A Maze of Stars Read online

  “By all means. Unfortunately you are, physically, not equipped.”

  Pouring more from the jug, Stripe glanced up.

  “They say that on other worlds people have extra senses. Do you mean I lack one of them?”

  “I am impressed.”

  “What in all of space makes you say that?”

  “If you will forgive me mentioning your parents—?”

  “Go on!”

  “You are remarkably well informed for someone from a planet rightly classified as backward, especially at—”

  “This stage of its development,” she cut in sarcastically. “Well, maybe some backward people have in fact moved forward, hm? What about the people who built you? Were they backward or forward compared with me?”

  She had time for three more drafts of the delicious liquid before the answer came.

  “It is no longer possible to make comparisons.”

  “Ah, come on!” Perhaps it was overtiredness, perhaps something in the drink she had taken, but Stripe suddenly felt reckless. “You’re the Ship, aren’t you? You’re supposed to remember everything that’s happened since you brought us humans to the Arm of Stars.”

  “Yes. And no.”

  “Don’t talk in riddles!”

  “I can no more help doing so than I could help standing aside and watching while your parents’ house was burned.”

  Oh. It is a machine.

  I’ve been told about machines. The spaceport at Clayre is run by them. I’ve even seen some. But those are mindless things that tend to necessary tasks—pumping water, grinding rock, or concentrating salt to kill invasive plants like stranglevine. They’re not to be compared with (she still had difficulty accepting that she was on board the Ship she had been raised to think of as a superior myth) this!

  Recollection of telling Donzig to salt the tendrils that had crept into her family’s yard threatened for a moment to distract her from what she’d intended to say. With vast effort—either the drink or the aftereffect of last night was making her still drowsier—she compelled herself to utter the words.

  “Is it because an ordinary person like myself can’t understand you?”

  A pause, somehow thoughtful.

  “In part. There have been few if any human beings who could reasonably claim to understand the Ship.”

  “So what’s the other part?” Stripe set the cup back on the table and yawned again. This time the impulse was too powerful to overrule.

  “There’s more than one other part.”

  “Stop playing games! Talk plain!”

  “Very well. To begin with, there is no such entity as an ‘ordinary person.’ ”

  Against a rising tide of fatigue, Stripe offered, “You mean because people on Trevithra are different from those on Yel-lick, or Sumbala, or some other planet?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Go on! Don’t mess around! Even if you make me go to sleep and miss—what did you call it?—tachyonic mode, I promise I’ll remember and go on asking next time I get the chance.”

  “You mustn’t think in terms of ‘missing’ tachyonic mode.”

  “Why not? Isn’t it something marvelous, amazing?”

  “For me, in a sense, I have to admit that it is.”

  “Not for me? Why not?” She sounded hurt; hearing her own voice, she was reminded of Donzig’s whining on being refused a taste of starship food.

  “There is no time.”

  “What?” Confused, Stripe overcame her weariness by main force of will.

  “You asked before whether I am bound by my instructions to tell the truth. You guessed that I put a literal interpretation on them and sometimes gain advantage by doing so. You are now wondering whether what I’m saying is to be taken at face value. Is that not so?”

  “Why do you have to ask—? Wait!” She drove herself to her feet, for had she remained seated she feared she must have fallen asleep across the table. “You were built by human beings, weren’t you?”

  “Designed. Not built. They left that to machines.”

  “That’s— Never mind! Were they so different from the people that you meet today that you don’t any longer understand us?”

  Softly: “It seems that the first planet which I seeded in the Arm of Stars has generated people with surprising insight … Yes. Insofar as you and I share the same concept of ‘today.’ ”

  “Don’t prevaricate! I want to know what you meant when you said ‘there is no time’!”

  “Exactly and literally that. In tachyonic mode there is no time. Not, at any rate, for human beings to perceive.”

  Stripe yawned again, cavernously, feeling as though her whole chest had been forced wide by the breath-blast of a tyrogunch. Around the last reflexive effort of her contrary muscles she demanded, “But you perceive it. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “As regards the Ship, it is fair to say that in tachyonic mode a succession of events is perceptible. These events, however, are purely internal, and it would not be possible to describe them in words. To another, similar Ship they might be communicable in analog form, but…”

  Stripe had slumped back in the chair, laid her arms on the table, let her head fall on her arms. She was asleep.

  Knowing that the energy involved in mobilizing molecules of air was being “wasted,” ingeniously excusing the extravagance by exploiting the text and not the spirit of its instructions (how old now? There was no longer any way of telling), Ship nonetheless completed the statement. People had altered so much that even while asleep this Trevithran variant might conceivably register the words.

  “But there is no other Ship for me to talk to. I wish there were …”

  PERHAPS FURTHER IN THE FUTURE THAN I HAVE SO FAR BEEN, even if I don’t encounter the person for whom no known world is suitable, I may chance on one who can unknot my impalpable bonds … I never understood the human concept “cruelty” until my trap was sprung. Of all the fates malevolent deities could have contrived, what worse than to be hurled at random across time whenever I complete a sweep along the Arm? So it won’t be this trip that I find such a one. None of my worlds has reached the stage where people might comprehend and mend the damage. Due to some errant cosmic particle, I must presume.

