Godspeed (novel)

Chapter 30

Eileen Xavier didn’t waste time on pity, for herself or anyone else.

She made a quick review of Jim Swift’s condition, came over to where I was still holding on to the cabin wall, and grunted: “Nothing much wrong with you. Snap out of it. You’re in charge. I’m going to find Mel and bring her to the bridge.”

I believe she was callous on purpose. Her statement that I was in charge surprised me, but it was her other comment that got me moving. There was no way I would let Mel Fury arrive on the bridge and find me sniveling and weeping.

As soon as Doctor Eileen had gone I released my hold on the cabin wall. I staggered along the corridor to a washroom, soaked two towels in cold water, and carried them back to the control room. As I mopped my face with a cool cloth and delicately touched it to my sore nose, I wondered how to handle Jim Swift. He was regaining consciousness, but as he came awake he was beginning to thrash about with his arms and legs. Maybe he thought he was still fighting. Whatever the reason, he wasn’t safe to go near. One hit from those flailing fists and I could be in worse shape than he was.

Finally I grabbed one of his arms and at the same time threw a heavy, soaking cloth right into his face. Either the cold or the pain got through to him, because he gasped and reached up to grab the towel.

“Oooh!” He groaned. “Where am I?”

“On the bridge of the Cuchulain. You’re going to be all right. Don’t touch your nose!”

Too late. He had moved the wet cloth to his face. As soon as it reached his nose he gasped and his left eye popped open. He glared sightlessly around him, until his one staring eye focused on me.

“Your nose is broken,” I said. “Mop the blood if you want to, but touch it very carefully.”

He grunted, and moved the cold towel to set it delicately against his right temple and closed right eye. “Never mind my nose. This is where it hurts bad. What hit me?”

“Alan Kiernan. You got into a fight. You lost.”

“Tell me something new,” Swift muttered. He belched, and I thought for a moment that he was going to throw up. But he just put his hand on his middle and stared at me, wall-eyed. “You, too?”

“I’m not sure mine is broken.” I took the cloth away from my face. “Could be it’s just bruised.”

“Kiernan did it to you?”

“No. I did it to myself.”

“It takes all sorts.” Jim Swift tried to open his right eye, and failed. The whole area from his nose to his right ear was red and swollen. But his brain was working all right, because he pointed to a wall display showing the Godspeed ship, where the shimmering rings on the corkscrew were brighter than ever. “The Drive has been primed. Who’s doing that?”

“The crew of the Cuchulain. Or what used to be the crew of the Cuchulain. Now I guess we’re that.”

Jim was going to hear the bad news sometime, it might as well be now. I started to give him a summary of what had been happening, from Danny Shaker’s arrival on the bridge with Tom Toole to their final departure. I omitted their claim that Jim had started the fight that broke his nose, and I didn’t mention Shaker’s attempts to recruit me to his new command.

Before I was finished Jim interrupted. He glared around the control room with his Cyclops’s stare. “Fly this heap to Erin? Never. Duncan said the engines are good for one or two more short runs, and that’s it. Unless he can do one of his magic fixes.”

I hadn’t yet got to Duncan’s change of allegiance. After I explained that, Jim moved over to stand behind the pilot’s chair. This time he held the towel over his whole face. “That’s it, then. Marooned in the middle of nowhere. Can you fly the Cuchulain?”

“I know how to do it. But I don’t know how far we’d get with the engines the way they are.”

“Anything’s better than nothing.” Swift peered out from behind his towel and pointed a finger at the display. “Take us away from that. Do it now.”

He was indicating the Godspeed ship. Bright rings of light were flickering faster and faster along the twisted spiral.

“Come on, Jay,” he said, when I hesitated. “Get a move on. Can’t you see the priming is almost done? The release could come any moment now. Someone on that ship is crazy. I tried to warn them, but they’re preparing for a jump at full power.”

