Strider's Galaxy

Elliptical

The nightmare dragged on: it was difficult to tell how long it was lasting, since every clock on the command deck—including all their wristwatches, Pinocchio's internal time sensor and the chronometric software in Nelson's thighputer—had stopped. Strider hadn't paid full attention to Pinocchio's comment that "We seem to have fallen entirely out of the Universe" because it had appeared to make no sense at the time. Now it was beginning to feel like the only possible answer.

But of course she couldn't tell her personnel that. As far as they were concerned, this was to be treated as a temporary interruption to the usual service. She recorded a loop-chip, so that every now and then her seemingly unperturbed voice boomed out through the hull, remarking that there had been, you know, this little slip-up, but no one was to panic or anything.

Then Strider began to feel physical sensations.

A glance at Leander and Nelson was enough to tell her that they were feeling the same.

This was something that couldn't be hidden from the personnel.

At first it was the feeling of being stretched, somehow, from head to foot. She flipped herself around, but it didn't make any difference. The tugging—irritating rather than painful—still seemed to run along the length of her body.

She wondered if she might throw up. The blood was rushing to her head and her feet. The general effect was vertiginous, and vastly disorienting.

"Do you all feel this?" she said hoarsely, knowing the question was unnecessary.

"Feel what?" said Pinocchio, who was still trying to figure out a safe way to hook himself into at least enough of the Main Computer's subroutines to restore lighting and atmospheric replenishment.

Strider explained as quickly as she could. The nausea made it difficult for her to speak. It would be disastrous if any of the three humans on the deck actually did vomit. Vomiting in free fall was one of the most antisocial acts of all. Strider did her best not to think of what was happening back in the hull. Her looped voice boomed out again. Some reassurance that must be giving right now, she thought sourly.

Worse followed.

Initially Strider thought that someone had pinched her thigh, but immediately she realized this was ridiculous. Then there came another pinch, this time on her cheek—not a hard one, but disconcerting.

"What in hell is this?" she yelled.

Again Pinocchio looked baffled. It was clear that, whatever was causing these effects, they were psychological rather than physical.

The odd little intimate pinching came more and more frequently.

"I don't like this at all," said Leander. She shoved herself away from her screen and drifted across the deck, swatting the air around her, as if trying to fight off a sex-pest. As a result she performed a complicated three-dimensional dance.

"Stop it!" said Strider. "You're just making things worse for yourself."

"Couldn't get much bloody worse," muttered Nelson.

"Done it," said Pinocchio. The entirety of his upper chest was open to view. A mass of wiring ran from him to the interface he had uncovered in the wall. Strider boggled. She had never realized the full complexity of the hardware that resided inside her friend and lover.

"Done what?"

"I have reinstituted air replenishment. We had seven point three seven days before the atmosphere would have degraded to such an extent that it would have been unable to sustain human breathing." The bot was spreadeagling himself against the bulkhead, as if to get closer to the interface. Strider was reminded of biological specimens back in her childhood: a frog pinned out on a board. "I will now try to restore lighting throughout the craft. This is a very difficult task for a computer as small as my own. I will therefore shut down my other functions."

He turned and gave Strider a smile, and then his face went into immobility and the lights in his eyes faded. It looked exactly as if he had just died.

Several seconds passed, and then the overhead lighting on the deck flickered uneasily into life.

Strider shook her head angrily, as if to shake away tears. Pinocchio couldn't have killed himself: he knew what his primary imperative was on this mission. But it felt to her as if he had. If they ever escaped this craziness, she would find out if her instincts were right or wrong.

"Are you getting anything out of the instrumentation now?" she said to Nelson.

"Not a thing," said the big man. He winced as an invisible pair of fingers pinched him yet again. "We should be getting something, thanks to our friend here." He nodded towards the bot. "He's imported enough of the Main Computer's systems that he should be able at least to perform some kind of triangulation exercise to try to estimate where the shit we are, but"—he gestured towards the view-window overhead—"there's nothing to triangulate against, is there?"

"Are we moving?" said Strider, instinctively slapping at her shoulder as she felt another pseudo-pinch.

"Who could tell?" said Leander, who had at last got herself under control. She carefully sprang from the far wall back towards her seat, swooping adroitly downwards and pinning her feet under the restrainers there.

