Sailing to Byzantium: Six Novellas

  15.

  THERE WAS SHIPWORK TO do. For days, now, Vox’s invasion of me had been a startling distraction. But I dared not let myself forget that we were in the midst of a traversal of heaven. The lives of us all, and of our passengers, depended on the proper execution of our duties: even mine. And worlds awaited the bounty that we bore. My task of the moment was to oversee spinaround acquisition.

  I told Vox to leave me temporarily while I went through the routines of acquisition. I would be jacked to other crewmen for a time; they might very well be able to detect her within me; there was no telling what might happen. But she refused. “No,” she said. “I won’t leave you. I don’t want to go out there. But I’ll hide, deep down, the way I did when I was upset with you.”

  “Vox—” I began.

  “No. Please. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  There was no time to argue the point. I could feel the depth and intensity of her stubborn determination.

  “Hide, then,” I said. “If that’s what you want to do.”

  I made my way down out of the Eye to Engine Deck.

  The rest of the acquisition team was already assembled in the Great Navigation Hall: Fresco, Raebuck, Roacher. Raebuck’s role was to see to it that communications channels were kept open, Fresco’s to set up the navigation coordinates, and Roacher, as power engineer, would monitor fluctuations in drain and input-output cycling. My function was to give the cues at each stage of acquisition. In truth I was pretty much redundant, since Raebuck and Fresco and Roacher had been doing this sort of thing a dozen times a voyage for scores of voyages and they had little need of my guidance. The deeper truth was that they were redundant too, for 49 Henry Henry would oversee us all, and the intelligence was quite capable of setting up the entire process without any human help. Nevertheless there were formalities to observe, and not inane ones. Intelligences are far superior to humans in mental capacity, interfacing capability, and reaction time, but even so they are nothing but servants, and artificial servants at that, lacking in any real awareness of human fragility or human ethical complexity. They must only be used as tools, not decision-makers. A society which delegates responsibilities of life and death to its servants will eventually find the servants’ hands at its throat. As for me, novice that I was, my role was valid as well: the focal point of the enterprise, the prime initiator, the conductor and observer of the process. Perhaps anyone could perform those functions, but the fact remained that someone had to, and by tradition that someone was the captain. Call it a ritual, call it a highly stylized dance, if you will. But there is no getting away from the human need for ritual and stylization. Such aspects of a process may not seem essential, but they are valuable and significant, and ultimately they can be seen to be essential as well.

  “Shall we begin?” Fresco asked.

  We jacked up, Roacher directly into the ship, Raebuck into Roacher, Fresco to me, me into the ship.

  “Simulation,” I said.

  Raebuck keyed in the first code and the vast echoing space that was the Great Navigation Hall came alive with pulsing light: a representation of heaven all about us, the lines of force, the spinaround nodes, the stars, the planets. We moved unhinderedly in free fall, drifting as casually as angels. We could easily have believed we were starwalking.

  The simulacrum of the ship was a bright arrow of fierce light just below us and to the left. Ahead, throbbing like a nest of twining angry serpents, was the globe that represented the Lasciate Ogni Speranza spinaround point, tightly-wound dull gray cables shot through with strands of fierce scarlet.

  “Enter approach mode,” I said. “Activate receptors. Begin threshold equalization. Begin momentum comparison. Prepare for acceleration uptick. Check angular velocity. Begin spin consolidation. Enter displacement select. Extend mast. Prepare for acquisition receptivity.”

  At each command the proper man touched a control key or pressed a directive panel or simply sent an impulse shooting through the jack hookup by which he was connected, directly or indirectly, to the mind of the ship. Out of courtesy to me, they waited until the commands were given, but the speed with which they obeyed told me that their minds were already in motion even as I spoke.

  “It’s really exciting, isn’t it?” Vox said suddenly.

  “For God’s sake, Vox! What are you trying to do?”

