And, he flattered himself to think, perhaps it comforted the people — the lost children he’d gathered here into his protection, in the midst of this, their greatest crisis — to be aware that he, Milpitas, their Planner, was among them.
But, he thought, what if gravity were never returned?
He pulled at his chin, his fingernails lingering on the network of AS scars they found there.
They would have to adjust. It was as simple as that. He evolved vague schemes for stringing networks of ropes across the Decks; there was really no reason why normal life — at least, a close semblance of it — should not resume.
The discipline of the Planners had already persisted for almost a thousand years. Surely a little local difficulty with the gravity wasn’t going to make any difference to that.
Still, he thought, some events — however unwelcome — did force themselves into one’s awareness. Such as the moment when the gravity had died. Milpitas remembered clinging to his own chair, watching in horror as the artifacts on his desk — the ordinary, humdrum impedimenta of everyday life — drifted away into the treacherous air.
In the Decks, there had been panic.
Milpitas had sounded the klaxon — and it still sounded now — calling the people to him, to the protection of the Temple.
Slowly, one by one, or in little groups clinging to each other fearfully, they had come to him. He had lodged them in offices, giving them the security of four stout walk about them.
People had been stranded helplessly in mid-air. Ropes had been slung between the Decks, huge nets pulled through the air to gather in the flopping human fish. All of them had been brought to him, some almost catatonic with fear, their old young faces rigid and white.
He reached the tetrahedral outer hull of the Temple. The skin was a wall of golden glass which inclined gracefully over him, softening the harsh light of the Decks; the wall’s framework cast long, soft-edged shadows across the outer corridors.
…But the light, today, had changed, he noticed now. He glanced up, quickly, above his head. Shafts of gray Deck daylight, raw and unfiltered, came seeping through holes in the golden wall. At each gap in the wall a sentry hovered, fixed to the glass wall by a loose sling of rope.
The holes had been punched out, in the last few minutes or hours, by the sentries; they must have seen someone, somehow, approaching the Temple.
The nearest sentry glanced down at Milpitas’ approach. It was a woman, Milpitas saw; she held her cross-bow up against her chest, nervously.
He smiled at her and waved. Then, as soon as he felt he could, he dropped his eyes and moved on.
Damn. His composure, the gestalt of his mood, had been quite disrupted by the sight of the sentries and the knocked-out glass panes. Of course he himself had posted the sentries up there as a precaution (a precaution against what, he hadn’t cared to speculate). He’d really hoped that the sentries wouldn’t need to be used, that no more irruptions from outside would occur.
Evidently that hope hadn’t yet been fulfilled. His plans to repopulate the Decks would have to be postponed for a while longer.
Well, there was still food and other essentials, here in the Temples. And when the supplies ran out, their AS nanobots could preserve them all for a long while; the nanobots would enable each antique human body to consume its own resources, digging deeper and deeper, to preserve the most vital functions.
And even the failure of that last fallback would, in the end, be irrelevant, of course.
The people would remain with him, Planner Milpitas, here in the Temple. Where they were safe. He had to protect the future of the species. That was his mission: a mission he had followed unswervingly for centuries. He had no intention of abandoning his duty to his charges now.
Not even if it meant keeping them in here forever.
The wings of the nightfighter loomed over the battered surface of Port Sol.
The relativistic effects of the flight — intense blue shift ahead, the hint of a starbow girdling the sky — faded rapidly from Spinner’s sensorium. The Universe beyond her cage of construction material assumed its normal aspect, with the wizened stars scattered uniformly around the sky, and the blood-red bulk of the Sun an immense, brooding presence.
She took her hands from the control waldoes and lay back in her couch. She closed aching eyes, and tried to still the trembling in her hands.
She sucked apple-juice from the nipple inside her helmet. The juice tasted slightly odd — as usual, because of the nutrient supplements that had been added to it. Her legs and back felt stiff, her muscles like bits of wood, after two days in this box. The plumbing equipment she’d been fitted with was chafing again, and somewhere under her back there was a fold of cloth in her suit, a fold which dug enthusiastically into her flesh. Even the loop of rope at her waist felt tight, restricting.
“Spinner-of-Rope. Can you hear me?” It was Louise’s voice, calling from the cozy shirtsleeve environment inside the life-lounge she’d fixed to the shoulders of the nightfighter. “Are you all right?”
Spinner sighed. “About as all right as you’d expect me to be.” She clenched her hands together and worked her fingers through the thickness of the gloves’ material, trying to loosen up the muscles. Over-tension in her hands was probably going to be her biggest problem, she reflected. Her guidance of the ship was assisted by the processing power Louise had had installed inside the life-lounge, but still, and quite frequently. Spinner had to supply manual intervention.
“Spinner, do you want to close up the wings?”
Spinner stabbed at a button on the left-hand waldo. She didn’t bother to look back to watch the controlled defects in spacetime heal themselves over; without the wings, the quality of light in the cabin changed a little, brightening.
“Okay. Would you like to come into the lounge for a while?”
Another damn spacewalk? She closed her eyes; her eyeballs prickled with fatigue. “No thanks, Louise.”
“You’ve been in that couch for thirty-six hours already, Spinner. You need to be careful with yourself.”
“What are you worried about?” Spinner asked sourly. “Bedsores?”
“No,” Louise said calmly. “No, the safety of the nightfighter…”
Spinner had quickly learned that journey times in the ’fighter were going to be long. Louise had worked out that the nightfighter’s discontinuity drive could bring it to better than half lightspeed. Terrific. But most of the Solar System was empty space. It was a big place. During a ’fighter journey, little would change visibly, even from hour to hour — but that served to make the worst moments, when she came plummeting at some planet or moon, even more terrifying, with their sensations of such intense speed.
Spinner had felt no acceleration effects, and Louise assured her that her suit and the action of the construction material cage around her — would protect her from any hard radiation, or heavy particles she might encounter… But still, she was forced to sit in this damn box, and watch the stars blue-shift toward her.
Maybe the Xeelee had never suffered from vertigo, but she’d quickly found that she sure did.
“Well, here we are at Port Sol. Louise, how long do you want to stay here?”
Louise hesitated. “Not long, I don’t think. I didn’t expect to find anything here, and now that I’m here I still don’t.”
“Then I’ll stay in the pod. The sooner we can get away, the more comfortable I’ll feel.”