Beyond the Farthest Suns (3 page)

“In short, you're useless,” Anna told the machine.

“That is as it may be.”

“I should replace you with my gigolo.”

“He's a handsome bastard, I'll say that for him.”

“What if we assume that Kamon is going to behave erratically, say, deranged by being denied an afterlife?”

“We have more options.”

“Then that's our operating hypothesis. No, wait. Use this—Kamon will behave
as if
he is deranged, by human stan­dards. I never underestimate opponents.”

“Do you wish that to be an hypothesis, or an assumption? There is a difference, you know.”

“Whichever way it works. You know what you're doing better than I do, dearie.”

“Incorporated. The resulting future model, still highly inadequate, indicates that the meeting at Precipice 5—course corrected for that des­tination, by the by—will not take place. The station will be destroyed. Kamon will probably be the destroyer, and the Aighors will claim Kamon has gone rogue to deny re­sponsibility.”

She paced in front of the panel, then asked for gravitation to be reduced and then shut off, and floated at ease. “Warn Precipice 5 to be on full alert when Disjohn arrives.”

“Done.”

“And contact USC, division of Martial Support, at Shireport. Tell them there is going to be a confrontation in the Paf­loshwa Rift, coordinates unknown.”

“Such an action will mark you as a rogue agent as well,” the machine said, a speculative tone in its voice.

“Whatever for?”

“It indicates a willing­ness to engage in battle, since you are heading toward the Rift of your own free will.”

“Not exactly my free will. USC doesn't know I'm aboard this vessel, so they'll assume—will have to assume, and believe me are smart enough to assume—that whoever advises the Captain is not playing with a full deck of cards.”

“I advise the Captain.”

“I will have you overhauled when we get back to Ansinger.”

“That will be a good time to install the new Parakem function modules. Where are you, since you're not here?”

“On Tau Ceti II. I made an appointment with Jessamyn Negras for a business talk, and she hates me enough to keep me waiting for at least a month. She will refuse to believe anyone would miss out on the blessed chance to talk to her. And appropriately deluded recorders are going at all times in my apartments. I'm there, that's certain.”

“I see,” said the Heuritex.

Kamon regretted killing the captain before learning all there was to know about ship operation. The Aighors who crewed the vessel were all competent in their special tasks, and the computers were helpful, but an overall cohesion was, if not lacking, at least shaky.

Kamon absorbed the captain's li­brary rapidly. He was gratified to know an Aighor pilgrimage fleet was forming on the borders of the Rift. His kind cheered him on, and the government—diplomats and rulers alike—had not yet sent a ship to stop him. It would be useless if they did.

Coldly, precisely, he figured where difficulties would arise. First would be the protection of Precipice 5—negligible defenses, all things considered. Second would be the presence of Anna Sigrid­ Nestor, whom of all the humans he had met he most admired. Third—the final battleground would not be Precipice 5. He would have to chase Fairchild across the Rift.

The station would be destroyed before the human ships arrived.

Fairchild's ship saw the dead ruin of Precipice 5, issued a distress signal on the station's behalf, and headed at full power for deep space. The ship was away from the major gravitational effects of the small system in hours and shamelessly relied on proto­geometry jumps to take it deep into the Rift. It then shut down all activities not connected with life-support, went into halfphase, and laid ghost images across a wide range of continua.

Graetikin silently cursed the Dallat conventions which made all private ships carry nothing more offensive than meteoroid deflection shields. He had spent his first thirty years in space as an apprentice commander in the Centrum Astry, helping to command ships armed to the teeth with all conceivable weapons, from rocket projectiles to stasis-­shielded neutronium blocks which, when warped into the center of another vessel, quickly gravitated everything into super-dense spheres. Now he was facing a violent confron­tation with nothing more offensive than flare rockets and half-phase warps.

It was like the final charge of an old lion against warriors wielding assegais. Fairchild's motives and the Aighor's motives didn't concern him. Both in their own ways were altruistic and noble, concerned with good tasks. But he was concerned with surviving to captain another ship, or at least continue captaining this one.

