Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

Legroeder frowned, trying to frame words. “I can tell you what happened,” he said finally. “But telling you what we learned—that’s going to be more difficult.”

“Then let’s start with what’s easy,” YZ/I said.

Legroeder felt momentarily at a loss; he gestured helplessly to his fellow riggers.

“Come, gentlemen,” YZ/I laughed. “ Impris is sitting in my docking port. You found her.” He clapped his hands together. “Don’t be bashful. Tell me how you did it.”

“Perhaps I can summarize,” said Cantha. And in a husky murmur, the Narseil gave a recap of the search for and discovery of Impris . He paused for breath, then briefly explained how the time instabilities had forced their hasty departure.

YZ/I’s eyes were intense with interest. “So the key discovery in all of this was the spacetime… ‘quantum flaw.’ Is that right?” He rummaged in his seat pockets until he found a cigar. He inspected it thoughtfully, as though by mulling over the cigar he might comprehend the meaning of the phrase, quantum flaw .

“Yes,” Legroeder said, finding his voice again. “And we can’t explain it fully, because we don’t understand it fully. We can tell you how we got into the flaw, and how we got out, but I’m not sure we can tell you why .”

YZ/I stopped in the middle of lighting his cigar. “You don’t know why you did what you did?”

“We know why we made certain decisions. But in the larger sense—it all happened so fast that by the end we were operating almost wholly on instinct.”

YZ/I puffed. “And once it was over, and you had some time to reflect back on it?”

Legroeder snorted. “Once we got out of the flaw, we had a little something else to think about—a ship named Hunter . I presume Captain Glenswarg informed you about our brush with KM/C?”

“Yes, he did,” YZ/I said. “It was exactly as we feared—Carlotta did not take kindly to having their prize lure taken out of the water.”

“No.” Legroeder reflected back on the discovery that his former captain was trying to kill him. “No, they did not.”

“Well, I’m glad our people were able to take care of it without too much trouble,” YZ/I said casually. “I understand you people were very good in the fight, too.”

“Thank you,” said Palagren with, Legroeder noted, a dry Narseil sarcasm that YZ/I almost certainly missed.

“But back to what you were saying—about your findings.”

“Well—” Legroeder drew a deep breath “—we don’t have a definitive picture of the quantum flaw yet. We do have a huge amount of information that we’re still analyzing.” And mapping? Is that what’s going to come out of all this?

YZ/I stared at him for a moment. “Still analyzing. Okay. But tell me this: are my ships in danger of disappearing into the quantum flaw the way Impris did? If you recall, that was one of the things I sent you to find out.” He rippled with white light, flicking his gaze from one rigger to the next.

Legroeder’s head hurt, buzzing with a sudden burst of activity from the implants. “I think they are,” he said at last.

“You think they are? You think they’re in danger?”

Legroeder drew another slow breath under YZ/I’s glare, and caught a slight nod from Palagren and Cantha. “Let me rephrase. The danger exists, definitely. It can happen again, and probably will. But I can’t tell you— yet —exactly where the dangers exist…” He shook his head; it suddenly felt full of cobwebs. He wasn’t purposely being vague. And yet his thoughts… what the devil was going on?

“Why not?” YZ/I demanded, puffing smoke. “Are you saying you don’t have the knowledge? Or that you aren’t planning to share it with us?” His voice was suddenly full of needles.

“Uh—”

Palagren raised a hand to interrupt. “May I be so bold as to ask a question in return?”

YZ/I cocked his head, frowning. “You may ask.”

“Thank you. I was just wondering, what would we expect in return for providing that kind of information?”

YZ/I’s eyes narrowed. He clicked his teeth together, though whether in surprise or admiration of Palagren’s bluntness wasn’t clear. “Well, I promised you the ship, and your freedom, didn’t I?”

He paused a beat, and Palagren said, “When?”

“ Eventually . What do you want? Some kind of preferred treatment?”

Palagren opened his mouth and closed it. “Could you define ‘eventually’? And ‘preferred treatment’?”

YZ/I glared around his cigar. “Better than nonpreferred treatment. Let’s quit screwing around. How useful is your information?”

Legroeder felt his own lips tighten, as Palagren made a soft hissing sound. Useful isn’t the right word, he thought. Indispensable is more like it, if it’s what I think it is .

“Look,” YZ/I said. His eyes flicked from one to another. “You all went out and risked your lives to bring this ship back, on the strength of my promise to release you. Right? Well, if I repeated that promise now, would it make any difference? I could still renege just as easily, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

How reassuring, Legroeder thought, noting that YZ/I had not repeated the promise. The Narseil seemed to be waiting for Legroeder to respond; this was human psychological territory. He cleared his throat.

“What?” YZ/I asked.

Legroeder let his breath escape. “We’re not trying to hold out on you. But until the information is processed—which we cannot do overnight—there’s only so much we can share. Right, Palagren? Cantha?”

Palagren’s neck-sail rippled in agreement.

YZ/I squinted through the cigar smoke. “All right, then—let’s back off a little. Tell me what you do know. Tell me what it felt like.” He waved his hands, inviting elaboration. “You were caught in this fold. Tell me what your instincts told you was going on…”

Palagren made a hissing sound, and began to describe the riggers-eye view of their flight out through the quantum flaw…

“The passage was utterly harrowing,” the Narseil concluded.

“To say the least,” Legroeder muttered.

Palagren glanced at him. “And I don’t know how repeatable it would be. I think we were very, very lucky.”

YZ/I looked troubled, as they by turns described their experiences. He questioned each of them with urgency, and a surprising degree of technical understanding. Legroeder was struck by how similar their impressions were in general, and yet how different in detail. Deutsch, in some ways, had the most interesting experience, since he’d been leading a team of human riggers who were wholly unprepared mentally. “Those men had some images during the transit that I would not want to see again in the net,” Deutsch murmured, the modulated tones of his synthetic voice belying the emotions that Legroeder guessed he was feeling. “If we had not been so closely linked to Phoenix , I doubt we’d have made it through.”

“I must speak with these Impris riggers,” YZ/I mused, when Deutsch finished. “But gentlemen—I’m still waiting to hear what caused Impris to fall into the fold in the first place. Was it just bad luck—or did they do something wrong, eh?” He squinted through the cigar smoke boiling in the air, and suddenly his manner seemed to suggest that they were old friends, catching up. “Was it because they’d rigged together too many times? Or was it their route?” He held out his hands. “ Tell me why .”

It was Cantha who replied. “We don’t know for sure. We had only a brief time with the Impris riggers, before the time distortions forced us to act.” Cantha’s dark-green cheeks puffed out, and his oval eyes stretched even further, vertically, making him look like a large cobra.