The lights dimmed for a few moments to a ghastly, sickly yellow, and then brightened again.

"Remind me to give that goddam valet a drink when this is over," said Nelson. "If it ever does get over."

"What's happening?" said Strider, maneuvering herself clumsily towards him and peering at his screen. Just for a second the display had lit up.

"He was right," said Nelson somberly. "We've fallen out of the Universe. What we've gone and done is found ourselves a wormhole." He leaned back in his chair, reaching his arms behind him in a simulation of boredom. "The big question is whether or not we can ever drop back into the Universe again."

Strauss-Giolitto slapped O'Sondheim across the face, once, twice and then a third time. She almost missed the third time because the previous impacts were causing her to drift away from him.

"Get yourself together, you asshole!" she screamed at him. "You're supposed to be the First fucking Officer on this fucking ship!"

He looked at her, and continued weeping.

"Leave him alone," said Lan Yi quietly. "He can't help it."

"He goddam can!" said Strauss-Giolitto furiously. Something pinched her ankle, and in response she swiped out again at O'Sondheim. This time she was a meter out of reach. Her body did a complicated pirouette, and she was lucky not to hurt herself as she slammed head-first against the forcefield futon. The vague glow of the forcefield had been their only source of illumination for what seemed like half a lifetime.

Outside, the daylight-simulator began to give a grey-yellow light, then brightened fitfully.

"All of us react differently to stress," said Lan Yi.

Strauss-Giolitto looked at him. She wouldn't mind hitting him as well.

"This turd is supposed to be our second-in-command," she said. "If anything happened to Strider, he's the one our lives would rely on. And look at him!"

Lan Yi chose not to.

O'Sondheim had at least stopped his loudly hysterical sobbing. The darkness and the free fall had seemed at first not to affect him much, but then the sensations of the bodily interference had started, and the First Officer had cracked completely. Lan Yi had tried to talk him back to sanity, but it hadn't worked. Strauss-Giolitto's more brutal methods hadn't been much use either—although they'd obviously done her a lot of good. O'Sondheim's face was a mass of bruises, yet he was still quietly weeping.

The lighting was improving steadily now.

"What do you think went wrong?" said Strauss-Giolitto for the thousandth time.

Lan Yi looked at her blandly. "I have been pondering that particular problem ever since the lights went out." He smiled bleakly. His face looked very old all of a sudden. "My guess is that we have fallen into a wormhole. It is the only reason that I can think of for the drive to have died."

She looked at him disbelievingly.

"I thought wormholes were supposed to be rare," she said.

"So did I," replied Lan Yi. "So did everyone. It seems we might have been wrong." He shook his head sadly. "Now it seems vanishingly unlikely that we shall ever see Tau Ceti II—which is a great pity, because it was an experience to which I was very much looking forward."

"You can think of that at a time like now?"

"I can think of very little else," said the old man, "except that perhaps some of our colleagues were injured when the g disappeared. Now that we have light again, I believe you and I might go to find out."

He pushed himself towards the door, and she followed.

"Just stay here, you understand, you creep," said Strauss-Giolitto to O'Sondheim.

He nodded wordlessly, and the tears continued to flow.

Humanity had tried to devise some means of faster-than-light travel for centuries, but without success. Very little technological work had been done on the problem, for obvious reasons, but theoretical physicists had nagged away at it interminably—and uselessly.

In theory there were a number of ways, all of which seemed futile. You could find a spinning black hole, then adopt just the precisely correct trajectory as you fell into it, so that you would emerge somewhere millions of parsecs away in the Universe—or perhaps even in an entirely different universe. Black holes had been identified, and the configuration of the x-ray spectrum given off by the raw matter falling into some of them confirmed that they were indeed spinning. The nearest useful candidate was a healthy three hundred parsecs from the Solar System, which meant that just getting there, using current technology, would take the best part of two millennia and require as much fuel as a small moon. On arrival, you would probably have to spend decades—if not centuries—studying the black hole and preferably correlating your data with a secondary team investigating another spinner. Comparing notes would be a lengthy business: the next nearest spinner was unfortunately in almost exactly the opposite direction from the Solar System, so that a one-way message would take a little over two thousand five hundred years.

