The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  “We can do this. Let’s skin about our main axis, dive straight down through the north pole.”

  We are turning. Hold on.

  Claire was at the ship axis anyway, so she felt nothing as the room started to spin. Her fore screen showed them shooting into the wormring. The ship knocked and strummed as they skated by whorls that slammed into their nose.

  “Y’know, I kinda hoped I’d have some time to talk to the theory guys about this.”

  You said you were in the shower a long time.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Alone?

  “You’re getting into an area beyond your competence. Y’know, not having a body and all.”

  Oh, my.

  This was in a phony, high-pitched English voice, like a parody of Jane Austen. “Look, skip the gossip! Why’s this thing look like a rotating doughnut?”

  Wormholes are not tubes, my database says. They present in our space as solid objects. One passes through them by just merging with them. It is not like falling down a pipe.

  “This one’s spinning.”

  Apparently. The alterations the scientists carried out to expand it seem to have added angular momentum.

  “Wormholes connect parts of spacetime, so—hey, well, it connects both parts of space and . . . uh . . . parts of time?” Not for the first time, she regretted her spotty education. Manual laborers usually did, and realistically, she was just about one grade above that.

  I do know from ancillary reading that the philosopher Gödel solved the general field equations in their classical limit, for a rotating universe. He found that time could form loops. Apparently, he did this to illustrate a point about time being eternal in some sense, as Gödel believed, to his friend Einstein. They were, as you would put it, buddies. Physics buddies.

  Claire thought, sourly, I never get a direct answer unless I coax. Maybe she should buy a patch into a more masculine software. But then she would have to deal with the male narrow-linear perspective too. There were always trade-offs.

  “Very nice, but what’s that mean?”

  Twist a wormhole, twist space, twist time. I suppose.

  “You suppose?”

  All wormholes can be made into time machines, by moving them around at high speeds. Apparently, ringholes, with their angular momentum, even more so.

  “Um. We need more. What about that big library program I bought you?”

  I use it to . . . browse.

  “Browse what, porn? I need—”

  You have been accessing my routines! And after all my scientific database searchings!

  Perfect, Erma; primly change the subject, mix in some offended hauteur. “Show me, with color coding.”

  On her wall screens, the magnetic grappling strands played and rippled like luminous wheat stirred by a breeze. In their grasp, the ringhole flexed and whirred. Blue lightning snarled and spat. It crushed and curdled light, stirring space with a spoon.

  Claire gingerly pulsed Silver Metal Lugger, spilling more antimatter into the chambers.

  This was more like surfing than flying. They fought their way down. The vortex groped for them. Grabbed.

  “In we go.” This was lots better than hauling dreary comets, which had come to resemble delivering the milk, door to door. Danger was never boring.

  Then the room . . . rippled. Stretched. Boomed. She watched sinusoids flounce through the walls without ripping anything, just flapping steel like waves crossing an ocean.

  Her heart pounded. A jittery hum waltzed through her acceleration couch. The couch leather dimpled and puckered as torques warped across it. She could see the rivulets of gravitational stress work across her body too, like tornadoes a centimeter across twisting her uniform. She reminded herself that pilots didn’t let their fear eat on them, not while there is flying to be done. And reminded herself again. It became a mantra.

  The magnetic catcher’s mitt slipped from view and they plunged into the whirl. It felt rubbery, somehow, and then her stomach tried to work up through her throat. Bile rushed into her nose. The acceleration slammed her around like a rag doll. She felt her skin stretching away in several directions. Gravitational stresses seemed to be trying to open her wrapping, to find a Christmas present inside.

  “How’re . . . we . . . doing . . . getting . . . through?”

  I believe we are not.

  “What!”

  We are stalled in the rotating core of the doughnut.

  “I . . . can . . . fly . . . us . . . out . . .” But her fingers moved like sausages.

  You are incapable. You have no plan. I believe I must take command.

  “You’re . . . a program . . . not an . . . officer.” Just saying that took all her strength.

