Varcin murmured, ‘One step at a time, remember, ensign.’
Dakk leaned forward. ‘Yes, he died. He rode the Sunrise. He was the one who took a monopole bomb into the Xeelee Sugar Lump. You see? Your child, Dakk. Our child. He was a hero.’
One step at a time. I kept repeating that to myself. But it was as if the wardroom was spinning around.
II
In Dakk’s yacht, I sailed around the huge flank of the Assimilator’s Torch. Medical tenders drifted alongside, hosing some kind of sealant into the living ship’s mighty wounds.
The injured Spline had been allowed to join a flotilla of its kind, regular ships of the line. Living starships the size of cities are never going to be graceful, but I saw that their movements were coordinated, a vast dance. They even snuggled against each other, like great fish jostling.
Dakk murmured, ‘Some of these battered beasts have been in human employ for a thousand years or more. We rip out their brains and their nervous systems - we amputate their minds - and yet something of the self still lingers, a need for others of their kind, for comfort. So we let the distressed swim together for a while.’
I listened absently.
The yacht docked, and the captain and I were piped aboard the Torch. I found myself in a kind of cave, buttressed by struts of some cartilaginous material. The lighting had been fixed, the on-board gravity restored.
We wandered through orifices and along round-walled passageways, pushing deeper into the body of the Spline. We saw none of Dakk’s crew, only repair workers from the Base.
Dakk said to me, ‘You haven’t served on a Spline yet, have you? The ship is alive, remember. It’s hot. At sleep periods you can walk around the ship, and you find the crew dozing all over the vessel, many of them naked, some sprawled on food sacks or weapons, or just on the warm surfaces, wherever they can. You can hear the pulsing of the Spline’s blood flow - even sometimes the beating of its heart, like a distant gong. That and the scrambling of the rats.’
It sounded cosy, but not much like the Navy I knew. ‘Rats?’
She laughed. ‘Little bastards get everywhere.’
On we went. It wasn’t as bad as that hour in the chaotic dark when the Spline first came limping in, and we had to haul a wounded crew out of a wounded ship. But even so it was like being in some vast womb. I couldn’t see how I was ever going to get used to this environment, how I could serve on a ship like this. But Dakk seemed joyful to be back, so I was evidently wrong.
We came to a deep place Dakk called the ‘belly’. This was a hangar-like chamber separated into bays by huge diaphanous sheets of some muscle-like material, marbled with fat. Within the alcoves were suspended sacs of what looked like water: green, cloudy water.
I prodded the surface of one of the sacs. It rippled sluggishly. I could see drifting plants, wriggling fish, snails, a few autonomous bots swimming among the crowd. ‘It’s like an aquarium,’ I said.
‘So it is. A miniature ocean. The green plants are hornweeds: rootless, almost entirely edible. And you have sea snails, swordtail fish and various microbes. There is a complete self-contained biosphere here. This is how we live; this little farm feeds us. These creatures are actually from Earth’s oceans. Don’t you think it’s kind of romantic to fly into battle against Xeelee super-science with a droplet of primordial waters at our core?’
‘How do you keep it from getting overgrown?’
‘The weed itself kills back overgrowth. The snails live off dead fish. And the fish keep their numbers down by eating their own young.’
I guess I pulled a face at that.
‘You’re squeamish,’ she said sharply. ‘I don’t remember that.’
We walked on through the Spline’s visceral marvels. I didn’t take in much.
The truth is I was struggling to function. I’m sure I was going through some kind of shock. Human beings aren’t designed to be subject to temporal paradoxes about their future selves and unborn babies.
And my head was full of my work on the inquiry into Dakk’s actions.
The inquiry procedure was a peculiar mix of ancient Navy traditions and forensic Commission processes. Commissary Varcin had been appointed president of the court, and as prosecutor advocate I was a mix of prosecutor, law officer and court clerk. The rest of the court - a panel of brass who were a kind of mix of judge and jury combined - were Commissaries and Navy officers, with a couple of civilians and even an Academician for balance. It was all a political compromise between the Commission and the Navy, it seemed to me.
But the court of inquiry was only the first stage. If the charges were established Dakk would go on to face a full court martial, and possibly a trial before members of the Coalition’s Grand Conclave itself. So the stakes were high.
And the charges themselves - aimed at my own future self, after all - had been hurtful: Through Negligence Suffering a Vessel of the Navy to be Hazarded; Culpable Inefficiency in the Performance of Duty; Through Disregard of Standing and Specific Orders Endangering the War Aims of the Navy; Through Self-Regard Encouraging a Navy Crew to Deviate from Doctrinal Thought …
There was plenty of evidence. We had Virtual reconstructions based on the Torch’s logs and the mnemonic fluids extracted from the ship’s crew. And we had a stream of witnesses, most of them walking wounded from the Torch. None of them was told how her testimony fitted into the broader picture, a point which many of them got frustrated about. But all of them expressed their loyalty and admiration towards Captain Dakk - even though, in the eyes of Commissaries, such idolising would only get their captain deeper into trouble.
All this could only help so far. What I felt I was missing was motive. I didn’t understand why Dakk had done what she had done.
I felt I couldn’t get her into focus. I oscillated between despising her and longing to defend her - and all the time I felt oppressed by the paradoxical bond that locked us together. I sensed she felt the same. Sometimes she was as impatient with me as with the greenest recruit, and other times she seemed to try to take me under her wing. It can’t have been easy for her either, to be reminded that she had once been as insignificant as me. But if we were two slices of the same person, our situations weren’t symmetrical. She had been me, long ago; I was doomed to become her; it was as if she had paid dues that still faced me.
Anyhow, that was why I had requested a break from the deliberations, so I could spend some time with Dakk on her home territory. I had to get to know her - even though I felt increasingly reluctant to be drawn into her murky future.
