Enigma

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “Switching on spots,” Thackery said, and two overlapping circles of light pierced the gloom inside Dove’s hull. Only a single bridge station, dark and inert, and a few square metres of the flooring remained. Below it, somewhat more of B deck was intact, though the damage extended down through the systems corridor to the operations decks and the vicinity of the chive.

  Exposed throughout were the hidden places of the ship, those known only to those who had built her: the conduits and cabling secreted into bulkheads, the plumbing and the gravity gridwork underlying the floors, the anonymous electronics packages nestled wherever space had allowed and function had demanded. Integument, axon, sinew, and skeleton were rent alike. It was a disturbing sight, far more disturbing than the simple news of Dove’s fate had been, for it drove home the reality that Munin’s crew were themselves living inside a fragile machine.

  “There’s no way she held any atmosphere after this happened,” Thackery said, directing his spots toward the center of the ship. ‘The inner cylinder was breached along with the rest.” He drifted in closer, and added, “I think I can get to the climbway through B deck.”

  The white figure disappeared from Munin’s view, and the attention of the spectators shifted to the relay from Thackery’s camera. They watched as he gave the ragged metal at the edge of the damaged area a wide berth, then reached out for an exposed conduit and began to move himself inside from one improvised handhold to the next.

  “Dove’s moving again!” Ryttn cried out suddenly.

  The briefest glance at the display provided confirmation.

  “Thack, get out,” Koi radioed frantically.

  “Too late,” came the answer. “I’m too far in. Better come along.”

  “Thack!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Navcon!” Koi barked. “Keep us alongside.”

  Ashen, Ryttn looked back at her. “We can’t run with her. I don’t know how she does it, but she’s got a fifty-seven degree gradient.”

  “Then do the best you can, goddamnit. Maximum slope. She let us catch her once,” Koi said, unaware of how tightly she was clenching the armrests of her seat. “Oh, Thack—”

  Picking his way along one of the radial corridors to the climbway, Thackery looked down through the twisted metal to the far end, and his breath caught in his throat. Twenty metres downship, in the long enclosed tunnel between Operations and Survey, one of the drive access panels had been either removed or torn away. A pale light from the opening played over the ladder rungs and the opposite wall.

  “Are you still monitoring me, Amy?” he called.

  “Voice and video. Thack—we can’t stay with you. We’re already a hundred klicks behind.”

  “What’s the range on a suit transmitter?”

  “About a thousand klicks. The signal is already weaker.”

  “I’m going downship, while we’re still in touch,” he said, and reached for a rung. “I love you, Thack,” she said with despair. “I love you, too,” he said, and started down. As he descended the last few rungs to where he could look through the access panel, Thackery’s heart was in his throat. It was a struggle to force himself to look through the panel. When he finally did so, he saw that the core was enveloped in a soft blue glow that danced and clung like jellied fire. Even where three of the coils were missing, the light conformed to the shape of what should have been there, forming an unbroken band around the rim of the drive core.

  “Do you see it?” he demanded of his audience. “Do you see it?”

  “Yes, Thack,” came Koi’s voice. “We see it. It looks a little like St. Elmo’s fire.”

  “I’m going to go inside.”

  The expected protest did not come, and Thackery clambered awkwardly through an opening which had been intended for a maintenance tech in coveralls rather than an E-suited visitor. Once inside, he could see that the blue glow enveloped the entire drive core, forming a complete circle. He also saw that the glow was not static but dynamic—he perceived it racing across the surface of the coils just as currents had once raced inside them.

  “Is Gwen there? Can this be what’s making her move?”

  “Here, Commander. Yes, it would have to be,” the exec said. “But don’t ask me what it is. I don’t do metaphysics.”

  “Could it be something residual—spontaneous?”

  “No, sir. No drive damaged like that should run at all, much less more efficiently than it did before the accident. If your D’shanna are doing that, then they’re magicians. Commander—I don’t want to presume, but if I were you I’d get out of the core. If that field is the source of the energy that’s driving Dove, I wouldn’t want to predict what’d happen if you came in contact with it.”

  “I think I’ll take that suggestion,” Thackery said. “There’s no one here, anyway.”

  But as Thackery turned to go, a tongue of jellied blue fire grew out toward him from the gap between coil 17 and coil 21 like an amoebic pseudopod. Deep in its substance appeared ghostly schlieren, like embedded threads of energy.

  “Get the hell out of there,” Koi shouted in his ear, half order and half plea.

  But Thackery was paralyzed by childish wonder. There were colors in the pseudopod too, scarlet and canary and rust, whorls of inner light made pale by the blue glow in which they were embedded.

  Like Jupiter—

  “No!” Koi screamed as Thackery reached out a gloved hand toward the projection. The instant they touched, the light raced up his arm, enveloping him in its substance, spreading across his torso and down his legs, crawling across his faceplate. Koi screamed again as the display screen on Munin showed nothing but blue, but the sound died in Thackery’s ears as the blue light and the ship around him both disappeared.

