by Christopher L. Bennett
* * * *
Tools can be used without being fully understood. Even really big tools....
It is a universal law that the faster a mode of transportation is, the more extreme its associated delays become. The Hub offered instantaneous travel to anywhere in the galaxy, so its gridlock achieved truly cosmic proportions.
The wait might not have been so bad for David LaMacchia if he hadn’t been seated in the midst of a family pod of Hijjeg tourists returning home from Earth. He’d expected everything in space to be grander than it was back home, but he hadn’t expected that to include his personal curse that the fattest individual on the bus—or in this case, the members of the largest, smelliest species—always sat next to him. My first lesson in galactic travel: from now on, take the aisle seat.
Once the transport finally got clearance to enter the Sol System Hubpoint, the surrounding bulk of Hijjeg flesh and the watering of David’s eyes made him miss the split-second transition to the Hub itself. He was here, just south of the far end of the galactic bar, forty thousand light-years from home. But he was still surrounded by Hijjeg and losing the feeling in his crushed extremities. The wait was even greater at this end, for as the single means of faster-than-light travel known to exist—the single point that every ship had to pass through to get anywhere—the Hub was, admittedly, something of a bottleneck.
Finally the transport docked at Hubstation 3742, serving Earth and worlds of comparable biochemistry and socioeconomic status. David found himself bustled off the shuttle by the press of Hijjeg bodies before he’d fully managed to restore circulation to his limbs. This is it, he thought as his luggage caught up with him after a frantic search, rubbing against his leg and offering up its handle. Here is the place where I begin my quest.
It looked uncannily like a bus station. Smelled like one, too, but with aromatic overtones unknown on Earth. David’s shoulders slumped. “This is the Hub?”
“What is to expect?” rumbled the largest of his Hijjeg seatmates as it trundled past, family pod in tow. “Low-rung world like yours getting good facilities? You want it, you earn it.”
His doubts evaporating, he gave the opinionated hillock a defiant smile. “My friend, that’s exactly what I’m here to do.”
The Hijjeg rumbled. “Good luck. My world try for six generations. Still stuck in this dump.”
“Thanks!” David replied. “Good luck to you too.”
As he navigated the crowd, David was thrilled to see so many exotic kinds of life in more types of mask, suit, exoskeleton, and other life-support mechanisms than he could identify; business and tourism transcended most environmental categories. It more than made up for the smells.
Finally he found the lobby area for the Hubstation’s hotel—about thirty meters past the end of the line for the registration desk. He napped on the back of his trunk until it finally reached the desk, and it gave a whirr of relief when he climbed off and stretched his limbs. “Boy, this place is busy! I hope you still have some empty rooms. I’m exhausted.”
The desk clerk, a cadaverous, blue-skinned Jiodeyn, peered at him with four small black eyes. “Empty rooms, sir? No, sir, we have none currently.”
“Oh.” David slumped. “Then where am I going to sleep?”
“We have a number of rooms available, sir.”
Huh? “But you just said there were no rooms.”
“No empty rooms, that’s correct, sir.”
“Wait ... you mean I’d have to share a room?”
“No, sir. You would have your own space.”
“Space. I’d just have part of the room?”
“One segment, sir, but you would have the full space.”
He blinked. “Do we take turns?”
“No, sir, you may stay as long as you wish.” The clerk looked him over. “Provided you can pay.”
“But other people will be in the room.”
The Jiodeyn spoke as if he were doing David a favor by being so patient. “Each suite accommodates seven, sir.”
“O ... kay.” David had lived with roommates before, during his college career—all five months of it—and he doubted any of them would be as interesting as the aliens he could meet here. “So there are seven beds per room?”
“No, sir, just the one.”
“For seven people?” he cried.
“We don’t pry into how our customers use their beds, sir,” the clerk replied primly.
“Isn’t that kind of ... well ... cramped?”
“Our beds are quite roomy, sir.”
“They’d have to be,” David muttered. Feeling a bit dizzy, he tried a different tack. “Look, what about life-support? You wouldn’t put an ammonia-breather or a silicone life form in the same suite with me, right?”
The clerk glared. “Sir, this establishment does not discriminate.”
“But that would kill me!”
“Not necessarily, sir, since you have not chosen a room yet.”
David took a breath and spoke very carefully. “Okay. Look. Do you have any rooms occupied only by species whose life-support needs wouldn’t kill me?”
The Jiodeyn checked his computer with two of his four arms. “Suite forty-seven currently holds five oxygen-breathers and one chlorine-breather. That is the best we can do at this time, sir.”
“Does the chlorine-breather wear a mask or something?”
“Not in his room, sir.”
David gasped. “Then how am I supposed to not die?!”
“That will be no problem, sir, so long as you stay in your own room.”
“But you said he’s in the room too!”
“Yes, sir. Would you like me to page him?”
“I don’t know,” David said, shaking his head. “What page are we even on?”
A new voice spoke. “That room will be fine for my friend here, Yolien. Put it on my account.”
David turned to see a tall, elegant, relatively humanoid biped with tawny skin, handsome leonine features, and a mane of golden feathers down his back. No surprise, he thought, that a Sosyryn would come to his rescue.
The clerk took it in stride. “Very good, Mr. Rynyan. Here is your key, sir.” He handed David a small crystal rod.
At the Sosyryn’s prompting, David took the key, but he was still confused. “But what about—”
“You’re new to the Hub, aren’t you?” Rynyan asked as he led David aside. At the human’s nod, he continued. “The rooms are tesseracts, you see. They use a quirk of the spacetime around the Hub to extend into four dimensions. Eight cubic ‘faces,’ making for seven rooms and one entry interface. The only way the Hub complex can handle the volume of traffic, you see.”
David was beginning to catch on. “So the key...”
