The alien spaceships were mere dots of light on the periphery of the viewscreen, but that they were there at all made Asha’s skin go cold and feel like it was shrinking around her. The ships were sleek vessels built for speed, and the Adastra was a lumbering generation ship constructed more than a century ago to sustain the lives of a thousand volunteers and their children and their children’s children.
It had all seemed such a grand and glorious adventure when the Adastra began its journey, the first ship to leave the comfortable human solar system behind for the cold, black uncertainty of interstellar space. There were banners and banquets and a general mood of celebration before the ship began its slow acceleration out of the solar system, but the mood on the ship had settled down to a slow-paced day-after-day monotony, filled with concentrated human odors and irritations, before the ship passed Mars orbit. Asha knew all that only from the stories that her friends had told her, youthful distortions corrected by her father when she ran to him for an explanation, and he told her how his father had taken him to a room in the ship to show him relics from the Earth he had never seen and the images the ship’s pedia had stored away until they were needed. The first generation had referred to them frequently, in moments of nostalgia for friends and scenes left behind, the second generation, only when forced to watch by their parents, and the third generation forgot them.
Memories of what they had left behind were too poignant for that first generation, and they soon stopped watching, too. It was better for them to focus on the voyage ahead than to mourn what they would never see again, when they knew that the Adastra was to be their only world for the rest of their lives, where they would tend the many machines that kept out the frozen darkness, where they would live and love and bear their children and die to contribute their remains to the ship’s irreplaceable store of biological materials. For their children it was different. Earth was a legend, not a memory, and legends nurture a culture. The Adastra was the only world her father knew, the only world any of them knew, and although he might never personally see the end of their voyage, it was the voyage that mattered, and Asha might be there when the Adastra arrived at its remote destination. What he did not imagine was that their voyage would come to an abrupt and tragic end, still far from their Alpha Centauri goal, their triumph turned into failure when the ship was intercepted by alien vessels and boarded by monsters of many different shapes and horrors, who might have slaughtered them all, as they feared, but instead treated them like animals, too insignificant for destruction. Their ship, too, the product of the best human engineering and the effort and sacrifices of generations, was the object of what her father and the others interpreted as contempt. The alien monsters took over the ship, issued orders to the ship’s pedia that the humans had considered immune to unauthorized control, and transported them back through the incredible, disorienting experience of the nexus points that were the aliens masters of the galaxy, and finally to the system that her father later learned was called Federation Central. These monsters were part of a grand Federation of many-shaped aliens who had governed this galaxy for half a million years—or long cycles as the aliens called them, because there was no consistency in planetary orbits.
Asha only knew all this because of what her father told her. She had been just a few months old when the Federation ship intercepted the Adastra, and the only change in her circumstances came after the aliens had guided them to a spot in space where a hole, unseen until then, opened, the ship plunged into the unknown and the unknowable, and she experienced the terror of unspace. She screamed, her father said, and continued screaming until the ship emerged into reality, hundreds of parsecs away from where they had entered. Her father had held her so tightly that her small body was bruised, he said, for fear that she would be lost in the unreality of a place where time and space do not exist. The passage took eternity and no time at all. But by the third or fourth Jump, the baby Asha had begun to adjust, her father said. But the adults took much longer.
Finally they had arrived at the insignificant system that was the home of the Federation Council and the bureaucracy that enforced the regulations that governed it. Its sun was small and red and dim, and its planets were barren and impoverished. But that was why it had become the governing center for the dozens of alien species that had worked out a method for living together without killing each other: they surrendered a certain amount of freedom for the sake of peace and the benefits of trade, particularly in technology. Their Council worked by consensus, the mutual agreements that benefited nobody excessively and disadvantaged nobody egregiously. It was a political system that privileged the way things were and kept the Federation stable until a new, spacefaring species broke out of its solar system and had to be absorbed or destroyed. And that was why Federation Central was so insignificant. No one would ever give it more than a passing glance. No one would ever suspect that it was the center of the organization that governed this spiral arm of the galaxy.
