Convergence

Chapter Two

The Torvil Anfract has a bad reputation, but the reality is worse. Phrases like “multiply-connected space-time” and “macroscopic quantum phenomena” don’t tell the half of it. Anfract is the noun formed from the adjective anfractuous, which means full of twists, turns, and windings; but that gives no more than a flavor of the real thing. Even the knowledge that the whole Anfract is a Builder artifact, of unimaginably vast proportions, fails to deliver the right message.

Of more significance is the fact that less than a quarter of the ships that have entered the Anfract have ever come back to report what they found there. If getting in is difficult, it is nothing compared to the problem of getting out.

Louis knew all that. For seven full days, the Indulgence had crawled alongside granular sheets of quantum anomalies, seeking an opening, or eeled its way through knotted space-time dislocations. For all that time, Louis had watched Atvar H’sial snoozing, and had thought dark thoughts.

Cecropians were accustomed to having sighted slaves who did all their dog work. Atvar H’sial, deprived of her Lo’tfian slave, J’merlia, seemed to be taking Louis Nenda for granted as an acceptable substitute. She never gave a thought to the fact that Louis might miss his own Hymenopt slave, Kallik, at least as much as she missed J’merlia. And she blithely assumed that he would bring them out of the Anfract, with not one ounce of help from her.

For seven days Louis had got by with catnaps in the uncomfortable pilot’s chair. He had made bathroom runs — literally — and wolfed down his meals in spare seconds. Atvar H’sial, for the few hours a day that she had been awake, had spent her time in the galley, making evil-smelling liquid refreshments to suit her exact tastes.

The worst of it was that Atvar H’sial was right. The Indulgence had been designed for piloting by a five-armed Chism Polypheme, with all the arms on one side of his body. Louis Nenda found the pilot’s seat inconvenient, to put it mildly, but at least he and the Polypheme both possessed eyes. If blind Atvar H’sial had tried to take the Indulgence out of the Torvil Anfract, she and Louis Nenda would have died in the first hour of flight.

That was logic, and undeniable. But Louis was not interested in logic. Whenever there was a free moment he turned to glare at the sleeping hulk of his business partner; he thought about reprisals.

Not physical ones. That wouldn’t work with someone twice his size and four times his strength. The most effective revenge on Atvar H’sial was to cheat her. But how was he going to do that, when neither of them owned anything? Even their slaves were gone. If he managed to find his way back to Glister and his beloved Have-it-all, that ship was Nenda’s. It was hard to see any way to use the Have-it-all to cheat Atvar H’sial.

Revenge is a dish best eaten cold. Louis kept that in mind, while he brooded over Atvar H’sial. What sort of stupid creature was it anyway, who saw using sound, and talked using smell? And in spite of this, his partner thought herself superior to humans and everyone else in the spiral arm.

As he schemed and fumed, the Indulgence under his careful guidance crept clear of the Anfract. His annoyance was so absorbing, it was almost an anticlimax when the panorama of star-dogs and the pinwheel fireworks of rotating micro-galaxies suddenly ended, and he saw ahead a clean, undistorted starfield.

It brought him fully awake for the first time in days. He realized then how exhausted he had become. He was so tired, so gritty-eyed bone-weary worn out, it was amazing that he had remained awake for so long. It would have been so easy to have killed them both by falling asleep in the middle of the Anfract. Maybe he should have done that. It would have served Atvar H’sial right. The trouble was, she would never have known it. And of course he would be dead, too.

He was tired, when that passed for thinking.

Nenda went over to the sleeping Atvar H’sial and nudged her with his boot.

“Your turn. I’ve done my bit.”

The Cecropian awoke like the unfolding of a gigantic and hideous flower. Six jointed limbs stretched luxuriantly away from the dark-red body, while the yellow horns opened and the long antennas unfurled like delicate ferns.

“No problems?” The pheromones generated by Atvar H’sial were a statement more than a question. The Cecropian lifted her white, eyeless head and scanned around her.

“Nothing you want to hear about. We’re out of the Anfract.” Nenda sniffed noisily and headed at once for the sleeping quarters. They were designed for a Chism Polypheme, a nine-foot tall corkscrew with helical symmetry; even so, they should be a lot better than the pilot’s chair. “Don’t bother waking me for the Bose jumps,” he said over his shoulder. “Just let me know when we get to the Mandel system.”

That might take a day, or it might take a month. Louis felt ready for something nicely in between — say, four or five days of sleep — when he collapsed onto the bunk. He tried to shape his body to the awkward spiral padding.

