“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice.
-LEWIS CARROLL
THEY EXISTED INSIDE AN EXPLOSION OF LIGHT. It filled their waking moments and their dreams. They heard it as a background of white noise; they smelled it underlying a stench of human and machine effluvia; they felt it like the warp of their world; they ate it with their breakfast cereal.
The external vision screens were blank. They had been turned off; nobody remembered who had done it or when. But they knew the glare was out there just beyond the walls of the ship. It was the only thing they knew for certain since they had entered the wormhole.
“No one knows what happens inside a wormhole,” Adrian Mast said, turning in the swivel chair that faced the useless controls.
“Except us,” Frances Farmstead replied.
They were inside the control room of the spaceship they had helped build. Although there was nothing to control, they found themselves meeting there as if by prearrangement. But that was impossible.
“If we really knew what was happening,” Adrian said. “Or remembered from one encounter to the next.”
“We should make notes.”
“I’ve tried that,” Adrian said. He wrote a note to himself on a pad of paper. He showed it to Frances. It read: make notes. “But I’ve never come across any record of anything I’ve written, on the computer or by hand.”
“That’s strange,” Frances said, leaning back. “I’ll have to try it.”
“It’s as if there is no before and after,” Adrian said.
“It’s a mystery,” Frances said. She was seated in the swivel chair next to him. She was wearing loose-fitting khaki coveralls. Moments earlier, he thought, she had been wearing a kind of body stocking. No, that had been Jessica, and it wasn’t moments earlier. It had been before they entered the wormhole.
“We’ve got to solve it like a mystery,” Frances said. “Like Ellery Queen or Nero Wolfe. Putting together clues.”
“There’s something wrong with that,” Adrian said, “but I can’t remember what. Maybe that’s the trouble. We can’t remember.”
“We should make notes,” Frances said.
“I’ll try that,” Adrian said. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“We had been accelerating for a long time, and then—and then—” The crew had built the ship from alien plans. But when they had started the ship on its first test run, the computer had implemented a program that sent them hurtling toward outer space.
They tried to reprogram the computer to take back control of the ship. But when they succeeded, they had to ask themselves: where else would they go? If they continued toward an alien-chosen destination they might find the answers to the other questions that had plagued them from the beginning: Why had the aliens sent the spaceship designs? What did they want from humans? What would humans find at the end of their journey, and what would happen when they arrived? If they arrived.
The ship had worked. Unlike most human designs, even though fallible humans had put the ship together, often from salvage, it worked the way machines and creatures in space had to work if they were to survive, that is, without a glitch. That nothing malfunctioned was due, as well, to Adrian’s obsession with perfection, with his insistence on checking and rechecking everything. The ship had accelerated at one gravity past the orbits of Mars, of Jupiter, of Saturn, of Uranus, of Neptune, and finally of Pluto, and they had left the Solar System.
That took thirteen days. Moving beyond the Oort Cloud consumed another four hundred days. After a hundred days more of plunging into the abyss—a year-and-a-half of living in enforced proximity to two hundred other people, smelling their body odors, hearing their familiar anecdotes, speech patterns, and throat clearings, and eating recycled food—their tempers shortened and their anxieties grew. By that time Jessica Buhler had isolated Cavendish’s program, and they had to fight the temptation to push the button that would put the ship back under their control and maybe cut them off forever from what had started them on this journey.
“I remember all that,” Adrian said, rubbing his temples. “But what happened then?”
Behind them the sun had dwindled into just another star, and although the stars were everywhere all the time, they could not escape the feeling of being far from everything that mattered. Then the blankness of space opened a blazing eye and glared at them.
“It was like a white hole,” Frances said, “suddenly in front of us….”
——
Conflicting gravities tugged at their bodies, as if all their loose parts wanted to go in different directions, as if their internal organs were changing places…. The glare was blinding. Jessica reached out with a hand that seemed to know what it was doing and slapped off the external vision screens. The relative darkness was blessed, but the wrenchings continued. If time had existed, the sensations would have seemed to go on forever, but then the twistings and displacements stopped as if they had never been.
The odor of fear filled the control room.
“I think we’re in a wormhole,” Adrian said, as if that explained everything.
“What’s that?” Frances asked. She was seated in one of the chairs in front of a panel that had been useless for control since the ship began moving. Now its readouts were gyrating wildly.
“Some kind of distortion in space. Physicists have said they could exist, in theory, but nobody has ever seen one.”
“What good is a wormhole?” Frances asked.
“It’s supposed to take us somewhere else,” Adrian said. “We entered one mouth; presumably there’s another somewhere and the two are connected through hyperspace. Physicists thought they would look like black holes but without horizons.”
“It looks more like a white hole,” Frances said.
“Some scientists speculated that the relative motion of the wormhole mouths would boost the energy of the cosmic microwave background into visible light and create a kind of intense glare.”
“Too bad they’ll never know they were right,” Jessica said. She was standing between Adrian and Frances with a hand on the back of each chair.
“These things, these wormholes, they’re everywhere?” Frances said.
Adrian shook his head. “Natural wormholes ought to be small and ephemeral. This one was created.”
“Why would somebody create a wormhole?” Frances asked. She didn’t like anything that she couldn’t connect with something that she had read or seen.
“To get from one part of the universe to another in a hurry. It may explain why Peter got a message in energetic cosmic rays. Sending a message over interstellar distances would have taken centuries, or millennia if the distances were really great. But if they were emitted from the end of the wormhole near the Solar System, the message would have arrived in little more than a year. And whoever is at the other end could have used it to know we were here, maybe even keep track of us.”
“Surely they couldn’t see anything from here,” Jessica said. “Even the sun looked like just another star.”