Then, when finally you were ready to boldly go, you could dip into the black hole and discover your constituent subatomic particles evenly distributed throughout one if not several universes and quite possibly in different eras of each universe's lifespan.

As this was not an appealing option, humanity instead turned its attention to wormholes, theoretical physical constructs which might link two different parts of the Universe closely together, subverting the normal fabric of spacetime. All the mathematics pointed to the fact that wormholes ought to exist, but no one had ever been able even to come close to suggesting how you could find one—or, much better, build one. In fact, the latter task was probably impossible: wormholes, if they did indeed exist as the theory said they should, were quantum structures based on the fact that the physics of reality is reliant not on certainty but on probability—or in their case improbability—so in order to build one you would first have to construct improbabilistic tools. Since no one had the first idea what an improbabilistic tool looked like—although jokes about the term had become thoroughly stale with age—this option, too, seemed unappealing.

A third option had seemed for a while to be encoded tachyons. Tachyons are particles that travel faster than light: indeed, they require to be energized in some unimaginable way if they are to be slowed down to light-velocity. In their natural state, tachyons travel at infinite velocity, and are thus everywhere in the Universe at once. If a craftful of human beings could somehow be encoded into tachyonic form and then reconstituted as normal matter somewhere else, its translation from one side of the Universe to the other could take no time at all—even better, since theory predicted that tachyons also travelled backwards in time, it could arrive at its destination centuries before its departure. This raised the intriguing possibility of being able to send a tachyonic message home to say: "Don't bother coming. We're here already."

Perhaps luckily, no one had ever caught a tachyon, so this mode of travel was abandoned even as a possibility—especially after the theoretical physicist Shutzi Katanara proved beyond any possible doubt that tachyons could not exist. The equations Katanara produced were so beautiful that they sang: there could be no doubt about his conclusions.

Attention turned back to wormholes. If only, if only, if only . . .

What human scientists hadn't reckoned on was that wormholes were everywhere. The trick of interstellar navigation wasn't finding them. It was avoiding them.

That was what Lan Yi had just realized, while he'd been curled up in the darkness listening to Strauss-Giolitto brutalizing O'Sondheim.

He found the idea exquisite.

And exquisitely frightening.

Yet another invisible somebody pinched him softly, and he hardly noticed.

Just at the door, Lan Yi paused. "I'll be with you in a moment," he said to Strauss-Giolitto. "Wait here."

He shoved himself towards a low cupboard behind his futon and rummaged inside it for a moment. "Here," he said, tossing something gently towards her.

It was a belt-rope. She clipped one end on to her belt and idly swung a circle with the other, which was weighted by its small grav-grapple. The device was for use in emergencies on-planet. Her unthinking action began to make her spin very gradually in the opposite direction. She clutched the doorpost.

"What about you?" she said.

"I insisted on having a spare," he said, producing it. "I insisted on having spares of everything, except my body. I am a lot older than you are, Maria Strauss-Giolitto, and am more likely to find myself in difficulties. It is probably because I am aware of this that I am a lot older than you are." He smiled.

He cued his musibot with a couple of jabs of a finger. Music filled the cabin. Then Lan Yi made a further manipulation and the sound began to boom out almost deafeningly. O'Sondheim, almost forgotten by the other two, recoiled, but the blast of noise seemed to bring him to his senses. He drew the back of his hand across his eyes, and then looked around alertly.

Lan Yi glanced at the First Officer. Was it possible that O'Sondheim could help them? No: there wasn't a third belt-rope. He gestured to O'Sondheim that the man should stay where he was, and by a miracle the First Officer understood what he was trying to say.

Back at the door, Lan Yi found the wall of sound was more tolerable. He hitched his own belt-rope on.

"We go one after the other between the cabins," he shouted into Strauss-Giolitto's ear. "Never let go of the rope, even when you're inside a cabin. If the g comes back suddenly, we could be killed if we weren't secured."

She nodded. It was tempting just to "swim" through the free fall to the next cabin but if either of them were halfway between cabins when an abrupt rearward force of 2g was reintroduced . . . No wonder Strider had been so insistent over the intercom that people stay indoors.

