Peripheral Visions: The Two of Us

Peripheral Visions: They coalesce in the soft blur of darkest shadows and take shape in the corner of your eye. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late.

The Two of Us

DAY 1

My name is Dominic. I live on a star ship.

Actually, I live on a commercial hauler. By necessity, that's technically a star ship, because to get merchandise from one solar system to another you need to travel between the stars. But when you say the word star ship to planet folk, they have romantic ideas of aliens and adventures. They watch too much science fiction: They mistake space trucking for space exploration.

Greg and I aren't planet folk. We're haulers. Greg is my partner. When planet folk ask me about him, they imagine that the myth is true: That space hauler teams are specifically designed to work well together. "You're lucky," one tea grower on Desera told me as he unloaded crates from his delivery truck onto my loading pallet. "My parents made a deal with friends that I would marry their daughter, and they told me that their marriage, too, was arranged, and we would fall in love eventually. But I hate her, and she hates me, and this is how it has been for fourteen years. I would be a happier man if my wife was made to fit me."

But that's not how it is. Yes, Astrogators are custom designed to be able to understand higher-dimensional mathematics; otherwise, we could not pilot the haulers through the shifting geometry of infraspace. We need to have an ability for precise calculation, but also a sense of imagination, even of aesthetics. Engineers, for their part, are designed to be physically strong and mentally focused on one task at a time. Greg sometimes gets gruff with me that I do not think or work the way he does, and I have to remind him that our designers made me to be object oriented – that is, focused on a goal, the what – while they intended him to be process oriented – that is, to be inclined to focus on the how, as in, how do I fix something?

We are in a good place in our lives and career. We are 52 years old. We enjoy some of the most prestigious and profitable cargo runs in the settled galaxy. We paid off the ship four years ago, and since then all our profit has gone into our account in order to fund our retirement. Our ship, CV/H-1174, has had three teams before us. That means the ship has been in service for about 128 years – 42 years for each team, with a six-month turnaround between teams for updates and refurbishments. We have operated Tubby – we call the ship Tubby, because Greg says ships used to be called tubs – for forty years. Two years from now we will retire, the corporation will buy the ship back from us, and then our savings, plus the money the corporation will pay us for the ship, will be enough for six years on Ephemera, which is where haulers go to live out the rest of their lives.

Greg talks about it all the time. He can't wait to be done with work. He looks forward to living in a flat in one of the enormous residential buildings on the Southern coastline of Chappadra Island in Ephemera's Southern Ocean. He talks about going to bed early and sleeping late; he talks about taking naps in the daytime. I prefer not to think about it. Maybe Greg can ignore how our days will start counting down as soon as we're planet side, but I'm sure I would feel time dwindling, each moment slipping away. I already do. It makes me impatient with wasted hours, and I'm disturbed by his fixation on naps and long nights of sleeping. I tell him that being dead will be enough like sleep to suit me, and I intend to keep busy. He thinks that's funny, and says, "You go right ahead."

But I'm starting to fear that Theran was right, and the corporation teams us up based not just on our temperaments, but on whether or not we have been engineered for early senescence. Theran has a theory that the corporation doesn't just intend for us to be pair-bonded for the sake of team stability and long-term efficiency, but so that the one intended to age and fail early will be supported and tended to by the one who's been engineered to live a longer, healthier life.

We both received medical training during our twelve-year preparation period – six years of maturation and elementary education, followed by six years of apprenticeship and advanced training – but I am the certified medic, along with being the pilot, accountant, load balance specialist, and cook. If Theran is right about his beliefs, I'm the one the corporation anointed to live longer, and Greg is the one designed to perish at an early age. "Their ideal worker puts in his 42 years and then dies the day after he retires," Theran told me. I've heard that elsewhere, too; it's a joke amongst haulers.

But the way Greg has been forgetting things... the way he loses track of time, the way he goes right to bed after supper, the way his powerful body aches... I suspect that the joke is one of those that people laugh at because it's true.

DAY 2

Barish is the port manager on Pell, which was our last port of call. We offloaded Sycrox pepper and cinnamon, and took on a shipment of Pellan fruits, plus a few dozen units of Pellan wood-carved furniture. It was Barish who told me that I should keep a journal.

"Why?" I asked him. "I remember everything." It's true. I remember how much tonnage we haul at any given time; I remember the cost of fuel and provisions at various ports of call; I remember the fuel expenditures and the standard traverse time of each of our 293 runs, and mentally keep score, always trying to do better. I also remember the traverse times of the various runs of my friends: Theran, Sargo, Phillit, Tyro, and... the lone female pilot in our social pod... Freeja.

Also, I told him, I didn't see the point. "My life is the same thing over and over; every day is like every other day, except when we're in port, and there's nothing new about that either." After all, Tubby services the same six ports of call, often in the same sequence, and often carrying the same kinds of cargo between planets. From the broad strokes of our usual itinerary to the daily routines aboard ship, our life on Tubby is the same list of tasks over and over, sometimes with minor surprises, but often without much variation.

"It's not about remembering the facts, or the tasks, or the stats," Barish told me. "It's about remembering what you were thinking about. Your moods, your points of view. Looking at a different graph that traces your life – not the graph of your efficiency, but the graph of your feelings."

I told him I should have started at least twenty-four years ago if I wanted to have much of a graph. With only two years left in our service, what change am I likely to see in my point of view or my feelings?

Barish said you never know. You might be surprised. "Even in sameness," he said, "you can start to see differences." I wasn't sure what he meant by that, but it intrigued me.

So I am now keeping a journal.

