Further: Beyond the Threshold (15 page)

“The time approaches for the celebration on Ouroboros to begin, sir,” whispered the eagle in my ear. “If you would not like to be late, we should go.”

I nodded and stepped through an arch into yet another world, leaving behind the myths of my mother’s ancestors, given flesh out there among the stars.

When we returned to the diamond house, a package was waiting for me in the foyer. Constructed of some featherlight alloy, it was simple and unmarked. As I opened the box, the escort explained that it had been sent over by Chief Executive Zel, who’d had a group of historians research appropriate attire for someone of my background and status, suitable for a formal gathering.

It was certainly an improvement on the outlandish and unlikely offerings in the diamond house’s wardrobe, I’ll give them that.

When I had dressed, I regarded myself in the mirror: a black sherwani coat, tailored to my exact measurements and extending just past the knees, with a Nehru collar, embroidered in gold and red at the neck and cuffs; white churidar pants; and on my feet, embroidered slip-on juties. Pinned on the coat’s breast was the stylized blue arrow of the
Wayfarer One
insignia, surrounded by the motto scroll—“Endeavor to Reach Beyond”—evidently copied from the hull of the derelict craft.

Strange that the motto should outlive the ship itself. I’d suggested it almost as a joke, and when no one had objected, it had been incorporated into the insignia. I hadn’t told anyone that the phrase had also been the motto of the Explorer house at the National Public School in Indiranagar, Bangalore. In Grade XI, I’d lead the Explorers to winning the House Cup, taking highest marks in quizzes and athletics—though, admittedly, my classmates had been canny enough to keep me out of any competitions involving dancing, singing, or spelling. By Grade XII, I’d been selected as vice prefect of the student body—having lost the position of prefect to Vijaya Nelliparambil, object of my long-standing unrequited love—and had already decided that my future lay out in space. I had no idea how right I’d been.

In the precisely tailored suit of clothes, hair combed and trimmed, chin neatly shaven, I allowed that I didn’t look half bad. Not a day over seventy, seventy-five at the most. When I stepped back into the foyer, the silver eagle was waiting for me, as always.

“Shall we go, Captain Stone?”

We stepped through the grand entrance into Central Axis, and the escort directed me toward a nearby threshold. The world of Ouroboros, it seemed, was important enough to merit a direct connection to the main hub of the network.

“Sir,” the escort said, as I stepped toward the metal arch, “I understand that there is to be something of a surprise for you at the event.”

Before I could ask what it had meant by “surprise,” I was through the threshold and standing in the midst of a massive crowd.

We were within an enormous ballroom, under a geodesic roof. The room was huge, easily the size of one of the secondary axes on the threshold network, and the roof must have been fifty or sixty meters from the floor at its highest point.

I took a step forward into the milling throng, the weight on me seeming only slightly less than one standard gravity. The planet of Ouroboros must have been very nearly the mass of Old Earth.

Before I’d taken another step, though, all eyes had turned to me and all conversation stopped. The room erupted in thunderous applause, and I felt the familiar twist of fight-or-flight in my gut.

“Um, hello?” I gave a halfhearted wave. Then I muttered, under my breath, “Who
are
all of these people?”

“They have all come to meet you, sir,” came the voice of the escort in my ear.

“Well, I…”

My response, which no doubt would have been brilliant, died in my mouth as I turned my head and my eyes fell on an unexpected sight. At the center of the room, a familiar shape rose high above the crowd. It was a rocket, a torchship, and the registry numbers marked out on its nose identified it as my home for almost three years. It was
Orbital Patrol Cutter 1519
, my first command.

The crowd jostled around to greet me, but I only had eyes for the rocket. I’ve loved a few women in my time, but never more than I loved that ship.

A Pole Star XT-14, manufactured by Winchell-Chung Industries,
Orbital Patrol Cutter 1519
had been one of the fastest of 22C spacecraft. With its inertial confinement fusion drive capable of maintaining accelerations of one standard gravity for weeks at a time, it could make the transit from Earth to Titan in just over twelve days in a straight-shot brachistochrone trajectory, full burn to the midpoint, and then flipping over and decelerating the rest of the way.

Forty-five meters from tip to tail, it had an interior volume of just over five hundred cubic meters, massing out fully loaded at only a few hundred metric tons. The 1519 had been lean and mean, a high-endurance
Cutter
-class vessel, whose primary missions were law enforcement, search and rescue, and defense operations. In the three years I’d been her skipper, we’d done all of that and more.

