Atmospheric mixing would guarantee the same general composition of the air over the whole planet. Tally’s sensors indicated that an unusually large percentage of that air consisted of the inert gases neon and argon. But he, and most other species from the Orion Arm, could breathe it with no ill effects.
He cracked open the faceplate of his suit and sniffed the air. The wind had a chill edge, more bracing than cold. Faint and unfamiliar odors filled his nostrils. It was a pity that the wind came from the cold side of the planet. The scents of life would be stronger and more revealing if they came from the hot side. But idle wishing for circumstances different from what you had was a waste of time. He had chosen this landing spot for other reasons.
Slow and easy.
Was there anything else that he ought to do before he sought the source of those scruffy bursts of radio noise? Tally could think of none. Here he was, and here, until someone came with a ship able to take him back to space, he would stay.
Choosing his path carefully so as to remain on dry land, he started to walk in the direction exactly opposite to the hovering gas-giant; away from warmth, toward the cold side. Toward the unknown source of the radio signals.
* * *
When you had little or no information, it was unreasonable to have any expectations. But somehow you did, even if they were often wrong.
Tally had noticed in the final moments before he landed that the local terrain contained plentiful hills and valleys. But the path that he was following, homing in on the intermittent radio chatter, constantly ascended. He was moving higher and higher, and the external temperature constantly dropped. By the eighth kilometer of his march, Tally was forced to close his faceplate so as to ensure the well-being of his flesh-and-blood embodiment.
He formed a working hypothesis. The source of the radio signals needed, or at least preferred, a cold environment. Either they located themselves on the side away from the source of planetary heat, or they found places high enough for the air to be thin and the radiative heat loss to open space to be high.
Well, as Julian Graves had remarked for some reason, after listening to E.C. Tally’s description of the unfortunate circumstances that led to the destruction of his second embodiment, “It takes all sorts of oddities to make a universe.”
Tally confirmed that the temperature control of his suit was set to a level comfortable for his body, and marched on.
Up, up, up—but that could not continue much longer. He was approaching an isolated peak, from which the land fell away in all directions. The vector of the radio noise pointed directly to the summit.
Tally stared ahead. He was seeking some evidence of intelligent activity. He found none, until he came close enough to the top of the mountain to observe that it formed a clear, flat line. The top had been sheared off.
He paused to give his body a breather. The last two kilometers had been hard going. The upward path had grown steadily steeper, over fresh snow that concealed hard-packed ice. Now was the time to be extra careful. With the line of the summit just ahead, this was no place to slide into a crevasse or fall over an icy precipice.
He scrambled the final thirty meters on hands and knees, digging his gloved hands deep into the snow to make sure that he could not slip backwards or sideways. And then it was suddenly easy. He had topped the final rise and stood on a level plain, clear of all snow and ice. He saw, no more than fifty meters away from him, a hundred moving figures. Sunlight reflected from glittering silver carapaces, scarlet heads, and multiple scarlet limbs.
Oddly enough, they did not seem to notice him. Well, that would change soon enough.
Tally walked forward, until he came to within ten meters of a rounded building that stood roughly in the middle of the cleared area. There he halted and opened the faceplate of his suit. The air was freezing, but this was necessary.
“Good afternoon.” As Tally spoke he sent the same words through every transmission channel of his suit. He stared at the sun, to make sure that he had it right. No point in getting off on the wrong foot. Yes, it was certainly afternoon, with sunset of this planet’s long day still maybe six hours away.
He said again, “Good afternoon. My name is E.C. Tally. I am an embodied computer, incorporated in a human form. I am eager to establish communication with you, and to exchange information.”
The beings all around him stopped moving. They remained silent, but the buzz of radio noise in his suit receiver rose to a crescendo. The task of analyzing that frenzy of signal activity was a difficult one, but Tally was well-suited to tackle it. How fortunate that this work had come to him, with his unparalleled computational and analytic ability, rather than to some organic being poorly equipped for such demanding activities.
The silvery beetle-backed creatures were closing in, forming a ring around him. Tally closed his faceplate. If Sue Harbeson Ando could see him now, she would be proud of him. He was protecting his latest embodiment. Since talk would probably be at radio frequencies, he was avoiding the inevitable wear and tear on his body that would be produced with an open faceplate in such extreme temperatures.
The beetlebacks were larger than a human, but low-built. He squatted down on his haunches, to bring his head level with theirs. It was time to start in on a tricky task for which he was uniquely well qualified: that of cross-species—in this case, cross-galactic arm—communication.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In Limbo, and out of it
Teri Dahl sat alone in the forward observation chamber of the No Regrets and wondered about the name she had chosen for their ship. Outside the port there was nothing—no stars, no faint galaxies, no dark occluding masses of gas. That had been their first hope when they emerged from the Bose node, almost a full day ago. Perhaps they were in the middle of a dark gas cloud that made the rest of the universe invisible; but tests using the sensors of the No Regrets showed that outside the ship lay nothing but the hardest of hard vacuums.
