Bob Shaw - Orbitsville Departure

VIP免费
2024-12-14 0 0 338.78KB 111 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt
ORBITSVILLE DEPARTURE
Chapter 1
They had decided to spend the few hours that remained to them walking in Garamond Park.
Dallen had been there several times before, but on this occasion his senses were heightened by a
blend of excitement and apprehension. The sunlight was almost painful and colours seemed
artificially intense. Beyond screens of trees the coppery roofs of the city shone with a spiky
brilliance, and the nearby shrubs and flowers—gaudy as tropical plumage—seemed to burn in the
sun's vertical rays. Lime-green lawns sloped down to the only feature of the scene which gave
relief to the eye—a circular black lake roughly a kilometre across. Its nearer edge was obscured
in part by low mounds of masonry and metal which were all that remained of an ancient
fortification. Small groups of sightseers, their hats shifting ellipses of colour, sat among the
ruined walls or wandered on the lake's perimeter path.
"Let's go down there and have a look," Dallen said to his wife, impulsively taking her arm.
6 Boh Shaw
Cona Dallen held back. "What's wrong? Can't you wait?"
"We're not going to start all that again, are we?" Dallen released her arm. "I thought we had
agreed."
"It's ail right for you to ..." Cona paused, eyeing him sombrely, then in an abrupt change of mood
she smiled and walked down the slope with him, slipping one arm around his waist. She was almost
as tall as Dallen and they moved in easy unison. The feel of her body synchronising with his made
him think of their prolonged session of love-making that morning. It occurred to him at once that
she was deliberately working on him, reminding him of what he was giving up, and he felt a
stirring of the resentment and frustration which had periodically marred their relationship for
months. He repressed the emotions, making a resolution to get all he could from the hours they had
left.
They reached the path, crossed it together and leaned on the safety rail which skirted the dark
rim. Dallen, shading his eyes, stared down into the blackness and a moment later he was able to
see the stars.
The surrounding brightness affected his vision to the extent that he could pick out only the
principal star groupings, but he was immediately inspired with a primeval awe. He had lived all
his life on the inner surface of the Orbitsville shell and therefore his only direct looks at the
rest of the galaxy had come during his rare visits to this aperture. When I get to Earth* he told
himself, marvelling, Ftt be able to drink my fill of stars every night. . .
"I don't like this," Cona said. "I feel I'm going to fall through."
ORBITSVILLE DEPARTURE 7
Dallen shook his head. "No danger. The diaphragm field is strong enough to take anybody's weight."
"Meaning?" She gave him a playful shunt with her hips. "Are you suggesting I'm too heavy?"
"Never!" Dallen gave his wife a warm glance, appreciating die good humour with which she faced her
weight problems. She was fair-haired and had the kind of neat, absolutely regular features which
are often associated with obesity. By careful dieting she had usually kept her weight within a few
kilos of the ideal, but since the birth of their son three months earlier her struggle had been
more difficult.
The thought of Mikei and of leaving him disturbed Dallen's moment of rapport. It had taken him the
best part of a year to secure die transfer to Earth, with its consequent promotion to Grade IV
officer in the Metagov civil service. Cona had been aware of his plans throughout her pregnancy,
but not until after the birth had she revealed her determination to remain behind on Orbitsville.
Her overt reason for not accompanying him had been that Mikel was too young for the journey and
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/De...r/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt (1 of 111) [2/24/2004 10:37:57 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt
the drastic change of climate, but Dallen suspected otherwise and his pride was hurt. He knew she
was reluctant to leave her ailing father, and also that—as a professional historian—she was deeply
committed to her current book on Orbitsviiie's Judean settlements. The former had allowed no scope
for recrimination, but the latter had been the source of many arguments which had been none the
less corrosive for being disguised as rational discussion or banter. Being Jewish is like a
religion with some people . . .
