Bridging Infinity Page 22

  “I see no snow,” I said.

  Eleanora lifted a hand. “There.” She stretched her arms toward me, palms up. I glimpsed only what appeared to be a speck of ice on her right forefinger.

  “You must come inside,” I told her. Mosquitoes were more numerous at dusk and she was not wearing any protective netting. She was unsteady on her feet and her link indicated that her heart was beating more rapidly than usual.

  “We’re lethal,” she whispered, “lethal. Our entire species is lethal. You know that. Almost everything else is gone. What I don’t understand is why you’ve kept any of us alive.”

  “You must come inside,” I repeated.

  “It’s snowing.” She looked up and then brushed something invisible from her face.

  “You must come inside, Governor.”

  She stared at me for a long time and then followed me back to the porch for one last glass of whiskey with ice before going to her bedroom to sleep.

  That night, as I had planned to do, I fled my remote to commune with the net. In the morning, when I slipped inside that avian construct once more, I discovered that Eleanora had left in her hovercar. The vehicle’s sensors informed me that she was heading north.

  HER CRAFT CARRIED her over northeastern Canada and its uninhabited marshlands toward swampy Hudson Bay, then on to Greenland. Her link remained closed. She had to know that I would not leave her unprotected and was observing her through the vehicle’s sensors, but said nothing. Sometimes she slept. Occasionally she sipped some water from one of the hovercar’s thin tubes but ate none of its provisions.

  At the northernmost tip of Greenland, ice had once again formed and a light layer of snow covered a patch of ice. Eleanora landed the hovercar on the brown barren Arctic desert that surrounded the layer of ice.

  “Governor,” I called out. She was out of the craft before I could say anything more to her. A wall of brown and gray cliffs lay ahead and a wind swept over the snow, creating a white veil of flurries. She stood still as the snow swirled around her and then she dropped to the icy surface and sat there, facing the cliffs.

  “Eleanora,” I said, amplifying my voice, “if you stay out here for too long...”

  “... the cold will kill me,” she called out. “Well, maybe I don’t care. The snow and ice are coming back,” she continued. “That’s what I wanted to see here, that’s why I came. I wish I could live to see the snow falling in the Adirondacks again. Tell me that it will.”

  “It will fall there again, I promise you,” I told her, “and farther south as well.”

  “On the Plaza?”

  “Perhaps farther south even than that.”

  I wondered if she would stay out there in the cold she longed for, sitting on the snow and ice until she lost consciousness, but at last she stood up and staggered slowly back to the craft. “You will see that I’m interred with Mother and Grandmother,” she whispered.

  “Yes,” I promised.

  “And that you’ll make a tomb for us under the ice on the Plaza when it freezes again.”

  “Yes.”

  Eleanora died two days after returning to the summer house, but without taking any of the medications she had saved for her self-deliverance. In the absence of an obvious successor to her title, we decided to appoint no one to her post. The depopulated region her family had once governed could be left to the President’s oversight.

  WE ARE THE children of humankind and their obsessions have taken root in us.

  The sunshade might have begun as the dream of a few human beings but now it belonged to us and we were soon making plans to increase its diameter and heighten the reflectivity of the surfaces on the side facing the sun in order to cool Earth more rapidly. I was already imagining another project, the icy tomb I would make for the three women I had served when the polar icecaps had grown larger and glaciers covered most of North America, much of Europe and Asia, and the southernmost parts of South America and Africa.

  These thoughts came to me as I flew over the wide marble plain of the Empire State Plaza, wearing my birdlike remote for the last time. As I landed, I called up an image of the Plaza’s towers rising above an icy surface, clouds of snow swirling around them. The empty rectangle of the fountain would be filled with water that would freeze into ice. I wondered what else we might make with ice, if we could construct walls of ice as high as the towers of the Plaza. A vision came to me of a transformed Earth encased in ice, a shimmering monument to those who had finally lost the world they had sought to dominate.

