Damon Knight: Orbit 14

“Damn, sometimes she’s such an ass.”

“She didn’t mean it.”

“Oh, I should have—”

“—done just what you did; she was sorry. And at least we’re not trespassing.”

“God, Maris, how do you stand it? They must do it to you all the time. Don’t you resent it?”

“Hell, yes, I resent it. Who wouldn’t? I just got tired of getting mad. . . . And besides—” he glanced at the closed doors—“besides, nobody needs a mean bartender. Come on, show me around the ship.”

Her knotted fingers uncurled, took his hand. “This way, please; straight ahead of you is our control room.” She pulled him forward beneath the daybright dome. He saw a hand-printed sign above the center panel, NO-MAN’S LAND. “From here we program our computer; this area here is for the AAFAL drive, first devised by Ursula, an early spacer who—”

“What’s awful about it?”

“What?”

“Every spacer I know calls the ship’s drive ‘awful’?”

“Oh— Not ‘awful,’ AAFAL: Almost As Fast As Light. Which it is. That’s what we call it; there’s a technical name too.”

“Um.” He looked vaguely disappointed. “Guess I’m used to—” Curiosity changed his face, as he watched her smiling with delight. “I—suppose it’s different from antigravity?” Seventy years before she was born, he had taught himself the principles of starship technology.

“Very.” She giggled suddenly. “The ‘awfuls’ and the ‘aghs,’ hmm, . . . We do use an ag unit to leave and enter solar systems; it operates like the ones in flyers, it throws us away from the planet, and finally the entire system, until we reach AAFAL ignition speeds. With the AG you can only get fractions of the speed of light, but it’s enough to concentrate interstellar gases and dust. Our force nets feed them through the drive unit, where they’re converted to energy, which increases our speed, which makes the unit more efficient . . . until we’re moving almost as fast as light.

“We use the AG to protect us from acceleration forces, and after deceleration to guide us into port. The start and finish can take up most of our trip time; the farther out in space you are, the less AG feedback you get from the system’s mass, and the less your velocity changes. It’s a beautiful time, though—you can see the AG forces through the polarized hull, wrapping you in shifting rainbow . . .

“And you are isolate”—she leaned against a silent panel and punched buttons; the room began to grow dark—“in absolute night . . . and stars.” And stars appeared, in the darkness of a planetarium show; fire-gnats lighting her face and shoulders and his own. “How do you like our stars?”

“Are we in here?”

Four streaks of blue joined lights in the air. “Here ... in space by this corner of the Quadrangle. This is our navigation chart for the Quadrangle run; see the bowed leg and brightness, that’s the Pleiades. Patris . . . Sanalareta . . . Treone . . . back to Oro. The other lines zigzag too, but it doesn’t show. Now come with me . . . With a flare of energy, we open our AAFAL nets in space—”

He followed her voice into the night, where flickering tracery seined motes of interstellar gas; and impossible nothingness burned with infinite energy, potential transformed and transforming. With the wisdom of a thousand years a ship of the League fell through limitless seas, navigating the shifting currents of the void, beating into the sterile winds of space. Stars glittered like snow on the curving hull, spitting icy daggers of light that moved imperceptibly into spectral blues before him, reddened as he looked behind: imperceptibly time expanded, velocity increased and with it power. He saw the haze of silver on his right rise into their path, a wall of liquid shadow . . . the Pleiades, an endless bank of burning fog, kindled from within by shrouded islands of fire. Tendrils of shimmering mists curved outward across hundreds of billions of kilometers, the nets found bountiful harvest, drew close, hurled the ship into the edge of cloud.

Nebulosity wrapped him in clinging haloes of- colored light, ringed him in brilliance, as the nets fell inward toward the ship, burgeoning with energy, shielding its fragile nucleus from the soundless fury of its passage. Acceleration increased by hundredfolds, around him the Doppler shifts deepened toward cerulean and crimson; slowly the clinging brightness wove into parabolas of shining smoke, whipping past until the entire flaming mass of cloud and stars seemed to sweep ahead, shriveling toward blue-whiteness, trailing embers.

And suddenly the ship burst once more into a void, a universe warped into a rubber bowl of brilliance stretching past him, drawing away and away before him toward a gleaming point in darkness. The shrunken nets seined near-vacuum and were filled; their speed approached 0.999c . . . held constant, as the conversion of matter to energy ceased within the ship . . . and in time, with a flicker of silver force, began once more to fall away. Slowly time unbowed, the universe cast off its alienness. One star grew steadily before them: the sun of Patris.

A sun rose in ruddy splendor above the City in the Clouds on Patris, nine months and seven light-years from Oro. . . . And again, Patris fell away; and the brash gleaming Freeport of Sana-lareta; they crept toward Treone through gasless waste, groping for current and mote across the barren ship-wakes of half a millennium. . . . And again—

Maris found himself among fire-gnat stars, on a ship in the bay of New Piraeus. And realized she had stopped speaking. His hand rubbed the copper snarl of his hair, his eyes bright as a child’s. “You didn’t tell me you were a witch in your spare time.”

He heard her smile, “Thank you. Mactav makes the real magic, though; her special effects are fantastic. She can show you the whole inhabited section of the galaxy, with all the trade polyhedra, like a dew-flecked cobweb hanging in the air.” Daylight returned to the panel. “Mactav—that’s her bank, there—handles most of the navigation, life support, all that, too. Sometimes it seems like we’re almost along for the ride! But of course we’re along for Mactav.”

“Who or what is Mactav?” Maris peered into a darkened screen, saw something amber glimmer in its depths, drew back.

“You’ve never met her, neither have we—but you were staring her right in the eye.” Brandy stood beside him. “She must be listening to Giri down below. . . . Okay, okay!—a Mactavia unit is the brain, the nervous system of a ship, she monitors its vital signs, calculates, adjusts. We only have to ask—sometimes we don’t even have to do that. The memory is a real spacer woman’s, fed into the circuits . . . someone who died irrevocably, or had reached retirement, but wanted to stay on. A human system is wiser, more versatile—and lots cheaper—than anything all-machine that’s ever been done.”

“Then your Mactav is a kind of cyborg.”

She smiled. “Well, I guess so; in a way—”

“But the Spacing League’s regulations still won’t allow cyborgs in crews.”

She looked annoyed.

He shrugged. “Sorry. Dumb thing to say . . . What’s that red down there?”

“Oh, that’s our ‘stomach’: the AAFAL unit, where”—she grinned —“we digest stardust into energy. It’s the only thing that’s never transparent, the red is the shield.”

“How does it work?”

“I don’t really know. I can make it go, but I don’t understand why—I’m only a five-and-a-half technician now. If I was a six I could tell you.” She glanced at him sidelong. “Aha! I finally impressed you!”

He laughed. “Not so dumb as you look.” He had qualified as a six half a century before, out of boredom.