Диана Дуэйн - Nightfall_at_Algemron

"So where is it?" Angela asked, only partly teasing.
Gabriel sighed. "Not here."
"You can tell already?" said Helm.
"I can tell that the reading is stronger than it was, but not that much stronger," Gabriel confessed. "Definitely I know that it's not anywhere nearby, not anywhere we could use system drive to reach anyway. We need to keep going in the same general direction as the last starfall. I'll give you another set of coordinates when the drives have finished charging."
They met again for dinner in Longshot this time. It turned out to be one of Helm's "I did it with a handlaser" dinners, a one-pot dish of the kind in which he so excelled.
Gabriel took a lot of good-natured chaffing during the meal about his stone not having produced the goods. "It might take a lot more jumps," Gabriel said. "I'm warning you."
"That means there might be some wisdom in not eating all the meat right away." Angela threw Grawl a look. "This means you."
"I will try some other forms of protein for a while," Grawl said, "especially if Helm is cooking them with his handlaser, but I expect to come out at some civilized world within, say, the next month or so."
"No guarantees," Gabriel said.
Angela gave him a look that he had trouble reading, and for the moment, not a whisper could he hear from the inside of her head.
That, Gabriel thought later when they had all parted for the evening, was something that was beginning to bother him. It was getting to the point where he could habitually hear not people's thoughts as such, but a kind of background noise made by their thinking and their emotions. It was like the faint rumble through a ship's system drive, except that it came in a slightly different flavor and timbre for each person. Sometimes it went away, but not often. Lately, he had awakened to think that the stardrive was malfunctioning in some new and interesting way, because he could hear and feel that vibration. except that it was no vibration. It was Enda.
The stone knew about fraal. It had known about them for a long time. That familiarity was plain, and also—strange to Gabriel—it had some obscure trouble with fraal, some problem. It seemed not to like them very much.
That made Gabriel wonder. Maybe Enda is right, he thought, and the stone sees her as some kind of rival or potential interference with its business. How do I tell it that it doesn't have anything to worry about? Its business is mine, for the moment.
Lying in his bed in the dark with the stone in his hand, he wondered if even that was open to question occasionally. There were moments when the fine hairs stood up all over him at the thought of what he was becoming. Some of his memories, Gabriel found, were becoming hazy. He had to concentrate to see them clearly. Some of them, quite old memories from his childhood, were becoming hazy enough that he had to look hard to remember whether they had really happened or whether they were dreams. In some cases he could no longer tell.
His mind was being altered. Compressed, Gabriel thought, to make room for something else? What else? There was no telling.
Delde Sota's warnings were beginning to seem more urgent to him now. When the changes had been merely physical and external—the hair going white, even the beard silvering rapidly now—those had seemed less threatening, but when things started happening in the inside of his head.
Still, Gabriel thought, this is the path I've chosen.
Or so I like to think. Has there been any choice in this? Has the stone been calling the shots ever since it got itself into my hand? What's it looking for when I use it to hunt down this old trove of alien science that the little edanwe—or what was hiding inside her—told me about? Granted, the Concord can use these things. In fact, he suspected that the Concord was going to need to have these things to protect its people, the civilization they'd managed to build so far, but that's not the stone's concern. It doesn't mind.
At least he didn't think it minded. He was almost afraid to try to look into that further.
But what does it really want?
Long silence. No answers came. In his hand, the stone declined even to glow.
Fine, Gabriel thought and put it off to one side on the shelf, turning over to go to sleep.
You Just be that way, he said to the stone. I'll find out myself, eventually,' and when I do, well see which of us is really running this show.
After recharging their drives, they jumped again. Again, five days passed during which Gabriel mostly avoided the stone and went back to studying the starship catalogues. Enda teased him mildly about this and occupied herself with her own routine, cooking, reading, listening to the fraal choral music that she favored, looking at "canned" entertainments and news programs downloaded from the Grid at Aegis or from the much bigger Grid that the Lighthouse carried with it.
When starrise came again, Gabriel had been awake for nearly twelve hours already, unable to bear the excitement, the thought that there might actually be something there this time, but they came out again in empty space, all the stars distant, not even an uninhabited one nearby. Gabriel nearly did not need the stone, or his slowly burgeoning ability, to hear Helm thinking, Now what? There's nothing here .
The three ships drew together in the darkness and linked up by comms.
"Everybody okay over there?" Helm asked.
"No problems," Gabriel said, looking at the mass detector. "Except one." "There's nothing here," said Angela from Lalique.
Gabriel sighed and wished she wouldn't belabor the obvious.
"Gabe," Helm said, "this is really beginning to seem like a waste of fuel."
Gabriel flushed hot with embarrassment. "Look," he said, "I warned you that it might. The stone—" "That thing might be wrong, you know," Helm said. "Has that occurred to you?" "Yes, it has, but—"
"Well, when are you going to start acting on the idea?" Helm growled. "It's all very well to blow your own food and fuel and funds chasing all over the black backend of nowhere, but when you—"
"Helm, I didn't—"
"Oh, what's the use of trying to talk sense to you? The hell with it." Helm chopped off his comms.
Gabriel sat there torn between frustration and anger, for he could understand Helm's viewpoint all too well. From Lalique there was nothing but silence.
Gabriel swallowed. "Well," he said, "we'll charge up again and head out. Who's cooking tonight?"
"Opinion: my turn," Delde Sota said as Longshot's comms crackled to life again.
It meant dinner in Longshot, which right now did not seem to be such a great idea. "What are you going to feed me?" Gabriel muttered. "Crow?"
"Assessment: cooking area here large," said Delde Sota dryly, "but not large enough to take a whole planet."
"Huh," Gabriel said, not sure how hard his leg was being pulled. Still, he reluctantly agreed that he and Enda would come over.
Normally, visiting Longshot amused Gabriel somewhat, for Helm's ship reflected a rather spartan lifestyle that was only slowly changing. One whole cabin of that fairly ample space was allotted to "things I don't know where to put"—a farrago of packed-up mining equipment, old entertainment chips, and a surprising amount of souvenirs and clothes, all pushed into that cabin and tied down. Every now and then, having acquired some new hobby or interest in his travels and then gotten bored with it, Helm would bundle up everything and stuff it into that cabin. "Adding a new layer," as he put it. When the three ships connected their tubes—Longshot having two airlocks made this their normal configuration when laying over for a recharge—Gabriel came over and found Helm engaged in this, while shouting suggestions over his shoulder at Delde Sota. The doctor was in the galley halfway down Longshot's long central hallway.
Angela and Grawl looked over his shoulder in a mixture of curiosity and bemusement. "You ask me," Angela said to Helm, who was lashing a plastic box full of chips down onto the top layer, "you're the one who should be looking for a new ship, not Gabriel. You're a pack rat."
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