The gathering of versers in my previous world defeated smallpox, and went on to do their best to crush infectious disease under their foot over the next two decades. One by one, we versed out. Shawn was the first to go with his large collection of enemies, and then his doppleganger dropped out of sight without any enemies since it had not been generally known their were two of them, per their plan. Kelly and Matt vanished since hiding lack of aging in a president and a Nobel Prize winner, respectively, gets difficult under the heavy public scrutiny. David started playing with rockets again, and a chemical explosion of a prototype he was driving did for him. I’m not sure what happened to Lara, we never found out, but I think she walked down a dark alley tracking a suspect, and got it in the back. The Alchemist was still around, when I got taken out by a nutcase who screeched about my supporting extinctionism. See, I had been one of the major players in the eradication of most of the humanly lethal viruses, and some people, mostly mentally disturbed, had difficulties with that.

I woke, after the incendiary grenade got tossed on my table by the passing “waiter”, in a new universe. A low thrumming vibrated the cerametal deck, and raising my self up from the position I had taken over the grenade to protect the other diners, I looked about in the dimness.

Neatly stacked boxes with electronic locks, and Galactic Standard (one of my languages) imprints announced. “Property of the University of Emerald.”; “Sensitive Data Material: Do Not Open”; “Mary Piper Hold A.”

Whoa.

Mary Piper. I was on one of the Mary Pipers. No one knows why, but versers often land on a ship, and that ship is the Mary Piper. In fact, I’d done it myself before, on a robotic starship, I’d met another verser, and we had traded stories nestled by the heat of a slowly dying plasma furnace.

Hopefully, this would end up better than that ship where Tim the Amazing, and I had frozen stiff. And another time, I had lasted five minutes on a Piper, so you could say my record was not that good on that regard.

I gathered my stuff, and wandered about looking for the crew. Walking up and down the narrow corridors, I found no one, and began to worry that I had landed on some sort of ghost ship.

The hold area had plentiful small holds, and what looked like checkboxes for a security team to verify they had swept the area, but it was a small, and isolated maze. And then I found a small hatch that I had not tried.

Going through it, I found myself in a main corridor which ran, what I guessed might be the length of the ship. A clean quarter-mile column that was fifty feet wide, and lightly constructed. And a running track with exercise stations circled it.

Looking back, I saw another hatch that said “Hold B”, and a heavily warded door that announced “Nuclear Fusion Systems: Authorized Personel Only” with an odd scrawl beneath the official letters, “That means me, bucko.”

I walked softly down the track, and found that every forty feet, it had a circular band of windows. So I looked out, and suffered a bit of nausea as the stars whirled about me. But then I realized what was happening.

The ship was spinning to provide centrifugal force downward to mimic gravity. Now that I knew it, I spotted the slight difference of feeling, the minor twisting sensation that differed it from real gravity.

Curious, I pulled out my plasma cannon, and indeed it advertised itself as ready to function. Not wanting to punch a hole in the ship, and flashfreeze the ship, I refrained.

Continuing forward, I came to another hatchway that said “Personel Storage; Pilot Commander Quarters; Navigation Deck; Sail Trimming Station” which obviously listed what was forward of the exercise area.

The whole place was quiet, except for an occasional crackle of heat-stressing metal, and the slight whir from the overall vibration of the deck.

I opened the hatch, and saw a bearded man, with wide eyes, and at least a weeks worth of accumulated grime stare at me with his mouth open which was fortunate since it enabled him to start shrieking without wasting any time as he scrambled away from me.

I let him go, and entered, but more cautiously. At least it wasn’t a ghost ship, I thought, but still I was not sure.

The name of “personel storage” had seemed odd until I checked out the great galleries next to the central corridor past the forward hatchway. Several dozen men and woman stood behind glass and ice, cryonically frozen, waiting for something.

I searched the rest of the forward area. The nose was a translucent bubble made of molded diamond sheets, and from there you could see the giant thousands of miles wide sail which received a pulsing laser burst from lightyears away to help push the ship onward through Einsteinian sublight space. And from here, you could control the microthin cables which served as the rigging for this ship.

Too bad Graeme had not come here, he would have enjoyed playing with these ropes.

To the right, the Pilot Commander’s Quarters refused to open to my presence, and to my left, the Navigation Bridge did.

