“It’s the Cork, Captain. I think he’s ready to snap.”

  “What?”

  “He’s sitting, not talking to anyone. Something’s wrong, I can feel it”

  I stared at him, letting it sink in slowly. The Cork. “Where is he?” I asked.

  “In the mess. He’s just sitting there, Captain. Drinking.”

  That was bad. I strode down the hall, found myself moving into a trot, came to the lift shaft, and dropped the three levels to the lounge. He was sitting by himself just behind the Cook’s coffee console, sipping at a steaming cup of coffee laced with absinthe. He was staring at his hands.

  I asked him, “What’s wrong?”

  Nothing. He shrugged and tried a weak smile. I slid onto the bench opposite him and nervously keyed the remote on the table before me. Muscles jumped in spasms along the outsides of my ankles as I waited for the coffee: it’s a nervous thing I get. I watched the Cork. He kept his eyes on his hands, occasionally taking a sip of his coffee.

  “Cook says there’s something the matter…”

  He said no, nothing was wrong.

  I felt uneasy sitting there with him; everything about him was calm and gentle—and yet 1 felt uneasy. I realized that I’d almost deliberately avoided him since that day in the lounge. Being near him made me uncomfortable; I couldn’t have explained it “Dammit,” I said, “say something.”

  He did. Quietly, he started to talk. Nothing in particular, commenting first on the smoothness of the run, the attitude of the crew, who he thought was involved with whom, how much he liked the ship, how happy he was to be Corking under me, how he liked the Engineer, how he was glad the others liked him. He rambled, continuing on without saying anything. His hands drifted across the tabletop as he spoke, brushing it gently as though smoothing a bed sheet. He talked, and finally I stopped listening. 1 didn’t want to listen, not really. I pushed away from the table. He stopped speaking and looked up at me.

  Was something wrong?

  “No,” I answered wearily. “No. Everything’s fine. Just OK. I’ll see you later.”

  I went out feeling weak. Something nagged at the back of my mind and I brushed it away, just as I brushed away my last view of the Cork sitting there watching me leave, his eyes blank and, apparently, uncaring.

  I saw him about the corridors of the ship. He moved through the halls slowly, bis head lowered as he took a wandering path along the rim corridors of the vessel, on those decks where the artificial gravity was activated. Moving like a wraith, he seemed lost in thought, but we knew that the distant look in his eyes was the look of a Sensitive in contact. He left varying impressions on the crew. Some thought him a touch insane, others that he was more sane than any of us, and was lost in our insanity; still others didn’t care,. Both extremes, madness and insanity, were wrong, by my thinking; his mind was a mixture. He was different, apart from us; dispassionate might have been the word for it, but for the fact that he was hardly cold. I found him once or twice when he thought he was alone, shaking himself back and forth and muttering something low and rhythmic under his breath. In anyone but a Cork I would have said it bordered on madness, but the ways a Cork maintains his sanity sometimes seem stranger than madness…

  That was the way it seemed to me at the time. Now I understand that I didn’t want to recognize his distress; I didn’t want to see how be was crumbling inside. He was the Cork. And I wondered why I picked him.

  So it went. He wandered and listened, and spoke little of himself—little of substance, little of him—and in his station he took up our insanities.

  And on our third run, three weeks out from Centauri, up from the Center, he blew.

  Mind-drive;

  I stand apart from the ship in my analog web, looking down at the ball of light webbed with a network of power and energy, sparked with arrows of mental light, a hundred mental waves turning in on themselves, waves on a muddy shore, churning up soot and soil, foaming in coils of power. Central to that silent storm is the prism of the Cork’s mind-field, which seems to draw the darkness in a whirlpool even as we generate it, funneling the black richness of our emotions through the Engineer and out of the ship in a beam that shoves the Charter through the Back Region, a helix blue and white behind us.

  Behind the ship are the stars. Ahead, the golden glow of hyperspace. We move through…and in.