“They might be able to pick up energy transmissions, radio, television,” Adrian said. “Maybe that’s why they created it in the first place—because we started broadcasting back in the 1920s.”
“This is so weird,” Frances said. “Who could do something like this?”
“We couldn’t,” Adrian said. “Creatures far beyond our technical capabilities, maybe they could. What a physicist named Kip Thorne called ‘an infinitely advanced civilization.’ Damn! There’s no ‘maybe’ about it. They did it, so they could do it.”
“You said wormholes ought to be ephemeral,” Jessica said. “This one seems to be persisting.”
“So they not only had to create it,” Adrian said, “they had to keep it from collapsing. Scientists think that would take something they call ‘exotic matter,’ something with negative average energy density, one of whose characteristics would be that it would push the wormhole walls apart rather than letting them collapse.”
“Like antigravity,” Jessica said.
“So what does it all mean?” Frances asked.
“We’re inside something that doesn’t belong to our reality,” Jessica said, “and it is going to take us, if we’re lucky, somewhere so far from Earth and our sun that we won’t even be able to identify them in the night sky.”
“And if we’re not lucky?” Frances asked.
“We could spend our lives in here,” Jessica said, “or have it collapse with us inside it, which might strand us in hyperspace, if we survived. I think that would be pretty bad.”
“That’s about it,” Adrian said absently. He was looking at a pad of paper.
“What’s wrong?” Frances asked. “Besides being lost.”
Adrian showed them the pad. On it someone had written: make notes.
“Seems like a good idea,” Frances said.
“Sure,” Adrian said. “But I didn’t write it. That is, I don’t remember writing it. I remember that I will write it.” He looked confused.
“I remember that,” Frances said. Her voice was excited. “But it won’t happen—”
“What’s going on?” Jessica asked.
Adrian drew a square around the words on his notepad and then constructed a square on each side. “Space is different inside a wormhole. Maybe time is, too. Space and time are part of the same continuum. We may be in for some strange effects. At some point, for instance, I’m going to say, ‘It’s as if there is no before and after.’ But that’s wrong. The before may come after the after.”
“Like remembering what hasn’t happened yet?” Frances said as if she were making a joke.
“And maybe not remembering what has already happened,” Jessica said.
“‘It’s a poor sort of memory,’” Frances said, “‘that only works backward.’”
“Why does it sound like you’re quoting from something?” Jessica asked. “Aside from the fact that you’re always quoting from something.”
“It’s from Alice in Wonderland,” Frances said. “Or rather from the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, and the reason it comes to mind is that, like Alice, we’ve fallen into a rabbit hole, and in Wonderland everything is topsy-turvy.”
“I don’t think we’re going to find any answers in children’s stories,” Jessica said.
“I’ve always found Frances’ fictional precedents helpful,” Adrian said.
“The point is,” Frances said, “that we’re going to experience something that is likely to make us crazy unless we have something to cling to.”
“Like what?” Jessica asked skeptically.
“When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, she encountered talking rabbits and caterpillars that smoked and cats that disappeared and who knows what all. Maybe we’re going to run into the same sorts of things. If we can treat it like a kind of wonderland experience, meeting the strange but not surrendering to it, we can cope.”
A patter of feet came from beyond the hatchway that led to the rest of the ship. Frances and Jessica looked at each other and then at Adrian.
“That sounded like children,” Jessica said.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Frances said.
——
In the middle of the night Adrian heard a rustling sound and something that sounded like a sigh. He pushed the switch beside his bunk, and overhead light flooded the tiny room. Jessica was standing just inside the open door, one arm out of the body stocking that was all she wore and the other arm halfway removed.
“What’s going on?” Adrian asked, sitting up so suddenly the room spun around him.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” Jessica said.
“I mean, what are you doing in my room?”
Jessica looked around, as if the question that Adrian had asked was being processed. “I don’t know. It seemed—natural,” she said. “But now I can’t remember why.”
Adrian looked at the portions of Jessica’s body that had been revealed: the smoothness of her skin and the curvature of what seemed, under most circumstances, athletic and slender. It was as if he were seeing her for the first time as a woman instead of a member of the crew.
“It’s this damned wormhole,” Jessica said, shrugging her arms back into the body stocking and closing the top with one stroke of her right hand.
But it wasn’t the same as it had been before. Maybe it was because he had no imagination, Adrian thought, or maybe because his imagination was focused on distant goals, but now that he had seen Jessica as a woman it was difficult to see her as anything else. But he would, he knew; the wormhole would see to that.
“What’s going on in here?” another voice asked from the doorway. It was Frances, solid and square in her pajamas, almost filling the space. The room was so small that she was standing next to Jessica.
“That’s hard to say,” Adrian replied.
Frances looked from Adrian to Jessica and back again. “Doesn’t look that difficult to me. If this were a romantic film, the next scene would show lovers springing apart guiltily, or waking up together. If this were a suspense film, they would be plotting some kind of caper. If it were a mystery, one would be planning to kill the other.”
“It’s a farce,” Adrian said.
“People wandering into each other’s rooms without any reason and finding themselves in embarrassing circumstances,” Jessica said.
None of this eased Frances’ air of suspicion. “Oh, there’s a reason. There’s always a reason.”
“You forget our wormhole inversions,” Adrian said. He had his feet planted firmly on the deck.
“Whatever the problems we’re having with cause and effect,” Frances said, “a midnight meeting doesn’t happen by accident.” She frowned at Jessica as if they were in a contest and Jessica had broken the rules.
“I admit it looks suspicious,” Jessica said, “but I wasn’t trying to seduce Adrian.”
Adrian flinched. The deck didn’t seem so firm.
“It just seemed natural,” Jessica said.
