A World Between Read online

  “Not for those buggers,” Carlotta muttered. “They don’t know the meaning of the word.” Then, crisply: “Okay, keep the scope locked on, keep it on this circuit, keep the circuit scrambled, and keep your mouth shut”

  “Now what?” Laura Sunshine asked.

  Carlotta pondered the haloed image of the Heisenberg for a long silent moment Sit on it? Release it to the general news channels? Announce it via the gov news channel? What? Once the damned thing went into orbit, nothing could keep the knowledge from becoming public. If I try to sit on it till then, I’ll face a vote of confidence for concealing information. But if I release the news now, before we formulate a policy, we’ll have to come up with some kind of policy in the middle of a planetwide shouting match. Damn! Either way, it was going to be political circus-time!

  I’d better not make a move without Royce, Carlotta realized. He’s supposed to be the expert at this kind of thing. And where the hell is he now? Out there on his boat with nothing but a clear com-channel, communing with the drooling boomerbirds! I told him he should put a scrambler on the Davy Jones, but no, my young bucko has to have his place to unplug!

  “Answer their transmission,” she told Laura Sunshine. “Audio only: Transmission acknowledged. Request you maintain silence until further contact’ Send that six times, cease transmission, keep this circuit open, and keep your fingers crossed.”

  Carlotta frowned at the image of the Heisenberg for another quiet moment. Here comes the Pink and Blue War, she thought. Why did it have to happen to me? Then, petulantly, she plugged in the Davy Jones.

  2

  A few stray drops of rain stung Royce’s bare back, whipped almost horizontally by the wind of the darkening storm behind him, but the boomerbirds had not yet abandoned the sky for the surface of the sea, and the first little islets of the chain leading to Lorien were already passing off to starboard. It might be a close thing, but he reckoned that he would be able to make it home without resorting to power.

  The wind suddenly gusted a few points further south, scattering the flock of boomerbirds for a moment and rippling the mainsail of the Davy Jones. The boomerbirds honked their indignation as they formed up again, and Royce adjusted the angle of his boom slightly, offsetting the change with his tiller so as to maintain his present course. Funny how a storm that drove the boomerbirds from the sky would drive human sailboats into the air, as if there were some strange reciprocal relationship between the humans and the native Pacifican life-forms—

  Suddenly the com-terminal built into the control console at the front of the cockpit began chiming at him insistently.

  “Arrr…” Royce grunted irritably as he leaned forward and punched the “accept” button. Carlotta’s face appeared on the screen, tense and impatient.

  “What is it?” he said. “Can’t it wait? I should be home in half an hour if the wind holds.”

  “No, it can’t wait,” Carlotta said brusquely. “It can’t wait at all. And forget about your precious wind and torch back here as fast as you can.”

  “What’s the hurry?” Royce asked. “What’s so cosmically important that a half-hour’s going to make a difference?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why can’t you tell me?”

  “Because you’re too godzilla-brained to install a scrambler on that damn boat of yours and this is a priority security matter, that’s why!” Carlotta snapped. “Now stop talking and get moving!”

  “Hey…”

  Royce watched Carlotta pause to cool herself before she spoke again. This must be serious! he thought. “I’m sorry, Royce,” she said much more quietly, “but this is really serious and I need you here five minutes ago.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll be there before your blood pressure can drop five points.”

  “Thanks, bucko,” Carlotta said with the faintest trace of warmth, and unplugged from the circuit.

  Royce slid his seat forward on its rails a meter or so in order to reach the flight controls more easily. He threw a switch and electric winches quickly sucked the sails into the hollow mast. He activated the float units, and pulsed fusion engines beneath the waterline lifted the Davey Jones two meters into the air, clear of the wavecrests. He set the thruster at minimum throttle and the boat was under power, skimming along above the surface of the sea at 30 kph. He punched a button and mast, boom, and rudder were retracted into the aerodynamically smooth hull of the boat. He threw another switch, and the gunwales of the open cockpit extruded a clear microglass canopy over him. Now the Davy Jones was ready to jump.

