Heaven's Reach

Harry

ABOUT ONE SUBJECTIVE DAY AFTER SETTING forth, pursuing the mysterious interlopers, Harry learned that an obstacle lay dead ahead.

Hurrying across a weird province of E Space, he dutifully performed his main task, laying instrument packages for Wer’Q’quinn alongside a fat, twisty tube that contained the entire sidereal universe. All the galaxies he knew — including the complex hyperdimensional junctions called transfer points — lay circumscribed within the Avenue. Whenever he paused to stare at it, Harry got a unique, contorted perspective on constellations, drifting nebulae, even whole spiral arms, shimmering with starlight and glaring emissions of excited gas. It seemed strange, defying all intuitive reason, to know the domain inside the tube was unimaginably more vast than the constrained realm of metaphors surrounding it.

By now he was accustomed to living in a universe whose complications far exceeded his poor brain’s ability to grasp.

While performing the job assigned to him by Wer’Q’quinn, Harry kept his station moving at maximum prudent speed, following the spoor left by previous visitors to this exotic domain.

Something about their trail made him suspicious.

Of course what I should be doing is lying low till Wer’Q’quinn’s time limit expires, then collect the cameras and scoot out of here before this zone of metareality transmutes again, melting around my ship and taking me with it!

So dangerous and friable was the local zone of eerie shapes and twisted logic that even meme creatures — the natural life order of E Space — looked sparse and skittish, as if incarnated ideas found the region just as unpleasant as he did. Harry glimpsed only a few simple notion-beasts grazing across the prairie of fuzzy, cactuslike trunks. Most of the mobile concepts seemed no more complex than the declarative statement — I am.

As if the universe cared.

His agile vessel made good time following the trail left by prior interlopers. Objects made of real matter left detectable signs in E Space. Tiny bits of debris constantly sloughed or evaporated off any physical object that dared to invade this realm of reified abstractions. Such vestiges might be wisps of atmosphere, vented from a life-support system, or clusters of hull metal just six or seven atoms wide.

The spoor grew steadily warmer.

I wonder why they came through here, he thought. The oldest trace was about a year old … if his Subjective Duration Meter could be trusted, estimating the rate at which protons decayed here, converting their mass into microscopic declarative statements. From dispersal profiles, he could tell that the small craft in front — the earliest to pass by — was no larger than his mobile station.

They must have been desperate to come this way … or else terribly lost.

The second spoor wasn’t much younger, coming from a bigger vessel, though still less massive than a corvette. It had nosed along in evident pursuit, avidly chasing after the first.

By sampling drifting molecules, Harry verified that both vessels came from his own life order. Galactic spacecraft, carrying oxygen-breathing life-forms — active, vigorous, ambitious, and potentially quite violent.

The third one had him confused for a while. It had come this way more recently, perhaps just days ago. A veritable cloud of atoms still swirled in its wake. Sampling probes waved from Harry’s station, like the chem-sense antennae of some insect, revealing metal-loceramic profiles like those associated with mech life.

As an acolyte of the Institutes, Harry was always on the lookout for suspicious behavior by machine entities. Despite precautions programmed into mechs for billions of years, they were still prone to occasional spasms of uncontrolled reproduction, grabbing and utilizing any raw materials in sight, making copies of themselves at exponentially increasing rates.

Of course this was a problem endemic to all orders, since opportunistic proliferation was a universal trait of anything called “life.” Indeed, oxygen breathers had perpetrated their own ecological holocausts in the Five Galaxies, sometimes overpopulating and using up planets much faster than they could restore themselves. Hence laws of migration that regularly set aside broad galactic zones for fallow recovery. But machine reproduction could be especially rapid and voracious, often beginning in dark corners where no one was looking. Once, a wave of autonomous replicators had built up enough momentum to seize and use up every small planetoid in Galaxy Three within the narrow span of ten million years, converting each gram into spindly automatons … which then began disassembling planets. The calamity continued until a coalition of other life orders intervened, bringing it to a halt.

Nor were machines Harry’s sole concern. At times like this, when oxygen-breathing civilization was distracted by internal struggles, it was important to keep watch lest the rival culture of hydrogen breathers take advantage.

Still, the traces Harry picked up seemed more strange than dangerous. The lavish amount of metallic debris suggested that this particular mech could be damaged. And there were other anomalies. His sensors sniffed amino acids and other organic detritus. Perhaps small amounts of oxy-life were accompanying the machine-vessel. As cargo perhaps? Sometimes mechs used biological components, which were more resistant than prim logic circuits to damage by cosmic rays.

At the stroke of a midura, he had to halt the pursuit in order to lay another of Wer’Q’quinn’s packages, aligning it carefully so the cameras peered straight into the Avenue, collecting data for NavInst technicians. Harry hoped it would prove valuable.

Of course his boss had plenty of measurements already, from probes that laced each transfer point, as well as hyperspatial levels A, B, and C. Moreover, travelers routinely reported conditions they encountered during their voyages. It seemed obscure and unconventional to send Harry all this way gathering information from such a quirky source. But who was he to judge?

