The Architects of Hyperspace Page 2

  Plum jerked his quantarifle up and aimed it at the animal, shouting, “Sean!” The quantarifle radio picked up his command and its central processor radioed back, “Scanning.” The two-centimeter disk at the end of the rifle sprayed the landscape with infrared. An array of trillions of microscopic lasers pumped infrared photons, automatically adjusting their phases to scan the scene and amplify the reflected photons.

  Plum couldn’t find a clear target as the two wrestled in his screen. Every time the cat’s dark image eclipsed Sean’s bright one, he hesitated for fear of shooting his friend. Even a minor wound in this supercold world could be fatal.

  The cat and the Irishman struggled fiercely, rolling over and over. The cat tried to bite through his suit, at first recoiling at the hot touch, then toying with Sean as if he were a finger-lickin’ good drumstick hot out of the microwave. Sean’s muscles strained as he grabbed the cat’s ears, twisting it away each time it tried to bite his neck.

  Plum’s tiny quantarifle screen showed a false-color holographic image of the scene. By far the brightest image was the red picture of Sean, his metallic suit-lining strongly reflecting infrared. The cryocat glowed blue on the screen, merging with Sean’s struggling image. Plum held the gunstock in his left hand and twisted the joystick trigger with his right, trying to keep the cursor over the cat’s blue image. Once he squeezed the joystick, the power to the microlasers would increase a thousandfold, their phases would lock and all beams would converge wherever the cursor pointed, vaporizing a deep hole into the target. But the blue and red blobs changed places too rapidly for a safe shot.

  The cat tried to bite through the metal collar at Sean’s throat, while man punched beast in the underbelly. She roared horrendously, puffs of fog shooting out of her throat like dragon’s breath. Plum aimed the cursor at her head, at the center of an infrared haze.

  Suddenly the cat let go and rolled over on her side, on top of Sean’s legs. Her snarls softened as she fell asleep.

  “I say,” said Plum, “that’s quite a right hook you have.”

  “I wish I could take the credit,” said Sean, pulling his legs out with difficulty. “It’s the helium at work.” He flexed his legs and grimaced with pain, but was relieved to find no signs of broken bones. Plum helped him up, brushing green crystals off his suit. Sean puffed hard, catching his breath. “She’s hibernating now. Took a little longer than I calculated, that’s all. And she is a she, as you can see.”

  “How long will it last?”

  “Maybe half an hour, maybe an hour. Too many variables. I’ll leave you here with the cryogun while I go get the ship. Just shoot her again if she wakes up.” He handed the gun to Plum.

  “I’m glad she’s only a young one. It would have been rather unpleasant for you if she’d been fully grown.”

  “It wasn’t a picnic as it was.”

  “I wish we could hunt directly from the ship. It would be far more civilized to float above the bushes and shoot from the comforts of home.”

  “That wouldn’t be very sporting, and the ship’s engine noise would scare all the game away.”

  “Alas, that’s—”

  A tremendous blow threw the men to the sand, weapons flying. The creature that had been trailing them had jumped: a huge, fully grown cryocat. This was Mother, and she was not pleased with the treatment of her kitten.

  Her claws slipped on their suits. She rolled over and crouched in front of the two battered men. While Plum lay stunned on his back, Sean staggered to his feet.

  The cat roared deafeningly and slammed Sean with a massive paw, like a cat playing with a mouse. He staggered. She arched her back and ran the serrated edge of a wing across his chest. Sean fell into the lake, his suit ripped.

  He lay there a moment, half submerged in the lox, and an alarm went off. “Heat leak!” shouted the suit’s alarm voice.

  “Air leak! Heat overload!” The messages repeated until he groggily hit the mute key.

  Lox boiled all around him where it came into contact with the relatively warm suit. He stood up with enormous difficulty, every bone hurting in the heavy gravity, and felt a great chill in his chest.

  Looking down, Sean saw insulation powder pouring from the gash. Only the thin innermost metal layer was unbreached. He pushed the edges together, but whenever he breathed, a cloud of fog emerged as trapped air escaped, condensing in the frigid atmosphere. “Holy Mary, mother of God!” he exclaimed. His feet were starting to freeze as the boiling on carried away more heat than his suit could provide.

