Transvergence (8 page)

"The region of the Zardalu Communion," E.C. Tally said, "and the Builder artifacts that lie within it. And now, the Bose access nodes."

A set of yellow lights appeared, scattered among the blue points.

"Eliminating the artifacts where there were no unexplained ship disappearances"—two-thirds of the blue lights vanished—"and considering only little-explored regions within two Bose Transitions, we find this."

The single orange region began to shrink and divide, finally leaving a score of isolated glowing islands.

"These remain as candidate regions for consideration. There are too many. However, the display does not show what I could also compute: the
probability
associated with each of the remaining regions. When that is included, only one serious contender remains. Here it is. It satisfies all our requirements, at the ninety-eight-percent probability level."

All but one of the lights blinked out, leaving a shape like a twisted orange hand glowing off to one side of the display.

"Reference stars!" It was Julian Graves's voice. "Give us reference stars—we need the location."

A dozen supergiants, the standard beacon stars for the Zardalu Communion portion of the spiral arm, blinked on within the display volume. Darya, trying to orient herself in an unfamiliar stellar region, heard the surprised grunt of Louis Nenda and the hiss of Kallik. They must have been three steps ahead of her.

"I have the location." E.C. Tally's voice was quiet. "That was no problem. But what the ship's data banks do not contain, surprisingly, is navigational information. I have also not yet found image data of this region. However, it has a name. It is known as—"

"It's the Torvil Anfract." That was Nenda's flat growl in the darkness. "And you'll never get image data, not if you wait till I grow feathers and fly."

"You know the region already?" E.C. Tally asked. "That is excellent news. Perhaps you have even been there, and can provide our navigation?"

"I know the place—but only by its reputation." There was a tone in Nenda's voice that Darya Lang had never heard before. "An' if you're talking about me takin' you into the Torvil Anfract, forget it. You can have my ticket, even if it's free. As my old daddy used to say, I ain't never been
there
, and I ain't never
ever
going back."

