Charles Sheffield - The Spheres of Heaven

“Well, there’s a surprise.” He rubbed at his arm, with its line of purple dots. “Now we know why he always wore long sleeves. And where he got the words for me. He knows it can be done, you see.”

Deb glared at him. “What are you talking about?”

“Chan told me that you can break the Paradox habit. He knew, because he did it. Didn’t you see his bare arms when your potion dissolved his shirt away?”

“Of course I did. We all did.”

“But I was nearer than you. I saw the marks. He’s a Paradox addict himself — or I should say, he used to be. The stigmata have faded to little white dots; but still they show, from long ago.”

“Long ago,” Danny Casement added. “Tully has it right. Not any more, though. Not for a long time. Chan’s over it.”

“ When? ” Deb’s voice would cut glass.

“You mean, when was he on it? Oh, I’m not sure.”

“I know.” Tarboosh Hanson stirred from his cross-legged position on the floor. The head of Scruffy the ferret peered out from a gap between the fastenings of his shirt. “I was there when it happened. It was right after the beginning of the quarantine when Chan came by Lunar Farside. He had found out that we wouldn’t be allowed to go to the stars and he was in despair. He said he had let everybody down, and he couldn’t stand that. He swore he was going to do something about it. You must know all this, Deb. He was with you on Vesta right before he came to Lunar Farside.”

“He was. But the two of us had just had a big fight. He never said anything like that to me when he left.”

“The Tarbush is right, though.” Danny Casement stood up. “Chan was feeling so low — I didn’t know about your argument, so I assumed it was about the quarantine — that I wondered if he’d ever come back to normal. And I know what happened next, though I didn’t hear it until a long time afterwards. Chan left Lunar Farside and went down to Earth. He was in contact with people there who said they had worked with aliens, and he thought he might be able to make a special deal. Isn’t that right, Tarb?”

“It is. He had some tricky plan worked out, something involving Pipe-Rillas operating in the basement warrens that could made an end run around the quarantine. But somebody was trickier than he was. A pusher slipped him a dose of Paradox during dinner, and that was it. You know what they say, one shot and you’re gone.”

Deb Bisson sat down suddenly on the bed. “I thought it had to be injected.”

“For maximum effect, it does. Regulars always take it that way. But most people get hooked orally, the way Chan did.”

“The way I did,” said Tully. He had closed his eyes. “Oh, yes. That’s the way it’s done. One shot in your cup, and you never come up. That would still be true for me if you and Chan hadn’t taken me from Europa.”

“What happened after that?”

At Deb’s question the others looked at each other.

“To Chan?” Danny Casement said at last. “He never came back. You can buy Paradox most places now, but right after the quarantine all the suppliers were down on Earth. So he didn’t leave.”

“He couldn’t leave.” Tully sat rocking to and fro, his eyes still closed and his arms folded across his chest. “You have no idea how good you feel when it hits, or how frightened you get when you don’t know where the next shot is coming from. You want to follow your supplier twenty-four hours a day, just to make sure. Get a shot, you’re red hot; miss a hit, you’re in the pit.”

“Stay here as long as you like and help yourselves to anything you want.” Deb was suddenly on her feet again. “I’m leaving.”

“Where are you going?” Chrissie took her by the arm.

“To talk to Chan.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Should I come with you?”

“ No! ” Deb shook herself free and was out of the door before anyone could move.

“Better go after her,” Danny said. “When she finds him she’ll kill him.”

“No.” Chrissie spoke firmly. “You stay here. Don’t you people understand anything ? If she does kill him, it’ll only be because he deserves it.”

She settled back down on the bed and stared at the display. The Geyser Swirl was still pictured, and the voice of the Angel droned on: “Mean estimated survival time for a suited individual on the surface of the planet Swirl Kappa Three, sixteen minutes. On Swirl Kappa Four, four minutes. On Swirl Kappa Five, nineteen minutes …”

“Oh, shut up,” Danny said. “Tarb? Tully? Should we follow Deb?”

“I’ll go with Chrissie’s judgment. We’ll be at the Link in a few more hours. And then, if it works, we’ll be there .” Tarbush Hanson nodded gloomily at the display of the Swirl. “Relax, Danny, and have a drink. Get me one, too, while you’re at it. It may be our last ever.”

Deb had not been totally honest. She did know where Chan was — or at least, she knew where his rooms were, thirty meters along the corridor from hers.

Only he was not there. Glancing around — if he could enter private rooms without knocking, so could she — Deb found no sign that he had ever been inside. The bed had not been touched and a travel case sat unopened in the middle of the floor.

Where was he? The only thing she knew for certain was that he must be somewhere on board. She stood still long enough to slow her pulse to an even fifty beats a minute, then set out on a careful and deliberate search.

After half an hour she had found no trace of Chan, but she had gained an idea of just how much space there was inside an eighty-thousand-ton warship. The interior volume was close to a million cubic meters, divided into thousands of rooms and chambers interconnected through a maze of tunnels and corridors. At the rate she was going, long before she located Chan the Hero’s Return would have reached the Link entry point and made its transition.

She needed help. That was not going to be easy to find, in a ship where the service robots were too dumb to answer even the simplest question.

Deb headed for the main control room. Surely there, if anywhere, she would find other people.

Make that person rather than people , and she would be right. The control room of the Hero’s Return had originally also been the fire control zone. Row after row of weapons terminals, all unoccupied, formed a three-dimensional matrix. At the far end of the great cylindrical chamber, lolling at ease on a couch, Deb saw a solitary blonde.

The woman, lanky and starvation-thin, turned at Deb’s approach and said, “If you’re looking for Dag Korin, he’s taking a nap. He said he’d be here when the time came to make the Link transition.” She glanced at one of the displays. “That’s less than five hours from now. I hope he wakes up in time.”

“I don’t want General Korin. I’m seeking Chan Dalton.”

Deb expected a casual “sorry” or “never heard of him.” But the woman nodded.

“I don’t know where Dalton is now. But I know where he was , half an hour ago.”

“Where?”

“Forward. I told him, the best place to see what’s ahead of the ship is the bow observation port. When he left there he said he’d be back later.”

“Thank you.” Deb was already on the way.

“All the way forward,” the skinny woman called after her. “Follow the central corridor as far as you can go.”

Which, as Deb soon found, was very far indeed. She seemed to race for miles before the corridor ahead ended in a small ring hatch. It was open, and she dived through headfirst and emerged into a bubble-like observation chamber.