The Reality Dysfunction Read online

  The polyp bulged up at the centre, its apex thinning as it rose, becoming translucent. Red rawness showed beneath it, the crest of a stem as thick as a human leg which stretched right down into the core of the starship’s body. The tumescent apex split open, dribbling a thick gelatinous goo onto the corridor floor. Inside, the sphincter muscle at the top of the red stem dilated, looking remarkably similar to a waiting toothless mouth. The dark tube inside palpitated slowly.

  Athene held up the bitek sustentator, a sphere five centimetres in diameter, flesh-purple, maintained at body temperature. According to the data core on the zero-tau pod it had been kept in, the zygote inside was female; it was also the one Sinon had fathered. She bent down and pushed it gently into the waiting orifice.

  >

  The little sustentator globe was ingested with a quiet wet slurp. The sphincter lips closed, and the stem sank back down out of sight. Sinon patted her shoulder, and they gave each other a proud smile.

  > Iasius said proudly.

  >

  Athene walked on. There were another four zygotes left to initiate, and Romulus was growing larger outside.

  The Saturn habitats were keening their regret at Iasius’s call. Voidhawks throughout the solar system answered with pride and camaraderie; those that weren’t outbound with cargo abandoned their flights to flock around Romulus in anticipation.

  Iasius curved gently round the non-rotational dock at the northern endcap. With her eyes closed, Athene let the affinity bond image from the voidhawk’s sensor blisters expand into her mind with superhuman clarity.

  Her visual reference of the habitat altered as the endcap loomed large beyond the rim of the starship’s hull. She saw the vast expanse of finely textured red-brown polyp as an approaching cliff face; one with four concentrically arrayed ledges, as if ripples had raced out from the axis in some distant time, only to be frozen as they peaked.

  The voidhawk chased after the second ledge, two kilometres out from the axis, swooping round to match the habitat’s rotation. Adamist reaction-drive spaceships didn’t have anything like the manoeuvrability necessary to land on the ledges, and they were reserved for voidhawks alone.

  Iasius shot in over the edge, seeming to hover above the long rank of mushroomlike docking pedestals which protruded from the floor, before choosing a vacant one. For all its bulk, it alighted with the delicate grace of a hummingbird.

  Athene and Sinon felt the gravity fade down to half a gee as the distortion field dissipated. She watched the big flat-tyred crew bus rolling slowly towards the bitek starship, elephant-snout airlock tube held upwards.

  > Sinon urged, his mind dark with emotion. He touched her elbow, seeing all too plainly the wish to remain during the last flight.

  She nodded her head reluctantly. “You’re right,” she said out loud.

  >

  She gave him a tired smile and allowed him to lead her out of the lounge.

  The bus had arrived at the rim of the voidhawk. Its airlock tube lengthened, sliding over the upper hull surface to reach the crew toroid.

  Sinon diverted his attention away from his wife to the flock of voidhawks matching pace with the ledge. There were over seventy waiting, latecomers rising into view as they left their crews behind on the other ledges. The emotional backwash from the waiting bitek starships was impossible to filter out, and he could feel his own blood singing in response.

  It wasn’t until he and Athene reached the passage to the airlock that he noticed an irregularity in the flock. Iasius obligingly focused on the starship in question.

  > Sinon exclaimed.

  Amidst the classic lens shapes it seemed oddly asymmetric, drawing the eye. A flattened teardrop, slightly asymmetric, with the upper hull’s dorsal bulge fatter than that on the lower hull; from what he supposed was prow to stern it measured an easy hundred and thirty metres; the blue polyp hull was mottled with a tattered purple web pattern.

  The larger size and various unorthodox configurations which set the blackhawks apart, their divergence from the voidhawk norm (some called it evolution), came about because of their captains’ requirement for greater power. Actually, improved combat performance was what they were after, Sinon thought acrimoniously. The price for that agility usually came in the form of a shorter lifespan.

