"Are they really gone?"
Dwer bent close to an ancient, pitted window. He peered at a glittering starscape, feeling some of the transmitted chill of outer space, just a finger's thickness away.
"I don't see any sign of em over here," he called back to Rety. "Is it clear on your side?"
His companion -- a girl about fourteen, with a scarred face and stringy hair -- pressed against another pane at the opposite end of the dusty chamber, once the control room of a sleek vessel, but now hardly more than a grimy ruin.
"There's nothin' -- unless you count the bits an' pieces floatin' out there, that keep fallin' off this rusty ol' bucket."
Her hand slammed the nearest bulkhead. Streams of dust trickled from crevices in the prehistoric metal walls.
The starship's original owners must have been oddly-shaped, since the viewing ports were arrayed at knee height to a standing human, while corroded instruments perched on tall pillars spread around the oblong room. Whatever race once piloted this craft, they eventually abandoned it as junk, over half a million years ago, when it was dumped onto a great pile of discarded hulks in the dross midden that lay under Jijo's ocean.
Immersion in sub-icy water surely had preserving effects. Still, the Streaker crew had accomplished a miracle, reviving scores of these wrecks for one final voyage. It made Rety's remark seem unfair, all considered.
There is air in here, Dwer thought. And a machine that spits out a paste we can eat... sort of. We're holding death at bay. For the moment.
Not that he felt exactly happy about their situation. But after all the narrow escapes of the last few days, Dwer found continued life and health cause for surprised pleasure, not spiteful complaint.
Of course, Rety had her own, unique way of looking at things. Her young life had been a lot harder than his, after all.
"i sniff every corner of this old boat," a small voice piped, speaking Anglic with a hissing accent and a note of triumph. "no sign of metal monsters. none! we scare them off!"
The speaker trotted across the control room on four miniature hooves -- a quadruped with two slim centauroid arms and an agile, snakelike neck. Holding his head up proudly, little yee clattered over to Rety and slipped into her belt pouch. The two called each other "husband and wife," an interspecies union that made some sense to another Jijoan but would have stunned any citizen of the Civilization of Five Galaxies. The verbose urrish male and an unbathed, pre-pubescent human female made quite a pairing.
Dwer shook his head.
"Those robots didn't leave on account of our fierce looks. We were hiding in a closet, scared out of our wits, remember?" He shrugged. "I bet they didn't search the ship because they saw it for an empty shell right away."
Almost a hundred ancient derelict ships had been resurrected from the subsea graveyard by Hannes Suessi and his clever dolphin engineers, in order to help mask Streaker's breakout, giving the Earthlings a slim chance against the overpowering Jophur dreadnought. Dwer's presence aboard one of the decoys resulted from a series of rude accidents. (Right now he was supposed to be landing a hot air balloon in Jijo's Gray Hills, fulfilling an old obligation, not streaking into the blackness away from the wilderness he knew best.)
But Rety had planned to be here! A scheme to hijack her very own starship must have been stewing in that devious brain for weeks, Dwer now realized.
"The sap rings cut us loose so they can go dolphin-hunting somewhere else! I knew this'd happen," Rety exulted. "Now all we gotta do is head for the Five Galaxies. Make it to some place with a lot of traffic, flag down some passing trading ship, an' strike a deal. This old hulk oughta be worth something. You watch, Dwer. Meetin' me was the best thing that ever happened to you! You'll thank me when you're a star god, livin' high for three hunnerd years."
Her enthusiasm forced him to smile. How easily Rety looked past their immediate problems! Such as the fact that all three of them were primitive Jijoans. Learning to pilot a space vessel would have been a daunting task for Dwer's brilliant siblings -- Lark or Sara -- who were junior sages of the Commons of Six Races. But I'm just a simple forester! How is skill at tracking beasts going to help us navigate from star to star?
As for Rety, brought up by a savage band of exile sooners, she could not even read a few months ago, when she began picking up the skill.
"Hey, teacher!" Rety called. "Show us where we are!"
Four gray boxes lay bolted to the floor, linked by cable to an ancient control pillar. Three had been left by the dolphins, programmed to guide this vessel through the now-completed breakout maneuver. Last was a portable "advisor" -- a talking machine -- given to Rety by the Streaker crew. She had showed Dwer her toy earlier, before the Jophur robots came.
"Passive sensors are operating at just seven percent efficiency," the unit answered. "Active sensors are disabled. For those reasons, this representation will be commensurately imprecise."
A picture suddenly erupted between Rety and Dwer... one of those magical holo images that moved and had the texture of solidity. It showed a fiery ball in one low corner -- Great Izmunuti, he realized with a superstitious shiver. A yellow dot in the exact center represented this hapless vessel. Several other bits of yellow glimmered nearby, drifting slowly toward the upper right.
The Jophur have cut loose all the captured decoys. I guess that means they know where Streaker is.
He thought of Gillian Baskin, so sad and so beautiful, carrying burdens he could never hope to understand. During his brief time aboard the Earth vessel he had a feeling... an impression that she did not expect to carry the burdens much longer.
Then what was it all for? If escape was hopeless, why did Gillian lead her poor crew through so much pain and struggle?
"Behold the Jophur battleship," said Rety's teacher. A blurry dot appeared toward the top right corner, now moving rapidly leftward, retracing its path at a close angle toward Izmunuti.
"It has changed course dramatically, moving at maximum C-Level pseudospeed."
"Can you see Streaker?" Dwer asked.
