"No!" Harra shouted again.
"What are you?"
"I'm a psychiatrist. I specialize in retrieving people like you, people who are in a mental vacation mode, what you call 'second childhood.' You're aware of all this, on another level, but the child in you has fought it at every stage. The result has been nightmares—probably with me as the focus, whether you admitted it or not."
She grasped both his wrists, one of them awkwardly because of her injury.
"Now listen to me." She spoke in an intense whisper, trying to get it all out before the panic she saw in his face broke free and sent him running. "You came here for a vacation. You were going to stay ten years, growing up and taking it easy. That's all over. The situation that prevailed when you left is now out of date. Things have moved faster than you believed possible. You had expected a ten-year period after your return to get things in order for the coming battles. That time has evaporated. The Common Market of the Inner Planets has fired the first shot. They've instituted a new system of accounting and it's locked into their computers and running. It's aimed right at Pluto, and it's been working for a month now. We cannot continue as an economic partner to the C.M.I.P., because from now on every time we sell or buy or move money the inflationary multiplier is automatically juggled against us. It's all perfectly legal by all existing treaties, and it's necessary to their economy. But it ignores our time-lag disadvantage. We have to consider it as a hostile act, no matter what the intent. You have to come back and direct the war, Mister Finance Minister."
The words shattered what calm Piri had left. He wrenched free of her hands and turned wildly to look all around him. Then he sprinted down the beach. He tripped once over his splay feet, got up without ever slowing, and disappeared.
Harra and Lee stood silently and watched him go.
"You didn't have to be so rough with him," Harra said, but knew it wasn't so. She just hated to see him so confused.
"It's best done quickly when they resist. And he's all right. He'll have a fight with himself, but there's no real doubt of the outcome."
"So the Piri I know will be dead soon?"
Lee put her arm around the younger woman.
"Not at all. It's a reintegration, without a winner or a loser. You'll see." She looked at the tear-streaked face.
"Don't worry. You'll like the older Piri. It won't take him any time at all to realize that he loves you."
He had never been to the reef at night. It was a place of furtive fish, always one step ahead of him as they darted back into their places of concealment. He wondered how long it would be before they ventured out in the long night to come. The sun might not rise for years.
They might never come out. Not realizing the changes in their environment, night fish and day fish would never adjust. Feeding cycles would be disrupted, critical temperatures would go awry, the endless moon and lack of sun would frustrate the internal mechanisms, bred over billions of years, and fish would die. It had to happen.
The ecologists would have quite a job on their hands.
But there was one denizen of the outer reef that would survive for a long time. He would eat anything that moved and quite a few things that didn't, at any time of the day or night. He had no fear, he had no internal clocks dictating to him, no inner pressures to confuse him except the one overriding urge to attack. He would last as long as there was anything alive to eat.
But in what passed for a brain in the white-bottomed torpedo that was the Ghost, a splinter of doubt had lodged. He had no recollection of similar doubts, though there had been some. He was not equipped to remember, only to hunt. So this new thing that swam beside him, and drove his cold brain as near as it could come to the emotion of anger, was a mystery. He tried again and again to attack it, then something would seize him with an emotion he had not felt since he was half a meter long, and fear would drive him away.
Piri swam along beside the faint outline of the shark. There was just enough moonlight for him to see the fish, hovering at the ill-defined limit of his sonic signal. Occasionally, the shape would shudder from head to tail, turn toward him, and grow larger. At these times Piri could see nothing but a gaping jaw. Then it would turn quickly, transfix him with that bottomless pit of an eye, and sweep away.
Piri wished he could laugh at the poor, stupid brute. How could he have feared such a mindless eating machine?
Good-bye, pinbrain. He turned and stroked lazily toward the shore. He knew the shark would turn and follow him, nosing into the interdicted sphere of his transponder, but the thought did not impress him. He was without fear. How could he be afraid, when he had already been swallowed into the belly of his nightmare? The teeth had closed around him, he had awakened, and remembered. And that was the end of his fear.
Good-bye, tropical paradise. You were fun while you lasted. Now I'm a grownup, and must go off to war.
He didn't relish it. It was a wrench to leave his childhood, though the time had surely been right. Now the responsibilities had descended on him, and he must shoulder them. He thought of Harra.
"Piri," he told himself, "as a teenager, you were just too dumb to live."
Knowing it was the last time, he felt the coolness of the water flowing over his gills. They had served him well, but had no place in his work. There was no place for a fish, and no place for Robinson Crusoe.
Good-bye, gills.
He kicked harder for the shore and came to stand, dripping wet, on the beach. Harra and Lee were there, waiting for him.
Lollipop and the Tar Baby
"ZZZZELLO. ZZZ. HELLO. HELLO." Someone was speaking to Xanthia from the end of a ten-kilometer metal pipe, shouting to be heard across a roomful of gongs and cymbals being knocked over by angry giant bees. She had never heard such interference.
"Hello?" she repeated. "What are you doing on my wavelength?"
"Hello." The interference was still there, but the voice was slightly more distinct. "Wavelength. Searching, searching wavelength... get best reception with... Hello? Listening?"
"Yes, I'm listening. You're talking over... My radio isn't even..." She banged the radio panel with her palm in the ancient ritual humans employ when their creations are being balky. "My goddamn radio isn't even on. Did you know that?" It was a relief to feel anger boiling up inside her. Anything was preferable to feeling lost and silly.
"Not necessary."
"What do you mean, not—who are you?"
"Who. Having... I'm, pronoun, yes, I'm having difficulty. Bear with. Me? Yes, pronoun. Bear with me. I'm not who. What. What am I?"
"All right. What are you?"
"Spacetime phenomenon. I'm gravity and causality-sink. Black hole."
Xanthia did not need black holes explained to her. She had spent her entire eighteen years hunting them, along with her clone-sister, Zoetrope. But she was not used to having them talk to her.
"Assuming for the moment that you really are a black hole," she said, beginning to wonder if this might be some elaborate trick played on her by Zoe, "just taking that as a tentative hypothesis—how are you able to talk to me?"
There was a sound like an attitude thruster going off, a rumbling pop. It was repeated.
"I manipulate spacetime framework... no, please hold line... the line. I manipulate the spacetime framework with controlled gravity waves projected in narrow... a narrow cone. I direct at the speaker in your radio. You hear. Me."
"What was that again?" It sounded like a lot of crap to her.
"I elaborate. I will elaborate. I cut through space itself, through—hold the line, hold the line, reference." There was a sound like a tape reeling rapidly through playback heads. "This is the BBC," said a voice that was recognizably human, but blurred by static. The tape whirred again, "gust the third, in the year of our Lord nineteen fifty-seven. Today in—" Once again the tape hunted.
"chelson-Morley experiment disproved the existence of the ether, by ingeniously arranging a rotating prism—" Then the metallic voice was back.
"Ether. I cut through space itself, through a—hold the line." This time the process was shorter. She heard a fragment of what sounded like a video adventure serial. "Through a spacewarp made through the ductile etheric continuum—"
"Hold on there. That's not what you said before."
"I was elaborating."
"Go on. Wait, what were you doing? With that tape business?"
The voice paused, and when the answer came the line had cleared up quite a bit. But the voice still didn't sound human. Computer?