A lurch.
. . . there we go ... .
I felt myself to be rising. And I rose.
What was happening! Dear stone, if only you had the capacity to experience my excitement. All the terror I had felt only moments before was alchemised suddenly into sheer, bright thrill. My AI had persuaded the machine that operated the star aperture to open, and had drawn in the rope to drag me up and into the electromagnetic channel. Then, with a magnetic peristalsis, I was shunted along this channel, and finally ejected out of the prison and into the body of the star itself.
I knew none of this at the time, of course, except when I entered the plasma of the star; and I only knew that because the AI told me. That takes us into the star-matter, it said.
I can't feel anything, I said. I mean, I can't feel the heat.
The foam is designed to be an excellent insulator, said the AI. You shouldn't feel much. But it is hot out there, believe me. Millions of degrees.
I was wrapped all in darkness, cool and drifting; but centimetres from my skin the temperature was hot enough to vaporise me. This knowledge gave me a curiously delicious sensation in my chest; despite the manifest danger I felt as safe as a child in the womb.
3rd
Dear Stone,
Time becomes a thing difficult to calculate when you are wrapped in the foam. Deprived of input, your senses first fixate on anything they can – the thrum of a heartbeat, the slightest pushing feeling of blood moving under the skin – and after that they begin to fade, to switch off.
I floated. I'm sure I slept.
But then things went wrong. Complacency! I began to feel hot. This worried me a great deal. The foam was supposed to protect me from this.
Trie temperature gradient was extreme, of course; the insulation of the foam was enough to protect a human body against the unimaginable cold of the vacuum between stars, but cold is one thing and heat another. More than this, travellers through space are usually carrying an internal protection, a full load of nanotechnological machines focused and expert at preserving the human body. I lacked that. 'I'm hot,' I muttered, as well as I could do with my mouth stuffed with the foam, and air piping up and down into my lungs without the control of my vagus nerve. But it didn't matter how garbled the word sounded: the AI could read what I was trying to say directly from my brain.
I know that, replied the AI. Don't you think I can sense that? I'm with you too.
It sounded angry, which surprised me. I began to wonder if the prospect of death, of extermination, was as frightening for it as for me. After all, an AI is more than just a linear processor; it operates by as complex a neural patterning procession as does the human brain, and with many more possible connections. We become habituated to our machines, dear stone; we forget that some of them are more than machines. AIs. The dotTech itself – it has problem solving, adaptive, pseudo-neural functions as well. Perhaps the nano-machines are alive too, sentient too, as alarmed at the prospect of their own death as any human being is of hers?
But there were no dotTech machines liable to destruction if the foam failed and I was melted by the stellar heat outside. I was all alone. Just myself and the AI.
'Are you scared?' I mumbled, mouth packed and numb.
Any genuinely sentient being, the voice of the AI announced, feels a certain alarm at the prospect of ceasing to exist. This came over as rather prissy. Besides, it was hardly calculated to reassure me.
Are we going to die, then? I aked, subvocalising thequestion this time.
Uncertain, said the AI. Uncertain. Wait. The heat rose, and rose. It was increasingly uncomfortable. My mind started jittering, running through possible scenarios. The foam was breaking up; the convection pattern was taking me into the core of the sun rather than out to the heliosurface. I was doomed. There was nothing the AI could do. Panic burped up into my thoughts, but it was quite impossible for me to struggle or kick out. I could not even breathe more rapidly than I would normally do. All that happened was that my heart started lolloping along much harder than was usual, and that my eyeballs swivelled randomly underneath my closed eyelids. Then, for no reason, the panic cleared and I was calm. If I was going to die, then I was going to die, that was that. There was nothing to be done, and therefore there was no point in fretting.
It's alright, said the AI. From what I can determine, we passed through a fusion bubble in the body of the sun itself. A very hot anomaly. Awkward, and unlucky, but we seem to be out the other side. The temperature outside is dropping now, and we should be fine. We should be on the surface shortly, and the flare that results will catapult us out into space. Our only problem, I think, is that the foam is such a good insulator that the heat inside won't dissipate.
Our problem?
It's my problem as well, insisted the AI, querulous-sounding. If you die, I die too.
Am I going to die?
Oh I do hope not. You are sweating, though the sweat doesn't have anywhere to go, so it's not managing to cool you down very much. If your core body temperature goes above a certain limit then you could pass out, maybe expire. I think we'll be alright. But this will be a less comfortable trip than we had otherwise assumed.
I cannot get used to you talking about 'us' like this.
Get used to it.
There was nothing to do. I was uncomfortable; my whole body just felt too hot, and there was no way of cooling myself.
Usually what happens in spaceflight is that, once the individual is underway and totally enveloped in the foam, the mind slows. Without external stimuli in a perfectly balanced environment it is easy to slip between sleep and a form of being awake where time means very little. There are mantras that help induce this state of mind, profound meditation that eases the months the journey may last. I had made such journeys many times before, but I discovered that in the prickly, dissolving heat, and without the dotTech in my body, this state of mind was impossible to achieve. I tried my mantras, but kept getting distracted from them by how uncomfortable I was. And every now and again the AI would chip in – an irritating distraction that ordinary spacefarers are also spared – and break whatever concentration I had managed to build up.