“Rotates the interface to the particular room it’s associated with. You use that key and you’ll have no worries about opening the wrong room, inhaling chlorine, and dying in agony as your mucus turns into hydrochloric acid.” He paused. “Well, so long as the interface doesn’t malfunction. The maintenance crews don’t get out here as often as they could,” he went on with no change to his breezy, reassuring tone. David looked warily at the key.
“Ah! I’ve been rude. I am Rynyan Zynara ad Surynyyyyyy’a. Welcome, traveler, to the Hub.”
David shook his hand. “Hi. David LaMacchia.”
“Human, right?” Rynyan asked. “From Earth?”
“And proud of it.”
“Good for you! I suppose someone has to be. I’ve taken an interest in your planet, you know. That’s why I’m slumming here—I’d been hoping to meet someone interesting from Earth. Are you interesting?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out.”
“Good answer! You humans have such clever ways of saying ‘no.’ Well, Earth is a lovely world anyway,” he went on before David could answer. “Shame about the climatic catastrophes, though. They must be terribly inconvenient.”
“Uhh ... thanks. Really, we’d be much worse off if it weren’t for all your people’s help.”
Rynyan spread his arms magnanimously. “It’s our purpose in this universe. I mean, we have no problems of our own, so we need to have them imported.” He gave a passing imitation of a human laugh. “I joke. Seriously, your world was fortunate to be discovered when it was. Rysos was in similarly dire straits millennia ago. Then contact with the Hub Network and its advances and wealth let us make our world the paradise it is today. It is our privilege to share our ... well, our privilege with others who are less ... privileged.” He tapped his neck, where he presumably kept the implant that translated his speech impulses into the language of his choice before they reached his mouth. “That can’t be quite right.”
“I really admire your people,” David said as Rynyan led him toward his room, his trunk scuttling wearily behind. “You’re so egalitarian. You have so much, but it isn’t hoarded by a greedy few. You make sure everyone benefits from it.”
“The gratitude of others is our wealth,” the Sosyryn replied. “Now, let me do something really generous for you. My cousin just endowed an orphanage, and I’ll never live it down if I let that uncultured boor out donate me.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t. The room is fine.”
“Come now, there must be something. What is it you hope to gain here at the Hub?”
David’s eyes lit up. “It’s been my mission in life to get here. I didn’t have much growing up, but I always believed that I—that humans—were capable of better. There’s a whole galaxy out there, just on the other side of the Hub, and that’s where humanity’s future lies. Where my future lies. It cost me all my savings just to get a ticket offworld. And now I’m here.”
“What a charming story. And now that you’re here, what will you do next? Or do you plan to kill yourself now that your life’s goal is achieved?” he asked with sincere curiosity. “That would be an unconventional thing to help you with, a bit tricky to work into the plus column, but I suppose I could work something out.”
But David smiled. “Oh, I’ve only just begun to chase my life’s goal. You see ... I’m going to figure out how the Hub works.”
“Oh, oh, I can tell you that!” Rynyan said excitedly. “It’s at the center of mass of the dark matter halo that encompasses our galaxy and its satellites, and it connects to every point within that halo, so long as you know the right entry vector. All you have to do is dive in at the right speed and angle and—”
“No, no, I know that part!” David said, chuckling. “I mean I’m going to figure out the part nobody else has figured out yet.”
Rynyan stared. “You mean the relationship between the Hub vectors and the exit points?”
“Right. I’m going to find the pattern. I’m going to make it possible to go anywhere in the Galaxy by choice, not just by trial and error.”
The Sosyryn gaped at him. “Why, this is delightful! I’d forgotten they haven’t yet cured insanity on your world! Do tell me more, this is invigorating!”
David took the comment in stride. “I know it sounds crazy. But somebody’s gotta be the one to solve this, and it might as well be a human.”
“Oh, this is an entertaining delusion! How do you intend to proceed?”
David explained his plan to hire a Hub scout, one of the pilots who took their ships into the Hub on random vectors in the hopes of discovering promising new destinations. It had been such a scout who’d stumbled across the Sol System thirty-four years ago; once that vector was logged and recorded, it allowed steady access to Earth, at least until Sol’s drift took it away from the Hubpoint over the next few millennia. But missing the correct vector by a milliarcsecond could send a ship to the other end of the galaxy or a Magellanic Cloud; the relationship wasn’t remotely linear, if there even was one. David believed there had to be, and he’d brought instruments that he hoped would prove it. “I just keep collecting data with each jump we make, try to find a pattern. That’s why it has to be a Hub scout. They make the most trips.”
“You’re in luck,” Rynyan said. “I just happen to know a very good Hub scout. And she’s human, too, so I’m sure she’d be happy to help you out.”
“Can you introduce me to her?”
“Absolutely. She positively adores me.”
* * * *
“You’re an idiot, Rynyan,” the Hub scout said.
Her name was Nashira Wing, and she’d spent a lifetime trying to live it down. It was just her rotten luck that she’d turned out to be better at piloting than anything else. “And so is your friend,” she went on, “if he thinks he has any chance of cracking the Hub.”
Nashira’s insult bounced off Rynyan’s impenetrable skull as usual, but the Sosyryn stood up for his new pet charity case. “He’s not an idiot.”
“Thank you,” the man named David said.
“He’s a lunatic,” Rynyan went on, beaming. “I’ve always wanted one of my own.”
Nashira tilted her head to regard him. “Doesn’t charity for lunatics involve curing them, not indulging them?”
“Oh, where’s the fun in that?”
She turned to the young, sandy-haired human, making an effort to soften her expression. She often welcomed the “dragon lady” severity her crisp Asian features and sharp-edged soprano could assume, but this David LaMacchia was a harmless wide-eyed hick who didn’t know any better. “Look ... David? If there were a way to predict the relationship between entry vectors and exit points, somebody would’ve done it already. It’s what they call an NP-complete problem—there’s no way to solve it in a finite amount of time.”
