by Brin, David
“I suppose.” He tilted his head towards the Glint. “So you really think she can reach one percent of light speed?”
“Should,” Jessa said. “We don’t have enough data at higher velocities to know for sure.”
Interesting. “You mean you don’t know its top speed?”
Jessa scowled at him. “Don’t even think it.”
He regarded her innocently. “Think what?”
“You be careful with my plane.”
He laughed amiably. “I’m going to wreak havoc on it.”
“Very funny.” Her voice quieted. “You be careful with Kelric, too.”
“Hell, he’ll be fine. He’s only an idiot when reporters interview him.”
“I’m not joking.” Jessa shook her head. “People look at you, they see big and quiet. They don’t think you feel. They don’t think you think.”
He shifted his weight. “It doesn’t bother me.”
“Kelric, listen.” She came over to him. “You’re smarter than all of them put together. And you feel. Too much. You keep thinking and feeling and locking it up. It will eat holes in your heart.”
Where the hell had that come from? “I’m fine.”
Jessa put her hands on her hips. “Only one dumb thing I’ve ever seen you do. And that’s agreeing to take up this plane. Schuldman had no right to push you into this mission.”
“He didn’t push me. I volunteered.”
“Yeah, right.” She poked her finger at his chest. “I want my plane back in one piece.”
“It’s not your plane, Zaub.”
“Just remember what I said.”
He did his best to look reassuring. “All right.”
“Good.” She paused awkwardly. “Good luck.”
Kelric smiled. “Thanks.”
After Jessa left, Kelric climbed into the cockpit and ran more tests. He put the computer through every one of its routines and it answered without a glitch.
Although the Glint could take off vertically, today Kelric tested it on the runway. After Tyrson gave him clearance, he sped down the asphalt and soared into the air, exulting in acceleration pushing him against his seat. He loved that sensation of speed.
As he shot higher into the sky, the world of Diesha spread out on his screens in a desolate landscape of sunrise colors. He accelerated steadily and the Glint answered like an extension of his own body. The wings folded back against the fuselage, cutting drag and preparing for the supersonic shock wave. Mach 1, Mach 2, Mach 4. Finally he hit the speed where the computer had developed jitters during his last flight.
“Glint One Eight to Control,” Kelric said. “Systems look good here.”
“I read the same,” Tyrson said over the audiocom.
“Good.” Kelric grinned. “I’m going to give it a kick.”
Captain, the Glint thought. I don’t think kicking me will serve any purpose.
Kelric chuckled. Don’t worry. It’s just another idiom. He fired the rockets, breathing in grunts to keep from blacking out from the g-forces. Mach 8, 16, 32. He hit escape velocity and kept going. On his screens, Diesha changed from a flat landscape to curved globe studded with ruby deserts.
“She’s beautiful,” he murmured.
Tyrson chuckled. “Is that someone you see up there or are you thinking about your last date?”
“Lady Diesha,” Kelric said. Beautiful sorceress, he thought. Hold me in your arms until the pain stops.
We’ve cleared the planet, the Glint announced. Do you want to start the inversion engine?
Let’s give it a go. Kelric fired the photon thrusters—and went into quasis.
Without quantum stasis, more commonly known as quasis, he would have died. A starship engine could accelerate a craft up to thousands of times the force of gravity, which would have smeared him all over his seat if he hadn’t had protection. The waveform modulators in the quasis coil worked on an atomic level, keeping the quantum wavefunction of the ship from changing state. During quasis, nothing could alter the configuration of particles in the plane or anything it carried, including him; on a macroscopic level, the craft became a rigid solid that no force could deform. Only the atomic clock that limited their quasis time was unaffected. Kelric felt nothing; the only way he knew he hadn’t been conscious the entire time was by the sudden jump in speed on his display.
Tyrson’s voice burst out of the audiocom. “Captain, she’s working like a dream!”
“You bet,” Kelric said. Thanks, Zaub, he thought. He fired the thrusters again and his speed suddenly read three thousand kilometers per second.
“Glint Control,” Kelric said. “I’m at one percent of light speed,”
“We read you smooth as silk,” Tyrson said. “It’s beautiful.”
An unwelcome thought came to his mind. No, it’s empty. Everything is empty. He pushed the thought away and spoke into the audiocom. “I’m going to crank it up again.”
Another voice came on the com. “Captain, this is General Schuldman. Your systems are operating well, better than predicted. The decision to exceed this speed is yours, but if you do so you will be going against the advice of the team that installed your engine. Do you understand?”
Kelric knew Schuldman wanted him to push the Glint’s limit. He also knew the general meant to make sure he knew the risks. “Understood, sir.”
He fired the photon thrusters. A vibration shook through the ship, a gentle shaking but one that didn’t feel right.
“Captain!” Static crackled in Tyrson’s voice. “I’m reading you at ten percent of light speed.”
“Captain Valdoria.” Schuldman’s voice came through the static. “That’s fast enou—”
Kelric fired the thrusters before the general finished; that way, he wasn’t disobeying orders. The display jumped to one hundred thousand kilometers per second. He hit the thrusters again and the number doubled. He was going at two-thirds the speed of light.
