The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  “But the fucking ship’s intact!” Entzwame said. “Sir.”

  “Lieutenant Helter did this?”

  “Yes!”

  “By himself?”

  “We’ve got the heavy-load waldo rails, sir,” he pointed out, “from when this was a colony support cruiser. The computer helped. Computer’s fine, sir, it’s the universe that’s⁠—⁠”

  “Belay that. Get a grip,” I told the man who was propping me up. “How does Helter explain this?”

  “We can’t get at him, sir. He’s out there now, fitting out to leave us.”

  “Fucking officers!” shrieked the parrot.

  A sudden moment of great clarity. That’s why I was needed, why Larkspur must be good enough to play the hero. It wasn’t that the crew was technically incapable—it was the chiefs who ran the ship, usually—but they had limited operational codes, passwords, computer privileges. Helter had locked them out of the cruiser’s central shaft with an override code. An officer’s code. But not, one suspected, a code of honor.

  He floated in midair, an ill angel in blue-white, his irises bleached by the colored lighting, his prematurely silver hair adding to the albino effect. “I didn’t have to let you in, brother. I’ve reset all the codes. But I’m taking the chance I can trust you.” Helter licked his lips nervously as he settled to the deck.

  I tried to reorient. There was no gravity to speak of, not even its centrifugal counterfeit, here in the nonrotating core of the ship. But as compensation for my loss of balance I’d acquired clothing, an engineer’s overalls—with something heavy and comforting in one pocket, something pressed on me with a whispered word in the last moment before I’d stepped into the rotation-lock. And a holster, and a pistol. But—where was I again?

  “I thought one or two officers might make it out of the tanks sane,” Helter went on. “The book says one out of ten, after four months. Maybe your Kanalist training gave you an edge, or maybe your poetry. Oh yes, I know all about you. We’re fraternity brothers.”

  It was the aft hold of the ship’s shuttle, almost unrecognizable because of the emergency lighting and the crammed-in bulks of the praeterspace generator and field shaper, a copulation of infernal engines.

  The shuttle’s lights shifted to red—which meant something, something vital, but what?—and Helter’s face looked demonic in them, his eyes suddenly darker. My heart thundered and stumbled.

  I groped for his first name, and as I did so my right hand flew of its own accord to the pistol. And I steadied the laser-green aim dot true on the center of his breastbone before he could blink. Not bad, if the gun wasn’t a hallucination.

  “I’d like to believe in your sanity, too…Nick,” I said, “but I need to know what you’ve done—and why you’re doing it.”

  “Let’s get one thing straight,” he said. “I outrank you at the best of times, and unlike you did not recently get my brains scrambled. It’s absolutely essential that you defer to my judgment. Everything is at stake.”

  “Including the crew. Looks like you’re ditching us.”

  He adopted what he might have thought was a soothing voice. “I’m doing the right thing, brother. I’m dealing with extraordinary circumstances, and may need your help later. But this is bigger than the ship, bigger than the Alignment. We’re talking about the fabric of the universe itself.”

  “Fate of the universe, yeah, I remember. You rigged the suspend-sleep tanks, didn’t you? Why?”

  He shook his head, but not in denial. “We’re beyond that now, brother. Haven’t you seen the sensor data on the bridge? Don’t you realize what it means?”

  “That you rigged that, too?” I suggested, in a parody of his humor-him-along voice. “To keep the ship from navigating while you went off to meet whoever you hope to meet?” A sudden inspiration, as I remembered the origin of this fantasy, Summerisle’s hokey warning. A cabal of saboteurs and hijackers within the navy. “A fellow agent of the Few—is that it?”

  He started violently, drifting off the deck. “You know of us? Then perhaps you know how we hijack ships—by entering praeterspace without a target star.”

  My hand shook, but the laser targeter continued to dance around the kill zone. “If you’ve done that, we could be anywhere in the universe now; our return coordinates may be no good from here; you may have marooned us⁠—⁠”

  “No, no, no,” he insisted, under apparent strain; he was waiting for something, something imminent—“that’s just what they tell you, when ships disappear. This is the reality. We left space-time at a right angle, Larkspur—we never went back in!”