“But a solution can be verified in a finite amount of time,” David responded, showing that he wasn’t completely ignorant about the subject. “If we have a theory to test, we can confirm it.”
“And what makes you think you can find a solution nobody else in thousands of planets has thought of? Are you some kind of supergenius?”
“Nope. Just an ordinary human.”
“No degrees in astrophysics, quantum physics, anything like that?”
He shook his head. “Don’t need ‘em.” He tapped his face next to his eye. She saw text dancing across his contact lens interface. “A wikigoogler. I’ve got the sum total of human knowledge at my fingertips. Or ... eyetips.”
She scoffed. “What?! You think that’s gonna give you some special insight?”
“The collective insight of the entire human species,” he answered with pride.
“You think that amounts to anything?” She let her face grow severe again, and her voice along with it. “You have no sodding idea what it’s really like out here, do you? You don’t understand what it means to be in a society with thousands of worlds, with civilizations thousands of times older than ours. I’ve heard it all—humans wondering why the rest of the galaxy hasn’t gone gaga over Shakespeare and Mozart and the Grand Canyon and chocolate. It’s because the galaxy is just too big. Too old. There’s too much stuff in it. Everything we have, everything we’ve ever built or written or thought of, somebody else did it first or has something better. There’s nothing new under the stars.
“Why do you think Earth is still so poor after thirty-four years on the Network? Because we have nothing to offer anybody. No reason for them to care about us.”
David glanced at Rynyan. “The Sosyryn care.”
“Please. Haven’t you been listening? You’re his new toy. Charity is something Sosyryn do to pass the time. They’ve wiped out all hardship on their own world, so they’re bored stiff looking for something to do.”
“You mean,” Rynyan corrected with his typical polite condescension, “that we seek to spread the fruits of our prosperity to others.”
“So we’ll bow down in gratitude and make you feel like there’s a point to your existence.” She turned back to David. “But they’ve never suffered, never wanted for anything. They can’t understand pain, so they can’t really care. So before his ... enabling gets you hurt, let me be cruel to be kind. Drop this. Now. Go back to East Bloody Podunk and work at the general store.”
“I’ve got nothing to go back to,” David said. “No money to live on ... or to buy a ticket with. The only way I can go is forward.”
Her heart threatened to go out to the poor fool, so she yanked hard on its leash. “Rynyan was right. You are insane.”
“You think I don’t know how the galaxy looks at humans, Ms. Wing? That’s the whole reason I’m out here. Because somebody has to be. Because we can’t let ourselves be brainwashed into thinking the galaxy’s right about us. Sure, they’ve all done wonderful things ... but none of them are us.”
“And what makes us so much better than anyone else?”
“We’re not better. But we’re new. We can come at the universe fresh, apply our unique way of thinking, maybe hit on something nobody else ever thought of.
“I’m not saying it’s a sure thing. But I know humans can contribute something important to the galaxy. Why not this? And how will we ever know unless we try?”
“Well, you don’t start small, I’ll give you that.”
“How can you not be excited at the possibility?” he continued, eyes gleaming. “I mean, you’re a Hub scout! A pioneer, braving unknown frontiers, seeking out strange new worlds and new—”
“If you split an infinitive, I’m leaving,” she told him. “You think this job is glamorous? Some big adventure you can tag along on? Let me tell you something. Space isn’t empty. Space is beyond empty. At least ‘empty’ implies there’s something there that can be filled. Space is nothing, with trace impurities.
“Now, imagine jumping randomly into nothing for a living. Imagine the odds of happening to materialize in range of one of those trace impurities, one that’s interesting enough that people might want to come to it. Can you imagine that?” He thought it over, and she interrupted before he could speak. “I’ll give you the answer: You can’t. Whatever you’re imagining, it’s not even close.
“Now, imagine knowing that if you do eventually find a Hubpoint that’s close to a star or planet, there’s no way to know you won’t emerge directly inside it and get an instant, no-fuss burial or cremation thrown in free with your death. Not that I’m complaining; that undercurrent of mortal terror before every dive helped relieve the monotony for the first year or so.”
“And now?”
“Now it offers a ray of hope.” He stared. “That’s what being a Hub scout is, kid,” she went on. “I don’t do it for the adventure. I do it because I’m a human, and that means I’m desperate. I’d quit faster than a Hub dive if I got a better offer.”
Rynyan leaned forward, leering. “That room in my mansion is still available for you.”
“I said a better offer.” She shuddered. “What is it with you? I’m not even your species.”
“It is my duty as a Sosyryn to share my people’s bounty with other species,” he intoned. “If that includes sharing the wonders of Sosyryn sex, then I stand ready to serve.”
“More like your own people are so decadent and dull that you have to look elsewhere for excitement. I’ll stick to humans, thanks.”
He shrugged. “Well, if you want to settle for males with only one penis...”
Mercifully, David got back on topic. “Look at it this way: your job won’t be so boring if you have me along for company. I don’t care if we find any interesting destinations—it’s the jumps themselves I want to study.” He smiled. “And it means your jumps will be accomplishing something even if they don’t come out anywhere good.”
“Except this crazy plan of yours isn’t going to accomplish a bloody thing,” she said.
He looked sad that he was unable to infect her with his enthusiasm. But he didn’t give up trying. “Taking me along will accomplish one thing, at least. It’ll get you paid. You can save up more toward getting a better job.”
Nashira remained skeptical. “You can’t even afford a ticket home. How’re you gonna pay me?”
“Rynyan’s agreed to fund the expedition.”
She turned to Rynyan. “Really?”
“Absolutely. It sounds like a marvelous adventure. I’ll be coming along, of course, to make sure my donation is put to good use.”
Nashira quailed. The prospect of Rynyan’s company almost outweighed that of Rynyan’s money ... but only almost. If Sosyryn got their kicks out of spreading their obscene wealth around on charity, who was she to refuse to take advantage of it? “Okay, Mr. LaMacchia.”
