Heaven's Reach u-6

by David Brin

  He sensed Rety sitting cross-legged on the floor next to him, her eyes shining in light from the hologram.

  “Forget the Earthers,” she demanded. “Show us where we’re headin’!”

  The display changed, causing Izmunuti and the Jophur frigate to drift out of view. A fuzzy patch moved in from the top edge, slippery to look at. Rows of symbols and numbers flickered alongside — information that might have meant something to his sister but just seemed frightening to Dwer.

  “That’s the … transfer point, right?” Rety asked, her voice growing hushed. “The hole thing that’ll take us to the Five Galaxies?”

  “It is a hole, in a manner of speaking. But this transfer point cannot serve as a direct link out of Galaxy Four — the galaxy we are in — to any of the others. In order to accomplish that, we must follow transition threads leading to some other hyperspatial nexi. Much bigger ones, capable of longer-range jumps.”

  “You mean we’ll have to portage from stream to stream, a few times?” Dwer asked, comparing the voyage to a canoe trip across a mountain range.

  “Your metaphor has some limited relevance. According to recent navigation data, a route out of this galaxy to more populated regions can be achieved by taking a series of five transfers, or three transfers plus two long jumps through A-Level hyperspace, or two difficult transfers plus one A-Level jump and three B-Level cruises, or—”

  “That’s okay,” Rety said, clapping her hands to quiet the machine. “Right now all I want to know is, will we get to the point all right?”

  There followed a brief pause while the machine pondered.

  “I am a teaching unit, not a starship navigator. All I can tell is that our C–Level pseudomomentum appears adequate to reach the periphery of the nexus. This vessel’s remaining marginal power may be sufficient to then aim toward one of the simpler transfer threads.”

  Rety did not have to speak. Her smug expression said it all. Everything was going according to her devious plan.

  But Dwer would not be fooled.

  She may be brilliant, he thought. But she’s also crazier than a mulc spider.

  He had known it ever since the two of them almost died together, months ago in the Rimmer Mountains, seized in the clutches of a mad antiquarian creature called One-of-a-Kind. Rety’s boldness since then had verged on reckless mania. Dwer figured she survived only because Ifni favors the mad with a special, warped set of dice.

  He had no idea what a transfer point was, but it sounded more dangerous than poking a ruoul shambler in the face with a fetor worm.

  Ah, well. Dwer sighed. There was nothing to be done about it right now. As a tracker, he knew when to just sit back and practice patience, letting nature take its course. “Whatever you say, Rety. But now let’s turn the damn thing off. You can show me that food machine again. Maybe we can teach it to give us something better than greasy paste to eat.”

  Harry

  HE RECONFIGURED THE STATION TO LOOK something like a Martian arachnite, a black oval body perched on slender, stalklike legs. It was all part of Harry’s plan to deal with the problem of those transumptive banana peels.

  After pondering the matter, and consulting the symbolic reference archive, he decided the screwy yellow things must be allaphorical representations of short-scale time warps, each one twisting around itself through several subspace dimensions. Encountering one, you would meet little resistance at first. Then, without warning, you’d slam into a slippery, repulsive field that sent you tumbling back toward your point of origin at high acceleration.

  If this theory was true, he’d been lucky to survive that first brush with the nasty things. Another misstep might be much more … energetic.

  Since flight seemed memetically untenable in this part of E Level, the spider morphology was the best idea Harry could come up with, offering an imaginative way to maneuver past the danger, using stilt legs to pick carefully from one stable patch to the next. It would be risky, though, so he delayed the attempt for several days, hoping the anomaly reef would undergo another phase shift. At any moment, the irksome “peels” might just evaporate or transform into a less lethal kind of insult. As long as he had a good view of his appointed watch area, it seemed best to just sit and wait.

