Starbuck swore under his breath. There were too many options, there was no way to predict what effect the mixing of their separate tone commands would have, even if they could outguess each other. He crouched low, started back toward Sparks across the bridge; concentrating grimly on keeping himself protected instead of on attacking. The closer they were to one another, the less the kid could afford to threaten his own stability by shifting the winds around them. If he could just get his hands on that flute and crush it, then he could still finish thisA clout of cold force knocked him flat; he sprawled sideways, flailing desperately as his feet went off one edge and head and shoulders slid out over the other. For an endless moment he looked straight down into the black-walled pit, where the dim spirals of machine lights glittered like the endless lost fire of a Black Gate’s heart; and the smell of the sea and the moaning dirge were strong inside his head. In that moment he lay still, waiting, hands clutching at the narrow edge of the arcing span, hypnotized by the immediacy of death.
But the final formless blow did not fall, or rise, to tumble him over the edge; the paralysis released him and he raised his head, saw Sparks Dawntreader standing frozen like himself, unable to make the kill.
He levered himself back onto the meter-wide solidity of the span, reacting instinctively now; flung himself up and into a protective hole in the air. He ran forward, almost in reach before the boy finally reacted, lashing out at him with a double buffet of wind. He countered it easily, and at the same time brought his booted foot up with all his strength to kick the boy in the groin.
Sparks collapsed with an animal cry of agony. The flute stayed in his fist, but it was no use to him now, no danger to his rival… Starbuck backed slowly away, savoring his triumph, sorry only that the kid hurt too much to care about what was going to happen to him next. Starbuck lifted his head to look at Arienrhod, still standing on the brink, far away, like some unattainable dream. In another moment the road to her would be clear again. His hand moved at the controls on his belt; Arienrhod moved slightly where she stood.
Two discordant notes collided in the air. Astounded, he felt his own feet go out from under him as the wind struck him down. Not the boy, not the boy — himself! Falling! “Arienrhod!” He screamed her name, a curse, a prayer, an accusation, as he fell; and it followed him down into darkness.
16
The Black Gate filled the shielded viewscreen that filled the center of the wall, a flaming whorl against the amber blackness of the distant starfield. In the heart of this stellar cluster there had once been a glut of cosmic flotsam to feed a black hole’s hunger; through eons it had been mostly consumed, and the deadly excrement of the hole’s gravitational radiation had dimmed. But it had also captured the star the Tiamatans called the Summer Star; held it prisoner on a narrow tether, siphoning away its chromosphere. The minutiae of dust and molecules blazed up, giving off their potential energy, as they were sucked down to destruction, as this ship was being sucked down…
Elsevier felt the hunger of the Gate lick out at her, felt the first tingling of physical sensation, the slow, compulsive movement of her weightless body toward the image on the wall… felt it too in the depths of her mind, where it probed her secret terror of dismemberment. The firmly yielding cushion of the transparent cocoon that wrapped her held her back with gentle reassurance.
She glanced down past her drifting feet toward the ship’s center of mass, where the girl Moon hung in another light-catching chrysalis. Moon shifted restlessly, like a fire moth impatient for birth; her luridly pink flightsuit caught reflections from the console suspended around her. A crown of silver mesh hung useless in the air above her silver-gilt hair — the crown that Cress should have worn, the symb helmet of an astrogator. Moon looked up to find Elsevier looking down, and Elsevier saw the emotions struggle on her face.
“Moon, are you ready?”
“No…”
Elsevier stiffened, afraid of what an outburst of rebellion from the girl could do to them. She thought she had convinced Moon that this trip was no more than a brief detour in her journey to find her cousin. But if she refused to begin a Transfer now’I don’t know what to do. I don’t understand anything, I don’t understand how—”
Elsevier felt a feeble smile form as she realized that it was only doubt on Moon’s face, and not refusal. She had only read her own guilty conscience there. “You don’t need to, Moon. Leave that to me. Trust me, I’m not ready to meet the Render yet. Just input all the data the way I showed you.”
Moon looked back at the screen wordlessly, her awe tempered by a half-formed comprehension of the Gate’s terrible power. They were above its pole of rotation, already trapped in the undertow of its black gravitational heart: that force so inexorable that light itself could not break free of it. This hole, at twenty thousand solar masses, was large enough that a specially designed ship fell through the event horizon before it could be ripped apart by the tidal forces working on its mass. But only an astrogator trained in singularity physics, and in symbiotic linkup with the ship’s computers, could maintain the critical balance of its stabilizers. Only an astrogator could make certain they entered the Gate at the precise point that would put them in the pipeline for their chosen destination. Only an astrogator — or an ignorant girl from a backward planet whose mind was already in symbiosis with the greatest data bank in known space and time. “Do you want me to begin Transfer? Elsevier—?” Moon looked up at her again, face set in a shield of determination.
Elsevier took a deep breath, postponing the inevitable moment. But the inevitable moment had already passed, and now she must say it. “Yes, Moon. Keep your eyes on the viewscreen and begin Transfer.” And the gods forgive me, as they protect you, child. Because you’ll never see your home again. Moon’s eyes closed for a brief moment, as if in a prayer to her own goddess, and then she focused on the shining vortex before them. “Input.” Elsevier pressed a button on the remote at her belt as the girl’s slim body quivered into a trance state; the data concerning their entrance flashed across the image on the screen, and was gone again. If she was right — and she couldn’t afford to be wrong — that should be enough to start the necessary information feeding back into the ship’s guidance system. Without an astrogator’s implants no human could make full use of the ship’s computer symb circuits, but the sibyl Transfer would supply the information the computers could not.
“It done.” Silky’s voice, speaking broken Sandhi, reached her in a sibilant whisper across the control room’s silence. “Is girl hurting?”
“How do I know?” sharp with the stab of her doubt. She frowned down across the open space at him. His amphibian body shone through its own cocoon, silken with the oils that kept him from dehydrating. He sounded strangely unsettled; it struck her that he must feel an empathy for this helpless innocent torn loose from the world she knew, at the mercy of betraying strangers.
“Could she die?”
“Silky, damn it!” Elsevier bit her lip and looked back at the spreading malignancy of the Gate. “You know I can’t answer that . but you know I wouldn’t have done it if I believed that she would. You know that, Silky… But what choice did any of us have, except to try? I told her it would be a long trance; she accepted that.”
“She too young. She not know. You lie to her,” as close to reproach as she bad ever heard him come.
Elsevier closed her eyes. “I’ll make it up to her. I’ll see that she has everything she needs to be happy on Kharemough.” She opened them again, looking down on Moon. The girl’s pink-suited body was limp now, pressed softly against the walls of the cocoon. Was it barely four days tau since they had made that fate-cursed landing on Tiamat, fled back to the ship with nothing to show for it but Cress barely on this side of death, and a dazed stranger in his place?