The Swan Pilot
BY L. E. MODESITT, JR.
I eased myself into the control couch of the ISS W. B. Yeats, making certain that all the connections were snug, and that there were no wrinkles in anything. Then I pressed the single stud that was manual, and the clamshell descended.
You could call a trans-ship a corade or a cockle guided by will across the sea of endless space. You could, and it would be technically wrong. Technically wrong, but impressionalistically right, and certainly the way it feels when you’re alone in the blackness, balancing the harmonics and threading your way from the light matter and through the dark matter and faerie dust of overspace, guiding the ship and all it contains out from light and into darkness and then on to another minute isle of solid warmth once again. Or you could refuse to call it a ship at all, nor the ocean it sails a sea. There is no true sea, the theorists say, just a mist of the undermatter that fills overspace, a mist that stretches to eternity, in which float the brilliant blocks of light matter that can incinerate you in a nanoinstant or the solid dark blocks upon which you can be smashed into dust motes tinier than the stitches on a leprechaun’s shoes.
A pilot is more like a light-blinded night bird with gossamer wings that soars across the mists of undermatter against and through the darkness and light that are but the representations of the universe above. Or perhaps those denizens of overspace perceive us as under-space, blocky and slow and awkward. I could call every flight a story of the twelve ships of the Tir Alir, and that would be right as well.
How many ways are there to explain the inexplicable? Shall I try again?
None of what I experience would make sense to, say, François Chirac, or Ahmed Farsi, and what they would experience would not make sense to me, either. But I’m Sean Shannon Henry, born in Sligo and a graduate of Trinity, and in the universe of the trans-ships, that has made all the difference, for the sky roads are not the same for each of the swan pilots, though the departures and the destinations—and the routes—are exactly the same. Nor can there be more than one pilot-captain on a ship. A second pilot wouldn’t help, because if a pilot fails for a nanoinstant, the ship is lost as well. Oh, the scientists have their explanations, and I’ll leave those with them.
With the clamshell down, I was linked to all the systems, from the farscanners to the twin fusactors, from the accumulators to the converters and the translation generators, and from the passenger clamshells to the cargo holds. I ran the checklist, and everything was green, and both cargo and the handful of passengers were secured.
“Alora,” I pulsed to the second, who handles cargo and passengers from the clamshell in the compartment aft of mine, “systems are go.”
“Ready for departure, Captain.”
A last scan of the systems, and I pulsed control. “High control, Yeats, systems green, ready for delocking and departure this time.”
“Yeats, wait one for traffic in the orange.”
“Yeats standing by.”
Another wedge shape, formed of almost indestructible adia-mante composite, so solid in the underspace we inhabit, slipped out from the glowing energy of Hermes Station, out toward the darkness up and beyond, where it would rise through the flames of translation, phoenix-swan-like, to make its way to another distant stellar hearth, and there untranslate, and glide like a falling brick back into the safe dullness of the reality we require.
“Yeats, clear to delock and depart.”
“Control, delocking and departing this time.” After releasing the couplers and giving the faintest touch of power to the steering jets, I eased the Yeats—a mere thousand tons of composite and cargo—away from Hermes Station, that islet of warmth in the black sea of oblivion that is space.
Like a quarrel arrowing through space, where there is no up or down, the Yeats and I accelerated away from Hermes Station and the world of Silverston. Once we were clear of satellites and traffic, I spread the photon nets, like the butterfly soul of the proud priest of ancient Ireland.
“Stand by for translation.”
“Ready for translation,” answered Alora.
I twisted the energies pouring into the translator. The entire universe shimmered, then turned black, and the Yeats and I fused into one entity, no longer pilot and ship, but a single black swan flying through deeper darkness.
A deep chime rolled from below, and crystalline notes vibrated from above, shattered, and fell like ice flakes across my wings, each flake sounding a different note as it struck my wings, and as each note added to the melody of the flight, it left a pinprick of hot agony behind.
I continued to fly, angling for the distant droning beacon that was Alustre, with the sure knowledge that there would be at least one timeless interlude. One was standard, two difficult.With three interludes began high stress on both the ship and the pilot, and a loss level approaching 50 percent. Only one trans-ship had been known to survive four interludes; the pilot had not.
Unseen cymbals crashed, and the grav waves of a singularity shook me. Black pinnae shivered from my wings, wrenched out by the buffeting of a black hole somewhere in the solid underspace I flew above/between.
Brilliant blue, blinding blue, enfolded me—and passed—and I stood on the edge of a rock, wingless, now just a man in a mackintosh, looking at the gray waves sullenly pounding on the stone-shingled beach less than two yards below. A rhyme came to mind, and I spoke it to the waves on that empty beach.
“So you’d not know a merrow? Is that what you’re saying, captain of a ship that is not a ship?”
I turned. To my right, where there had been no one, was a man sitting on a spur of rock. Although he wore brown trousers, and a tan Aran sweater, his webbed feet were bare, and he was not exactly a man, not with a scaly green skin, green hair, and deep-set red eyes that looked more like those of a pig than a man. He had a cocked red hat tucked under his arm.
“It’d seem to me that I know you, by your skin and hair, but mostly by the hat.”
“For a drowning sailor, you’re a most bright fellow.”
“Bright enough to ask your name,” I answered, not terribly worried about drowning. Overspace captains drown all the way through every voyage. We drown in sensation, and in the unseen tyranny of underspace that presses in on the overspace where we translate from system to system, world to world.
“ ’Tis Coomra, or close enough.” He smiled, and his teeth were green as well. Beside his feet was a contraption of wood and mesh. The mesh was not metal, but glimmered as if it were silver coated in light. It probably was. “And your name is . . . ?”
“Sean.”
“A fine Irish name that is.” He laughed.
“A fine lobster pot that is,” I replied, although I knew it was no such thing. I’d prepared for this moment as well as for many others, for to fly/sail overspace, a pilot must know all the stories and all his or her personal archetypes. That is, if he or she doesn’t want to drown out there. Or here. I had to remember that interludes were real, as real as life underspace, and just as able to kill me, and all the passengers who rode on my wings.
“A lobster pot? That’s what others have called it, but you, Sean Shannon Henry, would you not know better?” The green eyes glittered.