by Mel Keegan
Ops was already busy, and Travers was not surprised to see Vidal, Rabelais and Queneau watching the navtank with grim interest. They were the only humans who had ever seen the horizon and lived to tell of it, and to Travers’s knowledge no Resalq had seen it and lived. Dario, Tor and Kulich hovered beside a flatscreen, shoulder to shoulder, watching every line of data – Lai’a was making history right here, right now.
But only Vidal had ever tried to pilot a driftship through the horizon. Not even Lai’a had done this, and as Travers and Marin joined the gathering of physicists, pilots and engineers Vaurien was saying, “I assume you’ve run this in simulation, Lai’a.”
“Simulations were performed 204 times,” Lai’a assured him.
“Successfully, of course.” Vaurien angled a hard glance at Mark.
“In 24 consecutive simulated transits I was successful. Simulation was discontinued when this aspect of horizon dynamics was thoroughly, and demonstrably understood. Do you wish to review the flight logs?” Lai’a asked mildly.
“Well, now.” Richard turned his back on the tank and regarded Jazinsky and Mark with all due caution. “Do we?”
“Pointless, isn’t it?” Jazinsky looked a little pale, a little tight-lipped, barefoot, in battered white denims and a teeshirt of Richard’s that was two sizes too large. “Either we’re right or we’re wrong,” she said, every word lethally precise. “If we’re right, Lai’a will sail through the horizon on a combination of sheer power and wicked physics. If we’re wrong…”
“If we’re wrong,” Mark said with a lick of acid humor, “we really, genuinely won’t know anything about it.” He gestured at Vidal. “Michael was suspended in the field for some indefinite time. We don’t know how long, but to him it seemed a matter of perhaps a few minutes had passed, while according to the realtime clocks of the rest of the cosmos, the universe outside Elarne, months went by. We’ve calculated that he could have remained suspended in the horizon for a couple of centuries – on the available power of the engines salvaged from the Ebrezjim. And they,” he added, “were so close to burned out, Barb and I estimate it was just about even money if they started up at all.”
“Jesus,” Rabelais whispered, as nearly a prayer as a profanity.
“Lai’a,” Jazinsky said pointedly, “is so much more powerful, we don’t actually know how much more. The transspace drive has never been throttled out to maximum, with two, much less three Prometheus generators also pushed close to overdrive behind it.” The white-blonde head shook slowly. “The potential power is frightening. Apologies for the hyperbole, Richard, but the more you know about it, the more terrifying it is.”
“All…right,” Vaurien allowed. “So the odds are with us, unless you two have your arithmetic dead wrong.” For the first time in a long, long while, he glared into the shadows on the far side of the tank, actually looking for Tonio Teniko – the freelance consultant. “I imagine you’ve checked them? And if you haven’t, why haven’t you?”
He was sober, sane, functional, at least for the next hour. His eyes looked almost normal as he stepped out of the dimness in the furthest corner. In the warmth and humidity Jazinsky had asked for in the Ops room, he had shrugged out of the omnipresent hoodie, tied it around his hips. His body was thin, almost hunchbacked, arms noticeably too long, hands too big, with misshapen knuckles. Travers had not seen him clearly in months, and his skin crawled a little with the normal human reaction to radical mutation.
For better or worse, Teniko’s early life had always been defined by beauty, but he was beginning to learn the meaning of ugliness, and Travers wondered if physical repulsiveness armored him or wounded him. He always held to the shadows now and Neil knew instinctively, Teniko had come to hate himself again. His own beauty had infuriated him, but now it seemed he disgusted or frightened himself.
Even his voice was strange, deeper, croaking, as if it was breaking a second time. His larynx was reconfiguring for the bigger body, Travers knew without asking. Teniko cleared his throat twice, three times, before he said,
“Why should I run about after them, checking their numbers? Suddenly you don’t trust them?”
“I trust them,” Vaurien said curtly, “but I know you don’t. So I’m assuming you ran those numbers for yourself.”
“Of course I did.” Teniko shoved the big, misshapen hands into his pockets. “You think I’m about to risk my fucking life without checking their math?”
“No faith,” Dario observed.
“Faith is for airheads,” Teniko said dismissively.
“You might get an argument on that score, depending on who you talk to, and what about.” Vaurien lifted a brow at Vidal, but went on, “And your numbers…?”
