The Spheres of Heaven

by Charles Sheffield

  Chrissie, hanging farther back, could see nothing. She waited for what felt like minutes, until Tarbush at last said, "Well, I'll be damned. They're going away. They're filing into one of the buildings—every one of them, including what I thought were the guards for the fence. What's with them? Lunch break? Party time?"

  "Keep your head down!"

  Tarbush in his curiosity was beyond the cover of the scrub. "It's all right. There's no sign of them any more. Hold on a second, though. I'm wrong, here's one coming out. Lighter-colored, a bit bigger, like . . . Oh my God."

  "What?"

  "It's a person. A man. Vow-of-Silence was right. There's a human inside the encampment."

  "Is anyone with him? Is he a prisoner?"

  "Doesn't look like it. He's on his own. He's moving toward the fence—he's coming this way. What do we do?"

  Chrissie couldn't stand it any longer. She hurried forward to Tarbush's side and stared at the approaching figure, still about fifty meters away. "It must be Friday Indigo. He's wearing the same style and color of clothing as Bony and Liddy. It was standard issue for the Mood Indigo. He's limping."

  "Maybe he's hurt. He sure looks like hell. He probably took quite a beating in the storm when his ship was driven ashore. But he's smiling—and he's waving. Chrissie, he knows we're here. What do we do now?"

  "We ought to turn and run. We were told, no risks."

  "Deb said, turn back if there's any sign of trouble. There hasn't been any. Chrissie, we've at least got to wait long enough to say hello to him. He's unarmed, and he seems pleased that we're here—look at that grin, even though he can't possibly know who we are or where we came from."

  "I don't know." Chrissie sounded troubled, but she made no move.

  "Hello there." The approaching man called the greeting. He had passed through the fence and was still grinning. "Welcome to Limbo. I don't know you, but my name is Friday Indigo."

  "I'm Chrissie Winger, and this is Tarbush Hanson. We came here on a ship called the Hero's Return. But you're hurt."

  Now that he was closer, Chrissie could see streaks of dried blood running down from his temples and ears. His feet and calves were water-soaked, and more blood had run from a jagged hole in the left thigh of his suit.

  "Oh, that's nothing." He was still grinning, and he dismissed his wounds with one wave of his hand. "I don't need help, and I feel great. This is a wonderful planet. Wonderful people on it, too."

  "You mean the people who made this?" Chrissie waved her hand, to take in the encampment, with its cleared airstrip and the tri-lobed aircraft ready for flight.

  "Who else? Come on, I'll introduce you. You need to meet Two-Four, he's a funny little devil and a good friend of mine. Oh, and you definitely have to meet The One—especially The One, he's the greatest."

  He had turned and was leading the way toward the fence and the encampment. Chrissie began to follow, but Tarbush said, "Wait a minute. These people you want us to meet. Are they people? Or are they aliens?"

  "They're the Malacostracans—bit of a mouthful at first, but you'll get used to saying it." Friday was still walking, and they were at the gate to the fence. "They're people, but not exactly like us. I mean, not actual humans. But that's all right, because they're better than humans. Far better."

  "Now let's hold it right here." Tarbush had stopped just inside the gate, and he and Chrissie were looking at each other. "I can see I'd think well of anyone who saved my life—but better than humans? I don't like the sound of that. Did something else happen to you, messing up your head? Your ears have been bleeding."

  "My head is better than it's ever been. I've never thought so well and so clearly." Friday turned back to them. "Come on. If you're lucky, The One will make you feel the same way."

  Chrissie took a step backward, away from the buildings. "Who is this `The One' that you keep talking about?"

  "The leader of the Malacostracans. She's beautiful. Oh, don't judge by those specimens. They're lower level and they look nothing like her."

  Friday was pointing toward another of the buildings. Three creatures had emerged.

  "Those are the ones I saw before." Tarbush grabbed Chrissie's arm. "Let's get out of here. It was stupid to come this far."

