by Gunn, James
Frances reached over and patted Adrian’s hand. “Don’t worry! It will all work out. You take care of getting us out of here. We’ll take care of the social arrangements.”
Adrian looked from one woman to the other. “How are we going to get out of here?”
“You’ll figure something out,” Jessica said.
From outside the tiny captain’s quarters came the sound of children’s voices raised in some kind of game, but when Frances turned and Adrian reached the door, the corridor outside was empty.
When Adrian entered the control room, someone was seated in the chair that faced the prime computer station. That wasn’t unusual—or at least it wouldn’t have been unusual if the usual had existed as a comparison. What was unusual was that the head was familiar, and it should have been back in Earth orbit or, by now, back on Earth. But everything operated by different rules inside the wormhole, and the key to sanity was not trying to apply rules appropriate to normal existence. The person wasn’t computing; it seemed to be reading a book.
“Peter,” Adrian said. “What are you doing here?”
The chair turned. The person was Cavendish without a doubt, looking as real as Adrian, as solid as Adrian. “Same thing you’re doing,” Cavendish said. “Trying to find a way out of here.”
“We left you back in Earth orbit,” Adrian said reasonably.
“I remember that, too,” Cavendish said. “Yet here I am.”
“I don’t think so,” Adrian said. “I think you’re some kind of illusion.” He took a step toward Cavendish as if to confirm the existence of the other man by touching his shoulder.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Cavendish said.
“Why not?”
“If your hand passes through me, you’re going to think your mind is going. If you find out I’m solid, that I’m really here, you’re going to question your grasp on reality.”
“You’re the one who’s supposed to be paranoid.”
“And I’m not worried?” Cavendish shrugged. “Maybe that means I’m not really here. Or that what’s here isn’t really me.”
Adrian went to the captain’s chair, sat down, and swung around to face Cavendish. “Why are you here?”
“Things haven’t worked out, have they?”
“That depends on what things you’re talking about. The ship took us to this wormhole. That worked out. I gather that you programmed that into the computer.”
“I just downloaded that part of the message.”
“The part you didn’t tell us about.”
Cavendish shrugged. “It wasn’t something I could share without creating crises of decision.”
“So you made the decision for us.”
“I didn’t know that it would take the ship here. All I knew was that this was what the aliens wanted.”
“They could have wanted to blow us up,” Adrian said.
“If they didn’t want us out here in spaceships, they wouldn’t have sent the designs. It would have been a sorry joke to send the designs, with the antimatter technologies and everything, and have a few humans spend years building a ship just to destroy us.”
“Then why didn’t you come along?” Adrian asked.
Cavendish shivered. “You see? I am paranoid after all. I was afraid to go and afraid not to go. I was afraid not to have answers and afraid of the answers I might get. But I had to get some answers, even if only by proxy, and the only way any answers would emerge—although I would never know what they were—was by sending you to get them.”
“Thanks,” Adrian said.
“They were your answers, too,” Cavendish said.
“Okay,” Adrian said. “What hasn’t worked out, then?”
“The wormhole. Passage should be instantaneous. But the ship is still inside.”
“If we knew what ‘still’ meant. Time doesn’t exist as we know it, in the wormhole. We’ve found that out, though it’s hard to remember. So whatever is happening, in whatever order, or no order at all, may be happening in the instant we went into the wormhole and the following instant we emerge from it.”
“On the other hand,” Cavendish said, “this may be a test.”
“What kind of test?”
“A test of sapience. Like we test rats in mazes. Maybe picking up the alien message was a test, and deciphering it was another, and getting to build the ship was a third, and building it so that it worked was another. This wormhole may be our maze, and if we don’t do anything we may never get out.”
“And if we get out,” Adrian said, “what’s our prize?”
“That’s the big question, isn’t it? That’s what drove me into the protection of psychosis in the first place. Maybe the prize is a bit of cheese—or what cheese represents to a rat.”
“More gifts like the antimatter technologies?”
“Or maybe aliens hungry for a different delicacy.”
“Welcome to the galactic civilization?”
“Or insanity as we try to cope with the truly alien.”
“Whatever it is,” Adrian said, “we aren’t going to know until we get out of here. Do we do nothing and hope that eternity comes to an end? Or do we do something—anything in the hope that it’s the right thing?”
Cavendish looked uncertain and a bit fuzzy around the edges. “I don’t think it would be a good idea to do anything until you have a good idea it will work.”
“That’s the trouble in here,” Adrian said. “Not only is it difficult to make plans—it’s difficult to figure out causes and effects, when the effects come first and the causes later.”
“‘Sentence first, verdict afterwards,’” Cavendish said.
“You sound like Frances.”
“There’s a bit of Frances in me,” Cavendish said. He was beginning to look transparent. “Just as there’s a bit of you and of Jessica and maybe a tiny bit of me.”
“I’d make a note of all this if I knew what you were talking about,” Adrian said.
“And if you could find it after you wrote it.”