  Royce set the autopilot for Lorien, set the speed for max, and waved goodbye to the boomerbirds. “Watch your tailfeathers!” he said, and gave the con over to the automatics.

  The hum of the fusion engines rose a little louder and the Davy Jones shot a hundred meters straight up, scattering the outraged boomerbirds again. At the apogee of the lift, the fusion thruster accelerated rapidly to 1000 kph, slamming Royce against the back of his seat.

  The boat climbed rapidly at a forty-five-degree angle, and the islets below dwindled to green specks on a flat plane of azure glass. Almost before Royce could look down through the canopy at the dwindling world below, the boat nosed over and descended to a hover two meters above the sea, not a quarter of a kilometer west of the narrow mouth of Lorien’s lagoon.

  That boomin’ autopilot sure cuts it close! Royce thought as he cut out the automatics, turned on the thruster, and steered the boat for the lagoon, zipping along at a good 80 kph above the chop.

  In a few minutes, he was pulling up beside Carlotta’s boat, the Golden Goose, in the docking area under the veranda of the house. Another minute, and the boat was secured, and he was dashing two steps at a time up the gangway topside.

  Rugo, their fat brown bumbler, met him at the top of the gangway—a rotund, waddling bundle of self-centered affection. He rubbed up against Royce’s leg, regarded him with great soulful violet eyes, and nuzzled the bottom of his buttocks with his soft yellow beak. “Sorry, Jocko,” Royce said, ruffling the bumbler’s furlike feathers as he gently nudged the creature aside, “we appear to have a planetary crisis going, and mommy needs daddy.”

  “Whonk!” Rugo exclaimed with skeptical indignation as Royce pushed by him. Through the glass doors, Royce saw that Carlotta was waiting for him in his own netshop, sitting on the edge of one of the loungers, so intent on the screens that she appeared not to have yet noticed his arrival.

  Royce slid open the doors, pecked her on the cheek, and sat down in the other lounger. “So?”

  Carlotta nodded silently at the array of screens before them. Royce saw Laura Sunshine from his own Web Monitoring Bureau on the gov comscreen, and on the obscreen, the shimmering haloed image of some kind of decelerating starship.

  “A visitor…”

  “The Transcendental Science Arkology Heisenberg, to be precise,” Carlotta said. “And it makes orbit in twenty days.”

  “Oh-oh,” Royce muttered. He leaned back in the lounger and pondered a moment. “Any contact?” he asked.

  “Just this on a continuous tape-loop,” Carlotta said, punching a replay button.

  The strong, calm, slightly intimidating face of a gray-haired man appeared on the access screen—ancient with wisdom, yet somehow agelessly youthful. Royce felt immediately attracted yet also repelled—formidable was the word. “I am Dr. Roger Falkenstein of the Transcendental Science Arkology Heisenberg. We are entering your solar system and will make orbit around Pacifica in twenty days. Our mission is peaceful and will greatly benefit your people. We intend to establish an Institute of Transcendental Science on Pacifica. As Managing Director of the Heisenberg, I request permission to land on your planet and open negotiations with your government.” The voice was authoritative, oceanic, and something in it called to Royce, promised the ineffable. The political considerations, however…

  “How did this come through?” he asked.

  “Tachyon transmission,” Carlotta said. “I requested
they maintain silence until further notice, and they complied.”

  “Who knows about this?”

  “Laura Sunshine and one tech at planetary observation.”

  Royce let out his breath slowly. Only the Ministry of Media had the equipment to pick up tachyon transmissions. Only two other people knew. “Seems as if it’s effectively sat on,” he said.

  “For the next twenty days, anyway.”

  “No good,” Royce said flatly. “We can’t do that. If we don’t break the news soon, there’ll be a Parliamentary vote of confidence.”

  Carlotta frowned, indeed almost pouted. “I figured that much out myself,” she said rather plaintively. “But if we release this before we have a policy, we’ll be in the middle of a full-scale planetary debate when those bastards arrive, and my hands will be tied.”

