Further: Beyond the Threshold (19 page)

“Oh, no, of course not,” I said, and glanced at the eagle on my shoulder. “
Further
?”

“Physician Maruti is a member of our crew and is welcome in any of my habitable areas, naturally, and equally welcome to join us.”

“That’s settled, then,” Maruti said and made for the door. “Let’s go already.”

So we set out into the ship, the silver eagle, the fez-wearing chimpanzee, and me, trailed by a cloud of cigar smoke that lingered only momentarily as we passed, before tiny machines too small to be seen with the unaided eye quickly scrubbed out any impurities, leaving the ship’s air fresh and clean.

Even with my rejuvenated leg muscles, I didn’t relish the idea of walking around the entire ship, the largest deck of which—only one of many—was three square kilometers in area. Luckily, the ship’s designers had taken that into consideration. The corridors, which were almost as wide as city streets, had narrow lanes down the middle through which automated vehicles could pass. These rode on cushions of air, propelled by shifting magnetic fields in the deck and guided by the ship’s immense intelligence. The vehicles, or trams, as they were commonly called, varied from the size of a reclining chair to that of a city bus, capable of carrying dozens of crew at once. And considering the immense size of the
Further
’s crew complement, that was likely a wise precaution.

As Maruti and I were exiting his quarters, a tram the size of a couch was already speeding up the corridor toward us, directed by the ship’s avatar on my shoulder. We settled ourselves on the comfortable cushions, and as the tram began to pick up speed, the silver eagle spread its wings and took flight, keeping pace with us.

“You appear to have inherited your ancestor’s love of flight, then?” I called out to the ship’s avatar flying along beside us.

::Among many other aspects, Captain,:: the avatar answered, narrowcasting its response directly to my interlink so that there was no distortion from the wind whipping past. ::But where my progenitor was only able to soar in the skies of a handful of worlds, I’ll be able to fly among the stars.::

“The escort would envy you, I think.”

::Thank you, sir. That’s most kind of you to say.::

The
Further
was like a small city, in more ways than one. Its crew numbered in the low thousands, though that figure didn’t take into account a sizable population of digital incarnations that’d opted not to manifest in corporeal form. And since the crew also included a number of gestalt personalities and other forms of distributed coconsciousness, the actual number of individual crew people was a fairly nebulous and fluid concept.

And the ship was laid out much like a city as well. The corridors that cut through the decks were like roadways arranged in spokes and concentric circles, while lift shafts connected the decks, both those configured for individual use and those large enough to transport trams from one level to another.

One thing to which newcomers to the
Further
sometimes found it difficult to adjust to was the artificial gravity. Before the perfection of the metric engineering drive, the only way to get gravity—or anything like it—away from a massive body was to spin or to accelerate. Anything at relative rest was going to be weightless, essentially. But by modifying the variable vacuum dielectric constant, a metric engineering drive was able to produce all sorts of useful changes in a limited region of space surrounding the ship, including the speed of light, effective mass, inertia, clock speeds, energy states, and the length of rulers—all of which were not fundamental qualities, it’d been discovered, but secondary characteristics of the quantum vacuum itself.

The main use of the drive, of course, was to create a “bubble” of distorted space that completely surrounded the ship, such that while the real acceleration inside the bubble remained zero, the bubble itself traveled through normal space at superluminal speeds. An added benefit, which could be enjoyed even when the ship was at rest, due to the comparatively small amounts of energy it required, was the ability to induce gravity in the ship’s habitable areas.

The midpoint of the gravitation field were the drive elements themselves, which were contained in the ring around the sphere’s circumference. As a result, the equator of the main sphere was always “down,” the direction of the induced gravity’s pull. Consequently, the decks of the upper hemisphere had a different orientation to those in the lower hemisphere, and anyone riding a lift shaft from one to the other actually skewed over 180 degrees when passing the midpoint. The change was quick, and almost imperceptible, but particularly sensitive crewmembers were known to get momentarily ill in the transition, and there were several in the crew, as a result, who stayed in one hemisphere or the other unless the trip was absolutely necessary.

Those who stuck in the upper hemisphere perhaps get the better end of the bargain. While the lower hemisphere was largely given over to cargo space, industrial-sized fabricants, mass storage, and such, the upper hemisphere, in which much of the crew had their personal quarters, was where many of the ship’s amenities were to be found, chief among them the Atrium.

If the
Further
was a city, or at least a large town, then the Atrium was the town square. A large open space under a high, domed ceiling, the Atrium featured a sizable park with a broad meadow, a grove of trees, a bandstand and theater shell, and a large ornamental fountain with statues of smart matter that reconfigured into different shapes and postures at irregular intervals. Live birds and other animals up to the size of deer roamed freely in the park, tended by subsentient drones. The park was bordered by a circular walkway around which was positioned a café, stalls where crewmembers were able to vend their craftwork, and a variable number of restaurants. The domed ceiling of the Atrium could be configured to display any number of scenes, from a cloudless blue sky to a cloudy gray afternoon to green heavens sparked with red lightning to a color-corrected representation of the exterior view from the ship itself, compensating for red and blue shift.

