The captain is smiling.
She guesses his assessment of Erbach is similar to her own.
* * *
“Did you spend much time at the University on Azzecca, Doctor?” Captain Merrick asks. He glances across the dinner table to where the observer is bent over her plate, picking at her food. Her brown hair falls around her face, like a veil, as she leans forward.
“No longer than necessary,” says Erbach. “I wished to consult certain records there.” He sniffs. “Records of whose importance they were, of course, wholly unaware.”
He is a thin man, hollow-eyed and long-jawed. Elective surgery has made his face distinctive but not attractive, a pale oval framed by lank dark hair.
“Records supporting your . . . theories?” asks Belis.
Erbach turns to her. “I do not deal in theory,” he says. “I am in possession of certain scientific facts. But what I have discovered is fragmentary and incomplete. I wished to extend my knowledge.”
Captain Merrick suppresses a smile. “You must be aware that some of your . . . facts . . . are not widely accepted,” he says.
“The heliocentric system, atomic theory, the existence of Coleman-Vibbert subspace matrices were all once ‘not widely accepted,’ as you put it, Captain. They are no less real for that.” He looks directly at Merrick. “I would not presume to tell you how to run your starship, Captain,” he says. “But in this matter, you must consider me the expert.”
Merrick has so far treated his passenger with every courtesy, but he is not accustomed to condescension.
“Your contention, if I understand correctly, Doctor,” he begins, “is that certain archaeological and cultural relics found on Old Earth are not simply products of primitive superstition but point to the existence of an actual alien species that visited the birthplace of humanity in the remote past.”
The doctor bobs his head. “Not only Earth. Additional artifacts were recovered on Yttris and—”
“And this ancient race would, according to you, possess powers that can only be described as godlike. With intelligence an order of magnitude greater than human.”
“An order? Many orders, Captain. Beside the least of them, we would be no more than ants.”
Lysa Tallis looks up. “An exaggeration, surely,” she says. “Somsakchan has shown—”
“Somsakchan has shown nothing!” Erbach snaps. “He regurgitates a hash of numbers to bolster his ignorance.”
Captain Merrick, for whom metacognitive theory is something of a hobby, is unwilling to let this pass. “Humanity has encountered, Doctor, forty-six intelligent alien races. Some are more intelligent than humans, others less. But their intelligence, however you measure it, is of the same order as human intelligence. The same is true of machine minds. Evolutionary epiphenomena constrain biological intelligence; Godelian limits on self-description restrict the development of artificial intelligences. Superintelligences are the stuff of fantasy.” He pauses. “I have studied Somsakchan’s work. Far from being, as you call it, a ‘hash of numbers,’ it is elegant, formally precise, and well supported by observation.”
“Nevertheless,” Erbach says. “Somsakchan is a fool, and those who trust in his claims . . .” He hesitates, belatedly aware that he is on the point of insulting his host again. “They will be disappointed,” he finishes weakly.
“Well,” says Merrick. “That is interesting.”
* * *
“Mad,” says Belis. “Quite mad.”
Lysa fails to hide a smile. “It does look that way.”
They are in the supercargo’s office, which doubles as a command center for the ship’s automated laboratory. Without moving from her chair, Belis can call on analytical equipment that would be the envy of many university research departments.
“Not that it matters,” Belis says. “He can amuse himself looking for his kathooloos or whatever they’re called, and we can do some real science.”
The two women exchange a look of understanding. In theory, Lysa’s role on the mission is to observe the activity of the Chartering Party: the unlikeable Dr. Erbach. She does not look forward to trailing after him while he turns over stones and fills her ears with his messianic nonsense. Belis is offering her the chance to do actual work and put her name to a report that will not be an embarrassment.
“I’d like that,” Lysa says.
* * *
The Nerea masses a quarter of a million tons, and her power plant puts out as much energy as a small star. Her subspace processors can rewrite the structure of reality itself to open a bridge to a tachyonic alter-universe, hurling the huge vessel across light-years in the blink of an eye.