The most important planet of the system was the center of administration—Federation Central itself. It had been a minor planet that millions of years before had been stripped of its oceans and atmosphere when its sun had expanded into a destructive giant before collapsing into its present state. Thousands of years of labor had built offices and living quarters and the machinery that kept it running, one layer on top of another until the barren planet became a single, world-wide metropolis, covered with energy accumulators that sucked up the feeble radiations from its red dwarf sun, with only a few open spaces left for shuttle craft to descend from ships in orbit. But the humans knew nothing of that until later. The Adastra was placed in orbit around the moon of one of the system’s meanest planets. The humans called it “Hell.” The world it orbited they called “Hades.” They were the worst places the humans could imagine with creatures whose sole reason for existence seemed to be to torment their prisoners. But people, as they always did, learned to live under those conditions.
They had company. In the same orbit around Hell was another human generation ship named Vanguard. It had started its voyage from Earth twenty years after the Adastra, but it had been intercepted and brought to Hell a year before. Half its crew and a quarter of its passengers had been killed in a futile attempt at resistance. A computer technician named Ren was the highest-ranking, surviving officer.
Ren glanced at the viewscreen and then looked back at the keyboard he was using to communicate with the pedia he had liberated from the aliens’ electronic chains. He didn’t seem nervous, but Asha was. The dots on the screen had grown into three blobs in the few minutes since they had first appeared. Three Federation ships were pursuing them! Enough to cut off any escape routes that Ren might have devised. But he seemed unconcerned, just as he had seemed unperturbable as she was growing up, a rock of stability in a constantly shifting world. That was what had attracted her to him, but now it was driving her mad, and she couldn’t break through his veneer of calm confidence for fear she would release the volatile magma she imagined boiling beneath and they would all be doomed.
It was Ren who had organized the school for the children once the sickness that had taken her mother’s life and the lives of two others before it was traced to the food the aliens had given them, repulsive to begin and deadly in the end. Everything alien was a potential poison, fast or slow, nurtured by different suns, evolved under different challenges. The only comfort they could draw from that basic fact of alien contact was that humans were as deadly to the aliens as the aliens and their produce were to humans. The Adastra survivors could stop worrying that the aliens were saving them for a celebratory feast in which they would be the main course. They and the Vanguard people were allowed to return to the Adastra and the hydroponic gardens that had sustained them for two generations. Asha’s father believed that the aliens were as happy to have the humans removed from their midst as the humans were glad to be returned to the only home they had ever known. There were guards, of course, mostly weasel-like creatures, who seemed to be selected for menial positions, and an occasional barrel-shaped alien, all supervised by a creature like a baby elephant with a short trunk. Asha learned later that the weasel-shaped aliens were called Xifora and were from a planet called Xi, the barrel-shaped aliens were from a moon of a planet in the Sirius system, and the elephant-like creature was a Dorian from the heavy planet Doria.
The children of the two generation ships were schooled every day in the assembly room of the Adastra. Ren taught mathematics, science, and technology, but he was best at computer science. When he wasn’t teaching, he was communing with the corrupted pedia, as if it were some unreliable Sybil whose obscure prophecies could be riddled into meaning. Syl, a junior officer from the Vanguard, taught composition, communication, and group relations. Her father, who had learned xenology from his father, taught human history, psychology, and linguistics. At every other moment, he studied the languages and culture of their captors, but it was a task for which all the training in the history of the human species and the hundreds of languages it had developed over the millennia provided no insights. Even the pedia, with its near-infinite memory and computing capability, could piece together, over time, only a few words here and there. After school the children tended the gardens, helped prepare meals, and cleaned the living quarters. The older generation had been decimated, by resistance and by contact; everyone was needed, and the elders thought it was best to keep the children occupied. They did not know children well.
Mostly, though, when the older humans were alone and the pedia’s constant surveillance of every part of the ship had been turned off, they talked about escape. It was therapy for most of them. The aliens’ mastery of the nexus points, much less their constant surveillance, meant that escape was futile. Even if the Adastra could somehow free itself from the guards and sneak away before the Federation sensors detected its departure from orbit, the superior alien technology would prevail. It had been honed over millennia while the human species was still evolving from creatures that swung down from the trees to walk on the savannahs.
