‘Dad?’ he said.
‘No point asking me, son. I lost this battle years ago. Best I can suggest is you give in gracefully.’
Josh sighed and sat down. ‘Okay. You win. Do as you think best.’
Tao smiled. ‘Thank you. So, I think it’d probably be best if you did the trial run.’
‘What? But you said …’
‘It doesn’t matter what I said, I’m now saying that you should do it.’ She sat back and folded her arms, looking especially pleased with herself.
Josh couldn’t believe it. Deira was looking delighted and silently clapping her hands, and Sol simply shrugged again and looked at Josh as if to say, “I told you so.” It had all been a game – a game to ensure Tao came out on top. So, this was how it was going to be then. Despite himself, he smiled.
‘Alright. I get it. He inclined his head in a deferential sort of way. ‘Thank you for allowing me the great honour of embarking on the trial.’
‘You’re very welcome.’ Tao grinned and went over to give him a hug. ‘Now please can you get on with it? We’re waiting with bated breath.’
Josh immersed and moved straight into sub-quantal space. Barth was already waiting for him, presumably alerted by the “doorbell”. He listened while Josh explained what he was intending to do.
‘Give me a second.’ He disappeared, returning after a short time with another Founder. ‘This is Suram. He has volunteered to be the first extracted.’
‘Good to meet you, Suram,’ Josh said. ‘Are you ready for this?’
‘Ready and waiting. I’m fascinated to see how it works.’
‘Me too. Okay then, let’s give it a go.’
Josh had already identified the relevant procedure for piggy-backing the entity onto his own consciousness, and it had looked relatively straightforward. He soon found that what had looked easy in principle was a lot harder in practice. It wasn’t the procedure that was at fault, it was the energy body. It was as slippery as an eel, and what should have taken a few seconds at most, took Josh two minutes of struggling to get the damned thing properly attached. For some reason, it resisted everything he did, and he was just grateful when it quite suddenly clicked into place.
‘Phew, that was a bit of a fight,’ he said.
‘Believe me, it was nothing I was doing,’ Suram said. ‘I was trying hard just to relax and let you do your job.’
‘Well, there’s something strange going on,’ Josh said. ‘We’ll need to test a few more of you and see whether it’s a generic problem or something to do with individuals. Right, next step is to get back to normal space.’
Josh approached the hole in his infra-low hoping that the worst was behind him and that the journey back to normal space would be relatively easy. No such luck. He struggled simply to get through the hole back into the infra-low, and then the whole process repeated itself during the movement to delta-normal, the energy body appearing to resist every move towards normal space. He finally emerged into the real world after twenty minutes – twenty minutes of struggle that had seemed to go on forever. He liberated the Founder – that was easy at least – and watched as the energy body disappeared.
‘Shit!’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘That was a real bastard. Everything to do with those energy-bodies is a struggle. They’re hard to attach and then, when you’ve got them secured, there’s a sort of built-in inertia to any movement towards normal space. It feels like climbing a mountain with a fifty-kilo rucksack. We’ll need to sort it out if we’re to have any chance of evacuating all the Founders. I managed twenty minutes, and I was giving it all I’d got. I don’t think I could keep that up, so I’d guess we’ll only manage two Founders per hour. That’s nowhere near enough.’
‘I’ll give it a go now.’ Tao said. ‘I’ll look in the infra-low on my way down and see if I can find anything that looks like it might ease the extraction. If not, I’ll ask Barth if he has any ideas.’
‘Okay.’ Josh looked and felt exhausted. ‘This is serious, you know. We need a game-changer, or the whole program is going to fail.’
‘I know.’ Tao said. ‘See you soon,’ She immersed.
Chapter 41
Tao dived down to the infra-low and spent some time hunting around for anything that might be responsible for the difficulties Josh had experienced, or for something that might speed up the process of extraction. It was time-consuming work, and in the end proved to be pointless, yielding nothing of significance. It was strange because the entire universe was laid out down here as sub-quantal functions. There should be something. If there was, however, she couldn’t see it and eventually she had to give it up. She sank to the bottom of the infra-low and let the tentacle take her through into sub-quantal space.