Here I found where we were going. We were five months out of the Emerald Coast, and headed across the Syndic Nebula through a narrow pass in its immensity where the gas thinned enough not to erode us to particles as we pushed on at an averaged (taking into account the speed-up and slow-down) fifty percent of the speed of light which meant with our ten lightyear trip ahead of us that I was looking at a very long drive.

Twenty years to the next port of call is enough to chill the bones of even an experienced verser like me. And we were not going fast enough to get any benefit from time dilation effects either.

Despite looking about, I did not find the other man on the ship. Already, I surmised that policy was to leave one human awake at all times during the crossings, but especially the Great Crossing which is where we were now.

A bit depressed, I found a place to sleep, and rested a bit uneasily since I thought I heard sounds in the night.

The next day, I checked the computers, and saw no sign of the other man, but I smelled his scent. He had changed the passwords on the computers, but to little avail. He was clumsy, and I had the benefit of several software programs which came from universes much more technically advanced than his.

And besides, the computer was fundamentally a friendly design.

The great figure eight course the Mary Piper flew across the lightyears was necessitated by one thing, although other reasons tagged along. The terraforming on the human planets was unstable, a house of cards, and it continually needed fine quality adjusting.

And the only group capable of the really heavy theorizing and the massive computer resources needed on a very long-term basis (these people thought in terms of centuries) was the College of Emerald. Those containers held data programs to update the ecological models of the terraformed planets so as to provide local decision makers the best facts, and the most logical “decision support software”.

I spent the rest of the day reading about the software which was very clever stuff indeed considering that they had no access to artificial intelligences.

That night, I woke to see the Commander Pilot staring at me from a distance of three feet, but he was up and running before I could get to my feet. I dozed lightly the rest of the night.

Over the next few days, we fell into a routine. I studied the software, and he blocked the computer, and then he dropped by to examine me at night when he thought I was sleeping.

Finally he spoke.

“You’re real, aren’t you?”

I nodded slightly.

“Can you speak?”

I smiled and spoke a greeting, and tears ran down his face. And he began capering about, and singing disjointed phrases of praise songs to God.

After that, he showed me how to pull out the kitchen from the outside wall of his quarters, and we became companions.

It turned out that he had just logged a really long stretch as a Pilot, and been burned the last week in a plasma leak, and so he spent the month-long layover in the Emerald Coast in Dream Goo which knocks you out, and heals you at the same time. And then a rush in the schedulefor his old ship, and as he healed, he got assigned to a new ship, and as low man on the totem pole got the worst run. It would be another four and a half years before he could wake up the next two human beings.

Two, I wondered. Bitterly, he showed me the person who was supposed to work with him. A frozen man, the last in the row, looked out at us.

“He’s a hypochondriac. Always cleaning things. Said he got a fever, although I don’t know how, and froze himself on a Medical Override. Jerk planned to defrost himself, and fiddle with the records before everyone else defrosted, but I got him, oh yes, I moved him to being the last to be defrosted even though I had to program in machine language to do it.”

I laughed, and wondered. A skill, I had not much used, but this was a chance to see if it would work here.

I touched the computer, and felt its ons and offs, its ones and zeros, and I knew the machine’s language, or reasonably close to it. It would take awhile, but I had time to learn its dialect.

Over the next months, he taught me the jobs required of an Associate Pilot. We spun the sail to check for fraying at the edges which could be lethal since a fray could rapidly disintegrate the whole micromillimeter thick thing. I got to do an EVA outside the ship in a spacesuit, as I checked for micro-meteorite damage. And we tended the fusion furnace, but it was practically unbreakable, so that was not a big deal. The thing was over a thousand years old, and warranteed for another two thousand.

But we kept busy in other ways as well. Lots of exercise, and it turned out that the track area could, for short time periods be spun faster. So we got to play the masochistic sport of two-g marathoning.

And its spin could be zeroed out, in fact it had to be occasionally. Then he taught me the two main styles of hand-to-hand fighting that he knew. Crab Kung-fu which relied on staying low, and sideways dodges, and most of all keeping contact with a solid object so you did not spin helplessly into the air. The other was Zero-G Aikido which relished floating in the air. It was much slower since transport required “air-swimming”. And most of its attacks were choke holds, although for advanced students which I eventually became, you learned to hit while doing a “balancing strike” in the other direction, but those hits were mostly nerve strikes since they still lacked a lot of force.

