Needle in a Timestack

by Robert Silverberg

  “The what?”

  “The additional cargo area. The subspace extensions that surround the ship.”

  She gasped. “Those aren’t even real! I was in them, when I was traveling around the ship. Those are just clusters of probability waves!”

  “You’ll be safe there,” I said.

  “I’m afraid. It’s bad enough that I’m not real any more. But to be stored in a place that isn’t real either—”

  “You’re as real as I am. And the outstructures are just as real as the rest of the ship. It’s a different quality of reality, that’s all. Nothing bad will happen to you out there. You’ve told me yourself that you’ve already been in them, right? And got out again without any problems. They won’t be able to detect you there, Vox. But I tell you this, that if you stay in me, or anywhere else in the main part of the ship, they’ll track you down and find you and eradicate you. And probably eradicate me right along with you.”

  “Do you mean that?” she said, sounding chastened.

  “Come on. There isn’t much time.”

  On the pretext of a routine inventory check—well within my table of responsibilities—I obtained access to one of the virtualities. It was the storehouse where the probability stabilizers were kept. No one was likely to search for her there. The chances of our encountering a zone of probability turbulence between here and Cul-de-Sac were minimal; and in the ordinary course of a voyage nobody cared to enter any of the virtualities.

  I had lied to Vox, or at least committed a half-truth, by leading her to believe that all our outstructures are of an equal level of reality. Certainly the annexes are tangible, solid; they differ from the ship proper only in the spin of their dimensional polarity. They are invisible except when activated, and they involve us in no additional expenditure of fuel, but there is no uncertainty about their existence, which is why we entrust valuable cargo to them, and on some occasions even passengers.

  The extensions are a level further removed from basic reality. They are skewed not only in dimensional polarity but in temporal contiguity: that is, we carry them with us under time displacement, generally ten to twenty virtual years in the past or future. The risks of this are extremely minor and the payoff in reduction of generating cost is great. Still, we are measurably more cautious about what sort of cargo we keep in them.

  As for the virtualities—

  Their name itself implies their uncertainty. They are purely probabilistic entities, existing most of the time in the stochastic void that surrounds the ship. In simpler words, whether they are actually there or not at any given time is a matter worth wagering on. We know how to access them at the time of greatest probability, and our techniques are quite reliable, which is why we can use them for overflow ladings when our cargo uptake is unusually heavy. But in general we prefer not to entrust anything very important to them, since a virtuality’s range of access times can fluctuate in an extreme way, from a matter of microseconds to a matter of megayears, and that can make quick recall a chancy affair.

  Knowing all this, I put Vox in a virtuality anyway.

  I had to hide her. And I had to hide her in a place where no one would look. The risk that I’d be unable to call her up again because of virtuality fluctuation was a small one. The risk was much greater that she would be detected, and she and I both punished, if I let her remain in any area of the ship that had a higher order of probability.

  “I want you to stay here until the coast is clear,” I told her sternly. “No impulsive journeys around the ship, no excursions into adjoining outstructures, no little trips of any kind, regardless of how restless you get. Is that clear? I’ll call you up from here as soon as I think it’s safe.”

  “I’ll miss you, Adam.”

  “The same here. But this is how it has to be.”

  “I know.”

  “If you’re discovered, I’ll deny I know anything about you. I mean that, Vox.”

  “I understand.”

  “You won’t be stuck in here long. I promise you that.”

  “Will you visit me?”

  “That wouldn’t be wise,” I said.

  “But maybe you will anyway.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” I opened the access channel. The virtuality gaped before us. “Go on,” I said. “In with you. In. Now. Go, Vox. Go.”

  I could feel her leaving me. It was almost like an amputation. The silence, the emptiness, that descended on me suddenly was ten times as deep as what I had felt when she had merely been hiding within me. She was gone, now. For the first time in days, I was truly alone.

  I closed off the virtuality.

  When I returned to the Eye, Roacher was waiting for me near the command bridge.

  “You have a moment, Captain?”

  “What is it, Roacher.”

  “The missing matrix. We have proof it’s still on board ship.”

  “Proof?”

  “You know what I mean. You felt it just like I did while we were doing acquisition. It said something. It spoke. It was right in there in the navigation hall with us, Captain.”

  I met his luminescent gaze levelly and said in an even voice, “I was giving my complete attention to what we were doing, Roacher. Spinaround acquisition isn’t second nature to me the way it is to you. I had no time to notice any matrixes floating around in there.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. Does that disappoint you?”

  “That might mean that you’re the one carrying the matrix,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “If it’s in you, down on a subneural level, you might not even be aware of it. But we would be. Raebuck, Fresco, me. We all detected something, Captain. If it wasn’t in us it would have to be in you. We can’t have a matrix riding around inside our captain, you know. No telling how that could distort his judgment. What dangers that might lead us into.”

  “I’m not carrying any matrixes, Roacher.”

  “Can we be sure of that?”

  “Would you like to have a look?”

  “A jackup, you mean? You and me?”

  The notion disgusted me. But I had to make the offer.

