Time Past

by Maxine McArthur

  I wished Heron and the others who’d worked on Calypso II were still here to see this. If they were, I’d ask them to help me go over it. As soon as we’d worked out this present mess, I promised myself to look up where they’d been transferred and tell them what happened. And I couldn’t ask any of the present engineering staff for help—they’d either be arrested with me or end up transferred like the others.

  I reached out a hand to the ship, palm up. It seemed expectant, somehow. Perhaps I was more attuned to it now, but I could feel tension humming in the air. The name popped into my head immediately. “Farseer,” I said aloud. And the ship listened. Like a dog with its ears pricked, waiting. What a ridiculous simile. Ships don’t have ears.

  Farseer it is, then.

  I considered asking Murdoch for the tool An Barik had given Stone, in order to try gaining quicker access to Farseer, but the risk was too great that the ship would be completely immobilized. Better to stick with my own methods. I checked the control panel just inside the dock’s air-lock entry. Outer space door, inner space door locks activated. Atmospheric controls green.

  From the maintenance locker beneath the control panel I took a Level One toolkit then brightened the lights around Farseer before returning to its side. Setting my handcom to voice record, I began.

  “The hull looks smooth, but tactile examination reveals indentations that feel approximately one millimeter in depth and width. These indentations follow no easily discernible pattern and seem to continue across the entire surface.”

  I paused and took out a gauge from the toolkit. It should pick up any information the handcom’s more limited sensors missed.

  “The first time I used this vessel, it opened without direct command when I traced one of these trails with my bare hand and thought of entry hatches. I’m trying the same thing now...”

  And it worked again. Part of the hull moved, and suddenly an opening existed.

  “It’s not a sliding door. The opening part seems to actually dissolve back into its surroundings, rapidly. It leaves an entry of”—I glanced down at the gauge—“one hundred twenty by eighty centimeters. I’m going in now.”

  It looked the same as last time. Small cabin, floor-to-ceiling consoles or control surfaces. A definite floor, which showed its Invidi genealogy—they always used the gravity field. Dim to moderate lighting, orange-tinted.

  “I’m trying access with the sensor gauge first.” This was totally unsuccessful. The ship refused to recognize any of the gauge’s universal access codes. In fact, it refused to recognize the gauge itself. All console and wall surfaces remained stubbornly unlit. This could be because the universal codes hadn’t been developed when Farseer was built. But as the codes were based on Invidi access methods, I’d assumed Farseer would find something familiar in them.

  “Next I’m trying the same method of access as last time. That is, direct physical contact with one of the control panels.”

  This was more successful. Successful in the sense that the panel lit up and began to show me information, but less so in that the jolt of whatever it was up my arm sent continuous needles of pain through neck, head, and shoulders.

  On any ship with an Invidi jump drive, whether K’Cher, Melot, or Bendarl—I’d never been on an Invidi ship—the jump drive itself is inaccessible. On most of them, the drive is in a separate, sealed section. Only the master can activate it.

  When I worked as a ship’s engineer my job had always been to maintain the flatspace engines. Using the jump drive destabilized fuel ratios and the entire engine system required recalibrating after each jump. As even a minute antimatter leakage would finish the ship’s journey very quickly, this was an important task. And always rushed, as ships’ masters pressured engineers to get quicker and quicker after jumps. The only time I’d ever been able to take my time was when I piloted Calypso II from the jump point to Earth in 2023, and then I’d been worried about my supplies running out.

  Jump-capable ships have thrusters of a particular configuration. That is, the flatspace engine has a drive-enabling connection—the gate. It seems to draw energy from the thrusters, hence the slight imbalance after each jump that we have to recalibrate. In all my previous attempts to understand the jump drive, because I couldn’t actually get into the drive system itself, I’d been forced to concentrate on why the gate causes this imbalance. The gate was the closest I’d get to the drive itself.

