“No, probably there will be an ‘accident,’” Zeb said.
“Why has this Admiral moved to block you just now?”
“Nova triggers,” Zeb said.
Once invented, triggers had made war far more dangerous. A solar system could be “cleansed”—a horrifyingly bland term used by aggressors of the time—by inducing a mild nova burst in a balmy sun. This roasted worlds just enough to kill all but those who could swiftly find caverns and store food for the few years of the nova stage. Fleet wanted a supply of them, and Zeb led opposition to the weapon.
“Admirals love their toys,” he said sourly, fingering a stim but not inhaling it. They returned to the main party, not wanting to seem perturbed by the news.
“Is there no other way to get off Syrna?” Fyrna demanded of Vissian.
“No, I can’t recall—”
“Think!”
Startled, Vissian said, “Well, of course, we do have privateers who at times use the wild worms, an activity that is at best quasi-legal, but—”
In Zeb’s career he had discovered a curious little law. Now he turned it in his favor.
Bureaucracy increases as a doubling function in time, given resources. At the personal level, the cause is the persistent desire of every manager to hire at least one assistant. This provides the time constant for growth.
Eventually this collides with the carrying capacity of society. Given the time constant and the capacity, one could predict a plateau level of bureaucratic overhead—or else, if growth persists, the date of collapse. Predictions of the longevity of bureaucracy-driven societies fit a precise curve. Surprisingly, the same scaling laws worked for micro-societies such as large agencies.
The corpulent Imperial bureaus on Syrna could not move swiftly. Admiral Kafalan’s squadron had to stay in planetary space, since it was paying a purely formal visit. Niceties were still observed. Kafalan did not want to use brute force when a waiting game would work.
“I see. That gives us a few days,” Fyrna concluded.
Zeb nodded. He had done the required speaking, negotiating, dealing, promising favors—all activities he disliked intensely. Fyrna had done the background digging. “To…?”
“Train.”
The wormhole web had built the galactic empire. Made in the first blaring instant of the Great Emergence, found (rarely) floating between stars, they now were the most precious resources of all.
Of course, worms ended and began as they liked. A worm jump could bring you to a black vacuum still many years from a far-flung world. Hyperships flitted through wormholes in mere seconds, then exhausted themselves hauling their cargoes across empty voids, years and decades in the labor.
Wormholes were labyrinths, not mere tunnels with two ends. The large ones held firm for perhaps billions of years—none larger than a hundred meters across had yet collapsed. The smallest could sometimes last only hours, at best a year. In the thinner worms, flexes in the worm-walls during passage could alter the end point of a traveler’s trajectory.
Worse, worms in their last stages spawned transient, doomed young—the wild worms. As deformations in space-time, supported by negative energy-density “struts,” all wormholes were inherently rickety. As they failed, smaller deformations twisted away.
Syrna had seven wormholes. One was dying in gorgeous agonies.
It hung a light-hour away, spitting out wild worms that ranged from a hand’s-width size up to several meters. In the spongy space-time of the negative-energy-density struts, time could crawl or zip, quite unpredictably. This worm was departing our universe in molasses-slow torment.
A fairly sizable wild worm had sprouted out of the side of the dying worm several months before. The Imperial squadron did not know of this, of course. All worms were taxed, so a fresh, free wormhole was a bonanza. Reporting their existence, well…often a planet simply didn’t get around to that until the wild worm had fizzled away in a spray of subatomic surf.
Until then, pilots carried cargo through them. That wild worms could evaporate with only seconds’ warning made their trade dangerous, highly paid, and legendary.
Wormriders were the sort of people who as children liked to ride their bicycles no-handed, but with a difference—they rode off rooftops.
By an odd logic, that kind of child grew up and got trained and even paid taxes—but inside, they stayed the same.
Only risk takers could power through the chaotic flux of a transient worm and take the risks that worked, not take those that didn’t, and live. They had elevated bravado to its finer points.
