Heaven's Reach u-6

by David Brin

  “According to this teaching unit, stars like Izmunuti pour immense amounts of heavy atoms from their bloated atmospheres. Carbon is especially rich, condensing on anything solid that happens nearby. All our ancestor ships arrived at Jijo black with the stuff. Streaker may be the first vessel ever to try the trick twice, both coming and going. I bet the stuff is causing you some problems.”

  “No bet!” boomed Suessi’s amplified voice. Hannes had been battling the growing carbon coating. “The stuff is heavy, it has weird properties, and it’s been gumming up the verity flanges.”

  Sara nodded. “But consider — what if somebody has a use for such coatings? What would be their best way to accumulate it?”

  She stroked her black cube again, transferring data to the main display. Though Sara had been aboard just a few days, she was adapting to the convenience of modern tools.

  A mirrorlike rectangle appeared before the council, reflecting fiery prominences from a broad, planar surface.

  “I may be an ignorant native,” Sara commented. “But it seems one could collect atoms out of a stellar wind using something with high surface area and small initial mass. Such a vehicle might not even have to expend energy departing, if it rode outward on the pressure of light waves.”

  Lieutenant Tsh’t murmured.

  “A sssolar sail!”

  “Is that what you call it?” Sara nodded. “Imagine machines arriving through the transfer point as compact objects, plummeting down to Izmunuti, then unfurling such sails and catching a free ride back to the t-point, gaining layers of this molecularly unique carbon, and other stuff along the way. Energy expenditures per ton of yield would be minimal!”

  The whirling Niss hologram edged forward.

  “Your hypothesis suggests an economical resource-gathering technique, providing the mechanoids needn’t make more than one simple hyperspatial transfer, coming or going. There are cheap alternatives in industrialized regions of the Five Galaxies, but here in Galaxy Four, industry is currently minimal or nil, due to the recent fallow-migration—” The Niss paused briefly.

  “Mechanoids would be ideal contractors for such a harvesting chore, creating special versions to do the job swiftly, with minimal mass. It explains why their drives and shields seem frail before the rising storms. They had no margin for the unexpected.”

  Gillian saw that just half of the orange glitters remained, struggling to flee Izmunuti’s gravity before more plasma surges caught them. The three purple dots had already climbed toward the mechanoid convoy, ascending with graceful ease.

  “What about the Zang?” she asked.

  “I surmise they are the mechanoids’ employers. Our Library says Zang groups sometimes hire special services from the Machine Order. Great clans of oxygen breathers also do it, now and then.”

  “Well, it seems their plans have been ripped,” commented Suessi. “Not much cargo getting home, this time.”

  Pensive whistle ratchets escaped the gray dolphin in the water-filled tunnel — not Trinary, but the scattered clicks a cetacean emits when pondering deeply. Gillian still felt guilty about asking Kaa to volunteer for this mission, since it meant abandoning his lover to danger on Jijo. But Streaker needed a first-class pilot for this desperate ploy.

  “I concur,” the whirling Niss hologram concluded. “The Zang will be in a foul mood after this setback.”

  “Because they suffered economic loss?” Tsh’t asked.

  “That and more. According to the Library, hydrogen breathers react badly to surprise. They have slower metabolisms than oxy-life. Anything unpredictable is viscerally unpleasant to them.

  “Of course, this attitude is strange to an entity like me, programmed by the Tymbrimi to seek novelty! Without surprise, how can you tell there is an objective world? You might as well presume the whole universe is one big sim—”

  “Wait a minute,” Gillian interrupted, before the Niss got sidetracked in philosophy. “We’re all taught to avoid Zang as dangerous, leaving contact to experts from the Great Institutes.”

  “That is right.”

  “But now you’re saying they may be especially angry? Possibly short-tempered?”

  The Niss hologram coiled tensely.

  “After three years together, Dr. Baskin — amid growing familiarity with your voice tones and thought patterns — your latest inquiry provokes uneasy feelings.

  “Am I justified to be wary?

