III
Even if I live to be a hundred—unlikely, given my line of work—I'll never get used to Gate travel. Back at the Academy, they used to explain that the nausea most people feel when they fly through a Gate is purely psychosomatic. They'll point to studies showing that blindfolded psi-negs can't even tell that they have gone through a Gate.
Which may be true, but it is nonsense. You can feed me chock-full, blindfold me and then put me in an absolute-direction trainer, then spin it like a top, and I won't even get queasy. But Gates are different. Humans weren't meant to be squeezed through to the other side of the singularity left behind when a quantum black hole evaporates.
It's just not natural.
Now, it's not that I'm afraid of collision. While it's theoretically possible that one ship entering the Gate could bump into another leaving it—the three-space projection of the singularity may be infinitely thin, but the ship isn't infinitely short and it is always traveling at finite speed—a simple protocol prevents that from actually happening. Outbound vessels—relative to either of the AlphaCeeGates—use the Gates only during the first three-quarters of even-numbered hours; inbound vessels travel via Gate only during the first three-quarters of odd-numbered hours That leaves fifteen minutes cushion, which is more than enough, by a factor of about a million to one.
So it isn't fear. Maybe there is something to the psychosomatic argument, though. Knowing that an error of less than a thousandth of a degree in angle of insertion or a couple of centimeters per second too much or too little speed means that you'll end up coming out of some other singularity than the one you aimed for—probably one inside a stellar-mass black hole, almost certainly one at an energy level that'll fry you or freeze you—Well, that isn't good for the digestion. To make a long story short, I never looked at the screen as we approached AlphaCeeGate and Magellan released us, our scout's computer putting us into precisely the right insertion flight. It's just as well that the ship flies itself through the Gate: the Dutchman's the worst pilot I've ever seen wearing wings, and I was occupied.
"Occupied" is the nice way of putting it. The truth is that I had my eyes closed, vomiting up food that I must have swallowed in my childhood. My early childhood.
"You about done puking your guts out?" The Dutchman's hands were confident and sure as he ripped the sickbag's tapes from my cheeks, sealed the bag and pitched it into the open oubliette, then replaced the bag with a fresh one. "C'mon, Emmy—we're through already. Take a look at a new sky."
Cautiously, I pried an eye open, then looked at the screen in front of my couch. Stars, that was all.
I couldn't immediately make out any familiar constellations, but that wasn't unexpected. For one thing, the stars are a lot brighter when you're looking out of a scout's monitor than they are when you're looking out of a thick atmosphere; it sort of confuses the issue.
For another, in the two and a half centuries we've been sending point-five-one-cee ramscoops out to seed alien suns with the makings of Gates, some of the ships have gotten far from home. A lot of the familiar stars in our sky, the ones Papa used to point out to me at home in Graz or visiting cousins in Sao Paolo—Alpha Centauri B, Beta Hydri, Delta Pavonis, Epsilon Eridani—are just about as dinky as old Sol; they only look bright close up.
Hell, two of the three brightest, Sirius, and Arcturus, aren't all that far off. And in less than a hundred years, we'll have probes out past Canopus.
But the sky isn't just distorted; once you leave the filter of Earth's atmosphere, better than ten times as many stars become visible.
Which is why it's easy to feel lost when you're looking out at an alien sky. A globe with a radius of just 125 or so light-years may only be an amazingly small speck of the galaxy, but that's the wrong way to look at it. Imagine a cube one light-year on each edge; you could fit more than eight million of them inside the rough globe of our ramscoop exploration, without one cube even coming close to touching another.
"What do you think, Emmy?" The Dutchman's wide face smiled knowingly. "Don't you feel somehow different, being under another sky, looking out at a view that no more than ten other humans have ever seen?"
I looked him in the eye and answered honestly: "Not really."
Norfeldt laughed, clapping a hand to my shoulder. "Like I said, krauthead, just maybe you got possibilities." He leaned over my panel and punched a strobing square button, then sat back in his couch, pulled a fresh cigar—well, a new one, anyway—out of his pocket, turned his ashtray up to a loud hiss, then lit the cigar.
He clasped his hands over his ample belly. At least he was wearing clothes that once could have been called a uniform. "Kurt, Ari—break out the poker table. We got two weeks till we hit dirt."