The children accepted their captivity more readily. Except for the presence of aliens, who were more objects of curiosity than monsters to be feared, their lives were not much different than they had been when the Adastra had been coasting toward Alpha Centauri. And it was the children who began to understand alien speech. Asha’s father heard the children talking after class about their Xifora guards, and they told him what the guards were saying to each other. That astonished Asha’s father, but the children were more astonished to learn that the older human did not understand the Xifora or that each of the alien species had its own language, but when one of them was speaking to someone of another species it used a common language. That explained to Asha’s father why he had not made any progress in acquiring alien speech, and he apologized to the children and then to the other adults for not understanding it sooner. The common language he named “Galactic Standard.”
He also gained a new appreciation for the wisdom of children, and he asked them to teach him the concepts they had learned to associate with certain alien sounds, gestures, and body movements. Out of all this he began to piece together a grammar for Galactic Standard. Finally he had mastered the common language, as nearly as any human can expect to master any alien language, and had rudimentary knowledge of Xifor. Then, to the dismay of the other adults, he spoke to their captors. It was, he told the other humans, the first step toward achieving status as a civilized species with rights and opportunities, but the adults thought he had forfeited an advantage over their captors. As a xenologist, her father believed that it was his responsibility to negotiate an understanding with reasonable creatures who had an organization that had reconciled the cultures of at least three and maybe dozens of different species and had survived for millennia the challenges that every technological civilization encounters.
The Xifora were astonished when Asha’s father spoke to them. They passed their surprise to the Sirians, who in turn spoke to the Dorian. It was, the children learned, as if the apes in the zoo had opened a conversation with their keepers, and the children understood, although the adults did not, that some of the Xifora were scientists who had been studying the humans. They thought humans were clever animals who had been sent in ships built by their owners to test experimental devices before their owners trusted them with their own lives.
Now that the children had the alien grammar they were able to piece together the fragments of speech into revelations about how the aliens thought. The children had already begun to distinguish between the Xifora by markings and sometimes behavior, to give them names, and sometimes to make jokes about them. The children were able to understand some of the Sirian grunts but not the Sirians, and the Dorian was too remote to be observed or overheard. Now they saw consternation among the Xifora and even what might have been alarm. Asha’s father’s attempt to talk to them only made the Xifora seem more upset. They were not only suspicious, the children told him, they were paranoid. The Sirians, on the other hand, were impassive, and the Dorian was unapproachable. Asha’s father badgered the Xifora until, after delays of weeks that stretched into months, he was allowed to go down to Hades.
There, in a dismal office more barren of the amenities of civilized life than anything on the Adastra and thick with the stench of recycled alien effluvia, he was ushered into the presence of a Dorian named Noldor. He learned the name only from the obsequious address of the Xifora to the blocky alien who stood behind the desk. The Dorian did not introduce himself, and he had not dressed himself for a diplomatic meeting, if he ever did, wearing only a kind of tool belt around his thick waist. But he listened to Asha’s father’s practiced statement, in labored Galactic Standard, that humans were a technologically advanced peace-loving species that deserved to be treated with the respect offered all other civilized, intelligent species.
And then Noldor said the only word he uttered during the entire encounter: “No.”
The three blobs of light had turned into the needle shapes that identified ships. One was a little closer than the others. The other two had drifted to each side as if cutting off any attempts at the Adastra to escape by changing or reversing course.
“They’re getting closer, Ren,” Asha said. She had broken her silence but she tried to keep alarm from her voice. Everything depended on Ren remaining focused.
“We’ve evaded them through two nexus points,” Ren said calmly. “The third one’s the one that matters.”
He was, Asha thought, as single-minded as her father. Each of them could shut out everything except the goal on which their hearts were set. It was the kind of mania that achieved great ends or disaster.
