Strider's Galaxy

by John Grant

  "Are we moving?" said Strider, instinctively slapping at her shoulder as she felt another pseudo-pinch.

  "Who could tell?" said Leander, who had at last got herself under control. She carefully sprang from the far wall back towards her seat, swooping adroitly downwards and pinning her feet under the restrainers there.

  The lights dimmed for a few moments to a ghastly, sickly yellow, and then brightened again.

  "Remind me to give that goddam valet a drink when this is over," said Nelson. "If it ever does get over."

  "What's happening?" said Strider, maneuvering herself clumsily towards him and peering at his screen. Just for a second the display had lit up.

  "He was right," said Nelson somberly. "We've fallen out of the Universe. What we've gone and done is found ourselves a wormhole." He leaned back in his chair, reaching his arms behind him in a simulation of boredom. "The big question is whether or not we can ever drop back into the Universe again."

  #

  Strauss-Giolitto slapped O'Sondheim across the face, once, twice and then a third time. She almost missed the third time because the previous impacts were causing her to drift away from him.

  "Get yourself together, you asshole!" she screamed at him. "You're supposed to be the First fucking Officer on this fucking ship!"

  He looked at her, and continued weeping.

  "Leave him alone," said Lan Yi quietly. "He can't help it."

  "He goddam can!" said Strauss-Giolitto furiously. Something pinched her ankle, and in response she swiped out again at O'Sondheim. This time she was a meter out of reach. Her body did a complicated pirouette, and she was lucky not to hurt herself as she slammed head-first against the forcefield futon. The vague glow of the forcefield had been their only source of illumination for what seemed like half a lifetime.

  Outside, the daylight-simulator began to give a grey-yellow light, then brightened fitfully.

  "All of us react differently to stress," said Lan Yi.

  Strauss-Giolitto looked at him. She wouldn't mind hitting him as well.

  "This turd is supposed to be our second-in-command," she said. "If anything happened to Strider, he's the one our lives would rely on. And look at him!"

  Lan Yi chose not to.

  O'Sondheim had at least stopped his loudly hysterical sobbing. The darkness and the free fall had seemed at first not to affect him much, but then the sensations of the bodily interference had started, and the First Officer had cracked completely. Lan Yi had tried to talk him back to sanity, but it hadn't worked. Strauss-Giolitto's more brutal methods hadn't been much use either—although they'd obviously done her a lot of good. O'Sondheim's face was a mass of bruises, yet he was still quietly weeping.

  The lighting was improving steadily now.

  "What do you think went wrong?" said Strauss-Giolitto for the thousandth time.

  Lan Yi looked at her blandly. "I have been pondering that particular problem ever since the lights went out." He smiled bleakly. His face looked very old all of a sudden. "My guess is that we have fallen into a wormhole. It is the only reason that I can think of for the drive to have died."

  She looked at him disbelievingly.

  "I thought wormholes were supposed to be rare," she said.

  "So did I," replied Lan Yi. "So did everyone. It seems we might have been wrong." He shook his head sadly. "Now it seems vanishingly unlikely that we shall ever see Tau Ceti II—which is a great pity, because it was an experience to which I was very much looking forward."

  "You can think of that at a time like now?"

  "I can think of very little else," said the old man, "except that perhaps some of our colleagues were injured when the g disappeared. Now that we have light again, I believe you and I might go to find out."

  He pushed himself towards the door, and she followed.

  "Just stay here, you understand, you creep," said Strauss-Giolitto to O'Sondheim.

  He nodded wordlessly, and the tears continued to flow.

  #

  Humanity had tried to devise some means of faster-than-light travel for centuries, but without success. Very little technological work had been done on the problem, for obvious reasons, but theoretical physicists had nagged away at it interminably—and uselessly.

