Neptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles) (44 page)

Bandicut couldn't breathe. His diaphragm spasmed, trying to draw breath into his lungs. He heard himself making little involuntary crying sounds.

This is frightening me, whispered a thought somewhere in the back of his mind.

He blinked, searching inward for the source of that thought. But it was only his imagination, his subconscious.

Something inside him released—and he gasped in one frantic breath, then another. He began to hyperventilate as he wrenched his gaze closer to the enormous structure shadowed against the light...and then back out to the majestic ocean of stars, tilted toward him. As he gazed at it, and its great glowing center, he knew with a sudden, terrifying certainty that this was the Milky Way galaxy. His galaxy.

And he was viewing it from the outside.

He blinked, and swallowed, and clamped his eyes shut against an uncontrollable rush of tears.

*

It took a long time before he could bring himself to gaze again at the sight of the Milky Way; and then he did so with a kind of anguished fascination, imagining that he might locate the sun, lost in that sea of light—or even identify the portion of the spiral in which the sun lay. It was impossible, of course. He knew that Earth's sun lay in the Orion spiral arm of the galaxy, but even that was impossible to identify from this perspective.

When he drew his gaze back in to focus on the nearer structure—now a hard-edged shadow cutting across most of the breadth of the galaxy—he realized with a start that it seemed closer than it had been just minutes ago. Was
Neptune Explorer
moving toward it? The silhouette angle seemed different. He turned to check the sensor array, then remembered that Charlie had burned the sensors out pointing them at the sun.

*Wait.*

He felt the daughter-stones sparkling in his wrists.

*Look outside.*

Frowning, he peered out the window, shifting his gaze along the length of the mysterious object. He felt a flicker in the back of his mind, and realized that the stones were making calculations, steering by his eyesight. /Are we still threading space?/ he whispered.

*Translating.*

Translating, he thought—and
almost
, for an instant, caught an understanding of this nonNewtonian movement across space.

Bandicut blinked at the shadowy...ship, or space station, whatever it was, against the fiery galaxy. Half the Milky Way was blocked by it now, and he seemed to be flying directly into its galactic-light shadow. Any chance he might have had to perceive its shape or dimensions was gone; he was too close now. Its form vanished into darkness to his left and his right. He thought of L5 City, humanity's largest self-contained structure in space, and knew somehow that it was a toy compared to this. On impulse, he flicked on a forward-pointing spotlight. Its effect was invisible; the thing was still too distant. And yet it felt as though he ought to be able to reach out and touch it.

His heart pounded, as he began to pick out some surface detail: just a fine spiderwebbing of lines, and vague shapes, all of them black, but some blacker than others. For an instant he thought he glimpsed a winking light from the shadows. The spiderwebbing slowly resolved into a very broad, shadowy, sectional layout of surface structure. Some faint illumination was coming from somewhere behind him, perhaps the light of other galaxies. Idiot! he thought suddenly, and switched on the window's light-augmentation. The view brightened, and more detail emerged from the shadows: architectural sections within sections within sections. There was an almost fractallike quality to the dark, sculpted complexity. As patterns grew, they revealed finer patterns of equal complexity.

/What
is
it?/ he whispered, rubbing his wrists. /Is this the translator's home? Or Charlie's?/ Apparently the stones were too busy flying, because they gave no answer, except:

*Maintain visual link.*

He obeyed, and wished that he could somehow tell Charlie what was happening. Or Julie. He blinked back more tears.

The surface loomed closer, closer...he felt as if he were falling into a vast maze of canyons. His wrists burned; he felt the ship's gravity fluctuate momentarily; he was growing dizzy as he fell...

The structure rushed up to meet him, and he could just make out the yellow blur of his spotlight on its surface. For a terrified instant he knew he was going to crash...and then something directly below him began changing shape, a shadowy cat's eye dilating open, and inside the eye he glimpsed a flash of volcanic-red light, and then darkness. A heartbeat later he had fallen through the pupil, and was swallowed in the darkness.

*Prepare for docking.*

He moved his hands helplessly over the controls. He had no idea what to do. His spotlight had gone out. He could see nothing. /Please—tell me what—/

The ship's gravity lurched, and pitched its angle up sharply, and increased abruptly. He fell back against his headrest, grabbing his armrests with a gasp.

A blazing crimson light strobed in through the window, blinding him. The hull shuddered. He felt, or perhaps imagined, a
clang
as the ship hard-docked.

*Arrival.*

/Arrival?/ he whispered. /Arrival where?/

There was only silence for an answer.

—continued in Book 2 of THE CHAOS CHRONICLES:

Strange Attractors—

Afterword

For the better part of twenty years now, I have been living with John Bandicut and company—either in realtime while writing the books of
The Chaos Chronicles
, or between times while working on other projects. The Chaos series actually sprang from a feeling of total exhaustion—like a hangover from a long night of celebration. I had been writing a sequence of books, every one of which had turned into something longer and more complex than I'd originally dreamed. (
From a Changeling Star. Down the Stream of Stars. Dragons in the
Stars and
Dragon Rigger.
) I found the writing immensely satisfying—at least once the books were done—but the complicated stories and endless rewrites were leaving me physically and emotionally wrung out. Also, it was hard to even think of making a living from fiction when two or more years were going by between books.

