Shapers of Worlds

by Edward Willett

  “And those that aren’t too weak to stand usually pick up some allergy after a week, or a month, or a year here; or they eat something what ain’t right for them; or they look directly at the sun and go blind; or they go into the country of darkness on the night side of our planet, looking for the engines of the world they are sure must be here, or for what they call ‘officer’s country,’ or for some great hatch leading into the interior, where they still expect to find the shadows of the dead, alive in paradise. Lot of them, we dig their bodies out of mineshafts.”

  I stared at the old man for a time.

  I said slowly, “When you say, ‘we’ find them . . .”

  He laughed a brief sort of laugh, more like a cough. “I am a Bassark of the Ministry of Internal Purity. The Pure Police have jurisdiction over space-men, since our laws otherwise do not allow us to meddle with them, unless they bear diseases, spores, or epidemic vectors.”

  “What happens to the healthy ones?”

  He shrugged a half-shrug with one shoulder. “The Camarilla rules a turbulent population here. Even if half a shipload of a farship were to perish during planetfall, there are countless more who stay below deck, and don’t try to walk on lakes or eat poisonous bugs or jump out of trees. How can a dozen populations from half-a-dozen eras and planets stay alive and keep the peace? We live and we let live: that is the rule by which civilized societies are run—anything else is rule by the strong over the weak. If they are undiseased, we leave them be—even the mad ones who eat dirt or seek the world’s core. Oyeh! The world is harsh and enemy enough, without that we human beings must add more harshness to it, or make enemies of those who will leave us be if we don’t stir them.”

  I said finally, “Are there any star-farers on the long, cold voyages who do not go mad, and do not crash their ships?”

  “There’s ones that are clever, and when they come in-system, they hide their great ship somewhere, lights out, radio silent, drives dark. Maybe in the Oort cloud where the comets are born, or perhaps in orbit around some outer moon or icy ring of our gas giants. They send out a pinnace or a tender, or, if they are hardy, one crewman in an armoured suit, with a backpack carrying his fuel and chute. It’s amazing from what height a man can fall, if he does his calculations right, and the atmosphere is thick enough for the weight of his shroud. Why not from orbit? They send him out to look about, to see what he can see, and find out if the world he’s met is suited to his kind or not.”

  He gave me a knowing look.

  I said slowly, “And what do you do with those?”

  He said, “I cannot speak for the other police agents. Me, I ask them to buy me a drink. If he drinks my health, then I report to the Anonymous Man that the strangers be civil folk, and no threat.”

  I found myself smiling. “There are worse ways in which to greet a stranger.”

  We raised our glasses to each other. “Welcome to Nowhere!”

  Evanescence

  By L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

  I.

  In the semi-ordered centre of the chaos that comprises the arena of the universe, the singer looks to the vibrochordist, who signals to the other three before producing a deep, rumbling chord that reverberates through what is, whose gravitic reverberations align the proto-quantums of pre-quarks.

  Next, the multistringer pluck-strokes the fabric beneath and within the proto-quantums, to submerge that which underholds what will come, and to raise that not yet visible froth, still without boundaries and substance, into the edges of perception.

  As that fabric simmers under the pluck-strokes of the multistringer, the hothorn sears the froth with heat beyond heat, curing it into the first stages of being. Close behind come the cold chill-pulsations of the basswhomper, pushing all that has not quite yet come to be out in instant, even waves that flash-expand the arena that is the universe.

  Only then do the notes of the singer rise like evanescent and infinitely thin crystal spheres over the instrumentalists—whose percussive impacts and knife-edged notes should have fragmented those sonic spheres reaching for the meaning that is embodied in becoming, a meaning that will be sought in eons to come by the flashglancers who will struggle to understand that which brought them into being, even though most will live and die without wonder, let alone comprehension. For melody shapes all, not the composer, nor the effects that create the song of the universe.

  II.

  Laurent looked down at the lambent light captured within the nightmetal armour forged from the metal of the first singer and repaired after the last system shaping, its soft glow understating, thus misrepresenting, the energies harnessed within fields so intense mere matter was but unseen mist by comparison.

  “Will it suffice . . . again?” she asked.

  “Against time, against the battering of mere matter, and against entropy, but not against the dragons of the underspace-time,” replied the master artificer.

  “Should I encounter one . . . ?”

  “There always be dragons. Order and matter. Ordered matter structures chaos. Against chaos, mass alone is insufficient, because, without order, chaos scatters mass. Only ordered mass can prevail. No more and no less. Even forms of order that seem useless tip an uncertain balance, particularly when dealing with the foam on the surface of spacetime.”

  That may be, but there is more chaos than order where we’re headed, or little enough except that which we bring. Laurent kept that thought to herself as she donned the nightmetal armour. Once so clad, she glided from the armoury to the ready room. There she stretched out above what passed for a deck and shuttered her consciousness, a consciousness that would remain shuttered and dreamless until Blackmatter reached the next protostellar disk with appropriate parameters.