But it is the will of her captain that commands, that sets the ship in motion and gives her purpose and direction. It is Captain Merrick who will steer the ship through the labyrinths of Coleman-Vibbert subspace and bring them safely to their destination.
Resting in his gimbaled cradle, he fuses his consciousness with the ship’s systems. He slows his breathing, letting his mind empty of deliberate thought. He stretches, feeling the shape of the universe around him. Elemental hydrogen molecules crawl on his skin as he luxuriates in the warmth of the closest star.
“Stand by for transfer,” he says, and Rothan brings the Nerea’s twin reactors online. “On my mark.”
He feels Netts move the crystalline capacitors into alignment. The ship has become an extension of his body, interconnected at a synaptic level. As his body melds with the machine and his mind reaches out to explore the structure of subspace, he attains a holistic awareness of everything about him. He can feel the presence of the supernumeraries aboard–Belis, Tallis, Erbach–like grains of sand in the familiar and precise machinery of the vessel. His awareness hesitates for a moment on the three long pods tucked under the ship’s belly, Erbach’s “essential supplies,” and his eyes widen for a moment as he guesses their contents.
But he has no time to dwell on that now. The transfer window is opening. He breathes a word of command, and Rothan dumps fuel into the reactors. The space around them folds, uncoiling into higher dimensions.
A heartbeat later, the Nerea drops out of the mundane universe and into its shadow twin. It begins to accelerate, tumbling down an energy gradient from the dissolving gateway. If velocity has any meaning here, their speed is already many times the speed of light in the universe they left behind.
Travel is not instantaneous. Merrick, his consciousness accelerated by his pilot’s augments, is aware of the passage of time. He has time to observe and to decide. His instruments paint pictures of the space around them, and he reacts reflexively, choosing the safest path through a universe dancing with whorls of unpredictable energy.
The target star system, or rather its projection in this universe, is close enough that Merrick can already sense the energies surrounding it. He feels an instant of anxiety. The system’s configuration is known to be atypical. But nothing in the laconic notes of the scout who first catalogued it has fully prepared Merrick. It lies within a dense knot of force-lines, like a fist clenched in the fabric of spacetime. As the Nerea bears down on it, Merrick scans for angles of approach and finds none. The knot swells monstrously ahead of them, viciously involuted, rotating with lunatic fury. Whirlpools of energy blaze out from its core.
At the last instant, he sees an opening. Fighting momentum, he swings the ship around. A distortion arc, tendrils of energy tightening like tentacles, rises in their path, but Merrick has already initiated the process to open a gateway back to the physical universe. He feeds power to the subspace engines, preparing to climb back into real space.
Something kicks him hard in the ribs, and he cries out. The rusty taste of blood fills his mouth. Red lights flicker at the periphery of his vision, and he can smell burning. The Nerea howls like a wounded leviathan.
The gateway stabilizes. For an instant, Merrick hangs between two universes. Around him are the efflorescences and energy spikes of Coleman-Vibbert space, the barb of force
that lacerated his ship already sliding astern. Ahead, he glimpses normal space, with a silver sprinkle of stars against a sable sky. Like a diver rising from deep water, he and the ship ascend, squeezing his lungs tight on the last of his air.
They are through, the gateway winking out of existence behind them. Merrick slumps in his cradle, conscious of nothing but the whooping and chattering of the alarms.
* * *
Something is wrong. Lysa sees it in the behavior of the crew. They assure her that everything has gone according to plan, but their faces say otherwise.
The ship informs her that the captain is in his quarters and cannot be disturbed. Something about the phrasing reinforces Lysa’s suspicions. Like everyone else, the ship uses the language of the Commonwealth, an ancient tongue derived from the majority languages of Old Earth and capable of almost infinite degrees of nuance with layers of meaning hinted at through syntax and word choice. Reading between the lines, she gets the impression that the captain is somehow injured or embarrassed.
