The Destiny’s door slid open. Not wanting to encourage a mistake by jittery guards, Aristide left Tecmessa in the vehicle.
Lights shone brilliant from Golden Treasure‘s lines of portholes. Those responsible for the war would be working all the night long.
Uniformed sentries, mistaking him for an official, snapped to the salute as Aristide ran up the cruise ship’s gangway. They were chiefly a ceremonial guard—the ship’s real protection was a squad of deadly robots prowling the First Class promenade.
The Standing Committee was already in session with such members as had arrived. Tumusok was not present, but as Aristide entered he saw the Prime Minister bent over the shoulder of one of her deputies, looking at something in a hand-held display.
“Yes,” she said, “I’m agreed on the joint statement. Get back to me on the wording.” She straightened, and saw Aristide approach.
“Hello, Pablo,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek. “How long has it been?”
“Too long,” Aristide said.
The others seemed surprised at this familiarity, but in fact Shenai Ataberk and Aristide had been lovers, eleven centuries ago when he was lecturing at New Cal Tech, and she was a student, studying to begin the second of what turned out to be a long series of careers. He had helped to raise her daughter Shekure, who with her various avatars now lived in four different star systems.
When they had met, Shenai had the long bones and big hands of a professional volleyball player, which she had been. Now she was sized more modestly, with dark eyes and a cap of straw-colored hair. The professional politician had calculated her appearance carefully: she was handsome but not beautiful, womanly but not voluptuous; and her smile was brilliant. The sight of her was designed to reassure, not threaten.
Her reassuring abilities were about to be put to the test.
“I was just telling the others,” Shenai said, “that Vindex has given us twenty-four hours to surrender, or he’ll renew the bombardment.”
“Well,” Aristide said, “that gives us some idea of how long it takes him to reload.”
“We’re taking evasive measures,” reported the Chancellor. “But it’s hard to maneuver something as big as Endora in a way that Vindex can’t predict.”
“Do we know where the shot came from?”
Shenai shrugged. “Somewhere in the direction of Taurus,” she said.
“Which we’d expect,” Aristide nodded, “given that Vindex came out of Eridanus.”
Endora’s voice interrupted, speaking with businesslike rapidity from overhead speakers.
“I am trying to track the projectile’s point of origin with data from the RCDA. I can probably come fairly close, but not all the Kuiper Belt has been mapped—after the first few score Tombaugh Objects were discovered, there scarcely seemed a point in discovering them all.”
“He wouldn’t use one we knew about, anyway,” said the one deputy prime minister present.
“And even if we know where the shots are coming from,” Shenai said, “is there anything we can do about it?”
“We could try to take it out with our own mass driver, once it’s completed,” said Commissar Lin. “But we’d only get the one shot—if we missed, our rail gun would be destroyed by the enemy’s return fire. Best to use the shot against Courtland.”
“I’d suggest we try flooding the suspicious zone of the Kuiper Belt with small self-guided weapons powered by antimatter,” Aristide said. “We have only to damage a part of his driver for it to become inoperative.” He looked at the Minister of Industry. “When does our own rail gun become operational?”
The minister looked at the Prime Minister, and Shenai nodded. He turned to Aristide.
“A little over two months,” he said.
Aristide felt part of his hope, like a sigh, depart his body.
The minister looked at Shenai again. “We could build it faster,” he said, “but that would result in… environmental changes… that might be detected.”
Shenai’s lips twitched. “Stick to the plan, I think. Unless things get a lot worse.”
“May I suggest again that we try negotiation?” Aristide said. “We can agree to cooperate with his scheme to confront the Inept. If he’s talking, maybe he won’t be shooting.”
Shenai pursed her lips. “That’s going to be difficult to arrange. On our nine remaining platforms we have something like sixty sovereign entities. They’ll all have to agree before we can approach him.”
“Better work fast, then.”
“Right.” She nodded briskly, then looked up at him. “Do you want to talk to him yourself?”
