Netherspace

by Andrew Lane

  “It’s not the way I remember seeing it on the worldmesh,” he said. “Less… aerodynamic.”

  “These only operate within the solar system,” Greenaway told him. “They’re mostly people carriers. Space-proofed inside and plastic seating. But the longest netherspace trip is around a day to Pluto. Mars takes two minutes.”

  “They look kind of beat-up.” These SUTs were pitted and scarred. One of the containers even had a series of gouges, strangely like giant teeth marks, on its surface. “What’s that from – space dust and meteors?”

  Kara and Tse were staring off into the distance. Tse’s face was expressionless, Kara’s filled with fury and contempt. Marc turned around, intrigued to see what had distracted them.

  A quarter of a mile away a long line of people were filing into a flattened pyramid the size of a ferry, encouraged by human guards.

  “Hey,” Marc said, “isn’t that a…” His voice tailed off as a sudden wave of anger swept over him that could have been Kara’s ghost. He hoped it was his own.

  “A Gliese SUT,” Kara finished for him. “Someone’s just bought a nice new slip-drive.”

  Even at this distance there was something inherently tragic about the line of people slowly entering the alien SUT. Marc wondered if anyone would change their mind at the last moment. Would they be allowed to leave?

  “And we still don’t know what happens to them,” Greenaway said quietly.

  “Don’t look at me,” Tse said before Marc could ask. “I’d have to be one of them to have any idea.”

  “This just coincidence?” Kara stared hard at Greenaway. “Or are you reminding us what’s really at stake?” She switched her gaze to Marc. “He was being a little coy with the truth,” she said. “Bad things can happen in netherspace. SUTs vanish, others reappear empty or with passengers and staff like mindless zombies.”

  “A triple coating of spray-on foam, like a combination of enamel and insulation, seems to protect the transports,” Greenaway said. “The Gliese supply it along with the sideslip-field generators. There’s never enough.”

  “Which is why these rust-buckets are shit, right?” Kara said cynically. “The spray-on gets used for the long-haul interstellar journeys. Well, I hope we’ve got a two-times triple coating, Mr Greenaway, sir. No matter how scarce. Any less would be rude.”

  Greenaway smiled. “Let’s go.” He led the way to where Leeman-Smith waited in front of a medium-sized SUT. It was the size of a large house, and like the others it looked like a series of large metal containers welded together, and was studded with manoeuvring jets and sensors.

  “I see no wrap,” Kara said. And then, “That’s a spacecraft? It’s a bit… blockier than I was anticipating.”

  “Space utility transport,” Greenaway murmured with feigned world-weariness. At least, Marc assumed it was feigned.

  “Doesn’t need to be aerodynamic,” he found himself saying. “Not with updown-field generators.” Was that natural insight or information from the simulity? Assuming he survived – big assumption – in future years would he still be coming up with facts and conclusions, never knowing where they were from?

  “The protection’s sprayed on just before take-off,” Greenaway explained.

  “Protection from what, exactly?” Marc asked, suddenly worried. Then relieved to be momentarily distracted by the idea of a wrapped SUT as part of an artwork.

  “Netherspace,” Leeman-Smith said. He glanced at Greenaway, who jerked his head slightly. Leeman-Smith walked rapidly away towards the SUT, followed by the mechanic, Tate Breckmann. Marc held back, realising that Greenaway wanted to talk to him, Kara and Tse.

  “I’d expected only a family-sized SUT,” Kara told Greenaway.

  “With luck you’ll be bringing back hostages. Anyway, this was the best available at short notice.”

  “How many hostages?”

  “We don’t know.” He paused.

  Marc had his own concerns. “Netherspace degrades metal?”

  “The rumour is,” Kara said straight-faced, “that something in netherspace scratches away at the skin of any SUT trying to get in.”

  Tse glanced at Marc and smiled reassuringly. “No one’s ever seen it.”

  “I don’t see any weapons,” Kara said.

