“Creatures strong in life-energy stress a portal the least, pass through most efficiently, while non-living, non-biological matter presents the highest burden. Non-living items, such as food, supplies, or weapons, naturally cannot pass through any but the most stable of portals. Attempting to enter most portals with anything non-living will cause the gateway immediately to evaporate. The more robust portals will recover and restore themselves quickly. Others may not return for a long time.
“A useful analogy is to compare the portals to the children's toy plasma ball that is common on earth. You have seen these, a six or eight-inch globe filled with noble gasses and excited by high-voltage electricity, displaying filaments of sparkling energy arcing within. Visualize the entire universe as a massive plasma ball, with the tendrils of flowing plasma energy as conduits between far-reaching points within the sphere. A striking, if flawed illustration of reality.
“You witnessed a transit that day in the plaza. I had exited a portal, mere feet from where you sat and crossed to another one nearby. The two overlapped by only a few moments before both disappeared. That is what we term a 'Rapid Overlapping Transition.' When two short-lived portals appear in proximity, and we can pass between them to transit to a third destination. Often pairs of portals are linked and follow a synchronized pattern.
“It can be challenging to make such crossings, especially in cities. I was, of course, worried that someone clothed would bump into my exit portal and cause it to disappear before I could make the transition, stranding me in the city. Or possibly worse, given the unclothed protests that were starting that day, someone might accidentally step through and find themselves elsewhere without the knowledge to cope. One can easily be stranded in strange and often hostile lands by portals. Portals can be dangerous for the unwary.
“It happens more often than you might imagine. Think of all the mysterious disappearances. It is likely that at least some of them are unfortunates who just stepped into a portal by accident. That said, the fact that non-living materials do not readily transit a gateway prevents most modern humans from passing accidentally, as a generality, thanks to the prevalence of clothing. Things might well have been different in civilizations that did not have the same taboos. Not to mention animals. Who especially notices when a dog or cat appears or disappears. Or even less remarked are the wild creatures. Deer, for example, are on every inhabited world. They seem to find transition particularly easy. Perhaps they are somehow naturally drawn to the portals and strongly endowed with life-energy.
“Extraordinarily stable portals allow non-living materials to transit. One factor in a portal's stability is the magnitude of energy flowing between the portal's endpoints. Those long-lived, stable portals we always try and incorporate into a permanent base of operations. The building where you were examined is one such. That portal has been open and stable for over 500 years, and is highly accessible. We have studied these phenomena extensively trying to unravel the mysteries of why and how this is so. Even though we have been traversing portals for centuries, we are only beginning to formulate the theories that unlock them. It is a whole specialty of science to which advanced academics have devoted their entire lives.
“There are solutions to pass non-living matter through even the most delicate portals. One way items can pass through the most delicate of portals is if they are entirely enclosed inside a living being. You could, for the sake of discussion, swallow a phone, walk through a portal, then regurgitate it on the other side. As long as the foreign object is less than about one percent of the mass of the living being, and completely encased in living matter, it can transit almost any portal. However one cannot simply make a 'meat bag' and send stuff through like a postal envelope. It must be a living being, not just so much dead flesh. Anything massing over a percent of the living being quickly becomes problematical depending on how sensitive the portal is.
“This is not as strange as it seems. Consider a creature with freshly consumed undigested food in its system. If not for such tolerance, transitions would be much more difficult. We almost always have a chunk of non-living matter within our bodies, food and other inanimate matter necessary to life, but not a living part of our body.
“This 'Planet Oz' as you and Petch have called it, has two portals of immediate interest to us. The one we came through to get here and one that opens to the world where we must go to attack the adversary and hopefully end this plague. That one is terribly sensitive and delicate.”
“Sounds like a chancy way to travel, a good way to get yourself stranded somewhere hostile. What happens if you step through a portal, totally naked, from a hot tropical place such as this to something resembling Antarctica in winter?”
She grimaced and nodded, but said nothing. I sighed, trying to collect my thoughts. “So that is why we came here to train and prepare?”
She nodded. “We could have done so elsewhere, but there are many strategic reasons why this was the best place. For one thing, the laws of physics here are ever-so-slightly different than Earth. Subtle differences that affect the flow of electrons and chemical reactions. You have no doubt wondered why these people have nothing you think of as technology, despite their apparent very high intelligence. Much of what you think of as technology simply does not work here. Numerous physics effects that they haven't discovered here have eluded them for a good reason; they don't exist. Not here, anyway. Electronics won't work correctly because of subtle electromagnetic effects; even most explosives tend to just sort of fizzle, the reaction is perturbed enough to blunt its forces.
“Our enemy is a technological enemy, entirely dependent on technology, so to the enemy, this world is largely veiled. The enemy uses cyborg drones, tiny insect-like biological robots specially designed to be able to pass through portals. Though crafted from living tissue, they are not alive and depend on technology to function. The drones falter and die when they enter this world and do not return to report home. That is a significant strategic advantage for us. We can work freely here without fear of discovery. We are counting on the enemy's belief that we cannot use it either.”
