Emperor of Gondwanaland (24 page)

But the last puzzling thing the AOI had told him before it went mad was “You are not alone. There is another at Gradient Zero. She is …”

She is. What? Dying? Safe? Responsible for the Transvaluation? A multilifer? A registered berdache? She is.

Add to that the fact that the SCAM’s layout boasted no Gradient Zero, and the AOI’s final contact had proved less than enlightening.

Howard stepped over the contorted, barely recognizable body of Cheng Anderson, who had been brought down by a carapace of fungal plaques. Like all the others, he had died with that look of shock. What was the damn final revelation, the answer that killed?

If conventionally dead the victims even were.

Again, guilt at his lack of deep remorse coursed through Howard. Two months he had been aboard the
Nepthys
, hardly long enough to form any solid bonds. And most of the SCAM’s inhabitants had hated him instantly, placed him at the focus of their unease and suspicions.

But then to occupy that focus was his job.

His previous assignment had been a nasty little totalitarian world called Fagen III. (Neofascism and primitive agriculture unfortunately worked very well together.) There he had had to manipulate the fourfold plectic symbol of the organic
nation
into the fivefold symbol of a multicultural
state
. With luck the changed symbol would permeate the psyches of the population, effecting certain civil justice feelings.

Happily, the riots and cultural unrest had erupted on the day of his departure. The government thanked him profusely, and paid a bonus. There would be a culmination of the glorious creative unrest when the time to move beyond an agricultural economy arrived.

In fact he had done so well that he could pick his next assignment, so he went for that very mysterious, newly available plum that had the whole Sophontic Commensality atwitter.

Nepthys
.

He had written in his Diary then: “I will voyage to the edge of the unknown to find both my undiscovered self and something the universe has never before seen.” (He had not then formulated the thought that these two things might be one and the same.)

The Diary’s oracle function had written back: “Who are these children who scream and run wild?” He had thought it a marvelous oracle, referring perhaps to some Inner Child, an old archetype recendy resurfacing

Now, of course, after the Transvaluation he tended to interpret the oracle more disturbingly …

Leaving Anderson’s body behind, refraining from casting a backward glance for fear the corpse might choose to change, Howard took slow, deliberate steps. It wasn’t wise to run. Beatrice Somerville, the first victim, had discovered that. A glaucous mist had chased her from the gravitic engine room. She had run, and the mist laughed as she turned inside out before vanishing. Briefly displaying on its shimmering self scenes from Beatrice’s childhood, the mist soon faded away, leaving everyone with a headache and the smell of her perfume, which stood out even above the raw sewage unleashed by the rogue ganglia.

Everyone soon learned the best way to react, for what such knowledge was worth.

If you let the Transvaluator touch you at will, play with you, you lived longer.

Howard focused his attention away from his memories and onto his next few steps. If the Gradients hadn’t been reconfigured too terribly, there would be a dining hall twenty meters ahead to the left. He would only have to pass two doorways. Doorways were the worst. The Transvaluator, perhaps reflecting its own liminal nature, had some fascination with doorways.

There were no apparent changes as he passed by the first entrance.

No, that wasn’t right.

Something had changed.

Subjective time sped up, making the world around him, including his own body, seem super-slow.

Howard moved like a superannuated sloth, kicking a dropped scanner and watching it rise underwater-slow. He wondered how many mental hours it would take him to reach the next portal a mere eight meters away. Maybe this slowing had produced the shocked faces on his fallen companions. They had enjoyed what most humans never had—time to think it all out.

And judging by their faces, the answer to all of life’s questions wasn’t a nice one.

The director of the station, Sharon Dewdney, had been one of those who had hated him on sight.

“We don’t need a socio-plectic engineer! The dynamics of our interpersonal situation are firmly established, maximally optimized.”

“You’re probably right,” Howard agreed, “insofar as you go. There are enough humans here to produce a critical mass of affinities and discharges. If this were a boring, routine assignment, of course, you’d still need an engineer for conventional reasons.”

“No one will have the time to be bored, or play out the little rituals you devise in the name of psychic health, Com’sal Exaker. And since you admit as much, I fail to see your utility.”

“Allow me to share some data with you, commander.” Howard routed the dump from his personal nodes through the AOI and into Dewdney. He was gratified to note Dewdney’s eyes widen. “As you see, intense research groups such as yours generally avoid psychosis. But you risk blind spots and self-sustaining inversions that can lead to mission failure. And that would mean that the Kamakirians would get the concession, and take over your precious SCAM.”

Well, that was a definable fear, and enough of a fear to quash any further opposition from the commander.

For over a hundred years, both Kamakirians and humans had been aware of the black hole around which the SCAM now orbited. The singularity had been merely a navigational hazard of some fifty standard solar masses, with nothing to mark it as any more interesting than any other piece of dark matter that held the universe together.

Then a disabled Kamakirian ship had been caught by the greedy dead star. Before being completely sucked into the singularity, its crew had launched a message packet. Picked up decades later, it stunned the Commensality.

As they fell into the star pit, the Kamakirian crew reported experiencing strange mental adjustments bordering on the transcendental, adjustments that came to be subsumed under the catchall term “metanoia.” And deep within the singularity’s domain, where nothing should be able to exist, they could discern something. Something big in a stable orbit, which wasn’t being sucked into that awful gravity well.

The Kamakirians announced that they would study the anomaly exclusively, since one of their ships had discovered it (and died doing so). The Commensality ruled for them, but it was an academic decision, since neither Kamakirians nor humans could get anywhere near the hole, and long-range studies proved inconclusive.