“How do you know about that?” Adrian asked. He watched Cavendish’s wispy form waver in the slight breeze from the air vents. Gradually the various parts of him began to disappear, first the feet and the hands, then the legs and the arms, and finally the torso, beginning at the hips.
“I’m not really here, you know,” the ghost of Cavendish said. “You’re really talking to yourself.” His body had faded completely, and now only his head hung unsupported in the air.
“Some things you’ve said I didn’t know,” Adrian said.
“Nothing you haven’t guessed or speculated about,” Cavendish said. Now there was only a mouth. But it wasn’t smiling. The corners were turned down in Cavendish’s typical paranoid grimace.
Then he was gone. Adrian told himself that he would ask Frances what it all meant—if he could remember.
He looked down at the computer table. Cavendish had been reading Gift from the Stars.
The knock came on the door of the captain’s cabin as Adrian was going over the computer readouts once more, searching for an answer that he would forget even if he found it. Adrian had not wanted to occupy the captain’s cabin—more of a cubbyhole, really, like the ultra-compact quarters on a submarine. He preferred to bunk with the others in the single men’s dormitory, leaving the only private accommodation on the ship for the privacy of conjugal visits, but the crew had insisted. Partly, he thought, out of their own sense of propriety.
“Come in,” he said, putting the book he was reading on the surface that passed for a desk when it was pulled down, and turning on the stool that passed for a desk chair when it was not folded into the wall.
The airtight door slid aside. Jessica was standing in the narrow corridor, fidgeting from one foot to the other, looking concerned. That was nothing different. They all were.
“Do you have a moment?” Jessica asked.
Adrian gestured at the readout. “That’s all any of us have.”
Jessica si
dled into the room and sat on the edge of the bunk. Her knees were only a few inches from Adrian’s and that was uncomfortably close. “We’ve got a problem.”
“I know. Not only are we in a reality where the normal rules don’t apply, where even the laws of physics seem to be different, we can’t make plans because we don’t remember anything from one series of related events to the next.”
“As long as events have some continuity,” Jessica said, “they seem to hang together, pretty much, one following the other in before-and-after sequence. It’s when the continuity is broken that causality is suspended.”
“Or reversed,” Adrian said. “We do remember things that haven’t happened yet. So maybe what we have to do is to lay the groundwork for what we will remember earlier. At that point, maybe, we will know what to do and be able to do it.”
“Which, of course, would get us out of this place before we had a chance to lay the groundwork necessary for the proper decision.”
Jessica was sharp and a hard worker—in fact, she was his most reliable assistant. He knew this voyage would never have started without her, and it was likely that it wouldn’t continue without her either. “I know,” he said. “It’s crazy. But what we have to remember is that what makes sense is probably worthless and only the right kind of nonsense will work.”
She leaned forward to put a hand on his knee. “But that isn’t why I’m here.”
Adrian shivered. It wasn’t that he didn’t like to be touched. Frances put her arm around his shoulder and hugged him. Other crewmembers patted him on the back and shook his hand. This was different. He didn’t want to think about what made it different.
“We haven’t had any time for personal matters,” Jessica said. “We’ve been too busy with building the ship. Now we’ve got nothing but time until we find a way to get out of the wormhole.”
“Yes, time,” Adrian said. He couldn’t think of anything else, anything that would stave off what he feared was coming. He could make decisions about life and death but he wasn’t good at what came between.
“We’re a band of humans split off from the rest of the species, and there’s little chance we’ll ever get back.”
Adrian nodded.
“So,” Jessica said, “we’ve got to think about survival.” “That’s all I think about.”
“Not just us. The little band. What we stand for. The human species in space.”
Adrian cleared his throat. The room was getting stuffy. “Yes?”
“We must make arrangements.”
“Arrangements,” Adrian said.
“We’ve got to pair off. We need to think about having babies and the gene pool and everything else.”
“Everything,” Adrian repeated.
“I know you don’t like to talk about things like this, or think about them either,” Jessica said. “So we women have to think about it for you, make plans, arrange things.”
“You mean you’ve discussed this?” Adrian said huskily. “You and the other women?” He realized that he sounded incredulous, but he couldn’t help himself.
“Of course not,” Jessica said. “But we know. And I wanted you to know that I’ve always admired you, as a leader and as a man. Not only that, I like you.” She leaned forward and kissed him.
For a moment, surprised, he responded. Her lips felt soft and sensual. Then he drew away, shocked at the way his body had responded.
Jessica stood up. Suddenly he was aware of the fact that underneath the one-piece garment she was wearing, only a foot from his face, was the body of a woman, and it was the body of a desirable woman, and if he understood what was going on it was his if he wanted it.
“I’m glad that’s settled,” she said, leaned down to kiss him on the cheek, and went through the doorway and down the hall.
“Settled?” he said, too late to be heard. “Settled?” He had one saving thought: at least all this would be forgotten like everything else.
He thought he heard laughter somewhere down the hall, but it came from voices he had never heard before.