  He was surrounded by currents of color, each different from the next in hue, in density, in brightness, in scent, in sound, in taste, all senses confused, all sensations mixing immiscibly in great swirls and whorls, both distant and near, both surrounding him and enveloping his—

  His—

  His body did not exist. He regarded the place he seemed to occupy and found nothing. He opened his mouth but heard no sound. He brought his hand to his face, but his eyes saw nothing, his hand found nothing to touch.

  =You are locked into the patterns of your material existence. Release them. Reach out to me and I will show you. Reach out to me and I will help you.

  The knowledge that he was not alone sent Thackery twisting and jerking in a frantic effort to find his enemy. But there was nothing to push against, nothing to push with, and his most energetic contortions created not the least disturbance in the ebb and flow of the currents around him.

  =You have been here before—you have been here before—do not be afraid—you have been here before. I have bound you to the spindle.

  There was no climactic event, no clear moment of transition, but presently calm and reverie washed over Thackery, and his struggles ceased. He saw that there was order in the currents, and great energy. And he became aware of his companion as a complex resonance hovering nearby.

  –You are D’shanna.

  Thackery saw the thought enter the flux as a pattern, weakly formed but of clear meaning. Strangely, it had been stripped of the emotional overlay which he had thought integral to the concept. It was a label, not an accusation.

  The answer came in the same wise, childishly simple and achingly complete. = I know and answer to that name, though it is not a part of me.

  –What do you call yourself?

  =We know each other in other ways.

  –Others…– The incomplete thought was barely an outline, and vanished almost the moment released. Thackery reached out past his companion and saw a hundred resonances, a thousand, ten thousand, in the infinite expanse of his new universe.

  –I have never been here before.

  =You have. Once before I brought you across. Once before I bound you to the spindle. The memory of it has driven you to seek it again. But it was nowhere in y
our matter-matrix to find. Only here.

  –Why me? Why did you choose me?

  =You must stop. You must stop.= The patterns were bright and insistent. =I cannot do it. You must stop them.

  In the pattern of the thought Thackery saw its meaning: the survey ships turning back, retreating from the frontier. –You destroyed four civilizations.

  =I did not know that would happen. I saw only their yearning and that their yearning would carry them to danger. I meant only to fill their need. I meant only to protect you.

  –That’s not true.

  =A false thought will not form long enough to be perceived. A false pattern is destroyed by its own dissonance. You know this already. You thought us the destroyers, but you know now that it is not so, because you could not make it part of our namepattern.

  Thackery could not argue; the very substance of the spindle enforced the truth of the being’s response. –Then what danger? Why did you bring me here?

  =I do not understand what moves you. I have been watching you across ten million fibers of the spindle. When I look on the matter-matrix of your existence, I see the shadows of what it was and what it will be. The full Greatcycle is contained in the thing itself, its origin and destiny. But you are different. The origin is there to see, but I cannot see the destiny.

  –Are you…– The word “God” had never come easily to Thackery’s lips, but in the ideogrammatic communication of the D’shanna it could barely be formed at all.

  =You wish me to be more than I am.—You are not the force to which so many of my kind have , looked.

  =I am and am not. I am only what you see, not the answerer of orisons nor the bestower of eternal life—except that those pleas helped stir me to take note of you.

  Not God—Thackery felt emptied, deprived of the only label he had which seemed appropriate for the being before him.

  –Gabriel,– Thackery said on a sudden impulse. –I will call you Gabriel.

  =When I first looked out and discovered you, the idea that matter could be animate and self-directed was beyond formation. It took much time to find the pattern and confirm that it was a true-thought. Even then, as I watched you and came to know you, I believed that the consciousness of those like you was imprisoned in the matter-matrix. I tried at first to free you. But when I first brought your kind across, they could not keep themselves whole. Their energies lost coherence.

  –They died?

  =Some died. Some I returned to the matter-matrix, but even there they could not restore their coherence.

  –Will I die? Will I go mad?

  =No.

  –Why not?

  =Because you have come ready. You have prepared yourself in the searching. I knew one would come looking, and not die.

  –Then I am not the only one?

  =You are the one who came.

  –But there were others.

  =In a thousand ways, a thousand others were touched. Some were touched too deeply, and they lost their coherence. Some were touched too lightly, and were not changed. In the craze these last sense the nearness of the spindle and remember.

  –Amelia—McShane—

  Each name was a tiny resonance in the greater dynamic.

  =Yes.

  –We’re not in control—we never were. You’ve been watching us, guiding us, manipulating us—what are you? = I am as you perceive me. Nothing is hidden.—But what are you? What is this place? = This is the other face of reality. The birth and death of your matter-matrix are linked here, in the fibers of the spindle. We ride the fibers of the spindle and draw our energies from the cataclysms at both ends.

  –If you can do that, then what use are we to you?

  Thackery sensed puzzlement. =I have tried to protect you.

  –From what?

  =Look outward and find it. The spindle holds the reflections of the entire Greatcycle.

  –Is this what you did to the Sennifi? When I look will I know what Z’lin Ton Drull knew?

  =You will know more.

  –What the Drull knew destroyed him and his kind.

  =If you are not ready, then I will wait for another to come. If there is time.