  I stand apart from the ship, held in the electric stress of the web structured about me by the shipboard computers. I guide the minds hip with carefully directed bursts of power, power applied through the field my crew members create around me. I stand apart with my mind, outside the ship, the noneyes of the Captain’s Set overseeing the flow of the mind-drive.

  Like a golden bird, we fly.

  Below, a hundred sick men pour out the filth of their souls, and that filth is funneled by the Engineer. Below, a hundred sick minds are filtered through a sane one, our safety valve, our Cork.

  But here…we fly. The stream of energy pulses, eternal, unchanging.

  The Charter flies.

  I can feel the weight of Center dragging at me—a sensation akin to that one feels when climbing a mountain under a heavy pack. It sets me aslant. I compensate and the ship shifts, and we move sluggishly through the stream.

  Images in my mind:

  Twist—

  Squatting in sunlight, sweating from open pores, dying—waiting and no one comes. He’s dead. My fault. They’re all dead: Desert world.

  (Thoughts from the prism: gentle, cool, draining off the memory.)

  Twist—

  Dark, cold room around and over me, sounds throbbing in my bones, in my skull—alone, panicking—

  (His hand comes into my mind and draws away the madness, silken fingers brushing my thoughts—cold.)

  Twist—

  The Control Room, chaotic: fires, smashed consoles and screens, the labored breathing of the madman in the Captain’s Set, blood trickling from his nostrils, a river down his chin. Screaming, l shove him from his chair, watching his body curl over on itself like paper tossed into a fire. Screaming still, I clamber into the Captain’s Set, knowing I can’t do what l need to, finding the wires, shoving them in—

  (And the Cork comes, plumbing the poisons from my mind, and I am purged…cleansed…)

  And the ship dives on.

  In the Control Room I jerked forward as something took the Charter and shook it.

  Walls canted around me. I fell sliding from the Set, catching myself before the wires could tear from my skin. In the distance alarms wailed.

  Somehow I was back in the Set, strapping the emergency bands across my chest. Another shock threw the ship forward. I slammed into the restraining bands and bounced back, stunned.

  “Engineer…status report.” Calm. Tendrils of calm played with the panic lacing my consciousness. 1 gripped the armrest, forcing myself to relax.

  Forcing—

  I cut off the hurried string of numerals from the Engineering section. “The Cork,” I asked, “where is he? I want him up in the Control Room with me. Now.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Punching a key on the board to my left, I studied an exterior view of the ship. The screen showed a bowl of gray curling to either side, unmarked but for a puncture of black dead center ahead. A Black Hole. I felt a chill start a slow crawl up my spine.

  “He’s not in his section, sir.”

  “Then find him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Not in his section. The implication drove home and fell away. I stared at the screen, no longer registering the scene of disaster rapidly approaching. Not in his section.

  “Captain?”

  “What?”

  “We’ve located him, sir.”

  “Where?”

  “In the…ah…mess, sir. Drinking coffee.”

  God in heaven!

  “Send him up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The ship lurched forward again: the tidal forces from the stellar freak ahead, the “Black Hole,” final result of a collapsing star, the mass of a million planets compressed into an area four miles across, possessing gravitational properties that could reach even to the Back Region… I sent out signals to reverse thrust. The image on the screen flickered, faded, then grew large again. I’d need more power. Much more power, if we were to survive.

  Behind me a pneumatic hiss signaled the entrance of the Cork.

  “Where in hell were you?”

  He started to explain. I cut him off. “Never mind. You’ll be stationed here. I want you near me when we push past that hole.”

  He didn’t answer. I was busy once more, making course corrections and feeding new figures into the computer brains that lined the wails of the Control Room, relaying the decisions and revisions they arrived at along the mental circuits binding the ship. Around me the computers hummed, the screens winked and glowed, and I felt the ship gathering power as its many minds drew their strength together, preparing.

  During a pause, I glanced up at him.

  He was ready to blow.

