Elsevier felt the hunger of the Gate lick out at her, felt the first tingling of physical sensation, the slow, compulsive movement of her weightless body toward the image on the wall… felt it too in the depths of her mind, where it probed her secret terror of dismemberment. The firmly yielding cushion of the transparent cocoon that wrapped her held her back with gentle reassurance.
She glanced down past her drifting feet toward the ship’s center of mass, where the girl Moon hung in another light-catching chrysalis. Moon shifted restlessly, like a fire moth impatient for birth; her luridly pink flightsuit caught reflections from the console suspended around her. A crown of silver mesh hung useless in the air above her silver-gilt hair — the crown that Cress should have worn, the symb helmet of an astrogator. Moon looked up to find Elsevier looking down, and Elsevier saw the emotions struggle on her face.
“Moon, are you ready?”
“No…”
Elsevier stiffened, afraid of what an outburst of rebellion from the girl could do to them. She thought she had convinced Moon that this trip was no more than a brief detour in her journey to find her cousin. But if she refused to begin a Transfer now’I don’t know what to do. I don’t understand anything, I don’t understand how—”
Elsevier felt a feeble smile form as she realized that it was only doubt on Moon’s face, and not refusal. She had only read her own guilty conscience there. “You don’t need to, Moon. Leave that to me. Trust me, I’m not ready to meet the Render yet. Just input all the data the way I showed you.”
Moon looked back at the screen wordlessly, her awe tempered by a half-formed comprehension of the Gate’s terrible power. They were above its pole of rotation, already trapped in the undertow of its black gravitational heart: that force so inexorable that light itself could not break free of it. This hole, at twenty thousand solar masses, was large enough that a specially designed ship fell through the event horizon before it could be ripped apart by the tidal forces working on its mass. But only an astrogator trained in singularity physics, and in symbiotic linkup with the ship’s computers, could maintain the critical balance of its stabilizers. Only an astrogator could make certain they entered the Gate at the precise point that would put them in the pipeline for their chosen destination. Only an astrogator — or an ignorant girl from a backward planet whose mind was already in symbiosis with the greatest data bank in known space and time. “Do you want me to begin Transfer? Elsevier—?” Moon looked up at her again, face set in a shield of determination.
Elsevier took a deep breath, postponing the inevitable moment. But the inevitable moment had already passed, and now she must say it. “Yes, Moon. Keep your eyes on the viewscreen and begin Transfer.” And the gods forgive me, as they protect you, child. Because you’ll never see your home again. Moon’s eyes closed for a brief moment, as if in a prayer to her own goddess, and then she focused on the shining vortex before them. “Input.” Elsevier pressed a button on the remote at her belt as the girl’s slim body quivered into a trance state; the data concerning their entrance flashed across the image on the screen, and was gone again. If she was right — and she couldn’t afford to be wrong — that should be enough to start the necessary information feeding back into the ship’s guidance system. Without an astrogator’s implants no human could make full use of the ship’s computer symb circuits, but the sibyl Transfer would supply the information the computers could not.
“It done.” Silky’s voice, speaking broken Sandhi, reached her in a sibilant whisper across the control room’s silence. “Is girl hurting?”
“How do I know?” sharp with the stab of her doubt. She frowned down across the open space at him. His amphibian body shone through its own cocoon, silken with the oils that kept him from dehydrating. He sounded strangely unsettled; it struck her that he must feel an empathy for this helpless innocent torn loose from the world she knew, at the mercy of betraying strangers.
“Could she die?”
“Silky, damn it!” Elsevier bit her lip and looked back at the spreading malignancy of the Gate. “You know I can’t answer that . but you know I wouldn’t have done it if I believed that she would. You know that, Silky… But what choice did any of us have, except to try? I told her it would be a long trance; she accepted that.”
“She too young. She not know. You lie to her,” as close to reproach as she bad ever heard him come.
Elsevier closed her eyes. “I’ll make it up to her. I’ll see that she has everything she needs to be happy on Kharemough.” She opened them again, looking down on Moon. The girl’s pink-suited body was limp now, pressed softly against the walls of the cocoon. Was it barely four days tau since they had made that fate-cursed landing on Tiamat, fled back to the ship with nothing to show for it but Cress barely on this side of death, and a dazed stranger in his place?
And with time running out: The police would be searching Tiamat space for them, and they couldn’t afford to be caught with a kidnapped citizen of the planet on board. The girl had wanted to go home… but there was no way to send her back. Cress needed a hospital… and the only ones that could save him were on Kharemough, beyond the Gate.
But only Cress could take them through.
And then she had remembered: Moon was a sibyl, and once TJ had told her of seeing a sibyl go into a trance and operate a field polarizer to save five people during an industrial accident. That sibyl hadn’t been trained on sophisticated machinery; it shouldn’t matter that this one barely knew what machinery was. She was only a vessel, just as she had said; and it was her duty to serve all who needed her — she could take them through the Gate to safety.
But when she had tried to explain it to Moon, she had run into a barrier as impassible as the Gate itself. Moon sat firmly strapped into her seat on the LB, refusing to set foot inside the greater ship. “Take me back. I have to go to Carbuncle!” Her face was like a clenched fist, and she had answered every imaginable argument with the same two sentences, immovable and unmoved.
“But Moon, the off worlders will never let you go back if they find you with us. Your world is proscribed. They’ll sentence us all to the cinder camps on Big Blue, and believe me, my dear, you’d be better off dead.”
“It doesn’t matter, if I can’t go back. Nothing matters without him.”
Oh, child, how lucky you are to believe it’s that simple… and how naive. And yet a part of her said it was true; that since TJ’s death she had only lived half a life… “I know, truly. I know it seems that way to you now. But if you won’t think of yourself, then think of Cress.” Her hand had moved along the cool, translucent shell beside her that breathed on the fragile embers of his life. “He’ll die, Moon. Unless we reach Kharemough, he will die. You’re a sibyl; it’s your duty.”
“I can’t do what you ask!” Moon shook her head, her braids drifting with the motion. “I can’t, I don’t know how to do that. I can’t fly a starship—” Her voice rose, “And I can’t leave Sparks !”
“It’s only for a few weeks!” The words had burst out of Elsevier in exasperation; but before she could take them back she saw the girl’s head come up, the eyes fix on her quizzically.
“H-how long?”
“About a month, one way.” Ship’s time. And more than two years would have passed on Tiamat in the meantime. But Elsevier did not say that; inspiration took root in her need. “Only a month each way. Moon, if you’d taken a trader’s ship from Shotover Bay to Carbuncle it would take you as long. Help us get through the Gate, help Cress… and if you still want to come back when we reach Kharemough, I’ll bring you back. I promise it.”