"Start with who you are and why you're writing things down," Barish suggested. "Then, just keep a record of the things that happen day to day. Not things like fuel consumption or course corrections, but the things that make you smile. Or the things that worry you. Or the things you find yourself thinking about even if they seem trivial."

One bit of trivia that was amusing... at least, Barish thought it was amusing... was how I was startled by an insect as were loading the fruits. Suddenly, from among bundles of curving yellow fruits, a spindly creature with twelve legs appeared and raced toward me. Barish laughed at the way I screamed and jumped back, but I think it was a perfectly rational response. I thought I was being attacked by a wild animal.

"It's only a spider," Barish said.

I had never heard of spiders.

"They come from Earth," Barish told me. "Like the bananas."

Obviously, the bananas – the curving yellow fruits – were the product of Pell. But Barish meant that they had originated on Earth, a planet no one talks about much anymore except to remark on it as the origin for many things in the galaxy, both good and bad.

Barish swatted the spider away and it fell to the tarmac, then skittered off. I imagined that it found its way to the fields of wild sporra beyond the spaceport's landing field, and then to the jungle beyond.

"Watch out," Barish said. "Where you see one, there are sure to be a hundred others."

I don't think they will be a problem. Like the bananas, the spiders – if there are any – will be in stasis, sealed in their cargo husks with hard vacuum around them. Of course, we don't keep the cargo areas pressurized; with an allotment of thirty-six tonnes for perishable foods, as well as eighteen tonnes for textiles and other durable goods, that would be a lot of wasted energy and wasted air.

DAY SIX

I missed a few days, since I was plotting and correcting and replotting our course to Benali. it was not a hard task; no harder than usual, given the shifting topography of infraspace. It's the same run as ever – Sycrox to Pella to Benali and, from there, to Asthasia, and then to Gola Ceti, and then to Foresh, and then we close the loop back at Sycrox.

Like I said: The same thing, over and over. Few surprises, most of them worrisome, though sometimes you get a lucky alignment of infraspace geometries and you can make a traverse in the fraction of its usual time. A life that's always busy, but full of repetition. Sometimes it means that you don't keep your journal up to date.

But Barish said it doesn't matter if I miss a day here and there. The important thing is to write, even a little bit, whenever I get a chance.

"You will be surprised what you learn about yourself, and about your life," he told me.

DAY FIFTEEN

"Are you starting dinner already?" Greg laughed at me.

I didn't understand what he meant. "Of course I am," I said. Then I realized he thought it was still morning; he thought he'd just finished eating breakfast. He was holding a banana in his hands – one of the ones from the several bunches than Barish had given us to enjoy for ourselves.

"Breakfast was nine hours ago," I told him.

He looked angry with me, even though it was true. Then he seemed to forget his anger and looked down at the banana in his hands with confusion. "So can I eat this or not?" he asked.

"Go ahead. They're not only for breakfast," I told him.

A while later we sat down to dinner, and he said he was feeling hungry. After a bite or two he said I undercooked the pasta and should have used more salt in the sauce.

"Too much salt is bad for you," I reminded him.

"Yes, doctor," he groused at me.

DAY THIRTY-SEVEN

Another course correction, but this time not because of a gravimetric anomaly or the shifting extradimensional configurations of infraspace. This time it was for a much nicer reason: Theran and Corey. Our course plottings were going to allow us to reshift to normal space-time at a common set of coordinates, so, as is our custom, Theran and I arranged to meet.

On Brava, which is their ship, Corey is the cook as well as the engineer. He won't have time to prepare dinner, so I will. That means we will meet aboard Tubby.

"Do we have to?" Greg asked. He has never liked socializing, and he hates it when others board our ship.

"Yes, we have to," I told him. Not only because it's the polite and social thing to do, and not only because Theran and Corey are our friends... well, Theran and I are friends, anyway... but because we need to swap a few things. If Greg wants more salt, this is how we get it. I have too much soap, which Theran says they need. They have plenty of salt, because neither of them likes it much.

Greg wondered if they had some other things – stuff for the engineering; lubricants, coolants, exothermics, and a few parts. I suppose they have some of what we need, though maybe not the parts. We should just put into a drydock at a port of call and have some maintenance done, but Greg balks at the cost and the fact that we're so close to retiring. "The corporation is just going to refurbish the ship anyway," he argues. "Any new parts we install, they will toss out when they do the next rebuild."

That might be so, but our air scrubbers have needed replacing for at least two years. The ship shouldn't be as stuffy as it is, and strange odors sometime linger. I'm not an engineer, but I think that if odors can linger, dangerous gases might also be liable to build up. Something else: Our power grid is very shaky, and I've had to apply some of my astrogation formulae to the problem of figuring out how to route the power distribution and keep the engines running, plus life support, plus computational runtime, plus the six different fields that allow the lepton drive to function without us getting fried by the drive's radiation output.

"Can't you just keep doing what you're doing?" Greg asks me, and when he puts it that way... well, yes, I can. I do have the smarts and the skills. But I wish I had the latitude to focus more on other things.

"So quit wasting your time on that journal," he said to me last night.

When we were younger, we used to have fights like any other hauler team. As time has gone on and we have aged, our fights are rarer and less passionate. But his dismissal of my journal angered me, and I could have taken him to task for it.

Except that he seemed so tired and then he forgot all about it just a few minutes later.

And that brought other feelings to the surface that I haven't felt in a long time: Worry. Fear of mortality. Even love for my partner. We stopped having sex a long time ago – Theran says sexuality, too, has an expiration date, thanks to how the corporation designs its workers – and past a certain age it's no longer needed to cement and maintain the personal connection between haulers.

