David Brin - Heaven's Reach

The angle increased. A troubled whine came from the spinning rear wheels until they, too, reached the yellow.

In a shock of recognition, Harry shouted—“No! Reverse! They’re ban—”

Too late. The back tires whined as slippery yellow strips flew out from under the platform, sending it flipping in a sudden release of traction. Harry tumbled, struck the ceiling, then slid across the far wall, shouting as the scout platform rolled, skidded, and rolled again … until it dropped with a final, bone-jarring thud. Fetching up against a bulkhead, Harry clutched a wall rail with his toes until the jouncing finally stopped.

“Oh … my head …,” he moaned, picking himself up.

At least things had settled right side up. He shuffled back to the console in a crouch and read the main display. The station had suffered little damage, thank Ifni. But Harry must have put off housecleaning chores too long, for dust balls now coated his fur from head to toe. He slapped them off, raising clouds and triggering violent sneezes.

The shutters had closed automatically the instant things went crazy, protecting his eyes against potentially dangerous allaphors.

He commanded gruffly, “Open blinds!” Perhaps the violent action had triggered a local phase change, causing all the nasty obstacles to vanish. It had happened before.

No such luck, he realized as the louvers slid into pillars between the wide viewing panes. Outside, the general scenery had not altered noticeably. The same reddish blue, Swiss cheese sky rolled over a mauve pampas, with black mountains bobbing biliously in the distance. And a slick mesa still had his scoutship mired, hemmed on all sides by yellow, multiarmed shapes.

“Banana peels,” he muttered. “Goddamn banana peels.”

One reason why these stations were manned by only one observer … allaphors tended to get even weirder with more than one mind perceiving them at the same time. The “objects” he saw were images his own mind pasted over a reality that no living brain could readily fathom. A reality that mutated and transformed under influence by his thoughts and perceptions.

All that was fine, in theory. He ought to be used to it by now. But what bothered Harry in particular about the banana allaphor was that it seemed gratuitously personal. Like others of his kind, Harry hated being trapped by stereotypes.

He sighed, scratching his side. “Are all systems stable?”

“Everything is stable, Taskmaster-Commander Harold,” the pilot replied. “We are stuck for the moment, but we appear to be safe.”

He considered the vast open expanse beyond the plateau. Actually, visibility was excellent from here. The holes in the sky, especially, were all clear and unobstructed. A thought occurred to him.

“Say, do we really have to move on right away? We can observe all the assigned transit routes from this very spot, until our cruise clock runs out, no?”

“That appears to be correct. For the moment, no illicit traffic can get by our watch area undetected.”

“Hmmph. Well then …” He yawned. “I guess I’ll just go back to bed! I have a feelin’ I’m gonna need my wits to get outta this one.”

“Very well. Good night, Employer-Observer Harms. Pleasant dreams.”

“Fat chance o’ that,” he muttered in Anglic as he left the observation deck. “And close the friggin’ blinds! Do I have to think of everything around here? Don’t answer that! Just … never mind.”

Even closed, the louvers would not prevent all leakage. Flickering archetypes slipped between the slats, as if eager to latch into his mind during REM state, tapping his dreams like little parasites.

It could not be helped. When Harry got his first promotion to E Space, the local head of patrollers for the Navigation Institute told him that susceptibility to allaphoric images was a vital part of the job. Waving a slender, multijointed arm, that Galactic official confessed his surprise, in Nahalli-accented GalSix, at Harry’s qualifications.

“Skeptical we were, when first told that your race might have traits useful to us.

“Repudiating our doubts, this you have since achieved, Observer Harms.

“To full status, we now advance you. First of your kind to be so honored.”

Harry sighed as he threw himself under the covers again, tempted by the sweet stupidity of self-pity.

Some honor! He snorted dubiously.

Still, he couldn’t honestly complain. He had been warned. And this wasn’t Horst. At least he had escaped the dry, monotonous wastes.

Anyway, only the mad lived for long under illusions that the cosmos was meant for their convenience.

There were a multitude of conflicting stories about whoever designed this crazy universe, so many billions of years ago. But even before he ever considered dedicating his life to Institute work — or heard of E Space — Harry had reached one conclusion about metatheology.

For all His power and glory, the Creator must not have been a very sensible person.

At least, not as sensible as a neo-chimpanzee.

THERE IS A WORD-GLYPH.

It names a locale where three states of matter coincide — two that are fluid, swirling past a third that is adamant as coral.

A kind of froth can form in such a place. Dangerous, deceptive foam, beaten to a head by fate-filled tides. No one enters such a turmoil voluntarily.

But sometimes a force called desperation drives prudent sailors to set course for ripping shoals.

• • •

A slender shape plummets through the outer fringes of a mammoth star. Caterpillar-ribbed, with rows of talon-like protrusions that bite into spacetime, the vessel claws its way urgently against a bitter gale.

Diffuse flames lick the scarred hull of ancient cera-metal, adding new layers to a strange soot coating. Tendrils of plasma fire seek entry, thwarted (so far) by wavering fields.

In time, though, the heat will find its way through.

Midway along the vessel’s girth, a narrow wheel turns, like a wedding band that twists around a nervous finger. Rows of windows pass by as the slim ring rotates. Unlit from within, most of the dim panes only reflect stellar fire.

Then, rolling into view, a single rectangle shines with artificial color.

A pane for viewing in two directions. A universe without, and within.

Contemplating the maelstrom, Sara mused aloud.

“My criminal ancestors took their sneakship through this same inferno on their way to Jijo … covering their tracks under the breath of Great Izmunuti.”

Pondering the forces at work just a handbreadth away, she brushed her fingertips against a crystal surface that kept actinic heat from crossing the narrow gap. One part of her — book-weaned and tutored in mathematics — could grasp the physics of a star whose radius was bigger than her homeworld’s yearly orbit. A red giant, in its turgid final stage, boiling a stew of nuclear-cooked atoms toward black space.

Abstract knowledge was fine. But Sara’s spine also trembled with a superstitious shiver, spawned by her upbringing as a savage sooner on a barbarian world. The Earthship Streaker might be hapless prey — desperately fleeing a titanic hunter many times its size — but this dolphin-crewed vessel still struck Sara as godlike and awesome, carrying more mass than all the wooden dwellings of the Slope. In her wildest dreams, dwelling in a treehouse next to a groaning water mill, she had never imagined that destiny might take her on such a ride, swooping through the fringes of a hellish star.

Especially Izmunuti, whose very name was fearsome. To the Six Races, huddling in secret terror on Jijo, it stood for the downward path. A door that swung just one way, toward exile.

For two thousand years, emigrants had slinked past the giant star to find shelter on Jijo. First the wheeled g’Kek race, frantically evading genocide. Then came traekis — gentle stacks of waxy rings who were fleeing their own tyrannical cousins — followed by qheuens, hoons, urs, and humans, all settling in a narrow realm between the Rimmer Mountains and a surf-stained shore. Each wave of new arrivals abandoned their starships, computers, and other high-tech implements, sending every god-machine down to the sea, tumbling into Jijo’s deep midden of forgetfulness. Breaking with their past, all six clans of former sky lords settled down to rustic lives, renouncing the sky forever.