“Do you know them?”
“A lot of them,” said the boy.
“This is ‘The Ballad of Beta-2.’ It starts off, ‘Then came one to the City…’ ”
“Oh, sure. I know that one.”
“Well, what the hell is it about?”
“Leela RT-857.”
Could it be one of the descendants of the woman Hank Brandt had been in love with? “Who was she?”
“She was captain of Beta-2 City when”—he stopped — “when everything — when…I don’t know how to say it.”
“Say what?”
“When everything changed.”
“Changed? What things changed?”
“Everything,” the boy repeated. “That’s when Epsilon-7 City and the Delta-6 were attacked, and the Sigma-9 was crushed, and we were stuck in the desert and the Market crashed, and…everything changed.”
“Attacked? What do you mean, changed?”
The boy shook his head and shrugged. “That’s all I know. I can’t explain it anymore.”
“What were they attacked by?”
There was only silence. The green eyes were wide and bewildered.
“Can you tell me when this happened?”
“About two hundred and fifty years back,” the boy said at last. “The Cities were still a hundred and fifty years out. And Leela RT-857 was captain of Beta-2 City.”
“Then what happened?”
The boy shrugged. “Just like it says in the song, I guess.”
“And that’s just what I’m trying to find out.” Joneny thought for a moment, again remembering the verses. “For instance, can you tell me who the one-eyed woman was?”
“Her name was Merril. One-Eyed Merril. And she was…well, one of the One-Eyes.”
“Who are the One-Eyes?”
“They’re dead now,” the boy said after a minute. “They could have helped you. But they’re all dead.”
“But what did they do?”
“They kept us from the others. They tried to teach us. They tried to make it so we would know what to do. But they got killed finally by the others, the ones you saw.”
Joneny frowned. Something was beginning to clear, but he wasn’t sure what it was. “Maybe there’s somebody back at your City who can tell me just exactly what this is about. Why don’t we go back there?”
The boy shook his head. “Nobody there can help you.”
“How can you be sure? Do you know everybody on the ship?”
Joneny didn’t expect an answer, but the boy nodded.
“How many of you are there?”
“Many.”
“Let’s give it a try,” Joneny insisted.
The boy shrugged.
“They won’t be hostile to me, will they?”
“No, they won’t be hostile.”
“Fine,” Joneny said. He was excited by the idea of something to be uncovered on one of the other ships. His magnetic soles, however, were weaker than he thought, for when he turned, he came loose and drifted away from the floor, helpless.
The boy, still holding the desk, swung his leg out and offered, “Here, grab my arm.”
Joneny flailed at the boy’s ankle, caught, and was pulled back down to where his sandals clicked onto the bulkhead.
“You’re not very used to free fall, are you?” the boy said.
“I’m a little out of practice,” Joneny said, releasing the kid’s foot and righting himself. “That’s your idea of an arm?”
“What do you call it?” asked the boy a little indignantly.
“I call it a leg,” laughed Joneny.
“Sure,” said the boy. “But a leg is an arm, isn’t it?”
“I suppose, technically speaking, you could call anything that sticks out — Oh, never mind.” It really wasn’t worth going into. As they started for the door, Joneny reflected: now here’s a piece of information that could have nothing to do with the ballad. Legs and arms were both arms: that was quite logical when, under free fall, hands and feet had developed almost equal dexterity. Under her legs was a green-eyed child? That was safely in the realm of nonsense.
Only something from way back in a semantics course he had taken was jabbing at his mind. What did they call it? Denotative instability? The spiral of decreasing semantic functionality…something like that. Then it hit him. In an environment where there is no gravity, or little enough gravity to develop this much dexterity in hands and feet, words of vertical placement — up, down, under, over, above, below — would rapidly lose their precise meanings. According to the spiral, before the words disappeared from the language altogether, they would stay on awhile as subtle variants of words with more immediate meanings — inside, through, between. (Two fine examples of the spiral of decreasing semantic functionality that Joneny was completely unaware of were recreation hall and navigation offices.) Between, thought Joneny. Between her legs was a green-eyed child. He stopped as they were about to enter the tube to the cruiser. The boy stopped too, looked puzzled, and blinked at him with his wide green eyes.
It was impossible; they were all born from the Birth Market. But there had been a Market crash, and everything changed. “Which City did you come from?” Joneny asked suddenly.
“Sigma-9.”
Joneny stopped. Before them, the triple door to the flexible portion of the tube sank back into the wall.
“Which lock is your shuttle boat in?” Joneny asked.
The boy shook his head.
“Which lock?” Joneny demanded.
“No shuttle boat — ” the boy began.
“Then how the hell did you get over here?”
“Like this,” the boy said.
Then there wasn’t any boy there anymore. Joneny was floating alone in the tube. He blinked. He decided he was crazy. Then he decided he was sane and that something strange was happening. But if this was a fantasy of his own imagining, why was he aware of the contradictions in it? The boy had said there were “many” on Sigma-9, and he had also said there were no people on it. Suddenly Joneny turned and pulled himself back to the navigation offices. Launching himself into the room he shouted at the robot mechanism: “Connect me with somebody who can give me some cogent information about what’s going on here!”
“I am sorry,” came the clipped, archaic voice. “I have called all over the City, sir, and no human agent has responded to my announcement of your presence.” It was repeated: “No human agent has responded to your presence.”
Joneny felt chills unraveling up his spine.
Chapter Five
Once more in his chrono-drive, sitting back in his hammock, Joneny watched the twisted shell of Sigma-9 grow in his viewscope. The crushed surface plates had been chewed up and spit out by a mad rush through how many millions of miles of meson showers — those tiny particles bigger than electrons, but most smaller than nucleons, that came in a staggering quantity of which masses, spins, and charges — yet what had caused the catastrophe had been something else.
Automatically he slowed as the webbing of bare girders flashed brightly in the direct light from the sun. He passed over the wreck, and a gaping darkness veered beneath. From the distance, the shimmer that played over this ruins was invisible. He switched on the iridium cell computer and let it record the twists and wrenches in the metal. It might be able to reconstruct the catastrophe. He drifted out over the edge of the gaping hull, a blister of blackness beneath. Slowly the mechano took him down into the pit. The view screen went black as they cut into the shadow. He swept the selector up and down the spectrum. At the violet end of the band there was enough hazy light to determine the details of the wreck. Girders, melted to blobs on the ends, spider-webbed in a blue underwater fog. Hunks of refuse moved about lazily, caught by the faint gravity of the ship’s mass.