Divergence

“What are they?” asked Maurice.

“We don’t know,” admitted Judy. “Neither does Aleph.”

She pointed to a viewing field, where the systems repair robot they had picked up from the Petersburg could be seen clinging to the hull of their ship. Aleph gave Maurice a cheery wave. Maurice gave a halfhearted wave in return as he moved closer to the images. They reminded him of flowers: they were all the same size and shape, roughly spherical. Their surfaces were spectacularly colored, bursts of yellow and red and orange tangled around each other in fractally entwined patterns that deepened to a dark rose at a focus. Maurice understood why Edward seemed so frightened. The patterns on those flowers were unnerving: they gave the impression that they were looking straight at you. To conceal his uneasiness, Maurice pulled out his console and brought up a scale reading. The flowers registered as just over thirty centimeters in diameter. He called up a topographical mapping.

“The readings suggest that they are not completely spherical,” he announced. “There is an indentation at the other side of these objects. They’re hollow. So what’s inside?”

“We don’t know,” said Saskia. “They’re turning so as to face us as we travel. It’s like they are always keeping their back to us, not letting us see what they’re hiding.”

Maurice rubbed his chin. “Oh. I’ve never heard of anything like this before.”

“Neither has Aleph,” said Judy.

“I don’t like them,” Edward repeated. He noted Saskia’s glare. “They’re not right,” he whined. “They’re alien!”

Judy rubbed his arm gently and spoke to him in a voice learned from Social Care.

“Edward, they’re not alien. Aleph says so.”

“Aleph is an alien himself! Why should we believe him?”

“There are no such things as aliens,” Saskia snapped, looking painfully thin and bristling with nerves. “I already told you that. We have never found aliens on any of the planets we’ve visited, and humans have traveled a very long way. Aleph is just a systems repair robot.”

“Easy, Saskia,” said Maurice. “Hmm, has there been any sign of the Bailero yet?”

“Of course not.” Saskia was scathing. “We got stiffed again.”

Maurice tapped at his console. “We’re in the middle of empty space,” he said thoughtfully. “The closest star is over three parsecs away. Hmmm, if I were an AI escaping from Earth on a Warp Ship, this would be just the place I would choose to hide. Right where no one ever comes.”

“Hide maybe,” said Saskia irritably, “but not a very good place to build an empire from. There are no raw materials out here. The Free Enterprise said it was manufactured by the Bailero. Out of what, though?”

“I don’t know,” said Maurice. He gestured at the orange-red eyes of the flowers. “Maybe out of those things. Are there any more of them around?”

“Not that we know of.”

Maurice concentrated on his console. The space flowers—or whatever they were—were about two hundred kilometers distant. The Eva Rye was currently at rest relative to them. He checked back on the search pattern that he had programmed: a three-dimensional spiral that swept out a path through a volume of space that was covered by the limits of the ship’s senses. Long-distance senses had picked up the flowers from nine hundred kilometers back and had watched them closely as the ship slowed to a halt. The flowers had turned to watch the Eva Rye right back.

“Odd,” said Maurice. “I wonder what they are hiding inside? Let’s try and catch them out. Aleph?”

“Hi, Maurice.”

“I’m going to take the Eva Rye up and over to the other side of those things. Why don’t you let go of our hull and just stay floating here? If they turn to follow us, you might then get a look at what they’re concealing.”

“Maurice,” said Aleph reprovingly, “that wasn’t part of our contract.”

“Aleph, there should be an antique Warp Ship waiting here for us, payment for taking Judy to Earth. Instead we have found space flowers. Look at it this way, if there is no ship, there is no contract, so we will not be going to Earth.”