The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [78]
“You didn’t have much time for much weirdness,” Kaylor said. “You were gone only seven hours.”
“It was longer than that,” I said. “Ship’s time.”
“You took off ...”
“Earth and Moon shrank all in an instant, but so did the Sun. I don’t know what kind of effect that was. ‘What would you like to see?’ Vanayn asked me.
“ ‘Saturn,’ I said. I was remembering a starwatching party back in college, the first time I ever used a telescope. Mars was only a pink blotch, but Saturn never disappointed anyone. Vanayn didn’t know the name, so I sketched the solar system to show him what I meant.
“Beyond the curved outer wall, the starscape turned to something stranger. ‘Navigating through cf-furk-kup space isn’t straightforward,’ Vanayn said. My translator was having trouble with that word. ‘The trick is to define the loop. Here, is that Saturn?’
“ ‘No,’ ” I said.
Kaylor jumped. “Not Saturn?”
“No, it was a big, bloated gas giant planet. The ring was narrow, barely visible.
“Vanayn said, ‘Okay, I can fix it.’ His tentacles writhed, and the outside view changed. Graphs and letters in at least three dimensions. Probability curves, the infrared and X-ray universe, I had no idea what we were seeing. Later I learned to read some of those symbols—”
“Just a minute,” Kaylor said. “Could this ship of yours have been traveling in time?”
“Oh, it was,” I said. Aquavit had arrived, and I drank half of it and let it trickle down my throat. “Ah. Yeah, that’s what Vanayn meant by ‘put us in a loop.’ The trick seems to be that you have to bring the ship back to the same point you left. Otherwise you’ve violated some important parity laws.”
“You didn’t learn that right away, though.”
“Not for a couple of months. Mind, I didn’t keep time very well. My watch racked up almost a year before the battery ran out.”
“God, what an opportunity. But Saturn’s rings aren’t a permanent feature, Mr. Schumann. A moon bashes another moon or something, and for a few hundred thousand years we have big gaudy rings. Most of the time Saturn’s rings must look a lot like Jupiter’s or Neptune’s.”
I said, “Oh. But Vanayn thought he’d gotten lost.”
“What happened then?”
“He started searching. He was trying to find the neutrino trail from Quark Mapping. First we went to a view of nothing but galaxies. Flat space, he said. That didn’t do it. He took us to other domains, black holes, peculiar galaxies, always getting more and more lost.
“God, it was all wonderful! But it took weeks or months to get anywhere. The displays didn’t usually show normal space, normal suns and planets, or starscapes at all. Vanayn spent some time fiddling with my life support until I could get food—tee tee hatch nex ool means it won’t kill me, whatever it tastes like, but I had to explain about vitamins and fiber. He showed me how to use his library. I did some research. Eventually I could read some of his displays.
“He was looking for the point in spacetime from which we’d left. It was the only way we could get back into the universe.”
“Were you worried?”
“Scared out of my mind, at first. I was watching my life disappear. Vanayn never did consider himself lost. He was ‘having an adventure.’ I got on his nerves. Eventually Vanayn stopped talking to me.
“Then I kind of settled into the routine. I learned a lot from Vanayn’s library. It was my only friend. It’s sapient, near as I can tell. It taught me how to fiddle with the paste dispenser so I could get some variety into my diet. I made some changes in the medical system too. I invented two or three chemicals that would have a decent street value if I could manufacture them. After a while the library cut me off and made me sober up.
“I don’t know how Vanayn worked out how to get us back. If that first planet really was Saturn a million years ago, or a million from now, or fifty,