  “Do you find the notion of short-tempered Zang … appealing?”

  Gillian kept silent. But she allowed a grim, enigmatic smile.

  Harry

  FIVE EARTH YEARS HAD PASSED ON HIS PERsonal duration clock since he took the irrevocable step, standing amid volunteers from fifty alien races, laboriously mouthing polyglottal words of a memorized oath that had been written ages ago, by some species long extinct. Upon joining the Observer Corps, Harry’s life didn’t simply shift — it leaped from the riverbed of his genetic lineage, transferring loyalty from his birth planet to an austere bureaucracy that was old when his distant ancestors still scurried under Triassic jungle canopies, hiding from dinosaurs.

  Yet, during training he was struck by how often other students sought him out with questions about Earthclan, whose struggles were the latest riveting interstellar penny-drama. Would the newest band of unprotected, sponsorless “wolflings” catch up with starfaring civilization in time to forestall the normal fate of upstarts? Despite Terra’s puny unimportance, this provoked much speculation and wagering.

  What was it like — his fellow acolytes asked — to have patrons like humans, who taught themselves such basic arts as speech, spaceflight, and eugenics? As a neochimp, Harry was junior in status to every other client-citizen at the base, yet he was almost a celebrity, getting hostility from some, admiration from others, and curiosity from nearly all.

  In fact, he couldn’t tell his classmates much about Terragens Civilization, having spent just a year among the talky neo-chimpanzees of Earth before dropping out of university to sign on with the Navigation Institute. His life was already one of exile.

  He had been born in space, aboard a Terragens survey vessel. Harry’s vague memories of TSS Pelenor were of a misty paradise lost, filled with high-tech comforts and warm places to play. The crew had seemed like gods — human officers, neochim and neo-dolphin ratings … plus a jolly, treelike Kanten advisor — all moving about their tasks so earnestly, except when he needed to be cuddled or tickled or tossed in the air.

  Then, one awful day, his parents chose to debark and study the strange human tribes on a desolate colony world — Horst. That ended Harry’s part in the epochal voyage of the Pelenor, and began his simmering resentment.

  Memories of starscapes and humming engines became muzzy, idealized. Throughout childhood on that dusty world, the notion of space travel grew more magical. By the time Harry finally left Horst, he was shocked by the true sterile bleakness that stretched between rare stellar oases.

  I remember it differently, he thought, during the voyage to Earth. Of course that memory was a fantasy, formed by an impressionable toddler. At university, instructors taught that subjective impressions are untrustworthy, biased by the mind’s fervent wish to believe.

  Still, the thirst would not be slaked. An ambition to seek paradise in other versions of reality.

  The bananas held him trapped for days.

  If the allaphor had been less personal, Harry might have fought harder. But the image was too explicitly pointed to ignore. After the first debacle, when the station nearly foundered, he decided to wait before challenging the reef again.

  Anyway, this wasn’t a bad site to observe from. In a synergy between this strange continuum and his own mind, the local region manifested itself as a high plateau, overlooking a vast, undulating sea of purple tendrils. Black mountains still bobbed in the distance, though some of the “holes” in the red-blue sky became drooping dimples, as if the celestial dome had decided to melt or slump.

  There were also life
-forms — mostly creatures of the Memetic Order. Shapes that fluttered, crawled, or shimmered past Harry’s octagonal platform, grazing and preying on each other, or else merging or undergoing eerie transformations before his eyes. On all other dimensional planes, memes could only exist as parasites, dwelling in the host brains or mental processors of physical beings. But here in E Space, they roamed free, in a realm of palpable ideas.

  “Your imagination equips you to perform the duties of a scout,” Wer’Q’quinn explained during Harry’s training. “But do not succumb to the lure of solipsism, believing you can make something happen in E Space simply by willing it. E Space can sever your life path, if you grow obstinate or unwary.”

