The Wanderer

She flashed back: “Like your Desert, yes. And your wild painted women, no? Violet and yellow, like a desert dawn. We even paint the Wanderer’s boats to match — launches bigger than liners, dinghies like this. Oh, we’re the top of the mode, we are, we passengers on Satan’s Ark, we devil host, we angels going bump!”

She grinned swiftly at him, wrinkling her muzzle, but then she looked out again at the stars and down again at the two half moons, and her voice grew a little graver, though not entirely grave.

“The Wanderer sails the true void: hyper space. You want a rugged roadway, a cruel sea, a storm that makes a hurricane seem a breeze, a nova-front, a match-flash? Try the void! Formless as chaos, hostile to all life. No light, no atoms, even, no energy we superbeasts can tap — as yet! It is like quicksand you must tunnel through, or like a killing desert, waterless, which you must cross to reach a star with palms. A black, malignant seething that’s to space as the unconscious is to consciousness. Alleys to which the streetlight never gets, mouthless and twisted, full of dirty death — or dark, cold, oily water under docks, roiled by great waves. The Sargasso of the Starships! The Graveyard of Lost Planets! Oh, a most charming sea for Satan’s Ark, giving his angels nausea and nightmares — the flaming, freezing, formless Sea of Hell!

“This whole star-marqueed universe of ours — the cosmos you think rock-based, firm as God — rides in the endless hyperspatial storm just as a paper scrap might ride the whirlwind’s gust And…the Wanderer sails only in the fist of wind that holds the scrap. We’re timid sailors; we always hug the coast”

Paul stared out at the randomly scattered, lonely stars and wondered why he had always so easily accepted that they represented order.

“The power of a billion fission piles,” Tigerishka went on, “are what you need to burst into the void — and still more power, fantastic subtlest skill, and luck, too, to burst out. The Wanderer eats moons for breakfast and asteroids for snacks! Or rather, they are eaten by the void the Wanderer sails through, that gobbler of neutrinos — food tossed to hyper-spatial wolves to buy our way.

“It takes no time to travel hyperspace, except the launching and the landfall times,” Tigerishka continued, “but oh, the wit it takes to spy your port, the waits before you burst back to the world! — like threading an unknown coast in thickest fog. In hyperspace there are signs of our space here — shadows of suns, of planets and of moons, of dust and gases and of emptiness — but they are far more difficult to read than radar in a sky chockful of foil, than unknown, drip-worn, lime-brushed hieroglyphs within a cavern half as old as time.

“We ended this last trip battered and strained, starving for mass and sunlight. Our insulation from raw hyperspace had shrunk to zero; we almost lost our sky and atmosphere; no one could venture on our upper deck except the inorganic giants which dwell there — the crystal minds which are like colored hills.

“At that we made two false exits in your system, each gobbling up some cubic leagues of fuel we could not spare, but each time had to cancel because the signs weren’t right or else the vectors wrong, the exit spots not near enough your sun or to a moon that wholly suited us.”

Paul interposed automatically: “Only two false exits? There were four photos of twisting starfields.”

“Four photos, but only two false exits — one near Pluto, one near Venus,” she asserted sharply. “Don’t interrupt me, Paul. We finally managed our exit near your moon, the eclipse line-up making a perfect shadow. We surfaced from the sea of hyperspace. But we were almost powerless by then. Why, if we’d had to do battle we could barely have thrown the Wanderer into null gravity for maneuvering.”

“Tigerishka!” Paul protested. “You mean you could have nullified the Wanderer’s gravity field, so that it wouldn’t have caused quakes and huge tides on Earth — and you didn’t?”

“I’m not the Wanderer’s captain!” she snarled at him. “Besides, we had to have full gravity to catch and crush your moon, don’t you see? Full gravity augmented by local churn-fields and torque-volumes. And even in the worst emergencies we must maintain a general fuel reserve for battle — that’s obvious, surely!”

Paul said, “But Tigerishka, compared to the Wanderer’s, the world’s space forces and atomic weapons are a joke. What conceivable battle—”

“Paul, I told you once we were afraid.” There was a dark violet flash from her petaled irises as she turned her head away from him. “The Wanderer’s not the only far-ranging planet in the universe.”

Chapter Thirty-five