Barth was still there, and Nerima joined him after a couple of seconds. Both were eager to learn how things had gone with their colleague, and Tao explained about the problems Josh had encountered with the process.
‘We urgently need to identify the problem. If we can’t achieve the evacuation faster than this, we’re not going to make it in time.’
Barth and Nerima exchanged worried looks, and Tao got the distinct impression they were communicating at some level she wasn’t party to.
‘It’s obviously something to do with our energy-bodies,’ Barth said at last. ‘but exactly what, I can’t say. To be honest, I don’t see why there should be a problem. I’ll get onto it and see what I can find.’
‘You’ll have to be damned fast,’ Tao said. ‘The time-frame we’re operating in is already tight. If it’s delayed while we find a solution to this, we might not make it at all.’
‘I understand,’ Barth vanished.
‘Barth’s very good at this sort of thing,’ Nerima said. ‘I’m sure he’ll find a way through it.’
‘We’d all better hope so.’ Tao gazed at Nerima, feeling a sort of kinship with her. ‘What is it with you and Barth, anyway? He said you were his partner when you were corporeal. Did you know each other before then, or was that the first time you met?’
Nerima looked away, appearing uncomfortable with this line of questioning. ‘Barth and I go back a long way – a very long way.’ Her eyes took on a distant expression. ‘We’ve always been drawn to each other, whether in energy-bodies or corporeal. It’s difficult to explain.’
‘Sounds like love to me,’ Tao said, smiling. ‘Though I didn’t know it could last as long as you’re talking about.’
‘You’ll understand eventually.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ Nerima looked round, checking that Barth hadn’t returned. ‘I meant nothing.’ She looked round again. ‘And now I have to go.’
Without even a goodbye, she promptly vanished, and Tao was left confused and wondering what to do next. She’d been intending to extract another Founder, but with Barth and Nerima gone, she had no way of finding one. There was clearly little point in her remaining here, so she leaped back into her infra-low and had another search round for something that might help the extraction process.
After some time, she did come across a series of functions that appeared to be related to energy in some way, though whether they were specifically related to energy-bodies she couldn’t tell. She copied them and parked them in alpha-normal for later analysis, then emerged, feeling less than happy with her efforts. She was irritated at the two Founders’ attitudes, frustrated at her own inability to find anything substantial, and exhausted after a prolonged stay in sub-quantal space and the infra-low. Damn this infra-low and sub-quantal space stuff – it was fascinating but it sure as hell took it out of you. She noticed that Josh had already given up and gone to bed, so she looked around for Deira and Sol. They were chatting in the kitchen over a hot drink, and they looked up expectantly when she walked in.
‘Anything?’ Deira asked.
‘Nope. Barth doesn’t know what the problem is. He’s gone away to re-examine the maths. I’ve found a few functions that might be useful, but I think we need Chayka to
examine them.’ She flopped into a chair, exhausted. ‘I wondered whether you two could take them to the Professor? I need some sleep.’
‘Absolutely!’ Deira looked pleased. ‘We need something to occupy us, don’t we, Sol?’ Sol grunted a reply that could have been anything, but she carried on regardless. ‘How do we access them?’
Tao yawned. ‘I’ve just transferred them to Jiao, who’ll forward them to Chard and Hope. Any one of the AIs can download them to Chayka’s terminal.’
‘No problem,’ Deira was enthusiastic and ready to go. ‘We’ll get right on it. Oh! What time is it?’
It turned out to be 12.30, 17.30 in Cambridge. It was likely Chayka would still be in his office since he didn’t tend to leave until after 18.00 most days, according to Juliette. Tao took herself off to bed, and Deira and Sol folded over to Chayka’s lab, next to Juliette’s workstation.
There was no sign of Juliette, so they went straight to Chayka’s office, where they weren’t surprised to find him hunched over his terminal. He looked up and gave a faint smile before offering them seats. That wasn’t like the normal Chayka, as far as Deira was concerned, but then she remembered Josh had spent some productive time with him recently, so he was presumably still in a relatively mellow frame of mind. That assumption was borne out almost immediately.