  Even with Calypso II, all we’d done was buy an old freighter that had had its jump drive chamber removed. Into that we put what seemed like a similar chamber from the wreckage of Calypso, and linked what we hoped was its gate connection with the freighter’s thrusters. We hadn’t actually opened the drive chamber. I had to recalibrate Calypso II ’s thrusters after I arrived in 2023 in the usual way, which seemed to indicate Calypso didn’t have a special drive of any sort. That is, it behaved the same as did ships traveling on the Central network. And yet it jumped to a point off that network. Whatever the secret of the off-network jumping, I didn’t think it had been in Calypso itself.

  Farseer ’s drive might be accessible. I wanted to see into that system. I wanted to take it apart and see how it worked.

  First I had to map out what was in the system so I knew I was taking the right things apart, and so that if there were any Tor surprises in there, I’d know. I had to do it properly, through an interface, because I didn’t trust the mental link to give me all the information. And I had to set up safeguards both for myself and for the station. Especially given Farseer ’s Tor elements.

  I didn’t trust those Tor elements. We’d had so much trouble with Tor hardware in the early days of the station when I was still only site manager, before Jocasta was even named.

  We’d used the Tor structure of the core and Alpha ring because the alternative was to build a station from scratch and the Confederacy didn’t have the resources or the desire to do that. So we tiptoed around the booby traps and explored the mazes and tried to make it work to our directions. It did work, but even now, seven years later, the core was never trustworthy—you could go into it and find meter-wide sections encrusted with new connections, impassable. Not with live Tor technology, of course, more like our Invidi-designed connections were trying to prevent a revival of Tor activity.

  This didn’t seem to disrupt our systems, perhaps because everything was backed up in the rings and we ran regular observation teams to the core. But some systems, water circulation and atmospheric monitoring, for example, had to be coordinated from the center. Viewed as a whole, the Tor elements in the opsys were no more than one variable, but they could interfere significantly in an emergency by diverting power and information from important functions. As had happened during the Seouras blockade. Some of the other variables—the “extra” adjustments that half the population illegally made, for example, had been reduced since the end of the blockade.

  But the Tor bits were still there. I didn’t like it, this building a station on top of hostile hardware, however much we’d irradiated and restructured and overlaid the Tor systems with Invidi identity. In the early days of construction I’d often dreamed of being lost in a maze, booby traps on all sides, endlessly rewriting commands to overlay Tor systems, but the commands would unravel as I watched and the maze would close in.

  Invidi technology is also “alive,” of course, in the sense that it has active neural architectures and strong learning matrices. But the Tor codes try to rewrite each Invidi matrix, by using the Invidi ability to learn, and make it learn to be Tor. So why couldn’t we just live in a station built with Tor technology and not Invidi? Because Tor interfaces were not safe for humans. They were supremely xenophobic and rejected anything non-Tor.

  If the technology was like that, I hated to think what the Tor themselves might have been like. Hating all other life forms, probably. The Invidi must know, but they weren’t telling.

  In any case, I had to hurry and both set up a map of Farseer ’s system and make sure its Tor elements co
uldn’t affect the station’s opsys. I kept going with what I was doing—trying to get the system to send information to my handcom. And soon it did, although I wasn’t certain of the content of the information. The physical connection made it easier for me to comprehend it, but I couldn’t keep this connection up for however many hours the process would take.

  “The panel is giving me what I think is diagnostic information. It’s going to take a while to process this.” I kept talking to the handcom. Made it seem less like I was talking to myself.

  The physical effect of using the connection grew worse. If I got a migraine each time I connected, I couldn’t do much research on the ship. I tried taking a break, but the ache merely dimmed slightly. The ship didn’t read that as a proper disconnection. I moved my fingers the opposite way and thought about finishing. The connection dissolved and I slumped back, delightfully free of pain.

  As the information loaded into my stack of handcoms, I kept investigating the cabin. Wherever the drive chamber was, there must be an access door to it from here. But the walls remained smooth, except for where they carried indentations, which I prodded and tweaked as I looked.