  For all I knew, the others had heard her outburst as clearly as though it had come across a loudspeaker.

  “I mean,” she went on, “I never imagined it was anything like this. I can feel the whole—”

  I shot her a sharp, anguished order to keep quiet. Her surfacing like this, after my warning to her, was a lunatic act. In the silence that followed I felt a kind of inner reverberation, a sulky twanging of displeasure coming from her. But I had no time to worry about Vox’s moods now.

  Arcing patterns of displacement power went ricocheting through the Great Navigation Hall as our mast came forth—not the underpinning for a set of sails, as it would be on a vessel that plied planetary seas, but rather a giant antenna to link us to the spinaround point ahead—and the ship and the spinaround point reached toward one another like grappling many-armed wrestlers. Hot streaks of crimson and emerald and gold and amethyst speared the air, vaulting and rebounding. The spinaround point, activated now and trembling between energy states, was enfolding us in its million tentacles, capturing us, making ready to whirl on its axis and hurl us swiftly onward toward the next waystation in our journey across heaven.

  “Acquisition,” Raebuck announced.

  “Proceed to capture acceptance,” I said.

  “Acceptance,” said Raebuck.

  “Directional mode,” I said. “Dimensional grid eleven.”

  “Dimensional grid eleven,” Fresco repeated.

  The whole hall seemed on fire now.

  “Wonderful,” Vox murmured. “So beautiful—”

  “Vox!”

  “Request spin authorization,” said Fresco.

  “Spin authorization granted,” I said. “Grid eleven.”

  “Grid eleven,” Fresco said again. “Spin achieved.”

  A tremor went rippling through me—and through Fresco, through Raebuck, through Roacher. It was the ship, in the persona of 49 Henry Henry, completing the acquisition process. We had been captured by Lasciate Ogni Speranza, we had undergone velocity absorption and redirection, we had had new spin imparted to us, and we had been sent soaring off through heaven toward our upcoming port of call. I heard Vox sobbing within me, not a sob of despair but one of ecstasy, of fulfillment.

  We all unjacked. Raebuck, that dour man, managed a little smile as he turned to me.

  “Nicely done, captain,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Fresco. “Very nice. You’re a quick learner.”

  I saw Roacher studying me with those little shining eyes of his. Go on, you bastard, I thought. You give me a compliment too now, if you know how.

  But all he did was stare. I shrugged and turned away. What Roacher thought or said made little difference to me, I told myself.

  As we left the Great Navigation Hall in our separate directions Fresco fell in alongside me. Without a word we trudged together toward the transit trackers that were waiting for us. Just as I was about to board mine he—or was it she?—said softly, “Captain?”

  “What is it, Fresco?”

  Fresco leaned close. Soft sly eyes, tricksy little smile; and yet I felt some warmth coming from the navigator.

  “It’s a very dangerous game, captain.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes, you do,” Fresco said. “No use pretending. We were jacked together in there. I felt things. I know.”

  There was nothing I could say, so I said nothing.

  After a moment Fresco said, “I like you. I won’t harm you. But Roacher knows too. I don’t know if he knew before, but he certainly knows now. If I were you, I’d find that very troublesome, captain. Just a word to the wise. All right?”
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  16.

  ONLY A FOOL WOULD have remained on such a course as I had been following. Vox saw the risks as well as I. There was no hiding anything from anyone any longer; if Roacher knew, then Bulgar knew, and soon it would be all over the ship. No question, either, but that 49 Henry Henry knew. In the intimacies of our navigation-hall contact, Vox must have been as apparent to them as a red scarf around my forehead.

  There was no point in taking her to task for revealing her presence within me like that during acquisition. What was done was done. At first it had seemed impossible to understand why she had done such a thing; but then it became all too easy to comprehend. It was the same sort of unpredictable, unexamined, impulsive behavior that had led her to go barging into a suspended passenger’s mind and cause his death. She was simply not one who paused to think before acting. That kind of behavior has always been bewildering to me. She was my opposite as well as my double. And yet had I not done a Vox-like thing myself, taking her into me, when she appealed to me for sanctuary, without stopping at all to consider the consequences?