  “A—jackup, yes,” I said. “Communion. You and me, Roacher. Right now. Come on, we’ll measure the bandwidths and do the matching. Let’s get this over with.”

  He contemplated me a long while, as if calculating the likelihood that I was bluffing. In the end he must have decided that I was too naive to be able to play the game out to so hazardous a turn. He knew that I wouldn’t bluff, that I was confident he would find me untenanted or I never would have made the offer.

  “No,” he said finally. “We don’t need to bother with that.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “If you say you’re clean—”

  “But I might be carrying her and not even know it,” I said. “You told me that yourself.”

  “Forget it. You’d know, if you had her in you.”

  “You’ll never be certain of that unless you look. Let’s jack up, Roacher.”

  He scowled. “Forget it,” he said again, and turned away. “You must be clean, if you’re this eager for jacking. But I’ll tell you this, Captain. We’re going to find her, wherever she’s hiding. And when we do—”

  He left the threat unfinished. I stood staring at his retreating form until he was lost to view.

  17.

  For a few days everything seemed back to normal. We sped onward toward Cul-de-Sac. I went through the round of my regular tasks, however meaningless they seemed to me. Most of them did. I had not yet achieved any sense that the Sword of Orion was under my command in anything but the most hypothetical way. Still, I did what I had to do.

  No one spoke of the missing matrix within my hearing. On those rare occasions when I encountered some other member of the crew while I moved about the s
hip, I could tell by the hooded look of his eyes that I was still under suspicion. But they had no proof. The matrix was no longer in any way evident on board. The ship’s intelligences were unable to find the slightest trace of its presence.

  I was alone, and oh! it was a painful business for me.

  I suppose that once you have tasted that kind of round-the-clock communion, that sort of perpetual jacking, you are never the same again. I don’t know: there is no real information available on cases of possession by free matrix, only shipboard folklore, scarcely to be taken seriously. All I can judge by is my own misery now that Vox was actually gone. She was only a half-grown girl, a wild coltish thing, unstable, unformed; and yet, and yet, she had lived within me and we had come toward one another to construct the deepest sort of sharing, what was almost a kind of marriage. You could call it that.

  After five or six days I knew I had to see her again. Whatever the risks.

  I accessed the virtuality and sent a signal into it that I was coming in. There was no reply; and for one terrible moment I feared the worst, that in the mysterious workings of the virtuality she had somehow been engulfed and destroyed. But that was not the case. I stepped through the glowing pink-edged field of light that was the gateway to the virtuality, and instantly I felt her near me, clinging tight, trembling with joy.

  She held back, though, from entering me. She wanted me to tell her it was safe. I beckoned her in; and then came that sharp warm moment I remembered so well, as she slipped down into my neural network and we became one.

  “I can only stay a little while,” I said. “It’s still very chancy for me to be with you.”

  “Oh, Adam, Adam, it’s been so awful for me in here—”

  “I know. I can imagine.”

  “Are they still looking for me?”

  “I think they’re starting to put you out of their minds,” I said. And we both laughed at the play on words that that phrase implied.

  I didn’t dare remain more than a few minutes. I had only wanted to touch souls with her briefly, to reassure myself that she was all right and to ease the pain of separation. But it was irregular for a captain to enter a virtuality at all. To stay in one for any length of time exposed me to real risk of detection.

  But my next visit was longer, and the one after that longer still. We were like furtive lovers meeting in a dark forest for hasty delicious trysts. Hidden there in that not-quite-real outstructure of the ship we would join our two selves and whisper together with urgent intensity until I felt it was time for me to leave. She would always try to keep me longer; but her resistance to my departure was never great, nor did she ever suggest accompanying me back into the stable sector of the ship. She had come to understand that the only place we could meet was in the virtuality.

  We were nearing the vicinity of Cul-de-Sac now. Soon we would go to worldward and the shoreships would travel out to meet us, so that we could download the cargo that was meant for them. It was time to begin considering the problem of what would happen to Vox when we reached our destination.

  That was something I was unwilling to face. However I tried, I could not force myself to confront the difficulties that I knew lay just ahead.

  But she could.

  “We must be getting close to Cul-de-Sac now,” she said.

  “We’ll be there soon, yes.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. How I’m going to deal with that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m a lost soul,” she said. “Literally. There’s no way I can come to life again.”

  “I don’t under—”

  “Adam, don’t you see?” she cried fiercely. “I can’t just float down to Cul-de-Sac and grab myself a body and put myself on the roster of colonists. And you can’t possibly smuggle me down there while nobody’s looking. The first time anyone ran an inventory check, or did passport control, I’d be dead. No, the only way I can get there is to be neatly packed up again in my original storage circuit. And even if I could figure out how to get back into that, I’d be simply handing myself over for punishment or even eradication. I’m listed as missing on the manifest, right? And I’m wanted for causing the death of that passenger. Now I turn up again, in my storage circuit. You think they’ll just download me nicely to Cul-de-Sac and give me the body that’s waiting for me there? Not very likely. Not likely that I’ll ever get out of that circuit alive, is it, once I go back in? Assuming I could go back in in the first place. I don’t know how a storage circuit is operated, do you? And there’s nobody you can ask.”

