Since there was not one thing he could do about it, Drake stood perfectly still, watched, and listened. The caesura had already appeared. He could see a roiling spiral of darkness with a blacker eye at the center. A caesura was a slit in space-time, but this seemed more like a bottomless funnel, a conical swirl of ink and dark oil.
The ship was poised on the brink. Drake, knowing that his final moment of consciousness had arrived, thought of Ana. Now he would never see her again.
He squeezed his eyes shut…
…and opened them. There had been a violent moment of disorientation in which his fractionated body twisted and spun in a hundred directions at once. But when that ended, he was still alive. All was calm. The port beside him showed no chaos, no blazing glare or stygian dark, nothing but peaceful stars.
Had the Shiva prevented the caesura from operating?
“What went wrong? Why didn’t it work?”
Before he could struggle for his own answers to those questions, the ship was replying: “Nothing is wrong. Everything has proceeded exactly consistent with theory. ”
“Do you know what happened?” Of all improbabilities, this was the greatest: that Drake and the ship had been flung to
another universe looking exactly like their own. He stared again out of the port. The sky showed stars, gas clouds, and the faint misty patches of spiral nebulae. But the stars were in unfamiliar patterns, and the planet had vanished entirely. “Where are we?”
“Specifically ? I do not know.”
“The caesura was supposed to annihilate us — to throw us into another universe. This looks like our universe.”
“It is our universe. I have estimated the local physical constants, and they are the same within the limits of measurement. The probability of this occurring in another universe is vanishingly small. I am now in the process of measuring the global universe parameters.”
“Do you know what has happened to us?”
“I have no proof, but on the basis of deductive logic I can make a strong inference. The operation of the caesuras follows an unpredictable statistical pattern, thus the outcome of any specific use cannot be predicted. But the probabilities have long been known. In almost every case, the caesura serves to eject an object that enters it into another universe. Once in a million uses, the caesura serves as an instantaneous transportation device to a chosen location. And sometimes, so rarely that we had assumed it would never happen in practice, the caesura may transport an object to an unknown place and time within our own universe. The evidence indicates that has happened to us. According to the records, this possible outcome was explained to you long ago. ”
Drake remembered it — vaguely. It had been mentioned when the idea of using caesuras first came up; then he had ignored it, thinking of the caesuras only as weapons. But the Bose-Einstein Condensate that formed the ship’s cooled brain forgot nothing, and its atomic lattice memory held millions of times as much information as all of Earth’s old storage systems combined. The ship probably knew everything that Drake had ever been told, as a tiny subset of its database.
He regarded the stars outside with a new eye. “We are still in our own universe, but far away from where we started. Is it possible for you to take me back to headquarters? ”
“It may be possible, eventually. It cannot be done quickly, for several reasons. First, this vessel is able to travel only at subluminal velocities. Extended travel must necessarily be slow. Second, the caesura can cause translation through both time and space. We are now within a galaxy older than the one that we left. That also suggests the passage of considerable time.”
“What do you mean, considerable?”
“I have not yet determined that. It could be many billions of years. I will know better when I have completed my estimate of the universe’s global constants. Third, I have already sought to detect evidence of superluminal signals. I find nothing above threshold. Therefore, we cannot be anywhere within our original galaxy, or else S-wave communication has been replaced by something else. Finally, I do not recognize any galactic spatial patterns, as I would if we were somewhere within the local galactic supergroup. We have traveled, at a minimum, hundreds of millions of light-years. The problem of discovering the location of our galaxy is formidable. Even if that were solved, the problem of reaching it would remain. ”
A ship’s brain was designed to be free of emotional circuits, including any trace of humor or fear. Now Drake wished it were otherwise. He could use support at the moment from Tom Lambert or Par Leon. But the ship’s design was his own doing. He had not wanted others to be forced to face their own extinction, and perhaps to flinch. He was less lucky. He had emotion aplenty and enough intelligence to understand the implications of what he had just been told.
He stared down at his body, never used for its original purpose and now useless. It had been enhanced for what seemed a more than adequate life expectancy, at least a million years. For any point within his own galaxy that would have been more than enough. He could have endured until contact was established with other humanity or until an S-wave signal facility was reached.
Movement to the galactic scale changed everything. The home galaxy contained about a hundred billion stars, all packed within a flat disk a hundred thousand light-years across. The whole universe contained a hundred billion similar galaxies. The tiny misty patches he could see outside the ship faded to invisibility across more than twelve billion light-years. Each was an island of suns, from the densely packed galactic center to the fading edge of the outermost spiral rim.
Somewhere, far out there, his own galaxy endured. The desperate struggle to contain the Shiva continued. The suffering and terror of trillions of sentient beings were reduced by distance to a silent and ethereal dust mote of light.
He wondered what was happening now. Were other copies of him, in other ships, at last making progress against the Shiva? Were the Shiva sweeping on, unstoppable, across the whole galactic disk? He would never find out. Even if he knew his destination and could head for home at once, his body would wear out and die before he had traveled a tiny fraction of the journey.
And if the search for the home galaxy had to proceed at random? Then a searcher would still be wandering through space thirty or forty billion years in the future, when the universe collapsed toward its inexorable endpoint of infinite pressure and temperature. That searcher could not be Drake or this ship. Long before the end, in less than an eye blink on the cosmic scale, they would be dust.
It was a moment for despair. The logical thing was to end it now, before continued existence brought more grief and longing. He was looking down at his new, flawless, smooth-skinned body, wondering how it could most easily be given a peaceful end, when the ship spoke again:
“My defined actions did not extend beyond the point of entry into the caesura. I require new instructions. Can you tell me the nature of our future, and what activities you plan?”
A moment for despair. That much was permitted. Now it must be over. Someone depended on him — even if it was only a ship. He could not give up.
“You know the main criteria for stellar type and planetary orbits that encourage the development of life. Do you have instruments to determine the nearest and most promising stars that satisfy those criteria?”
“Certainly.”
“What about the development of intelligent life?”
“Essentially unpredictable. I can make crude estimates, but with little confidence in the results. The ascent of a native intelligence depends on too many random events in the evolutionary process.”