“You don’t fly a Spline ship. Such strong opinions, and you don’t even know that? Spline ships fly themselves.”
“Then what’s the ship? Squeem?”
“Xeelee,” he said softly. “They want you to fly a Xeelee ship.” He smiled again, knowing he’d hooked me for sure.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
Lipsey shrugged, turning his face from the rising breeze. “The Xeelee fighter was found derelict — a long way from here. The Qax paid well for it.”
I laughed. “I’ll bet they did.”
“And they’ll pay you well for flying it.”
“Prove it exists.”
Furtively he dug inside his coat of soft leather and produced a plastic-wrapped package. “This was found aboard,” he said. “Take a look.”
I peeled back the packaging. Inside was a delicate handgun sculpted from a marblelike material. The butt was wrapped in a hair-thin coil. Fine buttons were inlaid into the barrel, too small for human fingers.
“Xeelee construction material.” Lipsey’s gray eyes were fixed on my face. “Controls built to the Xeelee’s usual small scale.”
“What is it?”
“We don’t know. There is synchrotron radiation when the thing’s operated at its lowest power setting, so the Qax think the coil around the butt is a miniature particle accelerator. They haven’t had the courage to try the higher settings.” His face lit up briefly at that. He put away the artifact and pulled his coat tight around him. “The ship’s in orbit around the Qax home sun. The Qax will tell you the rest when you get there. I’ve a flitter waiting at Seoul spaceport; we can leave straight away.”
“Just like that?”
He studied me with a frank knowledge. “You have someone to say goodbye to?”
“…No. I guess you know that. But tell me one thing. Why don’t the Qax fly the damn ship themselves?”
He stared at me. “Have you ever seen a Qax?”
A million years ago the race we call the Spline made a strategic decision.
They were ocean-going at that time, great whalelike creatures with articulated limbs. They’d already been space travelers for millennia.
Then they rebuilt themselves.
They plated over their flesh, hardened their internal organs… and left the surface of their planet, rising like mile-wide, eye-studded balloons. Now they’re living ships, feeding patiently on the thin substance that drifts between the planets.
Since then they’ve hired themselves out to fifty races, including the Qax; but since they’re not dependent on any one world, or star, or type of environment, they’re their own masters — and always will be.
But there are drawbacks… mostly for their passengers.
Our cabin was a red-lit hole scooped out of the Spline’s gut. Our journey to the Qax home world meant three days in that stinking gloom. It was like being swallowed.
As a precondition of accepting our commission, the Spline sold us each an emergency beacon. It was a sort of limp bracelet. “It’s a quantum-inseparability beacon. You work it by squeezing its mid-portion,” Lipsey said. “The Spline guarantee your rescue, anywhere within the Galaxy. Of course, the price of the rescue’s negotiable. Higher if you don’t want the Qax to know about it.”
“I don’t want this.”
He shrugged. “Have it on credit. You might need it one day.”
“Maybe.” I wrapped the bracelet around my wrist; it nestled into place like a living thing.
Disgusting. I missed human technology.
We entered orbit around the Qax planet.
Our air and water were re-absorbed by the cabin walls, then an orifice dilated and we passed through a bloody tube to space. The stars were clean and cold. I breathed freely for the first time since we’d left Earth.
Lipsey’s two-man flitter was extruded from another sphincter, and we spiraled over the Qax world. Under the murky atmosphere I saw a planet-wide ocean. Submerged volcano mouths glowed like coals. There were no cities, no lights. “It’s a goddamn swamp,” I concluded.
Lipsey nodded cheerfully, intent on his inexpert piloting. “Yes. It’s like the primeval Earth.”
“So where are the Qax? Undersea?”
“Wait and see.”
We landed and stepped out onto a spaceport, a metal island in a bubbling quagmire. Steam misted up my face plate. Lipsey lifted a suitcase-sized translator box down from the flitter. “Meet our client,” he said.
“Where?”
He smiled. “Here! All around you.”
The translator box woke up. “This is the human pilot we discussed?”
I jumped, whirled around. Nothing but swamp.
“Yes,” said Lipsey, his tone deep and reassuring. “This is Jim Bolder.”
“And this is really one of your best?” boomed the Qax.
I bristled. “Lipsey, what is this?”
He smiled, then stood beside me and pointed. “Look down there. What do you see?”
I stared. “Turbulent mud.” Hexagonal convection cells a hand’s breadth across, quite stable: the ocean was like a huge pan of boiling water.
Lipsey said: “All known forms of life are based on a cellular organization. But there are no rules about what form the cells have to take…”
I thought it over. “You’re telling me that those convection cells are the basis of the Qax biology?”
I stared at the sea, trying to perceive the limits of the mighty creature. I imagined I could see thoughts hopping over the rippling meniscus like flies…
“Can we proceed?” the Qax broke in. The box gave it an appropriate voice: deep-bellied, like an irritable god.
I tried to concentrate. “Show me the Xeelee ship,” I said.
“In time. Do you know what we want of you?”
“No.”
“What do you know of galactic drift?” the Qax began. “Your astronomers first detected it in your twentieth century…”
The galaxies are streaming.
Like a huge liner our Galaxy is soaring through space at several hundred miles a second. That’s maybe no surprise — until you learn that all the other galaxies, as far as we can see in any direction, are migrating, too. And they’re all heading for the same spot.
Standing there on that shiny island in a mud sea, I struggled with the scale of it all. Throughout a sphere a billion light years wide, galaxies are converging like moths to a flame.
But what is the flame? And — who lit it?
“We call it the Great Attractor,” said the Qax. “We know something about its properties. It is three hundred million light years from here. And it’s massive: a hundred thousand times the mass of our Galaxy, crammed into a region about half the Galaxy’s diameter.”
A cold mist settled over us; the Qax restlessly stirred its oceanic muscles. I felt like a flea on the back of a hippopotamus.
“We need to understand what is happening out there,” the Qax went on. “Now: we have trading contacts throughout the Local Cluster, and we’ve been analyzing sightings of Xeelee ships. We had the idea of trying to track down the Xeelee Prime Radiant — their source and center of activities. We have done so.”
“The Prime Radiant is at the center of the Galaxy,” I said.
Lipsey smiled thinly. “You’re not thinking big enough, Bolder. The Xeelee transcend any one Galaxy.”
I thought that through… and my mouth dried up. “You’re not suggesting,” I asked slowly, “that the Xeelee are responsible for the Great Attractor? That they’re building it?”
“We plan to send a probe to find out,” said the Qax. “Our captured Xeelee ship is the technology we need to cross such distances.”