  Of course, he knew why a low-class Earthling recruit was assigned to this post. Wer’Q’quinn had said Harry’s test scores showed an ideal match of cynicism and originality, suiting him for lookout duty in allaphor space. But in truth, E Level was unappealing to most oxygen breathers. The great clans of the Civilization of Five Galaxies thought it a quaint oddity at best. Dangerous and unpredictable. Unlike Levels A, B, and C, it offered few shortcuts around the immense vacuum deserts of normal space. Anyone in a hurry — or with a strong sense of self-preservation — chose transfer points, hyperdrive, or soft-quantum tunneling, instead of braving a realm where fickle subjectivity reigned.

  Of course, oxygen breathers only made up the most gaudy and frenetic of life’s eight orders. Harry kept notes whenever he sighted hydros, quantals, memoids, and other exotic types, with their strange insouciance about the passage of time. They don’t see it as quite the enemy we oxy-types do.

  His bosses at the Navigation Institute craved data about those strange comings and goings, though he could hardly picture why. The orders of sapiency so seldom interacted, they might as well occupy separate universes.

  Still, you could hide a lot in all this weirdness, a trait that sometimes drew oxy-based life down here. On occasion, some faction or alliance would try sending a battle fleet through E Space, suffering its disadvantages in order to take rivals by surprise. Or else criminals might hope to move by a secret path through this treacherous realm. Harry was trained to look out for sooners, gene raiders, syntac thieves, and others trying to cheat the strict rules of migration and Uplift. Rules that so far kept the known cosmos from dissolving into chaos and ruin.

  He nursed no illusions about his status. Harry knew this job was just the sort of dangerous, tedious duty the great institutes assigned to lowly clients of an unimportant clan. Yet he took seriously his vow to Wer’Q’quinn and NavInst. He planned to show all the doubters what a neo-chimp could do.

  That determination was put to the test when he roused from his next rest break to peer through the louvered blinds, blinking with groggy surprise at an endless row of serrated green ridges that had erupted while he slept. Undulating sinusoidally across the foreground, they resembled the half-submerged spiny torso of some gigantic, lazy sea serpent that seemed to stretch toward both horizons, blocking his panorama of the purple plane.

  At its slothful rate of passage, several pseudodays might pass before Harry’s view was unobstructed once again. He stared for some time at the coils’ slow rise and fall, wondering what combination of reality and his own mental processes could have evoked such a thing. If a memoid — another self-sustaining, living abstraction — it was huge enough to engulf most of the more modest animated idealizations grazing nearby.

  When a concept grows big enough, does it become part of the landscape? Will it merge with the underpinnings of E Level? Will this “idea” take part in motivating the entire cosmos?

  One thing was for sure, he could hardly survey his assigned area with something like this in the way!

  Unfortunately, the damned banana peels still surrounded his station with a deadly allaphorical minefield. But clearly the time had come to move on.

  The station swayed at first when he tried controlling the stilt legs by hand. Apparently, his spindly tower pushed the limits of verticality in this region, where flight was forbidden by local laws of physics. The structure teetered and nearly fell three times before he started getting the hang of things.

  Alas, he had no option of handing supervision over to the computer. “Pilot mode” was often useless on E Level, where machines could be deaf and blind to allaphors that lay right in front of them.

  “Well, here goes,” he murmured, gingerly navigating the scout platform ahead, r
aising one spidery stem, maneuvering it skittishly past a yellow and brown “peel,” and planting it on the best patch of open ground within reach. Testing its footing, he shifted the station’s center of gravity, transferring more weight forward until it felt safe to try again with another.

  The process was a lot like chess — you had to think at least a dozen moves ahead, for there could be no going back. “Reversibility” was a meaningless term in this continuum, where death might take on the attributes of a physical creature, and entropy was just another predatory concept prowling a savannah of ideas.

  It became a slow, tense process of exertion, tedious and utterly demanding. Harry grew to despise the banana peel symbols, even more than before. He used his hatred to reinforce concentration, picking slowly amid the yellow emblems of slipperiness, knowing that any misstep might send the little scoutship flipping violently toward a gaudy oblivion.

  Somehow — he could tell — the peels sensed his loathing. Their boundaries seemed to shrink a little and solidify under his gaze.