“David.”
She ignored it. “It’s against my better judgment ... but as long as I’m getting paid, you can come along ... provided my supervisor okays it.” Not that there was any chance Kred would go for it; he hated variations from procedure. But he wouldn’t have any grounds to forbid it, either. She just didn’t want to seem too eager.
David took her hand and shook it ardently. “Thank you, Ms. Wing. When we crack the code of the Hub, I’ll make sure the history wikis say only nice things about you.”
Rynyan leaned across the table, putting a hand on her arm. “If all it takes to change your mind about an offer is money, my dear...”
A moment later, Rynyan began to understand pain.
* * * *
“What’s this about you taking on passengers, Wing?”
Nashira sighed. She should’ve known Mokak Vekredi would’ve found out about this. The molelike Zeghryk may have been myopic in more ways than one, but he certainly seemed to hear about everything that went on in the Hubstation he managed. “Why, hello, Kred,” she replied with feigned affection. “You’re positively glowing today, dear. Pregnancy agrees with you.”
The diminutive alien’s night-adapted eyes darted away under their tinted goggles. “I don’t know what you’re referring to. I asked about these passengers. They’re attempting to study Hub travel?”
“That’s the idea. So when are the babies due?”
“I know of no babies,” Vekredi insisted, ducking down to hide his swollen belly behind his desk. Nashira stifled a laugh. Kred was so easy. Zeghryk were prolific breeders, hermaphrodites that could produce dozens of litters from a single mating. The boons of Hub contact had cured disease and conquered dangers, letting their population explode and forcing them to migrate offworld en masse. On learning that other races might feel threatened by their rampant growth, they’d made a decision typical of the officious Zeghryk mindset: by denying the problem existed, they could make it go away. They utterly refused to discuss the concept of sex or procreation with outsiders, insisted that they were all male, and denied ever being pregnant or raising children—even when they were visibly pregnant or surrounded by young, one or both of which they usually were. The xenosociologists had their theories for this strange behavior, but Nashira had her own theory, which was that Zeghryk were freaking idiots.
Which must be why they so often took jobs in middle management. “Your job is to search for profitable destinations,” Vekredi went on. “Not to ferry tourists.”
“Hub scouts take scientists along all the time. You know the regs, Kred. I’m not violating any procedures by bringing these guys along.” She knew she’d have him there. He lacked the imagination to be comfortable with anything beyond clearly drawn procedure.
“Yes, but the Dosperhag want you to refuse this particular ... expedition.”
Nashira grimaced. Unless it involves following direct orders from above. “The Dospers don’t own the Hub, Kred. Nobody does.”
“It is in their territory.”
“Only ‘cause they moved their star system to keep it there.”
“Exactly. The Dosperhag have an enormous investment in the Hub. They are entitled to ... take an interest in its operation.”
She shook her head. “You mean try to quash any attempt to figure out how the Hub works, just in case someone figures out how to build another one and take away their gravy train.”
Vekredi blinked. “Their concerns run far beyond the import of meat-based sauces.”
“Come on, Kred, they’re being paranoid! Nobody’s ever gonna crack the Hub.”
“Of course not. But the Dosperhag feel that people should be discouraged from undertaking such futile efforts—possibly risking their lives for nothing.”
She hoped she was right that Vekredi lacked the subtlety for that to be a veiled threat. “Look, this guy’s just a kid with delusions of grandeur. He can barely find his sodding hotel room. The Dospers have nothing to worry about.”
The little manager fidgeted. “I suppose not. However...” He leaned forward and spoke conspiratorially. “There is no procedure violated if his experiments ... fail. And such failure would serve to ... caution others against similar attempts.”
Okay, so he did have a trace of subtlety after all. Not much, though. “No way, Kred. I’m not gonna sabotage this guy’s equipment.”
“What is your interest in defending him, Wing? Simply that he is of your species?”
He was really getting on her nerves now, so she reciprocated. “Yes, Kred. I’m madly in love with him. I’m going to spend the whole trip having wild, athletic sex with him.” Vekredi cringed. Zeghryk didn’t like discussing other species’ sex lives either. “In fact, maybe I’ll settle down with him and have lots and lots of babies. I bet you can give me all sorts of wonderful advice on mothering. Maybe your children can baby-sit for me!”
“They’re not children!” Vekredi insisted by rote. “They’re ... small relatives. And none of this is pertinent.”
“There’s nothing pertinent about any of this, Kred! There’s no point in sabotaging something that won’t bloody work to begin with!”
The fidgeting increased. Kred was torn between two imperatives: following orders from his superiors and following his beloved procedures. She wondered if his head would explode. That would be fun to see. “There might be a point,” he managed to say. “I know you are eager for promotion out of the scout position. A good performance review from me could open new doors for you, Ms. Wing.”
For once, she had no comeback.
* * * *
This time, David got to see the view. Once Nashira’s scout ship, the Starship Entropy, launched from the Hubstation into open space, he gasped in awe. The sky was ablaze with stars and nebulosity in all directions, making the skies of Earth seem empty by comparison—but the Bulge itself filled nearly half the sky with an unbroken mass of yellow-white light. Against this magnificent backdrop lay the enormous ring habitats that surrounded the Hub concentrically, their rotations providing different gravity levels to accommodate the thousands of species participating in the Hub Network.
The Entropy was one of countless vessels shuttling between the Hubstation rings and the heavily armored Shell that encased the Hub, the light from their various drive sinks and exhausts creating a multicolored light show rivaling the galactic splendor beyond. It looked like freeway gridlock on Earth, except in three dimensions and less cluttered; the lethally hot plasma exhaust from fusion engines tended to discourage tailgating.
But Hub scouts tended to be given priority, since there were simply so many untried Hub vectors remaining to test. The Entropy was able to soar past the gridlock on a reserved vector and was soon passing through a hatch in the Shell. “That’s no moon, it’s a space station,” David quipped, but Nashira ignored him.
