Brain Ships - Anne McCaffrey [254]
She couldn't optimize the path; spaces decomposed around her and shot off in an infinity of different recompositions, expanding in every path to lights and chaos that could tear her apart. The hyperchip-enhanced mathematics coprocessors returned gibberish. Her brain waves were strung out on the grid of a multi-dimensional matrix. Something was trying to invert the matrix. No computations matched previous results, and all directions held danger.
Nancia shut down all processing at once. The grating colors and stinking noises receded. She hung in blackness, refusing her own sensory inputs, balanced on the point of Singularity where decomposing subspaces intersected, with no way forward and no way back.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Polyon was pacing the narrow space of his cabin, too impatient to strap himself in for Singularity, waiting for some sign that Forister had taken the bait, when the air shimmered and thickened around him.
He opened his mouth to curse his luck. The ship had entered Singularity before that thick-headed brawn ambled to a reader slot.
The air distorted into glassy waves, then became almost too thin to breathe. The cabin walls and furnishings receded to specks in the distance, then swam around him, huge menacing free-flowing shapes. Polyon's curses became a comical growl ending in a squeak.
Damn Singularity! There was no chance that Forister would drop the datahedron into a reader now, he'd be safely strapped into his pilot's chair like a good little brawn. By now, too, the ship's reader slots would probably be shut down for Singularity—and even if by some miracle he could persuade Nancia to accept the hedron, he still would not be able to enter the Net until the transformations were over and they had returned to normal space. No, he would have to wait until after the subspace transformation to implement Final Phase—and this transformation would bring the brainship into Central subspace, close to all the aid that Central Worlds and their innumerable fleets could give.
He reminded himself that this made no difference whatsoever. The basic nature of the gamble remained the same. Either his plan had advanced far enough to succeed despite the way they were forcing his hand, or it hadn't. If it had, then the fleets of Central would be obedient to him and not to their former masters. If it hadn't—well, then, annihilation would be a little quicker than if he'd moved from the remote spaces around Nyota, that was all.
He had only to sit and wait. And waiting out a single transformation through Singularity should be nothing to him. He had already spent patient years waiting on Shemali, planting his seeds, watching them grow, seeding the universe, ever since he had the flash of brilliance which at once conceived the hyperchip design and saw how it could be twisted to his own ends.
But this waiting was harder than all those years in which he had at least been doing something to further those ends; and it seemed longer; and there was something disturbing about this particular ship's decomposition. Singularity wasn't supposed to be this bad. Polyon breathed and gagged on a sickly swirl of colors and smells and textures, looked down at the wavering distortions of his own limbs and closed his eyes momentarily. That was a mistake; Singularity sickness heaved through his guts. What was the matter? He'd been through plenty of decompositions during his Academy training, not to mention passing through this very same Singularity point on the way out to Vega subspace. Had he so completely lost conditioning in the five years on Shemali, to be gagging and puking like any new recruit now?
No. Something else was wrong. This decomposition was lasting too long. And some of the visual distortions looked oddly familiar. Polyon fixed his eyes on one small sector of the cabin, where braces