Would you mind if I altered your brain chemistry to—
Please! You started me out of my mantra.
I was only being polite, asking permission.
Be quiet!
Excuse me. The three-in-one voice sounded sarcastic. But it was quiet, if only for a while. Then: We are nearing the heliosurface.
Why must you tell me? Are you planning on providing a running commentary throughout my journey? The essence of interstellar travel is achieving the proper state of mind. If you keep interrupting me you are preventing me achieving that proper state.
Look—
No, no.
Actually I was being a little unfair to the AI. Once the foam-wrapped traveller enters faster-than-light travel it becomes very hard to concentrate anyway. The repeated quantum shifting plays strange games with the neural pathways of the brain, and the traveller almost always goes into a kind of trance. It is not an unpleasant experience, in fact, and in some senses is even soothing; and not even a twittering AI interjecting constantly would be enough to draw the mind out of it. More to the point, AIs are degraded by the process; they cannot survive it. But I was not travelling faster than light, I was creeping upwards and out; more than that I was hot and cross, and there was nobody else to be angry with except the AI.
And then, abruptly, there was a massive yaw and jolt in my belly and bones. Everything pulled towards my feet, my blood draining so fast out of my brain that I may even have lost consciousness; except that when I came to again I was still in the massive tug of acceleration.
I had reached the surface, and had been flung from the star by its arcing solar flare, like a bullet from a gun. I do not know exactly how fast I was accelerated, or how much g-force I was subjected to (in a body without dotTech that was little able to absorb the punishment), but I do know that the s
ensation was overpoweringly strong, and that it lasted for a very long time.
Eventually, though, it did start to settle; the sensation of being powerfully dragged through myself towards my boots reduced, and then was gone altogether. I assumed I was out. Free! Hormones thumped into my bloodstream, and I felt enormous elation. AI? I subvocalised. AI?
Sulkily, Yes?
Are we free of the star?
We are, as it happens.
I could have cried out for joy, were it not that my mouth was full or foam. Free! The flare had ejected me from the small body of the star.
Where was I? I had no sense of it. All I knew was that I was wrapped in the cocoon of interstellar foam; but that without the faster-than-light struts of the Zhip-pack all I could do was float through space at sublight speeds. I did not know in what direction, or what was going to happen next. You'll be collected, was what my AI told me. But there were more pressing issues. The miscalculation had meant that the inside of the foam was too hot. I felt deeply uncomfortable, uncomfortable down to the bones. My eyeballs felt hot, as if the jelly in them were liquefying and scalding the insides of my pupils and my irises. My tongue seemed to swell. The stippling on its upper surface felt like bubbles of heat as I pressed it against the roof of my mouth.
I was dying, more to the point. My AI would sometimes tell me this, perhaps to make me more miserable. If we are not picked up soon, it would say, we will die.
I will die, I subvocalised. Then, Who will pick us up?
Somebody, said the AI.
Don't play the games, I said. Or tried to. I don't know. It felt as if my brain were trying to sweat. I kept losing the thread of what was being said to me. How is it for you, dear stone, when you are heated? Perhaps you can tolerate it; yes, or freezing. Or is there a threshold beyond which you start to dissolve, to melt into lava, where you feel this profound distress deep in your being? That was how I felt.
An individual called Agif. He has a spaceship somewhere round here. We are to be met.
I may have passed out; in fact, the likely thing was I was passing out and coming to repeatedly; in the sensory-deprived environment of the foam I could not tell the difference.
And so it went on.On and on.
I was too distressed even to notice the shifting as I was connected, handled, brought aboard the ship. The sudden tug of gravity. The first thing I remember was a splash of beautiful cool air, as cold as cold water, landing against my face when the foam was dissolved away. I spat out the foam plug from my mouth and took juddering breaths of extraordinarily cold air into my lungs.
The Trench
1st
Dear Stone,
I was aboard the most peculiar construction, the oddest sort of spaceship. It took me hours to reach the point of recovery where I could even register the fact, but after half a day I was able, leaning on my rescuer's arm, to walk around the thing. Up angled corridors, via crooked dog-leg walkways, through boomy, echoey rooms like caverns, down a descending series of interconnecting tiny chambers. Agif's teetering, vast spaceship.
Of course, I was convinced I was being followed. In my mind I was constantly working through the likely sequence of events in the jail. Would I be missed some hours after I actually vanished, or some days, or some weeks? Weeks seemed unlikely; hours would be bad fortune for me but was perfectly possible. The jailer had never seemed to pay me much attention when I was there, but surely I would be missed. It was the way of things, to be rapt in oneself, to assume that one is the only being in the universe; but I had been continually under surveillance.
Assume hours; assume the worst. They would have to wait until the gates opened before they could communicate to the rest of the t'T. Most likely they would alert all local authorities and then come after me themselves. How would they track me down?