  “On board. For planet use only.” Greenaway sounded sombre. “We’ve never had an SUT with external space weaponry return from netherspace, no matter how well disguised the weapons are. Maybe if you’ve got weapons then you use them when things get tense, and that provokes some kind of… reaction. And don’t ask me why.”

  “You ever been off-world?” Marc asked.

  “Too many times. Don’t want to talk about it. Let’s go.”

  “One other thing,” Marc heard himself say, aware the question had suddenly appeared in his mind. Simulity or insight? “This sideslip-field generator trade with the Gliese – it’s always the same, right?” He glanced at Kara, saw that she was nodding slightly. “And that’s weird. Always the same number of humans.”

  “Why weird?” Greenaway asked.

  Marc glanced at Kara and saw that she’d reached the same conclusion. “Because it’s always the same,” he said, “and it’s the only trade that is. All the rest are different, no set pattern. But when it comes to netherspace drives,” his voice hardened, “there’s an established exchange rate. How come?”

  “There could be a pattern,” Greenaway said. “But an alien one. We wouldn’t see it.”

  Marc opened his mouth but Kara cut him off. “That’ll be one of the things we’re meant to find out,” she said firmly. “If GalDiv knew, Marc, they wouldn’t need us.”

  “Is that right?” He looked directly at Greenaway. “Suppose I say no? Screw you and your threats?”

  Greenaway shrugged. “Your choice. And you won’t end up on a shelf.”

  “I thought you were bluffing,” Marc said.

  “I wasn’t,” Greenaway said. “Tell him, Kara.”

  “We know too much now, Marc,” she said with a surprising gentleness. “You can leave but they’ll kill you.”

  He heard the truth in her voice and tried a smile. “I bet you’d take the job, too.” He turned towards the SUT, wondering why he wasn’t more shocked and angry. But he’d been told it was an all-in situation. And there was almost a sense of pride at working with such a ruthless organisation. For such a ruthless organisation. He had no illusions about the power he might or might not have.

  * * *

  The airlock was all that Marc had expected: a shipping container with massive, shiny metal lockable doors at each end. There were glowing and blinking lights, switches and a lever next to a sign marked EMERGENCY. It smelt faintly of oil and the heavy-duty plastic matting on the floor. A movement to one side caught Marc’s attention. Kara was tapping her forearm, accessing her AI avatar. For the first time he wished he had a visual one. It would be like belonging to the same tribe.

  She glanced at Marc and raised an eyebrow. “Well, you never know,” she said. Then, “Oh, fuck,” as she saw through the open door at the far end. “Tell me it’s still a simulity. Please.”

  Call it an anteroom. Receiving chamber. Reception lounge. The place where arrivals first formed an impression of the SUT – or its mission manager. It was a space about twenty by thirty metres and at least five metres high, formed from several shipping containers welded together with their internal sides removed. The metal bulkheads had been covered in a faintly rose-coloured material. Marc stretched out a hand and found it smooth, like plaspaper. The floor was covered with what looked like a beige wool carpet and the ceiling was white. Various items of retro furniture were scattered around: chairs, sofas, small tables, bookcases all made from a blond or light brown wood, and bright, geometric-patterned throw cushions. Tse and Tate Breckmann were already sitting on a sofa, looking dazed. Leeman-Smith stood in the centre, wearing a grim smile of self-approval.

  “Recognise it?” he asked.

  Kara shook her head, her exp
ression grim.

  “English, 1960s,” he prompted. He pointed to a portrait of a man on the opposite wall. “Recognise him?”

  Marc remembered what Greenaway had earlier said, and clearly Kara did too. “Well, of course,” she said. “That’s Douglas Leeman-Smith. The man who made the first contact.” There’d been a woman as well, in fact the mission commander, but Marc guessed that Leeman-Smith wouldn’t want to hear that.

