Primary Inversion

by Catherine Asaro

  Sauscony…

  I started. Jaibriol? He shouldn’t have been in psiberspace with me. He had no interactive connection to the ship. Hell, he had no biomech web in his body that could link him up.

  Can’t dissociate from you. His thought felt tired.

  Can you pull back any? With no preparation for this, his brain could end up fried when I boosted my interactions with the Mesh. Think of yourself as a program on Medline. Try to run in the background.

  A sense of laughter lightened his exhaustion. I will be as quiet as a node-mouse. He created an image of the glove on an old style virtual reality setup. A tail appeared on the glove, then two fuzzy ears, two eyes, and a mouth. The animal ran under the VR apparatus.

  I smiled. Then I thought, Medline, retrieve that flyer.

  Our port thrusters fired, moving us over the flyer. Hot gases scorched the pad and shook the flyer, but its reinforced hull remained sound. With a grinding clank, Medline extended claws from its belly. They closed around the flyer like a hawk seizing its prey and drew it up against the racer, holding it firm in a cage of metal claws.

  Flyer secured, Medline thought. However, the palace defense systems are preparing to fire on us.

  What the hell? Show me.

  Numerous red blips appeared throughout the mountains, indicating the installations that guarded the palace. Some were isolated gleams of red and others glowed in huge clusters, like fire. As I magnified one cluster, it resolved into a line of laser cannons swiveling toward us, the rumble of their turning a deep growl in the night.

  I paged the EI dedicated to the palace security systems. Zos respond.

  Here, Zos answered.

  Let us leave, I thought.

  I can’t do that.

  Why not?

  It violates my programming.

  For flaming sakes. I had programmed it. Verify my brain patterns. Then execute the command.

  I know who you are. Land or I’ll blow up your racer.

  I couldn’t believe it. How could Zos refuse my commands? I was its damned mother.

  You programmed me to protect your family, Zos thought. Jaibriol Qox’s escape endangers them. So I am preventing his escape.

  That was the problem with the EI knowing me so well; it had figured out my intent. Look, if Jaibriol and I don’t get out of here, a lot of people may die, including me. If I’m executed, it may kill my father. So quit messing around and let us go.

  No answer.

  Damn! What was the confounded computer doing? Zos, respond.

  The rumbling of the canons ceased.

  Zos?

  You may leave.

  I let out a breath. Erase all record of this exchange.

  Done.

  Thank you. I shifted my attention to the racer. Medline, show me the cordon.

  Medline showed me the grid of gold lines in the sky. The intersections mark ships in the cordon.

  The grid curved into a spherical surface enclosing Diesha. The pattern of squares was perfect, a tribute to the uncompromising order Kurj sought in the universe. Every intersection contained at least one red blip and some had so many they merged into a blaze. As I focused on one fiery blur, it resolved into the mammoth battle cruiser Maxar with its multitude of attendants. Medline flooded me with data, including intelligence reports only someone with my stratospheric clearance could access. But my knowledge of ISC was no help. It only emphasized the impossibility of escape. How would we get through? Those ships would shoot any craft that gave the slightest conceivable hint it was fleeing the cordon.

  So do the inconceivable.

  Medline, I thought. Invert.

  Restate command.

  Kick in the inversion engines and get us out of here.

  That is impossible.

  Never mind that. Just do it.

  To invert, we must leave the planet and accelerate to relativistic speed. If we leave the planet, the cordon ships will destroy us.

  I didn’t say speed up. I just said invert.

  To invert, we must speed up.

  I had no idea what would happen if we tried to invert while we were at rest. Popular wisdom held that we couldn’t complete the process and would cease to exist in a limbo between the real and imaginary universes. Since no one had ever returned from trying it, no one knew if that was true.

  I’ve intercepted a message to command central, Medline thought. The ship waiting to escort us to the hospital wants to know why we’re sitting here, holding the flyer.

  We had run out of time. Medline, invert.

  To invert, we must spee—

  Forget that! Just invert, damn it. Now!

  Engines engaged.

