by Janet Morris
But here he was, ready or not, swallowed like Jonah by an alien craft that none of the Secretariat's intelligence personnel, ConSpaceCom's rocket scientists, or the Stalk's astronics wizards had understood well enough to even recognize as a craft.
So he focused on South, a nice, comprehensible, three-dimensional object in a sea of optical illusions, surrounded by shapes that flickered and pulsed into and out of focus, as if South were standing on the bottom of some planetary sea and curious deep-water jellyfish were drifting over to take a look at the invader, rub up against him, dart away, and glide close on invisible currents.
Sometimes the creatures pulsed lights in a Morse code or alien ballet, and then you couldn't see much of South— maybe an arm, maybe a foot. Or just his helmet. South still had his helmet on his head.
Reice wiped his eyes with the heel of one hand. The liquid coming from his eyes was sticky, not like the salty tears of good old human emotion, more like some protective fluid generated to ward off eyestrain. Or blindness.
He depressed the ship's allcom toggle and closed his burning eyes. "South, do you read me? It's Reice." That was stupid. Who else could it have been, calling from STARBIRD?
"Yeah, Reice," came South's voice through STARBIRD's speaker grilles. "Ready to come out? You're missing all the fun."
Reice didn't need to open his eyes to see the strange shapes moving around South at the "command station," as South called the place where he stood. The alien shapes, or beings, were all over him. Nuzzling him. Caressing him. Or trying to find a way inside his spacesuit.
Reice's skin crawled. Damn, why had Reice called the Relic pilot, anyhow? He could have sat this mission out, safe and sound. All he'd wanted was a little reassurance that South was okay. Now, South was challenging him....
"Don't look like fun from here, Commander. I was never much for the zoo. But if you need help out there, I'll be glad to lend a hand." Was South actually trying to signal Reice that he needed help? Reice's hand dropped to his A-potential side arm. He was armed and dangerous in anybody's spacetime. If South was in some kind of trouble, Reice was duty-bound to go out there and do what he could to help.
"A helping hand wouldn't be a bad idea," came South's response, all banter and bravado. "We're going to be underway in a soontime minute. You really ought to come on out."
Reice was on his way. Helmet. Gloves. Systems check. Exterior life-support module over his shoulders. He checked the EVA-pack in STARBIRD's lock corridor twice, before he'd trust it to feed him oxygen and monitor his physiological well-being through the old-style pharmakit. Sling may have retrofitted this bucket of bolts, but he'd kept to the spirit of the period.
As Reice stepped through into the lock, he patted his side arm and loosened it in its holster. Just in case. He pulled down his faceplate and breathed the canned air of the EVA pack. He pulled up a quadranted multi-spectral visor-display with a center-punched hole for realtime imagery, so he could see where the hell he was going. He toggled through his corn-selects until he had an open feed to Birdy, STARBIRD's AI.
He told the AI, "If we have a problem out there, we're going to need to get out, quick. Leave the outer lock open, with a priority emergency cycle so we can move out before you've dumped the local air. Set an exact retrace of your course in here and be ready to execute without human guidance if need be. If we're in the lock, you go. Copy?"
Birdy made the weird processing noises that South had never programmed out of her, because he was a solo pilot on a long mission and he needed the company.
The AI said: "Clarification, please. Go where?"
Dumb piece of outmoded technology. The light around Reice was green. Now that he was going out there, he wanted to haul ass, not lounge around talking go-to-shit plans with an artificial semi-intelligent astrogation module.
"Clarification follows," Reice told it, trying to be precise and neutral. No use wasting exasperation on an AI. They just got confused. "If both of us people reenter this lock, close the outer lock immediately. Don't wait for human guidance. Blow the local air. Set course to retrace exactly the course that got us here. Navigate out of the Ball and back to the BLUE TICK'S orbit without additional orders. If the Ball won't open to let you out, ram your way out. Clarification understood?"
Birdy burbled.
Reice hit the plate to open the outer lock and the local atmosphere, wispy and misty, poured inside.
