The Tangled Stars, page 32
Again, one takes what one can get.
If Jeanne miscalculated, or the angle of the MASTT Primus opening no longer conformed to what she expected, we would simply shoot past and continue heading out-system until we could decelerate and curve back for another run. We’d have to decide on our course of action once we saw what the situation was.
The other nightmare scenario could be what awaited us in the New Earth system. If we did hit the MASTT just right, and Jeanne was able to open it as planned, and we shot through unscathed, we would emerge into the system on the other end at the same enormous velocity we would have as we entered the MASTT at this end—and we had no idea what we would encounter. If a station remained there, or a cluster of ships, or even a debris field, we might well announce our arrival in the New Earth system with something approximating a very small nova.
We had no way of knowing. We could only cross our fingers and pray. Since none of us were of the religious persuasion (although Thibauld claimed to be a follower of Bastet or, on occasion, her actual, reincarnated holiness, and despite—or because of—my upbringing in a religious orphanage), we were left with crossed fingers as our only protection from disaster—and neither Thibauld nor Jeanne even had them.
Oh, and just to make things even more interesting, Jeanne had noted that she had no explanation for the brief flicker of light in Ernie’s recording of our encounter with the reopened MASTT. No ship in pre-Cataclysm days had reported such a thing. “Perhaps it was a sensor malfunction,” she said.
“Thibauld and I both saw it,” I said.
“Are not your eyes sensors? They may have malfunctioned as well.”
I hadn’t told Laysa or Jeanne what I thought I’d seen in that flicker—the indelible impression, still solid in my memory, that I had been looking at other star systems. I hadn’t told Laysa to begin with because I didn’t want her to think I’d gone a little crazy, tooling around the outer system in an ancient cargo tug with only a cat for company, and I hadn’t told Jeanne because what was the point? She could have, and must have, analyzed that flicker with every tool at her disposal—and clearly had made no more sense out of it than Ernie, or Thibauld, for that matter.
In any event, Jeanne professed no concern. I wondered if she even had a sense of her own mortality. It might have been interesting to discuss with her, except that I didn’t want to accidentally persuade her to conduct experiments with death—especially ours.
Other than hashing and rehashing our “plan,” there wasn’t much to do during the trip to MASTT Primus. Thibauld slept, Jeanne stayed silent unless spoken to, and Laysa and I alternately entertained and annoyed each other.
And, yes, I continued to do my best to rekindle that old sexual flame between us, to no avail. “That was more than ten years ago,” Laysa said.
“So?”
“So,” Laysa said. “Maybe you’re not my type anymore.”
“I was your type back then.”
“But I’m not who I was back then.”
I’m not ashamed . . . okay, maybe I’m a little ashamed . . . to admit I considered drastic measures, like suddenly deciding to spend all my time in the nude, but an honest examination of my pale, skinny body in the mirror dissuaded me from the notion and sent my male libido whimpering back into the cave in my brainstem from whence it had emerged.
Even if Laysa hadn’t laughed at me, Thibauld definitely would have. My lack of fur was a constant amusement to him.
So, time crawled by until, as is usually the way when something possibly painful or even lethal is looming on the horizon, it suddenly seemed like no time at all had passed, and the pivotal moment had arrived.
“Contact,” announced Jeanne. “It’s the Heorot.” A pause. “MASTT sensors confirm existence of MASTT terminus where expected.” Another pause. “Orientation . . . not quite as expected.”
Sitting in the bridge chair to the left of the captain’s chair, I tensed. In her station to the right of the captain’s chair, I saw Laysa tense. If Thibauld, sprawled elegantly in the captain’s chair itself, tensed, there was no sign of it. In fact, he was washing. “Can we make it?” he said without pausing his ablutions, pink tongue flicking in and out as he licked his paw and rubbed it over his right ear.
“Affirmative,” said Jeanne. “Altering course now.”
I untensed, but not very much.
“Five minutes to MASTT terminus opening pulse,” Jeanne said.
I stared at the main display. The MASTT appeared as a blue cross. The Heorot, designated with a yellow triangle, was almost on top of it. Our projected course was a green line intersecting that glowing blue cross and therefore almost intersecting the yellow triangle, as well. It was all very colorful and rather uninformative as to the most important question:
What would Galioto do?
Chapter Thirty-Five
“Humans are remarkably weak. I’m surprised we cats didn’t subjugate them centuries ago. Oh, wait, perhaps we have.”
—Thibauld’s Private Log
The “suicide” of Sarah Kerr might or might not have elicited rumors among the crew of the Heorot. The communications lockdown definitely did. Galioto didn’t care. He had a number of extremely loyal minions among the crew, who made it clear to the rest that they, too, had better remain loyal, or they might find themselves conducting a search for Sarah Kerr’s body in nearby space without benefit of life support.
Time passed. Tensions rose, but a lid was kept on any incipient mutiny by the members of Galioto’s loyal faction, one of whom (for reasons having to do with certain files keyed to be released to the authorities upon Galioto’s untimely demise) was Captain Verago. He did not question Sarah Kerr’s abrupt disappearance. He simply kept the ship shipshape and waited for Galioto to give him new orders.