  IN ALL THE ages, there have been people like us. We’ve always been there, existing on the edge of society, invisible yet omnipresent, neglected yet never completely ignored. We’ve been called different things: bohemians, vagrants, gypsies, hobos, tramps, ramblers, hippies, dropouts, drifters, and the lost generation.

  On Hex, we were called joyriders. I was one, and so was my friend Apache Charley. This is about how he went in search of one of the pentagons of Hex, and where that strange and obsessive quest took him.

  THE HOLY FOOLS were visiting the tsajan habitat when Apache Charley learned the location of the danui pentagon. Their habitat was located almost three-quarters of the way up Hex’s northern hemisphere, nine hexagons north by northwest of Terrania, the human habitat. It doesn’t sound like a great distance when you consider that there’s something like six trillion hexes in Hex – an approximate figure; no one knows the precise number except the danui and, as usual, they’re not telling – but once you take into account that each hex has a perimeter of six thousand miles and do the math, you can see that’s a pretty far piece for us to have travelled to, particularly by tram.

  But a joyrider will make the trip if it means seeing something few, if any, people have seen before. So when Fracked Up Freddie, our navigator, learned from his counterpart in the Gang of Idiots the nineteen-digit coordinate code that would program a tram to take us there, naturally we boarded the next tram out of Terrania and off we went to meet the tsajan.

  Why? Because none of us had ever met these particular aliens. Because the Idiots told us that the tsajan of Gliese 581-c were friendly, air-breathing, and open to encountering other races inhabiting Hex. And especially because the government didn’t want anyone except the Janus Company making contact with other races, which made it more fun. Joyriders generally abhorred the Janus Company, particularly guys like Freddie and Genghis Bob who’d actually worked for them.

  So there we were, in what amounted to a town square except that, so far as we could tell, the tsajan didn’t have permanent dwellings of any sort; wherever a bunch of them gathered at any one time, that was home. And we were doing our damnedest to entertain what amounted to a race of sentient medicine balls. Which is pretty much what a tsajan looked like: a leathery blue-green sphere about three feet in diameter, squatting atop three tripodal legs with three arms equilaterally spaced about their circumference. Their heads were neckless hemispheres ringed by unblinking, button-like eyes and with a mouth on either side: one for eating, and the other for breathing and speaking.

  No doubt about it, the tsajan were weirder than weird, even for a place inhabited by the likes of the hjadd, the nord, and the khoru. Say what you will about them, though, at least they weren’t xenophobes. They didn’t seem to mind very much when a small band of humans arrived at the tram station and travelled down the escalator into one of the six biopods that made up their hex, the interior of which appeared to be a vast, open meadow of high grass with groves of something that looked like red asparagus ten feet tall. There was a clearing not far from the escalator, and when some of the natives came waddling over to greet us, we figured that this was as a good a place as any to... well, do what joyriders do. Meet the locals and make friends as best as we could, or at least not do anything that might get us chased out, or worse.

  For the Holy Fools, that meant being sort of a travelling road show. Charley, Su Mi Tu, Marie Juana, and I unpacked our musical instruments and began warming up the crowd while
Freddie and Genghis Bob went about using our hjadd translator disk to find out who was in charge and if it was all right if we stuck around for a little while.

  The latter wasn’t a problem. The tsajan liked us. We were pretty goofy, I suppose, but entertaining all the same. The band opened with a handful of traditional Earth songs – “Good Lovin’”, “Waltzing Matilda”, “Louie, Louie” and so forth – with Charley and Marie on guitar, Su on tambourine and vocals, and yours truly on harmonica – then Su broke out her cards and began showing them a bit of sleight of hand. The tsajan didn’t understand the songs but they loved the card tricks, and it didn’t take long for them to accept us as guests.

  The breakthrough came, though, when the local tsajan chieftain introduced us to another species native to their homeworld, small creatures known as khalits. With long tails and wide eyes that gave them a perpetually startled appearance, they resembled hairless lemurs except for the sucker pads on their feet that enabled them to cling to the top of a tsajan’s head... or a human’s, if you let them.

