"Are we going to land?" Willard asked. "Can we wear a vac suit?"
"I don't think we're going to land, honey," Tara replied.
"Why would anyone want to come here?" I asked. "It looks awfully dead to me."
Tara did not answer. She was watching the planet as we approached it. There was nothing at all we could do about it—we could not control the ship.
In orbit, we lounged on the bridge sipping dox, looking out the plex. The airless planet rolled past to one side, crisp and clear, a terrifying panorama—stark frozen mountains of silvery rock and ancient plains of pale powdery dust, awful seas of icy dust with grim islands of glittering stone. A dead world peppered with millions of harsh craters, splattered with the debris of the cosmos. An ancient, fossil moon. It was clear that it had never known life. It had been hurtling through infinity, lost and alone, since the dawn of time.
"What do you think?" I asked.
"I don't like it," Tara replied.
"Neither do I."
"Why here?"
"Yeah. Why here."
"There's a reason the O's were coming here," Tara said.
"Probably. Certainly! What do you think?"
"They were escaping from Uldo."
"All right."
"Maybe with a damaged star drive."
"But they made it here—it's quite a journey! Something worked," I said.
"All right, they made it here. But something was wrong. Maybe they couldn't go where they would normally go."
"Or maybe they couldn't go how they would normally go."
"So they came here." Tara was gazing out the plex.
"An alternate."
"It was an emergency. A designated emergency destination."
"Meet you in Omega Spiral, Null Six Sector, nobody will bother us there. And bring the tow-truck."
"I think that's it," Tara said. "That's it! We're here for a rendezvous with the O's!"
I put down my dox, carefully. We sure didn't need this.
###
"Well, I'm damned if I can figure this out." I turned away from the controls, baffled.
"This isn't going to work," Tara said. "Their minds are completely different from ours. The only thing that makes any sense here is the nav settings—and the stars. And that's because it's quantum, and Tess can read it. But the rest of it is not quantum. It's based on something else. Maybe some kind of mental energy. We could work on this all our lives and never understand it."
I was looking out at the dead world below us. This was the very edge of the galaxy, and the stark, tortured terrain was typical of almost all worlds—airless, lifeless, and incredibly beautiful.
"Tara to Wester, over."
"Sorry. You were saying?"
"I was saying we're…finished. I don't know what to do next. I've tried everything, and so has Tess. We've looked at uniphysics, rads, pressure, fluids, mags, biomags, biotics, vac, sound, quantum effects, DNA, electrochem, electrorads, lasers, vac, plasma, ionics, crystalflash, temperature…I even tried psyching it to life. Nothing makes sense. It may be mental."
"So we wait. For them to come."
"You're not going to be able to do any funny tricks this time, Wester. It was a miracle you stabilized that containment system. But we're not going to be able to drive this ship without knowing exactly what we're doing. And I can't understand these controls."
"But we've got the navs down, right? It looks like we can set it to exactly where we want to go."
"Maybe—but without activating the drive, we're not going anywhere. And as you said about the power controls, we can't even find the ON switch."
I pondered the controls. It was an incredible mess, a wide panel of glowing lights, a rainbow of lights, with plenty of movable tabs. Brilliant airy holo structures of multicolored lights hung in the air over the controls, ever changing, incredibly complex geometrical structures flashing on and off, never the same twice. Tara was right—the last time had been pure luck. But playing dice with Deadman was not recommended—especially on a star run.
"You said the promat is stable, right?" I asked.
"That's right—the unitium-based containment system for the D-neg appears to have stabilized."
"So—as far as we know, this stardrive could be in working order now."
"I don't know, Wester. We got here somehow. I guess it means one of the drives was working before—maybe the antimat. Something sure was. And whatever the problem was that we had in the power control room, it appears to have stabilized. Working order? Who knows—it could be."
Another great green O flickered and shimmered briefly on the bridge, then vanished abruptly. I was getting used to it.
"Too bad he can't help us."
"I've even tried that. Gildron has already tried to communicate with it. No luck."
"Well, how about the local drive? Assuming we can identify it."
"That won't do us any good, if the O's show up in this sector. They'll be on us in a flash. The actual propulsive power for the ship appears to be an antimat drive. The D-neg is used to generate and hold open the wormhole."
"Yeah—right." I lapsed into silence. Tara was absolutely right. It was the stardrive or nothing. We were on the wrong side of the galaxy, and we understood nothing about the stardrive.
"Have you ever heard of the C.S. New Worlds?" Tara asked.
"Yes—it's one of those ghost ships, isn't it?"
"That it is, trooper—that it is. It was one of the early explorers, in the first generation of stardrives. A fully-equipped scientific research vessel, with the mission of mapping the galaxy and discovering new worlds. They thought they had the antimat drive perfected. But they were wrong."
"Is that the one that keeps sending off signals?"
"That's the one. They blundered into another universe—an extension of our own. The signal probes pop back into our universe every few years. But the starship doesn't. They have no idea whether or not their probes are getting through. It's just a fluke, that the probes can make it back but the ship can't. They're all still alive, cruising unholy stars in an alternate universe. We have a very full record of their activities—an invaluable look into that particular universe. And the info in the probes keeps getting stranger and stranger. Several generations have grown up by now in the C.S. New Worlds, people who've never been off the ship. And they'll never return. They can't return, and we can't help. There've been a few reports of a spectral ship glowing like a star, struggling to break free from the hole, then vanishing. I don't believe that, of course. But that's what they say."
I was quiet. Tara wet her lips with her tongue, then continued. "There are other ships that disappeared into the hole, plenty of them. Ghost ships—that never came back. We're populating other universes, Wester. Who knows, maybe that's where we all came from. A lost ship marooned in time, circling a virgin world in an alien universe. Gods from the stars, to start a new race."
"Shut down," I said. "Just shut the hell down!" I did not want to hear it. We were in enough trouble already, without worrying about things that hadn't happened yet.
"Gildron won't let us play with the E!" Willard shrieked suddenly.
"You can't play with the E, honey," Tara said patiently. "It's dangerous. Why don't you play with the toolpak?"
"We don't WANT to play with the toolpak!"
"It's fun—there's a lot of stuff in there."
"We SHOULD play with the E! It's OURS!"
"Can't you shut him down?" I asked.
"Shut him down yourself!" Tara snapped. Wonderful—now she was upset with me, just because I'd yelled at her. Perfect! Marooned in the Omega Spiral with a stunningly beautiful girl who suddenly decides she can't stand the sight of me. Good move, Thinker.
"It should play with us." Willard stood before me, gazing at me gravely.
"Play with Gildron, all right?"