/What is it?/ he whispered, rubbing his wrists. /Is this the translator's home? Or Charlie's?/ Apparently the stones were too busy flying, because they gave no answer, except:
*Maintain visual link.*
He obeyed, and wished that he could somehow tell Charlie what was happening. Or Julie. He blinked back more tears.
The surface loomed closer, closer . . . he felt as if he were falling into a vast maze of canyons. His wrists burned; he felt the ship's gravity fluctuate momentarily; he was growing dizzy as he fell . . .
The structure rushed up to meet him, and he could just make out the yellow blur of his spotlight on its surface. For a terrified instant he knew he was going to crash . . . and then something directly below him began changing shape, a shadowy cat's eye dilating open, and inside the eye he glimpsed a flash of volcanic-red light, and then darkness. A heartbeat later he had fallen through the pupil, and was swallowed in the darkness.
*Prepare for docking.*
He moved his hands helplessly over the controls. He had no idea what to do. His spotlight had gone out. He could see nothing. /Please—tell me what—/
The ship's gravity lurched, and pitched its angle up sharply, and increased abruptly. He fell back against his headrest, grabbing his armrests with a gasp.
A blazing crimson light strobed in through the window, blinding him. The hull shuddered. He felt, or perhaps imagined, a clang as the ship hard-docked.
*Arrival.*
/Arrival?/ he whispered. /Arrival where?/
There was only silence for an answer.
*****
Afterword to Neptune Crossing
FOR THE BETTER part of twenty years now, I have been living with John Bandicut and company—either in realtime while writing the books of The Chaos Chronicles, or between times while working on other projects. The Chaos series actually sprang from a feeling of total exhaustion—like a hangover from a long night of celebration. I had been writing a sequence of books, every one of which had turned into something longer and more complex than I'd originally dreamed. (From a Changeling Star. Down the Stream of Stars. Dragons in the Stars and Dragon Rigger.) I found the writing immensely satisfying—at least once the books were done—but the complicated stories and endless rewrites were leaving me physically and emotionally wrung out. Also, it was hard to even think of making a living from fiction when two or more years were going by between books.
Something's gotta change, I thought. My problem was that I seem hard-wired to write long, twisty stories. I don't know why; that's just the way my subconscious works. I've never been a prolific short story writer, and most of my novels have grown in the telling. (And you should see what I cut out of them. Or no, on second thought, maybe not.) I'm also a slow writer. What was I to do?
The inspiration came like a couple of strobes in the night: Flash! Flash!
I don't recall which hit me first. One was the idea of writing a nice, long story like my subconscious wanted, but—hah!—breaking it into short, snappy, stand-alone volumes that I could write quickly. The other was chaos theory itself: I'd read James Gleick's Chaos, and also an article in The Planetary Report about the chaotic movement of objects in the solar system. These chaotic influences bring comets and asteroids into Earth's neighborhood from time to time, and occasionally down on our heads. That, combined, with some photos of Neptune and Triton from the Voyager spacecraft, provided the tiny nucleus I needed. I don't remember as clearly where my hero Bandicut came from, but his dazed and confused state at the start was probably a reflection of the chaos in my own mind as I struggled to compose the story.
I sketched out the general story arc, which at that point was intended to run four volumes. I ran the idea past my agent—always after me to write more quickly—and he ran it past my then-editor at Bantam Spectra, Amy Stout. Based on the outline, Bantam signed me up for the first three volumes.
And then I got to the "writing quickly" part. That didn't work out quite as planned. It took longer to get the first book written than I'd hoped. A few years longer. During that time, Bantam decided to cancel most of their SF program, and they canned my editor in the bargain, along with my overdue contract. Oof. Talk about a body blow. But it could have been worse. At the time I had two publishers. My editor at Tor Books, Jim Frenkel, picked up the contracts with enthusiasm, tempered by a touch of annoyance that he hadn't been offered the books in the first place. And so Tor became the publisher of the Chaos books—first for three volumes, and then for a second set of three (which I'm still writing, in 2010). I've worked with Jim on every book I've done since.
A few writing sidelights:
I started writing Neptune Crossing as a first-person narrative, from Bandicut's point of view. Partly that was because I hadn't done much first-person writing, and I wanted to try something new. Partly it was because I was aiming for a particular kind of immediacy that I hoped first person would give me. I gave it every chance. But sixty or seventy pages in, I had to face facts: It sucked. It just wasn't coming together. So with frustration, sorrow, and more than a little cursing, I threw out several months' work. And I started over from the beginning, this time in third person. It was painful—damn, was it painful—but it was also fortuitous in the end, because it gave me a chance to explore the viewpoints of a number of other, alien characters as the story progressed. I hadn't seen that coming.
