“But the Xeelee nightfighter survived,” Spinner said.
Louise smiled. “Yes. The Xeelee built to last. Whatever happened was enough to melt Callisto’s ice. But the nightfighter sank into the new oceans, and was trapped in there when Callisto froze again.”
Spinner thought: Trapped, dormant, for an immeasurable time — perhaps a million years.
“And they never came back,” Louise said. “The people, I mean. The humans. They never recovered, to return here to rebuild. Perhaps that really was the war to end all wars, as far as Sol was concerned…
“Here’s the pilot cage, Spinner-of-Rope… Well, now you can see why I need your help.”
Spinner-of-Rope stared at the squat cage of construction material. It was barely six feet across.
She felt a prickly cold spread across her limbs.
17
A simple metal stepladder rested against the side of the cage; the ladder looked incongruously primitive, amid all this alien high technology.
Spinner looked at the ladder with dread. “Louise,” she said. “I have to climb in. Don’t I?”
Louise, bulky and anonymous in her environment suit, stood close beside her. “Well, that’s the general idea. Look, Spinner-or-Rope, we need a pilot…” Her voice trailed off; she shrugged her shoulders, uncertain.
Spinner closed her eyes and took deep breaths, trying to still the shuddering, deep in her stomach. “Lethe. So that’s why I’m all wired up.”
“I’m sorry we didn’t tell you before bringing you down here, Spinner. We didn’t know what was best. Would telling you have made things any easier?”
“I don’t get a choice, do I?”
Louise’s face, through her plate, was hard. “You’re the best candidate we have, Spinner-of-Rope. We need you.”
Without letting herself think about it, Spinner grabbed the ladder and pulled herself up.
She looked into the pilot’s cage. It was an open sphere made of tubes of construction material. The tubes were arranged in an open lattice which followed a simple longitude-and-latitude pattern. Inside the cage was a horseshoe-shaped console, of the black Xeelee material. Other devices, made of dull metal looking crude by comparison, obviously human — had been fixed to the Xeelee console.
A human couch had been cemented into the cage, before the console. Straps dangled from it. To fit into the cramped cage, the couch had been made small too small for any human from the Decks but a child… or a child-woman from the forest.
“I’m going to climb in, Louise.”
“Good. But for Life’s sake, Spinner-of-Rope, until I tell you, don’t touch anything.”
Spinner swung her legs, easily in the light gravity, through the construction material frame and into the cage.
The couch fitted her body closely — as it should, she thought resentfully, since it had obviously been made for her — but it was too snug. The couch — the straps across her chest and waist, the bulky, crowding console before her — devoured her. The cage was a place of shadows, crisscrossing and mysterious, cast by the Jovian ring and the ice below her. It pressed around her, barely big enough for the couch and console.
She looked out through her murky faceplate, beyond the construction-material cage, to the ice plains of Callisto. She saw the blocky forms of the Northern’s ’bots, the pod that had brought her here, the shadowy figure of Louise. It all seemed remote, unattainable. The only reality was herself, inside this suit, this alien craft — and the sound of her own breathing loud in her ears.
Spinner had got used to a lot of changes, in the few decades since she and her father had climbed down through the life-dome with Morrow. Just not growing old had been a challenge enough. Most of her compatriots in the forest had refused the AS treatments offered to them by Louise, and after a few years the physical age differences had grown marked, and widened rapidly.
Spinner had a younger sister: Painter-of-Faces, Arrow Maker’s youngest child. By the time the little girl had grown older than Spinner could remember her mother, Spinner had let her visits back to the forest dwindle away.
The life of the forest people carried on much as it always had done — despite the end of the Northern’s journey and the discovery of the death of the Sun. Because of her greater awareness — her wider understanding — Spinner felt shut out of that old, enclosed world.
Isolated by age and by her own extraordinary experiences, she had tried to grow accustomed to the bizarre Universe outside the walls of the ship. And, over the years, she’d learned a great deal; Louise Ye Armonk, despite the ghastly way she had of patronizing Spinner, had assured her often of the great strides she’d made for someone of her low-technology upbringing.
But now, she longed to be away from this bleak, threatening place — to be naked again, and moving through the trees of the forest.
“Spinner-of-Rope.” It was the voice of the artificial man, Mark, soft inside her helmet. “You’ve got to try to relax. Your biostat signs are way up — ”
“Shut up, Mark.” Louise Ye Armonk walked up to the Xeelee cage and pressed her body against the black bars, peering in; she’d turned on the light behind her faceplate, so Spinner could see her face. “Spinner, are you all right?”
Spinner took a deep breath. “I’m fine.” She tried to focus on her irritation: with patronizing Louise, the buzzing ghost Mark. She fanned her annoyance into a flame of anger, to burn away the chill of her fear. “Just tell me what I have to do.”
“Okay.” Louise lifted her hands and stepped back from the cage. “As far as we can tell, the cage you’re in is the control center of the nightfighter. You can see, obviously, that it’s been adapted for use by humans. We put the couch in for you. You have waldoes — ”
“I have what?”
“Waldoes, Spinner. The metal boxes on top of the horseshoe. See?”
There were three of the boxes, each about a foot long, one before Spinner and one to either side. There were touch pads — familiar enough to her now — illuminated across the tops of the boxes. She reached out toward the box in front of her -
“Don’t touch, damn you,” Louise snapped.
Spinner snatched her fingers back.
With audibly strained patience, Louise said, “Spinner-of-Rope, the controls in those boxes have been tied into what we believe are controls inside the horseshoe console — and they are the nightfighter’s real controls, the Xeelee mechanisms. That’s why we called the boxes waldoes… By working the waldoes you’ll be able to work the controls. The waldoes are reconstructions, based on fragments left from the destruction of the original lab.”
“All right.” Spinner ran a tongue over her lips; sweat, dried in a rim around her mouth, tasted of salt. “I understand. Let’s get on with it.”
Beyond the cage, Louise held up her hands. “No. Wait. It’s not as simple as that. We reconstructed the waldoes from clues left by the original human researchers. We believe they are going to work… But,” she went on drily, “we don’t know what they will make the nightfighter do. We don’t know what will happen when you touch the waldoes.
“So we’ll have to be patient. Experiment.”
“All right,” Spinner said. “But the original researchers, before the war, must have known what they were doing. Mustn’t they?”