In the absence of the crew, Lysa has only Dr. Erbach for company. He at least appears to be in good spirits.
“A rough passage,” he says, “as I knew it would be. But I knew that our captain could do it. Few other men could.” His mood is euphoric, his long features animated by something like glee.
Outwardly, there is little to justify his excitement. The star is unexceptional, an F-class dwarf distinguishable from a million similar stars only by a few anomalous spectral lines. The ship’s sensors have detected a handful of planets: a hot Jovian in close orbit, its outline fuzzed by ionized gas, howling all over the 21 cm line of the radio spectrum; a rocky super-Earth farther out; and a trail of frozen rock and ice balls stretching toward the system’s tenuous Oort cloud. Lysa collates the data and finds it tediously similar to hundreds of other catalogued systems.
The one oddity is the presence of a moon in orbit about the super-Earth, a moon large enough to be almost a binary companion. Its presence does not fit with Lysa’s model.
Erbach is unsurprised. “I expected as much. You watched my lecture on the Gebel al Mawta fragments? The double logogram in the third line, pluralizing the duat, clearly indicated that the throne of the god was associated with a binary configuration.”
“Are you saying this system has already been described?” Lysa says.
Her disappointment must show. Dr. Erbach smiles. “Only by a half-literate scribe, six millennia ago. And his account has never been subject to peer review.” He pats her shoulder, and she flinches at his touch. “Do not be afraid, my dear. You will get your publication.”
* * *
On the second day, Merrick wakes to a soft but insistent chime. He rises gingerly from his bed, favoring one leg.
His physical injuries are minor: damage to the peripheral nervous system, some torn muscles, a lingering numbness in the fingers of one hand. His body is already healing.
But the passage has taken a psychic toll. In the twisted energies around the star, Merrick felt the presence of something he could not name. All conscious minds, human or otherwise, have their echo in the quantum substrate of reality. A psychically attuned pilot can easily pick out the pinpoint sparkles of consciousness from the background noise. But whatever he felt, it was not exactly a mind. It was more like—he shudders—an appetite.
He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to banish the thought. Since that fleeting contact, his dreams have been haunted. When he lies down, he is tormented by visions of places and things that should not exist. When he wakes, the nightmares vanish but the sense of dread lingers. Even the familiar surroundings of his quarters are strange, the mundane geometries seeming somehow wrong. Odd shapes crawl and flicker at the edges of his vision. Frightening voices murmur.
“Ship?” he says. His own voice sounds cracked and unreal.
“There is a priority message from Belis,” the ship says.
He nods. “Connect her.”
Her voice is anxious. “Captain? Forgive me for disturbing you. There is something you need to see.”
The center of the room fills with a projected radar image. He sees a rugged landscape, all broken rock and jagged canyons, rendered in muted false color. As the image stabilizes, more details emerge. He begins to see signs of order: straight lines and perfect curves. He is looking down on something that might be a city.
“Where is this?” he asks.
“The moon,” Belis says. “Right where Erbach said it would be.”
“I see,” Merrick says. He peers at the image and the details resolve, horribly familiar. He has seen these shapes in his dreams.
He dismisses the projection and sits down again. He rubs his eyes with trembling hands.
For the first time in centuries, Captain Merrick is afraid.
* * *
The city is not so much a city as a single huge, sprawling building, the only entrance a vast roofless hall lined with towering columns. From a vantage point near the entrance, Lysa watches as Merrick and Netts scout the interior.
They wear military-issue pressure suits, their armor covered by a photo-adaptive skin that generates constantly changing camouflage patterns. Lisa watches them leapfrog their way down the hall, darting from shadow to shadow, freezing into invisibility for a moment before moving on. Their equipment harnesses are hung with what Lisa suspects are powerful weapons, and it is clear that both have had military training. Despite herself, she finds something beautiful in the austere choreography of their war dance.
