by Larry Niven
For the Hindmost’s consort had considerable influence. There was a time that fact would have evoked bitterness, even fury—conflict with Nessus had once gotten Baedeker banished. But without Nessus’ trust in humans, the Concordance would still be ignorant of the Pak threat. The scruffy scout had been proven correct—no matter the consequences for Baedeker.
My misjudgment was not Nessus’ fault. The admission eased a burden that Baedeker had not acknowledged—not even to himself.
Nessus bobbed heads in acknowledgment. “How distant are we?”
“Twenty million miles.” Baedeker now even thought in English units: another artifact of his time among the humans.
Nessus whistled approval. “That seems safe enough.”
“We try.” Baedeker extended a neck to the display controls; with a wriggle of lip nodes he fine-tuned the image contrast. He straightened up again. “Because the Outsider drives move worlds through normal space, it seemed logical that all manifestations of operation are localized to normal space. That suggests the propagation of any side effects of our experiment will be light-speed limited.
“So, the string of probes between our homemade drive and this ship uses hyperwave comm. Whatever happens, we’ll know it long before any normal-space phenomenon can get to us.” And we’ll jump into hyperspace if anything looks amiss.
“Excellent, Baedeker. What is the prognosis?”
“We learn a little more each time.” A nonanswer worthy of Sigmund, Baedeker thought. The best he could hope for was an anticlimactic result.
“What will we see?” Nessus persisted.
“Probably nothing.” Baedeker twisted a neck, scanning the controlled chaos around the bridge. Minerva seemed to have everything under control. His research assistant still wore General Products violet-and-blue mane ribbons, as though the fortunes of a business mattered anymore. “Nessus, expect this test to be brief.”
“How brief?”
“Ready for final countdown,” Minerva announced over the intercom, speaking English for the benefit of the humans. “Thirty seconds, on my mark.” He released the intercom button. “Baedeker?”
“Proceed.”
“Mark. Twenty-nine . . . twenty-eight . . .”
Everyone here carried comps, synched to the shipboard network. The verbal countdown was unnecessary, a peculiarly human custom to which Baedeker still struggled to adapt. Despite everything, he could not resist looking himself in the eyes.
“Nineteen. . . eighteen. . .”
“How brief,” Nessus repeated.
“You’ll see soon enough.” Or we’ll unleash energies so vast that they swallow us even here, and the discussion becomes moot.
Nessus bobbed agreement.
“Three . . . two. . . one. . . done. Commencing analysis.”
On the main display, the lump of icy rock appeared unchanged. “How long?” Baedeker sang out.
Minerva looked up from his station. “Twelve point two seven nanoseconds.”
“Nanoseconds?” Nessus’ undertunes trilled with dismay.
“It’s our best yet,” Baedeker rebutted, staccato and impatient. He might have come to terms with Nessus’ unherdlike methods, but that tolerance hardly extended to uninformed criticism. “Have you read my progress reports?”
“I err on the side of other priorities. Like keeping your project funded and staffed.”
And if any of the herd were to survive the Pak onslaught that was the higher priority. Baedeker fluted apologetically. “Walk with me, and I’ll explain.”
They cantered off the bridge together, Baedeker leading the way. They began a long, slow trip around the ship’s rotund waist. (Humans had waists, although Citizens did not. A bigger difference between the species: where they chose to locate a ship’s bridge. Only a human would think to expose a hindmost’s duty station at the bow of the ship. The rational choice, surely, was at the center, as far as possible from any hull impacts.) The circuit was more than a half mile.
“You’re familiar with the zero-point energy of vacuum,” Baedeker began. “The Outsider drive taps the zero-point energy. Doing so asymmetrically is inherently propulsive.”
“For nanoseconds,” Nessus chided.
