Like Ten Thousand Jewels in the Sky

"Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour" ~William Blake

The ship climbed slowly out of the sun's gravity-well. The main engines could only be used when they were clear of it, and until then they were running on the in-system drive and were restricted to 2 Gs acceleration.

The in-system engines could easily have generated more thrust, but cautious experimentation had shown that Louie couldn't take it. He already weighed twice what he would have done on Earth, and felt like he was carrying a sack of cement whenever he moved - anything more and he would have basically been confined to bed.

Even so, for every minute that passed, their speed was increasing by over two thousand miles an hour.

The initial stage of their journey would carry them around seven billion miles to the edge of the system and the borders of deep space, and would last just under two weeks. The route they took was not direct. Cassita planned to give the ship an initial burst of speed by diving towards the sun, executing a tight, powered orbit and letting Brecher-2's gravity fling them outwards in a slingshot manoeuvre.

As they drew nearer, Louie stared at the burning surface of the star hanging above and in front of them, immense and implacable. "Is this dangerous?"

"We are deflecting most of the energy," explained Cassita. "The rest is absorbed and stored. We are safe."

The final stage happened almost too quickly to see. They whipped around the sun, only a few hundred miles above its surface, before shooting outwards like an animal fleeing before a forest fire. Louie let out a breath he hadn't even been aware he was holding. He didn't really feel comfortable again until the star was far behind them and shrinking hour by hour.

Louie was by now growing familiar with the ship. She was called the Lullaby for no discernable reason, and was both shabby and basic. She had been rented for the sole purpose of this journey and although the technology - which included a fission-powered generator the size of a fridge - was amazing, the smell of oil permeated everywhere, wires were fastened in place with whatever had come to hand, and missing panels exposed odd bits of machinery.

The layout was similarly basic. The main corridor had the bridge at one end and the cargo hold at the other, which also doubled as a hot and noisy engine and generator room - at least when the ship was in flight. Off the corridor were two cabins - one of which was empty, since Cassita had no use for it - plus the galley and a small storeroom.

Louie's cabin was small and fairly bare - the bed took up most of it, but there was also a small annex that contained what Cassita assured him was a toilet. Louie had viewed this a little dubiously at first - it was a simple hole with a short length of hose for cleaning, and the idea of a pit being the universal toilet seemed peculiar. "Don't other aliens need something different?"

"In what way?" Cassita had asked.

"I don't know - it just seems odd that a hole in the ground works for everyone."

"All space-faring species have evolved from more primitive forms," Cassita explained. "Given the constant of gravity, and assuming that the alien in question evolved on land, it is hardly surprising that this approach suffices in most cases - what else could they have used in their evolutionary past?"

"Fair enough."

"That said," the machine had continued, "individual customs and taboos do sometimes present particular problems - the Dennash, for example, have various rituals associated with passing faecal matter that require considerable space and equipment, as well as a priest. There are also several species that require a specific gravity for the relevant orifices to function correctly. Such considerations can make for complex travel arrangements."

Louie laughed. "I can imagine."

The constant 2 G acceleration left him exhausted, and for much of the time there seemed little to do beyond the basics of eating and sleeping.

One thing that did happen was that Louie finally got to learn how cronium made inter-stellar travel possible - or at least practical. It was while they were passing Brecher-2's only other planet, a distant gas giant, that Cassita gave him the explanation.

"Let us suppose you travel at a little below the speed of light, and that for every second of ship time, a hundred seconds would pass externally."

"Okay," said Louie, concentrating hard and trying to ignore the constant discomfort of the ship's acceleration.

"So, you complete a journey that takes you a year, but you find that a hundred years have passed for everyone who stayed behind," continued the machine. "In effect, the problem that cronium has to solve is not how long the journey takes for you, but how long it takes for a everyone else."

"And that's where the time-travel comes in?"