  “We do not require passionless observers for this kind of duty,” Wer’Q’quinn had explained when Harry joined the Observer Corps at Kazzkark Base.

  “There are many others we could choose, whose minds are more disciplined. More detached, cautious, and in most ways more intelligent. Those volunteers are needed elsewhere. But on E Level, we are better served by someone like you.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Harry had replied. “So, are you saying you don’t want me to be skeptical when I’m out on a mission?”

  The squadron leader bowed a great, wormlike head. Rustling segment plates crafted words in ratchety Galactic Five.

  “Only those who start with skepticism can open themselves to true adventure,” Wer’Q’quinn continued. “But there are many types of skeptical outlook. Yours is gritty, visceral. You take things personally, young Earthling, as if the cosmos has a particular interest in your inconvenience. On most planes of reality, that is an egregious error of solipsistic pride. But on E Level, it may be the only appropriate way of dealing with an idiosyncratic cosmos.”

  Harry came away from that interview with oddly mixed feelings — as if he had just received the worst insult — and highest praise — of his life. The effect was to make him more determined than ever.

  Perhaps Wer’Q’quinn had intended that, all along.

  I hate you, he thought at the ridiculous, offensive yellow peels. On some level, they might be neutral twists of space, described by cold equations. But they seemed to taunt him by appearing the way they did, provoking an intimate abhorrence that Harry used to his advantage, piloting around the traps as if each success humiliated a real enemy.

  His body grew sweaty and warm. A musty odor filled the cupola as one tense, cautious hour passed into the next.

  Finally, with a nimble hop, he stepped his spindly vehicle away from the last obstacle, breathing a deep sigh, feeling tired, smelly, and victorious. Perhaps at some level the reef allaphors knew they had lost, for at that moment the “peels” began transforming from yellow and brown starfish forms into another shape, one with curls and spikes.…

  Harry didn’t wait to see what they would become. He ordered the pilot program to hurry away from there.

  It took a while to get past the green “sea monster,” ducking through a gap between two of its slowly undulating coils. The passage made Harry nervous, staring up at portions of that mammoth, living conceptual torso. But then he was free at last to race for open territory. The purple plain swept by as he aimed for the most promising vantage point — a stable-looking brown hillock, too barren and mundane to attract any hungry memoids. A place where he might settle down to watch his assigned patrol zone in peace.

  The prominence lay quite some distance away — several miduras of subjective duration, at least. Meanwhile, the surrounding tableland appeared placid. The few allaphorical beings he did spy moved quickly out of the way. Most types of predatory memes disliked the simplistic scents of metal and other hard stuff intruding from other levels of reality.

  Harry deemed it safe to go below and take a shower. Then, while combing knots out of his fur, he ordered something to eat from the autochef. He considered taking a nap, but found he was still too keyed up. Sleep, under such conditions, would be dream-racked and hardly restful. Anyway, it might be wiser to supervise while the ship was in motion. Pilot mode could not be counted on to notice everything.

  The decision proved fortuitous. He returned upstairs to find his trusty vessel already much closer to its destination than expected. That’s quick progress. We’re already halfway up the hill, he thought, surveying the view from each window. This should offer an ideal surveillance site.

  Several instruments on Harry’s console suddenly began whirring and chirping excitedly. Checking the telltales, he saw that something made mostly of solid matter lay just ahead, over the ridge top. It did not seem to be from any of the other sapiency orders, but showed all the suspicious-familiar signs he was trained to look for in a ship from the Civilization of Five Galaxies.

  Oxies, he realized.

  Gotcha!

  Harry felt a thrill while checking his weapon systems. This was what he had trained for. An encounter with his own kind of life, moving through a realm of space where protoplasmic beings did not belong. He relished the prospect of stopping and inspecting a ship from some highfalutin clan, like the Soro or Tandu. They might even gag on the disgrace of being caught and fined by a mere chimpanzee from the wolfling clan of Terra.

  You aren’t really here to fight, Harry reminded himself as the station’s armaments reported primed and ready.

  Your primary mission is to observe and report.

