Sargasso Sector

by Paul Kupperberg

  “Well,” said Pattie. “Your ship could disappear out from under you, or you might become a species that finds your environment poisonous, or—”

  “Or any number of equally remote ‘what-ifs.’ Haven’t you noticed, Pattie, that for all the strange things that are happening, it is all of a mostly innocuous, if not disconcerting nature? I don’t think the Drive wishes us harm, just to render us harmless.”

  “What happened to Bart was not innocuous,” Pattie said sadly.

  “No, of course it wasn’t,” he quickly agreed. “But his death was certainly, even among a crew of forty individuals undergoing an extraordinary run of bad luck, an anomaly. However, if you consider all the many trillions of beings that exist in the universe, all the possible interactions, encounters, and outcomes…well, really, how unlikely is it that, even under normal probability, just about anything might happen at any given time?”

  The Shirley returned to its original spot, waiting for Soloman to board.

  “In fact,” said the Bynar, “you would no doubt find remarkable the case of elderly twentieth-century Earth twin brothers, both killed not two hours apart, hit by trucks while riding their bicycles on the same stretch of road.”

  “Yes, that sounds fairly remarkable,” she agreed.

  “Because they were brothers, dying so close together in so similar a manner?”

  Pattie nodded. “Of course.”

  “Except the fact of their relationship, though of great interest, is irrelevant to the equation. You would likely have found the story less remarkable had I told it this way: Two elderly men in the same hometown died within two hours of each other, each riding a bicycle along a busy motorway in a snowstorm.”

  Pattie chittered. “Ah, I see what you mean.”

  “The truly strange things—the impossible appearances of beings, the improbable transmutations of objects—those are without a doubt caused by the Drive. But, ignoring that Bart regularly consumed peanut butter, and considering only that allergic reactions in humans can, in some cases, strike without a prior history, it might just be that his death was, truly, a freak accident. Perhaps having nothing to do with our proximity to the Drive and more to do with the random universe we are accustomed to dealing with.”

  “We’ll never know, will we?” Pattie said. A rivet popped from the bulkhead overhead and dropped down on the Nasat’s head with a dull thud against her exoskeleton. A second and third followed before she could scramble out of the way.

  “Are you okay?” Soloman said.

  “Concerned,” she said. “There are no rivets used in the construction of this ship.” Pattie’s antennae quivered and she said, “Go, Soloman. Go talk to that crazy computer before what little luck there is keeping us alive runs out.”

  Chapter

  10

  Brightly colored party balloons adorned with the faces of cartoon characters flitted lazily past the Shirley’s forward window. Inside, a burly squat being in an antiquated and tattered space suit with a cracked visor seemed vaguely relieved when Soloman politely denied him permission to take the craft’s copilot seat and wandered, by chance, out of reality.

  Soloman was concentrating very hard on piloting the shuttle, trying not to be distracted by the increasing density of strangeness, such as when his heads-up display became a VR game featuring fairy princesses chasing after winged unicorns. The Drive had said they were being held in an “infinite-probability field,” an area where there was every chance of anything happening. It no doubt had calculated such extreme odds as being necessary to prevent the da Vinci from doing anything it deemed a danger, but, as a winged creature of a species he could not identify wheeled overhead, screeching out its mating call, Soloman could only wonder how well the Drive was functioning. It was, after all, an ancient system, perhaps no longer able to properly calculate, control, or manipulate probability.

  “This is the Shuttlecraft Shirley, of the U.S.S. da Vinci,” Soloman said into the communicator. “Requesting permission to dock with the Minstrel’s Whisper.”

  There had been a brief debate on the da Vinci over whether Soloman should have transported over to the other ship, but the Bynar had not been thrilled with the odds of having his molecular structure scrambled and successfully reassembled under current conditions. He would take his chances in the shuttle…a decision he thought he might soon regret.

  The response came in the form, Soloman was fairly certain, of Romulan light opera. The translator chose to convert it into a haiku in a Ferengi dialect. “Please repeat, Minstrel’s Whisper. Your transmission was…garbled.”

  The ship itself was faring little better than its attempts to communicate. As Soloman approached in the slow-moving shuttle, the Whisper randomly changed position every time he looked at or attempted to get an instrument lock on it. The Uncertainty Principle, he thought. The observation of a particle changes how it acts. What were the chances he would ever get to witness this subatomic phenomenon on a macro level?

  About fifty-fifty, he supposed.

  “Shuttlecraft Shirley. Calculation of danger to Minstrel’s Whisper under current probability level: sixteen to the twenty-third power. Permission to dock granted. Please follow indicators.”

  The Minstrel’s Whisper had apparently decided to once again occupy just a single place in the universe and stayed where it was as Soloman piloted the Shirley toward it. A line of blinking lights pulsed along the side of the silver craft, directing him toward the slowly opening maw of the cargo bay. And, in case he missed that, two unprotected dog-faced beings in greasy coveralls floated improbably in space on either side of the docking doors with brightly shining torches, pointing him to his destination.