  “Where can I go?” she asked, desperate. “If I move around the ship freely again they’ll track me and close me off. And then they’ll eradicate me. They’ll—”

  “Easy,” I said. “Don’t panic. I’ll hide you where they won’t find you.”

  “Inside some passenger?”

  “We can’t try that again. There’s no way to prepare the passenger for what’s happening to him, and he’ll panic. No. I’ll put you in one of the annexes. Or maybe one of the virtualities.”

  “The what?”

  “The additional cargo area. The subspace extensions that surround the ship.”

  She gasped. “Those aren’t even real! I was in them, when I was traveling around the ship. Those are just clusters of probability waves!”

  “You’ll be safe there,” I said.

  “I’m afraid. It’s bad enough that I’m not real any more. But to be stored in a place that isn’t real either—”

  “You’re as real as I am. And the outstructures are just as real as the rest of the ship. It’s a different quality of reality, that’s all. Nothing bad will happen to you out there. You’ve told me yourself that you’ve already been in them, right? And got out again without any problems. They won’t be able to detect you there, Vox. But I tell you this, that if you stay in me, or anywhere else in the main part of the ship, they’ll track you down and find you and eradicate you. And probably eradicate me right along with you.”

  “Do you mean that?” she said, sounding chastened.

  “Come on. There isn’t much time.”

  On the pretext of a routine inventory check—well within my table of responsibilities—I obtained access to one of the virtualities. It was the storehouse where the probability stabilizers were kept. No one was likely to search for her there. The chances of our encountering a zone of probability turbulence between here and Cul-de-Sac were minimal; and in the ordinary course of a voyage nobody cared to enter any of the virtualities.

  I had lied to Vox, or at least committed a half-truth, by leading her to believe that all our outstructures are of an equal level of reality. Certainly the annexes are tangible, solid; they differ from the ship proper only in the spin of their dimensional polarity. They are invisible except when activated, and they involve us in no additional expenditure of fuel, but there is no uncertainty about their existence, which is why we entrust valuable cargo to them, and on some occasions even passengers.

  The extensions are a level further removed from basic reality. They are skewed not only in dimensional polarity but in temporal contiguity: that is, we carry them with us under time displacement, generally ten to twenty virtual years in the past or future. The risks of this are extremely minor and the payoff in reduction of generating cost is great. Still, we are measurably more cautious about what sort of cargo we keep in them.

  As for the virtualities—

  Their name itself implies their uncertainty. They are purely probabilistic entities, existing most of the time in the stochastic void that surrounds the ship. In simpler words, whether they are actually there or not at any given time is a matter worth wagering on. We know how to access them at the time of greatest probability, and our techniques are quite reliable, which is why we can use them for overflow ladings when our cargo uptake is unusually heavy. But in general we prefer not to entrust anything very important to them, since a virtuality’s range of access times can fluctuate in an extreme way, from a matter of microseconds to a matter of megayears, and that can make quick recall a chancy affair.

  Knowing all this, I put Vox in a virtuality anyway.

  I had to hide her. And I had to hide her in a place where no one would look. The risk that I’d be unable to call her up again because of virtuality fluctuation was a small one. The risk was much greater that she would be detected, and she and I both punished, if I let her remain in any area of the ship that had a higher order of probability.

  “I want you to stay here until the coast is clear,” I told her sternly. “No impulsive journeys around the ship, no excursions into adjoining outstructures, no little trips of any kind, regardless of how restless you get. Is that clear? I’ll call you up from here as soon as I think it’s safe.”

  “I’ll miss you, Adam.”

  “The same here. But this is how it has to be.”

  “I know.”

  “If you’re discovered, I’ll deny I know anything about you. I mean that, Vox.”

