Heaven's Reach u-6

by David Brin

  Dolphins sleep just one hemisphere at a time. But this episode had the full flux and power of the Whale Dream, enveloping him in the presence of his beloved, and the planet where they had hoped to spend their lives together.

  When the noisome voice broke in, shattering that blissful illusion, he felt the loss of Peepoe all over again, finding himself once again stranded in harsh metal purgatory, megaparsecs away from her.

  In frustration, Kaa thrashed his flukes on the flotation bed of his walker unit. Bleary from fitful sleep, his right eye focused at last to regard the strange figure of Huck, a creature whose physical form seemed like an improbable swirl of organic and mechanical parts. Rolling on twin jittery wheels, the young g’Kek waved all four eyestalks in frantic agitation, jabbering rapidly about something that had her terribly upset.

  Anglic speech patterns came slowly to waking neodolphins, especially after immersion in the Whale Dream, but this time Kaa’s anger bulled through, driving a hot response.

  “I sssaid I wasn’t to be disturbed … except in an emergency!”

  Huck’s frantic words penetrated at last.

  “This is an emergency!” she wailed. “I j-just woke up and found Pincer-Tip—”

  “Yeah?” Kaa asked, sending a signal down his neural tap to power up the walker. “What about him?”

  The g’Kek was already rolling swiftly out of the little cabin, two eyes aimed ahead and two back at Kaa.

  “Come quick! Pincer’s dying!”

  The little red qheuen lay collapsed near the airlock — a crablike figure with five legs splayed outward symmetrically, like an ailing starfish. Several claws still shuddered and snapped reflexively, but there was no other sign of movement. When Kaa brought his walker unit closer, aiming its forward camera for a close look, he saw trails of ugly-looking substance — like ichor — dribbling from beneath the wide chitin carapace.

  “What-t happened?” he asked anxiously.

  Huck snapped back.

  “How should I know? I told ya, I was in that little cabinet you assigned me as a hiding place, tryin’ to sleep, since you won’t let me leave the ship. When I came out, he was like this!”

  “But-t … don’t you know what’s wrong with him? Can you do anything?”

  “Hey, just because I’m a g’Kek, that don’t make me a doctor, any more’n every dolphin is a pilot. We’ve got to call for help!”

  Kaa listened to the sick qheuen’s ragged breathing. Whatever the nauseating substance was, it came from all five armpits, where the delicate air vents lay. Clearly, the poor thing was nearing total collapse.

  “We …” He shook his sleek gray head left and right. “We can’t do that.”

  “What?” Huck rocked back so hard that both rims bounced off the floor. Her spokes hummed and she stared with all four eyes. “We’re not in a wilderness anymore, fish-head. We’re at civilization! They got all sorts of things out there, beyond that airlock. Stuff we Jijoans only read about in books, like hospitals and autodocs. They might save him!”

  Kaa felt the young g’Kek’s wrath and outrage. The heat of her devotion to a friend. He sympathized. But there could only be one answer.

  “We can’t call attention to ourselves. You know that. If anyone here even suspected that a dolphin was aboard this ship, they’d cut it apart to get at me. And the same holds for a g’Kek. We’ll just have to wait for Alvin and Ur-ronn to get back. They can move about without attracting attention. Or better yet, when Tyug returns, the alchemist can try—”

  “That could take miduras! You know Alvin’s got himself a star-hoon girlfriend. Tyug’s spying on the Jophur, and Ur-ronn stays out longer and longer each time, talking to engineers!”

  That was the plan, of course, for that trio to act as spies and envoys, getting to know the nature of things within Kazzkark Base, and in the Five Galaxies at large. If possible, they would make contact with some of Earth’s few allies, or else look for some way to buy passage toward Galaxy Two. While attempting to deliver Gillian Baskin’s message to the Terragens Council, they would also try to learn about their own kind, finding some way of securing future livelihoods, for themselves and their friends.

  Huck was right. Alvin and Ur-ronn might stay out for hours longer. Pincer would not last that long.

