She pulled her attention away and, keeping a grip on a handhold, punched the intercom button. "Su," she called. "This is Joelle. Come." It might take the linker a few minutes to get shut of whatever she was doing.
"To go back to the deeps below the deeps, that will be like returning to the shore after inland years," Fidelio breathed.
"I know," Joelle said. The same ardor was in her. Holothesis shared with a Betan had dimensions no human partner could offer, among them the knowledge that her dissimilarities to him gave him an equal heightening. Together they had speculated whether the Others might not be several distinct races who formed groups that were permanently linked.
"It has been dry. . ." Fidelio's voice trailed off. He was not really capable of self-pity.
Pain on his behalf clenched. Her free hand sought his nearest arm, the upper right. The claws on that paw could have shredded her, but she felt simply warmth and velvet. "Oh, Fidelio," she whispered.
Your food stores are good for less than a year. You will die among glabrous, tailless, four-limbed trolls who can't unaided swim a single day; no wife will hold you that you may suckle her for the last time as you sink; we do not know how you ought to be mourned.
His un-Earthly gaze captured hers. "I would ask this of you, Joelle," he said calmly. She expected him to shift his glance at once, for a Betan stared hard only at someone who had angered him or someone whom he loved and was offering his faith to. He kept looking. The blood beat in her ears. "Be warned, it is no ripple, it is a wave."
"Yes, if I'm able."
"Now that I can use this equipment, let me be the holothete whenever we need a single one, as long as I remain."
For you have nothing else left, do you, Fidelio? She let go the handhold in order to clasp his arm doubly. "Y-yes."
"You can carry out searches of your own when I float at rest. In a while, the system will again be yours entirely."
Her eyes stung. God damn it, she wasn't about to cry, was she? Joelle shook her head; the drops flittered glittering.
"Is this not acceptable?" Did he sound resigned? How could she tell? "G'ng-ng, I understand, female of intellect. My request ebbs."
"No, no!" The force of her reaction dismayed her. Overwrought, short on sleep, the forebrain functional but the rest going into oscillation. If I don't take care, I'll have hysterics. "You misunderstood. I didn't mean a negative. Of course you take over. Any time, any time."
"You let water flow, Joelle. You are sorrowful[wounded? without vital nourishment? cast on a sharp-shelled reef?] Have I done that?
"No. You-no. Fidelio, we can link together!"
"Often, I trust, beginning today. I scent a splendor before us. But Joelle, dear mind-mate, more often-" He was stammering, she thought, and she saw the tendons grow tense behind his claws. "Alone in the All, I can raise Beta from it, wife, co-husbands, children, grandchildren, friends, the living and the dead alike, not mere memories but perceived realities in space-time; I can feel that they exist. It will be nearly as good as embracing them."
He stopped. Blurrily though she saw him, she sensed his astonishment. "You did not know this, Joelle? You have never done it yourself? No words will serve to explain. Well, I think I can show you, teach you, before I go down. I must certainly try. It is very fine that I can make you a gift."
She cast her body against his, held tight, and wept.
Susanne came through the door. "Ere I am," she said; and:
"Oh! Pardonnez-moi! Vous me pardonnerez!"
Awkward in free fall, she tried to withdraw. Joelle, twisting her neck about (cheek brushing along the pelt of her mind-mate, who had gently laid his two lower arms around her while the talons of the upper left stroked her hair) saw the linker sprattle in the doorway like a large black spider. When Fidello, with whom she begot new comprehensions, was soon to die, but before he died might lead her to Oneness with Eric and Chris and himself and- "Get Out!" Joelle screamed. "You ugly little bitch! Go!"
Susanne fled weeping.
"What has come loose?" the Betan asked anxiously.
Nobody, nobody should see me like this... except you, you're not human, you're my fellow holothete... I'm being irrational I was unfair to that linker. I must apologize. No. How can I explain? Anger: Why should I explain? Why must I alone forever be rational? Bewilderment: Why have I kept remembering Eric, these past weeks? He's no more than a linker either. Less than that, the last I heard - settled down, long married, become a not particularly important administrator in Calgary.
Joelle gasped for air. "N-n-nothing, Fidelio. I'm tired and- Hold me close, let me rest a while. Then I'll get a sleeping pill,"
from our medical officer, that Mulryan woman; well, she may have the grace not to try sympathizing, "and... afterward I'll be in better shape to... oh, Fidelio!"
Suzannr sought her cabin, saying no word to anyone, apart from informing Caitlin that she wouldn't be in the mess for dinner.
Next mornwatch she entered the computer center expressionless. "I'm sorry I yelled at you," Joelle greeted her perfunctorily, in English. "I was feeling distressed on Fidelio's account. He's an old friend."
"I understand, madame," the linker replied with care; and they went about their mutual business.
Actually Susanne had little to do beyond monitoring, to make certain the union of Joelle, Fidelio, computers, and instruments did not start going subtly agley. It did not; the bugs were finally out of the system. The two holothetes joined awarenesses as two lovers who know each other well join bodies, and became more than the sum of themselves, and let the universe pour through them.
