by Isaac Asimov
“Yes, I’m quite impressed,” Dors said. “Perhaps you can explain to me the details of your Creativity Creation program? I’ve heard so much about it....”
Hari gave her a slight smile of thanks for distracting Fyrnix. He instinctively disliked the brand of rampant self-assurance common on Sark. It was headed for a crackup, of that he was sure. He ached to get back to his full psychohistorical resources, to simulate this Sark case. His earlier work needed refinement. He had secretly gathered fresh data here and yearned to apply it.
“I do hope you’re not worried about the wild worm. Academician?” Fyrnix spoke to him again, brow furrowed.
“It’s a tight fit,” he said.
They had to fly in a slender cylinder, Dors copiloting. 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,” Dors said. This was artful understatement. Another day and the sector general’s officers would have Hari and Dors under arrest.
“Riding in a little pencil ship. Such primitive means!”
“Uh, time to go,” Hari said behind a fixed smile.
She was wearing thin again.
“I agree with the Emperor. Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.”
So the Emperor’s ghost-written remark had already spread here. Minor sayings moved fast, with Imperial muscle behind it.
Still, Hari 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 Dors. “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.
Hari had passed through worm gates before, 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 spin-off, could vanish at any moment. Its quantum froth advertised its mortality. And maybe ours... Hari thought.
“Vector null sum coming up,” he called.
“Convergent asymptotes, check,” Dors 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
Hari felt a sudden desire to swerve, not dive into that impossibly narrow gullet.
Dors called out 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. Wormholes were held open with layers of negative energy, skins of antipressure 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–
Thrusters pulsed. The wild worm was now a black sphere rimmed in quantum fire.
Growing.
Hari felt suddenly the helpless constriction of the pencil ship. Barely two meters across, its insulation was thin, safety buffers minimal. Behind him, Dors kept murmuring data and he checked... but part of him was screaming at the crushing sense of confinement, of helplessness.
He felt again the gut fear that had struck him in the streets of Sarkonia. Not claustrophobia, but something darker: a swampy fear of confusion, a riot of doubt. It seized him, squeezed his throat.
“Vectors summing to within zero-seven-three,” Dors called.
Her voice was calm, steady, a marvelous balm. He clung to its serene certainties and fought down his own panic.
Squeals of last-second corrections echoed in his cramped chamber. A quick kick of acceleration–
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.
Dors 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.”
5.
A yellow-green sun greeted them. And soon enough, an Imperial picket craft.
They ducked and ran. A quick swerve, and they angled into the traffic train headed for a large wormhole mouth. The commercial charge-computers accepted his Imperial override without a murmur. Hari had learned well. Dors corrected him if he got mixed up.
Their second hyperspace jump took a mere three minutes. They popped out far from a dim red dwarf.
By the fourth jump they knew the drill. Having the code-status of Cleon’s court banished objections.
But being on the run meant that they had to take whatever wormhole mouths they could get. Lamurk’s people could not be too far behind.
A wormhole could take traffic only one way at a time. High-velocity ships plowed down the wormhole throats, which could vary from a finger’s length to a star’s diameter.
Hari had known the numbers, of course. There were a few billion wormholes in the Galactic disk. The average Imperial Zone was about fifty light-years in radius. A jump could bring you out many years from a far-flung world.
This influenced psychohistory. Some verdant planets were green fortresses against an isolation quite profound. For them the Empire was a remote dream, the source of exotic products and odd ideas. Hyperships flitted through wormholes in mere seconds, then exhausted themselves hauling their cargoes across empty voids, years and decades in the labor.
The worm web had many openings near inhabitable worlds, but also many near mysteriously useless solar systems. The Empire had positioned the smaller worm mouths–those massing perhaps as much as a mountain range–near rich planets. But some worm mouths of gargantuan mass orbited near solar systems as barren and pointless as any surveyed.
Was this random, or a network left by some earlier civilization? Certainly the wormholes themselves were leftovers from the Great Emergence, when space and time alike began. They linked distant realms which had once been nearby, when the galaxy was young and smaller.
They developed a rhythm. Pop though a worm mouth, make comm contact, get in line for the next departure. Imperial watchdogs would not pull anyone of high Trantorian class from a queue. So their most dangerous moments came as they negotiated clearance.
At this Dors became adept. She sent the WormMaster computers blurts of data and–whisk–they were edging into orbital vectors, bound for their next jump.
Domains that encompassed thousands of light-years, spanning the width of a spiral arm, were essentially networks of overlapping worms, all organized for transfer and shipping.
