I took my seat at the table’s head and rang for service.
I was beginning to realize why I had come out of my cabin that morning. In part it was a reflection of Vox’s presence within me, an expression of that new component of rashness and impulsiveness that had entered me with her. But mainly it was, I saw now, some stratagem of my own, hatched on some inaccessible subterranean level of my double mind. In order to conceal Vox most effectively, I would have to take the offensive: rather than skulking in my quarters and perhaps awakening perilous suspicions in the minds of my shipmates, I must come forth, defiantly, challengingly, almost flaunting the thing that I had done, and go among them, pretending that nothing unusual was afoot and forcing them to believe it. Such aggressiveness was not natural to my temperament. But perhaps I could draw on some reserves provided by Vox. If not, we both were lost.
Raebuck said, to no one in particular, “I suppose yesterday’s disturbing events must inspire a need for companionship in the captain.”
I faced him squarely. “I have all the companionship I require, Raebuck. But I agree that what happened yesterday was disturbing.”
“A nasty business,” Pedregal said, ponderously shaking his neckless head. “And a strange one, a matrix trying to get into a passenger. That’s new to me, a thing like that. And to lose the passenger besides—that’s bad. That’s very bad.”
“It does happen, losing a passenger,” said Raebuck.
“A long time since it happened on a ship of mine,” Pedregal rejoined.
“We lost a whole batch of them on the Emperor of Callisto,” Fresco said. “You know the story? It was thirty years ago. We were making the run from Van Buren to the San Pedro Cluster. We picked up a supernova pulse and the intelligence on duty went into flicker. Somehow dumped a load of aluminum salts in the feed-lines and killed off fifteen, sixteen passengers. I saw the bodies before they went into the converter. Beyond salvage, they were.”
“Yes,” said Raebuck. “I heard of that one. And then there was the Queen Astarte, a couple of years after that. Tchelitchev was her captain, little green-eyed Russian woman from one of the Troika worlds. They were taking a routine inventory and two digits got transposed, and a faulty delivery signal slipped through. I think it was six dead, premature decanting, killed by air poisoning. Tchelitchev took it very badly. Very badly. Somehow the captain always does.”
“And then that time on the Hecuba,” said Pedregal. “No ship of mine, thank God. That was the captain who ran amok, thought the ship was too quiet, wanted to see some passengers moving around and started awakening them—”
Raebuck showed a quiver of surprise. “You know about that? I thought that was supposed to be hushed up.”
“Things get around,” Pedregal said, with something like a smirk. “The captain’s name was Catania-Szu, I believe, a man from Mediterraneo, very high-strung, the way all of them are there. I was working the Valparaiso then, out of Mendax Nine bound for Scylla and Charybdis and neighboring points, and when we stopped to download some cargo in the Seneca system I got the whole story from a ship’s clerk named—”
“You were on the Valparaiso?” Fresco asked. “Wasn’t that the ship that had a free matrix, too, ten or eleven years back? A real soul-eater, so the report went—”
“After my time,” said Pedregal, blandly waving his hand. “But I did hear of it. You get to hear about everything, when you’re downloading cargo. Soul-eater, you say, reminds me of the time—”
And he launched into some tale of horror at a spinaround station in a far quadrant of the galaxy. But he was no more than halfway through it when Raebuck cut in with a gorier reminiscence of his own, and then Fresco, seething with impatience, broke in on him to tell of a ship infested by three free matrixes at once. I had no doubt that all this was being staged for my enlightenment, by way of showing me how seriously such events were taken in the Service, and how the captains under whom they occurred went down in the folklore of the starships with ineradicable black marks. But their attempts to unsettle me, if that is what they were, left me undismayed. Vox, silent within me, infused me with a strange confidence that allowed me to ignore the darker implications of these anecdotes.
I simply listened, playing my role: the neophyte fascinated by the accumulated depth of spacegoing experience that their stories implied.
Then I said, finally, “When matrixes get loose, how long do they generally manage to stay at large?”
“An hour or two, generally,” said Raebuck. “As they drift around the ship, of course, they leave an electrical trail. We track it and close off access routes behind them and eventually we pin them down in close quarters. Then it’s not hard to put them back in their bottles.”
“And if they’ve jacked into some member of the crew?”
“That makes it even easier to find them.”
Boldly I said, “Was there ever a case where a free matrix jacked into a member of the crew and managed to keep itself hidden?”
“Never,” said a new voice. It belonged to Roacher, who had just entered the dining hall. He stood at the far end of the long table, staring at me. His strange luminescent eyes, harsh and probing, came to rest on mine. “No matter how clever the matrix may be, sooner or later the host will find some way to call for help.”
“And if the host doesn’t choose to call for help?” I asked.
Roacher studied me with great care.
Had I been too bold? Had I given away too much?
“But that would be a violation of regulations!” he said, in a tone of mock astonishment. “That would be a criminal act!”
11.
She asked me to take her starwalking, to show her the full view of the Great Open.