“Of course it did,” Frances said.
“You know what I mean. Not something that was planned. God knows we can’t do that inside this damned hole. Just something that seemed as if it had happened before.”
“I’m not surprised,” Frances said.
“If it did,” Jessica said.
“And it didn’t,” Adrian said.
“You keep out of this,” Frances and Jessica said almost simultaneously.
Adrian looked from one to the other. Frances started laughing. “You look like Cary Grant in The Awful Truth.” Then her expression sobered. “We really need to come to an understanding.”
“I know,” Jessica said. “If we get out of this place, we’re going to need children.”
“They don’t have to be his,” Frances said. “There are lots of other men.”
“We can’t afford to waste any genetic material,” Jessica said. “Chances are we’ll never get back. Or if we get back, it may be in the remote past or the distant future. We may be all that’s left of the human species. All of space-going humanity anyway.”
“That’s as it may be,” Frances says. “But what’s to say I couldn’t have children?”
“No reason you couldn’t,” Jessica said. She put her arm around Francis’ shoulder. “We’ve got doctors and we downloaded to our computers all the medical information available. Your uterus might not be up to the pregnancy bit, but your ova may well be harvestable.”
“Thanks,” Frances said. “But there’s the emotion part.”
Jessica hugged Frances harder. “We’re going to have to get over that part. There’s too much at stake.”
Frances smiled and put her hand over Jessica’s. “That’s settled then. I’m glad we had this talk.”
Jessica smiled back. “Me, too. I just wish we could remember it later.”
Adrian looked from one to the other. “Wait a minute! What’s going on here?”
“None of your business,” Jessica and Frances said together.
“Come on, now,” Adrian said, feeling confused and maybe frightened. “You’re disposing of me like a prize cow—”
“Bull,” Frances said.
“And you say it’s none of my business?”
Frances reached over and patted Adrian’s hand. “Don’t worry! It will all work out. You take care of getting us out of here. We’ll take care of the social arrangements.”
Adrian looked from one woman to the other. “How are we going to get out of here?”
“You’ll figure something out,” Jessica said.
From outside the tiny captain’s quarters came the sound of children’s voices raised in some kind of game, but when Frances turned and Adrian reached the door, the corridor outside was empty.
——
When Adrian entered the control room, someone was seated in the chair that faced the prime computer station. That wasn’t unusual—or at least it wouldn’t have been unusual if the usual had existed as a comparison. What was unusual was that the head was familiar, and it should have been back in Earth orbit or, by now, back on Earth. But everything operated by different rules inside the wormhole, and the key to sanity was not trying to apply rules appropriate to normal existence. The person wasn’t computing; it seemed to be reading a book.
“Peter,” Adrian said. “What are you doing here?”
The chair turned. The person was Cavendish without a doubt, looking as real as Adrian, as solid as Adrian. “Same thing you’re doing,” Cavendish said. “Trying to find a way out of here.”
“We left you back in Earth orbit,” Adrian said reasonably.
“I remember that, too,” Cavendish said. “Yet here I am.”
“I don’t think so,” Adrian said. “I think you’re some kind of illusion.”
He took a step toward Cavendish as if to confirm the existence of the other man by touching his shoulder.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Cavendish said.
“Why not?”
“If your hand passes through me, you’re going to think your mind is going. If you find out I’m solid, that I’m really here, you’re going to question your grasp on reality.”
“You’re the one who’s supposed to be paranoid.”
“And I’m not worried?” Cavendish shrugged. “Maybe that means I’m not really here. Or that what’s here isn’t really me.”
Adrian went to the captain’s chair, sat down, and swung around to face Cavendish. “Why are you here?”
“Things haven’t worked out, have they?”
“That depends on what things you’re talking about. The ship took us to this wormhole. That worked out. I gather that you programmed that into the computer.”
“I just downloaded that part of the message.”
“The part you didn’t tell us about.”
Cavendish shrugged. “It wasn’t something I could share without creating crises of decision.”
“So you made the decision for us.”
“I didn’t know that it would take the ship here. All I knew was that this was what the aliens wanted.”
“They could have wanted to blow us up,” Adrian said.
“If they didn’t want us out here in spaceships, they wouldn’t have sent the designs. It would have been a sorry joke to send the designs, with the antimatter technologies and everything, and have a few humans spend years building a ship just to destroy us.”
“Then why didn’t you come along?” Adrian asked.
Cavendish shivered. “You see? I am paranoid after all. I was afraid to go and afraid not to go. I was afraid not to have answers and afraid of the answers I might get. But I had to get some answers, even if only by proxy, and the only way any answers would emerge—although I would never know what they were—was by sending you to get them.”
“Thanks,” Adrian said.
“They were your answers, too,” Cavendish said.
“Okay,” Adrian said. “What hasn’t worked out, then?”
“The wormhole. Passage should be instantaneous. But the ship is still inside.”
“If we knew what ‘still’ meant. Time doesn’t exist as we know it, in the wormhole. We’ve found that out, though it’s hard to remember. So whatever is happening, in whatever order, or no order at all, may be happening in the instant we went into the wormhole and the following instant we emerge from it.”
“On the other hand,” Cavendish said, “this may be a test.”
“What kind of test?”
“A test of sapience. Like we test rats in mazes. Maybe picking up the alien message was a test, and deciphering it was another, and getting to build the ship was a third, and building it so that it worked was another. This wormhole may be our maze, and if we don’t do anything we may never get out.”
“And if we get out,” Adrian said, “what’s our prize?”
“That’s the big question, isn’t it? That’s what drove me into the protection of psychosis in the first place. Maybe the prize is a bit of cheese—or what cheese represents to a rat.”