Teri could feel the stirrings within her brain of old legends and myths. All the species of the Orion Arm had discovered spaceflight long after the beginnings of their recorded history. When everything was written down or stored in computer data banks there should be no room for uncertainty. The mechanism for the creation of myths was that of oral memory and imperfect traditions. And yet the stories lived on. Ships had been lost, that was an undeniable fact. A group of unfortunate travelers might enter the Croquemort Timewell and be trapped there until time itself came to an end. Or perhaps you and your party would enter a hiatus, a singularity of spacetime from which you would emerge within half a minute—or this year, next year, sometime, never.
A rational mind rejected all such fancies. If the Croquemort Timewell existed and a ship vanished into it, how would anyone ever learn that fact? It was all imagining, the fancy of uneasy minds. And yet, beyond the No Regrets stood nothing.
For the first few hours, Teri, Torran Veck and Julian Graves had stayed together, comforting each other with useless reassurances that this would soon be over and they would pop out into open space. Teri had endured false optimism for as long as she could, then crept away to be alone. She retreated to the observation chamber and stared—stared so hard looking for something, anything, that her eyeballs felt ready to pop out of her head.
She was frightened, and ashamed of being frightened. So why was it reassuring when suddenly the door to the observation chamber slid open and Torran Veck came lumbering in?
“Oops. Sorry. I didn’t know someone was already in here.”
“Torran, if you are going to lie, you have to learn to be better at it.”
He grinned at her, quite unabashed. “All right. I knew you were here. I’ve been trying something, and I got a result. But I don’t understand it. You’re smarter than me, so I thought I’d ask you to help me out.”
“That’s a lie just as big as your last one.” Teri felt oddly comforted. “Where’s Julian Graves?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t want him in on this, in case it’s not
hing. It’s bad enough to make a fool of yourself in front of one person.”
Torran had twice Teri’s body mass, and when he sat down next to her, he as usual seemed to overflow the seat. “You came out here to find out if you could see anything,” he said. “In a way, I did the same thing, except that I went into the control room in case any of our sensors reported finding anything.”
He shook his head at her excited look. “Sorry. Not a peep from any recording instrument that we have. They all insist that the ship is nowhere in the universe. But then I did something stupid and irrational.”
“You mean more stupid than entering a Bose node when you don’t know where or if you’ll come out?”
“About that stupid. I sent a call for help.”
“You did what?”
“I know. It was totally dumb, but I felt desperate enough for anything. I generated a message saying who we were, that we were lost, and if anyone heard this, please would they come and help. I sent it. I didn’t expect any reply, but I sent it anyway.”
“And you had a reply?”
“No.” Torran shrugged. “Hey, let’s be reasonable. What are the chances of anyone picking up a call like that? Zero. But something peculiar did happen. A few microseconds after my message was sent out, the ship’s radio receivers recorded a signal. I call it a signal, but it would be more accurate to say it was a burst of static. I couldn’t make any sense of it, nor could the ship’s computer. But it was something, where before we’d had absolutely nothing.
“I sat there for a while, then I said to myself, Teri’s brighter than you. Why don’t you go and bounce it off her? And here I am.”
“Did you apply Lund’s First Rule of Oddities?”
Arabella Lund had been full of “rules,” and one of her most basic was this: Anything in the universe can happen once, or at least it can seem to happen. If you want to obtain information, make it happen again.
Torran nodded. “I did the same thing, three times over. I found identical results: send a signal, and microseconds afterwards we get a funny squiggle of radio sound on our receivers.”
“How did you send your message? I mean, was it in some particular direction?”
“No, I used omni-directional. Hell, if there was help to be had anywhere I wanted to hear from them. What is it, Teri? You’ve got an idea, haven’t you?”
“If you can call it that. It may be half-baked, but I want to try something. Let’s head back to the control room.”
“Do we need Julian Graves?”
Teri gave him a drop-dead-right-now glare. “You didn’t want to seem like an idiot in front of Julian Graves, but you don’t mind me doing it?”
“Sorry. What are you planning?”
“Wait and see. You didn’t tell me in advance.” Teri led the way to the control room. Once there, she ignored the radio wavelength equipment and went across the optical section. “Which one of these lasers provides the best collimated beam?”
“The blue-green. It diverges only one percent in fifty kilometers.”
“I hope that will be tight enough. How many microseconds after you started to send your call for help did the receivers begin to record radio noise, and how long after you stopped sending did the noise you received end?”
“I’ll have to check. It was small enough that only the instruments could pick it up—so far as I was concerned, they seemed simultaneous.” Torran moved across to the receiver displays. “Ninety-four microseconds, plus a fraction, for the delay at the beginning. And the signal went on for a hundred and sixty microseconds after my call ended.”
“That’s close enough.” Teri was at the laser station. “I’m going to send a one-second pulse from the blue-green laser. Watch the display. See anything?”
“Yes. A faint green dot showed on the screen—and it lasted about a second.”
“We’ll find when we measure it that it lasted exactly one second. Now I’m going to work my way around the full sphere, using one-second pulses every five degrees of arc. We’ll measure the exact time of return, and then we will know where we are—or at least, we’ll know the distance to the boundary.”