Matter could flow only one way at a time in a wormhole. The few experiments with simultaneous two-way transport ended in disaster. No matter how ingenious engineers tried to steer ships around each other, the sheer flexibility of worm tunnels spelled doom. Each worm mouth kept the other “informed” of what it had just eaten. This information flowed as a wave, not in physical matter, but in the tension of the wormhole itself–a
ripple in the “stress tensor,” as physicists termed it.
Flying ships through both mouths sent stress waves propagating toward each other, at speeds which depended on the location and velocity of the ships. The stress constricted the throat, so that when the waves met, a clenching squeezed down the walls.
The essential point was that the two waves moved differently after they met. They interacted, one slowing and the other speeding up, in a highly nonlinear fashion.
One wave could grow, the other shrink. The big one made the throat clench down into sausage links. When a sausage neck met a ship, the craft might slip through–but calculating that was a prodigious job. If the sausage neck happened to meet the two ships when they passed–crunch.
This was no mere technical problem. It was a real limitation, imposed by the laws of quantum gravity. From that firm fact arose an elaborate system of safeguards, taxes, regulators, and hangers-on–all the apparatus of a bureaucracy which does indeed have a purpose and makes the most of it.
Hari learned to dispel his apprehension by watching the views. Suns and planets of great, luminous beauty floated in the blackness.
Behind the resplendence, he knew, lurked necessity.
From the wormhole calculus arose blunt economic facts. Between worlds A and B there might be half a dozen wormhole jumps; the Nest was not simply connected, a mere astrophysical subway system. Each worm mouth imposed added fees and charges on each shipment.
Control of an entire trade route yielded the maximum profit. The struggle for control was unending, often violent. From the viewpoint of economics, politics, and “historical momentum”–which meant a sort of imposed inertia on events–a local empire which controlled a whole constellation of nodes should be solid, enduring.
Not so. Time and again, regional satrapies went toes-up.
Many perished because they were elaborately controlled. It seemed natural to squeeze every worm passage for the maximum fee, by coordinating every worm mouth to optimize traffic. But that degree of control made people restive.
The system could not deliver the best benefits. Overcontrol failed.
On their seventeenth jump, they met a case in point.
6.
“Vector aside for search,” came an automatic command from an Imperial vessel.
They had no choice. The big-bellied Imperial scooped them up within seconds after their emergence from a medium-sized wormhole mouth.
“Transgression tax,” a computerized system announced. “Planet Obejeeon demands that special carriers pay–” A blur of computer language followed.
“Let’s pay it,” Hari said.
“I wonder if it will provide a tracer for Lamurk?” Dors said over the internal comm.
“What is our option?”
“I shall use my own personal indices.”
“For a wormhole transit? That will bankrupt you!”
“It is safer.”
Hari fumed while they floated in magnetic grapplers beneath the Imperial picket ship. The wormhole orbited a heavily industrialized world. Gray cities sprawled over the continents and webbed across the seas in huge hexagonals.
The Empire had two planetary modes: rural and urban. Helicon was a farm world, socially stable because of its time-honored lineages and stable economic modes. Such worlds, and the similar Femorustics, lasted.
Obejeeon, on the other hand, seemed to cater to the other basic human impulse: clumping, seeking the rub of one’s fellows. Trantor was the pinnacle of city clustering.
Hari had always thought it odd that humanity broke so easily into two modes. Now, though, his pan experience clarified these proclivities.
Pan love of the open and natural had its parallel in the rustic worlds. This included a host of possible societies, especially the Femo-pastoral at tractor in psychohistory-space.
Its opposite pole–claustrophobic, though reassuring societies–emerged from the same psychodynamic roots as the pans’ tribal gathering. Pans’ obsessive grooming expressed itself in humans as gossip and partying. Pan hierarchies gave the basic shape to the various Feudalist at tractor groups: Macho, Socialist, Paternal. Even the odd thantocracies, of some of the Fallen Worlds, fit the pattern. They had Pharaoh-figures promising admission to an afterlife and detailed rankings descending from his exalted peak in the rigid social pyramid.
These categories he now felt in his gut. That was the element he had been missing. Now he could include nuances and shadings in the psychohistorical equations which reflected earned experience. That would be much better than the dry abstractions which had led him so far.
“They’re paid off,” Dors sent over the comm. “Such corruption!”
“Ummm, yes, shocking.” Was he getting cynical? He wanted to turn and speak with her, but their pencil ship allowed scant socializing.
“Let’s go.”
“Where to?”
“To...” He realized that he had no idea.
“We have probably eluded pursuit.” Dors’ voice came through stiff and tight. He had learned to recognize signs of her own tension.
“I’d like to see Helicon again.”
“They would expect that.”
