Nigel feels a rising electric field pluck at him. He moves to shed his excess charge. To carry a cloak of electrons here is fatal. Upstream lies the chewing gullet of the ramscoop, where incoming protons are sucked in, their kinetic power stolen from them by the electric fields. There the particles are slowed, brought to rest inside the ship, their streaming energy stored in capacitors.
A cyclone shrieks behind him. Nigel swims sideways toward the walls of the combustion chamber. The nuclear burn that flares around him is never pure, cannot be pure because the junk of the cosmos pours through here, like barley meal laced with grains of granite. The incoming atomic rain spatters constantly over the fluxlife walls, killing the organic superconductor strands there. Nigel pushes against the rubbery magnetic fields and swoops along the mottled yellow-blue crust of the walls. In the flickering lightning glow of infrared and ultraviolet he sees the scaly muck that deadens the magnetic fields and slows the nuclear burn in the throat. He flexes, wriggles, and turns the eellike form. This brings the electron beam gun around at millimeter range.
He fires. A brittle crackling leaps out onto the scaly wall. The tongue bites and gouges. Flakes bubble up like tar, blacken, and finally roast off. The rushing proton stream washes the flakes away, revealing the gunmetal blue beneath. Now the exposed superconducting threads can begin their own slow pruning of themselves, life casting out its dead. Their long organic chain molecules can feed and grow anew. As Nigel cuts and turns and carves he watches the spindly fibers coil loose and drift in eddies. Finally they spin away into the erasing proton storm. The dead fibers sputter and flash where the incoming protons strike them and then with a rumble in his acoustic pickup coils he sees them swept away.
Something tugs at him. Ahead lies the puckered scoop where energetic alpha particles shoot by. They dart like luminous jade wasps. The scoop sucks them in. Inside they will be collected, drained of energy, inducing megawatts of power for the ship. The ship will drink their last drop of momentum and leave them behind, a wake of broken atoms.
Suddenly he spins to the left—Jesus, how can—he thinks—and the scoop fields lash him. A megavolt per meter of churning electrical vortex snatches at him. Huge, quick, relentless, it clutches at his shiny surfaces. The scoop opening is a plunging, howling mouth. Jets of glowing atoms whirl by him, mocking. The walls near him counter his motion by increasing their magnetic fields. Lines of force stretch and bunch.
How did this—is all he has time to think before a searing spot blooms nearby. His presence so near the scoop has upset the combination rates there. If the reaction gets out of control it can burn through the chamber vessel, through the asteroid rock beyond, and spike with acrid fire into the ship, toward the life dome.
A brassy roar. The scoop sucks at his heels. Ions run white-hot. A warning knot strikes him. Tangled magnetic ropes grope for him, clotting around the shiny skin.
Panic squeezes his throat. Desperately he fires his electron beam gun against the wall, hoping it will give him a push, a fresh vector—
Not enough. Orange ions blossom and rage and swell around him—another death.
“Pretty bad,” Ted Landon said. Nigel tried to focus. Therapy devices nuzzled and stroked him like mechanical lovers. He could make out Ted’s scowl, and he said in the direction of the blurred image, “What … I tried to … get back to mooring …”
“You didn’t make it.”
Nigel lay back and let feelings seep into consciousness. His body felt worn and numb. “The … ”
“Destroyed, lost. Tracer shows it hit the wall. Thing is, you got a big retrofeed shock to your central nervous system when it blew.”
“I can’t … body doesn’t feel the same.”
“It won’t, for a while. So say the medics, anyway. Thing is, we never had this exact injury before. The other guys got out of those surges. You should’ve been able to get away from it. Nothing special about that surge.”
“It … got by me, I suppose. I won’t let it happen … ”
“I’m afraid this takes you permanently off manual tasks, Nigel. No way I can let you stay on the roster.”
He could think of nothing to say, and in any case he could hardly sort out the confusion of distorted impulses his senses brought him. He gazed out the exop door. People were clustered around, listening as a medic talked in a low whisper. He felt tears trickling down his face. He had lost something, some inner equilibrium; his body was not the same tuned instrument he had come to take so easily. A wracking sob came from him. He searched among the people and in the back, a point of calming rest in the bunched faces, he found Nikka. She smiled.
Four
Nigel’s recovery was slow. It was a long time before he could work again in the fields, harvesting, grunting with the effort and trying not to show it. But he liked the work and kept at it. It reminded him of moments in his past when, intent on some worrisome task, he would by chance press a finger to his wrist and feel, like a sudden reminder, the patient throb of his pulse, a steady note that lifted him out of fretful details.
But his internal confusion did not go away. He was enough of a mechanistic thinker to see that sudden jolts to the entire body could act on the mind in unknown ways. The glacial steadiness and resolve he had had since Marginis was now faltering, leaving him with strange, drifting anxieties.
About his own mental states he had never had any theories. He had refused to endorse mystical savants back Earthside. That lot had quite neatly done a job on Alexandria, thank you. More to the point, he could not speak for anyone else. Things happened to you and you learned from them whether you knew it or not but a pretense of a common interior landscape which could be described, a bloody touring book of the soul—that was a lie. No flat formulas could capture the human interior. Kafka, that gnarled spirit, was right: Life is defined by the closed spaces of the self.
That was why he had all along declined to become a savant figure himself, interpreter of the long-dead aliens of the Marginis wreck. He would have lost himself that way, when the whole point was to remain a man, to stay in the gritty world and experience it directly, avoiding abstractions. He knew that this made him appear increasingly isolated, cranky, out of step with the younger crew. But he did little to temper this, and used what pull he could when Nikka drew an assignment working on Lancer’s skin, to repair the ramscoop fields. Ted Landon made the quite reasonable point that he could not run a ship according to the loves of the crew. Nigel retorted that with the frequency of sex changes in the crew, it was bloody difficult to tell who was inclined to do what, and to whom. It came to him, then, why Ted smiled benignly on all the self-alteration that was so fashionable in Lancer.
“He’s got the game down, clean and simple,” Nigel said to Carlotta one evening. “People cloning new tissues, people socketed into machines more and more to up efficiency—so’s they can have more time off for their pursuits, preoccupation. My God! In a fad-driven society like Lancer, Ted looks reassuringly steady. Marvelous, ol’ Ted—let him keep a hand on the helm while we go off and console ourselves for the long voyage.”
Carlotta shook her head. “Makes no sense. The directives on involution therapy—that’s the term, don’t wrinkle your nose—came from Earthside. Ted had nothing to do with—”
“Nonsense. Look at that thing you’re drinking. Carbonated cherry frappé, seething along with microicebergs of orange floating in it. Where’d the resources for that come from?”