As they passed through the intricate array of launchers and scanners inside the Shell, David was finally able to look upon the Hub itself. It was less impressive-looking than he’d expected, just an odd pucker in the center of the Shell, faintly glowing with the trace energy that seeped through from literally every point within the galactic halo, but oddly difficult to focus his eyes on.
But as the Entropy took its place on the launch rail and was shunted around the curve of the Shell toward its dive trajectory, David remembered just how impressive the Hub really was. “This is so cool,” he said. “Here we are, about to go someplace no human or Sosyryn has ever been in the history of the Universe.”
“Yep,” Nashira said. “Hey, you did remember to update your will, right?” David swallowed, suddenly remembering what Nashira had said about the risks of her job. She cackled at his expression. “Now that’s the Hub scout spirit. Nice knowin’ ya, suckers!” she cried as the Entropy was launched from the rail and dove into the Hub. David missed the transition because his eyes were squeezed shut.
After a few moments, he realized he wasn’t dead, and dared to open them again—only to gasp at the vista that spread before him on the cockpit’s wraparound display wall. Out there, just beyond the ship’s nose, the whole expanse of the Milky Way spread out before him, its two major spiral arms and central bar clearly delineated. Off to the side, both Magellanic Clouds were visible, two small, irregular clumps of light with a faint streamer barely detectable between them. He looked to the other side and saw a spray of red-orange stars, a globular cluster a few thousand parsecs off their starboard bow.
“Wow,” he finally said. “Wow. There, you see, Nashira? Our very first dive, and we get something ... this beautiful. What are the odds of that?”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, about 4,999 in five thousand. Dives can take you anywhere inside the halo, and the galaxies make up a fiftieth of a percent of that by volume. I see views like this every bloody day, and so do the tourists who go to the hundreds of destinations with views just like this. Destinations that actually have nearby stars to support the tour facilities. Here, we’d be lucky to find a speck of dust within a parsec.”
As David’s face fell, Nashira worked the controls. “Now let’s get back before we lose the beam.”
He put his hand on her arm. “Wait. Can’t we just stay here a little longer? It’s my first time.”
“And it’s my first time today. I’ve got a lot of vectors left to test.”
“Please? Come on, can’t you remember what it was like the first time you saw this?”
She sighed. “All right, I guess there’s no harm.”
“Uhh, we can call for pickup after the beam’s shut down, right?”
“Long as we’ve got the ‘lopes.”
David kept drinking in the sight until the laser beam that “held the door open” along their Hub vector shut down, about four minutes after the dive. When the Dosperhag had first stumbled upon the Hub millennia ago, they had lost many probes and ships to one-way interstellar journeys before discovering the beam effect. That simple discovery had made the Hub viable for interstellar travel and begun bringing the galaxy together. As a result, the Dosperhag had become one of the most prosperous and influential races in the galaxy—although their low-gravity, metal-poor biology limited their ability to visit other worlds, so they were content to share the burden of managing the Hub with others. David cast a glance back at his instruments, hoping they would bring about another simple revolution—for the benefit of all, but in the name of humanity.
Nashira caught his glance. “Okay, I might as well ask—what’s this big theory of yours for how the Hub works?”
He smiled at her interest, however marginal it sounded. “Well, I got the idea from a twentieth-century physicist called Richard Feynman. He thought that every particle in the Universe was really the same particle, bouncing back and forth endlessly through space and time. I think he was onto something. I’m theorizing that every particle in the Universe is just a cross-section of one great big cosmic string ... and the Hub is a sort of tangle where all the paths intersect. The Hub vectors are the paths the strings take. So if I can identify the string signatures and how they intersect, we’ll be able to predict where a Hub vector comes out!”
Nashira stared at him blankly until David said, “Was I clear enough? Do you need something explained?”
After another moment, she turned to Rynyan in the back. “Rynyan, I owe you an apology. For once, you were right. You’ve found yourself a grade-A lunatic.”
Rynyan preened. “I bring you nothing but the best, my pet.”
“It just sounds crazy to you because it’s not accepted by the galaxy,” David told her. “But that’s exactly the kind of new idea we need to try!”
“Forget it. I’m just the driver. You play with your gadgets all you want, doesn’t matter to me. Whatever happens with that stuff, it’s not my problem.”
David chuckled. “You make it sound like something bad’s going to happen. What could go wrong?”
“Nothing. Never mind.” Nashira cleared her throat and headed back to the communication shack. “I’m calling for retrieval.”
David hastened to follow. “Ooh, I want to watch. I’ve never seen a quantelope.”
A quantelope was a small, rabbitlike creature with purple fur and two small horns on its head. And the whole of galactic civilization rested upon its tiny shoulders. The Hub allowed instantaneous travel, but the blanket energy leakage obscured any radio traffic. The only way to communicate with the Hub from a distance, whether to confirm a viable Hubpoint or to request a beam for a return trip, was by talking to a quantelope. Somehow, in the ultracold environs of their homeworld, these ammonia-based animals had evolved with Bose-Einstein condensates in their bloodstreams, allowing their brains to become quantum-entangled with those of their relatives. A little gengineering had turned them into quantum radios, able to parrot anything heard by one of their entanglemates. Which made them dandy for interstellar communication but unwise to keep as pets in one’s bedroom.
David was torn between staring in awe and giggling as the tiny, adorable beastie stared up out of its cryotank and intoned in a deep voice, “You’re overdue, Entropy. Anything to report?”
“False alarm,” Nashira said, and asked for a beam. Moments later, a spot of laser light appeared in the middle of nowhere, Hubpoint distortion scattering enough of its light to make it visible from any direction. Nashira piloted the Entropy until it aligned with the beam and rode it back through the Hub.
“Do us both a favor,” Nashira said once they were in the Shell again. “Get off now and take Don Wannabe here with you. You’re not going to find anything.”
