Further: Beyond the Threshold

by Chris Roberson

  “Don’t let me keep you, Captain,” Arluq said, with a wave of one enormous hand. “I’ll be around if you want to tour the interior later on.”

  “Thanks,” I said, glancing up longingly at the familiar shape looming over us. “I’d like that.”

  The escort navigated me through the crowd, and in a few steps, we came to the group it had indicated.

  The three women, who appeared to be of Asian ancestry, looked to be about twenty-five years old. They were completely identical, more alike than twins, each with the same face and build, the same height of 1.5 meters tall, the same dark hair and brown eyes.

  “Ah, the legendary Captain Stone,” one of the women said as I approached. “So nice to meet you in person.” She stuck out her hand, a gesture I’d not seen since waking, and as I shook it, she said, “I’m Jida Shuliang.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, and turned to the woman at her side. “And you are?”

  The three women looked at one another, smiling slightly.

  “Jida Shuliang is a legion,” the eagle on my shoulder said out loud, “a distributed consciousness, the longest-established and most stable in the Entelechy.”

  I looked from one woman to another to another. “Distributed? So you’re all—”

  “I am Jida Shuliang,” all three women said in unison. One of them grabbed a drink from a passing tray, and another’s attention drifted to the side of the room, but the third continued to speak to me, a slightly bemused expression on her face. “I first expanded my mind through more than one body in T3017, connected via primitive cortical implants. My original body expired after only a few centuries, naturally, but I’ve continued to use that original as a template when fabricating new bodies ever since.”

  “A single mind in a series of identical bodies?” This was a bit difficult to take on board.

  “Well, as identical as possible. I tweak the design as necessary, of course, with Jida residents on methane-breathing worlds, or high-gravity planets, or habitats kept only a few degrees above absolute zero, but I retain as much of the original morphology as is feasible.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  The Jida with the drink smiled slyly, but the one to whom I’d been speaking only looked at me in mock derision. “Captain Stone,” she scolded playfully, “that is an extremely personal question. Still…” She paused, and the Jida whose attention appeared to have drifted to the other side of the room slowly licked her lips. “Perhaps someday you’d like to visit me on my planetoid home of Tian Bao Jun? I could show you a few more of myself, and in exchange, I’d love to hear more about your life in the Information Age. I’m always so hungry for new information and new experiences.”

  “Begging your pardon, Madam Jida, but isn’t that precisely why we’re all here?”

  It was one of the two smaller figures that had spoken, with whom the three Jida had been talking earlier.

  “Captain Stone,” one of the Jida said, indicating the two with a nod, “may I present Hu Grimnismal and Mu Grimnismal.”

  The two were alike enough to be brothers, and the fact that they shared a name suggested that they were. They stood about a meter tall, covered in fine black feathers, with flexible beaks at the center of their round faces capable of forming a surprisingly large range of complex sounds.

  “A pleasure,” I said, inclining my head, hoping the escort would feed me more useful information.

  “The brothers Grimnismal are corvids,” whispered the voice of the escort in my left ear, failing to disappoint, “sentients derived from uplifted terrestrial birds of the order corvidae.”

  “My brother and I,” one of the two said, though whether Hu or Mu I couldn’t say, “have proposed a new type of exotic matter with negative mass, you should know. It will revolutionize society, more than any discovery since the establishment of the first threshold.”

  The corvid’s tone was boastful, and perhaps a little smug.

  “Provided, of course,” one of the Jida said, “that such a thing actually exists.”

  “Oh, it exists, Madam Jida,” the other corvid said, rankling. “And those who contribute to the Further fund will be the direct beneficiaries, you can count on it.”

  “Just what is the purpose of the fund, if you don’t mind me asking?” I said, but before anyone could answer, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  I turned, and behind me stood the chimpanzee Maruti, dressed in a purple tuxedo and tails, standing with a woman whose face was so familiar but so out of context that it took me a moment to place it.