He didn't mind Fairchild's employ. The man was reasonably sharp and knew how to provide for the upkeep of his ships. If he had the tact of a young bull in dealing with alien cultures, that was usually not Graetikin's concern.

Between and around these thoughts, he re-worked his equations describing the Thrina. There was a cool, young hypothesis on the horizons of his mind, and it tantalized him. In reworking the expressions on his notepad, he found four connections with Parakem functions that he hadn't noticed earlier. These implied that the Thrina, though ineffectual in a cause-effect relation in most geometries, had interesting properties in coincidence-controlled­ geome­tries. They could influence certain aspects of status­ geometry, where cause-effect and synchronicity operated in struggling balance.

He raised his eyebrows.

And that implied something extraordinary…

“There is a good possibility we can contact Fairchild if he chooses to coast free within the next thirty-five hours,” the Heuritex said.

Anna grumbled out of a light doze. “What was that?”

“We can join forces with him at points I have calculated along geodesics meeting in higher geometries.”

“Translate for us mortals, please.” She straightened in her command chair and rubbed her face with her hands.

“I think we can join with Fairchild's ship before Kamon reaches it. Here is our condition: fifth standard day of flight; all three ships are deep into the Rift. Fairchild is inert, following a least-energy geodesic in half-phase. Kamon is matching the most likely direction of that geodesic, though I'm certain he has no clear picture of the ship's present position along such a path. We follow Kamon closely. And we are constantly correcting our charts with observations of the Rift pulsars and singularities.”

“Yes, but what's this about joining Fairchild?”

“His vessel alone is not sufficient to propel itself away from Kamon. He has little or no chance of escape in the long run. But with our two ships linked, we can create a broader affect-beam in protogeometry—”

“You can arrange this in more than just theory?”

“I think so, madame. I can contact Disjohn Fairchild's ship in a code only it can understand, and arrange for the rendezvous without the Aighor knowing.”

“You're a maker of wonders, and you draw my curiosity like a magnet … into areas I'm sure will baffle me. I'll think on it,” she said.

Why hesitate?
she asked herself. Because now, faced with the possibility of doing what she had started out to do—save Disjohn Fair­child at any cost—a miserable, cold sensibility started to creep in. She needed to think about it long and hard. There were too many considerations to weigh for a hasty decision.

She made her way to the ship's observation chamber. Far out on the needle-like boom which extended from the crew ball, an isolated, multi-sense chamber seemed to hang in dark space. But its walls were transparent only by illusion. Trillions of luminous cells provided adjustable images of anything within range of ship's sensors, down to the finest detail a human eye could perceive. Images could be magnified, starbows undistorted into normal starfields for quick reference, or high-frequency energy shifted into vis­ual regions. If need demanded, such subtle effects as light distortion in higher geometries could be brought within human interpretation. The sphere could also synthesize programmed journeys and sound effects, or any combina­tion of fictions and synaesthesias.

Anna requested a tour of the nearby singularities. “Will there be a specific sequence, madame?” the media com­puter asked.

“Only an introductory tour. Explain what I'm seeing.”

“Some singularities are made obvious by surrounding nebulae,” the voice-over began, along with the visual journey. “These are veils of super­nova dust and gas that have been expanding for hundreds of millions of years.” Fading in, wisps like mare's-tail clouds in a sunset, backed by velvet space. Hidden within, a tiny spinning and glowing cloud, a pinprick, not worth noticing … geo­metric jaws gaping wide, tides deadly as any ravening star ­furnace.

“Others are companions to dim red stars, and thus are heavy X-ray sources. They suck in matter from their neigh­bors, accelerate and heat it through friction, and absorb it in bottomless wells.

“There is no comprehensive explanation why the major­ity of the Rift stars supernovaed within ten million years of each other, half an eon ago, but the result is a treacherous graveyard of black holes, white dwarfs, and a few dim giants. They all affect each other across the close-packed Rift in complex patterns.

