by Sharon Lee
“Now, what we’ll do for this ummm . . . trip . . .” the instructor murmured, as if talking to himself more than his increasingly puzzled student, “is restate the mass of the ship, drop it out of the locus defined by our standard five dimensions and into one defined by nine.”
He did this, Jela checking the new equation on his pad . . .
“Now, the thing is—” the instructor said, suddenly turning away from the board, “—no one really wants to go to Vinylhaven . . .”
Jela had been thinking the same thing himself, Vinylhaven being somewhat too close for comfort to the remains of the ember of a brown giant . . .
“ . . . because,” the instructor continued in his deceptively quiet voice, “it’s not there.”
Jela flat out stared. “Not there?” he demanded, wondering now if all of this had been some sort of elaborate hoax to test the gullibility of intransigent Ms. “I’ve been there.”
“Not lately,” the elder instructor said simply. “I have been—or, say, I have attempted to go—within the last two Common Years. It is, as my colleague says, not there. Not the garrison world, not the brown giant. While we can use the coordinates that formerly brought us to Vinylhaven, in fact we can only come to the approximate vicinity, for pretty much everything out that way is gone. The nearest known destination we can raise is the yellow star three light years away, which is still there, though it has gone nova.”
“Our guess,” the younger instructor said seriously, “is that a sphere—and this is a guess; it may well be a more complex shape—approximating three-fourths of a cubic light year was—taken away. I say the space was folded; my associate says the space—actually a small portion of the universe—was decrystallized. Down to the photons and below, there is nothing. We can measure the event—are measuring it—by finding the wave front of light.”
He paused for a moment’s serious study of the situation board and the equations elucidated there, then looked back to Jela.
“Given the fact that Vinylhaven is gone,” he murmured, “let’s calculate the transport-can big enough to hold the missing volume and mass. . . .”
The lesson was not lost on Jela. They did the math, several times.
“Your answer as to the power source?” the elder instructor asked Jela.
He sighed and pushed back from his pad, though his fingers still wandered lightly over the keys, looking for a solution that made sense, granting the data . . .
“Loss-less total conversion?” he offered.
“Consider the multiple spin-states, and the mass of the photons . . .” The younger, that was.
Jela sighed again. “Are you sure there’s not a black hole? I mean. . . .”
“Absolutely no sign of one,” the elder answered, “and insufficient to have cleared the zone. Loss-less total conversion fails, as far as we’re able to compute, if the mass actually moves somewhere else. We’re talking energy levels above those in a super-sized galactic core black hole. With no trace.”
“The nova you mentioned?”
“Likely not coincidence,” the elder conceded, “but not nearly enough power to cause this. Perhaps there was leakage and we simply don’t know what to look for.”
“Not natural,” Jela persisted. “You’re sure? Not some rare, once-in-a-billion-year event?”
The two instructors looked at each other and a message passed between them as surely as if they’d used finger-talk.
The younger reached into a pocket, and withdrew a datastrip.
“Vinylhaven is the seventh such event that we’re sure of. We have been apprized of three more since. All in the Arm. This datastrip contains a summation of the ten events and what we can deduce about the physics, the geology, and the cosmology.”
He laid the strip across Jela’s palm. “Tomorrow, we’ll want to see if you’ve found a pattern.”
The elder instructor placed a second strip in Jela’s hand.
“Background on the commanders and garrisons, native populations. The people . . .”
Dread nibbled at the edge of Jela’s consciousness again, dread and sadness.
“Do you expect me to solve this?” he asked.
They looked away, almost as one. The elder looked back with a sigh.
“No. Not solve it. But we want your help. We’re looking for special circumstances. For insight. For hope. And you must know, Captain M, that your mission, when you leave here, will be in part to keep the troops in place and fighting, whether there is hope or none. It’s about all we can do right now.”
HOWEVER, the next day did not bring the mathematical pair back, nor the next several beyond that. Rather, Jela was immersed in an intense round of training on surviving small-arms shoot-outs, of choosing the right weapon, of avoiding detection, as well as refreshers on ships, on engines and power plants, on intra-system navigation, and more history of the First Phase.
So, he kept to the project in his so-called “off-time,” eating over study flimsies, exercising with computer screens and keyboards within reach, captured by the problem and hungry to se where the data led him.
He tried to understand the locations of the disappearances, drawing simple maps of the missing sections, and more maps, over time. He’d tried analysis by local population or lack of it, since only four of the now-missing locations had any population to speak of. He analyzed by political leanings of nearby garrison commanders, by system discovery or occupation date, by the colors of the stars, even by the alphabetical orders of the names of the stars or systems or planets.
The databases he had been given were large and flexible; but he strained them, joined them together and drilled through them. He pondered and set the computer to pondering . . .
In the meantime: exercise, classes, exercise, reading, exercise, classes, exercise, research, sleep.