A voice on his audiocom drawled. “Are you recei… return to base…” The words faded away.
For a moment Kelric had no idea who had spoken. Then he realized it was Schuldman. Glint, he thought. What’s wrong with the audiocom?
It can’t cope with the time dilation.
Interesting. Starship audiocoms easily compensated for the effect of relativistic speeds on radio waves, but the Glint had no reason to carry one. He wasn’t supposed to be going anywhere near this fast.
How long does Control think we’ve been gone? Kelric asked.
Thirty-three minutes, the Glint answered. My clock says thirty minutes have passed for us.
How about that? We jumped three minutes into the future. When he went this fast, Control recorded his clock as running slow. However, he recorded the clocks on Diesha as running slow. It was like when he sat in a magtrain and it looked like the train next to him was going backward when in fact his train was the one that had started to move forward. Relative to him, the other train was going backward. Similarly, relative to this plane, Diesha was shooting off in the other direction. Only when he turned the Glint around did it break the symmetry of their relative motion. What it meant was that when he returned home, he would be several minutes younger than everyone at the base.
Captain. The Glint’s urgency cut through his mind. The strain on this craft exceeds advised safety limits.
No one ever claimed this job was safe, Kelric thought. How fast can you go, sweet Glint? Fast enough to the blow the grief out of his heart? Could anything take him that fast, that high, that far?
I also register a strain in your mind greater than advisable safety limits, the Glint said.
Who programmed you to tell me that? Jessa Zaubern?
Captain, I advise that we return to base.
Kelric watched his visored reflection in the console. Can we invert?
You mean go faster than the speed of light?
That’s right.
Captain, this flight wasn’t set up for such a maneuver.
Just answer t
he question.
I don’t know if we can invert, the Glint thought. But if we do, we won’t have enough fuel to get home.
Raise the beambox threshold. By scooping up only higher energy electrons, he could get more bang out of each annihilation and extend the range of his positron fuel.
If I raise it, the Glint answered, you will run out of air before we find enough electrons with an energy that high. You will die.
So invert the fuel first.
I see no reason to—
The cosmic ray flux is higher in supraluminal space, Kelric thought. We’ll find electrons a lot faster there.
They will be there and we will be here, the Glint said. Photons produced by annihilations in imaginary space do us no good in real space.
Sure they will, Kelric thought. If I release a flock of birds by an open window, some are bound to fly through it. As long as the engine operates here, some photons will invert back here.
That violates energy conservation.
For flaming sake. His computer was arguing with him. No, it doesn’t. What we gain, imaginary space loses.
Photons are not birds. Now the Glint sounded like Jessa. Inversion engines are not windows.
Just do it, Kelric thought.
Captain, you may not survive this procedure.
Are you refusing to accept my commands?
Yes.
Kelric frowned. You can’t do that.
What you suggest could be fatal. It amounts to throwing away your fuel.
The hell it does.
The only way for imaginary photons to become real, the Glint thought, is for their existence quantum number to change from zero to one. That doesn’t happen spontaneously.
So what? Kelric answered. Nothing spontaneously inverts. If starship engines can force starships to do it, they ought to work on photons, too.
There was a long pause. Then the Glint said, A finite probability exists that you are correct and that this either brilliant or insane idea of yours may actually work. If it works, it will revolutionize star travel.
I’m a test pilot, Kelric thought. I’m supposed to test things.
You are putting yourself in too much danger.
Yes, I have a dangerous job. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it.
I still advise against the procedure. The Glint’s thought came with what felt like genuine reluctance. However, it appears I am unable to refuse your command.
Good. Kelric glanced over his displays. Reset the engine to invert its fuel in increments of point one percent.
Engine reset.
Kelric fired the photon thrusters—and his speed jumped to 98 percent of light. The stars leapt on his holomap, converging towards a point in front of the plane. Data flashed on his displays: if Control could still track him, they would read his length as shrunk by 80 percent and his mass increased by 500 percent.
Why didn’t we invert? Kelric asked,
We need to get closer to light speed, the Glint told him.
Starships manage from a lot slower speeds than this.
Starships have entire systems dedicated to optimizing their inversion capability, the Glint thought. I don’t.
Kelric knew he should return to the base before time dilation jumped him any farther into the future. He had already gained more than half an hour. But he couldn’t make himself turn around. Up here he could speed away from the grief, the loneliness, the huge emptiness.
This time when he fired the thrusters, his display leapt to 99.999999 percent of light speed. His mass increased by a factor of seven thousand. The starlight turned into x-rays. In one minute, five days passed on Diesha.
We still can’t invert, the Glint thought.
Kelric fired the thrusters again. Centuries passed on Diesha. Now they were all dead. All of them. Everyone he had ever loved.
Cory, I can’t do it, he thought. I can’t live in a universe where the people I love are gone.
No inversion achieved, the Glint thought.