  Which is what Apache Charley did once Fracked Up Freddie relayed to us what the tsajan chieftain had explained to him: the khalits were natural telepaths, and very good at allowing different races to understand one another. Once each individual had a khalit perched on their head, the creatures would establish a telepathic rapport and transfer images and impressions, rather than words, from one mind to another.

  This seemed like a more efficient means of communication than even hjadd translator disks – which, like alien tram coordinates, was something the Janus Company did their best to keep out of the hands of joyriders – so Charley let the chieftain gently coax a khalit onto his shoulders, where it climbed up his neck to the top of his head and perched like a bizarre cap with oversized eyes. Once the Fools stopped laughing and Charley got over the ticklish feeling he got from the khalit’s feet, he began conversing with the tsajan leader.

  Sure enough, Charley and the chieftain understood each other better than if they’d been using translator disks. And then Charley did what he’d always done, whenever we met a new race with whom we managed to make friends. He asked the chieftain if he knows the location of the pentagons the danui had built in Hex.

  Charley had been seeking this knowledge for as long as I’d belonged to the tribe; it was something of an obsession for him. He had made this particular query so many times, of so many different races, that the rest of us started referring to it as The Question. The aliens he asked usually didn’t know what he was talking about or didn’t have an answer, but on this occasion...

  “Oh, my god!” Charley’s eyes went wide. “Oh my god, oh my god...”

  Su was sitting nearby. She stopped shuffling her cards for another trick to peer at her mate. “Charley? What’s going on? What did –?”

  “Quick!” He began urgently snapping his fingers. “Someone get this down!” He saw me standing across from him. “Jack! Write this down... fast!”

  I didn’t ask twice, but instead yanked out my pad. “Okay, shoot.”

  Charley closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then began to recite: “From right to left... triangle... vertical line... vertical line... square... diamond... pyramid... dot... square... vertical line... square... diamond...” And so on, one danui geometric digit after another, until he reached the end of the end of the nineteen-figure string that, once entered into a tram’s control pad, would send it straight to the Hex habitat for which it was designated.

  When Charley was done, he slowly let out his breath and looked at Su and me. “That’s it,” he said softly. “That’s what we’ve been looking for. The nearest pentagon.”

  “What do you mean ‘we’?” I asked.

  “Oh, no.” Su was already shaking her head. “Charley, no. Don’t even think about it.”

  “Oh, yes.” He was grinning like a maniac. “We’re most definitely going there.”

  And as soon as he said it, I knew we were. Or he was, at least.

  THE FIRST TIME I saw Hex...

  Scratch that. My experience was that not much different from anyone else’s. Everyone saw Hex the same way that first time, from a ship that was making the jump from 47 Ursae Majoris to HD 76700. In my case, it was through a starboard porthole of a freighter, the Coyote Queen, as it came through one of the six starbridges the danui had established in equidistant orbit 1.5 AUs from the primary.

  In my case, though, I was planning to jump ship as soon as it arrived.

  Hex has been called a Dyson sphere, but that’s a misnomer. Freeman Dyson never described anything like Hex when he wrote his famous letter to a scientific journal hypothesizing very large constructs an alien race might build about a star (and indeed, Dr. Dyson himself disowned the concept that bore his name). In fact, Hex was like nothing anyone imagined... anyone human, that is. Only the danui, the greatest engineers in the galaxy, could have conceived something like this, let alone devote thousands of years to creating the damned thing.

  Build a cylindrical habitat – a biopod – a thousand miles long and one hundred miles wide. Pretty big, right? You could fit a small continent into something like that. Make the roof transparent so as to allow sunlight to come in, and furnish it with whatever ecosystem you desire – rivers, deserts, snow fields, rainforests, you name it – along with the appropriate atmosphere.