  “My grandfather,” Leeman-Smith said. “This is a perfect reproduction of the sitting room in the house he grew up in. Except for the lack of a fireplace. Oh, and that.” He pointed at a piece against a wall. “Actually it’s a woman’s dressing table, but it makes a good desk. Real as well: antique G-Plan. Cost a fortune. Above it is one of the original newspapers, The Times, that reported my grandfather’s success. It’s real paper, you know. I had it preserved. It’ll last as long as I do. You know my grandfather’s story, of course?” Leeman-Smith beamed. “Everyone does.” He didn’t wait for an answer. “That one inspired, selfless act gave us all this.” His gesture seemed to take in the entire world. “Without my grandfather the Gliese would have left and we’d still be in the Stone Age. That’s compared to then, of course.”

  “Comfortable as this is,” Greenaway said, “and expensive as this is, let’s go take a look at the heart of this vehicle. The sideslip-field generator?”

  “The team is the real heart of this vehicle,” Leeman-Smith said. It sounded like something he’d heard on a leadership course.

  Marc, Greenaway, Tse and Kara followed Leeman-Smith out of his grandfather’s shrine into a metal corridor, up a short flight of metal steps and into what had to be the generator room. It was smaller than the anteroom. Half a dozen padded seats facing a bank of view screens above a metal sphere, bronze in colour and the size of an old naval mine, covered with incised lines. It hovered above a plinth on the floor – the dais obviously containing a small updown-field generator. An object the size and shape of a good-sized beetle seemed to be stuck to the sphere’s surface. A large, rounded hub was fixed to the ceiling directly above the sphere.

  It was the netherspace drive, the sideslip-field generator, as simple and as mysterious today as it had been forty years ago.

  A shaven-headed man and a woman with blonde hair cut short but with a longer stripe running from ear to ear, both attractive and in their early thirties, came towards them, smiling. That little part of Marc’s mind that asked “Would I sleep with this person or not?” every time he was introduced to someone new said an enthusiastic “Yes!” to both.

  “Nikki Long, navigator,” Leeman-Smith said casually, pointing at the woman. “I’m told she’s good. Are you?”

  Marc remembered that Nikki was also new on board, she and her colleagues having lost their previous commander.

  “Never had any complaints,” Nikki said cheerfully. But her blue eyes were cold.

  “Mmm. We’ll see. And this is our medic, also new. Hank Vandeverde. You want to be careful. He’s a mind-tech.”

  “Henk,” the man said casually. “It’s Nederlands.”

  Leeman-Smith turned to the netherspace drive as if he hadn’t heard. “That is the platen,” pointing to the beetle-like object. “You place the platen on the surface of the sphere to determine the direction of travel, working on the assumption that the centre of the sphere is where we currently are.”

  “How?” Marc asked. Had any of the staff worked with Leeman-Smith before? He doubted it. “How does it work?”

  Tate Breckmann, the mechanic, moved in front of Leeman-Smith. “Thing is,” he said, before the mission manager could answer, “that people always explain subspace, or hyperspace, or netherspace, whatever, in terms of flexible rubber sheets.”

  “I’ve had some memorable experiences on flexible rubber sheets,” Kara murmured, just loud enough for everyone to hear.

  Tate grinned. “Einstein’s fault. He used a rubber sheet to explain gravity, you know?”

  Kara looked doubtful. “Sort of.”

  “He said the space-time continuum is like a thin rubber sheet and a planet is like a steel ball-bearing on top of it. So the weight of the ball-bearing makes a dip in the rubber, so anything else will roll down to the bearing and hey presto you got gravity. Except that ‘anything else’ is also making an indentation on the rubber sheet, so you get dents within dents. And except that gravity operates over three pi radians, not just three hundred and sixty degrees. So actually it was a crap explanation but it stuck around because it was easy to visualise. And back then no one dared contradict Einstein. People had invested too much time and effort in trying to understand him.”

  “We got it,” Marc said. “Rubber sheets are a no-no.”

