'Well, I'll be damned. I wonder how we got here. I mean, considering that the stardrive doesn't work.'
'It obviously does work, Wester.'
'If the damned thing was working, why didn't this ship leave the Mound when the other ships left?'
'I don't know, Wester.'
'But we weren't in stardrive, Tara. We would have felt it! We were in the vac, the whole trip!'
'That's not possible, Wester. As you very well know. I'll admit it didn't seem we were on a star run. I didn't feel the pressure, either. But we were. Maybe it happened when we were unconscious. After the O's captured us.'
'Just like that? We couldn't have been out that long! A star run to the far side of the galaxy, and we didn't notice it?'
'It's worth thinking about, isn't it?'
'The Omega Spiral, huh?'
'That's where we are.'
'Do you think anyone's been out this far before?'
'No—nobody has.'
We could see the stars out the plex. It looked terribly cold and lonely out there.
'You ever been this far from home before?' I asked.
'I don't have a home.'
'Neither do I.' I put an arm around her shoulders and drew her to me. I kissed her, on the forehead.
'We'll get out of this, Tara,' I said. 'And when we do, I'll buy you a drink.'
'I don't drink,' she replied, 'but if we do get out of this, I may start. There's something else you should know.'
'What's that?'
'Tess was able to make some exact correlations between the stars out there and the artificial display in here, along with some of the instrumentation on the control panel there. Very precise measurements. We can understand part of the display now. Come on—I'll show you!'
###
It looked like a master control panel set just below the plex, directly in front of one of the O's body chairs. This particular portion of the control panel had not been hit by our x's. A dazzling display of silver dust hung in the air just over our heads. I was cold, dressed only in my litepants.
'Look on the panel here,' Tara said. 'These are quantum math readouts, believe it or not. According to Tess, they are super-accurate. Watch this.' She touched a flat tab with one slim finger. The stardust spun around us, hurtling past our heads.
'All right! It's moving!'
'What are they, Wester? Do you know?'
'Galaxies! Those are galaxies! That's the Great Wall!'
'Exactly. It's the universe, Wester. The whole, bloody universe. Now watch this.' Tara touched another tab. The display flashed, and silently exploded into a stunning panorama of cold silver nebulae and hot golden stars. Tara touched the tab again and the stars rushed past us wildly, out of control.
'It's a nav function,' I said. 'And this is our galaxy!'
'That's right, Wester. Watch!' The display exploded again, then stabilized. A starry field hung just above our heads. 'And here we are, Wester—the Omega Spiral. It's the last stop in our Galaxy. Do you know what Tess found out?'
'No—but I'll bet you're going to tell me.'
'With an exact fix on the stars, Tess was able to calculate the GZT—galactic zero time.'
'And?'
'She didn't have to correct her chron.'
'Yeah? So?'
'Because the chron was correct. Check your own chron—ask your tacmod. She'll say it's 314/06 on the 17th, galactic zero. And it is.'
'Why don't we just pretend I'm stupid, and you explain it to me in simple terms, all right?'
'We're on the far side of the galaxy, Wester. We've just made the longest star hop in history. A trip like this would be a huge project. It would take the Legion months—maybe a year—of continuous star hops. We've done it pretty much instantaneously.'
'You're saying this ship is functional; you're saying the damned stardrive works.'
'You're a little slow, Wester. Of course the stardrive works! Otherwise, we wouldn't be here. And the time would be a lot different.'
'So the stardrive works—terrific! It makes you wonder why the O's were hanging around the Mound when the subnorms were overrunning it.'
'I can't answer that, Wester. Perhaps they didn't think we were important, just as Merlin said. But I can tell you this D-neg drive is extremely powerful. Do you know what we have here, Wester? This is the key to the future. It appears this ship is equipped with D-neg drive. Antimat allows us to bore a wormhole in spacetime, connecting two regions of our own universe, holding open the hole and cheating time and distance. Antimat is the only exotic matter we have, and it works fine, but it has serious limits.
'We've used antimat to create quantum antigravity effects that generate negative pressure, essentially through brute force, and it's only negative pressure that keeps the wormhole open while we're in it.'
'Hold it, Tara. We haven't come close to the speed of light, have we? I mean—we're not in the future, are we?'
'No, Wester. That's what I was trying to tell you with the chron. Everything is just as we left it. It's just a wormhole—this isn't superluminal. It's just a better, more efficient stardrive. But it's not only that. There are other universes out there—some of them connected to our own through black holes, and some connected— intermittently—through natural wormholes. And if you run into one of these alternate universes on antimat drive, you're gone forever, never to return. Because, assuming you survive the trip, when you try to return here on antimat drive, chances are you will just return to the alien universe. On antimats, you don't have the power to leave one universe and enter another, except by accident. But it's always been theoretically possible, with a more powerful exotic material, to burn a wormhole between universes and keep it open. It took us a long time to learn how to use antimat drive correctly; we lost a lot of people and ships, and when we finally succeeded, we thought it was the ultimate tool for the exploration of the galaxy. But D-neg has always been there, the holy grail of generations of spacetime physicists. It's the backbone of our own universe, it's the stuff that created the dark energy that expands our own universe, the energy of a white hole, the cosmic glue of the Gods. But it's not in this universe—it's just beyond the gates, and there's no way to get at it, if you want to return. Well, we've got it, Wester—right here, right in this ship. A thimbleful of holy dust, the grains of creation, right in the heart of this ship! Nobody knows what it can do, Wester—but it's far, far more powerful and dangerous than antimat.'
'And this D-neg stardrive put us here, on the far side of the galaxy—instantaneously.'
'More or less.'
'All right—I'll accept that. Whatever it is, it's at the very least a new method of star travel. Right?'
'Not only star travel. Maybe even time travel.'
'All right—then it's more important than ever for us to deliver this ship, intact, to the Legion. Do you agree?'
'Absolutely!' Tara said.
'And we deliver it to the Legion—not to ConFree!'
'Absolutely!'
'Good. Then we agree. I'm freezing! Where's my liteshirt?'
'It's drying. I washed it. It was starting to move. I killed it, and then I washed it.'
'Well, thank you. You'll make somebody a good wife.'
'No, I won't. I can't cook, and I can't live with deadheads.'
'Why don't you move in with a psycher?'
'No thanks—they're worse than deadheads.'
'Mmm. So—this nice little nav function doesn't tell you how to operate this ship, does it?'
