Mission: Tomorrow - eARC

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  The ship had worked. Unlike most human designs, even though fallible humans had put the ship together, often from salvage, it worked the way machines and creatures in space had to work if they were to survive, that is, without a glitch. That nothing malfunctioned was due, as well, to Adrian’s obsession with perfection, with his insistence on checking and rechecking everything. The ship had accelerated at one gravity past the orbits of Mars, of Jupiter, of Saturn, of Uranus, of Neptune, and finally of Pluto, and they had left the Solar System.

  That took thirteen days. Moving beyond the Oort cloud consumed another four hundred days. After a hundred days more of plunging into the abyss—a year and a half of living in enforced proximity to 200 other people, smelling their body odors, hearing their familiar anecdotes, speech patterns, and throat clearings, and eating recycled food—their tempers shortened and their anxieties grew. By that time Jessica Buhler had isolated Cavendish’s program, and they had to fight the temptation to push the button that would put the ship back under their control and maybe cut them off forever from what had started them on this journey.

  “I remember all that,” Adrian said, rubbing his temples. “But what happened then?”

  Behind them the sun had dwindled into just another star, and although the stars were everywhere all the time, they could not escape the feeling of being far from everything that mattered. Then the blankness of space opened a blazing eye and glared at them.

  “It was like a white hole,” Frances said, “suddenly in front of us. . . .”

  Conflicting gravities tugged at their bodies, as if all their loose parts wanted to go in different directions, as if their internal organs were changing places. . . . The glare was blinding. Jessica reached out with a hand that seemed to know what it was doing and slapped off the external viewscreens. The relative darkness was blessed, but the wrenchings continued. If time had existed, the sensations would have seemed to go on forever, but then the twistings and displacements stopped as if they had never been.

  The odor of fear filled the control room.

  “I think we’re in a wormhole,” Adrian said, as if that explained everything.

  “What’s that?” Frances asked. She was seated in one of the chairs in front of a panel that had been useless for control since the ship began moving. Now its readouts were gyrating wildly.

  “Some kind of distortion in space. Physicists have said they could exist, in theory, but nobody has ever seen one.”

  “What good is a wormhole?” Frances asked.

  “It’s supposed to take us somewhere else,” Adrian said. “We entered one mouth; presumably there’s another somewhere and the two are connected through hyperspace. Physicists thought they would look like black holes but without horizons.”

  “It looks more like a white hole,” Frances said.

  “Some scientists speculated that the relative motion of the wormhole mouths would boost the energy of the cosmic microwave background into visible light and create a kind of intense glare.”

  “Too bad they’ll never know they were right,” Jessica said. She was standing between Adrian and Frances with a hand on the back of each chair.

  “These things, these wormholes, they’re everywhere?” Frances said.

  Adrian shook his head. “Natural wormholes ought to be small and ephemeral. This one was created.”

  “Why would somebody create a wormhole?” Frances asked. She didn’t like anything that she couldn’t connect with something that she had read or seen.

  “To get from one part of the universe to another in a hurry. It may explain why Peter got a message in energetic cosmic rays. Sending a message over interstellar distances would have taken centuries, or millennia if the distances were really great. But if they were emitted from the end of the wormhole near the Solar System, the message would have arrived in less than a year. And whoever is at the other end could have used it to know we were here, maybe even keep track of us.”

  “Surely they couldn’t see anything from here,” Jessica said. “Even the sun looked like just another star.”

  “They might be able to pick up energy transmissions, radio, television, ” Adrian said. “Maybe that’s why they created it in the first place—because we started broadcasting back in the 1920s.”

  “This is so weird,” Frances said. “Who could do something like this?”

  “We couldn’t,” Adrian said. “Creatures far beyond our technical capabilities, maybe. What a physicist named Kip Thorne called ‘an infinitely advanced civilization.’ Damn! There’s no ‘maybe’ about it. They did it, so they could do it.”

  “You said wormholes ought to be ephemeral,” Jessica said. “This one seems to be persisting.”

  “So they not only had to create it,” Adrian said, “they had to keep it from collapsing. Scientists think that would take something they call ‘exotic matter,’ something with negative average energy density, one of whose characteristics would be that it would push the wormhole walls apart rather than letting them collapse.”

  “Like antigravity,” Jessica said.

  “So what does it all mean?” Frances asked.

  “We’re inside something that doesn’t belong to our reality,” Jessica, “and it is going to take us, if we’re lucky, somewhere so far from Earth and our sun that we won’t even be able to identify them in the night sky.”

  “And if we’re not lucky?” Frances asked.

  “We could spend our lives in here,” Jessica said, “or have it collapse with us inside it, which might strand us in hyperspace, if we survived. I think that would be pretty bad.”

  “That’s about it,” Adrian said absently. He was looking at a pad of paper.

  “What’s wrong?” Frances asked. “Besides being lost.”

  Adrian showed them the pad. On it someone had written: make notes.

  “Seems like a good idea,” Frances said.

