“I'd have done the same thing,” he reassures me. “I tell you what: when we get settled aboard the pod, I'll come sit with you for a while so you can tell me all about it.”
“Sounds good, sir. And I have about a thousand questions for you as well.”
He pretends not to hear me, and instead busies himself herding the others up the steps.
Inside the pod is similar to what I imagine a first-class passenger sees when he boards a long-haul space shuttle. Everything is minted, impeccable, and smells brand new. The paired seats are sturdy but comfortable; they recline into beds. Strapped to a partition board in front of each seat is a full EVA spacesuit. It has a magno-fastener up the back, so you can just peel it open and step into it without much fuss in an emergency. The helmets and oxygen tanks are lightweight. All the equipment has been sized according to each buggo’s measurements.
I’m assigned seat 4A, a window seat on the port side. Rachel had wanted to sit next to me, but she was also the only buggo to beat O’see Hendron in the hundred-lap race in the Hex, so, claiming her prize, she’s taken a seat right at the front with the O’see, in the VIP section. Right at the front, where she’s always been, where she belongs.
Sergei’s directly in front of me, seated next to Lys. Lohengrin and Thorpe-Campbell are together on the starboard side, in front of Sarazzin’s team, chatting away. I have no one next to me during the launch.
Our rise into the Star Binder is as smooth as gliding through null-g, just as it was inside my “sanctum skin”. Auto-adjust straps hold me securely in place. The pod leans back into a vertical position, so that we’re facing upward. The launcher then lifts us very slowly through the thin, rose-coloured mist of the Binder shield, which isn’t quite invisible. Closer to, I can see the reams of tiny symbols drifting ghost-like across it as we pass through, as if the Binder is scanning us and visually logging its results into the mist.
That same sequence of images flickers through my mind's eye. A few of them are very early memories, so early I can't recall anything about them, only the strong feelings they evoke: fear, love, wonder. Others feel more recent, but they're too quick to pin down. The rest don't mean a thing, but they do feel important. They all do.
I sit up, still strapped to my seat in the pod, blinking that rose-red out of my vision. As we climb, the tiny symbols drifting and dashing through the mist below merge into a sea of pulsing circuitry. But that phenomenon isn’t isolated to the mist.
I only glimpsed it last time, but now I can see the whole interior of the Binder tunnel. It's a stupendous flickering cylinder. A dark crimson colour with the occasional blindingly chatty red or blue flashes. Inside those flashes are stark alien symbols. They project out like holographic fingerprints; in some hectic areas it resembles the rapid fingering of a giant phantom typist. The Binder’s curved surface reaches about half a kilometre in diameter. It stretches as far as I can see, a perfectly straight conduit into infinity.
“Then what did I just see?” Lohengrin asks Mr Thorpe-Campbell. “If those weren’t all memories, what were they?”
“There are theories about that,” our teacher tells him. “Whether or not you believe them is up to you. But each time you enter or leave the Binder, the images you see will vary, apart from a handful, maybe five or six that never alter. We’re not sure why. But one theory, and it’s a popular one, is that the Binder can somehow access your past and your future. It sees your whole life in a fraction of a second. The images you see include the five or six key defining moments of your life. They include your first memory, but also—and this is the part that weirds people out—the last memory you’ll ever have. If you buy into the theory, Lohengrin, your entire life has just flashed before your eyes, including the years you haven’t lived yet.”
That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, and I don’t mind telling him. “Sir, that makes no sense. How can anyone possibly know that if it hasn’t happened?”
“Because humans have been journeying through the Binder for over a century, Trillion, and many have died in that time. On their deathbeds, they’ve experienced powerful déjà vu. They’ve told relatives they’ve seen that moment countless times before, inside the Binder. Is that a coincidence?”
I shrug. “It just sounds screwy to me, sir. I mean how can this thing know when we’re going to die? The future hasn’t even happened yet.”
“Agreed,” says Lohengrin. “It doesn’t sound plausible, scientifically.”
Thorpe-Campbell slips a piece of caramel candy into his mouth. “Who knows? Maybe you guys can figure it out some day. Like I said, it’s just a theory.”