  “I’m sssorry,” Kaa said. “We can’t risk throwing everything away for just a sssslim chance of—”

  “I don’t care how slim it is, or about the risk! It doesn’t matter!”

  Her eyestalks waved and twined in furious anger. But while she cursed him roundly, Kaa knew he must be firm for her sake, even more than his own. With all the g’Keks of Jijo now in peril of genocide — deliberate extinction by wrathful Jophur, bent on satisfying an ancient vendetta — this one little female might be the sole hope of her entire species. Along with a tube of seminal plasm, stored in the scoutboat’s refrigerator, she might possibly reestablish her posterity in some safe hiding place, protected by sympathetic guardians.

  Although it was not a role the adventurous Huck relished, she had claimed to see its importance. Until now, that is, when she would toss it all away for friendship.

  Personal loyalty. Love. These are supposed to outweigh all other considerations, Kaa thought, wallowing in misery, even as the young g’Kek railed at him, demanding over and over that he open the door.

  Raised on Earthling novels, she feels the same way about it that I do. That only the worst sort of person would put stark pragmatism above intimate devotion, abandoning someone you care about to certain death … or something worse … even if it is logically the “right” thing to do.

  So Kaa silently derided himself while Huck did it aloud, making the small control room echo with her wails.

  Yet, he would not relent.

  Anyway, the issue was settled soon. Just a few duras later, Pincer-Tip was dead.

  Huck lacked both strength and will to help dispose of the body. That chore was left to Kaa, using the mechanical arms of his walker to heave the bulky qheuen toward the recycler. Huck turned three eyes away from the gory scene, but the remaining stalk quivered and stared, as if dumbly transfixed.

  How could this happen? Kaa worried as he sent control messages down his neural tap, causing the machine to move like an extension of his body. Did someone attack the ship? Or was this caused by the disease we heard about … the one that slaughtered many qheuens back on Jijo?

  If so, how was Pincer exposed?

  Abruptly, Huck let out an amazed cry. Her whistling shouts brought Kaa spinning around, stomping back from his grisly task. He looked down where she pointed, at the bloody deck where Pincer had lain.

  There, partly masked by gruesome liquids, both of them now made out a design of some sort, carved deeply into the metal deck.

  “He … he …,” Huck stammered. “He musta cut it with his teeth, while he was dying! Poor Pincer couldn’t walk or talk, but he could still move his mouth, as it lay against the floor!”

  Kaa stared, in part amazed by the slicing power of qheuen jaws, and by the acute — even artistic — rendering that had been the poor creature’s final act.

  It showed a face, vaguely humanoid, but somewhat feral looking, with lean, ravenous cheeks and a small, bitter mouth. He recognized the shape at once.

  “A Rothen!”

  The race of sneaky criminals and petty connivers, who had persuaded a cult of humans to believe they were patrons of all Earthclan, and rightful gods of Terran devotion.

  Then he remembered. There had been such a creature aboard Streaker! A prisoner, brought aboard in secret at Wuphon Port. A Rothen overlord named Ro-kenn, mastermind of many felonies against the Six Races of Jijo.

  “He musta stowed away aboard this ship!” Huck cried. “Stayed hidden till we docked, then came out an’ killed poor Pincer to get at the door!”

  Kaa’s mind roiled over the disastrous implications. No matter how capable, Ro-kenn could not have managed such an escape all by himself. He must have had help aboard Streake
r. Moreover, if this Rothen made it into Kazzkark, all their plans might be in jeopardy.

  Stay calm, he told himself. Ro-kenn can’t go to the authorities. The crimes he committed on Jijo are worse than anything the sooners did.

  Yes, hut he might hurry to one of the big fanatic clans or alliances, and try to sell them information about Streaker and Jijo. At the very least, he’ll send word to other Rothen.

  “We had better try to contact Alvin and Ur-ronn,” Kaa said. And for once he could tell that Huck agreed.