Sometimes people have asked me where certain scenes in the book came from, the mining scenes in particular. Well, you probably know the saying, "Write what you know." I've never worked in a mine, but when I was in college I spent a couple of summers working on an auto assembly line. It was not a happy experience. Moron bosses. Weird, scary, hissing machinery that I was supposed to operate after five minutes of training. The expectation that I would keep up with a demonically driven assembly line, one new car every sixty seconds. The inescapable smell of oil and electricity. The ceaseless noise, the yammer of pneumatic tools and the inexorable rumble of the conveyor line. And worst of all, the mind-numbing boredom overlaid with a constant fear of falling behind. "College boy!" That was my experience of working in a factory, and I had a strong intuition that it was fundamentally the same in factories around the world, and probably in mines on the surface of Triton, too. From the gestalt of that experience came several scenes: the interplay with annoying bosses, the mindless charge into the tunnel after the robot, and the Dodgem ride in the surface-mining crawler.
Write what you know!
And when necessary, make it up.
I hope you've enjoyed the ride so far. I'll confess that, at the end of this volume—with Bandicut's arrival at this strange outpost beyond the stars—I didn't have much more idea of what was coming next than Bandicut did. To learn that, I was going to have to write the next book.
Next stop: Strange Attractors!
Strange, indeed.
Acknowledgments for Neptune Crossing
FOR SCIENTIFIC AND technical advice concerning Triton, I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Dr. Robert H. Brown of NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory, as well as JPL's public information office. I am, of course, grateful for the Voyager 2 spacecraft itself, which sent back so many fine photos of my distant subject. I would also like to acknowledge the editors and contributors to The Planetary Report, Science News, and Ad Astra, who provided inspiration and information in ways too numerous to list. Finally, I must acknowledge James Gleick's book, Chaos, which is a wonderful introduction to the strange and fascinating science of chaos and Charles Carver, who first showed it to me.
Many thanks to Amy Stout and Jim Frenkel, sharp editors and good friends, and my stalwart agent Richard Curtis, who helped steer this project to publication despite some difficult and unexpected complications. And special thanks to Tom Doherty, who gave me a vote of confidence when it was needed most.
And need I say it? The writing group, as always; and most of all, my family, for giving me reason and sanity for writing the book in the first place. Thanks.
*****
BOOK 2: STRANGE ATTRACTORS
*
Jeffrey A. Carver
with a new afterword by the author
*****
Dedication
For Nancy and Fred Lorey
and
For those Palmers:
Fay and Phil,
and Andrew and Suzanne
*****
Strange attractors . . .
n. 1. Chaos theory. Patterns of turbulence; harmonies underlying disorder. 2. In phase-space, channels of order emerging from uncertainty; paths of transformation. 3. Shipworld sociology. Unseen forces tending to bring disparate energies and intelligences into convergence. Purposefulness of intent remains conjectural.
"I have not yet spoken of the esthetic appeal of strange attractors. These systems of curves, these clouds of points, suggest sometimes fireworks or galaxies . . . A realm lies here to be explored and harmonies to be discovered."
—David Ruel, "Strange Attractors"
*
Prelude
JOURNAL ENTRY BY JOHN BANDICUT:
(EARTH DATE UNKNOWN)
As I record this, I find myself wondering, just who am I addressing? Julie? Krackey? Dakota? I feel as if I want to write a letter but I am thousands of light-years from you now. I can only imagine all of you as you were before I left. You've probably all been dead for centuries. But really, I have no way of knowing.
How much time has passed? I can only guess.
All I can do, then, is speak my thoughts into these stones and pray that they will one day be heard by someone who cares—though I have little hope that it will be anyone human. Still, I must not abandon whatever hope I have. There is so much I don't know. So very much.
Have you ever heard voices in your head, voices that could lead you to do stranger things than you could imagine? It's a trick question, really; if the answer is yes, you're either a neurolinker, or crazy. If you neurolink, you just go to the nearest datajack to hear voices. I had to go to Neptune and Triton to find the voice that changed my life—but then, that trip turned out to be the shortest leg of the journey.
If you're a neurolinker, the datanet practically defines your existence. I know that even without knowing who you are; I was one of you once. But if you've ever lost your neuro, then you know the emptiness of never again having that sea of awareness lapping at your mind, offering you every sort of connection imaginable. It is almost the most terrifying loss I can think of. Almost.
I faced that loss, and it scared me as much as deafness and blindness rolled into one. But even that wasn't half as frightening as what came later—when the inner silence broke, and a voice told me to sacrifice everything I had, to save a world I barely knew anymore.
And that, of course, is what got me where I am now. Somewhere out here on the edge of eternity, friendless—at least in the beginning. Fine friendships have come to me since, of course, but nothing can erase the terror, the stark loneliness of what I faced, in that first view of the galaxy.
Am I being melodramatic? Probably. If Charlie were in my head now, I am sure he would chide me for it. But Charlie's not here; he's dead right now.
I'm sure he'll speak his piece later, when he rejoins me . . .
Chapter 1
At Eternity's Edge
HE HAD SURVIVED. John Bandicut knew that, and little more. What he did know didn't reassure him. He was trapped inside a structure of immense proportion and unknown nature, somewhere outside the galaxy of his birth. The image still blazed in his mind, long after it was blocked from his view: the vast spiral ocean of the Milky Way splayed across the sky before him, with its glittering stars and its dust lanes and its luminous core. Not around him or overhead in the sky, but before him, spread out in all of its awesome glory. He was marooned half a universe from home, in a survey craft built for leisurely orbits around the planet Neptune.
