Charles Sheffield - Transcendence

With Julian Graves incapacitated, Rebka was in charge. He did not need approval from the others for a decision to leave the Anfract — except that he had learned, long before, that unanimous group decisions guaranteed a lot more cooperation.

He automatically looked for Louis Nenda, the most likely source of opposition. And he noticed his absence, and that of Atvar H’sial, just as Dulcimer came bouncing into the chamber.

This time the Polypheme had hit it exactly right. His skin was a clear, bright green, his master eye and scanning eye were alert and confident, and he was delicately balanced on his coiled tail. He was in fine physical shape.

He was also in an absolute fury.

“All right.” He bobbed forward until he was in the middle of the group. “I’ve put up with a lot on this trip. I’ve been near-drowned and chased and starved and had my tail chewed half off — none of that is in my contract. I put up with all of it, brave and patient. Only this is too much.” The blubbery mouth scowled, and the great eye glared at each of them in turn. His voice rose to a squeak of rage. “Where’s my ship? What have you done with the Indulgence ? I want to know, and I want to know right now .”

Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial were asking much the same question. They had carefully drifted the ship free of the Erebus , leaving the drive off so that no emergency telltales would flash on the bigger ship’s control panels.

After a few minutes of floating powerless, Nenda again scanned his displays. The Indulgence ’s complete trajectory for exit from the Torvil Anfract had already been set in the computer, needing only the flip of a switch to send the ship spiraling out. A few kilometers away on the right, steadily receding, the Erebus was a swollen, pimpled oblong, dark against the pink shimmer of the nested singularities. On Genizee, a hundred thousand kilometers below, it was night, and the high-magnification scopes showed no lights. If the Zardalu were active down there they had excellent nocturnal vision, or their own sources of bioluminescence. The only illumination striking the surface from outside would be the faint aurora of the singularities and the weak reflected light of the hollow moon, glimmering far above the Indulgence to Louis Nenda’s left.

He turned to Atvar H’sial, crouched by his side. “We’re far enough clear. Time to say good-bye to Genizee. There’s a lot of valuable stuff down there, but if you’re anythin’ like me you’ll be happy if you never see the place again. Ready to go?”

The Cecropian nodded.

“Okay. Glister, here we come.” Louis Nenda flipped the switch that set in train the stored trajectory. For a few seconds they surged smoothly outward, heading for the constant shimmer of the nested singularities.

And then Nenda was cursing and grabbing at the control panel. The Indulgence had veered, and veered again. Atvar H’sial, blind to the display screens, clutched at the floor with all six legs and sent an urgent burst of pheromones.

“Louis! This is not right! It is not what I programmed.”

“Damn right it’s not! And it’s not what’s bein’ displayed.” Nenda had killed the program and was trying to assert manual control. It made no difference. The ship was ignoring him, still steadily changing direction. “We’re goin’ the wrong way, and I can’t do one thing about it.”

“Then turn off the drive!”

Nenda did not answer. He had already turned off the drive. He was staring at the left-hand display screen, where Hollow-Moon hung in the sky. A familiar saffron beam of light had speared out from it, impossibly visible all along its length, even in the vacuum of space. The Indulgence was caught in that beam and was being directed by it.

“Louis!” Atvar H’sial said again. “The drive!”

“It’s off .”

“But we are still accelerating. Do you know where we are going?”

Nenda pulled his hands away from the useless controls and leaned back in his seat. Genizee was visible in the forward screen, already perceptibly larger. The Indulgence was arrowing down, faster and faster.

“I’m pretty sure I know exactly where we’re going, At.” He sighed. “An’ I’m pretty sure you’re not gonna like it when I tell you.”

The definition of reality; the meaning of existence; the nature of the universe.

The philosophies of the spiral arm on these subjects were at least as numerous and diverse as the intelligences who populated it. They ranged from the Inverse Platonism of Teufel — What you see is all there is, and maybe a bit more — to the Radical Pragmatism of the Tristan free-space Manticore — Reality is whatever I decide it should be — all the way to the Dictum of Inseparability espoused by the hive-mind of Decantil Myrmecons — The Universe exists as a whole, but it is meaningless to speak of the function of individual components.

Darya had no doubts about her own view: The universe was real , and anyone who believed otherwise needed a brain tune-up. There certainly was an objective reality.

But could that reality ever be comprehended by a living, organic being, one whose intelligence and logical faculties had to operate in the middle of a raging cauldron of glands and hormones and rampant neurotransmitters?

That was a far more subtle question. Darya herself was inclined to answer no. If one wanted a good example, all one had to do was examine recent events.

Look at yesterday. On her return to the Erebus from the surface of Genizee, the objective universe had been an old and worn-down and shabby place, a weary present grinding its way forward into a pointless future. She had been swept by the random tides of exhaustion from confusion to anger to total languid indifference.

And now, one day later? Twelve hours of forty-fathom slumber had pumped ichor into her veins. She had followed that with a meal big enough to stun a Bolingbroke giant, and discovered that the universe had been remade while she slept. It gleamed and glowed now like the lost fire-treasure of Jesteen.

And she glowed with it.

The Erebus was winding its way slowly and quietly out of the depths of the Torvil Anfract. Darya sat knee to knee in silent companionship with Hans Rebka, staring at the panorama beyond the hulk of the ship. He was more relaxed than she had ever seen him. The view from the observation bubble helped. It was never the same for two seconds: now it showed a lurid sea of smoky red, lit by the sputtering pinwheel fireworks of tiny spiral galaxies rotating a million billion times too fast to be real; a few moments later all was impenetrable blackness, darkness visible. But by then touch had substituted for vision. The ship moved through the abyss with a shuddering irregular slither that created a tremor in Darya from hips to navel. An invisible something caressed her skin — caressed her inside her skin, with the most delicate and knowing of sensual fingers.

“More macroscopic quantum states,” Hans Rebka said lazily. He waved his hand at a Brownian-movement monitor. “But they’re getting smaller. Another few minutes and we’ll be back to normal scale.”

“Mmmph.” The intellectual part of Darya nodded and tried to look serious. The idiot rest of her grinned and drooled in sheer delight at the sybaritic pleasures of the world. Nothing ought to be allowed to feel so good. Wasn’t he feeling it, the way that she was? Something wrong with the man, had to be.

“And according to Dulcimer’s flight plan,” Rebka continued, “it’s the last time we’ll meet macro-states. Another few minutes and Graves should flip right back to normal. He’s feeling better already, just knowing what it is that’s wrong with him.”