“This wild worm, it’s tricky,” a grizzled woman told Zeb and Fyrna. “No room for a pilot if you both go.”
“We must stay together,” Fyrna said with finality.
“Then you’ll have to pilot.”
“We don’t know how,” Zeb said.
“You’re in luck.” The lined woman grinned without humor. “This wildy’s short, easy.”
“What are the risks?” Fyrna demanded stiffly.
“I’m not an insurance agent, lady.”
“I insist that we know—”
“Look, lady, we’ll teach you. That’s the deal.”
“I had hoped for a more—”
“Give it a rest or it’s no deal at all.”
In the men’s room, above the urinal he used, Zeb saw a small gold plaque: Senior Pilot Joquan Beunn relieved himself here Octdent 4, 13,435.
Every urinal had a similar plaque. There was a washing machine in the locker room with a large plaque over it, reading The Entire 43d Pilot Corps relieved themselves here Marlass 18, 13,675.
Pilot humor. It turned out to be absolutely predictive. He messed himself on his first training run.
As if to make the absolutely fatal length of a closing wormhole less daunting, the worm flyers had escape plans. These could only work in the fringing fields of the worm, where gravity was beginning to warp, and space-time was only mildly curved. Under the seat was a small, powerful rocket that propelled the entire cockpit out, automatically heading away from the worm.
There is a limit to how much self-actuated tech one can pack into a small cockpit, though. Worse, worm mouths were alive with electrodynamic “weather”—writhing forks of lightning, blue discharges, red magnetic whorls like tornadoes. Electrical gear didn’t work well if a bad storm was brewing at the mouth. So most of the emergency controls were manual. Hopelessly archaic, but unavoidable.
He and Fyrna went through a bail-out training program. Quite soon it was clear that if he used the EJECT command he had better be sure that he had his head tilted back. That is, unless he wanted his kneecaps to slam up into his chin, which would be unfortunate, because he would be trying to check if his canopy had gone into a spin. This would be bad news, because his trajectory might get warped back into the worm. To correct any spin he had to yank on a red lever, and if that failed he had to then very quickly—in pilot’s terms, this meant about half a second—punch two blue knobs. When the spindown came, he then had to be sure to release the automatic actuator by pulling down on two yellow tabs, being certain that he was sitting up straight with his hands between his knees to avoid…
…and so on for three hours. Everyone seemed to assume that since he was this famous politician trained in intricate galactic protocols he could of course keep an entire menu of instructions straight, timed down to fractions of seconds.
After the first ten minutes he saw no point in destroying their illusions, and simply nodded and squinted to show that he was carefully keeping track and absolutely enthralled. Meanwhile he solved chess puzzles in his head for practice.
He was taking a stroll with his bodyguards when the Admiral sent a greeting card.
The guard nearest him, one Ladoro, was saying something into his wrist comm as they ambled through a park. It was an Imperial distraction, with babbling brooks that ran uphill, this artful effect arising from intricately charged electrodynamic streams that countered gravity. His guards liked the effect
; Zeb found it rather obvious.
He chanced to be looking toward Ladoro, his oldest guard, a stout fellow whose personal service went back a full century. Later Zeb reflected that the Admiral probably knew that. It made what happened more pointed.
Ladoro went down with his head jerked back, as if he were looking up at the sky, a quizzical expression flickering. Over backwards, twisting, then down hard. He hit face first on the carpet-moss. Ladoro had not lifted his hands to break the fall.
Two other guards had Zeb behind a wall within two seconds. There was too much open space and too little shelter to try a move. He squatted and fumed and could not see who had fired the shot. Zeb risked a quick look over the wall’s low edge and saw Ladoro sprawled flat without a twitch.
Then a lot of nothing happened. No following pulses.
Zeb replayed the image. From Ladoro had spouted rosy blood from a punch high in the spine. Absolutely dead center, four centimeters below the neck. Kilojoules of energy focused to a spot the size of a fingernail.
