“Look who’s here,” I called to Rebona, opening the hatch for the aliens.
The Bagpipes brushed past me like visions from a nightmare and headed for the control room. After a moment’s hesitation they shuffled to the main computer’s I/O ports, pulled lumpy crystalline devices from their aprons, and, using seven or eight of their manipulators with blinding speed, began to plug hair-thin filaments from their contrivances into the computer’s access ports.
“What are they doing?” I asked Rebona, but she was as confused as I was and only shook her head. “Ship, defend your integrity by whatever means necessary if it looks like you’re being endangered.”
“Noted.”
Rebona tapped at her computer’s keyboard, then stood scowling at Tall And Thin s reply.
“He says they’re preparing to talk to us. They evidently think they can set up a better translator by connecting their equipment to your ship’s computer.”
“If they don’t destroy the Matrix in the process,” I muttered uneasily, inching forward to get a better look at what the Bagpipes were up to. A few minutes later Almost Gray held out two circular bands of a milky crystalline substance that were wired into the Venture’s I/O ports through a web of dozens of tiny tendrils. Tall And Thin hooted at Rebona and appeared to be motioning for us to approach.
“He says they’re ready or done or that we should proceed, something like that.”
“I’ll go first,” I said with no great enthusiasm. “If my head blows up…” I shrugged, unable to think of appropriate instructions.
I pulled the band over my head. The material softened and adjusted itself to my cranial contours and shortly my eyes and ears were completely covered. An instant later I found myself floating in the vastness of space, adrift in the middle of a grayish cosmos dimly lighted by a billion distant suns.
Slowly, more details began to take shape. Far below I saw a river winding its way across plains and through canyons until it disappeared into the misty distance. Just above the far horizon were two larger stars; stretching between them I could discern a tiny silver thread.
I had just formed the thought of wanting to examine the river more closely when my point of view zoomed downwards until I was floating barely a few feet above its swirling, quicksilver surface. Then, with only the slightest mental flicker, I was able to move along the river at dizzying speed.
Rapids, waterfalls, whirlpools, dams, lakes, reefs, rocks, cliffs, and canyons flashed past until the river finally emptied into a broad, placid sea. I paused for a moment, then began to rise. The ocean dwindled beneath me, the horizon grew curved, and within seconds I was far above what was now a planet hanging in space.
Turning my attention to the millions of distant suns, I realized that if I concentrated on any particular pair of them I could see a tiny silver thread running between them. Was this some sort of psychological visualization of routes through nullspace? I peered in all directions until I found a thread that seemed wider and thicker than the rest, then soared over to examine it.
Once again I found myself hovering above a river.
If the first had been a wild, barely tamed torrent, this one was a placid, heavily traveled, commercial artery. On the river were… things. They were, in a sense, ships, a weird cross between houseboats, ocean liners, and Tom Sawyer’s raft. That’s not, of course, very descriptive, but what I was seeing was not the factual image of a real object but only my poor human brain’s attempt to make sense of the alien signals being pumped through my optic and auditory nerves.
In addition to the boat-like objects there were other things—presences? animals? something—in the water around the ships—silvery-gray, rounded, oval blobs. While unable to determine exactly what they were, my intuition told me that these were living creatures in some sort of symbiosis with the ships, guiding or pulling them down the river, perhaps in a larger sense actually moving the ships through nullspace between the stars.
Was all this a representation of how the Bagpipes navigated their interstellar craft, how they avoided the nullspace dangers that had plagued humanity? I felt myself growing excited. If I could learn how to utilize the Bagpipes’ technique, I could make myself the richest man in HOS.
The distant stars and the threads between them began to fade, to be replaced by a vague, shimmering image of a single Bagpipe. Deep within my head it began to speak, though not in words or phrases. There was no real syntax. It was a gestalt, a succession of pictures overlaid with something like intuition that let me detect, feel, but not necessarily fully comprehend, the whole of the idea the Bagpipe was trying to convey.
I now realized that the blob-like creatures in the rivers were my brain’s visual depiction of crystalline intelligences whose physical presence was forever locked within the veins of Crystal deposits like that which Xerxes was excavating—but whose minds were free to roam the uncharted domains of nullspace.
The Bagpipe flashed me glimpses of world after world, all of them far outside Human Occupied Space and each of them containing deposits of Carson’s crystals. Each deposit comprised a living entity, or perhaps a tribe, or a group, or even a nation of these entities.
In our own three-dimensional world the crystals seemed dead and inert, mere hunks of rock, for we humans perceived only organic life. But the lattices that formed their structure had, over millions of years, evolved to form an intelligence that, though lacking physical senses in our Newtonian Universe, manifested themselves in the domain of nullspace.
For a fleeting instant, I wondered how many other supposedly inanimate objects might have attained some kind of life in the realms of nullspace. Had some of our supercomputers, which themselves were based on crystalline technology, also become sentient dwellers there?
By mining the deposits on New Sonora, the Bagpipe told me, Xavier Xerxes would not only destroy an entire collective of these creatures, he was also potentially injuring the entire Bagpipe species, for the Bagpipes depended upon the nullspace-expressed consciousness rooted in these crystals to guide/propel their ships from world to world. Without them, their ability to cross space would disappear.
I conjured up an image of the crystals in the Venture’s hold. “What about these?”
The response was instantaneous. It was imperative that my crystals be returned from where they had been mined. There, over an unspecified period of time, the crystalline structure would repair itself and grow again into a unified whole. But time was rapidly slipping away—the damage had to be repaired soon.
“Very well,” I temporized. “But I’ll have to figure out a way to actually do this. You don’t understand human laws and customs. You’ll have to give me time to figure out how to accomplish what you want.”
“Why? Why? Why?” the Bagpipe seemed to wail. Then I got something like: “Short time. Soon.” Was that a few days? Then, “No longer. We will take action.” He projected an image of me trying to leave the planet and of their ship tracking me down, taking the crystals by force and destroying the Venture.
My vision blurred to a uniform gray and I found myself back in the Venture with my fingers fumbling to pull the Bagpipes’ device from my head. Beside me Rebona Myking was tugging at her own band. She looked at me wide-eyed, her face filled with awe. “Did you see what I saw?”
“I suppose so.” I glanced at the three aliens and heaved an irritated sigh. “At least now we know what they want and why.”