The thing that got me going this way was thinking again about the Torvil Anfract, and about Medusa. You remember Medusa? She was the lady with the fatal face — one eyeful of her and you turned to stone. Miggie Wang-Ho, who ran the Cheapside Bar on the Upside edge of Tucker’s Tooth, was a bit like that. One mention of credit, and she froze you solid, and what she did to Blister Gans doesn’t bear thinking about. But I guess that’s a story for someplace else, because right now I want to talk about the Anfract.
The spiral arm is full of strange sights, but most of them you can creep up on. What I mean is, the big jumps are all made through the Bose Network, and after that you’re subluminal, plodding along at less than light-speed. So if there’s a big spectacle, well, you see it first from far off, and then gradually you get closer. And while you’re doing that, you have a chance to get used to it, so it never hits you all of a piece.
Except for the Anfract. You approach that subluminal, but for a long time you don’t see it at all. There’s just nothing, no distortion of the star field, no peculiar optical effects like you get near Lens. Nothing.
And then, all of a sudden, this great thingie comes blazing out at you, a twisting, writhing bundle of filaments ranging across half the sky.
The Torvil Anfract. The first time I saw it, I couldn’t have moved a muscle to save my ship. See, I knew very well that it was all a natural phenomenon, a place where creation happened to take space-time and whop it with a two-by-four until it got so chaotic and multiply-connected that it didn’t know which way was up. That didn’t make any difference. I was frozen, stuck to the spot like a Sproatley smart oyster, and about as capable of intelligent decision-making.
Now, do you think it’s possible that somebody else saw that wriggling snake’s nest of tendrils, and was frozen to the spot like me? And they gave the Anfract a different name — like, maybe, Medusa. And then they went backward ten thousand years, and because they couldn’t get it out of their mind, they talked about what they’d seen to the folks in a little Earth bar on the tideless shore of the wine-dark Aegean?
That’s theory, or if you prefer it, daydreaming. It’s fair to ask, what’s fact about the Anfract?
Surprisingly little. All the texts tell you is that ships avoid the area, because the local space-time structure possesses “dangerous natural dislocations and multiple connectivity.” What they never mention is that even the size of the region is undefined. Ask how much mass is contained within the region, and no one can tell you. Every measurement gives a different answer. Measure the dimension by light-speed crossing, and it’s half a light-year. Fly all around it, a light-year out, and it’s a little over a six-light-year trip, which is fine, but fly around it half a light-year out, and it’s only a one-light-year journey. That would suggest that near the Anfract, p = 1 (which doesn’t appeal too much to the mathematicians).
I didn’t make any measurements, and I hardly know how to spell multiple connectivity. All I can tell is what I saw when I got close to the Anfract, flew around it, and tried to stare inside it.
I say tried. The Anfract won’t let you look at anything directly. There’s planets inside there — you can sometimes see them, a spectacularly beautiful world, misty and glowing. At first you think it must be one of the planets inside the Anfract — except that as the image sharpens and moves you in closer, you realize that it’s familiar, a world you’ve seen before somewhere on your travels. You once lived there, and loved it. But before you can quite identify the place it begins to move off sideways, and another world is being pulled in, a second bead on the Necklace. You stare at that, and it’s just as familiar, and even more beautiful than the first one; a luscious, fertile world whose fragrant air you’d swear you can smell from way outside its atmosphere.
While you’re still savoring that planet and trying to remember its name, it, too, begins to move off, pulled out of sight along the Necklace. No matter. The world that draws in after it is even better, the world of your dreams. You once lived there, and loved there, and now you realize that you never should have left. You slaver over it, wanting to fly down to it now, and never leave.
But before you can do so, it, too, is sliding out of your field of view. And what replaces it makes the last planet seem nothing but a pale shadow world…
It goes on and on, as long as you can bear to watch. And at the end, you realize something dreadful. You never, in your whole life, visited any one of those paradise worlds. And surely you never will, because you have no idea where they are, or when they are.
You pull yourself together and start your ship moving. You decide that you’ll go to Persephone, or Styx, or Savalle, or Pelican’s Wake. You tell yourself that you’ll forget all about the Anfract and God’s Necklace.
Except that you won’t, no matter how you try. For in the late night hours, when you lie tight in the dark prison of your own thoughts, and your heart beats slow, and all of life feels short and pointless, that’s when you’ll remember, and yearn for one more drink at the fountain of the Torvil Anfract.
Your worse fear is that you’ll never get to make the trip; and that’s when you lie sleepless forever, aching for first light and the noisy distractions of morning.
Chapter Six: Bridle Gap
The Erebus was a monster, more like a whole world than a standard interstellar ship. Unfortunately, its appetite for power matched its huge size.
Darya sat in one of the information niches off the main control room, her eyes fixed on two of several hundred displays.
The first showed the total available energy in the vessel’s central storage units.
Down, down, down.
Even when nothing seemed to be happening, the routine operation and maintenance of the ship sent the stored power creeping toward zero.
But normal operation was nothing compared to the power demands of a Bose Transition. For something as massive as the Erebus, each transition guzzled energy. They had been through one jump already. Darya had watched in horror as the transition was initiated and the onboard power readout flickered to half its value.
Now they were sucking in energy from the external Bose Network, in preparation for another transition. And that energy supply was far from free. Darya switched her attention to the second readout, one specially programmed to show finance, not engineering. It displayed Darya’s total credit — and it was swooping down as fast as the onboard power of the Erebus went up. Three or four jumps like the last one, and she would be as flat broke as the rest of the group.
She brooded over the falling readout. It was a pretty desperate situation, when a poor professor at a research institute turned out to be the richest person on board. If she had been of a more paranoid turn of mind, she might have suspected that she had been invited along on this trip mainly to bankroll it. Julian Graves had used all his credit to buy the Erebus. E.C. Tally was a computer, albeit an embodied one, and owned nothing. J’merlia and Kallik had been penniless slaves, while Hans Rebka came from the Phemus Circle, the most miserably poor region of the whole spiral arm. The exception should have been Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial; but although they talked about their wealth, every bit of it was on Nenda’s ship, the Have-It-All, inaccessible on far-off Glister. At the moment they were as poor as everyone else.