  I would have laughed at him, but I didn’t want to lose my tiny friction-hold on the deck, and with it my aim. “You are crazy, Nick. You can’t take matter out of space-time, they’re two sides of the same coin, we couldn’t exist without a universe to⁠—⁠”

  “You’ve seen that universe, you moron!” he snapped. “The bubble in the holo tank! A bubble universe, outside normal space-time, created by our emergence!” He continued to glance nervously around the hold and began to wheedle again. “Don’t you want to help me, brother? No one knows what it’s like to burst a bubble from the inside, how much of a shock—two of us at the helm will double the chance of keeping control. And you’re a Kanalist, you can understand: discipline; the virtue of an elite; the necessity for…secrets?”

  “You created this universe,” I said slowly. “To park our ship in?”

  “Yes! And every universe I create, I learn a little bit more. But this time…this time I had a revelation!”

  I reminded myself not to look him in the eye, to keep my aim locked, as he raved on:

  “I’ve added it all to the ship’s log, all my observations and theories. But we can’t just wait to be salvaged, we must break out now! If I’m right, the Few must be warned, we have to protect the integrity of the universe against the bubbles, Larkspur, the bubble within a bubble⁠—⁠”

  Maniac, I was sure now, but too late, as he got what he’d been waiting for. As a soft beep sounded behind me, the emergency lights went into their green phase—a launch sequence!—and my green laser dot became invisible. The cradle holding the shuttle released with a jerk⁠—

  And my shot missed him easily. The ejection charge kicked in as I flailed for a handhold. Helter disappeared for a moment, then tackled me. My wrist exploded into more agony than I’d ever experienced and the pistol disappeared. He dodged my kick with grace, seized a stanchion with both hands, and piston-kicked me through the interior hatch. I fended off a control panel with my good hand and my forehead.

  He jackknifed in after me. He must have wanted to finish me off, but found it more imperative to grab a control seat. In the forward viewports, the smooth white hull of the Barbarossa was picked out by automatic spotlights. Then the shuttle flipped 180 degrees, swatting me against a bulkhead. I got a glimpse of something vast and sickeningly incomprehensible before us, then rebounded into the cabin just as the main engine fired.

  Only in dreams can one fall like this. I hit an acceleration seat, my back to its back but upside-down. The momentum of my legs flipped me up and over it in a forward somersault. With a twist, I absorbed the impact against the bulkhead with my feet, my buttocks. My balls tingled in relief at not being smashed.

  The only pain besides my wrist was where the heavy object in my pocket bit into me. My last gift from the crew, maybe just for luck, their best friend in a liberty port…I fished it out and played dead, sly as any savior-prince, holding it concealed in my hand, blade side open, thumb on the stud. Acceleration phase done, the shuttle hurtled on; the ship receded.

  While Helter unstrapped, I just floated in midair, eyes half closed, mouth half open. He took a pry-bar from the tool locker, raised it to strike, and drifted toward me purposefully. Homicidal maniac, I thought, and when he spun me around to get at my head I flicked the knife open and flicked his throat open and sprayed the green-lit cabin with jet-black blood⁠…

  Behind the compu
ter’s transparent access door, a brass-colored data disk I’d seen before—the Barbarossa’s log—spun and spun, giving the computer commands. To his twisted “observations and theories,” Helter must have added a launch sequence for the shuttle. And it was locked in. I hammered heroically at the panel, trying not to look through the forward port. Behind me the praeterspace generator began its warm-up, humming and clicking as it prepared to make its effort. And then a disembodied head appeared before me.

  It was Entzwame’s face, coldly afire. As if the Admiralty would have paid for full-hologram communications in an escape shuttle. But it was there; it screamed, and it cursed me.

  “I can’t get back!” I told him. “It’s too late, I’ve gone too far. I wake up soon, I’m sorry, I always wake up here.”