  “What are you trying to say, Vox?”

  “I’m not trying to say anything. I’m saying it. I have to leave the ship on my own and disappear.”

  “No. You can’t do that!”

  “Sure I can. It’ll be just like starwalking. I can go anywhere I please. Right through the skin of the ship, out into heaven. And keep on going.”

  “To Cul-de-Sac?”

  “You’re being stupid,” she said. “Not to Cul-de-Sac, no. Not to anywhere. That’s all over for me, the idea of getting a new body. I have no legal existence any more. I’ve messed myself up. All right: I admit it. I’ll take what’s coming to me. It won’t be so bad, Adam. I’ll go starwalking. Outward and outward and outward, forever and ever.”

  “You mustn’t,” I said. “Stay here with me.”

  “Where? In this empty storage unit out here?”

  “No,” I told her. “Within me. The way we are right now. The way we were before.”

  “How long do you think we could carry that off?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Every time you have to jack into the machinery I’ll have to hide myself down deep,” she said. “And I can’t guarantee that I’ll go deep enough, or that I’ll stay down there long enough. Sooner or later they’ll notice me. They’ll find me. They’ll eradicate me and they’ll throw you out of the Service, or maybe they’ll eradicate you too. No, Adam. It couldn’t possibly work. And I’m not going to destroy you with me. I’ve done enough harm to you already.”

  “Vox—”

  “No. This is how it has to be.”

  18.

  And this is how it was. We were deep in the Spook Cluster now, and the Vainglory Archipelago burned bright on my realspace screen. Somewhere down there was the planet called Cul-de-Sac. Before we came to worldward of it, Vox would have to slip away into the great night of heaven.

  Making a worldward approach is perhaps the most difficult maneuver a starship must achieve; and the captain must go to the edge of his abilities along with everyone else. Novice at my trade though I was, I would be called on to perform complex and challenging processes. If I failed at them, other crewmen might cut in and intervene, or, if necessary, the ship’s intelligences might override; but if that came to pass my career would be destroyed, and there was the small but finite possibility, I suppose, that the ship itself could be gravely damaged or even lost.

  I was determined, all the same, to give Vox the best send-off I could.

  On the morning of our approach I stood for a time on Outerscreen Level, staring down at the world that called itself Cul-de-Sac. It glowed like a red eye in the night. I knew that it was the world Vox had chosen for herself, but all the same it seemed repellent to me, almost evil. I felt that way about all the worlds of the shore people now. The Service had changed me; and I knew that the change was irreversible. Never again would I go down to one of those worlds. The starship was my world now.

  I went to the virtuality where Vox was waiting.

  “Come,” I said, and she entered me.

  Together we crossed the ship to the Great Navigation Hall.

  The approach team had already gathered: Raebuck, Fresco, Roacher, again, along with Pedregal, who would supervise the downloading of cargo. The intelligence on duty was 612 Jason. I greeted them with qu
ick nods and we jacked ourselves together in approach series.

  Almost at once I felt Roacher probing within me, searching for the fugitive intelligence that he still thought I might be harboring. Vox shrank back, deep out of sight. I didn’t care. Let him probe, I thought. This will all be over soon.

  “Request approach instructions,” Fresco said.

  “Simulation,” I ordered.

  The fiery red eye of Cul-de-Sac sprang into vivid representation before us in the hall. On the other side of us was the simulacrum of the ship, surrounded by sheets of white flame that rippled like the blaze of the aurora.

  I gave the command and we entered approach mode.

  We could not, of course, come closer to planetskin than a million shiplengths, or Cul-de-Sac’s inexorable forces would rip us apart. But we had to line the ship up with its extended mast aimed at the planet’s equator, and hold ourselves firm in that position while the shoreships of Cul-de-Sac came swarming up from their red world to receive their cargo from us.

  612 Jason fed me the coordinates and I gave them to Fresco, while Raebuck kept the channels clear and Roacher saw to it that we had enough power for what we had to do. But as I passed the data along to Fresco, it was with every sign reversed. My purpose was to aim the mast not downward to Cul-de-Sac but outward toward the stars of heaven.

  At first none of them noticed. Everything seemed to be going serenely. Because my reversals were exact, only the closest examination of the ship’s position would indicate our l80-degree displacement.

  Floating in the free fall of the Great Navigation Hall, I felt almost as though I could detect the movements of the ship. An illusion, I knew. But a powerful one. The vast ten-kilometer-long needle that was the Sword of Orion seemed to hang suspended, motionless, and then to begin slowly, slowly to turn, tipping itself on its axis, reaching for the stars with its mighty mast. Easily, easily, slowly, silently—

  What joy that was, feeling the ship in my hand!

  The ship was mine. I had mastered it.

  “Captain,” Fresco said softly.

  “Easy on, Fresco. Keep feeding power.”