  In theory there were a number of ways, all of which seemed futile. You could find a spinning black hole, then adopt just the precisely correct trajectory as you fell into it, so that you would emerge somewhere millions of parsecs away in the Universe—or perhaps even in an entirely different universe. Black holes had been identified, and the configuration of the x-ray spectrum given off by the raw matter falling into some of them confirmed that they were indeed spinning. The nearest useful candidate was a healthy three hundred parsecs from the Solar System, which meant that just getting there, using current technology, would take the best part of two millennia and require as much fuel as a small moon. On arrival, you would probably have to spend decades—if not centuries—studying the black hole and preferably correlating your data with a secondary team investigating another spinner. Comparing notes would be a lengthy business: the next nearest spinner was unfortunately in almost exactly the opposite direction from the Solar System, so that a one-way message would take a little over two thousand five hundred years.

  Then, when finally you were ready to boldly go, you could dip into the black hole and discover your constituent subatomic particles evenly distributed throughout one if not several universes and quite possibly in different eras of each universe's lifespan.

  As this was not an appealing option, humanity instead turned its attention to wormholes, theoretical physical constructs which might link two different parts of the Universe closely together, subverting the normal fabric of spacetime. All the mathematics pointed to the fact that wormholes ought to exist, but no one had ever been able even to come close to suggesting how you could find one—or, much better, build one. In fact, the latter task was probably impossible: wormholes, if they did indeed exist as the theory said they should, were quantum structures based on the fact that the physics of reality is reliant not on certainty but on probability—or in their case improbability—so in order to build one you would first have to construct improbabilistic tools. Since no one had the first idea what an improbabilistic tool looked like—although jokes about the term had become thoroughly stale with age—this option, too, seemed unappealing.

  A third option had seemed for a while to be encoded tachyons. Tachyons are particles that travel faster than light: indeed, they require to be energized in some unimaginable way if they are to be slowed down to light-velocity. In their natural state, tachyons travel at infinite velocity, and are thus everywhere in the Universe at once. If a craftful of human beings could somehow be encoded into tachyonic form and then reconstituted as normal matter somewhere else, its translation from one side of the Universe to the other could take no time at all—even better, since theory predicted that tachyons also travelled backwards in time, it could arrive at its destination centuries before its departure. This raised the intriguing possibility of being able to send a tachyonic message home to say: "Don't bother coming. We're here already."

  Perhaps luckily, no one had ever caught a tachyon, so this mode of travel was abandoned even as a possibility—especially after the theoretical physicist Shutzi Katanara proved beyond any possible doubt that tachyons could not exist. The equations Katanara produced were so beautiful that they sang: there could be no doubt about his conclusions.

  Attention turned back to wormholes. If only, if only, if only . . .

  What human scientists hadn't reckoned on was that wormholes were everywhere. The trick of interstellar navigation wasn't finding them. It was avoiding them.

  That was what Lan Yi had just realized, while he'd been curled up in the darkness listening to Strauss-Giolitto brutalizing O'Sondheim.

  He found the idea exquisite.

  And exquisitely frightening.

  Yet another invisible somebody pinched him softly,
and he hardly noticed.

  #

  Just at the door, Lan Yi paused. "I'll be with you in a moment," he said to Strauss-Giolitto. "Wait here."

  He shoved himself towards a low cupboard behind his futon and rummaged inside it for a moment. "Here," he said, tossing something gently towards her.

  It was a belt-rope. She clipped one end on to her belt and idly swung a circle with the other, which was weighted by its small grav-grapple. The device was for use in emergencies on-planet. Her unthinking action began to make her spin very gradually in the opposite direction. She clutched the doorpost.

  "What about you?" she said.

  "I insisted on having a spare," he said, producing it. "I insisted on having spares of everything, except my body. I am a lot older than you are, Maria Strauss-Giolitto, and am more likely to find myself in difficulties. It is probably because I am aware of this that I am a lot older than you are." He smiled.

  He cued his musibot with a couple of jabs of a finger. Music filled the cabin. Then Lan Yi made a further manipulation and the sound began to boom out almost deafeningly. O'Sondheim, almost forgotten by the other two, recoiled, but the blast of noise seemed to bring him to his senses. He drew the back of his hand across his eyes, and then looked around alertly.

