by Paul Preuss
Look at the heavens, said Thowintha.
Above her, in the highest reaches of the shadowy planetarium, the star map had assumed a peculiarly contracted quality, as if the whole sphere of constellations had been squeezed into a narrow circle. I see it. What is it?
This is the next stage of our journey.
Where is our destination? Sparta asked.
There where you see it, above you, replied Thowintha unhelpfully.
Sparta saw only the crowded constellations of Barth’s northern sky. If the center of the planetarium dome were to be taken as the aim-point of the world-ship—a not unlikely assumption—then the ship’s destination was somewhere in the constellation Gemini, near the plane of the Galaxy.
What is the name of that place?
It is a non-place. There followed a staccato series Sparta could not decipher.
Sparta lapsed into trance. In the milliseconds that passed, she evaluated the implications of the peculiarly contracted star pattern on the ceiling far overhead. It was instantly clear: this was the forward view of a spacecraft traveling at nearly the speed of light. In the next few hours the world-ship was to undergo far greater accelerations than those it had needed to leave Jupiter’s orbit.
Sparta came out of the trance that had passed so quickly no one would have noticed. So that is why we drowned them.
That is why.
Thus the ark that carried us all continued its headlong dive into the sun. Inside the photosphere, stealing some of the sun’s gravitational energy, the world-ship whipped itself up and away from the solar system and, minutes later, engaged its own awesome engines. For nine days the world-ship accelerated at forty times the gravitational acceleration normal to Earth. Then acceleration stopped. We fled through empty space, weightless.
Now our abandoned tug was secure again in its nest of half-living machines, a small and awkwardly shaped human artifact intruding upon the ethereal blue hemisphere of the enormous lock. Sparta guided herself along one of its landing struts, pulling herself easily toward the equipment bay airlock, which stood open.
Inside the ship she moved deliberately, working her way up from the life support deck, past the sleeping compartments, through the common areas, toward the flight deck. With every extraordinary sense at her command she probed the Ventris’s space-worthiness, seeking the malfunction that had prevented its escape. Earlier, there had been no time to search, but it should not take long to find the cause. She knew at least as many ways to sabotage a spaceship as the man called Nemo.
Reason and intuition suggested she waste little time on hardware. On the flight deck she kicked in full system power from the ship’s capacitors. From beneath her fingernails, conducting polymer FIN spines slid like cat’s claws; she slipped them into the handiest set of IO ports and lapsed into trance.
For a second or two her consciousness was wholly inside the computer; she swam in the datastream as easily as she swam in the world-ship’s waters, although (being only a tug’s memory) this was a much smaller pool. A rank odor rose instantly in the code, and she followed the sour current to its source.
In the last minutes before the Ventris had been abandoned, someone had accessed the computer’s central nets through the library program. Unlike Sparta, Nemo had no PIN spines under his fingernails to slide out and allow direct computer interface. What he had was an ancient and sly sophistication. He knew how to infect a system through its outlying terminals, introducing a worm through quotidian traffic—in the course of ordering a meal, or summoning a bookfile from the library, or adjusting the temperature and humidity of his solitary sleeping compartment.
A bookfile had given him access. In minutes he had been able to fashion a worm from borrowed chunks of other programs, a worm that would assemble itself when the main engine countdown sequence was initiated, a worm designed to eat up sensor feedback from the engines.
Seconds after launch, the number two motor had started to overheat. Its fuel and coolant pumps had shut down. The launch had aborted.
Sparta examined the clever worm, rolling it over, dissecting it from end to end. She left it in place. Less than two seconds after she had dropped into trance, she resurfaced into real-time consciousness and pulled her spines out of the ports.
Among all life forms disease is unavoidable. Best to excise the diseased organs.
Most of us do not think that way. Most of us are reluctant to kill those who disagree with us.
We have noticed. Still it is better to cut off the diseased feeler. Another will grow in its place.
We are not made like you. Besides, another would not be the same.
Thowintha was silent a moment, before emitting an emphatic series of sharp clicks and hollow booms. Denial of sameness is a heavy burden.
For whom?
For us and you. For the living world.
4
The second day of our weightlessness passed.
Sparta gazed upon the body of the man she loved. He floated entangled in gossamer veins of pulsing fluid … entwined by suckered tentacles … sliced open by glass-edged knives. Dark blood drifted from him in veils, to be absorbed in the luminous mucous that throbbed in the waters around them both.
Then, with exquisite care, the thousand instruments of Blake Redfield's transformation detached themselves from his body and retracted, while Sparta watched in fascination. The world-ship’s machines, half alive, possessed of their own intelligence, had performed his surgery with less trauma and much less fuss than the Earthly surgeons who’d done the same job on her.
Sparta watched him fondly. She’d been away from him for most of the past year, had seen him only intermittently before that; now, when she was with him—and especially when he didn’t know she was watching—she had a tendency to become fascinated by his freckled (and after ten days without a shave, auburn-bewhiskered) half-Chinese, half-Irish face. Handsome, in her eyes. Wonderfully so.
