Everyone was alone in unspace, even on the Throughways. But, if you stepped away from them into the deep void, you were as alone as any sentient creature had ever been. Except not quite, not entirely alone.
Every species that entered unspace reported the same feeling. Even the hardiest found the transit traumatizing; some manner of suspension or sleep was everyone’s preferred solution. It had been a prime piece of evidence in the case over whether Hivers were truly intelligent: that their composite minds reacted similarly to unspace. Unspace responded to intellect. A dumb computer couldn’t pilot you there. Before Intermediaries, humanity could only navigate the Throughways – paths through space that the vanished Originators had left behind long ago, along with their enigmatic ruins. The Throughways connected populated star systems, which were populated precisely because the Throughways led there. Easy enough for a regular pilot to set their ship to travel a Throughway. It was like positioning a paper boat in a stream, knowing that soon enough it would beach at a particular turn. Not so the deep void.
Idris felt the shift as they left it all behind: not like breaching a membrane but as though he and the ship were falling into a chasm, away from everything there ever was. Lights receded to infinity and the only thing ahead was the abyss that gazed also. This was the truth of the void, the thing that had driven the passengers of the Gamin mad. After you’d finished wishing you weren’t alone, you realized you weren’t, and then you really wished you were.
Idris had as much experience of this as any human being alive. There was a comforting body of literature about how it was just a reaction of the mind to the absence of some key sensory feedback. Idris – and every other Int he’d talked to about it – didn’t believe that for a moment.
He guided the Vulture God into the untracked spaces as if steering a ship on a horizonless ocean, past any hope of ever making land. And he knew, with absolute conviction, that far below in the depths something stirred. It slept, perhaps, but the wake that Idris’s mind made on the surface troubled its dreams. One day it would truly wake and rise, maw wide to engulf whatever unfortunate had caught its notice. Perhaps that had already happened, because ships vanished into the deep void sometimes, even those with trained Int navigators.
Idris settled deeper in his chair, letting his unique senses unfold. His mind’s eye began to draw unhelpful images of benthic abysses, slimy tresses of seaweed, chasms within chasms where lurked . . . something. Amidst all this distraction he was listening, reaching out. Mind’s ear attuned, mind’s fingers deft, testing the tautness of unspace as a spider plucks its web. He felt the texture of the cosmos against the tissues of his brain, each pucker and whorl a suggestion of mass and its attendant gravitic train. If he’d stayed with the Cartography Corps, or been conscripted by the Boyarin, this would have been his whole life. He’d have hunted down those traces, until at last he found something more than a mere will-o’-the-wisp: an unknown star, profitable new planets. Hopefully, even a Throughway to connect his discoveries to the rest of creation. Yet nobody stayed in the Cartography Corps for long. You got out after a tour or two, wild-eyed and trembling. Or you stayed and something went wrong in your head. Then one day you took your ship somewhere and never returned. Perhaps you finally understood what was behind that brooding sense of presence, and you went to the court of the abyss, to dance with its god-king forever and ever.
Idris kicked himself mentally.
Is it closer now? He always asked himself this. And it always seemed that the sense of something – down there, out there – was rising to meet him. He tried to write off that feeling as one more illusion and never convinced himself.
Idris Telemmier had been doing this for fifty years, wartime and after. He had endured when his peers had gone mad or killed themselves from the horror of it all. He’d outlasted the generation of Ints that came after him, and most of the next. He could have written a book, save that the final chapters would have degenerated into mystic ranting. It has a purpose for me! he could have screamed into the void.
He’d once heard another Int being bundled onto a ship during the war. Don’t make me go! the woman had been shouting. It knows me! Over and over. He hadn’t been into the deep void himself then. He hadn’t understood.
Idris Telemmier reached out into the solitary infinite, like a man feeling for some precious dropped object in a dark room. And somewhere in that sightless expanse, he felt something was reaching back to seize his hand and pull.