by Greg Bear
“Peloros was a monster,” Kawashita said, looking at the robot conveyors on the other side of the corridor’s glass partition.
“True, but another Peloros was a navigator of great skill. I like the mix. My father suggested it before the ship was built. You are now an official guest, and protocol demands I give you the best. But the best is a bit too rich even for my blood, and you probably won’t be used to it, so you have a choice.”
“I was just getting used to your cabin in the lander.”
“That’s Spartan fare, Yoshio. Only my ascetic friends live in such deprived surroundings. But maybe something can be arranged.”
“I begin to feel homesick,” Kawashita said. “Actually, I’ve been homesick for some time now. It is probably crazy, but I had peace in the dome, after the Perfidisians went away. Much time to think. Now I have a flood of thinking to do, and too little time to do it in. Can I have just a place to rest, recuperate? And a tapas pad. And food I am used to.”
Nestor nodded at each request. “Easily arranged. I was kidding—not all of us are sybaritic. A lot of useful work gets done on board. I don’t put up with people who waste time.”
“What will I do as guest? How will I pay my way?”
They came to the corridor’s end, a wider hall lined on each side and on the ceiling with hatches leading to cabins. Nestor didn’t answer for a moment, and there was an awkward silence.
“You can keep us entertained, I suppose, telling about old history. Stories of life in the dome. But most of all, for my pleasure, you can survive and try to be content. One part of me says that a man who has roots as far in the past as you do won’t be able to stand our cultures. He’ll go crazy. There are ways of repairing him, but he won’t be the same. But you aren’t going crazy. You’re adapting, and rather well. That fascinates me. You improve my view of humanity, and that’s a valuable gift. You’re also a planetholder, which makes you a potential business partner. No matter how barren a planet might be on first look, someone, somewhere, will think of a use. You control how your planet will be used, and if you control it wisely, we all benefit.”
“Which comes first,” Kawashita asked, “human interest or mercenary?”
“Personally, human interest. As a free-lance adviser, the mercenary aspects can’t be ignored. Socially, there’s prestige in having you as my guest. Take your pick of any aspect—there are a lot more. I haven’t bothered to sort them out.” She cocked her head to one side and lifted the corners of her lips with the barest indication of a smile. “Our cultures may be more complex, but the people probably aren’t. A lot of what you knew on Earth and in the dome still applies. I’m interested to see how you apply it.” She took a small card from her pocket and handed it to him. “Your room is number forty-five on the right side of the hall. Going in and out, pay attention to the access light above the hatch. You can tell whether someone is leaving the room above you, and avoid bumping into him, her, or…it. No it’s this voyage.”
He held up the card. “This is a key.”
“Hold it in whichever hand you’re most inclined to use, leave it there for thirty seconds, then slip it into the notch under the access light. That keys you into the room. Only you can open the hatch by touching the entrance panel—except in an emergency, of course. If you wish, you can key it to voice activation. The machines will explain themselves. Forty-five is an adjustable cabin. It’ll do anything you tell it to, short of expanding. Make it as spare as you wish. When you’ve gotten used to it, I’d like you to join me on the bridge for dinner.”
“When do we leave?”
“We already have. A few hours after dinner, we’ll enter higher spaces.”
Kawashita nodded and watched her walk down the long corridor back to the vehicle bay. Then he entered his room. When he opened the door, he saw that the closet was putting away his clothes for him.
Fifteen
The old Aighor ship was silent and cold. Water dripped softly in the sea-tanks that circumnavigated the midriff, and a small motor in the engine sentry systems whined briefly, but the usual sounds of ship life were absent. The old weapons storage chambers were littered with equipment, and scaffoldings had been set up along the sixty-meter inboard bulkhead, but there was no one to put them to use.
Two kilometers outside the ship, the Waunters inspected their last two weeks’ work. The lander swung in a slow, lazy arc around the green hulk. Its occupants watched the screens in a kind of stupor.
“We should go back inside. It’s all done,” Oomalo said.
“Why even bother to do maintenance?” Alae asked. “What will we do when we get back? Nobody’s commissioned us. We’re not listeners unless we have a commission.”
“We don’t need one. Nothing’s wrong with the ship. Systems will last another two hundred years before they incur any expense.”
“Two hundred years,” Alae said. “I don’t think I want to live that long.”
“Wait until we get back to routine. We can do basic research. We’re free-lance, remember. We can peddle information without a commission.”
Alae nodded absently. “I’d like to shift the quarters around. Open up new rooms and move into them. Have fresh surroundings. The old rooms make my guts ache.”
Oomalo agreed to that. “If nothing else,” he said, “you can help me explore and record the ship. There’s an awful lot left to do.”
“Nothing useful,” she said. “Nothing we can sell.”
“Probably not. The Crocerians wouldn’t have sold it to us if they thought anything unusual was in it. But who knows?”
“Every ten years, for the next two hundred years, we’ll go out and inspect the ship all around, plant new monitors on the hull, live our lives, and nothing will happen. Does that sound like much of a life to you?”
