With an effort of will, she continued her preparations for the crisis of g.
She’d learned this trick from Angus. No, “learned” wasn’t the right word for it. She’d seen him do it; she’d experienced its results; she’d even looked at it, in the files he’d let her see. But to remember it now, remember it well enough to reproduce it after so many months, so much intervening pain—
She had to make the effort.
While her artificial clarity gradually frayed and faded, she wrote a new batch command. Not for the self-destruct this time: for her black box itself.
As Angus had once done, she created a parallel zone implant control, using the circuits of the auxiliary communications station. Through the command board, she switched the functions of her black box to those circuits, then shoved the box itself into her pocket for what may have been the last time. After that, she programmed the parallel control to put her to sleep the moment Captain’s Fancy experienced g higher than 1.5—and to wake her up again when it dropped below that.
Even 1.5 was a risk; but she had to assume that her flawed mind could stand at least a little strain. If she set her sleep threshold any lower, she would be unconscious while g was still soft enough to let Nick’s people move against her.
If this worked—if she remembered it right, did it right—she could avoid her gap-sickness without being forced to relinquish the self-destruct. Nick had never been in her cabin with her during acceleration or deceleration: he didn’t know how she took care of herself. Before he could risk challenging her, he would have to discover—or guess—what her defenses were. And that might take time.
It might take long enough for Captain’s Fancy to cross the gap.
Once he reached human space, he might reconsider the commitment he’d made to the Amnion.
Morn’s arrangements took a long time to set up. They were complex—and she was losing recall. Emotional exhaustion drained her despite the pressure of the electrode in her brain.
At the fringes of her awareness, she noticed the steady increase of g as Captain’s Fancy took on thrust.
From the bridge, Carmel’s report reached her: Tranquil Hegemony and Calm Horizons were following Captain’s Fancy outward.
Abruptly Mikka entered the room. Without hesitation, she sat down at the auxiliary scan station. Scowling impersonally, she announced, “Nick sent me to keep an eye on you. Don’t worry, I won’t get in your way.”
A new threat. Mikka would see her helplessness under g. To protect herself, Morn slid her finger back onto the chronometer toggle. But her attention was contracting: her window of clarity shrank. She struggled with her preparations. If she made a mistake, g would drive her mad—
Then, over the intercom, she heard Vector say, “I don’t know about this, Nick.”
“I’m in no mood to guess,” Nick snapped back. “Say what you mean.”
“The new equipment checks out fine, as far as I can tell,” Vector answered. “I’ve got it powered up, and it looks stable. But, Nick”—the engineer faltered momentarily—“some of the tests don’t run. They come up blank. The rest are absolutely green, dead-center tolerances. But these ones—There must be fifty possible explanations. I’ll need a month to try them all.”
“Chance it,” Morn croaked into the intercom.
“No!” Nick shot back, “I won’t do it. Morn, you’re out of time. You can’t stay awake on that toggle for another month. And I’m not going to risk tach. We need too much g—you’ll blow us up. And if the drive fails, we’ll fry in the gap.
“Face facts, Morn! There’s no way out of this one.”
A visceral dread, cold and familiar, closed her throat. She had to force herself to reply. “And if we run tests for a month, Enablement will have plenty of time to find out you cheated them. Then those warships are going to start shooting.”
He would listen to that: he had to.
Grimly she continued, “I’ll give you ten minutes to pick up velocity. I’m setting the timer now.” Her fingers keyed commands. “After that, I’m finished with you. I’ll self-destruct.”
“Morn!” Vector protested, “what about your gapsickness?”
As hard as she could, she kicked Nick in the keystone of his doubt. “Goddamn it!” she shouted because she was terrified, “what the hell do you think I’ve got a zone implant for?”
Let him believe she wasn’t helpless. Let him believe she didn’t need unconsciousness to protect her. Please let him believe that.
She could tell by the way Nick cursed that he did.
“Secure for burn!” he yelled at his ship. He didn’t want to wait ten minutes. “You’ve got thirty seconds!” At once he began barking instructions for Vector and the helm first.
Thirty seconds. Time for one last bluff—one last, desperate attempt to keep herself and Davies alive. Fear mounted like a storm in her as she turned to Mikka.
“You know what’s at stake for me,” she said as firmly as she could. “You know I’m out of choices. I’m going to turn my seat so you can’t see how I take care of myself.” So Mikka wouldn’t see her go to sleep; wouldn’t see her release the chronometer toggle. “That’s for your protection as well as mine.”
Please don’t try to jump me. I beg you.
Mikka shrugged distantly. “It’s your neck. I’m not the one who has to face him when this is over.” A moment later she added, “I’m reasonably sure you’re not going to blow us up now. And I want out of Amnion space myself.”
As time ran out, Morn swung the command station so that the back of her seat concealed her from Mikka.
Then the tactile howl of full thrust fired through Captain’s Fancy’s hull, and Morn’s mind went away.
