Further: Beyond the Threshold (4 page)

“Shall we go, Captain Stone?” asked the silver eagle.

“What…?” I took a step away from the table, turning in a full circle. The Amazon and the chimpanzee were now nearing the far wall, passing through an exit and out of sight. “What just happened here?”

“I’m afraid that I can’t say with any precision, sir, since I was born only as the conversation neared its end, but from what I have gathered, there was some discussion about your origins, and about that of your craft.”

I hated that I’d done nothing since first opening my eyes but ask questions, none of the answers to which had yet been anything like satisfying, but I found that I couldn’t stop myself.

“Where the hell
am
I? What year is this?”

“We’re currently in the artificial habitat of Pethesilea, home of the culture of the same name, in orbit around the star known in your era as Beta Pavonis, located nineteen-point-nine light-years from Sol. As for the year, it is presently T8975.”

“Right, right,” I said impatiently, “that’s what the dog-man said, but what the hell does
that
mean?”

“Records of the intervening epochs are somewhat irregular, but in rough terms, a period of some twelve thousand years has passed since your craft left the Sol system.”

An enormous hole opened up in my mind, and anything like the ability to reason plummeted out of view.

“Twelve. Thousand. Years?”

“Standard years, sir, defined as three hundred and sixty-five standard days long. And each day being a single rotation of Original Earth in respect to Sol, or more specifically, as the duration of 7.93342121751 x 10^14 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-one-thirty-three atom at rest at a temperature of zero K. Except for the last day of the year, of course, which is twenty-five percent longer than the rest.”

“Twelve thousand?”

“You shouldn’t be surprised that the units of day and year with which you’re familiar have been retained. A diurnal, annual tempo has found to be beneficial for all Earth-derived biologicals. I’m afraid that the base-sixty increments of your era, though—holdovers from the Babylonian culture of a few millennia earlier—have been abandoned, so you’ll have to adjust to a percentage-based system of timekeeping.”

“Forget the calendar!” I snapped. “I’m having an existential crisis, here!”

“Sir?” Concern sounded in the voice of the escort, laced with confusion.

“I’ve slept for twelve millennia, my crew is dead, and I’m talking to a robot bird!”

“Yes, sir.” The escort bobbed its beak in a nod. “Perhaps we should return now to Earth, and to quarters that have been—”

“Earth?
Now
?”

“Of course, sir, if you’ll just—”

“But you just said we’re twenty light-years from Sol.”

“Nineteen-point-nine, to be precise, but near enough, yes.”

“And we’re going to just…?” I waved my hands suggestively, though suggestive of what I’m not certain.

“Walk there,” the escort finished for me.

“Walk there?”

“Yes, sir. If you’ll follow me.”

The silver eagle bunched for a brief moment and then launched into the air, taking wing. “This way, Captain Stone,” it called back, tucking its beak over its shoulder.

It winged toward the wall, opposite the direction the chimpanzee and the Amazon had gone. I followed as quickly as I could, my bare feet sliding on the smooth floor.

“I should warn you, though, sir, that Earth isn’t quite the world you remember.”

We approached a doorway surrounded by a large, silvery frame. I felt a faint breeze rustling the hem of my robe as we neared, and suppressed a shiver.

The eagle landed gracefully just short of the doorway. Though the light in the room was dim, bright light shone in the space beyond.

“To clarify,” the escort said, turning its silver eyes to me, “your preferred language is Information Age English, is it not?”

No more than I could resist the urge to
namaste
the chimpanzee could I keep from giving the same answer I’d always given to questions about my “native” language.

“I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.”

The escort cocked its head to one side, regarding me silently for a moment. “Sir?”

I sighed. “Look, I speak English, Hindi, Kannada, and Amharic, and I’m also familiar with the programming language Relational Q-Two, if you want to try that out on me, but English is what I’ve always spoken at home.”

“Very good, sir.”

The escort turned back to the door and then waddled forward, side to side, passing through to the other side—on the ground not nearly the elegant figure it was in midair.

“Wait a minute,” I said, calling after it. “Where are we…?”

I followed the silver eagle through the doorway and found myself not in the corridor I’d expected, but somewhere else entirely.

When I was in secondary school and should have been studying, I spent a lot of time in the Pentaverse. A network of five multiply connected virtual worlds accessible through the Internet, it was an experiment in artificial life, and I’m sure researchers somewhere were getting a lot out of it, but for kids like me, it was just the best game going.

The hub of the Pentaverse was called Ein Sof, from which each of the five worlds could be accessed through portals called “gates.” Users could navigate their virtual avatars, or “alters,” from one world to another, though some objects and attributes didn’t translate into all of the worlds and were cached by the operating system in Ein Sof until the alter returned.

I ran the same alter for two and a half years, which translated to centuries of subjective game time, but I still was never able to keep straight which of the countless classes of objects didn’t translate, so I was forever crossing the gate into a high-technology world like Beriah, only to find that the cloak of protection I’d been wearing in a high-magic world like Kadmon had been cached in Ein Sof, and my alter was left standing stark naked. The VR rig I owned carried a sensory channel, and I can still remember the gooseflesh feel of a chill Beriah breeze blowing across my alter’s bare backside.

