“Like a Virtual.”
“Yes. It will feel like you, have your memories. But it will not be you.”
“And this copy will be in configuration space.”
“Yes.”
“But why must I go there?”
“Because that is the place the pharaohs went. The pharaohs flocked there, from all over Sol system and beyond,” Luru Parz said. “Their knowledge — some of it preserved from long before the Qax Occupation — went with them, too. Configuration space is a black library — the final library — and it contains much we have lost.”
Nilis said, “You chose not to follow these undying refugees into configuration space, Luru Parz.”
Her face was blank. “Unfinished business,” she said.
Pirius said, “And this lost knowledge is what you want me to bring back.”
“Yes. The ancients had considerable powers. Don’t forget it was human action that turned Jupiter into a black hole. Perhaps they even knew how to land punches on the supermassive monster at the center of the Galaxy.”
He understood. “You want me to find a weapon in there. A weapon to strike at Chandra, in this hideous old library of yours.”
“Yes… but there’s a catch.”
“A catch?”
“Once in there, the refugees didn’t stay human for long. Which is somewhat inconvenient. Try to hold onto yourself, Ensign. Your identity. And stay away from the sea.”
Pirius peered at the portal. “Will I be able to come back? I mean, uh, he — the Virtual copy.”
Nilis strode up to him and took his shoulders. Pirius had never seen Nilis look so grave. “Pirius, I have taken you far from your home, your duty. I have asked you to face many extraordinary situations — and many dangers. But this is by far the most difficult thing I have ever asked you to do.”
Pirius said slowly, “I can’t come back.”
Luru Parz laughed. “But it doesn’t matter. Sentient or not, it will only be a copy, like a Virtual. And it won’t last long. It has to be you, Ensign.” She smiled, showing her blackened teeth. “You’re the only suitable resource we’ve got. I’m worn smooth with time, Nilis here is too aged… only you have the strength to endure this.”
Pirius looked at the frame. He felt numbed, not even afraid; perhaps his imagination was exhausted. He shrugged. “There are already two copies of me running around the Galaxy. I suppose I’m used to being split in half. When shall we do this?”
Luru Parz said, “The equipment is ready.”
Nilis gaped. “Now? Just like that?”
“Why delay?” She stepped close to Pirius, so close he could smell her musty odor through the chill tang of the ice. “Do it, Pirius. Step through and it will be over. Don’t think about it. Just step through…” She was grotesquely seductive. He felt oddly compelled to obey. It was as if he had a gun in his hand, pointed to his head; no matter how rational he was there was always a trace of a compulsion to pull the trigger — and that self-destructive compulsion was what Luru Parz was working on now. “Do it,” she whispered, like a voice in his own head.
Nilis said, “Oh, but this is so — I wish I could spare you this ordeal!”
“It will only be a copy,” Luru said. “Not you. What does a copy matter?”
Enough. Pirius turned away from Nilis. Luru Parz was right. If he had to do this -
He stepped into the frame. There was a flare of light, electric blue, blinding him. He pushed forward further, into the light.
He staggered. Gravity clutched at him, stronger than the ice moon’s wispy pull, as if inertial shielding had failed. The ground under his feet felt soft, dusty, like asteroid regolith.
The blue glare faded. He stood stock still, and blinked until he could see.
He was standing on sand, bits of eroded rock. He felt the gravity stress his bones, pull at his internal organs.
He was here, then, in configuration space. He felt like himself. But he was the copy, projected into this strange realm, while another Pirius, the original, was back on the ice moon.
He struggled with fear. Callisto was only seconds in his past, yet he could never go back. He somehow hadn’t imagined his impulsive action ending up like this — or hadn’t let himself imagine it — as Luru Parz had surely calculated when she talked him into this. And he didn’t want to die.
“Lucked out,” he said to himself.
He looked around. The sky above him was open — no roof, no dome. But he was used to that by now.
The light was bright, but diffuse, shadowless, without a single source, without a sun.
A mountain loomed over the horizon, a pale cone made misty by distance. The ground sloped gently toward a sea that lapped softly. But the sea was black, like a sea of hydrocarbons, as if this were Titan. He looked the other way and saw a tangle of some kind of vegetation. He dug the words out of his memory. Ocean. Land. This was a beach, then, an interface between land and the open ocean; he was on a beach.
None of this was real, of course. All of these props — the beach, the ocean — were a rendering of a more profound reality into terms he could grasp. Metaphors, drawn from the human world. But not his world. This was an abstraction to suit a different mind, a mind that had grown up on Earth. This would have been a strange place to a Navy brat even if he hadn’t come here by such a strange route.
But he had a mission. He was here to find a weapon that could strike at a galactic-center supermassive black hole. That was something to focus on. And maybe after that, he could find some way to survive after all.
He turned and trudged up the beach, toward the vegetation. It was difficult walking on the sand, which gave with every step.
The wall of vegetation that fringed the beach was thick, apparently impenetrable. He didn’t know much about plants, save what he had seen in Nilis’s garden. But then, this tangled bank was not a true forest; the plants that grew here were not “trees.” The trunklike shapes he saw, crowded with waxy, gray-green leaves, were each composed of dozens of ropelike vines, all tangled up together.
When he looked down, he saw that the vines spread out into the dirt at the base of the vegetation. They did not dig into the ground like roots, though. Instead they spread over the surface, bifurcating further — until, he saw now, they blended into structures in the sand itself, at last dissipating altogether in a scattering of grains. It was a gathering of structure, he thought, rising from the sand, melding into these apparently living things.
Luru Parz had told him none of this had anything to do with biology, but somehow, with causality, with chains of consequences gathering in significance…
He was never going back.
Suddenly the truth of it hit him, blinding him to the place in which he found himself. He probed for a sense of loss, of abandonment, found only numbness. He tried to think of other times, other places: the ancient ice mine on Callisto, and the deeper past beyond that, the worldlets of Arches Base, the dorms, the soft warmth of Torec. It took an effort, as if the brief moments he had been here were expanding to fill his life.
After all, he remembered, he was a mere representation of somebody else. He wasn’t real, and that lost life had never been his. His fear faded.
Luru had warned he might lose himself in here. Maybe losing his fear was the first stage of that. Real or not, he had his duty; that was real enough.
Something rustled, deep inside the tangle of gray-green. He looked up, startled. Two eyes peered back at him — human eyes? But another rustle, a shake of the leaves as if a wind had passed, and they were gone.
He plunged into the vegetation. “Wait,” he cried. “Wait!” He had to rip aside the tangle of vines by main force, and even so was barely able to move forward.