  The twisting started.

  As nausea swept over me, the stars and mountains blinked out of existence. No, the mountains disappeared, but the stars remained. They smeared across the sky like spots of paint in a black liquid. Then I realized the mountains were also still there, but smudged into the sky, black on black. We hadn’t inverted; we were caught between universes.

  I leaked back into the racer and saw myself in the pilot’s seat, my hands clenched on its arms, my eyes shut. The sim linked me to reality, but I was barely holding onto it. If I lost that last link to the universe where we belonged, we would melt into this bizarre otherworld. But the sim had drained my resources. I couldn’t hold it. The cabin rippled around us and began to fade.

  Then Jaibriol moved. He flowed off the bunk like paint dissolving in rain. The intravenous thread slid out of his arm with a drawn-out sucking noise. He crossed the cabin in slow motion, his face a smeared patch above the darker smears of his clothes. His body blurred and ran in dribbles onto the deck. The cabin was twisting, the fore section going to starboard, the aft section going to port. As it contorted, O’Neill and I poured out of our seats, our bodies dripping over the softened exoskeletons. The front of Jaibriol’s body ran to one side, the back to the other, spreading him out in the two directions. The cabin continued to twist, trying to close on itself like a Möbius strip.

  As Jaibriol reached me, the front half of his body dribbled across the black runnels that were my arms. His hand melted onto the flystick and the flystick spilled forward, splashing over the controls. I felt the thrusters fire. Sort of. Acceleration pasted us into our seats, sloshing our bodies, and Jaibriol melted across my exoskeleton, seeping onto the deck like a surrealistic painter’s nightmare.

  I couldn’t hold the psi-sim steady. I leaked out of the racer, passing through its hull as if it were a film. Only part of me slipped, but it was enough to see the nightmare outside. In this bizarre interstice between universes, the cordon had degenerated into a skyscape of oozing gold lines and red smears. Ships fired, but their missiles and beams pooling uselessly in space. Eerie vibrating noises echoed everywhere. The air slid past me like oil, smelling of exhaust.

  We were moving into the cordon. Meedliiinnnne, I thought. Ploooot cooourssssss…

  The words trickled away. I tried to create an image in my mind of an open space I could see in the deformed grid. Medline responded by heading for the opening. As we approached, the gold lines smeared out wider and wider, filling the hole. By the time we reached it, the opening was gone, but we dribbled past the gold smears like oil soaking through a sponge.

  I scraped back along the ship and soaked through the hull, my identity recollecting in the cabin. Jaibriol was lying in a pool on the deck, his body smeared across its surface. Everything was dark. Dim. So dim.

  Fading out…

  Fading in…

  Data dripped into my mind telling me we had come out of stasis. Medline had cleared the planet enough to fire the photon thrusters. The real part of our velocity was 60% of light speed…

  …96%.

  …99.999999%.

  Our liquefying mass increased by a factor of 7000. The engine sucked in matter from a cosmic ray flux that extended through real and imaginary space, its density far greater than the tiny fraction we saw in the subluminal universe. The race
r ate fuel like an insatiable behemoth, hurtling gods only knew where. For eighteen minutes, or maybe eighteen millennia, we poured through space, running on the rim of light speed, trying to invert—trying and failing.

  Meeeeeeeddddliiii…subliiiight…

  The cabin went black—

  And the twisting stopped.

  I gasped, shocked by my sudden solidity. My eyes snapped open. We were accelerating at more than one g, but we were solid. Normal. No, not quite normal. Bits of my uniform were embedded in the seat where Jaibriol had fallen across my arm, and I could see pieces mixed in with my skin too.

  “Jaibriol!” My voice rasped. I smacked my palm against the exoskeleton and it unfolded, letting me twist around to see the cabin.

  He lay in a heap, sliding along the deck. His legs were flat on the ground as if he were on his back, but his torso was twisted so that from the waist up he was lying on his side. One arm was caught behind him, pulling away from the rest of his body. It made him look distorted, broken in two.