THE TORVIL ANFRACT

I wish that I understood Time, with a capital T. It's no consolation to realize that no one else does, either. Every book you ever read talks about the "Arrow of Time," the thing that points from the past into the future. They all say that the arrow's arranged so things never run backward.
I'm not convinced. How do we
know
that there was never a connection that ran the other way? Or maybe sometimes Time runs crosswise, and cause and effect have nothing to do with each other.
The thing that got me going this way was thinking again about the Torvil Anfract, and about Medusa. You remember Medusa? She was the lady with the fatal face—one eyeful of her and you turned to stone. Miggie Wang-Ho, who ran the Cheapside Bar on the Upside edge of Tucker's Tooth, was a bit like that. One mention of credit, and she froze you solid, and what she did to Blister Gans doesn't bear thinking about. But I guess that's a story for someplace else, because right now I want to talk about the Anfract.
The spiral arm is full of strange sights, but most of them you can
creep up on
. What I mean is, the big jumps are all made through the Bose Network, and after that you're subluminal, plodding along at less than light-speed. So if there's a big spectacle, well, you see it first from far off, and then gradually you get closer. And while you're doing that, you have a chance to get used to it, so it never hits you all of a piece.
Except for the Anfract. You approach
that
subluminal, but for a long time you don't see it at all. There's just
nothing
, no distortion of the star field, no peculiar optical effects like you get near Lens. Nothing.
And then, all of a sudden, this great
thingie
comes blazing out at you, a twisting, writhing bundle of filaments ranging across half the sky.
The Torvil Anfract. The first time I saw it, I couldn't have moved a muscle to save my ship. See, I knew very well that it was all a natural phenomenon, a place where creation happened to take space-time and whop it with a two-by-four until it got so chaotic and multiply-connected that it didn't know which way was up. That didn't make any difference. I was frozen, stuck to the spot like a Sproatley smart oyster, and about as capable of intelligent decision-making.
Now, do you think it's possible that somebody else saw that wriggling snake's nest of tendrils, and was frozen to the spot like me? And they gave the Anfract a different name—like, maybe, Medusa. And then they went
backward
ten thousand years, and because they couldn't get it out of their mind, they talked about what they'd seen to the folks in a little Earth bar on the tideless shore of the wine-dark Aegean?
That's theory, or if you prefer it, daydreaming. It's fair to ask, what's
fact
about the Anfract?
Surprisingly little. All the texts tell you is that ships avoid the area, because the local space-time structure possesses "dangerous natural dislocations and multiple connectivity." What they never mention is that even the
size
of the region is undefined. Ask how much mass is contained within the region, and no one can tell you. Every measurement gives a different answer. Measure the dimension by light-speed crossing, and it's half a light-year. Fly all around it, a light-year out, and it's a little over a six-light-year trip, which is fine, but fly around it
half
a light-year out, and it's only a one-light-year journey. That would suggest that near the Anfract, π = 1 (which doesn't appeal too much to the mathematicians).
I didn't make any measurements, and I hardly know how to spell multiple connectivity. All I can tell is what I saw when I got close to the Anfract, flew around it, and tried to stare inside it.
I say
tried
. The Anfract won't let you look at anything directly. There's planets inside there—you can sometimes see them, because now and again there's a magnifying-lens effect in space that brings you in so close you can watch the clouds move downside and on a clear day you can count the mountains on the surface. Then that same planet, while you're watching, will dwindle to a little circle of light, and then split, so you find that you're looking at a dozen or a hundred of them, swimming in space in regular formation.
You'll read about that in most books. But there's another effect, too, one that you don't often see and never read about. After you've encountered it, it burns in your mind for the rest of your life and tells you to return to the Anfract again, for one more look.
I call it God's Necklace.
You stare at the Anfract long enough, and a black spot begins to form in the center, a spot so dark that your eyes want to reject its existence. It grows as you watch, like a black cloud over the face of the Anfract (except that you know it must be
inside
, and part of the structure). Finally it obscures two-thirds and more of the whole area, leaving just a thin annulus of bright tendrils outside it.
And then the first bead of the Necklace appears in that dark circle. It's a planet, just as it would appear from a few planetary radii out; and it's a spectacularly beautiful world, misty and glowing. At first you think it must be one of the planets inside the Anfract—except that as the image sharpens and moves you in closer, you realize that it's
familiar
, a world you've seen before somewhere on your travels. You once lived there, and loved it. But before you can quite identify the place it begins to move off sideways, and another world is being pulled in, a second bead on the Necklace. You stare at that, and it's just as familiar, and even more beautiful than the first one; a luscious, fertile world whose fragrant air you'd swear you can smell from way outside its atmosphere.
While you're still savoring that planet and trying to remember its name, it, too, begins to move off, pulled out of sight along the Necklace. No matter. The world that draws in after it is even better, the world of your dreams. You once lived there, and loved there, and now you realize that you never should have left. You slaver over it, wanting to fly down to it
now
, and never leave.
But before you can do so, it, too, is sliding out of your field of view. And what replaces it makes the last planet seem nothing but a pale shadow world . . .
It goes on and on, as long as you can bear to watch. And at the end, you realize something dreadful. You never, in your whole life, visited any one of those paradise worlds. And surely you never will, because you have no idea where they are, or
when
they are.
You pull yourself together and start your ship moving. You decide that you'll go to Persephone, or Styx, or Savalle, or Pelican's Wake. You tell yourself that you'll forget all about the Anfract and God's Necklace.
Except that you won't, no matter how you try. For in the late night hours, when you lie tight in the dark prison of your own thoughts, and your heart beats slow, and all of life feels short and pointless, that's when you'll remember, and yearn for one more drink at the fountain of the Torvil Anfract.
Your worse fear is that you'll never get to make the trip; and that's when you lie sleepless forever, aching for first light and the noisy distractions of morning.