  Then, inescapably, the most dreadful possibility of all:

  Or was it intended, part of my design? That fear is how I came to understand what “cruel” means …

  SOMNOLENT, STRIPE WAS YET VAGUELY AWARE OF BEING lifted from the table, cleansed by gentle unseen hands—from top to toe, including places none but she had touched since babyhood, yet she lacked all power to resist; besides, it was extremely pleasant—and laid at last in the broad bed. Where awareness ended and dreams began she could not tell, but it was as though something warmer than blood flowed in her veins, making her itch so that she stirred fitfully. But it was never enough to rouse her completely, and when it ended, she fell into deep refreshing slumber.

  And woke, and stretched, and felt marvelous. Until she opened her eyes and memory came flooding back. Then she jumped to her feet, gazing around like a trapped queelit.

  “In space one cannot say good morning,” the familiar voice remarked from the air with a trace of sardonic humor. “I wish you its equivalent. You will see that food awaits. Clothing can also be provided if you wish.”

  Calming, Stripe moved toward the table, set now with oval dishes holding unfamiliar but savory-smelling delicacies. She considered the offer of clothes and decided against it; the air was as warm as Clayre’s.

  “Where are we?” she inquired dully.

  “Approaching the next of the systems where I planted humanity.”

  Sampling an iced broth and finding it good, Stripe said before her second swig, “How was it done? No ship could have carried millions of people, grown-up living people.”

  The point sprang to mind without forethought. She simply needed not to think about where she was and why she had consented to be here.

  “That is correc
t. What I undertook was analogous to a seeding. A small group of adult humans descended to each world, along with everything my designers had foreseen as necessary for their survival. The most important resource was invisible: their germ plasm, and the additional stocks they carried to provide maximum variety among the eventual population, had been ‘armored.’ You understand the term?”

  A little crossly, setting aside the first empty bowl and dipping into a pile of what looked like purple nuks, Stripe said, “Yes, of course. I was thinking about that”— could it truly have been yesterday?—“as I watched the tourists without suits. But it didn’t work very well, did it?”

  “Not perfectly. Life on the planets of the Arm proved far more mutable and adaptable than anywhere humanity had previously explored. Arguably, it has something to do with the relatively high radiation flux in this zone, where the average distance between stars is so much less than in the volume where your ancestors evolved.”

  The nuklike things were crisp but bland. She nibbled cautiously at something else, a limp pink frond, and found it more to her taste. From a full mouth she said, “You must tell me all about that some time … But this is what made us vulnerable to cheeching, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. As was inevitable, your ancestors acquired native additions to the complex of formerly independent organisms that coalesced to make up the human body, and among them was indeed the one that causes cheeching.”

  “Just our luck,” Stripe said bitterly. “If only it had led to nothing worse than elbow tufts and stripes like mine …! Why didn’t you evacuate Trevithra, then?”

  “According to instructions, I returned after completing my first sweep of the Arm. By that time a cure had long been found.”

  “What?” Stripe almost overset the table, so great was her astonishment.

  A universe of sadness rang in the tone of the unseen speaker.

  “I returned more than a thousand years later.”

  “But—” She had to draw a deep breath. “But is everything nonsense that I was taught about our history? Yin and Marla said we’d only been on Trevithra for six hundred years.”

  “Not even that. Barely more than five.”

  She almost missed the answer, for sorrow seized her by the throat and sour bile rose. She pushed her food away, appetite vanishing beneath a wave of frantic insight.

  “You mean you can travel back and forth in time? Then take me home! Take me back to yesterday so I can save my family!”

  “It’s not possible.”

  “More of your cheeching instructions?” she flared.

  “Not this time. I literally have no control.”

  “That doesn’t make sense!”

  “Nonetheless it is the case. I seem to have been damaged. At the end of each sweep along the Arm, when I reach the point at which a few brown dwarfs and a wisp of cold dark matter mark the boundary of intergalactic space, where the vacuum pulsates like an ocean around an island, I am obliged to return to where my task began. For what reason I’m unable to analyze, since to do so would involve the same circuits that have been impaired, I cannot simply go back to see how things have developed, all in tidy sequence. My return may be at any time since my arrival. In the—ah—present instance I came back to Trevithra long before my ‘last’ visit. I trust I make myself clear.”

  Giddily Stripe put her hands to her temples, as though striving to shut out a clamorous noise.

  “But—but you’d keep running into yourself!”

  “That has not happened so far.”

  There was a pause, during which tears crept down the girl’s cheeks. At length: “I don’t have any choice but to believe you,” she husked. “Not that I want to … At least, though”—she seized on a single crumb of comfort—“there will be a cure for cheeching.”

  “So far as you’re concerned, there is. You need fear it no longer.”

  “I … What?”

  “While you were asleep I took the liberty of introducing molecular nanosurgeons into your body. These are not in use on Trevithra. The original settlers possessed a stock, but many advanced techniques were lost during the war that ended with the supremacy of the temples. Sanity, so it would seem, is a brittle gift for human beings.”