He raised his grav-grapple and shot it towards the wall of the cabin nearest to them. Then, to her surprise, he moved not towards it but in the opposite direction, instead leaping towards the Santa Maria's stern, paying out his belt-rope as he went. Almost immediately she saw the sense of what he was doing. They should start with the rearmost cabin and work their way forwards.

She followed suit, swinging in a long loop, carefully adjusting the control at her belt so that there was never too much of the rope paid out slack at any one time. If the gees were suddenly restored, the tautening of a slack rope could break her back. Even a taut rope would probably do so anyway, but at least this way they were reducing the risks.

She arrived beside Lan Yi at the rearmost cabin, panting slightly.

"That is the end of the most dangerous part of the exercise," he said, as calmly as if he were discussing the weather. The noise of the music he had started playing was far quieter here but still perfectly audible.

"What did you do that for?" she said, nodding towards his distant cabin as he shoved open the door of the one they'd arrived at. "It's a beastly racket."

"It's Telemann," he said. "Get inside."

She obeyed, finding herself confronted by a woman and a terrified child. The woman was holding herself and the child down on to the larger of the room's two forcefield beds. There was a stench of urine in the enclosed space. She knew the child, of course, from having taught him. "Hello, Hilary," she said, smiling. "There's nothing to be afraid about."

"Well," continued Lan Yi, pulling himself through the door behind her and shutting it firmly, "it's melded Telemann. Variations on a tune by another composer of roughly the same epoch, but whose name has been forgotten. If you are so very interested, Maria Strauss-Giolitto, the tune is called 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands'. I prefer the Telemann melding best of all, but my musibot has produced some other interesting combinations based on it. The Mozart version is over-fussy, however."

"It sounds beastly to me," said Strauss-Giolitto. Her own tastes ran to randomusic, where the musibot was programmed to produce randomly selected series of tones and rhythms.

The woman was looking at the two of them as if they were insane. "What the hell are you people talking about?"

"Quite right," said Lan Yi, with a little formal nod. "We are checking the cabins to ascertain the extent of any casualties there may have been, and to see if we can help. I played the Telemann piece because I always find it most soothing, and I thought that it might calm others. But it seems"—he shrugged towards Strauss-Giolitto—"that I may have been wrong."

Strauss-Giolitto silenced him with a raised hand. "Are you and Hilary the only people here?" she said, trying to make her voice sound friendly but unconcerned. "This cabin has sustained no casualties?"

"Just us two are here," said the woman. "We're OK."

Strauss-Giolitto's apparent calmness was infecting the child, who for the first time since they'd come through the door was beginning to look less frightened. "Hello, Maria," he said, forcing a smile. "I was doing my homework when this thing happened, so I . . ."

"I think we'll allow you to be late with your homework this once," said Strauss-Giolitto, grinning desperately.

Lan Yi had opened the door, and was fiddling at his waist. His belt-rope wound itself in swiftly until the grav-grapple finally appeared. "Please that you do the same," he said to Strauss-Giolitto.

She did so, at the same time thinking that Lan Yi must be very much more worried than he was letting on. His Argot, although habitually a little stiff and uncolloquial, was normally flawless.

"We will leave you now," said Lan Yi to Hilary's mother, patting Hilary's head. "I suggest that you retain your current position until instructions are given otherwise."

He nodded to Strauss-Giolitto, and she launched her grav-grapple towards the next bow-ward cabin, then let her belt-rope reel her towards it.

This time they had to manoeuvre themselves over the cabin's roof before they could reach the door. It was a terrifying few moments before they found themselves safely inside—only to discover that the cabin was empty.

They reached the fifth cabin before they found their first casualty. Strauss-Giolitto vaguely recognized him as a junior biochemist who had made a few amiable passes at her between Phobos and Jupiter. Now she felt embarrassed, because she couldn't even remember his name. He floated near the ceiling, his neck obviously broken. There might have been a chance, had a medbot got to him quickly enough, that he could have been saved, even yet; but she and Lan Yi had no means of summoning a medbot—besides, from what had been going on, it seemed very likely that the Main Computer was out of action, and the medbots were dependent on it, their own small puters being just sufficient to manipulate the various devices they employed. Maybe, if you were lucky, one of them could diagnose and splint a fractured leg. If you were unlucky, you could find your broken leg helpfully crammed down your throat.