  “I understand.”

  “You won’t be stuck in here long. I promise you that.”

  “Will you visit me?”

  “That wouldn’t be wise,” I said.

  “But maybe you will anyway.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” I opened the access channel. The virtuality gaped before us. “Go on,” I said. “In with you. In. Now. Go, Vox. Go.”

  I could feel her leaving me. It was almost like an amputation. The silence, the emptiness, that descended on me suddenly was ten times as deep as what I had felt when she had merely been hiding within me. She was gone, now. For the first time in days, I was truly alone.

  I closed off the virtuality.

  When I returned to the Eye, Roacher was waiting for me near the command bridge.

  “You have a moment, captain?”

  “What is it, Roacher.”

  “The missing matrix. We have proof it’s still on board ship.”

  “Proof?”

  “You know what I mean. You felt it just like I did while we were doing acquisition. It said something. It spoke. It was right in there in the navigation hall with us, captain.”

  I met his luminescent gaze levelly and said in an even voice, “I was giving my complete attention to what we were doing, Roacher. Spinaround acquisition isn’t second nature to me the way it is to you. I had no time to notice any matrixes floating around in there.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. Does that disappoint you?”

  “That might mean that you’re the one carrying the matrix,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “If it’s in you, down on a subneural level, you might not even be aware of it. But we would be. Raebuck, Fresco, me. We all detected something, captain. If it wasn’t in us it would have to be in you. We can’t have a matrix riding around inside our captain, you know. No telling how that could distort his judgment. What dangers that might lead us into.”

  “I’m not carrying any matrixes, Roacher.”

  “Can we be sure of that?”

  “Would you like to have a look?”

  “A jackup, you mean? You and me?”

  The notion disgusted me. But I had to make the offer.

  “A—jackup, yes,” I said. “Communion. You and me, Roacher. Right now. Come on, we’ll measure the bandwidths and do the matching. Let’s get this over with.”

  He contemplated me a long while, as if calculating the likelihood that I was bluffing. In the end he must have
decided that I was too naive to be able to play the game out to so hazardous a turn. He knew that I wouldn’t bluff, that I was confident he would find me untenanted or I never would have made the offer.

  “No,” he said finally. “We don’t need to bother with that.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “If you say you’re clean—”

  “But I might be carrying her and not even know it,” I said. “You told me that yourself.”

  “Forget it. You’d know, if you had her in you.”

  “You’ll never be certain of that unless you look. Let’s jack up, Roacher.”

  He scowled. “Forget it,” he said again, and turned away. “You must be clean, if you’re this eager for jacking. But I’ll tell you this, captain. We’re going to find her, wherever she’s hiding. And when we do—”

  He left the threat unfinished. I stood staring at his retreating form until he was lost to view.

  17.

  FOR A FEW DAYS everything seemed back to normal. We sped onward toward Cul-de-Sac. I went through the round of my regular tasks, however meaningless they seemed to me. Most of them did. I had not yet achieved any sense that the Sword of Orion was under my command in anything but the most hypothetical way. Still, I did what I had to do.

  No one spoke of the missing matrix within my hearing. On those rare occasions when I encountered some other member of the crew while I moved about the ship, I could tell by the hooded look of his eyes that I was still under suspicion. But they had no proof. The matrix was no longer in any way evident on board. The ship’s intelligences were unable to find the slightest trace of its presence.

  I was alone, and oh! it was a painful business for me.

  I suppose that once you have tasted that kind of round-the-clock communion, that sort of perpetual jacking, you are never the same again. I don’t know: there is no real information available on cases of possession by free matrix, only shipboard folklore, scarcely to be taken seriously. All I can judge by is my own misery now that Vox was actually gone. She was only a half-grown girl, a wild coltish thing, unstable, unformed; and yet, and yet, she had lived within me and we had come toward one another to construct the deepest sort of sharing, what was almost a kind of marriage. You could call it that.