  Harry never doubted that. Watching memiforms slither across the purple steppe, he passed the time speculating what concepts they contained. Probably, none of the creatures were sapient, since true intelligence was rare on any level of reality. Yet, each of the memes crossing before him manifested a single thought, unconstrained by any organic or electronic brain — a self-contained idea with as much structured complexity as Harry held in his organs and genetic code.

  That one over there, prancing like a twelve-legged antelope — was it an abstraction distantly related to freedom? When a jagged-edged flying thing swooped down to chase it, Harry wondered if the hunter might be an intricate version of craving. Or was he typically trying to cram the complex and ineffable into simple niches, to satisfy the pattern-needs of his barely sapient mind?

  Well, it is “human nature” to trivialize. To make stereotypes. To pretend you can eff the ineffable.

  Local meme organisms were fascinating, but now and then something else appeared beneath his vantage point, demanding closer attention.

  He could always tell an interloper. Outsiders moved awkwardly, as if their allaphorical shapes were clumsy costumes. Often, predatory memes would approach, sniffing for a savory conceptual meal, only to retreat quickly from the harsh taste of solid matter. Metal-hulled ships or organic life-forms. Intruders from some other province of reality, not pausing or staring, but hastening past the floating mountains to seek refuge in the Swiss cheese sky.

  Harry welcomed these moments when he earned his pay. Speaking clearly, he would describe each newcomer for his partner, the station computer, which lay below his feet, shielded against the hostile effects of E Space. At headquarters, experts would decipher his eyewitness account to determine what kind of vessel had made transit before Harry’s eyes, and where it may have been bound. Meanwhile, he and the computer collaborated to make the best guess they could.

  “Onboard memory files are familiar with this pattern,” said the floating M at one point, after Harry described an especially bizarre newcomer, rushing by atop myriad stiff, glimmering stalks, like a striding sunburst. “It appears to be a member of the Quantum Order of Sapiency.”

  “Really?” Harry pressed against the glass. The object looked as fragile as a feathery zilm spore, carried on the wind to far corners of Horst. Delicate stems kept breaking off and vaporizing as the thing — (was it a ship? or a single being?) — hurried toward a sky hole that lay near the horizon.

  “I’ve never seen a quant anywhere near that big before. What’s it doing here? I thought they didn’t like E Space.”

  “Try to imagine how you organics feel about hard vacuum — you shrivel and perish unless surrounded by layers of protective technology. So the fluctuating subjectivities of this domain imperil some other kinds of life. E Space is even more distasteful to quantum beings than it is to members of the Machine Order.”

  “Hm. Then why’s it here?”

  “I am at a loss to speculate what urgent errand impels it. Most quantum beings reside in the foam interstices of the cosmos, out of sight from other life variants — like bacteria on your homeworld who live in solid rock. Explicit contact with the Quantum Order was only established by experts of the Library Institute less than a hundred million years ago.

  “What I can suggest is that you should politely avert your gaze, Scout Harms. The quant is clearly having difficulties. You needn’t add to its troubles by staring.”

  Harry winced at the reminder. “Oh, right. The Uncertainty Principle!” He turned away. His job in E Space was to watch, but you could do harm by watching too closely.

  Anyway, his real task was to look for less exotic interlopers.

  Most of his ship sightings were of hydrogen breathers, easily identified because their balloonlike vessels looked the same in any continuum. For some reason, members of that order liked taking shortcuts through E Space on their way from one Jupiter-type world to another, even though A and B levels were more efficient, and transfer points much faster.

  On those rare occasions when Harry spotted anyone from his own order of oxygen breathers — the great and mighty Civilization of Five Galaxies — none of them approached his sentry position, defending a proscribed route to a forbidden place.

  No wonder they hired a low-class chim for this job. Even criminals, trying to sneak into a fallow zone, would be fools to use allaphor space as a back door.

  As I’m a fool, to be stuck guarding it.

  Still, it beat the dry, windy steppes of Horst.

  Anything was better than Horst.

