Charles Sheffield: Convergence

So he felt a strange mixture of pleasure and annoyance when, twelve hours later, she came to where he was still trying to fit his body — unsuccessfully — to a corkscrew shape, and announced: “I have a problem, Louis. I would welcome your counsel.”

“What’s up?” Nenda abandoned any attempt to sleep and swung his legs over the edge of the bunk.

“I am wondering. When you were navigating our way clear of the Torvil Anfract, did you notice anything unusual about it?”

“You gotta be kidding!” Nenda stood up and massaged his thighs, trying to get the stiffness out of them. “The whole Anfract is unusual. You find anything normal in there, it don’t belong. Why’d you ask?”

“Like any serious student of the Bose Network, I have learned certain preferred node combinations — shortcuts, in effect, both for energy and total transition time. Those preferred modes of transport, naturally, depend critically on the space-time structure of the Network itself.”

“Is that right?” Nenda’s pheromonal message carried an expression of total disinterest, one that Atvar H’sial could not miss.

The blind head nodded. “Hear me out, Louis Nenda, before you scoff. Except over very long time-scales, of centuries or more, the preferred node combinations ought to be invariant.”

“Sure.”

“But they apparently are not. For the past twelve hours I have been examining alternative routes to Mandel. Not one of the fastest and cheapest employs my standard node combinations. Instead I am coming up with an alternative to take us from here to Mandel with incredibly low cost and high speed.”

“So you missed a good one.” It was hard to keep the pleasure out of the pheromones. “Hey, At, anyone can goof up now and again.”

“To err is human? Just so. It is not, however, Cecropian. Accept my assurances, Louis Nenda, that I did not overlook a cheap path for transition. That path was not present when we entered the Anfract, just a couple of your months ago.”

“But you just said—”

“I know what I said. The travel times associated with particular node combinations should be stable for very long periods. They must be so — provided that the overall structure of space-time in the spiral arm is not subjected to major perturbations. Now do you see the reason for my question concerning the structure of the Anfract? Had it substantially changed since we entered?”

“If it did, I have no way of knowing. You see, I didn’t plan our way out, At, I felt the way out. Seat of my pants. I’m a pretty good pilot, even if I’m not up to Dulcimer’s level.”

“I agree; and if we are in confessional mode, let me also make an admission. I lack the experience to make a full evaluation of the new route to Mandel that I have discovered. It should prove considerably shorter than anything I have met before. On the other hand, since it is new there is a possible risk factor. A node used for our transition could lie too near to a star or a chasm singularity.”

“Lovely thought. You know me, At. I’m a natural coward. I say, go slow, but go safe.”

“And again I agree. Or I would, if these were normal times. But since the moment of our first meeting, Louis, has it not been clear that something exceptional has been happening within the spiral arm? The changes to Quake at the time of the Grand Conjunction, the rogue Phages around Glister, our encounters with the Builder Constructs, the passage through the Builder transportation system, the re-awakening of the Zardalu—”

“Hey! Don’t let me spoil your fun, but I don’t wanna hear any of that. So we’ve been through some strange stuff together. Are you suggesting that we go lookin’ for more of the same, with your special fast trip to Mandel?”

“Worse than that, Louis. I am asking the question, what next? Suppose that great changes continue to occur in the spiral arm. Suppose that those changes were eventually to include a failure of the Bose Network. Suppose our progress from this point on were to be restricted to subluminal speeds—”

“Don’t say that. We’d be stuck in crawlspace for the rest of our lives, just the two of us with each other for company, out at the ass-end of the known universe.”

“A dismal prospect indeed — though worse for me, I suggest, than for you. But that is why I awakened you — to ask, should we risk the fast transit to Mandel?”

“You call that a risk? Go do it — get that new flight plan into the computer.”

Atvar H’sial inclined her head, in a gesture common to humans and Cecropians. “It is already there, Louis, ready for execution. I did not doubt that, faced with the alternative, you and I would once more find ourselves in full agreement.”

Four days and six Bose Transitions later, Louis Nenda was beginning to have second thoughts. The Indulgence was on its final, slow, subluminal leg of the journey from the Torvil Anfract, heading out from the star Mandel toward its gas-giant planet, Gargantua. Nenda’s own ship, the Have-It-All , should be where they had left it months earlier, on Glister, the little artificial planetoid that orbited Gargantua.

The journey from the edge of the Anfract had gone without a hitch. They had found no sign of the changes to the apiral arm that had worried Atvar H’sial. And that, when you got right down to it, was the source of Nenda’s own uneasiness.

He was a squat, muscular human, born (though he could certainly never go back there) on the minor planet of Karelia, in a remote part of Zardalu Communion territory. Atvar H’sial was a towering Cecropian, from one of the leading worlds of the Cecropia Federation.

He preferred brutal directness; she was all slippery tangents. He might kill in moments of anger. She never seemed to feel anger, but she would destroy through calm calculation. They happened to be able to speak to each other, because Nenda had long ago obtained an augment for just such a purpose, but their overlap ended there. He and Atvar H’sial seemed to have nothing in common.

And yet…

They had first met on the doublet planet of Quake and Opal, in the Mandel stellar system where they now moved. Somehow, like had called instantly to like. When it came to business practices, Nenda knew that he did not need to ask Atvar H’sial’s opinion. It was enough to sound out his own. In Louis Nenda’s view, all sensible beings had the same business principles.

And what were they?

Sensible beings did not discuss such matters.

Which meant that if Atvar H’sial ever had an opportunity to cheat Louis Nenda, without risk to herself, she would surely do it.

Mutual need had held them together on Genizee, but that was over now. He could not see how she might be setting him up, but a good scam was never discernible in advance. And of course, there was another reason why he was not a good target: the only things he owned in the whole world, now that his slave was gone, were the clothes he stood up in; plus his ship, the Have-It-All — if they ever got that far.

Louis Nenda sank back into uneasy sleep.

He had spent most of the journey to Mandel napping, or trying to, as much as the corkscrew template of the Chism Polypheme bunk permitted. When discomfort and boredom finally drove him once more to the control room, he found that Atvar H’sial had been busy. She had rigged the electronics so that the visual signals of Nenda’s display screens were converted to multisource ultrasonics. She now “saw” just what he saw, although so far as he could tell it was not in color.

And what she claimed now, as the result of that “seeing,” roused Nenda’s worst suspicions.

“As I anticipated, Louis,” she said. “There have been changes in the Mandel system, and profound ones. See.”