Something huge moved in the black depths below Dallen, startling him and causing Cona to jump
backwards from the rail. After a second he identified it as
8 Bob Show
an interportal freighter slipping through space only fifty metres or so beneath his feet, like a
silent leviathan swimming for the opposite shore of a black lake. His gaze followed the ship until
it was lost in the mirages which overlay the more distant parts of the diaphragm field. At the far
side of the kilometre-wide aperture was the space terminal where he would soon embark for Earth.
Its passenger buildings and warehouses were a dominant feature of the scene, even though the
principal installations—the giant docking cradles for starships—projected downwards into the void
and were not readily visible.
"This place bothers me," Cona said. "Everything's more natural in Bangor."
Dallen knew she was referring to the fact that their home town of Bangor, 16,000 kilometres into
Orbits-ville's interior, was situated in Earth-like hilly terrain. Its official altitude was close
to a thousand metres, which meant that amount of sedimentary rock had accumulated there in the
Orbitsville shell, but Dallen understood that the geological structure counted for little. Without
the enclosing skin of ylem, the enigmatic material of which the vast sphere was formed, die inner
layer of rock, soil and vegetation would quickly succumb to instabilities and fly apart. It was an
uneasy thought, but one which disturbed only visitors and newly arrived settlers. Anybody who had
been born on Orbitsville had total faith in its permanence, knew it to be more durable than mere
planets.
"We don't have to stay here," Dallen said. "We could try the rose gardens."
"Not yet." Cona fingered the jewel-like recorder which was clipped to her saffron blouse. "I'd
like to
ORBITSVILLE DEPASTURE 9
get some pictures of the Garamond monument. I might want to include one in the book.*1
You're supposed to be seeing me off—not working, Dallen objected inwardly, wondering if she had
brought in the mention of the book to trigger precisely that reaction. Among the things which had
attracted him to Cona in the first place was her independence, and he could see that he had no
right to try changing the rules of their relationship. It was good that she was self-willed and
self-reliant, but—the thought refused to be dismissed—how much better everything would have been
had they been going to Earth together, sharing all the new experiences the journey had to offer.
There was, of course, an alternative to his present course, the alternative repeatedly put forward
by Cona. All he had to do was delay his transfer by a couple of years, by which time Mikel would
be bigger and stronger. Cona would have finished her book by then and would be mentally primed and
prepared to enter an exciting new phase of her life.
Dallen was surprised by a sudden cool tingling on his spine. A radical idea was forming in his
mind, thrilling him with its total unexpectedness. There was, he had just realised, still enough
time in which to change his plans! He could get out of going to Earth merely by not showing up
when the flight was called.
Bureaucratic though Metagov departments were, they all recognised- and accepted one fact of human
nature—that some people simply could not face the psychological rigours of interstellar travel.
Backing down at the last minute and running away so commonplace that there was a slang term for
it—the funk
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/De...r/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt (2 of 111) [2/24/2004 10:37:57 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt
10
Bob Show
ORBITSV/LLE DEPARTURE
11
bunk—and no passenger's baggage was ever loaded until after he or she had gone aboard.
There was no shame in it, Dallen told himself. No shame in being flexible, in adapting to
circumstances the way other people did. He had the opportunity to make a grand, romantic gesture
of unselfishness, and there was no need to reveal to anybody, least of all to his wife, that it
was actually a supremely selfish act in that it would enable him to hold on to what he cherished.
"Monument. Photograph." Cona wiggled her fingers close to his eyes. "Remember?"
"I'm with you," Dallen said bemusedly, trying to reassemble his internal model of the universe
with different building blocks. He walked with Cona along the edge of the aperture to where the
path widened into a small semi-circular plaza. Standing at its focus, on the very rim of space,
was an heroic bronze of a man wearing a space suit of a design that had been in service two
centuries earlier. He had taken off his helmet and was holding it in one hand while, with the
other hand shading his eyes, he scanned the horizon. The statue was deservedly famous because its
creator had captured a certain expression on the spaceman's face. It was a look of awe combined
with peace and fulfilment which struck a responsive chord with all who had had the experience of
climbing through an Orbitsville portal from the sterile blackness of space and receiving their
first glimpse of the grassy infinites within.