“Different from Sherratt’s and Jazinsky’s, but we’re all inside of allowable parameters.” Teniko retreated back to the shadows.
“Allowable parameters,” Jazinsky echoed.
“Now, there’s a nice, convenient term,” Alexis Rusch said cynically.
“You want the truth, Richard?” Jazinsky leaned on the side of the tank with both flat palms, which lit her face from below in weird lights and colors and shadows.
“Why don’t you lay it on me,” Vaurien invited.
She, Mark and Rusch shared a moment of silent conference and dark humor before she said, “The fact is, we’re so far off the map here, everything we think we know is constructed on skinny material evidence and physics predicated on instinct, intuition, the gut knowledge we’re right. We know the Resalq made it through Elarne – and a few almost made it home before they got stuck in quicksand here. We know Mick almost made it out of the void with engines that were pretty much junk. Even Tonio will tell you, transspace is all about gravity, time and a bunch of dimensions rubbing shoulders the way they ain’t supposed to, and never would in normal space. To play transspace at its own game takes energies so far off the scale of human experience, the extremes of those energies are out in the realms of philosophy.” She gave Vaurien a faint smile as his mouth compressed “Physics as poetry. Art.”
“But not abstract art.” Mark added. “Poetry written in the language native to Lai’a. It has no wish to self-destruct, Richard, and to it, Elarne is home.”
As they spoke the navtank had shifted from graphical plot to long-range vidfeed, and Travers murmured in reaction. He did not know what he had expected, but though Vidal called it a kind of hell, the inside of the horizon was actually beautiful. It was a tangle of writhing, dancing rainbows, fluorescing in every color visible to the naked human eye, and he knew it flared on into every part of the invisible spectrum. The feed was dimmed down to make it viewable; in fact, it was so bright, it would have shriveled living eyeballs.
He looked up from the tank into Vidal’s face, expecting to see horror there, or dread, but Vidal gazed into the image with an expression of awe. What he saw, Travers could not even imagine. “I was almost through,” he whispered. “Damnit, we were coming home. If the Resalq engines hadn’t been damaged, we’d have done it.”
Travers shivered, and Vidal’s words seemed to be all Vaurien needed to hear. “Lai’a,” Richard said crisply. “You have a go for transit.”
“Horizon transit in 50 seconds,” Lai’a acknowledged.
And Vaurien added deliberately, “Sound collision.”
“Collision?” Harrison Shapiro’s voice echoed from the passage just outside Ops. “Are we running into something?” Jon Kim was a pace behind him, with Hubler, Rodman and Queneau coming up from the service elevators, but none of Bravo Company felt a need to be here, and Bill Grant had little interest. Shapiro came to rest by the navtank, looking at Jazinsky for answers.
“It’ll be more like a bow shock,” she mused. “We’ll definitely feel it – Aragos won’t be able to absorb the entire contact. The Ebrezjim computer core is secured –?”
“Perfectly,” Mark assured her. “The lab drones will take care of everything, and we …” He was looking into the vidfeed and words seemed to die on his
tongue.
“Mother of gods,” Jon Kim murmured. “What is it?”
“A membrane,” Jazinsky said in a hoarse whisper. “We call it a horizon because it marks the place where here ends and there begins. You could just as easily call it a bridge.”
“Rainbow bridge,” Marin said with the flicker of a smile.
“Right out of legend.” Vidal’s arms closed around his own chest, hugging himself, perhaps as he remembered flying into the field in a craft no larger than a dock shuttle.
Lai’a was as imperturbable as ever. Travers wondered if it would register any flicker of reaction if it were racing to its own destruction, or if it really was a machine right through to the core. “Transit in 20 seconds. All decks report secure. Transspace drive functioning at .006 percent below optimum. Radiation screens to maximum. Transit in 10 seconds.”
“You might want to grab something,” Hubler warned.
Travers and Marin braced against the side of the navtank as Lai’a counted from five, and the display billowed into a dance of color and light, dropping out of focus as Lai’a drove right into it, retracing the sizzling wake of its own engines.
Velocity was almost meaningless here, but if Travers chose to notice instruments he saw numbers that made no sense – gravities, speeds, time indexes, suggesting they were either traveling at millions of times the speed of light, or that time was moving like the molecules in the heart of an ammonia glacier on a world orbiting a long-dead star.
