The Infinity Link Page 7

  "Will I know what's happening to the part of me that's with him?" she asked finally.

  Hoshi gazed at her silently, with upturned hands. She imagined his eyes to be spinning, hypnotic disks. She stared back at him, could not evade those eyes that were spinning, spinning. She imagined them saying: If you don't go through with this, you'll never see Kadin again. She thought of Kadin, his gentleness and strength, and she was caught, helpless, in a rush of desire. "Let's get started," she whispered hoarsely.

  Hoshi nodded and made the final adjustments. His hand touched hers, and they both jerked back nervously. Be done with it, she thought. Go turn the damn thing on. She looked away, unconsciously counting the seconds. Then he bobbed his head and said, "That's it. We're ready to run." He stepped backward, murmuring, and suddenly Mozy was alone in the booth and the lights were growing dim.

  * * *

  This is for you, Mozy. Just the way I promised.

  Hoshi's fingers fly over the console, initiating the clandestine programs he's so carefully worked out. It should be a cinch, he thinks. It's been a cinch so far, getting past the codes and security blocks; he was amazed at what a piece of cake it was, anyone who knows the computers the way he does could have cracked those codes. Now it's all coming together, and suddenly he feels an enormous knot in his shoulders, almost as if he were scared. He was scared for an instant, there, when they were discovered in the booth. He almost lost his head.

  Alone in the control room, his blood is running hot and excited. He's been aroused since the moment he kissed her—so innocently, thinking of nothing more than camouflage, throwing the others off the track. Ignore that now, he thinks, center and channel the energy, don't think about Mozy or desire. He'll show them, he'll prove what he can do with these programs, and no one will ever underestimate him again. Mozy, too—he'll give her exactly what she wants. Kadin for a lover—she can have him, no grudge. You'll see what it's all about, he thinks—you'll see. Won't you, Mozy, won't you?

  With quick, savage movements, he drops the operator's helmet over his head and keys himself into the link. A firestorm of sparks swirls past him. Here he's at home. Here he's in control. A large ball of tension eases itself past some obstruction in his brain, releases some of the knots in his neck and shoulders, and allows him to breathe freely again. He can do it now; it's time.

  A few privately coded triggers set into motion a cascade of programs. The scanning programs switch to the ready mode. No external display should betray him; but internally he sees an illuminated, three-dimensional grid in which a maze of circuits will open and close to create a pathway to transmission. Several links must function in unison: from the scanning computer to the transmitter; from the ground transmitter to Tachylab, overhead in synchronous orbit; from Tachylab, via modulated tachyon beam, to the spacecraft somewhere in deep space. If all goes well, Mozy's mindscan will flow in a continuous stream through all of those links, flashing from the subject booth to the receiving computer with scarcely a betraying sign.

  The tachyon relay may be the riskiest part of the chain. The signal will be sandwiched into the regular transmission to the ship, but there will be a sharp increase in signal density, which could betray him. With luck and skill, he'll finish the transmission and erase his steps backward through the network before his tampering can be traced. He has been extremely careful, in breaking the security codes, to protect his tracks along the way.

  A pathway is now lighted through the grid, with a single amber and a single red block remaining. A time check confirms that the tachyon link will open in fifty-three seconds.

  The amber changes to green, the red to amber.

  He keys in to Mozy. As the circuits connect him to his waiting friend, he thinks: Go to him, Mozy, and be happy. I'll have you here with me, still, and maybe now you'll take notice—maybe he'll be out of your thoughts.

  As a final door creaks open in the darkness, he calls, (Are you ready?)

  In the distance, he hears the soft answer: (Yes.)

  (Sequence start,) he says, as the last amber light turns to green. The tachyon link is open. He is aware in the back of his mind that someone is entering the control room. He ignores that and nudges one final command. A fountain of sparks streams through the grid as the process begins.

  * * *

  A glittering band encircled her skull as she waited in the darkness. Time slid by like an imponderable mass of ice. What would time come to mean when her consciousness was frozen into a series of impulses in the computer? Every nerve was wired, every thought agitated; strangely, even the memory of Hoshi's clumsily feigned embrace aroused her with sexual excitement. She tried to bring it all to a focus, to corral her thoughts and memories like burning sparks, and to balance the musical tones of her hopes and fears into stable harmonics. The result was a blur of color, a cacophony of tones.

  She thought of Kadin, the stable, good-humored man she had come to love; and she remembered the training for the linkup sessions. Go to him with a clear mind, centered and relaxed. Keep the pathways open, let the images and harmonics drift into their own order.

  Hoshi's mind-voice came through, distant and a little fuzzy, asking if she was ready.

  A heartbeat passed, then two. The circlet of fire around her forehead began spinning and twinkling, faster and brighter, and contracting. It tightened over the lobes of her consciousness like a glittering fist. In that instant, she was paralyzed, her awareness turning to crystal shot through with pulses like beacons in a starless night. Her emotions froze into a cold, white diamond. She felt a rush of sensations, and then icelike clarity, as her thoughts and memories became transparent straight through to the center of her mind and soul.