  Soloman found setting the Shirley down on a deck that couldn’t quite decide its position or density the most nerve-wracking experience of the brief journey, but soon he was down and shutting down the shuttle’s systems. Which, at the moment, apparently required the removal, from beside the thruster controls, of an old-fashioned key attached to a pair of large fuzzy, stuffed dice.

  Soloman sighed. “Well,” he said out loud, to himself, “at least the dice are appropriate.”

  The Bynar stepped from the shuttle onto a long red carpet that ran the length of the docking bay, flanked on either side by rows of formally attired footmen. Soloman tapped his combadge and said, “Soloman to da Vinci. I have arrived safely aboard the Minstrel’s Whisper.”

  “The number you are calling is no longer in service,” replied a metallic, mechanical voice. “Please check the number and dial again.”

  Soloman frowned. “Hello?”

  “We read you, Soloman,” came Gomez’s response.

  “Good,” he said. “I’d hate to feel like I was all alone in—”

  Soloman’s next step sent him plummeting down a hole that appeared, impossibly, in the metal deck-plate before him. He landed on his back in a twisting, slanted tube and proceeded to slide down this dizzying—and impossibly long—path, like a child caught on an amusement park ride.

  “Soloman?”

  Before he could catch his breath to answer, the slide leveled off and dumped him out into a plain, unmarked corridor lined with a series of short, round hatchways.

  “Ow.”

  “Are you okay, Soloman?”

  Rubbing his posterior, the Bynar rose to his feet. “Yes. I just rode a rather improbable alternative to a lift.”

  “I’m sure. Any sign of the Uncertainty Drive?”

  One of the rounded hatches burped open and a giant green humanoid with a single eye where it’s nose should have been started trying to squeeze through it. Soloman stared in surprise as the fingers on his left hand were briefly replaced by sensor probes. A line of game fowl from Naftali honked in chorus as they waddled past him down the corridor, disappearing around the bend.

  “No doubt I’m close,” Soloman said carefully. He looked around, brushing the web of an Arctyrrian narco-spider from his head. “Hello, Minstrel’s Whisper,” he called.

/>   “Please enter.”

  Soloman shrugged. “Enter where?”

  “Probability of choosing correct portal: one hundred percent.”

  He thought he understood now. Whichever door he chose to enter would be the one that lead to the Drive. The Drive itself had altered the odds to make it a certainty.

  Soloman approached a door at random and, when it opened, he stooped to fit through it into the chamber housing the core of the Uncertainty Drive.

  He could feel the world around him returning to normal. Creatures from other worlds and ancient times ceased scurrying and flapping around him. His limbs and digits no longer became something else, his uniform remained on his back, and things were no longer becoming other things for no reason other than probability allowed for it. Here, in the presence of the Uncertainty Drive, the odds ceased to conspire against sanity.

  The Drive itself was hardly impressive. All that was visible in the low-ceilinged, ten-foot by ten-foot chamber—which, along with the evidence of the small portals, led Soloman to speculate that the creators of the Minstrel’s Whisper had been a race short in stature, if not long on scientific know-how—was a floor to ceiling tubular chamber, transparent and filled with a bubbling gold liquid. It took him only a moment to realize that the bubbles traveling up and down the chamber did so in patterns.

  “A protein solution containing organic memory matter?” Soloman asked.

  “Analysis correct. I am Minstrel.”

  Soloman slowly circled the chamber. “I am Soloman.”

  “Yes. I calculated a ninety-nine point seven-two-three probability that you would be the one sent to interface with me.”

  The S.C.E. computer expert nodded, knowing he had to be careful until he had a sense of the Drive’s operating parameters. “Where is your crew, Minstrel?”

  “Insufficient data. I was briefly offline and rebooted to find the crew gone.”

  “Didn’t you find that…odd?” Soloman asked.

  “Improbable,” the Drive corrected. “Minstrel’s Whisper’s log contains incomplete data; analysis of probability incomplete.”

  “Do you know how long you were offline, Minstrel?”

  “Insufficient data.”

  “Do you know your current location?”

  “Insufficient data.”

  Soloman found it interesting that an artificial intelligence of this obvious sophistication and complexity had made no attempt to fill in the gaps in its data. It could have easily requested the information from the da Vinci’s computers, or even taken simple star readings to determine the time and its location, yet it was strangely content to do nothing.

  “I’ve come to assure you that the da Vinci has no hostile intentions toward you and ask to be released from your infinite-probability field,” he said. “We wish only to remove obstacles blocking our space lanes.”

  “Probability of hostile action by da Vinci: fifty point zero-zero-three percent. Da Vinci will remain in infinite-probability field until taken into custody by the Empire.”

  On a mere three one-hundredths of a percentage point of chance, the Drive had determined the da Vinci to be a threat. Soloman wondered exactly what this intelligent computer that could not seem to figure out how to read a star chart to calculate its location or the passage of some million years of time was using to calibrate its determination of the odds.

  “While we’re waiting for the Empire to take me into custody,” Soloman said, producing a deck of playing cards from his tunic, “might I interest you in a small game of chance?”

  It was time he found out.

  Chapter

  11

  Captain Gold waited.

