by Gene Wolfe
“This is your captain. The ship sighted last night is still on her course.” Daw chewed his lower lip for a moment, trying to decide just what to say next. The crew must be alerted, but it would be best if they were not alarmed. “There is no indication, I repeat, no indication, that she is aware of our presence. Possibly she doesn’t want to scare us off—she may want peace, or she may just have something up her sleeve. Possibly something’s wrong with her sensors. My own guess—which isn’t worth any more than yours—is that she’s a derelict; there’s no sign of drive, and we haven’t been able to reach her on any frequency. But we have to stay sharp. Battle conditions until further notice.”
He flicked off the mike switch. Several como lights were blinking and he selected one: the reactor module. Mike switch again. “What is it, Neal?”
“Captain, if you could give me a breakdown on the radiation they’re putting out, it might be possible for me to work up an estimate of how long it’s been since they’ve used their drive.”
“I’m happy to hear that you know their engineering,” Daw said. “Especially since Gladiator’s been unable to identify even the ship type.”
Neal’s face, seen in the CRT, flushed. He was a handsome, slightly dissipated-looking man whose high forehead seemed still higher under a thick crest of dark hair. “I would assume their drives are about the same as ours, sir,” he said.
“I’ve done that. On that basis they shut down only an hour before we picked them up. But I’m not sure I believe it.” He cut Neal off and scanned the rest of the lights. One was from the ship’s cybernetics compartment; but Polk, the cyberneticist, was bunking with the systems analyst this trip. Daw pushed the light and a woman’s face appeared on the screen. It was framed in honey-toned hair, a face with skin like a confection and classic planes that might have shamed a fashion model. And a smile. He had seen the smile often before—though as seldom, he told himself, as he decently could.
“Yes, Mrs. Youngmeadow,?”
“Helen, please. I can’t see you, Captain. The screen is blank.”
“There’s some minor repair work to be done on the camera here,” Daw lied. “It’s not important, so we’ve given it low priority.”
“But you can see me?”
“Yes.” He felt the blood rising in his cheeks.
“About this ship, Captain …” Helen Youngmeadow paused, and Daw noticed that her husband was standing behind her, beyond the plane of focus. “Captain, everyone on the ship can hear me—can’t they?”
“I can cut them out of the circuit if you prefer.”
“No—Captain, may I come up there?”
“To the bridge? Yes, if you like. It’s a long way.”
Another como light. This time the alternate bridge module—in appearance much like his, but lacking the battered Old and New Testaments bound in steel and magnetically latched to the console. “Hello, Wad;” Daw said gently.
Wad made a half-salute. His young, dark-complexioned face showed plainly the strain of two years’ involvement in a hell that demanded night and day a continual flow of deductions, inferences, and decisions—all without effect. Looking at Daw significantly, he drew a finger across his throat, and Daw gave him the private circuit he had offered Mrs. Youngmeadow.
“Thanks, Skipper. I’ve got something I thought you ought to know about.”
Daw nodded.
“I’ve been running an artifact correlation on the visual image of that ship.”
“So have I. Electronic and structural.”
“I know, I got your print-out. But my own analysis was bionic.”
“You think that’s valid?”
Wad shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s interesting. You know what the biologists say: Man has reached the stage where he evolves through his machines. The earliest spacecraft resembled single-celled animals—pond life. The dilettante intellectuals of the time tried to give them a sexual significance—that was the only thing they knew—but they were really much closer to the things you find in a drop of pond water than to anything else.”
“And what does your analysis say about this ship?”
“No correlation at all. Nothing higher than a tenth.”
Daw nodded again. “You think the lack of correlation is significant?”
“It suggests to me that it may have originated somewhere where life forms are quite different from what we are accustomed to.”
“Mankind has colonized some queer places.”
With heavy significance Wad said, “Would it have to be mankind, Captain?” He was speaking, Daw knew, not to him but to his instructors back home. If his guess were correct he would, presumably, be given some small number of points; if not, he would lose ground. In time he would, or would not, be given his own command. The whole thing embarrassed Daw and made him feel somehow wretched, but he could not really blame Wad. He was Wad. To keep the ball rolling—mostly because he did not want to answer the other como lights—he said, “Men have spread their seed a long way across the galaxy Wad. We’ve seen a lot of strange ships, but they’ve always turned out to be of human origin.”
“The part of the galaxy we know about is tiny compared to the vastness we don’t know. And there are other galaxies!”
Daw said, “I’ve been thinking about the stranger’s build myself, as I told you. He looks like a crystal to me—modules ranged in a three-dimensional rectangular array.”
“What do you think that means?”
“Comes from a world where they’ve discovered radio.”
Wad broke the connection; Daw grinned but found he didn’t much blame him for it.
Daw wondered what Gladiator’s bionic correlation program would say about Gladiator herself. Perhaps liken her to the armor of a caddis-fly larva—an empty cylinder of odds and ends. Caddis-fly armor exploded. The interior of his helmet held the familiar smells of fine lubricating oil, sweat, and the goo he sometimes used on his hair; he kicked down and the soles of his boots clinked home on the hull of the bridge module.