  “I believe that’s called democracy,” Royce said dryly.

  Carlotta glared at him. “It’s called the Pink and Blue War,” she said.

  Royce studied her face, and saw a very un-Carlotta-like defensive tension there. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting a little?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Royce nodded toward the image of the Heisenberg on the obscreen. “What we have at the moment is not the Pink and Blue War,” he said. “We have a Transcendental Science mission. We have no Femocrats. We don’t even have an Institute of Transcendental Science, only some people who want to talk about establishing one.”

  “I don’t quite follow,” Carlotta said. But her expression had softened, and she really seemed to be looking to him for advice and guidance now.

  “I’m looking at this strictly on a current political level, because that’s what we’ve got to handle right now,” Royce said. “The options are limited and so is the problem. We can’t not talk to this Falkenstein and we can’t refuse him permission to land, because that would violate interstellar protocol. So you have to negotiate, but at the moment, that’s all you have to do. So between now and then, all you need politically is to line up Parliament behind some negotiating position. Right now the issue isn’t the Pink and Blue War, it’s putting together political backing for a talking position with Falkenstein, period.”

  Carlotta’s expression brightened. “I see what you mean,” she said. “Call a closed session of Parliament and line them up behind a negotiating position between now and the time the Heisenberg makes orbit”

  “Right.”

  Carlotta stared out the window at the lagoon for a moment. “And I know just what that has to be,” she muttered. Oh-oh, Royce thought.

  Carlotta turned to Royce again. “But what do we do in the meantime?” she asked. “We can’t sit on the news for very long, but we can’t release it until we’ve hammered out a consensus position in Parliament either.”

  Royce nibbled on a thumbnail. It was all a matter of timing and nuance. “Okay…” he said slowly. “So we have to do something immediately to cover ourselves. A simple press release by a low-level Media official to the effect that a starship has entered the system, nothing about contact, the gov is trying to determine its identity. We can get away with that for a day or two…”

  “And two days from now…?”

  Royce grimaced. “By then, we’ll have to release the whole story or be charged with denial of media access when it finally breaks. No choice.”

  “Which gives me less than two days to call a closed session of Parliament together in Gotham and line up a majority of the Delegates behind some kind of tentative policy…”

  “’Fraid so.”

  “Shit.”

  They sat together silently for a long moment. “How?” Carlotta finally said. “If I tell them why I’m calling a closed session, do you think a hundred and three Delegates can keep a secret like that for two hours, let alone two days? If I just casually call an ordinary session, they’ll take a week to dribble in.”

  Royce laughed. “You’re the Chairman,” he said, “but if I were you, I’d just tell them I was calling an immediate closed session on a matter of priority security. Nothing like that kind of curiosity to encourage max speed.”

  Carlotta smiled her Mona Lisa smile. “They’ll he jumpy as flitbats, but they’ll be there practically before I can unplug,” she said. She got out of her lounger and gave Royce a quick wet kiss on the lips. “Gotta jump to it,” she said. “You take care of the press release in the meantime.” She ruffled Royce’s hair. “What would I do without you, bucko?”

  “Offend the electorate twice a week and masturbate a lot,” Royce answered dryly.

  It took only a few minutes to arrange the press release through Laura Sunshine (no sense in letting anyone else in on the secret), and Carlotta would be busy in her own netshop for hours setting up the Parliamentary session, so Royce decided he might as well use some of the time to refresh his hazy knowledge of Transcendental Science and the Pink and Blue War.

  Pacifica had steered as clear of the conflict between Transcendental Science and Femocracy as was possible on a planet where media access to all points of view was a sacred constitutional right; at best, the conflict was regarded as light farce, as witness the snide local term for what on most other worlds was considered an ideological battle of grave cosmic import.

