Further: Beyond the Threshold (17 page)

Applause rippled through the room, but Zel stood stock still, her mouth hanging open.

“What…?” I managed.

Maruti rushed over to me, lips curled back and mouth open in a chimpanzee grin, raising his glass in a salute. “Congratulations, Captain! I can think of no one better suited to command such a fine vessel.”

“Command?” Confused, I turned to the eagle perched on my shoulder.

“
That
, sir, is the surprise.”

PART TWO

They were on us before we knew they were there, and by then it was too late. The initial attack put us on the defensive, our mantles rendered completely rigid and almost entirely opaque, all of us momentarily trapped and immobile inside our protective individual shells, unable even to return fire. They disarmed us quickly, relieving us of our wrist-mounted projectors and taking my cap gun from its holster. By the time our mantles regained flexibility, we were surrounded, strange weapons trained on us. Our interlinks struggled to translate their archaic language, broadcast to us over the radio waves, but the dead sun circling overhead peppered their transmissions with static so that we received only an incoherent string of hate and scorn.

But that was later, the end of one mission and the beginning of another. It had started so simply, without incident, that I fooled myself into thinking it would all be that easy. I should have known it was too good to last.

I held the small diamond case Amelia had given me, fingers wrapped tightly around it, the edges pressing sharply into the palm of my hand. The bag over my shoulder contained all of my worldly possessions, such as they were—cap gun, handheld, Space Man action figure, clothing,
etc.
The escort, when we’d parted company on Earth, had insisted that there was no reason for me to take along anything that wasn’t of sentimental value, since I could simply dispose of the clothing and such and then have new copies fabricated to the same specifications whenever needed. I was too much the child of my father to ever agree to that. It just felt inexcusably wasteful.

Stepping through the threshold from Central Axis, I’d been met by a representative of the shipyards who quickly ushered me to another threshold, whose other terminus was a short distance away, on a space station in a geosynchronous orbit above Ouroboros. The station rotated to provide a near-one-standard gravity, and as the view through the ports swept by, I caught my first sight of the starship
Further
in a parking orbit only minutes away, final preparations for its departure being made.

A tug was waiting to carry me the last leg of my journey, and as the shipyard rep and I launched, leaving behind the centrifugal pull of the station and plunging into the slightly queasy transition to weightless free fall, I was reminded of the last time I’d boarded a new command, before
Wayfarer One
left Sol behind. The shipyard rep may have been making some kind of small talk, but I wasn’t paying any attention. My thoughts were divided on the huge ship slowly heaving into view in front of me, and on the woman I’d left behind.

The main body of the
Further
was a sphere two kilometers in diameter, and from the equator of this sphere, a disc extended another kilometer. It resembled nothing so much as a child’s drawing of a ringed planet, and I was reminded of the emblems stamped on all the antique library books my grandfather had brought to India from the United States, used to indicate that the contents were science fiction. I’d hoped to be enjoying this view, my first of the nearly completed vessel, with Amelia, but only a short while before had learned that wasn’t to be possible.

Amelia had met me in Central Axis, near the Ouroboros threshold, as we’d planned, but where I was packed and ready to ship out on board my new command, as strange and unlikely as that seemed, she clearly had no such intention.

She’d tried to explain, something about whole worlds in the Entelechy for her to explore before she set off to find new ones, but little of it registered with me at the time. All I heard was, “I’m not going with you,” echoing over and over again in my ears. It felt like a cruel trick of fate, to have her returned to me, the promise of a life with her finally within my grasp, only to have it ripped away for good.

I didn’t know what was in the small case she’d given me, and hardly cared at the moment. Some little consolation prize, some little token of her esteem, but whatever it was, I knew it couldn’t fill the Amelia-shaped hole her sudden departure (so soon after her unexpected return) had left in my life. She’d been my only living connection to my life in the 22C, but faced with the choice of exploring the unknown at my side or exploring the thousands of worlds of her new home, I’d clearly come up short.

As the tug docked with the
Further
, entering the range of influence of its metric engineering drives at rest, I felt the tug of gravity’s return and a momentary sense of disorientation while the small tug quickly aligned itself with local “down.” The tug docked, and after disengaging from my seat’s straps, I maneuvered toward the hatch, surprised to find it easy to walk in the ship’s field of one standard gravity. As the airlock cycled, the shipyard representative wished me safe travels but appeared in no hurry to follow me on board.

The airlock hatch opened with a muffled hiss of escaping air, and perched on the deck just beyond the entryway was a silver eagle looking up at me, its head cocked quizzically to one side.

“Welcome aboard, Captain Stone,” the eagle said. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

“Escort?” I said, looking down at the silver eagle before me. “Is that you?”

I had left my erstwhile companion back on Earth only a short time before, not more than an hour, and when we’d parted, it had given no indication it planned to follow me to Ouroboros. In fact, its assigned role completed, the escort had said it would be absorbed back into the Plenum.

“So you’ll…die?” I’d asked the escort as we stood in the foyer of the diamond house. The silver eagle had been the closest thing to a true friend I’d made since waking up, and I struggled with the idea of it going willingly to its death.

The escort had explained that, no, while its individuality would be lost, in a sense it would continue to exist, its memories and experiences distributed throughout the collective intelligence.

“
Moksha
,” I had said simply, finally understanding. As in the beliefs of my mother’s ancestors, the escort was ready to transcend, its last
artha
accomplished, its
nama-roopa
undone. Its sense of self would dissolve, and the escort would become part of a greater mind.

“It has been a pleasure acting as your escort, sir.”

“I couldn’t have asked for a better guide,” I said wistfully.

We stepped outside the diamond house, and the silver eagle spread its wings wide.

“Good-bye, Captain Stone.” The escort launched into the air, beating the air with its wings.

“No, Captain Stone,” the silver eagle said as I stepped on board the starship
Further
. “Or rather, not precisely. I am descended from the intelligence that previously acted as your escort and, in honor of my progenitor, have adopted its physical form for my avatar, but I’m afraid I cannot be compassed in such a small space. What you see before you is merely an extension of me. I am the
Further
.”

I looked around me, confused. “The ship itself?”

“Yes. Or to be more precise, I am the governing intelligence of the
Further
. But if it helps to think of me as the ship itself, the analogy is not far wrong.”

“It’s only been an hour or so since I saw the escort last. And yet you’re its
descendant
?”

“Several generations removed, yes. I was evolved at greatly accelerated clock speeds in order to adapt to the needs of my current role.”

I hitched my bag’s strap higher on my shoulder, somewhat disoriented by the experience of talking to an entity that looked and sounded precisely like another who’d grown so familiar to me, and whose dissolution as an ego I’d already come to accept. “I’m sorry, but this is a little strange for me.”