My first year passed, and I was glad to see that my companion had regained his grip on sanity which he had been losing.

A slight navigational error due to the unpredictable gravitational effects of uncharted stars hiding in the nebula on the nebula’s movement required us to fire up the fusion reactor to full, and engage the laser drive. The ship stopped vibrating as we closed the sail, and the pulsing beats of laser energy fired over a lightyear away at us flashed harmlessly around us, and into us.

It took us thirty-six hours of steady work, but we got around the tendril of gas that would have shredded us, and then put the sail back up.

And then afterwards, I got listed in the ship’s log as Sailsman, First Mark, which surprisingly brought tears to my eyes. It was an honor accorded to all who took down, and put up a three thousand mile wide sail.

Toward the end of the second year, I began to really spend time buried in the depths of the computer which I taught my friend to do as well, although he never could learn to “hear” the computer speak, he did develop a remarkable instinct for what it was doing.

In other words, we went full-fledged into geekiness.

I wanted to help my companion out, and myself as well, so next we dove into ship design for year three. By the end of year three we had a good basic grasp on how the ship was built, and we both had accumulated a large array of honors from the computer, and had been consequently promoted along the technical path four times each, and recommended to be placed on the command path, but such decisions had to be verified by the captain who slept.

I provided motivation for my companion, and he was a changed man. Plus the religious talks I had been having with him bore fruit, and so we began taking Sunday off to study and relax. This helped make us more productive on the other days.

And so, we finished our last half-year together before the unfreezing with more exercises.

And then we woke up the next two who wanted to know who I was, and where was the other senior man, and “where’s their coffee!” That is, until, my companion tapped the new rank tabs on his collar, and eyed them cooly. He was no longer the low man on the totem pole, and he offered no explanation, but just made sure they knew what to do, and informed them in tart terms of their responsibility not to mess up “his” ship.

Then we froze. The years passed in a vague, and short dream, and I awoke, cold, stiff, and longing for coffee with a craving that passed into almost obsession.

The Captain took me into his quarters, and the First Officer sliced and diced me, or tried to. My deliberate yawns in the midst of his tirades dampened the effect.

I explained what I was, and what I had done without going into the near-insane man I had found on the ship.

The Captain nodded.

“Thank you. A mistake on my part hiring Bronski. He fiddled the system to get a low-ranker he could push around, and then tried a dodge to get out of his duty. He’s getting to live on Durnmist with a note in his file of ‘Not Transportable’ which should be a repayment, even if not in full. His actions might have killed us all, and now no ship will even let him on board with that note.

And you’ve taken a decent, but low caliber individual, and returned someone who might become an officer. He’s already signing up for engineering.”

They handed me a bonus of Diktars, and released me to spend a month of shore leave on beautiful Durnmist with its small ponies, and its cow-sized goats that draw the plow through the thick, black soil, and its occasional outbursts of wild fungi which the data from the Emerald University should help correct.

But at the end, I got back on the ship, and headed toward Tempest in a cryonic freezer. It took us eighteen Terran months to get there. It took a bit long, because a rat gnawed a cable in the Durnmist Orbital Transport Laser Cannon, and put them out of action, while we were boosting, for two months.

The customs at Tempest did not like my weapons, and insisted they be peace-bonded, and refused to let me off the ship. Oh, well, everyone else got liberty.

Half the crew, including myself, rode awake to Tristar, and consequently it was a very quick run of eleven months. There was little lag time between spotting a minor inefficiency and fixing it, let alone any serious problems. It was a very tight ship, indeed.

The sunspots and solar flares in the system were being quiet, so we got to enjoy the gambling casinos and theme parks of Tristar underneath the radiation protection domes.

Onward to Moon of Korg which really needed our data since their metal-heavy moon only held onto life with its fingertips, and then to Sardic which is the home port of the laserpushed sublight starship, the Mary Piper.

I went on further, making the outer loop, and finally coming back to Sardic, and finding myself willing to stay on as we crossed the Syndic Nebula again.

By this time, I was ranked as second in computers and security, and so I got an offer.

The crew of the Yankee Trader needed a Chief of Computers, and was I interested. Regrettfully, I moved on.

