temperature. The rest would get hot enough to sear flesh, and was being filled with an inert-gas atmosphere to keep flammable objects from exploding.

  As Poiparesis was strapping us in, he went over his explanation again. “Understand this is the most danger we will all ever be in, at least until it’s time for the return flight. And—” he turned to Priekahm, who seemed about to complain again “—we do have to make this close pass at the Sun, and then another one at Zoiroy. Almost one-fifth of our total speed is going to come from doing this, and the only way to get such a big boost is to go in very close, where our light sail can do the most good. So we have to do this, and it is going to be very uncomfortable, and if anything goes wrong with the cooling and energy dissipation systems, we are all going to burn. That’s just the way it is.”

  I imagined Priekahm was still pouting, but I couldn’t see her. I had stretched out and was snugged far down in my own acceleration couch.

  The couches had been designed to fit our bodies exactly and to support specific bones and internal organs; we had all just had an incredibly uncomfortable procedure to fill our bowels and body cavities with support liquid, a nasty gelatinous goo. The fact that Soikenn had administered it, and had been very gentle and sympathetic, hardly compensated for having needles jabbed into us and being squirted full of the heavy liquid while another needle sucked out air.

  Once we were all in position on the couches, the mouthpieces that would protect our teeth and tongues went in next. If anyone was going to whine or complain, the chance had gone by.

  “Bite down hard,” Soikenn said. I did, and that triggered the mechanism; tiny clamps grabbed my teeth and a lever slid out of the mouthpiece to push my tongue flat against the floor of my mouth. Soikenn bent over the indicators as she pushed the button to take me to full IV. A moment later I felt the needle slide between my ribs and into the thick clump of veins behind my blood mixer, deep in my back.

  “Looks good,” Poiparesis said, joining Soikenn at the monitor stand, and triggered the support system; from now until it was time to release me, the needle sticking into my circulatory system would supply oxygen and sugar, and carry away carbon dioxide. I no longer needed to breathe through my lungs.

  The two of them watched the dial for what seemed a long time, until they were satisfied that they could trigger the next step. Finally they gestured agreement, and started the process.

  Until you’ve experienced it there’s no sensation anywhere like having your lungs filled with fluid. The suction pulled the air out abruptly, and I felt my reflexes try to stop it. Then the suppressor, a tiny electrode wired into the back of my brain, kicked in, and my diving and asphyxiation reflexes were suppressed.

  This meant I wasn’t in a panic anymore, but it did nothing for comfort. Cool glop flowed out of the tube and down into my lungs as the air was gradually taken up; it felt like a hideous chest cold.

  I lay there listening while they did it to all of the others. A peculiar sob/scream noise for a few seconds must have been Priekahm; it sounded like her suppressor wasn’t quite working and fluid had started to flow into her lungs without it, so that she was panicking and choking. There were quick, hasty footsteps, Poiparesis’s soothing voice, Soikenn’s low murmur, and then I heard Soikenn say “I think I have it working now” and Poiparesis add “Looks good, she’ll be fine.”

  That completed getting us into the bunks. “Now,” Poiparesis said, “last review. The ship will be running robotically for about a fifth of a day. The worst will be over after the first twelfth of a day, but do not try to get out of your couches until you’re allowed to. Remember that although you can lift several times your body weight with your thigh and hip muscles, most of your body is too delicate to take so much force.

  “I’m afraid the only amusement we can offer you is the screen over your couches, which will be showing you some scenes from outside. You’ll miss the most dramatic part anyway, first of all because you’ll probably black out—I hope so, because that’s about the most comfortable thing that can happen—and secondly because even if you do manage to stay awake, your eyes will distort under the force of the acceleration.

  “I’m afraid during the high acceleration you will be just about as alone as you’ll ever be—even though the rest of us are only a body-length away, no one will be able to reach you.

  “I know you’ll all be brave about it, and if it’s any consolation, the pass at Zoiroy will be much more gentle than this one. And remember that everyone back on Nisu is holding their breath right now; if billions of prayers to the Creator and to Mother Sea can do us any good, we have them. Now I have to get to work on securing the adult crew and myself; I’m sorry I can’t be with you right up to when the acceleration starts. If I have any advice at all, it’s to try to sleep through the whole thing. Think about squeezing that anesthesia button! See you for our next meal.”

  Then he passed out of sight from my acceleration couch. The support liquid felt like the worst case of constipation I’d ever had in my life and I couldn’t imagine how Poiparesis was enduring having to walk and move, filled with it, while he got the adults secured.