Her father had returned from his first Federation encounter with the belief that he had failed because he had not prepared himself well enough. He continued his studies and his teaching and his attempts to communicate with the guards. He even learned enough Sirian to make friends with one of them, if the concept of friendship was applicable to Sirians, and persuaded him to take to Noldor a message he had recorded in Galactic Standard. The message contained music, poetry, and performances of dance and drama, all from the shipboard library, accompanied by her father’s commentary on human history, philosophy, and civilization.
Her father waited for an answer as the months passed and turned into years, as the children grew older, larger, and wiser in the ways of the other humans and their captors. They tried to tell her father that the aliens moved in their own time, that they thought in decades, not in days or months or even years. But her father did not lose his confidence in the power of reason and persuasion, and he continued to send messages to Noldor with more art and music and commentary, and finally his faith was rewarded. Noldor consented to see him again.
The situation was much the same when her father arrived at Hades. The dismal office was the same, Noldor was the same impassive, blocky figure as before; only her father was visibly older and grayer. But Noldor listened to her father’s impassioned plea for the acceptance of the human species as an equal partner in the greater federation of civilized beings in the galaxy. Now he spoke in near-flawless Galactic Standard, and at the end Noldor acknowledged her father’s eloquence and the documentation he had provided.
“The Council has decided,” Noldor said, “to allow one human to petition for your species’ acceptance as an applicant for membership.”
“The Council’s generosity and wisdom is appreciated,” her father said. “I will be ready whenever the occasion arises.”
That period everybody celebrated. But when the summons arrived, almost a long cycle later, the human selected was Asha’s thirteen-year-old brother Pip.
Asha’s father protested to the Sirian who listened to him that Pip was not an appropriate representative, that he was merely a child who could not be expected to have the information and the maturity to speak for the human prisoners, much less for humanity itself, but the Sirian’s response was the closing of all the ports on the sides of its barrel body with which it controlled its temperature and now, apparently, its interactions with the outside world. Her father spent every waking hour drilling Pip on what he should tell the Council and what he should be cautious about discussing. The summons came too soon, however, and her father had to assure his son that he would do well, that all he had to do was to be himself. Asha hugged her brother as he was drawn away by Xifora guards and turned to her father after Pip was gone and said, “There never would be enough time to prepare for something like this.”
Time was what they had, though, as the periods passed and Pip did not return, until, at last, he was brought back, unharmed but often sickened by Adastra food contaminated by careless alien contact. All the time, though, he was frightened and confused. He had not appeared before the Council but individual aliens of many different shapes and methods of communication, who may or may not have been members of the Council. They questioned him at every waking hour and sometimes awakened him for more questions during the sleeping period. They wanted to know everything about Earth and its condition, about human history and culture and stories. They were particularly interested in stories, especially folklore, and it didn’t seem to make any difference in their questioning when Pip explained that he had never seen Earth or experienced its culture. All he knew was the Adastra and what he had been told about humanity’s home world, and the visuals he had seen in class or as entertainment. He had not even been born before the Adastra was intercepted, so he had no experience of what it was like to live in a humanly governed community. He pretended that he did not know Galactic Standard well, but they kept pestering him with questions, the same ones over and over, and when his answers differed they pounced and asked him to explain. Some of the aliens seemed gentle and understanding, some of them, brusque and contemptuous. He learned to be more wary of the gentle and understanding ones.
“They don’t like us,” Pip said.
“We mustn’t judge creatures by their appearance,” Asha’s father said. “Or by their alien cultures. Just as we wouldn’t want to be judged in that way by them.”
“I did the best I could,” Pip said.
“Of course you did,” Asha said. “Let’s get you some real food and then you can rest, for two sleep periods if you feel like it.”
“You did well,” her father said, but later, when Asha returned, he confided in her that he was afraid the Council was preparing a case against humanity. He renewed his request that he be allowed to represent the prisoners—and perhaps all humanity—before the Council, since Pip had not been allowed to do so.
Many months passed, but her father persisted, clutching to his faith in the sanity of a galactic civilization. “It is a terrible responsibility to represent all humanity,” he told Asha, “but someone must do it, and circumstances have chosen me. You’ll understand that some day.”
