Under Heaven's Bridge Read online

  “What makes you so sure?” Sixkiller challenged her.

  Keiko glanced at Andrik. He was eating again, spooning noodles into his mouth and following the others’ debate with merry eyes. Through no doing of his own he was becalmed in the eye of the storm. Grinning, he offered Keiko a portion of his bean-curd entrée. She shook her head, ran a concerned finger along his wrist.

  “Very well,” Naomi Davis was saying. “Let’s suppose the Kybers have drastically modified their natural evolution. Let’s suppose they’ve rebuilt themselves. They still must share with the rest of Onogoro’s biota an organic archeohistory going back hundreds of millions of years. Even the form of their rebuilding—if you really want to call it that—is probably inspired by the adaptive morphology of the local wild life.”

  “Adaptive morphology?” Sixkiller echoed her.

  “Certainly. You know those rubbery tortoise-things that are just now hardening off among the lithops. You’ve seen them. And what about the big, mottled ‘snailies’ secreting their ceramic shells? The Kybers’ rigid exoskeletons may seem several steps above these examples in complexity, I grant you—but I’m still convinced that our aliens once wore quasi-human skins that periodically hardened into a kind of protective armour. Working from the natural processes of the Onogorovan mock-tortoises and snailies, they may have painstakingly redesigned themselves.”

  “Why?” asked Clemencia Venáges, deflecting from Sixkiller a degree of the others’ civilized fury. “To adapt to the cycles of freeze and thaw here on Onogoro?”

  “It’s a possibility,” replied the ecologist.

  “Only if they evolved here,” Sixkiller said. “And they didn’t. They’re incapable of evolution.” His wounded doe’s eyes bleeding entreaty, he nodded at Olivant. “Tell them, sir. Tell ’em why it’s unlikely anything on Onogoro evolved here.”

  Olivant, a mane of blond hair clasped in a metal barrette at his nape, pushed his tray aside. “At the moment, Farrell, I can’t make any sort of authoritative pronouncement about life on this world. I’ve been too busy stargazing.”

  “That’s a hedge. Tell ’em what we’ve recently discovered.”

  Keiko looked at the floater pilot as did Andrik and the others. He was using “we’ve” in a ridiculously proprietorial manner, even if he had recently been privy to some important confidential information. By no stretch of the imagination was he a scientist.

  “Tell them,” Sixkiller urged, “that we’ve goofed, that we’ve jumped to a false conclusion. Namely, that this planet is habitable simply because it’s inhabited.”

  “You’re speaking in riddles,” Keiko said, exasperated. Turning her head to find Andrik comically shushing her, she realized that she had just drawn Sixkiller’s gaze back to their table.

  “Even so, he’s correct about Onogoro,” Craig Olivant conceded, rescuing them again. The astrophysicist proceeded to sketch great, boomeranging ellipses in the air with his bearlike right arm; the ellipses gyrated overhead around an imaginary sun.

  “This orbit around Dextro-Gemini isn’t stable,” Craig told the group. “That means our planet can’t have been in orbit longer than a few thousand years, if that. It’s been captured. And, as Farrell has been rather smugly hinting, it’s going to be uncaptured again.”

  Andrik’s wrist jumped under Keiko’s hand. “When?” he asked.

  “Soon,” Craig said, “speaking in terms of standard months. Probably when Onogoro is approximately equidistant between Dextro and Laevo—an event that will occur on this very revolution.”

  Sixkiller put in, hurriedly, “And a planet that’s only been in orbit around its primary a few thousand years just isn’t going to support the kind of continuous evolution leading to the Kybers.”

  “There go your original victims of genocide, too,” Betti Songa pointed out. “What do you really have against the Kybers, Farrell?”

  “That they’re machines,” he replied readily enough. “That they’re dead things mimicking the essence of life and making us believe in their clumsy masquerade. Somebody or something sinister put them here.”

  “Right now,” Keiko said, a sad guilt descending upon her like a shroud, “they’re not even mimicking life.”

  Andrik turned his chair so that he was facing Craig Olivant. A tic at the corner of the xenologist’s mouth betrayed his excitement.