Kelric gritted his teeth and fired the thrusters—
—and the universe turned inside out, yanking him with it, his body and mind twisting like a tortured Möbius strip.
3
Beyond the End
The agonizing sensation stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The stars reappeared, their colors returned to normal but their positions inverted through a point that appeared to be infinitely far in front of the plane. Kelric recognized none of the eerily distorted constellations.
We inverted, the Glint thought. But it definitely wasn’t as smooth as silk.
Kelric drew in a deep breath. You’re learning your idioms. That was like no inversion he had ever experienced. He didn’t know if he could survive it a second time.
I need you to specify a path in spacetime, the Glint said. We’re supraluminal.
He struggled to clear his mind. Time and space switched character at faster than light speeds. Now he couldn’t back up in space but he could back up in time. The relativistic equations allowed him to go into the past. A sublight observer would see an anti-matter Glint flying backwards from its destination to its origin. If he worked it right, he could compensate for his time-dilated leap into the future by leaping into the past here.
If only he could go back to before Cory died.
Unfortunately, no matter how much he wanted it, the final result of his trip couldn’t violate reality. A thousand pilots before him had verified that law of physics. The best he could do with a starship was come home with the same amount of time passing there as for him. With the Glint, he would be lucky to come out anywhere near the day when he had left Diesha. This morning. Except now it was centuries, even millennia in the past.
His displays weren’t telling him anything. The inversion had scrambled them. Glint, how fast are we going?
One trillion times the speed of light.
WHAT?
One trillion ti-
Slow down!
Silence.
Kelric blinked at the gibberish on his displays. Did anything happen?
We slowed to 132 percent light speed.
How did we get going so fast before?
When we passed light speed, our mass decreased, the Glint thought. So we sped up, which made our mass decrease, which sped us up, which—
I get the idea. To himself only, shutting the Glint out of his mind, Kelric thought, Can you imagine a more spectacular way to die? Hurtle along at infinite speed with zero mass and infinite length, your body turning to dust while time stops for the rest of the Universe?
And then what? he asked himself. You think Cory will be waiting? You think she’ll open her arms wide, welcoming you for the stupidity of killing yourself? He could see her glaring at him, her dark hair whipping in an imaginary wind.
“Cory, I miss you,” Kelric murmured.
I don’t understand ‘Cory,’ the Glint thought.
I never did either, Kelric admitted. But gods, I loved her. To the image of Cory in his mind, he thought, Good-bye, my love. Then he took a deep breath and directed his thoughts outward, focusing them enough so they would reach the computer. Glint, figure out a course that will get us home as near to when we left as possible. He gave voice to the realization lifting above his grief like a bird in flight. If there’s a way to get back alive, I want to do it.
I’ll do my best, Captain. After a pause, the Glint thought, I’m ready.
Kelric fired the thrusters. The stars shifted position, but nothing else changed. He fired them again, trying not to dwell on how little fuel he had left. The stars collapsed into a point, their sluggish photons lumbering towards him as he leapt farther and farther into the past. He fired the thrusters—
And ripped in two.
Kelric snapped like a rubber band pulled too far too fast, its torn edges writhing in space, screaming, screaming…
Suddenly he was whole again. He felt ill, dizzy, disoriented, as if his body had reset.
“We inverted,” the Glint said.
“The top of the plane, including the top of your body, inverted two picoseconds before the rest of the craft.”
Good gods. “Am I normal now?”
“Essentially.”
“What do you mean, ‘essentially’?”
“Only 99.99 percent of your mass reinverted.”
“What didn’t come back?”
“The missing molecules are distributed throughout the lower half of your body.” Then the Glint added, “We gave it a go and most of us went.”
Kelric managed a wan laugh, trying to ignore his bizarre mental image of 0.01 percent of his body doomed to forever hurtle into the past. “What happened to my cyber link with you?”
“The reinversion scrambled it.”
“Can we still get home?”
“Yes. However, we no longer have enough fuel to slow down.”
“Raise the beambox threshold again,” Kelric said. “Then do the bit with inverting the fuel.”
“We still won’t collect enough before you run out of air and suffocate.”
That was it? He had almost made it back only to find he couldn’t stop? He couldn’t accept that. “There has to be a way to get home.”
“Getting home is easy,” the Glint said, “But when we arrive you will be dead.”
Kelric grimaced. “You’re encouraging.”
“What do you want me to do?”
He touched the spare tank on his survival suit. “Can you tap my emergency air reserve?”
“I already have.”
Kelric sat absorbing his situation. Then he snapped his fingers. “I don’t breathe in quasis.”
“This is true.”
“So crank up the beambox threshold and put me in quasis until we reach Diesha.”
“It is inadvisable to your survival to remain in quasis that long.”
“Dying isn’t advisable to my survival either,” Kelric said. “What’s the problem with quasis?”
“It prevents the arrangement of molecules in your body from adapting as your environment changes. If you stay in too long, your environment will change too much. When you come out, your molecular wave function may not be able to readjust without catastrophic fluctuations.”