Already a strong swimmer, bigger than she was and with heavier muscles, he had been modified by experts. Now he was like her. For although she’d designed her own reconstructive surgery, it had been done uncannily well; with her lithe quickness they would be underwater equals.
As she watched, the crimson intakes beneath his collarbones opened, taking water into the passages beside his lungs, where the muscles of his thorax forced it out again through the slits between his ribs.
At the same moment his eyes opened, He closed them again immediately, then blinked stupidly, as if trying to clear his vision. She knew what he was experiencing; the darkness around him was filled with colored lights that formed no coherent picture for human eyes.
“Aigan’dzeeyou.”
“But I can see you.”
“Aizongfunnee.” Bubbles streamed from his mouth; his vocal chords hummed with air from lungs that borrowed it by oxygen exchange with his new gills. He could not understand his own words, much less hers; his effort to speak produced nothing but gong-like ringing in his ears.
“Not funny. You sound wonderful.”
For a moment he said nothing, only peering goggle-eyed into the gloom.
“Zell…” He paused to listen to the sound of his words. “Hhelll … not earring.”
“You’ll get used to it. The brain is a plastic organ.”
“Yah?” He assayed a ghastly grin. “‘Peshly mine.” He strained to focus on her; she was a blurry shape in the darkness, “I wonderrr … owww … mean, hhhhow thaiver…”
“How they ever what?”
“‘Skovered starz. Figurowwgravtee.’ Vended spaisshhhips.”
“They have eyes, but vision is not their primary way of understanding the world.” Sparta paused. “Did you understand me?”
He nodded. “Libbit.”
“Information space is big, a lot bigger than the little slice of the spectrum that registers on our retinas.”
“Sohh you tole me.”
She smiled. “So don’t be a perceptual chauvinist.”
“Easy for you to sa
y,” Blake mumbled. It came out as a string of low-pitched echoing rumbles, accented by a tingling fizz. Already he was hearing better, and forming words that were easier for both of them to understand.
He drew in a deep draught and, with conscious effort, expelled it forcefully through his gills. The skin flaps covering his gills were rosy at the edges with healing flesh; they stung in the salt water. He felt tender and vulnerable. He held his arms awkwardly away from his sides, shy of brushing against the new organs, moving them only when he started to sink in the water.
Sparta sympathized with his discomfort but said nothing. In a day or two he would love his freedom to move in the water, as she did. Air would come to seem a thin and unsupportive medium.
They had a world to play in, and months to play in it. She taught him all her tricks—how to use the oxygen in his lungs, borrowed from his bloodstream where his gills had captured it, to control his buoyancy; how to consciously control the CO2 level in his bloodstream; how to use a mix of gases, to produce the full range of clicks and resonances needed to speak the language of so-called Culture X in its original, underwater form. And she taught him what he considered her best trick: how to excrete from his modified salivary glands a mucous that could form a tough membrane over his entire body—mirror-bright mucous, like mother of pearl or the reflector eyes of clams, and vanishingly thin, tough enough to function as a pressure suit in vacuum, reflective enough to protect against wild swings in temperature. He amused himself by blowing silver mucous bubbles as big as basketballs, so strong they could hold compressed air.
Together, they explored the deep.
Thowintha had told her the route to the very center of the ship, taking an hour or more simply to describe it, never repeating him’erself, somehow confident that Sparta would remember it. Aided by her “soul’s eye,” the dense knot of artificial tissue implanted beneath her forehead, she did remember it. Perfectly.
They descended slowly through the shells of the ship, following winding pathways that might have seemed accidents of nature, their arrangement no more rational than the tunnels of an ants’ nest. All around them the translucent walls glowed prettily blue, giving the water the color of a clear tropical sea on Earth some eight or ten meters below the surface. Larger chambers opened beside and above them, their interiors barely glimpsed; stalactites of gleaming filigreed metal hung from the ceilings of the long galleries, or stood straight out from the walls. Streams of tiny glittering bubbles rose everywhere and looped about almost aimlessly, seeking the most minute pressure and temperature differences. The bubble-streams were reminiscent of an aquarium’s aerators; quite possibly they had the same function.
The dive was long, but they were in no hurry. The first ten vertical kilometers took them almost six hours of ceaseless swimming. Occasionally they refreshed themselves by pursuing the darting fish; what they could catch, they could eat. That was the way this world was.
Light and pressure did not change with depth; the scenery changed so constantly, however, that it could have run together into a featureless smear in minds less focused than theirs.
Once they swam out into a seemingly bottomless chasm whose walls glittered with living jewels, where wreathed cables of half-living stuff hung like garlands or twisted ceaselessly above the watery void. Everywhere they were surrounded by life, shoals of silvery fish and fingerling squid darting about, veils of plankton hanging almost motionless, silently tearing and then reknitting themselves in the clear water. They caught sight of larger creatures below, moving slowly through shadowy crevasses, not of Thowintha’s kind. They swam smoothly across the chasm and entered another winding cave.
