Further: Beyond the Threshold (20 page)

“Xerxes,” Maruti said, holding the end of his cigar in the flickering flame of a compact lighter, “you never struck me as a birdwatcher.”

“In our brief, fleeting encounters, Maruti, I’m surprised that I struck you as anything at all.”

Maruti took a long pull from his cigar. “Perhaps an interesting and unexpected benefit of our traveling together, a few thousand of us in such close quarters, is that we’ll all learn things we never suspected about one another, becoming faster friends in the process.”

The probe sighed and was silent for a long moment. “How…wonderful.”

Less than fifteen minutes later, Maruti was shouting at him at the top of his lungs, and the chances of the two becoming fast friends seemed vanishingly remote.

“What do you mean,
deluded
?”

We were on the tram, continuing our tour of the ship. Xerxes, having nothing better to do, had opted to join us, and sat between Maruti and me while the
Further
avatar flew alongside.

“I don’t mean to offend, of course, but it seems clear to me that you simply haven’t applied any sort of scientific rigor to your unformed beliefs.”

“
Unformed
?” Maruti’s mouth opened wide, his lips pulled back vertically and teeth bared, his facial hairs erect. I was still learning to read chimpanzee expressions, but even I recognized this as aggressive.

As we descended the lift shaft, heading toward the lower hemisphere, Maruti had casually asked what Xerxes hoped to get out of his participation in the
Further
, and Xerxes said that he was mainly hoping to stave off boredom. The chimpanzee had then mentioned the desire of the Demiurgists to find definitive, incontrovertible proof of ancient aliens, and things had gone quickly downhill from there.

“Well, your ideas have scarcely reached the level of hypothesis,” Xerxes went on, “and the scant data you’ve been able to gather, none of it statistically significant, can all be easily explained by a wide variety of far more plausible causes. I don’t see the desperate need to cling to the myth of ancient non-terrestrial intelligences as anything but an irrational delusion, and I’m sorry if that offends you.”

“‘
If
that offends,’ you say? As though such a casual dismissal of the work of thousands of sentients over hundreds of years can be anything
but
offensive?”

Xerxes shrugged. “I know that the fact that your life has, to date, been wasted must be a troubling one to accept, but that’s hardly
my
fault, is it?”

“But
you
are the result of design and intention, just as much as I am. I find it impossible to believe that a being such as yourself couldn’t accept at least the
possibility
that if my subsentient ancestors could be uplifted and dumb matter could be transformed into a consciousness such as yours, then the rise of life on Earth in the first place might not have been the result of an interfering intelligence, whether ancient alien or extradimensional being or what have you.”

Xerxes let out a labored sigh. “And I suppose next you’ll be claiming that rainbows are painted in the sky by fairies from underspace, no?”

Maruti, all sense of polite discourse forgotten, screamed wordlessly at the probe, teeth bared and hairy fingers curled into claws at his side.

The tram came to a stop in a large open space. “Ah,” Xerxes said calmly, climbing to eir feet, “we seem to have arrived.”

Ey strode away from the tram, pausing only to glance back and say, “Captain, Maruti, aren’t you coming?”

I looked over at Maruti, who seemed more like a wild animal than I would have imagined possible, and suspected that even four cubic kilometers would seem too small a space if this disagreement continued much longer.

The
Further
had brought us to a large hold area, a vast cavernous space, where familiar shapes were being carefully arranged. As we climbed from the tram, a large black-and-white shape, trailed by a cloud of fine mist, came ambling over toward us, singing out a greeting.

“Welcome aboard, folks,” called Arluq Max’inux, the towering cetacean. “Come down to make sure I’m not getting any scratches or dings on them?” She hooked an enormous thumb at the shapes hulking behind her, craft of various shapes and sizes. The far wall, with its slight curvature, was just within the outer hull, and bay doors could be opened to allow the craft to come in or out, the internal atmosphere kept in place by fields.

Two of the craft, in particular, were familiar—the replica of the
Orbital Patrol Cutter 1519
and the metric engineering prototype that Chief Executive Zel had displayed at the fundraiser. Arluq, who’d taken the post of ship’s fabricator, had been overseeing the arrival of the various craft the
Further
would carry on board, and I’d insisted that the cutter and the prototype be among them. The prototype, which I’d asked be dubbed the
Compass Rose
—I couldn’t conscience a ship that didn’t have a name, no matter how small—seemed to me like it would make a useful shuttle or captain’s gig. It couldn’t reach superluminal speeds, but its metric engineering drives could generate internal gravity in the crew compartments, and it could land and take off from spaces that a torchship wouldn’t be able to reach, much less a sailship.

