"Yes?"
"I am a Vardda now. I've proved it. What can they do to me, on Llyrdis?"
"I wish I could tell you. Actually, you are a true Vardda, a complete
atavism. But legally--that's another thing. That basic tenet of Vardda
law that Kerrel referred to is a prohibition against admitting into
our race non-Vardda strains of any kind. Keeping the Vardda blood pure
isn't just pride, it's an economic necessity, and the one unbreakable
tabu. The solution of that puzzle will be up to the Council, and my
advice is to forget it until then. Come on, and I'll give you something
else to think about."
Trehearne was glad enough to go. The lost, sick, nightmarish feeling
was creeping back on him again, and he was glad of any diversion. They
went out into the corridor, and he followed Edri forward. He became
aware of a deep inner vibration of power that filled the ship, a sort
of humming drone that seemed to challenge the whole universe to make it
stop. It sang in his ears, in his blood and his quivering nerve-ends,
and the excitement he had felt when he first saw the ship returned to
him full force. This was the ultimate. All his life he had been playing
with children's toys, but here, under his feet and all around him, was
the highest dream of men.
"What's the motive power? What's the principle? And how can you go
faster than light? The limiting speed, contraction, mass...."
Edri laughed. "One at a time, please. And such simple little
questions, too! It took centuries to evolve a technology capable of
answering them, and you want me to explain it all in a few words.
Well, a few words is all I know about it. I'm a drinker by profession,
not a scientist. Anyway, a really functional ship, whether it plies
water, air, or space, must get its motive power by reacting against
the element it travels in. And so, right now, the big atomic-powered
generators in the stern are producing fifth-order rays which react
against the fabric of space itself. And space, not wishing to be torn
apart, obligingly thrusts us onward. Very simple, I believe, once you
know the trick."
Trehearne grunted.
"As to limiting speeds," said Edri, "the Vardda scientists used to
believe in them too--until they got to playing around with cosmotrons.
One day a particle they were experimenting with upset them horribly
by going much faster than light, and that's how they discovered the
fifth-order rays. They found out, as your scientists will find, that
the theoretical absolutes you set up from limited knowledge will prove
illusory when your knowledge expands. I could explain all that to you
if I knew continuum-mechanics better than I do!"
"I couldn't understand it anyway," said Trehearne, "so it's just as
well."
They had reached the forward end of the corridor. There was a narrow
circular stairway leading up. Edri stood back and motioned Trehearne
to climb it. He did, fighting down another attack of the shakes on the
way--you couldn't take it all in, you couldn't get used to it all at
once, the strangeness, the utter separation from everything that had
been, the headlong plunge into alien horizons, for a long time you were
going to get panicky when you thought about it. He emerged into a round
observation dome of immensely heavy quartz. He didn't know what he had
expected to see, but he was disappointed. There was nothing to be seen
at all but darkness, streaked with creeping lines of light.
"Those are stars," said Edri, who had come up behind him. "Or rather,
the radiation patterns of stars. At our present velocity we're
overtaking the lines of luminous energy they have left behind them.
Star-tracks, we call them."
He closed a switch, and the thick quartzite became suffused with a
pallid, milky glow. Edri consulted a master dial, and made adjustments.
"Watch the dome," he said. "It's triple thickness, of a special
molecular composition, each plane laid at a different oblique angle.
I've switched high-frequency electronic current into hair-line grids
between the three planes and all sorts of interesting and complicated
things are happening in the molecular structure of the quartzite."
Trehearne watched. His heart was beating hard.
"Behold," said Edri, "the light-impulses of the star-tracks are caught,
stepped up, wrenched about, and finally held on the inner lens."
Trehearne beheld, and beholding, he forgot Edri and the ship and
himself. He forgot Earth, the past, and the future. He forgot almost to
breathe.
Edri's voice came to him softly. "You may see this often, Trehearne,
but never again for the first time."
Trehearne barely heard him. The ship had fallen away beneath him,
leaving him suspended in the plunging gulfs that lie between the island
stars, and he looked awestruck into the dark and splendid loneliness of
space.
Through the magic of that quartzite dome he saw the great suns march in
flame and thunder on their way around the ouroboros curve of infinity.
Some were solitary hunters, others were joined together in companies
of stars. He saw their cosmic pageant of life and death, the young suns
blazing with a blue-white strength, the golden suns, the old red suns,
the dead suns black with funeral ash. He saw the far-off galaxies, the
coiling fires of the nebulae, the wonderful terrifying nations of the
Milky Way streaming along the rim of creation. And as he looked the
last of thought and feeling went from him and he was like a child still
dazed from birthing.
Some of the stars, perhaps, he recognized--Algol beating like a bloody
heart, the splintered glory of Sirius. Orion strode gigantic across the
gulfs, girded with suns, and dead ahead, tipping the far-flung Hyades,
Aldebaran burned in sullen splendor.
Aldebaran. Another sun. Other worlds, other peoples, other ways of
life. He was going there, a stranger.
A deep tremor shook him. Time went by, but he took no notice of it. He
was a man lost, sunk and drowned in infinity. Edri watched him, with a
certain sadness. After a while he pulled the switch again, and the dome
went blank, showing only the flat darkness and the crawling streaks of
light. Trehearne sighed, but he did not move. Edri smiled, and shook
him. Trehearne turned slowly, and when Edri led the way back down the
stair he followed, but without knowing where he was going or why.
The passageway was empty. Edri stopped and waited until Trehearne's
eyes focussed on him with some semblance of understanding.
"I'm going," he said, "to break a life-long habit and say something
important. Are you listening?"
Trehearne nodded.
"You'll be spending a lot of time with the others, which will
inevitably mean with Shairn. Keep away from her, Trehearne. No matter
whether you love her or hate her, stay away."
Trehearne smiled. His head was ringing with stars, his vision was
dazzled by the blaze of nebulae.
"Shairn doesn't look to me like much of a permanent deal for anybody."
"That's the trouble. Kerrel talked her into this flying jaunt around
with him to break up the games she was playing with somebody else on
Llyrdis. He's put up with an awful lot from her, and he's not the type
at all--which makes people wonder."
"What?"
"Well, Kerrel's an agent of the Council, highly respected, got a lot
of influence and so on, but we Vardda count our wealth in ships, and
Kerrel's poor. Shairn inherited thirty, the fourth largest fleet in
space. In other words, he's got more than Shairn to lose."
"He can keep her," Trehearne said. "And her ships."
"You don't know the lady. I do. And I can tell you that staying away
from her is no easy job when she doesn't want to be stayed away from."
"Oh, the heck with her," said Trehearne impatiently. It was a long way
down from the stars to petty gossip, and it annoyed him. "I don't see
what it's got to do with me, anyway."
"I told you, I know the lady. And I know Kerrel. He's your enemy
already--"