  “Maybe their lack of animation is preparation for the inevitable decoupling,” he said, an unthinking sop to Keiko’s conscience. “They were pretty quiescent when we arrived, back at the end of ‘summer’ when the temperature must have topped all of twelve Centigrade. The colder it got, though, the more animated they became. It was almost as if they were reacting to our presence, unthawing as we fed the example of life into their environment. I had actually begun to think the cold was stimulating them.”

  “Me, too,” Betti said. “Until Keiko’s student began playing hooky and they all clocked back down again.”

  “Exactly,” Sixkiller interjected. “ ‘Clocked back down’—like wind-up mechanisms running at someone else’s bidding.”

  Andrik ignored this. “Craig, now that we’re swinging out toward Laevo, what’s going to happen?”

  The astrophysicist raised his thick, blond eyebrows and smiled apologetically. Shaking his head, he gathered his dinnerware together. “Is everyone finished eating?” he asked, standing.

  “Why?” Andrik asked in turn.

  “Because if you are, I’ll take all interested parties outside to illustrate our situation with a visual aid.”

  FOUR

  Bundled in heat-recycling parkas, five people left the refectory and strolled across the gleaming deck plates of the Platform to its western railing: Craig, Betti, Andrik, Sixkiller, and Keiko. Surprisingly, it was still twilight, the sky a disquieting mauve and the plain afire with vermilion scintillations. The cold bit at Keiko’s lips, reached down into her lungs.

  There—over to the northwest—Dextro was a trembling tangerine sinking behind the line of broken mountains beyond the plain. The fog on the icy marshes east of the mountains flickered with quicksilver glints, and the wind hooting over the lips of the sunken Kyber atria sounded in her ears like discordant oboe music. Twilight always astonished Keiko. Every dreadnought of mist, every rounded gnarl of lithoid vegetation, every inhabited crater partook of the same bleak but beautiful strangeness. Although still not acclimatized to the forbidding peculiarities of Onogoro, in some ways she was happy that her candid wonder persisted.

  “Look there,” Craig said, jabbing a fat thermal mitten at the sky.

  Andrik exhaled a long plume of vapour. “That’s just Il Penseroso, isn’t it? Nothing unusual there.”

  Il Penseroso was Dextro’s massive inner planet, a rock ball twice the diameter of Earth and ten times its density. Onogoro had no natural satellite, but Il Penseroso showed the party on the Platform a twilit disc, as if it were indeed a sort of distant, poor-relation moon. Keiko thought the planet an eerie, breathtaking apparition.

  “ Hell,” said Craig, “that’s my visual aid. I’m fairly sure that our last conjunction with the inner planet had decoupled Onogoro’s weird ellipse around Dextro. The Kybers are going to fly off into deep space aboard a runaway planet. Us, too, if we remain.”

  In the aching twilight everyone studied the sky.

  “We can easily save ourselves,” Keiko finally announced, her teeth like icicle nubs against her tongue and lips. “But what about the Kybers? Can they survive being hurled into the void?”

  “Survive?” hooted Sixkiller. “Survival isn’t an innate attribute of machines. Persistence maybe, but not survival. Besides, they’re already dead.”

  “Perhaps they can,” Craig told her, as if the floater pilot had never spoken. Then, like a priest of infinity, he sketched in midair a looping figure eight.

  “Their salvation may be this: Onogoro is exchanged between the two suns every few thousand years. To the heavy inner planet circling Dextro, you see, corresponds another such
world circling Laevo. Il Penseroso over here, good ole El Pesado over there. Our assumption is that the lighter elements created during the origins of this system were all blown clear by the radiation pressures of the two suns. The result was two fat-boy inner planets and our own lovely, lonely Onogoro. Computer simulations in our observatory here and also upstairs aboard the Heavenbridge verify the workability of an alternating orbit for the Kybers’ world. Given these conditions, folks, you can have a permanently unstable orbit.”

  Keiko could feel her cold-numbed lips forming a smile. “The Kybers have adapted to periodic switchovers, then.”

