And good-bye.
Harry
SOMETHING WAS TERRIBLY FAMILIAR ABOUT this region of E Space, ever since he first stared across the prairie of twisted, fuzzy growths toward narrow spires that climbed to meet a vast, overhanging plane. The back of Harry’s neck kept tickling unpleasantly — the way a neo-chimpanzee experiences deja vu.
Now he regarded the same scene from another vertiginous angle, as his scout vessel clung to a gigantic sheer cliff amid a blurry haze. Innumerable reddish blotchy patterns repeated symmetrically across the smooth vertical surface, like footprints left by an army of splayfooted monsters.
“Well,” he commented, his voice scratchy with surprise. “I never did this before. Who’d’ve thought the rules here would let a big machine climb straight up, like a spider on a w—”
Harry stopped. Realization left him mute as his jaw opened and closed.
It can’t be!
He stared at the cliff’s repetitious markings, then the distant spires, nearly lost in shrouding mist. A mental shift of scale made it all clear.
I … would’ve sussed it earlier, but for the blurry vision in this crazy place.
He felt cosmically stupid. Harry moaned aloud.
“By Cheetah’s beard an’ Tarzan’s hernia … it’s a room. A room in somebody’s goddam house!”
Awareness lent focus to his tardy perception.
The prairie of fuzzy growths?
Carpet!
The tall, narrow spires?
Furniture legs. And that huge flat plane I fell from before must be a table.
The blotchy pattern on this “cliff” was probably wallpaper, or some tasteless counterpart. From this close, he had no clue if the motif was Earthling or alien.
This zone of E Space has so few visitors, it was probably in a raw, unmanifested state when I dropped in. The whole megillah may have coalesced around some image from my own subconscious mind!
He had been thinking about the station format, equipped with long legs from his last mission, comparing it to a spider. Perhaps that thought helped precipitate this eerily personal subcosmos.
Unless I’m actually dreaming it all, and my body’s really lying in crumpled delirium somewhere, smashed under tons of debris where the station fell, an instant after I arrived.
Either way, it showed just why most sophonts thought this part of E Space especially dangerous.
Perhaps this was how insects saw things inside a house — everything a blur. Harry wondered if there were pictures on the walls, a bowl of fruit on the table, and a humongous kitten purring on some sofa, just across the way.
Maybe it was better not to know, or force E Space to reify too much.
Just one thing spoiled the impression of a quaint, gigantic drawing room — the Avenue — a slender, sinuous tube of radiance that emerged from the misty distance, wound its way across the floor, then pierced the wall below Harry’s vantage point. A place called Reality, dominated by matter and rigid physical laws.
“I sense vibrations approaching,” the station announced. “From the point of connection-rupture.”
In other words, from the mouse hole where the Avenue plunged toward another zone of E Space. Three interlopers had taken that route before, leaving distinct traces. A small vessel squeezed through first, about a year ago … followed by a pursuer who carelessly blasted a wider path. Both left spoor signs of oxy-life. A third, more recent craft, shed mixed clues before entering the narrow route.
Now something was coming the other way.
Harry checked the station’s weaponry console and found several panels lit up … meaning they were able to function here, though in what fashion remained to be seen.
“Let’s see if we can try that other trick again,” he murmured.
Taking manual control, he sealed the station’s reality anchor to the adjacent wall with an audible “thunk.” Then, nervously, he detached each clinging foot from the wall, until his vessel dangled high above the ground. “Lower away!” he said, causing the cord to stretch, halting just two ship lengths above where carpet met wall. The Avenue lay just a little to his left.
Whatever’s coming out … it can’t be much bigger than this station. And most starships that visit E Space aren’t well designed for it. I’ve got advantages, including surprise.
It seemed logical. Harry almost had himself convinced.
But logic was a fickle friend, even back in his home universe. In E Space, it was just one of many games you could play with symbols and ideas.
One of many ways to fool yourself.
“Here it comes!” announced pilot mode, as something began nosing out of the dark tunnel.
It looked pathetic — absurdly long and barely narrow enough to fit through the tunnel. The intruder comprised a chain of hinged segments carried on stiff, articulated legs. It scuttled out of the dark passageway rapidly, then swerved aside, crouching along the wall as tremors ran from section to section. Watching from above, Harry’s impression was of something wounded and frightened, cowering as it tried to catch its breath.
He did not have to engage observer mode to know at once, this entity was a machine. Its rigid formality of movement was a dead giveaway. More significant was the fact that it did not change very easily. Upon entering a new region of E Space, any other kind of life-form would already have flexed and throbbed through some sort of transition, adjusting its self-conception, its gestalt, to suit the new environment.
In this realm, believing often made things so.
Yet, by their very natures, machines were supreme manifestations of applied physical law. Consistency was a source of their power, back in Reality. But here it had crippling effects. Faced with an imperative need to adjust its form, a machine could only do so by carefully evaluating the new circumstances, coming up with a design, then implementing each change according to a plan.
Zooming in with a handheld telescope, Harry saw the mech’s body swarm with smaller motile objects — repair and maintenance drones — laboring frantically to alter its shape and function by cutting, moving, and reattaching hunks of real matter. In the process, bits and pieces kept falling off, crumbling or dissolving into big strands of carpet. Harry’s atom sensor showed a veritable cloud of particles billowing outward … debris that would start attracting scavenging memes before long.
Clearly, this thing had once been a spacefaring device, a dweller in deep vacuum and darkness. It was amazing the machine could adapt to this environment at all.
A sensor flashed anomaly readings. Some of the pollution consisted of oxygen, nitrogen, and complex organic compounds — telltale signs of quite another order of life.
Wait a minute.
Harry had already been suspicious. Now he felt sure.
This was the third entity he had been tracking.
“Must’ve bumped into something it disagreed with,” he surmised. “Something scary enough to make it run away.”
Pilot mode soon confirmed this.
“I am detecting more bogeys, approaching the rupture boundary from the other side, following this one at a rapid pace.”
Harry narrowed down the source of the abnormal gas emissions to a sealed swelling near the middle of the caterpillar-shaped machine. A habitat. A container for atmosphere and other life-support needs. Some glassy shimmers might be windows, though the interior was too dim to see anything.
Clearly the machine knew time was short. Reconfiguration work accelerated, but little drones broke down
