Resurgence

Graves leaned back in his chair and placed his fingertips together. “You know, sitting here it occurs to me that maybe the worst mistake we have made on this whole expedition has been to assume that processes in the Sag Arm resemble in any way the familiar ones of our own Orion Arm. There are Builder artifacts here, and none is in any way like those with which we have experience. To paraphrase an old philosophical thought, the Sag Arm is not only more strange than we imagine; it is more strange than we can imagine.”

Torran’s glance at Teri sent a clear message: He’s gone gaga. The councilor is off his head. He said to Graves, “The human eye and brain may be instruments, but there is nothing here for them to look at and work on.”

“Oh, but there is.” Graves pointed to the green pill-sized ball hanging before him. “We are not in free-fall, you see, even though our bodies feel as though they are. We are not even in the microgravity environment provided by the gravity forces of the ship itself. Steven calculated and compensated for those. An external gravitational force is acting on everything in this ship. A minute one, to be sure, which is why we can’t feel it. But if you observe the green sphere, you will find that it is being accelerated very slowly away from me and toward the rear bulkhead. There is a slight asymmetry, a preferred direction to this environment. I can estimate its magnitude by observation of the little marble. However, I have no explanation as to its origin.”

Teri said, “Councilor, we have an explanation.” Her glance at Torran said, Equal credit for this, all right? “Here is what we have learned. . . . ”

* * *

The No Regrets stood at a fixed location, five kilometers off center in a spherical region of radius nineteen kilometers. The space was bounded by a wall of unknown composition, impervious to external radiation and reflecting anything directed to it from inside.

“But we shouldn’t try to take the ship to either the nearest part of the boundary, or the farthest.” Teri was leaning over Torran Veck’s shoulder as he sat at the controls of the No Regrets. “Our best hope is one of the poles.”

It was their shorthand description for the only two points of asymmetry they had discovered in the spherical space. The “poles” were places where the return laser signal was much weaker than elsewhere, and they held out hope for an easier passage to external space.

“I have a vector to the nearer one,” Teri went on. “The distance is 12.3 kilometers.”

“Marked, and entered into the navigation system.” Torran was far more cheerful when he could do something that involved physical activity. “We can be on our way any time. All right to go ahead?”

“Proceed.” Julian Graves sat with his eyes closed and seemed half asleep. “I am sure that it is not necessary to remind you to proceed with extreme caution. We cannot afford to progress from a safe situation to a hazardous one.”

It seemed to Teri that Julian Graves was playing a little fast and loose with words. This was a safe place, where you had no idea how you had arrived and or where you were, and a surprise could pop up to destroy the present calm at any moment?

Teri couldn’t speak for the others, but she wanted out—out to a place where you could see stars and planets again, even if the one seemed ready to go supernova, and the other might be a world where nothing had ever lived or ever could.

“We’re closing in,” Torran said. Even crawling along, twelve kilometers for any form of spacegoing vessel was no distance at all. “We are six hundred meters away from the boundary. The drive is working harder to keep us in place, which means that a stronger attractive force is drawing us toward the wall. Nothing to worry about—we could stand a pull a thousand times as hard and still have spare drive capacity to keep us balanced. But there’s no way of knowing how things will change as we approach closer to the boundary. Our instruments have monitored our progress so far, and the ship’s computer did a fit and came up with an inverse cubic relationship with distance. That can’t go on—it implies an infinite force at the boundary—but what we have isn’t enough to worry about. Even so, I’m not sure we ought to approach any closer.”

That degree of caution from Torran was unusual. Teri leaned over him as he sat at the controls. “What’s the problem?”