  Lan Yi glanced at the First Officer. Was it possible that O'Sondheim could help them? No: there wasn't a third belt-rope. He gestured to O'Sondheim that the man should stay where he was, and by a miracle the First Officer understood what he was trying to say.

  Back at the door, Lan Yi found the wall of sound was more tolerable. He hitched his own belt-rope on.

  "We go one after the other between the cabins," he shouted into Strauss-Giolitto's ear. "Never let go of the rope, even when you're inside a cabin. If the g comes back suddenly, we could be killed if we weren't secured."

  She nodded. It was tempting just to "swim" through the free fall to the next cabin but if either of them were halfway between cabins when an abrupt rearward force of 2g was reintroduced . . . No wonder Strider had been so insistent over the intercom that people stay indoors.

  He raised his grav-grapple and shot it towards the wall of the cabin nearest to them. Then, to her surprise, he moved not towards it but in the opposite direction, instead leaping towards the Santa Maria's stern, paying out his belt-rope as he went. Almost immediately she saw the sense of what he was doing. They should start with the rearmost cabin and work their way forwards.

  She followed suit, swinging in a long loop, carefully adjusting the control at her belt so that there was never too much of the rope paid out slack at any one time. If the gees were suddenly restored, the tautening of a slack rope could break her back. Even a taut rope would probably do so anyway, but at least this way they were reducing the risks.

  She arrived beside Lan Yi at the rearmost cabin, panting slightly.

  "That is the end of the most dangerous part of the exercise," he said, as calmly as if he were discussing the weather. The noise of the music he had started playing was far quieter here but still perfectly audible.

  "What did you do that for?" she said, nodding towards his distant cabin as he shoved open the door of the one they'd arrived at. "It's a beastly racket."

  "It's Telemann," he said. "Get inside."

  She obeyed, finding herself confronted by a woman and a terrified child. The woman was holding herself and the child down on to the larger of the room's two forcefield beds. There was a stench of urine in the enclosed space. She knew the child, of course, from having taught him. "Hello, Hilary," she said, smiling. "There's nothing to be afraid about."

  "Well," continued Lan Yi, pulling himself through the door behind her and shutting it firmly, "it's melded Telemann. Variations on a tune by another composer of roughly the same epoch, but whose name has been forgotten. If you are so very interested, Maria Strauss-Giolitto, the tune is called 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands'. I prefer the Telemann melding best of all, but my musibot has produced some other interesting combinations based on it. The Mozart version is over-fussy, however."

  "It sounds beastly to me," said Strauss-Giolitto. Her own tastes ran to randomusic, where the musibot was programmed to produce randomly selected series of tones and rhythms.

  The woman was looking at the two of them as if they were insane. "What the hell are you people talking about?"

  "Quite right," said Lan Yi, with a little formal nod. "We are checking the cabins to ascertain the extent of any casualties there may have been, and to see if we can help. I played the Telemann piece because I always find it most soothing, and I thought that it might calm others. But it seems"—he shrugged towards Strauss-Giolitto—"that I may have been wrong."

  Strauss-Giolitto silenced him with a raised hand. "Are you and Hilary the only people here?" she said, trying to make her voice sound friendly but unconcerned. "This cabin has sustained no casualties?"

  "Just us two are here," said the woman. "We're OK."

  Strauss-Giolitto's apparent calmness was infecting the child, who for the first time since they'd come through the door was beginning to look less frightened. "Hello, Maria," he said, forcing a smile. "I was doing my homework when this thing happened, so I . . ."

  "I think we'll allow you to be late with your homework this once," said Strauss-Giolitto, grinning desperately.

  Lan Yi had opened the door, and was fiddling at his waist. His belt-rope wound itself in swiftly until the grav-grapple finally appeared. "Please that you do the same," he said to Strauss-Giolitto.

