Finished, he called, absently left his communicator on as he waited. There would be no one there, once he had gone, to use the instrument.
There was more difficulty as he joined the Artonuee packed into orderly lines at the shuttle pads, but once again, although he felt guilty to pass up the staring eyes of his fellows, rank allowed privilege, and he was escorted by two armed Delanian men to the work shuttle, allowed to carry his small case containing a few tools and the expander.
He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that his personal powered flyer was still in its dock. Then he was inside, moving under control direction past the shuttles, the waiting star ships with air locks connected to other shuttles which disgorged Artonuee into the five-mile-long hulls.
His flight plan had listed Nirrar as his destination, but once free of Fivegate control, he executed a smooth turn and pointed the rounded nose of his flyer toward deep space. Once there, he allowed the flyer to drift powerless as he made the substitution, his altered expander replacing the mires expander in the flyer’s power system.
Once his fingers would have flown over the work and the change would have been done in minutes. Now his hands shook with age and the task was irksome. When it was completed, he rested, his eyes closed, his heart laboring. When his pulse had slowed, he refreshed himself, then punched test circuits into play and watched with squinted lids, the results. They were satisfactory. He breathed deeply, ran the convertor to full power, the fusion engine giving headway toward deep space. His course had been planned years previously, a course which punched a straight-line hole through space for a distance of ten parsecs. The line ended outside the bounds of the galaxy, near a small, isolated cluster. The distance was incredibly far, roughly equivalent to the distance which separated the Artonuee system from the dead worlds of the Delanians, worlds now consumed in a huge ball of stellar fire which filled that sector of the galaxy. It was a distance which would take a light twenty ship over a year and a half to travel.
Bertt covered the distance in the time it took him to exhale after activating the drive. He rode, inertialess, on the force of the electrons in two 0.1-inch cubes of red metal. Against such force even God’s Constant was insignificant. With the activation of the altered mires expander, changed beyond dreams by Bertt’s theory and a small, plastic-enclosed loop which became a hole in space, Bertt the builder unleashed a new force into the universe and rode it like a thought down a line ten parsecs long, and then, waiting for something to happen, not realizing that it had, he looked out to see a sky unlike any he’d ever known. Ahead and to his left was the cluster, huge now, individual stars distinct, the nearer ones disced. Behind him was his galaxy. With the viewer on magnification, he could see the collisions as the two galaxies edged into each other, the point of star impact a mass of fire.
The man who had made infinite star travel possible, the male who, upon his return, would relieve two races of the necessity of decades, perhaps centuries of travel in the star ships, that male, Bertt, feeling joy in his heart, knelt before his flyer’s controls and made a prayer to God.
His prayer of thanks still in his mind, he returned in a wink to the original position just outside the orbit of gutted Five, performed the journey again and again, leaping parsecs instantly, not even feeling the vast power which defied every known physical law. Emboldened by the ease of it, he calculated an extended course and in the same wink of time blasted past the distant globular cluster into intergalactic space, there to see, for the first time, the wheels of the colliding galaxies small in the viewer’s magnification.
From afar, they were an object of mere astronomical beauty, cold, distant. It was difficult to think that twenty-four billion minds had perished there on the Delanian worlds, almost impossible to leave the triumph of deep space for the sorrow and turmoil of the home worlds. In a wink, he could be there, in a far galaxy. He could leave it all behind and be the first Artonuee to explore the vast deeps of the universe.
But he was Bertt, builder, and he had built the ultimate vehicle, and he would share his joy with them, his people, and with his friends, the Artonuee,
The fusion-powered journey from the orbit of Five to New World and then down to Government Quad at Nirrar consumed enough time for Bertt to circumnavigate the known universe.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Miaree lived a nightmare. For the first time in the history of the
Artonuee, the dwelling of the Mother was under armed guard. And the guards were powerful, uniformed Delanians. Although, on the surface, nothing had changed, she felt undercurrents of threat, felt fur-tingling moments of dread.
"Lady." Rei had assured her, "it is for your own protection. Many of our people have seen the Fires. Many left the home worlds just ahead of destruction. They had to bid farewell to friends and sons, knowing that they would never see them again. Now they are told that the tragedy must be repeated. True, it will be on a smaller scale, but those who have experienced the terror, who were lucky enough to be given space on a ship once, fear with knowledge that they might be selected out this second time."
"Does this, then, justify the wanton slaughter of Artonuee on Outworld?" Miaree asked, shaking her head tiredly.
"An isolated incident. We moved the Army in as soon as reports of the violence reached us."
"The Army," she said. "There is not even such a word in our language."
Rei turned from her, paced to a viewer, looked down moodily onto the Quad below.
"The evacuation from Five continues to be orderly and effective," he said at last.
"So it begins," she said. She was thinking of the females of Five, torn from the arms of the lovers who had become their lives. And a future of infinite sadness loomed before her.
"There is much to consider." Rei said. "The Light Twenty Scouts in the second arm have made astronomical findings which are encouraging. Their scannings have located no less than five stars whose orbital movements indicate the presence of planets."
She would grow old without him. She would seek her iffling in the confines of a metal ship and not under the warm sun of the Artonuee. Never again would she walk the Great Bloom. Five Hatchings, and she had yet to look on the beauty of a living egg.
On Outworld, the planet of art and beauty, Delanian women had first torn the wings from and then killed a female caught in a love merge with a Delanian man. And the violence had spread to terrorize an entire dwelling area. Now the star ships were converging on Outworld to move those who loved it most forever, first to The World, then—
"Old Bertt has been asking for an audience," Rei said. "Have you yet seen Kim?"
"I have not been informed." So, at last, he was homecoming. She did not want to see him, did not want to have to face that last bit of sadness. Yet, she had invited. "Will you have him called?"
He was aged and stooped. When she saw him last, he showed his maturity, and she had not suspected that homecoming was so near for him; but with a male, especially, the end, once upon him, approached with astounding suddenness. "Dear Bertt," she said, rising, touching his shaking arm. "We will provide you with transportation. The fleet lies, half loaded, off The World. The ifflings crunch happily in the lighted holds. There you will seed the life which will fly with us."
"I have waited for five days, Lady," Bertt said.
"Here?" She was puzzled.
"First the Delanian guards. Then, when I was passed, the Delanians below, in the lower levels. Has the Mother, then, been relegated to a small office in an upper floor, there to consort with her man," he spat the word, "and forget the greatness of our race?"
"Discourtesy does not become you," she said, saddened. "I accept your censure, however, as mine. The duties of the office." She paused, for there was a vacant look on Bertt’s face. Was there so little time for him?