The Second Star, page 6
“So what did you do?” she asked gently.
“We could only talk to them,” Tyrone said. “There was no video link; we could not see them. We had no idea what the journey had done to them, what the tau factor had done to them, none of that. But we could speak to them as we both hung there in the night, And I spoke to Boz—Bogdan Dimitrov, the engineer on the Parada—and I’ll tell you, it was astonishing just how much, between the two of us, we did not know. The two engineers on Earth’s two starships, talking across empty space at one another, trying to figure out how to save everybody. And whatever we came up with, there was a reason it would not work. We did not have compatible hatches, so we couldn’t even form an airlock and get them off that crippled bird and into ours and maybe limp home together that way. We had a smaller craft that could detach from Juno and then dock back—but, again, the shuttle couldn’t attach to the Parada in any meaningful way. We could attach, like a limpet, we had magnetic clamps in addition to the physical docking clamps we were equipped with, and we had a grapple arm, but that… had been something of a weird afterthought on the ship and its possibilities were not all that well thought out, as it happened. I’m not entirely sure what they expected us to latch onto and bring home with that grapple…”
“Certainly not the Parada,” Stella murmured.
Tyrone glared at her, and then gave a short sharp laugh. “Certainly not the Parada,” he agreed.
“So… you just clamped on and hoped for the best?” Stella said, blinking. It seemed like the most unlikely of schemes to her, but then she was no expert—except that Tyrone, who was, inasmuch as anyone could be, seemed to agree with her. He bared his teeth in what was only nominally a smile.
“If you want the exact specs,” he said, “I flipped the Juno and then we clamped onto the Parada, belly to belly. And then I had to figure on the added mass, and find out if the drive would even work with the other ship attached, never mind do anything coherent or necessary or, well, non-lethal—Boz had already tried to tell me that their own drive had somehow gone nova on them and then fried itself…”
“It exploded?” Stella interrupted, startled.
“Not literally. Metaphorically. Things just went faster than they anticipated or should even be possible and that screwed up the…”
“I get the general idea, I don’t think I could follow a detailed explanation.”
“Even if there was someone who could give you one,” Tyrone said, still with that feral grin. “So we tried the first bunny hop back towards home and I swear, I just closed my eyes and hit the right buttons and had no idea if we would come out at the other end of the jump with the Parada still attached… or having lost it somewhere in transit and this time permanently and with no hope of finding it ever again… or if we’d somehow bring them through and get lost ourselves… or if neither of us would ever see anything sane in real space ever again.” He closed his eyes, briefly, as the remembered adrenaline surged through him. Stella could see him try to suppress the shudder that wanted to shake his entire body. But all he did was ball his hands into fists and dig his fingernails into his palms, until he mastered the moment.
When he looked at her again, he was almost calm. “We both made it. It took three hops. I nearly lost it at every single one of them, but the Parada hung on. When we crossed back into our system I bawled like a baby. And then I slept for fifteen hours. I was barely awake when they transferred us off the Juno and down into this place. I was hoping that I could at least see if the Parada crew had made it, to speak to Boz, to shake his hand. But…”
“They made it,” Stella said carefully. “Thanks to you.”
“So they tell me,” Tyrone said, “But that’s all they tell me.”
“I’ll tell you the rest,” Stella said. “All of it. But like I said to your captain… I’ll do that with all three of you, after I’ve spoken to everyone first individually.”
She didn’t ask him any of the questions she had asked of his captain. Tyrone Kidman had gone through the crucible. If he had had any predilection to disassociate he would have done so. He might have been held together by passion and sheer intensity, but those were enough—he was one of the most solid, coherent personalities that Stella had ever met. Tyrone might live the rest of his life being tortured by memories he could not put aside—but that was all they would be. Memories. He would not get lost in them and create a new personality every time he came back to that crossroads in the hope that a new soul might take him to a new destination when he trudged the same difficult road.
“Thank you for telling me what happened,” Stella said as she ended the interview. “Could you please arrange for Joseph White Elk to come in, as you leave?”
If Tyrone Kidman had been pure fire, when Joseph White Elk walked into the interview room Stella felt as though she was in the presence of cool deep water. He met her eyes squarely, calmly, without any hint of disturbance at all. They were a light golden brown, unusual, like a wolf’s.
Stella actually took a moment to give herself a stern word of warning. Lion, then fox, now wolf, she was reverse-anthropomorphizing the Juno’s crew, retro-fitting them into a fable. She was supposed to assess their sanity, not lapse into oddness and whimsy herself.
“You wished to speak to me,” Joe said after a moment, a polite breaking of the silence.
Stella mentally shook herself. “Yes,” she said. And then, without planning, asked the first thing that came to mind. “Tell me about yourself?”