"I cannot. But judging from the Polkjhy 's angle of pursuit, the Terran ship may be masked by the red giant star."
He sensed Rety sitting crosslegged on the floor next to him, her eyes shining in light from the hologram.
"Forget the Earthers," she demanded. "Show us where we're headin'!"
The display changed, causing Izmunuti and the Jophur frigate to drift out of view. A fuzzy patch moved in from the top edge, slippery to look at. Rows of symbols and numbers flickered alongside -- information that might have meant something to his sister, but were simply frightening to Dwer.
"That's the... transfer point, right?" Rety asked, her voice growing hushed. "The hole-thing that'll take us to the Five Galaxies?"
"It is a hole, in a manner of speaking. But this transfer point cannot serve as a direct link out of Galaxy Four -- the galaxy we are in -- to any of the others. In order to accomplish that, we must follow transition threads leading to other hyperspatial nexi. A much bigger one, capable of longer-range jumps."
"You mean we'll have to portage from stream to stream, a few times?" Dwer asked, comparing the voyage to a canoe trip across a mountain range.
"Your metaphor has some limited relevance. According to recent navigation data, a route out of this galaxy to more populated regions can be achieved by taking a series of five transfers, or three transfers plus two long jumps through A-Level hyperspace; or two difficult transfers plus one A-level jump and three B-level cruises; or --"
"That's okay," Rety said, clapping her hands to quiet the machine. "Right now all I want to know is, will we get to the point all right?"
There followed a brief pause while the machine pondered.
"I am a teaching unit, not a starship navigator. All I can tell is that our C-Level pseudomomentum appears adequate to reach the periphery of the nexus. This vessel's remaining marginal power may be sufficient to then aim toward one of the simpler transfer threads."
Rety did not have to speak. Her smug expression said it all. Everything was going according to her devious plan.
But Dwer would not be fooled.
She may be brilliant, he thought. But she's also crazier than a mulc-spider.
He had known it ever since the two of them almost died together, months ago in the Rimmer Mountains, seized in the clutches of a mad antiquarian creature called One-of-a-Kind. Rety's boldness since then had verged on reckless mania. Dwer figured she only survived because Ifni favors the mad with a special, warped set of dice.
He had no idea what a transfer point was, but it sounded more dangerous than poking a ruoul shambler in the face with a fetor worm.
Ah, well. Dwer sighed. There was nothing to be done about it right now. As a tracker, he knew when to just sit back and practice patience, letting nature take its course. "Whatever you say, Rety. But now let's turn the damn thing off. You can show me that food machine again. Maybe we can teach it to give us something better than greasy paste to eat."
Harry
He reconfigured the station to look something like a Martian arachnite, a black oval body perched on slender, stalklike legs. It was all part of Harry's plan to deal with the problem of those transumptive banana peels.
After pondering the matter, and consulting the symbolic reference archive, he decided the screwy yellow things must be allaphorical representations of short-scale time warps, each one twisting around itself through several subspace dimensions. Encountering one, you would meet little resistance at first. Then, without warning, you'd slam into a slippery, repulsive field that sent you tumbling back toward your point of origin at high acceleration.
If this theory was true, he'd been lucky to survive that first brush with the nasty things. Another misstep might be much more... energetic.
Since flight seemed memetically untenable in this part of E Level, the spider morphology was the best idea Harry could come up with, offering an imaginative way to maneuver past the danger, using stilt legs to pick carefully from one stable patch to the next. It would be risky, though, so he delayed the attempt for several days, hoping the anomaly reef would undergo another phase shift. At any moment, the irksome "peels" might just evaporate or transform into a less lethal kind of insult. As long as he had a good view of his appointed watch area, it seemed best to just sit and wait.
Of course, he knew why a low-class Earthling recruit was assigned to this post. Wer'Q'quinn had said Harry's test scores showed an ideal match of cynicism and originality, suiting him for lookout duty in allaphor space. But in truth, E Level was unappealing to most oxygen breathers. The great clans of the Civilization of Five Galaxies thought it a quaint oddity at best. Dangerous and unpredictable. Unlike Levels A, B, and C, it offered few shortcuts around the immense vacuum deserts of normal space. Anyone in a hurry -- or with a strong sense of self-preservation -- chose transfer points, hyperdrive or soft-quantum tunneling, instead of braving a realm where fickle subjectivity reigned.
Of course, oxygen-breathers only made up the most gaudy and frenetic of life's eight orders. Harry kept notes whenever he sighted hydros, quantals, memoids and other exotic types, with their strange insouciance about the passage of time. They don't see it as quite the enemy we oxy-types do.
His bosses at the Navigation Institute craved data about those strange comings and goings, though he could hardly picture why. The orders of sapiency so seldom interacted, they might as well occupy separate universes.
Still, you could hide a lot in all this weirdness, a trait that sometimes drew oxy-based life down here. On occasion, some faction or alliance would try sending a battle fleet through E Space, suffering its disadvantages in order to take rivals by surprise. Or else criminals might hope to move by a secret path through this treacherous realm. Harry was trained to look out for sooners, gene raiders, syntac thieves, and others trying to cheat the strict rules of migration and uplift. Rules that so far kept the known cosmos from dissolving into chaos and ruin.
He nursed no illusions about his status. Harry knew this job was just the sort of dangerous, tedious duty the great institutes assigned to lowly clients of an unimportant clan. Yet he took seriously his vow to Wer'Q'quinn and NavInst. He planned showing all the doubters what a neo-chimp could do....
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The Real Culture War