"There's nothing we can do," said Lan Yi with a shrug, his face unperturbed. "We must speed on our way, Maria Strauss-Giolitto."

She felt guilty, just leaving the biochemist floating there, but Lan Yi was right: there was nothing they could do.

A few cabins later, however, they were able to make themselves useful. An agronomer had broken his wrist, and the darkness and the pain of the injury—plus the shock of finding that, unlike at home on the blisters of Mars, no medbot had arrived within minutes—had virtually sent him out of his wits: he was just staring at his limp hand as if it were some rare and valuable objet trouvé.

Lan Yi found a vest in a drawer and ripped it efficiently into strips, then began applying an emergency bandage. The agronomer made no protest, even when his bones ground together. Strauss-Giolitto tried her best to get through to him, speaking softly to him, forming words that didn't mean very much but attempting to make an encouraging pattern of sentences. She didn't know if she was having any success: in the end they had to leave him there, now strapped to his bunk, and carry on their nerve-racking survey.

They must have worked their way through over half the cabins—repairing lesser injuries and finding only one more fatality—when the gees came back on.

Despite all their precautions, they were slammed against an inner cabin wall, Strauss-Giolitto on top of Lan Yi.

She gave a shriek of surprise. He gave a yip of pain. As the cabin slowly swivelled to right itself, they slid to the floor together.

Strauss-Giolitto picked herself up wearily. One grew grudgingly half-accustomed to 2g in time—rather a long time, if you had spent much of your life on Mars—but it took only a few hours in free fall to realize quite what a burden the acceleration put on one's body.

She reached out a hand to the elderly Taiwanese.

"I think not," he said crisply, lying there. "You are a big person, Maria Strauss-Giolitto, and that was a heavy impact. You have broken my arm and at least one—no, certainly it is two—of my ribs."

He tried and eventually managed to sit up. Then he fainted.

"Holy Umbel!" shouted Leander, suddenly forced deep into her chair.

"You called," said Nelson. It was an old joke between them, and he spoke it automatically. He was as stunned as she was by what had just happened. Neither of them noticed Strider hauling her once-more ponderous body across the deck to assure herself that Pinocchio was securely moored.

The resumption of acceleration was shock enough in itself.

The view through the fore-window above them was something else.

The colors were like those of a skin of oil floating on the surface of a puddle of water—oddly metallic-seeming greens and blues and yellows and pale reds and grays—but all the hazy-edged random shapes were moving with frenetic speed through and around each other. Wherever the two officers looked, the dazzlingly colored forms seemed to be trying to create coherent patterns, but never quite succeeding. The effect was almost impossible to look at; it was almost impossible not to watch.

Strider walked heavily over to stand between them.

"Well, it's different," she remarked lamely. At least the succession of little pinching sensations seemed to have cut out as the acceleration cut back in.

Now there was a background of angry red flames behind the schemes of color, and traceries of hot yellow and white sparks were flitting rapidly through them.

"Do you think we've ended up in somebody's bonfire?" said Nelson drily.

"Seems as likely as anywhere," said Strider. She glanced away from the display of brilliances at the screens in front of the two officers. They were still dead. That meant the Main Computer was still out. She'd suspected as much: Pinocchio hadn't recovered consciousness. She was much more worried about losing the Main Computer than about where the Santa Maria might be taking them: even if they found themselves back in the Solar System—or back on course for Tau Ceti II—without the Computer they were dead. Pinocchio was able to keep the most basic systems running, but there was no way he could tackle the complex problems of astrogation the Main Computer was designed in part to solve. And who knew how long he could keep even those basic systems functioning?

Her eyes were dragged up to the window again.

There were quite a few electronic brains aboard the Santa Maria, of course. She speculated about the possibilities of trying to hook them all up together—or, rather, getting Pinocchio to do it—but she realized even as the thought was passing through her head that it would be impossible. The medbots and most of the others were really hardly more than drones served out of the Main Computer. Aside from that there were the rudimentary bots used for entertainment. Personal puters were limited in their scope, and affected by the speed with which their human operators could act. In fact, speed was another reason why her half-formed crazy scheme could never work: astrogation required a machine that could think fast, not just in working out the problems but in coordinating all the various minor rocketry that would alter the Santa Maria's configuration in space.