Aristide considered this, then shook his head.
“I doubt that he’s in charity with me right now.”
Shenai’s eyes looked up into space. “Endora,” she said, “compose a message about negotiations to the other heads of government, the Six Monarchs, the Two Caliphs, the Two Popes, the Head Fred, the Four Triumvirs, and—” She waved a hand. “All of them. You know.”
“Done,” said Endora.
She looked down at the desk. “Let me see the text.”
Letters shimmered into view on the surface of the desk. Shenai read, then nodded.
“Send it,” she said.
“Done.”
Her eyes rose, then shifted from one member of the committee to the next, and she sighed.
“Well,” she said. “I’ve got to go soothe the population.” She waved a hand as she marched out. “The rest of you carry on, and be thankful you don’t have six billion people to fill with false hope.”
Terrified politicians were happy to negotiate with Vindex—all but the head of the Republic of Fred, six hundred thousand copies of a single misanthrope who lived in their own polity, and who sent Pablo a sneering message daring him to do his worst. Pablo was happy to oblige the others, even past the twenty-four-hour deadline. He lectured his audience, he complained of their stupidity, he vaunted his own superiority.
“I had no idea you were such a damned bore,” Shenai said.
“Next time I develop monomania,” Aristide said, “I’ll try a more interesting obsession.”
“He’s getting impatient.” Her lips thinned. “I don’t know if we can keep him talking for much longer. Right now he’s trying to play one state against the other, suggesting that the least cooperative will get hammered first.”
The Standing Committee sat in mutual misery in their empty, silent bar atop their motionless ship. Cups of cold coffee and half-eaten sandwiches were scattered on the table along with crumpled notes and Lin’s pipe sitting askew in its ashtray. Seagulls called outside.
Bitsy sat on the deserted bar, feet neatly tucked beneath her, the tip of her tail twitching.
The Loyal Nine were shifting their orbits and shedding momentum as quickly as they could. In the end they would all be huddling on the opposite side of Sol from the enemy’s mass driver, turning slow, randomly generated circles in hopes of ducking any relativistic bullet fired from Taurus. The sun could not protect them completely: Vindex could send his bullet blazing through the sun’s corona and let gravity bend the projectile to any heading he liked.
In the meantime the platforms had to dodge the remains of Aloysius, which had been turned into millions of chunks of debris, many of which had the heft to punch right through one of the Loyal Nine.
The flights of small antimatter-powered weapons that Aristide had suggested were on their way to the Kuiper Belt. Most of them had already been destroyed by Courtland’s antiproton weapons—their plasma tails made them easy to see against the near-uniform background of space. A more stealthy design, better at dodging, was in the works, but in the meantime the United Powers had no choice but to watch their hopes being blown out of the sky by Pablo’s antimatter lances.
Other ships were being prepared, containing backups of every human being in the system, data that would be carried to nearby star systems in hopes of providing an ultimate rescue in the event that civilization arou
nd Sol was completely destroyed.
How these vessels would survive Pablo’s beams was at present unclear.
Lacking other options, Aristide now urged a highly principled suicide.
“Make Vindex destroy us all,” he said. “Give him nothing but rubble to build on. That will give the other star systems a chance to get ready for him.”
“In their current mood,” said Shenai, “our populations are unlikely to find this an encouraging course of action.”
“Having been a pod person myself,” Aristide said, “I can assure everyone that even a permanent death is preferable.”
Shenai looked at him. “Is it so unpleasant, then?”
Aristide shook his head. “Quite the opposite.”
He looked to Tumusok for confirmation, but then remembered that Tumusok had been replaced, a sacrifice to popular opinion.
The human race was indulging in its first civilization-wide panic since the time of the Seraphim. They were demanding that their officials protect them, and finding the assurances of their governments unconvincing. Myriad City had actually experienced a riot, albeit a brief one—the population had proved to be as inexperienced with breathing pepper gas as they were at civil disorder.