A plaque at the foot of the statue said, simply: VANCE GARAMOND, EXPLORER.
Cona, who had never seen the monument before, said, "I must have a picture." She left Dallen's
side
and moved away among the knots of sightseers who were standing in the multi-lingual information
beams being projected from the statue's base. Dallen, still lost in his own thoughts, advanced
until a wash of coloured light flooding into his eyes told him that one of the roving beams had
centred itself on his face. There was a barely perceptible delay while the projector studied his
optical response to subliminal signals and correctedly deduced that his first language was
English, then the presentation began.
Most of his field of view was suddenly occupied by images focused directly on to his retinas. They
were of a triple-hulled starship, as seen from space, manoeuvring closer to a circular aperture in
the Orbitsville shell. A voice which was neither male nor female spoke to Dallen.
It was almost two centuries ago—in the year 2096—that the first spaceship from Earth reached
Optima Tbule. That vessel was the Bissendorf, part of a large fleet of exploratory ships owned and
operated by Star/light Incorporated, the historic company which at that time bad a monopoly of
space travel. The Bissendorf was under the command of Captain Vance Garamond.
You are now standing at the exact place where Captain Garamond, after forcing bis way through the
diaphragm field which retains our atmosphere^ first set foot on the soil of Optima Tbule . . .
The images were now a reconstruction of the first landing, showing Garamond and some of his crew
on the virgin plain which was currently occupied by the sprawling expanse of Beachhead City.
Relevant facts were murmured in Dallen's ears only to glance off the barriers of his
preoccupation. What was to prevent him from actually doing it? What would it matter
12
Bob Show
to the universe at large if he did not make the flight to Earth? There would be some fierce
ribbing from the other pilot officers in the Boundaries Commission if he returned to his old job,
but where were his personal priorities? What was the opinion of outsiders compared to the feelings
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/De...r/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt (3 of 111) [2/24/2004 10:37:57 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt
and needs of his own wife? And there was three-month old Mikel . . .
The ruined fortifications visible to your right are among the few retraining traces of the Printer
civilisation which flourished on Optima Thule some twenty thousand years ago. Although we know
very little about the Primers, we can he sure they were a very energetic and ambitious race.
Having discovered Optima Thule, they attempted to control the whole sphere—regardless of the fact
that it has a usable land area equivalent to five billion Earths. To this endt they performed the
incredible engineering feat of sealing with armour plate all but one of Optima Tbule's 548
portals.
Opinions differ about whether they were vanquished by subsequent arrivals, or whether they were
simply absorbed by the sheer vastness of the territories they bad attempted to claim. However, one
of the first actions of the Optima Tbule Metagovernment was to order the unsealing of all the
portals, thereby giving every nation on Earth unlimited and free access to . . .
Cartoon animations floated on the surface of DalJen's vision. Miniature ships were firing
miniature radiation weapons, progressively clearing Orbitsville's triple band of portals, allowing
the enclosed sun to spill more and more of its beckoning rays into the surrounding blackness of
space.
The migrations from Earth began immediately, and continued at a high level of activity for a
century and a half. In the beginning the journey took four months, but there came
ORBITSV/LLE DEPARTURE
13
many rapid improvements in spaceship design which eventually cut transit time to a matter of days.
At the height of the migrations more than ten million people a year were arriving at the
equatorial portals, a transport undertaking of such magnitude that. . .
Annoyed by the intrusive voice and images, Dallen turned away sharply and broke the beam contact.
He retreated to the curving edge of the plaza and sat down on a bench to watch Cona taking her
holographic pictures of the monument. Again it seemed to him that her interest in the statue and
its historic associations was a little too evident, that she was putting on a show for his
benefit. The message was that she would be fully occupied in getting on with her own life while
they were apart, but did he have to interpret that as defiance? Was it not possible, knowing Cona,
that she was only trying to make things easier for him by not clinging on?