“We’ve barely even started,” David said. “And I, for one, would love to see our galaxy from a few dozen more angles.”
She turned to David’s backer. “How about you, Rynyan? We’ve been doing this for nearly fifteen minutes. We must have exceeded your attention span by now.”
“I am never bored so long as I have your beauty to gaze upon,” he said. “Though honestly, that jumpsuit doesn’t let me gaze upon nearly enough of your beauty. I’ll buy you some Earth lingerie to wear for me tomorrow.”
Nashira spun the ship around sharply to redock on the launch rail, sending Rynyan into the bulkhead. “Ooh, I love it when you get physical,” he said.
“Last chance to get off, save us all some grief,” she told David.
“I don’t give up that easy,” he replied. “Let’s dive.”
The second dive was on the same trajectory as before, but a centimeter per second faster. They came out a good hundred kiloparsecs from where they’d been, this time seeing the Milky Way edge-on from the other side. Over the next few dozen jumps, David certainly got his wish to see his home galaxy—and the various satellites and clusters that shared its dark-matter halo—from every possible angle.
On the second day, Rynyan’s generous donation of lingerie items was jettisoned eight thousand parsecs beyond the Canis Major Dwarf galaxy. On the third day, they actually materialized inside the Virgo Stellar Stream, the remnant of a dwarf spheroidal galaxy being torn apart as it slowly merged with the Milky Way’s disk. Despite his fascination with the extragalactic vistas, David was somewhat relieved to see a starry sky, even a sparse one like this. “I’m picking up energy readings,” Nashira reported. “Looks like radar transmissions.”
David perked up. “A new species? First contact?”
Her eyes were wide as she studied the readings, narrowing in on the source. “Maybe. If we’re lucky...”
“I bet you get a huge bonus for this!”
“Wouldn’t suck...”
After a moment, she slumped. Then she socked David in the shoulder, hard. “Damn you! You sodding moron, trying to get my hopes up!”
“What is it? No aliens?”
“Oh, there are aliens, all right! Great big sodding technical civilization, colonies all over their system.”
“Then what—”
“They’re eight light-years away, that’s what! We can’t go there! We can’t make contact! This is even worse than finding nothing! Do you get now why I hate this job?”
“Hey, it’s not a total loss. I’m sure they’ll want to set up a science outpost here to study them.”
“Oh, great, scientists. No tourism, no trade. I’ll be able to buy new shoes with my bonus.” She grimaced. “And now I have to fall further behind schedule so I can collect preliminary readings. A little present for the grandkids I’m never gonna have at this rate.”
“Hey, doing science. That sounds exciting.”
“You want to do science? You want to help?”
“Do I!”
She pointed. “Push that button.”
He did so. “Now what?”
“That’s it. It’s done. The ship’s taking readings. What do you think, I have xenology degrees? I’m a bloody pilot.” She crossed her arms. “Nothing to do now but sit and wait.”
She went back to get a sandwich. David heard Rynyan moving to intercept her. “If you’d like a way to pass the time, I’ve been studying this book called the Kama Sutra. I think its proposals would be very adaptable to a merging of our species.”
“You remember David’s theory, Rynyan? About how the particles in all our bodies are really the same particle looping back on itself?”
“Yes,” he replied, nonplussed.
“Well, if he’s right, then if you want to have sex with me ... you can just go fuck yourself.”
* * * *
“These are acceptable results,” Vekredi told Nashira as he reviewed her reports. “I’ll forward them to Research for eventual follow-up. The size of your bonus will be contingent on how these results pan out.”
Nashira declined to hold her breath. It was a big galaxy, plus eight small galaxies, and there was already plenty to keep the universities and research centers of the Network worlds busy for centuries. If she were lucky, she might see the bonus before she retired. If she lived that long.
“Meanwhile, I trust Mr. LaMacchia has made no progress?”
“Of course not, Kred.”
He peered at her through his goggles. “Then you have taken action to ... neutralize his equipment?”
“His equipment is off-the-shelf junk, and he barely knows how to use it. Even if there were something to find, I’m not gonna bother sabotaging something that has no chance of finding it. I don’t kick people when they’re already down for the count. Not worth the pain in my toes.”
“Very well,” Vekredi said after a moment. “Since your position is clear, the subject will not be raised with you again.”
“It better not be.” She didn’t tell him how close she’d come to sabotaging David’s equipment anyway. That bonus would have done her some real good, even if it had been for a pointless act. But if she’d let Kred and his bosses use her that way once, she’d never be free of them.
And maybe, on some level, she didn’t like the idea of betraying David LaMacchia. Not that she was getting sentimental; if she’d felt it was in her best interests to screw him over, she would’ve screwed him over and had no trouble living with it. But she was just a little bit glad she didn’t have to.
They soon settled into a daily routine, with David improvising new scan techniques with his instruments while Rynyan “supervised” and flirted, and Nashira tried her best to ignore them both. Each morning she advised them to give up and leave her to her sullen solitude, and each morning they climbed aboard with unrelenting enthusiasm.
But after a week in which none of the three made any progress toward their respective goals, David was beginning to think a change of tack was needed. “We need to go through the Hub as slowly as possible,” he told Nashira. “Just drift into it. Maybe a slower passage will get me better readings.”
“The jump’s instantaneous,” Nashira said.
“But it can’t be. The front of the ship enters the Hub before the back does. There has to be some kind of transition.”
“The controllers won’t like it. A slow dive means delays for other ships.”
And David turned to the Sosyryn. “Rynyan?”
“Not to worry. I’m wiring the bribes into their accounts as we speak.”
And so, thanks to Sosyryn generosity, one controller was able to buy a lavish anniversary meal for each of his six spouses, another was able to decorate her hothouse-dwelling with the finest K’slien pornographic topiaries, and Nashira was able to read insulting and threatening instant messages from a dozen fellow pilots before the Starship Entropy finally crept through the Hub.