Yeah, a screwy one. But even I have to admit this thing isn’t playing by our rules. It binds stars and galaxies together with some kind of trans-dimensional subway system. What’s impossible?
The launcher’s ever-so-gentle hum suddenly stops, and I know we’ve just been unclamped. It’s let us go. So we’re now on our own, partnered with the Binder, suspended in its invisible field. I nervously sip from the drink tube labelled ‘Chocolate Milk’. It’s really good. I haven’t had it in ages, but my taste for it is almost as old as I am. Right now anything familiar is good.
O’see Hendron makes an announcement over the pod comm: “Our destination coordinates are ready to transmit to the Binder. As soon as they’re accepted, we’ll start accelerating. Remember, we’re in a vacuum, so while the ride is smooth, our acceleration will be exponential. We’ll reach dizzying speeds. It can be disorienting when you look out at the light streams, but if you want to see something really interesting, ask Mr Thorpe-Campbell for an omnipod. You can use its pre-programmed high magnification lens to read messages inside the light streams. It’s never the same message twice. If you blink, the message will change. If you shift your eye position more than about an inch, the message will change.
“We’ve developed visual recognition software that can translate some of the glyph sequencing in the alien language. It’s math-based. Not very complex, but it is extremely extensive. The hardest part is converting the math into recognisable English. Most of it will show up in the original glyph form. Alien gobbledygook. If you’re lucky, though, you’ll be able to read and understand simple messages sent to you personally by the Star Binder! How awesome is that?
“And for the record, we’ve managed to record several billion billion lines of alien language so far, and each one is different. Some of the folks at Alpha have written plays incorporating the juiciest lines we’ve translated. So don’t be afraid to jot yours down. You’ll be the first human who’s ever seen them. Who knows? They might make you the next Shakespeare. Or, God forbid, the next Charlie Thorpe-Campbell.
“Okay, here we go. Co-ords accepted and we’re in sync. Enjoy the ride, guys. We won't reach minimum kick velocity for a while, so I’ll be serving breakfast shortly—yep, that’s me, the O’see, feeding buggos. Any complaints about my cooking and you’ll all be on the slow burn to Cinder Cone Nebula.”
“Make mine over-easy,” Thorpe-Campbell jokes out loud. “With French toast soldiers.”
“Somebody gag him before I kill him,” she calls back.
A smattering of laughter and a few snickers stops abruptly. We’re on the move. The pod accelerates up this vertical tunnel, but after a while it doesn’t feel vertical. The vacuum subtly reminds us that from now on, there is no up or down. Just momentum.
Reddish lights streak by outside like skyway cat’s eyes, those thousands of reflective lane dividers that merge together into a single strip when you observe them through the side window of a moving vehicle. As the pod accelerates, the streaks appear to split up and multiply. Soon there are dozens running parallel, with varying thicknesses and differing colours. It isn’t a spectrum, though; it’s more like a horizontal barcode of lights. The line definitions vary, too. Some are bold and perfectly toned, while others seem hazy, ill-defined. My intuition tells me it’s the Star Binder’s version of a dashboard readout: a speedometer, em gauge, stellar
map vector, traffic coordinator, and all the other things we might need to know about our trajectory through the tunnel.
Thorpe-Campbell hands out the omnipods. Using the specially designed ‘Static Binder Reader’ lens, I’m able to zoom in on the individual light strands and, at high magnification, make out the fast-changing lines of alien glyphs inside them.
“Keep looking, Jim,” Thorpe-Campbell tells me. “You’ll start to see little clusters of symbols that project out from the rest. You can spot them easily enough because they don’t change as long as you’re observing them. The symbols around them change but they don’t. Blink and you’ll miss them, literally. It takes a bit of getting used to, the no-blinking thing, especially with the longer messages, but like the O’see said, our translation software isn’t great. So if I was you I wouldn’t put too much stock in the precise wordage. Just get the gist of them. Most are gobbledygook because they’re referencing things—places, objects, names—from worlds we don’t even know. Alien histories, playwrights, poets, philosophers, etcetera. Just think how hard it must have been for the first Europeans to translate Chinese proverbs or Egyptian hieroglyphics. Better yet, try teaching whale-song to a cricket. And all of those share a similar DNA! Imagine collecting all the languages from all the species on all the worlds in a thousand galaxies, and translating them into math. Now try deciphering that math into English phrases, using English vocabulary. If we don’t have a word to describe an alien concept, how can we understand it?”