  > Iasius said equably. >

  > Athene said, using affinity’s singular-engagement mode so the rest of the crew were excluded from the exchange. She had a gleam in her eye as they paused by the airlock’s inner hatch.

  Sinon pulled a sour face, then shrugged and walked off down the tube to the bus, giving her the final moment alone with her ship.

  There was a hum in the corridor she had never heard before, a resonance coming from Iasius’s excitement. When she put her fingers to the sleek composite wall there was nothing, no tremor or vibration. Perhaps it was only in her mind. She turned and looked back into the toroid, the familiar confined corridors and lounges. Their whole world.

  “Goodbye,” she whispered.

  >

  The crew bus trundled back over the ledge towards the cliff of polyp, nuzzling up to a metal airlock set into the base. Iasius laughed uproariously across the communal affinity band; it could feel the ten eggs inside its body, glowing with vitality, their urgency to be born.

  Without warning it streaked away from the pedestal, straight towards the waiting flock of its cousins. They scattered in delighted alarm.

  This time there was no counter-acceleration force required for the crew toroid, no protection for fragile humans. No artificial safety limits.

  Iasius curved sharply, pulling an easy nine gees, then flattened its trajectory to fly between the endcap and the giant metal arm of the counter-rotating dock. Weak pearl-white sunlight fell on the hull as it moved out of the ledge’s shadow. Saturn lay ahead, the razor-sharp line of the rings bisecting it cleanly. The bitek starship headed in for the planet-swathing streamers of ice crystals and primitive molecules at twelve gees, stray dust-motes and particles brushed smoothly aside by the distortion field’s bow wave. Enthusiastic voidhawks raced after it, looking more and more like a stippled comet’s tail as they emerged into the light.

  In the crew quarters, metal was buckling under its new and enormous weight. Empty lounges and corridors were filled with drawn-out creaking sounds, composite furniture was splintering, collapsing onto the floor, each fresh fragment hitting with the force of a hammer blow, leaving a deep indentation. The cabins and galley were awash with water that squirted from broken pipes, strange ripples quivered across the surface as Iasius performed minute course adjustments.

  Iasius entered the rings, optical-band perception degrading rapidly as the blizzard raging outside the hull thickened. It curved round again, bending its path in the direction which the ring particles orbited, but always at an angle, always heading inwards towards the massive presence of the gas giant. It was a glorious game, dodging the larger chunks, the dagger fragments of ice which glittered so coldly, the frosted boulders, sable-black chunks of near-pure carbon. The bitek starship soared around them all, spiralling, diving, swooping in huge loops, heedless of the stress, of the toll its frenzy extracted from the precious patterning cells. Energy was free, coursing through the ring. Cosmic radiation, the planet’s undulating magnetic flux, the doughty gusts of solar wind; Iasius swept it all in with the distortion field, concentrating it into an abundant coherent stream which the patterning cells absorbed and redirected.

  By the time it reached the Encke division the power surplus was enough to energize the first egg. Iasius let out a shrill cry of triumph. The other voidhawks responded. They had followed tenaciously, striving to match the giddy helter-skelter route Iasius had flown, boring down the passage it had broken th
rough the ring mass, desperately deflecting the whirling particles tossed about by its wake. The leader of the flock kept changing, none could equal the speed, nor match the carefree audacity; often they were caught out by the savage turns, overshooting, blundering about in a squall of undisturbed particles. It was a test of skill as well as power. Even luck played a part. Luck was a trait worth inheriting.

  When Iasius called the first time, Hyale was the closest, a mere two hundred kilometres behind. It surged forward, and Iasius relented, slowing fractionally, holding a straight course. They rendezvoused, Hyale sliding in to hold position ten metres away, their hulls overlapping perfectly. Ring particles skidded round them like snow from a ski blade.

  Hyale began to impart its compositional pattern through their affinity bond, a software DNA flowing into Iasius with a sense of near orgasmic glory. Iasius incorporated the Hyale’s structural format into the vast energy squirt it discharged into the first egg.

