Part 39 (2/2)

He drifted farther still. Would it unleash its blast now? No, it had computed that it must lure him closer first, then obliterate him and itself.

” . . . come back, and I will be the servant from now on . . .”

The s.h.i.+p was too badly damaged to let it chase him, even slowly. He turned and moved deliberately away. Ahead, at a distance that his perception did not measure in kilometers but instead in terms of being reachable in a matter of hours, began the fringes of a galactic nebula that might, for all Michel knew, extend for a hundred pa.r.s.ecs. What Lance could still detect of the lifeboat's fading spoor seemed strongest in that direction.

He had to follow, before the fleet gave up the search and left him behind. Movement fed fear, and fear turned movement into flight.

Going home. Alpine.

Home lay somewhere in the galaxy, and there was nothing to stop his moving toward it now, for he was free. The Co-ordinator had been left far, far behind him now, and so had Tupelov, and so had the woman who had so softly and insidiously claimed to be Michel's mother. (Some idea there had been, hadn't there, of following a lifeboat? But that idea could no longer be remembered very clearly.) Panic. Got to watch out for that. Michel realized that he had been in a state of panic recently. But recently he had managed to master that. Just closing his eyes had helped. Closing his eyes and resting, drifting, here in this peaceful, restful spot.

Keeping his eyes closed, he allowed his breathing (which had recently been quite violent) to slow to a complete stop. With Lancelot you didn't need to breathe at all. Cramps wracked his guts for a moment, but in another moment Lancelot had taken care of that as well.

It was Elly who was dying, not his mother. It was a berserker who had first told him that Elly was his mother, and therefore that must have been a lie. They were evil and they always lied . . . something had been said about Frank being his biofather. That was too much to think about just now.

His real mother would now be . . . at Moonbase, probably. But soon she would be leaving there and coming home, home to Michel's father and to Michel as well. And they were all going to meet there, at home. Where else should a family meet?

Even if his mother hadn't quite got back to Alpine yet, she must be on the way. And his father was of course already there; somebody had to look after the business. Business included woodcarving orders, piled up there for Michel to work at. As soon as he had hugged his father he would go to his room and while waiting for his mother maybe do some work. First, though, he would slide under the quilted cover of the great carven bed, and get some rest. His bed stood by a window, a cosy window whose sky was blanketed eternally by a great Blackwool comforter that could keep out the stars.

His body wasn't really tired now. Not with Lancelot's support. But still something in him yearned for sleep.

Keeping his eyes closed, Michel issued a silent order: Let me rest, Lance, but fly me home. He waited, but he could feel that nothing was going to happen. Lance did not really know which way to go, that was the problem.

Opening his eyes again, unwillingly, Michel forced himself to study his surroundings. The scene had changed since the last time he had taken a look around. Certainly the wrecked goodlife s.h.i.+p was no longer anywhere within range of his perception, and he had no idea in which direction it now lay. Dust clouds bulking like thunderheads, within a few billion kilometers, kept him from getting much of a look at anything beyond, while at the same time the rest of the sky blazed with more stars than he really found comfortable. It was hard to gaze into them, Lancelot or not. His eyelids kept drooping and he felt so tired. . . .

At last (and the search took him an uncomfortably long time) Michel found an open line of sight through which he could just distinguish a few degrees of a curving spiral arm that he judged must be a thousand pa.r.s.ecs distant. That arm, Michel decided after he had looked at it for a while, embodied a great curve that was centered truly on the invisible Core. At least, the three-thousand-year-old light of those far stars brought into his/Lancelot's eyes a description of how that arm had curved three thousand years ago.

From that information it was obvious at least at what angle the plane of the galaxy lay-that would not have changed much in a mere three thousand years-and also in which direction was the Core.

Quite near the Core, he knew, lay Blackwool Nebula. Michel looked in that direction now, with eyes that stung, and presently he began to move. Impatiently he dodged the wisps and specks of matter that flickered past him, impeding his progress by preventing Lance from reaching anything like his best true speed. Home. Alpine. . . .

And almost before he had dared to begin to hope for it, he could see the dark ma.s.s of Blackwool outlined plainly before him. His home sun was still invisible, of course, inside, but Michel knew that it would be there, a single bright jewel in a black velvet pouch, and round it the fragile ring of Alpine's...o...b..t.

In another moment tears had blurred his/Lance's vision totally.