A year later his appeal was granted. He would be allowed to petition in person for an audience with the Council. Unlike previous occasions when the aliens had responded to his appeals, he boarded the next available shuttle to the planet of the Galactic Council, And unlike Pip, he was allowed to observe the astonishing spectacle of a world turned into one vast metropolis and the interminable ways and byways, offices and living quarters, and all the services necessary to sustain a world of peoples focused on the single purpose of governing a galaxy filled with a vast variety of species and civilizations, far more and stranger than he had imagined. It seemed as if the Council wanted to intimidate Asha’s father with their irresistible power. But, confident of his purpose and certain of his intent, Asha’s father kept his faith in the power of reason intact.
By now the alien pursuers had again halved the distance that separated them from the lumbering generation ship. Even Ren seemed a little concerned as he glanced at the readouts and then at the viewscreen as if calculating an interception point. That was the kind of concern that her father had displayed when he returned from the world that millennia of construction had roofed over into a single building. He didn’t want to talk about his experience, and that was so out of character that Asha was shaken. He not only was older, he had lost that confidence that all daughters need, especially those for whom the normal support systems have been taken away. He had, he said, not seen the Council at all. The Council’s world was a clutter of offices occupied by bureaucrats of many shapes and languages whose only purpose seemed to be to keep themselves in office, decide nothing, and pass him along to the next. Perhaps there was no Council at all.
That was the time Asha went to Ren. Now she was mature, or thought she was, and boys and some of the men had begun to look at her differently, as if they were aware she had reached the age when, according to Adastra tradition, she was ready to assume her role in insuring the ship’s future.
Ren, however, was the only male who appealed to her. He was solid and focused, the way she thought her father had been, though for different reasons. Her father’s stability had been built on faith in the rationality and essential goodness of civilized beings; Ren’s emerged from a steely determination to prevail, no matter what the odds against it. Asha thought she loved him, even though he had no apparent ability to connect with other people on the everyday level of communication and concern. He talked only about important matters—matters important to whatever mission he had undertaken. And he was twenty-five years older. But he was a rock of stability after her father’s change, and maybe, she thought later, she had embraced Ren as a substitute.
Ren had accepted her into his life, and in the sleep period, when they were alone in the cabin that served as his office and living space, he seemed to escape the walls he had built around him. But afterwards he would turn to the pedia with which he conspired far into the time when everyone else was asleep. Asha kept hoping that maybe she could make him love her too, and maybe he did, but he was unable to show it beyond moments of passion, and even these seemed controlled.
“What are you doing all those hours with the pedia?” she asked once.
“I can’t talk about it,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Someone”—he nodded at the walls—“might be listening.”
“They can’t understand our language,” Asha said.
“Who knows what they can understand,” he said.
She had to be satisfied with the confidence that at least he was there for her. He hadn’t surrendered to the acceptance of the other humans or the defeat of her father. Somehow, some time, he was going to do something dramatic. It might end badly, but it would be something the aliens would remember.
And then, after several months, in the most secret of places, a classroom filled with students shouting to each other, Asha heard Ren tell her father that he had broken into the alien files and downloaded their navigation charts.
“We can use their nexus points to open up the galaxy,” Ren said. “Humans need no longer be primitive plodders. We can be the equal of any galactic.”
“Only if we can get the charts back home,” her father said, and then his face assumed the dejection that had become its constant expression. “And we are prisoners.”
The glow of success faded from Ren’s face, but it was replaced by the grim determination with which Asha had become familiar.
A few months later her father was summoned to appear before the Council. Her father viewed it, finally, as vindication of his faith in the power of reason and his hopefulness returned, but Asha worried that the conversation between Ren and her father had been overheard or that, barring catastrophe, her father would return completely shattered by rejection.
They waited. Life went on as if the fate of humanity did not hang in the balance. Classes continued. Other instructors picked up her father’s instruction. Ren continued his secretive research, looking more frantic and more haggard every period. Finally, when her father returned, they both seemed like old men, though her father was only middle-aged and Ren was ten years younger.
As soon as they were alone again in the babbling classroom, her father told Ren, “You’ve got to escape.”