Reice could barely see his lower body through his realtime punch window. That was okay. Infrared gave him a good idea where the step-down ramp was.
When Birdy's voice in his helmet said, "Confirmed: Clarification understood," Reice nearly jumped out of his skin.
"Terrific," he muttered, toggling to include South in his comlink.
"What's that?" South whispered in his ear, sounding distracted.
"Ready or not, Southie baby, here I come, soon as I can find my way through this steambath."
"I'll send somebody for you—"
Somebody? "No, that's okay. I can see you. It looks flat enough on my infrared. So if I come straight—"
"Christ, Reice, there's no such thing as 'straight,' not the way you mean. Just stay put. A steward will come to get you."
"Gee, thanks. I can't wait." A steward? Reice almost turned around, climbed the step-ramp he knew was behind him, and barricaded himself in STARBIRD for the duration. But then South would know he was a coward.
And Reice couldn't stand that. South already knew exactly why Reice had parked BLUE TICK under the Ball's anus. So he figured his reputation was at stake.
He just hadn't realized how big those plasma shuttle things were, or how close he'd be to one of their heaving sides. Was it really breathing?
He reached out a gloved hand to touch the nearest one, but as he got close to what he thought was its skin, a bunch of lights started to snake off his fingers, as if he was discharging electrical energy. He pulled his hand back and cradled it, moving one finger at a time. Felt okay.
When he looked up, something was hovering in the mist before his face. It looked like a giant gelatinous tektite with eyes and a mouth, and it was glowing slightly in different places along its surface, as if it were becoming more solid here and there as he watched.
It extended a part of its substance, and the protuberance reshaped itself into an uncanny mock-up of a human hand, which beckoned. Reice was really sorry he'd decided to come out here.
He sidestepped to avoid contact with it. "Lead on, my man," he said fliply, toggling his exterior speaker so it could hear him.
It was already moving forward. Or spiraling upward. Its head, or its eyes, anyway, never left him. no matter what its body did. As for Reice, he found that if he looked at his infrared quadrant, he seemed to be stepping on thin air. So he didn't look at it. He kept his eyes on the eyes of the steward and walked up some spiral ramp that didn't read on any of his signature viewers.
Neat trick.
Eventually, they meandered over—or up—to South, who seemed to be standing on a level platform.
South's helmet inclined slightly. "Good to have you on board."
Where the hell had Reice been before? Wasn't STARBIRD "on board" this thing? "What's the trouble?" Reice asked bluntly, taking a quick peek over his shoulder, back the way he'd come. The jellyfish steward still hovered in the mist. Now it was streaming phosphorescent tentacles that sparkled and swayed. Behind it, he could see STAR-' BIRD, nestled in the slipbay between two oval-shaped jelly giants that seemed to be snoozing, the way their hulls rose and fell.
"No trouble. I want you to pick a destination. Anyplace you want. This will be the first time a human has ever flown a Unity eleven-space vessel. Most test flights have some preflight parameters. If you specify them, it'll be easier to quantify the results."
Crazy bastard. "I thought you did this all the time, twice before breakfast."
"Uh-unh," said South distantly, touching something in front of him that looked like a box of living ribbon candy. "Nobody—no spacetim
er—has ever flown one of these babies. I can handle a shuttlecraft okay in certain modes, but those modes didn't include maintaining a four-dimensional set of criteria."
"You mean this could get dangerous?"
"Nah, if I screw up, one of the plasma astrogators will take over. We just need to find out if it can be done this way, or whether we'll violate some local laws too violently by trying to take this craft into notime—into spongespace, if you like—while maintaining both a forward moving arrow and an alltime link."
"Speak English, South. What if we can't do this whatcha-macallit jump? What happens then?"
South's helmet dipped his way. The voice in Reice's ears didn't sound crazy, but the words didn't make astrogational sense to Reice.
South said, "Reice, this is an interdimensional craft. It can manifest in any spacetime you say, no problem. It can move through interstitial or collapsed dimensions, if it wants to. The question is, can we? If we're going to fly it realtime, find the Threshold flotilla, and steady the Stalk's jump into the energy sea and out again, then we've got to be sure that we don't generate any unintended discontinuities."