”Mother,” he murmured, stretching out his arms. Lance needed no conscious orders now. The specks of matter in his pathway thinned; the last fringes of an obstructing nebula were being left behind, in an eye-blink of speed.

When Michel's vision cleared again, he beheld an altering universe. The stars before him were gradually cl.u.s.tering together, in a formation centered on the dark nebula he sought. At the same time their light was s.h.i.+fting into the blue. When he glanced back he saw that the remaining stars and nebulae were cl.u.s.tering there, this time redly. All around Michel and at right angles to his flight, a belt of blackly deserted sky was widening. And now his own body began to appear distorted. His fingers were foreshortened when he stretched out a hand; his shoulders seemed to be set far below a slowly elongating neck.

He knew these were illusions, and he thought about them vaguely, and in time a vague sort of understanding came: ride a fast flyer through a rainstorm, and the drops must appear to come from almost nowhere but straight ahead. So with light quanta if your flyer approached the speed of light.

Other effects had to be involved as well, but they did not matter, he thought. The point was that he had to be approaching lightspeed. Still the dark nebula with its false halo of blue suns remained apparently as far away as ever. He could not detect growth in its size at all. He was still crawling across a lifetime of black utter emptiness.

He stretched his hands out, far ahead of him, toward his home where mother would be waiting. The middle portions of his arms ceased to exist, disappeared into his equatorial belt of nothingness.

His/Lancelot's hands were distorted into a tight, dark ring, almost lost in blue starlight, encircling Blackwool nebula.

It seemed to Michel that he could hear a sound, the whistle of a heavy log-hauler late at night. Some tame machine signaling its need for human help, stuck somewhere on a winding road that threaded Alpine's glacial deserts and deep forests.

Oh, Lance, I've got to close my eyes. You've got to-somehow-get me home. Where I can sleep.

Lance would take care of it. Somehow. And sleep of a kind did come at last.

TWELVE.

”Just like old times, El. Or Almost.”

Come to think of it, she had recently heard those same words, or some very like them, several times.

The voice they came in was rather mechanical, but most definitely human and achingly familiar. And this time, at last, the meaning of the words and voice had penetrated.

It was, oh G.o.d, it was truly Frank.

This time Elly awoke in no civilian pa.s.senger's berth, nor was she bound. She was wearing a service s.p.a.cesuit, and rested in a scouts.h.i.+p's right-side combat couch. And once her eyes had opened properly she found that she was looking at the interior of a scouts.h.i.+p. Here and there her gaze lighted on an item of unfamiliar gear, but the basic outlines and colors had hardly changed in the ten years . . . no, it had to be more than ten years now . . . in all the time since she had served.

”Oh, Frank. Frank?” Looking through the comfortably open hatch into the opposite cabin compartment she could see him there as usual, boxed for combat, his armored personal hardware no more and no less changed than that of the modified s.h.i.+p around them. The scouts.h.i.+p that, when he was in it, seemed always to Elly to have become little more than an extension of Frank's self.

Unless . . . oh, G.o.d, this couldn't all be some kind of a berserker trick. Could it?

”Frank?” she called again, and tried to move. Though unbound, she was too weak, and too well secured by the neatly fitting couch, to get out of it quickly and easily. Also, the attempt made her body hurt in several places, and she now became aware of several medirobot tubes that were patched into her suit and presumably into her body as well. Giving up the attempt to rise immediately, she lay back in the couch, not minding the mild pain at all; it authenticated reality.

”El?” came the familiar voice from the other compartment. ”I think you're really with me, this time.

Welcome aboard.”

She muttered something hopelessly inadequate.

”I pulled you out of a civvie lifeboat back there. Remember that?”

From the feel and the faint sounds of the scout around her she could tell that they were making good sublight time. ”Not being pulled out, no.”

”But getting into it? From that goodlife s.h.i.+p? The important thing I've got to know is, were there any other survivors? That could be vital.”

”There was a boy. He helped me into the boat. I don't know if he got clear himself or not. He had-he was wearing Lancelot. If you know what Lancelot-”

”That's him. Michel. Where is he now?”

”I don't know, Frank. I don't know whereIam.”

But Frank was muttering to himself: ”I wonder if I can get a scrambled beam through . . .” At the controls he displayed even less physical movement than was required of a pilot in a body of whole flesh, but Elly knew the subtle signs that meant that he was working. The idea that all this could be some berserker deception was fading from her mind, rapidly and gratefully.

”Secretary Tupelov direct,” Frank was ordering. ”Urgent from Colonel Marcus.”

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