"Exactly - in the example I gave you, a cronium-shift during flight would gradually move you ninety-nine years into the past. The result would be that the journey would now have taken a year from all perspectives - stationary and moving."

"I think I get it," said Louie. "But isn't it dangerous? I mean, couldn't you end up changing history or something?"

"Not at all," said Cassita. "The shift available never allows you to arrive prior to your departure. Causality is always preserved"

"So I don't get to kill my own grandfather?"

"Why would you want to do that?" said Cassita. "Was he unpleasant?"

Louie laughed. "No, he was really nice - well, one of them was. It's just what people say when time travel comes up."

"Ah, I see. A paradox."

Louie felt rather overwhelmed as he tried to process, or at least retain, all of this new information, and - perhaps sensing this - Cassita turned away and tended to one of the panels. Louie continued to think about what he had been told. The whole thing sounded bizarre, and he tried to find some flaw that would expose a universe of grandfathers to a suicidal army of grandchildren, but none was apparent.

As the days passed, Louie grew more and more used to the extra weight he laboured under. Left to his own devices, he might have been tempted to spend most of his time lying on his bed in his cabin, but Cassita advised him to keep moving about and to perform some gentle exercises. "Variable gravity is the one constant of space travel," it said. "It is advisable that you learn to cope with as large a range as possible."

Cassita also spent time showing Louie the function of many of the controls on the bridge of the Lullaby. "I prefer to not be the only pilot on board," it said.

Louie was rather startled. "Why? You're not going to suddenly rust or something, are you?"

"Unlikely. I would not be permitted to navigate on my own unless there was confidence in my reliability."

"Do inorganic intelligences fly many of the ships?" asked Louie. "I've only seen one other pilot, but he was organic I think. Or a really weird looking robot."

"The majority of pilots are organic," replied Cassita. "Basic AIs are not considered reliable or adaptable enough in the event of an emergency, and beings such as myself are difficult and expensive to make. It takes over a year to grow a single intelligence matrix, and less than one percent of all attempts result in a functional model - the rest are either comatose, imbecilic or insane. For most purposes, organic intelligences are more economical."

Eventually, with the sun reduced to a tiny dot seven billion miles behind them, Cassita announced that they were far enough away to turn on the main drives. Louie had learnt enough about how the ship worked to be very curious about what would happen next.

The in-system engines used principles that Louie understood. A circular particle accelerator - a smaller version of one of the giant rings at CERN - boosted electrons to nearly the speed of light, and then fired them from the bottom of the ship, creating thrust. The more electrons that were fired, the greater the acceleration - and the greater Louie's discomfort. The engines could have provided - and the ship could have taken - over 50 Gs, but Louie would have been dead long before that.

The main engines were different. They used a linear accelerator that stuck out of the rear of the ship, which accounted for the long complicated tail, and consequently would drive them forward rather than up. Normally, this would have had the effect of turning the rear wall of the ship into a deck, but the main engines used inverted gravitons as part of their mix - strange particles that were responsible for transmitting the force of gravity. The resulting reaction would not even be felt, and Cassita intended to leave the electron engines firing at 1 G so that they wouldn't be floating around. The graviton engines, meanwhile, would be generating 20,000 Gs, but the ship and its occupants wouldn't feel any of it.

"Why can't you use the main engines in-system?" Louie had asked.

"The shifting gravitational forces make them unstable," Cassita had replied. "It is the equivalent of trying to run on uneven ground. A smooth surface is required in order not to stumble."

"So we need to be out of reach of the sun's gravity?"

"Not exactly," replied Cassita. "More correctly, it is the planets that present a problem. They deform the gravitational gradient at close range in an unpredictable fashion."

In the event, the experience was slightly anti-climatic. Cassita reduced their acceleration to 1 G, making Louie feel as light as a feather, and then slowly rotated the ship 90 degrees and brought up the graviton-engine. There was an odd sensation - a slow wave of mild discomfort that seemed to pass through Louie's body - but that quickly passed.