Vd be crazy to cut myself off from tins, he thought, poised on the edge of a decision. He stood up
and waved as Cona lowered her recorder and turned to look for him. She waved back and zigzagged
towards him through the clusters of wide-brimmed hats which were worn almost universally on
Orbitsville as protection from the sun's vertical rays. He smiled, trying to visualise how she was
going to react to his momentous news. He had the choice of breaking it to her suddenly, going for
maximum dramatic effect, or of a more oblique approach in which, perhaps, he would begin by
suggesting that they go out of the hotel that light for a special celebration dinner.
Cona had just cleared the groups of sightseers when two boys of about ten ran up to her. She
halted and, after a short exchange of words, opened her purse
14
Bob Show
and gave them some money. The boys ran off immediately, laughing and pushing at each other as they
went.
"Young monkeys," Cona said on reaching Dallen. "They said they needed carfare home, but you could
see they were heading straight for the soda machines."
An inner voice pleaded with Dallen to ignore the incident, but he was unable to control his
reaction. "So why did you give them the money?"
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/De...r/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt (4 of 111) [2/24/2004 10:37:57 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt
"They were just a couple of lads."
"That's precisely the point. They were just a couple of kids and you taught them it pays to ask
strangers for hand-outs."
"For God's sake. Carry, try to relax." Cona's voice was lightly scornful. "It was only fifty
cents."
"The amount doesn't come into it." Dallen stared hard at his wife, furious with her for the way
she was casually destroying what had promised to be the most perfect moment of their lives. "Do
you really think I give a damn whether it was fifty cents or fifty monks? Do you?"
"I didn't realise you were so hot on child welfare." Cona, standing within the vertical column of
shade from her hat, might have retreated into a separate world.
"And what does that mean?" he asked, knowing exactly what it meant and challenging her to use
Mikel as a weapon against him. They were standing on the edge of a precipice and the ground was
breaking away beneath their feet, but the big drop might still be avoided if only she held back
from using Mikel.
"This touching concern for strange kids," Cona
ORB/TSVILLE DEPARTURE
15
said. "It seems slightly out of place in a man who is about to jaunt off to Earth and leave his
own son."
"I. . ." Vm not goings Dallen prompted himself. Say it right tww—Tm not going to Earth. He strove
to force the crucial words into being, but all human warmth had fled his soul. He turned away from
his wife, sick with disappointment, locked in combat with the chill, haughty, inflexible side of
his own nature, and knowing in advance that it was a battle he could never win.
Three hours later Dallen was on the observation gallery of the passenger ship Runcorn as it
detached from the docking cradle and climbed away from the humbling and inconceivable vastness of
the Orbitsville shell.
The ship was moving very slowly in the early stages of the flight, its magnetic scoop fields
unable to gather much reaction mass in a region of space that had been well scoured by other
vessels. As a consequence, the one-kilometre aperture around which Beachhead City was built
remained visible for some thirty minutes, only gradually narrowing to become a bright ellipse and
then a line of light which shortened and finally vanished. But even when the Runcorn was several
thousand kilometres into space the inexperienced traveller could have been forgiven for thinking
the ship had come to rest only a short distance "above" the shell. At that range Orbitsville was
still only half of the visible universe, a seemingly flat surface which occupied a full 180° of
the field of vision, the closest approximation in reality to the imagined infinite plane of the
geometer.
Also, it was black.
16
Bob Show
Except in the vicinity of a portal, there was nothing to see when one looked in the direction of
Orbitsville, There were no errant chinks of light, no reflections. As far as the evidence of the
eye was concerned the familiar cosmos, which was so richly spangled with stars and galaxies and
braids of glowing gas, had been sliced in half. There was a hemisphere of sparkling illumination
and a hemisphere of darkness—and the latter was the stupendous, invisibly brooding presence that
was Orbitsville. And even at a range of a billion kilometres, a distance which light itself took
almost an hour to traverse, the sphere was awesome. It registered as a monstrous black hole which
had eaten out the centre of the sky.