“More gifts like the antimatter technologies?”
“Or maybe aliens hungry for a different delicacy.”
“Welcome to the galactic civilization?”
“Or insanity as we try to cope with the truly alien.”
“Whatever it is,” Adrian said, “we aren’t going to know until we get out of here. Do we do nothing and hope that eternity comes to an end? Or do we do something—anything in the hope that it’s the right thing?”
Cavendish looked uncertain and a bit fuzzy around the edges. “I don’t think it would be a good idea to do anything until you have a good idea it will work.”
“That’s the trouble in here,” Adrian said. “Not only is it difficult to make plans—it’s difficult to figure out causes and effects, when the effects come first and the causes later.”
“‘Sentence first, verdict afterwards,’” Cavendish said.
“You sound like Frances.”
“There’s a bit of Frances in me,” Cavendish said. He was beginning to look transparent. “Just as there’s a bit of you and of Jessica and maybe a tiny bit of me.”
“I’d make a note of all this if I knew what you were talking about,” Adrian said.
“And if you could find it after you wrote it.”
“How do you know about that?” Adrian asked. He watched Cavendish’s wispy form waver in the slight breeze from the air vents. Gradually the various parts of him began to disappear, first the feet and the hands, then the legs and the arms, and finally the torso, beginning at the hips.
“I’m not really here, you know,” the ghost of Cavendish said. “You’re really talking to yourself.” His body had faded completely, and now only his head hung unsupported in the air.
“Some things you’ve said I didn’t know,” Adrian said.
“Nothing you haven’t guessed or speculated about,” Cavendish said. Now there was only a mouth. But it wasn’t smiling. The corners were turned down in Cavendish’s typical paranoid grimace.
Then he was gone. Adrian told himself that he would ask Frances what it all meant—if he could remember.
He looked down at the computer table. Cavendish had been reading Gift from the Stars.
——
The knock came on the door of the captain’s cabin as Adrian was going over the computer readouts once more, searching for an answer that he would forget even if he found it. Adrian had not wanted to occupy the captain’s cabin—more of a cubbyhole, really, like the ultra-compact quarters on a submarine. He preferred to bunk with the others in the single men’s dormitory, leaving the only private accommodation on the ship for the privacy of conjugal visits, but the crew had insisted. Partly, he thought, out of their own sense of propriety.
“Come in,” he said, putting the book he was reading on the surface that passed for a desk when it was pulled down, and turning on the stool that passed for a desk chair when it was not folded into the wall.
The airtight door slid aside. Jessica was standing in the narrow corridor, fidgeting from one foot to the other, looking concerned. That was nothing different. They all were.
“Do you have a moment?” Jessica asked.
Adrian gestured at the readout. “That’s all any of us have.”
Jessica sidled into the room and sat on the edge of the bunk. Her knees were only a few inches from Adrian’s and that was uncomfortably close. “We’ve got a problem.”
“I know. Not only are we in a reality where the normal rules don’t apply, where even the laws of physics seem to be different, we can’t make plans because we don’t remember anything from one series of related events to the next.”
“As long as events have some continuity,” Jessica said, “they seem to hang together, pretty much, one following the other in before-and-after sequence. It’s when the continuity is broken that causality is suspended.”
“Or reversed,” Adrian said. “We do remember things that haven’t happened yet. So maybe what we have to do is to lay the groundwork for what we will remember earlier. At that point, maybe, we will know what to do and be able to do it.”
“Which, of course, would get us out of this place before we had a chance to lay the groundwork necessary for the proper decision.”
Jessica was sharp and a hard worker—in fact, she was his most reliable assistant. He knew this voyage would never have started without her, and it was likely that it wouldn’t continue without her either. “I know,” he said. “It’s crazy. But what we have to remember is that what makes sense is probably worthless and only the right kind of nonsense will work.”
She leaned forward to put a hand on his knee. “But that isn’t why I’m here.”
Adrian shivered. It wasn’t that he didn’t like to be touched. Frances put her arm around his shoulder and hugged him. Other crewmembers patted him on the back and shook his hand. This was different. He didn’t want to think about what made it different.
“We haven’t had any time for personal matters,” Jessica said. “We’ve been too busy with building the ship. Now we’ve got nothing but time until we find a way to get out of the wormhole.”
“Yes, time,” Adrian said. He couldn’t think of anything else, anything that would stave off what he feared was coming. He could make decisions about life and death but he wasn’t good at what came between.
“We’re a band of humans split off from the rest of the species, and there’s little chance we’ll ever get back.”
Adrian nodded.
“So,” Jessica said, “we’ve got to think about survival.”
“That’s all I think about.”
“Not just us. The little band. What we stand for. The human species in space.”
Adrian cleared his throat. The room was getting stuffy. “Yes?”
“We must make arrangements.”
“Arrangements,” Adrian said.
“We’ve got to pair off. We need to think about having babies and the gene pool and everything else.”
“Everything,” Adrian repeated.
“I know you don’t like to talk about things like this, or think about them either,” Jessica said. “So we women have to think about it for you, make plans, arrange things.”
“You mean you’ve discussed this?” Adrian said huskily. “You and the other women?” He realized that he sounded incredulous, but he couldn’t help himself.
“Of course not,” Jessica said. “But we know. And I wanted you to know that I’ve always admired you, as a leader and as a man. Not only that, I like you.” She leaned forward and kissed him.
For a moment, surprised, he responded. Her lips felt soft and sensual. Then he drew away, shocked at the way his body had responded.
Jessica stood up. Suddenly he was aware of the fact that underneath the one-piece garment she was wearing, only a foot from his face, was the body of a woman, and it was the body of a desirable woman, and if he understood what was going on it was his if he wanted it.