“Some can be seen through distortion of the stellar background. The rings of stars around a black hole show the effects of gravitational lensing. Light is captured and orbited above the event horizons, producing two primary images and a succession of weaker images caused by anomalies in the spinning singularity. Gas falling into the holes produces hot points of high ­energy radiation, red-shifted into the visual spectrum by enormous gravitational fields. These are surrounded by rings of stars, images of stars from every angle—every visible object, including those behind the observer. There are gaps of darkness and then succeeding rings like the bands on an inter­ferometer plate, finally blending into star-images undeviated by the singularity.”

She was reminded of electronic Christmas ornaments from her childhood. Anna knew what she saw lay only a few million miles away, so close her ship could reach out to touch it in mere minutes.

“Dear God,” she murmured. To fall into one of those things would be to transcend any past experience of death. They were miracles, jesters of spacetime. Her eyes filled with tears which nearly broke their tension bonds to drift away in free-fall.

“Where no such diffractions and reflections are visible, perhaps absorbed in dark nebulosities, and where no X-ray or Thrina sources give clues, naked singularities stripped of their event horizons lurk like invisible teeth. These have been charted by evidence obtained in protogeometry warps. There is no other way to know they exist.”

The Thrina song of a nearby singularity was played to her. It sounded like the wailing of lost children, sweetly mixed with a potent bass
boum,
an echoing cave-sound, ghost-­sound, preternatural mind-sound. “No reason is known for the existence of the Thrina song. It is connected with sin­gularities as an unpredictable phenomenon of radiating and patterned energy, perhaps in some way directed by intel­ligence.”

Nestor left the sphere and drifted quickly back through the extension to the crew-ball.

Her hands shook.

Kamon followed and waited. A ship could remain in half phase only so long before its unintentional mass loss (how easily he had spotted and avoided the ghosts!) reached a critical level.

His shipmate meditated and fasted alone in her cabin. Kamon was left with the silent computers—it was blasphemous for an Aighor machine to have a voice­—and a few aides to see to his food and wastes. He preferred it that way.

At one point he even ordered them to clear away the captain's smashed body so he might be more alone.

The Venging was close. He had had no further contact with the Council at Frain or any other Aighor agencies. He had spotted and charted the course of Anna Sigrid Nestor's ship, and felt his own sort of appreciation at the intuition she was following him personally. She was on her own Venging.

Such was the dominance pattern of humans.

“Four minutes thirty seconds before critical point,” Graetikin said. Lady Fairchild gripped her husband's arm tighter. For a society woman she was holding up remark­ably well, Graetikin thought.

The worst was yet to come. Kamon would inevitably chase them down, and there was only one chance left. Graetikin's recent equations implied they would survive if they took that chance, but
how
they would survive—in what condition, other than whole and alive—was unknown. It was a terrifying prospect.

“We have to leave half-phase,” Fairchild said. “And we have to outrun him. There's no other way.” Edith nodded and turned away from the bridge consoles.

“Have you ever wondered why he called a Venging?” she asked.

“What?” Fairchild asked. He was focusing on the blank viewers, as if to strain some impossible clue from them. It was useless to look at half-phase exteriors, however. The eye interpreted them as if they weren't there, and indeed half the time they weren't.

“Kamon has to have a reason,” Edith said, louder.

“I'm sure he does,” Graetikin said.

“I've been trying to find out what that reason is. I might have a clue.”

“That doesn't concern us now,” Fairchild said, irritated. “Reason or no, we have to get away from him.”

“But doesn't it help to know what we're going to die for?” Edith cried. “You know damn well we can't outrun him! Graetikin knows it, too. Don't you?”

Graetikin nodded. “But I wouldn't say we're going to die. There might be another way.”

“You know that?” Fairchild asked.

Graetikin nodded. “First, I'd like to hear what Lady Fairchild has to say about Kamon's motive.”