  The air oozed like greasy hair. “Commit our full antimatter flux. Hammer us out of this.”

  Inward or outward?

  “Which way . . . is outward?”

  Something like a peeved sigh came from Erma. I was hoping you knew.

  “And you wanted to take command?” Irritation helped, actually. She could even complete a sentence. “Inward—that way.” She jabbed her chin toward the deck. “I guess . . .”

  Antimatter howled as it met its enemy in their reaction chamber. The room spun around her so fast it blurred into a fluid. Her teeth rattled. On the screens, there was nothing but dark outside. How big was this thing? Were they squeaking through or in some infinity? “Did you send out laser pulses? Microwaves?”

  Of course. Nothing came back.

  “Maybe this thing is a perfect absorber? But nothing’s perfect.”

  Something spurted actinic blue and arced big, coming at them. Coming fast. She got a flash image of an oddly shaped ship, far away. Then it was gone. The only thing they had seen. Were they in some murk?

  I have an incoming message.

  “What? How can—hell, patch it through.”

  The message says, “Worms can eat their tails and so can you.”

  “Is this one of your jokes?”

  I do not joke. I do not have the software.

  “Eat my tail? What’s . . . Oh.”

  Oh?

  “Maybe that refers to the Gödel thing? But who said it?”

  Who is here with us? I am mere software.

  Claire sniffed. She was sweating but the ship was cool. Her pulse quickened. This was intriguing, sure, but right now they were in a gravitational whirlwind. The couch adjusted to the tornado violence of their whirl but this could not go on for long. And how long was a wormhole, anyway?

  Some glowing stuff zoomed by them—or at least got larger, all she could tell in this dense dark. It looked like neon clotted cream.

  “What was that?”

  My database says that wormrings are held together with exotic material, some kind of matter that has “negative average energy density.” Whatever that is, it had to be born in the Blossoming. It threads wormholes, stem to stern.

  “Um. Great construction material, if you can get it. No use to us. Are we making any progress out of here?”

  I cannot tell.

  “And you thought I didn’t have a plan.”

  Wait—I do sense something bright—approaching—

  The black outside reddened. Churned.

  Suddenly they slammed out—and into a blue storm. A mirror twin of the wormring dwindled behind them now. Brilliant rainbows rimmed it.

  They tumbled, ass over entrails. Hot gas rushed by, prickly with blue and ruby glows. A huge gas giant hung between them and a bright, sullen star. The ship rocked and wheeled. A vast wind was driving them outward from the gas giant.

  This gas is blowing us away from the wormring. It is mostly molecular hydrogen, quite hot—thus the blue gas. It comes from the planetary atmosphere. We are very near the star, a fraction of Mercury’s orbital distance. The star is smaller than ours.

  She stared. The slightly reddish star was boiling away the gas giant’s surging atmosphere. In its orbit, the world was like a gassy comet, tail pointing outwar
d. The giant was doomed, trapped to circle its tormenter while being slowly shredded.

  A vast rosy plume erupted from the gas giant and curled toward Silver Metal Lugger. In the streaming gas curled a nasty vortex and they were at its edge.

  I cannot navigate in this. My piloting also is not capable of—

  “I’ll take the helm.” Claire fought to turn the ship. Their reaction engines could barely muster enough thrust to compete with the winds here. Winds in space! she thought wildly. This is worse than that coronal arch . . . which we barely survived.

  Even making a turn was hard. It was better to think of the days she had enjoyed sailing. Tacking with the wind, then rounding on it when the vectors and torques allow . . .

  She got them to take the billowing gas on their stern, slowing the tumbling pitch and yaw. A knot of angry violet gas shot by them. Flaming debris hit their flank. The screens showed no pressure loss, but plenty of abrasion from the roasting, eating winds. It took a long while to stabilize their course. They still rocked and veered like a sailboat in a hard storm.

  “Damn! We’re supposed to reconnoiter, then get back home. This stuff is incredible.” She had never had an experience of flying in space. No way to estimate the damage done to the ship, no clear navigation rules. “But—where’s the ringworm?”

