Berserker's Star Page 9

  In this neighborhood, the outcome of a slight mistake might be the smearing of ship and occupants together into a thin film of newly created neutrons on the pulsar’s surface. Or tidal forces could spin them into thin threads of exotic matter, crushing even neutrons into quarks, before spattering them down into the black hole’s event horizon, as heavily redshifted, eternally fading images.

  The hole itself was never visible, even at this close range. What one saw was the event horizon, a fiercely spinning, slightly and swiftly wobbling chunk of blackness, dark as a berserker’s heart. This ebony core, bulging on one side, was outlined by a tight-fitting, narrow ring of scalding brightness.

  Harry’s passenger said: “I want to know everything about this system, everything I can. Where do they get such names? I mean, Ixpuztec?”

  “Usually from someone’s ancient god of the underworld.”

  The bulge was visibly wobbling as they looked at it, a much slower cycle imposed on the incredibly rapid spin.

  Lily was fascinated. Most people would have been. “What makes it look like that, kind of lopsided?”

  “The way it spins. That makes it suck in passing starlight faster on one side than the other.”

  ” ‘Suck in passing starlight.’ I don’t understand.”

  Harry grunted.

  “How fast does it spin?”

  “Would you believe me if I told you?”

  Lily turned away from the port, leaning on the bulkhead as if she needed it to prop her up. She was giving him a long, thoughtful look. “I think I would tend to believe almost anything you told me, Harry.”

  He cleared his throat, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. “Then over here, by contrast, we have a pulsar.”

  By contrast, the neutron star called Avalon did not look all that strange—not for a pulsar. Not, at least, when seen from a distance of a quarter of a light-hour. When you were simply gazing at that body through the Witch’s optical telescope, it was possible to miss the fact that the star contained the mass of a normal sun, packed into the circumference of an Earth-like planet. To the unaided eye it seemed to glow fiercely with rather ordinary light, in almost the spectrum of a dutiful, ordinary star.

  Eventually, after a long long time in human terms, it would lose its fire and cool off. Even now the source of its visible radiation was different from an ordinary star’s. Light was not erupting from the stellar surface, which looked polished and metallic, almost dark, when Harry dimmed down the scope’s optics enough to let him see it. Most of the radiant glare of the neutron star came from the superhot thin gas that fell in endlessly toward that surface, drawn from nearby space by the star’s horrendous gravity— a kind of solar wind blowing in reverse.

  The Witch’s autopilot had discovered and locked on to one of the prescribed safe paths for spacecraft approaching the system. This avoided the plane of the monster beam of X rays that swept space in time with the pulsar’s spin—one rotation every two seconds, a peculiarly slow rate for a neutron star.

  Ordinarily Harry would have found any system containing both a pulsar and a black hole interesting, well worthy of some time spent in contemplation. But all of the Maracanda system’s other oddities paled to insignificance when Harry got a good look at their destination, the “habitable body” his data bank still refused to call a planet.

  Lily appeared to be just as astonished as Harry when she studied the image taking shape on the holostage—if “taking shape” was an accurate description of the process. If asked to be candid on the subject, Harry would have said the object was only attempting to take shape and not succeeding very well.

  It deviated from the spherical even more than the black hole did.

  As if this might be some new, especially outrageous trick intended to keep her away from Alan, Lily protested: “But it isn’t round.”

  Harry was slowly shaking his head. “No, it sure ain’t.” In fact, Maracanda was notably more lopsided than the black hole.

  They couldn’t call it even approximately spherical. No, it was more like a long, thin hen’s egg. From certain angles it appeared to be only one or two hundred kilometers thick. All right, maybe that was an illusion. Maybe. But…

  And was Maracanda rotating or not? Trying more or less optical magnification did not help. Was the habitable body more like a thin egg, a doughnut, or a pancake? In Harry’s eyes its sprawling presence seemed to assume these shapes and others, successively, in a progression that was obviously part of some optical illusion.

  When called upon, the data bank offered calm explanations. But they were not entirely satisfactory.

  A computer could offer explanations, but it couldn’t very well judge whether you were capable of understanding them or not. After listening, Harry tried to come up with his own.

  “What we’re seeing is only a type of mirage, due to a certain—what they compare to a reverse solar wind. Infalling matter, and not all of it normal matter by any means, moving between us and that—thing, whatever it is, where there’s supposed to be a place where ships can land. You’ll notice that the apparent shape changes not only with our position, but with our relative motion.”

  If the celestial mechanics of the system ever brought the habitable surface of Maracanda into the way of the pulsar’s periodically slashing X-ray beam, the peculiar body evidently enjoyed some effective natural protection, or it never could have been considered habitable. Harry’s data bank was sternly emphatic about the astrogational hazard presented by the veils of infalling gas.