  “Hello, RJ,” said Amelia Apatari, the pilot of Wayfarer One. “Did you miss me?”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Amelia, looking as though she hadn’t aged a day since we first boarded Wayfarer One, stood wearing a simple but elegant evening dress, hale and hearty. Considering that she’d either been a moldering corpse or a pile of dust only a day and a half before, her appearance was unexpected, to say the least.

  “A-Amelia?” I barely managed. “But…how?”

  Suddenly, my old, idle imaginings about Amelia becoming much more than a trusted colleague and friend flooded back to me. Looking from her smooth and unwrinkled skin to my gnarled and ancient hands, though, I knew that the days when we might have played Adam and Eve had long since passed.

  “Oh, it was simple enough,” Maruti said, taking a sip from the cocktail in one hairy paw, a cigar held in the other. “I was able to recover the majority of your crewmate’s consciousness and memory from her remains and then simply reinstantiated her in virtuo. That took only a matter of moments. I gave her a choice of destinies, so of course, she chose the most time-consuming option.”

  “At first, I couldn’t believe it,” Amelia said, her voice tinged with wonder. “I thought I was dreaming in my coffin sleeper.”

  “I’ll admit, I accelerated her clock time a bit, to speed her reaction time along, but the decision was her own, naturally.”

  “Dr. Maruti said that I could continue to exist as what he called a digital incarnation or that I could be downloaded into any sort of body I wished. Organic, synthetic, any shape or size.”

  “I had some interesting ideas in the way of morphology,” Maruti said wistfully, “but in the end, the patient insisted on the traditional model. Using DNA recovered from her remains, I fabricated a new body on a medical fabricant, which took the better part of a day, and then decanted her consciousness into it.”

  I couldn’t help but smile, a huge grin splitting my face ear to ear. “I…I just…” I surged forward and took Amelia in my arms in a big bear hug. “I just can’t believe you’re alive. And young!” Even if we couldn’t be Adam and Eve on some new world together, at least I wouldn’t be alone any longer.

  Maruti scoffed, “Well, if you hadn’t persisted in refusing medical treatment all this time, you could have been any age you chose by now. If you’d just consent to a few simple procedures, I can roll the clock back as far as you like.”

  I gaped.

  “But then…” I looked from the chimpanzee to Amelia, who beamed up at me. Suddenly, my idle fantasies of romance didn’t see quite so idle. I turned to the eagle perched on my shoulder. “Surely, this is the surprise, right?”

  Before the escort could answer, a chime sounded across the ballroom, and a podium rose up above the crowd, the one-eyed Amazon named Zel i’Cirea standing behind it.

  “No,” the escort said quietly as Zel began to speak, “but I think the surprise should be revealed at any moment.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “Honored sentients, citizens of the Entelechy, thank you for joining us here today,” Chief Executive Zel i’Cirea began. “As many of you know, I don’t consider the Further project merely a commercial enterprise. Ours is a superculture founded on the principle of exploration, as humanity in all its various forms and guises has spread life throughout this portion of the galaxy. But in the last few thousand years, the expansion of life into space has slowed to a crawl. Even when the drudgery o
f discovering habitable worlds is left to automated probes, terraforming efforts are delegated to subsentient processors, and threshold termini are dragged into place by unmanned tugs over the course of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of years. Still, so many of us consider it too much a bother to build new worlds and instead travel the threshold network to established worlds, to safe worlds, to familiar worlds.

  “Time and again, I hear the voices of those who say that life in the Entelechy has become staid, boring, routine. The Exode probe Xerxes, who has graciously consented to join us today, has exhausted the novelty of our existence in a matter of a few hundred years. Jida Shuliang herself has told me that even her endlessly various existence has become predictable, with few surprises left to her.