“I’m glad that’s settled,” she said, leaned down to kiss him on the cheek, and went through the doorway and down the hall.
“Settled?” he said, too late to be heard. “Settled?” He had one saving thought: at least all this would be forgotten like everything else.
He thought he heard laughter somewhere down the hall, but it came from voices he had never heard before.
——
Adrian wasn’t good at talking to groups, but Frances had said it was necessary and he knew that was true. He would have been as traumatized as the crew if he had experienced over the past few hours the time reversals and the gravity wrenchings of the wormhole transition, even though they had been forgotten, and was depending on someone else to solve the problems. Adrian was as puzzled about what was going on as the crew, but he was in charge. That meant whatever was done would be done by him, and, moreover, he couldn’t appear to the crew the way he really felt—helpless.
He had gathered the crew twice before, the first time before the test flight, when he had offered the opportunity to depart, unobserved, to anyone who wanted to sit out the test flight. The second meeting had discussed the computer program that was guiding the ship out of the Solar System, and the reasons for allowing the course to continue toward what they assumed to be an alien-selected destination.
After that the crew divided itself into groups—work groups and social groups, which were not always the same. The crew had been assembled from volunteers to build a ship; once that was done it had to discover new skills and new interests. At first that shakedown was enough to fill the hours. Later squabbles arose about social arrangements and romantic pairings that had to be settled by counseling from Frances or, failing that, a ship’s court, and if that was not acceptable an appeal to the Captain’s final review. Now, however, he had to face them all and explain the inexplicable.
They were gathered in the couples’ dormitory, which had been the single men’s dormitory before the inevitable pairings had led to the switch. As in the two times before, men and women were seated on bunks or stools, or stood wherever they could see Adrian. Frances stood behind Adrian and to his left, providing the support of her solid presence. Jessica, on the other hand, stood by the door as if guarding the avenue of their escape. The climate in the room had been transformed from the intense boredom of space flight broken periodically by personal successes, disappointments, and disputes to a communal unease broken by moments of panic.
“We knew we would encounter some strange phenomena out here,” Adrian said. “But we didn’t know it would be this strange!” The crew responded with nervous chuckles.
“We have been through an experience that defies explanation,” Adrian continued. “It is connected to our entering a wormhole. We know that much. We must have felt some gravity fluctuations.”
“Why do you say ‘must have’?” a man’s voice asked from several bunks back.
“That’s what we would expect from a wormhole, George,” Adrian said, “but we’re still here, so we survived them. If you’re like us, however, you don’t remember.”
“I don’t remember anything that happened after we entered whatever it was,” another man said. “And that scares me!”
“It’s enough to scare anybody, Kevin,” Adrian said.
“There’s something else,” a woman said. “I’m remembering things that never happened, like an argument Bill and I had—are going to have.”
“And I remember the way we are going to make up,” a man answered. He laughed as if he were pleased with himself.
“We’ve got a theory about that,” Adrian said. “You’re remembering things that haven’t happened yet, because time is mixed up in here. But we can’t let the unusual get to us if we’re going to figure out what’s going on, and get out of this place.”
“When’s that going to be?” a woman asked.
“We don’t know a lot, yet, Sally,” Adrian said, “but we know this much: ‘when’ is a word that doesn’t mean much where we are. A wormhole is an out-of-this-world means of getting from one place in the universe to another, like folding space so that distant points touch, and crossing there. The wormhole exists in some kind of hyperspace where space and time get mixed up. We think—”
“Why do you keeping saying, ‘we think’?” a woman asked nervously.
“This is all new and different for us as well as you, Joan,” Adrian said. “Give us a chance to figure this out, how this new kind of time operates and how we can function within it, and, I assure you, we’ll get out of here and on our way.”
Frances spoke up. “You might think about Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Alice was in a place where nothing made sense, but she stayed calm and eventually she got back to her safe, sane home.”
“This ain’t a children’s book!” a man said. “And this ain’t fiction.”
“Sam, I hope we can be as capable of handling the unknown as a Victorian child,” Frances said. “Maybe even get some answers.”
“We ain’t never going to get back, are we?” a woman said.
“We can’t be sure of that yet, Lui,” Adrian said.
Jessica spoke up for the first time. “But we’ve got to behave as if that’s true, or we’ve got no chance at all.”
“What I want to know,” a woman said, “is where ‘on our way’ is going to take us.”
“We don’t know, Yasmine,” Adrian said. “But we all signed on to have our questions answered, and we’re going to have to follow the yellow brick road wherever it leads us until we get the answers.”
A man said, “What’s ‘the yellow brick road’?”
Adrian smiled. “Frances has me doing it now.”
“That’s another children’s book,” Frances said.
“I’d rather come up with my own answers,” another man said.
“If you come up with any, let me know,” Adrian said. He folded his arms across his chest. “Meanwhile, we’re going to have to live with uncertainty and forgetfulness and not let it make us crazy. But there’s a way out of here. The wormhole was a confirmation that we are headed in the right direction. What we can be sure of is that we weren’t directed here simply to strand us in Wonderland. This is a pathway. We just have to figure out how to move along it.”
“Moving along it reminds me,” Frances said, “of what the chess queen said to Alice in Through the Looking Glass: ‘Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get to somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.’”
“What’s the good of that?” a man asked gruffly.
“We don’t know, do we, Fred?” Frances said. “But I have a memory that it’s going to matter. Oh, dear! That doesn’t make sense, does it?”
“Frances, you’re always finding a moral somewhere,” a woman said.
“‘Everything’s got a moral, if you can only find it,’” Frances quoted triumphantly.