  You get to know the look after a while. The slouched posture, the eyes, the trembling hands fumbling with the buttons and zippers on a jacket His gaze didn’t meet mine. It wasn’t a new thing, but now it seemed to have an unvoiced meaning, where before…

  “Oh god.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me.

  I groped in the slot under the left armrest and came up with a syringe kept there for the Captain’s use during a hard drive. It was full. A third of it would be enough. I grabbed his arm and plunged the needle in, and it was then I sinned. I gave it all.

  He seemed unaffected.

  “Just stay,” I said, “just keep thinking…

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t seem to hear me.

  I turned from him and made the connections that would send me over to mind-drive. I blacked out Black:

  Shrieking:

  Writhing and alive, the hole:

  Light.

  Mind-drive:

  It spins from everywhere and it bends in on us, a great obsidian sore. I throw the ship forward—

  —boxes, each flowering into the next, and (A ghost form comes and takes the fear from me, swallows it into himself)—

  —battering past the gravity well, slamming through seas of tidal pull, while the collapsed sun sinks forever below us, dragging us, the Back Region consumed with heat, wrinkling in the black-pitch energy storm, bending around us, warping around us, falling from us—

  Twist-

  Seething sun golden madness leaping now larger always larger—

  (Hands come, take our madness.) (Frail hands, like tissue.) (Tissue in a maelstrom.) (Breaking.)

  A hundred sick minds pour out their insanity and the sewer swallows the ichor, and it drives us on, funneled behind us.

  The Black Hole erupts.

  I slide the ship around and away—cut forward and pitch into overdrive.

  And we are gone, splicing from the unreal to the real, in and out and—gone. Where we’d been, the Black Hole blossoms, spreads like ink, and drains away.

  The ship moved through a fold in space and slid into the graindark midnight of Outside. We drifted through a sudden calm. In objective space, the Black Hole was light years distant, already a dying memory. Around us the stars were brilliant on a velvet sky. There was silence, blessed silence.

  Silence. …

  Everywhere.,.?

  .…no.

  From some dim corner of our collective consciousness there came a moan of pain and agony, not an audible moan, not a physical scream of torment—but a whimpering mental whine.

  The Code.

  I returned to the Control Room, tore off my straps, and swung down from the Captain’s Set. I found him slumped on the floor inches from my feet, his arms outstretched as though he were groping for something that was now forever out of his reach…

  His mind was gone, lost in the madness I’d forced him to drain. He lay in a huddle at the foot of the Set, wound in on himself fetuslike, his pale hair tumbling over eyes that were blank and staring. He’d clamped down on his tongue sometime during the flight and now a stream of thick blood dribbled past his lips and onto the floor, where already it was crusting brown. His clothes were in ragged strips. His arms were bleeding where he’d struck himself agains the sharp edges of the Set. He was whimpering when I came to him, spitting up blood with each sigh. I bent quickly, removing the wires from his forehead. I pulled him into a sitting position. His body was limp and sagging in my hands. I stared at him and after a time I let him down and left him there to whimper alone, in silence.

  Some nights I wake shrieking and huddle under the bedclothes warm with my sweat, and ask myself—why did I do that, why did I pick him, why him?

  As yet T’ve found no answer, but it doesn’t trouble me too greatly anymore. I have release, of a sort.

  At night the silken lingers quickly come, and steal the pain away.

  Chapter One

  Eighth month, third day, anno Domini 3146

  He’d been awake for hours, lying in the darkness of the room and watching the dusky glow of his cigarette crawl toward bis fingertips. The fingers were stained yellow, callused under each knuckle with a layer of thick white skin. At times, nervously, he would worry at the callus on his forefinger with the nail of his thumb. When he was sitting alone in the galley lounge aboard ship, or at his station during drive, or at times like this, lying awake in the early hours before false dawn, be would worry that lip of skin until the irritation made the flesh under the callus become inflamed, or until his nerves were unable to stand the monotony any longer, and then be would bite the dead skin free. Inevitably a new callus would form within a few days, and the process would begin anew.

