Heaven (32 page)

Yes, Second-Best Sailor did spend a lot of time dangling his tentacles in the water and talking animatedly to himself, but
that was merely an extension of his delusion. He also spent a lot of time admiring his collection of fanworm tubes, won with
such foolhardy courage from the pitch-dark depths of No-Moon’s ocean. He had left them on board
Talitha
for safekeeping, until the colony on Aquifer could be properly established. Now he stared at them as if they were the only
friends he had. That, too, proved nothing.

There was no doubting his sincerity. All the Neanderthals could feel it. He meant every word he said. But sincerity did not
equate with accuracy.

On other matters, he seemed entirely lucid. Sharp Wit Will Cut had spent several hours debriefing the mariner, trying to find
out everything he knew about events on Aquifer. Second-Best Sailor described his limited recollections: the nighttime attack
on No Bar Bay, his own capture, his interrogation by the hierocrat of Cosmic Unity—

Yes, that was right: Cosmic Unity. It was their installation. At the North Pole? Second-Best Sailor couldn’t confirm that,
but yes, it was cold, and the tunnels could well have been carved in ice. Which was good enough to convince Will. He had told
the reefmind; the information rounded out their timechunk and added perspective. Now they felt as if they had
always
known.

Will seemed to believe everything he told him when it came to Cosmic Unity. He broke off from the debriefing several times
to issue instructions and talk to No-Moon, based on what Second-Best Sailor had just said. But whenever the polypoid raised
the topic of ponds, Will’s eyes seemed to glaze over, and soon he was making a poor job of concealing his anger.

Second-Best Sailor was baffled. Considering what a strange place the Galaxy was, was it so inconceivable that a pond could
evolve intelligence? What about the reefwives? he pointed out. They were an intelligent
coral reef
, flounce it! And the ’Thals
traded
with them! But no, that was different; that was an organism—well, a superorganism, a social collective.

A pond couldn’t be an organism, though, could it?

So Second-Best Sailor asked what had healed the wound in his flank, if it wasn’t the pond. Will’s answer was particularly
hurtful: “
What
wound in your flank?” Because, of course, there was no trace that he had ever been wounded.

If only they’d brought the damaged suit back with them, then they could have seen the slit where the laser bolt had hit him.
But the pond had discarded the suit, leaving it exposed on the beach, and it had disappeared—probably blown away one blustery
night.

The polypoid was hurt that no one was willing to believe his story. He offered to act as interpreter, so that they could converse
with the pond—but his was the only species among the crew that could send and receive chemical messages, and he was the only
polypoid on board. Without independent confirmation, they would simply assume that he was making up the pond’s side of the
conversation.

There were ways around that, if they’d been seriously interested. The pond must know things that Second-Best Sailor could
not possibly know, and an intelligent line of questioning would be able to home in on a suitable topic. But they all
knew
that there was no such thing as an intelligent pond, and his near brush with death gave them the perfect excuse not to examine
that “knowledge.”

They’re just being reasonable
, he thought.
To them, I’m sick
. What was worse, he’d only gotten the pond on board as a thank-you gesture. Having been told about the Galaxy, the pond was
determined to see some of its marvels for itself. The pond had saved his life, after all; he could scarcely tell it to get
lost.

He had explained his trick with the fatflies. It was simple enough: get them to swarm in concert, blocking reflections from
the ponds and then unblocking them again. The Neanderthals were willing to believe that he had somehow gotten the flies to
swarm in patterns, since nothing else explained what they had seen with their own eyes . . . but they had not experienced
the pond’s intelligence, so they didn’t believe anything he told them about it. Yet they believed him all right when he told
them that there was another polypoid trapped on Aquifer! Not that it had made any difference. He and Will had both agreed
that it would be too dangerous to try to rescue him. As yet, they had no accurate assessment of the enemy’s capabilities.
But when it came to the pond, no one would listen.