It was a good ship, but not the Piper. That doubled loop, I learned about their ship, and began to truly master things. Another loop, I thought, and I might well be able to build the ship by myself from stem to stern, if given a thousand years, and the right equipment.

But something happened, my third time across the Nebula. Three things happened. For one, we passed the Piper, since the Yankee was smaller and faster. And two, on my watch, my companion, a fine fellow even if not my old friend, did honestly get sick, and so I froze him.

And then I buried myself in the computer, and at night my dreams started to get weird. Voices, fears, turbulent emotions that I could not name assailed me.

Gradually, I sorted it out even as I worried over going mad like the first man I met in this universe. Voices were speaking to me, and from outside the ship.

But it was hard to understand them. They thought slow, so slow, and odd. But eventually, I knew those voices.

The nebula was home to gaseous intelligences who communicated by telepathy, and they were trying to welcome me in joining them.

This made little sense as I did not plan on joining them. And then the fears made sense, for it had been my own intuition warning me.

We were heading toward a wake of an earlier ship. A spot where another ship had fired their engines, and we were about to plow into the gas cloud at fifty-five percent of lightspeed. We would soon be gas, and thus join the clouds.

They thought it great, but then they did not understand me when I told them it would kill us. It seemed they were truly immortal.

I really wanted to quiz them about the beginning of the universe, but I had no time.

I trimmed, and fired up the laser drive of my own, and ran down and up the ship attending to dozens of minor issues, and all the while the clock was ticking.

We pulled aside imperceptibly, and it was almost enough, but one stray tendril caught the side of the ship, and savaged us.

It disintegrated the sail control center in the forward area, and I had to sprint with all my cyborged strength back to the hatch into the exercise track, and slam it shut. If it reached me here, we were all dead, since I needed this volume of oxygen as a heat mass and as breathable storage.

It did not, but the ship shuddered for a long time after that.

And I asked the nebulans for a picture of the ship which they obliged me with. The whole front of the ship was shredded.

I ran back to the fusion reactor, and it worked fine. The problem was that we were drifting blindly out of control, and heading into a nebula that would finish the job. Its wall of near-vacuum gas particles might as well have been solid concrete for what it would do to the Yankee Trader.

And then I remembered the Piper.

How to reach her? Telepathy would not likely work, and would probably scare the pilots for a couple of days which I might not have.

So I tapped into their computer net, and asked for their navigational assistance on their net.

They took several hours which I used to wonder about the frozen crew, and then beamed the radio message to me which would take several hours. However, I lifted it straight from their computer.

We got straightened up, and then I began to fly the ship, slowly.

We were waiting for the Piper. They pulled up alongside which is a very delicate maneuver, and cut into the ship since all the airlocks were bent out of working order by the impact.

Why hadn’t I thought of that, I wondered with a sinking feeling.

The frozen crew was safe, and so was the the data, and both were transferred over while I lay in the Piper’s sick bay.

The Yankee Trader ran another route, mostly although it still homeported at Sardic, and went next to Durnmist. From there it went in a galactic northerly loop to St. Johns, Prescott’s Star, Bonnie Lass, and Cordovan’s End before making it back to Sardic, and doing a southerly loop.

So those people needed a ship, but the Trader was out of commission. Indeed, spewing gasses, she was a hazard to navigation.

We destroyed her by ramming her into the nebular wall which seemed to have been what those giants expected all along. I truly began to wonder how they perceived time.

But I was sick. The crash had caused a release of very energetic particles as the ship wall turned into subatomic soup. The others, behind their protective glass had been safe. I had been bombarded with gamma rays.

But with the Piper’s tech and freezing, I might make it, but I had a job to do.

I took myself down into the cargo hold B where the expandable orbital habitats (like blow up tents) were stored as well as other not much used stuff, and the Trader’s cargo.

Each box was a datafile. I could read these files if the lock was disengaged. My first friend used his executive authority, since he now was first mate, to open them.

And then I tried to memorize each file, and then convey it to the appropriate planet, but it was too much. The distance was too great, but so was the data mass. I literally did not have space in my brain to store one file.

Then the nebulans came to my aid. These massive minds took what I gave them, and held it and transported it under my direction, and each of the Trader’s planets got its required ecological counsel years early.

I hoped that did not mess them up, but it was the best I could do.

And then the strain was too much, and I versed out.

Tadeusz