Louie looked at one of the panels. Now for every minute that passed, their speed was increasing by over seven thousand miles a second - thousands of times faster than their previous acceleration. Louie shivered as he tried to comprehend the colossal velocities and forces that surrounded him. "When will you use the cronium-shift?"

"When we reach about half the speed of light," said Cassita. "Until then the relativistic effects of our velocity are negligible, and the cronium-shift would be equally irrelevant."

Louie glanced at the panel again and did some sums in his head. Quarter of an hour.

As their speed increased, the universe changed. The stars ahead started to brighten and take on a blue tinge, while the ones behind darkened and reddened. And something else was happening too - the universe was being gently and slowly squashed by two enormous hands placed at either end of their journey.

"Is it an optical illusion?" Louie asked.

"I would not characterise it as such," said Cassita. "The phenomenon, to all intents and purposes, is real."

"The universe is really being squashed?"

"Relative to our frame of reference, yes."

Louie nodded. He was growing to understand the rules of the new reality he seemed to have blundered into, and wasn't entirely sure how he felt about that. Because of an accident, his life had changed beyond either expectation or imagination, and the new knowledge and experiences that accompanied that change sometimes felt like scars - reminders that nothing could ever be quite the same again.

Soon, their velocity reached half light-speed - over ninety thousand miles every second.

"Would you like to activate the shift?" asked Cassita, indicating a control.

"Sure," replied Louie.

Cassita moved aside and Louie turned the simple switch. Outside, the universe returned to its normal shape and colour, the stars ahead and behind suddenly shifting away from them, the blue and red turning back to white. It was both impressive and slightly anticlimactic.

"That's it then?"

"That's it."

"We're travelling back in time?"

"Essentially, yes."

Their speed was staggering and it was still increasing. The numbers were so large that Louie didn't even like to try and think about them anymore. They made him feel light-headed and dizzy.

They now had about two weeks travel ahead of them and, with gravity back to a comfortable level, Louie started to spend time designing something decent to eat with the nutrimat. Initially, Cassita's guidance was needed - not just for help in adjusting the settings, but also to make sure that Louie didn't accidentally poison himself.

Once familiar with the machine's basic operation, he started playing around with the shape and texture settings, steering clear of the more complicated flavour options for now. There was a large library of resources to play with, from a revolting gritty slime to a moist flake that he flagged as a favourite. Even the gritty slime turned out to be useful - he copied some of its settings when he was trying to make cooked spaghetti. One texture that eluded him was bread. He'd managed a very dry toast - or a close approximation - but any attempt to add any moisture would turn the whole thing into a greasy mess. Louie spat out a mouthful and persevered.

When he grew bored or exhausted by his cooking experiments, Louie would often turn out the lights on the bridge and let his gaze and thoughts wander in the inky void. He had assumed that once over his initial awe he might grow bored with the view but, instead, he seemed to grow more fascinated with it. The sheer scale of it crept into his consciousness and caught at his breath. You could fall through that immense emptiness for a thousand generations and still be far from any haven or home.

At times Louie's wonderment was very close to terror. He imagined that the great dark abyss of space was alive and that he might attract its attention if he stared too long into it - that it might twist and stir and fix its pitiless gaze upon him. Shivering, he would turn the lights back on and seek out less alarming distractions.

Cassita also continued training Louie in how to operate the Lullaby and its various drives, as well as giving him the theoretical knowledge needed to navigate inside a planetary system. There were also further lessons in conlang, and the days passed quickly enough. Soon, they reached the midpoint of their journey - just over five light years from Brecher-2.

Under Cassita's watchful eye, Louie cut the graviton drive and then rotated the ship horizontally through a 180 degrees, so that the main engines now pointed towards their destination. The ship could pretty much be controlled from any point on the circular control panel, and he moved round to the opposite side of the room, so that he could continue to face Brecher. Then he restarted the drive and they began to slowly decelerate. They now had around a week to go. Brecher was still a distant star ahead of them, but growing brighter by the day.

