That was very feeble warmth indeed.
Wan-To knew dismally that he could manage to survive, more or less, even with that sort of input—but he did not like the idea at all.
The only thing was that he didn’t see any better alternative . . .
Until he became aware that the tiny tick his few remaining sensors had registered some time earlier was, strangely enough, a sudden and wholly unidentified flux of tachyons.
CHAPTER 24
Nrina was flushed and excited as they boarded the bus. “It’s going to be a nice party,” she was saying. She seemed younger than Viktor had ever seen her, happily making sure her packages were stored and that Viktor got a window seat. “Have you got the cat? Please, don’t let go of it. We’ll have a couple of velocity changes, and we don’t want it flying around and hitting some other passenger in the face. You don’t get spacesick, do you?”
Viktor Sorricaine, who was fairly sure he was the oldest living space pilot in the known universe, didn’t dignify that with an answer. “How far are we going?” he asked as he settled himself into the soft webbing of the seat, carefully adjusting the belt so that it didn’t squeeze the restless little kitten on his lap. The dark-haired man across the aisle was staring at the little animal.
“Not far. Frit’s family lives on a fabrication habitat; they make things. It’s two or three levels down, but it’s less than a quarter-orbit away. It’ll take about two hours to get there.”
Two hours! A spaceflight of only two hours? But he had picked up on something else she had said. “Is it a family party? I’m not family,” he objected.
She looked at him in surprise. “That doesn’t matter. I am. Sort of, anyway. They’ll certainly be glad to have you; there are always guests at this kind of party—” She stopped to nod to a young-looking woman who was strolling languidly through the bus, glancing to see that everyone was strapped in. “That’s the driver,” Nrina informed him as the woman passed. “We’ll be leaving in a moment now.” The driver seated herself in the front of the bus, before a broad screen. Casually she pulled a board of pale lights and twinkling colors down into her lap, glancing over it for a moment. Then she touched the control that closed the entrance hatch behind them, and Nrina said, “Here we go, Viktor. Don’t let go of the cat.”
Then they were in space. In space!
Viktor was thrilled by the feel of the bus launching itself free of the habitat. It wasn’t violent. The launch was no more than a gentle thrust against the back of the webbing, a quarter-gravity at most. Viktor found himself grinning in pleasure, though he felt Nrina, beside him, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. Absently, Viktor patted her knee with his free hand. (Under his other hand, the kitten didn’t seem to mind the acceleration at all. It was actually purring.)
Considered as a spaceship, the bus was—a bus. Even the old Newmanhome lander shuttles had been twice its size, but then they necessarily had to be; they had to carry the fuel and rockets capable of fighting a planet’s gravity. The bus had no such needs. All it needed were air and room for its dozen or so passengers, and engines enough to push it along through inter-orbital space.
Just outside Viktor’s window, it seemed, was the smoldering, bloody face of the brown dwarf, Nergal. The planet was less than a hundred thousand miles below them, almost hurting his eyes until Nrina indulgently leaned over him and darkened the polarization. Nergal-light wasn’t like bright sunshine, it looked hot—though only visible light came through the polarization, with the infrared frequencies screened out.
The word for it was “baleful.”
As the ship rotated Nergal slid away, and Viktor got a look at the habitat they had just left: A length of sewer pipe, half a mile long, spinning in stately slow motion, with odds and ends of junk hanging from it. Some of the appendages were the great mirrors that caught Nergal’s hot radiation and funneled it into the magnetohydrodynamic generators that gave them the power they needed to run the habitat. Some were probably communications gear; more were things Viktor could not even guess at.
Then that was gone, too, and Viktor turned to find Nrina looking at him with interest. “You’re excited, aren’t you?” she asked, placing her hand over his.
“I guess I am,” he admitted. “Oh, Nrina, it’s so good to be in space again! That’s what I dreamed about when I was a boy— Look, there’s another ship!” he cried as something the size of a family car slid rapidly past, only a mile or two away.
