“Say your prayers,” I whispered. “Say goodbye.”
“No. Oh, please.” She was straining back, away from the deadly vat. “Don’t. I’ll do anything. Anything!”
“Jeanie!” cried McAndrew.
“Shut up, Mac. This is between me and her.”
I moved the chair back a couple of feet and walked around in front of it to gaze into her eyes. “Look at me, Anna Griss. I’m not going to kill you — this time. But one more problem with you and you’re dead. Do you understand? If the sight or sound or smell of you crosses my path again, ever, I’ll come after you. And I’ll get you. Don’t ever doubt that. I’ll get you.”
She did not speak, but she nodded. I turned to McAndrew.
“I think she has the message. If she annoys either of us again, she’ll be pig feed. Come on, Mac.”
“You can’t just leave her! She might go over the edge.”
“If she goes, she goes.” I grabbed his arm. “No big loss. But you and I are leaving. Come on.”
He kept turning to look at her, but he allowed me to lead him away. I did not look back.
“You wouldn’t have, would you?” he said at last, when we had walked through half a dozen chambers. “You wouldn’t have killed her, no matter what she did.”
It was obvious what he wanted to hear. “No. I wouldn’t have killed her.”
“Then why did you do all that, threatening her?”
“Because I had to. I might as well ask, why did you push Van Lyle over.”
“But he was going to kill you! I didn’t think — I just did it. Like you when you were screaming, going toward the pit. You just did it. What a bit of luck that was, Lyle leaving your mouth untaped! Otherwise you’d not have been able to scream, and when I ran at him he would have heard me coming.”
I don’t usually care what credit I get. But that was a bit too much.
“Mac,” I said. “Listen to me. I’m going to tell you something about the invariants of nature. You have yours for physics and mathematics, determinants and momentum and conserved vector currents. And I have mine — the invariants of human nature: Love, and jealousy, and fear, and hate. Van Lyle was a cruel, sadistic bastard. He was like that when we first met him, he was like that out in the Oort cloud, and he was still like that until the moment he died. He couldn’t change his nature. I deliberately told him that I wouldn’t be able to beg and scream and grovel with my mouth taped. After that there was absolutely no way he’d muzzle me — no matter what Anna Griss told him to do. He wanted to see my terror, and hear my screams. And so I had the chance to free you.”
McAndrew is an innocent soul. He was shocked silent by what I said. Finally he sighed, and muttered, “Maybe you’re right. But I don’t see why you did that to Anna Griss.”
“I had to — because in her own way, she’s no different from him. She has her own invariants: power, and control, and fear. Anna won’t hold back on revenge to be nice to anyone. She’ll go on, as far as she can go, until she’s stopped. You and I have just stopped her. But we could never have done that by persuasion, or logic. She had to look death in the face for herself, and stare right down his black gullet.”
“She could still cause us trouble. She could come after us, on Earth or off it.”
“She could, but she won’t. She’d like to get us, but she’ll remember that pit. Anna understands power. If her people tried and failed again, she knows I’ll come after her. The pleasure of finishing me isn’t worth the risk.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I am. Mac, trust me. If I don’t question your spinors and twistors and calibration of optical scalars, you shouldn’t second guess me on Anna Griss.”
“So you think it’s safe to go back to the Geotron, and see how the experiments came out? I left before the results were in, you see, because of what you said to me.”
He was returning to normal. Which is to say, totally abnormal.
I sighed. “Sure. We can go to the Geotron.”
That sounded like the end of it, but it wasn’t. We were in the submersible, cruising back to Ernesto Kugel’s lab, while I wondered what story I was going to tell. Probably I’d say nothing. I’d pretend I had a nice pleasant tour, and leave it to Anna Griss to tell it otherwise.
Then McAndrew started up again.
“Jeanie. You really wouldn’t have killed her, would you? No matter what.”
I reached out and stroked his cheek. “Of course not. But can we drop it now? You and I ought to be celebrating our survival. Maybe we ought to act on Ernesto Kugel’s suggestion — his first one.”
It came out as flat and artificial as it sounds, and it didn’t fool McAndrew for one moment. He gave me a wary, weary look, and leaned back in his seat. But it did accomplish my objective. It shut off a line of conversation that I was afraid to pursue.
Because one thing I’ve learned in life is that a person never knows her own invariants. I thought I knew the answer to McAndrew’s question, but I wasn’t positive. That terrible rage, the all-consuming fury that I felt when Anna Griss was poised on the edge of the pit… if she had been a little more resistant, just a little tougher and more defiant — then who knows what I would have done?
Not I.
But one thing I did know for sure. I was not going to discuss that sort of thing with McAndrew. Ever.
He’s a dear, and he’s super-smart, and in almost every way I can think of he is wonderful. But he’s also like most people who spend their lives studying the nature of the Universe.
He can only take a tiny little bit of reality.
SEVENTH CHRONICLE: Rogueworld
The laws of probability not only permit coincidences; they absolutely insist on them.
I was sitting in the pilot’s chair with McAndrew at my shoulder. Neither of us had spoken for a long time. We were in low polar orbit, sweeping rapidly across the surface of Vandell with all pod sensors wide open. I don’t know what McAndrew was thinking, but my mind was not fully on the displays. Part of me was far away — one and a quarter light-years away, back on Earth.
Why not? Our attention here was not necessary. The surveillance sensors were linked to the shipboard main computer, and the work was done automatically. If anything new turned up we would hear of it at once. But nothing new could happen — nothing that mattered.
For the moment, I needed time to myself. Time to think about Jan; to remember her seventeen years, as a baby, as a slender child, as a fierce new intelligence, as a young woman; time to resent the chain of circumstance that had brought her and Sven Wicklund here, to die. Somewhere below these opalescent clouds, down on the cold surface of the planet, our sensor systems were seeking two corpses. Nothing else mattered.
I knew that McAndrew shared my sorrow, but he handled it in a different way. His attention was focused on the data displays, in a concentration so intense that my presence didn’t matter at all. His eyes lacked all expression. Every couple of minutes he shook his head and muttered to himself: “This makes no sense — no sense at all.”
I stared at the screen in front of me, where the dark vortex had again appeared. It came and went, clearly visible on some passes, vanished on others. Now it looked like a funnel, a sooty conical channel down through the glowing atmosphere, the only break in the planet’s swirling cloud cover. We had passed right over it twice before, the first time with rising hopes; but the sensors had remained quiet. It was not a signal. It had to be a natural feature, something like Jupiter’s Red Spot, some random coincidence of twisting gas streams.
Coincidence. Again, coincidence. “The laws of probability not only permit coincidences; they absolutely insist on them.”