I didn’t understand what he was talking about, but the urgency of his tone got through to me. I moved to the pilot’s chair and performed the steps to activate the drive of the Cuchulain. We were soon ready to fly. Then I hesitated. Would the engines function as I turned them on, or would they blow apart?

I was still dithering when Eileen Xavier and Mel appeared on the bridge.

“What’s—” Doctor Eileen began.

“Not now.” Jim Swift interrupted her. “First we move, then we talk. Jay?”

“Ready.” Or as ready as I would ever be.

“Then do it.”

I performed the final sequence. The Cuchulain came alive, with a dreadful groan and rumble of off-balance engines. I urged the ship on, trying to move it through space by sheer willpower.

The vibration grew. The smart sensors showed engine stresses beyond the danger level. I sat with my finger on the cutoff key. “We can’t—”

“A few more seconds, Jay.” Jim Swift was staring at the display showing the Godspeed ship. It was visibly smaller on the screen. But our whole ship was shaking so violently that everything blurred.

“That’s all we can take!” I stabbed at the key, and the vibration ended.

“Let’s hope it will do.” Jim Swift was muttering to himself, not to me. “It will have to do.”

“Do what?” Mel asked. But no one answered.

Nothing seemed to have changed on the Godspeed ship. If anything, the dancing rings of light were a little less brilliant.

“Radiated power peak’s shifting into the ultraviolet.” Jim Swift had forgotten his black eye and broken nose. “Any second now. It’s praying time. And I’m an atheist.”

As he spoke, all the rings of light along the corkscrew vanished. The Godspeed ship hung dark and motionless in space, not a light showing.

Jim Swift gasped, while Doctor Eileen sighed. “So it doesn’t work after all,” she said. “All our efforts, and for nothing.”

I stared at the ship on the screen and thought about Danny Shaker. He and his crew were marooned now, just like the rest of us. He would find a way to get us all home. In spite of everything, I had strange confidence in him.

“Look at the star field,” Mel said suddenly. “Should it be doing that?”

The Godspeed ship was not moving. But around it, like bright points on some great wheel, the whole backdrop of stars was turning. As we watched, the rotating pattern began to shrink in toward the central axis, to where the ship sat like the quiet eye of a giant whirlpool.

“Inertial frame dragging,” Jim Swift said. “And strong space-time curvature. If that effect keeps increasing—”

It did not. The star field blinked back to normal. And in that instant the Godspeed ship was gone. It did not accelerate away, out of our field of view. It did not move, or flicker, or fade. It vanished.

“The Godspeed Drive,” Jim Swift said softly. “I’ve waited all my adult life to see that. But I was wrong about one thing. I was afraid that tapping the vacuum energy would have a permanent effect on space-time structure. Apparently it does not. There’s been enough time since the Isolation for an adjustment to take place. We can have—”

I never did learn what we could have, because at that moment Mel screamed and every display in the control room blazed with light. A multicolor pinwheel flared into existence at the place where the Godspeed ship had stood. It grew, in size and intensity, until it filled the screens. Automatic dimmers came into operation, but the intensity of light grew faster than they could adjust. The screens went into overload and darkened in unison.

A moment later, all the lights on the bridge of the Cuchulain went out. I waited in shivering darkness, and felt a wave of nausea sweep over me. Through me. Some force was passing within my body, squeezing and wrenching and twisting and pulling. A moment earlier I had been in free-fall. Now I was hanging in a gravity field that changed direction every split second—up was over my head, then under my feet, now off to one side or another. All around me, loose furnishings flew away to clatter against the walls of the control room. The struts and hull plates of the Cuchulain groaned and whined under intolerable pressures.

If it was terrifying for me, it may have been worse for Jim Swift. I had no idea what was happening, while he knew in detail. And when things finally settled down, my own relief was all personal—it simply meant the end of an awful, head-spinning vertigo.

The control room remained dark, until one by one the overloaded displays crept back into operation. The bridge became lit by faint starlight, enough for me to make out the shapes of the other three people in the room. Mel was clinging white-knuckle tight to Eileen Xavier, while Jim Swift floated upside-down near them.

