Further: Beyond the Threshold

by Chris Roberson

  One thing to which newcomers to the Further sometimes found it difficult to adjust to was the artificial gravity. Before the perfection of the metric engineering drive, the only way to get gravity—or anything like it—away from a massive body was to spin or to accelerate. Anything at relative rest was going to be weightless, essentially. But by modifying the variable vacuum dielectric constant, a metric engineering drive was able to produce all sorts of useful changes in a limited region of space surrounding the ship, including the speed of light, effective mass, inertia, clock speeds, energy states, and the length of rulers—all of which were not fundamental qualities, it’d been discovered, but secondary characteristics of the quantum vacuum itself.

  The main use of the drive, of course, was to create a “bubble” of distorted space that completely surrounded the ship, such that while the real acceleration inside the bubble remained zero, the bubble itself traveled through normal space at superluminal speeds. An added benefit, which could be enjoyed even when the ship was at rest, due to the comparatively small amounts of energy it required, was the ability to induce gravity in the ship’s habitable areas.

  The midpoint of the gravitation field were the drive elements themselves, which were contained in the ring around the sphere’s circumference. As a result, the equator of the main sphere was always “down,” the direction of the induced gravity’s pull. Consequently, the decks of the upper hemisphere had a different orientation to those in the lower hemisphere, and anyone riding a lift shaft from one to the other actually skewed over 180 degrees when passing the midpoint. The change was quick, and almost imperceptible, but particularly sensitive crewmembers were known to get momentarily ill in the transition, and there were several in the crew, as a result, who stayed in one hemisphere or the other unless the trip was absolutely necessary.

  Those who stuck in the upper hemisphere perhaps get the better end of the bargain. While the lower hemisphere was largely given over to cargo space, industrial-sized fabricants, mass storage, and such, the upper hemisphere, in which much of the crew had their personal quarters, was where many of the ship’s amenities were to be found, chief among them the Atrium.

  If the Further was a city, or at least a large town, then the Atrium was the town square. A large open space under a high, domed ceiling, the Atrium featured a sizable park with a broad meadow, a grove of trees, a bandstand and theater shell, and a large ornamental fountain with statues of smart matter that reconfigured into different shapes and postures at irregular intervals. Live birds and other animals up to the size of deer roamed freely in the park, tended by subsentient drones. The park was bordered by a circular walkway around which was positioned a café, stalls where crewmembers were able to vend their craftwork, and a variable number of restaurants. The domed ceiling of the Atrium could be configured to display any number of scenes, from a cloudless blue sky to a cloudy gray afternoon to green heavens sparked with red lightning to a color-corrected representation of the exterior view from the ship itself, compensating for red and blue shift.

  The first time I’d seen the Atrium with my own eyes as the Further led me and Maruti on our abbreviated tour, I found it difficult to accept that I was still on board a starship. Almost as difficult to accept, perhaps, was the fact that the robot probe Xerxes was there, idling at a table in front of the café, eir eyeless gaze fixed on the small birds wheeling overhead, with something almost like a smile on eir metallic features.

  THIRTY-TWO

  “Xerxes 298.47.29A!” Maruti called out happily as we stepped out of the tram and onto the walkway leading to the café. “So nice to see you again.”

  The Exode probe glanced up—if a robot with no eyes can actually be said to “glance”—and the faint smile quickly faded.

  “Maruti,” Xerxes said with a faint sigh, nodding in Maruti’s direction. Ey turned, and to me said, “Captain Stone.”

  The Further avatar alighted gracefully on my shoulder.

  “And…?” Xerxes regarded the silver eagle for a moment, thoughtfully. “Ah. Further. I almost didn’t recognize you.”

  “Astrogator,” the avatar answered, inclining its head momentarily.

  Xerxes had contributed a significant amount of power to the Further fund—the majority of the non-inconsiderable fortune ey’d amassed over the centuries by sharing Exode technology and science with the Entelechy—more than any but the Plenum, the Demiurgists, and the Pethesilean Mining Consortium and, as a result, was one of the leading voices in the crew. Ey’d accepted the role of astrogator, but more to stave off boredom than anything else, it seemed.

  “Mind if we join you?” Maruti said, pulling up a chair before waiting for an answer. As the probe regarded him silently, the chimpanzee motioned the waitron over. At first, I assumed it was a subsentient drone, like the zookeepers who looked after the park animals, but as the server drew near, I saw it was flesh and blood, some sort of uplifted bipedal feline.

  “Yes, gentles?” the cat-waitron purred. “Can I help you?”

  “It’s not too early in the ship’s day for a cocktail, is it?” the chimpanzee answered and, when the waitron responded with only a confused look, hastened to add, “I’m sorry, an obscure joke. In our dear commanding officer’s day, I’ve discovered, some cultures preferred to limit the ingestion of intoxicants to the later percentages of the day.”

  The cat, who I saw now was female, glanced at me, a somewhat suspicious look on her face. “Whyever for, Captain?”

  I could only smile and shrug. “Things were different in primitive times, I suppose.”

  With a lingering confused glance my way, the waitron took Maruti’s order, some strange beverage with an unlikely name. I joined Xerxes and Maruti at the table, as the Further avatar hopped from my shoulder to the back of a nearby chair, and then the cat turned her attention to me.

  “And you, Captain Stone, is there anything you require?”

  “No,” I said, and then thought better of it. “Actually, you can answer a question for me, if you don’t mind.”

  “Certainly,” the cat said with a smile.

  “I was just wondering…” I paused. “I’m sorry, what was your name again?”

  “It hasn’t been announced, but it’s Ailuros, actually.”

  “I was just wondering, Ailuros, why choose to wait tables? When the work can be done by drones, I mean.”

  The waitron regarded me quizzically, her whiskers twitching. “You could just as easily ask why any of us do anything, sir. All of us on board the Further, as indeed all sentients throughout the Human Entelechy, perform functions that could just as easily be accomplished by subsentients, who would just as likely be more efficient and error-free in their work. So why bother, when we could be at our ease?”

  I thought it over for a moment. “Well, from what I’ve seen, people still perform services in exchange for payment—power, I mean.” I glanced at Maruti. “Don’t you intend to give Ailuros a gratuity when she brings your order?”

  “Naturally,” the chimpanzee said in a broad gesture, pulling a cigar from a case in his smoking jacket and cutting off the tip. “Provided the order’s right.”

  “So it would be easy to assume, Ailuros, that you work in exchange for power. Right?”

  “Perhaps,” Ailuros purred, her head tilted to one side, “until one took into account that, as an expert in the physics of the quantum vacuum, I could likely find more lucrative employment elsewhere. There are engineering firms who’d be willing to exchange more power for one day’s work from me than I could earn in ten years of serving beverages.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, nodding appreciatively. “In that case, my question stands. Why wait tables?”

  “Because I like waiting tables.” Ailuros, smiling, turned and walked away.

  When she’d gone, I turned to the others, confused.

  “If I’m too much the unfrozen caveman in your world, please forgive me, but there are still so many things about your society that I just don’t understan
d.”

  “Don’t worry, Captain Stone,” Xerxes said in a tired voice, “there’s much about them I don’t understand, either. Like the reasons why so many biologicals feel the desperate need to unburden themselves to me. Perhaps it’s something to do with my physiognomy, I don’t know. But our server felt impelled earlier to tell me an abbreviated version of her life story, when all I wanted to do was watch the birds. She’s contributed a hundred-thousandth share to the Further fund, I’m given to understand, and has a post working in drive engineering, but intends to spend her free time here, serving orders.” Ey glanced the way the waitron had gone, and then back at me, and shrugged. “Your explanation for her actions is likely as good as mine.”

  “Xerxes,” Maruti said, holding the end of his cigar in the flickering flame of a compact lighter, “you never struck me as a birdwatcher.”

  “In our brief, fleeting encounters, Maruti, I’m surprised that I struck you as anything at all.”

  Maruti took a long pull from his cigar. “Perhaps an interesting and unexpected benefit of our traveling together, a few thousand of us in such close quarters, is that we’ll all learn things we never suspected about one another, becoming faster friends in the process.”

  The probe sighed and was silent for a long moment. “How…wonderful.”

  Less than fifteen minutes later, Maruti was shouting at him at the top of his lungs, and the chances of the two becoming fast friends seemed vanishingly remote.

  THIRTY-THREE

  “What do you mean, deluded?”

  We were on the tram, continuing our tour of the ship. Xerxes, having nothing better to do, had opted to join us, and sat between Maruti and me while the Further avatar flew alongside.

  “I don’t mean to offend, of course, but it seems clear to me that you simply haven’t applied any sort of scientific rigor to your unformed beliefs.”

  “Unformed?” Maruti’s mouth opened wide, his lips pulled back vertically and teeth bared, his facial hairs erect. I was still learning to read chimpanzee expressions, but even I recognized this as aggressive.

  As we descended the lift shaft, heading toward the lower hemisphere, Maruti had casually asked what Xerxes hoped to get out of his participation in the Further, and Xerxes said that he was mainly hoping to stave off boredom. The chimpanzee had then mentioned the desire of the Demiurgists to find definitive, incontrovertible proof of ancient aliens, and things had gone quickly downhill from there.

  “Well, your ideas have scarcely reached the level of hypothesis,” Xerxes went on, “and the scant data you’ve been able to gather, none of it statistically significant, can all be easily explained by a wide variety of far more plausible causes. I don’t see the desperate need to cling to the myth of ancient non-terrestrial intelligences as anything but an irrational delusion, and I’m sorry if that offends you.”

  “‘If that offends,’ you say? As though such a casual dismissal of the work of thousands of sentients over hundreds of years can be anything but offensive?”

  Xerxes shrugged. “I know that the fact that your life has, to date, been wasted must be a troubling one to accept, but that’s hardly my fault, is it?”

  “But you are the result of design and intention, just as much as I am. I find it impossible to believe that a being such as yourself couldn’t accept at least the possibility that if my subsentient ancestors could be uplifted and dumb matter could be transformed into a consciousness such as yours, then the rise of life on Earth in the first place might not have been the result of an interfering intelligence, whether ancient alien or extradimensional being or what have you.”

  Xerxes let out a labored sigh. “And I suppose next you’ll be claiming that rainbows are painted in the sky by fairies from underspace, no?”

  Maruti, all sense of polite discourse forgotten, screamed wordlessly at the probe, teeth bared and hairy fingers curled into claws at his side.

  The tram came to a stop in a large open space. “Ah,” Xerxes said calmly, climbing to eir feet, “we seem to have arrived.”

  Ey strode away from the tram, pausing only to glance back and say, “Captain, Maruti, aren’t you coming?”

  I looked over at Maruti, who seemed more like a wild animal than I would have imagined possible, and suspected that even four cubic kilometers would seem too small a space if this disagreement continued much longer.

  The Further had brought us to a large hold area, a vast cavernous space, where familiar shapes were being carefully arranged. As we climbed from the tram, a large black-and-white shape, trailed by a cloud of fine mist, came ambling over toward us, singing out a greeting.

  “Welcome aboard, folks,” called Arluq Max’inux, the towering cetacean. “Come down to make sure I’m not getting any scratches or dings on them?” She hooked an enormous thumb at the shapes hulking behind her, craft of various shapes and sizes. The far wall, with its slight curvature, was just within the outer hull, and bay doors could be opened to allow the craft to come in or out, the internal atmosphere kept in place by fields.

  Two of the craft, in particular, were familiar—the replica of the Orbital Patrol Cutter 1519 and the metric engineering prototype that Chief Executive Zel had displayed at the fundraiser. Arluq, who’d taken the post of ship’s fabricator, had been overseeing the arrival of the various craft the Further would carry on board, and I’d insisted that the cutter and the prototype be among them. The prototype, which I’d asked be dubbed the Compass Rose—I couldn’t conscience a ship that didn’t have a name, no matter how small—seemed to me like it would make a useful shuttle or captain’s gig. It couldn’t reach superluminal speeds, but its metric engineering drives could generate internal gravity in the crew compartments, and it could land and take off from spaces that a torchship wouldn’t be able to reach, much less a sailship.

  “Looking good, Arluq,” I said.

  I followed the cetacean over to the Compass Rose, which sat flush on the deck, the size of a small house. One walked up any of the eight radiating points to the open hatch, looking for all the world like a flying saucer from an old black-and-white science fiction movie.

  “I took her out for a spin before bringing her on board, RJ, and if the full-size model is anything like the prototype, we’re in for quite a ride. I got her up to a quarter the speed of light in less than seven-thousandths of a standard day.”

  That was quick, a little under ten minutes. I was impressed, and I’m sure my expression showed it.

  “What do you say?” Arluq’s mouth spread in a wide smile, revealing wicked teeth. “Want to take a ride?”

  I was deeply tempted, but before I could answer, the Further avatar interrupted. “Your pardons, but the first has requested that the command crew convene on the bridge. If you have no objections, I’m to escort you.”

  I looked from the silver eagle to the cetacean and sighed a bit wistfully. “Maybe another time, Arluq?”

  “Sure,” she answered with her vicious smile. “I’m not going anywhere. Or I guess I am, but we’re all going there together, right?”

  “True enough,” I said. Except it wasn’t. I had to go to the bridge and deal with the “first,” while Arluq got to stay in the landing bay and play with the toys.

  It hardly seemed fair.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The bridge was designed like an amphitheater, concentric steps leading down to the control center, a wide circular table surrounded by seats at regular intervals. One seat was slightly larger than the others—the command chair.

  Lit only by the glow of the smart displays on the table’s surface, the rest of the room in shadows, Zel i’Cirea and the brothers Grimnismal were in close conversation when we entered the room, but as soon as we did, they fell quickly silent.

  I stepped down into the center of the room, followed by Maruti and Xerxes, while the Further avatar winged overhead, coming to rest on a perch high on the wall. A long silence followed, broken at last when Zel finally spoke.

  “Captain Stone.” She pause
d again, her expression unreadable. “I believe this is yours.”

  She stood up slowly from the command chair and stepped to one side. The two corvids, shooting me looks, retreated to the far side of the table and slumped down side by side in a pair of seats, leaning close together like birds on a wire.

  Zel had little love for me, I knew, but I didn’t know why—not yet, at any rate.

  “Thanks, First,” I said, opting not to sit, but instead just leaning my hand on the seat’s back. “Glad to be here.”

  One of the problems I ran into when agreeing to act as the Plenum’s representative was that the Further wasn’t originally part of any tradition of command and that there was no structure in place for how things were to be run. The only guide we had was that responsibility and authority, like any potential profit, was to be apportioned on a share basis, determined by the amount of power donated to the ship’s construction. Almost like the old wet navies of earth, which divided spoils in equal shares among the crew, with the lowest-ranking crewmembers getting only fractional shares and the captain getting multiple shares, and everyone else falling in between.

  In working up an organizational structure for the Further, then, each of the shareholders had a voice, but the principal contributors had the most influence. Shortly after Maruti had completed his rejuvenation and installed my interlink, the principals met to hammer out some kind of approach.

  The principal shareholders of the Further are the Plenum, who ceded all right to contribute to the discussion to me, their sole representative; the Pethesilean Mining Consortium, represented by Zel i’Cirea; the Demiurgists, represented by Maruti Sun Ghekre IX; and Xerxes, representing himself. It took the better part of two days to work out an agreement, which seemed remarkably fast to me, but to those more accustomed to the speed of Entelechy, decision making was an eternity.

  The organizational structure we ended up devising was a mélange of the lessons I learned in the Orbital Patrol and UNSA, Zel’s experience with the solar sailships of the Pethesilean fleet, and as much authority and structure as the more lax Maruti and the more ordered Xerxes were able to agree upon between them. There were no ranks on board the Further as such—though some insisted on adopting their own, such as the Anachronists who prefered to pretend like they were in an antique wet navy or on board a ship of the First Space Age—but by consensus, it was decided that the commanding officer would bear the title of “captain.” Most everyone else in the crew had been given titles describing their posts, such as Exobiolgist Maruti, Astrogator Xerxes, and Fabricator Max’inux. Zel i’Cirea, whose people are second only to the Plenum in the amount they contributed to the Further fund, was second in command and, in accordance with Pethesilean tradition, was referred to as “First.”