Everything depended on how tricky Atvar H’sial could get. The Torvil Anfract lay in remote Zardalu Communion territory, hundreds of light-years away from the Phemus Circle. Mandel’s stellar system was located within the Circle. The Have-it-all had been left near a gas-giant planet, Gargantua, that orbited Mandel. But linear distance was quite irrelevant. The Indulgence would negotiate a series of superluminal transitions, jumps through the nodes of the Bose Network. Travel time was a function of operator cunning, node loading, and energy budget.

Atvar H’sial could see nothing at all in human terms, but she had a remarkable power to visualize. Louis knew that when it came to manipulating the nonlinear connectors of the Bose geometry, she left him standing.

So he felt a strange mixture of pleasure and annoyance when, twelve hours later, she came to where he was still trying to fit his body — unsuccessfully — to a corkscrew shape, and announced: “I have a problem, Louis. I would welcome your counsel.”

“What’s up?” Nenda abandoned any attempt to sleep and swung his legs over the edge of the bunk.

“I am wondering. When you were navigating our way clear of the Torvil Anfract, did you notice anything unusual about it?”

“You gotta be kidding!” Nenda stood up and massaged his thighs, trying to get the stiffness out of them. “The whole Anfract is unusual. You find anything normal in there, it don’t belong. Why’d you ask?”

“Like any serious student of the Bose Network, I have learned certain preferred node combinations — shortcuts, in effect, both for energy and total transition time. Those preferred modes of transport, naturally, depend critically on the space-time structure of the Network itself.”

“Is that right?” Nenda’s pheromonal message carried an expression of total disinterest, one that Atvar H’sial could not miss.

The blind head nodded. “Hear me out, Louis Nenda, before you scoff. Except over very long time-scales, of centuries or more, the preferred node combinations ought to be invariant.”

“Sure.”

“But they apparently are not. For the past twelve hours I have been examining alternative routes to Mandel. Not one of the fastest and cheapest employs my standard node combinations. Instead I am coming up with an alternative to take us from here to Mandel with incredibly low cost and high speed.”

“So you missed a good one.” It was hard to keep the pleasure out of the pheromones. “Hey, At, anyone can goof up now and again.”

“To err is human? Just so. It is not, however, Cecropian. Accept my assurances, Louis Nenda, that I did not overlook a cheap path for transition. That path was not present when we entered the Anfract, just a couple of your months ago.”

“But you just said—”

“I know what I said. The travel times associated with particular node combinations should be stable for very long periods. They must be so — provided that the overall structure of space-time in the spiral arm is not subjected to major perturbations. Now do you see the reason for my question concerning the structure of the Anfract? Had it substantially changed since we entered?”

“If it did, I have no way of knowing. You see, I didn’t plan our way out, At, I felt the way out. Seat of my pants. I’m a pretty good pilot, even if I’m not up to Dulcimer’s level.”

“I agree; and if we are in confessional mode, let me also make an admission. I lack the experience to make a full evaluation of the new route to Mandel that I have discovered. It should prove considerably shorter than anything I have met before. On the other hand, since it is new there is a possible risk factor. A node used for our transition could lie too near to a star or a chasm singularity.”

“Lovely thought. You know me, At. I’m a natural coward. I say, go slow, but go safe.”

“And again I agree. Or I would, if these were normal times. But since the moment of our first meeting, Louis, has it not been clear that something exceptional has been happening within the spiral arm? The changes to Quake at the time of the Grand Conjunction, the rogue Phages around Glister, our encounters with the Builder Constructs, the passage through the Builder transportation system, the re-awakening of the Zardalu—”

“Hey! Don’t let me spoil your fun, but I don’t wanna hear any of that. So we’ve been through some strange stuff together. Are you suggesting that we go lookin’ for more of the same, with your special fast trip to Mandel?”

“Worse than that, Louis. I am asking the question, what next? Suppose that great changes continue to occur in the spiral arm. Suppose that those changes were eventually to include a failure of the Bose Network. Suppose our progress from this point on were to be restricted to subluminal speeds—”

“Don’t say that. We’d be stuck in crawlspace for the rest of our lives, just the two of us with each other for company, out at the ass-end of the known universe.”

“A dismal prospect indeed — though worse for me, I suggest, than for you. But that is why I awakened you — to ask, should we risk the fast transit to Mandel?”

“You call that a risk? Go do it — get that new flight plan into the computer.”

Atvar H’sial inclined her head, in a gesture common to humans and Cecropians. “It is already there, Louis, ready for execution. I did not doubt that, faced with the alternative, you and I would once more find ourselves in full agreement.”