Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 (15 page)

The transport steadily moved closer, robot
arms extending ready to grasp Axon and its support tanks.

“
No need to wait for me,”
Axon said, the tone unusually cheerful. “Step out of the door – I
have you.”

The two sixteen-year-olds fought to overcome
their fear of falling and stepped slowly out of the lift door. Jets
on their suits moved them out into the hangar, and they were
turning to face the door of the lift and the figures floating
inside and around it on their tethers.

“
I think it is customary to
wave,” Axon said. So they waved, and the anonymous space suits
waved back. And then they were accelerating, out of the hangar,
past the incoming transport and into space, racing towards the
ship. Victor was not happy, but Axon could feel the smile on
Mariam’s face.

“
I love it,” she said.
“It’s like swimming! Star diving!”

So Axon took her in a series of loops,
dives, spin-turns and crazy corkscrews around the unwaveringly
straight track of Victor, who would have white-knuckle gripped the
arm-rests of whatever seat he was riding on, but there was no seat
and no arm-rests. Behind them the transport entered the dock; a
telescopic arm extended into the lift and, attaching to Axon’s
support platform pulled the protected, but still fragile, cargo of
biology into its hold.

And so the months of training began. The
command deck of the ship was in the centre of the egg-like
structure, surrounded by layers of decks and parks. The thick outer
shell was hollow and filled with its own skins of radiation-damping
liquid hydrogen, polyethylene and water. Each of the ‘floors’ of
the one hundred and twenty eight decks was made of a hybrid of
concrete and tailored plastic.

Not many tissue-damaging particles were
going to get through to the yolk at the heart of the ship.

The deck was a sphere of seamless 3D display
panels, punctuated by some hatches to the living quarters and the
chamber which held Axon and its support systems. Four couches were
attached on gimbals to a central column.

“
Why four?”

“
Did you think they’d build
something this big just for you?”

Mariam and Victor had explored many areas of
the ship, but most of it was secured and Axon refused to open the
whole vastness on the inarguable grounds that many sectors were
mothballed, and it would be a waste of energy to open them merely
for pleasure trips.

“
You have diagrams,
schematics, 3D models, images – what more do you want?”

“
I like to touch things,”
Mariam answered. But on their birthday, when they had been greeted
with a tuneless rendition of ‘Happy Birthday To You’ over a video
link to base, Axon summoned them both to the control room and
issued some instructions. Victor, he sent to a newly-unlocked
Virtual Reality games centre, where he spent eight hours slaying
Hell-Spawn with a variety of swords, axes, razor-whips, soul-wands,
fire-bolts and other hard and soft weapons, and discovered that a
rail-gun is of absolutely no use against Undead Wraiths, although
average Zombies could be fragged quite successfully.

Mariam followed her plan and navigated a
maze of corridors and jump tubes until she reached a door with an
illuminated red sign above it – NOT AVAILABLE. Then, as she was
close to the door, the sign changed to a green heart and vanished.
The door whispered open. She walked through into a chamber filled
with sunlight. Surrounded by low grassy hillocks, a blue lake
gleamed and rippled. Dragonflies darted over the water. House
Martins swooped low over the surface, the blue reflecting on their
pale breasts and making them seem exotic and rare.

She followed a narrow path to a strangely
familiar rock jutting out over the lake, peeled off her clothes and
followed the birds in a graceful dive. Under water she swam
strongly and suddenly was in the centre of a host of silver fish,
darting and flocking.

“
Are these real fish?” she
thought at Axon.

“
They’re not just real
fish, Mariam. They’re your fish.”

“
I don’t believe
you.”

“
Ask Victor. Dr Somerton
was most displeased.”

Mariam thought a giant smile, and took only
the briefest of breaths before diving again and again amongst the
flickering, shining creatures.

* *

After they’d eaten
their supper in
what was called the crew mess, Axon said, “You must both go
immediately to level five, corridor seven, room seventeen.”

“
Why?” Victor
demanded.

“
These are not my
instructions. I have no idea.”

Twenty minutes later they walked into a
dome-like chamber with curiously-textured non-reflective walls.
Seats faced a series of display panels. As soon as they entered,
the doors closed and the lights dimmed.

The big central 3D display lit up and Julia
appeared. “There’s no need to be alarmed,” she said. “This
presentation is pre-recorded and will take one hour. Whilst in this
room you will not be able to access Axon and he will have no access
to you. You are of age now, and will soon know everything.”

Julia walked away and Somerton stepped into
view.

“
For over fifty years now,”
he began, “we humans have tried to reach beyond the confines of our
galactic arm. All but one attempt has failed, and that exception is
not a happy story. Victor, you’re fond of asking ‘Why?’ and that’s
the easiest of questions to answer. In four hundred years’ time a
dense ball of dark matter eight light years in diameter will fly
through our local systems. The gravitational consequences will be
devastating. Stars will collide. Planets will fall into their suns
or be flung into the outer darkness. Nothing can survive. Many such
catastrophes have happened in the history of the universe, but this
will be our catastrophe. Our only hope is to escape it, destroy it,
or deflect it.

“
This information is not
known by many. The truth behind it has been systematically
discredited for centuries. Scientists have been persuaded into
public scepticism, sent into exile, or even killed. Yes –
killed.

“
Long ago people thought
the end of the Earth could be escaped by building ark ships, and we
have inhabited planets around seventeen nearby stars. But now, that
seems futile. None can evade the invisible destruction which is
coming.

“
No human mind can control
a ship like yours. We cannot build computers complex enough to do
so. Consequently, we started to harness the billion-year work of
evolution – we began to build larger and larger biological brains.
Most of these have failed. One did not – but an error caused it to
die of an infection, stranding its ship and crew ninety-seven light
years away.