Shortly after that the meeting ended, with the crew informed but not relieved. For the moment, at least, they were not rebellious. Adrian had an uneasy feeling, however, that something about the meeting wasn’t right: the room was more crowded than it had ever been before.
But he promptly forgot.
——
Adrian was alone in the control room when the deputation arrived. Three were men; two were women. All of them were young and all about the same age, late teens, maybe, or early twenties. In their youth and energy, they all looked a lot alike. One of the men and one of the women was blond; two of the men were dark-haired and one of them was dark-skinned; the second woman had dark hair. Adrian had never seen them before.
The dark-haired woman reminded Adrian of Jessica. One of the men looked familiar, too, but Adrian couldn’t quite decide whom he looked like.
“We’re here to present our demands,” that young man said. His voice sounded familiar, too.
Adrian tried to keep from flinching. “Who are you?” he asked.
“You know who we are,” the blond girl said.
Adrian shook his head. “You’re all strangers. And the strangest part is that we’re in a wormhole inside a ship that nobody can leave or enter.”
“We’re the next generation,” the woman said.
Adrian was seated in the captain’s chair. The five newcomers formed a semi-circle around him, lithe, athletic, and leaning slightly forward as if they were poised to take him apart. “We’ve been here that long?” Adrian asked.
“Duration is a word that has no meaning,” the first young man said. “It’s hard to break old habits,” Adrian said.
“We don’t have any to break,” the other dark-haired young man said.
He sounded bitter.
“We agreed to keep this civil,” the first young man said. He looked back toward Adrian. “We’re here to present our demands.”
“You’ve got to let me get used to the idea that the crew has had children who have grown up while we have been stranded in a wormhole that was supposed to provide instantaneous passage. I don’t feel twenty years older.”
“That’s old-fashioned thinking!” the other blond young man said contemptuously.
“He can’t help it,” said the young man who appeared to be the spokesman for the group, if not, indeed, its leader. “He’s system-bound.”
“He’s got to help it,” the blond young man said. “He’s the captain.”
“How many of you are there?” Adrian asked.
“Many,” the blond young woman said.
“Enumeration is as difficult as duration,” said the spokesman.
“Are you all the same age?” Adrian asked.
“You see?” the young man asked. “He’ll never learn.”
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no,” the spokesman said patiently. “None of these questions you’re asking has any meaning unless we get into normal space. And that’s what we’ve come about.”
“To present our demands,” the blond young woman said.
Adrian folded his hands across his lap. “I don’t know what you can ask for that we can provide, but go ahead.”
“We want you to stop trying to get out of the wormhole,” the spokesman said.
“We can’t do that!” Adrian said.
“Why not?” the young man said.
“We’re in never-never land,” Adrian said. “Nowhere. No memory.
No continuity. Virtual non-existence. And then, you see, we committed ourselves to finding out why the aliens sent us the plans for this ship and brought us here.” He gestured at the book lying in front of him; it was Gift from the Stars. Often he found himself reading it as if he could find therein a way out.
“We didn’t,” the bitter young man said.
“Didn’t what?” Adrian asked.
“Sign up for this trip.”
“But—” Adrian began.
“You’ve got no right,” the spokesman said, “to take us somewhere against our will.”
“And against our right to exist,” the dark-haired young woman said. “What’s that?” Adrian asked.
“What do you think will happen to us if you get out of this wormhole?” the spokesman asked.
Adrian was silent.
“We won’t exist.”
“What kind of existence is that?” Adrian asked finally. “What is life without memory? What is existence without cause and effect?”
“The only kind we know,” the bitter young man said.
“We are your children,” the spokesman said. “You brought us into this world, crazy as it seems to you. But it’s our world, and you owe us.”
“He also owes the rest of us,” a woman said from the door. It was Frances. “And the species. If you’re more than illusions, you’ll be born at the right time in the right place. But now—be gone. You’re nothing but a pack of possibilities.”
The five turned toward her, frightened and uncertain, and disappeared like snowflakes evaporating before they hit the ground, leaving their potentials etched into the air.
Adrian rubbed his forehead. “They were so—real. So like the children the crew might have had—might have. Our language wasn’t meant for in here.”
“One of them looked like Jessica,” Frances said.
“And another one—” Adrian began and stopped.
“What?”
Adrian looked into one of the darkened vision screens. There were no mirrors in the control room, but he could see his reflection. He knew who the spokesman for the group looked like.
He looked like Adrian.
——
A familiar figure with a familiar walk and a familiar look to the back of his head turned at the far end of the corridor and, before Adrian could speak, disappeared down the side corridor that led toward the mess hall. It was a man. Adrian was sure of that. “Hey!” he called out, but by the time he reached the corridor it was empty. Only Frances was in the mess hall, cleaning the table that doubled for conferences, and she looked puzzled when he asked if anyone had just come in or passed.
But when Adrian returned to the corridor leading back toward the control room, he saw the same figure in front of him. He ran toward it, but it got farther away the faster he ran. By the time he got to the control room, it was empty. He went back down the corridor, trying to figure out what it meant. When he turned to look behind, he saw the back of the figure again, still moving away. This time Adrian turned and went the other direction, and came face to face with the man just outside the mess hall.
“Adrian!” they each said. Then, “I don’t believe it!”
“We’d better speak one at a time,” Adrian said.
“I agree,” Adrian said.
“We’ve got to decide, first, who’s the real Adrian and who is the doppelganger,” Adrian said.
“I’m real,” they said together.
“Look,” Adrian said, “this isn’t getting us anywhere. I’ll tell you what.
As Frances would say, “‘if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you.’”
“That sounds reasonable,” Adrian said. “Maybe this is the opportunity we’ve been looking for—to find a way out of this place. Let’s go in here and talk about it.”
Adrian nodded. “We can put our heads together.”
