Galactic North (27 page)

“Go now,” she said.

The red material of the couch flowed over Weather completely, covering her hands and face until all that remained was a vague, mummy-like form.

I knew then that I would not see her again for a very long time. For a moment I stood still, paralysed by what had happened. Even then I could feel my weight increasing. Whatever Weather and the boy were doing between them, it was having some effect on the engine output. My weight climbed smoothly, until I was certain we were exceeding half a gee and still accelerating.

Perhaps we were going to make it home after all.

Some of us.

I turned from Weather’s casket and looked for the way out. Held tight against my chest to stop it itching, my hand was lost under a glove of twinkling machinery. I wondered what gift I would find when the glove completed its work.

Spacers tell people that the worst aspect of starflight is revival. They speak the truth, I think. They give us dreams while the machines warm us up and map our bodies for cell damage. We feel no anxiety or fear, detached from our physical selves and adrift in generated fantasies.

In my dream I was joined by the cybernetic imago of Katia, my wife. We found ourselves within a computer-constructed sensorium. An insect, I felt my six thin legs propelling me into a wide and busy chamber. Four worker ants were there, crouched in stiff mechanical postures. With compound vision I studied these new companions, observing the nearest of them deposit a pearly egg from its abdomen. A novel visceral sense told me that I, too, contained a ready egg.

“We’re gods amongst them,” I told my wife’s imago.

“We are
Myrmecia gulosa
,” she whispered into my brain. “The bulldog ant. You see the queen, and her winged male?”

“Yes.”

“Those maggoty things in the corner of the cell are the queen’s larvae. Her worker is about to feed them.”

“Feed them with what?”

“His egg, my darling.”

I rotated my sleek, mandibled head. “And will I also?”

“Naturally! A worker’s duty is always to serve his queen. Of course . . . you may exit this environ, if you choose. But you’ll have to remain in reefersleep for another three hours.”

“Three hours . . . might as well be centuries,” I said. “Then change it. Something a bit less alien.”

My imago dissolved the scenario, the universe. I floated in white limbo, awaiting fresh sensory stimulus. Soon I found myself brushing shimmering vermilion coral with eight suckered arms, an octopus.

Katia liked to play games.

Eventually the dreams ceased and I suddenly sensed my body, cold and stiff but definitely anchored to my mind.

I allowed myself a long primal scream, then opened my eyes. The eyes I opened were the eyes of Uri Andrei Sagdev, who was once a mainbrain technician at the Sylveste Institute but who now found himself in the odd role of Starship Heuristic Resource, a crewperson.

Under different circumstances, it is not a role I would otherwise have chosen. I was alone, the room cold and silent. My five companions remained in reefersleep around my own capsule; only I had been revived. I sensed, then, that something must be wrong. But I did not query Katia, preferring to remain in ignorance until she saw fit to enlighten me regarding our situation.

I hauled myself from the open reefer and took falterng steps out of the room.

It was several minutes before I felt confident to do anything more ambitious than that. I stumbled to the nearby health bay and exercised with galvanic activators, pushing my muscles beyond the false limits of apparent exhaustion. Then I showered and dressed, taking the expediency of wearing a thermal layer beneath my overalls. Breakfast consisted of fried ham and Edam slices, followed by garlic croissants, washed down with chilled passion fruit and lemon tea.

Why was I not concerned to discover our difficulty? Simply because the mere fact of revival told me that it could not be compellingly urgent. Any undesirable situation upon a light-skimming starship that does not instantly destroy it—probably in a flash of exotic bosons—will act on such an extended timescale that the mainbrain-crew overmind will have days or weeks to engineer a solution.

I knew we were not home, and that therefore something was wrong. But for a moment it was good simply to lie back in the kitchen and allow the music of Roedelius to envelop me, and to revel in this condition called life. To simply suck air into my old lungs.

I who had been dead, or near death, for so long.

“Some more, Uri?” asked my wife’s imago.