Once more she turned to look at Pinocchio. Still his face was lifeless.

The blaze of colors ahead of them was changing in nature yet again. The illusion of oiliness had returned, but it was now as if the oil were, against a sullen black sheet of water, congealing into droplets, each made up of myriad iridescent shades. They were darting around all over the field of view as if in some hyperactive Brownian motion, their velocity and their constant changes of direction making the eye try to follow individual balls of light, but always unsuccessfully. Strider again felt, despite the insistent tug of the gees on her, that she was dropping from a great height and at fantastic speed. Not for the first time during these past few subjective hours, her gorge began to rise.

"Run a check on casualties, Leander," she said, keeping her voice controlled.

"Yes, Captain," said the officer. She spoke into her throat-mike, but clearly received no answer. Of course, Strider could see Leander realizing, the throat-mikes were linked through the Main Computer; it was hard to remember that the things you'd taken for granted most of your life didn't work any more. Leander prepared to repeat the message through her commline.

"I meant physically go and find out," said Strider.

Leander pushed herself up from her chair and made leadenly for the door. With a sense of relief—standing still for any length of time was the most difficult thing of all to do in the accelerative gees—Strider slid herself down to take Leander's place.

She ran her fingers across the keyboard, looking resentfully at the still-blank screen. They'd switched off the banks of sensor screens around the walls of the deck—all except the clock and the one through which Pinocchio had rigged himself, of course—some while back, so that they wouldn't be driven mad by the senseless audio and visual static. In a moment, after she'd rested briefly, she'd try them again. But the static had been as nothing compared to the breathtaking theater of light that was playing all around them now.

And then it was over, and they were looking out on a starfield.

The figures on the clock began to move again, but neither Strider nor Nelson realized it at first.

"Well," said Nelson after a while, running a palm nervously across his broad forehead, "it looks like we've got someplace at last."

Strider stared at the dead screen in front of her, feeling betrayed. Somehow she'd expected that merely emerging into normal space would reactivate the Main Computer.

"The big question now is," Nelson continued, "where we've actually got to."

Without the Computer there was no way of telling. Even just two years out from Jupiter many of the familiar constellation shapes had become strangely distorted. Now it was obvious that they were a lot further from home than that: there was nothing remotely recognizable out there at all. Moreover, the starfield seemed unnaturally rich. It wasn't something you noticed at first; instead, it slowly dawned on both of them that there were rather too many stars around. And that more of them were red than they should be.

"Do you think we've ended up somewhere near the Hub?" said Strider.

"No, sweet light of my life," said Nelson slowly, a look of both horror and wonder spreading across his big face. "I don't think we're anywhere near the Hub."

She turned in her seat to follow his line of sight.

Visible through the stars, not quite edge-on to them, stretching over maybe thirty degrees of her field of vision, was something she'd thought she'd never see except through telescopes and in holos.

A spiral galaxy.

Neither of them spoke for several minutes as they took in the implications. The sight was beautiful: that was what Strider registered first. It was impossible not to feel awe. Although the galaxy was not the brightest object in the Santa Maria's sky, it possessed sheer beauty and massiveness that made it the most impressive thing she had ever seen. And it had a reality that even the holos produced by Hubble XVII could never hope to emulate. What stunned the senses most were the colors of it—little by way of structure could be seen from here. The colors of galaxies in holos always seemed artificial—and often enough they in fact were, having been deliberately enhanced for one reason or another. But the colors of the galaxy she was looking at were true ones. They seemed almost alive, even though they were motionless. Patches of blue and white and yellow predominated closer to where the Santa Maria seemed to hang; beyond, the hues shaded towards both red and a brighter blue, where the hub was. The hub itself was bigger than she'd expected: she'd always known that spiral galaxies were basically flat with a slight bulge in the center, but from this angle you could get a full appreciation of how large the bulge really was.

The second thing that she took in was the remoteness of the galaxy. The sheer distance chilled.

Finally she said: "I think we must have ended up in a globular cluster. That's our old friend the Milky Way over there."

"I think not," said Nelson quietly. "Globular clusters are almost all high above the galactic plane, and we're looking at this baby almost from the side. That's not the Milky Way at all, I reckon. I can try to find out."