Louie continued to experiment with the nutrimat, playing with flavours as well as texture. The good news was that managed a very acceptable cheddar. The bad news was that he didn't much like cheese. It was slow work developing even the simplest of foods. The first serious attempt at a potato tasted like a mixture of decay, hair and mud, and it seemed to take the best part of a day to get the taste out of his mouth.

Experience taught him that it was easier not to try and recreate something he was familiar with. Instead, he would start with a single texture and a single flavour. If he liked the initial combination, he would use it as a starting point, adding and subtracting further elements until he was either happy with the result or had given it up as a failure.

Once happy, he would give the recipe a name and a description and store it on his gencard, as well as in the nutrimat's memory. It was a slow process, but, with a few more days of their journey to go, Louie had created and saved several basic recipes, even if the names he had given them would have raised a few eyebrows in kitchens on Earth:

* Sour Sea Soup

* Fruity Spawn

* Meat Gum

* Honey Flakes

* Crunchy Fish Crystals

* Vanilla Foam

* Vegetable String

He remained reluctant to eat something based on his own flesh. He did wonder if he wasn't being squeamish, but - squeamish or not - he felt that auto-cannibalism was a step he wasn't yet willing to take. Besides, Meat Gum was much better than it sounded.

The routine on board the Lullaby seemed settled - novelty in the space between the stars was hard to come by. However, there was one further surprise in store for Louie. It started with Cassita describing the cronium decontamination process that they and the ship would have to undergo when they arrived in the Brecher system.

"It sounds complicated," said Louie once Cassita had finished.

"It is - and both expensive and lengthy where the ship is concerned. Not only must the process be paid for, but the owner must be compensated for the potential lost revenue while it is taking place."

Louie grinned guiltily. "I must be costing your bosses a lot of money."

"Boss," corrected Cassita. "Yes, considerable expense has been involved in your rescue, and currently my employer's finances are not as secure as they might be. It is most inconvenient."

"Sorry," said Louie, the grin fading.

"No apology is required. Besides, you will be expected to repay a significant portion of the outlay."

Louie had a moment of panic. "Oh... How will I... I mean, I don't have any money... Sorry, but..."

"You are wealthy."

"No, not really. I mean my dad has a good job, but we're not rich or anything - just average I guess - and, anyway, that's all back on Earth, and..."

Cassita interrupted him. "You misunderstand. It was not a question. It was a statement of fact. You are wealthy."

A confused Louie looked at Cassita, open mouthed and temporarily lost for words. The silence seemed to build. Eventually, Louie spoke. "What?"

"One of the rocks you carried with you contained more than enough cronium to pay for your rescue," explained the machine. "I believe that the caretaker gave you a receipt. In addition, you had clearly marked the location of an area that is expected to yield even greater quantities. The price of cronium has fallen recently, but the finders-fee will still be considerable. You are wealthy."

Louie, who had been standing throughout this exchange, now sat down rather abruptly. He felt light-headed. It was some time again before he spoke.

"This money - can I use it to get home?"

"Certainly it could be used to facilitate efforts towards that outcome, yes."

The news was exciting, but Louie found it more overwhelming than anything else. It was a little early for bed, but he felt suddenly very tired and went to his cabin to sleep. He felt calmer the next day. Cassita seemed unwilling at this stage to guess exactly how wealthy Louie was, or what the money could best be spent on. However, the machine did say that accurate information and advice would be available when they reached Brecher, so Louie put it aside until then.

The days passed, and soon there were only a few more hours until they would arrive. Brecher was now distinct from the general backdrop of space. It remained a pinprick, but was clearly brighter than the surrounding stars. The distance was still immense, but could now be measured in billions of miles, rather than needing light-years to express the scales involved.