I stopped just short of the ship, which was standing upright on its landing jacks, its nose only a dozen or so meters from the ceiling high overhead. I reached out a hand, almost afraid to touch the hull. It couldn’t have been the same ship, I knew, not after so long a time, but it looked as though I’d just parked it and went off for a brief wander.

“What do you think?” said a voice in my left ear as a rumbling sound issued from behind me. “Have we captured the likeness?”

I turned, startled, and looked up at a huge figure towering over me. I must have gaped, mouth open, before finally thinking of anything rational to say. It looked for all the world like a killer whale, crammed into human clothing.

“I’m the fabricator who designed the replica and oversaw its fabrication,” the killer whale said, a wide smile revealing curved teeth several centimeters long. “Arluq Max’inux is the name.”

“R. J. Stone,” I said after a lengthy pause, unsure the proper etiquette when addressing a talking orca.

The voice of the escort whispered in my left ear, coming to my rescue. “Arluq Max’inux is a female cetacean, a sentient derived from uplifted terrestrial sea-dwelling mammals.”

I resisted the urge to whisper thanks to the eagle perched on my shoulder, and smiled up at the
female
killer whale. She stood almost three meters tall, easily a meter broad at the shoulders, with anthropoid-like arms and legs instead of fins, but otherwise resembled her sea-dwelling ancestors in all regards. Her skin seemed thick, patterned in sharply contrasted white and black, and she wore a simple coverall of yellow. Periodically, little puffs of mist issued from her collar and wrists, suggesting that some internal plumbing in her clothing was required to keep her skin moistened, perhaps to prevent it from drying and cracking.

“I’m something of an amateur historian,” Arluq explained, pausing only briefly to expel a quick blast of air through a blowhole on the top of her head, “and I’ve always been fascinated with the history of avionics. When I heard the news of your arrival, I dropped everything I was doing and started working on this replica right away.”

I was brought up short, remembering how short a time it had been since the news of my return had been released. “But it’s been only a couple of days since I woke up. And you built all of this”—I waved a hand up at the torchship towering over us—“so quickly? I doubt Winchell-Chung could have even gotten the registry numbers stenciled on the hull in so short a time.”

Arluq shrugged, a strange gesture for so large a creature. “I finished it yesterday, actually, but decided to wait and unveil it at this reception.” She paused and stepped over to slap one of the landing jacks with an enormous hand. “Oh, it’s fully functional, though. I could have put in a more efficient engine but, in the end, decided to go with a historically accurate inertial confinement fusion drive, powered by pellets of deuterium/helium-three ignited in the reaction chamber by inertial confinement using intense laser beams. I only had time for a short test flight, of course, but at full burn, I was able to get it up to a full standard gravity of acceleration, with no hiccups along the way.”

“Amazing.” I gestured to the silver eagle on my shoulder. “My escort here mentioned there’d be a surprise for me here, and it wasn’t kidding.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint, sir,” the escort responded out loud, “but this wasn’t the surprise of which I’d been informed. There are others who would like to make your acquaintance, though.” With its beak, it indicated a cluster of people a short way off, three women talking to two smaller figures.

“Don’t let me keep you, Captain,” Arluq said, with a wave of one enormous hand. “I’ll be around if you want to tour the interior later on.”

“Thanks,” I said, glancing up longingly at the familiar shape looming over us. “I’d like that.”

The escort navigated me through the crowd, and in a few steps, we came to the group it had indicated.

The three women, who appeared to be of Asian ancestry, looked to be about twenty-five years old. They were completely identical, more alike than twins, each with the same face and build, the same height of 1.5 meters tall, the same dark hair and brown eyes.

“Ah, the legendary Captain Stone,” one of the women said as I approached. “So nice to meet you in person.” She stuck out her hand, a gesture I’d not seen since waking, and as I shook it, she said, “I’m Jida Shuliang.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, and turned to the woman at her side. “And you are?”

The three women looked at one another, smiling slightly.

“Jida Shuliang is a legion,” the eagle on my shoulder said out loud, “a distributed consciousness, the longest-established and most stable in the Entelechy.”

I looked from one woman to another to another. “Distributed? So you’re all—”

“I am Jida Shuliang,” all three women said in unison. One of them grabbed a drink from a passing tray, and another’s attention drifted to the side of the room, but the third continued to speak to me, a slightly bemused expression on her face. “I first expanded my mind through more than one body in T3017, connected via primitive cortical implants. My original body expired after only a few centuries, naturally, but I’ve continued to use that original as a template when fabricating new bodies ever since.”