CAPACITY

reaction was automatic. Then she remembered the strange drug that was still at work within her system. She ground the blue pill to powder between her fingers.

“Where shall I begin?” Schummel asked.

“At the beginning. What were you doing on Gateway?”

David Schummel closed his eyes as his thoughts traveled back through the years. When he began to speak, it was in a faint murmur that gradually grew louder as he gained confidence.

“I suppose you’re too young to remember the day the EA revealed the existence of the Enemy Domain? It was, what, twenty, thirty years ago? Completely unexpected: a message broadcast simultaneously to every console. I can’t think of another time they ever did that. It was a serial feed, too. You had to start at the beginning of the story and work your way through to the end, every human in the Earth System experiencing the story at the same time. I think you had to have lived through it to have any idea of the emotions we experienced. They were incredible… To think how close we had come to total destruction.

“The Enemy Domain! A hostile runaway region of self-replicating machines that had grown to the point that it could literally wipe us out. You saw the pictures on the feeds, that huge volume of hostile space, completely dwarfing ours. The Earth System was tiny, a blue-white pearl about to be cupped in the hands of a giant. All that machinery, all of that weaponry bent on our destruction, and we had been going about our daily lives unaware. Of course, the EA said we were never in any danger…but to see the pictures, you couldn’t bring yourself to believe it. I remember I just sat there, watching the scenes. Watching them, over and over again.

“And then we heard about the clones. The Enemy had been growing humans, trillions of them, but it had never completed them. Trillions of half-grown humans were scattered on planets in a bubble two hundred light years across.”

Schummel paused and looked at Judy. “How old are you? Late twenties?”

“Twenty-nine.”

He nodded. “I don’t know if you’ll understand this, but I should tell you something else. When all this happened, I was in my early sixties. Social Care had done their best, but I still had this sense of dissatisfaction, this feeling that I wanted to do something useful with my life. When I heard the requests for volunteers to travel to the ED, to aid in the harmonization, well, it struck a chord in me. It took me a couple of weeks to pluck up the courage, but I volunteered. I had skills: I could pilot craft, solo, without AI or TM help. I thought that had to be useful. It turns out it was, but not for the reasons I thought.

“There was only one way to volunteer, so I contacted Social Care, despite my misgivings.” A shadow crossed his face. “I should explain…I had a little habit back then that maybe wasn’t quite within socially acceptable parameters. Nothing actually wrong, you understand, but enough for me not to want them to know more than was necessary. Ah, why am I trying to hide it from you? It all came out after I returned from Gateway. You’ll have seen the records, of course. Still, I thought they were going to refuse me. They would have refused me, I’m convinced of it, if it hadn’t been for the fact that somebody wanted me. Social Care’s rejection was overruled, and I was accepted, but not for the ED. Not that I knew this at the time. Me, Mareka, Glenn, and Gwynnedd…and Justinian, all of us were being handpicked for the rescue mission to Gateway.”

Schummel took a deep breath and looked up at Frances. “This could take some time. Could you get me a glass of water, please?”

“Of course.” Frances quickly returned from the kitchen area, with a glass. David took a sip, then coughed a little.

“Okay. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about it until the day of departure. We boarded a ship in Kenya, as we had been instructed, a big city-class job, space for two or three hundred people in comfort. We thought that would be taking us all the way to the Enemy Domain. It wasn’t until we had taken off and were safely inserted into warp that they told us.

“We weren’t going to the ED at all. We were going to another galaxy: M32. It’s a small satellite galaxy of Andromeda. Look it up on your console.

“I remember all of us sitting there in the main assembly area of the ship. A robot stood up at the front and made the announcement. An odd-looking thing, it was: it had no skin on. I couldn’t believe what it was saying. The shock at being lied to, the confusion, but oh, the excitement. It was incredible. I remember turning to look at the expressions of the other people sitting around me. That’s when I twigged that what the robot was saying wasn’t news to most people in that room. Most sat there, faces impassive, just like this young lady here.”

He looked at Frances, but pointed to Judy.

“Oh, I was angry about that at the time, so angry. I wanted to know why I hadn’t been told. I calmed down later on when I realized that there was someone else with even more reason to be angry than I.”

“Justinian?” suggested Judy.

“Justinian.” David Schummel shuddered, took another sip of water. “Yes, Justinian. But that comes later. First we had to board the hypership…”

Schummel gazed into the distance, lost in thought. Gradually he collected himself and continued his story.

“The robot warned us about it. I don’t know how they built that ship, Judy. The robot told us it was beyond human comprehension. It’s not quite of this universe, its shell…You know, they wouldn’t let us see it as we flew to it. It was floating out in the Oort cloud, surrounded by baffles against chance discovery. We spent the journey out there wondering about that ship. How did it work? Why was it a secret? Why couldn’t we even see it? We tried getting the shuttle’s AI to put it up on the viewing fields, but it kept refusing. We tried all sorts of ways to get a proper look at it. Leslie caught some of the astronomers setting up a deep-radar telescope in their quarters, trying to get a picture of it through our ship’s hull. I remember, after that, he broadcast to the whole ship, warning us how dangerous it would be for us to see the hypership, warning us it was not a good idea for humans to look directly at it… But all the time he knew there was one human who would have to see it. One human who had no choice. The one who had to fly the shuttle. Me.

“Every time I flew up from Gateway, it was there. And me, alone in the cockpit of the shuttle, gazing up at it, hanging balefully over the planet…”

He shivered. “It was…long. No, that’s not the word. There isn’t a word to describe it. I don’t know…It always seemed to be much longer than the space it occupied. I used to get lost just flying towards it. I never knew for sure how far I had to go before I docked. It didn’t have a color, but there was a purple tinge at the boundary of where it existed-energy seeping through from somewhere else, Leslie once said. There’s something else…I could hear it. I could feel its presence.”

He looked deep into Judy’s eyes.

“You don’t believe me?”

Judy shook her head. At the moment she could feel everything. “I believe you,” she said.

Schummel gazed at her, not sure whether she meant it. He squeezed her white hands briefly, then continued.

“Oh, but inside it, there were three hundred of us inside it, and we all felt it. The ship’s… presence. I remember when we first boarded.

“We had to march from the warp ship down a silver corridor, but you knew you were in the hypership the moment it enfolded you. It was always cold inside, even though your skin was warm. Energy seemed to just leak away from inside you, though Leslie always denied that was the case. We had vivid dreams, even in the daytime. You would be speaking to someone, and then you’d realize that there was no one there; there never had been. The closer you got to the ship’s hull, the worse it was. The AIs that ran the ship said the effects were all psychosomatic. They offered to prove it, but I didn’t believe them. I don’t believe any AIs now, not after the way they lied to us. I don’t even believe the Watcher. There was a theory that circulated in the ship. I don’t know where it came from, but rumors were rife. It’s hard to understand what it means unless you’ve experienced it, but there was no Social Care on that ship. We weren’t constantly being cajoled and comforted and led down prescribed paths. I tell you, one time I even saw a fight. Yes, a fight! A real fight, born of anger. Kicking and punching and biting and…But I digress. No, there was a theory. That that ship was pulled from the fabric of somewhere else, and in entering it we had hung ourselves over this great sucking void, and that at any time it would claim us and take us down. I walked the corridors of that ship like a tightrope walker…”