Something's gotta change, I thought. My problem was that I seem hard-wired to write long, twisty stories. I don't know why; that's just the way my subconscious works. I've never been a prolific short story writer, and most of my novels have grown in the telling. (And you should see what I cut
out
of them. Or no, on second thought, maybe not.) I'm also a slow writer. What was I to do?

The inspiration came like a couple of strobes in the night:
Flash! Flash!

I don't recall which hit me first. One was the idea of writing a nice, long story like my subconscious wanted, but—hah!—breaking it into short, snappy, stand-alone volumes that I could write quickly. The other was chaos theory itself: I'd read James Gleick's
Chaos
, and also an article in
The Planetary Report
about the chaotic movement of objects in the solar system. These chaotic influences bring comets and asteroids into Earth's neighborhood from time to time, and occasionally down on our heads. That, combined, with some photos of Neptune and Triton from the Voyager spacecraft, provided the tiny nucleus I needed. I don't remember as clearly where my hero Bandicut came from, but his dazed and confused state at the start was probably a reflection of the chaos in my own mind as I struggled to compose the story.

I sketched out the general story arc, which at that point was intended to run four volumes. I ran the idea past my agent—always after me to write more quickly—and he ran it past my then-editor at Bantam Spectra, Amy Stout. Based on the outline, Bantam signed me up for the first three volumes.

And then I got to the "writing quickly" part. That didn't work out quite as planned. It took longer to get the first book written than I'd hoped. A few
years
longer. During that time, Bantam decided to cancel most of their SF program, and they canned my editor in the bargain, along with my overdue contract.
Oof.
Talk about a body blow. But it could have been worse. At the time I had two publishers. My editor at Tor Books, Jim Frenkel, picked up the contracts with enthusiasm, tempered by a touch of annoyance that he hadn't been offered the books in the first place. And so Tor became the publisher of the Chaos books—first for three volumes, and then for a second set of three (which I'm still writing, in 2010). I've worked with Jim on every book I've done since.

A few writing sidelights:

I started writing
Neptune Crossing
as a first-person narrative, from Bandicut's point of view. Partly that was because I hadn't done much first-person writing, and I wanted to try something new. Partly it was because I was aiming for a particular kind of immediacy that I hoped first person would give me. I gave it every chance. But sixty or seventy pages in, I had to face facts: It sucked. It just wasn't coming together. So with frustration, sorrow, and more than a little cursing, I threw out several months' work. And I started over from the beginning, this time in third person. It was painful—
damn
, was it painful—but it was also fortuitous in the end, because it gave me a chance to explore the viewpoints of a number of other, alien characters as the story progressed. I hadn't seen that coming.

Sometimes people have asked me where certain scenes in the book came from, the mining scenes in particular. Well, you probably know the saying, "Write what you know." I've never worked in a mine, but when I was in college I spent a couple of summers working on an auto assembly line. It was not a happy experience. Moron bosses. Weird, scary, hissing machinery that I was supposed to operate after five minutes of training. The expectation that I would keep up with a demonically driven assembly line, one new car every sixty seconds. The inescapable smell of oil and electricity. The ceaseless noise, the yammer of pneumatic tools and the inexorable rumble of the conveyor line. And worst of all, the mind-numbing boredom overlaid with a constant fear of falling behind.
"College boy!"
That was my experience of working in a factory, and I had a strong intuition that it was fundamentally the same in factories around the world, and probably in mines on the surface of Triton, too. From the gestalt of that experience came several scenes: the interplay with annoying bosses, the mindless charge into the tunnel after the robot, and the Dodgem ride in the surface-mining crawler.

Write what you know!

And when necessary, make it up.

I hope you've enjoyed the ride so far. I'll confess that, at the end of this volume—with Bandicut's arrival at this strange outpost beyond the stars—I didn't have much more idea of what was coming next than Bandicut did. To learn that, I was going to have to write the next book.

Next stop:
Strange Attractors!

Strange, indeed.

About the Author

Jeffrey A. Carver
was a Nebula Award finalist for his novel
Eternity's End
. He also authored
Battlestar Galactica,
a novelization of the critically acclaimed television miniseries. His novels combine thought-provoking characters with engaging storytelling, and range from the adventures of the Star Rigger universe (
Star Rigger's Way, Dragons in the Stars,
and others) to the character-driven hard SF of
The Chaos Chronicles—
which begins with
Neptune Crossing
and continues with
Strange Attractors,
The Infinite Sea,
and
Sunborn.

A native of Huron, Ohio, Carver lives with his family in the Boston area. He has taught writing in a variety of settings, from educational television to conferences for young writers to MIT, as well as his ongoing Ultimate Science Fiction Workshop with Craig Shaw Gardner. He has created a free web site for aspiring authors of all ages at
http://www.writesf.com
.
Learn more about the author and his work at
http://www.starrigger.net
.