And Adrian added, “Two heads are better than one.”
When they entered the tiny mess hall, Frances was gone. Adrian didn’t think enough time had passed for Frances to have completed her clean up and departed. He didn’t know whether that meant he was in his doppelganger’s reality or whether it was another example of the wormhole’s vagaries.
“Obviously,” Adrian said, seating himself on a stool at the table, “the time variables have us tied up.”
“Obviously,” Adrian said, leaning back against one of the microwaves, not wanting to put himself in a mirror-image position. “But what isn’t obvious is what we’re going to do about the fact that we only remember what happens later.”
“That’s true,” Adrian said. “So the secret is to prepare later for what we need to know earlier.”
Adrian nodded. “I’ve thought of that. At least I think I’ve thought of that. The difficult part is remembering that we have to store information for earlier use.”
“We have to come to that realization independently, every time. We have to learn to think differently, just as we have to learn to think differently about Jessica and Frances.”
“What do you mean?” Adrian asked.
“It’s clear to me, and it should be clear to you, that both Jessica and Frances are fond of us.”
“And I’m fond of them,” Adrian said.
“One is, or maybe both are, going to want that relationship to get even closer.”
Adrian nodded. “That’s an uncomfortable thought, but if it happens I will have to handle it.”
“When we ‘handle it,’ as you say, we will have to think in unaccustomed ways.”
“I know,” Adrian said.
“I don’t mean just the business of allowing emotional involvement, even intimacy, but the possibility of sharing, or being shared.”
Adrian took a deep breath. “I understand you. What am I saying? I am you.”
“In the same way,” Adrian said, “we are going to have to think about our physical predicament in unconventional ways. Logic doesn’t work.”
“We’ll have to try illogic,” Adrian said. “As a matter of fact, I’ve already tried it. I caught up with you by going the other way.”
“I was the one who caught up with you,” Adrian said and then waved his hand. “No matter. We’ll have to think impossible things.”
“As Frances would say, ‘I can’t believe impossible things.’”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” Adrian continued. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Adrian moved from in front of the microwaves. “I’m glad we had this meeting, even though it was a bit of a shock.” He didn’t offer to shake hands with the other Adrian. That would have been too much. “But I hope it doesn’t happen again.”
He went through the doorway into the corridor. This time he didn’t look back.
——
They all knew it was time to act. Jessica looked at Adrian, Adrian looked at Frances, Frances looked at Jessica. They had been in the wormhole too long. None of them knew how long it had been: days, weeks, maybe even years. But they knew that if they didn’t do something soon they would never get out.
Jessica looked at the gyrating readouts on the control panel. “We have to know what is going on outside,” she said.
“None of our instruments work,” Adrian said. “Or if they work, they aren’t recording.”
“We could turn on the vision screens,” Frances said.
Jessica turned them on. The glare was blinding. “I think we’ve tried that before,” she said. She turned them off.
“That’s the cosmic microwave background boosted into visible light,” Adrian said.
“I think the vision screens are as unreliable as the readouts,” Jessica said. “We try to cut back on the light, and the screens go black. Somebody has to go outside and report.”
Adrian nodded. “I agree. And I’m the only one who is capable of making sense of what is happening. I’ll get ready.”
“You can’t be spared,” Frances said. Her face had that “there’s-no-use-arguing-with-me” look.
“Frances is right,” Jessica said. “I’m the most experienced in working on the outside, the youngest, the most athletic, the steadiest—”
“You can’t be spared either,” Frances said. “You’re young, all right, and you have a life ahead of you if we ever get to a place where you can live it. That leaves me.”
“There’s radiation out there,” Adrian said. “God knows what. Even if it isn’t fatal, whoever goes out there is going to take a lot of damage.”
“Besides,” Jessica said, “you get sick just turning your head quickly.”
“I can do this,” Frances said. “I can do whatever I have to do. And you’ve got a young body and young ova—all that needs to be preserved if we’re going to have a future.” She stood in front of them both, in the control room, square and ready.
“I’m not going to talk you out of this, am I?” Jessica asked.
Frances shook her head. “In a movie you’d hit me on the head and take my place, but this isn’t a movie and it isn’t going to happen.”
“I’m glad you know the difference,” Adrian said. “No heroism.”
“Just common sense,” Frances said. “Now I need some help in getting into a suit.” She smiled at her admission of inadequacy.
Spacesuits had not been built for someone as short and wide as Frances, but a man’s suit had been adapted by removing sections of the leg and welding the remaining pieces together. That didn’t help Francis’ agility, but then she hadn’t used the suit much. Now she struggled into it, and Jessica checked all the closures twice.
“Don’t stay out there more than a minute or two,” Jessica said, “and don’t try to do more than a simple survey. Be sure to snap yourself to the interior hook and make certain your magnet is firmly attached to the outer hull before you—”
“Hush,” Frances said. “You’re only making me nervous.”
She turned and hit the large button beside the inner hatch. It cycled open as Frances turned, patted Jessica’s shoulder with her glove, and touched Adrian’s hand. She adjusted her helmet and stepped over the sill into the airlock.
Jessica spoke into her handheld microphone. “Can you hear me? Be sure you keep your mike open all the time. I’m going to suit up so that I can come out and get you if you’re in trouble.”
Frances shook her head inside the helmet as she pushed the inner button and the door began to close. “We don’t want to lose two of us,” she said. “Don’t worry. If I don’t get back, it’s been a great run.” But her face looked pale before the door completely closed. “I’m opening the outer hatch. God, it’s bright out here!”
Jessica looked at Adrian, and Adrian looked back, but their thoughts were outside. “What’s going on?” Adrian asked.