It was the third day of her concealment within me. Life aboard the Sword of Orion had returned to routine, or, to be more accurate, it had settled into a new routine in which the presence on board of an undetected and apparently undetectable free matrix was a constant element.
As Vox had suggested, there were some who quickly came to believe that the missing matrix must have slipped off into space, since the watchful ship-intelligences could find no trace of it. But there were others who kept looking over their shoulders, figuratively or literally, as if expecting the fugitive to attempt to thrust herself without warning into the spinal jacks that gave access to their nervous systems. They behaved exactly as if the ship were haunted. To placate those uneasy ones, I ordered round-the-clock circuit sweeps that would report every vagrant pulse and random surge. Each such anomalous electrical event was duly investigated, and, of course, none of these investigations led to anything significant. Now that Vox resided in my brain instead of the ship’s wiring, she was beyond any such mode of discovery.
Whether anyone suspected the truth was something I had no way of knowing. Perhaps Roacher did; but he made no move to denounce me, nor did he so much as raise the issue of the missing matrix with me at all after that time in the dining hall. He might know nothing whatever; he might know everything, and not care; he might simply be keeping his own counsel for the moment. I had no way of telling.
I was growing accustomed to my double life, and to my daily duplicity. Vox had quickly come to seem as much a part of me as my arm, or my leg. When she was silent—and often I heard nothing from her for hours at a time—I was no more aware of her than I would be, in any special way, of my arm or my leg; but nevertheless I knew somehow that she was there. The boundaries between her mind and mine were eroding steadily. She was learning how to infiltrate me. At times it seemed to me that what we were were joint tenants of the same dwelling, rather than I the permanent occupant and she a guest. I came to perceive my own mind as something not notably different from hers, a mere web of electrical force which for the moment was housed in the soft moist globe that was the brain of the captain of the Sword of Orion. Either of us, so it seemed, might come and go within that soft mois
t globe as we pleased, flitting casually in or out after the wraithlike fashion of matrixes.
At other times it was not at all like that: I gave no thought to her presence and went about my tasks as if nothing had changed for me. Then it would come as a surprise when Vox announced herself to me with some sudden comment, some quick question. I had to learn to guard myself against letting my reaction show, if it happened when I was with other members of the crew. Though no one around us could hear anything when she spoke to me, or I to her, I knew it would be the end for our masquerade if anyone caught me in some unguarded moment of conversation with an unseen companion.
How far she had penetrated my mind began to become apparent to me when she asked to go on a starwalk.
“You know about that?” I said, startled, for starwalking is the private pleasure of the spacegoing and I had not known of it myself before I was taken into the Service.
Vox seemed amazed by my amazement. She indicated casually that the details of starwalking were common knowledge everywhere.
But something rang false in her tone. Were the landcrawling folk really so familiar with our special pastime? Or had she picked what she knew of it out of the hitherto private reaches of my consciousness?
I chose not to ask. But I was uneasy about taking her with me into the Great Open, much as I was beginning to yearn for it myself. She was not one of us. She was planetary; she had not passed through the training of the Service.
I told her that.
“Take me anyway,” she said. “It’s the only chance I’ll ever have.”
“But the training—”
“I don’t need it. Not if you’ve had it.”
“What if that’s not enough?”
“It will be,” she said. “I know it will, Adam. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ve had the training, haven’t you? And I am you.”
12.
Together we rode the transit track out of the Eye and down to Drive Deck, where the soul of the ship lies lost in throbbing dreams of the far galaxies as it pulls us ever onward across the unending night.
We passed through zones of utter darkness and zones of cascading light, through places where wheeling helixes of silvery radiance burst like auroras from the air, through passages so crazed in their geometry that they reawakened the terrors of the womb in anyone who traversed them. A starship is the mother of mysteries. Vox crouched, frozen with awe, within that portion of our brain that was hers. I felt the surges of her awe, one after another, as we went downward.
“Are you really sure you want to do this?” I asked.
“Yes!” she cried fiercely. “Keep going!”
“There’s the possibility that you’ll be detected,” I told her.
“There’s the possibility that I won’t be,” she said.
We continued to descend. Now we were in the realm of the three cyborg push-cells, Gabriel, Banquo, and Fleece. Those were three members of the crew whom we would never see at the table in the dining hall, for they dwelled here in the walls of Drive Deck, permanently jacked in, perpetually pumping their energies into the ship’s great maw. I have already told you of our saying in the Service, that when you enter you give up the body and you get your soul. For most of us that is only a figure of speech: what we give up, when we say farewell forever to planetskin and take up our new lives in starships, is not the body itself but the body’s trivial needs, the sweaty things so dear to shore people. But some of us are more literal in their renunciations. The flesh is a meaningless hindrance to them; they shed it entirely, knowing that they can experience starship life just as fully without it. They allow themselves to be transformed into extensions of the stardrive. From them comes the raw energy out of which is made the power that carries us hurtling through heaven. Their work is unending; their reward is a sort of immortality. It is not a choice I could make, nor, I think, you: but for them it is bliss. There can be no doubt about that.