Galioto himself was probably the tensest person on the ship, and with good reason, he told himself as he sat on the bridge one ship’s afternoon, staring at the depressingly unchanging main display. He alone on the Heorot knew that his empire had been stripped from him and was undoubtedly even now embroiled in a vicious civil war as various factions fought for control. He just hoped his loyalists might yet seize control of some of his more valuable assets, like The Maroon Off Vesta, so that he would have some base of operations left in Old Earth’s system when and if he returned from his interstellar adventures. The undoubtedly substantial body count of said civil war didn’t particularly concern him. Sarah Kerr had been the only one of his followers his attitude toward had ever approached “care about,” and now she was gone.
He did miss enjoying her body and savored the last time she’d shown it to him, just before he killed her. It was a pleasant and, when he focused on it, arousing memory, but it wasn’t like he couldn’t have any woman he wanted (or man, for that matter) once he regained the heights of power and wealth he fully expected to scale once more.
He would have been less tense if there were some indication, out here where the MASTT Primus Station would have been orbiting if it still existed, that Cooper Douglas had been correct in his assessment that MASTT Primus had reopened. In truth, there was nothing. Whatever he had seen seemed to have vanished or shrunk to the point of near-invisibility. And yet, clearly Coop believed, and Laysa Grey believed, and Ilya Stadnyk believed, that he had seen what he claimed to have seen.
Galioto had no choice but to believe, as well, because if this was all a wild goose chase, this final corner of the empire he’d once controlled would sooner or later come crashing in on him, most likely in a spectacularly fatal fashion.
And then, of course, there was the tension of wondering just what awaited on the other end of the MASTT, assuming he could open it and travel through it.
Galioto would never have admitted it to anyone, but it was just possible that his usual utmost confidence in his abilities had been shaken.
“Contact,” the Heorot said suddenly, and his heart skipped a beat.
“On main display,” Captain Verago said, for Galioto’s benefit, since, of course, he was wearing his command goggles.
And there she was: the Jeanne Baret, last seen in Earth orbit, streaking toward them on an intercept course, far too fast to rendezvous—and accelerating.
Verago swore. “How’d they get so close? Heorot, what’s the collision risk?”
“High,” the ship replied but then immediately said, “Contact changing course.”
“Very minor course change, but it means they’re not aimed right at us,” Verago said.
“Can we disable them?”
“Not at this angle,” the captain said. “We’d destroy the MASTT-pulse array and RASHER on the Jeanne Baret’s bow, at least, and probably the entire ship.”
Galioto swore silently, and his hands clenched the arms of his chair so tightly his knuckles turned white. All he could do was watch.
And then came the pulse.
• • •
“Twenty seconds to MASTT opening pulse,” Jeanne said. “Ten seconds . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . pulse executed.”
I don’t know what I expected that had me clutching the arms of the chair as if I was in danger of being thrown out of it. Nothing happened from my perspective, but on the main display, the blue-crossed circle suddenly expanded and turned green . . .
. . . and swallowed the Heorot.
I sat upright. “What just happened to the Heorot?”
“Jeanne,” said Thibauld, who had actually stood up just before the pulse, as sure a sign of heart-pounding excitement as the cat ever showed, “status of the Heorot?”
“The Heorot is inside the indeterminacy border of the MASTT,” Jeanne said as if that explained anything.
“The what?” Laysa said.
“The indeterminacy border,” Thibauld said. “You might say . . . she’s become a cat.”
“What?”
“Schrödinger’s cat.”
I blinked. “Whose cat?”
Thibauld sighed but didn’t answer.
“Do you mean she’s been destroyed?”
“MASTT entry in twenty seconds,” Jeanne said.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Thibauld said.
“Ten seconds.”
“Visual display,” Thibauld said.
And there, suddenly, was the thing that had started all my adventures, the black, nonreflective object that had almost swallowed the Ernest Cox: the mouth of MASTT Primus, the tunnel to the stars that had been closed for more than a century, now open again.
Seconds later, we entered it.
That, I felt.
• • •
Galioto couldn’t make sense of anything around him. He was on the bridge, but there seemed to be more than one bridge, more than one Captain Verago, more than one of every member of the bridge crew, and more than one of him. His mind felt shattered into a million fragments, thoughts spinning and colliding, unable to coalesce. He would surely have gone mad if it had gone on for even a second, but the sensation lasted only a fraction of that—or else, he thought later, lasted for years or eons. He could never remember it clearly.
He found himself, singular, back on the bridge, also singular, though somehow, he was on his hands and knees on the deck, on which he’d apparently thrown up. He sat back on his haunches and wiped his sleeve across his lips, grimacing at the sour taste in his mouth. “Report, Captain,” he shouted.
Verago was picking himself up from the deck as well. His VR goggles were smashed on the deck beside him as if he’d thrown them there in a fury. Perhaps he had. He turned and looked up at the main display.
It was blank.
“Heorot!” the captain shouted. “Status!”