  A vibration was building inside; forces were gathering, currents of life once bound were coming unleashed. Exhilaration and terror and vertigo flashed through her in a pulse. Somewhere within her, fierce streams were cutting new beds, winds were gusting and moaning, the earth shivering. There was a sun flaring, a candle guttering, a feeling of disconnectedness. From somewhere, a papery voice called: (You will be alone at first. Wait for him there.) They were words that made no sense, held no meaning. All real thought was lost in a whirlwind.

  Then, for a breath, everything fell silent. There was no sound—

  —no light—

  —no motion—

  —and then the world erupted with a thunderclap and a keening wail, driving a spike of pain straight through to the center of her consciousness. Hallucinating in agony, she wandered among the stars, heard the void speaking in tongues. The emptiness rang around her like an infinite gong, and then darkness crushed in upon her.

  PART TWO

  INTO THE ETERNAL NIGHT

  Prelude

  The waters became clearer, and tangier with the taste of salt, as the whales entered the warm fringes of the joining grounds, moving into seas where the sun rose high. Sunlight danced through the surface swells and angled into the abyss, turning from golden-belly pink near the surface to clearwater blue in the midrange. Far below, where only darkness met the eyes, the realm was mapped with whistling echoes. Even now, someone's cry reverberated dimly out of a watery canyon.

  Theirs was a world filled with sounds: the mutter of the sea itself, the whistle of their own songs, the click and rasp of dolphins and other creatures. Earlier, several of the herd had caught the moan of a blue, its lonely song reverberating through the deep layers. Always, too, there was the drone of the manships plodding their courses back and forth across the sea, a minor but continual irritant.

  Songs filled their thoughts. For some, a special restlessness accompanied their return to these waters—a renewed memory of the songs of last year's joining—songs that had come from a place they did not know and touched them in a way they did not understand—songs that had come to enchant them, songs whalelike and yet not-whale, filled with bewildering and intriguing harmonics, evoking images of emptiness and incalculable distances, and a migrational swim lifetimes long.

 
; A godwhale, some said. Would the godwhale's visions return?

  As the waters grew warm, the herd began to fragment. Some whales cavorted on the surface while others tuned their voices. The new year's songs began reverberating, and a change was at once felt, in new tones and rhythms, some of them not-whale rhythms. The altered strains were in their own voices—not from the outside, but from their own hearts, an echo and a harmony to the songs that had so haunted their sleep last year. Whatever those songs had been, they were now a part of the whales' own language.

  The herd moved southward. There was no hint of the godwhale's song itself, and some wondered if it would ever be heard again, or if it and the mystery of its existence would become merely a part of the lore, embroidered and changed until the original was lost from memory.

  Chapter 8

  As Joseph Payne's eyes adjusted to the gloom, a ghostly illumination welled up around him. Misty, blue-green space; the hiss and mutter of the sea. The tropical Pacific: depth, sixty meters. Translucent rays of sunlight slanted down like moonbeams in a forest. Below him, the blue deepened; and far below was the darkness of the abyss.

  The music and the narrative that whispered in his head made him feel a part of the sea, a part of the cascading chain of life that surrounded him here. He turned to and fro, like a shark swaying its head, searching the depths for prey. The music and narration faded, and then all around him was solitude and tranquility, silent and gloomy spaces, the sea's emptiness.

  He became aware of a thin, droning sound at extreme range, the propeller whine of a distant ship enveloping him in the sea's cathedral-like acoustics. Overhead, he caught sight of a moving shadow—a cluster of pelagic fish, darting and swerving. A beam of light stabbed upward, illuminating the iridescent undersides of the fish; then they flashed one way, and another, and were gone.

  Emptiness . . . and then a new sound, a familiar low moan that ended with a sharp rise in pitch. The cry was repeated, followed by a sighing stream of bubbles, and then a mournful keening, ending in a downward wail. Payne recognized the humpback whales' songs; he had heard their recordings many times before, and now, as always, reacted to them with a feeling of wistfulness and longing. Was it a whale's cry for companionship, or something else entirely? He didn't know; but in the whales' songs there was always a feeling of space, and distance, and loneliness.

  He squinted upward toward the sunlight. A whale's shadow moved high overhead, but was growing as it descended, diving lazily toward him. It swelled, blocking the light until it filled the world over his head; and then it banked and wheeled around to peer sideways at him with a single large, unblinking eye. The encounter lasted for a heartbeat, as Payne stared back into the creature's eye, sensing the imponderability of its gaze. Its mouth was turned downward in a sour grin. Did it wonder at this strange creature in its realm? The whale slid by him, its rounded belly and roughened, grey-white flukes so close that Payne instinctively drew back. An enormous tail fluke swung past his face, and then the whale was a dark shape growing darker in the depths.

  Silence. Then the mournful song began again.