  “God damn!” shouted the Englishman over the radio.

  Sean glanced at Plum, who was struggling to stand up. The giant cat knocked the Englishman down on his belly and tried to bite off his helmet.

  Sean looked around for their weapons, but could not see them in the lox steam. He stepped onto the dry land and unsheathed his roidknife.

  The cat, unsuccessful at eating Plum’s helmet, turned her attention to his backpack and poked at it with a paw. She tore open a line and a pale blue fluid gushed out: the liquid oxygen of his air supply.

  Sean held the roidknife overhand, holding the gash closed with his other hand, and staggered up behind the cat. He squeezed the handle and stabbed her in the abdomen. The blade hardly made a dent in the rocklike silicate threads of her skin.

  “Christ almighty!” he shouted and stared at the roidknife. The indicator light was dead. “Frozen!” He threw it down. The knife relied on the field-ion effect and was all but worthless with the high-voltage supply in the handle dead from the cold.

  The cat snarled, turned, and slammed him onto his back.

  The animal put her two huge front paws on his chest and began to tear away at the gash. The weight, the cold, and the pain were unbearable. Sean screamed, then forced himself to think through the pain. Plum shouted, “Air!” and struggled to close the lox valve.

  The cat paused and stared at Sean, two of her blue eyes just centimeters away. Her breath formed snow puffs, vaporizing when they hit his suit. She pawed at the insulation again. Powder flew out and the gash grew bigger. Fascinated, she pawed the gash again and again, deepening it and chilling Sean more each time. Once she ripped through the inner lining, he would be dead.

  “Need oh-two!” shouted Plum.

  Sean slugged the cat in the belly with no effect, then had an inspiration.

  As she pounded him with jackhammer blows, he took a deep breath and unlocked his faceplate. As it swung open, the supercold atmosphere hit his face like a meteor shower. The moisture and carbon dioxide in his suit air froze into snow; oxygen became fog.

  The cat looked at him quizzically. She was so close, he could see every crack in her red, diamondlike teeth, though ice glazed his eyes painfully and his vision blurred.

  He blew into her face like a storm god.

  His breath shot out in a cloud of snow and fog. To another human, his exhalation would have been frigid, but cold as it was, it was incomparably hotter than anything the cat had ever experienced—like a blowtorch in her face.

  She screamed and jumped away, blinded.

  Sean slammed the faceplate back on. The alarm was screaming its warnings again.

  The cat ran around in circles, then splashed into the lake, swishing her face in the cold liquid and swimming away fitfully.

  Sean collapsed onto his back and Plum staggered over.

  “Help!” whispered Plum, falling to his knees. “Reserve. Air. Going!” He pointed at the torn lox line.

  On his knees, Sean reattached Plum’s lox line, sealing it with cryotape. The gauge on the lox cylinder was in the red. “No lox in your tank!” he whispered through frozen lips.

  “Bloody hell!” exclaimed the Englishman, falling on his face as the air ran out and his mind became foggy.

  Sean thought quickly and struggled to his feet. “Come here!” He dragged Plum over to the edge of the lake and yanked the lox cylinder off. Unscrewing the lid, he dipped the cylinder in the lake. The lox boiled furiously. He held
it under until it was half-full and his fingers began to freeze.

  He reattached the cylinder to Plum’s backpack and hit the converter key. The pump started the lox on its way to the heat exchanger, where the liquid was heated to body temperature for breathing.

  After two endless minutes, Plum stirred and smiled weakly. “Good show,” he muttered.

  Sean collapsed on the ground, his torso numb from cold. “I could do with some repairs myself,” he said with difficulty.

  Plum struggled to his feet and examined Sean’s suit. He grimaced when he saw the huge gash, got out the repair kit from Sean’s backpack, and poured insulation powder into the hole. Then he stretched cryotape over the gash, sealing it. Sean stared at him, too weak to move.

  “I shall get the ship,” said Plum. He glanced at the sky, which had become an angry red. “It does appear that hailstorm is coming.”

  Plum picked up Sean’s fallen roidknife. Parting him on the shoulder, Plum added, “I might have known an Irishman would have breath that could stun a tiger.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Sean said feebly.