Joe lifted his hands in a small gesture that seemed to indicate several things—assent, resignation, polite confusion. “I am three quarters Cheyenne,” he said, “but I was raised by the grandparents who came from the only part of my family who was not—my white mother committed the ultimate sin of marrying an Indian, and her parents didn’t speak to her for years. I was seven when my parents were both killed in a car accident, and my white grandparents swooped in and took me—and tried very hard to make me forget anything in me that wasn’t part of their world. But I was seven. It was too late. They might have erased some memories but the roots had sunk in and they were deep enough.”
He paused. “My grandparents gave me a good education, and even sent me to medical school, but by the time I turned eighteen I was already pulling away from them and when I graduated from med school, I claimed my Cheyenne blood. My grandparents did the same thing they had done to my mother. They practically disowned me. The rest is administrative history. I found a job, then another, then applied for the space program without any great hopes of getting in, but I did. And then came Juno.”
He paused again. “I was not the first to volunteer to be considered for the mission—and they only took on volunteers for this, nobody was going to be appointed to this crew—I may quite possibly have been the last person to put my name into the hat, as it were. I thought long and hard about this, about whether I was capable of doing it at all, if I could bear being torn from this world, from the dust and waters of which I was made. But then I walked out into the wilderness one day, to ask my questions of the wind, to see if the spirits of my ancestors who still haunt the land had any answers for me. When I returned to my home, I had a handful of soil in a box, and a canteen full of water I had gathered from a creek. I made a thing, myself, that would hold these for me—half of it the dirt gathered from my world, half of it in a glass vial the living waters that run on her—and the next day I volunteered for Juno, knowing that I would be on her when she left, knowing I would return.”
“Your captain said you were one of those people who knew when you were going to die,” Stella murmured, hardly aware that she was speaking out loud.
Joe inclined his head, and smiled. “He may be right. I knew that my death didn’t wait out there. I would have to come home to meet it.”
It was pointless asking this man if he had ever heard voices inside his own head, voices other than his own. Clearly, he did, and he listened to what they said. But it wasn’t remotely the disassociation that plagued the Parada people. Joseph White Elk knew how to hold multitudes, and that was just part of what he was. But they weren’t splinters, poking out at all angles. They were all part of a greater whole, making him stronger, like a sequoia.
“You still have it? Your talisman?”
“Of course,” Joe said. He patted his chest, where something hidden underneath his clothes rested on his skin. “It never leaves me. And I never leave it. So long as I hold it, I am always here, I am always home. Wherever I am. Whatever the exile. I carry my world inside me.”
Stella found tears prickling at the corners of her eyes. “I think I understand.”
“I think you may,” he said, giving her both courtesy and a high compliment.
She didn’t really need to ask any more questions, but she was interested from a purely personal vantage point as to his take on the Parada rescue. So she sat back in her chair, her legs straight out in front of her, crossed at the ankles.
“What do you remember, about finding the other ship?”
“The Captain had his hands full with command,” Joe said quietly. “Tyrone had his own full of logistics. Both their minds were full of noise, and they could not hear anything outside of that. But… I listened. Out there in the great emptiness that lies between things, you would think there is only silence—but that isn’t true, not quite. The stars have their own songs, and if your mind is still enough, you can hear them. But what I heard when we came to the Parada was… chaos. There were… too many voices inside that ship.”
Stella had thought she had asked all the questions she needed to, but now she sat up sharply. “What was that?”
Joe just looked at her, out of those improbable golden eyes.
“I haven’t said anything to the others, because if we weren’t being told everything there was probably a reason for it—I may not have stayed silent forever, but for now the better part of wisdom seemed to be to hold my peace. But for what that is worth—when we found that other ship… there were children on it.”
“Children?”
“Children’s voices. At first I tried to understand in terms of the possibility that the ship had been lost for so long that there were actually children who had been born on it—but that could not have happened. The Parada was not built for that. If things had come to that point they would all be dead already, the children and the crew members whose progeny they might have been. There was simply no logical way there could be children on that ship—when we finally contacted the Parada we spoke with the people whom we knew had been on board when the ship left, and there was no background noise that would have indicated anything other than those same six people who left with her were still with her now.”
He looked pointedly at Stella but she said nothing. “And yet, I could sense children on that ship. As though they were physically present there. Every time I stilled my mind enough to listen, I could catch an echo of them. They were so young, and they were so wise. In my own mind, I called it the Children’s Collective. I almost had the feeling that those children were the circle of sanity that remained in that ship, that they were the ones who decided what was possible. It… even made sense to me. Out there, everything that makes us feel big, competent, grown-up—all you have to do is look at those many indifferent stars and it all shrivels away—we are all children, out there, facing all those other things so immeasurably older and greater than ourselves.”
Joe paused and studied Stella’s face for a moment. “You look as though you are seeing ghosts. Just like I was hearing them, back there.”
Stella fought the urge to laugh at the bone-headed and paranoia-fed idiocy that had decreed that someone like Joe White Elk was to be kept behind a wall of ignorance, when he was already more than half aware of it all anyway, and already arguably knew—through instinct, through whatever wisdom (natural or supernatural) was his through blood and heritage—more about the secret than the people who thought they were guarding knowledge of it from him. He wasn’t Stella’s patient—or ‘subject’ as Martin Peck might have called him—as much as her potential colleague.