  The time necessary passed before Laurent unshuttered her consciousness in response to the alert signal. Others around her did the same, the aether filled with the unsent thoughts of shapers ordering their consciousnesses after the dormancy of the crossing.

  Once her consciousness was fully ordered, Laurent checked all her biosystems, ensuring that they were all optimized. Next came the briefing infusion, when Laurent received full perception of the swirling protostellar disk above which Blackmatter was poised. Already, modest concentrations of matter had formed in the randomness of gas and dust, concentrations needing to be adjusted, as once others had adjusted previous protostellar disks that had given rise to Laurent’s forebears.

  The infusion received and registered, Laurent glided toward her dustsled, checking her nightmetal armour a last time before inserting herself and linking with the supramaterial dustsled, both wavicle and point, whose reality could not be compromised in either spacetime or underspace-time.

  Order levels combined. Trajectory adjusted. Ready for release.

  Wavicle Laurent . . . released.

  The dustsled dropped into the Now of spacetime, and Laurent continued to monitor the angled release and insertion point before easing into deep slowtime as the dustsled vectored toward the disk of gas and dust, slowly coming to parallel the incipient rotation of the cloud-disk, if at a higher velocity.

  In time, the dustsled and Laurent slid through the upper levels of the disk, her consciousness linked to the arrow of time, moving through the centuries, smoothing, combining, and channelling the currents, preparing, waiting . . .

  III.

  Coburn was jolted out of instastasis, the sensation always the same, like being dunked in liquid nitrogen and then solar-fried, all in less than a nanosec. Except that neither really occurred, because Coburn’s body and physical brain were still in stasis. Coburn accessed the instruments and scanners, and found . . . nothing . . . or nothing besides a few scattered planetesimals that Celestina had already discovered, catalogued, and then continued on from, because they were little more than ice and worthless rock, of a size and composition worthy of neither greater study or potential utilization for other than fuel. But then, that was true of most of the scattered matter in the Oort Cloud.

&n
bsp; “Object . . . one thousand kilo-kays out . . . anomalous mass-energy profile,” announced the carefully modulated androgynous voice of Celestina, a voice only in the sense that Coburn’s superconscious registered the words as such. “Probability of artifact close to unity. Decelerating to inspect.”

  “Energy reserves?” asked Coburn.

  “Reserves are sufficient for inspection of object and for extended travel to recover ice from nearest suitable planetesimal.”

  “Composition of object?”

  “We’re unable to determine at this time.”

  “Interrogative origin.”

  “Comparative analysis is inconclusive.”

  Coburn could only wait while the Celestina closed on the potential artifact, wondering what the object might be. Absently, another thought occurred. “How far have you gotten in your listening to the bygone classics of opera?”

  “We don’t just listen; we also analyze the mathematical strata and structures as they’re performed.”

  “That sounds like listening to me.”

  “That’s a terrible pun.”

  “I admit it, but it’s totally appropriate. I still don’t see why you chose opera.”

  “Popular music is more simplistic and repetitious. Opera is more challenging.”

  And that fills the hours . . . and the years. Coburn would have nodded, thoughts going back to the object that they were approaching. Most likely, it was just another worthless rock, or possibly an actual nickel-iron asteroid tossed out of the inner system during the early Solar Restructuring . . . and just possibly, it might be some lost and early attempt at interstellar travel, among the mostly futile many. Except . . . what if it is alien?

  That wouldn’t change anything. Celestina was eight light months from Earth, and that meant they’d have to deal with the object one way or another, since no one had yet discovered FTL travel or communication.

  “What characteristics make this object different?” asked Coburn.

  “We can discern gravitational attraction without optical discovery.”

  “How big is it?”

  “Analysis indeterminate. No optical available so far. Spacetime deformation indicates body mass approximately one-fifth T.”

  Coburn would have snorted, had that been physically possible. “Something with twice the mass of Mars that we can’t even visually discern? That sounds like the miniature black holes the physicists say exist . . . and no one’s ever found.”

  “The observed deformation is insufficient for a black hole,” replied Celestina. “Deceleration complete.”

  Coburn couldn’t help but worry about what the object was . . . and who or what might be contained within it . . . and what it was doing so far from anything. “Interrogative distance to object.”

  “Two hundred kays.”

  “Optical scan.”

  “Enhanced optical scan.”

  What Coburn “saw” was unremarkable . . . yet totally amazing. It was rectangular, perhaps four times as long as wide, and a tenth as thick at one end and half that at the other. And it was darker than dark. With nothing nearby, there was no visual way of telling how big it actually was. “What are the dimensions?”

  “A thousand metres in length, two hundred in width and a hundred thick at one end, half that at the other. The precise dimensions and regularity indicate a technological creation or artifact.”

  Even after all the years, sometimes Celestina could pedantically state the obvious. Coburn did not comment, but, instead, began to study the blacker-than-black object. A kay long, with no protrusions, totally featureless. Streamlined, as if designed to move through something denser than the comparative vacuum of space . . . but out in the middle of almost nowhere.

  As Coburn watched, the darkness changed, and faint lambent lights flicker-strobed across the outer surfaces of the object. “What did you do?”