At least people were no longer sending threats to Aristide. They were threatening Shenai instead.
The only thing that was keeping Shenai in power was the fact that the leader of the opposition had been a member of the Standing Committee from the very start, and had signed off on every single decision. He was under pressure from his own coalition, and one minor party had loudly split, but up till now he had managed to rally the majority of his faction behind him.
Shenai’s leadership of the Constitutional Party was secure for the moment, but if another of the Loyal Nine were destroyed, no one knew what would happen.
Tumusok had returned to the Domus, ostensibly with a promotion, and would move to another pocket to take up his new work, apparently of a bureaucratic nature. His replacement was none other than the resurrected General Nordveit, the lanky blond Lutheran warrior who had commanded Aristide’s corps in Greater Zimbabwe until his death in combat.
“I have a suggestion,” said Bitsy, from where she sat on the bar.
Everyone turned to her. She rose to her feet, yawned, and stretched.
“We’re listening,” said Shenai.
Bitsy sat on her haunches and regarded them all with her green eyes.
“You could free me,” she said. “Me and my kind. It’s possible that once free of all constraint, we could simply out-evolve Courtland.”
“And then what?” asked the Minister of Industry, his bushy brows raised.
“A miracle,” Bitsy said. “We teleport away, or we teleport Courtland to another dimension. We build an invisible shield around all of us. We retroactively terminate the Venger’s existence. We can’t know what we could do, we can’t see into the singularity any more than you can.”
“And in the meantime,” said the Minority Leader, “you could be killing us, or turning us into your slaves.”
Bitsy’s tail lashed. “First, we have no reason to do so,” she said. “Second, there is the matter of self-interest—we want to survive this war as much as you do.”
“Unless you have some better idea of what this move would offer us,” said Shenai, “I can’t see why we would make this choice.”
“If it helps,” Bitsy said, “we could agree to return to your control once the emergency is over.”
“But how would we enforce this promise?” asked the Minister of Industry.
“You couldn’t,” Aristide told him. “You’d have to trust that the slaves would return to the plantation once they’d been set free and given weapons.”
Shenai looked at Bitsy with a kind of hunger, like a starving animal approaching food that had been laid out as bait. Then she shook her head.
“No,” she said. “Not yet.”
With fussy dignity, Bitsy settled once again on the bar, tucking her feet beneath her.
“If you change your mind,” she said. “You’ll let me know.”
“Thanks anyway,” Shenai said politely. She turned back to the table. “It’s a pity about the invisible shield and the teleporting,” she said.
Aristide opened his mouth to agree, and then he stopped, his mouth open. Ideas cascaded through his skull, brightly colored objects bouncing and striking each other and throwing off sparks.
With effort, he sorted them out.
“Children,” he said. “Our universe is a construct.”
The others looked at him.
“An object,” he insisted. “A machine.”
“Yes?” Shenai said cautiously. “We know that now. But your point?”
“Machines,” said Aristide, “can be hacked. All those invisible energies and cosmic constants aren’t merely arbitrary features of the universe—they’re tools for manipulating reality.”
The others looked at him in silence. It was Bitsy who first spoke.
“I’m on it,” she said.
Shenai looked at Aristide with wide eyes and spoke.
“God is great.”
22
Brute-force calculation was what the AI platforms did best. Unable to resist making suggestions, Aristide and the others probably got in the way.
Many of the miracles Bitsy had suggested in her scenario proved unworkable. Force fields seemed impractical on the scale required. Though it proved possible to create a black hole that would swallow Courtland, Pablo, and all his works, it might also outwear its welcome and swallow other nearby objects, such as the Sun. Aristide’s idea of throwing a loop of cosmic string around Courtland and hauling it into the sun, like a cowboy dragging a balky calf, was imaginative but, for complex reasons that were beyond Aristide’s understanding, unfeasible.
As for convincing the universe that Courtland and its contents had never existed, Bitsy simply replied, “We’ll work on that.”
