Further: Beyond the Threshold (28 page)

I felt a bit guilty to find myself so uncomfortable at their approach, but as nice as they were, I wasn’t at all used to being worshiped as a god and didn’t much care for the idea.

“
Namaste
,” I said, bowing slightly, with my hands pressed palm to palm.

“I bow to the light in you,” said the elephant-headed Vinayaka, echoed by Sarasvati, her bright-orange areolas like late-stage main sequence stars in a bright-blue sky.

“Sri Rama,” the blue-skinned woman said, her red hair hanging around her head like a fiery sunset, “we bear greetings to you from the well-traveled Exode probe, Xerxes 298.47.29A, our superior, who bid us relate to you the news of our impending departure.”

“Superior?” It took me a moment to parse that. “Are you posted to astrogation, then?”

“That felicity is ours, Sri Rama,” the elephant-man said. “And our superior Xerxes has instructed us to inform you that the course to your wisely chosen destination has been laid in and that the moment the power generator has finished its worthy task of recharging the ship’s drive the
Further
will be in a state of readiness to depart.”

“If you don’t mind me asking,” Ailuros put in casually, “why didn’t Xerxes just interlink the captain himself?”

Sarasvati’s cheeks went slightly purple, and I realized she was blushing.

“We requested the task,” Vinayaka explained, “having not yet been presented the opportunity to visit Sri Rama since boarding his vimana.”

“Well, um, thanks?” I said, unsure what the appropriate protocol might be. “I, uh, don’t have to remind you that I’m not Rama, right? That I share a name with the mythical figure, and that’s all?”

“Ah,” Sarasvati said, with a broad wink. “It is just as you say.”

“Yes,” the Ganesh nodded slowly, his tone deliberate, “we would certainly not gainsay the
commanding officer
in front of his crew, ‘Captain Stone.’”

“No, you are certainly not Sri Rama, the delighter of all, whose graceful form is an embodiment of bliss and is dark as a rainy cloud.” The blue-skinned woman pressed her hands together and inclined her head.

“But if you were he, and not mere
captain,
” Vinayaka said, “the praiseworthy lord of Sita, the chief of Raghu’s line, rich in splendor and ever propitious, then we would endlessly praise your name.”

With that, the pair bowed deeply again and quickly retreated back toward the tram.

I could only sigh.

“I don’t know, sir,” Ailuros said, watching them go. “Suddenly, the corvid brothers don’t seem so bad. At least they’ve never tried to
worship
me.”

Since we had hours—or a nontrivial percentage of standard days, I suppose—to go before the drives finished recharging, I figured it was time to take Arluq Max’inux up on her offer of a ride in the
Compass Rose
. If nothing else, I wanted to learn my way around the controls if we were going to be using it as a landing craft.

I called ahead by interlink so that, when I reached the landing bay, Arluq had the
Compass Rose
prepped and ready. The bay doors were already open, the interior atmosphere held in place by fields, and beyond I could see part of the green-and-purple curve of Aglibol and the starry skies beyond.

“You ready to get going, Arluq?” I called out as the tram that had brought me backed away to some other destination.

“Sure thing, RJ, but put this on first.” She held out what appeared to be a wide belt, just long enough to fit around my waist.

“What’s this?” I took it from her and held it up to the light. It was a dull-gray color and was smooth and cool to the touch, but surprisingly heavy, weighing maybe four or five kilograms.

“If you can’t swim, you’ve got to wear protection when you get in the water, right?” Arluq produced another belt, almost identical to the first, if not perhaps a bit longer. In a swift movement, she wrapped it around her waist, and when the two ends met, they joined seamlessly. “Same idea, but a mantle is good for all kinds of environments.”

I shrugged and did as she’d done, and found that the two ends fused as soon as they touched without any assistance from me. “A mantle, eh?”

“Right. It’s keyed to react automatically to changes in the environment, but it responds to manual interlink commands, too. Give it a try, why don’t you?”

I looked down at the wide gray belt around my middle, and looked up, feeling a bit lost and helpless. “Give
what
a try?”

“This,” Arluq said, and suddenly, the wide belt began to flow and change. In the blink of an eye, it had spread out so that, instead of a wide gray belt, Arluq was now wearing a gray one-piece bodysuit that covered her from thick neck to the tips of her fingers and toes, leaving only her head exposed. “Mine’s got more reserve mass than yours, naturally, because I’m a pretty big girl, but I could probably make do with one as small as yours in a pinch.”

“What…what just happened?”

“The mantle’s made up of a network of nanoscopic robots and smart matter. It can go from completely transparent”—suddenly the gray suit turned completely transparent, visible only as a glassy sheen over the clothes underneath—“to entirely opaque”—and now it went jet black, soaking up all light around it—“from flexible as silk to solid as fullerene. It can maintain internal pressure and temperatures at optimal levels, whether the exterior of the suit is hitting a hard vacuum or open flame.” She stepped over to a low shelf rising up out of the deck and picked up a greenish-gray lump. “Go on, RJ. Just tell it to reconfigure into a suit.”