I don’t have much luck with the symbols. They don’t unscramble for me, and staring at the light streaks starts to give me a headache. I get up to have a word with Sergei. He’s ensconced in his Binder-viewing, like Lyssa, who’s leaning over him to see out the window. From behind, I flick both theirs ears at the same time. No reaction. I do it again, harder this time.
Without looking, Sergei makes a grab for me over the top of his seat. Misses.
“You little snot,” Lyssa growls, and I have to stuff a hand over my mouth to hold the chortling in.
“You guys seen anything yet?” I ask.
“Bollocks,” replies Sergei. “It’s like reading computer code when you don’t even read computer code.”
Lyssa adds, “I wish they could just use English. Everybody knows it’s bad manners not to. So inconsiderate.”
“You sound just like me,” her dad says. “Your mum hates it when I talk that way, even when I’m kidding. She says it makes me sound too British.”
“You are British, Dad.”
“Yeah, but we’re supposed to leave our nationalities behind us when we leave Earth, aren’t we? Anything divisive like that, ISPA discourages it. It’s not good for colonial unity.”
“That’s a bunch of bull,” she answers. “It’s who we are. We’ll always be from somewhere, whether we hide it or not. If other people don’t like it, that’s their problem. The chip’s on their shoulder, not ours.”
Thorpe-Campbell smiles to himself. “Do you agree with that, Sergei?”
“With what? That we should be proud of where we come from?”
“Yes.”
To everyone’s surprise, Sergei bursts into song:
“Eto yest nash posledniy
I reshitelniy boy;
S Internatsionalom
Vospryanet rod lyudskoy!”
It probably means nothing to the others, but I remember when he first learned it in Russian, word for word, during several Juve-Ed history classes. It’s the New Soviet anthem, The Internationale.
Lyssa elbows him to stop. When he won’t, she rolls her eyes and launches into a full-throated rendition of the British anthem, Land of Hope and Glory. Neither of them can carry a tune worth a damn, so I try to melody them up a little—with the emphasis on try—by blaring out Under the Moons of Mars, the Martian global hymn/anthem.
You’d think that three-way racket would deter anyone else from joining in, but it has the opposite effect. Next up we get Rachel’s whistled rendition of Selene, Selene, which I can barely make out in the VIP section up ahead. Then Lohengrin pipes up with a disastrous larynx-wrecker from a world that is, it has to be said, somewhat musically challenged. Ramirez croaks out the Spanish equivalent of a classical music chart-bottomer; while Sarazzin, for whatever reason, jumps to his feet and belts out a series of obnoxious Pacintic football chants.
Pretty soon the entire pod crew is fighting to make themselves heard. It’s ear-splitting and totally insane. It’s the best time we’ve all had together as a group of buggos since those first days in the Hex. Just as the disharmony reaches its sickly crescendo, the most amazing soprano voice rises high above it all. It’s so sharp and so on-key, it cuts the air in two. We all stop to listen while O’see Hendron, wheeling a trolley stacked with sweet-smelling cooked breakfasts, sings an opera number to die for as she passes us.
During a brief pause she says, “Come on, Foggerty—I know you know this one,” then resumes, but not quite as loud. A few seconds later, a quiet, even higher-pitched voice joins in from the front, growing clearer, louder, more confident. Rachel sidles into view, kneeling upright on her seat. She doesn’t take her eye off me. All I can see of her is a tiny portion of her side profile, but it’s enough to keep me watching. Listening. And grinning stupidly. By the time the O’see starts handing out our meals, we’re treated to a full-on operatic duet.