—from
Hot Rocks, Warm Beer, Cold Comfort:
Jetting Alone Around The Galaxy
; by
Captain Alonzo Wilberforce Sloane (Retired)

The
Erebus
was a monster, more like a whole world than a standard interstellar ship. Unfortunately, its appetite for power matched its huge size.

Darya sat in one of the information niches off the main control room, her eyes fixed on two of several hundred displays.

The first showed the total available energy in the vessel's central storage units.

Down, down, down.

Even when nothing seemed to be happening, the routine operation and maintenance of the ship sent the stored power creeping toward zero.

But normal operation was nothing compared to the power demands of a Bose Transition. For something as massive as the
Erebus
, each transition
guzzled
energy. They had been through one jump already. Darya had watched in horror as the transition was initiated and the onboard power readout flickered to half its value.

Now they were sucking in energy from the external Bose Network, in preparation for another transition. And that energy supply was far from free. Darya switched her attention to the second readout, one specially programmed to show
finance
, not engineering. It displayed Darya's total credit—and it was swooping down as fast as the onboard power of the
Erebus
went up. Three or four jumps like the last one, and she would be as flat broke as the rest of the group.

She brooded over the falling readout. It was a pretty desperate situation, when a poor professor at a research institute turned out to be the
richest
person on board. If she had been of a more paranoid turn of mind, she might have suspected that she had been invited along on this trip mainly to bankroll it. Julian Graves had used all his credit to buy the
Erebus
. E.C. Tally was a computer, albeit an embodied one, and owned nothing. J'merlia and Kallik had been penniless slaves, while Hans Rebka came from the Phemus Circle, the most miserably poor region of the whole spiral arm. The exception should have been Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial; but although they
talked
about their wealth, every bit of it was on Nenda's ship, the
Have-It-All
, inaccessible on far-off Glister. At the moment they were as poor as everyone else.

Darya glanced across to the main control console, where Louis Nenda was all set to take them into their second jump. They were just one Bose Transition away from the region of the Torvil Anfract; one jump would leave them with comfortably enough power for the return journey.

Except that they were not going to make the jump! Louis Nenda had been adamant.

"Not with me on board, you don't." He glared around the circle. "Sure, we been through a lot together, and sure, we always muddle through. That don't mean we take chances with this one. This is the
Anfract
. It's
dangerous
, not some rinky-dink ratbag planet like Quake or Opal."

Which came close to killing all of us, Darya thought. But she did not speak, because Julian Graves was slapping his hands on his knees in frustration.

"But we
have
to go into the Anfract. You heard E.C. Tally's analysis, and I thought you were in agreement with it. There is an excellent chance that the Zardalu cladeworld is hidden within the Torvil Anfract, with living Zardalu upon it."

"I know all that. All I'm saying is we don't go charging in. People have been pokin' around the Anfract for thousands of years—an' most who went in never came out. We need
help
."

"What sort of help?"

"We need an expert. A pilot. Somebody who's been around this part of the arm for a long time and knows it like the back of his chelicera."

"Do you have a candidate?"

"Sure I got one. Why'd you think I'm talking? His name's Dulcimer—an' I'm warning you now, he's a Chism Polypheme. But he knows the arm cold, and he probably needs work. If we want him, we have to go looking. One thing for sure, you won't find him around the Anfract."

"Where will we find him?" Darya had not understood Nenda's warning about Chism Polyphemes, but figured they'd better take one problem at a time.

"Unless he's changed, he'll be sittin' around and soaking up the hot stuff in the Sun Bar on Bridle Gap."

"Can you take us there?"

"Sure." Louis Nenda moved to the main control console. "Bridle Gap, no sweat. Only one jump. If Dulcimer still hangs around in the same place, and if he's broke enough to need work, and if he still has a brain left in his pop-eyed head after he's been frying it for more years than I like to think—well, we should be able to hire him. And then we can all go off together an' get wiped out in the Anfract."