Transvergence by Charles Sheffield

habits did not just die hard . They refused to die at all.

    Darya Lang, sitting alone in an observation bubble stuck like a glassy pimple on the dark bulk of the Erebus , gazed on the Torvil Anfract and felt vaguely unsatisfied. As soon as the seedship had left for Bridle Gap, she had started work.

    Reluctantly. She would have much preferred to be down on the planet, sampling whatever strangeness it had to offer. But once she got going on her research—well, then it was another matter.

    She did not stop. She could not stop.

    Back in school on Sentinel Gate, some of her teachers had accused her of being "slow and dreamy." Darya knew that was unfair. Her mind was fast, and it was accurate. She took a long time to feel her way into a problem; but once she was immersed, she had the devil's own mental muscles. It took an act of God to pull her out. If she had been a runner, she would have specialized in supermarathons.

    Even the return of the landing party from Bridle Gap and the arrival on board of the no-legged, five-armed oddity of the Chism Polypheme, bobbing and smirking and croaking while he was introduced to her, his scanning eye roaming over everyone and everything on the Erebus as if he were pricing them . . . all that had been unable to distract Darya for even a few minutes.

    She had decided that the Anfract was more than interesting. It was unique , in a way that she could not yet express.

    She had tried to explain its fascination to Hans Rebka when he first returned with the Polypheme.

    "Darya, everything in the universe is unique." He cut her off in a moment, hardly listening. "But we're on our way. Dulcimer says he can have us there in two days. We'll need the most detailed data you can give us."

    "It's not just the data that matters, it's the patterns —"

    But he was heading for the cargo holds, and she was talking to herself.

    And now the Anfract was shimmering beyond the observation port—and Darya was still plodding along on what to Hans Rebka was no more than unproductive analysis. Hard-copy output surrounded her and overflowed every flat surface of the observation bubble. There was no shortage of data about the Torvil Anfract. Hundreds of ships had scouted its outer regions. Fifty or more had gone deeper, and a quarter of those had returned to tell about it. But their data had never been combined and integrated . Reading the earlier reports and analyzing their measurements and observations made Darya feel that the Anfract was like a gigantic Rorschach test. All observers saw their own version of reality, rather than a physical object.

    There was unanimity on maybe a half-a-dozen facts. The Anfract's location within Zardalu Communion territory was not in question. It lay completely within a region two light-years across, and it possessed thirty-seven major lobes. Each lobe had its own characteristic identity, but the components of any pair of lobes were likely to interchange , instantaneously and randomly. Ships that had traveled inside the Anfract confirmed that the interchange was real, not just an optical effect. Two vessels had even entered the Anfract at one point, become involved in a switch of two lobes, and emerged elsewhere. They agreed that the transition took no time and produced no noticeable changes in ship or crew. All researchers believed that this phenomenon showed the Anfract to possess macroscopic quantum states, of unprecedented size.

    And there the agreements ended. Some ships reported that the subluminal approach to the Anfract from the nearest Bose access node, one light-year away, had taken five ship-years at relativistic speeds. Others found themselves at the edge of the Anfract after just two or three days' travel.

    Darya had her own explanation for that anomaly. Massive space-time distortion was the rule, near and within the Anfract. Certain pathways would lengthen or shorten the distance between the same two points. "Fast" approach routes to the edge of the Anfract