“Two. One. Transit,” Lai’a said evenly.
Sensations of falling, of submerging in an ocean of dark honey, of hollow insides and suffocating pressure, dizziness, an inability to breathe, disorientation and some irrational blend of blinding fear and wild euphoria, overwhelmed Travers for what might have been a split second or an hour. He heard no human or Resalq voices, but Lai’a continued to speak clinically, reporting on engine function, radiation levels, gravities registered, the stability of overlapped and interlaced Arago fields.
Darkness washed over Travers’s head like the murk of deep water. And then the pressure lifted, the hollow sensation was gone and he blinked open his eyes to see Marin, Vidal, Rabelais, Vaurien – dazed, pale, as confused as himself, while Lai’ said,
“Driftway. Transspace engine is stable. Establishing contact with the Orpheus Gate comm drone. Standby.”
Mark and Jazinsky were the first to rally their wits, while Vidal propped himself on the side of the tank and continued to pull deep breaths to the bottom of his lungs. Shapiro and Kim dropped into the nearest chairs. Hubler and Rodman looked merely stunned, as if the ship had just physically ridden a broadside heavy enough to rattle their teeth. Rusch seemed to shake herself and without a word went for coffee. Rabelais and Queneau regained their senses a moment later, and were jubilant. They grabbed Vidal between them in an ecstatic embrace.
“I told you,” Vidal rasped, triumphant, eyes blazing with the same kind of zealot light Travers had seen in Jazinsky’s face, and Mark’s. “We were coming home!”
“And if the engines from the Ebrezjim had been any less burned out,” Mark added, “you’d have done it.” He pulled both palms over his face, and gave Jazinsky a nod. “We can do this.”
Shapiro sounded shaken. “You had doubts?”
It was Rusch who said quietly, “There are always doubts, Harrison, until the thing’s been done. Remember your history … the sound barrier was broken by a suborbital rocket plane at the cost of countless pilots’ lives, and for years before, physicists and engineers swore it was impossible. The translight drive was four decades in development. It didn’t cost lives because drones flew it, but it cost over two trillion Confederate dollars, and success was supposed to be proscribed by the immutable laws of nature.”
“Well … fuck,” Roark Hubler said succinctly. “That was one hell of a ride, Doc.” He offered his hand first to Mark, then to Jazinsky. “Just don’t do it again real soon.”
“Or ever,” Rodman added hoarsely. “The driftway, I can handle, and the tides, the gravity express. This…?”
“You might get used to crossing a horizon,” Vidal mused. “Lai’a, you take any damage riding the storm?”
“Minimal damage,” Lai’a said with a faintly smug tone. “Estimated repair time is two hours. I will remain in the driftway until optimum function is re-established. Drones have already deployed.”
“Like antibodies,” Marin observed. “Lai’a will rest up for a couple of hours and heal itself.”
“As I said before, this,” Mark said with deep satisfaction, “is its natural environment. And we,” he added, with a frown at Dario and Tor, “have a lot of work ahead of us.”
“Not for 48 hours, minimum,” Tor argued. “That’s how long it’ll take the brains of the Ebrezjim to come up to a workable temperature. Me? I’m going to catch up on some sleep. The last few weeks before we launched, I couldn’t sleep worth a damn even when we had the chance, which didn’t come often.”
“I have located the comm beacon at the Orpheus Gate,” Lai’a announced. “Comparison between its clocks and my own demonstrate a major discrepancy. Assuming the drone’s clock is approximately true to a clock located in normal space, Captain Ingersol aboard the Wastrel will record the elapsed time of this mission at 26 days, 14 hours, 45 minutes.”
For a moment the words refused to make sense, and then Vidal swore quietly and knuckled his eyes hard enough to leave them pink. “We always knew this was going to happen. We certainly rode a temporal stream to get here – who knows how fast time passes in the lagoon? And we could have spent weeks in the horizon.”
“I … think we did,” Jazinsky speculated. “Lai’a wouldn’t have been any more aware of the passage of time than we were ourselves. The horizon pulls the rug out from under meaningful observation. It’s either 750 light years from the inner membrane to the outer, or else time slows down to a dawdle under the immense gravities governing the Heisenberg tunnel – and I’ve no idea which.” She angled a hard look. “There you go, Tonio. There’s a puzzle for you, if you want it. Work that one out.”