  He and his parents were the only members of their species on the planet, which meant the long process of learning speech, laborious for young neochimps, came doubly hard. With Marko and Felicity distracted by research, Harry had to practice with wild-eyed Probsher kids, who mocked him for his long, furry arms and early stammer. With painted faces and short tempers, they showed none of the dignified patience he’d been taught to expect from the elder race. By the time he learned how different humans were on Horst, it didn’t matter. He vowed to leave, not only Horst, but Terragens society. To seek the strange and unfamiliar.

  Years later, Harry realized a similar ambition must have driven his parents. In youthful anger, he had spurned their pleas for patience, their awkward affections, even their parting blessing.

  Still, regret was just a veneer, forgiveness a civilized abstraction, devoid of pang or poignancy.

  Other memories still had power to make his veins tense with emotion. Growing up listening to botbian night wolves howl across dry lakes under patch-gilt moons. Or holding his knees by firelight while a Probsher shaman chanted eerie tales — fables that Marko and Felicity avidly studied as venerable folk legends, although these tribes had roamed Horst for less than six generations.

  His own sapient race wasn’t much older! Only a few centuries had passed since human beings began genetic meddling in chimpanzee stock.

  Who gave them the right?

  No permission was needed. Galactics had followed the same pattern for aeons — each “generation” of starfarers spawning the next in a rippling bootstrap effect called Uplift.

  On the whole, humans were better masters than most … and he would rather be sapient than not.

  No. What drove him away from Earthclan was not resentment but a kind of detachment. The mayfly yammerings of Probsher mystics mattered no more or less than the desperate moves of the Terragens Council, against the grinding forces of an overwhelming universe. One might as well compare sparks rising from a campfire to the stars wheeling by overhead. They looked similar, at a glance. But what did another incandescent cinder really matter on the grand scale of things?

  Did the cosmos care if humans or chims survived?

  Even at university this notion threaded his thoughts. Harry’s natural links elongated till they parted one by one. All that remained was a nebulous desire to seek out something lasting. Something that deserved to last.

  Joining Wer’Q’quinn and the Navigation Institute, he found something enduring, a decision he never regretted.

  Still, it puzzled Harry years later that his dreams kept returning to the desolate world of his youth. Horst ribbed his memory. Its wind in the dry grass. Smells that assailed your nose, sinking claws into your sinuses. And images the shaman painted in yo
ur mind, like arcs of multicolored sand, falling in place to convey deer, or loper-beast, or spearhunter.

  Even as an official of Galactic civilization, representing the oxygen order on a weird plane of reality where allaphors shimmered in each window like reject Dali images, Harry still saw funnels of sparkling heat rising from smoky campfires, vainly seeking union with aloof stars.

  Lark

  NOT THAT WAY!” LING SHOUTED.

  Her cry made Lark stumble to a halt, a few meters down a new corridor.

  “But I’m sure this is the best route back to our nest.” Lark pointed along a dim, curved aisle, meandering between gray ceramic walls. Strong odors wafted from each twisty, branching passageway aboard the mazelike Jophur ship. This one beckoned with distinct flavors of GREEN and SANCTUARY.

  “I believe you.” Ling nodded. “That’s why we mustn’t go there. In case we’re still being followed.”

  She didn’t look much like a star god anymore, with her dark hair hacked short and pale skin covered with soot. Wearing just a torn undertunic from her once shiny uniform, Ling now seemed far wilder than the Jijoan natives she once called “savages.” In a cloth sling she carried a crimson torus that leaked gore like a wounded sausage.

  Lark saw her meaning. Ever since they had tried sabotaging the dreadnought’s control chamber, giant Jophur and their robot servants had chased them across the vast vessel. As fugitives, the humans mustn’t lead pursuers to the one place offering food and shelter.

  “Where to then?” Lark hated being in the open. He grasped their only weapon, a circular purple tube. Larger and healthier than the red one, it was their sole key to get past locked doors and unwary guardians.

  Ling knew starships far better than he. But this behemoth warship was different. She peered up one shadowy tunnel, a curled shaft that seemed more organic than artificial.