Dr. Erbach is unimpressed. He waits until the captain and Netts have reached the far end of the hall, then cuts in on the common channel. “The builders of this place, Captain, are long gone. There is nothing to fear here.”
Merrick does not respond immediately. He and Netts continue their inspection. Finally, he turns, his chameleon suit fading to matte black. “You may approach, Doctor,” he says.
Behind Merrick, the end wall is dominated by what is unmistakably a door, but one of monstrous size. Its massive hinges are twice the height of a man, and the whole surface is covered with fine inscriptions, the unfamiliar glyphs carved with millimetric precision into the metal. Erbach approaches, his gauntleted hands by his sides, staring up at it. “Magnificent,” he says. “In other circumstances, I might devote my whole life to deciphering this one text.” He gestures to a patch of symbols. “Here we have our Rosetta Stone: this is Old Kydelian, a description of the Acheterine Rite. By convention, the text should be repeated in other scripts across the whole surface.”
Lysa cannot make sense of the writing, but she finds something unsettling about the shapes of the glyphs and the obsessiveness with which their creators covered every centimeter of the door and walls. Some of the patterns are repeated, and she guesses that the text was intended to be read or chanted aloud.
“We can bring up a deep radar set, see what’s beyond the door,” says Netts.
“No need,” says Erbach. “I will open it.”
“Do you need help with that?” Belis asks. “We have manipulator units–”
There is no mistaking the amusement in Erbach’s voice. “You could pry at that door with your machines for a millennium, Scientist Belis, and it would not open for you. Even a nuclear bomb would barely scratch it.”
“Say the word, Doctor,” says Merrick, “and we can put that to the test.”
“A kind offer, Captain, but I have a better way. I will need you to bring down the pods now.”
* * *
Something about the environment blocks whisper band radio, so Merrick ends up having to walk halfway back to the lander to communicate with the orbiting starship. The landscape around him is ash grey, the rock outcrops fused and folded into bizarre shapes. On the horizon, the companion planet is a reddish half-circle filling most of the sky. It looks larger than it has any right to be; the moon orbits well inside the bigger world’s Roche limit and should have been ground to dust by tidal forces millennia ago. The astrophysical impossibility is just one
more factor adding to Merrick’s growing sense of wrongness.
What disturbs Merrick most is the city itself. When they entered the long avenue that led to the vast entranceway, his dreams flooded back. It was as if he saw a double city. One, desolate and abandoned, its nightmare monuments shrouded in ancient dust; the other alive and inhabited by creatures of an unfamiliar species. He cannot quite make out their features; even in his dreams, he shrank from looking at them directly. They infest the periphery of his vision, writhing over the tortured landscape, scurrying and crawling like ants.
Ahead, the lander squats on the ash plain, a familiar man-made shape in this alien hell. He fights the urge to run the last kilometer, strap in, and blast off, leaving the others to fend for themselves.
With great effort, he turns his back on the lander and forces himself to face the city. He squats, digging his gauntleted hands in the dirt. He has never left anyone behind. He will not start now. If need be, he will find the courage to save even the unappealing Dr. Erbach.
He opens a connection to the starship. “Everything good?” he asks.
“Good enough,” says Rothan. “You?”
“Erbach wants his pods now.”
“Can do,” Rothan says at last. “You want to guide them in, or shall I?”
The pods are one-shot devices, cramped cargo units balanced on a pentad of braking rockets. Merrick estimates that they have just enough fuel to land, but not to take off again.
“You guide them,” he says. “Put them down as close to the city as you can.”
“Copy that. What’s in them anyway?”
“People,” says Merrick.
* * *
The people shuffle into the hall in little groups. The yellow-white plastic of their cheap pressure suits is covered with stenciled glyphs. They move like sleepwalkers, still dazed by whatever drugs they took to let them ride out the voyage in suspended animation, crammed in their landing pods. Only a few seem alert, gazing around them at the looming walls and the vast doors with rapt expressions.
Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird Page 38