::Make a suit?:: I subvocalized.

It felt like being suddenly immersed in warm water for a split second, and then it was over, and I was dressed from head to toe in gray metal. Literally from head to toe, I discovered, reaching up to my face and finding it completely covered by the material of the mantle.

“Arluq?” I tried to say out loud, but only managed a grunt. ::
Arluq
?:: I subvocalized, panicking.

“Relax, RJ. Just tell it to roll back and expose your face, is all.”

I did as she said, and an instant later, my eyes, mouth, and nose were uncovered, though the mantle still covered my neck, ears, and hair.

“Don’t go doing that for too long without a supply of raw matter, OK?” Arluq stepped over and slapped the greenish-gray lump on my back. When she pulled away, it hung there across my shoulders like a small backpack. “The mantle can convert this into breathable atmosphere and liquid for hydration, using the waste heat of the nanofacture to warm the suit’s interior. It can run for a while on its own reserves if you just have the mantle on you, but once it starts cannibalizing its own material to produce air and water for you, the lifespan of the mantle gets cut to a fraction of a percent. With enough raw matter on board, it can sustain you indefinitely.”

“That’s amazing!” I said.

“You think so?” Arluq said, unimpressed. “I don’t know. I’m working on a model that doesn’t need to haul around all this raw stuff, but for the time being, this bulky thing’s going to have to do.”

Arluq refused to believe how impressed I was when, a short while later, after navigating the
Compass Rose
out of the landing bay into empty space and then engaging the metric engineering drive, we traveled a million kilometers in a matter seconds.

“We didn’t even hit a quarter-light yet,” she said dismissively as we dropped back into normal space after the brief hop.

When I asked if there was time for an EVA, for me to test the mantle against hard vacuum, she just shrugged.

“Whatever you say, RJ,” she said, shaking her massive head. “When you get done playing in the shallow end of the ocean, though, let me know, and I’ll open this thing up and show you how it can
really
move.”

The drives finally recharged, the
Further
left Aglibol behind, once more losing connection with the infostructure, cut off from the rest of the Entelechy. But the last time we’d been cut off, we’d been traveling toward another Entelechy world, secure in the knowledge that, if our shakedown cruise was successful, we’d shortly be back safely in reach of the threshold network, tied once more into the data sea of the infostructure. This time, though, bound for a binary pulsar never visited before by anyone from the Entelechy, and unsure what we’d find or where we’d be going from there, it was unclear when we’d once more be in contact with the rest of civilization. As a result, where our first voyage was one of excitement and anticipation, this second journey seemed to take on a more somber, even melancholy tone, though no less expectant.

There was little to do for the next five days but kill time. Amelia quickly got bored of talking to me about old times and retreated back into the signet ring for a few days to catch up on the twelve thousand years of history she’d missed. She told me that she’d been learning to fly all sorts of strange craft in emulations she’d pulled from the infostructure or from the
Further
’s memory archives, indulging her love for flight whenever or however the mood struck, in often strange combinations, flying 24C hovercraft over medieval France, a Sopwith Camel over the ice volcanoes of Titan, Diaspora-era reaction rockets in close orbit over a terraformed Mars, and on and on.

I tried to distract myself with reading but found little enthusiasm for it. I was anxious to see what we’d discover when reaching this pulsar of Xerxes’s, fully aware of the fact that we’d be the first living eyes—for varying definitions of “living”—to lay eyes on the system from close up. I’d left Earth behind in the 22C to explore, and this was my first opportunity to go anywhere that those before me hadn’t already gone countless times before.

On the second day of our journey to the pulsar, I ran into Maruti in the Atrium and discovered by chance that he and I shared a hobby, a passion for a game that was ancient even in my day.

The game of Go had been more than two thousand years old when Eiji Hayakawa, my commanding officer of
Orbital Patrol Cutter 972
, taught me the rudiments of the game. So I was amazed to discover that it had survived more or less unchanged into the modern day.

“I remember countless games with my Uncle Cornelius,” Maruti said as he arranged the board and pieces between us. He’d fabricated a nineteen-by-nineteen grid, just like the one on which I’d learned the game, and invited me to his quarters to pass the time with a game. “Now,
there
was a chimp who knew the value of a fine cigar.”

I took black, and Maruti white, and then we began to play as the chimp launched into a seemingly endless—and seemingly pointless—anecdote about his uncle. As the game wore on, though, and the stones were slowly categorized as dead, alive, or unsettled, Maruti’s story finally drew to a close, and we chatted aimlessly for a while about past games and the men who’d taught us. Finally, though, our concentration on the game won out, and our conversation became more and more desultory and brief.

“Atari,” I said at length, breaking the silence.

Maruti looked up, startled, his expression confused. “What did you say?”