That much energy delivered so precisely would have done the job even if it hit the hip or gut. Delivered so exactly, it burst the big bony axis of the man, massive pressures in the spinal fluid, a sudden breeze blowing out a candle, the brain going black in a millisecond.
Ladoro had gone down boneless, erased. A soft, liquid thump, then eternal silence.
Zeb held up his hand and watched it tremble for a while. Enough waiting. “Let’s go. They can lob anything they want here.”
A guard said, “Sir Zeb, I don’t advise—”
“I’ve been shot at before, kid.”
“Well, I suppose we could fire as we move—”
“You do that. Go.”
They worked their way along a creek frothing uphill. More guards arrived and spilled out across the park. The pulse had come from behind Ladoro. Zeb kept plenty of rock between him and that direction. He got to Ladoro and studied the face from behind a boulder nearby. The head was cocked to one side, eyes still open, mouth seeping moisture into the dry dirt. The eyes were the worst, staring into an infinity nobody glimpses more than once.
Goodbye, friend. We had our time, some laughs and light-years. You saved my ass more than once. And now I can’t do a damn thing for you.
Something moved to his right, a gossamer ball of motes. Cops, or rather, a local manifestation of them.
It flickered, spun, and said in a low, bass voice, “We regret.”
“Who did this?”
“We suspect an Imperial source. Our defenses were compromised in a characteristic way. Sir.”
“And what can you do?”
“I will protect you.”
“You didn’t do a great job for Ladoro.”
“I arrived here slightly late.”
“Slightly?”
“You must forgive errors. We are finite, all.”
“Damn finite.”
“No place is safe. This is safer, however. I extend the apologies of Madame Vissian—”
“Tell the Admiral I got his calling card.”
“Sir?”
“I’m sure you will be all right,” Vissian said fulsomely to them in the departure lounge.
Zeb had to admit this woman had proven better than he had hoped. She had cleared the way, stalled the Imperial officers. Probably she shrewdly expected a payoff from him, and she had every right to do so.
“I hope I can handle a wormship,” Zeb said.
“And I,” Fyrna added.
“Our training is the very best,” Vissian said, brow furrowing. “I do hope you’re not worried about the wild worm, Governor?”
“It’s a tight fit,” he said.
They had to fly in a slender cylinder, Fyrna co-piloting. Splitting the job had proved the only way to get them up to a barely competent level.
“I think it’s marvelous, how courageous you two are.”
“We have little choice,” Fyrna said. This was artful understatement. Another day and the Admiral’s officers would have Zeb and Fyrna under arrest, then dead.
“Riding in a little pencil ship. Such primitive means!”
“Uh, time to go,” Zeb said behind a fixed smile. She was wearing thin again.
“I agree with the Emperor. Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.”
Zeb felt his stomach flutter with dread. “You’ve got a point.”
He had brushed off the remark.
Four hours later, closing at high velocity with the big wormhole complex, he saw her side of it.
He spoke on suitcomm to Fyrna. “In one of my classes—Nonlinear Philosophy, I believe—the professor said something I’ll never forget. ‘Ideas about existence pale, beside the fact of existence.’ Quite true.”
“Bearing oh six nine five,” she said rigorously. “No small talk.”
“Nothing’s small out here—except that wild worm mouth.”
The wild worm was a fizzing point of vibrant agitation. It orbited the main worm mouth, a distant bright speck.
Imperial ships patrolled the main mouth, ignoring this wild worm. They had been paid off long ago, and expected a steady train of slimships to slip through the Imperial guard.
The galaxy was, after all, a collection of debris, swirling at the bottom of a gravitational pothole in the cosmos. The worms made it traversable.
Below, the planet beckoned with its lush beauties.