I didn't believe him at first. Now I think he is right. The corporation only puts same-sex pairs into service as hauler teams, because they don't want us reproducing... something that in theory is not possible even if they mix genders while putting a team together. But why do we have sexuality at all, except in service to the efficiency that comes with pair bonding, all to boost the value of our long-term servitude?

That's something I thought about for years, but I would never have entered those thoughts into a report along with the fuel stats and travers records. But now I'm putting it in my journal, and I see what Barish was talking about.

DAY SIXTY

I wanted to talk about the dinner we had with Theran and Corey the day after we hosted them, but things have been busy. There was the power problem, and that was frightening for all sorts of reasons. But first I should talk about the dinner.

Actually, the dinner was not that interesting. The food was fine; I am a good cook, and I had procured some real meat steaks on our run to Fioros, a side trip the corporation assigned us almost four years ago – they were in stasis all that time and needed to be used.

Theran brought a bottle of alcohol. He called it scotch, but he only told me this because he thought Greg might be superstitious. Bringing a bottle of booze named for the act of canceling a run or scuttling a ship? Even I thought it was less than auspicious. But Theran said that the word comes from an old Earth language, and it originally mean water... or rather, he said, water of life.

The drink was strong, and it did feel lively in our mouths, and it did burn a little in our throats and then in our stomachs. It also made us talkative – even Corey and Greg, who started out discussing ship systems and engine efficiencies, but then began discussing other things like the joys of impending retirement or, when Theran brought it up, the fun there was to be had in the bordellos of various ports of call. It's been many years since we went to any bordellos, or even thought about those youthful days, but it was a nice recollection.

As our mates talked about engineering, Theran and I swapped stories about cargo and lading mishaps. He had recently miscalculated on a mass distribution plan and almost capsized their ship when they tried to take off. He laughed hard about that, but he was also proud of how he narrowly avoided catastrophe with a quick-thinking reconfiguration of their ship's gravity dilution system.

I had nothing so amusing to offer, so I settled for the story of the spider among the bananas.

"It had how many legs?" Theran asked, leaning forward, a gleam in his eye.

I thought he was taking a boyish delight in my description of the grotesque creature. "Twelve!" I exclaimed.

"Then it wasn't a spider," he said, sitting back with a smug grin. He wasn't being puerile, I realized; his tendency to be a know-it-all had surfaced with his second glass of scotch. "Spiders are from Earth and have eight legs. What you saw was probably a glass leg."

"A glass leg?"

"They originated on Payrafia, but they seem to do well in all sorts of different environments. Ice worlds, tropical worlds, lunar colonies, submerged colonies on the ice moons. I never heard of bananas, though."

"I could give you some," I offered.

"No, that's fine... I don't want any of your famous spiders coming along with them to my ship."

"There are no spiders on my ship!" I told him.

"And I know why," he said.

"Because they're glass legs!" I shouted, laughing, beating him to the punchline.

It was around then that Corey offered some sort of plant material that he said should be smoked. Greg used to enjoy that sort of thing, but I never have. Corey and Greg went into the dry lab, where the air scrubbers still more or less operate as they should, and enjoyed their smoking there. Theran and I stayed at the table, and Theran showed me something he thought I would be more interested in than the smoke.

"What is it?" I asked him, as he offered me some kind of dried fruit he unwrapped from a napkin. "A fig? A prune? A pear?"

"Nothing so tame," Theran said excitedly. "This is godfruit."

I only vaguely knew what that was.

"It's not native to the part of the galaxy where we usually work," Theran said. "It comes from Tantagilles Prime. At least, that's what the guy told me."

"What guy?"

"The guy who sold me the fruits," Theran said. "I bought several. I want you to have this one."

"Was it expensive?"

"Ah," he said in a noncommittal way that meant yes, it had been expensive, but he still wanted me to take it.

"Don't you want it for yourself?"

"Honestly, once or twice is enough," he said.

"Once or twice?" I waited for him to explain. He didn't. He just sat there with the open napkin in his hand waiting for me to take the godfruit. I did not reach for it. "Once or twice what?"

"I can't really explain it to you," Theran said, wrapping the godfruit in the napkin and setting it on the table. "It changes the way you think. It changes how you perceive the universe. It even changes how you process higher-dimensional equations."

I wasn't sure I liked the idea of that.

"No," he insisted, "that's a good thing. I mean, suddenly it's as though you are able to comprehend higher math as higher math... dwell in the concepts, and not simply rely on the..." He shrugged and grinned. "On the shadows that the numbers cast."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that mathematics represent higher dimensions and the operations that allow us to move faster than light, and allow us to figure out how to get from one place to the next in the shortest time-space route through infraspace. But all we comprehend are the numbers, which are not the actual..." He shrugged again. "The actual thing."

"All right," I said, listening.

"The godfruit takes you to that place where you can see the higher dimensional world. You can see the math. I mean, you see beyond the math, to the things the math talks about. You see the way that infraspace folds and stretches and undulates."

"Undulates," I repeated. The word impressed me but also made me uneasy. Theran has always had a poetic bent, but I had the feeling he was using the words that best fit what he was trying to say – in a literal sense, not in a metaphorical way.

"Is this legal?" I asked.