  Only that was far from easy. It seemed that all available telecomm lines were jammed with frantic traffic. And things only got worse as another wave of subspace disruptions hit, causing the planetoid to shake and rattle, resonating like a great, hollow bell.

  From the Journal of Gillian Baskin

  THE UNIVERSE IS AWASH IN TRAGEDY. YET, ONLY now, as it seems to be falling apart, have I finally begun to see some of the ironic, awesome beauty of its cosmic design.

  As happened at the Fractal World, we find ourselves surrounded by sudden devastation, orders of magnitude greater than I ever imagined.

  Far below us, whirling near the condensed core of a massive ancient star, we see vast, needle-shaped habitats — each one longer than the moon is wide — made of superstrong godstuff, built to withstand fierce tidal strains. Only now those habitats of the Transcendent Order show signs of terminal stress, shedding their outer skins like brittle slough — quivering as wave after wave of spatial convulsions surge through this part of Galaxy Four.

  According to both Sara and the Niss Machine, these are symptoms of a fantastic rupture, beyond anything seen in a quarter of a billion years.

  The effects have been even worse on the huge armada of “candidate ships” accompanying Streaker converging on multiple, crisscrossing downward spirals toward those needle monoliths. What had been a stately procession, triumphant and hopeful, wedding two of life’s great orders in a great and glorious union, is swiftly dissolving into chaos and conflagration.

  So closely were the giant arks and globules packed together — in dense, orderly rows — that each wave of hypergeometric-recoil throws one rank against another. Collisions produce blinding explosions, slaughtering untold millions and throwing yet more vessels off course.

  Yet, despite this awful trend, only a few other craft have joined Streaker in attempting to escape, climbing laboriously outward through the maze, seeking some relative sanctuary of deep space. It seems that the addiction of tides cannot easily be broken, once sapients have tasted its deeper pleasures. Like rutting beasts, irresistibly drawn toward mating grounds they know to be on fire, a majority continue on course, accelerating into the funnel, bound for the Embrace they so deeply desire.

  Is this the ultimate destiny of intelligent life? After striving for ages to become brainy, contemplative, wise (and all that), do all races wind up driven forward by ineffable instinct? By a yearning so strong they must plunge ahead, even when their goal is falling apart before their eyes?

  At last, for the first time in three long years, I begin to understand the persecution we Streakers have suffered — and Earth, as well. For our discovery of the Ghost Fleet truly does present a challenge, a shocking heresy, that strikes at the very heart of Galactic belief systems.

  Most of them — and the hydrogen breathers, as well — maintain that true transcendence is the ultimate destiny of those who merge within the Embrace of Tides. Something must lie beyond … or so they’ve reasoned for countless ages. Why else would the universe have evolved such an elegant way of focusing, gathering, and distilling the very best of both life orders?

  Surely, this must be the great path spoken of by the Progenitors, when they departed two billion years ago.

  Ah, but then what of the Ghost Fleet, with its haunting symbols and glimmering hints at ancient truth?

  Where did we find it?

  In a “shallow” globular cluster, dim and nearly metal-free, drifting lonely toward the rim of Galaxy Two. A place where spacetime is so flat that even young races experience a faint, nervous revulsion. A kind of creepy agoraphobia. Such locales are seldom visited, since they contain nothing of interest to any life order, even machines.

  (In which case, what clue … what hunch … drew Creideiki there? Did he set Streaker’s course for the Shallow Cluster because it seemed neglected by the Great Library, with an entry as skimpy as the one about Earth?

  (Or was there something more to his decision? A choice that seemed so strange at the time.)

  Now, at last, I see why our enemies — the Tandu and Soro and Jophur and the others — got so upset when Streaker beamed back those first images of the Ghost Fleet … and of Herbie and the rest.

  If these truly are relics of the great Progenitors, sealed away in field-protected vessels for countless aeons, what does that imply about the Embrace of Tides? Did the founder race — earliest and wisest of all — seek desperately to avoid the attraction? Did they shun the deep places? If so, might it be because they knew something terrible about them?