  The storm was over. Now there was only a gentle rain misting the balcony beyond his window with a faint post moonlight haze. Kilgarin looked at the woman sleeping beside him. She lay turned away on her stomach, her back bare above the quilt. There was a soft tracing of brown fur across her shoulders and shoulder blades, just thick enough to be noticed in the blue light from outside. The down moved as she breathed. Just then, as he watched, she shivered and tried, in her sleep, to snuggle more fully under the covers. Kilgarin drew them up about her neck. Her stirrings ceased and she made low throat noises as she shifted once more, turned her face toward him, and drifted gently back to sleep.

  He stood and drew on his robe, bracing himself against the moist wind off the Endrim sea. His legs felt cold, his arms wet. The breeze tasted of salt, but Kilgarin knew it was only an illusion. The sea fronting the tavern district was fresh water, as were most of the smaller bays and lakes on the young frontier world. He closed his eyes and welcomed the memory of other planets, especially the clear, crystal memory of his only visit to earth. He’d spent his leave near the sea, on an untainted shore in the eastern hemisphere. The water had been warm, salty. There’d been a woman…Kilgarin broke oS the thought, opening his eyes and staring at the motion of shadow in the room, and the window showing the town below.

  He was a tall man, a little over two meters, with black hair drawn back from his forehead and bound with a leather wrap at the base of his neck. His arms were well muscled, his shoulders broad and thick, but his chest was thin, his waist was narrow, and his hips were a bit wider than normal, all signs of his non-Physical background. His legs were heavy and strong: he’d spent most of his hours off the Browner walking. On the worlds the mindship had visited, Kilgarin had wandered for hours through forests and deserts, over hills and across plains: it gave him time to fix a sense of place in his mind, making the planet more Teal than it would have been seen only from a port window or studied from the base of a ship’s fin. His wrists were thick and his hands were callused, and that by itself was odd for a Sensitive, especially odd for a former Cork. Kilgarin enjoyed working with his hands, and had gone out of his way to find craft work, finally settling on wood carving as a hobby. His pieces were primitive—he readily admitted it—but they’d gained some favorable comments, particularly from a friend he’d had aboard the Drowner, a former art critic who’d worked as Communications Sensitive until he’d blown, the Centaurian named J’kar, who’d mentioned something about “an assurance to the work that amazed” him. Kilgarin smiled at the memory. He looked at his hands, then tucked them under his arms and glanced out at the balcony and the port city beyond.

  The air was cool out there. He relaxed against the brick wall, closing- his eyes and trying to visualize the town. It was something he did when he settled on a planet for more than a day; he tried to place the buildings and streets in his mind. It gave him a kind of mental freedom then, to arrange his life around those things—as though he were studying a new game board, learning, in a way, to play the game.

  There: the steeple of a church. And there: the row of prefabricated buildings, which had been erected by the Company before the advent of the new Independence government on Endrim, little white-and-blue dollops on a green strip. And closer: the thick structure of the Company’s factory complex, the processing and refining plants, the managerial offices separated from the rest by a rectangular fountain/pool. And also there, fittingly, the first of the city’s taverns, on the same block as the plant, just a half mile outside the Sensitive District, a small windowless tavern built into an older building’s basement. And here: the newer buildings erected under the Independence government, black iron balconies set close to pseudo-brick facades. Kilgarin opened his eyes. It was all there, including the landmark he’d neglected to remember, accidentally or deliberately: the spaceport. The ships in the port glistened under the arc lights of the maintenance buildings, their snub prows running with rivers of blue light, the cleansing autohoses swooping about them in the glow of the bright spots. Kilgarin half-turned from the sight, and saw instead the Company refining plant. Neither pleased him, but both were the cause of his being there on Endrim, his reason for picking this planet for his retirement. He rubbed his hands over his eyes, sighing.