  He had told us many times that we ought to just sleep through it. Even now I had only to extend one finger toward the anesthesia button by my left side, and I would be knocked unconscious within a minute or so. At peak acceleration, the brief period when we wo
uld be pulling more than twenty times the force of gravity, I would not be able to move that finger, so if I found I really couldn’t stand it, it would be too late then.

  But none of us had had any patience for the idea of going through the most dangerous part of the voyage—and the part that only two people, Steraz and Baibarenes, the test crew, had been through before—asleep in bed. Or at least that’s what we all said. It suddenly occurred to me that Poiparesis had rigged things so that if one of us decided to be unconscious, none of the others need ever know.

  The balance organ in my forehead was hurting, so I snorted hard to clear it. That drew more liquid into my lungs, and though the IV oxygenator was working fine, it still triggered a spasm in my chest. I could feel all of my hearts pounding, and there was an unpleasant gurgle from my blood mixer; I shook myself and the sloshy gurgle subsided. I could hear the others snorting and sloshing, and the sound was so funny I began to giggle, snort, and slosh as loudly as I could. Pretty soon we were all giving a whole concert with our internal organs, and then Poiparesis said, “All right, everyone, we all know what noises you can make, now stop that!”

  We subsided into occasional giggles, and now and then Mejox would softly snort, which would send us all off into laughter again—a sound that grew higher in pitch as the liquid slowly filled our lungs. I don’t know if Poiparesis was too busy to do anything about it, or had decided to let us get our high spirits out of our systems.

  At last we heard the captain’s voice, from her couch. “All right, everyone, let me just remind you all that I expect everyone to bear up well, but courage has nothing to do with this—it’s out of our control—and all we have to do is survive. I know you’ll bear it with patience. I have complete confidence in you, as does everyone back home on Nisu. And now I’ll put in my mouthpiece before Poiparesis comes around and makes me do it. Good luck!” Before she switched off her microphone, we heard the gurgle of liquid into her lungs. It set us all giggling—or rather sloshing—again.

  Long ages crept by and I watched my screen. I itched in a couple of places and quickly scratched those, always watching the clock on the screen to make sure that it wasn’t too close to sail deployment. Poiparesis had told us that if we got a hand trapped under ourselves, very likely we would break every bone in that hand and in our wrists, and give ourselves deep bruises in whatever flesh lay across the hand.

  Time crawled by slowly. The screen showed the sun bloated and swollen, almost as large as Sosahy seen from Nisu’s surface; the filters over the cameras meant we were seeing less than one ten-millionth of the actual brightness outside, and yet the screen was becoming uncomfortably bright to look at.

  If we had tried to use a rocket, to have made the trip to Setepos and returned within our lifetime would have taken a vastly larger ship that would have had to be almost all antimatter. As it was we had burned virtually all the antimatter of Nisu, nine years of production, in our booster at takeoff, and the speed it had gotten us up to would have taken tens of thousands of years to get us to Setepos. We needed more power than all of Nisu produced in a year, and we needed it early in the trip so that we could travel as much of it as possible at high speed.

  The solution was a light sail: a huge, flat parachute made of a super-thin weave of beryllium and boron, only about three hundred atoms thick.

  Light exerts pressure. Ordinarily the pressure is so slight we don’t feel it, but if it’s exerted by a really bright light on a really large surface, it adds up.

  The sail for Wahkopem Zomos was wider across than the Ring Island, and all the billions of people on Nisu lying down on it wouldn’t have covered a twentieth of its surface area. But I had held scraps of the sail material in my hand, and they were so light that they couldn’t be felt. In essence the sail was one big beryllium-boron molecule, the individual atoms woven in an intricate matrix that was stronger than any other material (except for the spun-diamond shroud lines that held it to our ship) and yet so thin that if you put a sheet of it next to the ceiling in an ordinary room and let it drop, its air resistance was so much greater than its weight that it might spend an eightday spiraling down to the floor.

  We would use this wisp of a sail first to catch the fury of the sun, kicking us up to fourteen times our current speed, and then to pick up another kick in our close pass by Zoiroy, so that as we left the system we would be moving at over twenty times our present speed. Then we would move onto the beam of the giant laser that had been built in solar orbit, and that would speed us up until at peak we were moving at two-fifths the speed of light, just about eighteen years from now. All of the energy required to reach such a tremendous speed—ninety times what the whole world of Nisu used in a year—would be caught and handled by that thin film of woven atoms.