  The egg, Acetes, awoke in a blaze of wonder and exhilaration. Alive with racing currents of power, every cell charged with rapture and purpose and the urge to burst into immediate growth.

  Iasius filled space with its glee.

  Acetes found itself propelled out into the naked vacuum. Shattered fragments of Iasius’s hull were spinning away, a dark red hole set in midnight blue receding at a bewildering speed.

  > the egg sang. >

  A huge dark bulk hung above it. Forces it could sense but couldn’t understand were slowing its wild tumbling. The universe seemed to be composed entirely of tiny splinters of matter pervaded by glowing energy bands. Voidhawks flashed past at frightening velocities.

  > Hyale said. >

  > Acetes struggled to make sense of the scraps of knowledge fluttering around its racing mind, Iasius’s final gift.

  > Hyale counselled. >

  Acetes cautiously opened its affinity sensitivity to cover the whole of Saturn’s environment, and received a chorus of greetings from the habitats, an even greater wave of acknowledgement from individual adult Edenists, excited trills from children; and then its own kind offered encouragement, infant voidhawks nesting within the rings.

  Its tumbling halted, it hung below Hyale’s lower hull, looking round with raw senses. Hyale began to alter their trajectory, moving the egg into a stable circular orbit around the gas giant where it would spend the next eighteen years growing to full size.

  Iasius plunged on towards the cloudscape, ploughing a dark telltale furrow through the rings for any entity watching with the right kind of senses. Its flight produced enough power to energize two more eggs, Briseis and Epopeus, while it was still in the A-ring. Hesperus emerged while it was passing through the Cassini division. Graeae, Ixion, Laocoön and Merope all awoke in the B-ring, to be borne away by the voidhawks whose compositional patterns they had been given.

  Udat caught up with Iasius near the inner edge of the B-ring. It had been a long, arduous flight, straining even the blackhawk’s power reserves, testing manoeuvrability as seldom before. But now Iasius was calling for a mate again, and Udat glided across the gap until their distortion fields merged and the hulls almost touched. It sent Iasius its own compositional pattern through the affinity bond, swept away by a fervent gratification.

  > Iasius said at the end. >

  The egg cannoned up from its ovary, sending out a cascade of polyp flakes, and Udat was left to exert its distortion field to brake the intrigued, eager infant as Iasius departed. The puzzled blackhawk had no chance to ask what it had meant by that last enigmatic statement.

  > Udat said formally, when it had finally stopped the seven-metre globe from spinning.

  > Oenone replied. >

  >

  > A pause as it probed round with immature senses, its giddy thoughts quietening down. >

  The last egg was Priam, ejected well below the meagre lip of the B-ring.

  Those voidhawks remaining in the flight, now down to some thirty strong, peeled away from Iasius. They were already dangerously close to the cloudscape which dominated a third of the sky; gravity was exerting its malign influence on local space, gnawing at the fringes of their distortion fields, impairing the propulsive efficiency.

  Iasius continued to descend, its lower, faster orbit carrying it ahead of the others. Its distortion field began to falter, finally overwhelmed by the intensity of the gravitational effect five hundred kilometres above the gas giant.

  The terminator rose ahead, a black occlusion devouring the silently meandering clouds. Faint phosphene speckles swam through the eddies and peaks, weaving in and out of the thicker ammonia-laden braids, their light ebbing and kindling in hesitant patterns. Iasius shot into the penumbra, darkness expanding around it like an elemental force. Saturn had ceased to be a planet, an astronomical object, it was becoming hugely solid. The bitek starship curved down at an ever increasing angle. Ahead of it was a single fiery streak, growing brighter in its optical sensors.

  The darkside equator, that frozen remote wasteland, was redolent with sublime grandeur.

  Ring particles were falling alongside Iasius, a thick, dark rain, captured by the gossamer fingers of the ionosphere, a treacherously insistent caress which robbed them of speed, of altitude. And, ultimately, existence.

