“And does she have grounds for that?”
“Occasional comments of mine have not always, um, accorded with common sense.”
“You really are,” I said kindly, “a child, aren’t you?”
“Aye Master.”
“Morval. Tell me about the ship. What weapons do we have?”
“Six gen-guns; twelve light-cannons, three negative matter transporters, and a disruptor ray,” Morval said.
“Engine capacity?”
“Four point two kais. With booster engines, and stay-still wraparounds. In a crisis, we flee to the nearest rift and escape.” Morval’s tone was brisk now; when it came to the business of the ship, he clearly knew his stuff.
“Show me how the stay-still does its job.”
Phylas conjured up his phantom controls, and pressed an oval; and our three bodies shimmered as the inertial haze surrounded us.
Then Phylas pressed another oval and the ship suddenly flipped over. Albinia of course was strapped to her seat; but Phylas, Morval and myself remained hovering in air, in the same position, though we were now upside down in relation to the Hub floor and control rigs.
Phylas pressed a third oval and we were right way up. “An alternative,” he said, “to seat harnesses.”
“Seat harnesses have always worked for me,” I said testily.
“I find,” said Morval, “they chafe.”
Phylas pressed the oval again. The ship flipped again. I was upside down, again.
“Oh, boy,” I said, delighted.
“Initiate the space drive,” said Commander Galamea.
We were ready to rift, and Commander Galamea had joined us in the Command Hub. She had made no comment about the wrap-around space panorama that now dominated this small room, but had quietly asked Albinia to cut the background music.
Galamea was a lean, strongly muscled female; her eyes burned with a blue light that betrayed many years in rift space; she did not look as if she knew how to smile, nor did it seem likely she would welcome instruction in that art.
“I am proud to serve, o exalted mistress,” I said.
“Just ‘Yes Commander’ will do,” Galamea said tersely, and I recalled how the military hate any display of courtesy and eloquence.
“Yes, exalted Commander,” I replied.
“Disreality is achieved, Commander,” said Morval.
“The slippery-sands-of-chaos envelop us,” said Phylas.
“Explorer is content,” said Albinia, dreamily. The cable that connected her to Explorer hung loosely out of her shaved head; her eyes were closed; her mind entirely in tune with the ship’s computational brain. She was, I noted in passing, the most ravishingly clever-looking Star-Seeker I had ever seen.
On my phantom controls, I could see that we were getting random readings across all vectors, as a consequence of the flux of chaos being generated.
A certain amount of time elapsed, but no one knew how much, or whether it was a longer or shorter passage of time than usual.
“A rift has emerged,” said Phylas eventually.
“I see it,” I said authoritatively, though in fact I saw nothing; just a jumble of incomprehensible graphs and equations on my phantom control screen.
“Can we predict the destination?”
Albinia moaned, as she tried to analyse the data flux and find some notion of what lay beyond the rift in time and space.
“No,” Albinia eventually concluded.
“Morval?” asked Commander Galamea.
“I see no trace of disruptive nothingness,” Morval said, slowly reading the data on his phantom control screen as if was a novel of which he was savouring the sentence structure.
(In passing, I marvelled at the nerve of the man; pretending he understood the data!)
“Phylas?”
“The ship’s engines are showing no potential signs of imminent spontaneous detonation,” said Phylas, comfortingly.
I looked at Commander Galamea as she made her decision. She was pensive, almost absent-minded.
Finally, she nodded her assent. Travel through rifts via disreal projection was a hazardous business; we all needed a few moments to prepare for the possibility of never becoming our actual selves again.
I took her nod as my instruction. “Proceed with space leap,” I instructed.
Phylas moved the sliders on his phantom controls; the ship’s drive was restarted; the disreality beams were dimmed. And the Explorer flew-instantly, so fast that it arrived before it left, almostthrough a rift in space.
As we flew, the Command Hub tilted violently, first this way, then that, until we all were all upside down relative to the harnessed Albinia and the Hub itself. But the stay-still fields kept our bodies immune to the effects of violent oscillation, and the phantom control displays patiently followed us to our new positions.
Albinia moaned with joy as she entered the rift; and I knew that she could sense, with every part of her skin and body, what it was to be not-real. And even we, who did not have her direct access to Explorer’s sensors, could feel the strangeness of the moment.
We emerged from the rift.
Morval assessed the data on his screen.
“We are-nowhere,” he said.
“No traces of organic life,” Phylas confirmed.
“No habitable planets,” Morval added.
Albinia’s eyes snapped open. “Explorer,” she said, “hates this place.”
“Try again,” said Galamea.
“Reduce our probability once more,” I said tensely.
“Yes, Master,” said Albinia, and closed her eyes again.
A few moments of idle nothing passed; I yearned to have my ship’s wheel back. There was no romance in pressing ovals on an illusory screen.
Then I felt the strangeness come upon me again.
“Probability is reducing, Master-of-the Ship,” said Phylas, reading the data off his screen. “And reducing more. And more. And more,” Phylas added.
I knew, though I did not fully comprehend, that the universe is a rocky reality built upon slippery sands of disreality; this was the heart and truth of Olaran science. And only the Olara-or strictly speaking, the Olara women- knew how to control this process.
And so, whilst remaining motionless, Explorer began the long process of reducing its own likelihood, until the new rift appeared, and had been, and was, and will be again. (Though all this made much more sense in mathematical form, so I am reliably informed.)
And thus Explorer vanished, and reappeared elsewhere; and the ship’s computational mind swiftly calibrated where it was this time.
Again we detected no traces of life; the process recommenced; Explorer vanished, and reappeared, a million light years further on; and then did so again.
We were taking our ship out, far out, into regions of space never yet charted.
“We have a possible trace of organics, Master-of-the-Ship,” said Morval, eventually, and the ship halted and its probability rose.
All of us on the Hub forced vomit back down our throats; the stay-still wraparounds weren’t that good.
“Let us proceed,” I said calmly, and the ship’s true engines fired up, and Explorer began its slow journey towards its destination.
Albinia was communing deeply with Explorer. Her eyes were closed; her expression rapt. She was lost in a whirl of data from sensors that could perceive the mass and chemical constitution of stars a million baraks from