The breakfast, as it turns out, is forgettable. But that song will stay with us for a long time. Rachel tells us it’s the letter duet from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Both she and the O’see have performed it on stage, at different times and venues, of course. Maybe it was a part of their Phi training. In between the mortal combat. At any rate, they hug each other, then offer us dainty bows. We clap till our hands are sore.
* * *
TRILLION JAMES TRANSMIT RADIO REPLY AT UHF IF YOU CAN READ THIS MESSAGE
The words wake me from a daze. I stare for a while through the high magnification lens, puzzled at first, then certain I must have scrambled some sort of personalized setting on my device. Blinking doesn’t change anything. I take the omnipod off and rub my eyes with the heels of my hands. Maybe I am tired. But I don’t feel it. There’s something screwy with my viewer.
TRILLION JAMES TRANSMIT RADIO REPLY AT UHF IF YOU CAN READ THIS MESSAGE
Ooooh-kaaay...
“Sir?” I call for Thorpe-Campbell. He’s chatting with Lyssa, who’s gone to sit with Rachel in the VIP seats. “Sir? I think there’s something wrong with my ’pod.”
“Trillion. What have you done now?” He steals a handful of Lys’s potato chips and forces a really big disc-shaped one into his mouth, crunching it into segments. He offers me one. I take three.
“My readout’s showing something weird,” I explain. “You should take a look.”
“Mm.” He stuffs the remaining chips into his mouth, wipes his fingers on my EVA suit, and tries my ’pod. He presses a button on the side. The zoom, like most functions on the omnipod, is eye-operated: focus your gaze on a spot and then keep your weak eye closed to zoom in, or your dominant eye closed to zoom out. “Seems okay to me, Jim. What’s this about the readout?”
“It might have been the translator software, but...you said blinking loses the message.”
“True. It’s something to do with the quantum observer effect. The light streams seem to know they’re being observed; it’s as if they interact with each individual observer. Blinking or shifting position seems to interrupt that link. It resets it.” He hands it back to me. “You’re saying you can blink and still read the same message?”
“More than that, sir. Look, it’s still there—the same message. Exactly the same. It’s addressing me.”
“What?”
“It’s saying my name. Trillion James. It’s telling me to transmit a radio message at UHF if I can read this.”
“Impossible.”
“Well, I’m blinking, shifting position, closing one eye, both eyes, and it’s still there. So what’s the deal?”
He snatches the ’pod again, looks for himself. “Nothing for me. Just glyph speak. What you’re suggesting has never happened once in billions of observations, and you’re saying it’s singled you out by name? The Binder has singled you out?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I’ve never liked being called a liar. “I don’t know what’s going on. And neither do you, from the sounds of it.”
“You understand why I’m sceptical, though, right?”
“Yeah, but why would I make it up? It’s the first time I’ve ever looked through that damn thing. I don’t even know what glyph speak looks like. All I know is that’s the first thing I saw.”
“Really?” He lowers the ’pod, scrutinizes me. “That is interesting. That’s—” He jumps up and dashes down the aisle toward the O’see. “Don’t move, Jim. Keep watching it—don’t lose contact.”
I do as he says, but it’s creeped me out a little. He’s saying this has never happened before? Just like the dragonfly and my invitations into the Binder. He should know. He’s the one who found this interstellar subway in the first place.
“Jim? ’S up?” Sergei leans over the back of his seat. “Wha’ve you got?”
I read the message aloud for him word for word, adding, “Can’t be for me, then. Trillion James. That’s not even my name.”
“Yeah, right,” he says sarcastically. “You’ve never seen it written that way round before.” He’s referring to the Hex scoreboard. “Best face it—it’s after you, and it’s gonna get you.”
“Shut it.”
The O’see sits beside me. I can’t see her because I’m staring out the window, but I can smell her perfume. “Okay, Trillion. I’ve just heard what’s happened. I can’t say I understand it, but we should probably try to get to bottom of this. If it’s come from the Binder...well, it’s our duty to learn as much as we possibly can. So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to say your name, tell it you’ve understood the message, then ask it what it wants. Can you do that?”
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