Without missing a step, Baedeker plucked at his mane. If Nessus truly understood the risks, he would be tearing apart his mane. “The process evokes matter-antimatter particle pairs from the quantum foam, myriads of pairs, scattered across a volume larger than the body to be moved. Every infinitesimal region requires a subtly different treatment to achieve net thrust. Every particle requires tracking. It all takes massive amounts of computing power—more than any technology customarily used on Hearth. You’ll wonder what kind of computing power the Outsiders employed, and that is the scary part. We do not exactly know.”
Scary was the ultimate expletive. Nessus twitched but made no comment.
“We do not dare to unseal an Outsider drive, or even to scan one invasively, yet somehow we had to determine how these tremendous forces are manipulated.” Baedeker fell silent as a human scurried past in the opposite direction, her errand unknown. He had accepted human help, but the nuances of the project must remain Concordance secrets. “An endless stream of neutrinos is constantly passing through everything, and deep-radar technology uses neutrino pulses. So, we modified a deep-radar unit to emit very weak pulses, at neutrino intensities Hearth last saw before our sun began to swell. Our ancestors’ activation then of their planetary drive did not cause a disaster. It stood to reason another neutrino source emitting at the same level would not induce problems in a drive.”
And the uncertainties of that probing had still reduced Baedeker to a ball of tightly coiled flesh. He saw nothing to be gained by admitting it.
“And what did you find?” Nessus asked.
“All we got was a shadowy image, indistinct, the circuitry suggestive of quantum computing.” That, and a days-long retreat to catatonia. Any perturbation, even an unexpected neutrino flux, risked decohering the quantum superpositions on which the control algorithms must rely. If the probe’s pulses had altered the quantum states—the potential damage was incalculable and unknowable.
And beyond the ability of a dilettante like Nessus to comprehend. “That revealed a great deal regarding the complexity of the control process and nothing about the algorithms.”
“But a mere twelve nanoseconds,” Nessus intoned. “The control processes seem rather sensitive.”
Sensitive? That seriously understated it. Baedeker had been left to determine—in theory, by analysis; in practice, by trial and error—how to shape and channel energy eruptions coaxed from the vacuum. And each iteration risked unleashing unknowably vast energies. . . .
“Our first three tries, Nessus, we failed to attain one nanosecond. That’s how fast the process can destabilize.”
“What about net thrust?”
Two humans and a Citizen loped out of a cross corridor, comps in hands and mouth, talking excitedly about gravitational lobes, particle densities, and flux vortices. This was the stuff of progress—nanosecond by nanosecond—and the type of detail to which Baedeker should be attending. He waited for the technicians to disappear around the curve of the corridor. “Thrust? Certainly. Net thrust? Unclear. We may be seeing only a bit of random effect, beyond our control. And there may be longer-duration feedback effects we have yet to encounter.”
“A twelvefold increase is progress, but nanoseconds will be a hard sell.” Nessus came to a halt and fixed Baedeker with a bold, two-headed stare. “I’ll have to embellish to the Hindmost. Your task is to make sure that by the time Nike looks closely at this project, I am not too much of a liar.”
49
Thssthfok sat on the floor of his cell, knees drawn against his chest, back against an unyielding bulkhead. Except for occasional fleeting moments of freedom, he had been in this prison for—with a jolt, he recognized he did not know how long.
He searched his memories and surroundings for clues. The faint clatt
er and clank of shipboard maintenance, become all but constant. Sigmund’s appearances, less and less frequent. A tray of fruit, scarcely touched. Images of his long-lost breeders and friends, memories of long-ago conversations, more real to him than anything in the room.
Dispassionately, he studied the tray. The food looked tired but not yet spoiled. He forced himself to take a bite, and then another, and then a third, despite his lack of appetite. Without noticing, he had abandoned his hope of escape, had lost himself in the past.
Three times he had broken out of this cell; three times, his captors had retaken him with ease. Had failure reduced him to apathy? Yes, he decided. That, and the ceaseless activity outside the hatch. That, and the metallic stomping of armored workers, the corridors ever alive with a many-limbed gait. To wrest this ship from its crew demanded more than superior intellect and strength. He needed the element of surprise—and did not see how to achieve surprise when armored work parties constantly plied the vessel’s corridors. And so, imperceptibly, he had stopped scheming, stopped analyzing, stopped watching. . ..