I was alone apart from a servitor. It was a dumb-bell shaped drone hovering on silently energised levitation fields above the metal floor. Extruding a manipulator from the matt-gold surface of its upper spheroid, it offered me the jug of pale juice.

With a well-practised subvocal command, I enabled my entoptic system. The implant supplied the visual and tactile stimuli necessary to fully realise the imago, the simulation of Katia, drawing it from the ship’s mainbrain. Bright grids and circles interrupted my ocular field, then meshed and thickened to form my wife, frozen and lifeless but apparently solid. Copyright symbols denoting the implant company flashed, then faded. I locked her entoptic ghost over the dull form of the servitor, its compact size easily concealed within her body-space. Her blunt silver hair fell around a narrow pale face, black lips pursed like a doll’s and eyes staring right through me. Her clasped hands emerged from a long hooded scarlet gown inlaid around the shoulder with the insignia of the Mixmaster geneticists, a pair of hands holding a cat’s cradle of DNA. My wife was a geneticist to the marrow. On Yellowstone, where cybernetics was the primary creed, it made her a virtual pariah.

As the mainbrain-generated program took hold she grew vivacious and smiled, and her hand appeared now to grasp the jug.

“I was tiring of storage, my darling.”

“I’m not comfortable with this,” I admitted. “Katia— my actual Katia—despised the whole idea of you. This illusion would have especially sickened her.”

“It doesn’t sicken me,” Katia said.

“It ought to,” I said. “Aren’t your personalities supposed to be the same?”

She smiled, as if the point were settled. So infuriatingly like her original.

“I see that,” I said dubiously. The imago had been against my actual wife’s wishes. When the Melding Plague hit us I saw my chance of escape via this craft. Katia was unable to become a crewperson, so I surreptitiously set about digitizing my wife’s personality. The implant did all the hard work. It had assembled a behaviour map of Katia whenever we were together, studying her through the conduits of my own senses. The simulation grew slowly, limited by the memory capacity of the implant. But each day I downloaded more of her into an Institute mainbrain, performing this routine for weeks on end. I have no doubt that Katia suspected something, although she never made any mention of it.

Having completed my clandestine work, I then grafted the copy over the mind of the ship. It lacked her memories, of course, but I went to the expense and danger of having my own trawled and substituted instead, using software routines to perform the gender inversion. Katia’s personality only assumed dominance when I was in rapport with the vessel. There was no doubt in my mind that the other crewpersons had also arranged for their own fictitious companions. They too would speak to their loved ones, or some idealised fantasy of a lover, when they addressed the ship.

But I preferred not to think about that.

A lie, then. But my entire life had been a lie, Katia’s imago simply the most recent aspect of it. But why had she awoken me? Or rather: why had the ship chosen to awaken me, and not one of the others? Janos, Kaj, Hilda, Yul and Karlos still remained in reefersleep, displaying no signs of imminent thaw.

I upped from the table decisively. “Thank you, Katia. I’ll take a stroll, admire the view.”

“I must discuss something with you,” Katia said. “But I suppose it can wait a few minutes.”

“Ah,” I said, grinning. “You want to keep me in suspense.”

“Nothing of the sort, darling. Is the music fine?”

“Music’s fine,” I answered, leaving the kitchen.

I entered a curving hexagonal corridor, bathed in dull ochre light. A node of Roedelius chased me, humming from piezoacoustic panels in the walls. The gravity that held me to the floor arose from our one-gee thrust, and not from the centrifugal spin of the lifesystem, otherwise the vertical and horizontal axes would have been interchanged. This fact told me that we were not at home; not approaching the cluster of carousels and asteroids called Shiphaven, in the Trojan point that trailed Jupiter. We were still on stardrive, still climbing up or down from the slowtime of light-speed.

We might be anywhere between Epsilon Eridani and Solspace.

My stroll carried me away from the core of the vessel to her skin, where the hot neutron sleet wafted past us. The parts of the vessel through which I travelled grew darker and more machinelike, colder and less familiar. Irrationally, I began to imagine that I was being pursued and observed.