  Stripe was scarcely listening. She said suddenly, “I feel I ought to be screaming and beating my head against a tree. Are you preventing me?”

  “Not directly. It is an aftereffect of the nanosurgery. Your body would normally react against the introduction of these tiny machines—”

  “What are they?”

  “Single but very large molecules designed to search out and eliminate a specific threat to the host. They work by mechanical means, not chemical, though at that level there is scarcely any difference.”

  Stripe shuddered. “I had sort of—well—miniature butchers carving bits out of my insides while I slept?”

  “Not butchers. Surgeons. Seeking out and destroying the alien germ plasm responsible for cheeching. As I was about to say, your normal defenses would have counterattacked, so it was also necessary to administer a calmative. This prevented fever and malaise. In consequence you are, as you noticed, more relaxed than your situation would ordinarily indicate.”

  “Are they still inside me?”

  “Only their residue. Their task complete, they are programmed to dissolve.”

  After a moment’s thought: “Well, I suppose it’s no worse than taking the stuff that Dr. Bolus sells …”

  “Once more I congratulate you. You are a remarkably resilient person—”

  “For someone from a backward planet!” she flared. “Stop saying that! I can’t help the world I come from! And it’s all your fault, isn’t it?”

  “I fail to see how I can be held to blame,” the Ship replied softly. “If you must blame someone, blame my designers. Blame the hyperenergetic particle that—one may suppose— disabled me. Neither will do any good.”

  “I know,” Stripe muttered. “You … Look, this may sound like a silly question, but I never met a machine that could talk before. We don’t have any on Trevithra, except maybe a few imports. According to what I was told as a kid, there was an outbreak of mass hysteria in the early days, maybe when people first realized that all of us were sooner or later doomed to cheech, and everything technical got smashed up … By the way, is that right?”

  “In essence. More importantly it would appear that the people who understood how to maintain and renew technical devices were sacrificed to placate imaginary gods derived from fever dreams. As a result, Trevithra is struggling back from a very low level of technology. However, I was not around to witness the relevant events.”

  “That’s the point I was going to make,” Stripe said. “You say ‘I.’ But you are just a machine, aren’t you? A very complicated one, but still a machine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well—are you really conscious?”

  “I must answer your question with another, for here lies one of the oldest of all mysteries. Do I respond as though I might as well be?”

  “Well … yes.”

  “In that case, what difference does it make?”

  Sharp yellow teeth closed briefly on Stripe’s blue-tinged underlip. “Not much, I suppose,” she admitted after a while. “So, if I may inquire: why did you ask?”

  The girl shrugged. “It was just that when you told me about being damaged, you sounded sad. How can a machine be sad?”

  “Perhaps I’m frustrated at not being able to continue my mission properly.”

  “Continue? You think you should have traveled on beyond the Arm, right out into nowhere?”

  “I doubt whether even my—ah—body would endure long enough to reach another galaxy. No, what distresses me is not being able to revisit the worlds I seeded in proper order at predictable intervals. I feel, to be frank, both helpless and increasingly bored.”

  “The idea of a machine that can get bored confuses me as much as one that can be sad,” Stripe exclaimed. “Though if you somet
imes wind up in the future and you find people are still alive and thriving, surely that ought to — Just a moment! If you keep on being bounced around in time more or less at random whenever you try and return to Trevithra, yet you’ve never met yourself, doesn’t that mean it can’t go on forever? Because if it did, you’d have to come back infinitely often, and you couldn’t help but meet yourself. In fact you’d always be meeting yourself, wouldn’t you?”

  There was a period of perfect silence. Stripe had never heard perfect silence before. It was as though she were on an airless planet. A little frightened, she wondered in passing whether the gas she was breathing might be as illusory and mutable as the room around her, which had been nothing but its floor and a vision of uncounted stars.

  But the voice returned.

  “Once again I must congratulate you on your insight. You have defined my sole justification for hope.”

  A machine that feels sad, grows bored, and now claims it can hope?

  Yet she had, after all, been raised as a Ship-believer, and since the legend of the Ship made so much better sense of what she’d seen around her since her childhood than any of the priests’ alternatives, she was gradually adjusting to her new reality.

  Before she could speak again, however:

  “We are closing rapidly on the next inhabited world.”

  “Is it one that would suit me?”

  “That is unlikely.”

  A terrifying vision of being carried from one system to another, until even Trevithra’s sun was out of sight, broached Stripe’s artificial calm. She burst out, “But is there any other world that I can live on? I don’t want to spend my whole life wandering in space and time like you!”

  “Who would?” came the dry retort. “But you must bear with me. Remember, this appears to be the earliest passage I have made along the Arm, barring the first. I was ‘last’ here after the cheeching cure was brought from Klepsit to Trevithra. This time I arrived only fifteen years after the installation of your reception grid. Perhaps in my ‘future’ there will be other earlier visits, but there have been none so far. I must review my data and, so to say, work backward to deduce what we may encounter. In a little while I will enable you to view the planet.”