Then a human named Octavia Xibalba-Fitzsimmons developed the gravitic engine, a device that utilized the long-sought Fifth Force and permitted maneuvering in ultrahigh gravity fields. The gravitic engine created an island of stability—like a bubble caught in a vortex; it was able to remain stable by its complex movement and interaction with the forces around it.

Plainly, this was the means whereby the mysterious Object maintained itself against the black hole’s perpetual desire, deep inside the event horizon.

The humans declared their right now to study the whole enigma alone, since they had developed the technology to make it possible. The SCAM—existing at this point as only a CAD-gleam in an AOI’s neurons—would be fitted with a gravitic engine, allowing it to swirl round and about the hole, occasionally “surfacing” to take on supplies and download information.

Diplomacy, negotiations, eventual mediation by the Free Machines, resulted in the birth of the
Nepthys
.

Four standard years ago when Howard had first heard of the project, he had written in his Diary: “
Nepthys
, the Lady of the Temple, goddess of the future of the unknown.” And the oracle function had responded: “What are the secrets they trace in the sky?”

The unique
Nepthys
, also denominated SCAM, assembled itself at a nearby red dwarf, and when it was ready, its AOI grown, it called for its citizen crew, all volunteers. Impelled within the hole’s reach, station and crew began a crazy spin orbit, a glyph so plectically ramified that the minicity would never repeat its position twice in the whole of Time. When the “bubble” of low gravity was farthest from the hole, crew and supplies could be taken on, data sent out.

The first standard year of its assignment passed before the
Nepthys
shot far enough away from the hole to relay its first databurst.

It told news of the Object.

And of the death of its original socio-plectic engineer, the need for a replacement.

The humans had twice passed between the Object and the hole. At those times
Nepthys
’s sensors had been able to intercept the infalling radiation of all energies emanating from the Object and to draw a limited picture of it.

It didn’t look like any ship or station ever seen in the Commensality. It looked like a castle designed by a mescal-crazed Escher. In its angular windows lights glowed, something vast and dark moved.

The Transvaluator? Howard had since had cause to wonder. Or simply, it would soon be plausible, another mortal victim of that unknown agency?

As for Howard’s predecessor, supposedly, by training, the most stable of minds, he had inexplicably committed suicide in a novel way, making an EVA outside the protective field of their gravitic engines.

Was it his ghost, perpetually caught in some wormhole, that was raising havoc onboard?

Howard had no feeling one way or the other. All theories seemed equally valid.

Time was discongealing around him now.

Howard’s foot, suspended infinitely in midstride, now fell normally toward the floor.

The second doorway drew near.

It was very, very hard to be certain, but Howard felt he had three standard days to make it to the escape pod. At the end of that period,
Nepthys
would be at one of its infrequent apogees. He could launch the pod and have some hope of not being sucked into the hole.

During that time, he would search the Gradients for any survivors—at least those who could move under their own power and sustain themselves. It would be no favor to bring the irrecoverably ultrawarped out into the glare of a disgustedly fascinated populace.

In some ways, he felt the decision to leave was the supreme act of cowardice. What human being before him had had the chance to explore Pandemonium? If he could only grasp the mechanics of the Transvaluation, its necessary (?) laws and rules, he would be the first cartographer of hell. Unless Hieronymous Bosch had had similar visions. Did theory not offer the possibility of travel backwards in time? Perhaps the metanoia resonated pastwards, awakening others to the strangeness. Perhaps, he thought, I am the mother of all weirdness.

His thoughts had gotten more and more unruly. Was this what had overtaken his predecessor? Was his cadre hypersensitive by training to the Transvaluation? Could he turn that training now to his survival? He should be able to channel his thoughts and feelings, however odd. Make a game of them. Even the drug-induced visions of ancient shamans had gained order from the ability of the mystics to think ascriptively.

Could he summon a spirit guide? A Virgil, an Isis?

But what if there were no ordered system behind the chaos? A hell of concentric rings rang true for the Renaissance, but the hell for an ungraphable orbit—? Perhaps there is no poetry in chaos …

He stepped through the second doorway—

Untouched? Seemingly.

A large dining hall stretched out before him, pleasingly empty of bodies, though not of looping vines and fleshy flowers. He could smell food. He crossed toward the swinging doors that led to the kitchen. There, he hesitated. Entered.

One of the rogue ganglia had subverted the servocooks, which now poured out liters of spaghetti and meatballs. The floor was awash in them.

Howard attempted to assert control, speaking aloud.

“I am hungry and about to eat. I am hungry and think about five hours of objective time have passed since my last meal. Therefore, I will now eat.” For good measure he added, “I am Howard Exaker.”

All of this brave facade melted away as pink rose petals began to rain from the ceiling. A woman’s voice trilled out “The Caverns of Altamira,” a hit from the twenty-third century. “They heard the call, and they wrote it on the wall …”

Howard recognized the voice wistfully as belonging not to a professional singer, but to a musicologist he’d met many years ago on Fezzon. She had been his first real lover. It made him sad and angry that such a sweet memory should manifest itself amidst such alienage. Even the dearest, most familiar parts of his life were being estranged from him.

He fell to his knees amid the edible slop.

As he ate and cried and choked, some of the rose-petal rain began to turn blue. By the time he was sated, the blue petals covered every surface. He had eaten several, despite his best efforts.

Apparently, that had been a bad mistake.

As he stood, Howard felt a change overtaking him.

His arms fused to his side, his legs melded. Rotundity shaped him. Simultaneously, he felt himself stretching upward toward the ceiling, rooting downward.