  “I won’t lie to you. When we first completed work on the prototype for the Further project in T8881, my primary motivations were of commercial gain. The fortune of my Pethesilean sisters and I rests almost entirely on the product of the cosmic string mine, which provides the negative matter necessary to create and sustain the thresholds that bind our civilization together. The promise of an efficient and sustainable faster-than-light vessel, one that could seek out as yet unknown materials, perhaps even the exotic matter proposed by the brothers Grimnismal, would mean an immeasurable increase in our fortunes. Others of us have their own motivations, perhaps equally as selfish. The Demiurgists wish to prove their doctrine is an incontrovertible fact, while the Ordinators likewise seek evidence of their own beliefs.

  “But perhaps it takes the return of Wayfarer One and Captain Ramachandra Jason Stone after so many millennia to rekindle a spirit of exploration in the Entelechy and to remind us of the other, more important benefits voyages of discovery promise.

  “Now, as most of you are aware, our first practical application of the polarizable vacuum principle, the metric engineering prototype, was unable to reach velocities above one-quarter c, but it was successfully able to maintain its ‘bubble’ of distorted space for one and a half days.” Zel motioned, and the ceiling of the room suddenly seemed to disappear.

  The escort, whispering in my ear, explained that the ceiling was constructed of smart matter, reconfigured into transparent diamond with a refraction index approaching zero, allowing everyone in the ballroom to see the heavens above, but knowing how the trick had been done didn’t make it any less impressive.

  More impressive still, though, was the craft now visible beyond the ceiling. Hovering overhead was a flattened hemisphere surmounting an eight-pointed star; it wasn’t large and could have easily fitted inside the ballroom itself.

  “With the successful completion of the prototype, work began on the full-sized model.” Zel paused dramatically. “It has taken nearly one hundred years, but work on the Further nears completion, requiring only the necessary funds to finish the work.”

  Zel signaled again, and this time the floor of the room also went transparent. I wasn’t the only one to get a quick sense of vertigo, and I saw the two corvid brothers clutch at each other’s arms in a momentary panic.

  “Below us,” Zel continued, “in the hollowed-out core of the planet, you see the Ouroboros shipyards themselves. And there, just beneath our feet, is the unfinished hull of the starship Further.”

  Suspended in the weightless center of the hollow planet hung the skeleton of a spherical starship some two kilometers in diameter. Robotic drones jetted around the structure, carrying pieces into place, welding others together.

  “Inspired by the return of Wayfarer One and her captain, I invite all of you present and in the sound of my voice to contribute to the Further fund. Together, we will journey to the unknown stars, not only in the pursuit of our own commercial interests, but in the interests of humanity’s very future.”

  All around the room heads began to nod, while others exchanged meaningful glances. The escort explained, whispering in my ear, that many in the crowd were communicating subvocally via interlink, sending and receiving messages without even speaking out loud.

  At her podium, surveying the crowd, Chief Executive Zel smiled, a satisfied expression on her face. It seemed that her speech, as overblown as it may have been, had gotten the desired effect. As for me, I kept moving my gaze from the compass rose–shaped ship overhead to the looming skeletal sphere beneath my feet. A faster-than-light ship? Was it even possible?

  Suddenly, a murmur rippled through the crowd, and several people around me even gasped. Whatever was being communicated noiselessly over the interlinks, it had come as a surprise.

  “This…” Zel began, visibly distressed, “this is…an unexpected…” She stopped, straightened, and went on, her tone strained. “I am, of course, happy to announce that we have received the necessary amount of power to complete construction and to equip the craft”—she glanced toward the threshold just as a translucent image of a human-headed lion appeared on the transparent ballroom floor—“thanks to the last-moment contribution of the Plenum, who now hold,” she paused, swallowing hard, “a majority share of the fund.”

  The man-lion stepped forward, and the crowd parted, thoughtfully stepping out of the way before the holographic image passed through them.

  “Thank you, Chief Executive Zel,” boomed the Voice of the Plenum in unaccented Information Age English. “The Plenum is pleased to take part in this historic venture.”

  Zel’s gaze shifted uneasily, and she seemed thoughtful for a moment, as though framing her next words carefully. “And will you exercise your right to provide a portion of the ship’s crew?”

  “Yes,” the man-lion said serenely, “but the Plenum has chosen as its sole representative among the crew Captain Ramachandra Jason Stone.”

