Further: Beyond the Threshold (25 page)

“In any event,” the other corvid said impatiently, “you are quite right, Captain Stone, that thresholds must be maneuvered in place at sublight speeds, and given that the fastest subluminal ships can accelerate to speeds no greater than half that of light, the installation of a new threshold can be a time-consuming procedure.”

“And my brother Hu fails to mention,” said the other, who I guessed must be Mu, “the problems associated with the cosmic string material that is the fundamental component of a threshold construction.”

“Too true, brother, too true.” Hu nodded eagerly. “I’m sure, in your primitive era, that such things were scarcely dreamed of, but the fundamental principle of threshold engineering is negative mass.”

“Yes,” Mu put in, “negative mass is required to stabilize the wormhole mouth, and before the discovery of a cosmic string in interstellar space, thousands of kilometers long but only a proton in diameter, thresholds were only theoretical. The creation of the first threshold, the moment from which their calendar is measured, was the true birth of the Human Entelechy.”

“A cosmic string is a topological defect in the fabric of space time,” Hu said, interrupting his brother. “They form when different regions of space time undergo phase changes, resulting in domain boundaries between the two regions when they meet. This is somewhat analogous to the boundaries that form between crystal grains in solidifying liquids, or the cracks that form when water freezes into ice.”

“Precisely right, brother. Extremely thin and with a diameter on the order of a proton, they nevertheless have immense density and represent a significant source of gravity. As a result, the transportation of cosmic string material through normal space can be a very time-consuming and costly task as well, undertaken only by those—like our erstwhile employer
First
Zel i’Cirea—who are quite experienced in such matters.”

“But why wouldn’t you just transport the cosmic string fragments through existing thresholds like everything else?” I asked. “Why do they have to be transported in normal space?”

The two corvids glanced at one another, shaking their heads sadly. “Haven’t you heard
anything
we’ve said? Cosmic string fragments have negative mass, correct? And so any attempt to transport it through a threshold destabilizes the support and causes the wormhole to collapse.”

“And you couldn’t transport it aboard a faster-than-light ship like the
Further
for the same reason?” I asked.

“Hardly the ‘same reason,’” Mu said, his tone scornful, “but such a childish analogy will suit for your purposes, I suppose.”

“The gravitation effects and negative energy characteristics of the comic string could collapse the local distortion of the quantum vacuum,” Hu added slowly and simply, as though talking to a simpleton or a child.

“Which is, of course,” the Jida emissary said, her eyes narrowed but her tone playful, “where
you
two come in, no doubt?”

The two corvids paused for a moment, seeming to swell with pride, lifting their beaks higher and straightening their rounded shoulders. “As you say, Madame Jida,” said Mu.

“As you should know, Captain Stone,” Hu explained, “my brother and I have hypothesized the existence of a novel form of exotic matter, one that would have negative energy characteristics similar to cosmic string material and would likewise be able to stabilize and sustain thresholds, but that could be transported at faster-than-light speeds via a metric engineering drive.”

“Expansion in the Entelechy,” his brother declaimed, “has always been limited by the time needed to transport cosmic string material to one terminus of a new threshold, the creation of the threshold, and then the transport time as the other terminus is moved into position. With distances of hundreds, even thousands, of light-years, this means that the rate of expansion is slow, to say the least.”

“If our predictions are correct,” Hu said haughtily, “and we’re able to locate a transportable form of negative matter, then we might even be able to design new forms of thresholds, themselves capable of being moved at faster-than-light speeds. And
then
humanity would be free to expand throughout the galaxy at unimaginable speeds.”

“Throughout the galaxy?” Mu scoffed. “Throughout the
universe
!”

“And,” Jida said, smiling sweetly but with an edge beneath her voice, “I imagine you boys will make them pay dearly for the privilege, won’t you?”

The two corvids only exchanged a quick glance and grinned hungrily.

To be “commander” of the
Further
was a somewhat nebulous concept, I quickly discovered. As the spokesperson for the majority shareholder, I was able to make decisions—or at least cast a tie-breaking vote—on large-scale decisions affecting the ship as a whole. On the small scale, though, the various departments and groups that made up the ship’s crew were functionally autonomous, essentially their own little fiefdoms. So long as they carried out their designated role, the departments were free to govern themselves however they saw fit. Most had adopted a more or less strict hierarchical structure, individual workers reporting to supervisors, who themselves reported to department heads, with the department heads themselves directly answerable to me. But a few of the departments, particularly those that constituted only a handful of sentients, had adopted more novel organizational approaches.

Astrogation was, so far as I was aware, made up of only three individuals. The department head, and member of the command crew, was Xerxes. Ey was assisted by two others, though it was some days into our shakedown cruise before I discovered who. At first, all I knew was that Xerxes didn’t appear to be terribly busy and that ey could often be found in the Atrium watching the birds.

It was there that I found em, with still a day’s journey ahead of us before we reached Aglibol.