  How had An Serat kept a balance between the Tor elements and the rest of the Farseer ’s opsys, that is, how did he stop the Tor elements taking over the rest? Did the aliveness I sensed in Farseer come from the Invidi structure or from whatever he had taken from the Tor? If it was the former, I might be able to incorporate information from Farseer into storage in Jocasta to investigate later. From building Jocasta, I knew as much about Tor engineering as any other human in the Confederacy, as much as any other Nine Worlds member, probably.

  But it was too risky. We’d only had one emergency with Tor technology, in which energy bolts from the gray ship had almost led to a ring-wide atmospheric containment failure during the blockade. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t the Tor elements of the opsys that had malfunctioned, but I’d always been suspicious of how the energy bolts had sought out and damaged the one system that, if it failed, would have immediate catastrophic consequences.

  I picked up the sensor gauge and tried to roll the kinks out of my shoulders. Get on with the job, Halley, don’t sit staring into space.

  “I’m trying to find information about the propulsion system. If I know where the gate is, I can see how it connects with the drive. But at the moment this mapping of the system seems like it’s going to take hours. And we don’t have too many.”

  But I couldn’t go ahead without mapping. “I’ll keep checking and as soon as I’ve got enough information, I’ll begin an interior examination.” I went back to patting the walls of the cabin. Like someone looking for a secret passage in a spooky house, in one of those old vids Grace used to watch. At the end of the secret passage the characters would find hidden treasure.

  My hidden treasure was the jump drive in Farseer. My only break in twenty years spent working with and studying the jump drive. A chance to finally understand.

  Understanding the jump drive will do so many things for humans and the rest of the Nine. It will open up the rest of the Confederacy worlds to us. Imagine being able to go anywhere on the jump network we liked. Before the Seouras blockade I’d been a Four Worlds supporter, in particular an Invidi supporter. Now, while I still believed they wouldn’t deliberately harm us, I also knew they put their own interests ahead of ours, as An Barik did when he let Jocasta be blockaded simply because he didn’t want to disturb Calypso ’s arrival. Definitely, humans and the rest of the Nine need access to the jump drive.

  It can’t bring Will back.

  The thought popped into my mind and stuck with all the adhesiveness of Seouras slime.

  I found I was sobbing into my knees, rocking against the console-covered wall. The physical pain of contact with Farseer was nothing compared to this.

  How long am I going to be haunted by the thought of Will’s death? The memory keeps sneaking back, hitting me when I don’t expect it, dropping me without warning into the abyss of loss. If only... here we go again. If only I hadn’t entered that damn competition. But I knew we’d win—a century’s head start is fairly conclusive. If only I hadn’t taken Will along. Why didn’t Grace put her foot down and forbid it? Usually she was so protective.

  Because she trusted you.

  I felt sick. Farseer ’s golden light seemed too warm, the walls of the cabin too close. Damn An Serat for sending us back there. Damn myself for deciding my present on Jocasta was more important than my present in the out-town.

  How did he do it? I clutched at the thought because it wasn’t part of that guilt. How had An Serat sent Calypso to Jocasta? How did we get to Earth from Jocasta and back again? How could a jump point exist off the network?

  The handcoms made minute whirring sounds as they processed Farseer ’s information. Surely the answer was in there.

  Leaving aside the question of why Calypso ’s jump had a shorter correspondence than Calypso II or Murdoch’s ship, we could assume that An Serat was involved in possibly creating new jump points off the network. When I used Calypso ’s jump drive in Calypso II, the flatspace engines reacted in exactly the same way as they did with a normal jump drive. So I felt safe in assuming that whatever Serat did, it wasn’t with Calypso.

  All of this supported the theory that the Invidi are able to create or open jump points at will, and not necessarily from Central—An Serat was on Earth at the time.