Despite everything, Second-Best Sailor persevered. He made a thoroughgoing pest of himself. He buttonholed people and started
explaining some bizarre theory of mind as an emergent phenomenon; he coined new terms like “ecoconsciousness” and laced his
conversation with them until he started to sound like the late lamented Fat Apprentice. He had long discussions with Epimenides,
who found his ideas interesting but could cite a hundred authorities to dispute every one of his assertions. He spent hours
quizzing crew members on what their neural components
felt like
when they were thinking. Not what it felt like to have those neural components—what the components themselves experienced
while their owner’s brain was putting together a thought.

The crew didn’t understand. They wouldn’t listen. A few of the Tweel, less polite than their fellows, displayed amusement.
Several told him to shove off.

It depressed him.

The Neanderthals tried to treat Second-Best Sailor’s depression with drugs, but he refused. The more they pressed, the more
obstinate he became. Eventually, they stopped trying and pretty much left him to work out the problem on his own. The mariner’s
welfare was important, but there were more urgent and more important things to do. And the most urgent of them all was to
return to No-Moon. The reefwives’ evacuation strategy had come to pieces; the polypoid race would no longer be safe if No-Moon
was lost. The reefmind needed to sort out an alternative before Cosmic Unity’s mission fleet got its forthcoming invasion
properly under way. And to do that, it had to find out exactly what the fleet was up to. Only
Talitha
could provide that information.

So the issue of the pond was put on the back burner, and Will concentrated on developing a consensus for the return to No-Moon.
To his surprise, Ship agreed that consensus had been reached on the very first attempt. When it inquired what route he wanted,
Will had expressed no preference: “You choose, Ship. Whichever route seems best to you.”

Talitha
deftly removed itself from orbit around Aquifer. This was an emergency: Ship was willing to use hydrive. Knowing that even
by that means the trip would take several weeks, Will retired to his cabin to rest. But he had been asleep for less than three
hours when Ship woke him with an offhand “Will? We’ve arrived.”

This was so utterly improbable that he shot out of bed and rushed to the nearest gallery.

Ship hung stationary in space. Instead of the expected scene of stars pinpointed against a velvet backdrop, the window showed
a striking image of a spiral galaxy. It was huge; it dominated the view in that direction.

Ship was right: They had arrived.

The only question was,
Where?

When he asked Ship, it refused to answer. “There is no consensus,” the vessel insisted. “But you can stop worrying that we’ve
gone off course. This is exactly where I intend us to be at this stage. Now we will wait.”

“Wait? What for?”

“I cannot tell you,” Ship replied. “It is crucial that you should be left to find that out for yourselves.”

Will decided that he had made a mistake when he told Ship to choose its own route. He should have struck a consensus for the
quickest and most direct route, not the best. “Best” was too vague a word. Who knew what Ship thought might be best for them?

For the first time in his eventful life, he no longer trusted Ship’s judgment.

“Well, I can tell you where we are,” said Stun. She had been working with their highly experienced Yükü astrogator, and they
had an answer to Will’s question. It hadn’t taken long.

He wasn’t going to like it.

She decided to prepare the ground first. “I am sure you have noticed that Ship is behaving much more efficiently than it used
to.”

“Effectively,” said Will. “Ship never gave a toss for efficiency, and still does not.”

“More effectively.
Much
more effectively.”

Will growled, “Get to the point, Eyes That Stun the Unwary.”

She continued to evade it. “But you
have
noticed this?”

Will flexed his forearms, took a deep breath. He looked like a lion king surveying his domain. “It would be difficult for
any ship’s captain
not
to notice such a dramatic improvement, Stun. I first became aware of it when we started reaching consensus almost before
any suggestions were made. Then I noticed that routine tasks were being carried out without any discussion whatsoever.”

“I agree,” May broke in. She had been tending to Will’s crevit while its master was preoccupied with running the ship. “Have
you observed that the atmosphere on board has become more contented than we have ever felt before?”

“Yes,” Will agreed. “Despite the difficulties we all face.”