I had been rambling around the ship, trying to familiarize myself further with its layout, and been stymied by the fact that some of the corridors and compartments had been restructured even since I had passed them last, only a few days before. In the end, all I really managed to do was tire myself out and make the nodding acquaintance of a hundred or so of the crew I’d not previously met. At the end of a few hours of that, I was ready to get off my feet for a while.

A short tram ride carried me to the Atrium, where I knew, if nothing else, the large-scale structures would have remained principally unchanged, I could find a place to sit, and someone might be willing to bring me something to drink. I was right on all three counts; though, since my last visit, the café appeared to have shifted a few meters to one side to make room for a collection of chairs that seemed to be some sort of virtual reality parlor or gaming area, those in the chairs connected via interlink in a simulated sensorium.

Picking up a tall glass of ice-cold water from the café, I wandered into the park to find a comfortable place to rest my legs, and chanced upon Xerxes, sitting on a bench, head titled back, eyeless gaze fixed on some point high above. I looked up and saw a small flock of birds wheeling overhead.

“You’re not disturbing me, Captain, if that’s the reason for your hesitation.”

I’d been standing behind Xerxes, some meters off, and as ey had said, I’d indeed been hesitant to approach, reluctant to interrupt what seemed to be a private moment.

“Thanks,” I said simply and, closing the distance to the bench, settled down beside em. “I keep forgetting that you see in all directions.”

“Any light that hits my surface registers,” Xerxes said, sighing, “though I find I only pay attention to a small percentage of the visual information at any given time.”

I glanced at the flock overhead, which seemed to shift and move like a single organism as it swooped and dove back and forth above the treetops, darting first one way and then another. “Birdwatching again, eh? Is it a habit of yours, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Xerxes shrugged. “I suppose—that it is a habit, that is, and not that I mind you asking, which I don’t. A few incarnations ago my signal was intercepted by a planet colonized in the later days of the so-called Diaspora by sentients descended from uplifted terrestrial avians.”

“Bird people?”

“Precisely. And in the years I spent with them, observing and cataloguing their culture, I was forever amazed to find preserved in their habits the biological imperatives of their subsentient ancestors.”

“Such as?”

“Well, flocking behavior, principally. Whenever they moved from one population center to another during their seasonal migrations, they would spread out over the landscape like black clouds, tens of thousands of flightless individuals in any given cluster, and yet without any central authority or guiding intelligence, they still managed to move essentially as one, maintaining set distances each from another, the mass moving almost as a single organism.”

“Just like a flock of birds,” I said, watching the cloud of birds darting back and forth overhead.

“Exactly like a flock of birds,” Xerxes agreed. “The scientists and sociologists of the avian culture had spent generations studying their own inborn imperatives, and had developed whole classes of mathematics devoted to continuum dynamic predictions and the analysis of the effects of individual fluctuations on group movements, and in the end, the only result of the countless years of labor was a single, simple statement.”

Ey paused thoughtfully.

“Well?” I asked, at length. “What was it?”

Xerxes turned eir eyeless face to me. “We are animals, and we do as animals must.”

I took a long sip of my water. “That seems somewhat…bleak.”

“Only if one finds the notion of being an animal as something to be avoided. If anything, the avians found it to be a tremendous comfort.”

“They were…comforted? By someone saying that they were no better than animals?”

Xerxes shook eir head. “They wouldn’t have said ‘no better,’ and I won’t, either. It assumes some hierarchy with an animal at one extreme and the speaker at another, and is suggestive of nothing so much as the ancient notion of a ‘great chain of being,’ in which organisms were ranked by how closely they approached some divine ideal.” Ey paused and looked at me. “You are not a holder of an irrational belief in some divine, are you, Captain Stone?”

I took another sip of water, thoughtfully. “If you mean do I believe in a god, or gods, some supreme intelligence that exists outside the observable universe, then the answer would be no. However, by the same token, I can’t say to you definitively that none exist. We simply lack substantial evidence to make a decision one way or another.”

Xerxes gave a small nod, pursing his metallic lips. “A supremely defensible position, Captain. And one that goes to support the avians’ contention.” Xerxes glanced around, a gesture that was clearly for my benefit, to indicate the variegated crewmembers who were scattered through the Atrium. “The Human Entelechy takes great pride in its name, and in the notion that it has extended the franchise of ‘humanity’ to all of the children of Earth—biological, synthetic, and otherwise. The avian culture among which I lived came to a related, but opposite conclusion. Rather than saying that all sentients were humans, as no clear dividing line between animal and human could be drawn, the avians concluded that all sentients were animals, though with varying levels of sophistication and degrees of expression. There was no ideal to which they were evolving, no divine atop a great chain of being, but rather an accumulation of instinct and tradition carried down to them by their forebears. And as such, there was no shame in recognizing that, as animals, there were certain biological necessities that were their inheritance and that they would no sooner escape than you could the need to consume quantities of hydrogen hydroxide.”

I lifted my glass in a mock salute and took another long swallow. “And that’s why you watch birds?”

Xerxes shrugged. “No,” ey said simply. “I watch them because I find it difficult to predict what they’ll do next, and that helps me pass the time.”