Then short-circuit the polymer bubble.
He quietened down eventually and I heard him pull his trousers up. Steering the raft put me in a trance, saving me from having to think, and I didn’t notice how much time passed until he tapped me on the shoulder.
‘How much longer?’
I shrugged.
‘You said we’d be an hour at the most,’ he complained. ‘It’s been more than two hours already.’
‘We spent time on the sandbank.’
‘Only a few minutes!’
I started giving him guff about how a sandbank stopover distorts the timeflow and extends the journey time, making it up as I went along. I must have sounded unconvincing. He leaned forward to peer over my shoulder at the instrument panel. He probably saw the blank navigator visor and understood the meaning of that, because he said, in a plaintive voice, ‘We’re lost, aren’t we?’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
Did I say the wrong thing? My passenger collapsed in a sobbing heap.
~ * ~
It was my finest hour. My swansong. The back universe soared and sang all around us. My raft rattled like it was plunging through broken shale. Yow-Wow. I had no idea where the hell we were - and what did it matter anyway?
Through recklessness, probably, the moment came when I made what should have been a fatal error of judgement. We were going through a flume. That ‘ s different from a water flume, incidentally: the current rotates corkscrew fashion and the trick is in the timing. That was where I fell down. The raft tipped up, I lost all control and we were dumped into the turbulence, spinning like crazy and being carried further and further off.
The titanium bracing groaned as it tried to hold the raft together. My customer let out a soprano ululation, a screeching aria of fright. Poor devil. I fought to regain control, though how I possibly could, and to what end, was entirely unclear. Never mind that turbulence can quickly carry you out of range of all the hundred and ten beacons. You wouldn’t know the difference, because man-made structures give in to the stresses in short order. I was about to chuck it in, too, just close my eyes and let the raft break up, when suddenly the turbulence lessened. I found I was able to hold us steady.
And the music behind me subsided to a whimpering. I might have offered a few words of comfort, but I was too taken up with studying what lay ahead of us. The turbulence smoothed out and gave way to a field that was peculiar, a slowly moving three-dimensional vortex.
In the centre of that vortex, on the upper left of the polymer bubble, was an orange glow.
Miracle of miracles. Little Tony, all the luck in the universe has descended on your head! That was what I told myself as I turned the nose of the raft, nudging the power stick a trifle. ‘Cheer up,’ I said, thinking to quieten the sniffling in the back, ‘there’s a phase port ahead.’
A little moan of relief came forth. ‘Is it Elivira?’
‘No way to tell. The navigator’s out.’
Then, as we vectored in, it became clear that something was amiss. I couldn’t quite accept it at first. I kept blinking and shaking my head and looking again, sure there was something wrong with my vision. As I said, you can’t decode an identification signal without a working navigator; but the signal itself should have been visible as a slight pulse or flicker. Instead, the orange glow was steady.
So what, you might say, the IS could have been switched off. But no, because that can’t happen; it’s part of the phase modulation itself. If the beacon is on, the signal has to be there.
Beating the odds is one thing; this was something else again. Only one explanation fitted the facts. And it had to be something no one any longer believed existed.
An alien phase port.
~ * ~
There weren’t supposed to be any alien civilizations. Nature was not prolific. Of the thousands of planets that had been investigated, only a handful were life-bearing, and all were of poor evolutionary development. The lengthy search for non-human phase pushers had been closed down a long time ago. Engineers were unanimously of the opinion that there were none to be found, in our galactic group anyway.
Whether I had taken the raft further than that, or whether this was an alien pusher brought newly on line was, for the moment, academic. We had been thrown out of the frying pan into the fire, and out of the fire into the middle of the floor, as Brigham Young put it. There was nowhere else to go, and we would have to take our chance on the aliens being friendly. Maybe they would fix my navigator, I thought with a burst of optimism.
So I kept going into the centre of the orange glow until it spread out over the whole bubble, tensing myself to make the phase shift into that smooooth middle continuum, and then to co-operate with the pull of the port as it phased us all the way through to frontspace.
And it didn’t happen that way. I felt the shivery thrill of phasing through the curtain, but there was no intermediate transit - the instrument panel registered a 180 degree phase shift all in one go, straight slam bang into frontspace. That didn’t make sense, not at all. There has to be a continuum between the front and the back, just as there has to be thickness between the two sides of a piece of paper, and I couldn’t imagine any phase pusher, alien or otherwise, that could miss it out.
There was no time to think about it. I was baffled and confused, but I killed the motor, bringing us to a stop. Yow-Wow and Yim-Bim at the same time! I was thrilled and I was scared. What a situation! I, Little Tony, was the first human being in history to make alien contact! Well, me and the guy in the back. The polymer bubble flowed over us and collapsed into its container, which meant that it had detected breathable atmosphere. I crouched on my guidance plate and peered around.
