Resurgence (27 page)

The beetlebacks were larger than a human, but low-built. He squatted down on his haunches, to bring his head level with theirs. It was time to start in on a tricky task for which he was uniquely well qualified: that of cross-species—in this case, cross-galactic arm—communication.

Teri Dahl sat alone in the forward observation chamber of the
No Regrets
and wondered about the name she had chosen for their ship. Outside the port there was nothing—no stars, no faint galaxies, no dark occluding masses of gas. That had been their first hope when they emerged from the Bose node, almost a full day ago. Perhaps they were in the middle of a dark gas cloud that made the rest of the universe invisible; but tests using the sensors of the
No Regrets
showed that outside the ship lay nothing but the hardest of hard vacuums.

Teri could feel the stirrings within her brain of old legends and myths. All the species of the Orion Arm had discovered spaceflight long after the beginnings of their recorded history. When everything was written down or stored in computer data banks there should be no room for uncertainty. The mechanism for the creation of myths was that of oral memory and imperfect traditions. And yet the stories lived on. Ships had been lost, that was an undeniable fact. A group of unfortunate travelers might enter the Croquemort Timewell and be trapped there until time itself came to an end. Or perhaps you and your party would enter a hiatus, a singularity of spacetime from which you would emerge within half a minute—or this year, next year, sometime, never.

A rational mind rejected all such fancies. If the Croquemort Timewell existed and a ship vanished into it, how would anyone ever learn that fact? It was all imagining, the fancy of uneasy minds. And yet, beyond the
No Regrets
stood nothing.

For the first few hours, Teri, Torran Veck and Julian Graves had stayed together, comforting each other with useless reassurances that this would soon be over and they would pop out into open space. Teri had endured false optimism for as long as she could, then crept away to be alone. She retreated to the observation chamber and stared—stared so hard looking for something, anything, that her eyeballs felt ready to pop out of her head.

She was frightened, and ashamed of being frightened. So why was it reassuring when suddenly the door to the observation chamber slid open and Torran Veck came lumbering in?

"Oops. Sorry. I didn't know someone was already in here."

"Torran, if you are going to lie, you have to learn to be better at it."

He grinned at her, quite unabashed. "All right. I knew you were here. I've been trying something, and I got a result. But I don't understand it. You're smarter than me, so I thought I'd ask you to help me out."

"That's a lie just as big as your last one." Teri felt oddly comforted. "Where's Julian Graves?"

"I don't know. But I don't want him in on this, in case it's nothing. It's bad enough to make a fool of yourself in front of one person."

Torran had twice Teri's body mass, and when he sat down next to her, he as usual seemed to overflow the seat. "You came out here to find out if you could see anything," he said. "In a way, I did the same thing, except that I went into the control room in case any of our sensors reported finding anything."

He shook his head at her excited look. "Sorry. Not a peep from any recording instrument that we have. They all insist that the ship is nowhere in the universe. But then I did something stupid and irrational."

"You mean more stupid than entering a Bose node when you don't know where or if you'll come out?"

"About that stupid. I sent a call for help."

"You did
what
?"

"I know. It was totally dumb, but I felt desperate enough for anything. I generated a message saying who we were, that we were lost, and if anyone heard this, please would they come and help. I sent it. I didn't expect any reply, but I sent it anyway."

"And you had a reply?"

"No." Torran shrugged. "Hey, let's be reasonable. What are the chances of anyone picking up a call like that? Zero. But something peculiar did happen. A few microseconds after my message was sent out, the ship's radio receivers recorded a signal. I call it a signal, but it would be more accurate to say it was a burst of static. I couldn't make any sense of it, nor could the ship's computer. But it was something, where before we'd had absolutely nothing.

"I sat there for a while, then I said to myself, Teri's brighter than you. Why don't you go and bounce it off her? And here I am."

"Did you apply Lund's First Rule of Oddities?"

Arabella Lund had been full of "rules," and one of her most basic was this: Anything in the universe can happen once, or at least it can seem to happen. If you want to obtain information, make it happen again. 

