Love in Backspace
The titanium bracing groaned as it tried to hold the raft together. My customer let out a soprano ululation, a screeching aria of fright. Poor devil. I fought to regain control, though how I possibly could, and to what end, was entirely unclear. Never mind that turbulence can quickly carry you out of range of all the hundred and ten beacons. You wouldn’t know the difference, because man-made structures give in to the stresses in short order. I was about to chuck it in, too, just close my eyes and let the raft break up, when suddenly the turbulence lessened. I found I was able to hold us steady.
And the music behind me subsided to a whimpering. I might have offered a few a few words of comfort, but I was too taken up with studying what lay ahead of us. The turbulence smoothed out and gave way to a field that was peculiar, a slowly moving three-dimensional vortex.
In the centre of that vortex, on the upper left of the polymer bubble, was an orange glow.
Miracle of miracles. Little Tony, all the luck in the universe has descended on your head! That was what I told myself as I turned the nose of the raft, nudging the power stick a trifle. ‘Cheer up,’ I said, thinking to quieten the sniffling in the back, ‘there’s a phase port ahead.’
A little moan of relief came forth. ‘Is it Elivira?’
‘No way to tell. The navigator’s out.’
Then, as we vectored in, it became clear that something was amiss. I couldn’t quite accept it at first. I kept blinking and shaking my head and looking again, sure there was something wrong with my vision. As I sad, you can’t decode an identification signal without a working navigator; but the signal itself should have been visible as a slight pulse or a flicker. Instead, the orange glow was steady.
So what, you might say, the IS could have been switched off. But no, because that can’t happen; it’s part of the phase modulation itself. If the beacon is on, the signal has to be there.
Beating the odds is one thing; this was something else again. Only one explanation fitted the facts. And it had to be something no one any longer believed existed.
An alien phase port.
There weren’t supposed to be any alien civilizations. Nature was not prolific. Of the thousands of planets that had been investigated, only a handful were life-bearing, and all were of poor evolutional development. The lengthy search for non-human phase pushers had been closed down a long time ago. Engineers were unanimously of the opinion that there were none to be found, in our galactic group anyway.
Whether I had taken the raft further than that, or whether this was an alien pusher brought newly on line was, for the moment, academic. We had been thrown out of the frying pan into the fire, and out of the fire into the middle of the floor, as Brigham Young put it. There was nowhere else to go, and we would have to take our chance on the aliens being friendly. Maybe they would fix my navigator, I thought with a burst of optimism.
So I kept going into the centre of the orange glow until it spread out over the whole bubble, tensing myself to make the phase shift into that smooooth middle continuum, and then to co-operate with the pull of the port as it phased us all the way though to frontspace.
And it didn’t happen that way. I felt the shivery thrill of phasing through the curtain, but there was no intermediate transit—the instrument panel registered a 180 degree phase shift all in one go, straight slam bang into frontspace. That didn’t make sense, not at all. There has to be a continuum between the front and the back, just as there has to be thickness between the two sides of a piece of paper, and I couldn’t imagine any phase pusher, alien or otherwise, that could miss it out.
There was no time to think about it. I was baffled and confused, but I killed the motor, bringing us to a stop. Yow-Wow and Yim-Bim at the same time! I was thrilled and I was scared. What a situation! I, Little Tony, was the first human being in history to make alien contact! Well, me and the guy in the back. The polymer bubble flowed over us and collapsed into its container, which meant that it had detected breathable atmosphere. I crouched on my guidance plate and peered around.
Where were the aliens? Where was the phase pusher machine? The ones we use shrink not much smaller than a medium-sized office block. Come to that, where was anything? We weren’t in any sort of docking space, like the side shacks in our phase ports. There was nothing to see but a thin mist stretching indefinitely in all directions.
Cautiously I drew air into my lungs. It was neutral, lifeless, without discernible tangs or odours.
The raft rested on a smooth rubbery surface. I tested it with one foot before stepping down. Just like rubber.
My customer, finally letting go of the handgrips he had been clutching like straws for God knows how long, joined me.
‘What is this place?’ he wondered.
‘Oh, somewhere or other.’
The mist cleared suddenly. A landscape appeared. It was covered in trees, not resembling any variety I had seen before, foresting a spread of downs and vales. There was no horizon. Rather, the background seemed to rise up as though we stood on the inside of a sphere, instead of on the outside.
The mist came down again, and then again cleared. This time another, different landscape showed, consisting of bleak mountains and craters. Nothing alive was in sight.