“We could always go back, sell the ship now. I’m sure we could get a good price for it. It’s a good ship.”
“Big. Like a world. I’ve lived in it too long to be happy where other people are. The quiet gets in my blood, settles the waves. I’ll be okay. Let’s go back and start shifting things around.”
“That’s better,” Oomalo said. “Back to routine. We’ll start listening on our own tomorrow.”
“Back to routine,” Alae said slowly. “Peace.”
Sixteen
“I have two thousand people on the Peloros,” Nestor said, laying out the hard-copy plans on a table for Kawashita to see. “Five hundred crew and researchers—only about ten active crew, but the roles mix sometimes—and fifteen hundred friends, hangers-on, artists, entertainers. Mostly I keep them around to gauge their reactions when we find something new.”
“How often is that?”
“Two or three times a voyage. We’ve scouted a thousand systems in this ship and explored about a hundred. We’ve found fifteen habitable worlds, five without indigenous life forms. The other ten we turned over to the care of the Galactic Social Engineers. They make sure nobody bothers the natives until they’re ready to join the fun on their own. We put survey teams on the other five, mapped and charted and sampled them, and staked claims. Some of the information we sold to a few consolidations, some to the Centrum. We even sold information to Hafkan Bestmerit for a genealogical survey.”
“How was that?”
“A million years ago the Aighors developed interstellar travel—that is, an ancestral species did. In a short time they got into a war with the Minkies and destroyed about fifty civilized worlds. God knows why they went to war. Peaceful coexistence is so much cheaper, and there’s room enough for everybody but the most die-hard propagationist. Even then, and the Galaxy was more crowded at the time. At any rate, they reduced each other to prespace technology. That was the first-stage Aighor civilization.
“The second stage rediscovered interstellar travel and made an experiment. They took several dozen intelligent species, still locked on their ho
me worlds, and transplanted them by force to other planets. Nobody appreciated that, and when the Aighor watchdogs over the experimental planets became lax, some of the transplants developed space technologies and attacked them.
“That was the end of the second stage. Because of that, the lineage of a lot of species has been called into question. We found three far-flung vestiges, relatives of groups still active in Hafkan Bestmerit. One had survived with only prespace technology. The other two had sunk even lower, down to minimal existences, completely overcome by the natural planetary ecologies. Some species are still pressing a kind of lawsuit against the Aighors, and in the interest of unity within Hafkan Bestmerit, the Aighors are complying with the judgments.”
“Hafkan Bestmerit is the only consolidation with no human members?”
“If it can strictly be called a consolidation. It’s a rather exclusive group. Aighors, Minkies, Crocerians, and—some think—Perfidisians. But there’s no evidence Perfidisians associate with anyone. We guess there are about twenty distinct species within Hafkan Bestmerit, some of whom we know little about.”
“These Aighors, are they totally irrational?” Kawashita said.
“Not at all. They’re among the most inventive and intelligent species we’ve met. They’re aggressive, but then they developed from a background where extreme aggression was the only way to survive. Still, we’re lucky they didn’t find us before we were ready to compete.”
“But they destroyed their civilization several times.”
“That’s not unheard of,” Anna said. “We’ve found the remains of four thousand spacefaring civilizations, of which maybe a hundred are going concerns today. That appears to be the norm, judging from transmissions received from other galaxies.”
“You have not traveled between galaxies?”
“Only to the Magellans. A few exploratory ships are planned. But higher space warps depend to a certain extent on large local bodies of mass for guidance. The distances between the galaxies are forbidding because they’re practically empty. On the other hand, we’ve yet to investigate the galactic core because the stars are too densely packed. I’ve heard the Aighors have a way of navigating hyperdense and hypodense geodesics—”
“Excuse me,” Kawashita said. “I can’t keep pace looking up definitions on the tapas.”
“Don’t worry. You’re doing fine. I understand a lot less than I know, myself. Poetic imagery is the only way some of these ideas can be grasped, unless you’re hooked up to a computer with specially augmented circuitry.”
“Back to the Aighors. Have you had a war with them yet?”
“Some skirmishes but no official wars. We may not be especially adept, but we do develop fast, and our technology is the equal of theirs, point for point—at least in transportable weapons and shields. They may have something—but no, that’s top secret. I’m not supposed to know about it.”
Kawashita grinned. “Now I am curious.”
Anna suddenly resembled a little girl about to divulge a secret. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “But we found parts of some of the ships that went into the Ring Stars. Not my group—humans, though. Something very odd had happened to the scraps. I’m not sure what it was, but one older physicist had a heart attack when he saw them.”
Kawashita shook his head slowly; whether in disbelief or wonder, Anna couldn’t tell. “Do you believe in gods?” he asked.
“I don’t disbelieve in anything. I’ve seen too much to be a complete agnostic, so I suppose I do believe in something, yes.”