  Still, he was an officer of the law, empowered to question oxy-beings who passed this way. Anyway, preparing weapons seemed a wise precaution. Scouts often disappeared during missions to E Level. Being attacked by some band of criminals might seem mundane, compared to getting gobbled by a rampant, self-propagating idea … but it could get you just as dead.

  The bogey’s not moving, Harry noted with some surprise. It’s just sitting there, a little beyond the hillcrest. Perhaps they’ve broken down, or run into trouble. Or else …

  Among the worries flashing through his mind was the thought of ambush. The bogey might be lying in wait.

  In fact, though, Harry’s sensors were specially designed for E-Level use, while the interlopers, whoever they were, probably had a starship’s generalized instruments. There was a good chance they hadn’t even detected him yet!

  I might take ’em by surprise.

  And yet, he began rethinking how good an idea that was, as more duras passed and pseudodistance to the target shrank. This’ continuum made most oxy-types edgy. Perhaps trigger-happy. Surprise might be an overrated virtue. Too late, he recalled that the station was still formatted like an arachnite! Spindle-legged and fierce looking as it took giant footsteps. The design offered a good view of his surroundings … and exposed him to crippling fire if things came down to a firefight.

  Well, it’s too late to change now. Ready or not, here we go!

  As he crested the metaphorical hill, Harry triggered the recognition transponder, boldly beaming symbolic references to his official status, commissioned by one of the high institutes of Galactic culture.

  The intruder entered line-of-sight, filling a forward viewing panel — a squat oblong shape, resembling a fierce armored beetle, with formidable claws. Those tearing pincers swiveled toward Harry. Spindly emitter arrays waved like antenna-feelers above the beetle’s browridge, hurling aggressive symbolic replies to Harry’s challenge. Those writhing blobs of corporeal meaning sped rapidly across the narrowing gap between the two vessels. When the first one struck his forward pane, it made a splatting sound that resonated loudly, smearing and transforming into a shout that filled the little chamber.

  “SURRENDER, EARTHLING! RESISTANCE IS USELESS! CAPITULATE OR DIE!”

  Harry blinked. He stared for two or three dura
s, hand poised over the weapons panel while new threats pounded the window in quick succession.

  “HEAVE TO AND SUBMIT! PREPARE TO MEET THY MAKER! DROP YOUR SHORTS! CRY UNCLE! GIVE UP, IN THE NAME OF THE LAW!”

  Abruptly, Harry let out a low moan.

  It must be Zasusazu … my replacement. Can it be time already?

  Besides, who else would squat on a hillock in E Level, just hanging around in the open, but another damn fool recruit of Wer’Q’quinn?

  More horrid clichés smacked against his windshield, making the cupola resound painfully until he answered with volleys of his own, serving Zasusazu salvo after salvo of rich Terran curses, satisfying his colleague’s appetite for colorful wolfling invective.

  “Laugh while you can, frog face! Take that, you overgrown slimeball! Moldy Jack cheese!” He laughed, half out of relief, and half because Zasusazu’s obsession seemed so silly.

  Well, everyone who works for Wer’Q’quinn is more than a little weird, Harry thought, trying to feel charitable. Zasusazu’s not as bad as some. At least he likes a little surprise now and then.

  Still, even after he exchanged reports with his replacement, then left Zasusazu in command over the realm of ideas, Harry wondered about his own reaction to being relieved. After all, this had been a wearying mission and he certainly deserved time off. Yet, despite the frustration, danger, and loneliness of E Space, it always came as a bit of a letdown for a mission to end. To head back home.

  Home? Maybe the problem lay in that term.

  He mused on the word, as if it were a conceptual creature, wandering the purple plain.

  It can’t mean Horst, since I hated nearly every minute there. Or Earth, where I spent just a year, lonely and confused.

  Can Kazzkark Base be “home,” if it lacks any others of my kind?

  Does the Navigation Institute fill that role, now that I’ve given it the same loyalty others devote to kin and country?

  Harry realized he didn’t really know how to define the word.