  “Too fucking late? How can it be too late and too far, you bastard, sir, when we’re outside time, and outside space? We’ll always be waiting here, no matter how many dreams you hide in, always fucking always, until you bring us back in. Always, always, al⁠—⁠” And then his white teeth and white eyes exploded into a trillion viewport stars, cross-sections of space-time sliced me through like an egg, the data disk popped free of the suddenly silent computer, and still I didn’t wake up. I wanted to wake up, I cried and pleaded to wake up. But it’s not clear I ever did.

  I am alone. There is only the void now. Not a trace remains of the survey cruiser Barbarossa, the lost Barbarossa. My ship.

  Chapter Eight

  A pattering sound. I must not have blacked out for long at all, two or three seconds. How could the trauma dream strike so fast, with such impact? More surreal than usual, too. Was I finally cracking all the way? The dreams were supposed to get less awful with time, but ever since I’d entered the Blue Swathe…I heard Ariel moan next to me.

  Black mulch covered most of the noseport, leaving us in semi-darkness. I remembered the muddy little clearing now, the way it had looked an instant before we nosed into it. With the engines shut off again, for good this time, there was no sound except that brief patter of branches we’d torn free—and then Ariel’s inexpert curses, piping from beneath the forearms bent over her head in crash position. I was the first to throw up, but Ariel needed no further encouragement.

  ◆◆◆

  Ariel had left the stinking cabin, but I remained to take a last look at the emulator that had failed us. Stupidly, the system’s diagnostics checked out fine—except for two gaps in the automatic log. One ten-minute period was missing from the hour before the flight, and another ended the record. Just the sort of cutting in and out you’d expect if the cybercell was dying. Perhaps it was only bad luck that the failure had extended to the warning systems, but I had a different theory.

  As ancient as myself, the emulator still included a digital log buffer—even in my day something of a vestigial organ, but useful in cases like this as a partial backup log. Sure enough, at the receding end of the command train, almost pushed out of memory by the emulator’s subsequent translation calls, I discovered a discrete set of human commands. A special program. It included a function to conceal its own interference by blanking out the main log; hence the missing ten minutes just before we’d taken off.

  Judging by the program’s mnemonic tags, someone had commanded the emulator to send false power-loss messages after a certain distance flown, trusting Ariel and me to dutifully carry out our own murder by shutting down the engines.

  Presumably, a military skeleton coder—a sabotage model—had generated the code; a standard maintenance tool wouldn’t be specialized enough to bypass all the safety routines, not in ten minutes. Was the saboteur too young to have encountered one of these old buffers? Or had he thought that the incriminating program would be pushed out of memory by crashtime? Or⁠—

  I checked the third possibility, and heard myself curse when I’d confirmed it. The saboteur had also manually disconnected the canopy release mechanism. If we’d fired the ejector seats, they would have smashed us into the ceiling and exploded. Everything within the cabin—the canopy, the computer, all evidence of the crime—would have been incinerated.

  Artful.

  There was no time to think about who had done it—only to cover it up. I started by running the diagnostic commands a second and third time, thereby pushing the tail end of the sabotage program out of the buffer. I had no choice. A deliberate attempt to murder a sub-commissioner would have to be reported to the Column, and I couldn’t do that.

  Just before lifting the door of the cabin, I remembered to go back and take some things from the first-aid kit. The repairmen at the construction base would chalk up any equipment loss to the accident, though in fact Ariel and I had been unhurt. I tucked the items out of sight before descending to meet her.

  She had thought to take the Otis module with her, worse luck. She also bore evidence, on the seat of her pants, of having slipped and sat down in a puddle earlier, and she pointed out the tricky ground now. “Careful, sir,” she said. “Your poor uniform’s been through enough.”

  “And the flitter? The damage looks worse from out here,” I noted.

  “There’s a lot to salvage, though,” she said. “More than if I’d let it go.”

  “Well, you’d told me how important your heavy equipment is to Construction. Also…if you’ve never ejected into trees, believe me, it’s a last resort. I had to try the manuals first.”

  “Don’t apologize! You were⁠—⁠” She laughed lightly and shook her head. “But now, sir, we must decide whether to walk, or to wait for the satellites to notice our distress call.”

  “The radio didn’t survive the shock,” I said. “Let’s hike.”