“I’m darkening my face plate. There, that’s better.”
“What can you see?” Jessica asked.
“Wait a minute. I feel a little sick. There’s nothing to look at.”
“Frances!” Jessica said. “Look at the airlock. Look down at your feet.
Then look at the ship. Orient yourself to the ship!”
“Got it!” Frances said. “The ship seems to be moving. I can see some kind of disturbance in the glare that might be exhaust, so the engine is still operating, but we knew that, since we’ve had gravity.”
“Which way are we going?” Adrian asked.
“Hard to say,” Frances said. “There seems to be a dark place in the glare.”
“Which direction?” Adrian asked.
“Toward the rear of the ship,” Frances said triumphantly. “Where the antimatter stuff comes out.”
“That must be the mouth of the wormhole where we entered,” Adrian said.
“That’s enough,” Jessica said. “Come in.”
“Not yet,” Frances said. “I’m looking around while I’m here.”
“Don’t look around!” Jessica said.
“Funny stuff out here,” Frances said. “A weird-looking contraption just went by. All twisted pipes and girders. Speaking of ships that pass in the night!”
“You’re not doing us any good out there,” Adrian said.
“There’s another ship, or vehicle, or something,” Frances said. “Only it’s like a stack of waffles with a flagpole through the middle.”
“Frances!” Jessica said. “You’re making us nervous.”
“Goodness knows, you’ve made me nervous often enough,” Frances said. “There’s an alien, I think. A creature of some sort with tentacles. And one shaped like a cone with eyes. And another, and another!”
“You’re losing touch!” Adrian said. “Come back! Now!”
“There’s the Mad Hatter!” Frances shouted. “And Humpty Dumpty. And the caterpillar smoking the water pipe. And the Queen!”
“Come back!” Jessica said softly. “Come back, Frances!”
“Off with their heads!” Frances said.
Adrian looked at Jessica. She turned and began climbing into her spacesuit.
“Remember,” Frances said. “You have to run twice as fast as that!”
Something clanged from outside the ship, like a magnet being freed and metal-shod feet pushing against the hull.
Jessica stopped halfway into her suit. “I knew I should have gone,” she said.
Adrian shook his head. “There’s no way we can go faster,” he said.
“But maybe we can make Frances’ sacrifice meaningful.” He didn’t know how that was going to happen, but, as unshed tears burned his eyes, he knew he would make it happen.
——
Jessica slapped the vision screens back on and let the glare fill the control room. “We’ve got to do something. Frances has—is going to—oh, I don’t know what the right tense is. But she has given us all the information we’re likely to get, and she’s dead—surely she’s dead.”
“There’s not much doubt about that,” Adrian said. “We’re remembering things that have yet to happen, including things that might happen, and we’ve got all the memories of what has yet to happen that we’re likely ever to get.”
“Even though we’ve just entered the wormhole,” Jessica said.
Adrian nodded. “That’s the funny way time works in here. Now we know but later on we’ll forget. So we’ve got to do it now.”
“Frances said we had to run twice as fast,” Jessica said.
“And I said there was no way to do that,” Adrian said, “or any reason to think going twice as fast would get us anywhere.” He looked around at the control room. In spite of the glare, for the first time he was seeing things clearly—Frances, Jessica, the aliens and their plans. “We’ve been trying to reconcile the irreconcilables, the time anomalies, our own inability to adjust to inversions and potentials.”
Jessica looked at him hopefully, the way an apprentice looked at her master, anticipating wisdom.
“We’ve got to turn the ship around,” Adrian said. He turned to the controls. “Go back the way we came. If we were in real space, we’d have to decelerate for as long as we’ve accelerated, but this is hyperspace and we haven’t moved far from where we entered.”
“Let me do it,” Jessica said. She began punching instructions into the computer. “But isn’t that just giving up?”
“Maybe,” Adrian said. He tried to isolate a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. Maybe it was giving up. “Logically we should come out the way we came in, and then everything will have been for nothing—all our psychological torment, the felt years of experience, Frances’ sacrifice—”
“But maybe not?” Jessica said.
Adrian could feel the ship swinging even though there was nothing to see, no way to get information from gauges, nothing but glare….
Something surged.
Conflicting gravities tugged at their bodies, as if all their loose parts wanted to go in different directions, as if their internal organs were changing places. Then the glare and the gravity fluctuations stopped suddenly. Adrian and Jessica looked at each other, remembering everything that had happened or might have happened inside the wormhole. They turned to look at the vision screens. The glare was gone. Outside was the blackness of space with here and there the pinpoint hole of a star. It could have been anywhere in the galaxy, including back near the spot from which they had been drawn into the wormhole.
Jessica adjusted the controls and new arenas of space swam into view. The stars were few and distant. A single star loomed closest, but it was old and faint.
“That isn’t our solar system,” Jessica said. “That isn’t our sun.” Adrian shook his head. “Wherever we were going, we’ve arrived.”
“How did you figure it out?” Jessica asked.
“If time was inverted,” Adrian said, “maybe space was, too. In order to get out, we had to reverse our course. But then, I had some help.” He thought about the other Adrian, who now would never exist, except maybe in the never-never world of the wormhole, and how he had caught up with him only when he went the other way. But maybe that never-never existence, like that of the children and maybe even of Cavendish, was as real as any other. “Maybe I’ll tell you some time.”
“Meanwhile,” he continued, “I think we have managed our rite of passage and have a rendezvous with destiny.”
“Whatever that means,” Jessica said.
Adrian smiled at her. There would be great moments ahead, he thought, and moments of tenderness and fulfillment and maybe distress and regret and pain. But it would be living.
He heard a noise behind him and turned toward the entrance. “Frances?” he said. “Frances?”