  Applause rippled through the room, but Zel stood stock still, her mouth hanging open.

  “What…?” I managed.

  Maruti rushed over to me, lips curled back and mouth open in a chimpanzee grin, raising his glass in a salute. “Congratulations, Captain! I can think of no one better suited to command such a fine vessel.”

  “Command?” Confused, I turned to the eagle perched on my shoulder.

  “That, sir, is the surprise.”

  PART TWO

  TWENTY-SIX

  They were on us before we knew they were there, and by then it was too late. The initial attack put us on the defensive, our mantles rendered completely rigid and almost entirely opaque, all of us momentarily trapped and immobile inside our protective individual shells, unable even to return fire. They disarmed us quickly, relieving us of our wrist-mounted projectors and taking my cap gun from its holster. By the time our mantles regained flexibility, we were surrounded, strange weapons trained on us. Our interlinks struggled to translate their archaic language, broadcast to us over the radio waves, but the dead sun circling overhead peppered their transmissions with static so that we received only an incoherent string of hate and scorn.

  But that was later, the end of one mission and the beginning of another. It had started so simply, without incident, that I fooled myself into thinking it would all be that easy. I should have known it was too good to last.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I held the small diamond case Amelia had given me, fingers wrapped tightly around it, the edges pressing sharply into the palm of my hand. The bag over my shoulder contained all of my worldly possessions, such as they were—cap gun, handheld, Space Man action figure, clothing, etc. The escort, when we’d parted company on Earth, had insisted that there was no reason for me to take along anything that wasn’t of sentimental value, since I could simply dispose of the clothing and such and then have new copies fabricated to the same specifications whenever needed. I was too much the child of my father to ever agree to that. It just felt inexcusably wasteful.

  Stepping through the threshold from Central Axis, I’d been met by a representative of the shipyards who quickly ushered me to another threshold, whose other terminus was a short distance away, on a space station in a geosynchronous orbit above Ouroboros. The station rotated t
o provide a near-one-standard gravity, and as the view through the ports swept by, I caught my first sight of the starship Further in a parking orbit only minutes away, final preparations for its departure being made.

  A tug was waiting to carry me the last leg of my journey, and as the shipyard rep and I launched, leaving behind the centrifugal pull of the station and plunging into the slightly queasy transition to weightless free fall, I was reminded of the last time I’d boarded a new command, before Wayfarer One left Sol behind. The shipyard rep may have been making some kind of small talk, but I wasn’t paying any attention. My thoughts were divided on the huge ship slowly heaving into view in front of me, and on the woman I’d left behind.

  The main body of the Further was a sphere two kilometers in diameter, and from the equator of this sphere, a disc extended another kilometer. It resembled nothing so much as a child’s drawing of a ringed planet, and I was reminded of the emblems stamped on all the antique library books my grandfather had brought to India from the United States, used to indicate that the contents were science fiction. I’d hoped to be enjoying this view, my first of the nearly completed vessel, with Amelia, but only a short while before had learned that wasn’t to be possible.

  Amelia had met me in Central Axis, near the Ouroboros threshold, as we’d planned, but where I was packed and ready to ship out on board my new command, as strange and unlikely as that seemed, she clearly had no such intention.

  She’d tried to explain, something about whole worlds in the Entelechy for her to explore before she set off to find new ones, but little of it registered with me at the time. All I heard was, “I’m not going with you,” echoing over and over again in my ears. It felt like a cruel trick of fate, to have her returned to me, the promise of a life with her finally within my grasp, only to have it ripped away for good.

  I didn’t know what was in the small case she’d given me, and hardly cared at the moment. Some little consolation prize, some little token of her esteem, but whatever it was, I knew it couldn’t fill the Amelia-shaped hole her sudden departure (so soon after her unexpected return) had left in my life. She’d been my only living connection to my life in the 22C, but faced with the choice of exploring the unknown at my side or exploring the thousands of worlds of her new home, I’d clearly come up short.