Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

“Zardalu!” said the slurred and croaking voice. The bulging high-resolution eye went rolling from side to side, following the movement of the sheet that Darya was holding. Dulcimer seemed to see her for the first time. His head lifted a little, to move the thick-lipped mouth farther away from the floor. “Zardalu, bardalu. If you want me to fly you to the location listed on what you’re holding there…”

“We do — or we would, if you were in any shape to do it. But you are—”

“A trifle warm, s’all.” The Polypheme made a huge effort and managed to stand upright on his coiled tail, long enough for his top arm to reach out and snatch the coordinate sheet from Darya’s hand. He slumped back, lifted the page to within two inches of his master eye, and stared at it vacantly. “Aha! Thirty-third lobe, Questen-Dwell branch. Know a really good way to get there. Do it in my sleep.”

Darya stepped back as he collapsed again on the floor in front of her. In his sleep? It seemed about the only way that Dulcimer could do it. But from somewhere the Polypheme was finding new reserves of coordination and energy. He wriggled his powerful tail and began to inch single-minded toward the main control chair.

“Wait a minute.” Darya hurried to stand behind him as he pulled himself up into the seat. “You’re not proposing to fly the Erebus now.”

“Certainly am.” The five arms were flying over the keyboards seemingly at random, pressing and flipping and pulling. “Have us inside the Anfract in half a minute.”

“But you’re hot — you admit it yourself.”

“Little bit hot.” The head turned to stare at Darya. The great slate-gray eye held hers for a second, then turned upward to fix its gaze solidly and vacantly on the featureless ceiling. The five hands moved in a blur across the board. “Just a little bit. When you’re hot, you’re hot. Little bit, little bit, little bit.”

“Somebody stop that lunatic!” Julian Graves cried. “Look at him! He’s not fit to fly a kite.”

“ Better if I’m hot, you see,” Dulcimer said, throwing a final set of switches before Rebka and Nenda could get to him. “ ’Cause this’s a real bad trip we’re taking, ’n I wouldn’t dare do it if I was cold.” The Erebus was moving, jerking into motion. “ Littlebitlittlebitlittlebitlittle.” Dulcimer went into a fit of the giggles, as the ship began a desperate all-over shaking.

“Whooo-oo-ee. Here we go! All ab-b-oard, shipmates, and you all b-b-better hold on real t-t-t-t-t-t—”

When Darya Lang was a three-year-old child growing up on the garden world of Sentinel Gate, a robin made its nest on the outside ledge of her bedroom window. Darya told no one about it, but she looked each day at the three blue eggs, admiring their color, wishing she could touch their smooth shells, not quite realizing what they were…

…until the magical morning when, while she was watching, the eggs hatched, all three of them. She sat frozen as the uniform blue ellipsoids, silent and featureless, gradually cracked open to reveal their fantastic contents. Three downy chicks struggled out, fluffy feathers drying and tiny beaks gaping. At last Darya could move. She ran downstairs, bubbling over with the need to tell someone about the miracle she had just witnessed.

Her house-uncle Matra had pointed out to her the importance of what she had experienced: one could not judge something from its external appearance alone. That was as true for people as it was for things.

And it also applied, apparently, to the Torvil Anfract.

The references spoke of thirty-seven lobes. From outside, the eye and instruments confirmed them. But as the Erebus entered the Anfract and Darya’s first panic subsided, she began to recognize a more complex interior, the filigree of detail superimposed on the gross externals.

Dulcimer knew it already, or he had sensed it with some pilot’s instinct denied to Darya. They had penetrated the Anfract along a spiraling path, down the center of a dark, starless tube of empty space. But then, when to Darya’s eyes the path ahead lay most easy and open to them, the Polypheme slowed the ship to a cautious crawl.

“Getting granular,” said the croaking voice from the pilot’s seat. “Easy does it.”

Easy did not do it. The ship was moving through vacuum, far from any material body, but it jerked and shuddered like a small boat on a choppy sea. Darya’s first thought — that they were flying through a sea of small space-time singularities — made no sense. Impact with a singularity of any size would destroy the Erebus totally.

She turned to Rebka, secured in the seat next to her. “What is it, Hans? I can’t see anything.”

“Planck scale change — a big one. We’re hitting the quantum level of the local continuum. If macroscopic quantum effects are common in the Anfract, we’re due for all sorts of trouble. Quantum phenomena in everyday life. Don’t know what that would do.” He was staring at the screens and shaking his head. “But how in heaven did Dulcimer know it was coming ? I have to admit it, Nenda was right — that Polypheme’s the best, hot or cold. I’d hate to have to fly through this mess. And what the hell is that ?”

There was a curious groaning sound. The jerking had ended and the ship was speeding up again, rotating around its main axis like a rifle bullet. The groaning continued. It was the Chism Polypheme in the pilot’s chair, singing to himself as he accelerated the Erebus — straight for the heart of a blazing blue-white star.

Closer and closer. They could never turn in time. Darya screamed and grabbed for Hans Rebka. She tightened her arms around him. Dulcimer had killed them all.

They were near enough to see the flaming hydrogen prominences and speckled faculae on the boiling surface. Nearer. One second more and they would enter the photosphere. Plunging—

The sun vanished. The Erebus was in a dark void.

Dulcimer crowed with triumph. “Multiply-connected! Riemann sheet of the fifth order — only one in the whole spiral arm. Love it! Wheeee! Here we go again.”

The blue-white star had popped into existence behind them and was rapidly shrinking in size, while they went spinning along another narrowing tube of darkness. There was a rapid series of stomach-wrenching turns and twists, and then all lights and power in the Erebus had gone and they were in free-fall. “Oops!” said the croaking voice in the darkness. “Hiatus. Sorry, folks — just when we were nearly there, too. This is a new one on me. I don’t know how big it is. We just have to wait it out.”

There was total silence within the ship. Was it no more than a simple hiatus? Darya wondered. Suppose it went on forever? She could not help thinking about the stories of the Croquemort Time-well. The earlier twisting and spinning had affected her balance centers and her stomach, and now the free-fall and the darkness were making it worse. If it went on for much longer she felt sure that she would throw up. But to her relief it was only a couple of minutes before the screens flashed back to life, to show the Erebus moving quietly in orbit around a translucent and faintly glowing sphere. Wraiths of colored lights flickered and swirled within it. Occasionally they would vanish for brief moments and leave transparency; at other times the sphere became totally opaque.

“And here we are,” Dulcimer announced. “Right on schedule.”

Darya stared again at the displays. She was certainly not seeing the planet and moon that she and Kallik had proposed as Genizee, the Zardalu homeworld.

“Here we are? Then where are we?” Louis Nenda said, asking Darya’s question. He was in a seat behind her.