He spoke out of the shadows, where he was sitting hunched in a chair. “Lai’a, report on the gravities you registered during transit.”
“I have only a little useful information at this point, Doctor Teniko,” Lai’a told him. “I registered spikes up to 405 gravities, beyond which conventional instruments ceased to function reliably. These intense gravities resulted in the six failed Arago generators which are currently under repair. However, 54 Arago generators functioned within acceptable parameters. Diagnostics confirm them to be fully operational.”
“Did it say – 400 gravities?” Jon Kim was a pale shade of green.
Jazinsky laid a hand in his shoulder. “Don’t sweat it, Jonny. Lai’a was built for this.”
“Structural damage?” Vaurien wanted to know.
“None,” Lai’a said coolly. “Arago screening was adequate to maintain stability during entry and exit of the Heisenberg tunnel. Theoretically, half of my generators could fail completely before structural damage took place, which is unlikely to occur during transit of fields similar to this temporal horizon.”
“And if you did suffer wide-scale failure,” Shapiro prompted, “it’s repairable, I assume?”
“Naturally, General Shapiro.” Lai’a paused. “The repair process could be described as similar to that of a living body healing a broken bone.”
“Bullshit,” Teniko rasped. “Quit it, Lai’a.”
“Quit what, Doctor?” the AI inquired.
“Stop comparing yourself with a living organism,” Teniko snapped. He glared at Mark. “Did you do this?”
Fresh tension snapped across the Ops room. Travers almost groaned – Teniko was adept at causing this electric stress, and from everything Neil had observed during years on the crewdeck of a carrier, it was never productive. Mark was not about to let himself be drawn. He was busy with a handy and did not even look up as he said in unconcerned tones, “Did
I do what? Really, Tonio, you must learn to be more specific, if you intend to bite a chunk out of my flesh.”
The mutated, still mutating Lushi was seething with anger strong enough to override his pain and bring him to his feet. “Did you imbue this fucking freak of an AI with some bloody stupid simulacrum of organic awareness?”
The silence in the Ops room was profound. The loudest sound was the soft shush of machinery, and Travers could hear the pulse drum in his own ears. Slowly, with measured calm, Mark set down the handy. He clasped his hands at his back, turned slightly, head tilted at Teniko.
“Lai’a is a Resalq AI, and one of only two Nexus 27 AIs in existence . The other is currently deactivated, in fact sleeping, in a lab at my house on Saraine. You clearly have little experience with Resalq AIs.”
“It’s pretending to be conscious.” Teniko refused to be intimidated.
“It’s pretending nothing of the sort,” Mark said flatly.
“You want to give it some kind of dumb-ass personality to sugar-coat the human-cyber interface for the benefit of bozos like them,” nodding at Marin, Travers, Shapiro, Kim, even Rabelais and Queneau, “that’s dandy. But if you’ve given the machine itself some idea it’s conscious –”
“Doctor Teniko,” Lai’a said coolly, “You would be better to direct your indictments at me. I know my own mind.”
He was still focused on Mark, though he addressed the AI in acerbic tones. “You don’t have a mind, Lai’a. You have a 500 yottabyte database you call your memory, and 40 parallel Generation X6 processors that give you a 700 yottaflops potential for calculation. The rest of you is circuits, cables and plugs, and you ought to be bright enough to know the bloody difference between a mechanism and a mind.”
“The difference,” Lai’a said with imperturbable calm, “is in the semantics. You are biological. I am not. Nor have I any desire to be.”
Teniko’s face twisted as he glared up at Mark. “So you think you know what desire is, do you, Lai’a?” He stabbed a finger at Mark. “This is your fault.”
Mark breathed a long sigh. “I’ve already told you, as succinctly as I know how – Lai’a is a Resalq AI. The interface personality constructs itself in response to the person, or people, who develop the emerging awareness of the machine. All Resalq AIs are self-aware, even the simple ones, like Joss. They have been for twelve centuries. The more complex the AI, the more aware it is. If the computer core of the Ebrezjim is still viable, when it comes online you’ll be confronted with another self-aware machine.” He frowned deeply at Teniko. “Are you concerned the machine believes itself to be alive, or conscious in the sense a living organism is alive and self-aware? Lai’a, would you care to comment?”