“Thank you for sharing this with me,” she said, feeling a real warm kinship with this man, despite the vast differences between them. “I need to have a quick consult with the people in charge of this whole thing—but I don’t think that should take long. I’ll call you, the Juno crew, back, when I’m ready. It’s past time you were brought up to speed on what is going on. And perhaps it’s more than past time you were all allowed to just… go home.”
“That will be a good thing,” said Joe tranquilly, brushing one hand, perhaps even without having been aware that he was doing so, against the talisman he wore. Whatever its powers were, whatever the powers it had been imbued with by Joe himself and the powers that it held over him, the thing had traveled too far, had been stretched too thin. Stella suspected there were limits, and that Joe, if he reached those limits and was forced past them, might end up quite a different kind of crazy than the authorities were afraid of.
He stood now, and gave her a small bow of respect as he did so, and turned to make his way to the interview room’s exit. At the door, he hesitated, and turned back to face her again.
“Are they all right?” he asked, very softly.
“I don’t know,” Stella said, finding the strength in his own dignity and courage to offer him no more than the truth. “But I do intend to find out, and if they are not, to do what I can to fix it.”
“That is fair,” he said. “That is everything. I will tell the others to be ready for your return. I look forward to hearing what it is that you have to tell us.”
The room seemed far emptier than it should have been after Joe White Elk stepped out of it. And in the silence he left behind, Stella listened to her own heartbeat, to the blood rushing through her body, and took a guilty, illicit moment to herself in which she wondered what exactly a star sounded like when it was singing.
Martin Peck might have been the designated liaison between Stella and the military and government juggernaut which appeared to be in control of the whole matter of the starships’ return home, and the officer nominally in charge of the quarantine area and its inhabitants, but he was not the ultimate authority. He had his superiors, and Stella’s crusade to have at least the Juno crew released from their captivity had to be sold to those. Before she could have the talk she had promised with the three Juno crewmen, Stella herself sat on the other side of an interview table, in a conference room that looked very much like the one in which she had seen her first presentation before diving into this situation in what seemed such an unconscionably short time ago, before a committee of high-ranking officers and functionaries who didn’t look too happy to be there or to be put in a position of making the necessary decisions.
Martin himself, in full dress uniform, sat on the far end of the table; he looked uncomfortable, as though he was very aware that he didn’t quite belong there. One of the other men wearing a military uniform, General Aristide Niarchos, was someone whose path Stella had already crossed once—he was the one who had chaired the original presentation, at the beginning of her adventure here. But there were three other people behind that table whom she had not personally met before the day that she was summoned to make her case before them—a man in a uniform not too different from General Niarchos’s, and two civilians, a woman in elegant clothes who managed to look every bit as stern as the hatchet-faced military personnel surrounding her, and an elder statesman with silver hair at his temples and the kind of cleft chin that would have looked good on a leading man in old-fashioned action movies.
She knew their names and faces, of course—the civilians were Dag Nyland, the Minister of Information, and Premier Katarina Vasilieva, head of the World Council; the second staff officer was General Jose Camacho, who had (rather disconcertingly under the circumstances) acquired the nickname ‘Diablo’ somewhere in his checkered military past. It did Stella’s frame of mind absolutely no good at all to be reminded every time she looked at General Camacho’s face, which bore an almost theatrically appropriate scar, thin but impossible to ignore, from the corner of his eye to the edge of his sharp jaw, that she was literally here to make a case before the Devil himself.
Stella was outnumbered and outgunned. On her side, she had only Ichiro Amari, here to present his own findings on the Juno crew, and Father Philip Carter, who had conducted his own interviews with the three. She could only hope that they would be able to add sufficient weight to the proposal that the crew of the Juno be declared sane before God and man and be released back into the world.
Martin Peck might or might not speak up for her on the judgment panel. She knew she’d have to talk a very good game to get past an already half-raised wall. So far as she could tell, they didn’t exactly have an endgame plan—but not knowing exactly how they wanted everything to play out didn’t mean that they didn’t have an excellent idea about how they didn’t want it to go. The two Generals, in particular, looked as though they had been sucking on sour lemons.
The return of not one but both the starships to their home planet should have been a public relations coup of the first order, something that could have been extremely useful in firing up the populace, whipping up enthusiasm and goodwill, and there would have been plenty of credit that they could have claimed for it all, had everything not gone so potentially catastrophically awry. As it was, things had unraveled quickly and were still in the process of coming unwound. As far as Stella could tell, from things that Martin Peck had let slip, those who had the power to influence events seemed to be of the unilateral opinion that things could only get worse from here. The potentially disastrous possibility that any attempt at straightening the twisted story could dig a deeper hole for them, at this point, was a very real danger.