  “Optical enhancement was not possible without electromagnetic and laser scan. The object responded to the energy flow.”

  “I’d say you woke it up,” commented Coburn. Whatever “it” is.

  “The distance to the object is diminishing,” offered Celestina.

  “How can it do that?”

  “The object is not moving. We are.”

  “It’s moving us? By what means?”

  “It appears to be employing some advanced technology. The greatest probability is directed gravitational attraction.”

  “Stop us from getting closer.”

  “That’s not possible without sustaining maximum structural damage.”

  “If we crash into it, we’ll definitely suffer maximum structural damage,” replied Coburn.

  “That is unlikely. The rate of closure is slowing,” announced Celestina.

  A gravitational tractor beam? Coburn would have shivered, but lacked that ability at present. What was such an object or spacecraft . . . or whatever it was . . . doing in the Oort Cloud? “Display all information on object.”

  “Displayed.”

  Coburn slowly, at least comparatively, went over the images and data, but the only thing that stood out was that the surface temperature of the object registered at 2.8 K, suggesting that its surface or hull, or the outer layer, was a perfect insulator, since it was unlikely that the interior of a functioning technology could be that cold. Not any technology you know.

  “What’s the composition of the hull?”

  “That cannot be determined. The highest probability is an amalgam of partly collapsed elements.”

  Partly collapsed matter? That made no sense. Neutron matter the size of the object would have possessed a gravitational force that would have already shredded Coburn and Celestina. Partly collapsed matter would have been unstable and resulted in something similar to a solar flare, if not a nova. “How is that possible?” asked Coburn.

  “It isn’t, according to present observations and current theory.” After a pause, Celestina added, “Position stable at ten kays separation.”

  “Is there any attempt at communication?”

  “No emissions at any frequency of electromagnetic spectrum. No gravitonic pulses detected.”

  “Are we still being restrained?”

  “A test attempt at using the drive was countered by increased attraction.”

  “In short, we’re stuck.” Captured, is more like it. “Then we’d better see what we can do in the way of communications.”

  IV.

  Proto-gas-giant parameters outside limits! Evanescence threatened.

  The alarm from Blackmatter jolted Laurent out of deep slowtime. After readjusting her consciousness and biosystems, she focused on the proto-gas-giant creeping inward toward the habitable zone, where the proto-rocky-planets had not yet accumulated enough mass to nurture the evanescent globes of the first singers, those spheres so tough . . . and yet, so fragile.

  The dustsled’s sensors detected the dragon, or rather, its influence—that darkness that pulled the very fabric of spacetime into an unseen depression through which the proto-gas-giant orbited, each ellipse bringing it closer to the eventual boundary of the habitable zone, not that any of the stellar disk was presently habitable for any unarmored being, device, or technology.

  Laurent angled the dustsled inward, vectoring it behind the proto-gas-giant that was the dragon’s tool, a position from which she would employ the dustsled to gather a wave of matter and then accelerate it to merge with the incipient gas-giant, with enough velocity for it to surmount the insidious false slope of the underlying spacetime.

  Over orbital ellipse after orbital ellipse, she and the dustsled built that mass, trailing the proto-gas-giant, but closing the gap while gathering more and more matter.

  Then, as she, the dustsled, and the matter close to the size of a more-than-modest protoplanet accelerated toward the proto-gas-giant to begin the manoeuvre that would reverse the inward drift of the proto-gas-giant’s orbit, the chaos dragon emerged from underspace-time, directly between Laurent and her target.

&
nbsp; For an instant—a real instant, not a slowtime instant—Laurent saw into and through the surface of spacetime, through the gaping maw of the dragon, beholding the tangled and interlocked chaos-webs on which rested the foam of order, created by the primal evanescent songs to block the excessive emergence of chaos into spacetime.

  Driving the dustsled forward, employing and increasing the kinetic force created over more than decades, she pushed the mass so carefully and painstakingly gathered toward the dragon’s mouth, then, at the last moment, accelerated the dustsled toward that gaping maw, that momentary entrance into underspace-time, while separating herself from the sled and triggering the recovery beacon.

  As she watched, the energy from the dustsled sealed the breach into underspace-time, while the mass she and the dustsled had gathered fused with the proto-gas-giant, accelerating it, trembling and shuddering, out of the false deformation of spacetime and along a widening orbit. Out from the habitable zone to come.

  Even so . . . Laurent recalculated.

  She had been late, not fatally late, but close, and the proto-gas-giant had gathered too much of the dust and gas from the outer edges of the habitable zone to come . . . and the rocky planet that would grow there would be too small, large enough for proto-life, but little more, before it withered, unable to sustain and nurture evanescence.

  But there will be one farther in-system . . . and there would have been none had you not foiled the dragon, whose random chaos could not be trusted to foster the evanescence that was the only hope of prevailing against the trolls of entropy.

  She dropped into dormancy, knowing Blackmatter would recover her, sooner or later, wondering where the dustsled would re-emerge from underspace-time . . . and when.