Torran nodded. "I did the same thing, three times over. I found identical results: send a signal, and microseconds afterwards we get a funny squiggle of radio sound on our receivers."

"How did you send your message? I mean, was it in some particular direction?"

"No, I used omni-directional. Hell, if there was help to be had anywhere I wanted to hear from them. What is it, Teri? You've got an idea, haven't you?"

"If you can call it that. It may be half-baked, but I want to try something. Let's head back to the control room."

"Do we need Julian Graves?"

Teri gave him a drop-dead-right-now glare. "You didn't want to seem like an idiot in front of Julian Graves, but you don't mind me doing it?"

"Sorry. What are you planning?"

"Wait and see. You didn't tell me in advance." Teri led the way to the control room. Once there, she ignored the radio wavelength equipment and went across the optical section. "Which one of these lasers provides the best collimated beam?"

"The blue-green. It diverges only one percent in fifty kilometers."

"I hope that will be tight enough. How many microseconds after you started to send your call for help did the receivers begin to record radio noise, and how long after you stopped sending did the noise you received end?"

"I'll have to check. It was small enough that only the instruments could pick it up—so far as I was concerned, they seemed simultaneous." Torran moved across to the receiver displays. "Ninety-four microseconds, plus a fraction, for the delay at the beginning. And the signal went on for a hundred and sixty microseconds after my call ended."

"That's close enough." Teri was at the laser station. "I'm going to send a one-second pulse from the blue-green laser. Watch the display. See anything?"

"Yes. A faint green dot showed on the screen—and it lasted about a second."

"We'll find when we measure it that it lasted
exactly
one second. Now I'm going to work my way around the full sphere, using one-second pulses every five degrees of arc. We'll measure the exact time of return, and then we will know where we are—or at least, we'll know the distance to the boundary."

"
What
boundary?"

"Don't you get it, Torran? We're not in limbo, or in the Croquemort Timewell, or a spacetime hiatus. The ship is sitting
inside
some other object, with an interior surface that screens out external radiation and reflects interior radiation. The reason that you got what looked like random returns from your signal is because it went out in all directions, and the distance is not constant to all parts of the boundary wall. So the return was scrambled, with bits of your message jumbled together. It took ninety-four microseconds round-trip time to the nearest point on the boundary, and a hundred and sixty microseconds to the farthest point.

"Now, I'm going to assume that the velocity of propagating radiation is the same here as in open space—that seems pretty reasonable. So at three hundred thousand kilometers a second, we are fourteen kilometers away from the nearest point of the boundary, and twenty-four kilometers from the farthest point. I also find a zero Doppler shift in frequency between the outgoing laser pulses and their returns, so our ship is at rest relative to the boundary. The advantage of using laser pulses in precise directions is that we—or rather, the ship's computer—can calculate and reconstruct the shape of the space we are inside, and also our ship's distance from any point of the boundary. If we find places where the structure of the wall seems different, those are the logical spots where we should look for a way out."

"Teri, you're a marvel. Can we start that work at once?"

"I'd like to. But I think we ought to tell Julian Graves what we have learned. Do you know where he is?"

"Last time I saw him he was in his own cabin. Contemplating his navel, from the look of him. But you are right, he does need to be told. Come on."

Julian Graves was in his own cabin. He was not actually contemplating his navel, but he was engaged in a pursuit that seemed just as unproductive. He sat in a chair, lightly strapped in position so that he would not move around in the ship's free-fall environment. He was staring intently at a fixed point in space. Torran and Teri finally realized that a tiny green marble hung there, about a meter in front of Graves's face.

Teri said, "Councilor, we have important news. We are not in limbo, or in some form of spacetime hiatus."

Graves nodded. "I know. In a few minutes I was proposing to come and tell the two of you the same thing."

Torran said, "But how could you possibly know that? You have been sitting in your cabin, and there are no instruments here."