Louie had assumed that, even once they arrived at the system, they would then need to spend several days in-system slowing down - a mirror-image of their voyage out from Brecher-2. This, however, had turned out to not be the case. "Why not?" he had asked, confused and wondering if he had misunderstood.

"Provided the graviton engines aren't running, we can coast in at high speed."

"But how are we going to slow down?" Louie asked. "I mean, we've got to stop sometime."

"Most populated systems - including this one - are equipped with momenta-shunts," explained the machine. "They can be used to either apply or remove velocity from a ship."

"We'll just stop dead?"

"Essentially, yes. They have their limitations, but they can cope with velocities up to about half the speed of light."

"So why not have one at Jormungand?"

"They are expensive to build and maintain, and are largely a luxury rather than a requirement," said Cassita. "Brecher-2 is not visited often enough to justify one, even if there was some commercial advantage to be gained."

In any event, Louie was grateful. Without the shunt, they would have had to spend two weeks travelling inside the Brecher system while decelerating at 2 Gs. With it, they could make the same trip in around thirty-six hours with just one very sudden stop at the end. It wasn't the time that worried Louie, it was the thought of spending days on end with all that extra weight to carry around.

Their speed when they hit the outer edge of the system was just over two hundred million miles an hour - about a third of the speed of light. Louie, under Cassita's guidance, switched off the cronium-shift and the graviton unit, but left the in-system drive running to maintain their gravity as they coasted inwards. The sun ahead of them still appeared to be little bigger than any of the other stars, but was now bright enough to cast shadows.

Brecher had four planets. Their eventual destination, Taurog, was the innermost, followed by a gas giant called Rosson. Orbiting Rosson was a station reserved exclusively for cronium ships, and this was where the decontamination process would take place.

The shunt, however, was near Taurog, which meant that they had a rather convoluted route - first to the shunt, then on to Rosson, and finally back to the shunt and the short hop to Taurog. The run to Rosson would add another two days to the trip, and Louie would be labouring under 2 Gs for the duration, but he felt he'd got off lightly.

Meanwhile, Cassita was negotiating access to the shunt. This seemed quite a leisurely process, if for no other reason than that it would take several hours for a reply to reach them.

"What happens if the shunt isn't working?"

"It would be inconvenient," replied Cassita. "We are not travelling at the optimal speed for a conventional approach - we would be forced to travel to the far side of the system, engage the graviton drive and turn around."

Eventually a reply was received acknowledging the request. Cassita made a few adjustments to their course and speed to match a scheduling instruction. After that there was little to do until they arrived.

As the last few minutes counted down, Louie stared forward towards their destination. They were still travelling at a third of the speed of light, and there was no real chance of seeing the shunt until they were inside it, but he couldn't resist trying. Cassita had described it to him in some detail, so he had a fairly good idea of what it should look like - a hollow sphere twenty miles across, studded with wide tubes that poked out into space. Louie imagined that it must look like a gigantic sea urchin. The tubes were the critical part of the shunt - arriving ships would roar down them at ridiculous speeds, only to be brought to a sudden halt by a series of shaped graviton fields. The tremendous energies involved would then be stored, before being applied to departing ships, hurling them outwards like stones from a sling.

Only seconds remained, and Louie concentrated hard. It was a waste of time. One moment, they were racing through space, and the next they were suddenly coasting through the interior of the enormous sphere at only a few hundred miles an hour - practically a standstill compared to their velocity a moment before. Cassita decelerated even more and steered towards one of the tubes off to one side, in order to be given a boost in the direction of Rosson. Meanwhile, Louie had a few minutes to observe their progress.

There was little visible machinery, since the sphere was nothing more than a supporting brace for the tunnel-like shunts, but low clusters of buildings were crammed into the diamond-shaped spaces between the entrances, joined to each other by a lattice-work of pipes and passageways. A large ship, several times bigger than theirs, floated near a group almost dead ahead, attached by a series of tubes and cables to a short tower. Louie searched and thought he saw two more craft located in distant areas.