“When I was a young boy, my mother let me attend a Christian Sunday school service in Hiroshima. It was taught by an old Jesuit from Spain, and he said that someday, when men looked far enough into space with their telescopes, they would see the face of God glowering at them. Have you seen anything like that?”
Anna smiled. “I’m sorry to be rude, but you’re still asking quaint questions. Not bad ones—just quaint. We have legends. Lost ships, planets that disappear when they’re landed, paradises—but they’re fairy tales for the most part.”
“For a Japanese from my time, the universe would be filled with kami,” he said. “Aighors would be kami, and so would Perfidisians. Kami are not the same as the Christian God, but they are intelligent beings, special ancestors, spirits sometimes, not omnipotent, however. And every star is a goddess, every world a pearl. Does that give you awe?”
Anna paused. “Sometimes I think I’m too dense to be awed,” she said, “or too busy having fun. But somewhere, yes, I suppose I’m a little scared of it all.”
“I’ve been lucky, coming to see it gradually,” Kawashita said. “The person who was a pilot, back in the twentieth century—he would be mad by now. Me, I am just made nervous most of the time.”
“Welcome to the world-anxiety of the modern human,” Anna said, laughing. “Some night, come to my observation bubble and look at the magnified and annotated stars with me. Be prepared to shiver a little. We haven’t scratched the surface yet. Maybe God’s face will glower down on us some day. Maybe at the Galaxy’s core.”
“No, there are six wings at the Galaxy’s core,” Kawashita said cryptically. Anna couldn’t get him to explain what he meant, but it seemed a kind of joke.
She pointed out the ship’s engines on the chart and asked if he’d like to do something he could only do once.
“It does not sound pleasant,” he said. “‘Once a philosopher, twice a pervert,’ as Voltaire said.”
“Oh, it isn’t dangerous, and it doesn’t change you any way you’d notice. But you can only do it once.”
“I’ll decide when I see what it is.”
She took him down the long tube separating the living quarters from the vehicle bays and engines, then pointed him through a round hatch into a room gleaming with bare metal surfaces. The rest of the Peloros was decorated with a variety of coordinated color schemes, but here, at its heart, there was no speck of color. A steel-gray cube approached and asked their business. Anna held her hand out for identification and requested its presence at an initiation. Apparently she had done this sort of thing before; the cube complied without objection. It led them down another tube to a weightless spherical chamber. A transparent globe was suspended in the center. Kawashita felt a gluey kind of force fingering him as they floated toward the sphere, like moving through webs of invisible gelatin. His hair stood on end, and his eyes flashed with sparks when he closed them.
Anna, resembling a comedy harridan, took his hand and pressed it against the transparent surface of the sphere. “It’s not glass,” she said. “It isn’t even matter. It’s a field of probabilities. It dictates that the chances your hand will pass through it are zero. So you can’t pass through. But there’s a way.” She told the cube to open a test hole.
“At the center of the probability zone is something which makes up about one third of the ship’s mass. You were reading about black holes a few wake-periods ago, weren’t you?”
Kawashita nodded. “Something was said about their use in ship’s engines.”
“Then you read about black holes separating virtual particles out of space and radiating energy.”
“Virtual particles—they are the ones that are always being created and destroyed, but so fast nothing can detect them?”
“Right—created in pairs of opposites, and they annihilate each other after being created, so the total energy content of the universe is stable. Around a black hole, however, a pair of virtual particles can be separated before they annihilate each other. One particle falls below the event horizon—which nothing can escape from—and the other escapes as created energy. But that defies the conservation of energy, so we have to think of the particle that fell into the black hole as actually emerging in reversed time. It’s much more complicated than that, but what it means is a black hole radiates energy. The smaller the hole, the brighter it is—until we get
down to quantum black holes. At the center of the sphere there’s a collapsed mass about the size of an electron. But size doesn’t mean much down there because we protect ourselves by wrapping it in thirty or forty layers of probability—”
“Thirty-seven this voyage, madam,” the cube said.
“Right. Each layer is equal to a self-contained universe, each with its own separate rules and constants. Every opposite layer has precisely the reverse character of the layers above and beneath it. Nothing can interact between regions with qualities and constants so drastically different. The final layer, surrounding the hole, puts enormous pressure on it—in effect, makes it probable the black hole will radiate several trillion times more energy than it naturally should. This makes it leak out through itself—a concept I’ve never understood—and from that leakage below the Planck-Wheeler length—”
“Pardon,” Kawashita said, bringing up his tapas.
“Something like ten to the minus thirty-three centimeters,” Anna said. “Much smaller than an electron. Anyway, we get our power from the leakage. The interesting thing—and it can only be done once—is to reach in and touch the outermost probability field.”
Kawashita looked doubtful. “Why can it only be done once?”
“Touch it once, nothing happens to you. But touch it twice—with a lapse of several minutes—and it increases your chances of dying. Don’t ask me how—it has to do with Parakem functions and world-line energy theorems. I’ve done it. It’s an initiation for spacefarers, like crossing the equator used to be for seafarers on Earth.”
“What does it feel like?”