Nrina glanced briefly at the thing. “It’s just a cargo drone, probably nobody on it.” Then, reassuringly, she said, “This is quite safe, you know, Viktor.”
But it wasn’t safety that was on his mind, it was the glandular excitement of being in space. Viktor stared longingly at the nearly empty black sky.
It was so terribly black. So very little was left of the familiar sky. Without Nergal or the distant sun, there was nothing to see but an occasional glint—a distant habitat, perhaps, or another ship—and one or two more distant things: the surviving stars.
That was it.
The familiar spread of constellations that had always been there—always—simply did not exist anymore.
Viktor shivered. He had never felt so alone.
Chatter beside him reminded him that he wasn’t alone at all. Nrina had taken the kitten from him and was feeding it with a little object like a baby bottle, while half a dozen other passengers were clustered around in admiration, braced awkwardly against the mild thrust of the ship. “Yes, it is called a ‘cat,’ ” Nrina was explaining. “No, they’ve been extinct for ages. Yes, it’s the only one of its kind now—I just finished it—but if it lives I think I’ll make a mate for it. No, they aren’t wild animals. People used to have them in their houses all the time. Didn’t they, Viktor?” she appealed.
“What? Oh, yes, they make great pets,” Viktor confirmed, recalled to reality. “They do have claws, though. And they needed to be housebroken.”
That led to more questions (What were “claws”? What was “housebroken”? Could they be trained to do useful things, like gillies?) until the driver broke up the party. “Everyone get back to his seat, please,” she called. ‘We’ll be matching orbit with the target in a moment.”
As the little ship swerved Viktor saw what was waiting for them. This new habitat was also cylindrical—no doubt because that was the best shape for an orbiting people container—but along its perimeter were a dozen rosettes of air hatches where odd-looking little ships had attached themselves. “They’re raw-materials gatherers,” Nrina explained when he asked. “This is a manufacturing habitat, didn’t I tell you? That’s what Frit’s family does, manufacturing. Those things—I suppose you’ve never seen them before—they are set loose here. Then they go out to the asteroids and so on to grow and reproduce themselves and bring back metals and things to use—”
Viktor felt a start of recognition. “Like Von Neumann machines?” he asked, remembering the ore-collecting nautiloids that he had encountered so often in the seas of Newmanhome.
“I don’t know what those are, but—oh, look! That must be Pelly’s ship!”
And Viktor forgot the Von Neumanns, because as the habitat rotated under them he saw what Nrina was pointing to. Yes, that was a ship, a real spaceship, hugged to the shell of the habitat. The ship had to be nearly a thousand feet long by itself, and it in turn had hugged to its own shell a lander larger than their bus. He stared at it longingly. That was more like it! A man could take pride in piloting a ship like that . . .
“Maybe Pelly will be at the party,” Nrina said with pleasure. “Anyway, we’ll be getting out in a minute, Viktor. Do you want to take the cat?” She passed the kitten to him and then, leaning past him, looked with disfavor at the habitat. “It doesn’t look like much, does it? It’s so big. It has to be, I suppose, because they do all sorts of industrial things there. I don’t think anyone would live there if they didn’t have to. Still, it’s quite nice on the inside, anyway. You’ll see.”
What she said was true. On the inside the factory habitat was nice, very much so, but it took Viktor a while to find that out.
Its design was not like the one they had come from. It was almost a reversal of Nrina’s, in fact. Instead of a shell of dwelling places surrounding a core of machinery, this habitat’s machinery was all in the outer shell. The passengers exited the bus into a noisy, steel-walled cavern, with the thumping, grinding sounds of distant industrial production coming from somewhere not far on the other side of the wall. Then Viktor and Nrina and the kitten took a fast little elevator, and when they emerged Viktor saw that the whole heart of the cylinder was a vast open space. Great trees grew along the inside of the rim, all queerly straining up toward the axis of the cylinder. There a glowing rodlike thing stretched from end to end to give them light. The whole place was almost like a vast park, rolled around to join itself.