The AI was very slow to respond, and what that said about the confusion inside its lightning-fast mind, Galioto didn’t like to think about. The answer it gave wasn’t exactly reassuring, either. “Unknown,” it said. “Ship functions appear normal, but our position is . . . indeterminate.”
“Did we move?”
“Unknown,” the AI said. “I have no reference stars. The sun has disappeared in all frequencies. There is nothing to get a fix on.”
Galioto got to his feet and staggered down toward the captain. “We have to figure out where we are!”
“I’d love to, sir,” the captain said. “But . . . how?”
And to that question, of course, there was no answer.
• • •
In all my research into what interstellar travel had been like, I’d somehow never bothered to try to find out what it felt like to enter a MASTT that had just been opened by a Pioneer-class starship and zip through the non-space between universes to another star system.
I don’t suppose it would have helped even if I had because what it felt like was indescribable. Time stretched, broke, ran backward. My life flashed before me, and so did some other people’s lives. Phantom sensations tore through my body, of heat and cold and pain and ecstasy, too fast to feel, too intense to endure. My mind expanded and contracted and gave birth to nightmares and visions that vanished almost before they began and yet lasted a lifetime.
And all of those words are meaningless gibberish that does not even begin to touch on the reality—or the unreality—of the sensation.
The human mind was not intended to experience whatever it was we experienced, and I realized then why passengers and crew were given short-term sedation before each journey, a little detail I’d read about but hadn’t internalized.
“Ungh,” I said when it ended. That didn’t seem sufficient, so I added, “Urrrgh.”
I found myself slumped in my chair. I raised a shaking hand to brush sweaty hair out of my eyes and glanced right at the captain’s chair. Thibauld was staring at me, head cocked to one side. “Interesting,” he said. “You look exactly like you did after the Rangers stunned you. Drool and everything.”
“You didn’t . . . feel that?”
“I felt something. Like someone had rubbed my fur the wrong way. It hardly made me collapse.” He looked over his shoulder. Laysa looked as ill as I felt. “Clearly, humans are not really cut out for interstellar travel. Perhaps it should be left to cats.”
“Ha ha,” I said. And then, belatedly, I raised my head to look at the main display. It showed nothing. “Where are we?”
“Inside our own little normalized space-time bubble inside the MASTT,” Thibauld said. “The RASHER envelope.”
“I thought the transit was almost instantaneous,” Laysa said. She looked pale but more herself than she had a moment before. I wondered if I did.
“Almost is a subjective word,” Thibauld said. “Not scientific. Aboard the ships that regularly made the transit to New Earth more than a century ago, the passage of time experienced on board varied from twelve seconds to four minutes and thirty-three seconds.”
“Weird,” I said. I took a deep breath. I felt better by the minute. “And how long have we been in transit?”
“Subjectively,” Thibauld said, “Three minutes and thirty seconds as of . . . now.”
“So, we’ll pop out into normal space any second,” Laysa said.
“Presumably.” Thibauld raised his right rear foot and began worrying at the fur between his toes with his teeth. I doubted any other captain of a starship or any other kind of ship had ever done such a thing, so that was a first for our little expedition.
“Are you all right?” I asked Laysa.
“I’m fine,” she said. “But that was . . . disconcerting. Not to mention unpleasant.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I wonder what happened to the Heorot?”
“Probably reappeared as soon as we zipped into the MASTT and the mouth shrank behind us,” I said. “With Galioto cursing.”
“I hope you’re right,” Laysa said.
“You are incorrect,” Jeanne said, startling me. It was the first time the AI had spoken since she’d counted down our entry into the MASTT.
“Then what happened to them?” I said.
I expected her to ask Thibauld’s permission to answer or somehow defer to him, but instead, she replied, “Had Heorot remained in the indeterminacy border of the MASTT when it shrank behind us, she would have become disassociated.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t sound good.
“Therefore, I deliberately extended the RASHER envelope to its maximum diameter to ensure it encompassed the Heorot as we entered the MASTT.”
“But that means . . .” My voice trailed off.
“They’re traveling with us, in our wake,” Jeanne said.
“And our traveling time,” Thibauld said, raising his head, “has just passed four minutes and thirty seconds. In the historical record, no ship ever remained in transit to New Earth this long.”
Another first. Yay, us. I looked at the main display.
It remained blank.
Uh-oh, I thought.
Another minute passed, and then another.
“Interesting,” Thibauld said. “Jeanne, do you have any explanation for the extended nature of this MASTT transit?”
“I do not have an explanation. I have a guess.”
Normal AIs don’t make guesses.
“So do I,” Thibauld said, thus proving my point about “normal” AIs. “You go first.”
“My guess,” Jeanne said, “is that the presence of a second ship in our wake has altered the nature of the transit.”
“A reasonable guess,” Thibauld said.
“What is your guess, Captain?” Jeanne said.
“I’d prefer not to say until I find out if I’m right.”
“In that case,” I said, “I certainly hope it isn’t your guess that we’re about to explode and be scattered as subatomic particles through billions of alternate universes.”
“No,” Thibauld said. “Although if you’d like to make that your guess, perhaps we could run a betting pool.”