  –Time before what?

  =Look and you will have the answer.

  –I am afraid.

  =You do not yet know why you must be afraid. Look.

  It was like learning to read all over again. Just as there was far more contained in writing than the simple black marks on white paper suggested, so too there was far more to seeing than the eddies and currents he had perceived so far. He opened himself up and the Universe poured into him, finite in extent and infinite in detail, bursting with energy and activity. He saw the Universe for the first time as alive and interconnected, not hostile and empty.

  –I can see the ships! The sudden thought was jubilant, a glittery grid of harmonic energy. = Yes. Your vessels draw their energy from here, disturbing the spindle at the interface.

  Thackery perceived each ship as a snag, an imperfection, where the fibers of the spindle were drawn outward across the boundary between Gabriel’s universe and Thackery’s. He saw each ship distinctly: the packets shuttling between Earth and the Advance Bases, the survey ships scattered beyond. How tiny is the part of it which we know, how tiny the steps we have taken. But he swelled with pride nonetheless as he found Dove and Munin playing fox and hound among the stars of Lynx.

  –You always knew where we were.

  =But you guided your own ships, set your own destinations—as did your Forefathers.

  –Can I see them?

  =You must.

  –Where? How?

  =Each fiber encircles space and partitions time. If you would look elsewhere, then you must move in-matrix toward centrality or out-matrix toward horizon. If you would look elsewhen, then you must move uptime toward origin or downtime toward terminus.

  –I can go to any time or place? = If you can find the proper place in the spindle and can look with sufficient skill. I will guide you.—No,—Thackery said, retreating.—If I am to believe what you show me, there are things I must see alone first. = 1 will wait for you here.

  Moving required Thackery to employ a conception of direction. Unconsciously, Gabriel’s ideograms had already tapped Thackery’s library of schema for the words most appropriate to describe the undescribable. Following that lead, Thackery completed the image of a great translucent cell caught in metaphase, the birth and death of the universe forming the poles of the mitotic spindle.

  Time flowed along the fibers of the aster, past to future, centriole to centriole. Across the breadth of the aster stretched the expanse of space, its geometry reflecting the slowing expansion and inevitable contraction of the cosmos. And beyond the cell membrane lay the matter-matrix of Thackery’s Universe.

  The image was incomplete and imperfect, but it sufficed. He crossed space in great dancing leaps. His self-resonance propagated from one fiber to the next to the next. The leaps were made with more confidence than was justified. Deceived by his own heliocentric mentality, having forgotten that the shape of the Universe reflected not human coordinate systems but the dictates of the physics which spawned it, he quickly became lost, looking out on nameless suns with no conception of which of the Galaxy’s billions they might be.

  His very conception of Gabriel’s universe buckled at the realization that, again the victim of ethnocentrism, he had failed to factor in the infinitude of galaxies. Burdened by that complexity, he lost his perception of order, and with it very nearly lost the coherence of the resonance which was his entire existence.

  –Gabriel, help me. Guide me to Earth.

  The call did not bring Gabriel, but other D’shanna came to cluster around him as though examining a curiosity. They sent thought-pictures to each other, but not to him.

 
  >The matrix is disturbed here.

  one thought, and stirred up a swirl of ocher energy which crashed down on Thackery and further weakene
d him.

  :It persists.

  –Call Gabriel, Thackery pleaded.

  >See, you have disturbed the disturbance into an imitation of life. A good joke, –namepattern–, I will remember to speak it when I return downtime. With that, the D’shanna moved off. Thackery was too feeble to follow, his resonance half the amplitude and a far paler hue than it had been. He did not know how much time passed while he languished that way, carried toward terminus by the current of the fiber.

  =Merritt Thackery.

  The ideogram came out of the distance, bright and clear. Thackery seized it and molded what remained of his self to its contours.

  =Merritt Thackery.

  =Merritt Thackery.

  Each repetition strengthened him, for the name was more than a label—it was the pattern of his consciousness, taken in totality. It came to him that the D’shanna were not immortal, that they required the mutual reinforcement which came from other-recognition to persist as coherencies. As he thought that, his own resonance acquired a new harmonic.

  –Gabriel,—he called as the alien appeared in the distance. It was then that Thackery realized Gabriel’s resonance was far more complex than those of the D’shanna who had found him a curiosity and nothing more.

  =Have you found what you wanted?

  –No. I was lost.

  =Show me where you wish to see.

  –Earth.

  The glittery thoughtpattern was blue, brown, and white, as beautiful as the planet itself.

  =I will take you there.

  Together, Thackery and Gabriel flew across the aster, a hundred thousand light-years compressed into a thousand multifilamented fibers.

  –Where are the people?– Thackery demanded as he looked down on a world of stone and ocean and cloud.

  =You came a long way downtime in your wandering.

  –This is the future?

  =You can see only the impulse of the inanimate future. Extend yourself against the current and we will find the present.

  Though the fiber itself was tranquil and turgid, unlike the leaps across the aster, there was resistance to their passage uptime. As they neared the present, the complex turbulence which had surrounded Thackery in the beginning began slowly to reappear.