  "Not stupid at all." Friday called after them. "Hey, it's running that's stupid. You're making my friends do something that you won't like—I know, because the same thing happened to me. Did you hear what I said? Stop running!"

  Chrissie and Tarbush ran faster than ever. They were almost at the edge of the cleared area when Tarbush risked a quick look back. Friday Indigo was standing where they had left him, still urging them not to run away. The three dark-shelled aliens had advanced to stand by his side. They carried black canes, which they were lifting to point toward the humans.

  "Down, Chrissie. I think they're going to fire." Tarbush started to throw himself flat. Two more meters, and they would reach the safety of the scrub.

  He heard a faint popping from behind, like the bursting of children's small balloons. Then his brain was boiling, turning to liquid and spouting out of his ears. He heard Chrissie scream, and he began his own matching scream which was never completed.

  They were diving forward, seeking cover—and unconscious before they hit the ground.

  27: ON BOARD THE HERO'S RETURN

  "Nine, eight, so seven's next. Or did I do seven already?"

  Bony was muttering to himself, counting hull partitions as he crawled past them.

  He had already seen more than enough partitions. The Hero's Return was divided along its entire length into twenty-meter segments, each separated from its neighbors by bulkheads strong enough to allow vacuum on either side. That was all very well for a cruiser in space, where during a battle any section might be breached by enemy weapons; but when you were down on the seabed of an alien planet, with vacuum a longed-for memory, partitions were nothing more than a nuisance with sealed hatches to be negotiated at each one.

  Water was seeping into the ship, slowly but steadily, and Bony wanted to know where it came from. The ship's external sensors were no longer working, which meant he had to examine the condition of the outer and inner hulls for himself. That involved crawling the length of the ship and looking for water in the space between the hulls.

  He had begun without a suit, and learned by the fourth segment that was a mistake. The Hero's Return did not have a bilge like a seagoing vessel, but in a gravity field everything seeped down to pool in the curved space between the inner and outer hulls. As he passed the third bulkhead he had skidded into—and fallen down in—a revolting mixture of oil, water, and slick ooze. He went back and put his suit on, but it was already too late. His face and body were coated with black glop, and sweating inside the suit only made things worse.

  "Six—or is it five?" Bony crawled grimly on, oily water covering him to shoulder level and casting rainbow reflections from the light in his suit's helmet. Never before had he realized the true size of a Class Five cruiser. But now he was far past the ship's midpoint, and the curve of the hull was upward. Another couple of sections and he should have ascended until he was above the water level.

  That was small comfort. His journey along the lowest level had convinced him that the Hero's Return was dying, and far faster than the ship's computer was willing to admit. Jettisoning the defensive shields had been necessary for the ship's immediate survival when they arrived in the ocean of Limbo, but the same act had guaranteed long-term and irreversible failures.

  He reached the last two sections, and discovered worse news. On the ship's arrival on Limbo its forward motion had finally been halted by an underwater ledge. Even at a speed of a few meters a second, the impact of the ship's bow with unyielding rock had buckled and twisted the outer and inner hulls and mashed them into each other. Worse than the damage to the hull was the destruction of the vital navigational instruments mounted at the bows. The Hero's Return would be ready for another trip to space only after major refurbishing had b
een performed; which, in practice, meant never.

  Bony made his final assessment as he clambered up a tight spiral staircase leading to one of the main corridors, and from there headed for what had once been the fire control room. It was the most likely place to find Chan Dalton and Dag Korin and give them his report. Bony's message would be a grim one: the ship could not be used for a Link transition, and it would become totally uninhabitable in a few days.

  Chan and the General were not in the control room. Tully O'Toole and Liddy Morse were; also—a surprise to Bony—the Angel, Gressel, immobile and apparently asleep on a broad-based pot of black earth, while next to it Elke Siry sat at a terminal frowning and grimacing and biting her lips. She was hammering a keypad at a furious rate. Tully O'Toole and Liddy Morse hovered by, apparently urging her on.