“What happened?” Ren said.
“The Council is preparing for war with humanity,” her father said. “They’re using our own revelations against us.”
“Pip?” Asha asked.
“He was only a child,” her father said. “But I should have known better.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them nothing. It was the documentary I foolishly prepared for them, particularly our poetry, our art, our drama, even my own commentary on history and civilization—all based on conflict resolved by conciliation or rationality or love or recognition of common humanity, but often by force. They picked out the violent parts and said humanity was not only unfit for galactic membership, but a danger to galactic civilization. That’s their standard rationale for war.”
“We’ll have to prepare,” Ren said, looking even more haggard.
“No time,” her father said.
“The Xifora are beginning to act more paranoid,” Asha said. “I’ve heard them talk about the best way to kill a human. Most of them prefer knives, but a few talk of poison.”
Ren suddenly looked decisive. “We’ll do it just before the sleep period, when the current guards are leaving and the new ones haven’t arrived. They’ve gotten careless over the years, and their tours of duty have fallen into a routine. And they underestimate us.
“Asha, you get the children together. You,” he said to Asha’s father, “organize the adults. The pedia and I have come up with a virus that will shut down the galactics’ pedias. They haven’t experienced a virus for thousands of years, and Earth’s Pedia has rarely had a moment when it wasn’t under attack.
“The cells will open on Hades. Everything will go dark. We will sneak away before they know we are gone.”
“I can’t go,” her father said.
“You won’t have a chance when they discover the Adastra is gone,” Asha said. “And even if they allow you to live, you won’t have any food.”
“There are the gardens on the Vanguard,” her father said.
Ren and Asha tried to persuade him that his decision was folly, but they could not shake his belief that a human should remain behind to confront the Council and to exhaust every possibility of a peaceful solution. His misplaced confidence in the power of rational persuasion had been damaged by his experience but not destroyed. To lose that would be to lose his sense of who he was. Asha knew the aliens better, and Ren distrusted them utterly, but Asha also knew that their chances of a successful escape were nearly zero. Whether they stayed or went probably didn’t matter.
And yet they got away.
The Adastra neared the nexus point where the nothingness of normal space met the unreality of unspace, but Asha wasn’t certain that they would reach its temporary sanctuary before their pursuers caught up. But crises were when Ren responded best, his icy resolve turning to decisive action.
That’s how it had been when he launched his plan for escape. The galactics, as always, had underestimated human intelligence, ingenuity, and determination. Where a galactic would have accepted the overwhelming power of the Council and the impossibility of resistance, humans took pride in fighting to the end.
As soon as the guards departed and before the new shift arrived, Ren released his virus. Everything galactic stopped. Lights went out on Hades and Hell alike. Life-support systems stopped. Ships drifted in space. Ren timed the start of the Adastra’s engines for that moment. The ship drifted out of orbit, but it would have seemed to the galactics no different from any other vessel suddenly deprived of control. By the time Hades awoke, the Adastra already had a good head start. Only then did the pursuit begin.
Ren was masterful. He downloaded his stolen navigation charts into the ship’s pedia, guided the ship to the nearest nexus point, and initiated a Jump as if he had been doing it for half his lifetime. He seemed to understand the system of galactic shortcuts better than the galactics themselves.
When he was instructing her as his backup, Asha asked him why he thought they could get away.
“They’ve been using these nexus points for more generations than we’ve had since we swung down from the trees. It’s all routine for them now. They give an instruction to their pedia, and it happens. But I want to explore every aspect of these impossible tunnels through space and time because it’s new and exciting. That’s how we’re going to beat them at their own game.”
And so it was that they had arrived at the third nexus point.
“Now is the time to gather the children into the Captain’s Barge,” Ren said, “and the crew that has been assigned to accompany them. You’ll be in charge.”
“I’m not going,” Asha said, feeling a bit like her father. “I’m no longer a child.”
“You’re needed to navigate the escape vessel,” Ren said.