"Unintended discontinuities," Reice said numbly. Creating discontinuities by putting matter where it didn't belong meant huge discharges of energy, especially when nonstandard matter crossed boundary conditions meant to separate different spacetimes following different sets of laws. When you collected antimatter molecules, one at a time, the only thing that kept them stable in your universe was the electromagnetic storage vessel you put them in, which had an equal charge pushing the antimatter molecules together and keeping a pure vacuum between the antimatter and the matter of the containment vessel. "The universe I grew up in, South, doesn't like unintended discontinuities one bit," Reice said.
"The universe we all grew up in was created—is created—from discontinuities, Reice. That's one thing I've learned. Don't sweat it. We'll take one interdimensional short hop for fun and to establish a baseline. Then we'll see if we can get to the Stalk through spacetime, notime, or however."
Finally, the real import of what South had been saying penetrated Reice's overstimulated brain. "You're telling me that the Threshold jump is in trouble? That's the problem?"
"I'm telling you we've got permission to go see if we can assist the Threshold spacetimers en route, yeah. The Unity can't do it directly: you need biologically-synced spacetimers—us—to find Threshold and its outriders in the notime and help them navigate through it without losing outriding craft—or clocktime."
"Nobody's going to find anybody in spongespace who doesn't go in together," Reice said with finality, trying to keep the horror out of his voice. What was this fool saying?
South's fingers were stroking the incomprehensible colored ribbons of the control station. His helmeted head turned away from Reice, then back, as if he were looking inside Reice's helmet.
"Wanna bet? That's why we brought STARBIRD— and you—to establish a baseline for clocktime, or realtime. Me, I just want to fly this sucker. If you've lost your nerve, go back and sit in STARBIRD and let Birdy take care of you. She can put you out for the duration of the n-space jump. You don't need to validate the short interdimensional hop. I've been doing fine learning this stuff without help from spacetimers, so far."
"And what are you, buddy, if not a 'spacetimer' just like me?" Reice put his hands on his hips and his right knuckles bumped the side arm in its tie-down holster.
"Easy, Reice. No offense. I'm kind of in transition. It's hard to talk about places you haven't been yet and experiences you haven't had. Watch the third monitor on your left, second tier."
"South!"
But it was too late. Reice's whole body knew it for certain, even thought he felt no vibration or jerk of ignition or g-force or any other sign that the Ball was moving.
The area where South had directed his attention was full of speeding images, colored lights, octagonal grids whirling over embedding diagrams of spacetimes that weren't quite right. And then a place came up in the second tier monitors.
A real place. Reice saw an approach vector and beyond it a planetary horizon half-obscuring a sun's corona. A moon spun by him, receding at an impossible speed. A half-dark planet loomed so that he stuck out his hands to grab something. Handholds were under his fingers. He held on hard as they drove straight into atmosphere at a rate that couldn't be possible, then leveled out and skipped along a stratospheric surface.
"Where the hell are we?" Reice breathed.
"Earth," South said. "You didn't give me a destination. I had to have something incontrovertible. You didn't even feel the translation, right?"
What the hell was Reice holding on to? His hands were gripping something resilient, almost like flesh with bone under it. He used all four signature scans to try to identify the material. All he could figure was that it was alive.
He let go fast and wiped his gloved hands on his hips.
"Reice, you okay? You see the Earth, right?"
"Right. I see it. We've just broken half a dozen laws and we're about to get shot out of the sky to boot." Reice kept waiting for ConSpaceCom to come roaring after them, demanding surrender.
"No chance," South chuckled. "We didn't trip any alarms getting here: we came intradimensionally. Only the atmosphere-skipping is phenomenally real for space timers."
"Oh. Well, that's okay then, right? Can we go someplace else, since this worked and we aren't dead?"
"Name it."
"I don't goddamned know what to specify. Let's get out of here before we get hurt. Go save Threshold or something."