  Bony opened the visor of his helmet and sank down into a seat next to them. His suit was covered with sticky ooze, but he was too bushed to care. Even though the onboard robots were close to imbecility, a simple cleaning job should not be beyond them.

  "Well?" Liddy came closer, but she did not try to touch him. He could hardly blame her. But she knew where he had been, and what he had been doing.

  "I give us three days, if we push everything to the limit."

  Elke had frowned in irritation when Liddy first spoke, but at Bony's words she spun around in her chair. "Three days for what?"

  "Three days until we're forced to abandon the Hero's Return and try our luck ashore. This ship is dying around us." Bony's wave took in the tilted floor, sweating ceiling, and fading wall lights. "It's on its last legs. Any word from Deb and the others while I've been below? They've been gone nearly ten hours, and it must be getting dark up there."

  Tully shook his head. "Nothing. But that's not so strange, because Chan doesn't want radio signals until we know more about whatever destroyed our orbiters. We'll hear from the shore party when they come back and report, not before. Let's hope they make it fast, 'cause this old ship won't last."

  "Three days," Elke said. "Damnation. Just when this is getting really interesting." That wasn't the word that Bony would have chosen, but Elke went on, "We're making great progress mapping the multiverse, and we have some guesses about the way the new Link might work; but I can't continue the analysis without a computer."

  Liddy looked at Bony. "I suppose we can't take it ashore with us?"

  "The computer? Not a chance. It's a distributed system with elements scattered all the way through the ship. It would be easier to take the power plant, and that weighs three hundred tons."

  Gressel showed sudden signs of life, rippling its fronds from top to bottom. "Computer," the Angel said in a deep, dreamy voice. "Hmmm, computer. Yes, a computer is indeed useful in defining the Link transition that a homebound ship must make. But that abstract problem, despite Dr. Siry's modesty, is close to being solved, and our own internal computational power should suffice to handle the remainder. Of far more concern, we suggest, is the absence of a ship that can make the Link transition. Recall the human recipe for making a rabbit pie: First catch your rabbit. Accepting what Mr. Rombelle tells us, we ask: Where is our ship?"

  "The aliens on shore have a ship, and more," Tully said.

  "But will they make one available to us?"

  "Well, if they don't and if they won't, we'll—"

  "Do not continue with that thought." The Angel's voice deepened. "Remember, violence is never the answer. There are always peaceful solutions. We will not pursue that subject. Instead, we suggest that a summary of our current state of knowledge is in order. Dr. Siry, would you like to proceed?"

  "You could do it better than I."

  "How true. But this is to an audience of humans, with its own curious cultural referents." Gressel waved a succulent side frond. "Horses for courses. Better, we think, if you offer the summary."

  "We-e-ll . . ." Elke sighed, but as she turned to face the others she did not seem displeased. "The amazing thing about the multiverse is not that we've discovered its existence. It's that we've been blind to it for so long while it was staring us in the face. We've used the Links to make interstellar jumps for—how long?" No one spoke. "Well, hundreds of years at least. All that time, theorists have argued that the only way you can go somewhere through a Link is by passing through an intermediate space, one that's connected differently from our own spacetime. Points that are widely separated in our universe are close together in the other one."

  "But I thought that `other universe' was just sort of a mental picture," Liddy objected. "Just a way of visualizing things."

  "If it were just a picture, how could it work?" Elke's blue eyes were sparkling and she displayed more passion than anyone on the Hero's Return had ever seen. "No, this is a real alternate universe—it has to be, because we travel through it. Our mistake was in thinking that there was one alternate universe, and it was the only possible alternate universe. What Gressel and I have discovered is a large number—possibly an infinite number—of other universes, all just as real as the one we came from, or the one we're in here on Limbo. And we're finding out a lot of things about them. For instance, there are universes in which all the basic physical constants are widely different from what we're used to. A transition to one of them would be fatal, because nothing like us could survive. We were lucky. This universe and ours are very close in properties. We know that, because we're alive. Also, the universe that the land aliens came from, no matter how alien it may be in other ways, must also be close in its physical constants. Otherwise they couldn't survive here, either."