"It's not illegal," Theran said. "They won't confiscate your ship or cancel your savings over it. And, really... I mean, I think the reason that godfruit is starting to make its way across the galaxy along unofficial trade routes like this, from hauler to hauler, is because the corporation likes it. The best pilots, the most highly skilled... like you, like me... are able to calculate new routes that take you farther and faster than you ever managed before. You know how exhausting it is, and how long it takes, just to calculate a typical traverse path? Well." He made a head waggle – a gesture he'd picked up during a six-year stint ferrying rice and exotic spices from Vaayada to Valtamari and then hauling fish, kelp, and other protein-rich marine bounty back to Vaayada from Valtamari. It was a bit of body language that meant he profoundly believed what he was saying. "The godfruit will make it possible for you to calculate faster, cleaner, more efficient routes."

I was puzzled. "But you don't want to keep using it?" I asked.

"No," he said. "I have a sense for that kind of higher calculation potential now, and I can do better work even without it. And there are other effects... ways that the fruit has of opening doors in your mind... it feels wrong to use it too much."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I now have enough to think about for the rest of my life. Questions I answered; new questions I asked. Things I never considered before."

"I don't understand."

Theran picked up the napkin and then grabbed me by the wrist. Pressing the small bundle into my hand he said, "You will. But you probably shouldn't share this with Greg. He's..." Theran looked apologetic. "I can tell that he's starting to decline."

"You can tell?"

"He told Corey the same story about the field attenuators three times."

"He does that," I said.

"He didn't used to. I mean... you live and work with him, so you might not see it, but he's changed. Even in the year or so since we last got together in person, it's pretty obvious to me that he's changed rather a lot."

"Yes," I said. "I have noticed. I just didn't realize anyone else would see it."

"Does it worry you?"

"I think it's like you said before: The corporation pairs us up so that one of us will decline early but the other one can prop him up for a while."

"I'm sure if they could perfect the timing the early decline would happen after the mandatory retirement age," Theran sighed. "But like everything else in the universe, genetic design comes down to a matter of probability."

DAY SIXTY-THREE

I was going to write about the power problem last time I had a chance to sit down with my journal, but I didn't expect to write so much about Theran and the godfruit.

I'm still not sure I'm going to take it. But the power problem affected our traverse, and that in turn put us behind schedule. I don't want to pay a penalty or, worse, lose one or more of the prestigious routes the corporation gave us thanks to our efficiency record. At this stage in our service life, a tarnished efficiency record is a one-way ticket to Loserville – as Theran likes to say. He's funny.

But the situation is not funny, not at all, and Greg doesn't seem to be able to grasp that our problems are growing. The power grid isn't transferring as much energy to the flight systems as it should. In fact, everything on the ship is starting to be affected; the lights are dimmer, the computational operations in the quantum core are slower, and there are some calculations the HD processors can't seem to carry out at all given our current energy feed.

So I might have to take the godfruit not in a spirit of inquiry, but rather as an act of desperation.

It was last Tuesday when the problem suddenly occurred. I mean, I knew the power grid was not working well; it hasn't been working at peak performance levels for more than a year, but in the past few weeks it suddenly got much worse. I was in the dry lab running some quality control tests on samples I retrieved from the cargo to be sure it's not deteriorating. The lights went out. Anyone who works a hauler knows that the lights should never go out: It's a sign of things going terribly wrong. If the lights fail, then everything from the air circulation to the gravity substitution system is probably going wrong, too.

The intercom has its own dedicated battery supply, so even though I couldn't get the door open I was able to contact Greg. "Where are you?" I asked him.

He was surly: "I'm the engineer. Where the hell do you think I am?"

"Do you have lights?" I asked him.

"Of course I have fucking lights," he said.

"But I don't," I said. I'm used to him being grouchy and cussing at me. He has always been a little rough – a little antisocial. He's not hostile, he's just not very polite, and that's always been part of who he is. It's not uncommon for engineers, which is why pilots tend to be the ones who manage communications with suppliers, port masters, corporate reps, and whoever else. But Greg has been touchier than ever lately. It's part of his decline, I think, and I don't take it personally, though it has got me worried.

I was more than worried, though, about Greg's state of mind and his level of competence, being as I was trapped in the dry lab with only a few control lights to offer illumination. I have to say, I was even scared.

"Are the doors working? Can you come here and get me out?" I asked him.

Greg said the door to engineering was working, but then he came back a minute or two later and said that the door was not working. Then he said the lights were flickering. Then he started talking to me in engineering jargon about different ship's systems. I didn't know all the technical parlance, but I knew the systems, and it was obvious that some sort of grid-wide problem was happening. What Greg was telling me didn't make sense, though; it wasn't a cascading failure, and it wasn't an overload, and it didn't seem to be a problem with any of the ship's various isolated systems or redundancies. The fluctuating energy feeds were not blinkering in and out on any sort of predictable or systematic basis. It seemed more or less random, with adjacent systems being affected one moment and then totally separate systems suffering the next.

"Can you stop explaining," I said, "and find a way to just get me out?"

"Why don't you try the override?" he asked.

The dry lab doesn't have a manual override. It should; I don't know why it doesn't, but it never has.

"You just won't let me work until I come and get you," he said gruffly.

"Wait, can you leave engineering?" I asked him.

"Of course I can!" he snapped at me – even though he'd said a few minutes earlier that he couldn't.

"Are you sure?"

He didn't respond. I hoped that meant he had left engineering and was making his way to the dry lab.

A little while later his voice came back on the intercom. "I'm at the pilot station," he said, "and you're not here."

"No, I'm the dry lab," I said.

"What are you doing there?"

"I'm stuck here!" I told him.

"Don't worry," he said, suddenly sounding reassuring – suddenly sounding like he knew what he was doing. "I'll get you out." It was only two or three minutes later that I heard him on the other side of the door to the dry lab, accessing the door mechanism from a small access port.

The door jolted open – just a little, but enough. I grabbed the edge from my side, and he grabbed from his side, and we both worked to push the door open. He provided most of the force, his physique having been designed for greater strength.

"What's going on?" he asked me. "Are we in quicksand?"

That's the vernacular for an energetic or gravitational anomaly in infraspace that can suck a ship's power supply.

"I don't think so," I said. "A quicksand event drains the whole grid at once, in a steady fashion. This is something else."

Greg accompanied me to the master situation panel in engineering, which allowed us to study the surges and outages affecting the power grid. Greg saw it before I did: "It's located here," he said, pointing to an area on the ship schematic. The spot was midway between the living quarters and the larger cargo bay, I saw, which caused me whole new worries. If the fluctuating power compromised the stasis field, we might lose the shipment of fruit. That would tarnish our efficiency record for sure.

"Okay, Greg, we have to fix this."

"I need to get back to the power modulator and make sure the conversion assembly doesn't go down," he said.

"If it does, it will be because of this power grid problem," I said. He kept arguing, not seeing that the problem he was fixated on was being caused by the problems I was asking him to shift his focus to. Finally, I said: "Do you want to retire? Or do you want to lose the ship, our savings, and our future, and get put down?"

He stopped protesting and looked at me with a combination of panic and confusion.

I rephrased: "Do you want to end up in Loserville?" – a shorthand that he, too, knew from our many years associating with Theran.

Greg went with me to the access port near the locus of the problem. He didn't seem to quite comprehend everything that was happening, but his mechanical skills were undiminished; he opened the emergence access in less than half a minute, and I crawled into the close, winding guts of the ship's distribution system.

It was dark in the access area, but that helped: I saw the sparks right away. I told Greg about it.

"Can't be," he called back. "There's no way for sparks to be generated in there."

I crawled, contorted, compressed into the bulkhead where it was safe and tried to stay back from the power grid's hard and soft filamentary channels. "I can see them," I said. "Sparks for sure."

"Can you find the hand torch?" he asked, his voice muffled and distant. "There should be one in a charging rack mounted to the bulkhead."

Maybe that was what my shoulder was pressing into? I tried to keep my arms close to my body as I half-rotated in place and then felt around gingerly. The contours of a torch took shape under my hand. I pulled it from the rack, and it lit up automatically.

I turned back to the array of filamentary channels and cried out in primal fear: Half a dozen spiders were there, large and multi-legged. The spiders from the bananas. No, not spiders, I thought; glass-legs.

And their legs did seem to be made of glass. Their legs were lighting up as they crept around; I realized the creatures were conducting energy from one filamentary channel to another... no, to many other filaments, simultaneously. No wonder the ships' systems were being affected at random. There were six or eight of the things crawling around, all of their many legs cross circuiting the grid's distribution array.

"How the fuck did they get in here?" I said to myself.

"What?" Greg called back.

I pointed my face back to the access panel and shouted for Greg to get me a canister of either compressed carbon dioxide – the kind he would use in case of an overload or an overheating element – or else a stick of some kind. He always carries a few CO2 cartridges in his utility harness, so he had those ready to hand. He half crawled into the space to hand them to me. Seeing the glass legs, he said, "What are those disgusting things?"

"They came with the bananas," I told him, before I unleashed a freeing torrent of gas at them. They were dead in seconds, their legs curling up to their bodies and their bodies dropping off the filamentary channels.

The ships' systems started humming in their old familiar way. Crawling out of the access space, I could see the lights were all back on, but still a little dim.

"There's no way around it," I told Greg. "We need an overhaul."

He didn't say anything. He put the access panel back in place and then walked back toward engineering.

I went to my pilot's station, called up the ship's diagnostic systems, and started trying to figure out how the glass legs got from the cargo bay – an airless section of the ship where stasis fields should have kept any stowaway life forms in a state of suspended animation – into the ship's inner workings.

Suddenly, I thought about the three bunches of bananas that Barish had offered me for our own enjoyment. Maybe the creatures were in those bunches. I hadn't seen them, but perhaps they have been in larval form at that point, too small to see.

Then I remembered, somewhat dimly – thanks to the scotch, I think – how Theran had been telling me that glass legs were extremophiles, able to survive the harshest conditions. Hard vacuum, for instance. Or stasis fields. Though how they would have gotten from the cargo bay into the ship's power grid was another question. But then, was it such a leap? They could have simply drilled or punctured tiny holes in the cargo hold bulkheads. Or not even that: They could have just found their way to one or more of the micrometeor punctures of the hull that Greg refuses to pay to get repaired. We've done a few space walks and fixed the hull punctures that affected the inhabited areas. The hold probably has a dozen punctures of its own, and we hadn't fixed those, because why would we? The cargo hold isn't kept pressurized. Maybe the glass legs had escaped through such a hole in the hold and found their way to one of the scars on the hull we'd repaired with silicon fluid. The sealant would have been easy enough to penetrate, I thought. Then, thanks to the silicon sealant's fluid nature, the hole would have sealed shut again after the creatures gained access to the ship's interior.

A ship full of holes, some poorly mended and some not even. A mate who's clearly not thinking straight even in a crisis situation. I can't ignore it or minimize it any longer: Both Greg and the ship are declining.

At least the ship can be overhauled. Greg, though, really will need to retire, and me along with him. I hate the thought, but I have to be pragmatic. At least if I think about it as a goal, I can focus on it without getting too upset: The virtue of being object oriented. But I could use some of Greg's engineering talent for how to solve, or at least manage, problems. The trick will be to make up lost time and get through the rest of this run, and then complete the next one without resorting to costly repairs. We just need to hang on, and keep going, for another couple of years, but I'm not sure if... or how... it will be possible.