  I struggled out of the pilot’s seat. As dizziness swooped over me, I slid down to the deck. Then I crawled to Jaibriol. Please don’t let him be dead. I lifted his arm, the one behind him, and put it in front of his torso. With a groan, he rolled onto his back, his body relaxing into a normal position. As we slid along the deck, he stared at the bulkhead above him, his gaze unfocused.

  I pulled myself up to lie alongside of him. “Can you see me?”

  He squinted at my face. “Yes.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Primary Valdoria,” Medline said. “We are using up a great deal of fuel.”

  “Stop accelerating,” I said.

  The hum of the engines changed, and Jaibriol and I stopped sliding. As he turned his head, the motion caused him to drift up from the deck.

  A groan came from the co-pilot’s seat. I pushed off the deck and floated to the cockpit, where my exoskeleton caught my body and pulled me down. O’Neill sat in her own seat, her face pale.

  “We made it,” she said.

  “I hope so.” I settled into the exoskeleton. The holomaps in front of my chair showed images of the region where we were traveling, along with graphs charting fuel consumption, trajectory, location, date—

  I whistled. “We’ve jumped three months into the future.”

  Jaibriol floated over and grabbed the arm of my chair. “That can’t be. We’ve only been traveling a few minutes.”

  “We never inverted,” I said. “So we never compensated for the time dilation.” It could work to our advantage, I realized. “They’ll search for us in the wrong place. Or I should say the wrong time. They’ll be looking for us three months ago.”

  “That means I haven’t reported to President Calloway in three months,” O’Neill said. “She must think we’re dead.”

  “Let us hope they all think that,” Jaibriol said.

  We had lost three months of our lives. Three months had passed since my father gave our story: a desperate Jaibriol had managed to reached the palace and capture the flyer; he tried to adapt its engines for inversion; I and “Lyra Merson” grabbed him with the racer; the backlash of his improperly inverting engines caught us—and after that no one knew what had happened.

  “Medline,” I said. “Release the flyer.”

  The grind of opening claws vibrated through the deck. My holomaps showed the flyer riding under us, matching our velocity. I manipulated the claws until they nudged the small vessel, changing its velocity enough that it drifted in front of the racer.

  “Blow it up,” I told the racer.

  The flyer exploded. Debris hurtled in all directions, some coming straight at us on the screens and deflecting away when it hit the protected hull. By the time anyone discovered the wreckage, it would be spread out over too much space for them determine that none of us had exploded with it.

  And then it was done.

  I leaned back and closed my eyes, overwhelmed by exhaustion as my adrenalin eased.

  “Maybe I should take over,” O’Neill said.

  I managed to nod. While she took the controls, I released my exoskeleton and pulled out of it. Jaibriol and I floated over to the bunk. As we maneuvered onto it, the medweb slid around us both, securing our bodies. And finally we could relax, wrapped in each other’s arms. Although I wanted to stay awake, we both slept, dozing and waking sporadically. When we inverted, my stomach rebelled, but this time the twisting lasted only an instant.

  Some time later, I awoke to see O’Neill floating by the bunk.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “All right.” My voice sounded raspy, but I felt steadier.

  “I put the racer on autopilot,” she said. “It will be a few hours, ship’s time, before we reach our destination.”

  Jaibriol stirred. “Where are we going?”

  O’Neill took hold of a strut and drew herself down so she was eye level with us. “A planet called Gamma IV.”

  “What constellation?” I asked. Gamma IV was an incomplete designation.

  O’Neill only said, “No one knows it exists except us, President Calloway, and the robot scout that found it four standard days ago—” She paused. “Four days and three months ago. Calloway intercepted the report before anyone else saw it. By now, she will have erased that record.”

  So. O’Neill wasn’t going to reveal its location even to us. “Are there people on the planet?” All these precautions would do no good if someone recognized us.

  “No intelligent species,” O’Neill said. “A lot of wildlife and some beautiful areas, like the mountains where I’ll put you down. That’s all we know. We have no surveys.” She motioned at the cabin. “I brought as much gear as I could manage without drawing attention. I also got you a solar powered EI with a library. Other than that, you’ll be on your own.”

