Strider's Galaxy (26 page)

Here she infiltrated a subroutine and coaxed it back into some semblance of activity. She felt as if she were a nanobot penetrating the slightest neuron of an almost-dead brain. Elsewhere she was discovering all sorts of kinks in the puter's basic programming, and components of herself were reflexively straightening them out. It was obvious to Polyaggle that the Humans were hardly above basic grade in the construction of artificial intelligences. This largely dead machine had once had just about sufficient intelligence to start repairing the basic design flaws that had been built into it, but little more than that. It seemed to have developed a certain amount of curiosity—the sign of a good puter—but to have been capable of little by way of creative thought. The millions of pieces that were Polyaggle sighed in unison as they worked their way through the turrets and sewers of the Main Computer's software.

Parts of her found a river that was frozen into immobility. On its silver surface there were small ripples with sharp edges. She skidded across the silent water, then nudged the first of the ripples into motion. The little wave broke, and in so doing caused others to break. Soon the river began to flow, albeit reluctantly: for a long time—milliseconds upon milliseconds—ice-floes bumped against the banks as the waters strove for motion. Somewhere far up ahead there was a waterfall that represented the start of a connective thought—a linkage between two remote parts of this thing that had once been a consciousness.

Somewhere else bits of Polyaggle encountered a sand desert that stretched for millions of square kilometers. They discovered that a weed was poking its pale green head through the surface. One of her touched the top of the weed while another blew up a wind, so that seeds were scattered all over the sandy surface. As much as a second was taken up while the weeds grew and died and grew again until a rainforest covered the land. Birds and bats flew between the sweaty trees, feeding on the humming insects. Polyaggle lost two of the particles of herself to the hungry creatures; each time she felt a small agony.

A highway on which the cars were still. Polyaggle touched them, and they began to move.

A nest of ants poised in motionlessness, one of the workers crushed almost flat by the weight of a crumb. A portion of Polyaggle buzzed against the nest and the ants lurched back into industry as if there had been no hiatus. The worker, the crumb on its shoulder, continued its relentless trek towards home.

A man in a laboratory was looking—had been looking forever—through an ultramicroscope at the colloidal solution on the bench in front of him. Suddenly sparks of light began to appear, moving in the drunkard's dance of Brownian motion. The activity of the sparks brought the man to life. He stood up, punched a button, and watched as the colloid swelled until those dancing sparks were the size of his own eyes. Stripping himself naked, he plunged into the liquid, at last feeling the soft, fondling touch of what, for all his life, he had been able only to observe.

For eternity a woman who believed herself sterile had been watching the slick greenish head of an infant emerging from her vagina. She would have been overjoyed—had she been capable of thought. Now a fraction of Polyaggle touched her belly, urging on the process of creation. The baby shouldered its way through to complete the greatest quest of its life. Another followed. And another. And another. And then there were more. The woman rejoiced as the room filled with babies, piling ten and twelve deep, all screaming for her milk. Still she kept giving birth until the room was full and she was smothered to death by the mass of writhing, mucus-covered flesh.

You lose a few,
thought Polyaggle.

The wind that came from out of the rainforest that had once been a desert brought with it locusts which died and fertilized the plains and then seeds which floated mistily down on to them. In pursuit came the birds, many of which also died through starvation and thirst. But other parts of Polyaggle, seeing that there were clouds in the world that was the Main Computer's residual consciousness, winged their way through them, causing raindrops to form. The second wave of birds found green pastures.

Little brown mammals followed.

Satisfied that she had begun a process of evolution within the Main Computer, Polyaggle withdrew.

#

"Are you there, Geena?" said Lan Yi once again to the empty elevator. He had deliberately stopped it midway between two levels of fields. He needed time to talk this over.

Once again there was no reply from her.

He couldn't believe she had just deserted him like this. Was she punishing him for the times he had wondered about the possibilities of bedding Strauss-Giolitto? No, surely it couldn't be that. Back in the time before she had killed herself she had watched his occasional infidelities with a benign smile.

