Vacuum Diagrams

Slowly she opened her fingers, turned her hands palm down, and deliberately rested them on the tabletop.

Now another shudder ran through the ship; she imagined a giant waking, stretching huge muscles after too long a sleep. Fear flooded through her; but she kept her hands steady and clung to the idea that the Friend was hovering over her somewhere. Surely the Friend would not lead her into harm.

Arke came bursting into the chamber. He stared around wildly, sweat sparkling on his bald scalp. “Erwal! What are you doing to the ship?”

She turned. “What are you talking about?”

He gestured, swinging his arms through wide arcs. “You can see it from the Eighth Room. The ship has grown wings! They must be a hundred miles long and they’re as black as night…”

Erwal barely heard him, for her head was flooded with a new series of dreams, as if the Friend were now excited beyond endurance. She closed her eyes, shook her head; but still the visions persisted. She could see the Eighth Room, but from the outside; it was a crystal toy against a backdrop of stars… and the ship was gone from its side.

She had no idea what the vision meant. Again and again it pounded into her head like a palm slapping her temple. At last, terrified and confused, she… reflected… the vision back.

There were screams; she heard people fall, splash into the pool. Then there came that terrible dream-sensation of sliding—

With a cry she snatched her hands from the mittens. There was an instant of pain, of regret, as if she were spurning a lover. The sense of motion ceased.

She stared around. Baffled villagers clung to each other, crying. The door which had led to the Eighth Room had sealed itself up. In one of the wall panels she saw the Eighth Room… but, just as in the dream, the Room was diminished in size, as if she were viewing it from some distance.

A muscle in Arke’s cheek quivered. “Erwal, what have you done?”

“I…” Her throat, she found, was quite dry. She licked her lips and tried again. “I think I’ve moved the ship. But I’m not sure how.”

He pointed to the door. “If that hadn’t closed itself the co

Her fears subsiding, Erwal found herself able to say calmly: “Arke, I don’t think that could have happened. The ship simply isn’t made that way. It’s here to help and protect us.”

He stared at her curiously, scratching his scalp. “You talk about it as if it’s alive.”

“Perhaps it is.” She touched the mittens and remembered the excitement that had surged through her senses.

“Take us back.” There was a barely controlled tremble in Arke’s voice.

She looked up at the wall panels. Villagers inside the Eighth Room called soundlessly to the ship, hammering at the crystal walls; they looked like insects in a box of ice, and the occupants of the ship stared at them numbly.

Erwal nodded. “Yes. All right.” Once again she slid her hands into the gloves; once again the ship trembled, as if it were some huge animal ready to do her bidding.

She sensed the Friend hovering close by.

She closed her eyes and — imagined — the ship restored to its berth next to the Eighth Room. There was another disconcerting slide through space, briefer this time, and the ship came to rest.

She looked up. The door barring the way to the Eighth Room had dissolved; the villagers in the ship rushed to the door and embraced their companions, as if they had been separated by far more than a few hundred yards and a few minutes.

After that many of the little group retreated to the comparatively familiar confines of the Eight Rooms — some went so far as to spend some nights outside, buried in the chill, comforting snow — and it took some time before they grew to trust the interior of the ship once more. For some time Erwal did not dare move the ship again; but when she slid her hands into the mittens it was like the feel of the muscles beneath the thick hair of Damen’s forearm.

Paul exulted.

Unsophisticated the humans might be, but they were not primitive, Paul saw clearly. They had been shaped by the habitation of a Galaxy, over millions of years. The woman, for all her fear and tentativeness, had no difficulty with grasping the essential concepts — that the object she sat in was a ship, which could be directed through immense spaces — despite the fact that such things were so far beyond her own experience. It was as if humans had evolved for spaceflight, as if the imaginative concepts required were embedded in deep mental muscles in the woman’s brain — atrophied perhaps, but now stirring anew.

Paul tried to analyze his own reactions. Not long ago he had been near the peak of his sophistication, his awareness multiplexed and his senses sweeping across the Galaxy… Now he was spending so much time locked into a crude single-viewpoint self-awareness model in order to communicate with the pilot woman that he was in danger of degenerating.

Why was he doing this? Why did he care?

He shook off his introspection. There were greater issues to resolve. He had focused so long on the question of teaching the humans to fly the ship that he had neglected to consider where they were meant to take it. Already he sensed the most advanced one, the woman pilot, was begi

He must consider.

He withdrew from the woman. (There was a sharp, bittersweet sense of loss.) Then his awareness multiplied, fragmented, and spread like the wings of the ship, and the small pain vanished.

The watching Qax had become aware of the quantum-function creature through its interaction with the primitives, and had only slowly come to recognize it as an advanced-form human.

Now the evolved human had gone.

The Qax considered.

The primitive humans were helpless. There would be time to collect them later.

The Qax departed, following the evolved human.

The Friend had gone.

Erwal worried briefly; but he would return when she needed him.

And in the meantime there was the ship.

Inside the warm stomach of the ship the days were changeless, their passing marked only by sleep intervals.

Erwal found a way to dim the light in the main chamber, and each “evening” the villagers would retreat to their nests of blankets, and soon a soft susurrus of snoring, gentle scratching, of subdued belches and farts, would fill the clean walls of the ship.

Erwal found it difficult to rest.

Nights — “nights” — were the times she missed Damen most. She lay alone in her cordoned-off space for long hours, staring up at the featureless ceiling. At length, driven by the boredom of sleeplessness, she would steal past sleeping bodies to the control table, slip her hands into the warmth of the mittens, and once more touch the great muscles of the craft.

She could not put aside the thought that they had not come so far simply to stop here. They had braved the snows to reach the Rooms — they had learned to use the ship’s facilities to feed and cleanse themselves…

They could even make it fly.

Surely they should not simply give up? If they could make the ship fly, why should they not make it fly far and wide in this strange, roofless Universe?

The claustrophobic warmth, the cosy human scents of the cabin, closed in around her once more.

She wished the Friend were still here. But she was alone, with her frustration.

Arke came to her, concern creasing the flesh between his eyes. “You worry me,” he said softly.

“Then I’m sorry. There’s no need—”

“Erwal, most of us are happy simply to have reached this haven. Warmth, safety, peace, food — that’s all we ever wanted. We don’t want more uncertainty, adventure. You know that. But you — you are different. You seem driven,” Arke said.