  Opinion among the Nine is divided into two main camps on the nature of the jump drive. The first holds that the jump points are engineered wormhole mouths and that there is no such thing as a “drive”—what we call jump drive engines couldn’t possibly process the energy needed to manipulate the mouths. The “drive” is just a way for the Invidi to track all registered ships that approach a jump point. At a signal from the drive, the Invidi open the jump points from Central.

  This doesn’t explain how the Invidi have less than perfect control of the Central network—the K’Cher and their subsidiaries use the jumps for shady business all the time. And where does the energy to open the points come from?

  The second opinion says that the jump points are like bubbles in spacetime that are inflated to allow passage “through.” The jump drive is necessary to propel the ship in a certain way (nobody can explain exactly how) to pop through the bubble. This explanation seems to give the Invidi godlike powers and doesn’t really explain how they keep the network together.

  I’d never bothered too much about which theory was more likely, because I thought that when I knew how it works, I’d know why. But the off-network jump points between Earth and Jocasta supported the latter theory. The “bubbles” are supposed to be there, waiting to be activated. Maybe the Invidi have always had this ability, but don’t use it by mutual consent. You’d run into a lot of causality problems without the fixed jump network.

  I sat up straight, let my knees go, and wiped my eyes with the back of my sleeve. That fits. If Serat went against the consensus of the other Invidi by opening a jump point off the network, they’d be mad at him. If he’d also been experimenting with Tor technology... I ran my hand along the warm, almost organic surface of Farseer ’s deck.

  Maybe it was the same thing. Tor technology—new jump point— Farseer. Maybe An Serat had used it to open new jump points off the network.

  No, wait. I held my head in frustration. An Serat didn’t use Farseer, we did. The off-network jump point was there in December 2022 because that’s when I arrived from Jocasta. How could it be there before Serat had a chance to open it? Unless he opened it from the other end... no, that’s the jump point where Calypso appeared.

  My head throbbed. I’d go and talk to Murdoch, get an update on the Bendarl situation. See Lorna, ask her what my legal status is. And talk to Eleanor about getting rid of this headache. By then it might be possible to look inside Farseer and find some answers.

  Twenty-four

  Murdoch listened calmly to my excited talk of bubbles and Tor technology. The ba
nks of monitors behind his chair cast a bluish glow on the top of his head and turned the shoulders of his olive-green uniform turquoise.

  “So what you’re saying is that we can’t rely on that link you’ve got with the ship to provide accurate information.” He poured a cup of tea from the bottle beside his desk and passed it over the mess to me.

  “Yes, and getting enough information on the ship to begin investigating it is taking time.” I looked for a place to put the cup among the handcoms, data crystals, and stacks of plastocopy.

  “Drink it,” he suggested. “It’s been five hours since breakfast.” I stared at him. Five hours? I’d spent so long with Farseer. “ConFleet?” “Holding position. Nothing’s come back through the jump.” The tea was hot and sweet and did a lot to relieve my headache. “How long will you need to get an idea of how it works?” he said. I nearly laughed. For nearly a century we’d been trying to get an idea of how the jump drive works. “I’ll take as much time as I can get. A lifetime mightn’t be enough.”

  “Don’t think we can manage that long.” He had that worried line between his brows again. He rummaged below the desk and pushed a wrapped ration bar across the desk at me as well. “Eat that. You look like you need it.”

  I unwrapped the bar and chewed its sweet crumbs. “What have you been doing?” He shifted in his chair. “Getting back up to speed on what’s been going on here while I was on leave.”

  I didn’t think that was the whole story. He was looking at me as if trying to decide something. When I came into the office he’d jumped and placed the handcom he’d been reading obviously out of reach on the far side of the desk.

  “And?”

  He sighed and passed that particular handcom to me.

  The screen scrolled slowly down what looked like a diary entry. The initial date said 12 March 2076, Mars City. The first human colony on Mars. The screen’s first paragraphs concerned impressions of an official function to celebrate the colony’s foundation in 2050. It was obviously a personal record of somebody involved with colony administration. Then it continued: