Transcendence

Chapter Seven: The Torvil Anfract

Old habits did not just die hard. They refused to die at all.

Darya Lang, sitting alone in an observation bubble stuck like a glassy pimple on the dark bulk of the Erebus, gazed on the Torvil Anfract and felt vaguely unsatisfied. As soon as the seedship had left for Bridle Gap, she had started work.

Reluctantly. She would have much preferred to be down on the planet, sampling whatever strangeness it had to offer. But once she got going on her research — well, then it was another matter.

She did not stop. She could not stop.

Back in school on Sentinel Gate, some of her teachers had accused her of being “slow and dreamy.” Darya knew that was unfair. Her mind was fast, and it was accurate. She took a long time to feel her way into a problem; but once she was immersed, she had the devil’s own mental muscles. It took an act of God to pull her out. If she had been a runner, she would have specialized in supermarathons.

Even the return of the landing party from Bridle Gap and the arrival on board of the no-legged, five-armed oddity of the Chism Polypheme, bobbing and smirking and croaking while he was introduced to her, his scanning eye roaming over everyone and everything on the Erebus as if he were pricing them… all that had been unable to distract Darya for even a few minutes.

She had decided that the Anfract was more than interesting. It was unique, in a way that she could not yet express.

She had tried to explain its fascination to Hans Rebka when he first returned with the Polypheme.

“Darya, everything in the universe is unique.” He cut her off in a moment, hardly listening. “But we’re on our way. Dulcimer says he can have us there in two days. We’ll need the most detailed data you can give us.”

“It’s not just the data that matters, it’s the patterns—”

But he was heading for the cargo holds, and she was talking to herself.

And now the Anfract was shimmering beyond the observation port — and Darya was still plodding along on what to Hans Rebka was no more than unproductive analysis. Hard-copy output surrounded her and overflowed every flat surface of the observation bubble. There was no shortage of data about the Torvil Anfract. Hundreds of ships had scouted its outer regions. Fifty or more had gone deeper, and a quarter of those had returned to tell about it. But their data had never been combined and integrated. Reading the earlier reports and analyzing their measurements and observations made Darya feel that the Anfract was like a gigantic Rorschach test. All observers saw their own version of reality, rather than a physical object.

There was unanimity on maybe a half-a-dozen facts. The Anfract’s location within Zardalu Communion territory was not in question. It lay completely within a region two light-years across, and it possessed thirty-seven major lobes. Each lobe had its own characteristic identity, but the components of any pair of lobes were likely to interchange, instantaneously and randomly. Ships that had traveled inside the Anfract confirmed that the interchange was real, not just an optical effect. Two vessels had even entered the Anfract at one point, become involved in a switch of two lobes, and emerged elsewhere. They agreed that the transition took no time and produced no noticeable changes in ship or crew. All researchers believed that this phenomenon showed the Anfract to possess macroscopic quantum states, of unprecedented size.

And there the agreements ended. Some ships reported that the subluminal approach to the Anfract from the nearest Bose access node, one light-year away, had taken five ship-years at relativistic speeds. Others found themselves at the edge of the Anfract after just two or three days’ travel.

Darya had her own explanation for that anomaly. Massive space-time distortion was the rule, near and within the Anfract. Certain pathways would lengthen or shorten the distance between the same two points. “Fast” approach routes to the edge of the Anfract could be mapped, though no one had ever done it. The two-day approach route that the Erebus had followed was discovered empirically by an earlier ship, and others had followed it without understanding why it worked.

Darya had begun to map the external geometry of the Anfract. She began to have a better appreciation of why it had never been done before. The continuum of the region was enormously complex. It was a long, long job, but it did not require all her attention. While she was organizing the calculation, Darya felt a faint sense of uneasiness. There was something missing. She was overlooking some major factor, something basic and important.

She had learned not to ignore that vague itch in the base of her brain. The best way to bring it closer to the surface was to explain to someone else what she was doing, clarifying her thoughts for herself as she did so. She found Louis Nenda in the main control cabin and started to explain her work.

He interrupted her within thirty seconds. “Don’t make no difference to me, sweetheart. I don’t give squat about the structure of the Anfract. We still gotta go in there, find the Zardalu, an’ get out in one piece. Get your head goin’ on that.” He had left her, still talking, and wandered off to the main hold to make sure that Dulcimer’s ship, the Indulgence, was safely stowed and the seedship was again ready for use.

Barbarian, Darya thought.

He was no better than Hans Rebka. No telling them that knowing was necessary, that knowledge was good for its own sake, that understanding mattered. That learning new things was important, and that it was only abstract knowledge, no matter what Nenda or Rebka or anyone else on board might say, that separated humans from animals.

She went angrily back to work on the Anfract’s external geometry. Could other variations reported by earlier ships also be explained in geometric terms? All approaching observers agreed that the Anfract popped into being suddenly. One moment there was nothing to see, the next it was just there, close up. But to half the approaching ships, the Anfract was a glowing bundle of tendrils grouped into thirty-seven complex knots. Others saw thirty-seven spherical regions of light, like diffuse multicolored suns. Half-a-dozen observers reported that the only external evidence of the Anfract was holes in space, thirty-seven dark occlusions of the stellar background. And two Cecropian ships, their occupants blind to electromagnetic radiation and relying on instruments to render the Anfract visible in terms of sonic echolocation, “saw” the Anfract, too — as thirty-seven distorted balls of furry velvet.

Darya believed that she could explain it all in terms of geometry. Space-time distortion in and around the Anfract affected more than approach distances. It changed the properties of emitted light bundles. Depending on the path taken, some were smoothed, others canceled by phase interference. She happened to be seeing the pattern of glowing white-worm tendrils, but if the Erebus had followed a different approach route, she would have seen something different. And her geometric mapping of the Anfract’s exterior could be continued to its interior, based on light-travel properties.

Darya set up the new calculations. While they were running, she brooded over the vast inconstant vista beyond the observation bubble. Her mood seemed as changeable and uncontrollable as the Anfract itself. She felt annoyed, exhilarated, guilty, and superior in turn.

A major mystery was hovering just beyond her mental horizon. She was sure of that. It was infuriating that she could not see it for herself, and just as maddening that the others would not let her explain the evidence to them. That was her favorite way of making things clear in her own mind. Meanwhile, the itch inside was getting worse.

The arrival of Kallik in the observation bubble was both an unwelcome interruption and a reminder to Darya that there were other formidable intelligences on board the Erebus.

The little Hymenopt came drifting in, to stand diffidently by Darya’s side. Darya raised her eyebrows.

“One has heard,” began Kallik. She had learned to interpret human gestures, far better than Darya had learned to read hers. “One has heard that you have been able to perform a systematic mapping of Anfract geometry.”

Darya nodded. “How do you know that?”

“Master Nenda said that you spoke of it to him.”

“Pearls before swine.”

“Indeed?” Kallik bobbed her black head politely. “But the statement is true, is it not? Because if so, a discovery of my own may have relevance.” She settled down on the floor next to Darya, eight legs splayed.

Darya stopped glooming. The unscratched itch in her brain started to fade, and she began to pay serious attention to Kallik. It was the Hymenopt, after all, who had — quite independently of Darya — solved the riddle of artifact spheres of change which had led them to Quake at Summertide.

“I, too, have been studying the Anfract,” Kallik went on. “Perhaps from a different perspective than yours. I decided that, although the geometric structure of the Anfract itself is interesting, our focus should be on planets within it. They, surely, are the only places where Zardalu could reasonably be living. It might seem well established from outside observation that there are many, many planets within the Anfract — the famous phenomenon known as the Beads, or String of Pearls, would seem to prove it: scores of beautiful planets, observed by scores of ships. Proved, except for this curious fact: the explorers who succeed in reaching the interior of the Anfract, and returning from it, report no planets around the handful of suns that they visited. They say that planets in the Anfract must certainly be a rarity, and perhaps even nonexistent. Who, then, is right?”

“The ones who went inside.” Darya did not hesitate. “Remote viewing is no substitute for direct approach.”

“My conclusion also. So the Beads, and the String of Pearls, must be illusions. They are the result of an odd lens effect that focuses planets from far away, perhaps outside the spiral arm or in another galaxy entirely, and makes them visible in the neighborhood of the Anfract. Very well. I therefore eliminated all the multiple planetary sightings of the Beads, and of String of Pearls. That left only a handful of isolated planet sightings within the Anfract. If our earlier analyses are correct, one of them will be Genizee. I have locations from which they were viewed, and their directions at the time. But I did not know how to propagate through the Anfract’s complex geometry to the interior—”

“I do!” Darya was cursing herself. She had worked alone because she usually worked alone, but it was clear now that she should have been collaborating with Kallik. “I needed to do those calculations so I could derive lightlike trajectories across the Anfract.”

“As I surmised and hoped.” Kallik moved to the terminal that tied the observation bubble to the central computer of the Erebus. “So if I provide you with my locations and directions, and you continue their vectors along Anfract geodesics—”

“ — we’ll have your planet locations.” The mental itch was almost gone. Darya felt a vague sense of loss, but action overrode it. “Give me a few minutes, and I’ll crank out all your answers.”

Darya was tempted to call it a law of nature.

Lang’s Law: Everything always takes longer.

It was not a few minutes. It was six hours before she could collate her results and seek out Hans Rebka and Louis Nenda. She found them with Julian Graves in the main control room of the Erebus. Dulcimer was nowhere to be seen, but the three-dimensional displays of the Anfract, ported over from the Polypheme’s data banks on the Indulgence, filled the center of the room.

She stood in silence for a few seconds, savoring the moment and waiting to be noticed. Then she realized that might take a long time. They were deep in discussion.

She stepped forward to stand right between Nenda and Rebka, where she could not be ignored.

“Kallik and I know how to find the Zardalu!” A touch of sensationalism, maybe even a little smugness — but no more than their discovery deserved. “If Dulcimer will take us into the Anfract, we know where we should go.”

Nenda and Rebka moved, but only so that they could still see each other and talk around her. It was Julian Graves who turned to face her, with a ringing, “Then I wish that you would bring it to their attention.” He gestured at Nenda and Rebka. “Because the conversation here is certainly going nowhere.”

At that moment Darya became aware of the level of tension in the room. If she had not been so full of herself, she would have read it from the postures. The air was charged with emotion, as invisible and as lethal as superheated steam.

“What’s wrong?” But she was already guessing. Louis Nenda and Hans Rebka were close to blows. Atvar H’sial hovered close-by, rearing up menacingly on her two hindmost limbs.

“It’s him.” Rebka stabbed an accusing finger an inch short of Nenda’s chest. “Tells us he’ll take us to somebody who can pilot us in, then wastes our energy and money and days of our time getting to Bridle Gap and arguing with that lying corkscrew. And then that’s what we get for our Anfract approach routes.”

He was pointing at the big display. Darya stared at it in perplexity. It was not the Anfract she had been studying. In addition to the usual features, the 3-D image was filled with yellow lines snaking into the center of the anomaly. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Take a close look, and you’ll see for yourself. Like to fly that one?” He pointed to a wriggling trajectory that abruptly terminated in a tiny sphere of darkness. “See where it ends? Follow it, and you’ll run yourself right into the middle of a singularity. No more Erebus, no more crew.”

“You’re as dumb as a Ditron.” Nenda stepped closer to Rebka, pushing Darya aside as though she did not exist. “If you’d just listen to me for a minute—”

“Now wait a second!” The days when Darya would let herself be ignored were over. She pushed back and grabbed Rebka’s arm. “Hans, how do you know that the Polypheme suggests those as approach paths? For heaven’s sake, why don’t you ask him what he’s proposing to do?”

“Exactly!” Nenda said, but Rebka roared him down.

“Ask him! Don’t you think I want to ask him? He’s on board, we know that, but that’s all we know. He’s vanished! That brain-burned bum, as soon as we started to talk about Anfract approach routes, and safety factors, and time-varying fields, he excused himself for a minute. No one has seen him since.”

“And it’s your damned fault!” Nenda was as loud as Rebka, pushing Darya to one side again and glaring at him eyeball-to-eyeball. “Didn’t I tell you not to let Tally do that stupid data download from the Indulgence? I warned you all.”

Two long, jointed limbs came swooping down, grasped Nenda and Rebka by the back of their shirts, and drew them easily apart. Julian Graves nodded gratefully to Atvar H’sial. “Thank you.” He turned to Rebka. “Louis Nenda indeed warned you.”

“Warned him of what?” Darya was tired of this.

Nenda shook himself free of Atvar H’sial’s grasp and slumped into a seat. “Of the obvious thing.” His voice was exasperated. “Dulcimer makes his living as a pilot. But he’s a Chism Polypheme, so that means he’s paranoid and expects people to try to rob him. His stored displays are exactly how I’d expect them to be — totally useless! He has all the real stuff hidden in his head, where no one can steal it. There’s nothing but lies in the data bank. Pilfer from him and use that to fly with, and you’re a dead duck.”

“With respect, Atvar H’sial would like to make a statement,” J’merlia put in. He had been translating the argument for the Cecropian. “Dulcimer is a liar, says Atvar H’sial, but he also has low cunning. We must assume that he made himself absent not by accident at this time, but by design.”

“Why?” Graves asked. He bit back the urge to order J’merlia to stop acting like a slave to Atvar H’sial. J’merlia was a free being now — even if he didn’t want to be.

“In order to divide our group against itself,” the Lo’tfian translator went on, “as it has just been divided by the fighting of Louis Nenda and Captain Rebka. Dulcimer’s influence is maximized when we are not united. Also, he wished us to realize what we seem to be proving for ourselves, by our substitution of emotion for thought: without the Polypheme, we have no idea how to penetrate the Anfract. You have been playing Dulcimer’s game.” Atvar H’sial’s blind white head swung to survey the whole group. “If this battle does not cease, Dulcimer will surely return — to gloat over our disarray.”

Atvar H’sial was getting through — Darya knew it, because Louis Nenda and Hans Rebka would not look at each other.

“Hell, we weren’t fightin’,” Nenda muttered. “We were just havin’ a discussion about where we want to go.”

“That’s right,” Rebka added. “We wouldn’t know what to tell Dulcimer, even if he was here.”

“Yes, we would!” It had taken a long time, but Darya could finally make her point. “If Dulcimer can get us to the Anfract, Kallik and I can give him a destination inside it.”

At last she had their attention. “If you’ll sit still for a few minutes, without fighting, I’ll show you the whole thing. Or Kallik will — it was really her idea.” She glanced at Kallik, but the little Hymenopt sank to the floor, while her ring of black eyes flickered in the signal of negation. “All right, if you don’t want to, I’ll do it. And I can use this same display.”

Darya took over the control console, while the others moved to sit where they could easily see. They watched silently as she outlined her own analysis of geodesics around the Anfract, mated it with Kallik’s sifting of planetary sightings within the complex, and carried on to provide a summary of computed locations.

“Five or six possibles,” she finished. “But luckily previous expeditions have provided good-quality images of each one. Kallik and I reviewed them all. We agree on just one prime candidate. This one.”

She was zooming into the Anfract display along one of her computed light-paths, a dizzying, contorted trajectory with no apparent logic to it. A star became visible, and then, as Darya changed the display scale and the apparent speed of approach, the field of view veered away from the swelling disk of the sun. A bright dot appeared.

“Planet,” Julian Graves whispered. “If you are right, we are looking at something lost for more than eleven millennia: Genizee, the Zardalu cladeworld.”

A planet, and yet not a planet. They were closing still, and the point of light was splitting.

“Not just one world,” Darya said. “More of a doublet, like Opal and Quake.”

“Not too like either one, I hope.” The anger had gone out of Hans Rebka and he was staring at the display with total concentration. As the world images drew closer he could see that there were differences. Quake and Opal had been fraternal twins, the same size though grossly dissimilar in appearance. The Anfract doublet was more like a planet and its single huge moon, the one blue-white and with a surface hazily visible between swirls of cloud cover, the other, just as bright though only half the size, glittering like burnished steel. Darya’s display in accelerated time showed the gleaming moon, tiny even at highest magnification, whirling around the planet at dizzying speed, against a fixed backdrop of steady points of light. Rebka peered at the planet and its moon, not sure what it was that forced him to such intense examination.

“And now we need Dulcimer, more than ever,” Louis Nenda added, breaking Rebka’s trance. Nenda, too, had been sitting quietly through Darya’s presentation, but during the approach trajectory he had twisted and writhed in his seat as though matching its contortions.

“Why?” Darya felt hurt. “I just showed you the way to go into the Anfract.”

“Not for any vessel I ever heard of.” Nenda shook his dark head. “There’s not a ship in the arm could follow that path an’ stay in one piece. Not even this monster. We gotta find an easier way in. That means we need Dulcimer. We gotta have him.”

“Quite right,” said a croaking voice at the entrance to the control chamber. “Everybody needs Dulcimer.”

They all turned. The Chism Polypheme was there, sagging on his coiled tail against the chamber wall. The dark green of his skin had faded and lightened to the shade of an unripe apple. While all had been intent on Darya’s presentation, no one had noticed his entry or knew how long he had been slumped there.

Atvar H’sial had predicted that the Chism Polypheme would return to gloat. She had been wrong. He had returned, but from the look of him he was far from gloating. While they watched, Dulcimer’s tail wobbled from under him and he slid lower down the wall. Louis Nenda swore and hurried to his side. The scanning eye on its short eyestalk had withdrawn completely into the Polypheme’s head, but the master eye above it remained wide open, vague and blissful as it peered up at the stocky Karelian human. Nenda bent and placed his hand on Dulcimer’s upper body.

He cursed. “I knew it. Look at the green on him. He’s sizzlin’. Without a radiation source! How the blazes could he get so hot, without even leavin’ the Erebus?”

“Not hot,” Dulcimer murmured. “Little bit warm, that’s all. No problem.” He lay face down on the floor and seemed to sag into its curved surface.

“A power kernel!” Nenda said. “It has to be. I didn’t know there were any on this ship.”

“At least four,” E.C. Tally informed them.

“But shielded, surely, every one of ’em.” Nenda stared suspiciously at the embodied computer. “Aren’t they?”

“Yes. But when the Chism Polypheme first came on board the Erebus—” Tally paused at Nenda’s expression. He was programmed to answer questions — but he was also programmed to protect himself from physical damage.

“Go on.” Nenda was glowering. “Amaze me.”

“He asked me to show him any kernels that might be on board. Naturally, I did so. And then he wondered aloud if there might be any way that a shield could be lowered in just one place, to permit a radiation beam to be emitted from the kernel interior to a selected site outside it. It was not a standard request, but I contain information on such a procedure in my files. So naturally, I—”

“Naturally, you.” Nenda swore again and prodded Dulcimer with his foot. “Naturally, you showed him just how to cook himself. What junk did they put in that head of yours, Tally, after they pushed the On button? Look at him now, grilled on both sides. If you don’t know enough to keep a Polypheme away from hard radiation… I’ve never seen the skin color so light. He’s really smoking.”

“Nice and toasty,” Dulcimer corrected from floor level. “Just nice and toasty.”

“How long before he’ll be back to normal?” Darya asked. She had moved to stand closer to the Polypheme. He did not seem to see her.

“Hell, I dunno. Three days, four days — depends how big a radiation slug he took. A whopper, from the looks of it.”

“But we need him right now. He has to steer us to the Anfract.” She had run off a copy of the computed coordinates of Genizee, and she waved it in Nenda’s face. “It’s so frustrating, when we finally know where we have to go to find the Zardalu…”

“Zardalu!” said the slurred and croaking voice. The bulging high-resolution eye went rolling from side to side, following the movement of the sheet that Darya was holding. Dulcimer seemed to see her for the first time. His head lifted a little, to move the thick-lipped mouth farther away from the floor. “Zardalu, bardalu. If you want me to fly you to the location listed on what you’re holding there…”

“We do — or we would, if you were in any shape to do it. But you are—”

“A trifle warm, s’all.” The Polypheme made a huge effort and managed to stand upright on his coiled tail, long enough for his top arm to reach out and snatch the coordinate sheet from Darya’s hand. He slumped back, lifted the page to within two inches of his master eye, and stared at it vacantly. “Aha! Thirty-third lobe, Questen-Dwell branch. Know a really good way to get there. Do it in my sleep.”

Darya stepped back as he collapsed again on the floor in front of her. In his sleep? It seemed about the only way that Dulcimer could do it. But from somewhere the Polypheme was finding new reserves of coordination and energy. He wriggled his powerful tail and began to inch single-minded toward the main control chair.

“Wait a minute.” Darya hurried to stand behind him as he pulled himself up into the seat. “You’re not proposing to fly the Erebus now.”

“Certainly am.” The five arms were flying over the keyboards seemingly at random, pressing and flipping and pulling. “Have us inside the Anfract in half a minute.”

“But you’re hot — you admit it yourself.”

“Little bit hot.” The head turned to stare at Darya. The great slate-gray eye held hers for a second, then turned upward to fix its gaze solidly and vacantly on the featureless ceiling. The five hands moved in a blur across the board. “Just a little bit. When you’re hot, you’re hot. Little bit, little bit, little bit.”

“Somebody stop that lunatic!” Julian Graves cried. “Look at him! He’s not fit to fly a kite.”

“Better if I’m hot, you see,” Dulcimer said, throwing a final set of switches before Rebka and Nenda could get to him. “ ’Cause this’s a real bad trip we’re taking, ’n I wouldn’t dare do it if I was cold.” The Erebus was moving, jerking into motion. “Littlebitlittlebitlittlebitlittle.” Dulcimer went into a fit of the giggles, as the ship began a desperate all-over shaking.

“Whooo-oo-ee. Here we go! All ab-b-oard, shipmates, and you all b-b-better hold on real t-t-t-t-t-t—”