Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

“Let’s not get into that. I got reasons.”

“I will not ask them. I will continue. It seems reasonable to assume that the Zardalu, too, were returned close to the point of their origin, which would place them in the territories of the Zardalu Communion, rather than within the Alliance, Cecropia Federation, or Phemus Circle regions. Let us accept that they arrived close to an artifact in Communion territory. As Professor Lang and others have pointed out, we all arrived close to artifacts. It seems unlikely, however, that the Zardalu would have arrived exactly where they wished to be. So let us also accept the validity of Captain Rebka and Louis Nenda’s logic, that the Zardalu would have found it necessary to acquire a ship , and destroy all evidence of such acquisition.

“Let us agree with Professor Lang, that if such a ship were required to make more than one or two jumps through the Bose Network, that would have been noticed.

“Finally, let us agree that Genizee, wherever it is, cannot be in a location that is fully explored, and settled, and familiar. Preferably, the location ought to be difficult to reach, or even dangerous. Otherwise, the Zardalu homeworld would have been discovered long ago.

“Put all this information together, and we are left with a well-defined problem. We want a place satisfying these criteria:

“One: it should be a planet within the territories of the Zardalu Communion.

“Two: it should occupy a blank spot on the galactic map, little-explored and preferably hard to reach.

“Three: it should be within one or two Bose Transitions of a Builder artifact.

“Four: the only Builder artifacts that need to be considered are ones where an unexplained ship disappearance has taken place since the return of the Zardalu to the spiral arm.

“That leaves a substantial computational problem, but each of you already performed part of the work. And fortunately, I was designed to tackle just such combinatorial and search problems. Look.”

The lights in the chamber dimmed, and as they did so the figures of the Zardalu simulation vanished from the central display region. In their place was total darkness. Gradually, a faint orange glow filled an irregular three-dimensional volume. Within it twinkled a thousand blue points of light.

“The region of the Zardalu Communion,” E.C. Tally said, “and the Builder artifacts that lie within it. And now, the Bose access nodes.”

A set of yellow lights appeared, scattered among the blue points.

“Eliminating the artifacts where there were no unexplained ship disappearances” — two-thirds of the blue lights vanished — “and considering only little-explored regions within two Bose Transitions, we find this.”

The single orange region began to shrink and divide, finally leaving a score of isolated glowing islands.

“These remain as candidate regions for consideration. There are too many. However, the display does not show what I could also compute: the probability associated with each of the remaining regions. When that is included, only one serious contender remains. Here it is. It satisfies all our requirements, at the ninety-eight-percent probability level.”

All but one of the lights blinked out, leaving a shape like a twisted orange hand glowing off to one side of the display.

“Reference stars!” It was Julian Graves’s voice. “Give us reference stars — we need the location.”

A dozen supergiants, the standard beacon stars for the Zardalu Communion portion of the spiral arm, blinked on within the display volume. Darya, trying to orient herself in an unfamiliar stellar region, heard the surprised grunt of Louis Nenda and the hiss of Kallik. They must have been three steps ahead of her.

“I have the location.” E.C. Tally’s voice was quiet. “That was no problem. But what the ship’s data banks do not contain, surprisingly, is navigational information. I have also not yet found image data of this region. However, it has a name. It is known as—”

“It’s the Torvil Anfract.” That was Nenda’s flat growl in the darkness. “And you’ll never get image data, not if you wait till I grow feathers and fly.”

“You know the region already?” E.C. Tally asked. “That is excellent news. Perhaps you have even been there, and can provide our navigation?”

“I know the place — but only by its reputation.” There was a tone in Nenda’s voice that Darya Lang had never heard before. “An’ if you’re talking about me takin’ you into the Torvil Anfract, forget it. You can have my ticket, even if it’s free. As my old daddy used to say, I ain’t never been there , and I ain’t never ever going back.”

THE TORVIL ANFRACT

I wish that I understood Time, with a capital T. It’s no consolation to realize that no one else does, either. Every book you ever read talks about the “Arrow of Time,” the thing that points from the past into the future. They all say that the arrow’s arranged so things never run backward.

I’m not convinced. How do we know that there was never a connection that ran the other way? Or maybe sometimes Time runs crosswise, and cause and effect have nothing to do with each other.

The thing that got me going this way was thinking again about the Torvil Anfract, and about Medusa. You remember Medusa? She was the lady with the fatal face — one eyeful of her and you turned to stone. Miggie Wang-Ho, who ran the Cheapside Bar on the Upside edge of Tucker’s Tooth, was a bit like that. One mention of credit, and she froze you solid, and what she did to Blister Gans doesn’t bear thinking about. But I guess that’s a story for someplace else, because right now I want to talk about the Anfract.

The spiral arm is full of strange sights, but most of them you can creep up on . What I mean is, the big jumps are all made through the Bose Network, and after that you’re subluminal, plodding along at less than light-speed. So if there’s a big spectacle, well, you see it first from far off, and then gradually you get closer. And while you’re doing that, you have a chance to get used to it, so it never hits you all of a piece.

Except for the Anfract. You approach that subluminal, but for a long time you don’t see it at all. There’s just nothing , no distortion of the star field, no peculiar optical effects like you get near Lens. Nothing.

And then, all of a sudden, this great thingie comes blazing out at you, a twisting, writhing bundle of filaments ranging across half the sky.

The Torvil Anfract. The first time I saw it, I couldn’t have moved a muscle to save my ship. See, I knew very well that it was all a natural phenomenon, a place where creation happened to take space-time and whop it with a two-by-four until it got so chaotic and multiply-connected that it didn’t know which way was up. That didn’t make any difference. I was frozen, stuck to the spot like a Sproatley smart oyster, and about as capable of intelligent decision-making.

Now, do you think it’s possible that somebody else saw that wriggling snake’s nest of tendrils, and was frozen to the spot like me? And they gave the Anfract a different name — like, maybe, Medusa. And then they went backward ten thousand years, and because they couldn’t get it out of their mind, they talked about what they’d seen to the folks in a little Earth bar on the tideless shore of the wine-dark Aegean?

That’s theory, or if you prefer it, daydreaming. It’s fair to ask, what’s fact about the Anfract?

Surprisingly little. All the texts tell you is that ships avoid the area, because the local space-time structure possesses “dangerous natural dislocations and multiple connectivity.” What they never mention is that even the size of the region is undefined. Ask how much mass is contained within the region, and no one can tell you. Every measurement gives a different answer. Measure the dimension by light-speed crossing, and it’s half a light-year. Fly all around it, a light-year out, and it’s a little over a six-light-year trip, which is fine, but fly around it half a light-year out, and it’s only a one-light-year journey. That would suggest that near the Anfract, p = 1 (which doesn’t appeal too much to the mathematicians).