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/De...r/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt (5 of 111) [2/24/2004 10:37:57 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt
What, Dalten wondered, must the crew of the Bissendorf have thought when they were making that
first approach all that time ago? What was going through their minds as they saw the edges of the
dark circle balloon steadily outwards to occlude half the cosmos?
He could imagine those first explorers inclining to the idea that they had encountered a Dyson's
Sphere. The 20th Century concept was that, in order to meet all its land and energy requirements,
a highly advanced civilisation would eventually need to englobe its parent sun and spread across
the inside of the sphere which had been created. A Dyson's Sphere, however, would have been a
patchy and inconsistent construct, laboriously cobbled together over many millennia from
dismantled planets, asteroids and cosmic debris. And it would have been leaking various kinds of
radiation which would have given abundant clues about its true nature.
Orbitsville, in stark constrast, would have remained
ORBITSVILLE DEPARTURE
17
enigmatic. Its shell of ylem was opaque to everything except gravitation, and therefore the
wanderers of the Bissendorf would have known only that they were approaching a sun which had
somehow been enclosed within a vast hollow sphere. Their long-range sensors would have told them
that the surface of the globe was seamless and as smooth as finely machined steel, but no more
information would have been forthcoming.
Even now, two centuries later, man's understanding of the sphere's origins was sharply limited,
Dallen reminded himself. It was a study which had yielded little in the way of concrete fact, much
in the way of speculation—a field which offered less to pragmatic researchers than to poets and
mystics . . .
How does one account for a seamless globe of ultra-material with a circumference of a billion
kilometres? There can be only one source for such an inconceivable quantity of shell material, and
that is in the sun itself. Matter is energy, and energy is matter. Every active star hurls the
equivalent of millions of tonnes a day of its own substance into space in the form of light and
other radiations. But in the case of the Orbitsville sun—once known as Pengelly's Star—the Maker
had set up a boundary, turning that energy back on itself, manipulating and modifying it,
translating it into matter. With precise control over the most elemental forces of the universe,
the maker created an impervious shell of exactly the sort of material He wanted—harder than
diamond, immutable, eternal. When the sphere was complete, grown to the required thickness, He
again dipped His hands into the font of energy and wrought fresh miracles, coating the interior of
the sphere with soil and water and air. Organic acids, even complete cells and seeds, had been
constructed in the same way, because at the
18
Bob Shaw
ORBITSV/LLE DEPARTURE
19
ultimate level of reality there is no difference between a blade of grass and one of steel. . ,
"Quite a spectacle, isn't it?" The speaker was a young woman who, unnoticed by Dallen had
positioned herself beside him at the curving rail of the observation gallery. "It seems to pull
your eyes."
"I know what you mean," he said, glancing down at her. The illumination was subdued, most of it
from the extravagant blazing of star clouds, but he could see that she had Oriental features and
was attractive in a forthright physical manner. He would have guessed she was an athlete or in
some way connected with the performing arts.
"This is my first trip to Earth," she said. "How about you?"
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/De...r/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt (6 of 111) [2/24/2004 10:37:57 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt
"The same." Dallen was intrigued to find that, for one unsettling instant, he had been tempted to
pose as a veteran space traveller. "This is all new to me."
"I noticed you coming on board."
Dallen weighed all the connotations of the remark, including her awareness of the fact that he was
travelling alone. "You're very observant."
"Not really." The woman locked her gaze with his. "I only see what I like."
"In that case," Dallen said gendy, "you're a very lucky person."
He turned away and left the gallery, easily putting the woman out of his thoughts. He was still
angry with Cona, still feeling betrayed over their not making the trip as a family, but rebounding
to another woman would have been a cheap and ordinary response, the sort of thing that many men
would have done, but not Carry Dallen. His best plan, he decided, would be to make maximum use of
the
ship's gymnasium facilities, burn off his frustrations in sheer physical effort.