  “The air will freeze,” Sixkiller objected. “Say your hypotheses about these alternating orbits and the aliens as living beings do happen to be correct. It’s still not likely that things as complex as the Kybers could evolve on a world that keeps passing back and forth between two suns, is it? What about the different intensities of radiation, the different sorts of climatic conditions that would result on Onogoro?” Even inside his plush-lined hood, the man’s face was offended and disbelieving.

  “How the hell could Craig possibly know for sure?” Andrik rejoined, tapping the floater pilot on the chest. “Are those possibilities less acceptable to you than the idea that Great Sinister Somethings put the Kybers down here to seduce humanity into sin? We’re not devotees of God the Machine, Sixkiller. We haven’t yet elevated the Kybers to Golden Calf status.”

  “If the alternating-orbit hypothesis is correct,” Craig quickly put in, “all I can hazard about the atmosphere is that it probably won’t freeze. The planet’s going to pick up heat from Laevo as it leaves Dextro behind. Winter’s going to get a whole helluva lot more wintery before the first spring thaw, sure—but that thaw’s gonna come, folks, it’s definitely gonna come.” The big man hunched his shoulders and nodded at the vibrant, falling sun. “Provided Dextro doesn’t …”

  “Doesn’t what?” Sixkiller prodded him.

  “Captain Hsi wants to talk to me,” Craig said. “He’s waiting in the observatory, and I’m late.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Sixkiller declared.

  “The hell you will!” Vapour curling draconically from the corners of his mouth, Craig glowered at the other man. “You’ll stay out of the observatory until or unless you’re invited to enter.”

  Keiko heard herself chuckling nervously. In his sudden explosive wrath the astrophysicist had become even more imposing than usual. The floater pilot, abashed, blinked at Craig, then clasped the railing with his mittens and stared lugubriously toward Dextro.

  “I’m late,” Craig repeated, as if apologizing. “It’s just that we may have to abandon Onogoro during transit between its decoupling from the Dextro orbit and its recapture by Laevo. These petty arguments about the nature of the Kybers will necessarily give way to close observation of the gravitational mechanics of the switchover, probably from aboard the Heavenbridge.” He paused again, then concluded: “If we’re permitted to stick around this system at all.”

  “Why wouldn’t we be?” Betti asked.

  “That’s what I’m not able to divulge just yet,” Craig replied. “I’m not trying to be unduly mysterious, either. You’ll learn soon enough—maybe even by tomorrow, folks.” He hunched his shoulders, nodded a curt farewell, and turned to lumber away toward the Platform’s lab complex and observatory.

  “Wait a minute!” Andrik shouted after him. “How long is this transit between Dextro and Laevo going to take?”

  Craig looked back toward them, the plush of his hood half obscuring his meaty face. “Using the former orbit around Dextro as a standard, Onogoro’s going to be sailing through no-man’s-land, the Dread In-Between Sea, for one and a third local years. That’s a little more than two E-years, Andrik.” He waved, resumed his trek toward the observatory.

  “You mean we’re going to have to abandon our study of the Kybers for two goddam years?” Andrik shouted.

  Craig, still walking, did not even look back. “Unless you’re willing to sit out the winter transit on this Platform,” he called. “Or unless you can entice a couple of Kybers aboard the Heavenbridge.”

  Andrik put an arm around Keiko’s waist and pulled her to him. The contact was so muffled that she felt grappled at rather than caressed. “Not bloody likely,” he muttered.

  “Hallelujah,” said Sixkiller quietly.

  Releasing Keiko, Andrik whirled on the man. “Ignorance spawns hatred, Sixkiller. In turn, hatred of the Kybers—if it prevails as an official attitude—is going to contribute to our remaining ignorant about them. How the hell can you justify this know-nothing, no win quackery? How the hell can you justify it even to yourself?”

  Sixkiller smiled, his eyes dancing. “See no evil, hear no evil—”

  “Speak no evil,” Andrik concluded in disgust, shaking his head. “ You’re as phoney as a plastic peace pipe.”

  “Or as a ‘life form’ made out of bauxite and redwood, hey?”

  Keiko grasped Andrik’s upper arm with both hands, gently. “You sound like children, snotty-faced little boys. It’s cold out here, getting colder. I suggest that you both return to your dormicles.”