“What in God’s name was that?” It was Doctor Eileen, sounding as queasy as I felt. There is no way of describing what it is like to have some unknown force manipulating the inside of your body.

“Call it space-time’s revenge.” Jim Swift reached out and grabbed the cabin wall, slowly turning himself until he was the same way up as the rest of us. “That’s what I was afraid of. That’s what I tried to warn them about—and no one would listen.”

“You mean that every time anyone ever used the Godspeed Drive, a region of space near it was affected like that?” I said.

“No, I don’t think so. That’s what happens now, and has ever since the Isolation. But once it wasn’t so. This means that the Godspeed Drive can’t be used. Maybe can’t be used ever again.”

“But they just used it.” Mel released her hold on Doctor Eileen and seemed unaware of the death grip she had taken. Doctor Eileen began rubbing ruefully at her upper arm as Mel gestured to where the Godspeed ship had been floating a couple of minutes earlier. “We saw them use it,” she said.

“We sure did.” Jim Swift nodded, and winced as he moved his head. “Do you know where they were planning to go?”

“On a trial run,” I said. “Maybe to Erin.” For Mel’s sake, I didn’t add that the second stop would be Paddy’s Fortune.

“Erin can’t be much more than a light-hour away.” Jim carefully touched the end of his nose, and winced again. “A one-light-hour trip is nothing for a Godspeed Drive. But I’ll bet my life that if they set off for Erin, they haven’t arrived there. In fact, I’ll bet that they never arrive.”

“Then where are they?” asked Doctor Eileen. I saw bewilderment on her face.

“That’s the great question of my life.” Jim Swift groped his way forward and sat down in the pilot’s chair. “I could say, they’re in the same place as anyone else who used the Godspeed Drive at the time of the Isolation or since. But that’s not much of an answer.”

“It’s no answer at all,” I said. The control room was overheated, but I had the shivers. If Danny Shaker and his killer crew had not flown to Erin… “Do you mean the Godspeed ship is still around here somewhere, but we just can’t see it?”

“Easy, Jay,” said Doctor Eileen. “We’re all nervous.”

And Jim Swift added, in a curiously satisfied voice, “Easy, all of us. Sit down, and I’ll tell you what I think, and what I know—less of that than I’d like, I’m afraid.”

Eileen Xavier sat down. After a few moments, Mel and I followed her lead.

“I wish Walter Hamilton were here to start this off,” Jim went on, “because some of what I have to say comes from him, and I don’t know how much of that was guesswork. It starts all the way back. Back before the Isolation, before there was a Godspeed Drive. Humans had been spreading through the galaxy, out across the stars. But they’d been doing it slowly, on ships that couldn’t even get close to light speed. We don’t know much about the first colonists of Maveen and the Forty Worlds, but Walter believed that they came to Erin on a multigeneration, culturally homogeneous starship. He claimed to be able to trace most of our place names and family names to a single small region of the original home of human beings.

“I can’t vouch for that, but I do feel sure that the old star travelers did it the hard way, creeping out slowly, star after star, planet after planet. Humanity explored and developed and colonized that way for thousands and thousands of years. Nobody in the Forty Worlds knows how long that went on. Then somewhere, sometime, an unknown young genius discovered the Godspeed Drive.”

“Genius, yes.” Doctor Eileen frowned. “But young genius?”

“Yeah.” Jim Swift smiled, a bruised, lopsided grin. Battered or not, it didn’t take him long to become cocky again. “A young genius, and one who either died young, or wasn’t listened to much after the invention was made. How do I know? Easy. Anyone who makes a huge breakthrough like the Godspeed Drive is going to be young, not old. Great discoveries come from people who aren’t stuck in an old mindset. And I don’t think the inventor was listened to, because any person bright enough to invent the drive would also be bright enough to understand the possible consequences when it was used.

