Well, he was still an officer of the law. Harry’s other job was to patrol E Space and watch for criminal activity.
“Computer, do you detect signs anybody’s been through this area lately?”
“I am scanning. Interlopers would have to travel alongside the Avenue in order to reach an intersection with Galaxy Four. Any large vessel piercing the tube, or even passing nearby, would leave ripple signs, whatever its allaphorical shape at the time.”
The platform nosed closer to the shining tube of brightness. Harry had glimpsed the Avenue many times while on patrol, but never this close. Here it appeared rather narrow, only about twice the height of the station itself. The tube shone with millions of tiny sparks, set amid a deep inner blackness.
The narrow, snakelike volume was filled with stars … and much more. Within that twisty cylinder lay the entire universe Harry knew — planets, suns, all five linked galaxies.
It was a topological oddity that might have looked, to its long-extinct first discoverers, like a wonderful way to get around relativity’s laws. All one needed was an intersection near the planetary system one was in, and another near one’s destination. The technique of entering and leaving E Space could be found in any Galactic Library branch.
But E Space was a world of unpredictability, metapsychological weirdness, and even representational absurdities. Keeping the Avenue in view until you came to some point near your destination could entail a long journey, or a very short one. Distances and relationships kept changing.
Assuming a traveler found a safe exit point, and handled transition well, he might emerge where he wanted to go. That is, if it turned out he ever left home in the first place! One reason most sophonts hated E Space was the screwy way causality worked there. You could cancel yourself out, if you weren’t careful. Observers like Harry found it irksome to return from a mission, only to learn they no longer existed, and never really had at all.
Harry didn’t much approve of E Space — an attitude NavInst surely measured in his profile. Yet, they must have had reasons to train him for this duty.
The platform began zigging and zagging alongside the Avenue, occasionally stopping to bend lower on its stilts, bringing instruments to bear like a dog sniffing at a spoor. Nursing patience, Harry watched strange nebulae drift past, within the nearby cylindrical continuum.
A bright yellow star appeared close to the nearby tube edge, against a black, star-flecked background. It looked almost close enough to touch as his vessel moved slowly past. I guess there’s a finite chance that’s Sol, with Earth floating nearby, a faint speck in the cosmos. The odds are only about a billion to one against.
At last, the station stopped. The slanted letter seemed to spin faster.
“I note the near passage of three separate ship wakes. The first came this way perhaps a year ago, and the second not long after, following its trail.”
“A pursuit?” This caught his interest. For the spoor to have lasted so long testified how little traveled this region was … and perhaps how desperate the travelers were, to pass this way.
“What about the third vessel?”
“That one is more recent. A matter of just a few subjective-duration days. And there is something else.”
Harry nervously grabbed his thumbs. “Yes?”
“From the wake, it seems this latter vessel belongs to the Machine Order of Life.”
Harry frowned.
“A machine? In E Space? But how could it navigate? Or even see where it …” He shook his head. “Which way did it go?”
“To the figurative left … the way we are now facing.”
Harry paced on the floor. His orders from Wer’Q’quinn were clear. He must lay the cameras where they might peer from E Space back into more normal continua, offering NavInst techs a fresh perspective on the flux of forces perturbing the Five Galaxies. And yet, he was also sworn to check out suspicious activities.…
“Your orders, Captain Harms?”
“Follow them!” he blurted before the decision was clear in his own mind.
“Sorry. I am not programmed …”
Harry cursed. “Engage pilot mode!”
Almost before the cursive P popped into place, he pointed.
“That way. Quickly! If we hurry we still might catch them!”
The platform jerked, swinging to the right.
“Aye aye, Hoover. Off we go. Tallyho!”
Harry didn’t even grimace this time. The program was irritating, but never at the expense of function. Even Tymbrimi usually knew where to limit a joke, thank Ifni. The station jogged onward in a quick eight-legged lope across the savannah of fuzzy, cactuslike growths.
To his left the Avenue swept by, a glittering tube containing everything that was real.
Sara
THINGS GOT PRETTY COMPLICATED RIGHT after Streaker began navigating the snarled innards of the transfer point.
From his liquid-filled chamber next door, Kaa thrashed muscular flukes, churning a foamy froth while protesting aloud.
“It’sss too damned crowded in here!”
Sara knew he wasn’t complaining about Streaker’s cramped bridge, but the twisted labyrinth outside the ship — a maze of stringlike interspatial boundaries, looping and spiraling through every possible dimension, like the warped delirium of some mad carnival ride designer.
The t-point nexus was rather crowded. During any normal transfer, one might glimpse a few distant, glimmering dots amid the gnarled threads, and know that other ships were plying the same complex junction linking far-flung stars. But this time it felt like plunging through a tangled jungle, with countless fireflies strung out along every branch and vine.
Instrument panels flared amber warnings as Kaa repeatedly had to maneuver around large vessels moving ponderously along the same slender path. Margins were narrow, and the dolphin pilot skimmed by some giant cruisers so closely that Sara caught brief, blurry glimpses in a viewer set to zero magnification. Turbulent ship wakes made Streaker buck like a skittish mount. Her straining engines moaned, gripping the precious thread for dear life.
Sara overheard Gillian’s awed comment.
“All these starcraft can’t be running away from the Fractal World!”
The Niss Machine answered, having managed to regain some of its accustomed saucy tone.
“Obviously not, Dr. Baskin. Only about a million other vessels are using trajectories similar to ours, fleeing the same catastrophe that drove us into panicky exodus. That is but a small fraction of the population currently thronging this dimensional matrix. All the rest entered from other locales. Library records show that this particular thread-nexus accepts inward funnelings from at least a hundred points in normal space, scattered across Galaxy Four.”
Sara blinked at the thought of so many ships, most of them far bigger than poor Streaker, all in an Egg- blessed hurry to get wherever-whenever they were heading.
“I–I thought Galaxy Four was supposed to be deserted.”
That was the image she had grown with. An entire vast galactic wheel, nearly void of sapient life. Hadn’t her own ancestors come slinking this way in camouflaged sneakships, evading a fierce quarantine in order to settle on forbidden Jijo?
“Deserted, yes. But only by two of the great Orders of Life, Sage Koolhan. By machine intelligences and oxygen-breathing starfarers. The migrational treaty did not require evacuation by members of other orders. And yet, from what we are witnessing right now, it would not be far-fetched to suggest that a more general abandonment