Where were the aliens? Where was the phase pusher machine? The ones we use come not much smaller than a medium-sized office block. Come to that, where was anything? We weren’t in any sort of docking space, like the side shacks in our phase ports. There was nothing to see but a thin mist stretching indefinitely in all directions.
Cautiously I drew air into my lungs. It was neutral, lifeless, without discernible tangs or odours.
The raft rested on a smooth rubbery surface. I tested it with one foot before stepping down. Just like rubber.
My customer, finally letting go of the handgrips he had been clutching like straws for God knows how long, joined me.
‘What is this place?’ he wondered.
‘Oh, somewhere or other.’
The mist cleared suddenly. A landscape appeared. It was covered in trees, not resembling any variety I had seen before, foresting a spread of downs and vales. There was no horizon. Rather, the background seemed to rise up as though we stood on the inside of a sphere, instead of on the outside.
The mist came down again, and then again cleared. This time another, different landscape showed, consisting of bleak mountains and craters. Nothing alive was in sight.
This was not your ordinary everyday planet, that much was obvious. It probably wasn’t a planet at all. We carried on watching as the mist came and went, presenting a succession of scenes, no two the same. On a few occasions there was only blackness peppered with stars. A lot of times there was confused curving and billowing, like in backspace. The landscapes would often move and writhe as well, curving right over our heads and then winding away like smoke.
After a bit, the bubble sprang on again, spreading out to give us some room to move around. The air must have disappeared. That wasn’t so much of a worry. As long as there was still enough charge in the fuel rods to work the CO2 splitter and extract oxygen from our exhaled carbon dioxide, we could continue to breathe. That would be for quite a long time while the rods weren’t being used to power the raft, so we weren’t in immediate danger.
But what were we to do?
~ * ~
Well, of course, there was one thing; but we didn’t think of it straight away. We kept on looking at the weird stuff all around us, while he kept on asking, ‘Where are we? For God’s sake tell me
where we are.’ And so in the end I told him as much as I knew. He looked stunned as it sank in. Then he was blubbering again and blaming me for everything. ‘You told me you were the best! You said I’d be safe with you! Oh, I shouldn’t have listened! I never should have got into this thing!’
‘You did it for love,’ I reminded him.
‘Yes,’ he said dreamily, ‘for love.’ He switched just like somebody had pressed a button. The sparkle came back in his eyes, and he was rhapsodizing once more. That neural connectivity must have been still working for us somehow, because I could feel it too. So why shouldn’t we finish what was interrupted on the sandbank? We snuggled down on the rubbery floor and started messing with one another, fiddling and unbuttoning. I caressed his tool and balls while kissing his throat. Our bellies squirmed together. Then off came my codpiece and our two dicks were prodding and rubbing like a pair of maddened pike. I was on fire: this was working up to the biggest thrill I could remember. I manoeuvred to ease my organ into his orifice, but it seemed he had the same idea and was probing for mine, getting in the way.
While this was going on, something funny was happening all around us, though in the excitement I was only half conscious of it. The landscape had finally closed up over our heads and taken on a smeared appearance. Now it was closing in so that we were visibly on the inside of a globe. I didn’t worry about it for the moment. I was too busy trying to get my urgently lunging shaft into where it could do itself some good.
Dimly it occurred to me that not only could this not be a planet, but maybe we weren’t in frontspace at all, despite what the instruments said. Certainly it was a very funny kind of space. Our world was now very small, a spherical chamber. As it contracted, everything inside seemed to curve in proportion. The raft was curving, bending like a bow. Then it performed a topological dance and flowed into itself.
Like I said, I was in no mood to think too much about it. We were both too hot, because the same sort of thing was happening to us too. The space we occupied had acquired more than three dimensions, I was able to understand that, so that impossible things were able to happen, and we were ready to take full advantage of them. We could bend and twist all round each other. My moist swelling knob found his heaving bud and pushed all the way up; at the same time, marvel of marvels, I felt the delicious pungent pain as he entered me. We were both thrusting in perfect rhythm, out of our heads with pleasure.
Simultaneous double sodomy! It definitely was the biggest thrill I could remember!
We came in unison, twice, three times, then fell apart, butts red and raw. I was panting, glazy-eyed. Not him, though. His eyes were shining. He stood and looked down at himself, as though he had had a revelation.
‘Love,’ he said softly. ‘Do you know the important thing about love? You must learn to love yourself. The way I do.’