ANCILLARY
DOCUMENTATION
GAP DRIVE
Progress in science is often a matter of discovering what works first and discovering why it works afterward. Dr. Juanita Estevez of SpaceLab Station developed a functioning gap drive five years before she had any idea what it was.
By some standards, her greatest achievement was her demonstration that it was possible to design and build a gap drive without ever having been aware that the gap existed. Her ignorance was indicated by the fact that, when she finally learned what her invention did, she referred to the effect as “going into tach” and “resuming tard,” as though tachyon/tardyon principles were somehow involved. Plainly they were not—and yet her terminology persisted. A century after the first gap ship returned successfully from its first mission, people still talked about “going into tach” when the gap drive was engaged and “resuming tard” when the gap crossing was complete.
Of course, Dr. Juanita Estevez was a genius—or, as some of her colleagues insisted, “a major loon.”
The device which eventually proved to be a gap drive prototype she built believing it to be a “matter disassembler”: objects of various kinds were placed within the field of the device; power was applied; the objects disappeared, “disassembled” into their component particles and, presumably, dispersed into the atmosphere. Because she was a private individual with a strongly developed instinct for self-protection, Dr. Estevez was in no hurry to attract attention for her work. Instead she concentrated her research in two primary areas: she attempted to measure the emission of “disassembled” particles into the atmosphere; and she strove to discover the limits of the “disassembling” process by experimenting with objects of various weights and structures.
The former produced no results. The latter—eventually—opened the frontiers of the galaxy.
Until coincidence intervened, however, she had no way of knowing that her test objects did indeed go somewhere, not “disassembled” but whole; or that where the objects went involved a complex interaction between the strength of the field, the potential strength of the field, the mass of the object, and the direction and velocity in which the object was moving when the field was energized (in this case, SpaceLab Station spin provided both direction and speed). She knew only th
at the objects were in fact gone, and that they left no measurable emissions.
But one day she energized her field to “disassemble” a block of solid titanium. At virtually the same instant, an explosion occurred in one of SpaceLab Station’s bulkheads—fortuitously, a redundant cargo hold bulkhead intended to protect the occupied regions of the station if, through accident or terrorism, the cargo should detonate and the hold decompress. The cause of the explosion became apparent when the block of titanium was found in the hole of the bulkhead: the block had come through the gap into a physical space already occupied by the bulkhead; and since the block was solider, harder, the bulkhead tore itself loose.
Of course, no one realized the event’s significance until Dr. Estevez rather sheepishly admitted that the block was hers.
From that moment, it was only a matter of time before human beings began to venture beyond their own solar system.
The initial research was, inevitably, confused and cautious. Dr. Estevez was chagrined by her misunderstanding of her own experiments; and embarrassment made her even more protective and territorial than she might have been otherwise. SpaceLab Station’s administrator of research was torn between his desire to pursue Dr. Estevez’s experiments and his wish to wrest control of the invention away from her. And the administrator of facilities was opposed to the entire project on the grounds that SpaceLab’s ecology was too fragile to absorb the risk that more bulkheads or perhaps even the station’s skin might be damaged.
Nevertheless Dr. Estevez’s research had become too dramatic to be thwarted; and eventually its potential benefits became too obvious to be denied. New versions of the “disassembler” (now called the “Juanita Estevez Mass Transmission Field Generator”) were built; more objects were passed through the gap and relocated; vast computer analyses of the experiments and the results were run. Then predictions were made, and more tests were run to verify the predictions.
The gap drive worked before any but the most abstruse thinkers had conceived of the gap itself. Interdimensional travel became a reality as soon as the interactions of the gap field (primarily mass, velocity, and hysteresis) were adequately quantified—long before any theoretical understanding of the gap itself achieved broad acceptance within the scientific communities of Earth.
As usual, humankind took action first and considered the consequences later.
Dr. Estevez should have expected—but did not—that as soon as a theory of the gap became current scientific coin, her name for her own invention would fall out of use. The JEMTFG became, first, “the interdimensional drive,” and finally, “the gap drive.” In a sense, she was only remembered for her mistakes: references to “tach” and “tard” endured; and the term “an Estevez” referred to “a major blunder with beneficial results.”
She died an extremely bitter, as well as an extremely wealthy, woman.
ANGUS
Angus Thermopyle woke up many times and remembered none of them. The nightmare he’d spent his life fleeing had hold of him. There was nothing he could do to make it let go.
He didn’t wake up while he was frozen, of course. He’d been frozen for a number of reasons, and that was one of them: so that he wouldn’t wake up. While he slept, he couldn’t talk.
However, there were other reasons as well. Cryogenic transportation was safer than numbing him with sedatives or doping him with cat. It offered less risk of neurological damage—and Hashi Lebwohl didn’t want one synapse or ganglion harmed. The UMCP director of Data Acquisition had complex intentions for Angus, all of which depended on preserving the integrity of what Angus knew, remembered, and could do.