Sleep proved its own mystery for there was no doubt that he’d found a pattern to his wakefulness that no longer matched a typical M’s profile. As little as the average of the M Strain slept, he slept less. And there were the dreams, usually not so loud as to wake him, and behind them the conviction that he could almost smell the water, hear the surf on the beach, recall the dragons hovering over the world-forest, and know their names.
This last was the most perplexing—for he must assume that the dreams and wistful memories were the tree’s, channeled to him by a mechanism he accepted without understanding—and how would the tree know the names of beings who rode the air currents?
He permitted himself little time to explore these personal mysteries, however, with so glorious and complex a problem before him.
IT WAS THE MIDDLE of the sixth day following his assignment to the task of the disappearances when the elder of the two instructors reappeared, interrupting a landing sim. Jela was a little disturbed by this, for the sim was decidedly trying to create unfavorable conditions and he’d yet to crash or hard-land—
“Captain,” the instructor said briskly. “We will be sharing a quick meal with my colleague; our schedules will no longer mesh with yours after today, and so we seek a summary from you. In no case, by the way, will you divulge your analysis of the situation to the common troops you will be visiting as part of your mission. Most will lack your training and appreciation of nuance. Please follow me.”
Though courteously enough phrased, it was an order, so Jela locked the sim and followed the instructor out of the connected rooms of his dormitory and tutoring hall, through a series of corridors on dark-time schedule.
They passed several people, none of whom acknowledged them, and arrived in a small cafeteria as the younger instructor hurried in from yet another corridor, carrying what appeared to be travel cases.
“We’re set,” he said to the elder. “When the interview is over, we go.”
Jela’s interest was piqued: For many days it had been as if the only concern of this place was him and his training. To see outside necessity now so much in view . . .
“Please,” the elder instructor said to Jela. �
�Sit and eat. We’re outbound in short order.”
The meal was decidedly more ambitious than he’d been expecting, given the apparent imminence of the instructors’ departure, and Jela fell to with more enjoyment than he usually found in dining hall food. The initial discussion was near commonplace—questions about which information he’d thought most useful, which databases might as well be left out if the information were to be shared elsewhere . . .
There was, amazingly, real coffee to finish the meal, which suggested his instructors to be even more out of the ordinary than he’d thought. High-rank officers, then, or independent specialists beyond the direct control of the military—
“And so,” the younger said at last, “as you have had an extra bit of time in which to consider, would you care to share with us your analysis?”
Eyebrows up, Jela glanced about the room, and the several tables occupied by quiet-speaking folk.
The elder instructor smiled. “Of the secrets here, this is—like every secret here—the most important.”
The younger moved a hand for attention.
“What we have is a series of potentially cascading situations,” he said seriously. “Some discuss this type of event in terms of catastrophe. Things beyond our control and possibly beyond our ken have been set in motion and will continue in motion. And we? We are in a precarious spot, as if we stand on a high ridge of sand capable of sliding either to the right or to the left.
“The motion—let’s call it a wind—may set off a slide, or it may not. If the wind carries more sand, the slide might go to the right. If the wind carries moisture, the slide may be delayed—or it may be to the left. If the winds gain strength slowly, an equilibrium may be reached for some time. If the winds, they bluster—well then, we may have an avalanche—and still we are unsure if we will slide left or right.”
“So our words, heard or unheard,” the elder said after a moment, “do not move us from the ridge. They may or may not permit us to jump in the most advantageous direction at the correct time. And that we know the wind is blowing—it is of no moment. The wind cares not.”
Jela, from an impulse which felt oddly tree-like, saluted the instructors.
“In that case, yes, I have found patterns. Many of them. They perhaps point somewhere useful; they raise questions I would pursue if my time were my own.”
“Have some more coffee, my friend,” suggested the elder, pouring as he spoke.
Jela sipped appreciatively and placed the cup carefully on the table.
“I would summarize this way: the basic patterns of the settled worlds were such that trade peaked at about the same time for all of them. This makes some sense, after all, when one compares the ebb and flow of galactic economics and populations, and when one looks at what these worlds offered for trade. None of them ever rose above mid-level—but they’re all somewhat removed from the most profitable of the trade routes.
“The pattern of the unsettled worlds was that traffic to and from peaked at about the same time as the settled worlds in question.” He paused to look at the instructors, seeing only serious attention in their faces.
“These are misleading patterns,” he continued. “There’s a far more interesting underlying connection; and one far, far older.
“As near as I could tell, the star systems in question were all very nearly the same age. I mean this with an accuracy I can’t properly express. Though listed in some catalogs as having a range in birth of several millions of years, it appears that they may have been more closely linked than that. My guess would be that they were exactly the same age.”
The instructors sat as if entranced while Jela paused, picked up his cup, stared into it, trying to put thoughts, feelings, intuitive leaps into something approaching linear.
At last, he sipped his coffee, sighed. Sipped again, and looked at them hard, one after the other.
“The trade patterns were merely an accident of trade and technology; I doubt that they were anything more than a symptom.”