  “I’ll take this one to safety,” Betti said, pushing Sixkiller away from the railing. “Anyway, he and I have a board game to finish in the common room.”

  “I may be wanted elsewhere,” said Sixkiller evasively.

  “Then you’d certainly better get there, hadn’t you?” Like a collie outflanking a truculent tup, Betti herded the floater pilot toward the recreation inflatable near the dormitories.

  When Betti and Sixkiller had disappeared into the deepening umber shadows Andrik said, “What a lout. Even if he’s had no scientific training, he’s not an uneducated man. There’s no excuse.”

  “He’s afraid of the Kybers,” Keiko said.

  “Then he’s a coward as well as a lout.”

  Vaguely disappointed, Keiko shook her head. “His fear isn’t merely a private faint-heartedness. You know him to be courageous in the performance of his duties. It’s an abstract sort of fear on the behalf of all of us. He’s afraid for humanity, Andrik.”

  “He sees us all as Indians before the fateful coming of the White Man.” The xenologist laughed sardonically.

  “Perhaps he does.”

  “Well, Kei, his abstract fear is a cliché, and like most fears it stems from ignorance.”

  “Perhaps it does.”

  “And now it seems that even celestial mechanics are conspiring to put a holy imprimatur on the ignorance he worships.”

  “That’s not Sixkiller’s fault.”

  “I know.” Andrik released a heavy, cloudy breath, deliberately calming himself. “It still makes me angry.”

  They talked a little longer, and Keiko invited Andrik to spend the night in her dormicle. They had not slept together since the defection of her alien student, six local days ago. Since then, Andrik’s “chivalrous” refusal to discuss her failure had scarcely had the amicable effects of an aphrodisiac. Further, Andrik had been returning to the Platform these last several evenings morose and care-worn. The moratorium on their love-making had developed by unspoken mutual consent. This evening marked the first occasion in days that she had felt the need for both intimate conversation and physical closeness. Besides, the mass hibernation of the Kybers might be owing to the impending decoupling of Onogoro from Dextro rather than from any sin of commission or omission during her tutoring of the septa-prime. Now her lover appeared ready to discuss recent events, and she was ready to join her flesh with Andrik’s. Smiling faintly, the xenologist accepted her invitation.

  “Is it too early to sack out now?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she said, returning his smile. “You go back to the complex, get your things. I want to finish watching Dextro set. I’ll meet you in my dormicle, well, what about two hours from now?”

  “All right.”

  After some bantering small talk, Andrik put his nose to hers, Eskimo fashion, then trotted bac
k across the rime-coated deck plates to the warmth of the living facilities.

  Keiko, comfortable in her thermals despite the biting cold, watched Dextro sink behind the mountains. A flat orange glow spread across their jagged crests, then spilled down their flanks toward the lakes of fog hovering over the marshes east of the foothills. Beautiful—but the magic was surreal, an act of systematic delirium, as if an invisible hand had squeezed icy juice from the tangerine sun and then basted the mountains with it. The crater dwellings on the plain also got a quick swipe with that brush, and Keiko imagined that a few wakeful Kybers were staring up at the lamp-lit Platform even as she stared down across the twilight desolation of their world. What was she—what were any of her colleagues—doing here?

  A hand fell across Keiko’s shoulder.

  She started, swung about, and found herself confronting a wide-eyed Farrell Sixkiller, his irises marbled with the colours of sunset.

  “Dr Norn has one very basic and crippling hang-up,” the floater pilot informed her, not quite whispering.

  Keiko instinctively retreated a step.

  “I’ve been with him in the Kyber palaces, you know. He believes the aliens to be a genuine life form.”

  “So does Betti, even if she is a cyberneticist. So do I, for that matter. I taught one to speak Translic, after all.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand, Dr Takahashi. Dr Norn also believes that they embody an answer—maybe the answer—to the riddle of the cosmos.”

  Keiko laughed.

  “I mean it. He thinks them the key to the very meaning of our existence.”

  Certain that the man was touched with a peculiarly virulent form of “decoupling madness”, Keiko stared at Sixkiller.

  “It’s true,” he declared.

  “You’re distorting the nature of his involvement, Farrell, mistaking the depth of his commitment for—for I don’t know what.”