Gift from the Stars by James Gunn

Author:James Gunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gift from the Stars
ISBN: Gift_from_the_Stars
Publisher: Reputation Books
Published: 2005-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice.

-LEWIS CARROLL

Part Four

THE RABBIT HOLE

THEY EXISTED INSIDE AN EXPLOSION OF LIGHT. It filled their waking moments and their dreams. They heard it as a background of white noise; they smelled it underlying a stench of human and machine effluvia; they felt it like the warp of their world; they ate it with their breakfast cereal.

The external vision screens were blank. They had been turned off; nobody remembered who had done it or when. But they knew the glare was out there just beyond the walls of the ship. It was the only thing they knew for certain since they had entered the wormhole.

“No one knows what happens inside a wormhole,” Adrian Mast said, turning in the swivel chair that faced the useless controls.

“Except us,” Frances Farmstead replied.

They were inside the control room of the spaceship they had helped build. Although there was nothing to control, they found themselves meeting there as if by prearrangement. But that was impossible.

“If we really knew what was happening,” Adrian said. “Or remembered from one encounter to the next.”

“We should make notes.”

“I’ve tried that,” Adrian said. He wrote a note to himself on a pad of paper. He showed it to Frances. It read: make notes. “But I’ve never come across any record of anything I’ve written, on the computer or by hand.”

“That’s strange,” Frances said, leaning back. “I’ll have to try it.”

“It’s as if there is no before and after,” Adrian said.

“It’s a mystery,” Frances said. She was seated in the swivel chair next to him. She was wearing loose-fitting khaki coveralls. Moments earlier, he thought, she had been wearing a kind of body stocking. No, that had been Jessica, and it wasn’t moments earlier. It had been before they entered the wormhole.

“We’ve got to solve it like a mystery,” Frances said. “Like Ellery Queen or Nero Wolfe. Putting together clues.”

“There’s something wrong with that,” Adrian said, “but I can’t remember what. Maybe that’s the trouble. We can’t remember.”

“We should make notes,” Frances said.

“I’ll try that,” Adrian said. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“We had been accelerating for a long time, and then—and then—” The crew had built the ship from alien plans. But when they had started the ship on its first test run, the computer had implemented a program that sent them hurtling toward outer space.

They tried to reprogram the computer to take back control of the ship. But when they succeeded, they had to ask themselves: where else would they go? If they continued toward an alien-chosen destination they might find the answers to the other questions that had plagued them from the beginning: Why had the aliens sent the spaceship designs? What did they want from humans? What would humans find at the end of their journey, and what would happen when they arrived? If they arrived.

The ship had worked. Unlike most human designs, even though fallible humans had put the ship together, often from salvage, it worked the way machines and creatures in space had to work if they were to survive, that is, without a glitch.

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