All the other passengers appeared to be tourists— couples, family units, dubs, study groups taking
advantage of the heavy Metagov subsidy to visit the birthplace of their culture—and Dallen felt
himself to be a conspicuoulsy solitary figure as he wound his way through them to fetch his
training clothes. The gymnasium was empty when he got there and he went to work immediately,
pitting his strength against the resistance frames, repeating the same exercise hundreds of times,
aiming for a state of mental and bodily exhaustion which would guarantee his night's
His scheme was successful to the extent that he fell asleep within minutes of going to bed, but he
awoke only two hours later with the depressing knowledge that it was going to be a long, uphill
struggle to morning. He tried to pass the time by visualising his new job in Madison City, with
all its opportunities for holiday travel to hundreds of fabulous old cities and scenic splendours
so conveniently crowded on one tiny planet. But his brain refused to cooperate. No bright visions
were forthcoming. As he drowsed through the small hours, in that uneasy margin between wakefulness
and sleep where strange terrors prowl. Earth seemed an alien and inimical place.
And the doors of the future remained obstinately closed, denying him any hint of what was to come.
Chapter 2
Gerald Mathieu opened a drawer in his desk and, in spite of a drug-induced sense of tightness, he
frowned as he looked down at the object within.
The gun was of a type which had once been known as a Luddite Special, and had been custom-designed
for a single purpose—chat of killing computers. It was also one of the most illegal devices that a
citizen could own. Even with Mathieu's extensive connections it had taken him nearly a month to
obtain the gun and to make sure that no other person in the whole continent knew it was in his
hands.
Now the time had come to use it and he was highly apprehensive.
Merely being caught with the device in his possession would bring a mandatory prison sentence of
ten years; and if it were established that he had actually used it he could expect to be removed
from society for the rest of his life. The severity of the punishment was intended to protect
people rather than property, because the weapon—in a consequence its
20
ORBITSV1LLE DEPARTURE
21
inventors never foresaw—had a devastating effect on anyone caught in its beam. In some vxtys worse
than straigtbforward murder, had been one judicial comment, and in many ways a greater threat to
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/De...r/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt (7 of 111) [2/24/2004 10:37:57 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt
social order,
"How in hell did I get into this situation?" Mathieu said to his empty office, then dismissed the
question, trying to push irrelevancies aside as he picked up the gun and released the safety catch
behind the trigger. The whole assemblage was solid and heavy in his hand, evidence of close-packed
circuitry within, and a certain angularity and lack of cosmetic finish showed it to be the product
of an underground workshop.
Aware that he was in danger of hesitating too long, Mathieu slipped the gun into the side pocket
of his loose-fitting jacket and turned to check his appearance in a wall-mounted mirror. He had
reached the rank of deputy mayor at the exceptionally early age of thirty-two, and he took a
secret pleasure in seeming even younger by virtue of his fair-skinned athleti-cism. He also had a
reputation for the casual perfection of his dress, and it was important that nothing about him
should look out of place during the next few minutes. At this rime of the morning his chances of
encountering others on his way to Sublevel Three were slight, but the risk was always there and if
a meeting occurred he wanted it to be unmemorable, something which would quickly be lost in City
Hall's humdrum routine.
Satisfied that he had made himself ready, Mathieu went into the corridor and walked quickly
towards the emergency stair on the building's north side. The transparent wall ahead of him
provided panoramic views of the city of Madison. Its suburbs shone placidly in the distance,
colours muted and outlines blurred
22
Boh Shaw
ORB/TSVILLE DEPARTURE
23
in the humid air streams swirling inland from the Gulf. Mathieu, with a final glance back along
the empty corridor, opened the door to the stairwell and went downwards. He had chosen to wear
soft-soled shoes and his progress was both swift and silent, like the effortless sinking spiral of
a gull.
Be careful, he thought; quelling a sudden exhilaration. He had omitted his pre-breakfast shot of
felicitin, knowing he would need a clear head for the morning's desperate venture, but the drug
was bound to be lingering in his system, subtly persuading him that he was invincible. And a foil
at this stage could turn die threat of disaster into hard actuality.
