Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

The great lidded orb blinked. If Darya had known how to read his expressions she would have recognized a scowl on the Polypheme’s face. Zardalu, indeed! And she had referred to his twelve percent far too glibly. She was taunting him! How would he know what they found on Genizee — or how much they would stow away, to recover when he was no longer around to claim his share — if he was not with them?

Dulcimer knew when someone was trying to pull something over on him. Darya Lang could say what she liked about living Zardalu, the original bogeymen of the spiral arm, but he was sure that was all nonsense. The Zardalu had been wiped out to the last land-cephalopod, eleven thousand years before.

Dulcimer realized how he’d been had. They all talked dangers, and being ready to fly for your life, just so that Dulcimer would not want to go into the singularities.

And it had worked! They had caught him.

Well, you fool me once, shame on you. You fool me twice , shame on me. They would not trick him so easily again. The next time anyone went looking for Genizee — or Zardalu! Dulcimer sniggered to himself — he certainly intended to be with them.

The seedship was making progress.

Slow progress. It had penetrated the sphere of the first singularity through a narrow line vortex that shimmered threateningly on all sides, and now it was creeping along the outer shell of the second, cautious as bureaucracy.

Hans Rebka sat in the pilot’s seat, deep in thought, and watched the ghostly traces of distorted space-time revealed on the displays. There was little else to look at. Whatever might be hidden within the shroud of singularities, its nature could not be discerned from their present position. It had not been his decision as to who would travel on the seedship, but he realized he was glad that neither Darya Lang nor Julian Graves was aboard. They would be going mad at the slow pace, chafing at the delays, pointing out the absence of apparent danger, pushing him to speed up.

He would have refused, of course. If Hans Rebka had been asked for his basic philosophy, he would have denied that he had any. But the nearest thing to it was his profound conviction that the secret to everything was timing .

Sometimes one acted instantly, so fast that there seemed no time for any thought at all. On other occasions one took forever, hesitating for no apparent reason, pondering even the most seemingly trivial decision. Picking the right pace was the secret of survival.

Now he was crawling. He did not know why, but it did not occur to him to speed up. There had been no blue-egged robin’s nests in Rebka’s childhood, no idyllic years of maturing on a garden planet. His homeworld of Teufel offered no birthright but hardship. He and Darya Lang could not have been more different. And yet they shared one thing: the hidden voice that sometimes spoke from deep within the brain, asserting that things were not what they seemed, that something important was being overlooked.

The voice was whispering to Rebka now. He had learned from experience that he could not afford to ignore it.

As the seedship crept along a spiral path that promised to lead through the shell of another singularity, he probed for the source of his worry.

The composition of the seedship’s crew?

No. He did not trust Nenda or Atvar H’sial, but he did not doubt their competence — or their survival instincts. J’merlia and Kallik’s desire to be given orders, rather than acting independently, was a nuisance more than a threat. It would have been better if Dulcimer could have been on board and flying the seedship — Rebka knew he could not compete with the Chism Polypheme on the instinctual level where a great master pilot could operate. But it was even more important to have Dulcimer back on the Erebus , to take it out of the Anfract.

Rebka had learned not to expect optimal solutions for anything. They existed in Darya Lang’s clean, austere world of intellectual problems, but reality was a lot messier. So he did not have the ideal seedship crew. Very well. One took the crew available and did with what one had to do.

But that was not the problem that nagged at his subconscious. It did not have the right feel to it.

Was the world inside the shell of singularities actually Genizee, and would the Zardalu be found there?

He considered that question as the adaptive control system sensed a way through the next singularity and delicately began to guide them toward it. Rebka could override if he saw danger, but he had no information to prompt such action. His warning flags were all internal.

It might be the planet Genizee inside there, or it might not. Either way, they were going in. Once you were committed to a course of action, you didn’t waste your time looking back and second-guessing the decision, because every action in life was taken on the basis of incomplete information. You looked at what you had, and you did all you could to improve the odds; but at some point you had to roll the dice — and live or die with whatever you had thrown.

So his worry had to be arising from somewhere else. Something unusual that he had noticed, and lost when he was interrupted. Something…

Rebka finally gave up the struggle. Whatever was troubling him refused to show itself. Experience told him that it was more likely to return if he stopped thinking about it for a while, and now there were other things to worry about. The ship had turned again and was crawling along a path that to Rebka’s eyes led only to a white, glowing wall. He tensed as they came closer. They were heading straight for that barrier of light.

Should he override? If only human senses included a direct sensitivity to gravity waves…

He forced himself to trust the ship’s sensors. They reached the wall of light. There was a faint shiver through the seedship’s structure, as though an invisible tide had swept along it, and then they were through.

Right through. The innermost shell singularity was behind them. The front of the ship was suddenly illuminated by the marigold light of a dwarf star.

Louis Nenda had been crowded into the rear of the seedship, deep in pheromonal conversation with Atvar H’sial. He squeezed quickly forward past the sixteen sprawled legs of J’merlia and Kallik, to stand crouched behind Rebka.

“Planet!”

Rebka shrugged. “We’ll know if there’s one in a few minutes.” Then he would release a tiny drone ship, designed to retrace their path from the Erebus and provide information of their arrival to the others waiting outside. Whatever happened, Julian Graves and Darya should be told that the singularities were navigable. Rebka ordered the onboard sensors to begin their scan of space around the orange-yellow sun, masking out the light of the star itself.

“I wasn’t askin’ , I was tellin’.” Nenda jerked his thumb to the display that showed the region behind the ship. “You can see the damn thing, naked eye, outa’ the rear port.”

Rebka twisted in his seat. It was impossible — but it was true. The rear port showed the same blue-white world with its big companion moon that Darya Lang and Kallik had displayed, back on the Erebus . They were both in half-moon phase, no more than a few hundred thousand kilometers away. Large landmasses were already visible. Rebka turned on the high-resolution sensors to provide a close-up view.

“Do you know the odds against this?” he asked. “We fly through the whole mess of singularities, we emerge at least a hundred and fifty million kilometers away from a star — and there’s a planet sitting right next to us, close enough to spit on.”