David Brin - Heaven's Reach

Of course, he knew why a low-class Earthling recruit was assigned to this post. Wer’Q’quinn had said Harry’s test scores showed an ideal match of cynicism and originality, suiting him for lookout duty in allaphor space. But in truth, E Level was unappealing to most oxygen breathers. The great clans of the Civilization of Five Galaxies thought it a quaint oddity at best. Dangerous and unpredictable. Unlike Levels A, B, and C, it offered few shortcuts around the immense vacuum deserts of normal space. Anyone in a hurry — or with a strong sense of self-preservation — chose transfer points, hyperdrive, or soft-quantum tunneling, instead of braving a realm where fickle subjectivity reigned.

Of course, oxygen breathers only made up the most gaudy and frenetic of life’s eight orders. Harry kept notes whenever he sighted hydros, quantals, memoids, and other exotic types, with their strange insouciance about the passage of time. They don’t see it as quite the enemy we oxy-types do.

His bosses at the Navigation Institute craved data about those strange comings and goings, though he could hardly picture why. The orders of sapiency so seldom interacted, they might as well occupy separate universes.

Still, you could hide a lot in all this weirdness, a trait that sometimes drew oxy-based life down here. On occasion, some faction or alliance would try sending a battle fleet through E Space, suffering its disadvantages in order to take rivals by surprise. Or else criminals might hope to move by a secret path through this treacherous realm. Harry was trained to look out for sooners, gene raiders, syntac thieves, and others trying to cheat the strict rules of migration and Uplift. Rules that so far kept the known cosmos from dissolving into chaos and ruin.

He nursed no illusions about his status. Harry knew this job was just the sort of dangerous, tedious duty the great institutes assigned to lowly clients of an unimportant clan. Yet he took seriously his vow to Wer’Q’quinn and NavInst. He planned to show all the doubters what a neo-chimp could do.

That determination was put to the test when he roused from his next rest break to peer through the louvered blinds, blinking with groggy surprise at an endless row of serrated green ridges that had erupted while he slept. Undulating sinusoidally across the foreground, they resembled the half-submerged spiny torso of some gigantic, lazy sea serpent that seemed to stretch toward both horizons, blocking his panorama of the purple plane.

At its slothful rate of passage, several pseudodays might pass before Harry’s view was unobstructed once again. He stared for some time at the coils’ slow rise and fall, wondering what combination of reality and his own mental processes could have evoked such a thing. If a memoid — another self-sustaining, living abstraction — it was huge enough to engulf most of the more modest animated idealizations grazing nearby.

When a concept grows big enough, does it become part of the landscape? Will it merge with the underpinnings of E Level? Will this “idea” take part in motivating the entire cosmos?

One thing was for sure, he could hardly survey his assigned area with something like this in the way!

Unfortunately, the damned banana peels still surrounded his station with a deadly allaphorical minefield. But clearly the time had come to move on.

The station swayed at first when he tried controlling the stilt legs by hand. Apparently, his spindly tower pushed the limits of verticality in this region, where flight was forbidden by local laws of physics. The structure teetered and nearly fell three times before he started getting the hang of things.

Alas, he had no option of handing supervision over to the computer. “Pilot mode” was often useless on E Level, where machines could be deaf and blind to allaphors that lay right in front of them.

“Well, here goes,” he murmured, gingerly navigating the scout platform ahead, raising one spidery stem, maneuvering it skittishly past a yellow and brown “peel,” and planting it on the best patch of open ground within reach. Testing its footing, he shifted the station’s center of gravity, transferring more weight forward until it felt safe to try again with another.

The process was a lot like chess — you had to think at least a dozen moves ahead, for there could be no going back. “Reversibility” was a meaningless term in this continuum, where death might take on the attributes of a physical creature, and entropy was just another predatory concept prowling a savannah of ideas.

It became a slow, tense process of exertion, tedious and utterly demanding. Harry grew to despise the banana peel symbols, even more than before. He used his hatred to reinforce concentration, picking slowly amid the yellow emblems of slipperiness, knowing that any misstep might send the little scoutship flipping violently toward a gaudy oblivion.

Somehow — he could tell — the peels sensed his loathing. Their boundaries seemed to shrink a little and solidify under his gaze.

“We do not require passionless observers for this kind of duty,” Wer’Q’quinn had explained when Harry joined the Observer Corps at Kazzkark Base.

“There are many others we could choose, whose minds are more disciplined. More detached, cautious, and in most ways more intelligent. Those volunteers are needed elsewhere. But on E Level, we are better served by someone like you.”

“Gee, thanks,” Harry had replied. “So, are you saying you don’t want me to be skeptical when I’m out on a mission?”

The squadron leader bowed a great, wormlike head. Rustling segment plates crafted words in ratchety Galactic Five.

“Only those who start with skepticism can open themselves to true adventure,” Wer’Q’quinn continued. “But there are many types of skeptical outlook. Yours is gritty, visceral. You take things personally, young Earthling, as if the cosmos has a particular interest in your inconvenience. On most planes of reality, that is an egregious error of solipsistic pride. But on E Level, it may be the only appropriate way of dealing with an idiosyncratic cosmos.”

Harry came away from that interview with oddly mixed feelings — as if he had just received the worst insult — and highest praise — of his life. The effect was to make him more determined than ever.

Perhaps Wer’Q’quinn had intended that, all along.

I hate you, he thought at the ridiculous, offensive yellow peels. On some level, they might be neutral twists of space, described by cold equations. But they seemed to taunt him by appearing the way they did, provoking an intimate abhorrence that Harry used to his advantage, piloting around the traps as if each success humiliated a real enemy.

His body grew sweaty and warm. A musty odor filled the cupola as one tense, cautious hour passed into the next.

Finally, with a nimble hop, he stepped his spindly vehicle away from the last obstacle, breathing a deep sigh, feeling tired, smelly, and victorious. Perhaps at some level the reef allaphors knew they had lost, for at that moment the “peels” began transforming from yellow and brown starfish forms into another shape, one with curls and spikes.…

Harry didn’t wait to see what they would become. He ordered the pilot program to hurry away from there.

It took a while to get past the green “sea monster,” ducking through a gap between two of its slowly undulating coils. The passage made Harry nervous, staring up at portions of that mammoth, living conceptual torso. But then he was free at last to race for open territory. The purple plain swept by as he aimed for the most promising vantage point — a stable-looking brown hillock, too barren and mundane to attract any hungry memoids. A place where he might settle down to watch his assigned patrol zone in peace.