  The humpback whale songs were a worldwide choir, whales sharing musical themes with their siblings around the globe. As the seasons changed, so too did the songs, evolving in one part of the world as in another, by some orchestration not yet known to human science. Another Payne, a Dr. Roger Payne, had studied cetacean songs in the late twentieth century; despite much work since, human analysis had yet to achieve an understanding of the songs. As Joe Payne sat now and listened to the songs and the narration, something in his heart dissociated itself from his mind. The sounds filled him with images of a timeless space through which life passed like an endless series of ripples.

  He felt a rushing sensation and realized that his point of view was moving, turning. Three whales emerged from the mist—a calf and two adult females. Accompanied by the distant song, the whales circled around him in a slow ballet. The calf orbited its mother twice, and then spiraled down into a dive. The adults descended, moving in lazy curves bracketing the young one. The song echoing out of the mist sighed and melted into a downward glissando that ended in a throaty gurgle. They were now shadows moving in the depths below. A breath of bubbles erupted and rose in a graceful cluster. The bubbles rumbled musically as they raced upward, breaking toward the surface. The three whales reappeared from the depths, spiraled past, and breached the surface overhead with a burst of silver.

  The scene shifted then, and turned into a moving collage. A boisterous humpback dropped past, doing barrel rolls. A school of flashing silver fish twisted and danced in the sunlight that broke, dazzling, through shallow waters. A shark cruised by, hunting and sweeping. A whale emerged from the mist, hanging vertically, its tail pointed to the surface, its head toward the abyss. It was singing.

  Payne, mesmerized, plummeted with a sperm whale into the gloomy abyss and then rose back into the world of light like a missile, bursting out of the water and falling back with a boom and a rush and swirl. He exploded his breath into the air with a gasp, and dived again.

  Eventually twilight closed in, and the whales dispersed, leaving only the haunting bass rumble of an invisible blue whale. The blue's call gave way to the thrumming of a ship's propeller. The thrumming gave way to silence, and the sea dissolved to darkness.

  * * *

  The lights rose around him, revealing an audience stirring beneath the theater dome. Payne's head still echoed with the sounds and movements of the sea. He could hardly imagine getting up and walking now, on dry land.

  What a stunning accomplishment, this Theater of the Sea! Two hundred and sixty seats rotated on individual gimbals, each with a headrest equipped for quadraphonic sound. Holographic projectors lined the enormous silver dome overhead, and the somewhat smaller bowl in the center. If this preview performance was any indication, the theater would be a sensation.

  Payne rose, thinking, it would be easy to produce a straightforward, glowing review; but how much better it would be if he could develop an angle, and produce a short feature for syndication. What could he do that dozens of other newscopers wouldn't? he wondered, as he made his way to the aisle.

  He followed the crowd out into the lobby, where a reception was getting underway. He ordered a drink and surveyed the crowd. There weren't many familiar faces—probably mostly local media people and print journalists. He strolled around the edge of the room, listening to the chatter, and studying the lobby critically. The walls and ceiling were done in square, concave blue and green tiles, shaded in certain places with reds and maroons. It bordered on tackiness, and yet succeeded in evoking a sense of the depths, with flares of odd color suggesting marine organisms. Large, recessed holoprints of underwater scenes were spaced around the lobby.

  "Joseph?" A woman's voice penetrated his reverie.

  He turned—and broke into a broad smile. "Teri!"

  "How are you, Joe?" said a slender, chestnut-haired woman of thirty-three or thirty-four. It was Teri Renshaw, a newscoper friend from the days of his first freelance assignments. They hugged briefly and stood apart, grinning at each other. Teri was several years his senior, and looked just the way he'd always thought a newscoper should look—competent, alert, and attractive, without excessive stylishness. "I haven't seen you in what—over a year?" Teri said.

  Payne thought back. "Summer of thirty-three, in New York."

  "It has been that long, hasn't it?" Teri murmured. She turned to introduce a portly gentleman standing to one side of her. "Joe, this is Peter Armunson, director of the theater. Peter, Joe Payne, a colleague of mine. I'm sure you've seen his work."

  Armunson smiled in polite nonrecognition as they shook hands. "Whom are you with, Mr. Payne?"

  "Freelance," Payne answered. "Like Teri."

  "He's an up-and-comer," Teri said, touching Payne's arm. "If you haven't heard of him yet, you will soon."

  "Is that right? I'll be looking for your name," Armunson said, nodding and beaming to someone else
in the crowd. He turned back to Payne and Teri, and they chatted for a few minutes about the theater, before Armunson excused himself to greet other guests.

  Payne was left standing alone with Teri. "You look great," he said.

  "And you. Have you been working? I haven't seen your name, but then I don't always—"

  He interrupted. "Things have been—slow," he said.

  "Hm." She nodded with a sympathetic scowl. "I know what it's like. Are you having trouble getting assignments—or are they not buying your work?"

  Shrugging, he said, "Right now I'm having trouble just coming up with material. I'd say that I'm in a slump, except that I'm not sure my career has gotten far enough off the ground for the word to apply. That's why I'm here—to see if I can pick up some ideas."