So he was kept frozen while Min Donner completed her business on Com-Mine Station: the meetings demanded by protocol; the elucidation of policy; the discussions concerning piracy, forbidden space, and the Preempt Act. Then he and Milos Taverner were taken back across the gap to UMCPHQ.
Soon after that, Angus began waking up—and forgetting it. Before they could do anything else, UMCPDA’s surgeons had to unfreeze him. Until they did so, his body and brain were as intractable as permafrost. So he was shifted from the cold tomb of his cryogenic capsule to the warmer helplessness of cat and anesthetics and surgical restraints. On brief occasions, he was allowed to rise toward consciousness so that the surgeons could test their work. But those occasions were too brief to cling to—and the pain he felt until the drugs took him back down into the dark was too acute. In self-defense, he edited them out of his mental datacore.
As a result, he had no understanding at all of what the surgeons did to him; what form his nightmare had taken.
He wasn’t aware that they peeled back his flesh like the skin of a fruit in order to install utility lasers as keen as stilettos along the bones of his forearms and hands. When the operation was done, there was a strange gap between the third and fourth fingers of each hand, a gap over which his fingers couldn’t close. Connected to their power supply, those weapons would be able to cut open locks and thoraxes with equal facility.
He wasn’t aware that his hips and knees and shoulders were taken apart and reinforced to double or even triple the effective strength of his muscles; or that struts to support and shield his spine were installed in his back; or that another shield was molded over his ribs; or that a thin, hard plate was set under his shoulder blades to anchor and reinforce his arms, protect his heart and lungs—and to hold the power supply and computer which would eventually become part of his identity.
He wasn’t aware that his eyes were removed and fitted with prostheses which were then wired into his optic nerves, thus enabling him to see electromagnetic spectra that no organic vision could perceive—spectra relevant to such diverse applications as alarm systems and computer circuitry.
He wasn’t aware that zone implants were installed in his brain: not one electrode but several. When they were activated, they would control him with a subtlety that made the things he’d done to Morn Hyland look like hatchet-work.
And he certainly wasn’t aware that weeks went by while all these operations were performed. In fact, only advanced surgical procedures and potent curative drugs enabled the doctors to do such things to him in weeks instead of months or years. Making cyborgs wasn’t easy; and the difficulties were increased in his case because his designers had to assume that he would be unalterably opposed to his own technological enhancement.
Not because he had moral or visceral objections: nothing in the UMCP files suggested that Angus Thermopyle would reject being made a cyborg for its own sake. No, he would fight forever against his own enhancement because he would never be allowed to command it. The same technology which made him superior to his former self would also rule him; deprive him of volition completely. When the surgeons were done, Angus would be nothing more than a tool, a biological extension of the UMCP’s will.
With luck, he would be the perfect tool. He would retain his mind, memory, and appearance—retain everything which made him dangerous to the UMC and human space. He could go everywhere he used to go, do everything he used to do. But now his every action would serve his new masters.
In their own way, the surgeons worked to transform him as profoundly as an Amnion mutagen.
If all the operations were successful.
That was the crucial question. Neural probes and metabolic modeling could only provide so much information. They couldn’t prove whether or not the surgeons’ efforts succeeded. And the computer which would control him could only be calibrated in reference to his specific electrochemical “signature,” his unique endocrine/neurotransmitter balances.
Eventually the doctors needed him awake.
So they began withdrawing their drugs from his veins; began sending delicate stimulations into his brain. By careful degrees, they urged him out of the sleep which gave him his only protection against horror and pain.
When he regained enough consciousness to thrash against his restraints and scream, they began teaching him who he was.
You have
been changed.
You are Joshua.
That is your name.
It is also your access code.
All the answers you will ever need are available to you. Your name gives you access to them. Find the new place in your mind, the place that feels like a window, the place that feels like a gap between who you are and what you remember. Go to that place and say your name. Joshua. Say it to yourself. Joshua. The window will open. The gap will open. All the answers you need will come to you.
Joshua.
Say it.
Joshua.
Angus screamed once more. If weeks of surgery hadn’t left him so weak, he might have been able to burst his restraints. But he couldn’t, so he curled into a fetal ball and did his best to turn himself into a null-wave transmitter. The link between his brain and his temporary computer remained inactive. If he thought anything, if he ever let himself think again, he would remember his nightmare—remember that they’d dismantled his ship; remember the large, sterile room full of equipment for cryogenic encapsulation; remember the crib—and then the abyss from which he’d fled all his life would open under his feet.
Nevertheless he was already cooperating with his doctors. Every internally generated whimper and twitch provided them with exactly the data they required—the neural feedback which allowed them to verify their assumptions and calibrate their instruments.
When they were satisfied with what they’d gained this time, they let him sleep again.
The next time, they pushed him harder toward consciousness.
You have been changed.
You are Joshua.
That is your name.
It is also your access code.
All the answers you will ever need are available to you. All you have to do is say your name. Think it to yourself. Accept it.
Joshua.
Say it.