Deep Sky

“Around there,” Bethany said.

“There are disputed claims,” Garner said, “but the most agreed upon candidate is a Union veteran named Albert Woolson. He died in August of 1956.”

Travis traded looks with the others.

“It doesn’t sound right, does it?” Garner said. “The mind tends to chop off the tails of the bell curve when it makes an estimate. But do the math. Three million people fought in the Civil War, most of them very young, many young enough that they had to lie about their ages to serve. You could safely estimate a few tens of thousands of them were fifteen or sixteen when the war ended in 1865. Which means they were born around 1850. Out of that number of people, a handful could be expected to live to a hundred. A much smaller handful would make it a bit further, or would’ve been a little younger than fifteen when they served. Either way, the mid 1950s would be your best guess, even if you could never know for sure.” He offered a smile. “It is right—it just doesn’t seem right. It’s strange to consider that Civil War vets and atomic bombs overlapped each another in history by more than a decade.”

He looked forward again. “It’s stranger still to learn that the first humans to become effectively immortal— ageless, anyway—were born just before the Great Depression. You’re familiar with the Methuselah Project? You must have seen the political attack ads during the midterms.”

Travis and Paige and Bethany all nodded.

“Turns out it works,” Garner said. “It comes in about fifteen years ahead of schedule, in fact, according to the message from the Deep Sky. The first real stabilization and reversal of age symptoms is achieved around 2035. Which means a tiny scattering of people born in the late 1920s will live long enough to benefit from it—will live to see their biological age rolled back until they look and feel about twenty-five, indefinitely. Many more from the 1930s, forties, and fifties will make the cut, and damn near everyone born after that will. Most of the Deep Sky’s crew don’t yet exist in our time, but some do, and some were already adults in the year 1978—including all nine of the people Ruben Ward was instructed to take the message to that summer.”

Travis felt as if two halves of a drawbridge had just dropped together and locked with a heavy thud. He looked at Paige and Bethany and knew what they were thinking, to the last word:

Some of us are already among you.

“Who better to trust the message with,” Garner said, “than themselves?”

Paige started to respond, then stopped and frowned, as if something that’d been bothering her for the past couple minutes had finally surfaced. “It’s one thing to send us a message through the Breach, but why are they sending dangerous things like entities? If they created a wormhole to tell us something—”

“They didn’t,” Garner said. “They didn’t create the wormhole. Or the entities passing through it. That stuff is all archaic, even on the timescale of the universe. Whoever created it disappeared long ago. Probably a billion years back. These old transit tunnels full of relics are all that’s left of them. The Deep Sky’s original purpose was simply to study the tunnels—a whole network of them, discovered earlier by the first robotic probes that went out to neighboring stars. The Deep Sky was built from top to bottom as a dedicated research ship, with the means to investigate and even exert some control over wormholes. In the end, the crew used that capability to cause the Breach to open here on Earth, in our time. They rerouted a single tunnel to some degree—enough to make sure that the VLIC’s first shot in 1978 would connect with it, and not to a primordial one teeming with parasite signals. It took an ungodly amount of power to move the tunnel, and as soon as they’d done it, they had to begin generating and storing more power to move it again—this time so they could tap into it on their end. That process—repowering—would require a little over thirty-eight years, and be completed on June 5, 2016, by our calendar. During all the time in between, they had no way of stopping the flow of entities through the system. The most they could do was set up a kind of reverb effect in the tunnel, a very specific disturbance in which they could encode a message.”

“The Breach Voices,” Paige said.

Garner nodded. “Along with the initial impulse that would make a translator of whoever was standing closest when the Breach opened. That was some kind of neurotechnology that’s probably a few centuries ahead of ours— and obviously not perfected, given the damage it did to Ward.”

Travis let all the information settle in his mind, to the extent that it could.

“The tunnels are abandoned?” he said.

Garner nodded again. “Ancient ruins. Though many of the systems engineered into them are still running. Including defensive measures. Safeties.”

“Like what?” Paige said.

“The message covered it all pretty briefly. I got the sense that it would take a textbook to really explain it, but the basics were straightforward enough. One of the safeties is the resistance force inside the Breach, which doesn’t allow you to enter from our end. All the tunnels have that, to protect against the threat of outsiders—like us—tapping in at some random spot and immediately traveling throughout the network. Which makes sense, when you think about it. If you strung the universe with these tunnels, you’d never know when some hostile race might evolve somewhere, punch in and show up in your backyard.”

“So how do you go through it?” Bethany said.

“You need a tumbler,” Garner said.

Everyone waited for him to go on.

“That’s the best stab at translating the word from their language—whoever built the tunnels. Tumbler, as in the mechanism inside a lock. The way it works is, any two points connected by a tunnel need to be authorized before someone can travel between them. Think of it as unlocking them. And the only way to do that is for a single individual—a single conscious mind—to think the same complex thought outside both entry points first. You see how that works? It means at least one person has to make the trip the old-fashioned way—in a ship—before the tunnel lets anyone through. So you’d open one entrance, think a specific thought near it—an exchange from Twelfth Night, say—and then chug across space at ship speed to the other entrance, and think the exchange again. Same mind, same thought—that’s what the tunnel listens for. Until it hears that, it won’t open.”

Travis thought he understood the concept, and the reasoning behind it. “It means no new civilization can come out of the blue and expand their presence in space too quickly, right? They can’t push their boundaries any faster than ships can travel.”

Garner nodded. “And a person stuck with that job, unlocking a tunnel’s two ends, is the tumbler. In this case it’s you. I’m sure you can guess why.”

Travis considered it. He stared at the seatback in front of him, then turned to Garner. “Because I’ve already made the trip. There’s one of me on that end already, and one of me on this end.”

Another nod.

“Will that actually work?” Travis said.

“Same mind, same thought,” Garner said.

“So what is the thought? Did they put it in the message?”

Garner shook his head. “They’ll give it to you in person. After you go through to their end.”

He watched Travis for the confusion he obviously expected. Travis saw Paige’s and Bethany’s eyes narrow too.

“How will you go through the tunnel if you haven’t unlocked it yet?” Garner said. “That’s another safety—one for the tumbler’s own protection. The term for it translates to something like ‘scouting.’ You get to do it just once, back and forth—a single round-trip. The logic of it goes like this: a tumbler usually has to unlock a tunnel’s first end, then travel for a very long time across space to unlock the second end. But before he unlocks the second end, he can choose to enter the tunnel there, just once, and go through it to take a good look at the first end again. To scout it.”

Travis saw the point—was pretty certain he did, anyway. “After all that time had gone by, while you were crossing space in a ship, it’d be risky to reach the far end of the tunnel and just open it blindly. What if things back home had changed by then? What if there was something dangerous waiting to come through?”

Garner managed a smile. “Hell, you might open the tunnel and get a magma flow. Or seawater pressurized at a mile’s depth. A lot can change, given enough time, and it could take thousands of years for a ship to travel the