She was still composing suitably scathing replies when they reached the other side, hoping to provoke a good brawl in the pilots’ lounge later on and get enough bones broken to justify a medical leave. So she ignored David’s gasp of amazement. Then she ignored Rynyan’s gasp of amazement.
Then Rynyan grabbed her head from behind and tilted it up to the viewing wall. And she gasped in amazement.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” David said.
“Neither have I,” Rynyan said, “and I’m not even a backwater hick.”
“I don’t know if anyone has,” Nashira said.
What they saw, so the Entropy computer told them after digesting a few minutes of scans, was a red giant star a few AUs in front of them. But not just any red giant. This star had not one or two, but four hot Jovians in close orbits around it. All four had been engulfed by the star’s expanding atmosphere as it swelled past its main-sequence confines. But they had not been fully vaporized, for they were large, and the extremely hot hydrogen around them was also extremely tenuous. Rather, they had carved out gaps in the vast hydrogen cloud, bulldozing their orbital paths clear. Their gravity had concentrated the star’s hydrogen into the zones between their orbits, confining it against the outward push of the stellar wind from the white-hot, dying core. Friction with the stellar atmosphere had eroded their own atmospheres, which had coursed behind the planets like cometary tails and been blown outward to mingle with the confined hydrogen in between them, spiking it with trace amounts of ammonia, methane, ice crystals, hydrocarbons, and organic compounds.
In short, the newly dead white dwarf was surrounded by a system of immense, multicolored rings, so vast that the Jovian planets functioned as shepherd moons. These rings were encased within the tenuous remains of the red giant’s outer atmosphere, minus the layers that had already sloughed off to begin forming a planetary nebula around it, nested shells encasing the nested rings.
“This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” David said.
“The hell with that—this is gonna make me rich!” Nashira replied with glee. “Oh, we’d better get back so I can stake a claim on this place! Wing’s Rings, they’ll call it!”
“You can do that?” Rynyan asked.
“If I’m quick about it. If I can do an end run, get the paperwork done in my name before I have to report this to Kred. I’ll still have a ton of debt to work off, but eventually I should be able to get out of this shitty job and rub my success in their faces and assorted sensory clusters. One quick scan and then we go back!”
“Whoa, what’s your hurry?” David asked. “Come on, Nashira, look at it! You’ve found something incredibly beautiful, something that nobody has ever seen before. How can you not be thrilled by this? How can you not give yourself a little time to be moved by it?”
She glared at him. “You’re right. This is an amazing place. It’s gorgeous. Anyone would give a fortune to retire here. And I can never see it again. That’s a Hub scout’s life, understand? We try the new vectors, the ones nobody’s been to before. Well, we’ve been here now, and that means I’m not coming back. So where’s the percentage in letting myself give a damn about it, except as a way of maybe someday getting out of this life?”
He was nonplussed. “But ... if you did get out, you could still come back.”
“If I’m lucky,” she told him, reality setting back in. “If nothing else goes wrong. If I don’t materialize inside a brown dwarf tomorrow. That’s my life, kid.”
David was quiet for a time. “I’m really sorry,” he said, and it sounded like pity, so she hated him for it.
She spent a few minutes ignoring him, studying the scans to make sure there was nothing here to jinx her find. Once she was satisfied, she jumped out of her chair and headed to the comm shack, pushing past Rynyan, who was loitering in the hatchway and clearly relished the close contact. “I’m calling for the beam. Sooner you two dreamers are out of my hair, the better.” And out of my head.
A few moments later, she screamed. “What is it?” David cried, rushing in after her with Rynyan behind him. She just pointed and let them see for themselves:
The quantelopes were dead.
A quick investigation showed that the cryotank’s supposedly failure-proof systems had failed. The quantelopes had boiled alive well before reaching room temperature. “Well!” Rynyan declared. “I shall certainly complain to the manufacturer when we get back.”
“When we get back?!” Nashira cried. “How exactly do we do that? We have no way of contacting the Hub!”
“Won’t they send a ship to find us when we don’t report in?” David asked.
“In about five years, maybe. For all they know, we’re inside a planet or got caught in a war or a supernova wavefront. They’ll give it time for the danger to move past the Hubpoint.”
“Oh.” He paused. “Well, we’ll have to figure something out ourselves, then.”
“Don’t you get it?! We’re dead! There’s nowhere habitable in this system. The ship’s got less than a week’s supplies for three. God, it’d be better if we’d come out right inside the bloody star, been flash-vaporized.”
She went back to the cockpit and took her seat, tempted to fire up the drive and fly the Entropy into the star. Instead, she just clunked her head down on the console and wrapped her arms around it. I never thought I’d go this way. I thought I’d never even know I’d died. She damned the Universe for getting her hopes up just before it killed her.
She felt a hand on her shoulder—a human one, at least. “Maybe there’s another way,” David said. “Maybe the scans I took can let us figure out a way back, or at least a way to contact the Hub.”
“Stop deluding yourself, kid. You ... are going ... to die.”
He sat down beside her. “I don’t think it’s deluded to go on trying. If you try, at least you have a chance. If you don’t try, you have none.
“That’s the whole point of what you do, Nashira. It’s why I admire you so much. Your job, it’s all about playing the long odds, risking it all to find things you have only the tiniest chance of finding. The fact that you do this job at all tells me that there must be a part of you that believes in hope.”
“Hope just sets you up for disappointment, David.”
“I don’t believe in disappointment,” Rynyan said. “Just delayed gratification. We’ll be home by dinnertime.” He rubbed his belly. “That reminds me, I need a snack.”
“Go ahead,” Nashira told him. “No point in rationing our food anyway.”
“Nashira...”
“Don’t, David. You just go play with your toys until you figure out we’re buggered.”