He sipped again, still feeling for the proper way to tell it . . .
“Isotopic timonium,” he said, at last. “Each of the systems had been sources of an isotopic timonium. The stars were known to retain a fair amount, the planets orbiting them contained some, the gas clouds beyond had it . . . I’m tempted to say a unique isotopic timonium—I can’t, not having all the information to hand.
“The pattern I see most fully is that the matter in all of those systems was formed from the same cataclysmic event. They shared birth, perhaps in the intergalactic collision that helped form the Arm. Again, I can’t—didn’t have time—to do the retrograde orbital analysis, the spectrum comparisons, the motion component cross-sections, the . . .”
He stopped himself. After all, the instructors didn’t care what he hadn’t done, but what he had.
“Unique isotopic timonium?” the younger instructor murmured. “This despite the distances from each other?”
“It’s the pattern behind many of the other patterns,” Jela assured him, being confident on that point at least. “I’ve lately seen literature which indicates that timonium was long considered to be an impossible element, semi-stable despite its atomic number, radiating in an unnatural spectrum . . . all this early conjecture was news to me, since my education was practical rather than creative.”
He shrugged.
“I can’t guess all of it. But, given a unique proto block or proto cloud formed in part into a galaxy that collided with the one we now inhabit—we speak in billions of years now!—and this timonium, which has all decayed at the same time, so close as if it came from the same furnace.”
He sipped the last bit of coffee in his cup, saw the glance between the instructors from beneath hooded eyes.
“The sheriekas,” he murmured, almost as quietly as the younger instructor. “They use timonium as if it were the commonest of metals. If anyone can find it at a distance, they can. If anyone knows how to make it act, or how to act on it at a distance, they can.”
A chime then, and the instructors looked to chronographs and hastily rose.
“Destroy your working files,” said the elder tutor, “and whatever hard copies you may have made. Eventually, of course, others may see the same thing, assuming they can access the information.”
The younger instructor sighed audibly.
“You have—given the information we brought together over our careers—duplicated our thinking. This information has been shared only at the highest levels. Your commanders understand and act upon it; all others ignore it and deny it.”
The elder instructor picked up a travel bag and looked pointedly at Jela.
“Do not doubt yourself,” he said sternly. “The particular crystal that we protect, that we live within, is in danger. You, Captain, are one of a few who know the depth of the danger, and one of the fewer still who might do something about it. “
Then, with a most unexpected flutter of pilot hand-talk, signaling, most urgent, most urgent, most urgent he continued. “My studies show that there are universes entirely inimical to life. And there are universes not inimical which yet have none . . .”
From without came the sudden snarl of an air-breathing engine. The speaker lost his train of thought in the noise and looked to his fellow.
A second chime sounded, and amid a checking of pockets and carryabouts the instructors saluted Jela as if he were an admiral, and hurried off.
“Carry on, soldier,” the quiet instructor said over his shoulder—and that was the last he heard or saw of them.
He carried on. He saluted the empty space, poured the last of the coffee into his cup, and sat with it cradled between his palms until it grew cold. Shaking himself, he rose, leaving a hint of a drop in the bottom of the hard-used cup, and returned to his interrupted sim.
SEVEN
Awaiting Transport
JELA STOOD QUIETLY in the arid breeze, fascinated—or so it might have appeared to an observer—by the pair of contrails c
rossing the cloudless blue-green sky on exactly the same heading, one perhaps a hundred of Jela’s calm breaths behind the other.
There was no way that a man without instruments could positively say which was higher, though Jela felt he knew. The leader, he thought, would land and be on its way to rotating its wheels for takeoff before the second touched down. After all, that’s what had happened when he’d landed here, many days ago.
Yet the observer—and there was no small chance that there was such, likely watching from a camera or sensor stand for one last bit of measurement, one last bit of information about this particular candidate—the observer would have been wrong.
Far from being fascinated, M. Jela Granthor’s Guard had pitched his mind as close to a dream state as he might while continuing to stand upright at the edge of the runway, and was himself observing: Listening to the keening echo of ancient, dead-and-gone flying things and concentrating on templates that fell almost visually across his concentration. The tree sat companionably by his side, its topmost leaves moving in a pattern not entirely wind-driven.
Leaning against the tree’s lightweight traveling pot was the small kit he’d been given on his arrival at the training grounds. Anything else he owned was elsewhere, perhaps not to be seen again. He hoped, as he stood watching the contrails approach, that he’d soon be allowed his name back. The trainers had, without fail, called him Captain M, and while his name was nothing more than a quartermaster’s joke, he was fond of it.
It could well be that they had been told no better name for him. After all, the fact that he was an M was there for all to see—and that he’d been training for duties and activity somewhat . . . above . . . those assigned a corporal, was also as clear as the air here.
There.
With an almost audible snap, the top branch fluttered and the template not quite before his eyes became an odd cross, the image half a small spacecraft and half a dragon gliding serenely on stiff wings.