  The data bank had more to say, its voice slightly louder than usual, as if to emphasize that this was important. It was prescribing exact approaches, issuing warnings that Harry heeded, though he didn’t understand them right away. The same forces that protected Maracanda’s surface, effectively creating a livable world in a place where such a thing had no business to be, also tended to disable many kinds of complex machinery. There were large portions of the otherwise habitable surface, known as breakdown zones, where such modern tools as groundcars, radios, and spaceships almost always failed to operate.

  Harry puzzled over that statement for a moment, then put it aside. “All right, as long as we can be sure of a safe area to land, we’ll figure out the rest later. Let’s get back to basic questions, like what shape does this damned place have?”

  Harry’s data bank still seemed somewhat out of its depth in this discussion. It informed him soberly: “The real shape, that is, as mathematically defined, is somewhat more ordinary, almost spherical in fact, except flattened somewhat at the three poles.”

  Three poles. Sure. Harry’s mathematical education was comparatively limited, and right now he had other things to be concerned about, and besides, he hated arguing with machines. Instead of arguing he said: “This I want to see. Dispense with the live video for the moment. Draw me a diagram.”

  “The holostage can present only a relatively crude approximation,” the ship’s pleasant voice warned.

  “I understand. Go ahead.”

  Immediately there began to take shape upon the stage an image that looked like some clever madman’s proposed design for an optical illusion. This looked even crazier than the triple primary. Harry thought the object might have been meant to represent a slowly rotating sphere, except that it was not only turning but seemed perpetually on the verge of turning itself inside out. Harry wanted to keep staring, and at the same time he was glad to tear his gaze away.

  He waved it aside. “All right, I’ll take another look at this later. There is an area where we can land safely?”

  “There is.”

  “Can you handle this landing, autopilot?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then do so.”

  Lily looked suddenly relieved, as if the issue had been in doubt. A smile twitched at her lips, as she said: “You must repeat one hundred times: This is not a planet. This is not a planet. This is not…”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “It looks like at least a few other ships have
recently made it down in one piece,” Lily observed, nodding at the display that had just winked into existence on the holostage. It showed what was obviously a landing field, a flat expanse dotted here and there with symbols representing stationary spacecraft. The Witch’s assigned berth was conveniently marked.

  Harry didn’t comment. His ship’s data bank, which Harry updated at every opportunity, was firm on the subject: there was only one spaceport on Maracanda. Examining what little he could see of the flattened surface in the general vicinity of the landing field, Harry could see a sizable settlement, clusters of strange-looking buildings. The oddity was that they seemed to be made entirely of the same material as the ground on which they stood.

  When they were a few minutes closer, near enough for a telescope to give them a good look at the city, it seemed not to have been built up so much as carved out of the surrealistic land. The place looked more like a crude computer graphic of a landscape than any real place Harry had ever visited. To Harry, the look of this place suggested a crude attempt by some reality-designer to imitate the fine detail and subtle colors of good computer holographies, the type that aimed more at artistic effect than realism. Streaks of color, distributed according to no visible plan, ran across the varied surfaces in random patterns.

  Lily put a hand on his arm. The gesture seemed perfectly natural. “Look at that.”

  What the two people in the approaching ship had first taken to be vegetation, trees of some kind, appeared as they drew closer to be bizarrely shaped outcroppings of the land itself.

  Moments later, the Witch had set herself gently down near the middle of a large and almost disappointingly normal landing field. It was smaller than their departure site on Hong’s World, but otherwise very similar.

  Within a minute after touchdown, the ship requested captain’s permission to turn off artificial gravity altogether. The local gravity was so precisely close to standard normal that keeping it on would be simply a waste of power.

  “Permission granted,” said Harry after a moment. Then he wondered aloud: “Why should it match so closely? This isn’t even…”

  “A planet,” Lily finished. “But typical of azlaroc-type objects. I’ve been doing a little reading up on them over the past few months.”

  “You didn’t tell me that before.”

  “I was afraid to sound like an idiot, repeating the things I’d read.”

  Two minutes after touchdown, Harry and Lily, each carrying one meager pack of personal baggage, walked out of the Witch’s main hatch and down the little landing ramp to stand under what looked more like smooth, continuous cloud cover, or the interior of some huge artificial dome, than it did a sky. From high above they had been able to see the landing field, but looking up from the field was a different story. The gravity was evidently completely natural, yet he could feel in his bones and muscles that it matched the standard of Earth-surface normal with eerie precision.

  There were some ten or a dozen other ships visible on the broad field, which still had room for hundreds more. In the distance, a few people and groundcars moved about. Beyond that, a couple of kilometers in the distance, rose the modest towers of a peculiar city that, judging by its colors, seemed to have been built entirely of slabs and blocks of the strange ground.

  An ordinary people transporter, a comfortable-looking machine, roofless as if it were intended only for indoor use, and somehow incongruous in this setting, came rolling toward them from the direction of a distant building. It rolled on smooth treads, as it might have done on the majority of public spaceports across the settled Galaxy.

  The machine stopped in front of the waiting couple, and its scanners inspected them briefly. Then in a smooth voice it invited them to climb aboard for a ride to the office of the local Port Authority, where all visitors were requested to check in on landing.