This way waited death.
Did he choose that path? He had seen so much, learned so much, since leaving Mala. If he died here, that knowledge died with him. The good that knowledge could do Pakhome’s evacuees would die with him.
He could summon no emotion at the thought of death, but neither did the prospect bring indifference. He picked up a piece of fruit and managed to swallow another nibble. He took a few more bites and felt a small stirring of energy.
It was not yet his time, apparently, to fade away.
He began an exercise routine, taking the opportunity to recover his scanner from its hiding place in a recessed handhold. Later, his exercises complete, the tool hidden under a blanket, he turned his attention, working through the tactile interface, to his cell’s curved wall. With every probe he learned something new about the hull material. With every scrap of knowledge he extended the scanner capabilities to discern yet more.
The hull hummed with resonant energies. It explained how this material could be harder than twing: by dynamically reinforcing the interatomic bonds. Ways to produce similar stuff blossomed in his thoughts, and he filed away the ideas.
The hull itself had just become a resource. He could alter his modulator to tap the hull’s own energy. . ..
The possibility caught his attention, and suddenly he was ravenous.
WITH A FINAL PRECISE ADJUSTMENT, Thssthfok finished rebuilding the scanner into a structural modulator.
He stood close to the curved wall, blocking with his body the device in his hands. He swiped it over a small area, and the handle pulsed with energy. A patch of the curved bulkhead (or of an outside coating, he thought) turned clear—
Another ship clung just outside!
Sounds in the corridor. Thssthfok hurriedly swiped the modulator over the wall and restored its opacity. His thumb twitched to disable the device. He wrapped his fist around it, sliding his arms and hands behind his back as he pivoted to face the inside hatch.
The door swung open. “Something interesting there?” Sigmund asked.
His need for life restored, Thssthfok resented Sigmund’s interruptions. Sigmund had made no mention of a new crewwoman, yet traces of her scent clung to Sigmund’s armor. When had she come aboard? Her presence, like the heavy pace of unexplained maintenance, went unexplained. She had come from the docked ship, of course.
“No more than usual,” Thssthfok lied.
Sigmund launched into another round of questions. With some difficulty Thssthfok answered, or disdained to answer, with the boredom the questions deserved. With the boredom with which, surely, he had answered while sinking deeper and deeper into apathy. He dared not reveal excitement now.
Finally, Sigmund tired of the conversation and left.
When next the sounds of shipboard maintenance receded into the background noise, Thssthfok risked a glance into the corridor. He saw no one. He strode briskly to the curved bulkhead, softened a swath of the hull, and the much more malleable second hull just beyond—
And pressed through both walls into the cockpit of another vessel.
THE LITTLE SHIP WAS A CURIOUS amalgam of human and Pak influences. The pilot console bore labels in the same symbol set as the ship Thssthfok had just left. Some words seemed changed from the English he had learned, but they were close enough. He saw at a glance that the ship’s systems were functioning properly and the deuterium tank was nearly full.
A pressure suit and helmet waited in a small locker. They were large, but he could make do. He might need to make a quick trip into the vacuum to detach or undock this little ship.
One of the teleportation discs lay on the deck. He had speculated for so long about those. He lifted it, marveling at its low mass. He turned it, spotting a keypad in a recess along its edge and a long bank of tiny switches. An identification code, no doubt.
Leaving the disk operational risked someone coming aboard—but only one, for the little ship was crowded with just Thssthfok here. He would easily overpower one unsuspecting visitor, if it came to that. Deactivating the disc, if he spent the time to find the key code, risked triggering a maintenance alert and prematurely revealing his presence here. So did reprogramming the disc address. So did stowing the disc upside down, or somewhere too small for a person to rematerialize—any competent system design would check for open space before transmitting.