  She did so, at the same time thinking that Lan Yi must be very much more worried than he was letting on. His Argot, although habitually a little stiff and uncolloquial, was normally flawless.

  "We will leave you now," said Lan Yi to Hilary's mother, patting Hilary's head. "I suggest that you retain your current position until instructions are given otherwise."

  He nodded to Strauss-Giolitto, and she launched her grav-grapple towards the next bow-ward cabin, then let her belt-rope reel her towards it.

  This time they had to manoeuvre themselves over the cabin's roof before they could reach the door. It was a terrifying few moments before they found themselves safely inside—only to discover that the cabin was empty.

  They reached the fifth cabin before they found their first casualty. Strauss-Giolitto vaguely recognized him as a junior biochemist who had made a few amiable passes at her between Phobos and Jupiter. Now she felt embarrassed, because she couldn't even remember his name. He floated near the ceiling, his neck obviously broken. There might have been a chance, had a medbot got to him quickly enough, that he could have been saved, even yet; but she and Lan Yi had no means of summoning a medbot—besides, from what had been going on, it seemed very likely that the Main Computer was out of action, and the medbots were dependent on it, their own small puters being just sufficient to manipulate the various devices they employed. Maybe, if you were lucky, one of them could diagnose and splint a fractured leg. If you were unlucky, you could find your broken leg helpfully crammed down your throat.

  "There's nothing we can do," said Lan Yi with a shrug, his face unperturbed. "We must speed on our way, Maria Strauss-Giolitto."

  She felt guilty, just leaving the biochemist floating there, but Lan Yi was right: there was nothing they could do.

  A few cabins later, however, they were able to make themselves useful. An agronomer had broken his wrist, and the darkness and the pain of the injury—plus the shock of finding that, unlike at home on the blisters of Mars, no medbot had arrived within minutes—had virtually sent him out of his wits: he was just staring at his limp hand as if it were some rare and valuable objet trouvé.

  Lan Yi found a vest in a drawer and ripped it efficiently into strips, then began applying an emergency bandage. The agronomer made no protest, even when his bones ground together. Strauss-Giolitto tried her best to get through to him, speaking softly to him, forming words that didn't mean very much but attempting to make an encouraging pattern of sentences. She didn't kno
w if she was having any success: in the end they had to leave him there, now strapped to his bunk, and carry on their nerve-racking survey.

  They must have worked their way through over half the cabins—repairing lesser injuries and finding only one more fatality—when the gees came back on.

  Despite all their precautions, they were slammed against an inner cabin wall, Strauss-Giolitto on top of Lan Yi.

  She gave a shriek of surprise. He gave a yip of pain. As the cabin slowly swivelled to right itself, they slid to the floor together.

  Strauss-Giolitto picked herself up wearily. One grew grudgingly half-accustomed to 2g in time—rather a long time, if you had spent much of your life on Mars—but it took only a few hours in free fall to realize quite what a burden the acceleration put on one's body.

  She reached out a hand to the elderly Taiwanese.

  "I think not," he said crisply, lying there. "You are a big person, Maria Strauss-Giolitto, and that was a heavy impact. You have broken my arm and at least one—no, certainly it is two—of my ribs."

  He tried and eventually managed to sit up. Then he fainted.

  #

  "Holy Umbel!" shouted Leander, suddenly forced deep into her chair.

  "You called," said Nelson. It was an old joke between them, and he spoke it automatically. He was as stunned as she was by what had just happened. Neither of them noticed Strider hauling her once-more ponderous body across the deck to assure herself that Pinocchio was securely moored.

  The resumption of acceleration was shock enough in itself.

  The view through the fore-window above them was something else.

  The colors were like those of a skin of oil floating on the surface of a puddle of water—oddly metallic-seeming greens and blues and yellows and pale reds and grays—but all the hazy-edged random shapes were moving with frenetic speed through and around each other. Wherever the two officers looked, the dazzlingly colored forms seemed to be trying to create coherent patterns, but never quite succeeding. The effect was almost impossible to look at; it was almost impossible not to watch.