One thing at a time. Or, as Theran likes to say, "One step by one step."

DAY SEVENTY-TWO

I've decided: I'm going to use the godfruit. It's just as I was writing about before – an act of desperation. But if I can recalibrate our traverse with just a .02 improvement, we will make up the lost time. That should be possible, shouldn't it?

DAY SEVENTY-EIGHT

Theran's head waggle didn't bring me to the wrong conclusion. He really did believe what he was saying about the godfruit. Now, so do I, because I see what he meant.

I mean, literally see what he meant... I still have the visions, if that's the word for it, lodged in my brain. Not images in the usual sense, and yet clear and defined and utterly distinct... and beautiful, so beautiful.

While under the effect of the godfruit, I saw everything even more clearly and comprehended the higher-dimensional reaches of the cosmos in a way I can barely recall now. It was like being transformed into another kind of life, being able to think not just in three dimensions with a mathematical hint of dimensions four, five, and six, but perceiving all those dimensions directly, thinking about them in all their impossible vertices and perpendiculars.

The calculations were easy because I could see exactly how infraspace was twisting, twining, rippling... ...

Running the higher-dimension scans, processing the results through the quantum core, I felt like I was leaping off a springboard and soaring into a vast, wild sky. Looking at the data, I saw it as if it were right there, opening up in front of me: A fast, short route through infraspace. But at the same time, a cosmic leap that would take us where we wanted to be and get us there in an impossibly short amount of time.

Keying in the commands only took a few seconds. Or did it take hours? I don't know. Time seemed to collapse, just another dimension to walk along, to sprint along, or to pause and reflect without any hurry.

And at the same time, these calculations, these perceptions, were embedded in a larger vision... a boiling, perpetually flowering universe, radiant with colors that came frothing out of colors, patterns that emerged from patterns; like the days of my life, like the words in my journal, like every exchange with Greg, like every exchange with anyone I might have been partnered with... a hundred, a thousand possible partners in this life...

And a hundred, a thousand, a countless myriad of selves I might have been; would never be; and yet had always contained within me...

Was I Dom, the self I had always been? Was I some other Dom? Was I Theran? Was I Greg?

Was the universe itself, solid and majestic? Or was the universe we knew only some momentary variation in an endless suite of possible universes? Was this moment... any moment... expanding to engulf all of time? Or vanishing into a singularity that would obliterate the past and the future?

All of this happening at once, or outside of time. I was flying through higher dimensions while scrutinizing new calculations while surveying the other lives I might have had... we might have had... no, I might have had...

And then I disengaged the drive, dropping Tubby into normal space-time. And then, the new transverse plotted and ready, I reengaged the drive. Leptons spun in an invisible EM shell all around the ship, then converted into tachyons, and Tubby slipped out of ordinary reality and back into infraspace – and the ship soared forward, or sideways, or up and down, or in every direction along every axis in six, twelve, twenty-four physical... metaphysical... beyond-physical dimensions...

Everything seemed to dissolve around me and there was light, dissolution, clarity. Also: Panic, profound and sharp; sadness, deep and mournful; desperation that made the fears that had motivated me to use the godfruit shrink away into triviality; a sense that I was in many places at once, a sense that I was dwelling within a single point as compressed as a singularity. A sense that all of creation – this universe, other universes, the whole cosmos – was a dual-bulbed construct tumbling through endlessness, two chambers of potential and possibility that echoed one another into being, and a single self that was bouncing between those two chambers, forever resonating into two selves, two minds and viewpoints, contrasting wills and opposites...

When I woke up, I was lying on the deck. Hours had passed... many hours. At some point I had vomited. I had no idea where Greg was.

But I knew right where the ship had gone: To our destination. Actually, to less than a parsec from Benali; empty space between the stars, but only a short hop to the port where we were expected...

Almost exactly one standard year early.

I got to my feet, dragged myself to the lavatory, cleaned up and changed my clothes. I felt stunned; hollow; unreal. I was in my own body, in normal reality. The ship, too, was in normal reality. I found myself smiling, and then laughing; then I realized it wasn't funny. Or was it?

I found Greg. He was working in engineering. He hadn't noticed how late it was.

"What's for dinner?" he asked.

DAY EIGHTY-ONE

I gave it some thought and finally decided that showing up to Benali a year early was my best bet. The alternative would be to cut the engines, put the ship on low-power mode, and wait all that time. But if flight is hard on a ship, station-keeping is harder; it actually costs more fuel and puts more strain on the system. Ships are designed to function in infraspace flight, not to endure idleness. It would be better just to show up. They weren't expecting us, or our cargo, so soon; it might cause a little reshuffling in terms of distribution schedules and bookkeeping. But wasn't making the run as quickly as I had something to celebrate? The corporation would certainly keep us on our prestigious runs and maybe even promote us.

Though, given how short our remaining service life was, maybe they wouldn't promote us after all.

But maybe we could wrap up our next, and final, run that much more quickly, and they would discharge us from service early, and that would suit Greg just fine.

It took half a day to get into port at Benali. I sent an FTL message first so that they would expect us.

But when we got there... here, I should say... the welcome was not celebratory. Three enforcement cruisers awaited us. It seems they thought we were pirates or smugglers, though why they thought so eludes me. What sort of pirate announces they are on the way? What sort of smuggler sends an FTL message saying to expect him?