She looked quickly at him.

He gestured towards his thighputer. "I have data on the Milky Way in here. I can get a screen view of what it should be like from this kind of location."

She turned back to look at the spiral. Even if the personnel of the Santa Maria died here, as far as she was concerned it would probably be worth it. This was the kind of sight that she had come into the SSIA for—knowing that it was something she'd never be able to see for herself, but at the same time getting part of the thrill that her distant descendants would experience when finally humanity advanced that far. Now she was doing the impossible—achieving her dream.

"Have you got information on the Andromeda spiral in that device as well?" she asked suddenly.

"It's the very next thing I'm going to check out, but I want to run these specs on the Milky Way first, just in case I'm wrong. You've got where I was thinking, huh?"

"Yeah. We're in an elliptical."

The Milky Way has two small, seemingly young satellite galaxies, both of them irregularly shaped: the Greater and Smaller Magellanic clouds. The Andromeda Galaxy has at least two satellite galaxies as well, but these are seemingly far further evolved than the Magellanic clouds: they have formed into tightly packed ellipsoids of closely clustered, redder, older stars. From the lesser of these two ellipticals it might just be possible that one could see the view that was confronting Strider right now.

"I can confirm it's not the Milky Way," said Nelson behind her.

"Thanks," she said absently.

A little while later he added: "And it's not the Andromeda spiral either. I've got the puter to do a search of all the galaxies it has on file to see if there are any that remotely match the parameters of this one."

"But you're not hopeful," she said.

"Who knows?" She could hear his jumpsuit rustle as he shrugged.

"Snap," she said.

"We encountered two fatalities between cabins one and twenty-two," said Strauss-Giolitto to Leander. "Lan Yi is currently resting in cabin twenty-seven. They had some painkiller there, and I was able to splint up his arm." What she didn't say was that the painkiller in question was marijuana. All forms of drugs—including alcohol, tobacco and, the one most argued about of all, ziprite—had been banned from the mission. They weren't in fact necessary. You could get a much higher high out of your stim socket than through a shot of ziprite, with the great advantage that you could snap out of your high at a moment's notice if necessary. The disadvantage was that stim dreaming was if anything more addictive. But someone had clearly smuggled aboard some dope seeds, and there must be a covert little plantation on one of the fields. Strauss-Giolitto felt it was her responsibility to report the matter to Leander, so she didn't. The Santa Maria's officers would know about it soon enough anyway: the switch into free fall and then back to 2g had deposited large sections of agriculture at the rear of the vessel. In the meantime, Strauss-Giolitto had partaken of a bite of hash cookie herself: she wasn't about to report the people who had very kindly given it to her. "He'll be all right," she said.

"Can you turn off that noise while I check out the rest?" said Leander, gesturing towards Lan Yi's cabin.

"I can try," said Strauss-Giolitto. "But I think Lan Yi's musibot has been specially programmed." This was a flat lie, and probably Leander knew it. If Lan Yi wanted to listen to distant Telemann as he suffered on his borrowed bed, Strauss-Giolitto was prepared to let him do so. He had probably saved several lives during the period of free fall: he deserved to be allowed to hear whatever racket he chose.

He deserved to be allowed to get as high as a kite without some petty demagogue like Leander butting in.

"Have you checked out the remaining cabins?" Leander was asking.

"Not yet. I was concerned about Lan Yi. Can you get the medbots moving yet?"

"Yeah, I guess so," said Leander. "They won't be able to do much, but . . ."

"We weren't able to do much either. We did our best. I want to be with the old guy. If it hadn't been for him . . ."

"I know," said Leander, holding up a hand. "You do that. Give him my love. I'll take over from here."

After a long time Nelson spoke.

"As far as this puter can tell," he said lazily, "we could have gone right to the other end of the Universe. I think we're in real trouble, sweet little lady from the old country."

"I knew we were in shit right from the beginning," said Strider. "Even if that had been the Milky Way, we've got no way of getting to it." She pushed back her spread fingers through her short hair; she was trying to cure herself of the habit, but without success. "We're stuck, Umbel. Fancy a spot of cannibalism?"

Their laughter was artificial.

WELCOME TO THE WONDERVALE, said a voice in both of their heads.

The Images had arrived.