Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

“Maybe mathematics. Cosmology.”

“The theoretical side of M-drive navigation.”

“I suppose.”

He’d always visualized his journeys through space. They happened quickly, leaping over real space, but he always imagined stars, gases, nebulae soaring past him in a blaze of color.

Keesey said, “I’ve observed—in a completely unscientific fashion, mind you—that there are two kinds of navigators. There are those who are tested, identified as having the proper aptitude, and recruited. For them, it’s a job, like any other. Then there are those who love the work, who couldn’t think of doing anything else. They live for the distances between the stars. I’ve observed that everyone who ends up in this ward falls into the latter group.”

So, those who loved navigation would eventually be destroyed by it.

One glimpse of the Drake . To say goodbye, to have one more chance to try and remember. If he could see the Drake again, he might remember. If he could see anything besides these corridors, the lab, the walls of his tiny room. A longing overcame him, a physical pain settling in his gut. He refused to wipe away tears, because if he brought his hands to his face, Keesey would know he was crying.

Careful to steady his voice, he said, “I’d like to see outside. The station has to have an observation area near the docking ports. I want to see a ship again. Any ship.”

Spoken aloud, the desire sounded vague and childish.

“I’m not sure that’s feasible. The sensory input might trigger another episode.”

How many patients had she watched kill themselves, and still she smiled. Such blind dedication was its own insanity, but Keesey wasn’t the one locked in a cell.

“Then when can I leave my quarters? I’d like to go to the common room.”

“So you can talk to Dora some more? I know what she says, what she thinks. She’s paranoid, in a clinical sense.”

He tried sitting up again and managed to keep his stomach on an even keel. He stared at the gray rubberized floor instead of Doctor Keesey and her pitying, patronizing face.

“Dora says that all the patients here commit suicide.”

“Dora says a lot of things.”

I’m going to die soon . Being here, that was the only conclusion Mitchell could draw.

“She says Dalton thinks I should be locked up. Why would he think that?”

“I think you shouldn’t listen to everything Dora says.”

He looked up, glaring. “I don’t have anyone else to talk to.”

“I’m sorry, Mitchell, but we need to stabilize your neural—”

She didn’t need to do anything. It was all about him, his brain; he was the one who had to live with it. He’d lost his rank somewhere. Wasn’t Lieutenant anymore, just Mitchell.

“Doctor, I need to know what happened on the Francis Drake.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think you should.” She paused a moment, her mouth open in mid-sentence. Then changed her mind. “We haven’t been able to do much about controlling OSDS, much less curing it. The physicists who understand the M-drive don’t know anything about physiology, and the doctors don’t know anything about the M-drive. Sometimes I think we’re just waiting for the genius who’s an expert in both to come along and tell us what we’ve been doing wrong.”

Mitchell took a deep breath, ignoring the pressure of the headache that threatened to build whenever he tried to think too hard, to dig in those places in his mind. His own body was telling him to leave it alone.

“The colors were wrong. I remember looking at the monitor, and the colors were wrong.” Something was wrong with the departure matrix. He’d chosen a course correction, an alternative that would avoid the wrongness he was sure was there. He’d announced the course correction, he’d entered the course correction—

Frowning, he touched his temple and shook his head. It was gone, what happened next was gone from his mind, and the pressure was building.

Keesey gripped his wrists. Startled, he flinched back.

“Mitchell,” she said, her voice stern. “Stop. Stop trying to remember. The more you do, the more you’ll exacerbate the problem. That’s where the damage started, with those memories. So just—just stop.”

She let him go and went to his desk computer, typed in a few commands. Music started, something slow and classical.

“I’ve disabled the screen on your computer. You only have audio output now. I’d like you to just listen for a while. All right?”

Who was he to argue? He didn’t say anything, didn’t even nod or shake his head. She wasn’t giving him a choice, no need for him to respond.

She left, and the door shut and locked.

M-drives pushed ships between coordinates in space dozens of light-years apart. Dora insisted some navigators—the elite ones, the crazy ones—could create jump points themselves. Mitchell had never heard of such a thing. Wouldn’t someone have tried it by now?

Maybe they had and ended up here. Sedated in a featureless room, like him.

Everything that could be done could be described by mathematics. Sometimes the equations took years to discover, and M-drive mechanics were only a hundred years old. What if the technology could be scaled down to the size of an individual human body? It was a nice idea to think about, so Mitchell did.

The room could be described in terms of dimension and volume. His chair, his position on it, his distance to the door, graphed and defined.

If a memory could be delineated by the laws and structures of mathematics, then the equations defining it could be discovered, reconstructed, remembered. And he could escape from this.

The point on the middle of the plane of the door had a set of coordinates in space, identifiable along a standard set of recognized coordinates. Or he could define his own system, with that point on the door as zero-zero-zero. Any location Mitchell could wish to find himself, from any place on Law Station to, say, the bridge of the Drake , had another concrete set of coordinates. He had only to identify those coordinates, describe those coordinates. In those terms the entire Universe was finite, concrete, describable. In the end, those numbers defined what one could know, what one could manipulate.

That was all navigation was, identifying two points and traveling the most likely route between them. The math, the ships, the drive, were only tools that enabled people to travel more easily. But what if, what if… What if they’d been missing something all along?

He put his hand flat against the door that would not open for him. Given this point in space had a finite value, and some other point in space also had a finite value, and an equation could be found describing a relationship between them, and the path between them could be collapsed, the distance between them could be made into nothing. He could step through the door.

He’d done this a hundred times, sitting in the navigator station of the Drake . He knew the process so well, his training had ingrained it in him so thoroughly, it was part of his mind, second nature, as unconscious as dreaming.

Captain Scott said, “Greenau, do you have our heading?”

“Yes, sir. Transferred to your monitor.”

And the matrix was there. He could touch it. He could put his fingers inside it, work it open wider, stretch it open, and he could climb through and out, away from here. He dug with his fingers to make the area wider, to make a doorway. He should have listened to Dora. People would be able to travel across the galaxy with a thought. No more ships, no more danger. When he stepped through the door, he’d find Keesey and show her she was wrong, that there was more happening here than a neurophysiological disorder. Humanity was on the cusp of learning something it couldn’t yet control. The navigators who were patients here were only the first pioneers, sacrificed for the pursuit of knowledge. Mitchell felt proud to be in their company.