Jack L. Chalker
Uniontown, Maryland
February 29, 1992
Prologue:
Near an Unnamed Neutron
Star in the Galaxy M-22
IN THE NEARLY ONE BILLION YEARS IT HAD BEEN IN ITS LONELY imprisonment, it had never lost its conviction that this universe required a god.
For eons beyond countless eons it had traveled through space in its crystalline cocoon, imprisoned until the end of time, or so those who’d fashioned the cage had boasted, yet what was time to it? And could any prison hold one such as it? Not entirely. They could hold the body, but the mind was beyond imprisonment.
The universe had been re-created, not once but many times, since it had been cast adrift by the only ones who could achieve such a feat, those of its own kind. It had been startled at the first re-creation, for it had been separated and walled off from the master control lest even in its eternal damnation it should somehow get inside once again. The Watchman had done it, the Watchman had reset all, but even the Watchman could not reset its own existence or alter its imprisonment, for it was of the First Matter.
Indeed, each time the system had been reset, its own power had increased; each re-creation required so much energy drawn from dimensions beyond the puny universe of its birth that for moments, for brief moments, there was no control at all, no chains, nothing to bind or hold, and its mind had been able to contact more and more of the control centers.
The jailers had not counted on that. They had not counted on a reset of their grand experiment in any way touching it, in any way influencing it; indeed, there had been much debate about whether to have a reset mechanism at all, and even those who argued in favor of it never dreamed it would actually be used, let alone more than once. Nothing was supposed to influence the prisoner in its eternal wanderings, but even gods can make mistakes; their mistakes, however, were of the sort that no one but another god could ever know of them.
But then, of course, freed of time, they nonetheless could never free themselves of its frame of reference; it was too ingrained in their genes and psyches. Unbound by instrumentalities, they had created their own boundaries in their less than limitless minds—minds indeed so limited that they could never accept the fact that absolute power was an end and not a means.
The last reset had done it. Intended to repair some sort of rip in the fabric of space-time itself, apparently wrought by artificial means, the reset had proved the need for a cosmic governor beyond doubt. The shift had been subtle, as they all had been subtle, yet the mathematics of its own prison were absolute, while that of the rest of the universe was not. At the crucial moment of the massive power drain, the one tiny fraction of a nanosecond when energy was not being equally applied as parts of the universe were selectively re-created, it was subject to the absolutes of physics without an interfering probability regulator.
It had been enough, just enough so that when the regulator kicked back in, it hadn’t allowed for that most infinitesimal of lapses.
A neutron star grabbed at its prison, pulled it with ever-increasing speed, not enough to crash into the terribly dense surface but enough to create massive acceleration, to eventually propel it, like a missile in a sling, to speeds approaching that of light, bending time and space, catching it in the eddies and currents of space and punching it right through a tunnel, a hole in space-time created by the series of massive bodies here.
As usual, the prisoner did not know where or when it would emerge, but it also knew that for the first time the regulator didn’t know either and would be slow to attempt adjustment. In that period it would be free of the regulator; in that period there might be a chance. Then only the Watchman would stand between it and ultimate power. It was a being that even space and time could never fully contain, a being that had spent long eons planning its rule and reign. It would have to meet the Watchman eventually; it knew that and welcomed it, for the Watchman was in a way very much a prisoner as well, doomed to wander forever until needed yet always alone. It looked forward to that meeting. In a billion years it had never been able to imagine who they’d gotten that was stupid enough to volunteer for the job and yet so slavishly loyal that, in all this time, it had never once taken advantage of the position.
A Small Town In Georgia
IT HAD BEEN A SHOCK OPENING THE DOOR TO THE APARTMENT and seeing just how much was missing.
Have I accumulated so little in my life as this? she wondered, oddly disturbed as much by the thought as by the emptiness.
Even most of the furniture had been his. He’d been nice, of course, offering to leave some of it, but she wanted everything of his, everything that might bring her back into contact with him, removed.
The effect was as if thieves had broken in and stolen anything that could be carried but had gotten scared off just before finishing the job. The drapes were hers, and the small stereo, the TV and its cheap stand, the six bookcases made of screw-it-together-yourself particleboard that sagged and groaned under the weight of her books, and the plants in the window. But only the big beanbag chair with the half dozen patches afforded a place to sit.
She went over to the sliding glass door that led to the tiny balcony and saw that the two cheap aluminum and plastic patio chairs and the little table she’d picked up at a garage sale were still there. So, too, were the worn chairs at the built-in kitchenette. He’d been sparing of the cutlery and glassware and had taken nothing save his abominable Cap’n Crunch cereal.