“Then where is the portal to the enemy world, and how do we fight them when we get there?”
“The portal we must transit is more than five-hundred miles across this continent. That is a big challenge, a monumental feat of itself. Crossing this hostile land and surviving to transit a portal and arrive in fighting shape on the other side is a serious challenge, one for which you have been training, one for which we have all been training. Once there, effectively fighting the enemy, and winning is yet a different sort of problem. Along with thousands of others, I have been working on that problem for many decades. We have to solve the first problem of how to get there, and we have to do it quickly.”
I digested this information. Petchy had darkly stated that there were significant nocturnal predators here. That would make crossing five hundred miles of territory a challenge. I voiced this concern.
“Not challenging!” she stated bluntly. “Guaranteed fatal. There are three extraordinarily vicious creatures and a variety of less forbidding ones. They have kept human populations under threat of being lizard food for millennia. It is not for no reason that the people here live in massively large families in colossal stone castles. A more modest structure would not protect them.
“These predators and the intensely communal lifestyle they enforce is in some ways a serious detriment to individual creativity. The lone-wolf, the social outcast who works alone in a private laboratory or garage tinkering at some idle pursuit does not easily arise under these conditions. The concept of personal time or private enterprise does not grow easily in such a society. Any who do not turn an industrious hand at the communal wheel finds themselves turned away from the communal meal. A perfect work-or-don't-eat commune fighting for bare subsistence leaves scant room for individual creativity.”
She sighed, “Fitz, this world still has dinosaurs! Big, mean ones! One of the most troubling is tyrannos
aurus rex. Or a close analog. They are big lumbering beasts, able to knock down almost any conventional structure. A sturdy log cabin is so much tissue paper to a raging T-Rex. Then there are the Velociraptors, or at least the next thing to them. Much smaller, think giant 50-pound chickens, but much faster, meaner, vicious and very crafty. If you have ever seen the viciousness of cock-fighting, imagine those creatures at ten times their size and ten times more vicious, and ten times faster. T-Rex are rare, solitary, lumbering beasts. Velociraptors hunt in packs and are much more intelligent. An armed human might, and I say might advisedly, survive an encounter with a single Velociraptor. They never travel alone. Packs or flocks of ten to twenty-five or more are commonplace. Killing one with a bow and arrow is improbable. Killing a flock is starkly impossible.
“Then there is the close cousin to Earth's deinonychus. This satan's spawn is what most people think of as a velociraptor, mostly due to misinformation propagated by some movies. He is the velociraptor's much bigger and much more deadly cousin, five times the size with an attitude and disposition that makes the velociraptor seem like a candidate for a domesticated household pet. They don't travel in packs like the velociraptors, but they do tend to congregate in pairs. Encountering any one of them is a quick journey to the afterlife. They are vicious and nearly invulnerable, too fast to outrun, and too hungry to face on any terms. So humans must hide behind massive stone walls. Or die!
“There are a variety of smaller lizards, including flying pterosaur-like predators, some dangerous, not all nocturnal, none nearly so deadly as these three. Fortunately, the worst varieties of beasts found on this planet do not like the heat and sun of the daytime, so they only hunt at night. The pterosaurs are cathemeral as opposed to nocturnal, irregularly active at any time of day or night, and eat mainly fish. They are rarely seen and then mainly over bodies of water. As long as you are behind massive stone walls before the sun sets, this is a nice enough world. Being out at night, not so nice, which limits our ability to travel to the distance we can cover in daylight and our pathways to straight lines between stone shelters.”
I asked, “Are there sufficient shelters that we can hop-scotch from safe-haven to safe-haven and reach our goal?”
“There used to be,” was the reply. “No doubt Petch has told you this world's peoples are experiencing a population crash. A few decades ago, we could reasonably count on it. Today we don't know. Many castles have been abandoned to the forest and fallen into ruin. Some castles we need have gone silent in recent years. If no one is living there, it may be because the lizards have breached their walls, or it may be that collapsing fertility meant that there were insufficient people to keep a family functioning. Some might be repairable if anyone wanted to, many may not.
“We run a serious risk of traveling as fast as we are able for an entire day, only to find our intended safe-haven for the night is not so safe. Before we can plan our route, we must determine whether we can find viable shelters. We must send telegraph messages to other castles and discover their condition.”
Telegraph
Telegraph, she had said! That gave me some pause. We must call-ahead and make our reservations! With no technology, we are supposed to send telegraph messages to far-distant castles. Neat trick. I wondered what stone-age technology might provide such messaging. Telegraph, she called it. That conjured up a specific set of preconceptions. It seems every day I learn more about this primitive society, and discover new ways they are more sophisticated than I knew.
It turns out that these simple stone-age inhabitants of 'Planet Oz' do, in fact, have a sophisticated communications network. It does not depend on electron flow in copper wires. That, I am given to understand, would not work even if they had the copper wire or the source of electrons to drive it. They use the scorching tropical sun instead, reflecting it off polished metal mirrors.
