Пол Андерсон - Orbit 1

As one begins to notice the ticking of a clock that has never ceased ticking but that customarily ticks unheard, Wystan Godwin noted the small physical signs that preceded an assessment. While he waited for insight, one hand raised in the universally recognized King’s X signal — honored even by a berserker like Harms — one corner of his mind that was uninvolved with the problem at hand marveled at his own ability. That endless stream of information cross-connecting itself, sub-connecting, crossing over, canceling itself out or throwing out transforms did arrive ever so often at a conclusion that was more than the mere sum of its points. The conclusion, the supralogical assessment, was not under his control, and so could never be dismissed as a mere talent. The only test of the ability was that it was always right. The ability to produce such conclusions was the only prerequisite to training for Liaison.

The moment of assessment was a physical fact, a proprioceptive fact that pre-empted attention from all other activity and made him as vulnerable as a long-necked animal at a waterhole: for a split physical second he “felt” the assessment eject itself from his mind in the same way that he could feel himself swallow and begin to breathe again. Total lack of data is a datum. Harms withheld data. . Harms assumes menace. . Harms (HARMS!) is the menace.

Contrary to custom, he did not voice the assessment. The room full of people waited, immobile, for the man of the law to pronounce the law. He wondered, as an agent always must when his insight contradicts the apparent facts, if he had this time slipped a cog and come up with a wrong one. He had never before faced a potential criminal. He had never contemplated treason himself — for the law said that until he was recalled and reassigned, Harms’ purposes were his purposes.

Smoothly, allowing his audience to believe that his next words were the actual assessment, Godwin intoned, “An announcement so arbitrary can be delivered only by Liaison to Liaison. I will accompany this man.”

Harms made no response other than to wheel around and march out of the room.

Godwin offered the civ his arm as they left the room, saying equably, “What has the specimen to do with all this?”

“Wh—, well, — nothing, sir,” the civ whispered. The change of ground had evidently frightened him. “I collect them. I was looking at one of them — at that one— when my Agent sent me over here, and I brought it along without thinking. So it really hasn’t anything to do with the ship or the problem or anything; it was just mine.”

He paused, but once started, he seemed voluble enough. “How it got broken was the Exec got mad at what I told him — my Agent wants to talk to you — and he said, ‘Give me that piece of junk’—because I guess I was rubbing it for luck. And of course I did. Give it to him, that is. But I said it wasn’t junk. I said just like I told you, ‘It’s my hobby, sir. I collect specimens.’“ The civ laughed, and several stray tears still coasting down his cheeks made his lack of integration obvious. Godwin had to look away as the civ said plaintively, “And what he did, he broke it.”

“What were you telling him before he asked for the specimen?”

“My Agent says she most particularly needs your presence. Because I’m understanding the aliens real good now and they object to dealing with a female. Got that clear about the same time I got the last blanks filled. ‘Hearing droops at lapse so great and grasper aches from emptiness,’ you know.”

“What?” Godwin realized he was shouting, blamed the Exec, realized he was blaming another than himself and winced as his pollyanna-prod gave him a good one in the upper gut. They were strolling across the park, and at his shout the startled civ leaped a good two feet off the path into a bed of flowers. He picked his way out again, whimpering a little, making useless gestures of straightening the bent stalks.

“Look here,” Godwin said in his normal voice, “tell me, please, how you happen to have heard that sentence in the first place, and where you obtained the words you supply for the blanks, in the second.” He added quickly, “And what’s your name?”

As he should have expected, and would have expected if he had been calmer, the civ replied in reverse order.

“Mager, sir. Andrew Mager. I got the words kind of out of my own head, sir. Those two words just fell into place like a knight’s move. Two forward and one sideways, you know. Or-”

“One forward and two sideways,” said Godwin, who did not know. He answered only out of a vague need for self-chastisement — and his Agent’s instinct that if he spoke gibberish, too, he might get some sense out of the little man yet.

“Right!” cried Mager. Godwin suffered a moment’s revulsion from such easy pleasure, so openly expressed. He wanted to look away again in self-protection. Remembering his shout of a moment ago, he disciplined himself by keeping his gaze on Mager’s face. He was therefore looking deeply into the guileless brown eyes, and could not doubt what he heard next.

“Oh, I didn’t just happen to hear the sentence, sir. I was talking back and forth with the Leloc, like I do, on this job, and the head one was acting it out, like he does, two kinds of stretch and the first one is something missing but the second is more something hurting— lapse and aches. It wasn’t hard, right there in the ship like that, to see what he meant.”

Now Godwin was reduced to a whisper. Their stroll had taken them through the encampment and completely across the park. He gestured helplessly upwards. “You were in this ship?”

And the little man was nodding.

The gathering seemed to have been in session for a long time when Wystan Godwin at long last entered the ship in the park. The entrance was open and unguarded, although there was one last lock to go through before he reached the great hall at the center of the ship.

His first coherent thought, as he and Mager passed through the ranks of humans massed on the nearer side of the hall, was a sharp distress that the human beings were seated on chairs, all of one distinct kind, while the aliens perched on low backless blocks. Each kept an enormous broad tail in balance in thin air, like a well-rehearsed string section with all the violins in first position. Godwin winced at the thought of supporting such a burden unassisted, even as he noted that “thin air” was a misnomer. The atmosphere inside the ship was certainly Earthlike, but more wet, more warm, like the moist air of a greenhouse. He had halted outside that last lock, wondering if he ought to inquire about protection — suit or mask or something to mark that the “air” inside came from another world — but the lock had swung open for them, and they had simply walked in.

Nonetheless, it had been a discriminatory breach of protocol if they had imported chairs from Liaison stores. Better to have sat on the floor, he thought, if there just had not been enough blocks to go around. He must insist that he personally must sit on the same kind of seat as his hosts.

The foremost of the aliens rose and paced forward to cross wrists with him. The creature’s forelimbs were absurdly small, in comparison with the rest of his bulk. Two more aliens approached Godwin and Mager, holding out their tiny wrists in the same fashion. Waves of a faintly spicy scent like old nutmeg reached Godwin’s nostrils, and he noticed that “his” alien was holding his tail straight up in the air behind him.

Mager said, “They’ll have one of our chairs up here in a moment for you. Don’t sit on one of those blocks, whatever you do!”