Instantly, one of the starships disappeared from the starport. A cheer arose from the crowds as everyone rushed to get into one of the remaining ships. Peter and Wang-mu waited, waited, knowing that with every minute that it took to unload that starship on the colony world, the Little Doctor came closer to detonation.
Then the wait was over. A boxy starship appeared beside them. Peter had the door open and both of them were inside before any of the other people at the starport even realized what was happening. A cry went up then, but Peter closed and sealed the door.
“We’re inside,” said Wang-mu. “But where are we going?”
“Jane is matching the velocity of the Little Doctor.”
“I thought she couldn’t pick it up without the starship.”
“She’s getting the tracking data from the satellite. She’ll predict exactly where it will be at a certain moment, and then push us Outside and bring us back In at exactly that point, going exactly that speed.”
“The Little Doctor will be inside this ship? With us?” asked Wang-mu.
“Stand over here by the wall,” he said. “And hold on to me. We’re going to be weightless. So far you’ve managed to visit four planets without ever having that experience.”
“Have you had that experience before?”
Peter laughed, then shook his head. “Not in this body. But I guess at some level I remembered how to handle it because –”
At that moment they became weightless and in the air in front of them, not touching the sides or walls of the starship, was the mammoth missile that carried the Little Doctor. If its rockets had still been firing, they would have been incinerated. Instead it was hurtling on at the speed it had already achieved; it seemed to hover in the air because the starship was going exactly the same speed.
Peter hooked his feet under a bench bolted to the wall, then reached out his hands and touched the missile. “We need to bring it into contact with the floor,” he said.
Wang-mu tried to reach for it, too, but immediately she came loose from the wall and started drifting. Intense nausea began immediately, as her body desperately searched for some direction that would serve as down.
“Think of the device as downward,” said Peter urgently. “The device is down. You’re falling toward the device.”
She felt herself reorient. It helped. And as she drifted closer she was able to take hold of it and cling. She could only watch, grateful simply not to be vomiting, as Peter slowly, gently pushed the mass of the missile toward the floor. When they touched, the whole ship shuddered, for the mass of the missile was probably greater than the mass of the ship that now surrounded it.
“Okay?” Peter asked.
“I’m fine,” said Wang-mu. Then she realized he had been talking to Jane, and his “okay” was part of that conversation.
“Jane is tracing the thing right now,” said Peter. “She does it with the starships, too, before she ever takes them anywhere. It used to be analytical, by computer. Now her aiъa sort of tours the inner structure of the thing. She couldn’t do it till it was in solid contact with something she knew: the starship. Us. When she gets a sense of the inner shape of the thing, she can hold it together Outside.”
“We’re just going to take it there and leave it?” asked Wang-mu.
“No,” said Peter. “It would either hold together and detonate, or it would break apart, and either way, who knows what the damage would be out there? How many little copies of it would wink into existence?”
“None at all,” said Wang-mu. “It takes an intelligence to make something new.”
“What do you think this thing is made of? Just like every bit of your body, just like every rock and tree and cloud, it’s all aiъas, and there’ll be other unconnected aiъas out there desperate to belong, to imitate, to grow. No, this thing is evil, and we’re not taking it out there.”
“Where are we taking it?”
“Home to meet its sender,” said Peter.
Admiral Lands stood glumly alone on the bridge of his flagship. He knew that Causo would have spread the word by now — the launch of the Little Doctor had been illegal, mutinous; the Old Man would be court-martialed or worse when they got back to civilization. No one spoke to him; no one dared look at him. And Lands knew that he would have to relieve himself of command and turn the ship over to Causo, as his X.O., and the fleet to his second-in-command, Admiral Fukuda. Causo’s gesture in not arresting him immediately was kind, but it was also useless. Knowing the truth of his disobedience, it would be impossible for the men and officers to follow him and unfair to ask it of them.