Now they were closing quickly on their exit-point. Louie could see stars at the end of the channel as they approached it, and then they had slipped inside. For a moment, nothing seemed to happen, and he wondered if something had gone wrong. Then, suddenly, the tunnel vanished and they were out in space again. There had been no acceleration that Louie had noticed - just a sudden transition from virtual rest to colossal velocity. Compared to their speed on arrival, it was a relatively sedate ten million miles an hour. Nevertheless, Taurog and the shunt were falling behind them by thousands of miles every second.

They immediately began to decelerate as there was no shunt at Rosson, and they needed to be matching its stately solar orbit on arrival. Once the route was programmed in, there was little to do apart from keep an eye out for any unexpected traffic and any required course deviations. Louie had enjoyed the time between the stars, but now felt a growing frustration and had the sense that the next stage of his journey home was so close, but still constantly slipping just out of reach.

On a more positive note, he was growing more proficient in piloting the ship, as the relatively busy environment around the inner planets of Brecher gave him a seemingly endless series of factors to play with. The work involved was often demanding - a complex series of calculations involving different and constantly shifting velocities and gravitational forces - but the outcome was a series of graceful curves, charting how they might respond to any potential emergency or new requirement. The need never arose to implement one of these scenarios, but Louie was grateful to be kept busy.

Eventually, they matched course with Rosson and prepared to enter its orbit. It hung above them, seemingly filling the entire sky - a vast ball striped in coloured bands of honey and pale rose. It was one of the most beautiful things Louie had ever seen.

Cassita moved back and let Louie handle the last few adjustments to their trajectory unsupervised.

"Is this allowed?"

"Technically, I have not relinquished control," replied Cassita. "As you will discover if you deviate from the optimal course or if an emergency occurs."

"That's a relief," said Louie - although he couldn't help but feel a little disappointed at this apparent lack of faith in his abilities.

They eased into free-fall above Rosson and slowly moved up behind the cronium-handling facility. Although not huge, the station was an impressive site. It was shaped like a wine glass that had lost its base - a flat-topped solid half-sphere with a thin stem descending a few hundred feet towards the planet below. Bands of lighted windows punctuated the dark metal surface in isolated clusters, and the top was illuminated by a circle of powerful lights.

Louie glanced at a couple of the readouts. "There's something wrong with its orbit," he said. "It needs to move higher or faster, or it's going to fall onto the planet below."

"Normally you would be correct," replied Cassita. "But in this case the station is applying a downward force in order to maintain its current state."

Louie was perplexed. "Why? What for?"

"Should the station lose power for any extended period, this strategy will ensure that it falls into the gas giant, rather than outwards, possibly contaminating the entire Brecher system with cronium particles."

"That seems a bit extreme," replied Louie.

"Not at all," replied Cassita. "If you consider that the most likely cause of any power failure would be some catastrophic cronium event, then the precaution is appropriate. It has the added advantage of providing gravity on the station, although you will find it very light - I would advise care when moving about."

They were now moving up on the flat top in a gentle curve. Louie carefully factored the mild gravity into the manoeuvre as he aimed for a pulsing circle of lights that indicated their landing place. He swung the craft down onto the spot, but made a small mistake and the touchdown itself was less than perfect. Louie winced as the craft landed with an unmistakable bump.

"Sorry."

"Ah," said Cassita. "I was distracted. For a first attempt, the landing was most adequate."

"Distracted?" said Louie. Cassita seemed so single-minded and the idea that anything could distract it was rather alarming. "What by?"

Cassita looked at Louie, as though considering its reply, and then pointed at a sleek silver-coloured ship visible outside. "The flagship of my employer is currently parked in an adjacent bay. This is a most uncommon event."

"So what does it mean?"

"That," said Cassita, "is a very good question."

A light started to flash on the communications panel indicating an incoming message.

"It would appear," continued the machine, "that we are about to find out."