“You’ve already programmed everything into the computer,” Asha said. “I’m staying with the Adastra.” And, though she did not say it, with Ren. There was no time for protestations of love or loyalty, and for once Ren relaxed his icy grasp on command. And perhaps he was too busy out-maneuvering the pursuit ships into the nexus point and initiating the actions that he had planned during their long years of captivity.
Once the ship had entered the unspace of the nexus point and everyone was caught up in the insanity of non-reality—everyone but Ren—he launched the Captain’s Barge, with its precious cargo of children and the galactics’ navigation charts that he had copied into the computer. More important, he had programmed the vessel to emerge on a different route, an option that he had found buried in an obscure chart. The Adastra, or what remained of it, emerged on a different course, while what seemed to be the ruins of a generation ship came out of the Jump on the course the pursuers would have anticipated.
“What have you done?” Asha asked. “Through the madness of the Jump I felt an explosion.”
“Your perceptions are sharp,” Ren said. “We just jettisoned most of the Adastra and left its remains in scattered pieces.”
“That may buy us some time,” Asha said, “but how are we and the rest of the crew going to survive without the Adastra’s gardens?”
“We still have one left,” Ren said, “and we’ve reduced our numbers by more than half. We’ll survive. And we’ve increased our speed. I don’t know how much.”
“They’ll pick up our trail again,” Asha said. “They’re not stupid.”
“It is important that they do,” Ren said. “We’ll lead them away from the escape vessel with the children and the navigation charts that will give humanity a fighting chance. If they get back safely.”
“And what about us?” Asha asked. “Do we have a fighting chance?”
“We’ll see,” Ren said.
As it turned out, they had six working periods and five sleep periods before the galactic pursuers became blips on the viewscreen again. There still were three of them, which Ren considered a good sign that the escape vessel had been undetected. Asha, though, considered it a sign that their own fate had been determined. Her mood remained gloomy through the excruciatingly long passages between nexus points, as Ren’s navigation led them farther and farther down the spiral arm toward the dwindling stars at the far end while their pursuers seemed at times to grow closer and at other times to fall behind.
“We’re going to run out of stars,” Asha said. “And maybe of nexus points.”
“We’re almost there,” Ren said.
“Where is there?”
“Where the galactics won’t follow.”
“What kind of place is that?” Ren had been strange before, Asha thought, but now he had become even stranger, as if his obsessions had turned into mania.
“The galactics own this spiral arm,” Ren said, “but there are other spiral arms that they have never reached. The center of the galaxy is too deadly for ships to cross over there, and farther out the space between the spiral arms is too great. They call it the Great Gulf and they don’t have any navigation charts for it.”
“And you’re going to take us out there?” Asha said.
“I found an ancient chart.”
“How do you know it’s any good?”
“Why would it be hidden away like that—inside another chart that may be even older than the galactics’ recorded history? It’s like a treasure map.” Ren’s eyes were glowing, and Asha was suddenly afraid of him.
“Why can’t we wait out here until they give up, and then take our message to Earth?” she said. “Just in case the Barge didn’t make it.”
“They’ll post a guard ship or two. We’d never get past them. Our only chance is to go where they won’t follow.”
Or where, she thought, he wants to go.
When they arrived at the final nexus point, the pursuers had fallen farther behind, as if this part of the spiral arm was unfamiliar and maybe dangerous.
“You see?” Ren said. “They already have begun to suspect our intentions. They think we’re going to throw ourselves into the Great Gulf in a final act of human folly. Or desperation.”
“At least the Captain’s Barge should have reached Earth by now,” Asha said.
“Or not,” Ren said.
“And if it did?”
“There will be a war,” Ren said. “Death. Destruction. But then maybe a truce, when the losses of destruction seem greater than the rewards of victory. But that’s better than destruction without any chance at all.”
Asha looked at the viewscreen whose darkness might have been mistaken for a black hole. Beyond Terminal, beyond even the small, insignificant stars that had never been approached by galactic ships. The Great Gulf awaited them.
“What’s going to happen to us?” Asha said.
“Who knows?” Ren said. He didn’t seem unhappy. “That’s what exciting about it.”
And he launched the Adastra into the darkness beyond the stars and whatever mysteries waited for them...