I’m near the bottom of the ol’ totem pole. I can just do my job as well as possible, and not try to second-guess my chief.

In pre-mission briefings, Harry had learned that strain gauges were showing increased tension along nearly every navigable route in the Five Galaxies. Ruptures and detours had grown routine as commerce began suffering noticeably. Yet, when Wer’Q’quinn made inquiries to high officials at Navigation Institute headquarters, the response consisted of little more than bland, reassuring nostrums.

• • •

These events are not unexpected.

Provisions have been made (long ago) for dealing with the phenomena.

Agents at your level should not concern themselves with causes, or long-term effects.

Perform your assigned tasks. Protect shipping. Safeguard the public. Continue reporting data. Above all, discourage panic. Hearten civil confidence.

Maintain your equipment at high levels of readiness.

Cancel all leaves.

It wasn’t the sort of memorandum Harry found exactly inspiring. Even Wer’Q’quinn seemed disturbed — though it wasn’t easy to read the moods of a land-walking squid.

The situation prompted Harry to wonder again about his current mission.

Perhaps Wer’Q’quinn didn’t clear my trip with his bosses. He may have sent me to get a look at things from a perspective that no one at HQ could co-opt, anticipate, or meddle with.

Harry appreciated his supervisor’s confidence … while at the same time worrying about what it implied.

Could everything be falling apart? he pondered. Maybe the Skiano proselyte is right. If this is the end of the world, what can you do but look to the state of your own soul?

Just a midura before taking off on this mission, with some mixed feelings and trepidation, he had accepted an invitation from the Skiano to visit its small congregation of converts. Entering a small warehouse bay in one of the cheaper quarters of Kazzkark, he found a motley assortment of creatures following the strange new sect.

There had been a pair of portly synthians — creatures traditionally friendly to Terran customs and concepts — along with several little wazoon, a goggle-eyed pring, three por’n’aths, a striped ruguggl, and …

Harry recalled rocking back in surprise, dismayed to see a cluster of terrifying Brothers of the Night! With muscular, streamlined arms and sharklike faces, Brothers were famed for their intense though fickle religious impulses, sampling different creeds and pursuing them fanatically — until the next one came along. Still, it shocked Harry to see them in such a gregarious setting, worshiping alongside beings who had no relationship at all with their race or clan.

The variegated faithful had gathered before a symbol that Harry found at once both quaint and unnerving … a holo portrait of Earth, homeworld to his neo-chimpanzee line, depicted with cruciform rays of sacred illumination emanating outward. As the hologram turned, the planet seemed to swell … then burst apart, donating its own substance to the brilliant rays, enhancing the gift of enlightenment with an act of ultimate self-sacrifice.

Then, moments later, the world recoalesced in a feat of miraculous resurrection, beginning the cycle once more.

“We are taught that the aim of life is its own perfection,” preached the Skiano, speaking first in a flashing dialect of Galactic Two, with glitters from its lower pair of eyes, then almost simultaneously via audible Gal-Seven through a vodor held in one hand.

“This wisdom is true, beyond arty doubt. It crosses all boundaries of order or class. Once sapiency is achieved, life must be about more than mere self-gene-ego continuation. Long ago, the Progenitors taught that our highest purpose is to seek a sense of purpose. For existence to have meaning, we need a goal. A target at which to aim the projectile of our lives.

“But what in the universe is perfectible? Surely not matter, which decays, eventually reducing even the greatest artifacts and monuments to a dim glow of heat radiation. Any individual organism will age and eventually die. Some memories may be downloaded or recorded, but true improvement grinds to a halt.

“Even the cosmos we perceive with our senses appears doomed to entropy and chaos.

“Only species seem to get better with time. First blind evolution prepares the way on myriad nursery worlds, sifting and testing countless animal types until precious presapient forms emerge. These then enter a blessed cycle of adoption and Uplift, receiving guidance from others who came before, accelerating their refinement over time.

“Up to this point, the way taught by the Progenitors was good and wise. It meant that nursery worlds would be preserved and sanctified. It ensured that potential would be preserved, and wisdom passed on through an endless cycle of nurturing.

“And when an elder species has taught all it can, reaching high levels of insight and acumen? Then its own turn comes to resume self-improvement, retiring from the spacefaring life, seeking racial perfection within the loving Embrace of Tides.

“Down that route, into the snug clasp of gravity, the Progenitors themselves are said to have gone, waiting to welcome each new gene line that achieves ultimate transcendence.”

The Skiano pressed its sucker-tipped hands together, leaning toward the congregation.

“But is that the sole route to perfection? Such a far-sighted, species-centered view of salvation seems cold and remote, especially nowadays, when there may be very little time left. Too little for younger races to refine themselves in the old-fashioned way.

“Besides, where does this leave the individual? True, there is real satisfaction from knowing your life has been well spent helping the next generation be a little better than yours, and thus moving your heirs a bit closer to fulfillment. But is there no reward for the good, the honorable, the devoted and kind in this life?

“Is there no continuity or transcendence offered to the self?