‘Good to see you both,’ he said, prompting Sol to look at Deira in surprise. ‘I had a most rewarding discussion with your son earlier today. He gave me many insights into sub-quantal space.’
‘I’m glad,’ Deira said. ‘We’re also here on a matter related to sub-quantal space.’
‘I’d be pleased to help if I can.’
Deira explained about the difficulties Josh had experienced freeing one of the Founders and the lack of available data that might explain the problem.
‘Even the Founders don’t seem to know what the issue is. All we’ve managed to get hold of are some sub-quantal functions that Tao Chen thought might be relevant. She wanted us to pass them on to you to see if you could make anything of them.’
‘Indeed. Please let me see them.’ Chayka looked quite animated, as if he couldn’t believe his good luck.
‘They’re already on your terminal,’ Deira said, knowing that Hope had downloaded them as soon as they’d entered the lab. ‘The file’s …’
‘Found it!’ Chaya said, and immediately drifted off into one of his absences.
‘Now this, I remember,’ Sol said, sitting back and folding his arms. ‘I’d wondered what had happened to the real Chayka – and here he is. I wonder how long it’ll be this time.’
In fact, it wasn’t long at all by Chayka’s standards and, within five minutes, he had returned to them again, smiling broadly. Sol almost fell off his seat in amazement.
‘Extraordinarily interesting. There does seem to be a hint of something, a relationship between energy and sub-quantal space that might be the answer to your problem. I’ll start looking tomorrow.’
‘Er, I don’t suppose you could start straightaway?’ Deira said. ‘The thing is, we’re very short of time and…’
‘Yes, yes, yes. I understand that. However, I’m due to give a lecture at the Cambridge Institute this evening and I simply can’t put it off. Rest assured, I’ll start first thing tomorrow.’
Deira glanced at Sol and could see that this was no more than he’d expected. He was looking resigned and beginning to stand up to leave. Deira wasn’t giving up quite that quickly.
‘Professor, this is the survival of the universe we’re talking about.’
‘Yes, and we have around five months to accomplish our goal. I don’t think a single evening will make much difference to the outcome, do you?’
Deira was stumped because they, too, had just taken a day off. Granted, they’d still managed to achieve the scoping exercise, but their original feelings had been the same as Chayka’s.
‘Alright,’ she agreed, reluctantly ‘Tomorrow it is, then. You have my contact number if you find anything interesting, don’t you?’
‘Indeed, I do.’ Chayka stood, clearly suggesting this was the end of the discussion and the two agents stood too.
‘Thanks for your help,’ Deira said. ‘Hope to hear from you soon.’
She didn’t wait to get to Juliette’s terminal but simply folded directly out of Chayka’s office into their living room.
‘Shit!’ she said. ‘I hoped he’d get the message. Sol, we’re all wasting precious time – time that we don’t have. We need to move tomorrow.’
‘Yeah, I know. Tomorrows going to be a big day. Tao and Josh will be operational again and the young agents will be back.’ He took her hand. ‘Dee, I know you want to get on with things, but there’s nothing we can do for now. We might as well let our hair down and relax for the rest of the day.’
‘I know. It won’t be easy, though.
§
The next day, the young agents turned up early, ready and eager to begin the evacuation. They were brought down to earth with something of a bump when Josh explained the problems they faced.
‘We have another issue. Five of you still haven’t achieved the time-fold, and without that you won’t be any help with the evacuation. You’ll need to return to your programme with the Eich and try to make some progress if you want to be involved.’
That brought the mood down even more, and it was a disgruntled set of young agents that were taken by Josh to the Eich enclave. When he returned, he found the others already sitting round the dining room table waiting for him.