  The clock crawled downward. The outside temperature on the ship was just below the point where we would have begun to glow cherry red, and the antenna of our reradiation system, which carried heat from the ship surface into a high-temperature collection system and then got rid of the energy as short-wavelength electromagnetic radiation, was glowing a strange deep violet color whenever the camera looked at it; most of the energy was now radiating away as ultraviolet light.

  Still the compartment was growing warmer and warmer, even though we were in one of the coolest parts of the ship.

  I was afraid to scratch, and one of my legs was itching fiercely. I watched the last thin wedge of remaining time, a mere thousandth of a day, vanish from the dial.

  The view shifted to the forward camera. A streak shot out in front of the ship—the rocket to deploy our sail. Then a long silvery strand, pointing straight ahead, became visible—this was the sail itself, not yet unfolded, looking like an ultrafine wire reaching into infinity. A forty-eighth of a day crept by as it spun out from the spool. The distant glare of the rocket motor dwindled to nothing, and still the sail kept streaking out in front of us.

  Finally a large white lump—the nuclear-fusion charge at the base of the furled sail—shot out into space, taking only an 8192nd of a day to zip out farther than we could see and reminding us just how fast the rocket still pulling the sail was going. After the charge, the shroud lines—hundreds of strings of spun diamond—followed the same line out into space. These were transparent, so that rather than shining in the sun like the sail, they glimmered and flickered. The shroud lines were so fine, yet so strong, that they would cut right through steel with a touch—the winches on which they were wound had to be jacketed with woven spun diamond. All of this took a long time. I could probably have scratched, I told myself, if I had realized how long the sail would take to deploy, but it was certainly too late now.

  I thought I couldn’t endure watching the glistening stream pour into black space for one instant longer. It went on, flickering white-hot once it cleared the ship’s shadow and moved into the three-million-times normal sunlight, far out in front of the ship so that we seemed to be on a thin line to infinity. Time crawled by. A brilliant white silent flash, like a sudden star, announced that the little nuclear-fusion charge had been set off to deploy the sail.

  The bright star in the viewscreen widened into a circle, swelling quickly. The nuclear-fusion charge had been reflected from the inside mirror surface of the sail, and the pressure of its light shoved the sail open at enormous speed. As I stared up at the viewscreen, the sail spread across it, over and over, a dozen times in the space of a single breath as the view kept scaling up to get the whole sail onto the screen. Each time it scaled up it darkened, as the filters compensated for more and more intense light being reflected back toward us.

  The couch swung on its pivot and settled with my back pointing toward the rear of the ship, as “down” changed all but instantly from outward to rearward. The screen scaled up twice more and became stable. I felt a low vibration through my back as the blast of sunlight caught the open sail and flung it wide open, the shroud lines yanking the ship closer to it.

  I thought of squeezing the button for anesthesi
a, but I wanted to know what this would be like—

  Acceleration rammed me deep into the couch and kept increasing. Too late. I could no longer lift my hand. The force pulled my face backward, my lips sliding over my mouth guard. The liquid in my lungs was no longer uncomfortable, but welcome, as it held my chest open against the fierce pressure.

  I felt as if I were pressed between blocks of stone. I fought for breath; even with the added pressure it took great effort to force my chest to expand. My eyes began to ache, I had trouble blinking to relieve their dryness, and it was getting dark around the edges of my vision. The mouthpiece felt like a giant piece of lead jammed into my jaws. I thought about how hard I was being pressed into the couch and then couldn’t focus enough attention even for that.

  The world became dark gray, and then sank to black.

  At first all I knew was that I was beginning to dream again. I dreamed I lay on my back, and Mejox was piling rocks on top of my chest. I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t cry out to him to stop. I looked up at his face and saw that he seemed to be in agony himself, that he didn’t want to do this to me, that it was all a mistake—

  First dim gray. Then shapes. I began to be able to think, a little, and though my eyes ached and I was troubled by abrupt flashes of light (they said those would happen from the stresses on the vision center in the brain), I was able to see the screen and its clock a little. I had been unconscious for more than a sixteenth of a day. I was still almost nine times as heavy as normal, and it wouldn’t be safe to move, but I seemed to be all right, though I felt as if I had been beaten all over with a heavy stick and then rolled under a huge wheel.

  Finally the indicator lights showed that I could expel the liquid from my lungs. I clicked the control button to tell the machinery yes, do it, by all means.

  Instantly the suction through my mouthpiece began to take up liquid; I felt my chest spasming and struggling as it collapsed, but the pain was welcome as the liquid was pulled out of me. Then the tongue depressor and tooth grips released, and the mouthpiece lay inert on my face, still intrusive, but no longer forcing its way in.