His hands were running up and down his partly clothed body. Then he bent over and took his cock in his mouth. Well, I’ve known guys who could do that - but this was different; he wasn’t the sort to be that supple. He sank down and curled up like a cat - or a snake, it’s hard to visualize, really, just what was happening - let his dick flop out of his mouth and reached further to lick his scrotum; then the perineum behind it; then he was nuzzling between the cheeks of his own buttocks, making mooing sounds.
He had flipped, I guess. I stepped back and stared in fascination. You’re not going to believe this, but I swear it, I swear I saw it. He was pushing his face into his backside and it was going in. His buttocks widened till his whole head went in, and still he kept going. Shoulders, torso, even his bum in the end, all vanished. Up his own arsehole. And there was nothing left.
First time I ever lost a passenger. To make matters worse he had taken my one thousand kudos with him. It had been in his jacket, which he hadn’t bothered to take off.
I suppose I should have felt some concern over a fellow human being, but now I’d had my fun I had no time to be anything but scared. The place was still contracting, and I had worked out where I was now. This was no phase station. No friendly aliens were going to bale me out. The topological disappearing act I had just witnessed could only mean a region of collapsing space. A singularity, in other words. Though not a black hole. Something rarer, unknown to science. And how far was it going to shrink? To a dimensionless point? The rubbery surface was taking on the consistency of glue. I hated to think what I was looking like by now, but I certainly did not relish the idea of what might happen next. Neither did there seem any way to avoid it. How I’d got from backspace and into this hole I couldn’t exactly say; but the point was that the phase shift that gets you into backspace is not the same as the shift that allows you to leave it.
The singularity’s effect would be one-way. I couldn’t leave.
I closed my eyes and waited to be squashed out of existence. Then a thought struck me. To suppose I had come upon a body just as it was on the point of collapsing into nothing was asking too much of coincidence. It must have been here a long time. It would be a singularity with a pulsation, expanding and contracting. And, in my imagination, the phase pop that had fetched me from backspace would most logically result from the expansion stage. Now it was contracting maybe the phase would be reversed.
I made for the raft, even though it seemed to have tied itself in knots. The limits of the singularity were now only yards away and I think I resembled some elaborate knot myself, so the journey was agonisingly long. I yelled out loud when I found myself staring at my own bare backside, afraid I was about to suffer the fate of my self-loving customer, but somehow I crawled on to -into? - the raft and located the switches, bringing the harmonizer on line.
And it worked. My stomach turned over like never before, a jolt that nearly made me pass out, as the raft was shot into backspace like a pip being squeezed. It was the same as the first time, with no midspace in between. But the raft was straight and linear, and all my limbs were in the right places. I gunned the motor and got out of there fast, zooming along the curve of the enormous swirling vortex.
The orange glow faded. I took a minute out to check everything over, especially the dangerously depleted charge rods. While going through the routine, I automatically happened to glance down into the visor of the navigator.
And there, would you believe it, was the familiar red encoding of the readout.
The crappy useless thing was working again. An intermittent fault after all.
Want me to tell you about the relief I felt? Ever heard of ecstasy?
Well, that’s the story, or most of it. I had to search for some time before I came in range of a beacon, but when I did I took a calculated risk and headed back to Hawtaw, even though there were nearer stations. There was a reason for that, which I’ll come to in a moment.
The first thing I had to do, of course, was notify the authorities of my lost passenger, an embarrassing disclosure, naturally, and then make polite explanations to the inquiry board which convened, phase ports being no-time-wasted-type operations, that very same day. There’s a strategy to concealing an uncomfortable fact: tell only one lie, and keep to the truth about everything else. So apart from that one detail I came clean about it all. The sandbank stop, how we got lost, the singularity and, most important of all, what happened to my customer in it. The board was goggle-eyed about that last part, but they believed me. Complaining about the way I’d lost my fee helped, I think.
In fact I appear to have made a contribution to theoretical cosmology. A pair of government scientists came to see me a couple of weeks later and got me to tell them everything all over again. I had been right about the singularity: it wasn’t a black hole.
It seems physicists have long wondered why front and backspace don’t become unravelled. Midspace is a separator; it’s not a glue. My talk of experiencing instant transition between the two sides gave them a possible answer: scattered through space at immense distances from one another are singularities of this particular type, which punch right through and act like
staples.
So there you have it. Existence is stapled together.
It’s never been found again. The phase-push effect, they told me, might even have been a transient phenomenon.
I asked them how they explained the planetary scenes we had seen appearing and disappearing. That was consistent, they said, and trundled on about how probability is different inside singularities, how almost anything can happen quite spontaneously. The planet surfaces were randomly emerging and dissolving structures, a fast-action mirror to what went on more slowly in the universe at large. Professional types have to have an answer for everything, wouldn’t you say?
And the reason why I had to get back to Hawtaw despite being low on charge: think about it. The one thing I had to hold back, the little lie 1 had to tell:
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