He felt a stab of disappointment. Until now he had not realized how close to his heart his early years still were. Had Trantor dulled him to his own emotions? “Where, then?”
“I took advantage of this pause to alert a friend, by wormlink,” she said. “We may be able to return to Trantor, though through a devious route.”
“Trantor! Lamurk–”
“May not expect such audacity.”
“Which recommends the idea.”
7.
It was dizzying–leaping about the entire galaxy, trapped in a casket-sized container.
They jumped and dodged and jumped again. At several more wormhole yards Dors made “deals.” Payoffs, actually. She deftly dealt combinations of his cygnets, the Imperial Passage indices, and her private numbers.
“Costly,” Hari fretted. “How will I ever pay–”
“The dead do not worry about debts,” she said.
“You have such an engaging way of putting matters.”
“Subtlety is wasted here.”
They emerged from one jump in close orbit about a sublimely tortured star. Streamers lush with light raced by them.
“How long can this worm last here?” he wondered.
“It will be rescued, I’m sure. Imagine the chaos in the system if a worm mouth begins to gush hot plasma.”
Hari knew the wormhole system, though discovered in pre-Empire ages, had not always been used. After the underlying physics of the wormhole calculus came to be known, ships could ply the Galaxy by invoking wormhole states around themselves. This afforded exploration of reaches devoid of wormholes, but at high energy costs and some danger. Further, such ship-local hyperdrives were far slower than simply slipping through a worm.
And if the Empire eroded? Lost the worm network? Would the slim attack fighters and snakelike weapons fleets give way to lumbering hypership dreadnoughts?
The next destination swam amid an eerie black void, far out in the halo of red dwarfs above the Galactic plane. The disk stretched in luminous splendor. Hari remembered holding a coin and thinking of how a mere speck on it stood for a vast volume, like a large Zone. Here such human terms seemed pointless. The Galaxy was one serene symphony of mass and time, grander than any human perspective or pan-shaped vision.
“Ravishing,” Dors said.
“See Andromeda? It looks nearly as close.”
The twin spiral hung above them. Its lanes of clotted dust framed stars azure and crimson and emerald. “Here comes our connection,” Hari warned.
This wormhole intersection afforded five branches. Three black spheres orbited closely together, blaring bright by their quantum rim radiation. Two cubic wormholes circled farther out. Hari knew that one of the rare variant forms was cubical, but he had never seen any. Two together suggested that they were born at the edge of galaxie
s, but such matters were beyond his shaky understanding.
“We go–there.” Dors pointed a laser beam at one of the cubes, guiding the pencil ship.
They thrust toward the smaller cube, gingerly inching up. The wormyard here was automatic and no one hailed them.
“Tight fit,” Hari said nervously.
“Five fingers to spare.”
He thought she was joking, then realized that she was underestimating the fit. At this less-used wormhole intersection slow speeds were essential. Good physics; unfortunate economics. The slowdown cut the net flux of mass, making them backwater crossroads.
He gazed at Andromeda to take his mind off the piloting. Narrow wormholes did not emerge in other galaxies for arcane reasons of quantum gravity. Extremely narrow ones might, but if the throat had other mass coming through, the squeeze wave could kill. Few had ever ventured down them in search of extragalactic emergent points.
Except, that is, for Steffno’s Ride, a legendary risky expedition which had popped out in the galaxy cataloged as M87. Steffno had gotten data on the spectacular jet emerging from the black hole at M87’s center, majestic strands twisting into helical arabesques. The lone rider had not tarried, returning only seconds before the worm snapped shut in a spray of radiant particles.
No one knew why. Something in wormhole physics discouraged extragalactic adventures.
The cubic worm took them quickly to several wormyards in close orbit about planets. One Hari recognized as a rare type with an old but ruined biosphere. Like Panucopia, it supported advanced life-forms. On most inhabitable worlds early explorers had found algae mats that never developed further.
“Why no interesting aliens, then?” Hari mused while Dors dealt with the local wormyard Grey Men.
Occasionally Dors reminded him that she was, after all, an historian. “The shift from one-celled to many-celled creatures took billions of years, theory says. We just came from a fast, tougher biosphere, that’s all.”
“We came from a planet with at least one big moon, too.”
“Why?” she asked.
“We’ve got repeating patterns of twenty-eight days built in. Female menstruation, for instance–unlike pans, incidentally. We’re designed by biology. We made it, these biospheres didn’t. There are plenty of ways to kill a world. Glaciers advancing when an orbit alters. Asteroids slamming in, bam-bam-bam!” He slapped the side of the pencil ship loudly. “Chemistry of the atmosphere goes wrong. It runs away into a hothouse planet, or a frozen-out world.”