“Another starwalk so soon, Captain?” Banquo asked. For I had been here on the second day of the voyage, losing no time in availing myself of the great privilege of the Service.
“Is there any harm in it?”
“No, no harm,” said Banquo. “Just isn’t usual, is all.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “That’s not important to me.”
Banquo is a gleaming metallic ovoid, twice the size of a human head, jacked into a slot in the wall. Within the ovoid is the matrix of what had once been Banquo, long ago on a world called Sunrise where night is unknown. Sunrise’s golden dawns and shining days had not been good enough for Banquo, apparently. What Banquo had wanted was to be a gleaming metallic ovoid, hanging on the wall of Drive Deck aboard the Sword of Orion.
Any of the three cyborgs could set up a starwalk. But Banquo was the one who had done it for me that other time and it seemed best to return to him. He was the most congenial of the three. He struck me as amiable and easy. Gabriel, on my first visit, had seemed austere, remote, incomprehensible. He is an early model who had lived the equivalent of three human lifetimes as a cyborg aboard starships and there was not much about him that was human any more. Fleece, much younger, quick-minded and quirky, I mistrusted: in her weird edgy way she might just somehow be able to detect the hidden other who would be going along with me for the ride.
You must realize that when we starwalk we do not literally leave the ship, though that is how it seems to us. If we left the ship even for a moment we would be swept away and lost forever in the abyss of heaven. Going outside a starship of heaven is not like stepping outside an ordinary planet-launched shoreship that moves through normal space. But even if it were possible, there would be no point in leaving the ship. There is nothing to see out there. A starship moves through utter empty darkness.
But though there may be nothing to see, that does not mean that there is nothing out there. The entire universe is out there. If we could see it while we are traveling across the special space that is heaven we would find it flattened and curved, so that we had the illusion of viewing everything at once, all the far-flung galaxies back to the beginning of time. This is the Great Open, the totality of the continuum. Our external screens show it to us in simulated form, because we need occasional assurance that it is there.
A starship rides along the mighty lines of force which cross that immense void like the lines of the compass rose on an ancient mariner’s map. When we starwalk, we ride those same lines, and we are held by them, sealed fast to the ship that is carrying us onward through heaven. We seem to step forth into space; we seem to look down on the ship, on the stars, on all the worlds of heaven. For the moment we become little starships flying along beside the great one that is our mother. It is magic; it is illusion; but it is magic that so closely approaches what we perceive as reality that there is no way to measure the difference, which means that in effect there is no difference.
“Ready?” I asked Vox.
“Absolutely.”
Still I hesitated.
“Are you sure?”
“Go on,” she said impatiently. “Do it!”
I put the jack to my spine myself. Banquo did the matching of impedances. If he were going to discover the passenger I carried, this would be the moment. But he showed no sign that anything was amiss. He queried me; I gave him the signal to proceed; there was a moment of sharp warmth at the back of my neck as my neural matrix, and Vox’s traveling with it, rushed out through Banquo and hurtled downward toward its merger with the soul of the ship.
We were seized and drawn in and engulfed by the vast force that is the ship. As the coils of the engine caught us we were spun around and around, hurled from vector to vector, mercilessly stretched, distended by an unimaginable flux. And then there was a brightness all about us, a brightness that cried out in heaven with a mighty clamor. We were outside the ship. We were starwalking.
“Oh,” she said. A little soft
cry, a muted gasp of wonder.
The blazing mantle of the ship lay upon the darkness of heaven like a white shadow. That great cone of cold fiery light reached far out in front of us, arching awesomely toward heaven’s vault, and behind us it extended beyond the limits of our sight. The slender tapering outline of the ship was clearly visible within it, the needle and its Eye, all ten kilometers of it easily apparent to us in a single glance.
And there were the stars. And there were the worlds of heaven.
The effect of the stardrive is to collapse the dimensions, each one in upon the other. Thus inordinate spaces are diminished and the galaxy may be spanned by human voyagers. There is no logic, no linearity of sequence, to heaven as it appears to our eyes. Wherever we look we see the universe bent back upon itself, revealing its entirety in an infinite series of infinite segments of itself. Any sector of stars contains all stars. Any demarcation of time encompasses all of time past and time to come. What we behold is altogether beyond our understanding, which is exactly as it should be; for what we are given, when we look through the Eye of the ship at the naked heavens, is a god’s-eye view of the universe. And we are not gods.
“What are we seeing?” Vox murmured within me.
I tried to tell her. I showed her how to define her relative position so there would be an up and a down for her, a backward, a forward, a flow of time and event from beginning to end. I pointed out the arbitrary coordinate axes by which we locate ourselves in this fundamentally incomprehensible arena. I found known stars for her, and known worlds, and showed them to her.
She understood nothing. She was entirely lost.
I told her that there was no shame in that.
I told her that I had been just as bewildered, when I was undergoing my training in the simulator. That everyone was; and that no one, not even if he spent a thousand years aboard the starships that plied the routes of heaven, could ever come to anything more than a set of crude equivalents and approximations of understanding what starwalking shows us. Attaining actual understanding itself is beyond the best of us.
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