Neptune. Solar System. Earth. For all practical purposes, they were gone now, along with everyone he had ever known or cared for. Charlie, Julie, Krackey, Dakota . . . all gone. He had saved Earth from destruction. But he hadn't saved himself, not in any way that gave him comfort. He was alone now, except for a pair of simple robots, and left with the haunting question: Who has done this to me—and why? No one had come knocking since his ship had docked, so it seemed if he wanted to learn what sort of place he had been taken aboard, he would have to go out and see for himself.
He zipped up the utility backpack and dropped it on the deck. It was stuffed full of rations, a recorder, some spare clothes, and a few simple tools. After a last check of the ship's bridge, he called the robots to the airlock. He reached for his spacesuit—or rather, the spacesuit he had stolen from Triton Station just before he had stolen the spaceship.
You didn't steal it, he reminded himself. You borrowed it, to save the Earth. He sighed, weary of the memory, and began to unfasten the front seam.
*You will not need a spacesuit.*
He started at the voice in his head. The translator-stone in his right wrist flickered diamond white, as it spoke for the first time in several hours. It was a daughter-stone of the alien "translator" that he had found in a cavern on Triton, and a component of the incomprehensible mechanism that had brought him to this place. It was also the closest thing he had to a guide since Charlie the quarx had died, just before impact with the comet. The translator-stone seemed to have some knowledge of this place, but it parceled that knowledge out in exceedingly small doses. When it spoke at all, it displayed little interest in answering Bandicut's questions.
Bandicut frowned. /How sure are you about that?/ he asked silently, reluctant to hang the spacesuit back up.
*You will not need a spacesuit.*
Bandicut grunted and left the spacesuit hanging. Beside him, the two mining robots that had accompanied him from Triton whirred and clicked quietly. "Ready, boys?" he asked. "Fully charged?" Copernicus, a low-slung tunnel surveyor on wheels shaped like fat, horizontal ice cream cones, replied with a light drumtap. "Aye, Cap'n." Napoleon, shaped like a cross between a monkey and a chest-high grasshopper, and built for walking rather than rolling, flexed its knees in a quick plié and said, "Ready, John Bandicut."
Bandicut hefted one strap of the bag over his shoulder, took a deep breath, and hit the airlock button.
The outer door thunked open. He blinked, facing a featureless, meter-deep boarding passageway—ending in a purplish bulkhead. "So." He frowned. An instant later, the bulkhead dissolved, revealing a long, smooth-walled corridor, gloomily lit. At its far end, the corridor bent to the right.
Bandicut swallowed, twice. Then he took his first step onto an alien world. It didn't feel like much, as his foot touched the floor. The gravity felt the same—a little heavy, for one recently accustomed to the one-thirteenth gee of Triton—but that change had occurred earlier, at the moment of docking. He stepped into the corridor and paused to see if his hosts would appear, or maybe just strike him dead.
*Proceed.*
He blinked. Was the translator-stone receiving messages, or did it already know what Bandicut was about to encounter? He had no idea what world the translator was from; could this place be its home? He didn't bother asking. /Okay,/ he said, and glanced back at the robots. "Let's go, boys." He started down the passageway. The robots clicked and thrummed behind him.
The walls of the corridor gave off a satiny sheen. The violet light seemed stronger ahead; it flickered with an erratic, strobelike intensity that soon made him feel a little dizzy. He put out a steadying hand. The wall was cool to the touch and finely textured. There was something more to the touch, though; he felt a momentary mental dizziness, and a sudden urgency to keep moving, not quite an encouragement and not quite a threat. It was more like a sense of need, like the urgency that might have been conveyed by an approaching siren.
/Do you know what that is?/ he asked nervously.
The stones did not answer.
He rounded the bend, and the passageway widened. On the left wal
l were a number of indecipherable panels, with strangely fuzzy, flickering lights that didn't seem to illuminate anything. Bandicut clicked on a handheld lantern and flashed it around briefly, before continuing onward. The passage narrowed again, but the violet strobe was growing brighter. Followed by the whirring robots, Bandicut rounded a second bend, to the left, and entered a large, oval chamber.
It looked a little like the lobby of a theater, darkened, but with pools and flashes of light radiating into the darkness. It was roughly circular, with dark panels lining most of the outer wall. To his right, a pool of violet light flickered, apparently created by shifting, sparkling patterns in the adjacent walls and ceiling. This was the source of the strobe. It looked almost as if it were intended to spotlight some object—a sculpture perhaps, some absent work of art.
Dropping his backpack, Bandicut squinted at a broad glass partition that appeared to bisect the chamber. On the far side of the glass was what looked like a control room, though he quickly saw that it was, in fact, a wide hallway that swept out of view in both directions. Directly opposite, on the far wall of the control room, were four panels with screens and controls, shaped and indented in ways that clearly suggested nonhuman users. "Anyone there?" he murmured, rapping softly on the partition with his knuckles. His rapping was silent, at least to his ears. There was no one visible.
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