  I have lost it. We moved quickly, blown away. I tried magnetically attaching a hailer as we departed, but it did not stick.

  “It must be hard to glue on to spacetime,” Claire said. How do you clip anything to a wormhole?

  She was distracted as she banked and turned against the roiling banks of hot hydrogen. “I wonder what happened to the ringworm?”

  It may be in a stabilized orbit, a balance of its gravitational forces against this hydrogen wind.

  “So it’s back there. Somewhere.”

  They gradually came about and steadied. She took them abroad the gale and worked toward lesser densities. Blue streamers fell behind. The ruddy fog-mist paled. They gradually emerged into fairly open space. The stars reappeared, gleaming reassuringly.

  Claire saw the bright sun from an angle now, sighting back along the misty edge of the plume. The eroding giant planet was a round nub against the glaring yellow-white solar disk. Outward from them and surprisingly nearby hung a two-mooned world in crescent. No recognizable constellations in a sky somehow brighter, with more stars—and yes, a globular cluster hovering like an ivory flower between two bright stars.

  “Any idea where we are? Can you find galactic reference points?”

  I am trying, but none of the local stars are known to me. We’re a long way from Earth.

  “Keep trying. We may have to walk home.”

  Another solar system. A long way from Earth. A thrill ran through her and she whispered commands to Erma to take scans of it all. Otherwise, she was speechless, adrift, fears dropping away. Somehow she had thought of this as just another gig. Now the immensity of the ideas Erma went on about, or the biz deals of Tall Guy—all those were details, clues, chatter. This was real.

  Something hit them. Hard. The ship rattled.

  “What the—”

  A large soft mass hit us astern.

  “Soft?”

  It did little damage but conveyed momentum.

  Nothing in Earth’s space was soft. Not even comets.

  “Distance scan.”

  I track many small objects. Nearby, approaching.

  The screen filled with shapes. A fried-egg jellyfish swooped at them, attached to their skin. Drifting with spines out came a warty cucumber. There were amber pencils in flight, their rear tubes snorting out blue burning gas. Something like an ivory solar sail came at them, reeling its sails in along spars.

  “This is crazy.”

  Disturbing, yes. These cannot be machines—at least, not of metal and ceramics, run by computers. They are alive.

  She eyed the many shapes with wonder. Gravity imposed simple geometries—cylinders, boxes, spheres. Here were effortless fresh designs: spokes and beams, rhomboids, fat curves. Rough skins and prickly shells, rubbery rods, slick mirrors—and all in the same twirling creature. “Feeding off that hydrogen, you figure?”

  “Get our bots on the skin. Assess the damage. See if they can deal with these living things too.”

  I have no idea how . . .

  Angular shapes came at them, diving close and then veering away, apparently sizing them up. Needle-nosed predators, she would have guessed if this were undersea biology. All these creatures were much smaller than Silver Metal Lugger, but she did not like their numbers. More flocked in as she watched. They seemed to come from back toward the pale blue plume, as though they feasted on the hydrogen, hid among the streams, and then came out to forage. Predator/prey ratios in high vacuum? Or more like cloud life?

  “Great, we play this by ear. Our bots deployed?”

  They are popping out from their hatches.

  She could see the clunky forms walking on magnetics across the silvery skin. The teeming ruby sky reflected in the hull and made a double geometry of whirling seethe. The skylife wheeled and darted in gaudy flocks in that sky. They had backed away once the bots were out. After all, they looked more like kites than birds. The bots were solid, rugged, probably of no interest to these gas-eaters.

  The bots followed their grid sweep commands. They found rips and gouges and filled them with quick-fix patches. Claire always liked to do maintenance in case they had a major, subtle problem. It also gave her time to think.