  What an understatement. True, as a Jagernaut I had survival training. My enhanced speed and strength would help, as would Jaibriol’s strapping good health and his intelligence. But it wouldn’t be easy. I supposed that had a certain logic from Calloway’s point of view. What better way to keep the Highton and Imperial Heirs out of trouble than to set us down in an uncharted wilderness where all our energy would go into staying alive?

  O’Neill cleared her throat. “If you wish—I can perform the ceremony.”

  “Ceremony?” I asked.

  “The marriage.” She hesitated. “You asked for one…?”

  I rolled over to face Jaibriol. “Want to marry me?”

  He smiled and pushed up on his elbow. “All right.”

  With that vastly romantic proposal done, we went over to the cockpit and brought up the library files, looking for a ceremony. Medline had several, mostly from Skolian worlds. Then one from Earth caught my attention. It came from the Maya Indians. I noticed because it scrolled up with the image of a woman who reminded me of my grandmother, with her large, dark eyes and luxuriant braid of black hair hanging down her back. The only words we found for it were in a language called Tzotzil. Since we didn’t want an AI translating during our wedding, O’Neill made up Skolian words, keeping the spirit of the ceremony.

  We needed three candles, a ribbon, thirteen coins, and two rings. For candles, O’Neill dug out penlights from a locker. She found a long string we could use as a ribbon, and she had a handful of coins in her pocket. The rings gave us the most difficulty. We finally took two fittings off a brace on the bunk. We were supposed to kneel at an altar, but since we had neither the altar nor the necessary g-forces, we improvised by floating near the bunk.

  O’Neill turned on the penlights and gave us each one, keeping the third for herself. She spoke gently. “May these lights keep your future well lit.” Then she tied the ends of the string together and slipped the loop over our heads. “May this ribbon join your lives together as one.” She counted out the coins. “May your souls remain safe within you.” Handing them to Jaibriol, she said, “Tell her, ‘I give these
to you, wife.’”

  Jaibriol pressed the coins into my hands. “I give these to you, wife.” Softly, he added, “It’s all I have and I’m afraid it’s borrowed, but I give it with all my heart.”

  I lifted his hand and pressed his knuckles against my cheek, sending us floating into a strut of the bunk. “Then you’ve made me a rich woman.”

  O’Neill peered at her notes. “Actually, you say, ‘I receive them, husband.’ It’s the first time you call each other husband and wife.”

  “I receive them, husband.” I glanced at O’Neill. “Don’t I give him anything?”

  She studied her notes. “It doesn’t look like it. You give the coins to whoever marries you.”

  That seemed rather redundant, given that they were hers to start with. But I offered them. “Thank you.”

  She smiled. “Keep them. For a memory.” She pulled the rings out of her pocket, the motion bumping her against a brace on the bunk. Lifting Jaibriol’s hand, she slid a ring onto his fourth finger. Then she handed him the second ring. “You may give it to your bride.”

  Jaibriol put it on my index finger, where it fit best. It felt odd; I rarely wore jewelry. But that was all right. I would get used to it.

  “If I were a priest,” O’Neill said. “I would read Mass now. But since I’m not…”

  “We understand,” I said.

  “I guess that’s it, then.” She unhooked a node pad from her belt. “As Captain of this ship, I pronounce you married.” She extended the pad toward me. “You both have to sign.”

  Jaibriol visibly tensed. “If a record exists, someone might find it.”

  “If we don’t make this record, it’s not legal,” O’Neill said. “I’ll give it only to President Calloway.” She offered us the pad again. “Why get married if it doesn’t mean anything?”

  “It means something to us,” Jaibriol said. “That’s what matters.”

  “No. She’s right.” I smiled wanly. “That’s how they used to end wars, right? Marry off the children of the opposing forces. And think of our children, if we have any. Illegitimacy will weaken their position. If something happens to us, that may mean a lot more than we can imagine now.”