“The Godspeed Drive seems like a perfect something-for-nothing device, the ultimate free dinner. But that’s an illusion. You saw how small the drive unit was in the Godspeed ship that we found. Not a hundredth the size of the Cuchulain’s engines, but with enough power to toss a ship from star to star.

“So where does the power come from? There was no energy source on the Godspeed ship.

“Well, I tried to explain it to Alan Kiernan and the rest of those numbskulls. The Godspeed Drive taps the vacuum energy of space-time, to create a bridge from one place to another. There’s a huge amount of energy available, but the supply isn’t infinite. And it’s not like pumping water from a well, where you have some warning before it runs dry because less and less water comes out and it gets harder and harder to pump. This is more like a solid stone bridge. You can run loads over it for years with never a hint that the bridge is under stress. Until one day, without any warning, the whole thing collapses.

“That’s what happened with the Godspeed Drive—except that I suspect we’re talking not just years of use, but many, many centuries. A period so long that people came to rely on it completely. They forgot that the Godspeed Drive might have its limits. They no longer kept old, slow, multigeneration ships as back-up.

“Then one day the bridge broke. The vacuum energy drawdown passed a critical level. The Godspeed Drive failed, all at once and everywhere. Any ship that tried to cross the bridge fell off into the water.”

“Water?” I said. He had lost me.

“Sorry. That was just a figure of speech. The Godspeed Drive formed a bridge through space-time, a short route from one place to another. And when that bridge collapsed, a ship that tried to use it fell out of space-time itself.”

Apparently he had lost Mel, too. “Fell out of space-time,” she said. “How can you fall out of space-time? There’s nowhere to fall to.”

“I know. But I can’t give you a better description. Let’s just say, the ships left our universe, and went somewhere, beyond the universe we can perceive.”

“But it still doesn’t make sense,” I complained. “I mean, suppose that the drive suddenly stopped working, the way that you say. Every ship with a Godspeed Drive wouldn’t try to fly on that same day. There would be lots of ships left.”

“Of course there would. But you see, this wasn’t a bridge you could look at, and say, hey, it’s damaged, or hey, it’s vanished. No one would know that the bridge had gone. If they were too close when a Godspeed ship tried to make an interstellar jump, they could have been destroyed the way we were nearly destroyed a few minutes ago. But if people weren’t too close, all they would know was that the Godspeed ship had vanished. And that was normal. The ships always vanished when they made a jump. Of course, it would be obvious that there was a problem to the people at the other end, when a Godspeed ship failed to arrive. But if that happened in your system it would just encourage you to send out a Godspeed ship of your own, to learn what the problem was at the other end.

“After a while there were no ships left to send. Every stellar system became isolated. Then you had hundreds or thousands of populated stellar systems, all totally cut off from each other. They might all be in trouble, but they wouldn’t be able to help each other. They weren’t even set up to talk among themselves without the use of the Godspeed Drive. It’s no accident that the word that has come down to us through history to describe the disaster is Isolation. The Maveen system is isolated. But so is everyone else.”

Isolation. Jim Swift could talk theory and see that word in the abstract, but as he went babbling on I stared up at the nearest display screen. It showed nothing but barren space in all directions. I had spent sixteen happy years on Erin and I hadn’t for one moment suspected that I was isolated from anything or anyone—or even in any kind of trouble, except sometimes for skipped chores or homework. Real isolation was here and now: lost in the Maze, without a working ship or the hope of contact with any other humans.

I turned to scan the other screens. We were still in the middle of the Net. I could pick out dozens of nodes as tiny points of light. Tom Toole had told me that this hardware scrap-heap was hugely valuable, enough to make any scavenge-and-salvage crew rich. If they were alive, and hadn’t been thrown into another universe as Jim Swift believed, the crew might return here—eventually. Maybe an experienced spacer like Danny Shaker could even sort through the junk pile of the hardware reservoir, and repair the battered Cuchulain enough to fly it home. But that sort of work was far beyond our talents. And no one else was going to do it for us.

The four of us were truly isolated. And eventually, when our supplies ran out, the four of us would be dead.