They had us hold station for a day and a half and wouldn't explain what the problem was. For a moment I got worried that we'd come to the wrong port of call – after all, I had been under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen when I'd calculated and executed the traverse, and so maybe I'd missed the mark.

But no: We were where we needed to be. We were holding just outside of Benali orbital space, and as soon as they gave us clearance we could land at a port on Benali – probably in Kuresh, but maybe in Dimore, if the Kuresh port was too busy. That was the drawback to arriving so far ahead of schedule, I thought, preparing to launch a more general survey of the nearby marker stars.

I did the survey out of boredom, and to fulfill the letter of the navigational operating standards, which called for periodic readjustments to the nav systems – adjustments that could only be refined by doing scans of known cosmic markers. I did not expect anything to be amiss.

Or did I?

Maybe I did. Surely, I did. Something seemed wrong, somehow. Something was nagging at me – something I'd seen in that exultant moment, hours long, when the godfruit had opened my mind to higher planes of mathematical contemplation.

I'd seen something other than the equations... a blaze of revelatory light and, in the midst of that light, something funny about the universe, some insight or mathematical tic that I had never thought of before, had never even heard hinted about....

Like a dream, it had vanished from my consciousness; but like a dream, the memory of it seemed to hover just beyond my thoughts.

So I checked the marker stars, and they made sense.

Until they didn't.

A nebula was missing. Three degrees to galactic North and sixteen parsecs from where the nebula should have been was a stellar nursery I'd never seen on any map. Elsewhere, three black holes had seemingly appeared from nowhere, two of them paired with stars that were in the correct position relative to the rest of the galaxy, but were both the wrong spectral types.

"What the fuck is going on?" I asked myself.

It was a question the enforcement cruisers also seemed to be asking: Their commanders contacted me repeatedly, asking me to verify who I was, who my mate was, our ship's registry, and our cargo. They seemed to be hearing the answers they anticipated – all except for our date of arrival, which I explained was a matter of a lucky alignment of infraspace topography. Yes, it was unusual – highly so – but not unheard of for a ship to exceed the standard schedule parameters the way we had.

Finally, a fourth ship approached and a woman who identified herself as a fleet commander appeared on my communications screen. She asked me all the questions I had already answered... at least eighteen times at this point... and then she said, "I want to patch you in to another ship. I think you will want to talk to them."

Was it Theran? Was he okay? Was Corey okay?

A new face appeared on the screen. The feeling returned that I was not quite in my body... that I was hollow, floating and remote, seeing and speaking and moving my limbs from a great distance by some sort of remote control. The feeling flashed over me, and my sight dimmed, and my heart roared in my ears.

Then that dissociation changed into something cold and hard and stark.

"Who are you?" someone said.

The man on my screen was me. But... not me.

He had my face, my voice, my name... he was me. And yet, not me.

DAY EIGHTY-THREE

They have let us land. Greg doesn't understand what's going on. They can see he's in decline; he's no threat to anyone. Still, they have put him in a hotel and restricted his movements.

They gave me less comfortable accommodations. The way they look at us, the way they've treated us. make me afraid. No one has been rude or unkind, but there's a sense of suspicion, even fear, that hangs in the air when they interact with us. They let me keep my dataslate, but they subjected it to intensive searching and decryption first, so they have read my entire journal, including the passages about the godfruit.

They tell me they have pieced together what happened. It's happened before... once, eighty-three years ago.

What I saw after eating the godfruit turns out to be more than a flight of fancy. I don't mean the equations; obviously, the math is sound. What I mean is the rest of it – the poetry. The vision of the cosmos as an endless unfolding, a coruscating palette of possibilities. But also, the trapped, confined panic of being in those two interlocked metaphysical chambers. I thought that I was seeing a metaphorical idea for a philosophical conundrum. Maybe it's more than that.

But I'm getting sidetracked. The point is, what they learned eighty-three years ago, when another vessel arrived that was seemingly a duplicate of a ship already in service, was that the theory of an infinite, flat universe extending forever in all directions is actually true. Space has no end point, and never curves back on itself to create a cosmic globe in four or six dimensions – a "finite but unbounded" universe that was once the model envisioned by cosmologists.

We don't know what's contained in that infinite expanse, because we can only see so far. The observational horizon lies forty-six and a half billion light years away in every direction. No telescope has ever been able to look beyond that limit.

But, given that we are able to traverse infraspace and cross enormous distances in a short period of time, it's obvious that we can travel beyond that horizon... if, that is, a rare combination of traverse opportunities and navigational insight come into conjunction. It seems that is what's happened. Tubby has brought us well beyond that forty-six and a half billion light year horizon. How far beyond? In a way, the question has no meaning.

The man who has been interviewing me is a cosmologist. His name is Tobey. He showed me a computer-generated animation. "Does this look like what you saw in your vision?" he asked.

It did seem familiar, but it also seemed crude and rough and limited. I told him that.

"Yes," he nodded. "Well. You're only seeing it visually, not conceiving of it with your mind. Which means that you're only seeing it represented in three dimensions and with a color palette that consists of a mere one-millionth of the whole spectrum of light."

"What are you talking about?" I asked, impatiently.

Tobey is the sort who never gets impatient, which also means he never feels like he should get to the point just because you want him to cut his musings short. It took him a while, but he finally explained that what he was showing me was a basic model for the true nature of the universe.

Staring into the image, which floated in the air between us, I tried to remember what I had seen in my vision. A boiling, unfolding succession of... shapes? Events? Probabilities?

"This is what's called a Mandelbrot set," Tobey told me. "It's an ancient mathematical construct – six centuries old, at least. Maybe even older. Maybe even originating on Earth."