She brought me to a new chamber, deep within the Spline ship. Criss-crossed by struts of cartilage, this place was dominated by a pillar made of translucent red-purple rope. There was a crackling stench of ozone.
I knew where I was. ‘This is the hyperdrive chamber.’
‘Yes.’ She reached up and stroked fibres. ‘Magnificent, isn’t it? I remember when I first saw a Spline hyperdrive muscle—’
‘Of course you remember.’
‘What?’
‘Because it’s now. This is my first time seeing this. And I’m you.’ Some day, I thought gloomily, I would inevitably find myself standing on the other side of this room, looking back at my own face. ‘Don’t you remember this? Being me, twenty years old, meeting - you?’
Her answer confused me. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’ She glared at me. ‘You do understand how come I’m stuck back in the past, staring at your zit-ridden face?’
‘No,’ I admitted reluctantly.
‘It was a Tolman manoeuvre.’ She searched my face. ‘Every faster-than-light starship is a time machine. Come on, ensign. That’s just special relativity! Even “Tolman” is the name of some long-dead pre-Extirpation scientist. They teach this stuff to four-year-olds.’
I shrugged. ‘You forget all that unless you want to become a navigator.’
‘With an attitude like that you have an ambition to be a captain?’
‘I don’t,’ I said slowly, ‘have an ambition to be a captain.’
That gave her pause. But she said, ‘The bottom line is that if you fight a war with FTL starships, time slips are always possible, and you have to anticipate them … Think of it this way. There is no universal now. Say it’s midnight here. We’re a light-minute from the Base. So what time is it in your fleapit barracks on 529? What if you could focus a telescope on a clock on the ground?’
I thought about it. It would take a minute for an image of the clock on the Base to reach me at lightspeed. So that would show a minute before midnight … ‘OK, but if you adjust for the time lag needed for signals to travel at lightspeed, you can construct a standard now - can’t you?’
‘If everybody was stationary, maybe. But suppose this creaky old Spline was moving at half lightspeed. Even you must have heard of time dilation. Our clocks would be slowed as seen from the base, and theirs would be slowed as seen from here. Think it through further. There could be a whole flotilla of ships out here, moving at different velocities, their timescales all different. They could never agree.
‘You get the point? Globally speaking there is no past and future. There are only events - like points on a huge graph, with axes marked space and time. That’s the way to think of it. The events swim around, like fish; and the further away they are the more they swim, from your point of view. So there is no one event on the Base, or on Earth, or anywhere else which can be mapped uniquely to your now. In fact there is a whole range of such events at distant places, moving at different speeds.
‘Because of that looseness, histories are ambiguous. A single location on Earth itself has a definite history, of course, and so does the Base. But Earth is maybe ten thousand light years from here. It’s pointless to map dates of specific events on Earth against Base dates; they can vary across a span of millennia. You can even have a history on Earth that runs backwards as seen from a moving ship.
‘Now do you see how faster-than-light screws things up? Causality is controlled by the speed of light. As long as light has time to travel from one event to another they can’t get out of order, from wherever they are viewed, and causality is preserved. But in a ship moving faster than light, you can hop around the spacetime graph at will. I took a FTL jaunt to the Fog. When I was there, from my point of view the history of the Base here was ambiguous over a scale of decades … When I came home I simply hopped back to an event before my departure.’
I nodded. ‘But it was just an accident. Right? This doesn’t always happen.’
‘It depends on the geometry. Fleeing the Xeelee, we happened to be travelling at a large fraction of lightspeed towards the Base when we initiated the hyperdrive. So, yes, it was an accident. But you can make Tolman manoeuvres deliberately. And during every operation we always drop Tolman probes: records, log copies, heading for the past.’
I did a double-take. ‘You’re telling me it’s a deliberate tactic of this war to send information to the past?’
‘Of course. If such a possibility’s there you have to take the opportunity. What better intelligence can there be? The Navy has always cooperated with this fully. In war you seek every advantage.’
‘But don’t the Xeelee do the same?’
‘Sure. But the trick is to try to stop them. The intermingling of past and future depends on relative velocities. We try to choreograph engagements so that we, not they, get the benefit. And of course they reciprocate.’ Dakk grinned wolfishly. ‘It’s a contest in clairvoyance. But we punch our weight.’
I tried to focus on what was important. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Then give me a message from the future. Tell me how you crossed the chop line.’
She paced around the chamber, while the Spline’s weird hyperdrive muscles pulsed. ‘Before the fallback order came, we’d just taken a major hit. Do you know what that’s like? Your first reaction is sheer surprise that it has happened to you. Surprise, and disbelief, and resentment. And anger. The ship is alive; it’s part of your crew. And you live in it; it’s as if your home has been violated. So there was shock. But most of the crew went to defence posture and began to fulfil their duties, as per their training. There was no panic. Pandemonium, yes, but no panic.’
‘And in all this you decided to disobey the fallback order.’
She looked me in the eye. ‘I had to make an immediate decision. We had an opportunity; we were close enough to strike, I believed, and we were in a situation where my orders weren’t valid. So I believed. I decided to go ahead.
‘We went straight through the chop line and headed for the centre of the Xeelee concentration, bleeding from a dozen hits, starbreakers blazing. That’s how we fight the Xeelee, you see. They are smarter than us, and stronger. But we just come boiling out at them. They think we are vermin, so we fight like vermin.’
‘You launched the Sunrise.’
‘Hama was the pilot.’ My unborn, unconceived child. ‘He rode a monopole torpedo: the latest stuff. A Xeelee Sugar Lump is a fortress shaped like a cube, thousands of kilometres on a side, a world with edges and corners. We punched a hole in its wall like it was paper.
‘But we were taking a beating. Hit after hit.