South sighed in Reice's comlink. "I always wanted to come home. Now I'm here and there's a chance to look around. Okay, we'll test the notime sync in a minute. First, I want to show you X-3."
X-3 was the planet out to hell and gone from everywhere that South and STARBIRD had found on their experimental sponge-jump in the early days of interstellar spaceflight. When South hadn't returned, the whole mission had been written off—for five hundred years.
"South," Reice said, "I'm not ready—"
But then he was ready. His whole body coruscated as if he were bathing in light. His indrawn breath came out of his lungs in a glowing stream of energy. He leaned back and something supported him, as if the universe itself was cradling him in its arms. Before his eyes, every speeding vista of creation unfurled, endlessly. And stopped.
The second tier monitors showed green fields carpeted with flowers, a soft cloud-banked sky, a city that looked more as if it had been grown than built, and a sea that lapped from the foreground of the viewscreen to a gentle amber shore.
"Want to get out here, verify that we're somewhere new?" South's voice said in Reice's ear. "We've been here nearly an hour on UNE clocktime. Another one won't matter where we're going."
"No. No, I don't." An hour? He couldn't remember the time passing. Then he did, dimly, recall some dreams he might have had, with sweet grass in them, and soft singing crystalline spires around him, and a choir of plasma angels, singing.
What had happened to him? Had he left the ship? Was he back from somewhere? His sequential memory was shot to hell. It was a nice dream, if it had been a dream, of a picnic on a shore with cherubs and plasma dogs fetching living sticks.
He could feel a soft salt spray on his face. But that was impossible. He still had on his helmet. Didn't he?
Reice's whole body felt wrong. His skeleton felt as if it had been dismantled, reconstituted, and was now slightly different than before. His muscles tingled strangely. He could feel the blood coursing in the soles of his feet, his pulse throbbing in his ears, and he imagined he could feel the neural firings of his brain and of his muscles as he rubbed his arms. "We can joyride some more later. Let's finish these tests. Threshold's in trouble, remember?"
"Might be," said South, and when Reice looked over at the pilot, Joe South was wrapped in a pulsing, amber cloak of flesh with veins and spiderwork tracery glowing from it.
"South!" Reice cro
aked.
The thing that dipped its round head toward him was a foot taller than South, a pod shaped from ambergris and filled with milkweed, with South's spacesuit inside it as if the pilot had been embalmed.
Reice grabbed for his side arm without thinking, but his hand couldn't find it. His body, his hand and arms, all of him was cocooned in the same awful manner as South. He started screaming.
The South-thing took a step forward, and Reice tried to run. He couldn't move. He was rooted to the spot. He lunged back and forth in his prison. He couldn't break free.
Gasping for breath, he finally realized South was shouting at him through the allcom. "Don't panic, damn it. You're just inside a different kind of protective suit, for this kind of travel. Stop thrashing, before you hurt yourself!"
Reice couldn't quite stop sobbing. Gasps of breath roared into his lungs and out again. If he could get his A-potential handgun, he could blast this disgusting, sticky stuff off of himself and ...
And then what? Blast South's covering away, as well? Without hurting either of them? Or would he kill South in the process and be marooned here, wherever this was, forever?
He slumped back against the fleshy encasement and it supported him, hugging him close. It was warm in here. At first he thought his suit was trying to cool him, then he realized that the cocoon had grown into his suit, and that tiny tendrils were all over him, against his skin, moist and sticky.
"Christ, South," he said hoarsely, "why didn't you warn me?"
"How was I going to explain it? You're now a veteran of interdimensional travel. It gets better."
"I bet."
"Just wait. When we come back out into spacetime. you'll have a chance to customize your gear by just thinking about the optimum suit system."
"I just want to be able to get at my weapon, that's all" Reice muttered.
The thing in the cocoon next to him said, "Reice, you don't need a weapon. But you do need to be careful what you wish for. These custom-bred astronic systems, and the life support, are real accommodating. Don't build any bogeymen for us, okay? I wouldn't have brought you along if I didn't think you were up to it. Riva Lowe's been this far and she didn't wet her pants."
