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

Still, after a while—without anything that served to delineate the time, either to a trade standard or a local schedule—she started wondering just how long she could manage. The accelerator’s black walls were depressing and disorienting, like she was both adrift in starless space and confined in a space where the walls were too close. She could reach out and just barely not touch the walls of the room.

So eventually, she started wandering.

It was strange, how easily her body adapted to moving through the gravity of this place. As though her body was also accessing memories that weren’t hers.

And eventually, she encountered Tarsul.

He was at rest, reclining on a little bench which may not have been a bench, in design. His hands were folded on his chest. He wasn’t moving, but he was breathing deep and even; his eyes were open, so he wasn’t sleeping. Kiu paused in the doorway to the little room.

“What are you doing?”

Tarsul tilted his head. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been home,” he said. “It’s strange to realize I’m finally returning.”

Kiu grunted. She let herself in, a few more handspans. Still kept a good distance between herself and Tarsul. “How long?”

Tarsul was silent.

Kiu narrowed her eyes at him, but she kept silent as well. Even so, Tarsul exhaled, sounding like he was disappointed in her. “I’m not sure, exactly.”

“How many times have you made this trip?” Kiu asked.

At that, Tarsul actually looked surprised. He turned so that his whole body was facing her, head canted to one side.

“Me?” he asked. “The last time we sought resources from a star system was over a hundred twenty standard generations ago. How old do you think I am?”

“I remembered you,” Kiu said. “You were there, in the accelerator’s memory.”

Tarsul’s eyebrows knit together. “Two explanations,” he said. “One: your own memories contaminated the accelerator’s stored memory at the same time its contaminated yours. Pieces of your own experience became blended with what you remembered. None of the memories are faithful representations of anyone’s experience. Two: coincidence. Someone on an historical resource-gathering expedition looked like me. Nothing more.”

That would make more sense, she supposed.

Because what was the other explanation? He was over a hundred twenty standard generations old?—whatever that even meant , coming from his colony. Unlikely; the best genetic treatments couldn’t extend life that far. He was cloned, or gengineered? Plausible, but why? She’d met plenty of heavily-gengineered humans, and they were without fail more impressive than Tarsul seemed to be. And if over a hundred generations had passed since that memory, they probably would have improved their gengineering, too. Why reuse the same models?

“You came out here. From your arcology.”

Tarsul nodded, absently.

“How did you—” Not go insane? “Keep busy on the way out?”

“Meditation, mostly,” Tarsul said.

“Really?”

Tarsul spread his hands. “I regarded it as a pilgrimage. I was chosen because I was… temperamentally suited to such a long journey. Unfortunately, that was a consideration I didn’t have the luxury to make, for you.”

Kiu made a disparaging noise.

“Maybe you’d prefer to sleep,” Tarsul said. “We can still put you into suspension. I’m told that it’s a dreamless sleep.”

The same way that memory was supposed to be reassuring? Kiu thought. “No. Thank you. I’ll figure something out.”

“Of course,” Tarsul said. “Let me know if I can offer any diversion.”

“I’m not much into meditation,” Kiu said.

Tarsul laughed, briefly. “I’d think not. Even so.”

“Right.”

Kiu lingered for a moment longer, then took herself away down the hall.

And occupied herself for some short span before folding, and admitting that stasis might be a more comfortable way of traveling by far.

Tarsul was right about this, at least—the sleep was dreamless.

She had no conception of the passage of time when consciousness infiltrated her mind again, arriving in a fog of sleepy confusion. She came to not quite knowing where she was; shivering very badly. Entirely psychosomatic, she’d been told, but she didn’t believe it.

Tarsul was at the console beside her stasis bay, an inscrutable series of tones informing him of something. Kiu’s arm ached, faintly, where an IV had gone in. “We’re there?” she asked—but the apprehension of entering a new world, a strange station and culture, didn’t have a chance to develop.

“We’re off-course,” Tarsul said. Maybe it was her imagination, but he sounded tired. “Something must have gone wrong with the calculations.”

Kiu pushed herself out of the bay, and caught herself against the wall. It felt strangely warm against her palm. “I thought you said the accelerator handled all the actual calculations.”

“With some form of input, some guidance, from the pilot,” Tarsul said. “I don’t pretend to understand the intricacies. But it has never failed, before.”

And with that, a new apprehension rose in Kiu’s chest. “What’s that mean?” Don’t ask me to, don’t ask me to—

“It means we’re traveling into nothingness,” Tarsul said. “Unless you can correct the course. The accelerator can correct itself, I’m led to believe, even at these speeds.”

The apprehension roiled into full-blown fear. “You want me to plug back into that thing.”

“Unless the thought of drifting forever appeals to you.” Tarsul turned his ear toward the hall. “Though ‘forever’, in our case, is bounded by the finite amount of supplies we have on board.”

Slow deaths, then. Set against the immediate threat of all those voices, all those images, blooming up in Kiu’s mind. Her heart sped.

As though he could hear that, Tarsul turned back toward her. “It can wait. A few hours will hardly make a difference.”

Except that it would be a few hours more of sitting and dreading. Kiu grit her teeth. “No. I’ll go now.” Go under threat, but then this entire voyage had been under threat. That was nothing new.

She went back to the interface. Plugged herself in. Tensed her shoulders, tensed her hands, and all sensation of shoulders and hands and body dissolved.

Into—

A little planetoid was nothing. She stood at the helm of a planet, now—no atmosphere to shear off, but thrust turned it oblate. Their progress was slower. Not, however, slow. They could put together most of a system this way—

Or simply flee. Another time, another planetoid, another pilot, staring down at his gloved hands. Memories already coursing through his brain, which Kiu felt at one remove. The whole black body of the accelerator representing a theft as well as an escape. Looking up, to meet the eyes of an engineer who had no idea how to work any but its most basic functions, an entire body of knowledge left behind. Saying—

The tall man again, the one who looked like Tarsul, saying, No, it’s futile. In the long run, the arcology will die. Of isolation. Of indolence. Of attrition. Saying, the prudent choice is to return to a star, and all the resources it offers. Not to continue out here, in the black .

Saying, I’ll do my best for you, but I won’t do anything beyond that .

Kiu didn’t even remember the snap of the course correction; the driving need to go home. She snapped back into herself like a line under tension, shaking, with her hands in fists. And Tarsul, standing there, head cocked, as though he could hear the rage pouring off her. As though he’d neglected one of the traditional senses for some fleet of senses she had no knowledge of.