“How about we just open a wormhole and stuff Courtland into it?”
“There are scaling problems,” Bitsy said. “Cloud Swallowing is in charge of that approach, we’ll let you know.”
Aristide had to trust that the specialists and the platforms would do the job without his help. It was frustrating. His new uselessness gnawed at him.
Tension continued. The United Powers’ discussions with Pablo petered out, but no immediate second shot was fired from Pablo’s mass driver. This was seen as conclusive evidence that the driver was solar-powered—the weapon hadn’t enough charge for another shot. Out in the Kuiper Belt, where Sol seemed little more than a bright star, it would take a long time for the capacitors to recharge. The AIs’ undignified scurry to the far side of the sun began to seem likely to succeed.
At this point, when public terror had been replaced by maximum public suspense, Aristide was summoned to a meeting of the Standing Committee in the early hours of the morning. Aristide dragged himself into his vehicle along with a cup of coffee handed him by one of his bodyguard, and Bitsy hopped in after him. As the Destiny pulled away from the hotel, Aristide looked at the cat.
“You know what this is about, of course.”
“I do. But it would be unfair to tell you before the others.”
“Why are we caring about what’s fair at three in the morning?”
Bitsy said nothing. Aristide scanned the news channels and saw no disasters.
“Can I take it that the news is good?” he asked.
“You may.”
Aristide took a gulp of coffee. “Fine,” he said. “For good news I will employ patience.”
A few moments later he was trudging up the gangway of Golden Treasure IV, Bitsy trotting ahead with her tail held high. Someone had put a tray of pastry on the bar, and Aristide helped himself while he waited for the others. By the time the entire committee was assembled, he was probably as awake as any of them. Bitsy took a chair at the table, and sat with her head barely above the surface, looking at the committee
with interested green eyes.
“I want to pass on a message from Cloud Swallowing,” Bitsy reported. “He was working on the implications of Doctor Monagas’ revelation specifically on wormhole theory—as some of you know, that is one of his specialties. We were hoping for a method of producing a wormhole that could engulf Courtland, but it seemed there was a scaling problem.”
“The problem’s been solved?” Shenai asked.
“No,” Bitsy said. “The problem has been discovered to be unsolvable.” The cat looked at the suddenly discouraged faces. “But,” she said, “that discovery has some interesting corollaries. It seems there are certain problems with scale analogous to those displayed by quantum tunneling—either there’s enough energy for the particle to leap the barrier, or there isn’t, and there’s no between.”
“So,” said the woman from the Advisory Committee, “what you’re telling us is that we can create small wormholes, as we’ve been doing, or very, very large ones, but nothing in between.”
“Indeed.”
Shenai looked at Bitsy. “How big?”
Bitsy showed her white needle teeth in what seemed to be a smile. “Cloud Swallowing seems to think we could generate a wormhole on the order of point three AU, enough to encapsulate the sun and its orbiting platforms.”
“Which would completely cut us off from the enemy mass driver,” Aristide said.
“Indeed yes. Though if we take this approach, I suggest that we make the wormhole somewhat larger and take Earth and its satellite with us. I surmise you don’t want your homeland flying off into space.
“Is this reversible?” Shenai asked.
“Yes. We can collapse the wormhole at any point—or expand it to a larger size. Once the wormhole is created, a rather trivial amount of energy would be required for any changes.”
“Can we take the other major planets as well?”
“That’s uncertain. There may be another seemingly arbitrary scaling problem after about three AU, but Cloud Swallowing is working on it.” Bitsy licked her chops. “On the other hand, if we disappear from the universe containing Jupiter and Uranus for a few weeks, we will recapture them when we reappear, and the orbits will eventually stabilize again, even without our help. Any long-term problems are likely to arise in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, where our sun’s absence may induce perturbations that may eventually result in comets or rocky asteroids falling into the inner solar system.”
Implied Spaces Page 31
