Heaven's Reach (38 page)

“Can we retract our reality anchor now?” he asked the pilot.

“No need. The anchor is restored to its accustomed niche.”

“Then what is that?” Harry asked, pointing to the blue cable, still rising vertically toward the sky.

“The ropelike metaphor has become a semipermanent structure. We can leave it in place, if you wish.”

Harry peered up the stretched cord, rubbing his chin.

“Well, it might offer a way out of here if we have to beat a hasty retreat. Just note this position and let's get going.”

The scout station set out, striding across the plain of fuzzy tubes. Meanwhile, Harry kept moving from window to window, peering nervously, wondering how this region's famed lethality would first manifest itself.

Rearing up on all sides, at least a dozen of the slender, immensely tall towers loomed in the background. Some of them seemed to have square cross sections while others were rectangular or oval. He even thought he perceived a rigid
formality
to their placement, as if each stood positioned on a grid, some fixed distance apart.

Harry soon realized the strange blurriness was not due to any obstructing “haze” but to a flaw in vision itself. Sight appeared to be a short-range sense in this patch of E Space.

Great. All I need is partial blindness in a place where reality literally can sneak up on you and bite.

It should be a short march to where he last saw the Avenue. Awkwardly at first, Harry accelerated his station across the plain of fluffy growths, all bent and twined like tangled grass. These “plants” didn't wave in a breeze, like the saw-weed of Horst. Still, they reminded him somehow of that endless steppe where dusty skies flared each dawn like a diffuse torch, painful to the eyes. The sort of country his ancestors had sniffed at disdainfully before returning to the trees, ages ago on
Earth. Sensibly, they left scorching skies and cutting grass to their idiot cousins—primates who lacked even the good sense to escape the noonday sun, and later went on to become humans.

According to the Great Library, Horst had been a pleasant world once, with a rich, diverse ecosystem. But millennia ago—before Earthlings developed their own starships and stumbled on Galactic culture—something terrible had happened to quite a few planets in Tanith Sector. By the ancient Code of the Progenitors, natural ecosystems were sacrosanct, but the Civilization of Five Galaxies suffered lapses now and then. In the Fututhoon Episode, hundreds of worlds were ravaged by shortsighted colonization, leaving them barren wildernesses.

Predictably, there followed a reactionary swing toward manic zealotry. Different factions cast blame, demanding a return to the true path of the Progenitors.

But
which
true path? Several billion years would age the best-kept records. Noise crept in over the aeons, until little remained from the near mythical race that started it all. Speculation substituted for fact, dogma for evidence. Moderates struggled to soothe hostility among fanatical alliances whose overreaction to the Fututhoon chaos now promised a different kind of catastrophe.

Into this delicate situation Earthlings appeared, at first offering both distraction and comic relief with their wolfling antics. Ignorant, lacking social graces, humans and their clients irked some great star clans just by existing. Moreover, having uplifted chimpanzees and dolphins before Contact, humans had to be classified as “patrons,” with the right to lease colonies, jumping ahead of many older species.

“Let them prove themselves first on catastrophe planets,” went the consensus. If Earthlings showed competence at reviving sick biospheres, they might win better worlds later. So humans and their clients labored on Atlast, Garth, and even poor Horst, earning grudging respect as planet managers.

But there were costs.

A desert world can change you
, Harry thought,
recalling Horst and feeling abruptly sad for some reason. He went down to the galley, fixed a meal, and brought it back to the observation deck, eating slowly as the endless expanse of twisted, fuzzy tubes rolled by, still pondering that eerie sense of familiarity.

His thoughts drifted back to Kazzkark, where a tall proselyte accosted him with strange heresies. The weird Skiano with a parrot on its shoulder, who spoke of Earth as a sacred place—whose suffering offered salvation to the universe.

“Don't you see the parallels? Just as Jesus and Ali and Reverend Feng had to he martyred in order for human souls to he saved, so the sins of all oxygen-breathing life-forms can only be washed clean by sacrificing something precious, innocent, and unique. That would be your own homeworld, my dear chimpanzee brother!”

It seemed a dubious honor, and Harry had said so, while eyeing possible escape routes through the crowd. But the Skiano seemed relentless, pushing its vodor apparatus, so each meaningful flash of its expressive eyes sent a translation booming in Harry's face.

“For too long sapient beings have been transfixed by the past—by the legend of the Progenitors!—a mythology that offers deliverance to species, but nothing for the individual! Each race measures its progress along the ladder of Uplift—from client to patron, and then through noble retirement into the tender Embrace of Tides. But along the way, how many trillions of lives are sacrificed? Each one unique and precious. Each the temporal manifestation of an immortal soul!”

Harry knew the creature's eye twinkle was the natural manner of Skiano speech. But it lent eerie passion each time the vodor pealed a ringing phrase.

“Think about your homeworld, oh, noble chimpanzee brother! Humans are wolflings who reached sapience without Uplift. Isn't that a form of virgin birth? Despite humble origins, did not Earthlings burst on the scene amid blazing excitement and controversy, seeing things
that had remained unseen? Saying things that heretofore no one dared say?

“Do you Terrans suffer now for your uniqueness? For the message that streams from that lovely blue world, even as it faces imminent crucifixion? A message of hope for all living things?”

Even as a crowd of onlookers gathered, the Skiano's arms had raised skyward.

“Fear not for your loved ones, oh, child of Earth.

“True, they face fire and ruin in days to come. But their sacrifice will bring a new dawn to all sapients—yea, even those of other life orders! The false idols that have been raised to honor mythical progenitors will be smashed. The Embrace of Tides will be exposed as a false lure. All hearts will turn at last to a true true faith, where obedience is owed.

“Toward numinous Heaven—abode of the one eternal and all-loving God.”