  Commanders of Starfleet vessels seldom had to endure the endless waits David Gold often found himself facing. True, he was the top man aboard the da Vinci, but aside from seeing to it that the ship got safely from point A to point B, much of his time was spent waiting for the various scientists and engineers under his command to finish their jobs before moving on to the next point on the map. Naturally, he took a great interest in what his people did and expected them to keep him fully apprised of their progress, but there really wasn’t a whole lot for him to do while they built their gadgets and adjusted their gizmos. Absent an emergency, he was pretty much left to hang back and let his people do what they did best.

  Which left him feeling, at times, very much like a third wheel. Sometimes that separation caused command issues, as happened at Rhaax a little while ago, but mostly it caused boredom. And sometimes, when an emergency did arise, the captain felt guilty that he might have brought it on by wishing for something to do to relieve the tedium.

  If nothing else, the Uncertainty Drive was fast curing him of the desire for something to happen while he waited. At the moment, he would have given anything for some good old tedium in an environment that didn’t make the impossible routine.

  “Captain, look at this.”

  Gold looked. The viewscreen on the bridge showed a section of the Sargasso where the derelict ships were drifting into a new and very strangely recognizable pattern. “Is that…?” he asked.

  Gomez nodded. “Yes. Those ships are rearranging themselves into a diagram of a sodium chloride molecule. Common table salt.”

  “But…why?” Gold said with a shake of his head.

  “Because the odds are that they can,” Gomez said. “The readings in the field of altered probability appear to be intensifying.”

  A muffled explosion that caused the da Vinci to shudder and alarms to go off punctuated Gomez’s words. It was quickly determined that a newly installed convection tube in the recently repaired port nacelle had, against all odds, burst.

  “Those tubes don’t just burst,” Gold said angrily.

  “They do when there are even odds that they might,” Gomez said. “We’ve been experiencing more and more improbable failures over the last hour. Most of them were relatively minor, but what are the odds they can continue that way? The longer we’re held here, the more likely the chance we’ll experience a catastrophic failure, a structural abnormality, or even human error that could destroy this ship.”

  “We’re just an accident waiting to happen,” he said.

  “Bet on it,” Gomez agreed.

  The lift doors opened and, as a kangaroo hopped onto the bridge, the da Vinci’s sensors chose that moment to crash.

  Soloman settled himself on the floor beside the Uncertainty Drive and began shuffling the cards.

  “Define ‘game of chance’?” the Drive inquired.

  “Diversions that are dependent on chance, such as the drawing of a specific card or the rolling of dice to achieve a specific number to determine victory or loss. Your civilization has no such games?” Soloman was surprised. Most civilizations across the universe had developed such games, and he would have guessed that a culture that developed this mode of travel would have such.

  “The Khnndak attained mastery of probability millennia ago. Games of chance, under such conditions, would contain no element of risk.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s so,” said Soloman. “Still, if you’re interested, I could teach one such game to you.”

  “Explain.”

  Soloman dealt two hands of five-card poker, all faceup, to demonstrate to the Drive how the game was played. He quickly explained the fifty-two card deck, the different suits contained therein, the various odds of achieving the desired hands, and the methods of betting. A single simulated hand and the Drive indicated its understanding of the fundamentals.

  The Bynar gathered the cards back up, shuffled, cut the deck, then dealt, turning the Drive’s cards toward a visual sensor on the wall.

  Soloman had drawn a pair of fours and three useless cards. In a real game, he would likely have folded his hand on such a pair, but there was more at stake here than winning a round of cards. “We each discard the cards that do not fit into our hands and draw an equal number of new cards in the hope of achieving a better hand.” This he did, finding himse
lf little better off than he had been with his original cards. He asked the Drive, “How many cards do you want?”

  “I will maintain the initial selection.”

  “Really?” Soloman reached over and turned the Drive’s cards, unprepared for the shock of seeing a perfect royal flush, just as he had dealt it.

  “Remarkable,” Soloman said. He gathered the cards, shuffled thoroughly, and dealt out another hand.

  Even after drawing four new cards against an ace, he could not better the straight flush held by the Drive.

  A third hand produced another royal flush for the Drive, followed by two full houses, a straight, two pairs (three times in a row), three of a kind, a third royal flush, and three more straights, all exactly the same. The best hand Soloman was able to achieve had been that initial pair of fours. After that, even the humblest pair of deuces had eluded him.

  “Fifteen hands in which you’ve been dealt nothing less than three of a kind, including not just one but three royal flushes. In any individual hand the probability of a royal flush is some thirty-one thousand to one.”

  “Probability of drawing the five necessary cards: fifty percent for each individual card.”

  “But what of drawing all five necessary cards in every single hand? In fifteen consecutive hands,” Soloman said, “the odds are mind-boggling. Where exactly does probability currently stand for us?”

  “Probability is normal.”

  Soloman began dealing the newly reshuffled cards, one at a time, faceup on the floor. They came out of the deck in sequential order, by suits.

  “This, Minstrel,” he said, “is not normal.”

  A loud, high-pitched screech filtered up to the bridge from belowdecks of the da Vinci.

  “What now?” Gold demanded.

  Gomez signaled engineering and a stressed-sounding Nancy Conlon’s voice said, without any preamble, “You’re not going to believe this one!”