Adrian wasn’t good at talking to groups, but Frances had said it was necessary and he knew that was true. He would have been as traumatized as the crew if he had experienced over the past few hours the time reversals and the gravity wrenchings of the wormhole transition, even though they had been forgotten, and was depending on someone else to solve the problems. Adrian was as puzzled about what was going on as the crew, but he was in charge. That meant whatever was done would be done by him, and, moreover, he couldn’t appear to the crew the way he really felt—helpless.
He had gathered the crew twice before, the first time before the test flight, when he had offered the opportunity to depart, unobserved, to anyone who wanted to sit out the test flight. The second meeting had discussed the computer program that was guiding the ship out of the Solar System, and the reasons for allowing the course to continue toward what they assumed to be an alien-selected destination.
After that the crew divided itself into groups—work groups and social groups, which were not always the same. The crew had been assembled from volunteers to build a ship; once that was done it had to discover new skills and new interests. At first that shakedown was enough to fill the hours. Later squabbles arose about social arrangements and romantic pairings that had to be settled by counseling from Frances or, failing that, a ship’s court, and if that was not acceptable an appeal to the Captain’s final review. Now, however, he had to face them all and explain the inexplicable.
They were gathered in the couples’ dormitory, which had been the single men’s dormitory before the inevitable pairings had led to the switch. As in the two times before, men and women were seated on bunks or stools, or stood wherever they could see Adrian. Frances stood behind Adrian and to his left, providing the support of her solid presence. Jessica, on the other hand, stood by the door as if guarding the avenue of their escape. The climate in the room had been transformed from the intense boredom of space flight broken periodically by personal successes, disappointments, and disputes to a communal unease broken by moments of panic.
“We knew we would encounter some strange phenomena out here,” Adrian said. “But we didn’t know it would be this strange!” The crew responded with nervous chuckles.
“We have been through an experience that defies explanation,” Adrian continued. “It is connected to our entering a wormhole. We know that much. We must have felt some gravity fluctuations.”
“Why do you say ‘must have’?” a man’s voice asked from several bunks back.
“That’s what we would expect from a wormhole, George,” Adrian said, “but we’re still here, so we survived them. If you’re like us, however, you don’t remember.”
“I don’t remember anything that happened after we entered whatever it was,” another man said. “And that scares me!”
“It’s enough to scare anybody, Kevin,” Adrian said.
“There’s something else,” a woman said. “I’m remembering things that never happened, like an argument Bill and I had—are going to have.”
“And I remember the way we are going to make up,” a man answered. He laughed as if he were pleased with himself.
“We’ve got a theory about that,” Adrian said. “You’re remembering things that haven’t happened yet, because time is mixed up in here. But we can’t let the unusual get to us if we’re going to figure out what’s going on, and get out of this place.”
“When’s that going to be?” a woman asked.
“We don’t know a lot, yet, Sally,” Adrian said, “but we know this much: ‘when’ is a word that doesn’t mean much where we are. A wormhole is an out-of-this-world means of getting from one place in the universe to another, like folding space so that distant points touch, and crossing there. The wormhole exists in some kind of hyperspace where space and time get mixed up. We think—”
“Why do you keeping saying, ‘we think’?” a woman asked nervously.
“This i
s all new and different for us as well as you, Joan,” Adrian said. “Give us a chance to figure this out, how this new kind of time operates and how we can function within it, and, I assure you, we’ll get out of here and on our way.”
Frances spoke up. “You might think about Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Alice was in a place where nothing made sense, but she stayed calm and eventually she got back to her safe, sane home.”
“This ain’t a children’s book!” a man said. “And this ain’t fiction.”
“Sam, I hope we can be as capable of handling the unknown as a Victorian child,” Frances said. “Maybe even get some answers.”
“We ain’t never going to get back, are we?” a woman said.
“We can’t be sure of that yet, Lui,” Adrian said.
Jessica spoke up for the first time. “But we’ve got to behave as if that’s true, or we’ve got no chance at all.”
“What I want to know,” a woman said, “is where ‘on our way’ is going to take us.”
“We don’t know, Yasmine,” Adrian said. “But we all signed on to have our questions answered, and we’re going to have to follow the yellow brick road wherever it leads us until we get the answers.”
A man said, “What’s ‘the yellow brick road’?”
Adrian smiled. “Frances has me doing it now.”
“That’s another children’s book,” Frances said.
“I’d rather come up with my own answers,” another man said.
“If you come up with any, let me know,” Adrian said. He folded his arms across his chest. “Meanwhile, we’re going to have to live with uncertainty and forgetfulness and not let it make us crazy. But there’s a way out of here. The wormhole was a confirmation that we are headed in the right direction. What we can be sure of is that we weren’t directed here simply to strand us in Wonderland. This is a pathway. We just have to figure out how to move along it.”
“Moving along it reminds me,” Frances said, “of what the chess queen said to Alice in Through the Looking Glass: ‘Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get to somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.’”