Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

Old habits did not just die hard . They refused to die at all.

Darya Lang, sitting alone in an observation bubble stuck like a glassy pimple on the dark bulk of the Erebus , gazed on the Torvil Anfract and felt vaguely unsatisfied. As soon as the seedship had left for Bridle Gap, she had started work.

Reluctantly. She would have much preferred to be down on the planet, sampling whatever strangeness it had to offer. But once she got going on her research — well, then it was another matter.

She did not stop. She could not stop.

Back in school on Sentinel Gate, some of her teachers had accused her of being “slow and dreamy.” Darya knew that was unfair. Her mind was fast, and it was accurate. She took a long time to feel her way into a problem; but once she was immersed, she had the devil’s own mental muscles. It took an act of God to pull her out. If she had been a runner, she would have specialized in supermarathons.

Even the return of the landing party from Bridle Gap and the arrival on board of the no-legged, five-armed oddity of the Chism Polypheme, bobbing and smirking and croaking while he was introduced to her, his scanning eye roaming over everyone and everything on the Erebus as if he were pricing them… all that had been unable to distract Darya for even a few minutes.

She had decided that the Anfract was more than interesting. It was unique , in a way that she could not yet express.

She had tried to explain its fascination to Hans Rebka when he first returned with the Polypheme.

“Darya, everything in the universe is unique.” He cut her off in a moment, hardly listening. “But we’re on our way. Dulcimer says he can have us there in two days. We’ll need the most detailed data you can give us.”

“It’s not just the data that matters, it’s the patterns —”

But he was heading for the cargo holds, and she was talking to herself.

And now the Anfract was shimmering beyond the observation port — and Darya was still plodding along on what to Hans Rebka was no more than unproductive analysis. Hard-copy output surrounded her and overflowed every flat surface of the observation bubble. There was no shortage of data about the Torvil Anfract. Hundreds of ships had scouted its outer regions. Fifty or more had gone deeper, and a quarter of those had returned to tell about it. But their data had never been combined and integrated . Reading the earlier reports and analyzing their measurements and observations made Darya feel that the Anfract was like a gigantic Rorschach test. All observers saw their own version of reality, rather than a physical object.

There was unanimity on maybe a half-a-dozen facts. The Anfract’s location within Zardalu Communion territory was not in question. It lay completely within a region two light-years across, and it possessed thirty-seven major lobes. Each lobe had its own characteristic identity, but the components of any pair of lobes were likely to interchange , instantaneously and randomly. Ships that had traveled inside the Anfract confirmed that the interchange was real, not just an optical effect. Two vessels had even entered the Anfract at one point, become involved in a switch of two lobes, and emerged elsewhere. They agreed that the transition took no time and produced no noticeable changes in ship or crew. All researchers believed that this phenomenon showed the Anfract to possess macroscopic quantum states, of unprecedented size.

And there the agreements ended. Some ships reported that the subluminal approach to the Anfract from the nearest Bose access node, one light-year away, had taken five ship-years at relativistic speeds. Others found themselves at the edge of the Anfract after just two or three days’ travel.

Darya had her own explanation for that anomaly. Massive space-time distortion was the rule, near and within the Anfract. Certain pathways would lengthen or shorten the distance between the same two points. “Fast” approach routes to the edge of the Anfract could be mapped, though no one had ever done it. The two-day approach route that the Erebus had followed was discovered empirically by an earlier ship, and others had followed it without understanding why it worked.

Darya had begun to map the external geometry of the Anfract. She began to have a better appreciation of why it had never been done before. The continuum of the region was enormously complex. It was a long, long job, but it did not require all her attention. While she was organizing the calculation, Darya felt a faint sense of uneasiness. There was something missing. She was overlooking some major factor, something basic and important.

She had learned not to ignore that vague itch in the base of her brain. The best way to bring it closer to the surface was to explain to someone else what she was doing, clarifying her thoughts for herself as she did so. She found Louis Nenda in the main control cabin and started to explain her work.

He interrupted her within thirty seconds. “Don’t make no difference to me, sweetheart. I don’t give squat about the structure of the Anfract. We still gotta go in there, find the Zardalu, an’ get out in one piece. Get your head goin’ on that .” He had left her, still talking, and wandered off to the main hold to make sure that Dulcimer’s ship, the Indulgence , was safely stowed and the seedship was again ready for use.

Barbarian , Darya thought.

He was no better than Hans Rebka. No telling them that knowing was necessary, that knowledge was good for its own sake, that understanding mattered . That learning new things was important , and that it was only abstract knowledge, no matter what Nenda or Rebka or anyone else on board might say, that separated humans from animals.

She went angrily back to work on the Anfract’s external geometry. Could other variations reported by earlier ships also be explained in geometric terms? All approaching observers agreed that the Anfract popped into being suddenly. One moment there was nothing to see, the next it was just there , close up. But to half the approaching ships, the Anfract was a glowing bundle of tendrils grouped into thirty-seven complex knots. Others saw thirty-seven spherical regions of light, like diffuse multicolored suns. Half-a-dozen observers reported that the only external evidence of the Anfract was holes in space, thirty-seven dark occlusions of the stellar background. And two Cecropian ships, their occupants blind to electromagnetic radiation and relying on instruments to render the Anfract visible in terms of sonic echolocation, “saw” the Anfract, too — as thirty-seven distorted balls of furry velvet.

Darya believed that she could explain it all in terms of geometry. Space-time distortion in and around the Anfract affected more than approach distances. It changed the properties of emitted light bundles. Depending on the path taken, some were smoothed, others canceled by phase interference. She happened to be seeing the pattern of glowing white-worm tendrils, but if the Erebus had followed a different approach route, she would have seen something different. And her geometric mapping of the Anfract’s exterior could be continued to its interior , based on light-travel properties.

Darya set up the new calculations. While they were running, she brooded over the vast inconstant vista beyond the observation bubble. Her mood seemed as changeable and uncontrollable as the Anfract itself. She felt annoyed, exhilarated, guilty, and superior in turn.

A major mystery was hovering just beyond her mental horizon. She was sure of that. It was infuriating that she could not see it for herself, and just as maddening that the others would not let her explain the evidence to them. That was her favorite way of making things clear in her own mind. Meanwhile, the itch inside was getting worse.