“Looking good, Arluq,” I said.

I followed the cetacean over to the
Compass Rose
, which sat flush on the deck, the size of a small house. One walked up any of the eight radiating points to the open hatch, looking for all the world like a flying saucer from an old black-and-white science fiction movie.

“I took her out for a spin before bringing her on board, RJ, and if the full-size model is anything like the prototype, we’re in for quite a ride. I got her up to a quarter the speed of light in less than seven-thousandths of a standard day.”

That was quick, a little under ten minutes. I was impressed, and I’m sure my expression showed it.

“What do you say?” Arluq’s mouth spread in a wide smile, revealing wicked teeth. “Want to take a ride?”

I was deeply tempted, but before I could answer, the
Further
avatar interrupted. “Your pardons, but the first has requested that the command crew convene on the bridge. If you have no objections, I’m to escort you.”

I looked from the silver eagle to the cetacean and sighed a bit wistfully. “Maybe another time, Arluq?”

“Sure,” she answered with her vicious smile. “I’m not going anywhere. Or I guess I am, but we’re all going there together, right?”

“True enough,” I said. Except it wasn’t. I had to go to the bridge and deal with the “first,” while Arluq got to stay in the landing bay and play with the toys.

It hardly seemed fair.

The bridge was designed like an amphitheater, concentric steps leading down to the control center, a wide circular table surrounded by seats at regular intervals. One seat was slightly larger than the others—the command chair.

Lit only by the glow of the smart displays on the table’s surface, the rest of the room in shadows, Zel i’Cirea and the brothers Grimnismal were in close conversation when we entered the room, but as soon as we did, they fell quickly silent.

I stepped down into the center of the room, followed by Maruti and Xerxes, while the
Further
avatar winged overhead, coming to rest on a perch high on the wall. A long silence followed, broken at last when Zel finally spoke.

“Captain Stone.” She paused again, her expression unreadable. “I believe this is yours.”

She stood up slowly from the command chair and stepped to one side. The two corvids, shooting me looks, retreated to the far side of the table and slumped down side by side in a pair of seats, leaning close together like birds on a wire.

Zel had little love for me, I knew, but I didn’t know why—not yet, at any rate.

“Thanks, First,” I said, opting not to sit, but instead just leaning my hand on the seat’s back. “Glad to be here.”

One of the problems I ran into when agreeing to act as the Plenum’s representative was that the
Further
wasn’t originally part of any tradition of command and that there was no structure in place for how things were to be run. The only guide we had was that responsibility and authority, like any potential profit, was to be apportioned on a share basis, determined by the amount of power donated to the ship’s construction. Almost like the old wet navies of earth, which divided spoils in equal shares among the crew, with the lowest-ranking crewmembers getting only fractional shares and the captain getting multiple shares, and everyone else falling in between.

In working up an organizational structure for the
Further
, then, each of the shareholders had a voice, but the principal contributors had the most influence. Shortly after Maruti had completed his rejuvenation and installed my interlink, the principals met to hammer out some kind of approach.

The principal shareholders of the
Further
are the Plenum, who ceded all right to contribute to the discussion to me, their sole representative; the Pethesilean Mining Consortium, represented by Zel i’Cirea; the Demiurgists, represented by Maruti Sun Ghekre IX; and Xerxes, representing himself. It took the better part of two days to work out an agreement, which seemed remarkably fast to me, but to those more accustomed to the speed of Entelechy, decision making was an eternity.

The organizational structure we ended up devising was a mélange of the lessons I learned in the Orbital Patrol and UNSA, Zel’s experience with the solar sailships of the Pethesilean fleet, and as much authority and structure as the more lax Maruti and the more ordered Xerxes were able to agree upon between them. There were no ranks on board the
Further
as such—though some insisted on adopting their own, such as the Anachronists who prefered to pretend like they were in an antique wet navy or on board a ship of the First Space Age—but by consensus, it was decided that the commanding officer would bear the title of “captain.” Most everyone else in the crew had been given titles describing their posts, such as Exobiolgist Maruti, Astrogator Xerxes, and Fabricator Max’inux. Zel i’Cirea, whose people are second only to the Plenum in the amount they contributed to the
Further
fund, was second in command and, in accordance with Pethesilean tradition, was referred to as “First.”