I was skeptical about that. Earth had had very few advanced arts or sciences. All high technology and sophisticated thought emerged only after early humanity became a multi-system race.

But Tobey was still talking about it. "You see how all the details, all the shapes and colors, seem to unfold out of themselves over and over again? That's a rough depiction for the universe... for what the topography is, not of infraspace, but ordinary space."

"This?" I frowned at the dynamic illustration hovering in front of me, its colored lights flickering over my common grey clothing.

"If you reduce the universe to a mathematical abstract, yes. It might not look like it to our eyes, but... yes. Shapes and colors, complexes of detail that swim up out of nothingness, and then dissolve, and then repeat. It's like you're falling into something. And if you were falling into, or across, a vast span of ordinary space and time, you'd see this same effect: Identical patterns emerging again and again. Across endless distances. Across infinite time."

"This is...?"

"This is what the universe looks like from some other point of view. Some..." Tobey laughed. "Some god-head point of view. Or, maybe, godfruit point of view. What you saw was, maybe, the reality of..." He paused.

"Of reality?" I asked.

The reality of reality. Not the mathematical models we construct to explain or navigate. Not the darkness between stars or the birth and death of some new oasis of matter and energy in the endless expanse. But the universe, raw and pure, cold and hot, driven and stagnant, forever unfolding... into the same thing, over and over, forever.

The concepts washed over me with all-absorbing intensity.

I blinked. Theran had said I might experience... what was the word he used? Flashbacks?

That must have been what had just happened: For a moment I'd been back in that high-dimensional place, looking down at...

At this, I thought, gazing into the holographic animation. Only, more so. Infinitely more so.

"You traveled so far that you arrived in a place within the same infinite universe, where there was a repetition of the galaxy... the galactic clusters... no, I mean, the observable universe around you," Tobey said. "A place that's identical to the place you left." He nodded at the hologram in his turn. "A place that acts a lot like that mathematical model, generating the same configurations over and over again. The same symmetries on mass, energy, and even event. The same planets. The same histories. The same people."

"But minor variations," I whispered, thinking of the misplaced nebula, the three black holes and their companion stars that should have been different. I looked at Tobey, concerned. "What happens now?"

Tobey shrugged. "No one wants to publicize this. No one wants to punish you for it, either. But we do have a problem: There are two of you, two of Greg, and two of your ship. Do we put you back to work on a cargo route across the galaxy somewhere? Do we try to replicate the traverse you accomplished, only in reverse, and send you back?"

"I don't know if I could do that again, even if I ate more godfruit," I told him.

"There is a rather obvious solution," Tobey said, hesitantly. "Although I'm not sure how you'll like it..."

DAY FOUR HUNDRED SIXTY-TWO

Tubby arrived several weeks ago... the local version of Tubby, anyway. Along with it came another version of me, and another version of Greg.

Talking to myself for those few minutes more than a year ago, when the enforcement cruisers were keeping guard over us, I'd seen that the other me... the other Dominic... was having trouble following the conversation. He'd kept defaulting to a sort of stunned disbelief that I could exist, that I could have found my way to his region of endless space.

More than a year later, meeting him in person, he was even more confused.

Greg... the other Greg, his Greg... had held Other Dom by the elbow and smiled at me apologetically. "Please excuse him," Other Greg said. "I'm afraid he's in decline."

"Yes," I said. "Tobey explained it to me."

"He explained things to me, too." Other Greg glanced at Other Dom, who was staring at the floor, looking blank. Then he looked back at me. "And he told me you would be interested in the corporation's offer?"

"Refit Tubby? Your Tubby, that is?" I smiled.

Of course, both Tubbies were going to be refit, but my Tubby was going to be renamed and put into service under a new team.

Other Greg's Tubby, though... Other Greg's Tubby would be upgraded and repaired and then continue on her prestigious runs for as many years as we both had left in us.

"Which could be a while," Other Greg said, "since no one lives past the sixth anniversary of their retirement." I nodded: It was the same where I came form. Six years after retirement was the point of mandatory euthanasia for all workers, whether they were haulers or bureaucrats or soldiers or anything, really, less than Owners.

" 'Only people with two names get to die a natural death,' " Other Greg said, quoting a joke that was, evidently, as common among the working class here as it was billions (trillions?) of light-years away, in my part of the echoing, repeating cosmos.

Of course I agreed to the proposal. Of course I did. I had never wanted to retire. I had never wanted to sacrifice my routine aboard the Tubby, sailing from port of call to port of call, enjoying the sameness of the runs and the years – and the telltale differences that set those years and those runs apart from each other.

The corporation had offered this new opportunity to us out of pragmatism, but also because they didn't know what else to do. I suspect it's also out of fear. They can monitor me – and my Greg – and think about what how to respond if anyone else shows up from across the distant horizons of the universe. Meantime, Other Greg and I will happily be plying our trade.

We leave tomorrow. The corporation must have prioritized work on Tubby, because the upgrades and repairs only took a couple of weeks. I think everyone is anxious to have us on our way, including me.

As for Greg... I mean, my Greg... he's safely retired now and enjoying his life on the Southern Coast of Chappadra Island... I mean, Caffadra Island, as it's called here... along with Other Dom, the two of them a little confused but getting on just fine: Going to bed early, getting up late, and punctuating every sun-soaked day with one or two naps.

Next week we stop off for a layover between places where an eclectic group of travelers wait for... what? Passage to their destinations? Or the realization that none of them is on the journey they think they are? Only time will tell, as we bide a few hours at "Gate 558."