Feeling hollow and empty yet still distanced from the emotional shock, she put the small kettle on for tea and continued the inventory.
All her clothes were still there, of course, but even though they took up the vast majority of the closet space, there was an emptiness. The dresser and makeup table were just where they always were, but the room looked grotesque without the water bed, just the impression of where it had rested on the discolored and dirty carpet. She would have to tend to that right off the bat. She wondered if she could get a bed in four hours and doubted it; she’d have to either go to a motel tonight or sleep on the floor with just a pillow and sheets until it was delivered. There was no way in heaven that she could get as much as a twin mattress in the little Colt she was driving.
A sudden wave of insecurity washed over her, almost overwhelming her, and she dashed into the bathroom and then grabbed the sink as if to steady herself.
Funny how the bathroom had a calming effect. Maybe it was because, other than being minus his toiletries, it was intact. Then she looked at herself in the mirror, and some of the fear, the emptiness, returned.
She was thirty-six years old and, thanks to the two years she’d spent working at various odd jobs while waiting for an assistantship to open up so she could afford grad school, only seven years out of college. All that time she’d been a single-minded workaholic—push, push, push, drive, drive, drive. Two years teaching gut courses at junior college because even in an age when they were crying for scientists to teach, she’d discovered, there was a lot of resistance from the older male-dominated science faculties to hiring a young woman. All the research and academic excellence counted for little. Oh, they’d never come right out and said anything, but she knew the routine by now; at first she had been merely frustrated but was quickly clued in by her female colleagues at the junior college. “They never take you serious unless you’re well over forty because they think you’re going to teach for a while and then quit and have babies” and “They still believe deep down that old saw about women not being as good as men in math and science.”
But they also, she had to admit, credited experience. Not that she hadn’t tried that route, but the big openings for her were in the oil industry, and that meant both swallowing a lot of her principles and old ideals and also facing the probability of going off to Third World countries where women had no rights at all and trying to do a job there.
Finally she got this job, one she really loved, thanks to an old professor of hers who had become department head. As an instructor, teaching undergrads basic courses, it hadn’t been the fun it should have been, but it allowed her to work as an assistant on the real research, even if it wasn’t her grant and wouldn’t merit more than a “thanks” in the articles that might be published out of it. Still, she’d done more work in the lab than the professors who would get the credit, trying to show them, prove to them that she was in their league and on their level.
And now she was thirty-six going on thirty-seven, not yet tenured, teaching elementary courses to humanities students who didn’t give a damn but needed these few basic science courses so they could get B.S. instead of B.A. degrees. And she was alone in this mostly stripped apartment, going nowhere as usual and doing it alone.
Not that he’d dropped her. She had been the one to break it off, the one to give the ultimatum. It was always understood that they had an “open” relationship, that they were free to see others and not be tied down. They even laughed at the start about making sure they both had safe sex and got regular tests for any nasties that might be picked up. And she’d meant it at the time. The problem was she’d never fooled around with anybody else after he’d moved in, even though she’d had the chance. She simply didn’t need anybody else. But he’d kept doing it and kept doing it and kept doing it until he’d done it with a regularity that finally showed that he was not about to slow down or become monogamous.
She felt guilty, even now, for being jealous. Worse, it wasn’t based on morality but on her ego. She’d never expected to be so wounded, and it bothered her. What do they have that I don’t? What do they give him that 1 can’t? Am I that bad in bed?
Best not to dwell on it now. Best to pick up the pieces and go on to something else. She was good at that, she thought ruefully. It seemed like all her life she was picking up the pieces and going on to something else.
She slipped out of her clothes, removed her glasses, grabbed some towels, and went in to take a shower. The mirror on the shower wall reflected her back to herself with no illusions. She stepped very close to the glass so that she could see it clearly, her vision without the glasses being perfectly clear for only a foot or so in front of her, then stared at the reflection as if it were someone else, someone she hardly knew.
Her black hair was cut very short, in a boyish cut; it was easy to wash and easy to manage, and it had fewer gray hairs to pluck that way. Her face was a basic oval shape with brown eyes, thin lashes, a somewhat too large nose, and a mouth maybe a bit too wide, but not much. Not an unattractive face, neither cute nor beautiful, but with maturity creeping into its features, hardening them a bit—or was that her imagination?
Average. That’s what she was: average. Not a bad figure but no bathing beauty type, either. Breasts a little too small, hips too wide. With the right clothes she could be very attractive, but this way, unadorned, her body would win no prizes, no envious gazes, no second looks. She looked like a million other women. Generic, that’s me, she thought glumly. I ought to have a little black bar code tattooed on my forehead.