He spent a few hours with his instruments before growling in frustration. “Let me guess,” Nashira said.
“It’s not hopeless,” he insisted. “Just difficult.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“There’s some data ... I just have to figure it out.”
“Random noise.”
“I’m not giving up. At least...” He sighed. “At least it’s something to keep me occupied if...”
“So you’re finally starting to admit it.”
He returned to his seat next to hers. “Okay. Maybe we are going to die here.”
She stared. “How can you be so calm about it?”
“Are you kidding?” He gestured to the display. “I got to see that.”
“You’re not disappointed that you’ll never get to crack the Hub and make the galaxy sit up and notice humanity?”
“At least I tried. I set a goal for myself, a big goal. Something more than just working a nine-to-five and watching the vidnet. That’s not enough of a life anymore, not when there’s a whole universe for us to reach for. I know a lot of people back home who dream of coming out here. But they’ll never actually do it. Because they’re not stupid or crazy enough to risk everything to try it. But I was. I was stupid. I was crazy. And so I really tried. And I made it out here. Maybe I’m going to die, but at least I actually lived first.” He turned back to admire the rings. “Just look at it, Nashira. We get to see something nobody else has ever seen. And it’s all ours, for the rest of our lives. That’s not so bad a way to go, is it?”
Nashira looked into his eyes for a while. Then she turned to the display and really saw the rings for the first time.
After a while, the rings blurred, and she realized she was crying. In wonder. “It really is beautiful.”
“It’s an amazing universe,” David said.
“Yeah ... I guess sometimes it is.” She found herself looking into his eyes again ... and found herself not wanting to look away. She felt herself moving closer to him, closer...
And then the proximity alert went off. Nashira spun back to the console in bewilderment. “What? There—there’s a ship coming! It just came through the Hub! We’re saved!”
“Well, it’s about time they got here,” Rynyan spoke up. “The snacks on this ship aren’t very good.”
Nashira heard something more than his usual cluelessness in his voice. She turned to face him. “‘They’ who?”
“Oh, just some friends of mine. Business partners, really. They’re here to secure my claim.”
She stood. “Your claim?”
He grinned and gestured toward the glorious vista beyond. “Welcome to Rynyan’s Rings. I’m going to donate them as a federal park, so the entire Network can benefit from them!”
“You—you! You—when the hell did you ... How did you ...?”
“Oh, I called them hours ago! While you were doing the system scan. The quantelopes were fine when I used them. Oh, I do hope I didn’t break something. If so, I’ll pay for—”
“You bastard!” She pinned him against the bulkhead. “You come aboard my ship and you have the gall to jump my claim?!”
“I prefer to think of it as saving your life. Which I’m sure you’ll agree is a much more generous act than letting you have the claim to the Rings. Along with my donation of the Rings themselves, I’ll be the envy of all Rysos come tallying season!”
“Saving my—you didn’t even know we’d be in danger when you made that call!”
“The intent doesn’t matter,” he said with the serene smile of the bodhisattva who’d eaten the canary. “The meaning lies in the gift itself.”
* * * *
“The failure of the cryotank is being investigated,” Vekredi told them upon their return to Hubstation 3742. “Naturally the reliability of our quantelope communication is of the highest priority to us. But I hope this incident has driven home to you, Mister LaMacchia, that Hub scout missions are intrinsically dangerous. If you continue your ... researches in this vein, the Hub management cannot be held liable for the consequences. Do you understand me, sir?”
“Yes, thanks,” David said. “Your translator’s working fine.”
Vekredi nodded in satisfaction and waddled away. Once he was out of earshot, Nashira punched David in the shoulder. “Don’t you get it, kid? Translated or not, that was a threat. No way that tank just happened to fail. It was sabotaged.”
His eyes widened. “Are you sure?”
“I can’t prove it, but I know it. The Dospers wanted me to sabotage your equipment, but I refused. So they had someone sabotage my ship instead.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because they don’t want to lose their monopoly on interstellar travel! If you keep digging, David, they’ll keep trying to stop you.”
“Oh my God,” he said. Then he grinned. “This is great!”
“It’s great that they tried to kill us?”
“Don’t you get it, Nashira? Thousands of species have studied the Hub and found nothing. If the Dosperhag are afraid of what I’m doing ... it means they must think there’s a chance that I can find something. A chance that humans—insignificant, irrelevant humans—can offer the galaxy something that nobody else can.
“And you know what that means?”
“It means,” Rynyan said thoughtfully, “that maybe there is an answer after all. One the Dosperhag have been covering up. You might actually be sane after all.” He slumped. “Aww.”
“More than that,” David said. “It means—”
Nashira sighed, troubled that she was beginning to understand how he thought. “It means you can’t give up now. That you’re gonna keep trying to show the galaxy what humanity can do.”
“That’s right.” He shrugged. “Maybe I won’t keep studying Hub travel—not openly, anyway. I’m not that stupid.” He winked. “But there have got to be other things humans have to offer the galaxy. And I’m going to find them, no matter how long it takes. Just like you’re gonna find another special place someday, no matter how long it takes.”
“And just as I,” said Rynyan, “will find a way to share the wonders of Sosyryn sex with Nashira, no matter how—”
“Not happening, Goldilocks,” she told him absently before turning back to David. “You’re gonna get yourself in so many kinds of trouble.”
“Then it’s a good thing I have Rynyan to help me out.”
“Like I said: you’re gonna get in so many kinds of trouble.” She sighed again, knowing she was going to have to keep an eye on the kid until he got a better feel for the big, bad galaxy. If only because she shuddered to think what would happen to humanity’s reputation with David and Rynyan carrying the torch.
But maybe, she thought as she studied David’s eyes and infectious smile, she had one or two other reasons to care what happened to him. Maybe he’d reminded her what it felt like to care.
So she’d have to stick close until she figured out whether to thank him or take revenge.
Copyright © 2010 Christopher L. Bennett