  Tully asked, "How do you know they're not from our universe?"

  He had moved closer when Elke began to speak, and now to his amazement she reached forward and placed her hand on his arm. "The nature of the Link tells us that! It's completely different from what we're used to, different from anything we've imagined. For one thing, it's on an air-water boundary, which before we came here I would have said was impossible. For another, if the Link had been present in the Geyser Swirl for years, the Stellar Group aliens would have found it. But the Angel and I are beginning to understand it, and how everything works."

  She finally realized that she was touching Tully and pulled her hand away. "It's all right," he said, but she turned quickly to the display controls and went on, "See, we're starting to map the structure of the multiverse. It contains a whole spectrum of energy levels. Just knowing that those exist is half the battle. I've made a diagram of what I've been calling `uphill' and `downhill' universes. Here it is." The screen showed a set of nodes connected by a complicated network of lines. "The yellow arrows are to places that call for a greater energy expenditure to reach them, the blue to ones that you can reach more easily. The aliens who made the Link here on Limbo probably came uphill, because the ships we've seen from orbit don't seem to have huge power units. They'll find it easier to go home than they did to come here. We think the same is true of us. We'll go home"—she ignored Bony's murmured If we go home—"easier than we came, because the power drain getting to this place was enormous, much bigger than it usually is for a single transition." She paused in annoyance. A buzzing tone like a giant bee was ringing through the ship, interrupting her final words. "What on earth is that?"

  "Main airlock, with an emergency signal that's not working quite right. Like everything else around here." Bony stood up. "It must the shore party, returning to the ship. Come on."

  He led the rush out of the control room. After a few seconds of hesitation Elke and Tully followed, leaving the Angel to fend for itself.

  "I didn't get to tell them the most interesting part of all," Elke complained to Tully as they went. "Every universe runs at its own individual clock rate. For instance, as the Angel pointed out, time passes in this world more than sixty times as fast as on Earth. If we're here for another two days, four months will elapse for people back home. But it could be a lot worse. Gressel estimates from the structure of the multiverse that some places run a million times as fa
st. If we stayed in a place like that for just a week, twenty thousand years would pass back on Earth. That's longer than the whole of human recorded history. We're mapping multiverse coordinates so we can be sure to avoid places like that."

  Elke paused. Even she, swept away by her enthusiasm for science, realized that Tully was not listening. He was pretending to, but he was staring ahead in anticipation as they came closer to the airlock. Chan Dalton and Dag Korin had appeared from nowhere, and the General was bustling along as fast as anyone and cursing his aged legs. Bony, still muck-splattered and grimy, earned only a raised eyebrow.

  "Not too close," Chan snapped when they were at the lock. He spread his arms to keep the others away from the hatch. "I hope I know who's coming out of there, but we can't be sure."

  It was a new and disturbing thought. Everyone but Dag Korin took a pace back. The lock seemed to be cycling slower than usual, and the tension was huge until at last the hatch slid open and Danny Casement stepped out.

  Stepped was perhaps the wrong word. He staggered forward, sagged against Chan, and allowed himself to be supported. When he saw the waiting group he reached up and wearily opened his suit's visor. "I made it, but I'm on my last legs." He jerked his head back toward the lock's interior. "She's in bad shape."

  "Deb!" Chan released his hold on Danny and jumped forward. But there was no sign of Deb Bisson inside the lock. All it held was the giant form of Vow-of-Silence, her pipe-stem body tightly curled and her spindly limbs wrapped tight around it.

  "What happened?" Chan was reaching down to lift the Pipe-Rilla, but her body remained rigidly knotted.

  "Long story." Danny was sitting on the floor, taking deep breaths. "I'll tell you everything when I can sit down and have a drink—a strong one. Short version: we saw Chrissie and Tarbush cut down right in front of our eyes."