Further: Beyond the Threshold Read Free

of the chimpanzee sounded satisfied, echoing from the table. “Very good. The crew of Zel’s mining ship seems to have stabilized your condition quite nicely, Captain Stone. Your body is in an advanced stage of senescence, but nothing that can’t be reversed. Now, as to the question of your cognition, what’s the last thing you remember, Captain Stone?”
    “Going into cryogenic suspension on board my ship,” I answered.
    “And what ship would that have been?” the chimpanzee asked.
    I struggled to keep my mounting impatience in check. “ Wayfarer One .”
    The boffins in Vienna had been developing the Wayfarer missions since before I was born and had selected Alpha Centauri B as the destination of the first Wayfarer when I’d still been a student at Addis Ababa University, when the unmanned starwisp probe Sojourner A97 sent back the first images of the extrasolar terrestrial planet that came to be known as Alpha Centauri B II. Which was quite a mouthful. I was always grateful that early on they’d ditched the official registry name in practice and started referring to it in conversation simply as “the Rock.”
    Equipped with an inertial confinement fusion drive, using pellets of deuterium/helium-3 ignited in the reaction chamber by intense laser beams, Wayfarer One was capable of accelerating to one-tenth the speed of light. With the crew in cryogenic suspension, the ship would launch in 2167 and reach the Rock in just over forty-three years.
    As it happened, it appeared to have taken quite a bit longer.
    “Where are the others?” I asked, growing increasingly agitated. “Where are my crewmates?”
    There had been six of us in the crew of Wayfarer One . I was commander, first on board and last to sleep. Next in line was our pilot, Amelia Apatari, followed by mission specialists Gastuvas Katende, Martin Villers, Eija-Liisa Ylönen, and Beatriz Countinho. The rest of them had all been scientists originally, recruited by the United Nations Space Agency right out of school, but Amelia had been a flyer with the Peacekeepers, and I’d earned my wings with the Orbital Patrol. It’s probably not surprising, then, that we bonded so quickly, having met shortly after I was promoted to captain and seconded to UNSA.
    “Mmm?” The chimpanzee raised a brow as he regarded me, momentarily confused. “Oh, still with your craft, I imagine. Now, I can install an interlink for you as well while I’m at it, which should help streamline your conversation considerably.” The chimpanzee gestured apologetically at the table, an expression of distaste momentarily twisting his expression.
    Before I could ask about the state of Amelia and the others, a new voice sounded. But this one issued not from the table, but from a point somewhere at the far side of the room.
    “Allow the man a moment to acclimate, if you would, Maruti. He’s only just arrived, after all.”
    Padding around the scattered chairs came a lithe shape. It resembled a lion, easily 50 percent larger than life size, but surmounted by the hairless head of a man instead of that of a great cat. It approached silently, its footfalls not making a sound, and as it drew nearer, I realized that it was not entirely opaque, the vague outlines of furniture or the glimmers of lights visible through its body.
    The lion-thing rounded the table silently and lay down on the mirrored floor, its forepaws crossed in front, regarding me serenely.
    “Captain Ramachandra Jason Stone,” it said, the voice issuing from the supple lips of the man-head. “We are the Voice of the Plenum. We welcome you to the present, and to the Human Entelechy.”

FIVE

    The man-lion turned to address the one-eyed Amazon. “We have examined the derelict craft as you requested, Chief Executive Zel, and our constituent elements/agents have completed their analysis. Thermoluminescence dating of the ceramics in the craft place its age at some twelve millennia, dating from the Information Age. As near as we