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In the final moment, a new form of energy swept through the Mood Indigo. The control board in front of Chan went dark. The lights went out. Blind and dead , he thought. We’re dead and blind. The crippled ship vanished into the multiverse.
37: UNFINISHED BUSINESS
Stars.
There were stars again, glittering hard-edged points of brilliance in a black sky.
They shone in through every port in their thousands. And nothing inside the Mood Indigo competed with their remote luminance; because every form of internal power, including lighting, had failed. The inside of a ship should never be silent. Now this one lacked even the purr of air circulators.
“It happened in the final split-second,” Bony said. He was over at the main systems panel, flipping switches and examining displays. “Dead, dead, dead. Not a thing’s working.” He turned on the tiny lamp on his suit helmet. “No wonder, every level is down to zero. But we were lucky. The other ship hit us just as we were going into the Link. It sucked us dry, but it didn’t have time to dump in resonant energy. A few seconds more and we’d have been blown apart.”
“Can you do anything about it?” Chan was still adjusting to the idea that they were alive — not just alive, but in a universe showing familiar constellations. The Link exit point must be within a lightyear of Sol. Without any form of power, though, they could not signal for help. And without help their survival might not continue for long.
“Oh, I can fix it,” Bony said. “We still have generator capacity, and lots of fuel. A few replacement parts here, a little bypass work there. I’ll do lights and air first. Everything else will come back on-line in a few hours and we can tell people where we are. One thing about Friday Indigo, he bought only the best.”
Bony spoke confidently, but Chan noticed a curious chill in his voice. He glanced around the cabin. It was hard to make out the faces behind the visors, but everyone was u
“Are you feeling all right?” Chan said. “Was anyone hurt during the transition?”
Shaking heads. But still the coldness, and a long perplexing silence, until at last Tully O’Toole said, “We may all be feeling fine, but we left Chris and Tarb behind.”
Da
“Not even Friday Indigo,” Bony added. “I admit I hated him, because of the way he treated Liddy. And I know that the Angel says there’s some sort of Mallie inside him, so he isn’t human any more. But we shouldn’t have left him with them. It was wrong.”
“And if we had saved him from them,” Liddy said, “maybe something could have been done to help him.”
“That may well be so.” Gressel spoke up unexpectedly. Unlike anyone else on board, the Angel sounded positively cheerful. “Most of Friday Indigo’s original brain still exists. Possibly it can be restored to permit independent thought. To the extent, of course, that any human is capable of such. You ca
Chan wished that Dag Korin were on board, to say Or get sense from an overgrown artichoke. Suddenly, he felt immensely weary. He leaned back in the control chair. “We didn’t desert Chrissie and the Tarb, or Eager Seeker and Vow-of-Silence. We didn’t even desert Friday Indigo. I mean, it looked like we did, but we really didn’t. As for Dag Korin …”
“The General was on the Malacostracan ship,” Deb said. “The one that entered the Link ahead of us. I know you wanted to be on it instead of him, Chan. But we did desert Tarbush and Chrissie. We left them behind on Limbo. You can’t deny that.”
“I don’t. But I spoke to them before we left, and it’s not the way it seems. As for Dag Korin, we didn’t have much choice. The Mallies wanted to be taken through to our universe, and that was the last place we wanted them.” Chan turned to Elke Siry. “You know the multiverse a lot better than I do. Would you explain that part of it, and I’ll do the rest?”
“Well.” Elke bit her lower lip and looked at Tully for support. He nodded encouragingly. “Well, I guess so. It starts because the multiverse exists on many different levels. We’re back in our own original level now, and Limbo is in a different one. The levels differ in the total mass-energy associated with them. The way that I like to think of it, a higher total mass-energy corresponds to a higher frequency of that universe’s spacetime, exactly the way that a higher frequency implies a higher energy in electromagnetic radiation. Higher frequency means a higher clock rate. So if you know the mass-energy of a level of the multiverse, you can use it to calculate rates for the passage of time.”
“Elke,” Tully said gently. “Time is passing right here, and you’re not at all clear. I can’t speak for the others but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I do,” said Bony. “Or I think I do. Elke, are you saying that a clock can run at a different rate in every multiverse?”
“Exactly.” Elke nodded toward Chan. “He knew all this, which is why he asked me to do what I did.”
“Which was to seek out the most extreme case she could find,” Chan added. “I had given Elke a task: look for a level of the multiverse where the clock rate is slowest. She found one that she called the Omega level, a place where time runs two thousand times as slow as it does on Limbo. While one day passes in the Omega level of the multiverse, two thousand days — more than six years — go by on Limbo. And time on Limbo runs sixty times as slow again as it does in our own universe. Two months pass here, one day passes there. So when you put those two factors together, if you spend one day on the Omega level three hundred and twenty-eight years go by in our universe. It was my plan to take the Mallies to the Omega level” — he glanced at Deb — “but Dag Korin had other ideas. He went in my place.”
Chan pulled a printed sheet from his pocket and illuminated it with his helmet lamp. “The General seems pretty upbeat about the whole thing. Here’s what he wrote to us: Benjamin Franklin is one of my heroes. He said he wished that he could be pickled in a barrel for a couple of hundred years so that he could see what the world was like when he came out. I feel the same way. And who knows? Maybe that’s what I’ll do. As soon as the Mallie ship emerges on the Omega level, I’ll tell them that I made a minor miscalculation, and we have to go back to Limbo and try again. I don’t think The One will kill me at that point — she will be relying on me. If they make the turnaround at once, say four hours Omega-time, and then they find a way to make an immediate jump through to our own universe — which they’re not about to learn from me, you can be sure of that — you’ll have fifty-plus years to get yourselves ready for their arrival, because time on Limbo runs sixty times as slow as it does on Earth, and the Omega level runs two thousand times slower than Limbo. I reckon that when they get there you should be able to organize a pretty strong welcoming party. But don’t damage the Mallie ship too much, because I plan to be on it. Actually, I suspect that long before I get there, you will have — well, you know my philosophy. I’m going to leave the rest of the thought to you.” Chan folded the letter. “The first time I met Dag Korin, he said that no matter what people tell you about old soldiers fading away, he didn’t want to be like that. He’d rather go down in flames. He also explained to us, several times, his philosophy. Generals and admirals who are lightyears — or universes — away from the battle should not try to control the action. So he won’t tell us what we have to do next. But he hints at it, with his comment that time on Limbo runs sixty times as slow as it does on Earth.”