Above him and around him Gladiator flung her shining threads, the stars a dust of ice seen through the interstices, the connecting tubes like spider web—half glittering, half drowned in inky shadow.
Still ten thousand miles off, the other ship was, under the immense lasers Gladiator directed toward it, another star; but one that winked and twinkled as its structure surged and twisted to the urgings of accelerations long departed.
A hatch at Daw’s feet opened and a metal-clad figure he knew to be Helen Youngmeadow rose, caught his hand, and stood beside him. Like his own, her faceplate was set for full transparency; her beautiful face, thus naked to the darkness of a billion suns, seemed to him to hold a hideous vulnerability. In his earphones her voice asked: “Do you know this is the first time I’ve been out? It’s lovely.”
“Yes,” Daw said.
“And all this is Gladiator; she doesn’t seem this big when she talks to me in our cabin. Could you show me which one it is? I’m lost.”
“Which module?” From his utility belt Daw took a silver rod, then locked the articulations of his suit arm so that he could aim it like a missile projector with the fine adjustment controls. In the clean emptiness no beam showed, but a module miles down the gossamer cylinder of the ship flashed with the light.
“Way down there,” the girl said. “It would be a lot more sociable if everyone were quartered together.”
“In a warship the men must be near their duty,” Daw explained awkwardly. “And everything has to be decentralized so that if we’re blown apart, all the parts can fight. The module you and your husband are in has more of the ship’s central processor than any of the others, but even that is scattered all over.”
“And their ship—the ship out there—is modular too.”
“Yes,” Daw said. He remembered his conversation with Wad. “Ours is a hollow cylinder, theirs a filled rectangle. Our modules are different sizes and shapes depending on function: theirs are uniform. You’re the emp
athist—the intercultural psychologist—what do those things tell you?”
“I have been thinking about it,” Helen Youngmeadow said, “but I’d like to think some more before I talk, and I’m anxious to fly. Can’t we go now?”
“You’re sure—?”
“I’ve had all the training.” She relaxed her boots’ grip on the steel world beneath her, kicked out, for an instant floated above him, then was gone. Backpack rockets made a scarcely visible flame, and it was several seconds before he could pick out the spark of her progress. He followed, knowing that all around them, invisible and distant by hundreds of miles, the other boarding parties he had dispatched were making for the ship ahead as well.
“I’m an empathist, as you said,” the girl’s voice continued. “Gladiator is a warship, but my husband and I are here to take the side of the enemy.”
“That doesn’t bother me.”
“Because by taking their side we help you. We give you someone who thinks like them and reacts to their needs. In a way we’re traitors.”
“This is exploration; if we had come just to fight you wouldn’t even be on board.”
“Because the Navy’s afraid we might blow our own vessel up, or induce the crew to mutiny. We humans have such a high empathy coefficient—some of us.”
“When you and I reach that ship,” Daw said wryly, “we’ll be the underdogs. Perhaps then you’ll empathize with the Navy.”
“That’s the danger—if I do that I won’t be doing my job.”
He chuckled.
“Listen, Captain Daw. If I ask you something, will you tell me the truth? Straight?”
“If you’ll let me catch up to you, and assuming it’s not classified.”
“All right, I’ve cut my jets. I’m—”
“I see you, and I’ve been ranging you on suit radar. It’s just that with more mass to accelerate I can’t match you for speed when you’re flat out.” Ahead of them something had been transformed from a winking star to a tiny scrap of diamond lace. Three thousand miles yet, Daw estimated, and checked his radar for confirmation. Five thousand. That ship was big. He said aloud, “What’s the question?”
“Why did you let me come? I want to, and I’m terribly grateful, but while I was going up to the bridge I was sure you’d say no. I was thinking of ways to go without your permission—crazy things like that.”
For the second time Daw lied.
He held her in space, his hand on her arm, telling her it was a safety precaution. The scrap of lace grew to an immense net and at last acquired a third dimension, so that it was seen as thousands of cubes of void, tubes outlining the edges, spherical modules at the intersections. “Right angles,” Helen Youngmeadow said. “I never knew right angles could be so lovely.” Then, a moment later. “This is more beautiful than ours.”
Daw felt something he tried to choke down. “More regular, certainly,” he admitted. “Less individualized.”
“Do you still think it’s abandoned?”
“Until they show me otherwise. The question is, which one of these things should we enter?”
“If we can enter.”
“We can. Mrs. Youngmeadow, you empathize with these people, even though you’ve never seen anything of theirs except this ship. Where would you put the command module?”
It was a challenge, and she sensed it. “Where would you put it, Captain? As a sailor and a military man?”
“On a corner,” Daw said promptly.
“You’re right.” He saw her helmet swivel as she looked at him. “But how did you know? Are you trained in empathics too?”
“No. But you agree? I thought you were going to say in the center.”