Not only do they communicate technologically using reflected sunlight, but they also have an extensive relay network of runners who travel between castles carrying messages, goods for trade and pretty much anything a young, athletic girl might easily bear. Any given runner can only reach the next castle of course, and the necessity of being behind thick stone walls before the sun sets limits the distance a runner can travel. Camping on the road is out of the question. Even so, regular mail and commerce spirit their way along the trails and pathways.
There are no domesticated beasts of burden on Planet Oz! There are no horses or oxen. All cargo, all transport is via runners, either carrying packs or pulling lightweight two-wheelers similar to rickshaws. They use the buggies sparingly because they are slower than a lightly encumbered runner, thus limiting the distance they can traverse in a day. Castles that are relatively close can easily send cargo and trade via rick-buggy, but the more distant ones rely solely on fleet-footed young girls and the relatively small packs they can carry. The buggies are usually accompanied by teams of runners who take turns at the role of draft animal. Carts come in different sizes, the larger ones requiring corresponding larger draft-teams to pull. A typical trade party might consist of two, four, to as many as eight runners, taking turns pulling a single cart. The heavier the cargo in the buggy, as well as the vaster the distance, the more runners accompanying it.
It turns out that not one, but several of the ladies I had met while doing my duty were what on Earth we might designate 'Communications Officers.' I had been told their title and job function under less formal circumstances, but it was a meaningless noise to me then. Now that I had a clue it suddenly made sense.
Their sole daytime job was to monitor the distant mountain peaks for flashes of light, messages sent from neighboring castles. They had great, polished mirrors, crafted from the limited, scarce metal supplies they possessed. They used those mirrors to reflect the sun and cause flashes of light on those same peaks. They send and receive messages via carefully encoded flashes, not unlike Morse Code.
Direct communications were necessarily limited to routes between castles able to observe the same distant peaks and to the time of day when the sun is at the optimum angle, which meant that wireless messaging was limited. They had developed an extensive system of relays, whereby messages may be bounced castle to castle as sun and visibility permits. In some cases, castles are close enough to allow direct visibility, and the fur-people had erected great 'Watchtowers' on walls and roofs high above the castle to allow for direct, line-of-sight communications. When 'wireless' techniques failed, messages carried by runners filled in the gaps. Vital communication could move across the entire continent in a matter of days.
I talked to the communications specialists at some length to learn how it all worked and I must say I came away awed with how sophisticated the whole scheme is. Even though severely limited, it is quite efficient. The communications are necessarily slow and cumbersome, but very functional. As I came to understand it, the network functions much better than the first long-distance underwater telegraph cables Earth had built in the 19th century, and we had the advantage of using electricity and copper wires. I was impressed!
It took many days to send the necessary messages, to have the communications relayed to distant castles and then for answers to make their way back. I thanked the communications specialists with my usual exclusive personal attention, but they all placed in the 'not catching yet but still hopeful' category and sadly nothing changed. My unique currency was decreasing in value as it became more and more evident that only so many swelling bellies were to grow, no matter how many gametes I might provide. Still, they appreciated my ministrations, and I welcomed their messaging efforts. It was a win-win for us all.
I was pleased to report to Teena and Petch that we had a clear path and willing hosts for our entire route, except for one dead zone. One castle almost precisely in the middle of our course had not reported back. Their immediate neighbors confirmed they had heard nothing from them for quite some time. They had unaccountably gone dark.
It was becoming all too common to abandon a c
astle when its population falls below the level needed to keep things running smoothly. Maintaining one of these households takes a lot of hands. When the headcount dropped too low, two castles would often combine their resources, and one abandoned. Others reported two of our needed refuges as uninhabited, but intact. Their population had declined to the point that they could not maintain their society, and they had merged with a neighbor. The physical structure itself was regularly visited and kept in repair, after a fashion. There might be no one there to welcome us, but we could, we were assured, expect to shelter there safely.
The mysteriously unresponsive castle was a different matter. The inhabitants had not just abandoned the structure to combine with another, locking up to keep out vermin. They had suddenly just unaccountably gone dark and ceased communicating. The neighbors thought that some great disaster befell them, perhaps a plague, or even possibly their walls had been breached by a determined predator. Because of the distance and risks, no one had investigated.
While I was busily sending and receiving telegraphs with the aid of my friends in the communications office – and paying them for their services with my ever-welcome currency – Teena and Petch were equally busy planning our route and the impending assault.
Even with all of this activity, our training schedule continued unabated, with Teena now joining our sessions. I found myself driven to ever greater heights, my body cajoled into ever greater exertion, lest the intolerable possibility of being out-performed by a 'girl' should tilt my male ego off of its precarious perch. She could not match my biceps, but that was the only area where I had a significant and indisputable advantage.
Chromosome Quest- a Hero's Quest Against the Singularity Page 10
