Strider's Galaxy (10 page)

2

Elliptical

The nightmare dragged on: it was difficult to tell how long it was lasting, since every clock on the command deck—including all their wristwatches, Pinocchio's internal time sensor and the chronometric software in Nelson's thighputer—had stopped. Strider hadn't paid full attention to Pinocchio's comment that "We seem to have fallen entirely out of the Universe" because it had appeared to make no sense at the time. Now it was beginning to feel like the only possible answer.

But of course she couldn't tell her personnel that. As far as they were concerned, this was to be treated as a temporary interruption to the usual service. She recorded a loop-chip, so that every now and then her seemingly unperturbed voice boomed out through the hull, remarking that there had been, you know, this little slip-up, but no one was to
panic
or anything.

Then Strider began to feel physical sensations.

A glance at Leander and Nelson was enough to tell her that they were feeling the same.

This
was something that couldn't be hidden from the personnel.

At first it was the feeling of being
stretched
, somehow, from head to foot. She flipped herself around, but it didn't make any difference. The tugging—irritating rather than painful—still seemed to run along the length of her body.

She wondered if she might throw up. The blood was rushing to her head and her feet. The general effect was vertiginous, and vastly disorienting.

"Do you all feel this?" she said hoarsely, knowing the question was unnecessary.

"Feel what?" said Pinocchio, who was still trying to figure out a safe way to hook himself into at least enough of the Main Computer's subroutines to restore lighting and atmospheric replenishment.

Strider explained as quickly as she could. The nausea made it difficult for her to speak. It would be disastrous if any of the three humans on the deck actually
did
vomit. Vomiting in free fall was one of the most antisocial acts of all. Strider did her best not to think of what was happening back in the hull. Her looped voice boomed out again.
Some reassurance
that
must be giving right now,
she thought sourly.

Worse followed.

Initially Strider thought that someone had pinched her thigh, but immediately she realized this was ridiculous. Then there came another pinch, this time on her cheek—not a hard one, but disconcerting.

"What in hell is
this
?" she yelled.

Again Pinocchio looked baffled. It was clear that, whatever was causing these effects, they were psychological rather than physical.

The odd little intimate pinching came more and more frequently.

"I don't like this at all," said Leander. She shoved herself away from her screen and drifted across the deck, swatting the air around her, as if trying to fight off a sex-pest. As a result she performed a complicated three-dimensional dance.

"Stop it!" said Strider. "You're just making things worse for yourself."

"Couldn't get much bloody worse," muttered Nelson.

"Done it," said Pinocchio. The entirety of his upper chest was open to view. A mass of wiring ran from him to the interface he had uncovered in the wall. Strider boggled. She had never realized the full complexity of the hardware that resided inside her friend and lover.

"Done what?"

"I have reinstituted air replenishment. We had seven point three seven days before the atmosphere would have degraded to such an extent that it would have been unable to sustain human breathing." The bot was spreadeagling himself against the bulkhead, as if to get closer to the interface. Strider was reminded of biological specimens back in her childhood: a frog pinned out on a board. "I will now try to restore lighting throughout the craft. This is a very difficult task for a computer as small as my own. I will therefore shut down my other functions."

He turned and gave Strider a smile, and then his face went into immobility and the lights in his eyes faded. It looked exactly as if he had just died.

Several seconds passed, and then the overhead lighting on the deck flickered uneasily into life.

Strider shook her head angrily, as if to shake away tears. Pinocchio couldn't have killed himself: he knew what his primary imperative was on this mission. But it felt to her as if he had. If they ever escaped this craziness, she would find out if her instincts were right or wrong.

"Are you getting
anything
out of the instrumentation now?" she said to Nelson.

"Not a thing," said the big man. He winced as an invisible pair of fingers pinched him yet again. "We should be getting
something
, thanks to our friend here." He nodded towards the bot. "He's imported enough of the Main Computer's systems that he should be able at least to perform some kind of triangulation exercise to try to estimate where the shit we are, but"—he gestured towards the view-window overhead—"there's nothing to triangulate against, is there?"

"Are we moving?" said Strider, instinctively slapping at her shoulder as she felt another pseudo-pinch.

"Who could tell?" said Leander, who had at last got herself under control. She carefully sprang from the far wall back towards her seat, swooping adroitly downwards and pinning her feet under the restrainers there.

The lights dimmed for a few moments to a ghastly, sickly yellow, and then brightened again.

"Remind me to give that goddam valet a drink when this is over," said Nelson. "If it ever
does
get over."

"What's happening?" said Strider, maneuvering herself clumsily towards him and peering at his screen. Just for a second the display had lit up.

"He was right," said Nelson somberly. "We've fallen out of the Universe. What we've gone and done is found ourselves a wormhole." He leaned back in his chair, reaching his arms behind him in a simulation of boredom. "The big question is whether or not we can ever drop back
into
the Universe again."

#

Strauss-Giolitto slapped O'Sondheim across the face, once, twice and then a third time. She almost missed the third time because the previous impacts were causing her to drift away from him.

"Get yourself together, you asshole!" she screamed at him. "You're supposed to be the First fucking Officer on this fucking ship!"

He looked at her, and continued weeping.

"Leave him alone," said Lan Yi quietly. "He can't help it."

"He goddam
can
!" said Strauss-Giolitto furiously. Something pinched her ankle, and in response she swiped out again at O'Sondheim. This time she was a meter out of reach. Her body did a complicated pirouette, and she was lucky not to hurt herself as she slammed head-first against the forcefield futon. The vague glow of the forcefield had been their only source of illumination for what seemed like half a lifetime.

Outside, the daylight-simulator began to give a grey-yellow light, then brightened fitfully.

"All of us react differently to stress," said Lan Yi.

Strauss-Giolitto looked at him. She wouldn't mind hitting him as well.