  As a result, however, Royce found that his understanding of the Pink and Blue War was strictly in comic opera terms. Something like two centuries ago, militant feminists had come to power on Earth in the aftermath of the Slow Motion War, and now, apparently, the women were all godzilla-brained lesbos who kept a small supply of ball-less wonders in cages for breeding purposes, at least if one took the incomprehensible but massively solemn propaganda they poured into the Web at face value.

  Meanwhile, back on Tau Ceti, a colony of double-domed geniuses had founded the first Institute of Transcendental Science which began to spew forth a bottomless cornucopia of scientific wonders, or so they claimed, and then began to spread through the human worlds via perambulating artificial worldlets they called “Arkologies,” establishing new Institutes wherever they went, promulgating their scientific vision of a hyperevolved Homo galacticus.

  The Femocrats considered the Transcendental Scientists “faschochauvinist Fausts,” and the Transcendental Scientists considered the Femocrats “misguided primitives” several light-years beneath their intellectual contempt. These were the roots of the Pink and Blue War, an ideological conflict too silly to be taken seriously by sophisticated Pacificans, enlightened citizens of the media capital of the human galaxy.

  However, Royce realized, there had to be more to it than material for historical comedies. Several planets had actually turned Femocrat after visits by missions from Earth, and Institutes of Transcendental Science on perhaps half a dozen planets were launching Arkologies of their own these days, Royce gazed out his window. The sun was beginning to set into the deepening blue of the sea. The western sky was a sheet of purpling orange flame, but toward the east the heavens were already darkening, and the first bright stars of night were winking into existence as a flock of birds passed like shadows across the truncated disc of the setting sun. It was hard to imagine that up there in the galactic night strident voices were screaming godzilla-brained propaganda at each other, ideologues were subverting long-established cultures, a war of sorts was going on, and out there beyond his unaided vision, the Arkology Heisenberg was speeding toward Pacifica, bringing the whole unwanted mess to the planet that he loved, a harmonious world at peace with itself.

  Rugo slapped at the glass door with his big webbed swimming feet, demanding admittance. Royce got up and let the bumbler in. “Whonk-ka-whonk, ka-whonk!” the big brown bird opined as he followed Royce back to the lounger and stood beside it for his head to be scratched.

  Royce laughed as the bumbler cocked his head at him solemnly. “You’ve got a point, Jocko,” he admitted. And I told Carlotta she was overreacting? he thought. Nothing’s really happened yet. Surely we can handle these clowns.

  Still, it behoo
ved him to know something more about what was speeding toward Pacifica than a few stale jokes and the bilge that the Femocrats and Transcendental Scientists put out on the Web.

  He called up the basic briefing tape on Transcendental Science from the accessbanks. “Transcendental Science is a philosophy, a technology, and one of only two human transtellar political entities,” a female voice said as the Transcendental Science ensign, a four-pointed silver star, appeared on the access screen. “Some contend that it is also an ideological religion.” The image of a middle-aged man with short blond hair appeared on the screen; there was something vaguely unsettling about his intense blue eyes. “The movement was founded two hundred and fifty years ago by Dr. Heinz Shockley who established a colony on the fourth planet of the Tau Ceti system. Citizenship was open only to scientists who passed a rigorous screening and their immediate families. Shockley’s basic philosophy is still the raison d’être of Transcendental Science today…”

  Shockley began to speak in a deep, urbane, almost syrupy voice. “We are living at the end of human prehistory. Though we travel haltingly from star to star, communicate instantly across the light-years, and have unlocked the secrets of the stellar phoenix, we are still circumscribed by the universal parameters of matter, energy, time, and mind. Science is our method for understanding those parameters and maximizing our mastery of the universe within them. But this is prehistory. Homo galacticus, true star-roving man, must learn to transcend the so-called natural limits of the universe through a transcendental science. He must not be confined by the speed of light, or the so-called natural human lifespan, or the consciousness he evolved with. He must seize this sorry scheme of things entire and mold it totally to the heart’s desire…”

  “Deep,” Royce admitted aloud. But not exactly relevant to the current problem. “Let’s have the capsule history,” he told the access computer.