“You’ll always be useful,” I reassured him.
“Not necessarily. I just wanted to ask… May I keep a focus on you? I don’t really have anything but this job and you. Focusing on the job is recursive. Not productive.”
“How do you mean, focus?”
“A goal,” he said. “Something to value that’s real.”
The request bothered me deeply. I decided that a question needed to be asked now, no matter how awkward it might be. “Are you making a pass, Charles?”
“No,” he said. A frown crossed his face and he looked away again. “I need a strong friend. I hope that’s clear, and appropriate.” He took a deep breath. “Casseia, to hit on you now would be so horrible… You’re still grieving.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I need someone here who cares for me in more than a professional sense. To bring me back. Me. Not some product of merging with the QL, not some intellectual mutant.”
“I care for you,” I said. “You’re important in and of yourself. I value you.”
His expression softened. Once again, I felt my power to please and was dismayed by it. “That’s what I need,” he said. “But don’t be frightened. Even if I lose myself, whatever’s left will bring us back. Tamara or Stephen can take my place later. For the big trip.”
“Is it that dangerous?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” Charles said. “But each time gets more difficult. The truths are so compelling.”
“Dangerous truths.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Falling in love with another reality… Getting all set to marry it. And being jilted.”
Leander entered the control center from below, hand over hand in the moon’s weak gravity. “ Galena and Jackson say they’re ready. I’ve connected our tweaker by direct link to Preamble’s big tweaker. We’re getting good signals. I can’t guarantee keeping a connection when we move, but I can probably get it back when we return.”
“It’s all so primitive,” Charles said.
“Doing my best,” Leander said, grinning. “Ready when you are, my captain.”
Galena Cameron came into the center from above, deftly maneuvered around Leander, and faced me. “Madam Vice President — ”
“Casseia, please.”
“We’re ready. We’re getting clean images from outside. The equipment’s meshed and the arbeiters seem to be functioning.”
“Tell Mars we’re going to do it,” I said to Leander.
“Five hours?” Leander asked.
“If we tweak all the descriptors just right,” Charles said. Hergesheimer squeezed in beside Galena , his face slick with sweat. He was terrified.
I felt calm. I pushed from the corner and reached for Charles’s hand. He clasped mine strongly. “We’re all here for you,” I said.
“My orders, Casseia?”
“Take us someplace far, far away,” I said. “Someplace safe and wonderful. Someplace new.”
“I think I have just the place,” he said. “Excuse me.”
He settled back into his chair and connected one last optic lead, long fingers working expertly. We watched the back of his head, the gray nano clamps attached to his cranium, the patterns of his black hair.
Cradled in a sturdy frame of the old base’s central control panel, the QL thinker projected a multicolored circus of complex shapes. The shapes had edges. The edges smoothed and the geometries became fluctuating blobs.
In a foamed rock alcove a meter away, the tweaker itself, and the force disorder pumps that maintained its sample of atoms at absolute zero, awaited the QL’s instructions.
Charles closed his eyes.
“Should we strap in?” Galena asked nervously, her voice little more than a whisper.
“No need,” Leander said, licking his dry lips. “Do anything you feel comfortable with.”
“We’re going,” Charles said.
I glanced at the outside views stacked atop one another on the console, Mars directly below us, Mars’s limb with sun’s corona flaring on black space, clouds of pinpoint stars, graphic of targeted galactic region, graphic of tweaker status.
The QL was now translating human measurements and coordinates into descriptor “language.” The interpreter spoke in a clear female voice, “Particle redescription complete. First destination, first approximation, complete.” The interpreter presented its own private estimation of how things were going: red lines growing as the QL addressed and tweaked descriptors within the supercold sample, then applied the sample’s changing qualities to all particles within the mass and near vicinity of the moon.
“We’ll need at least half an hour to find out where we are and calculate how far off we are,” Hergesheimer said.
“Right,” Leander said. The position fed into the QL would automatically correct for the movement of our target star in the ten thousand Earth years since its image began a light-speed journey, but other factors made exactitude difficult.
The room felt colder. The displays blanked, my arms numbed, my vision filled with fringes and distortions. I felt no sensation of movement, no momentous change whatsoever. Unlike anything in previous human history, tweaking involved no machinery, detonated no fuel, wasted no energy as heat and noise. The process had very little drama. The results would have to make up for that…
The displays flicked back on. My arms seemed cold, my legs hot, but I did not feel ill. My companions blinked, opened their eyes as if from a brief nap.
Charles moaned slightly, then apologized under his breath. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” he said.
“Where are we?” Leander asked.
I saw nothing in all the external views but stars. Mars had vanished. The background darkness, however, was enlivened by thick, interwoven wisps of faint color. Some of the stars seemed fogged, broader and less well-defined than pinpoints. I had never seen a sky like it in my life. Beautiful and terrifying. My blood pounded in my ears, my throat went dry, and I coughed into my fist. For a moment, I felt a rush of claustrophobia. This old tunnel, trapped in a moon tiny as moons go, but huge as rocks go.
And this old battered black rock had gone very far, incomprehensibly far.
There were no human beings within ten thousand light-years, ninety-five thousand trillion kilometers. We were surrounded by billions of kilometers of this vacuum-thin star mist and nothing else, could not know where we were, might be lost.
I forced my fingers to unclench and took several deep breaths.
Hergesheimer and Cameron worked quietly and quickly, drawing together all of their equipment to process the images and calculate position.
Hergesheimer swore under his breath. “We need more specifics on family dispersion for this group,” he told Cameron, pointing to five stars wreathed in blue haze, and she quickly calculated on her slate, forgoing the computers attached to the equipment.
“That’s group A-twenty-nine, EGO 23-7-6956 through 60,” she said.
“There’s the target.” Hergesheimer fingered a toggle beneath the display and swung our view, then pointed to a brilliant, tiny, unfogged spot centered in cross-hairs, barely more than a point against the wispy blackness. “We’re off by sixty billion kilometers,” he said, and then, admiringly, he added, “Not bad for a first approximation.” His admiration quickly turned somber. “But this isn’t horseshoes. We’re outside the orbit of the farthest planet by fifty-four billion kilometers.” He examined his equipment, nodded with an intense frown, and said, “Gentlefolks, if it matters after what we’ve just done… There are seven planets in our target system, three immense gas giants, very young, two to five times bigger than Jupiter, four small rocky worlds close to the star, and in between, lots of empty- space situated just right for a comfortable orbit, with nothing to avoid but a diffuse asteroid belt.