"Oh, but there are. The human eye and the human brain are both instruments, potentially of a high order. It is true that at no point have I looked beyond the ship itself, but I did not need to. I noticed an oddity in the control cabin some time ago. The ship's drive appeared to be off, since we felt no accelerations. However, the drive monitors indicated that the drive was—and is—turned on, although at an extremely low level. Since our position sensors insist that we are at rest in inertial space, the only explanation is that the ship itself resides in a field of force, albeit a very weak one—far too weak to be apprehensible to human senses. If that is the case, then although the drive holds the ship itself in a fixed position, objects
within
the ship that are free to move should do so. They experience a small body force."

Graves leaned back in his chair and placed his fingertips together. "You know, sitting here it occurs to me that maybe the worst mistake we have made on this whole expedition has been to assume that processes in the Sag Arm resemble in any way the familiar ones of our own Orion Arm. There are Builder artifacts here, and none is in any way like those with which we have experience. To paraphrase an old philosophical thought, the Sag Arm is not only more strange than we imagine; it is more strange than we
can
imagine."

Torran's glance at Teri sent a clear message:
He's gone gaga. The councilor is off his head
. He said to Graves, "The human eye and brain may be instruments, but there is nothing here for them to look at and work on."

"Oh, but there is." Graves pointed to the green pill-sized ball hanging before him. "We are not in free-fall, you see, even though our bodies feel as though they are. We are not even in the microgravity environment provided by the gravity forces of the ship itself. Steven calculated and compensated for those. An external gravitational force is acting on everything in this ship. A minute one, to be sure, which is why we can't feel it. But if you observe the green sphere, you will find that it is being accelerated very slowly away from me and toward the rear bulkhead. There is a slight asymmetry, a preferred direction to this environment. I can estimate its magnitude by observation of the little marble. However, I have no explanation as to its origin."

Teri said, "Councilor,
we
have an explanation." Her glance at Torran said,
Equal credit for this, all right?
"Here is what we have learned. . . . "

The
No Regrets
stood at a fixed location, five kilometers off center in a spherical region of radius nineteen kilometers. The space was bounded by a wall of unknown composition, impervious to external radiation and reflecting anything directed to it from inside.

"But we shouldn't try to take the ship to either the nearest part of the boundary, or the farthest." Teri was leaning over Torran Veck's shoulder as he sat at the controls of the
No Regrets.
"Our best hope is one of the poles."

It was their shorthand description for the only two points of asymmetry they had discovered in the spherical space. The "poles" were places where the return laser signal was much weaker than elsewhere, and they held out hope for an easier passage to external space.

"I have a vector to the nearer one," Teri went on. "The distance is 12.3 kilometers."

"Marked, and entered into the navigation system." Torran was far more cheerful when he could do something that involved physical activity. "We can be on our way any time. All right to go ahead?"

"Proceed." Julian Graves sat with his eyes closed and seemed half asleep. "I am sure that it is not necessary to remind you to proceed with extreme caution. We cannot afford to progress from a safe situation to a hazardous one."

It seemed to Teri that Julian Graves was playing a little fast and loose with words.
This
was a safe place, where you had no idea how you had arrived and or where you were, and a surprise could pop up to destroy the present calm at any moment?

Teri couldn't speak for the others, but she wanted
out
—out to a place where you could see stars and planets again, even if the one seemed ready to go supernova, and the other might be a world where nothing had ever lived or ever could.

"We're closing in," Torran said. Even crawling along, twelve kilometers for any form of spacegoing vessel was no distance at all. "We are six hundred meters away from the boundary. The drive is working harder to keep us in place, which means that a stronger attractive force is drawing us toward the wall. Nothing to worry about—we could stand a pull a thousand times as hard and still have spare drive capacity to keep us balanced. But there's no way of knowing how things will change as we approach closer to the boundary. Our instruments have monitored our progress so far, and the ship's computer did a fit and came up with an inverse cubic relationship with distance. That can't go on—it implies an infinite force at the boundary—but what we have isn't enough to worry about. Even so, I'm not sure we ought to approach any closer."