20
Three Body Problem

Two days out from Redline, and the White Cat was changing course every twelve nanoseconds. Dyne-space enfolded the ship in a figured, incalculable blackness, out of which reached the caressing fingers of weakly reacting matter. The shadow operators hung motionless at the portholes whispering to one another in the old languages. They had taken on their usual form, of women biting their knuckles in regret. Billy Anker wouldn’t have them near him. “Hey,” he said, “we don’t know what they want!” He tried to exclude them from the human quarters, but they crept in like smoke while he was asleep and hung up in the corners watching him dream his exhausted dreams.

Seria Mau watched him too. She knew that she would soon have to have his account of himself, and of the object she had bought from Uncle Zip. Meanwhile she spent her time with the ship’s mathematics, trying to understand what was going on behind them, where, several lights adrift, the Krishna Moire pod wove itself chaotically round the curious hybrid signature of the Nastic ship, to make a single, watery, undependable trace in the display.

“It’s hard to feel threatened, when they stay back so far.”

“Perhaps they don’t want us to panic,” the mathematics suggested. “Or—” with its equivalent of a shrug “—perhaps they do.”

“Can we lose them?”

“Their computational success is high, but not as high as mine. With luck, I can keep them at arm’s length.”

“But can we lose them?”

“No.”

She couldn’t bear that idea. It was a limitation. It was like being a child again. “Well then, do something!” she screamed. After some thought the mathematics put her to sleep, which for once she welcomed.

She dreamed again of the time they were all still happy. “Let’s go away!” the mother said. “Would you like to go away?” Seria Mau clapped her hands, while her brother ran up and down the family room, shouting, “Let’s go away! Let’s go away!” though when the time came he threw a tantrum because he couldn’t take his little black cat. They caught the Rocket Train north, to Saulsignon. It was a long journey in a lost season—not quite winter, not quite spring—slow and exciting by turns. “If it’s a Rocket Train it should go faster!” the little boy shouted, running up and down the aisle. The sky was a stretched blue over long hypnotic lines of plough. They got down at Saulsignon the afternoon of the next day. It was the tiniest of stations, with wrought iron posts and tubs of Earth flowers, washed bright as a new pin by the little showers of rain falling through the sunlight. The platform cat licked its tortoiseshell fur in a corner, the Rocket Train departed, and a white cloud obscured the sun. Outside the station a man walked by. When he stopped to look back, the mother shivered and wrapped her honey-coloured fur coat about her, drawing its collar tight with one long white hand.