At the terminator, valleys sank into darkness while a chain of snowy mountains gleamed beyond. Late in the evening, just beyond the terminator, the fresh, peaked mountains glowed red-orange, like live coals. Mountaintops cleaved the sheets of clouds, leaving a wake like that of a ship. Tropical thunderheads, lit by lightning flashes at night, recalled the blooming buds of white roses.
The glories of humanity were just as striking. The shining constellations of cities at night, enmeshed by a glittering web of highways. His heart filled with pride at human accomplishments. Here the hand of his fellow Empire citizens was still casting spacious designs upon the planet’s crust. They had shaped artificial seas and elliptical water basins, great squared plains of cultivated fields, immaculate order arising from once-virgin lands.
“So beautiful,” he mused. “And we are fleeing for our lives from it.”
Fyrna sniffed. “You are losing your taste for politics.”
“You have no poetry left in your soul?”
“Only when I’m not working.”
He saw distant ships begin to accelerate, their yellow exhausts flaring. “Many believe that the early Empire was a far better affair, serene and lovely, with few conflicts and certainly fewer people.”
“Fine feelings and bad history,” Fyrna said, dismissing all such talk.
“No doubt you are correct. Note the Admiral’s approach.”
Fyrna saw them now. “Damn! They’ve spotted us already.”
“We’ll have one chance to make the worm run.”
“But they know—and they’ll follow.”
Zeb had passed through worm gates before, but always in big cruisers plying routes through wormholes tens of meters across. Every hole of that size was the hub of a complex which buzzed with carefully orchestrated traffic. He could see the staging yards and injection corridors of the main route gleaming far away.
Their wild worm, a renegade spinoff, could vanish at any moment. Its quantum froth advertised its mortality. And maybe ours…Zeb thought.
“Vector null sum coming up,” he called.
“Convergent asymptotes, check,” Fyrna answered.
Just like the drills they had gone through.
But coming at them was a sphere fizzing orange and purple at its rim. A neon-lit mouth. Tight, dark at the very center—
Zeb felt a sudden desire to swerve, not dive into that impossibly narrow gullet.
Fyrna called numbers. Computers angled them in. He adjusted with a nudge here and a twist there.
It did not help that he knew some of the underlying physics. Wormhol
es were held open with onion-skin layers of negative energy, sheets of anti-pressure made in the first convulsion of the universe. The negative energy in the “struts” was equivalent to the mass needed to make a black hole of the same radius.
So they were plunging toward a region of space of unimaginable density. But the danger lurked only at the rim, where stresses could tear them into atoms.
A bull’s-eye hit was perfectly safe. But an error—
Don’t hit the walls…
Thrusters pulsed. The wild worm was now a black sphere rimmed in quantum fire.
Growing.
Zeb felt suddenly the helpless constriction of the pencil ship. Barely two meters across, its insulation was thin, safety buffers minimal. Behind him, Fyrna kept murmuring data and he checked…but part of him was screaming at the crushing sense of confinement, of helplessness.
He had never really liked travel all that much… A sudden swampy fear squeezed his throat.
“Vectors summing to within zero seven three,” Fyrna called.
Her voice was calm, steady, a marvelous balm. He clung to its serene certainties and fought down his own panic.
“Let’s have your calculation,” she called.
He was behind! Musing, he had lost track.
With a moment’s hard thought he could make his mind bicameral. The two liberated subselves did their tasks, speaking back and forth only if they wished. The results merged when each was done.
“There.” He squirted her the answers, last-moment computations of the changing tidal stresses into which they now plunged.
Squeals of last-second correction echoed in his cramped chamber. A quick kick in the pants—
Lightning curling snakelike blue and gold at them—
—Tumbling. Out the other end, in a worm complex fifteen thousand light-years away.
“That old professor…damn right, he was,” he said.
Fyrna sighed, her only sign of stress. “Ideas about existence pale…beside the fact of existence. Yes, my love. Living is bigger than any talk about it.”
The Best of Gregory Benford Page 42
