The automatic straps fixed him in place with a soft click. This was an almost pointless precaution—after all, if gravity compensation failed, all living tissue would be torn apart. Still, even the craziest instructions had been issued for a reason; behind them was somebody’s life and somebody’s death.
“Contact…”
A warm wave washed away the cozy, tiny world of the pilot’s module.
Space opened up all around him in every direction. The planet, the cosmos, the ships. The glowing rainbow—the soul of his vessel. And other people’s consciousness like fiery vortexes circling around him.
Never before had Alex experienced this, seen the world this way—being in its center, at the very rainbow. The old Heron didn’t count—it had been a one-person ship.
His crew was waiting.
Alex reached for a small white vortex. He felt sure that was Kim, and he was right. The vortex curved toward him and its heat splashed onto Alex, a mixture of adoration, lust, flirtation… and a pure, completely unbridled readiness to destroy. Alex touched the vortex, as if slapping his hand onto hers, and recoiled away from her. Back towards the rainbow, towards the ship.
A dark-red clot of fire. Janet. She did not rush toward the captain. Just saluted him with a brighter flash. A cold, dying star… ready to explode at any moment and turn into the devouring blaze of a supernova.
A nebulous cloud of blue light. Like high-temperature plasma, bound by a magnetic trap. Alex watched Puck with intense curiosity, trying to see how he differed from the others. The navigator could not use a bioterminal because the neurons of his brain had not been altered. He entered the ship’s net with a primitive cable, like some spider from the spaceport accounting office. But it did not look as though that created any problems. The cloud glowed, greeting the captain.
A quivering white zigzag. A captured bolt of lightning. When Alex first entered the virtual space, the zigzag lengthened, straightening itself. The engineer. For some reason, Alex had been sure that Paul would look precisely this way. Nothing fancy, no quirks—the way a novice astronaut, just out of school, should look.
And finally, the other master-pilot. An emerald-colored spiral and a handful of precious gems, connected by an invisible thread and circling around the ship’s consciousness. Xang did not react to the captain’s presence at all. That was a bad sign.
Alex moved toward the rainbow light.
“It’s me…”
The rainbow brightened, and every color of the spectrum turned painfully vivid and distinct. The six colors that naturals saw in rainbows turned into the seven colors scientists had thought up. Then split apart into strips of turquoise and threads of carrot-orange, veins of crimson and belts of canary-yellow, shadows of gray and filaments of sand.
“Take me in…”
A warm touch. Whispering foliage. Sunlight. A mother’s embrace. A gentle sea wave. Soft breeze. Sweetness and tranquility. Restrained passion. Intoxicating lightness. Giddy excitement. Restful contentment. Quiet exultation.
No ordinary human could ever experience it. All of this at once. All of life’s pleasures, all this happiness accumulated bit by tiny bit. Alex, a small boy of five, racing toward the edge of the sea, seeing it for the first time in his life. Running and laughing, overflowing with joy, into his mother’s open arms, into a rolling wave… Alex, overcome with delight, holding Pawlie, his dog, warm and real, and Pawlie enthusiastically licking his face. Alex, celebrating his thirteenth birthday, the cake in front of him twinkling with multicolored candles, and his father, so young, brimming with pride, saying that his son would become a pilot next year, would be a person destined for nothing but happiness… Alex, already a student learning to use his new abilities, in a city park, kissing a girl-natural, his first real lover, inexperienced, but burning with desire to gain that experience with his help… Alex, wearing his pilot’s uniform for the first time, standing on parade square, and the legendary master-pilot Diego Alvarez attaching badges to the young pilots’ uniforms, finding a special word of encouragement for each of the graduates… Alex, sweaty and worn out, sliding out of the pilot’s chair, barely able to walk… but the throat of the channel, which had suddenly narrowed, is already behind them, passed, and he passed it, an inexperienced third pilot, none of his five hundred passengers realizing how close death had come… Alex, barely out of the hospital, alone and lost on a strange planet, saving a girl-spesh, helping her get through the most difficult time in her life…
This was something new. He didn’t realize just how happy and proud he had felt about rescuing Kim. But memory lives by its own rules, so now that night would always be with him, as well as the quiet exaltation of a man who had done some good…
Suddenly, something pricked him. Almost imperceptibly, and immediately washed away by a warm wave of iridescent light. And yet it did prick him, before it vanished…
Before he became one with the ship.
And the crew became a part of his own self.
Alex sent out an order, without so much as a thought, and not in any verbal form. The white lightning flashed brighter, giving off energy. The emerald spiral lifted Mirror off the concrete blocks, then folded in the supports, checked all the equipment one last time. The bluish light opened like a fan, displaying hundreds of take-off trajectories. The white vortex and the red flame, his two fists, tensed up, ready for a personal battle with the entire planet of Quicksilver Pit, with the entire galaxy….
Now that Alex was in complete confluence with the ship, all of them became one whole, connected by his will.
Exactly the way it all should be.
Alex got up from his pilot’s chair and stretched. Everything around him still seemed irregular, unreal. The bridge looked too small after the boundlessness of space. The co-pilot getting out of his chair was no longer an emerald spiral. His own beating heart had replaced the silent stream of energy.
“Seven minutes, thirty point five seconds,” murmured Xang. “Do you think that’s enough for the first training session, Captain?”
“Quite enough.”
Alex felt that the tone of his voice had changed, but he couldn’t do anything about it. And why should he? Now he really had become the captain.
That was the whole point of the training session—to get a feel for every crewmember and to place his own image into their psyches. That was the goal, not the synchronization of all their actions, which was unavoidable anyway.
“Captain?”
He looked at Morrison.
“Do you wonder what you look like from the outside?”
Alex reflected a moment and nodded. “I do.”
“A white star. So bright it hurts to look at it… even in virtual reality. A tiny white star. And when you had your confluence with the ship, the rainbow seemed to explode from within.”
“Was it beautiful?” inquired Alex.
Morrison hesitated a little before he answered. “Don’t know. Impressive, bright… beautiful, perhaps.”
But he didn’t sound all that sure.
“Thank you, Xang. You’re an excellent pilot. I think we will split our bridge duty time equally.”
The co-plot looked suddenly perplexed. “Captain?”
“Is that all right with you?”
“Hell, yes!” Xang got up. “But why?”
“Because you’re a good pilot,” said Alex. He couldn’t see the Demon, but knew that it had a spiteful smile on its face.