Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten

Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten - Chapter 19

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The pilot stood in the middle of an empty runway which stretched to a distant row of cubes. Everything was white, in what could have been a perfectly flat desert of salt, except that this was even more featureless. It was a theoretical plane, slit down the middle by converging dotted lines, and circled by blank blue.

The three cubes marked the end of the runway. They were perfect cubes, as was everything in this simplified world that let the pilot concentrate on the routine but delicate takeoff of her wingscoop. It was not a game. A momentary lapse in concentration, and she could suddenly awake amidst real enough flames and destruction.

Shifting her weight onto the heavy polished balls she had for toes, the pilot gently urged thrust from her heels. Slowly at first, she rolled down the runway leaning slightly into the air. She held out her arms, palms forward, long spider fingers spread to cup the wind in the webbing that grew between them.

Rolling faster, she tested the surrounding forces with her wrists, and then balanced her aim straight down the runway. Her legs and chest tightened, as she fell forward in full acceleration. The control of her hands now was microscopic, intuitive. She fluctuated on the nose of a force that could slam her down, or simply tear her apart if she lost her concentration. Still she moved faster.

The cubes at the end of the strip raced up, flashing red. The pilot spread her arms and lunged, pushing her way into a smooth climb. Her back uncurved. Her thoughts turned inward.

More than a month before, she had begun rehearsing for this moment. Tarni had flown many different ships, but never one controlled through simulation. The couch let her fly as if she herself, and not the ship, were flying. Nobody had seen her practice in this body, this mutated long armed reptile in which she lived out takeoffs and landings. Nobody had been there with her when she flew. Even the ship's voice addressed her as "pilot" and that was how she wanted it. She had no desire to be on a first name basis with a machine.

As the abstract surface fell below, Tarni relaxed, gradually giving way to the ship's control, and bringing the full detail of nature into view. The flat blue plane blossomed into real ocean, and harmless clouds condensed out of nowhere. Like Sand, she too had spoken her wordroots to the whales. It had been part of her training with Don Andrews at the plantation, while waiting for Mara to send the artist.

Tarni emptied her mind into the motionless ripples that were waves below, and her wordroots surfaced.

A squirming mass of bodies spews you upwards, and groping your way from the worm's eye warmth, you rise. Firm hillside bulges beneath, and the trees surround, and the sea sniffs at your trail in the dim sand. Now and again a visitor will peer up the darkened slope in your general direction and shout, "Are you coming?"

"No," you tell them. The frozen ocean stretches out, taut over the water like a drum head it carries your voice. The branches of the winter trees slice the sky into a shifting puzzle. You will make them stop. You will make them freeze. You will hold them with your eyes, so still, that one lasting image burns into your retina, and leaves you lifeless, not to worry, never to worry.

She was Weissenbaum's granddaughter. A child of the colonization. Under the dome of the Cathedral, she had heard Don Andrews' farewell with the other colonists. They who were no longer alive, who might have been her family after the flash.

She had not seen them since that final night before the Pinta's doomed departure. After his speech when Don Andrews had dismissed them, Tarni had lain awake in her room. The vision of the darkened cathedral ceiling under her closed eyelids, colored by doubts, decreed that she not sleep, that her dreams not come to conquer second thoughts.

Because she was not sure. That was her crime.

The colonists were all too perfectly prepared. Tarni was secretly terrified by the momentum of their unchangeable decision. No coming back, no afterwards. Her stomach twisted at the thought of leaving forever, with so much still not understood.

That night her brothermate was snoring soundly next to her. Her perfect partner. Two screws sunk into the same block of wood. But what if that block were thrown into the fire?

Her door slid open, and a ribbon of light streamed across the sheets. Her partner rolled over in his sleep with a grunt. In the doorway stood a woman with curly blond hair, silhouetted like a halo. Judy, the chief engineer of Backdoor.

"Tarni?" she whispered.

Tarni did not answer. The tall figure came halfway into the room and spoke again.

"Tarni?" Still no answer. The older woman spoke now seeming to know that Tarni was awake.

"I have orders from Don Andrews. You are not leaving with the others tomorrow, but will stay behind in Backdoor. You are not like the others. Don Andrews needs your skills as a pilot. You are also...not a child. He has noticed you, and you are to remain with us." Judy paused. "Go to the ferry port now. You are leaving for Earth, tonight."

Apparently not interested in a reply, Judy turned and left. Tarni lay awake for a while in the unlit room. She wondered why she was not more surprised.

Tarni got up without speaking or disturbing her companion, and gathered her things. She went directly to the ferry port, and to her station as the pilot of the next ferry back to Earth. Without so much as seeing another human face, she received her departure plans, and left Backdoor at the helm of an empty ship, to pick up next year's crop of young colonists. She had graduated to the ranks of those who stayed behind.

Around the Moon, not many hours distant, Tarni overheard the distress signal from the Pinta. The ship had not made it clean away, and was snagged by some kind of turbulence in the flow of space. It had never happened before. Slipping sideways out from behind the protective shadow of the Moon, the Pinta would soon be hanging over billions of unknowing, helpless people on the Earth. If it finished jumping then, the flash would melt the surface of the Earth, the way it should have melted Backdoor's crater. From inside the tunnels of Backdoor came the signal for the Pinta to destroy itself, and her former crewmates along with it.

In an action later to be excused by the court as temporary insanity, Tarni maintained the empty ferry's orbit back around the Moon instead of heading for the Earth. All the way she beamed a signal meant to interfere with the command to destroy the Pinta. She failed to disrupt the command, and the Pinta blew into a million pieces. A week later the troops from Earth found her still looking through debris for survivors. There were none, of course.

They treated her carefully on Earth. Her captivity had been mild, with liberty to move around. But she might as well have been in prison. She was from the Pinta, a child of the colonization. The only people she would ever love were atoms free in space.

And so Tarni spent her time oblivious to her captors, ungrateful for the mercy they had shown her. Not until Don Andrews came for her did she reawaken. Only then did the purpose of her existence dawn upon her, and the reason for the court's leniency become clear. Don Andrews had arranged for her release.

He told her that he did not blame her for her actions. He said that he believed her story, that she had not considered those she might have killed on Earth. He said that long ago when people drove their own cars on the roads, there had been lanterns hung where two roads crossed, whose red and green had flashed for people to obey. Even late at night when roads were empty, most drivers had automatically obeyed. But some had not, and such a person, said Don Andrews, was young Tarni.

This made her feel much better, for Don Andrews was her family now. She had been very young when Weissenbaum had left, and like so many other children both her parents had been addicts. Like the other colonists, she had joined to get away, to find a replacement. But now the colonists were gone. Don Andrews would take their place. Now she was part of his plan. The worst had passed, the accusations of insanity, the loneliness, the grief. Now she was free again.

Free. But free to use the couch? She thought she'd joined the Pinta to escape the couch. How the others would scorn her now, seeing her dine at fine restaurants, as Don Andrews had encouraged her to do. But he wanted her to see what they were fighting, to learn from the enemy itself. The simulation in Backdoor would be quite different, more like the program she now used to fly the wingscoop. There would be no interaction in Backdoor. How strange, that she was tied once more to her profession, but this time flying on a couch in this fantastic program, where she had practiced all month for the takeoff she had just performed. And it was stranger still that fate should carry her to where she thought she'd never go again.

Backdoor.

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