  “Sure,” Adrian said. “But I didn’t write it. That is, I don’t remember writing it. I remember that I will write it.” He looked confused.

  “I remember that,” Frances said. Her voice was excited. “But it won’t happen—”

  “What’s going on?” Jessica asked.

  Adrian drew a square around the words on his note pad and then constructed a square on each side. “Space is different inside a wormhole. Maybe time is, too. Space and time are part of the same continuum. We may be in for some strange effects. At some point, for instance, I’m going to say ‘It’s as if there is no before and after.’ But that’s wrong. The before may come after the after.”

  “Like remembering what hasn’t happened yet?” Frances said as if she were making a joke.

  “And maybe not remembering what has already happened,” Jessica said.

  “‘It’s a poor sort of memory,’” Frances said, “‘that only works backward.’”

  “Why does it sound like you’re quoting from something?” Jessica asked. “Aside from the fact that you’re always quoting from something.”

  “It’s from Alice in Wonderland,” Frances said. “Or rather from the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, and the reason it comes to mind is that, like Alice, we’ve fallen into a rabbit hole, and in Wonderland everything is topsy-turvy.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to find any answers in children’s stories,” Jessica said.

  “I’ve always found Frances’s fictional precedents helpful,” Adrian said.

  “The point is,” Frances said, “that we’re going to experience something that is likely to make us crazy unless we have something to cling to.”

  “Like what?” Jessica asked skeptically.

  “When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, she encountered talking rabbits and caterpillars that smoked and cats that disappeared and who knows what all. Maybe we’re going to run into the same sorts of things. If we can treat it like a kind of wonderland experience, meeting the strange but not surrendering to it, we can cope.”

  A patter of feet came from beyond the hatchway
that led to the rest of the ship. Frances and Jessica looked at each other and then at Adrian.

  “That sounded like children,” Jessica said.

  “‘Curiouser and curiouser,’” Frances said.

  In the middle of the night Adrian heard a rustling sound and something that sounded like a sigh. He pushed the switch beside his bunk, and overhead light flooded the tiny room. Jessica was standing just inside the open door, one arm out of the body stocking that was all she wore and the other arm halfway removed.

  “What’s going on?” Adrian asked, sitting up so suddenly the room spun around him.

  “I didn’t want to wake you,” Jessica said.

  “I mean, what are you doing in my room?”

  Jessica looked around, as if the question that Adrian had asked was being processed. “I don’t know. It seemed—natural,” she said. “But now I can’t remember why.”

  Adrian looked at the portions of Jessica’s body that had been revealed: the smoothness of her skin and the curvature of what seemed, under most circumstances, athletic and slender. It was as if he was seeing her for the first time as a woman instead of a member of the crew.

  “It’s this damned wormhole,” Jessica said, shrugging her arms back into the body stocking and closing the top with one stroke of her right hand.

  But it wasn’t the same as it had been before. Maybe it was because he had no imagination, Adrian thought, or maybe because his imagination was focused on distant goals, but now that he had seen Jessica as a woman it was difficult to see her as anything else. But he would, he knew; the wormhole would see to that.

  “What’s going on in here?” another voice asked from the doorway. It was Frances, solid and square in her pajamas, almost filling the space. The room was so small that she was standing next to Jessica.

  “That’s hard to say,” Adrian replied.

  Frances looked from Adrian to Jessica and back again. “Doesn’t look that difficult to me. If this were a romantic film, the next scene would show lovers springing apart guiltily, or waking up together. If this were a suspense film, they would be plotting some kind of caper. If it were a mystery, one would be planning to kill the other.”

  “It’s a farce,” Adrian said.

  “People wandering into each other’s rooms without any reason and finding themselves in embarrassing circumstances,” Jessica said.

  None of this eased Frances’s air of suspicion. “Oh, there’s a reason. There’s always a reason.”

  “You forget our wormhole inversions,” Adrian said. He had his feet planted firmly on the deck.

  “Whatever the problems we’re having with cause and effect,” Frances said, “a midnight meeting doesn’t happen by accident.” She frowned at Jessica as if they were in a contest and Jessica had broken the rules.

  “I admit it looks suspicious,” Jessica said, “but I wasn’t trying to seduce Adrian.”

  Adrian flinched. The deck didn’t seem so firm.

  “It just seemed natural,” Jessica said.

  “Of course it did,” Frances said.

  “You know what I mean. Not something that was planned. God knows we can’t do that inside this damned hole. Just something that seemed as if it had happened before.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Frances said.

  “If it did,” Jessica said.

  “And it didn’t,” Adrian said.

  “You keep out of this,” Frances and Jessica said almost simultaneously.

  Adrian looked from one to the other. Frances started laughing. “You look like Cary Grant in The Awful Truth.” Then her expression sobered. “We really need to come to an understanding.”

  “I know,” Jessica said. “If we get out of this place, we’re going to need children.”

  “They don’t have to be his,” Frances said. “There’s lots of other men.”

  “We can’t afford to waste any genetic material,” Jessica said. “Chances are we’ll never get back. Or if we get back, it may be in the remote past or the distant future. We may be all that’s left of the human species. All of space-going humanity anyway.”