The discovery some weeks earlier that Sublevel Three housed an independent Department of Supply
computer had, in spite of the chemical shields around his mind, numbed Mathieu with dread. It had
been installed decades ago at the instigation of some forgotten Metagovernment official, back in
the days when Orbitsville was more actively concerned with the affairs of Earth, and since then
had—unknown to Mathieu—been monitoring the distribution of certain categories of imports.
The computer's specification had apparently been drawn up by a bureaucratic supersnoop with a
tendency to paranoia. It had an internal power supply which was good for at least a century, and
it obtained its entire data input by direct sensing of product identity tags within a radius of
fifty kilometres. The single feature of the system which had operated in Mathieu's favour was that
the computer did not interact with Madison City's general information network. It sat in the
building's deserted lower levels, like a spider interpreting every vibration of its web, acquir-
ing and storing detailed knowledge of the movement of Metagov supplies throughout the region. The
information was jealously guarded, locked inside an armoured data bank—but it would be yielded on
receipt of the correct command.
And even a cursory glance at the print-out would show that Mathieu had privately disposed of
public property worth some half-a-million monits. The consequences of such a revelation were
something that Mathieu could not bear to think about. He had resolved to destroy the evidence,
regardless of the additional risk.
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/De...r/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt (8 of 111) [2/24/2004 10:37:57 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt
On reaching Sublevel Three he turned right and went through a ballroom-sized area which had once
been used as a computer centre and now was a maze of movable partitions and discarded crates. He
found the door he was seeking, one he would never have noticed under normal circumstances, and
went through it into a short corridor which had three more doors on each side. The most distant
bore the initials N.R.R.D. in stencilled lettering, a combination which meant nothing to Mathieu,
and again he wondered how Solly Hume had chanced upon the troublesome computer in the first place.
A junior architect in the City Surveyor's office, Hume was a self-styled "electronic
archaeologist" in his spare time and was currently trying to have the machine declared obsolete
and redundant so that he could buy it on behalf of some like-minded enthusiasts. It had been pure
coincidence that Ezzati, the salvage officer, had mentioned the subject to Mathieu during a
meeting, thus alerting him to the imminence of disaster.
Mathieu used his master key to open the door and quietly stepped into the fusty little room. The
ceiling
24
Bob Shaw
ORB/TSVILLE DEPASTURE
25
globe pinged faintly as it came on, throwing an arctic light over a plain metal table which
supported the department of Supply computer, it looked more like a strongbox than a complex
electronic monitor, with only a plate engraved with chains of serial numbers to indicate its true
nature. In a volume not much greater than that of a shoebox were sensors which could track the
incredibly faint signals emitted by product identity tags, plus a computer which converted the
signal variations into geographic locations and stored them in its memory. Millions of freight
movements had been recorded, going back to before Mathieu's birth, but he was solely concerned
with those of the last three years—the evidence of his grand larceny.
He stared at the box for a moment with resentment and grudging respect, and then—feeling oddly
guilty— drew the Luddite Special out of his pocket.
He aimed its bell-shaped muzzle at the machine and squeezed the trigger.
Cona Dallen switched off her voice recorder, forced to acknowledge the fact that she was too hot
and uncomfortable to do any serious work. She had chosen a seat beneath one of the mature dogwood
trees in the City Hall grounds, but the shade meant little in the pervasive humid warmth. It was
almost four months since she and Mikel had arrived from Orbitsville, and apparently she was no
nearer to adapting to the climate of the area which had once been known as Georgia.
And being seven or eight kilos overweight doesn't help, she reminded herself, resolving to have
nothing but green salad for the rest of the day. A glance at her
watch showed there was more than an hour until the luncheon appointment with Carry. It seemed a
pity not to do as planned and outline the next chapter of her book, but on top of the unsuitable
working conditions she had a problem in that her subject was becoming increasingly remote.