  Chapter 2

  A few days later, while Sean and Plum traveled on their return trip toward the solar system, two scuba divers were swimming over an ancient Phoenician shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea.

  “We’ve only just excavated to the hull at this point,” said Ariadne Zepos, her breath hissing with soothing regularity over the communicator. “We’re following the ultrasonic scan.” The divers spoke in Italian, though either would have been comfortable conversing in English, French, Latin, or Greek. “We have to be extremely careful, of course, or the wood will crumble.” The woman was the beautiful young hydroarchaeologist known to some of her colleagues as the Greek Goddess, whose office was in the Italian undersea city of Delphinus, near Sicily.

  “This not being my specialty,” said Stefan Draganescu, “I leave the details to you. I am more at home in an office, but I am grateful for the opportunity to visit my grantees out in the field.” Stefan was the Deputy Minister of World Culture, a handsome, mature Romanian.

  “I’m so glad you came,” said Ariadne, looking lovingly at the ancient wood.

  “So am I,” said Stefan, looking with similar intensity at Ariadne.

  In their flippered envirosuits, they were warmed and air-conditioned like spacemen. Low-power laser beams crisscrossed the site, forming a giant reference grid. Several green-encrusted ribs of the vessel lay exposed like a skeleton, mingled with ballast stones. Three small fish swam among the ribs, mimicking the scuba divers; and the suits’ hydrophones picked up the squeaks of two amorous dolphins.

  “Sometimes,” said Ariadne, “it is difficult for us out here in the field, not knowing whether the ministry appreciates what we’re doing, or whether you’re going to shut off our funds and sink the project like this ship.“

  “I know how hard it is to be unappreciated.” He nodded against the languid resistance of the cool water. “Sometimes I think the minister thinks I’m just another clerk. But one day, they’ll need a new Minister of Culture, and there’ll be just one obvious choice.” He tapped his chest.

  Ariadne grasped a barnacle-encrusted oarlock, while the gentle current slowly swept her flippered feet over her head. “Just think—more than two thousand years ago, men were sweating on this trireme, breaking their backs over the oars. Perhaps one of them was your ancestor.”

  Stefan smiled and said, “Perhaps he was on his way to attack one of your ancestors.” He awkwardly grabbed a ballast stone to anchor himself.

  Ariadne smiled and Stefan added, “I hope we shall have a friendlier relationship. Much friendlier.” There was a gleam in his eye.

  “So do I,” said the woman—but without the gleam.

  Her speaker began to beep. She touched her wrist-panel and shut it off. “I have an urgent message. We’d better get back. The last time this happened, there was a sunken tourist submarine. I helped rescue them.” She released the oarlock and swam effortlessly toward the submersible. Stefan followed slowly.

  They jetted to Delphinus, that collection of underwater cottages, offices, hotels, aquaculture farms, and casinos sprawling across the bottom of the Mediterranean, interconnected by glasstex tunnels made of a transparent silicate strong enough to maintain one atmosphere of air pressure against a water pressure as much as three times that. At an average depth of fifteen meters, the complex grew out of the seafloor like an artificial coral reef. Enough greenish sunlight penetrated the depths so the aquanauts could see the spheres and domes of the nearer buildings, but so vast was the city that even in the clear waters only a small part could be viewed from one point. At the limit of vision, where water absorbed the delicate light, the city seemed a futuristic castle, its outlines soft and misty in the distance.

  They docked the little submersible by Ariadne’s office, a little hemispherical bubble on top of a short cylinder, much like an astronomical observatory. Mowed kelp surrounded the office, and schools of tiny fish were darting among the blades. A glasstex tunnel ran to the oceanography complex forty meters away, a giant Tinkertoy of spheres interconnected by similar tunnels.

  They passed quickly through the airlock and removed their helmets, remaining dressed in dripping envirosuits. A humid, salty tang penetrated the city’s air. Ariadne sat down at the console, facing the open sea.