  There were only open-air seats, tending to confirm something Harry’s data bank had told him, that this world saw neither rain nor snow. Space was provided for ten or twelve people, but no other riders at the moment.

  While being borne smoothly across the plain of the landing field, Harry looked around.

  “What is it?” His companion was suddenly alert.

  “The silence.” He made a vague gesture. “As if we were in a—sealed chamber somewhere.”

  Lily nodded. The quiet seemed unnatural for any out-of-doors location, anywhere in atmosphere. There was very little wind.

  “There are no birds,” she added suddenly. She was leaning a little closer to Harry in her chair, as if unconsciously.

  That was right, Harry thought, no birds. Nor any bugs either, as far as he could tell so far. No life forms casually present, at least on this part of Maracanda. Even the gradually approaching city and its people seemed too quiet, though now they could begin to hear some ordinary sounds of traffic.

  Harry also took note of the fact that one of the landed ships was a Space Force vessel. Only a scoutship, but enough to give evidence that the Force was active here. Smoothly rounded, house-sized mounds in the middle distance were identifiable as some of the ground defenses.

  Lily was silent for most of the ride, mostly leaning forward in her seat, as if trying to pull the rolling vehicle a little closer to her Alan. Harry could see nothing in her behavior to suggest that she had visited this world before.

  A scattering of traffic moved around the edges of the field, as it would at the spaceport of any normal planet. The people moving about on foot, ignoring the two new arrivals, looked much like travelers on any world with a mild climate. A minute later, the transporter deposited Harry and Lily at the main entrance of a building of modest size that seemed, like all the other visible structures, to have been built out of slabs and blocks carved or molded from the land itself, alternating with windows of imported glass. ADMINISTRATIVE CENTER read the graceful sign over the main entrance.

  Smaller signs indicated the way to various tenants of the headquarters, including the Port Authority office. Lily was carrying her pack as they started up to the entrance, attracting no attention from the people going in and out on business. She told Harry that she had brought with her a list of names, of specific addresses where she thought Alan might be found, and of religious officials who might be here and, if here, might be expected to know his exact location. Beyond that, Lily had only a vague idea of where to start looking for him.

  She tripped quickly up the gracefully shaped ramp and into the building, with Harry pacing less hurriedly behind. Inside, they found their surroundings reassuringly normal. This building had a roof, was fitted with more or less standard office decor, and was moderately busy. Half a dozen civilians, clothed in a cosmopolitan variety of styles, were trying to hold face-to-face meetings with two or three low-rankers in Space Force uniforms. Evidently the Force occupied a good share of this facility’s ground floor.

  Signs giving directions and advice were posted everywhere, their little arrows and fingerposts pointing in every direction, and Harry noted several signs marked with the stylized spiral that was the most common symbol of Malakó. These, in a script that changed from language to language while you watched, advised newly arrived pilgrims where they could go to establish contact with their fellow worshipers.

  Lily looked indecisive. Harry asked her: “So, where would you expect your man to be?”

  But Lily was already moving toward the map.

  All across one broad wall, so that everyone who came into the building saw it at once, stretched a long, rectangular holomap, twice as broad as it was high. A small printed legend proclaimed the entire livable surface of Maracanda. There was no suggestion that the domain portrayed was really not practically flat.

  No lines of latitude or longitude had been drawn, but directions of east and west, north and south, were clearly shown, as was the scale. The area marked as habitable, an enormous oval, extended for thousands of kilometers, not over the surface of a sphere, but across a vast plain. The area outside the oval, at the extreme edges
of the map, was filled with a chaos of symbolic little lines marked here and there with the terse comment: UNINHABITABLE.

  The east-west dimension of the oval was considerably greater than the north-south. Harry wondered on what basis the directions had been assigned, when just determining the poles of rotation seemed to be far from a simple matter.

  Lily had gone immediately to the map, and was pointing out some of its features, with the intent, abstracted air of someone just discovering them for herself. She was fretting about how far away the other settlements seemed to be. They were distant indeed, more than a thousand kilometers east of the only marked spaceport, where they had just landed.

  “The what?” Harry hadn’t heard the first time.

  “The Tomb of Timur. Also called the Portal, not to be confused with Port City, which is where we are now. Alan will be way over there, a thousand klicks from here, at the Portal. Or as near to it as he can get.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “When he gets enthusiastic about something, he becomes a real fanatic. Where else would he go?”

  Harry didn’t want to try to guess. Once more he scanned the map, thinking there was something wrong about it. It finally sank in on him that there were no other cities or towns marked anywhere. Not one. Port City on one edge of the vast oval expanse, and at the other end, Minersville and the Portal, separated by less than fifty klicks. And that was it. Oh, except for one small dot, four-fifths of the way across, labeled CARAVANSERAI. He wondered if, for some reason, a large part of the population had simply been left off the map.

  He observed: “All those other places are a long haul from here, well over a thousand klicks. And it seems spacecraft can’t or don’t land over there. How will you get there?”