I have never enjoyed either solitude or the dark. I was a fool, then, to address this fear by turning around. Yet the hairs on my neck were bristling and my sweat had become chilled.

Most of the radial corridor was dark, apart from the miserly locus of light that had followed me like a halo. Nonetheless, it was still possible to make out a darker thing looming in the distance, almost lost in the convergence of the walls.

I was not alone.

It was a figure, a silhouette, regarding me. Not Katia’s imago, for sure.

I felt a brief terror. “Katia,” I croaked. “Full lights, please.”

I jammed my eyes shut as the bright actinics snapped on. Red retinal ghosts slowly fading, I reopened them, not much more than a second later. But my watcher had gone.

I slowly emptied my lungs. I was wise enough not to leap to conclusions. This was not necessarily what it appeared. After all, I had only just emerged from reefersleep, after several years of being frozen. I was bound to be a little jittery, a little open to subconscious suggestion.

It seemed I was utterly alone. I vowed, shakily, to put the experience immediately out of mind.

Ten minutes later I had reached the outer hull, and was in naked space—or rather, seeing through the proxy eyes of a drone clamped on the outside with spidery grappling feet. The machine’s camera head was peering through a porthole, into the room where I sat. I looked pale and strained, but I did not have company.

I looked away from the porthole, towards the bow of the ship. The vessel, the
Wild Pallas
, was a ramliner—a nearlight human-rated starship. Most of what I saw, therefore, was very dense neutron shielding. The vessel required protons for its bosonic drive process. Ahead, a graser beam swept space and stripped deuterium nuclei into protons and neutrons. Our gauss scoop sifted free the protons and focused them into the heart of the ship. The neutral baryons were channelled around the hull in a lethal radiative rain, diverted clear of the lifesystem and its fragile payload of sleepers. The drone sensed the flux and passed the data to me in terms of a swirling roseate aura, as if we were diving down the gullet of the universe.

To the rear, things were eclipsed by the glow of the exhaust. Gamma shields burned Cherenkov-blue. Within the ship, the proton harvest was extremely short-lived. Fields targeted the protons into a beam, lancing through a swarming cloud of heavy monopoles. The relativistic protons were decelerated and steered into the magnetic nodes. Inside each monopole was a shell of bosons which coaxed the protons to disintegrate. This was the power source of a ramliner.

I had studied all the tech before signing up for the overmind partnership, the human-cybernetic steering committee that commanded this vessel. When I say studied, I mean that I had downloaded certain eidetic documents furnished by the Macro that owned the ship. These eidetics entered my memory at an almost intuitive level, programmed of course to fade once my contract expired. They told me everything I needed to know and little else. We carried nine hundred reefersleep passengers and we crew comprised six humans, each of whom was an expert in one or more areas of starflight theory. My own specialties were scoop subsystems—gauss collimators and particle-ablation shields—and shipboard/in-flight medicare. The computer that wore the masque of Katia was also equipped for these zones of expertise, but it was deficient—so the cybertechs said—in human heuristic thought modes. Crewpersons were therefore its Heuristic Resources—peripherals orbiting the hard glittering core of its machine consciousness.

Crewpersons thus rode at a more reduced level of reefersleep than our passengers: a little warmer, a little closer to the avalanche of cell death that is life. The computer could interrogate us without the bother of complete revival. Our dreams, therefore, would be dreams where matter and number flowed in technological tsunami.

I altered the drone’s telemetry so that the neutron wind became invisible. Looking beyond, I saw no stars at all. Einsteinian distortion was squashing them up fore and aft, concealed by the flared ends of the ship. We were still accelerating towards light-speed.

“Well?” I asked, much later.

“As you know, we’ve yet to reach midpoint. In fact, we will not reach home for another three years of shiptime.”

“Is this a technical problem?”

“Not strictly. I’m afraid it’s medical, which is why I was forced to bring you out of reefersleep between systems. Like the view, my darling?”

“Are you joking? An empty universe with no stars? It’s the gloomiest thing I can remember.”