Further: Beyond the Threshold

by Chris Roberson

  A short tram ride carried me to the Atrium, where I knew, if nothing else, the large-scale structures would have remained principally unchanged, I could find a place to sit, and someone might be willing to bring me something to drink. I was right on all three counts; though, since my last visit, the café appeared to have shifted a few meters to one side to make room for a collection of chairs that seemed to be some sort of virtual reality parlor or gaming area, those in the chairs connected via interlink in a simulated sensorium.

  Picking up a tall glass of ice-cold water from the café, I wandered into the park to find a comfortable place to rest my legs, and chanced upon Xerxes, sitting on a bench, head titled back, eyeless gaze fixed on some point high above. I looked up and saw a small flock of birds wheeling overhead.

  “You’re not disturbing me, Captain, if that’s the reason for your hesitation.”

  I’d been standing behind Xerxes, some meters off, and as ey had said, I’d indeed been hesitant to approach, reluctant to interrupt what seemed to be a private moment.

  “Thanks,” I said simply and, closing the distance to the bench, settled down beside em. “I keep forgetting that you see in all directions.”

  “Any light that hits my surface registers,” Xerxes said, sighing, “though I find I only pay attention to a small percentage of the visual information at any given time.”

  I glanced at the flock overhead, which seemed to shift and move like a single organism as it swooped and dove back and forth above the treetops, darting first one way and then another. “Birdwatching again, eh? Is it a habit of yours, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Xerxes shrugged. “I suppose—that it is a habit, that is, and not that I mind you asking, which I don’t. A few incarnations ago my signal was intercepted by a planet colonized in the later days of the so-called Diaspora by sentients descended from uplifted terrestrial avians.”

  “Bird people?”

  “Precisely. And in the years I spent with them, observing and cataloguing their culture, I was forever amazed to find preserved in their habits the biological imperatives of their subsentient ancestors.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, flocking behavior, principally. Whenever they moved from one population center to another during their seasonal migrations, they would spread out over the landscape like black clouds, tens of thousands of flightless individuals in any given cluster, and yet without any central authority or guiding intelligence, they still managed to move essentially as one, maintaining set distances each from another, the mass moving almost as a single organism.”

  “Just like a flock of birds,” I said, watching the cloud of birds darting back and forth overhead.

  “Exactly like a flock of birds,” Xerxes agreed. “The scientists and sociologists of the avian culture had spent generations studying their own inborn imperatives, and had developed whole classes of mathematics devoted to continuum dynamic predictions and the analysis of the effects of individual fluctuations on group movements, and in the end, the only result of the countless years of labor was a single, simple statement.”

  Ey paused thoughtfully.

  “Well?” I asked, at length. “What was it?”

  Xerxes turned eir eyeless face to me. “We are animals, and we do as animals must.”

  I took a long sip of my water. “That seems somewhat…bleak.”

  “Only if one finds the notion of being an animal as something to be avoided. If anything, the avians found it to be a tremendous comfort.”

  “They were…comforted? By someone saying that they were no better than animals?”

  Xerxes shook eir head. “They wouldn’t have said ‘no better,’ and I won’t, either. It assumes some hierarchy with an animal at one extreme and the speaker at another, and is suggestive of nothing so much as the ancient notion of a ‘great chain of being,’ in which organisms were ranked by how closely they approached some divine ideal.” Ey paused and looked at me. “You are not a holder of an irrational belief in some divine, are you, Captain Stone?”

  I took another sip of water, thoughtfully. “If you mean do I believe in a god, or gods, some supreme intelligence that exists outside the observable universe, then the answer would be no. However, by the same token, I can’t say to you definitively that none exist. We simply lack substantial evidence to make a decision one way or another.”

  Xerxes gave a small nod, pursing his metallic lips. “A supremely defensible position, Captain. And one that goes to support the avians’ contention.” Xerxes glanced around, a gesture that was clearly for my benefit, to indicate the variegated crewmembers who were scattered through the Atrium. “The Human Entelechy takes great pride in its name, and in the notion that it has extended the franchise of ‘humanity’ to all of the children of Earth—biological, synthetic, and otherwise. The avian culture among which I lived came to a related, but opposite conclusion. Rather than saying that all sentients were humans, as no clear dividing line between animal and human could be drawn, the avians concluded that all sentients were animals, though with varying levels of sophistication and degrees of expression. There was no ideal to which they were evolving, no divine atop a great chain of being, but rather an accumulation of instinct and tradition carried down to them by their forebears. And as such, there was no shame in recognizing that, as animals, there were certain biological necessities that were their inheritance and that they would no sooner escape than you could the need to consume quantities of hydrogen hydroxide.”

  I lifted my glass in a mock salute and took another long swallow. “And that’s why you watch birds?”

  Xerxes shrugged. “No,” ey said simply. “I watch them because I find it difficult to predict what they’ll do next, and that helps me pass the time.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  On the morning of the fifth day out from the Ouroboros shipyards, the command crew gathered on the bridge to watch as the bubble of distorted space around us collapsed, and the Further dropped back into normal space.