  For some reason this prospect seemed to please her. “I have a bearing,” she said. “There’s a clear Earth-style magnetic north on Newcount, and my watch is set to it.”

  “You’re the leader, then.” My own wristcomp had been smashed to bits.

  “Did you find out what made the emulator fail?” she asked.

  “Its cybercell is completely dead.” At least, it soon would be, for I’d isolated it from the system—as if to inspect it—and it would starve within minutes. “No way of knowing what killed it now, but considering how it lost control in phases, I suspect it was cyberbacteria of some kind. If you don’t flush these old systems, sometimes⁠—⁠”

  “Yes, I know. I can’t tell you how sorry I am, sir. All our equipment has seen rough use. If only we’d had time to prepare for your visit—some advance notice.” This was a delicate subject, but she had plenty of spunk. “Frankly, sir, I still don’t see what’s changed since the last sub-commissioner gave the dig his blessing. Of course, it’s not for me to ask⁠…⁠”

  “It’s a reasonable question,” I said. Through an intervening stand of trees I saw a much larger meadow ahead of us. “I’m just a poor bureaucrat, and they don’t always give me reasons either. But it may have something to do with the possibility of the title changing hands.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if this Condé fellow does prove his claim to Newcount Two, any protected lands will have to be resurveyed.”

  “With all due respect, sir, the Column’s sent you on a wild-goose chase. Sir Max Condé is a VIP, but he’s also thoroughly crooked, and a bit mad. I know about his case, and it was thrown out of court a while back. He was furious about it. To tell you the truth, I think that he’s the reason for our current security mania. Not that Senator Mehta would ever admit to being afraid of the Knuckle-Cracker.”

  “ ‘The Knuckle-Cracker?’ ”

  She laughed, but said quickly, “I hope Sir Max isn’t a friend of yours, Commissioner. I shouldn’t call him that, but we’ve picked it up from the senator. There’s some story behind it. They spent a long time in each other’s company once, and apparently Condé has this disgusting habit⁠…⁠”

  “Well, don’t worry. He’s no friend of mine. And I’m glad for your sake if his claim is no good. But are you absolutely sure?”

&
nbsp; She began to lay out the case in detail, and I stopped listening as soon as it became clear that she knew what she was talking about. So Condé had lied to me, about his rights to Newcount Two and God knew what else. I would have to interrogate Bunny, Shih Ho fighter or no; but I’d already known that.

  Ariel had an informed grasp of Court of Claims procedures, and she was still showing it off. I didn’t step on her enthusiasm. We had entered the larger meadow. Ariel tended to get ahead of me and then suddenly slow down, perhaps self-conscious about the rear view, her soaked slacks plastered to her skin. If she was right about the distance, the construction camp would be just beyond that last barrier of trees, a half-hour’s hike. The exercise felt good despite the heat; a touch of whiplash was fading from the muscles of my neck.

  The grass was greener here, with small flowers, coral and yellow and powder blue. Our passage triggered a flight of butterflies, and one of them, after circling me aimlessly for a few minutes, came to rest on the back of my outstretched hand. He was mainly orange, with black edges and markings, and without flexing the skin beneath him at all, I turned him at various angles into the breeze of our motion, watching his body go flat, the wings trimmed this way and that.

  Give them credit: the life bombers stock a world with some sense of style. On Wayback, where I was born, where the sky burns like a hot iron and the grass is like steel wool and the scavenger birds never stop scanning, there are only well-camouflaged field moths. I’d seen my first butterfly on Nexus, standing in line to register at the university. One of these delicate painted fantasies had alit on a flower in the courtyard. And I’d thought, This is the place. Where even the moths are decadent and beautiful⁠…

  I must have slowed to a halt. I stood watching the butterfly, and Ariel stood watching me. “Look,” I said, and held him closer to her face. I froze and after a moment said, “Fly.” Without moving a muscle I concentrated on the feel of the insect against the back of my hand, blanked out everything else except that specific tactile sensation. Something physical but extremely subtle happens when you do that, a change in skin conductivity, perhaps. It’s the basis of a number of “psychic” magic tricks, and—my usual luck in small matters—it was enough to make the butterfly take off on cue.