  This was a crazy outcome. The theory boys imagined that this ringhole was a gateway, long unused. So by all odds the other end—or ends, because nobody knew if these could have multiple mouths—should be in open space, probably far from a star. They thought this, even though she had caught the wormhole in a coronal magnetic arch on the sun. But then, the original wormhole wasn’t an ordinary one either. It had the equivalent of negative mass, since something at its other end had been pouring mass out through it, forcing the curvature of spacetime near the mouth to act as if it held a net negative in its mass budget. Now the thing had stretched and tangled in the tender grasp of techies who didn’t know what they were doing—and presto, it had spin and was even more confusing.

  Crazy but real, not her favorite category.

  “This doesn’t feel like progress,” Claire mused to herself. Her lips must have shaped the words, because Erma read them and replied,

  We are making great discoveries! This is far more interesting than hauling ore and comets around.

  “Far more dangerous too. Thing is, we don’t know how to get back. That hydrogen column is huge. We can’t find our way around in it. The ringhole—what’s that? And—”

  We can learn more by reconnoitering. Once our repairs—

  A bullet-shaped brown thing shot along the hull. This was different, not an airy thing but solid.

  It clipped a bot and sent it tumbling into space. The bullet-shape turned in a tight arc and came back. It tossed another bot offhull with a shrug as it passed.

  Claire sprang into action. She had two laser cannons on both ends of Silver Metal Lugger. They came online in a moment and she patched in the seek-and-fire software. All this was by the drill, but she was still too late.

  The bullet-thing was so fast the utility bots never had a chance. Bots were made to patch and fill, not fend and fight. Within a few moments, the entire crew had spun away into oblivion.

  Claire watched in silence. There was nothing more she could do. Another hull crew would get tossed too, and she had skimpy reserves for maintenance.

  Erma said nothing. They went after a few of the bots but among the swarming skyline the bots were hard to find on radar. They managed to salvage two, whose carapaces were crumpled in by impact.

  Odd. The attacker seems to have lifted out the command module in each.

  “Studying us, I guess.” Claire frowned.

  Silver Metal Lugger drifted for a while and the swarm of living spacecraft simply glided past, as
if on patrol—pencils, sails, puffy spheres of malevolent orange. But cautious. None tried to enter the ship through hull ports.

  I suggest we get a clear view of that distant planet.

  “I want to find the ringhole. I learned that in high school—at a party in a strange place, always find the exits first.”

  To extend your metaphor, we were not invited to this party at all. The locals seem to be making that point.

  “Let’s shed them. Accelerate away, take some good long scans of that planet. Then dodge back into the hydrogen column and search it for the ringhole.”

  Seems plausible. I am accelerating.

  The swarm outside started to fall behind. They could trim sails and muster more sunlight, maybe even ride the vagrant hydrogen winds, but Silver Metal Lugger outran them in minutes.

  “While we’re getting set up—that is, while you are—let’s think on this. Why is the ringhole down in that gas column?”

  I suppose because it got caught there. Much as we found its other end in a wildly unlikely place, atop a coronal loop. These are not places anyone designing a wormhole transit system would want it.

  “And who put it there? Who’s in charge here?”

  Let me guess. Not someone who wants these wormhole mouths used.

  “Yeah, all this fits the opposite of what we thought wormholes were useful for doing.”

  But anyone who wanted to make a wormhole useless could just throw it into a star.

  “But then it would gush hot plasma into your neighborhood.”

  True. If both mouths were dropped into stars, the two stars would feed each other. If one gained mass that the other lost, that would perturb both stars, affecting their sunlight. I see your point. There may be no good way to rid oneself of a wormhole . . .

  Claire snapped her fingers. “So! This system is for limited use. Who around here would want that?”

  Not the space life, one assumes.

  “Um. Maybe they’re part of this, though . . .”

  They were turning, systems running hard. Claire could see the diagnostic panels lighting up with fresh commands. Erma knew her stuff, how to case out a place and make a quick assessment. But for a whole new world? Quite a job for a ship designed to sniff out asteroid ore. Claire watched their long-distance telescopes deploy from their caches, blossoming like astronomical flowers. Dishes and lenses turned and focused like a battery of eyes.