  “That’s as may be,” Frances says. “But what’s to say I couldn’t have children.”

  “No reason you couldn’t,” Jessica said. She put her arm around Frances’s shoulder. “We’ve got doctors and we downloaded to our computers all the medical information available. Your uterus might not be up to the pregnancy bit, but your ova may well be harvestable.”

  “Thanks,” Frances said. “But there’s the emotion part.”

  Jessica hugged Frances harder. “We’re going to have to get over that part. There’s too much at stake.”

  Frances smiled and put her hand over Jessica’s. “That’s settled then. I’m glad we had this talk.”

  Jessica smiled back. “Me, too. I just wish we could remember it later.”

  Adrian looked from one to the other. “Wait a minute! What’s going on here?”

  “None of your business,” Jessica and Frances said together.

  “Come on, now,” Adrian said, feeling confused and maybe frightened. “You’re disposing of me like a prize cow—”

  “Bull,” Frances said.

  “And you say it’s none of my business?”

  Frances reached over and patted Adrian’s hand. “Don’t worry! It will all work out. You take care of getting us out of here. We’ll take care of the social arrangements.”

  Adrian looked from one woman to the other. “How are we going to get out of here?”

  “You’ll figure something out,” Jessica said.

  From outside the tiny captain’s quarters came the sound of children’s voices raised in some kind of game, but when Frances turned and Adrian reached the door, the corridor outside was empty.

  When Adrian entered the control room, someone was seated in the chair that faced the prime computer station. That wasn’t unusual—or at least it wouldn’t have been unusual if the usual had existed as a comparison. What was unusual was that the head was familiar, and it should have been back in Earth orbit or, by now, back on Earth. But everything operated by different rules inside the wormhole, and the key to sanity was not trying to apply rules appropriate to normal existence. The person wasn’t computing; it seemed to be reading a book.

  “Peter,” Adrian said. “What are you doing here?”

  The chair turned. The person was Cavendish without a doubt, looking as real as Adrian, as solid as Adrian. “Same thing you’re doing,” Cavendish said. “Trying to find a way out of here.”

  “We left you back in Earth orbit,” Adrian said reasonably.

  “I remember that, too,” Cavendish said. “Yet here I am.”

  “I don’t think so,” Adrian said. “I think you’re some kind of illusion.” He took a step toward Cavendish as if to confirm the existence of the other man by touching his shoulder.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Cavendish said.

  “Why not?”

  “If your hand passes through me, you’re going to think your mind is going. If you find out I’m solid, that I’m really here, you’re going to question your grasp on reality.”

  “You’re the one who’s supposed to be paranoid.”

  “And I’m not worried?” Cavendish shrugged. “Maybe that means I’m not really here. Or that what’s here isn’t really me.”

  Adrian went to the captain’s chair, sat down, and swung around to face Cavendish. “Why are you here?”

  “Things haven’t worked out, have they?”

  “That depends on what things you’re talking about. The ship took us to this wormhole. That worked out. I gather that you programmed that into the computer.”

  “I just downloaded that part of the message.”

  “The part you didn’t tell us about.”

  Cavendish shrugged. “It wasn’t something I could share without creating crises of decision.”

  “So you made the decision for us.”

  “I didn’t know that it would take the ship
here. All I knew was that this was what the aliens wanted.”

  “They could have wanted to blow us up,” Adrian said.

  “If they didn’t want us out here in spaceships, they wouldn’t have sent the designs. It would have been a sorry joke to send the designs, with the anti-matter technologies and everything, and have a few humans spend years building a ship just to destroy us.”

  “Then why didn’t you come along?” Adrian asked.

  Cavendish shivered. “You see? I am paranoid after all. I was afraid to go and afraid not to go. I was afraid not to have answers and afraid of the answers I might get. But I had to get some answers, even if only by proxy, and the only way any answers would emerge—although I would never know what they were—was by sending you to get them.”

  “Thanks,” Adrian said.

  “They were your answers, too,” Cavendish said.

  “Okay,” Adrian said. “What hasn’t worked out, then?”

  “The wormhole. Passage should be instantaneous. But the ship is still inside.”

  “If we knew what ‘still’ meant. Time doesn’t exist as we know it, in the wormhole. We’ve found that out, though it’s hard to remember. So whatever is happening, in whatever order, or no order at all, may be happening in the instant we went into the wormhole and the following instant we emerge from it.”

  “On the other hand,” Cavendish said, “this may be a test.”

  “What kind of test?”

  “A test of sapience. Like we test rats in mazes. Maybe picking up the alien message was a test, and deciphering it was another, and getting to build the ship was a third, and building it so that it worked was another. This wormhole may be our maze, and if we don’t do anything we may never get out.”

  “And if we get out,” Adrian said, “what’s our prize?”

  “That’s the big question, isn’t it? That’s what drove me into the protection of psychosis in the first place. Maybe the prize is a bit of cheese—or what cheese represents to a rat.”