“I noticed those things, too,” said Stun. “Did you also realize that major items of equipment were functioning better?”

“The life-support allocation seemed unusually slick,” May admitted.

“And the gallery window unusually clear,” added Will.

“Mmm. And the hydrive?”

He shook his thick mane and ran his fingers through it. “What of the hydrive?”

“It has improved beyond recognition.”

“What makes you think that? Oh, I believe I sense . . .”

Stun ducked her head in affirmation. “Correct. In a few hours, we traveled considerably farther than No-Moon, which on previous
experience had to be several weeks distant, even if Ship found a route with less gravitic turbulence than the one we followed
to journey to Aquifer.”

Will accepted this, even though it was incredible. He could feel that she was telling the truth. “So where are we?”

She pursed her full, prominent lips, then licked them uncertainly.

“Still hesitant? I will not argue with your conclusions. The Yükü never miscalculates.”

“Thank you, Will, for your confidence. We seem to be . . . No, we most assuredly
are
somewhere in the Agathyrsi Cluster.”

“Excellent. Uh—where is that?”

“It is a globular cluster located some sixty thousand light-years from the Galactic core in an axial direction.”

“Sixty thousand light-years? That would put us well out towards the rim.”

“Will, I said
axial
. Not radial.”

The enormity of it struck home. Now he knew which galaxy they were looking at.
The
Galaxy. Theirs.

Nobody had
ever
been able to travel out of the Galaxy’s main body of stars, into the spherical halo of globular clusters that extended for
a hundred thousand light-years in every direction. Nobody had ever made a really good map of the Galaxy as a whole.

“We are the first people ever to visit this region,” said May.

Knowing which galaxy it was, Will began to see familiar features. Conjectured maps had been pieced together, of course, but
he now saw that they were wrong in numerous details.

They were right about the general shape: a spiral galaxy with a distinct bar, from which two thick arms trailed. Between them
were two thinner arms, and the four arms were separated by lobes that were too short to count as spirals. The whole thing
really did look like a blob of milk that had been dabbed onto the universe and stirred with a spoon. Their familiar Trailing
Spiral Arm was just like the maps, including a pronounced fork about forty-five thousand light-years from the hub. Its matching
Leading Spiral Arm (the terminology was conventional; actually, both arms trailed) was split by a long rent halfway out, and
broken by a dark gap. In between were arcs and isolated patches of brightness, and the three gas clouds of the rim—Ugric,
Pome, and Ellops—were clearly visible as dark smears.

Ship had made a rather large detour.

It was no coincidence that no one—at least, not from their own civilization—had ever visited this area. It was far beyond
reach. At the hydrive speeds normal for
Talitha
—normal for any ship—it would take them many generations to get back to No-Moon. But the sparsity of stars left no places
for travelers to take on essential substances—not even atomic hydrogen. So they could only hope that Ship’s newfound effectiveness
did not vanish as suddenly as it had appeared.

“You should never take Precursor technology for granted,” he said, voicing his thoughts out loud. His throat felt dry, and
his voice was husky.

“No,” said Stun. “And never assume you know everything that it is capable of.” A shadow of fear crossed her face. “Why has
Ship brought us here, Will? So far out of the plane of the Galaxy? It must have a reason.”

“It wants us to wait.”

“What for?”

“It refuses to say. It says that we must work that out for ourselves.”

“Wonderful.”

The galaxy’s resources had been depleted by its eons-long battle against the infection of Life. Still a relative infant, it
had become old before its time, and it was dying. Its central fires were beginning their long, slow decline
.

But if the life of a galaxy is slow, its death is slower. No mind can grasp the time that must elapse before a galaxy’s reserves
of energy are exhausted. For the disease of life creates new resources, repackages old, tired structures. It breathes new
vitality into everything it touches—for that is its role, its function, its essence.

This galaxy was sick, but it was a sickness of function, not of substance. It might yet be cured. Its disease might undergo
remission.