Maybe it was the thin robe I was wearing, with nothing underneath, but something about stepping through that doorway after the escort reminded me of nothing so much as the gates of the Pentaverse. So much so that my right hand involuntarily curved into the control gesture to call up an alter’s inventory, to see what I’d left behind in the last world.

I’d thought that the domed chamber I’d just left had been enormous, but you could have fit a hundred of it into the space in which we now stood, or even a thousand. Immense, as a description, simply doesn’t do it justice. I was reminded of the architecture of old 20C metropolitan train stations, like Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, which I’d only ever seen in movies, but on a much grander scale. The ceiling was impossibly high, and the walls on either side almost too distant to see.

How had there been no hint of this in the chamber I’d just left?

I turned, and through the doorway, I could see the table and the confusion of chairs, just as we’d left them. But the metallic frame of the doorway—and I saw now that there was no door, just the frame—was surrounded on both sides by nothing but empty air. No walls. I stepped to one side and could see that the doorframe was freestanding, with nothing behind it but open space. No table, no chairs, no domed chamber.

My confusion was no doubt evident to the silver eagle, which had lifted into the air and was now circling overhead.

“Allow me to apologize,” the escort said, landing once more on my shoulder. “I should have explained. We have just transited a threshold, one terminus of which is located in the orbital habitat of Pethesilea, the other of which is here in Central Axis on Earth.”

“Threshold?” My mind was racing, but my mouth was moving slow in catching up.

“A flat-space, traversable wormhole connection within a frame containing fragments of cosmic string. The negative mass of the frame is balanced by the positive mass of the mouth itself, leaving the threshold with an almost-zero mass.”

“Wormhole,” I repeated, seemingly unable to string two or more words together.

“If you’ll observe,” the escort pointed with its silver beak, “the other thresholds of Central Axis, all part of the threshold network.”

I stepped back from the doorframe—the
wormhole
—and saw a profusion of other similar structures, of varying sizes, arranged in concentric circles throughout the enormous space. The largest towered overhead, while the smallest were so narrow I’d have had trouble squeezing through, but most were the same size—that of a respectably large doorway, perhaps three meters tall and two wide.

“There’s a…
network
of these things?” I was slowly regaining basic communication skills as I tried to process what the silver eagle had told me.

“The threshold network can be described as analogous to a metropolitan transportation system, such as subways on Original Earth.” The escort spoke matter-of-factly, like a guide at a tourist destination. “The thresholds to the most populous and powerful of worlds and habitats link directly to the Central Axis on the megastructure Earth, while worlds with lower populations or levels of power are linked to satellite axes that are themselves linked to the Central Axis. Less powerful worlds still are linked to even smaller satellite axes, which themselves are linked only to larger satellites. And so on.”

A web of traversable wormholes, accessible from Earth. The ability to walk from one world to another in a matter of steps. My mind reeled.

The eagle still perched on my shoulder, I shuffled barefoot to the next of the metal frames in the circle, indistinguishable in almost all respects from that through which we’d just passed.

I glanced within and saw only purple skies beyond.

“Where…? Where does it lead?”

“To a planet in orbit around the triple-star system known in your era as Algol ABC, or Beta Persei. It lies roughly 92.8 light-years from Sol.”

The distance was so large I had trouble fitting it inside my head. I swallowed hard and had a thought.

“Tell me,” I began, a slight quavering in my voice, “is there a…threshold that leads to Alpha Centauri B?”

“Naturally,” the silver eagle said, and pointed to one side with its beak. “If you would only proceed thirty meters in that direction…”

I walked, though don’t really remember how long it took or what thoughts might have gone through my head as we went. I remember only passing what appeared to be the upright sides of a threshold, but lacking the crosspieces at top or bottom.

Seeing my gaze linger on the object, the escort explained.

“That was once the threshold that led to the home world of the Iron Mass, the dismantled elements left as a memorial to those unpleasant days.”

A question began to formulate in my mind, but before it reached escape velocity, passing beyond the reach of the torpor that gripped my thoughts, the escort said, “We have reached the threshold to the star you know as Alpha Centauri B.”

I stood there, motionless, looking up at the silver frame before me. It was a twin to the one I’d walked through, though instead of a darkened room or a purple sky, I saw a cloud-flecked stretch of blue heavens arching over a gently rolling field of green, dotted here and there with splashes of color, which seemed familiar strains of flowers to my untrained eye.

“There is no cost associated with transiting this particular threshold, sir, if you’d like to step through.”

I took a single step forward and paused. The eagle on my shoulder was still near weightless, but I could feel the press of thousands of long years weighing on my back.

My crewmates and I had sacrificed any kind of normal life, on Earth or one of the colonies of the Sol system, to brave the interstellar gulfs and be the first humans to reach another star. Had our mission been successful and we returned to Earth as planned, we’d have been away the better part of a century, while everyone who might ever have known us aged and died. As it happened, we were gone much longer than that, which only poured salt into the wound.