That was the trouble, really, in academia as well. There were women at the top of most scientific disciplines, including hers, none of whom would have any problems being wooed from one major chair to another, writing their own tickets their own way, but they were very few in number because the deck was still stacked. Those women were the geniuses, the intellects who could not be denied. As “attractive” was to “knockout,” so “smart” was to “brilliant.” Intellectually, she knew that the vast majority of people, male or female, could not have attained a doctorate in a field like hers, but it just wasn’t quite enough. Enough to finally teach at a great university, but only as “Instructor in the Physical Sciences”—not just Physics 101, which was bad enough, but, God help her, “Introduction to the Sciences for Humanities Students”—and a lowly assistant on research projects whose grants and control were held by middle-aged male professors.
The shower helped a little, but not much, since it left time for more brooding. Was it the fates that struck her where she was, or was it rather lapses in herself? Was she demanding too much of a guy and maybe too much of herself? With people starving around the world and the working poor standing with their families in soup kitchen lines, did she have any right to complain about a dead-end life if it was such a comfortable, yuppified dead end? Was she being just daddy’s spoiled little girl, in a situation many would envy, depressed because she couldn’t have it all?
A line from one of her undergraduate seminars came to her, fairly or not, and tried to give her some relief from those hard questions. The professor had been a leading feminist and sociologist, and she’d said, “It’s not tough enough being a woman in this day and age, we also have to be saddled with some kind of constant guilt trip, too.”
She was, she knew, at a crisis point in her own life, no matter how miserable other lives might be. She was at an age when biological clocks ticked loudly, at an age when ease of career change was fading fast with each passing page on the calendar, when any move that could be made had to be made or the status quo would become unbreakable. At some point in nearly everybody’s life there came the time when one came to a cliff’s edge and saw a monstrous gap between oneself and the other side, a side that was nearly impossible to make out. She was up for tenure and possible promotion next year, and she’d not heard anything to indicate she wouldn’t get it, although one could never be sure. It was something she wanted, yet it also meant being here, on this side of the chasm, for the rest of her life.
Or she could break away and take real risks and, like most people who did so, fall into the chasm. But all the people who got what and where they wanted, the satisfied movers and shakers, had taken that same risk and made it to the other side. Not all of those people were happier than they’d been before, but many were. The trouble was, she was on the old side for making that leap. She was, after all, in this situation now because she craved stability, not earthquakes. Taking a risk in her personal life would mean saying yes to the first guy who proposed who wasn’t a geek or a pervert. And professionally, to take a risk would mean first having someplace to jump to, and the offers weren’t exactly pouring in, nor did risky opportunity just fall from the sky.
The vortex was never black; rather, it revealed the underside, the sinews, the crisscrossing lines of mathematical force that sustained and essentially stabilized the relevant parts of the universe. The Kraang examined those lines, noted the symmetry and precision, and, this time, noted the relay and junction points. Now, after all those millennia, the slight deviation the Kraang had been able to induce in the last reset had paid off; a line was being followed, not avoided as always before. The Watchman’s line, the focal point for probability itself, the emergency signal and warning beacon for the physics of the governable portions of the cosmos . . .
The emergence, as always, was like suddenly being catapulted out of a great tunnel; there, ahead, a solar system, a governed construct in a pattern the Kraang understood well, although it had no knowledge of what sort of creatures might live there or their current stage of development. It did not matter. The Kraang was not supposed to be in this sort of proximity, and already the signal of an aberration would be flowing back to Control, but it was a very long way, and even at the sort of speed such messages could travel Underside, it would be several seconds before it reached Control, and then Control would react.
By now the Kraang knew how it would react.
Control was not self-aware, for if it were, it would be a living god of the universe with no limits and no governor. Automatic maintenance meant automatic response; the experiments were supposed to be controlled, not supervised.
The Kraang’s great mind searched frantically for the now-invisible termination of the force line. Great Shia!
Where was it? A world incredibly ancient, a world with an artificial yet living core . . .
For a moment the Kraang experienced panic. No such world existed in this system! The nine planets and dozens of assorted larger moons were all dead save the experiment itself! A billion years the lords of chance had made the Kraang wait for this moment! A billion years, and now to be faced with failure . . . ! It would be too much for even the Kraang to bear.
And then, suddenly, it found what it was looking for. A planet once but no more, pulled apart by the strains of gravity and catastrophe, broken into impossibly small fragments that still worked together, trapped into sufficient cohesion by Control’s grasp of the energy of probability. Although in a million million pieces, the living heart still somehow functioned in what remained, two tiny steering moons and a vast additional ring . . .