From time to time they came to a wall or a smooth floor which grew transparent and dissolved before them—-until a brief surge of current would carry them effortlessly through what moments before had been a solid barrier. These were pressure locks, and it was soon evident (as Sparta had suspected from the expedition’s previous explorations) that the water pressure inside the world-ship varied little from level to level. It was a huge ship but a small world, and its self-gravity was minuscule; pressure was regulated much as the cells of the human body regulate pressure, by constantly adjusting the molecular structure of their containing walls.
Only the sounds changed, and those gradually. In the upper levels of the ship the water had been filled with the insect-like chitter and skirl of countless organisms, punctuated by the occasional bark of a fish or the click of closing shells or claws. Barely audible beneath this mostly soprano chorus there beat a dark, low tone, like that of a giant heart.
As they went deeper, the frantic natterings of life grew less insistent. The dark heartbeat increased.
Below twelve kilometers, the nature of the view changed, subtly at first and then—with their passage through a final domed pressure lock—abruptly: all lifelike forms, whether sculptural or real, had vanished, left behind in the upper regions, to be replaced on every side by mirror-bright columns, narrow and cylindrical, and wire-fine catenary arches of diamond stuff like that which formed the world-ship’s flawless outer hull.
The water in this innermost chamber was perfectly clear, undiffused by organic matter and unstirred by swaying towers of bubbles. Perhaps a kilometer below where Blake and Sparta hovered, breathing in slow pulsations, the shining radial shafts of the columns converged steeply upon something bright and spherical, throbbing with light in the depths.
They forced bubble-rushes of oxygen from their lungs where, having borrowed it from their gills, they had stored it. Slowly they began to sink.
Sparta listened.
The water boomed with the throbbing of the thing at the heart of the ship. They saw it plainly now. It looked like a sea urchin, tiny, but with very long spines.
The taste of the water that flowed through Sparta’s throat and gills brought nothing unusual, beyond the astringency of a higher concentration of dissolved oxygen. She detected no gamma radiation, no neutrons.
After several minutes of passive sinking she and Blake floated a few meters away from the apparent outline of the pulsing light, which seemed wholly without inner substance or structure. No physical object was visible at the origin of the luminous sphere. Even the light itself seemed to recede as they drew closer to it—surely that was a function of their pupils’ adjustment to its brightness.
The diamond “columns” that radiated in every direction were not columns at all, but slender cones which sprouted from one another in tapering branches until a mere score of hair-fine filaments slimmed virtually to invisibility upon entering the globe of light. The pattern was reminiscent of arborized neurons.
They swam as close as they could, until the diamond reticule barred them from approaching any closer.
“It’s taking energy from the vacuum,” she said,
“It’s a captured singularity,” Blake said in wonder.
“A singularity,” she agreed. “But captured? Or created?”
They found Thowintha inside the Temple bridge. The living stars on the high vault had assumed a tight, highly resolved pattern, concentric rings of red and blue light. We are near, sh’he said.
Near our destination?
Another burst of indecipherable sounds from the alien.
We do not understand you, Sparta said.
Do you understand the concept of small ice-bodies?
Sparta looked at Blake. He formed a silent word: “Comets.”
We think perhaps you mean what we call “comets,” she said.
An old word: originally it meant ‘hairies,’ Blake added.
Thowintha emitted a plosive noise they thought might indicate amusement—if indeed Thowintha was capable of being amused. ‘Hair’ is not a common characteristic among us, said the alien. What we call small ice-bodies, you call comets. This place we name Ahsenveriacha—Whirlpool in the classical speech.
Whirlpool? Sparta repeated.
“Nemesis,” Blake said to her.
It was a name not heard recent
ly. In the late 20th century physicists and astronomers had hypothesized that the sun was one member of a binary star system—that like many stars in the universe it had a companion star. Supposedly this small companion had an eccentric orbit and periodically perturbed the cloud of comets surrounding the solar system, causing some of them to fall inward toward the terrestrial planets and a few even to collide with those planets. But the supposed companion star, dubbed Nemesis, had never been found, and the hypothesis had been abandoned.
What sort of thing is Whirlpool? Sparta asked.
No thing. A singular region of time and space.
A singularity! Blake said.
A black hole? Sparta asked Blake.
“If the sun’s companion had collapsed into a black hole before anyone started looking”—Blake paused, excited—“that would certainly explain why they never found it.”
Black hole. Thowintha’s percussive sounds expressed appreciation. A fine description.
But why is this place our destination? Sparta asked.
This … black hole … is of the kind that rotates rapidly, giving access to other regions of time and space. We must return to it to reorient ourselves in the universe.
Reorient ourselves? Blake asked. Then our final destination is not predetermined?
We have choices, Thowintha said simply.
Apparently they were limited choices, however. Thowintha’s explanation was far from explicit, but Sparta and Blake gathered that decisions coded milleniums ago in the genome of the living world-ship were now expressed in its nervous system. When the ship, temporarily inhabiting the orbit of the false moon Amalthea, had emerged from its protective mantle of ice, it had searched the skies for a pre-programmed target and, having found it lying sunward, had set off straightaway. Even Thowintha, the voice of the ship, was seemingly helpless to alter its path until the final stages of their outward journey.