‘I’m glad to have the three of you at least,’ he said, looking from Victor, to Kadir, to Dominique. ‘Now, as far as I’m aware, you haven’t been to sub-quantal space yet. Is that correct?’ Three heads nodded, almost in unison. ‘Okay, then the first thing we need to do is familiarise you with the environment you’ll be working in. I want to ensure you can enter and leave at will as well as form a hard photon body.’ He watched their faces. ‘Yes, the mere fact you don’t know what I’m talking about speaks volumes. Look, I know that time is against us, but I must insist that today is spent practicing the procedures you’ll need when we get started with the evacuation proper. You’ll find it exhausting and will need a long period of sleep afterwards.’
‘We’ll use the two spare bedrooms,’ Deira said. ‘I suggest the two girls share one, while Victor has the other. Would that work?’
‘Sounds good. Now then – shall we get started?’
‘Just a minute,’ Deira said. ‘What about us? Sol and me? It’s all very well you youngsters heading off into sub-quantal space, but surely there’s something we can do to help?’
Josh hesitated, and Deira could tell he had no idea what to suggest. It was amazing, really, every time she made progress with her mentalics and, in this case, had even got her own PWC, things moved further away from her. In the current situation, she and Sol remained effectively useless. Yes, they could both get into sub-quantal space, but they couldn’t get out again without help – and certainly couldn’t assist with the evacuation. It was Tao who finally had an idea.
‘Why don’t you do what the other agents are doing and return to the Eich for further training?’
That was the last thing Deira had considered and her look of incredulity made everyone smile. ‘
‘You’ve got to be joking. Sol and I are well past our sell-by date.’
‘Somehow, I don’t think so.’ Tao smiled. ‘Deira, I can’t see the Eich taking the trouble to make a PWC for you if they didn’t think you could make some further progress. And Sol’s already done some good development. What do you think, Josh?’
‘You might be right.’ Josh was looking thoughtful. ‘I hadn’t thought about it until now but, yes, Mum and Dad might still have some developmental potential.’
‘You think?’ Deira said. ‘Really?’
‘I think it’s worth giving it a shot, and while you’re there you could work on the Eich to take down their barrier. They don’t need it anymore, after all.’<
br />
‘So, we’re to be diplomatic envoys too?’ Deira laughed.
‘Crazier things have been said in jest,’ Josh replied. ‘Though I’m not sure about Dad’s ability to be diplomatic, even when he’s on top form.’ He laughed and slapped Sol on the back. ‘Just joking, Dad, I’m sure you’re up to it as well as Mum.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Sol grinned. ‘You know I was being diplomatic before you were born, right? It’s second nature to me.’
‘Oh yes, and I’m a porcupine’s mother,’ Deira laughed. ‘Your best bet, diplomatically, is to keep your mouth shut and let me do the talking. Go and play mentalics with Chard or something.’
Sol looked hurt. ‘You know I’m perfectly able to …’
‘I know you are, you great lump.’ Deira hugged him. ’And even if you weren’t, the Eich know you pretty well by now. I don’t think they’d take offence at anything you said. Now then …’ she stared at Josh and Tao, ‘… if this is what we’re going to do, which one of you dynamic young agents is going to help these two creaking geriatrics into the Eich enclave?’
Now everyone laughed, and Josh said he’d take them to the Eich community before having a rest. He did his yellow flash thing and deposited Sol and Deira in the Eich enclave, where they found the Speaker already waiting for them.
‘How did you know we were coming?’ Deira asked.
‘It was the most logical action after we constructed a PWC for you.’
‘But surely you haven’t been waiting here for me all that time?’
‘Time is an unusual variable. Sometimes it’s of the utmost importance, and sometimes it’s not. In this case, it wasn’t. Waiting isn’t a problem for us.’
‘Well that’s good to hear. I guess the first thing I should ask is how you all are? The Eich, I mean. The last I heard, you were experiencing what I think Tao called a “realignment crisis.”’
‘Yes, we’ve been through a very difficult time recently. However, now that our Cthon conditioning has been thrown off, we are once more aware of our prime objective. We have much to thank you for. We also have much to apologise for. We have clearly misled you over a prolonged period and, for that, we are truly sorry.’
Gods of Titan- The Cosmic Constants Page 35