Disabling the disc must wait until he escaped.
He put the disc back where he had found it, then looked around and under the pilot’s couch for hidden restraints. The chair was not rigged, and he settled into it. He surveyed the console. Life-support controls. Ship’s power. Fusion drive. Artificial gravity. Sensor array. Radio and comm laser. There were other systems, some not immediately familiar. Those, like the teleportation device, could wait later study.
Curious. Magnets secured a cloth to the canopy rim, hiding the view port. Thssthfok yearned to see stars again. He ripped away the cloth—
The edges of the canopy came together. That made no sense, and he concentrated on the expanse that until moments ago the cloth had covered. And saw—
Nothing. Less than nothing. The denial, even, of the concept of anything. The less than nothing drew him in, deeper, deeper . . .
He tried to look away and failed, unable to recover the concept of direction.
Deeper, deeper. . .
THSSTHFOK WOKE, utterly disoriented. He was flat on his back. He had the vague sensation of someone repeatedly calling his name. A booted foot, none too gently, prodded his side. Sigmund’s boot. Eric, also in armor, stood nearby.
“What happened?” Thssthfok managed.
Sigmund stepped back. “It’s called the Blind Spot. The name fits, because the mind refuses to see it.”
A place that was no place, a place beyond Pak—and, apparently, human—perception. A place beyond space, in which speed might have another meaning, and a clue to how the faster-than-light drive worked. The argument was compelling, the prospects momentous, but Thssthfok trembled, too shaken to follow the logic.
Sigmund was still speaking. “You don’t want to stare into the Blind Spot, Thssthfok. People who do, sometimes don’t find their way out.”
“What happened?’ Thssthfok asked again. “The last I remember, I was . . .” He wanted to gesture at the curved wall, behind which the other ship clung. Only all walls here were straight. This was a new room. Smaller.
“You were lucky,” Eric said. “Kirsten found you, frozen. Lost in the Blind Spot. And you were lucky again she managed not to lose herself there.”
Thssthfok suddenly remembered that other little ship. He remembered boarding, tugging himself through walls. His fingers twitched. The structural modulator was gone from his hand!
“Looking for this?” Sigmund asked. He had the modulator in his gloved hand. “We’ll be keeping it. And since you’ve never been in this cabin, we should be safe from any more hidden surprises.”
/> Sigmund and Eric left, and Thssthfok was alone. On Mala, and even on this ship, he had always had tools and technology at his disposal. Bit by bit, one abortive escape after the next, he had lost everything. He felt as helpless, as primitive, as a breeder. Thssthfok looked about the bare cabin. He saw only a bit of food, a vessel of water, and a chamber pot.
The food tray held absolutely no interest for him.
50
Two tiny minds, scarcely communicating, quavering. A third mind. A fourth.
Hints of emanations of thought, of someone other than these scarcely sentient components. More, the emergent mind roared into an inchoate inner space.
Trembling, the four reached out. Another little mind, and another, and another. . .
Awareness cascaded. Consciousness blossomed. We are Ol’t’ro, they remembered. Lesser minds faded into irrelevance.
They sifted the memories of their sixteen lesser components. By their own choice, much time had passed since the last meld. Their units had answered every request for help, at a time when the mission needed every skilled hand and tubacle. And what had best served Sigmund also served Ol’t’ro: It was far better to plumb the mysteries of the ship—particularly its engine room!—than to monitor Sigmund’s and Alice’s pondering of obscure human historical puzzles.
In performing repairs, making calibrations, and disconnecting unnecessary equipment, Ol’t’ro’s units had absorbed many nuances of Don Quixote’s design. They would learn more from the myriads of miniature sensors that repair duties had allowed them to hide across the vessel. Meanwhile, they still had much to infer from observations of the Outsider vessel. And they found fascinating the recent discussions about neutronium existing outside of stellar objects.