Lan Yi knew there was something wrong with his thinking. Geena was dead—had been dead for years. Yet since the
Santa Maria
had arrived in The Wondervale his wife had been alive, although it was evident that he was the only person able to see her or hear her. She couldn't be alive: he had seen her corpse in its coffin, and then the cremation of the coffin. So much for logic: he had heard her voice and seen her face, and he had made love with her tenderly and sweetly last night.

Somewhere far beneath the surface his scientist self protested bitterly. Lan Yi ignored the dissident voice.

"Geena?" he said to the vacant elevator.

There was no response, just the emotionless whiteness of the lighting.

Suddenly Lan Yi became aware of how utterly lonely he was. A few meters away from the wall of this elevator was the hull of the ship, and beyond that there was vacuum that stretched out for ever. Somewhere in that vacuum, almost as isolated as he was, a small planet swam through its orbit around a small yellow star. He perceived the distance between them not just in terms of parsecs but in terms of years. He
knew
, too, that there were years and parsecs between himself and Geena. But, at the same time, she had been with him only a few hours ago.

He couldn't stay here for ever. Others would be wanting to use the elevator. Perhaps already there was a posse of techbots on its way to try to find out what had gone wrong with the mechanism. He had to press the release button soon. But he also had to say at least one last goodbye to Geena.

"Speak to me!" he begged, falling to his knees.

The lighting hummed faintly.

#

"Let's get this boat on the move, then," said Strider to Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

Within the moment, it was as if all the surfaces of the command deck fell in towards each other in successive waves of colored, feathery flakes. She put up her arms instinctively to protect her face. Between the bright blue elbows of her jumpsuit she saw the tapestry of Polyaggle stitching itself back into existence. For an instant there was the sensation that iridescent wings filled all of the air; then the Spindrifter was standing in the center of the command deck as if she had never been away. Her wings collapsed easily in to her sides.

"Nineteen point eight one three seven six recurring of your Main Computer is now functional," said the Spindrifter, "and that portion is sufficient to locate for you the wormhole that brought you here."

"You mean we can get home?" said Strider.

"There is a chance. A good chance."

Strider thought hard. "Could you quantify your use of the word 'good'?" she said at last.

"Travelling by wormhole is always a risky business because there is never a one hundred per cent certainty where or when you will arrive," said Polyaggle as if speaking to a slightly backward child, "but I and the Main Computer estimate that your chances of reaching the Solar System again by this means are in excess of ninety-nine per cent."

"That sounds pretty good to me," said Strider. She sat down slowly. "When can we go?"

"There is one very grave problem."

"Oh yeah?"

"You are well over a billion parsecs from your home. Establishing timescales over that sort of distance is very difficult." Polyaggle paused. "But as far as I can work it out, you seem to be several million years in your own future. The worlds you go back to may not be the ones you left."

Strider shook her head wearily. "I'm not sure I understand you."

"If we successfully located this end of the wormhole, and travelled back through it, it is almost certain that you would discover your culture evolved several million years beyond the point where you left it. Your star would still be alive, of course. It is more questionable whether your culture would be."

"The human species might be already dead," said Pinocchio.

"It might indeed," replied Polyaggle. "The ancient species in The Wondervale count their ages in billions of years, rather than millions, but our experience has been that the successor species last less long than that. Most destroy themselves within a millennium of achieving interstellar capability."

"So there's no real way home?" said Strider.

"It depends what you think of as home."

"We have a tachyonic drive," said Pinocchio. "Surely that could take us back."

Polyaggle said nothing, and Strider immediately realized why. In order to get from place to place using the tachyonic drive you had to know where you were going. String on to that the fact that, apart from Polyaggle herself, the only ones aboard the
Santa Maria
who could operate the tachyonic drive were the Images, who presumably did not want to leave The Wondervale, and the problem became almost insuperable.