  Perhaps they saw the Embrace as something else entirely. Not a route to transcendence, but a trash disposal system. A means for recycling dross, like the Great Midden on Jijo.

  Nature’s way of siphoning away the old in order to make room for the new.

  Standing in his glass case, Herbie smiles at me across my desk. The mummy’s eerie humanoidal rictus has been my most intimate companion, ever since Tom went away. Sometimes I find myself talking to him.

  Well, old fellow? Is this the big joke? Have I at last figured out why you’ve been grinning all this time?

  Or are there more layers yet to peel away?

  More terrible surprises to come.

  It isn’t easy trying to work our way out of this trap with our two best pilots gone. The swarm of arks and globules appears to extend endlessly above us, reaching far out beyond the range of any solar system. The sheer amount of mass involved approaches macroplanetary scales! Like the accretion disk surrounding a newborn star.

  Where could all these “candidates” have come from?

  Might the same thing be happening elsewhere? A lot of elsewheres? If even a small fraction of older white dwarves are home to such convergences, that would mean millions of sites like this one, surrounded by migrants eager to enter paradise, despite a growing gauntlet of collision and fire.

  On a practical level, Streaker cannot attempt any hyperspace jumps till we’re clear of all these massive ships, and the rippling effects of their mighty engines.

  Even if we do succeed in working our way outward, the Jophur dreadnought is still out there. We detect it from time to time, tracking us like some tenacious predator, crippled and dying, with nothing else to live for anymore beyond finishing the hunt. If we make it to open space, there will be that peril to contend with.

  If only we could rid ourselves of this deadly coating and restore Streaker to her old agility!

  Hannes has been working on a new idea about that, alongside Emerson D’Anite. Something involving the big Communications Laser.

  Poor Emerson struggles to explain something to us — humming melodies and drawing pictures, but all we can tell so far is that he managed to defeat yet another meme-attack on Streaker a while back, and destroyed the renegade — Tsh’t — in the process.

  I cannot help it. I grieve for my friend. The sweet comrade who was by my side through crisis after crisis. Poor Tsh’t only thought she was doing the right thing, seeking help and succor from her gods.

  Now another wraith follows through the night, surging like a porpoise through my restless dreams.

  The big news is that the Niss Machine lately made a breakthrough. It managed at last to tap into what passes for a communications network among the Transcendents.

  As one might expect, it is a dense, complex system, as far beyond Galactic-level technology as a hand computer exceeds an abacus. It was invisible for so long because only small portions on the fringes use classical electronics
or photonics. The core technique appears to be quantum computing on a scale so vast that it must utilize highly compressed gravitational fields.

  “Such fields are unavailable here,” commented the Niss. “Even among the needle habitats, whirling just above the compact star core, the potentials are many orders of magnitude too small.

  “We must be picking up the margins of something much greater. Something with its center located far away from here.”

  Of course it occurred to us that this might be our chance. Our hope of communicating with “higher authorities,” as ordered by the Terragens Council. The creatures who betrayed us at the Fractal World — those so-called Old Ones — were like infants in comparison to the minds using this new network. Indeed, all signs suggest they are the pinnacle that life achieves.

  Yet, I’m reluctant to just hand over our data from the Shallow Cluster. We’ve been disappointed too many times. Perhaps the Transcendents also suffer from the same fear — that a deadly trap underlies the Embrace of Tides.

  If it entered their thoughts to be vengeful toward us, we’d have all the chance of a hamster against a bolo battle tank.

  “Let’s ask simple questions, first,” I said. “Any suggestions?”

  Sara Koolhan burst forth.

  “Ask about the Buyur! Are they down there? Did the Buyur transcend?”

  Lately, she’s grown obsessed with the last species to have leasehold over Jijo. A race of genetic manipulators, who seemed to know in advance that sooners would invade their world, and about a coming Time of Changes.

  “Even such a simple query will be hard to translate. It may be impossible to slip within the matrix in such a way that anyone will notice, or bother answering,” warned the Niss. “But I will try.”