“That’s what I thought you were going to say—but it has to be wrong. The entire ship is a structure of empty cubes, with the edges and corners having the only importance. An outer corner would be the corner of corners—did you feel that?”
“No, but I saw that observation from an interior module would be blocked in every direction, and even on an outside plane the rest of the ship would blot out a hundred and eighty degrees. A corner module has two hundred and seventy degrees of clear field.”
They explored the surface of the nearest corner module (Daw estimated its diameter at sixty thousand feet, which would give it a surface area of over three hundred and fifty square miles) until they found a hatch, with what appeared to be a turning bar on the side opposite the hinge. “How do you know it’s not locked?” the girl asked as Daw braced himself to heave at the bar.
“Nobody’s worried about burglars out here. But anyone’s going to worry about having a crew member outside who has to get in fast.” He pulled. The bar moved a fraction of an inch and the hatch a barely visible distance. “I’ll give you some more data to empathize on,” Daw said. “Whoever built this thing is damn strong.”
The girl grasped the other end of the bar, and together they turned it until the hatch stood wide open. Light poured from it into the limitless night of space, and Helen Youngmeadow said softly, “They left everything turned on,” and a moment afterward, “No airlock.”
“No, they don’t mind vacuum.” Daw was already climbing into the module. There were no floors and no interior partitions; windowed solids that might have been instruments lined the hull wall; machines the size of buildings, braced with guying cables thousands of feet long, dotted the vast central space.
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” the girl said. “Like being in a birdcage—only I can’t tell which way is up.”
“Up is always an illusion on a ship,” Daw told her. “Why have illusions?” He was already far over her head, exploring. “No chairs, no beds. I like it.”
“You mean they don’t rest?” The girl had launched herself toward him now, and she put herself into a slow roll so that, to her eyes, the interior of the module revolved around her.
“No.” Daw moved closer to one of the great mechanisms. “Look, on our ship we have couches and chairs with thousands of little suction holes in them, so that when your clothes touch them you stay where you put yourself. But somebody who might have been doing something more valuable had to make every one of those pieces of fancy furniture, and then a hundred times their cost was spent lugging them up out of Earth’s gravity well into space. Then their pumps require power, which means waste heat the ship has a hard time getting rid of—and any time we want to go anywhere on reaction drive—all the close-in maneuvers—we have to accelerate their mass, and decelerate it again when we get there. All this to hold you down on a ship that never gets up much over half a G, and in addition to the crash couches on the tenders and lifeboats.”
“But we have to lie down to sleep.”
“No, you don’t; you’re simply accustomed to it. All you really have to do is pull your feet off the floor, turn out the lights, and hold onto something—tike this guy wire—with one hand. Which is probably what the people who built this ship did. Our ancestors, in case you’ve forgotten, were a tree-dwelling species; and when we go to sleep with our hands around anything that resembles a limb, we automatically tighten up if it starts to slip out.”
“You still think this ship was built by human beings?”
Daw said carefully, “We’ve never found one that wasn’t.”
“Until now.”
“You don’t.”
There was no reply. Daw looked at the girl to make certain she was all right, jockeyed himself to within touching distance of the great machine, then repeated, “You don’t?”
“People? With no airlock?”
“The hatch we used may not have been intended for use in space. Or there might be safety devices we don’t know about, deactivated now.”
“There wasn’t any atmosphere, even before we opened it; as large as this place is, it would have to discharge for hours, and we’d have felt the push as we came through. There wasn’t anything. You said yourself that they didn’t mind vacuum.”
Daw said, “I was thinking they might use this one
for some special purpose, or they might wear suits all the time in here.”
“Captain, I love mankind. I know when somebody says that, it’s usually just talk; but I mean it. Not just the people who are like me, but all human beings everywhere. And yet I don’t like this ship.”
“That’s funny.” Daw swung himself away from the machine he had been examining. “I do. They’re better naval engineers—I think—than we are. Do you want to go back?”
“No, of course not. The job is here. What are you going to do now?”
“First check out a few more modules; then have some of our people land on the opposite corner of this thing with routes mapped out for them that will take at least one man through every module. They can work their way toward us, and I’ll take their reports as they come in.”
“Are you going into some of the other modules now?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll come with you. I don’t like it here.”
It was almost ten hours later when the first searchers reached the point where Daw and the girl waited, having traversed the diagonal length of the ship. They came in talking, in threes and fours, having met when their lines of search converged. Daw, who except for one brief return to Gladiator had spent the time studying some of the devices in the corner module and those immediately adjacent, broke up the groups and questioned each man separately, using a private communication frequency. Helen Youngmeadow chatted with those waiting for debriefing and waved to each party going back to the ship.
In time the groups thinned, fewer and fewer men clustered around the girl; and at last the last crewman saluted and departed, and she and Daw were alone again. To make conversation she said, “It always seems so lonely on our ship, but seeing all these men makes me realize how many there are; and there are some I’d swear I’ve never even met.”
