Erelya had notified me a week earlier that no other contacts with Engee had been reported and that I could pilot again - along with dropping a strong caution about mentioning Engee and also letting me know that I had to pass another physical screening in Runswi before taking the shuttle to Orbit Two.
The image flashed into place, and the information was stark enough: Tyndel - Alexandri Gamma/Thesalle (4/12/30).
Cerrelle looked over my shoulder and winced. 'Don't stay planetside longer than you have to.'
'Bad memories?'
'No memories, really, except hazy ones, and that's worse.'
No memories? What were we but memories governed by a form of intelligence, seeking to make our lives in some way memorable? Trying to attain dreams that would secure such remembrance?
Pushing that aside for the moment, I scanned the lists of assignments. Nothing was out of the ordinary - except that there were no direct runs to Beta Candace. Somehow, that wouldn't make much difference. Not to Engee.
I flicked off the link, mind-directly, rather than with my fingers.
'That still fascinates me,' Cerrelle said. 'Even if I know the theory, it's something else to see someone you know and love do it.'
My thoughts lingered on the word love for a long moment before I replied. 'Mind over matter, but it's a mind aided by a great deal of nanite-sized matter.' I laughed.
Then I frowned. What is Engee but a creation aided by a huge amount of nanite-sized matter? What is the difference between Engee and a needle jockey?
There wasn't an answer to that, not at hand, but I wondered, then set aside that as well, and enfolded Cerrelle in a hug born out of my own uncertainties, as if she were a rock in the storming sea, shade in blinding light.
79
Myths dissected by logic and science die, and so does the culture that lived by them.
The transit to Thesalle had been uneventful, as uneventful as any insertion and exit, but once I had gone planetside... then ... then I had understood the disorienting effect of the planet. I'd stood in the middle of the square of Machedd and looked up and seen green everywhere. The air was green - a mistlike green, unlike the heavy veils of green that cascaded down the terraced slopes - and the five-sided mountain was green -five green flush sides that rose eight thousand meters over the valley, so regular one would have thought it had been sculpted rather than weathered into shape. Except when I counted again there were four sides, and a recount gave me seven. Post-Web sensory scrambling? Or that unnamed and undiscovered hallucinogen mentioned by an Authority scientist years before, that hallucinogen presumably still undetermined.
I'd never figured that out, and Dzin hadn't helped that awareness, nor had the red-golden fires that had flared through my system as I had stood in the four-pointed green square and looked up at the mountain overlooking the town. In the end, I accepted that I wouldn't know how many sides the mountain had, and had gone and gotten some sleep.
Berya was hollow-eyed when she met me outside the Mambrino's lock the following day. 'How did you rest?' I asked.
'Didn't... not well. Should have stayed on the station.'
The control spaces were quiet as we prepared for departure and the return to Earth Orbit Two.
Departure and insertion were smooth, easy, and overspace was an even lighter green-purple than usual, a green-purple of unusual clarity as the Mambrino and I eased our way down the incline toward Sol, past the Baroque-like deep melodies of a barely formed singularity and across the first of the triplet gulfs. As we hung over the first gulf, there was a rumbling ... that sense of an unvoiced question, a sense that I ignored until we were clear of a yellow velvet ice trumpet that had narrowed into a spear and tried to impale the ship.
Even the mighty are limited ...
'That's a tautological paradox,' my mind replied. I concentrated on avoiding the deadly rectangles that followed the spear. 'True mightiness would have no limits.'
Any being within a universe is limited by that universe. Any ordered action in any universe results in a total increase in disorder. Even gathering and creating information is an ordered action, and as such, there is no way even a god can create more information than is destroyed through the creation process. Golden-red starfire punctuated the words.
'Then how can any being increase knowledge?' I eased the ship into a climb over the dissonant wake of a singularity.
By linking two universes, by using the energy from a collapsing high-entropy antimatter universe to power the creation of order within this universe.
'That would take more than a god.' I dismissed the thought and concentrated on the white/black warmth of the lunar beacon, and on untwisting the unNow and breaking out into normspace.
'Energy spikes, again.' Berya's words were bleak as I eased the Mambrino toward earth and the orbit station on its photonjets. 'You felt them, didn't you, captain?'
'Very much. I'm sure operations will want to know.' I tried to keep my own thoughts focused as I considered Engee's message.
Ordering information within any universe destroys more information than it creates ...
That was probably true, but how much of the destroyed information was usable? Usable by whom? And when? Add to that the power implied by Engee's last words ... By linking two universes, by using the energy from a collapsing high-entropy antimatter universe to power the creation of order within this universe.
I shook my head. That kind of power was impressive, and I had no doubt Engee had already been using it. That explained Astlyn's comments about the 'more energetic' matter of the Anomaly. Then, too, there was the fact that Engee had used those no-time moments of red and gold fires of the deep to sear through me at the pinnacle of overspace, from the distance of Alpha Felini to a point in overspace that all the science of Rykasha could not have precisely located. Yet Engee had.
I took a deep breath as I shut down the photon nets and brought the ionjets on line, then triggered a transmission to Earth Orbit Two. 'Orbit Two, this is Mambrino. Estimate arrival in fifteen your time. Captain Tyndel, second Berya, third Alek, six passengers. I say again, six passengers. Cargo less than three tonnes. Request conference with operations upon arrival.'
We continued inbound and had less than twenty percent of deceleration to go when Orbit Two replied. 'Mambrino, this is Orbit Two. Understand you wish conference with operations. Is that affirmative?'
'That is affirmative.'
'Request status, Mambrino! 'Status is green. Green, I say again.'
'Stet. Cleared to lock four upon arrival. No inbounds this time.'
'You meeting about the energy spikes, captain?'
'Unfortunately ... yes.'
Berya nodded. 'Some ships don't make it past them, do they?'
'That's what operations suspects, but we don't know for certain. That's why they want to know about anything like that' I didn't want to say more; I'd not wanted to say that, and I certainly wasn't looking forward to dealing with commander Krigisa or even senior captain Erelya. I might feel that Engee was more curious than dangerous, but that kind of power wasn't going to set well on Orbit Two.