Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

I didn’t make any measurements, and I hardly know how to spell multiple connectivity. All I can tell is what I saw when I got close to the Anfract, flew around it, and tried to stare inside it.

I say tried . The Anfract won’t let you look at anything directly. There’s planets inside there — you can sometimes see them, a spectacularly beautiful world, misty and glowing. At first you think it must be one of the planets inside the Anfract — except that as the image sharpens and moves you in closer, you realize that it’s familiar , a world you’ve seen before somewhere on your travels. You once lived there, and loved it. But before you can quite identify the place it begins to move off sideways, and another world is being pulled in, a second bead on the Necklace. You stare at that, and it’s just as familiar, and even more beautiful than the first one; a luscious, fertile world whose fragrant air you’d swear you can smell from way outside its atmosphere.

While you’re still savoring that planet and trying to remember its name, it, too, begins to move off, pulled out of sight along the Necklace. No matter. The world that draws in after it is even better, the world of your dreams. You once lived there, and loved there, and now you realize that you never should have left. You slaver over it, wanting to fly down to it now , and never leave.

But before you can do so, it, too, is sliding out of your field of view. And what replaces it makes the last planet seem nothing but a pale shadow world…

It goes on and on, as long as you can bear to watch. And at the end, you realize something dreadful. You never, in your whole life, visited any one of those paradise worlds. And surely you never will, because you have no idea where they are, or when they are.

You pull yourself together and start your ship moving. You decide that you’ll go to Persephone, or Styx, or Savalle, or Pelican’s Wake. You tell yourself that you’ll forget all about the Anfract and God’s Necklace.

Except that you won’t, no matter how you try. For in the late night hours, when you lie tight in the dark prison of your own thoughts, and your heart beats slow, and all of life feels short and pointless, that’s when you’ll remember, and yearn for one more drink at the fountain of the Torvil Anfract.

Your worse fear is that you’ll never get to make the trip; and that’s when you lie sleepless forever, aching for first light and the noisy distractions of morning.

The Erebus was a monster, more like a whole world than a standard interstellar ship. Unfortunately, its appetite for power matched its huge size.

Darya sat in one of the information niches off the main control room, her eyes fixed on two of several hundred displays.

The first showed the total available energy in the vessel’s central storage units.

Down, down, down.

Even when nothing seemed to be happening, the routine operation and maintenance of the ship sent the stored power creeping toward zero.

But normal operation was nothing compared to the power demands of a Bose Transition. For something as massive as the Erebus , each transition guzzled energy. They had been through one jump already. Darya had watched in horror as the transition was initiated and the onboard power readout flickered to half its value.

Now they were sucking in energy from the external Bose Network, in preparation for another transition. And that energy supply was far from free. Darya switched her attention to the second readout, one specially programmed to show finance , not engineering. It displayed Darya’s total credit — and it was swooping down as fast as the onboard power of the Erebus went up. Three or four jumps like the last one, and she would be as flat broke as the rest of the group.

She brooded over the falling readout. It was a pretty desperate situation, when a poor professor at a research institute turned out to be the richest person on board. If she had been of a more paranoid turn of mind, she might have suspected that she had been invited along on this trip mainly to bankroll it. Julian Graves had used all his credit to buy the Erebus . E.C. Tally was a computer, albeit an embodied one, and owned nothing. J’merlia and Kallik had been penniless slaves, while Hans Rebka came from the Phemus Circle, the most miserably poor region of the whole spiral arm. The exception should have been Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial; but although they talked about their wealth, every bit of it was on Nenda’s ship, the Have-It-All , inaccessible on far-off Glister. At the moment they were as poor as everyone else.

Darya glanced across to the main control console, where Louis Nenda was all set to take them into their second jump. They were just one Bose Transition away from the region of the Torvil Anfract; one jump would leave them with comfortably enough power for the return journey.

Except that they were not going to make the jump! Louis Nenda had been adamant.

“Not with me on board, you don’t.” He glared around the circle. “Sure, we been through a lot together, and sure, we always muddle through. That don’t mean we take chances with this one. This is the Anfract . It’s dangerous , not some rinky-dink ratbag planet like Quake or Opal.”

Which came close to killing all of us, Darya thought. But she did not speak, because Julian Graves was slapping his hands on his knees in frustration.

“But we have to go into the Anfract. You heard E.C. Tally’s analysis, and I thought you were in agreement with it. There is an excellent chance that the Zardalu cladeworld is hidden within the Torvil Anfract, with living Zardalu upon it.”

“I know all that. All I’m saying is we don’t go charging in. People have been pokin’ around the Anfract for thousands of years — an’ most who went in never came out. We need help .”

“What sort of help?”

“We need an expert. A pilot. Somebody who’s been around this part of the arm for a long time and knows it like the back of his chelicera.”

“Do you have a candidate?”

“Sure I got one. Why’d you think I’m talking? His name’s Dulcimer — an’ I’m warning you now, he’s a Chism Polypheme. But he knows the arm cold, and he probably needs work. If we want him, we have to go looking. One thing for sure, you won’t find him around the Anfract.”

“Where will we find him?” Darya had not understood Nenda’s warning about Chism Polyphemes, but figured they’d better take one problem at a time.

“Unless he’s changed, he’ll be sittin’ around and soaking up the hot stuff in the Sun Bar on Bridle Gap.”

“Can you take us there?”

“Sure.” Louis Nenda moved to the main control console. “Bridle Gap, no sweat. Only one jump. If Dulcimer still hangs around in the same place, and if he’s broke enough to need work, and if he still has a brain left in his pop-eyed head after he’s been frying it for more years than I like to think — well, we should be able to hire him. And then we can all go off together an’ get wiped out in the Anfract.”

Chism Polypheme.

As soon as the Bose jump was complete and the Erebus had embarked on its subluminal flight to Bridal Gap, Darya consulted the Universal Species Catalog (Subclass: Sapients) in the ship’s data banks.

And found nothing.

She went to see Louis Nenda, lounging in the ship’s auxiliary engine room. He was watching Atvar H’sial as she ran a dozen supply lines to a glossy chestnut-brown ellipsoid about three feet long.