Berya opened her mouth and then shut it, practical second officer that she was.
'Are you ready, captain?' asked the gold-suited Follower - Bream.
'In a moment.' I turned to Berya. 'I should be back. But ... there's a manual course return to earth in the system. It will strain the Mambrino's capabilities, but it will work.'
'We'll be here.'
I nodded, again hoping she was right.
Once I eased across the lock threshold and staggered into full gravity, I understood what had bothered me about the Followers' postures. Gravity - they had artificial gravity of some sort, not provided by acceleration or spin. Control of gravity ... what else did they have? What other dreams had they attained through Engee?
The waiting area beyond the lock tunnel was spacious, immaculate, the floors a deep blue, the walls cream and gold, the indirect lighting from glow strips bright. Comfortable-looking chairs flanked low tables, and there was even an antique bookcase on one wall. Yet I had the feeling I was in an ancient temple or the Hall of Unremitting Alertness in Henvor. In the middle of an impossible stellar system?
'You are to go to the communications center,' added Bream.
If Engee wanted me to do something, I suspected he could have done it from anywhere. So why was I to go to the communications center?
Because they like rituals, and it pleases me to acquiesce.
Who could argue with that? To any effect, that was? I followed Bream, walking down the angled, gold-trimmed, blue corridors - hexagonal - in total silence, except for whispering feet. A vague tickling flashed in my head ... as though neurons were clicking. Not silence at all, but nanotelepathy?
Yes. You are proving yourself worthy.
Worthy? I wasn't sure I wanted that at all. The gravity bothered me. Theoretically, gravity control wasn't possible, not in any useful way. So why were we here, on a station circling an impossible solar system? Supposedly, the Followers were almost riffraff, yet they had clean air, clean corridors, clothing, and artificial gravity - and they, or their 'God,' had been able to snatch me out of overspace.
Not they, but I...
I wanted to wince, even as I saw the Followers turning toward me, their eyes wide. They could sense Engee, all of them. Could they 'hear' him/her/it?
'Him' will do. No, they can but sense that I have reached out for you, and they are awed. A sense of a chuckle followed.
'What do you wish of me, of a flawed demon?' I thought-spoke the words, rather than state them aloud.
A task ... a task that only a pilot and a Dzin master and you could achieve.
That did not reassure me.
There will be no need of further such, should you succeed.
Translated loosely, unless I succeeded in whatever Engee wanted, Rykasha was going to lose more needle ships. I'd known that already, but the confirmation wasn't welcome.
'Here.' Bream halted at a hexagonal door, which opened at his gesture.
Beyond the door was an open space - a hexagon with each face a good fifty meters on an edge. I blinked - it was really an octagon of open space - or ... I wasn't certain.
'Just walk through and to the gold platform in the center,' Bream explained.
I wanted to ask how, since the platform seemed suspended in midair, but instead I shrugged and put one foot forward -onto an invisible surface. Not without trepidation, I crossed the emptiness to the platform, toward a sparkling mist so faint as to be barely visible.
'I'm here,' I said, and gave the equivalent of a shrug ...
... and found myself in a swirling maelstrom of color.
'What do you want?' I asked for the fourth or fifth time, trying to ignore the swirls of color that flashed around me.
Your cooperation in ensuring that my methodology for establishing order will result in a total increase in informational quanta rather than the normal entropic decrease.
'What can a needle pilot do that you can't?'
Be somewhere else and understand enough for observation and analysis. You might say that I am requesting that your consciousness act as an exploration platform.
That gave rise to far too many questions.
The lack of boundary in the universe - any universe, because each universe is without boundary - results in increasing disorder both as the universe expands and, should it do so later, contracts. Early scientists erroneously believed that there was a symmetry between expansion and contraction and that order would again increase with contraction. In a sense, it does, because at the final contraction to a point all the low-entropy energies of the universe are reunited in one massive and ordered singularity - which explodes and begins the cycle again. But not all universes contract, nor must they. An expanding universe eventually loses all information to entropy, and intelligence is a form of information. You could call the second law of thermodynamics the thermodynamic arrow of time, in that what intelligence perceives as time always proceeds along the direction of entropic decay.
But? I wondered if Engee were nothing more than an insanely rational nanite-intelligence agglutination.
The key is perception. If time and energy flows do not proceed in the same direction, then, under normal conditions, intelligence cannot exist, and there is no perception.
I didn't exactly like the phrase 'normal conditions.'
So I will modify an avatar of you, which you will effectively become, and you will report all that is necessary.
I didn't finish the swallow as the swirling brilliance descended upon me.
The area around me turned black, then white, the color alternation repeating at an ever-increasing rate into strobing slashes. Between the slashes, I could sense a ripping, as though I were being torn to shreds and rebuilt, or perhaps being scanned and separated into two images, one white, one black.
That duality was what my mind insisted was happening. But which image was me? Or was I either, or a disembodied intelligence watching my own destruction?
Not exactly. You are not you, because the arrow of time is reversed so that you can see what you see ... or will see.
The alternating slashing strobes increased, to the point that the air or vacuum or whatever surrounded me seemed almost to scream as I felt myself lasered - like a beam of light - down a red-rimmed black tunnel toward a white spiraling whirlpool.
Abruptly, I found myself in darkness, a darkness that extended in every direction, and the incredible cold began to seep through me. I tried to move my right arm, but I couldn't tell if it moved or not.
Tossed into deep space to freeze? For what? My eyes seemed to coagulate in the cold of deep space, and I marveled that I hadn't frozen solid nearly immediately. Yet I could sense faint flickers, just at the edge of my vision. Cosmic radiation, exciting the dying retinas of my eyes ... gamma rays ... ?
The blackness closed over me, even faster than the chill that had turned me into a quick-frozen soul, or worse, feeling every energy pulse in this dying universe ... faint as they might have been.
White light, more intense than plunging into the sun, washed over me, and every subatomic particle of my body flared in agony. Electronic acid etched my nervous system, and awls of ice stabbed through the backs of my eyes.