The sensible thing for me to do would be to acquire a new strain of dotTech in my body as soon as I found a supplier of the nanotechnology, a world where they did not know the bizarre injunction against the stuff with which I had been punished inside the jailstar. My pursuers would surely expect me to do this; which meant that they would have to assume that my appearance could change over a few days. Either they would have to move very quickly with face-recognition software, and survey a wide range of worlds, or else they would have to think of more subtle ways of tracking me down. A possibility was this: a strain of dotTech released into the air, testing each person for a particular DNA, and broadcasting when it found it. This would only work at relatively short distance, because air-dispersion was unreliable and because dotTech, being so very small, can barely broadcast ten metres. In other words, they would have to come and actively find me.
This, I reasoned, was the most likely thing. They would assume that I had come to a nearby planet – Rain, or Mont l'Or, or Cantal. They would assume that I had obtained dotTech and used it to reshape my appearance. Rain was a good world to hide on, because the water-filled atmosphere there would render airborne dissemination of dotTech more difficult than it would otherwise be.
I wanted to leave immediately. 'You are sick,' said my rescuer. 'It is too soon for you to leave.'
'I must go you don't understand,' I jabbered, collapsing a little with the feverish intensity of my manner and having to be supported by his arm, 'they'll come find me, get me.'
'They don't know where you are,' he soothed, in a deep resonating voice. 'They don't even know you're gone yet, most likely. You must rest first. Go tomorrow. Go when you are rested.'
My rescuer was a solitary space-wanderer, an eccentric fellow who had taken me aboard his own craft, his crazily stepped spaceship full of wandering pipes. The name of this individual was Agifo3acca, a strange name with a number in the middle of it after the fashion of his culture. He had travelled here many years previously, and had been accompanied only by a separate foam-covered pod out of which a self-assembly machine had constructed a sort of vacuum-proof shed, a simple structure that could be pressurised and in which Agif (he asked me to call him Agif) could wash off his foam and usher himself back to the real world. Then, alone, he had constructed a series of parallel engines, flown at sublight speeds about the nearby space accumulating the raw materials to add to his small craft. Over many years he had built up the most tottering and ramble-shackle space-structure I think I have ever seen. Many years for him, at fractions of light speed; decades and decades for others.
I asked him many questions, of course, in the day or perhaps two days during which I was recovering from my near-fatal escape bid, and preparing to go back into fast-space and travel to a nearby world.
'Where will you go?' he asked me.
'I don't know,' I said. 'Perhaps you will tell me?'
'How should I tell you?' he retorted, as if we were playing that childhood game where you can only speak in questions.
'The people,' I said slowly, wishing to broach this issue with him but not knowing how. 'The people who have employed me, who have facilitated my escape from the jailstar. Yes?'
He stared at me.
'They have also contacted you. This is how you knew to collect me?'
'What of it?' he said.
'Perhaps they told you where they wanted me to go next?' I had asked my AI on this, but it knew nothing of possible destinations. Allit woula say was just go, move on, don't stay here or they will come after you. It doesn't matter where you go in the first instance.
'No,' said Agifo3acca, ponderously, shaking his head, tugging his spade-shaped beard. 'No.'
"What did they tell you?'
'They offered me certain – wealths,' he said, in his booming fashion. 'If I collected you and helped you on your way again.'
'Wealths?'
'Software, information, kedgers, atlans, that manner of wealth.'
'And?'
'Just that.'
He had not been told, I assumed, that my employers wanted me to destroy the population of an entire world. It would be better to keep that information to myself, I thought.
<
br /> 'Do you know who they are?' I pressed him.
He shook his head, slowly. 'Only that they have delivered the wealths as they said they would, and have promised more if I continue to tend to you.'
I ought, maybe, to have left it there, but I was curious. 'You realise that I have escaped from the jailstar?' In effect I was telling him, 'You realise of course that I am a criminal'
We were in a curiously arched and segmented room that stretched for dozens of metres, although it was only three or four wide. The walls were stitched transparent polymer that provided a slightly distorted, fuzzy view of the space outside. Agifo3acca stared at this blurred vista. The jailstar was receding with the minute slowness of sublight acceleration; it was now a thumbnail sized blot of gleaming red-orange. There was nothing else in view, except the faint backdrop-splatter of stars.
Agifo3acca looked back at me. 'There is nowhere else,' he said in his slow voice, 'from where you could have come.'
'I was in the prison,' I confirmed. 'Perhaps I am a dangerous individual.'
'Perhaps you are.'
'Perhaps I might harm you,' I said. 'Kill you.'
He looked at me.
'Aren't you curious why I was there?' I pressed. 'Aren't you curious about who I am and what I have done?'
'I only have curiosity for one thing,' he replied dolorously.
The one thing for which Agifo3acca had curiosity, the thing that had taken over his life and had leached the interest out of every other subject, was the Trench. The Gravity Trench. He told me this, but even over the two days I spent with him it was obvious in a thousand ways without him telling me. It was obvious that he had left off studying the Trench to collect me only reluctantly, and had done so because my employers (whoever they were) had promised him things he considered vital for the study of the Trench. He had accelerated his craft for months – to him, many years to the rest of us – to travel close enough to the jailstar to collect me, and was now travelling back as fast as his parallel sublight engines would take him. He lived to study the Trench. He had a purpose in life.
Adam Roberts - Stone(2002) Page 6