In response, the bright-feathered parrot flapped its wings and squawked
“Amen!”

Many onlookers glowered upon hearing the Progenitors called “mythical.” Harry felt uncomfortable as the visible focus of the proselyte's attention. If this kept up, there could be martyrs, all right! Only the august reputation of Skianos in general seemed to hold some of the crowd back.

In order to calm the situation, Harry wound up reluctantly accepting a
mission
from the Skiano, agreeing to be a message bearer … in the unlikely event that his next expedition brought him in contact with an angel of the Lord.

It was about an hour later—subjective ship time—that a blue
M
popped into place a little to his left.

“Monitor mode engaged, Captain Harms,”
the slightly prissy voice announced.
“I take pleasure to announce that the Avenue is coming into range. It can be observed through the forward quadrant.”

Harry stood up.

“Where? I don't …”

Then he saw it, and exhaled a sigh. There, emerging out of the strange haziness, lay a shining ribbon of speckled light. The Avenue twisted across the foreground like a giant serpent, emerging from the murk on his left and vanishing in obscurity to his right. In a way, it reminded Harry of the undulating “sea monster” he had witnessed during his last survey trip, near the banana-peel mesa. Only that had been just a meme creature—little more than an extravagant idea, an embodied notion—while
this
was something else entirely.

The Avenue did not conform to the allaphorical rules of E Space.

Strictly speaking, it consisted of everything that was
not
E Space.

Because of that, cameras might perceive it. The tech people at NavInst had loaded his vessel with sensor packages to place at intervals along the shining tube, then retrieve later on his way back to base. Ideally, the data might help Wer'Q'quinn's people foretell hyperspatial changes during the current crisis.

He pressed a button and felt a small tremor as the first package deployed.

Now, should he turn left, and start laying more instruments in that direction? Or right? There seemed no reason to choose one way over the other.

Well, he was still an officer of the law. Harry's other job was to patrol E Space and watch for criminal activity.

“Computer, do you detect signs anybody's been through this area lately?”

“I am scanning. Interlopers would have to travel alongside the Avenue in order to reach an intersection with Galaxy Four. Any large vessel piercing the tube, or even passing nearby, would leave ripple signs, whatever its allaphorical shape at the time.”

The platform nosed closer to the shining tube of brightness. Harry had glimpsed the Avenue many times while on patrol, but never this close. Here it appeared rather narrow, only about twice the height of the station itself. The tube shone with millions of tiny sparks, set amid a deep inner blackness.

The narrow, snakelike volume was filled with
stars … and much more. Within that twisty cylinder lay the entire universe Harry knew—planets, suns, all five linked galaxies.

It was a topological oddity that might have looked, to its long-extinct first discoverers, like a wonderful way to get around relativity's laws. All one needed was an intersection near the planetary system one was in, and another near one's destination. The technique of entering and leaving E Space could be found in any Galactic Library branch.

But E Space was a world of unpredictability, metapsychological weirdness, and even representational absurdities. Keeping the Avenue in view until you came to some point near your destination could entail a long journey, or a very short one. Distances and relationships kept changing.

Assuming a traveler found a safe exit point, and handled transition well, he might emerge where he wanted to go. That is, if it turned out he ever left home in the first place! One reason most sophonts hated E Space was the screwy way causality worked there. You
could
cancel yourself out, if you weren't careful. Observers like Harry found it irksome to return from a mission, only to learn they no longer existed, and never really had at all.

Harry didn't much approve of E Space—an attitude NavInst surely measured in his profile. Yet, they must have had reasons to train him for this duty.

The platform began zigging and zagging alongside the Avenue, occasionally stopping to bend lower on its stilts, bringing instruments to bear like a dog sniffing at a spoor. Nursing patience, Harry watched strange nebulae drift past, within the nearby cylindrical continuum.

A bright yellow star appeared close to the nearby tube edge, against a black, star-flecked background. It looked almost close enough to touch as his vessel moved slowly past.
I guess there's a finite chance that's Sol, with Earth floating nearby, a faint speck in the cosmos. The odds are only about a billion to one against.

At last, the station stopped. The slanted letter seemed to spin faster.

“I note the near passage of three separate ship wakes. The first came this way perhaps a year ago, and the second not long after, following its trail.”

“A pursuit?” This caught his interest. For the spoor to have lasted so long testified how little traveled this region was … and perhaps how desperate the travelers were, to pass this way.

“What about the third vessel?”

“That one is more recent. A matter of just a few subjective-duration days. And there is something else.”

Harry nervously grabbed his thumbs. “Yes?”

“From the wake, it seems this latter vessel belongs to the Machine Order of Life.”

Harry frowned.

“A machine? In E Space? But how could it navigate? Or even see where it …” He shook his head. “Which way did it go?”

“To the figurative left … the way we are now facing.”

Harry paced on the floor. His orders from Wer'Q'quinn were clear. He must lay the cameras where they might peer from E Space back into more normal continua, offering NavInst techs a fresh perspective on the flux of forces perturbing the Five Galaxies. And yet, he was also sworn to check out suspicious activities.…

“Your orders, Captain Harms?”

“Follow them!” he blurted before the decision was clear in his own mind.

“Sorry. I am not programmed …”

Harry cursed. “Engage pilot mode!”

Almost before the cursive
P
popped into place, he pointed.

“That way. Quickly! If we hurry we still might catch them!”

The platform jerked, swinging to the right.

“Aye aye, Hoover. Off we go. Tallyho!”

Harry didn't even grimace this time. The program was irritating, but never at the expense of function. Even
Tymbrimi usually knew where to limit a joke, thank Ifni. The station jogged onward in a quick eight-legged lope across the savannah of fuzzy, cactuslike growths.

To his left the Avenue swept by, a glittering tube containing everything that was real.

Sara