"This turd is supposed to be our second-in-command," she said. "If anything happened to Strider, he's the one our lives would rely on. And
look
at him!"

Lan Yi chose not to.

O'Sondheim had at least stopped his loudly hysterical sobbing. The darkness and the free fall had seemed at first not to affect him much, but then the sensations of the bodily interference had started, and the First Officer had cracked completely. Lan Yi had tried to talk him back to sanity, but it hadn't worked. Strauss-Giolitto's more brutal methods hadn't been much use either—although they'd obviously done
her
a lot of good. O'Sondheim's face was a mass of bruises, yet he was still quietly weeping.

The lighting was improving steadily now.

"What do you think went wrong?" said Strauss-Giolitto for the thousandth time.

Lan Yi looked at her blandly. "I have been pondering that particular problem ever since the lights went out." He smiled bleakly. His face looked very old all of a sudden. "My guess is that we have fallen into a wormhole. It is the only reason that I can think of for the drive to have died."

She looked at him disbelievingly.

"I thought wormholes were supposed to be rare," she said.

"So did I," replied Lan Yi. "So did everyone. It seems we might have been wrong." He shook his head sadly. "Now it seems vanishingly unlikely that we shall ever see Tau Ceti
II
—which is a great pity, because it was an experience to which I was very much looking forward."

"You can think of that at a time like now?"

"I can think of very little else," said the old man, "except that perhaps some of our colleagues were injured when the g disappeared. Now that we have light again, I believe you and I might go to find out."

He pushed himself towards the door, and she followed.

"Just stay here, you understand, you creep," said Strauss-Giolitto to O'Sondheim.

He nodded wordlessly, and the tears continued to flow.

#

Humanity had tried to devise some means of faster-than-light travel for centuries, but without success. Very little technological work had been done on the problem, for obvious reasons, but theoretical physicists had nagged away at it interminably—and uselessly.

In theory there were a number of ways, all of which seemed futile. You could find a spinning black hole, then adopt just the precisely correct trajectory as you fell into it, so that you would emerge somewhere millions of parsecs away in the Universe—or perhaps even in an entirely different universe. Black holes had been identified, and the configuration of the x-ray spectrum given off by the raw matter falling into some of them confirmed that they were indeed spinning. The nearest useful candidate was a healthy three hundred parsecs from the Solar System, which meant that just getting there, using current technology, would take the best part of two millennia and require as much fuel as a small moon. On arrival, you would probably have to spend decades—if not centuries—studying the black hole and preferably correlating your data with a secondary team investigating another spinner. Comparing notes would be a lengthy business: the next nearest spinner was unfortunately in almost exactly the opposite direction from the Solar System, so that a one-way message would take a little over two thousand five hundred years.

Then, when finally you were ready to boldly go, you could dip into the black hole and discover your constituent subatomic particles evenly distributed throughout one if not several universes and quite possibly in different eras of each universe's lifespan.

As this was not an appealing option, humanity instead turned its attention to wormholes, theoretical physical constructs which might link two different parts of the Universe closely together, subverting the normal fabric of spacetime. All the mathematics pointed to the fact that wormholes ought to exist, but no one had ever been able even to come close to suggesting how you could find one—or, much better, build one. In fact, the latter task was probably impossible: wormholes, if they did indeed exist as the theory said they should, were quantum structures based on the fact that the physics of reality is reliant not on certainty but on probability—or in their case improbability—so in order to build one you would first have to construct improbabilistic tools. Since no one had the first idea what an improbabilistic tool looked like—although jokes about the term had become thoroughly stale with age—this option, too, seemed unappealing.

A third option had seemed for a while to be encoded tachyons. Tachyons are particles that travel faster than light: indeed, they require to be energized in some unimaginable way if they are to be slowed down to light-velocity. In their natural state, tachyons travel at infinite velocity, and are thus everywhere in the Universe at once. If a craftful of human beings could somehow be encoded into tachyonic form and then reconstituted as normal matter somewhere else, its translation from one side of the Universe to the other could take no time at all—even better, since theory predicted that tachyons also travelled backwards in time, it could arrive at its destination centuries before its departure. This raised the intriguing possibility of being able to send a tachyonic message home to say: "Don't bother coming. We're here already."

Perhaps luckily, no one had ever caught a tachyon, so this mode of travel was abandoned even as a possibility—especially after the theoretical physicist Shutzi Katanara proved beyond any possible doubt that tachyons could not exist. The equations Katanara produced were so beautiful that they sang: there could be no doubt about his conclusions.

Attention turned back to wormholes. If only, if only, if only . . .

What human scientists hadn't reckoned on was that wormholes were everywhere. The trick of interstellar navigation wasn't
finding
them. It was avoiding them.

That was what Lan Yi had just realized, while he'd been curled up in the darkness listening to Strauss-Giolitto brutalizing O'Sondheim.

He found the idea exquisite.

And exquisitely frightening.

Yet another invisible somebody pinched him softly, and he hardly noticed.

#

Just at the door, Lan Yi paused. "I'll be with you in a moment," he said to Strauss-Giolitto. "Wait here."

He shoved himself towards a low cupboard behind his futon and rummaged inside it for a moment. "Here," he said, tossing something gently towards her.

It was a belt-rope. She clipped one end on to her belt and idly swung a circle with the other, which was weighted by its small grav-grapple. The device was for use in emergencies on-planet. Her unthinking action began to make her spin very gradually in the opposite direction. She clutched the doorpost.

"What about you?" she said.

"I insisted on having a spare," he said, producing it. "I insisted on having spares of everything, except my body. I am a lot older than you are, Maria Strauss-Giolitto, and am more likely to find myself in difficulties. It is probably because I am aware of this that I am a lot older than you are." He smiled.