“Indeed, my friends and compeers, I am here to tell you that there is a reward! It comes to us from the most unlikely of places. A strange little world, where wolflings emerged to sapiency whole and virginal, after a long hard struggle of self-Uplift with only whale songs to ease their lonely silence.

“That … and a comforting promise told to them by the one, true God.

“A dreadful-beautiful promise. One that the little world called Earth will soon fulfill, as it suffers martyrdom for all our sins. Yea, for every solitary individual sapient being.

“A promise of salvation and everlasting life.”

With the last instrument packages deployed, Harry had time to kill before they must be retrieved, so he set out again after the interlopers.

All three had stuck close to the Avenue … a wise precaution, since conventional starcraft were scarcely built to navigate in E Space. This way there was always a chance of diving back into the real universe if things went suddenly wrong here in the empire of memes.

Of course “diving” into the Avenue held dangers of its own. For instance, you might emerge in one of the Five Galaxies all right, with every atom in the right position compared to its neighbors … only separated by meters instead of angstroms, giving your body the volume of a star and the density of a rarefied vacuum.

Even if your ship and crew held physical cohesion, you could wind up in a portion of space far from any beacon or t-point, lost and virtually stranded.

By comparison, Harry’s vessel was a hardy beast, flexible and far more assured for this quirky kind of travel. Designed specifically for E Space — and piloted by a trained living observer — it could find much safer points of entry and egress than the Avenue.

Of the vessels he was following, the machine entity worried him most, provoking something almost like pity.

It’s really vulnerable here. The poor mech must be feeling its way along, almost blind.

Harry accelerated the station’s bowlegged gait, curious to see what would drive such an entity to invade E Space, following the spoor of two oxy-life vessels. Soon, he began detecting traces of digital cognizance, a sure giveaway that high-level computers were operating, continuously and unshielded, somewhere beyond the haze.

It’s like the thing’s broadcasting to all the carnivorous memes in the neighborhood. Yoo hoo! Beasties! Come and eat me!

Harry peered through the murk to make out a fantastically sheer cliff “ahead — grayish off-white — covered with symmetrical reddish splotches. The abrupt barrier reared vertically, vanishing into the mist some number of meters — or miles — overhead, and the shining, tubelike Avenue seemed headed straight for it!

The red-orange blemishes were arrayed in strict geometrical rows, like endless ranks of fighting ships. Harry eyed them dubiously, till the pilot called them two-dimensional discolorations. Nothing more.

The station marched on, stilt-legs swinging across the fuzzy steppe, and Harry soon realized there was a hole, just wide enough to admit the Avenue, with some room to spare on either side to admit the scout platform or a small starship.

“I believe somebody has used energy weapons here,” the pilot mode murmured speculatively.

Harry saw the cavelike opening had been widened by some tearing force. Cracks ran away from the broken entrance. Crumbled fragments of wall lay among the fuzzy cylinders.

“Fools! Their ship was too bulky to fit. So instead of trying to find a metaphor that’d get them through, they just blasted their way!”

Harry shook his head. It was dangerous to try altering E Space by force. Far better to get your way by following its strange rules.

“This apparently happened a year ago, when the larger vessel tried following the smaller. Do you wish me to engage observer mode to find out what types of weapons were used?”

Harry shook his head. “No time. Clearly we’re dealing with idiots … or fanatics. Either way it means trouble.”

Harry looked into the blackness surrounding the Avenue as it passed within. No doubt this was another transition boundary. Once he moved inside, the metaphorical rules must change again.

Wer’Q’quinn would not like it. There was no absolute guarantee Harry could backtrack once he entered. The instrument packages were supposed to be his first priority.

After a long pause — spent largely scratching himself, neo-chim style — he grunted and decided.

“We’re going in,” Harry ordered. “Prepare for symbol shift!” He took his command seat and buckled in. “Close the blinds and …”

The cursive P whirled faster.

“Warning! Something is coming!”

Harry sat up and looked around. The sheer cliff took up half his field of view. On the other side, the glowing tube of the Avenue stretched back the way he came, across an open plain of fuzzy tubes as far as the haze would let him see.

Yanking on both thumbs, he recalled the first rule of survival in E Space. When in doubt about a stranger, be quiet and find out what it is, before it finds out about you.

“Identification? Can you tell where it’s coming from?”

The pilot program hesitated for only a moment. “The object is unknown. It is approaching from within the transition zone.”

From the dark cave in front of him! That ruled out ducking in there to hide. Harry whirled, looking desperately for an idea.

“We need to get out of sight,” he muttered. “But where?”

“I cannot answer, unless we fly. Have you worked out a way yet, Harvey?”

“No I haven’t, damn you!”

“The bogey is getting closer.”

Harry brought his fists down on the armrests. It was time to try something, anything.

“Go to the wall!”

The station responded with an agile gallop. Thrusting his arms and legs into the manual control sleeves, Harry shouted.

“I’m taking over!”

As the platform reached the sheer cliff, he made two stilt-legs reach out, slapping their broad feet against the smooth surface.

Harry held his breath.…

Then, as naturally as if it had been designed for it, the station reared up and began climbing the wall.