Much they already knew from observations and deductions made by their shipmates. The bearings of neighbor galaxies showed this region to be approximately five hundred light-years from Sol in the general direction of Hercules. That information made various bright stars like Deneb and objects like the Orion Nebula identifiable, which in turn defined the position more precisely. (As if it mattered. A single light-year is an abyss wherein imagination drowns.) The sun was a red dwarf of type M, mass 0.02 Sol, luminosity 0.004 Sol. It had five planets, none of them in the least Earthlike, all seemingly barren-except, perhaps, this largest, around which the T machine and Chinook were orbiting at a distance of some twenty-four million kilometers.
That world was a giant, ninety-two percent the mass of Jupiter, attended by a dozen moons. Its mean distance from its primary was 1.64 a.u., a bit further out than Mars is from Sol. Like Jupiter, it had a vast atmosphere, chiefly hydrogen, secondarily helium; lesser components included ammonia, methane, and more elaborate organic compounds. Also like Jupiter, it was hot from contraction; the upper air was thin and space-cold, but lower down it thickened and warmed, until water became a vapor and storms raged that were the size of lesser planets. Most of its bulk was liquid, though sheer pressure, despite temperature, kept solid a metallic core equal to about five Earths.
Spinning around once in ten hours and thirty-five minutes, it generated an immense magnetic field which trapped charged particles from the sun. However, the latter was so feeble a radiator that these Van Allen belts were nowhere near the Jovian intensity. No human could safely linger long in them; but, given her electrostatic defenses, Chinook could drop down through them and climb back up without those aboard getting a dosage to worry about.
She would have a reason to.
Joelle and Fidelio would have lost themselves in sun, moons, ambient magnificences and subtleties, every uniqueness. Hardly had they settled into the wonderful kaleidoscope, however, when a thing tugged at the fringes of their consciousness. They dismissed it a while, explored a vortex, found out why an inner globe rotated widdershins, established that this whole system was older than Sol's; but the thing would not go away. Almost impatiently, they brought their double mind to confront it. Hertzian emission from the world they were circling, yes, surely, what else would you expect?
The fact leaped forth.
Lightning, synchrotron effects, a hundred separate sources were putting forth radio energy yonder. Each had its set of patterns, which the holothetes understood in the way that a ballet dancer understands how another is executing a par seul. But one small element was like a flute, defiant and variable amidst the uproar of a gale at sea- Perhaps in a decade of concentrated effort, unaided humans would have made this discovery. The holothetes realized instantly that here was nothing which unliving nature could produce: therefore, that they were overhearing the discourse of beings which were alive and intelligent.
Afloat in the common room before his crew, the planet splendid at his back, Brodersen said into a hush: "Yeah, I do believe we should go look."
"The hazard is too great," Joelle objected. `We're safe in orbit. We can keep signalling."
"Till we start starving?" Dozsa snorted. The effort to get a response had been his. "We could, you know."
"Really?" Caitlin asked. "And why should that be? Have you not been sending on their wavelengths, and a mathematical signal they cannot mistake?"
Dozsa smiled through the weariness on his broad features. "You've been too busy to hear the news, no, my dear? Well, the basic problem is the sheer size of that world. And, yes, the natural background at those frequencies, the noise level. Without holothetics, we might never have strained the information-carrying fraction out. It's a mere by-product of broadcasts. The natives, whoever they are, have no reason to listen for calls from outside, I am sure. We must use a tight beam, to get a power they cannot miss picking up and identifying. But then we touch just a very small area." He gestured at the tawny globe. "The whole of it is huge. And the broadcasting sources aren't fixed, they appear to be constantly moving around."
"I'd like to know how that's done," Brodersen remarked, "or how electronics is possible there."
"At any rate, I have been making the attempt on the-off chance, do you say?" Dozsa went on. "Although mainly to pass the time while others collected more planetological data. The probability of our striking a receiver which happens to be tuned to the precise right band is-" he released his handgrip for a moment to shrug the more eloquently-"about like the probability of our guessing the path around the T machine which will get us back to the Solar System."
"Besides," Rueda pointed out superfluously, "we're under a time limit. Exercise will not maintain our health indefinitely in free fall. We must soon have weight. Our reaction mass is limited, and if we go into spin mode, that's irreversible; we'll lie in orbit forever."
"Therefore, either we quit here and jump through a random gate, or we make an effort to contact the natives," Brodersen summarized. "I vote for sticking with what we've got till we know it's useless." He could give tactical orders to be obeyed on the spot, but in a loneliness like this, a captain who did not consult the strategic wishes of his followers would not long remain captain. "There is thinking, technologically sophisticated life here. And it's a life that maybe rates high with the Others, since they didn't put the T machine in a Lagrange position, but right in satellite orbit before God and everyman." He paused. "The dwellers could be Others themselves."