“
Your first mission is to
rescue that ship and what it contains, which is vital for the
survival of the human race. You will be briefed in more detail on
that later. In the meantime, Axon trusts you, but you must be very
careful. If you need to discuss things only between yourselves,
come into this room.”

* *

Mariam lay awake
in her cabin. Sleep
refused to come. The simulations had come to an end, and the first
real flight, their first defiance of the universe’s unfeeling
indifference, was only twelve hours away. Restlessly, her hand
strayed across her breasts, her nipples stiffening under her
fingers, and then slid slowly down her stomach.

“
It’s nice when you do
that.”

“
Go away Axon, This is
private.”

“
Victor does it
too.”

“
I don’t want to
know.”

“
I think you do. It’s
different, but similar. Sometimes he goes very fast, sometimes very
slowly. Like you. I know what he thinks about. Shall I tell
you?”

“
No.”

“
He thinks about lying
beside you, touching and kissing. He thinks about your breasts. He
thinks about you opening to him. Don’t you, Victor?”

A long mental pause, and then Victor’s
thought voice: “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“
So does Mariam. Don’t you,
Mariam?”

Mariam’s fingers were wet. “It is
forbidden,” she thought at them. “We are brother and sister.”

“
That’s what they told you.
It’s not true. You are from different gene pools. They modified a
few things to make you look alike. There is no reason why you
should not share your sexual feelings with each other. Even if you
didn’t know it, you have shared them with me. Perhaps that was part
of the plan.”

Mariam rolled off the bed, pulled a shift
over her head and left the cabin. Down the corridor, she opened
Victor’s room without going in, said, “Isolation room. Now!” and
continued walking.

“
I don’t like it when you
go in there. Why do you want to cut me out?”

“
Do you understand the word
‘private’?”

“
Of course.”

“
I don’t think you do.” She
went into the isolation room and the door closed behind her. Soon
after, Victor came in, looking flushed and embarrassed.

“
Why do you think Axon is
suddenly so interested in our sex lives?” she asked. “Why
now?”

“
No idea.”

“
Control. He’s looking for
ways to control us. So either Axon’s lying or Julia and the others
have lied to us. I think we need to find out.”

Ten minutes later a sleepy Julia came on
line and gave them the answer. Axon was telling the truth. “You
should have told us!” Victor shouted. “What else does Axon know
that we don’t know?”

“
We thought it was best for
all three of you. I’m sorry if we were wrong.”

As they were about to leave the room Mariam
stepped in front of Victor. “If ever…if we ever…in here and nowhere
else. Agree?” Victor nodded, and she went on: “Okay. Truth time. We
have to know if Axon’s using us for some hidden reason. So…when
you…do you really think about me?”

He nodded slowly and looked away,
whispering, “Sorry.”

Mariam smiled and said, “Stop saying sorry.
For some reason I’m not surprised. Perhaps I…well, to be fair, I
should confess too. I often wonder what it would be like to touch
you there. It’s going to take a bit of getting used to.”

“
I know why they did it.
They wanted to create a bond we couldn’t break.”

“
I think those come in
several flavours.”

“
I still love you,
sis.”

“
And I still love you,
brother.” And then they burst into laughter. “There’s one thing,
though. If you’re going to be my lover instead of my brother you’re
going to have to be a whole lot nicer to me.”

Then she kissed him on the cheek, ruffled
his hair, and went off to her cabin to sleep.

* *

For twenty-six
hours the
reaction-mass engines accelerated the ship away from the
containment wordlet and the star Angelus XI, with its rocky planets
and settlements. Mariam and Victor took four hour shifts, and Axon
‘slept’ for the last twelve hours whilst unconscious,
massively-parallel processes assessed the constant data from the
arsenal of sensors as they probed the space ahead of them at a deep
level for a distance of many light years. Finally, the words they’d
heard a thousand times in simulations rang out: “Impulse engine
shutdown in five seconds.” A pause for breath, and then the steady
two-G push ceased. “All ready?” In the strange ordering of things
evolved over seventeen years it was necessary for all three
consciousnesses to agree before radical action could be taken.
Three thought yeses committed them.

Outside the ship the mesh sails expanded,
thinning to a web of mono-atomic threads. Power surged through the
web. Axon sensed the multi-dimensional space around the ship,
almost tasted the seething point-events in the quantum foam. Under
Axon’s control, the web twisted into planes and interlinked
toroids, into cylinders with spheres, into spikes of filigree
fronds, focusing, concentrating. Suddenly, the point-particles of
the foam could not annihilate each other as they wished. The forces
of annihilation were cancelling out. Unwilling to accept this
breach of fundamental laws, space shifted, moving the ship into an
absolute vacuum, falling down the front of a huge energy wave.

Right across the galactic arm, a burst of
high-energy neutrinos signalled ignition. The entire ship’s mass,
its hull, its plants, fish and tiny human population experienced no
acceleration forces. The bubble of modified quantum events simply
translated itself elsewhere, although where is a complex concept in
eleven-dimensional space-time. You might say that at the moment
Axon released the field it had travelled twenty-seven light years –
but year and travel didn’t apply in any meaningful sense. It just
was where it was not, and the universe repaired its minor injury.
From ignition to shutdown had taken thirty-six seconds of ship
time.

Displays which had blanked during the
space-time shift began to light up.

“
I’m sorry,” Axon thought
at them. “I missed the target.”

“
By how much?”

“
Eight point five three
metres. I’ll try to do better next time!”

Mariam and Victor slapped their restraining
harnesses off, whooped and high-fived.

“
Ship’s status?”

“
Checks are still running.
So far, only trivial damage to a couple of X-ray sensors and a
slightly higher level of radiation in the outer skin than expected.
We appear to be stable. May I signal the damaged ship Iron
Lady?”