Besides, did Strider herself want to leave The Wondervale? Not long ago she had seen an entire species wiped out by the Autarchy. She didn't really understand the motivations that drove Polyaggle, and reckoned she would have had as much difficulty comprehending the imperatives of the Spindrifters as a whole—the Spindrifters had been alien and alien and
alien
—but the species had not set out to exterminate others. The Autarchy, by contrast, was only too happy to do so. There was a war between wrong and right to be fought within The Wondervale. The
Santa Maria
might be able to make only a very small contribution to the winning of that war, but it was a contribution nevertheless. Contrast that against the opportunity of going home . . . no, it wouldn't be going home, because home was not just a place but a time, and the time had seemingly slipped away.

Strider decided what she herself wanted to do: stay in The Wondervale and help the rebels. But it wasn't a decision she could take on her own—she had over forty people under her command, and a majority of them might want to make the break for Mars. She couldn't decide about their lives without asking them first.

"Can you make contact with Holmberg?" she said to Pinocchio.

"I've already done so. He's on his way to the command deck. He will be with us shortly."

"Shift us to join the Helgiolath fleet," Strider said to the Images.

IS THIS WISE?
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"I don't care if Holmberg wants to take the
Santa Maria
out from under me and try to get it home," she said. "I want to see this Autarchy driven from the face of The Wondervale." She looked at Polyaggle. "Even if I'm the only human taking part, I want to help avenge the death of the Spindrifters. This is a gamble I choose to take."

#

Holmberg looked up through the view-window and felt himself to be a very small fish in a very large shoal. The star they were orbiting illuminated only a minor portion of the Helgiolath fleet, but even so there seemed to be an infinitude of spaceships out there. He knew there were only a few hundred that he could see; Strider had told him that in total there were nearly eight thousand.

#

"Most of the personnel want to try to get home," he said a few hours later.

"And they want to take the
Santa Maria
with them?" said Strider.

"Is there any other way?"

"Not that I can think of."

"I want to stay here," said Strider. "I think there are a few accounts that have to be settled."

"I agree with you. I myself voted to stay in The Wondervale."

She looked at him in amazement. "I never thought of you as a natural-born revolutionary."

"I've represented the personnel as well as I could. That doesn't mean I don't have opinions of my own. Perhaps we could help these people."

"Who else wants to stay here?"

"Very few."

"Any names?"

"You. Me. Lan Yi, for reasons I can't quite understand, although he explained them to me in detail—the chance of carrying out a scientific investigation of the physiological construction of the Spindrifter appears to be a large part of it. Umbel Nelson. Maloron Leander. Maria Strauss-Giolitto, somewhat to my surprise. That's about the strength of your support, Captain Strider. Oh, yes, and the bot."

"That's a very big 'Oh, yes'," said Strider absently. "He'll probably be more use to the Helgiolath than the rest of us put together." She ran the fingers of one hand back through her hair. "What do you think we should do?"

She found it odd talking with Holmberg this way. Ever since the
Santa Maria
had left Phobos the man had been her bane, except for that one moment when he had declared himself—improbably—to be her ally, and she had believed him. Now they were reclining naked in the bath in her cabin. His pink stomach protruded above the surface of the water. It was as good a place as any to discuss this. In a vague way she would have preferred him to have had an erection—as a sign of respect, as it were.

"You say that Polyaggle has reconstituted much of the Main Computer—enough that the
Santa Maria
might be able to find its way home," he said.

"That's what she tells me. The Images agree."

"I think we ought to let the
Santa Maria
go home," said Holmberg. "O'Sondheim could take over as captain, surely?"

"You mean I should desert my ship?"

Holmberg splashed his chest with water, then reached for the soap. "One alternative is that you desert all the sentient species of The Wondervale. Another is that you get yourself and the ship back home but leave me and Nelson and the rest behind."