  The entire hemisphere of the office was transparent glasstex, giving an uninterrupted view of the sea in all directions. To Stefan, watching the fish swim mere centimeters in front of his nose,there was an uneasy sense of claustrophobia, as if the ocean were about to crush him. But to Ariadne, the feeling of being a part of the sea, of almost breathing the very water that flowed by, was exhilarating.

  In front of her console, she glanced affectionately at her garden of living sponges just outside the dome. She shook out her long, brunet hair as she hit the keyboard. Small, colorful fish darted in and out between the sponges like butterflies among flowers. Stefan carefully combed his black hair and pointed beard in the window’s reflection.

  Ariadne listened to the English message on the viziphone: “Call Lunar Farside Operator. You have an interstellar message. Dial white-gray-purple, black-red-green.”

  “What is this, some kind of joke?” she said.

  “You get interstellar phone calls?” said Stefan. “I didn’t think it was possible.”

  “Of course not. I don’t even know anyone off Earth, much less from another star. Except for one family friend I haven’t heard from in years. But I might as well see what this nonsense is all about.” She dialed the color code and an operator came on the screen after a momentary delay.

  “Lunar Farside, Operator Red,” said the man in English.

  “I’m Ariadne Zepos,” she replied in Greek-flavored English, “and I had a message saying you had an interstellar call for me.” When no reply came at first, she tapped her fingers with irritation, forgetting that it took three seconds to get to the moon and back.

  The operator replied, “Glad to get you at last.”

  “Is this some kind of prank?”

  “This is the first time I’ve ever heard of an interstellar call,” said the operator. “It’s new to me too. After all, radio communication is limited to the speed of light. No, this is not a prank. And please pause at the end of each question, due to the three-second delay.”

  “I’m not used to talking to the moon.”

  “This is the situation. One of our antennas on lunar farside monitors for interplanetary distress signals. We got an alarm when it picked up a signal today. At first, we thought it was a ship on the asteroid run, but when we cleaned up the signal—it was very noisy—we found it had been transmitted from some interstellar location twenty years ago!”

  Ariadne looked at Stefan uncomprehendingly. “So why did you call me?”

  “Because he specifically asked for you. His name is Alexandros Zepos.”

  She turned pale. “Patera mou!”

  “W
hat the hell is going on?” asked Stefan, touching her shoulder.

  “Daddy!” Her knuckles were white as she gripped the keyboard. “He disappeared when I was a little girl. Went on an interstellar expedition. Never returned. Mommy said he died.”

  Stefan embraced her and stroked her hair.

  “Let me hear the message!” she shouted at the viziphone, her face bent just centimeters from the screen.

  The operator said, “This call will cost 340 geodollars, including special processing. Do you accept the charge?”

  “Of course!”

  “I recommend you record this.”

  Ariadne stabbed the record switch.

  After a moment, the image of a man’s head and shoulders filled the screen. The picture was blurred and streaked with electronic snow, but the pale, handsome features of a middle-aged man with silver hair and a noble, aquiline nose stood out, his dark eyes piercing the screen. He winced with pain. One shoulder was covered with blood. Thunder roared and the background flared erratically.

  “It really is Daddy!” exclaimed Ariadne, turning even paler. Her eyes fastened hypnotically on the screen.

  The image spoke in English: “I am Alexandros Zepos of Athens, Greece, Planet Earth. By the time you get this, I will be dead. Just find my wife, Katerina, and my daughter, Ariadne, and give them this message. When last I saw them, they were living in Zaragoza, Spain, but if they are no longer there, try Athens or Piraeus, Greece.”

  He shifted from English to Greek and spoke slowly, painfully. “Dearest Ariadne and Katerina, I wish that I could be with you now. We never got all the way to Beta Hydri. We found an anomaly in hyperspace and stopped to investigate. It turned out to be this diabolical world. All of the crew have died. I am alone now, and I too will join them soon.

  “Katerina my darling, I want you to know that from the moment I fell in love with you, I have never betrayed you, even though I was gone most of the time, and even though we argued ceaselessly. You called me cold and distant, and you never understood why I could never be happy at home. You could not accept the fierce drive I have to explore, to see what has never been seen, even if it kills me—as it is doing now. But I will love you as long as my spirit remains. Nevertheless, you must find another man, for your own sake and for our daughter.”