“Well, it hasn’t killed us. That seems like a good start.”
“Could definitely be worse. But… You think you know something, right? Then it turns out you were only used to it. It does something, and it does something, and then after a while, you think that’s what it does. Then it turns out there was this whole other thing, maybe.”
“Using a microwave as a lamp, because it has a light in it,” Jim said. He tried to remember where he’d heard that analogy.
“Yeah, exactly,” Alex said. “You thought you knew it, but you were only familiar with it.”
Jim took another sip of the beer. The hops tasted like mushroom, for good reason. “I’m hoping that Elvi has figured some things out. I mean, she’ll know better than we do.”
“We can hope,” Alex agreed, then squeezed the last of the beer out of his bulb and tossed it into the recycler. His belch was deep and satisfied.
“How many of these did you have?” Jim asked.
“A few.”
“Are you drunk?”
Alex considered the question. “A little, I guess.” He lowered himself into the crash couch. “There was this time when I was a kid, I had a really crap babysitter. I was maybe nine? She was sixteen. And we watched this monster film. A huge cat monster that lived underground, and it got pissed off by some seismic surveys. Came to the top and started tearing up cities and collapsing tunnels. Scared the shit out of me.”
“Weird the things that get to you when you’re a kid,” Jim said.
“I knew it wasn’t for real. I was young, I wasn’t dumb. But it still scared me, and the thing my dad told me that actually got me past it? He showed me how it wouldn’t scale.”
“Wouldn’t scale?”
“Volume goes up by cubes. A cat big enough to crush a city wouldn’t be strong enough to stand up, even at Martian gravity. Its bones would break under its own weight. And that did it for me. I was all right, because I saw it couldn’t work. This is like that cat, it doesn’t scale.”
Jim sat with that for a second. “Either you’re too drunk or I’m not drunk enough. I don’t get it.”
“The gates. The systems. It’s bigger than us. It’s bigger than we can be. I mean, have you ever thought about what it would be like to see every system there is now? To see just the places where we are? There’s thirteen hundred seventy-three gates—”
“Seventy-one. Thanjavur and Tecoma are gone.”
“Thirteen hundred and seventy-one,” Alex agreed. “Now let’s say you plot it so that you don’t have to slow down when you get to the ring space. Accelerate all the way to the ring gate, brake all the way back to the goldilocks region at wherever you’re going. Maybe take you a month to do it.”
“You’d run out of reaction mass.”
Alex waved the objection away. “Pretend you could stock up in flight. All the reaction mass and fuel and food and everything. And liquid helium to boil off the waste heat.”
“So ignoring every actual constraint that makes it impossible?”
“Yeah. Five billion klicks a month, every month. No time on the float. No time at the planets. Just—” He threw his hand forward, a gesture of speed.
“All right.”
“Hundred and fifteen years. Start it the day you’re born, and finish it an old man, and never see anything but the inside of your ship. Take a week at each planet—not each city, not each station, each planet—to play tourist? Add another twenty-eight years. A hundred forty-some years old. That’s a solid lifetime, just to take a peek. Get the lay of the land. Never see the same place twice.”
Jim thought about that. Between working for the Transport Union back in the day and fleeing with the underground, he’d been to more systems than most people ever would, and it was still probably under three dozen. He knew how many more there were, how many he’d never see, how many Naomi was trying to coordinate. Alex was right. It was daunting. Maybe more than daunting.
“And that’s not the worst of it,” Alex said. “By the time you’re done, there’s been a century of change at the place you started from. It won’t be the same. All the places you visit start changing into new ones the second you leave.”
On the screen, the bright gate shifted and muttered. The false-color map showed radio waves and X-rays pouring out of it. Jim couldn’t help imagining it as a vast eye looking back at them.
“This is all too big for people,” Alex said. “The things that built it? Maybe they could handle it, but we’re not designed for this scale. We’re trying to get big enough we can make it work, but we’re breaking our legs just standing up.”
“Huh,” Jim said. And then, a moment later, “You got any more beer?”
“Nope.”
“Want some?”
“Yep.”
With its drive off, the Falcon was no more than a small, oddly shaped asteroid at first. It was a little under three hundred thousand kilometers off the Adro diamond, orbiting it like a tiny artificial moon. The artifact itself was eerie: vast and green and flickering now and then with murky internal energies like storms that penetrated deep into the flesh of the object. The planet. The library. Jim knew enough about Elvi’s preliminary work that he could appreciate the supremely unnatural aspects of the thing: that it didn’t collapse under its own mass, that it was connected using the same locality-breaking principles as the ring gates, that it had the capacity to hold vastly more information than humanity had generated in its millennia of progress. The Falcon—pale-skinned and half-organic the way Laconian ships all were—would have been unnerving in any other context. Here, Jim felt a weird kinship with it. The technology might be alien, but the design language was mostly human.
Alex brought them into a matching orbit, maneuvering the Rocinante gently into place until the two ships seemed like they were already connected. Locked by the common forces of velocity and gravity. The Roci’s crew gathered at the crew airlock as Amos prepared to extend the docking bridge.
“You know what’s funny?” Jim said. “I feel certain this door will open and Tanaka will be standing there with a bunch of Laconian Marines in power armor ready to charge across.”
Teresa rolled her eyes, but Naomi laughed. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Of course not. But I’m certain it will. That’s weird, right?”
She took his hand, squeezed it once, and as she looked into his eyes, she said, “This is all right. Elvi is with us, and she’s in command of this ship.”
“Besides,” Alex said, “if she’s not, they’ve had plenty of time to call for backup. No one’s here besides the two of us.”
Jim nodded. He knew that the fears were irrational. That didn’t keep him from feeling them, but it did make it a little bit easier to take them lightly. Alex was right. They’d announced Elvi’s complicity to her crew the moment they’d transferred into the system, and no one had sounded the alarm as far as they could tell. The connection of their two ships, the transfer off the Rocinante and onto the Falcon, was almost symbolic compared with what they’d already done.
Amos clicked the last of the safety latches into place and keyed in the syncing protocol. A soft hissing vibration meant that the docking bridge was moving out, creating a corridor between the ships.
“Still, I don’t think we should all go over,” Naomi said. “Not at the same time, anyway.”
“Not until we know the situation over there,” Alex agreed.
“Not ever,” Naomi said. “One of us is always on the Roci. That’s a rule. I trust Elvi, and I trust her to know her crew. But I trust us more.”