  Next, build five more, then arrange them in a circle to form a hexagon: five are habitable and the sixth contains the complex biomachinery needed to make the habitat ecologically self-sufficient. Connect the biopods with a high-speed maglev tram system that runs along their outer rims and through their connecting nodes, and you’ve got something with approximately the usable surface area of a small planet.

  Now... build approximately six trillion of these hexes, collectively containing thirty-six trillion biopods. Each hex is as different as you want it to be.

  Bind them together as an enormous sphere two AUs, or 186 million miles, in diameter, with a circumference of 584,537,600 miles, surrounding a G-class star much like Earth’s sun.

  Supply power to the habitats through the vast network of photovoltaic panels you’ve arranged along the electrically-charged cables holding each hex rigid and furnishing the magnetic fields necessary to deflect cosmic radiation. These arrays also function as solar sails to provide stability when you rotate the sphere on its axis, thereby allowing centripetal force to give the hexagons interior surface gravity ranging from 2g at the equator to microgravity at the poles.

  Connect each habitat’s tram system so that they form the greatest mass-transit network ever, and establish those starbridges I just mentioned at equidistant points 14,602,140 miles from one another.

  Then invite all the starfaring races of the galaxy to move in. Would you like to establish your next interstellar colony in our system? Please feel free to do so. We love company, and we have lots of room...

  That’s Hex.

  All those statistics and numbers oversimplify what I saw from the freighter. At first glance, it looked like an enormous dust cloud, spherical and with distinct margins, copper-hued and not completely solid, with a sun shining at its center. It filled the porthole through which I was gazing, and over the course of the next few days it grew larger and larger, gradually losing its curvature until it no longer resembled a sphere at all but instead a wall of hexagons stretched endlessly across space.

  During the week it took for the Coyote Queen to reach Terrania, located about halfway up Hex’s northern hemisphere, the captain became increasingly put out with me. According to him, I was a lazy, good-for-nothing bum who had no business being aboard a freighter, and if I didn’t shape up and start doing my share of the work, he intended not only to fire me as soon as we returned to Coyote, but also make sure I was blackballed from any other ship in the Coyote Federation Merchant Marine.

  I didn’t care. When I talked my way into a job as a cargo loader, it had never been my intent to remain aboard the Queen any longer than it took to hitch a ride to Hex.
And, just as soon as the freighter slid into the vast harbor within one of the half-dozen spherical nodes connecting the biopods, I jumped ship, pausing just long enough to grab my duffle bag. I skipped a paycheck, but that was beside the point. The job was just to get to Hex without having to buy passage aboard a commercial liner, an expense I couldn’t afford.

  What I’d done was totally illegal, of course. From the moment I arrived, I was an outlaw. But once I joined the Holy Fools, Apache Charley gave me my tribal nickname... my ‘travelling name’ as we’re called by joyriders. What was on my birth certificate became a thing of the past. From then on, I was Ship Jump Jack.

  THAT EVENING, ALL Charley wanted to talk about were the pentagons. Or rather, the prospect of the Holy Fools undertaking a journey to one of these things so we could see it for ourselves.

  The tsajan had been sufficiently entertained by our little road show to let us camp out near the escalator. They even brought us dinner. Once Freddie and Marie tested it with our biochemistry kit to make sure nothing they’d given us would accidentally poison us, we each tried a bit. The tsajan were vegetarians, so that made things easier; the raw lichen was inedible, but the vegetable soup wasn’t bad, and so was something that looked like ravioli and tasted like chicken. Yes, it’s true; every alien culture has something that tastes like chicken.

  The tsajan have a deep fear of open flames that made us wonder how they’d ever developed a technological culture, so we couldn’t start a campfire. Instead, we set up our lanterns in the middle of the clearing between our tents, and once the photosensitive barrel ceiling that comprised the sky of every biopod on Hex polarized and the habitat went dark, we discussed what Charley had discovered.

  “Of course, we’ve got to see it.” Charley sat cross-legged on the ground, Su’s head nestled in his lap. “No one has ever seen a pentagon... we’ll be the first!”