  “Damn right.” Tate reached out and took a sheet of plaspaper off a nearby bench. He held it up, holding opposite edges with thumbs and forefingers. “But they still ask you to imagine this two-dimensional sheet represents the three-dimensional universe. To get from one side to the other you’d have to traverse the whole sheet in between, unless…” He twisted the plaspaper so that his hands were touching, “… you can twist three-dimensional space through a fourth dimension so that distant points are actually very close to each other, just like I’m twisting this two-dimensional sheet through the third dimension. That’s great, except…” He glanced at the plaspaper and frowned. The navigator, Nikki, stepped forward – pushing Leeman-Smith even further into the background – and obligingly took the now nearly circular edges that Tate wasn’t holding between her thumbs and forefingers. Because of the way the sheet was twisted, when she tried to fold it so that her own fingers and thumbs touched it just buckled and crumpled, and she couldn’t get the edges together.

  “Except if someone else wants to make a different journey,” Tate continued, “say between these two other sides of the sheet, then the sheet has to be bent in a completely different direction – and that may not be possible. We don’t know how flexible the multi-dimensional universe is, and as far as we know the Gliese haven’t mastered the ability to bend it. Frankly, interested minds are concerned that if you repeatedly bend the universe back and forth then it might split, and that would be bad for all kinds of reasons.”

  “So,” Marc repeated, “how does it work?”

  Nikki stepped back. Tate screwed the sheet up, crumpling it into a ball. He then opened it out, and crumpled it up again.

  “The three-dimensional universe is fractally folded,” he announced, “a bit like this, but much, much more complicated. Some parts of it are close together and some aren’t.” He threw the ball of plaspaper over his shoulder, narrowly missing Leeman-Smith’s head. “In fact it’s more like the convolutions of a brain. Or better, the Florida Everglades. If you look at a map of them and want to get from one piece of solid ground to another via canoe, then you might have to follow miles of little waterways. Far easier to row to the nearest bank, pick your canoe up, cross a spit of land, get into your canoe again and row across another channel, go across another spit of land and keep going in a straight line.” He paused to see if Marc, Kara and Tse were still with him. They were. Just.

  “Now imagine that the water is our normal space,” he said, “and the land is netherspace. You get where you’re going by using both of them, not one or the other. Except they keep shifting back and forth, so that a water channel that was there yesterday might not be there today, or might be there but might end up going in a different direction.”

  “So,” Marc repeated, nodding towards the Gliese sideslip-field generator, “how does it work?”

  “We don’t know,” Tate admitted, sighing. “Somewhere in there is a sensor that plots the shifting interfaces between realspace and netherspace, plus a calculator unit that works out the best route, plus something that can slip the SUT from realspace into netherspace and then slip it out again at the appropriate location. The calculator unit then either operates an Up-drive that moves the SUT through realspace to the optimal point by pushing against the gravitati
onal underpinning of the universe – a bit like rowing the canoe across a channel of water – or it waits until the interfaces have shifted around and another push in the right direction into netherspace will take the SUT in the right direction.” He gestured to the pitted, incised sphere. “In practical terms, this thing has to be operated by a whole range of species that can’t communicate with each other, so the user interface is as simple as possible.”

  Leeman-Smith was not to be denied. “There’s a compartment in the dais,” he said smoothly, stepping forward. “And a whole series of platens, of different sizes. Smaller platens move the SUT a smaller distance through netherspace; larger platens move it a larger distance.”

  “We’ve put sticky labels on the platens,” Nikki called from the far side of the control room. She had taken a seat at the navigator’s station behind the sphere and was running through her pre-flight checks. “The smallest one moves us just over three kilometres; the next a hundred, then five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand and five hundred thousand. That’s approximate distances, give or take. The Gliese don’t use kilometres, obviously. After that it gets interesting: the next one moves us a light-year. The one after that takes us five light-years, then fifty – all spot on, the Gliese do seem to understand the light-year concept – and a hundred.” She looked comically sad. “Please do not ask how it works again, for a refusal often offends.”

  “So we pop into netherspace, and pop out again a light-year away,” Marc said, sorting it out in his own mind. “Given there’s no way anyone could place a platen on that sphere with nanometre precision, there will be some kind of error – we won’t pop out exactly where we want. That’s why we need a navigator who works out where we are by the star positions, then works out which platen is needed next and where to place it. Repeat until arrival, when the updown-field generator system comes into play. Simple.” He frowned, and turned to Leeman-Smith. “So – why do we need you?”