The first time I’d seen the Atrium with my own eyes as the
Further
led me and Maruti on our abbreviated tour, I found it difficult to accept that I was still on board a starship. Almost as difficult to accept, perhaps, was the fact that the robot probe Xerxes was there, idling at a table in front of the café, eir eyeless gaze fixed on the small birds wheeling overhead, with something almost like a smile on eir metallic features.

“Xerxes 298.47.29A!” Maruti called out happily as we stepped out of the tram and onto the walkway leading to the café. “So nice to see you again.”

The Exode probe glanced up—if a robot with no eyes can actually be said to “glance”—and the faint smile quickly faded.

“Maruti,” Xerxes said with a faint sigh, nodding in Maruti’s direction. Ey turned, and to me said, “Captain Stone.”

The
Further
avatar alighted gracefully on my shoulder.

“And…?” Xerxes regarded the silver eagle for a moment, thoughtfully. “Ah.
Further
. I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“Astrogator,” the avatar answered, inclining its head momentarily.

Xerxes had contributed a significant amount of power to the
Further
fund—the majority of the non-inconsiderable fortune ey’d amassed over the centuries by sharing Exode technology and science with the Entelechy—more than any but the Plenum, the Demiurgists, and the Pethesilean Mining Consortium and, as a result, was one of the leading voices in the crew. Ey’d accepted the role of astrogator, but more to stave off boredom than anything else, it seemed.

“Mind if we join you?” Maruti said, pulling up a chair before waiting for an answer. As the probe regarded him silently, the chimpanzee motioned the waitron over. At first, I assumed it was a subsentient drone, like the zookeepers who looked after the park animals, but as the server drew near, I saw it was flesh and blood, some sort of uplifted bipedal feline.

“Yes, gentles?” the cat-waitron purred. “Can I help you?”

“It’s not too early in the ship’s day for a cocktail, is it?” the chimpanzee answered and, when the waitron responded with only a confused look, hastened to add, “I’m sorry, an obscure joke. In our dear commanding officer’s day, I’ve discovered, some cultures preferred to limit the ingestion of intoxicants to the later percentages of the day.”

The cat, who I saw now was female, glanced at me, a somewhat suspicious look on her face. “Whyever for, Captain?”

I could only smile and shrug. “Things were different in primitive times, I suppose.”

With a lingering confused glance my way, the waitron took Maruti’s order, some strange beverage with an unlikely name. I joined Xerxes and Maruti at the table, as the
Further
avatar hopped from my shoulder to the back of a nearby chair, and then the cat turned her attention to me.

“And you, Captain Stone, is there anything you require?”

“No,” I said, and then thought better of it. “Actually, you can answer a question for me, if you don’t mind.”

“Certainly,” the cat said with a smile.

“I was just wondering…” I paused. “I’m sorry, what was your name again?”

“It hasn’t been announced, but it’s Ailuros, actually.”

“I was just wondering, Ailuros, why choose to wait tables? When the work can be done by drones, I mean.”

The waitron regarded me quizzically, her whiskers twitching. “You could just as easily ask why any of us do
anything
, sir. All of us on board the
Further
, as indeed all sentients throughout the Human Entelechy, perform functions that could just as easily be accomplished by subsentients, who would just as likely be more efficient and error-free in their work. So why bother, when we could be at our ease?”

I thought it over for a moment. “Well, from what I’ve seen, people still perform services in exchange for payment—power, I mean.” I glanced at Maruti. “Don’t you intend to give Ailuros a gratuity when she brings your order?”

“Naturally,” the chimpanzee said in a broad gesture, pulling a cigar from a case in his smoking jacket and cutting off the tip. “Provided the order’s right.”

“So it would be easy to assume, Ailuros, that you work in exchange for power. Right?”

“Perhaps,” Ailuros purred, her head tilted to one side, “until one took into account that, as an expert in the physics of the quantum vacuum, I could likely find more lucrative employment elsewhere. There are engineering firms who’d be willing to exchange more power for one day’s work from me than I could earn in ten years of serving beverages.”

“Fair enough,” I said, nodding appreciatively. “In that case, my question stands. Why wait tables?”

“Because I like waiting tables.” Ailuros, smiling, turned and walked away.

When she’d gone, I turned to the others, confused.

“If I’m too much the unfrozen caveman in your world, please forgive me, but there are still so many things about your society that I just don’t understand.”

“Don’t worry, Captain Stone,” Xerxes said in a tired voice, “there’s much about them
I
don’t understand, either. Like the reasons why so many biologicals feel the
desperate
need to unburden themselves to me. Perhaps it’s something to do with my physiognomy, I don’t know. But our server felt impelled earlier to tell me an abbreviated version of her life story, when all I wanted to do was watch the birds. She’s contributed a hundred-thousandth share to the
Further
fund, I’m given to understand, and has a post working in drive engineering, but intends to spend her free time here, serving orders.” Ey glanced the way the waitron had gone, and then back at me, and shrugged. “Your explanation for her actions is likely as good as mine.”