  When they had been lured down to the fringes of the ionosphere, icy gusts of hydrogen molecules burnt around them, emitting banners of spectral flame. They dipped rapidly as atmospheric resistance built, first glowing like embers, then crowned by incandescent light; sunsparks, stretching a hundred-kilometre contrail behind them. Their billion-year flight ended swiftly in a violent spectacle: a dazzling concussion which flung out a shower of twinkling debris, quickly extinguished. All that remained was a tenuous trail of black soot which was swept up by the howling cyclones.

  Iasius reached the extremity of the ionosphere. The light of the dying ring particles was hot on its lower hull. A tremulous glow appeared around its rim. Polyp began to char and flake away, orange flecks bulleting off into the distance. The bitek starship began to lose peripheral senses as its specialist receptor cells grew warm. Denser layers of hydrogen pummeled the hull. The descent curve began to get bumpy, vexatious supersonic winds were beginning to bite. Iasius flipped over. The abrupt turn had disastrous consequences on its avian glide; with the hull’s blunt underside smashing head on into the hydrogen, the starship was suddenly subjected to a huge deceleration force. Dangerous quantities of flame blossomed right across the hull as broad swaths of polyp ablated. Iasius started to tumble helplessly down towards the scorching river of light.

  The retinue of voidhawks watched solemnly from their safe orbit a thousand kilometres above, singing their silent hymn of mourning. After they had honoured Iasius’s passing with a single orbit they extended their distortion fields, and launched themselves back towards Romulus.

  The human captains of the voidhawks involved with the mating flight and the Iasius’s crew had passed the time of the flight in a circular hall reserved for that one purpose. It reminded Athene of some of the medieval churches she had visited during her rare trips to Earth, the same vaulted ceiling and elaborate pillars, the intimidating air of reverence, though here the polyp walls were a clean snow-white, and instead of an altar there was a fountain bubbling out of an antique marble Venus.

  She stood at the head of her crew, the image of Saturn’s searing equator lingering in her mind. A last gentle emanation of peacefulness as the plasma sheath wrapped Iasius in its terminal embrace.

  It was over.

  The captains stopped by one at a time to extend their congrat
ulations, their minds touching hers, bestowing a fragile compassion and understanding. Never, ever a commiseration; these gatherings were supposed to be a reaffirmation of life, celebrating the birth of the eggs. And Iasius had energized all ten; some voidhawks went to meet the equator with several eggs remaining.

  Yes, they were right to toast Iasius.

  > Sinon said. There was a mild tone of resentment in the thought.

  Athene raised her eyes from the captain of the Pelion, and observed Meyer making his way through the crowd towards her. The Udat’s captain was a broad-shouldered man in his late thirties, black hair cut back close to his skull. In contrast to the silky blue ceremonial ship-tunics of the voidhawk captains he wore a functional grey-green ship’s one-piece and matching boots. He nodded curtly in response to the formal greetings he received.

  > Athene told Sinon, using singular-engagement mode, > She didn’t want anything to spoil the wake; besides she felt a certain sympathy for someone so obviously out of place as Meyer was. Nor would it do the hundred families any harm to introduce some diversity into their stock.

  She kept that thought tightly locked at the core of her mind, knowing full well how this bunch of traditionalists would react to such heresy.

  Meyer stood before her, and inclined his head in a swift bow. He was a good five centimetres shorter than her, and she was one of the smaller Edenists in the hall.

  > she began. She cleared her throat. No fool like an old one; his affinity bond was with Udat alone. A unique neuron symbiont meshed with his medulla, providing him with a secure link to its clone-analogue in the Udat, nothing like the hereditary Edenist communal affinity.

  “Captain Meyer, my compliments to your ship. It was an excellent flight.”

  “Thank you for saying so, Captain. It was an honour to take part. You must be proud all the eggs were energized.”

  “Yes.” She lifted her glass of white wine in salute. “So what brings you to Saturn?”