“What boundary?”
“Don’t you get it, Torran? We’re not in limbo, or in the Croquemort Timewell, or a spacetime hiatus. The ship is sitting inside some other object, with an interior surface that screens out external radiation and reflects interior radiation. The reason that you got what looked like random returns from your signal is because it went out in all directions, and the distance is not constant to all parts of the boundary wall. So the return was scrambled, with bits of your message jumbled together. It took ninety-four microseconds round-trip time to the nearest point on the boundary, and a hundred and sixty microseconds to the farthest point.
“Now, I’m going to assume that the velocity of propagating radiation is the same here as in open space—that seems pretty reasonable. So at three hundred thousand kilometers a second, we are fourteen kilometers away from the nearest point of the boundary, and twenty-four kilometers from the farthest point. I also find a zero Doppler shift in frequency between the outgoing laser pulses and their returns, so our ship is at rest relative to the boundary. The advantage of using laser pulses in precise directions is that we—or rather, the ship’s computer—can calculate and reconstruct the shape of the space we are inside, and also our ship’s distance from any point of the boundary. If we find places where the structure of the wall seems different, those are the logical spots where we should look for a way out.”
“Teri, you’re a marvel. Can we start that work at once?”
“I’d like to. But I think we ought to tell Julian Graves what we have learned. Do you know where he is?”
“Last time I saw him he was in his own cabin. Contemplating his navel, from the look of him. But you are right, he does need to be told. Come on.”
Julian Graves was in his own cabin. He was not actually contemplating his navel, but he was engaged in a pursuit that seemed just as unproductive. He sat in a chair, lightly strapped in position so that he would not move around in the ship’s free-fall environment. He was staring intently at a fixed point in space. Torran and Teri finally realized that a tiny green marble hung there, about a meter in front of Graves’s face.
Teri said, “Councilor, we have important news. We are not in limbo, or in some form of spacetime hiatus.”
Graves nodded. “I know. In a few minutes I was proposing to come and tell the two of you the same thing.”
Torran said, “But how could you possibly know that? You have been sitting in your cabin, and there are no instruments here.”
“Oh, but there are. The human eye and the human brain are both instruments, potentially of a high order. It is true that at no point have I looked beyond the ship itself, but I did not need to. I noticed an oddity in the control cabin some time ago. The ship’s drive appeared to be off, since we felt no accelerations. However, the drive monitors indicated that the drive was—and is—turned on, although at an extremely low level. Since our position sensors insist that we are at rest in inertial space, the only explanation is that the ship itself resides in a field of force, albeit a very weak one—far too weak to be apprehensible to human senses. If that is the case, then although the drive holds the ship itself in a fixed position, objects within the ship that are free to move should do so. They experience a small body force.”
Graves leaned back in his chair and placed his fingertips together. “You know, sitting here it occurs to me that maybe the worst mistake we have made on this whole expedition has been to assume that processes in the Sag Arm resemble in any way the familiar ones of our own Orion Arm. There are Builder artifacts here, and none is in any way like those with which we have experience. To paraphrase an old philosophical thought, the Sag Arm is not only more strange than we imagine; it is more strange than we can imagine.”
Torran’s glance at Teri sent a clear message: He’s gone gaga. The councilor is off his head. He said to Graves,
“The human eye and brain may be instruments, but there is nothing here for them to look at and work on.”
“Oh, but there is.” Graves pointed to the green pill-sized ball hanging before him. “We are not in free-fall, you see, even though our bodies feel as though they are. We are not even in the microgravity environment provided by the gravity forces of the ship itself. Steven calculated and compensated for those. An external gravitational force is acting on everything in this ship. A minute one, to be sure, which is why we can’t feel it. But if you observe the green sphere, you will find that it is being accelerated very slowly away from me and toward the rear bulkhead. There is a slight asymmetry, a preferred direction to this environment. I can estimate its magnitude by observation of the little marble. However, I have no explanation as to its origin.”
Teri said, “Councilor, we have an explanation.” Her glance at Torran said, Equal credit for this, all right? “Here is what we have learned. . . . ”
* * *
The No Regrets stood at a fixed location, five kilometers off center in a spherical region of radius nineteen kilometers. The space was bounded by a wall of unknown composition, impervious to external radiation and reflecting anything directed to it from inside.
“But we shouldn’t try to take the ship to either the nearest part of the boundary, or the farthest.” Teri was leaning over Torran Veck’s shoulder as he sat at the controls of the No Regrets. “Our best hope is one of the poles.”
It was their shorthand description for the only two points of asymmetry they had discovered in the spherical space. The “poles” were places where the return laser signal was much weaker than elsewhere, and they held out hope for an easier passage to external space.
“I have a vector to the nearer one,” Teri went on. “The distance is 12.3 kilometers.”
“Marked, and entered into the navigation system.” Torran was far more cheerful when he could do something that involved physical activity. “We can be on our way any time. All right to go ahead?”
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