  Before us hung the purple-and-green world of Aglibol, an Entelechy world some forty light-years away from our starting point. Instantly reconnected to the infostructure, we were flooded with congratulations, queries, and well wishes, and we paused to bask for a moment in the knowledge that our shakedown cruise had been a complete success.

  Things wouldn’t be that easy again for a long, long while.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Celebrations, both impromptu and planned, sprang up all over the Entelechy as word of our successful voyage rippled outward. Interest in the Further had been limited for decades, even longer, and it had taken my unexpected return for Zel and Maruti and the others to whip up enough support to complete construction. Now, countless citizens of the Entelechy were regretting their decision not to take part, and the intelligence of the Further reported that it was fielding an unending series of requests by individuals, groups, and worlds to take part in the project.

  That night, a dinner and reception was held aboard the ship itself, in a grand ballroom configured especially for the event. It was like the night of the Further fundraiser, but on a much grander scale, as dignitaries transited in from all over the Entelechy to attend.

  There was the kind of aimless, shuffling meet and greet that seems to cross cultures and eras, and I was introduced by any number of crewmembers to an endless parade of names and faces I’ll never recall, whether family or friends or fellow members of whatever group or culture or doctrine the crewmember represented. It reminded me of nothing so much than an open house at a secondary school, parents, students, and teachers mingling uneasily, and as I wandered the grand room with a glass of some spirit or other, smiling politely and trying to tune out the underlying buzz of interlink communication that whispered at the edge of hearing, I wondered how my father, not a gregarious man by nature, had weathered so many years of such gatherings at the National Public School.

  Finally, bells chimed from somewhere high above us, and the throng reconfigured as tables and
chairs rose from the floor. Dinner was about to begin.

  I found myself sitting at a round table with faces familiar and new. To my left sat one body of Jida Shuliang, who was temporarily reconnected via interlink to the rest of the legion while the ship was back in real-time range of the infostructure; her other two bodies were positioned elsewhere throughout the room. To my right sat Maruti and his guest, and opposite sat Zel, flanked by a pair of statuesque women.

  Amelia Apatari had declined the invitation to attend, and I could understand her wanting to avoid any awkwardness, but the Amelia emulation in my signet ring had chosen the opportunity to mingle and had projected herself onto the table to take part in the discussion. Sitting primly on a little holographic chair, she was dressed in an elaborate high-waisted skirt and jacket that she assured me was a perfect replica of that worn by one of the heroines of The Chronicles of Zenna, a seemingly endless series of fantasy novels she’d devoured as a kid, all about a pair of girls, one a Kiwi and the other a Brit, transported to a strange world of magic. Amelia confessed that she felt not a little like Melanie and Kate these days, herself.

  “So, Captain Stone,” the woman to Zel’s left said as subsentient drones set drinks and starter dishes on the table in front of us, “I imagine it must be difficult for a man with your…limitations to be thrust into such a challenging role, no?” She smiled, and her tone was all sweetness and light, but I could feel the edge of a knife beneath her words. Introduced to me as Cirea t’Stralla, Executive Emeritus of the Pethesilean Mining Consortium, she could have been Zel’s twin but that she had green hair instead of blue, and had both eyes intact.

  “Well, Cirea,” I said with a smile, “my mother always said that limitations are hurdles, not walls, and that it’s best to jump right over them instead of worrying about climbing.”

  Cirea exchanged a glance with the woman on Zel’s other side, who chuckled ruefully. She’d been introduced as Renwa t’Dianor s’Foian ch’Girasil, the Pethesilean Mining Consortium’s chief strategist, and though she’d not spoken a word to me yet, I got the distinct impression that she was carrying on a lively conversation with the other two Pethesileans via interlink. From the glances she kept shooting my way and the cold smiles that spread occasionally across their faces, I decided it was probably best I wasn’t able to hear her comments or jokes or whatever they might be, since I doubted seriously they were terribly flattering to me.

  “What in the Demiurge’s name is a hurdle?” burbled the individual sitting beside Maruti. Apparently genetically engineered to live in a heavy-gravity environment, his wattled skin a shade of green that suggested photosynthesis might be part of his diet, the Demiurgist, introduced to me only as Hierocrat Nmimn, looked like a cross between a sumo wrestler and a toad, and wouldn’t have been out of place if cast as a monster on an episode of Doctor Who.

  “An ancient sport,” Maruti explained, gesturing slightly with his glass. “Primitives set up obstacles and raced each other while running and jumping over them, sometimes on foot and sometimes riding on the backs of enslaved subsentients.”

  Nmimn rolled his bug eyes at me and took a few gasping breaths. “Your mother seems to have employed cruel metaphors, Captain Stone. She delighted in the enslavement of subsentients, I take it?”

  “Horses weren’t slaves,” Amelia chimed in. “It was more like a symbiotic relationship, I’d say. I was no fan of steeplechase, myself, but then, I didn’t much care for boxing, either.”

  ::What do you know about horses?:: I subvocalized, my words sent only to Amelia, the interlink equivalent of whispering behind my hand.

  ::Only what I learned from reading Taimi Taitto in the Wild West,:: Amelia replied with a nonvocal smirk. ::But I’m getting tired of this whole more-evolved-than-thou routine from the Amazon Triplets and Mister Toad, aren’t you?::

  ::Just a bit.::

  Jida seemed to recognize our mounting discomfort and, as a product of an earlier era herself must have sympathized, because she quickly came to our rescue.

  “Surely,” she said, her tone casual, “accusations of enslavement, perhaps unfounded, are not relegated to the distant past. What about the self-proclaimed Subsentient Separatists?”

  Nmimn harrumphed, his thick jowls shaking, and Maruti took a long sip of his drink, while the three Amazons bristled visibly.

  “Separatists?” I asked.

  “They’re what your era would call a ‘fringe group,’ Captain,” Jida explained. “They’re a loose confederation of individuals who claim that all cognition, even the low-level processing of a subsentient drone or insect, is sacred and that the Entelechy’s use of drones for menial labor amounts to nothing more than slavery. They’re known for declaiming that the Entelechy is built on the back of subsentients and that we should shut down the threshold network and return to some imagined pristine existence, in harmony with all cognition.”

  “They’re lunatics,” Cirea said dismissively.

  “They’re a menace,” growled Nmimn.

  “Yes,” Jida said, nodding slowly, “but it’s important to remember that…”

  She trailed off, her mouth hanging open and her eyes widening as something across the room caught her attention. I looked in that direction and saw a pair of strangely dressed figures entering the room. With rows of horns on their heads and their skin coded jet black, they had some sort of symbol on their foreheads—three interlocking circles in a triangle—and were wearing floor-length white robes and heavy black boots.

  I watched as the two waved to someone off to my left, and then saw the answering waves from the three Anachronists I’d run into earlier in the corridor—the midshipwoman, the redshirt, and the sailor suit. Were the horns and jet-black skin another historical “re-creation”?

  “I…” Jida began. I glanced back her way and saw that her face had frozen in a mask of anger and hatred. She sat so rigid her blood might have turned to solid ice in her veins. “You’ll have to excuse me,” she said hastily, and then stood up quickly, the chair flowing seamlessly back into the floor at her feet. “I’ve suddenly lost my appetite.”

  She strode quickly away in the opposite direction, her footfalls sounding like gunshots on the floor, and I could see the other two Jida bodies following closely after, their expressions just as grave.

  “What was that about?” I said, looking from Maruti to Zel.

  “Damnable poor taste, if you ask me,” Maruti said, shaking his head.

  “Iron Mass,” Zel said simply, her gaze flicking over to the table where the two horned figures were now sitting. “As though these Anachronists weren’t noisome enough with their childish playacting, they chose to re-create true horrors as well.”

  I’d remembered what my escort had told me about the Iron Mass. I knew that they’d been “bad neighbors” but still didn’t have a clear idea of what they’d done that was so horrible. “They were a ‘lost culture,’ right?”

  “Not the first,” Cirea said thoughtfully, “but certainly one of the worst. The Iron Mass was formerly a planetary culture of the Human Entelechy whose threshold was dismantled when they proved to be habitually antisocial. Their misguided beliefs led them to reject all digital consciousness and artificial life of any kind.”

  “Yes,” thrummed the toad-thing Nmimn. “But while their strange customs were tolerated so long as they were harming no one but themselves, with the rise of the one known as the Scourge of the Divine Ideal, and the bloody holy war they called the Second Lesser Effort, they brought pain and suffering to countless millions of Entelechy citizens, after which the threshold to their world was permanently dismantled, and they were cut off forever from the rest of the Entelechy.”

  “Most of us know it only from history, of course,” Maruti said, “but Jida was alive in those days, some five thousand years ago. Can you imagine what it must have been like to live through those times?”

  I thought about the rogue nations of the 22C, those who refused to join the world community and continued to wage
wars fought by their ancestors centuries before, all in the name of one myth or another. “Yes,” I said sadly. “I’m afraid that I can.”

  After dinner, everyone gathered in an adjacent auditorium, where a group of dramatists were staging a play to commemorate the Further’s successful maiden voyage. While I’m pretty sure that Gilbert and Sullivan hadn’t intended HMS Pinafore to be set on a solar sailship of the 27C, nor for Captain Corcoran to be portrayed by the descendant of uplifted meercats, I think they would most likely have been pleased by the production.

  FORTY-SIX

  The next morning, I gathered together the command crew representing the principal shareholders. With nothing to see from the bridge but the slowly turning Aglibol, and nowhere to go until the ship’s stores of energy were resupplied, I suggested that we meet in the café overlooking the Atrium.

  “Well, troops,” I said, setting down my cup of buna, while the others settled into chairs at the surrounding tables, “where are we going next?”

  With the shakedown cruise successfully completed, the Further was ready for its first new mission.

  “Isn’t that really up to you, Captain Stone?” Xerxes said. “After all, as majority shareholder in the Further, the Plenum is in a position to select whatever destination it likes, with the wishes of the other shareholders following in subsequent missions.”

  “True,” I said. “And since I’m the sole Voice of the Plenum on the ship, the decision is mine, and I’m deciding to open the floor for suggestions. So”—I glanced around the room—“any suggestions?”