With its working title of The Second Diaspora, the book should have been a genuine personal
statement about the history of Judaism on Orbitsville, but— somewhat to her surprise—the work had
gone slowly and badly after Carry's transfer to Earth. That fact had contributed to her agreeing
to join him earlier than she had planned. Also, she had been touched when, trying to conceal his
nervousness over venturing into academic realms, he had put forward the idea that distance would
improve historical perspective. The prospect of ending a year of separation had helped persuade
her he was right, that what she really needed was an overview, but now the two-century adventure
that had been the founding of New Israel seemed oddly perfunctory, oddly passionless, when
observed from a distance of hundreds of light years.
Was her new perspective valid? Was the fate of a single nation a truly insignificant fleck in the
vast mosaic of history, or—as had been the case with other writers—had the very act of voyaging
from one star to another leached some vital essence from her ;• mind?
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/De...r/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt (9 of 111) [2/24/2004 10:37:57 PM]
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt
It war a mistake to come to Carry, she thought, and •. immediately regretted having allowed the
thought to | form. After four years of one-to-one marriage, it ;;- seemed that her relationship
with Carry might turn
26
Bob Show
out to be the durable armature around which she ought to build the rest of her life.
"Mum!" Mikel picked up the miniature toy truck he had been trundling through the grass and walked
backwards until he was pressed against her knees.
"What's wrong, Mikel?"
He pointed apprehensively at a grey-and-white gull which had landed nearby. "A bee!"
"That's a bird, and it won't hurt you." Cona smiled as she dapped her hands and caused the
incurious gull to retreat by several metres. To Mikel, every creature which flew was a bee and all
four-legged animals were cats, and yet he had a vocabulary of at least a dozen nouns which he
applied accurately to forms of mechanical transport. Cona wondered if a child could show
engineering aptitude so early.
"Don't like," Mikel said. He continued to press against her and she detected the pure smell of
baby perspiration in his coppery hair.
"It's too hot out here—let's go into Daddy's office and get a cold drink." She stood up, easily
gathering Mikel into her arms, and walked towards the north side entrance of the City Hall.
Carry's office would be empty till noon and, provided that Mikel was prepared to amuse himself
unaided, offered a better environment for working.
The silvered glass doors parted automatically as she reached them, attracting Mikel's interest,
and she walked into the air-conditioned coolness of the north lobby. Cona hesitated. The correct
procedure would have been to go quarter-way round the building and report at the main entrance
before taking an elevator to Carry's second-floor office, but her clothes were sticking to her
skin, Mikel seemed heavier with each
ORBITSVILLE DEPARTURE
27
passing second, and there were no officials around to enforce the rules. Late morning stillness
pervaded the lobby.
She opened the door to the emergency stair, a route favoured by Carry when he was in a hurry to
get to work, and began the brief climb to the next floor, unconsciously making her footsteps as
light as possible. There was a square landing midway between floors, and Cona had barely reached
it when the air was filled with the shrill bleat of an alarm signal.
Shocked, filled with irrational guilt, she clutched her son closer to her and froze against the
wall, momentarily unable to decide whether to turn back or goon.
The sound of the alarm caused Mathieu to moan aloud in panic.
He backed away from the Department of Supply monitor, knowing that the hail of radiation he had
sent blasting through it would have erased programmes and memory alike. For an instant he thought
the machine had retained the ability to warn of sabotage, then it dawned on him that there was a
still-functioning alarm system somewhere in Sublevel Three, a relic of the days when it had housed
a computer centre. This was something he had not even considered, yet another proof that it was
foolhardy to plan anything important while under the influence of felicitin . . .
Why are you standing around? The words reverberated between his temples. Run! RUN!
file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/D.../Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txt (10 of 111) [2/24/2004 10:37:57 PM]
摘要：

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Bob%20Shaw%20-%20Orbitsville%20Departure.txtORBITSVILLEDEPARTUREChapter1TheyhaddecidedtospendthefewhoursthatremainedtothemwalkinginGaramondPark.Dallenhadbeenthereseveraltimesbefore,butonthisoccasionhissenseswereheightenedbyablendofe...

展开>> 收起<<
Bob Shaw - Orbitsville Departure.pdf

共111页,预览23页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：111 页 大小：338.78KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-14

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 111
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注