Ice Planet

by Nicole Stuart

  They walked along a few of the streets, admiring the homes and gardens, and the farm fields, which seemed to blend into the town, providing a slightly rural ambience. The entire valley seemed to exude an atmosphere of peace and learning.

  “Let’s go back to the canteen,” suggested Mian. “We can have our breakfast there. We’ve asked Dr. Benia Rekomik and Genok, her Chief Researcher, to join us. They’re both heavily involved in researching the time element of quantum science, and have expressed strong interest in meeting you. Benia comes from the planet Vikton, and her assistant is a boda from Kirona. I think you’ll find both of them very interesting people.”

  They walked back to the university, enjoying the mild morning. The town seemed to exude an atmosphere of learning and erudition. Both Aria and Savi could sense it. The canteen was nearly full, although most of the people seemed to be nearing the end of their meals. They were joined at the entrance to the canteen by Benia and Genok, and were introduced to both of them. Benia took Aria’s hand in greeting, smiling at her.

  “We’ve heard a lot about you, Aria, and we’re looking forward to working with you. Genok is sure that our joint efforts will produce excellent results, and so am I.” Benia was a beautiful young woman, with eyes that seemed to penetrate to their minds. Aria, Cora and Savi took to her immediately.

  Genok was a boda, a member of a race that, the scientists agreed, split from the mainstream of humans at least a hundred thousand years ago, although no suggestion had been found as to how the bodas had arrived on the planet Kirona, so far from the rest of the human race. She looked humanoid, except that her arms were a little longer than they would be in a human of her size, and her face a little more flat. She too was smiling broadly. It was a pleasant smile.

  “Hello, Aria, Cora and Savi. It’s a pleasure to meet you at last. Your story has gone around the Community like wildfire, becoming more exciting each time, but I’m sure that the real story is fascinating. I know that both of you will enjoy working with us.”

  “If Genok says it will be so, it will be so,” declared Benia, laughing. “She has a remarkable ability to look into the future. That is one of the main thrusts of our research at the moment, as a part of the study of time theory in a quantum context.”

  “We’re looking forward to it, too.” Aria spoke with confidence. The meeting that she had anticipated with such trepidation was working out better than she had expected. She felt very comfortable with these two scientists. “My work was done with a team of very good people, but we did not have the opportunity to do much experimentation, apart from a single experiment in which we transported an animal a week into the future to test whether the theory was valid. We had proven it mathematically, but, as you know, theoretical proof is not always enough. Sometimes the real world comes up through the scientific theory to bite you.”

  “I admire your courage in making the first long-time time transport, Aria. It must have been nerve-wracking to do that.”

  Aria laughed.

  “I was sure that the theory was correct, but it would have been unfair to ask someone else to test it. Apart from that, if there had been a fault that related to a time movement of more than a year, such a test would have been valueless, because we would not have known that the fault did actually exist. The cold was increasing at such a rate that we would almost certainly not have survived another year. It was bad enough having to build the chamber to last a long time, and then having to sit and wait for it to prove its value.”

  “How exactly did you make the transport, Aria?” asked Mian. “We’ve known that time travel is theoretically possible, but how to do it has eluded even the best of our scientists.”

  “During my study of quantum theory, I noticed that there is certainly a dimension in which distance is not a parameter, as you know. That makes particle transport possible and feasible as a means of communication in real time, as well as transport over long distances. That caused me to think that there must also be a dimension in which time is not a parameter. After all, time and distance are, in a way, different sides of the same coin. I revisited the calculations to see if I could spot what we had missed in the conventional theory. I was working very late one night, and I was tired. Suddenly, there it was, staring me in the face, the element that lay hidden in the distance elements of the theory. I had probably missed it before because it was hidden in a complex mass of equations that I had always tended to regard as a single element, but with my tiredness, my mind probably reduced the mass to a series of simple elements. I investigated it a little more deeply, and grew to understand how it would be possible to manipulate the particles now, instead of just here, to reconstruct matter that was being deconstructed now and to reconstruct it then. After I had gained that understanding, it required no great genius to construct the modification to the matter transport device to accommodate a transport in time. I was fortunate to have a great team working with me. Every one of them is a genius, and accomplished far beyond the norm in what they do. Together, we built and tested the device, as much as we could, then we turned our energies to setting up the chamber to remain in existence for a very long time, as long as it would take for humanity to reestablish itself on the planet and for some astute human to understand the clues that we left, and find the chamber. We had absolutely no idea of how long that would take. It might have been as little as five thousand years or as much as a few hundred thousand years. Of course, it could not be too obvious, because humans with little interest in science have always had a tendency to plunder a new discovery before they could understand what they would be doing. If that had happened, the device would have been useless. We needed a target whose coordinates we could know exactly to transport to, and the only such target we could arrange was the chamber. It was the place that had the greatest probability of surviving intact for an undetermined number of thousands of years. Any damage to the contents of the chamber would have frustrated our work. Fortunately, the people who found the structures we built from solid rock were Savi and Cora, who are both accomplished geologists as well as archaeologists. They understood the purpose of the structures, and were interested enough to find the chamber, and intelligent enough to work out how to open it. Being accomplished archaeologists, they knew that the whole was more valuable than the components, so they had no motive to strip the ‘valuable’ items from the chamber. The whole process was purposely difficult and obtuse, to cut out the possibility of a chance opening of the chamber. Once they were inside the chamber, there were other tests they had to pass to activate the computer that initiated the quantum computers to receive us, so that we could be reasonably sure that the people who would meet us would be the right type of people.”

  “Why two sets of computers, Aria?”

  “We knew that the memory of a quantum computer tends to fade over a period. The quantum memory needs constant renewal to remain fully operational, and no other memory system that we know has the speed to work efficiently with a quantum computer. That factor had been greatly improved over the years, but we could not be sure that a random event, such as penetration of the memory core by a neutrino, would not damage the program. To counter that, we had to use a memory system that was more rugged, more resistant to such an event. We decided to employ memory disks made of titanium, with the programs mechanically engraved on the surface. That gave us the longevity of the programs that we needed, but at the cost of relatively slow performance, so we arranged that the programs would commence to be read when some questions were answered positively, and their contents placed in quantum memories as they loaded, to be dumped into the quantum computer memory when those computers were booted up. That solved the question of processing speed. We also produced a system that looked initially for only one pattern of communication through the particles, so that recognition of that could be made quickly. Even with quantum computing speed, loading the full database for recognition of the various combination possibilities to transport matter out would have taken several hours, and we
could not rely on having that much time. Many of the capabilities of the quantum computer-based system became available to us only days after the boot-up as a result of the compromises we had to make. Aria smiled brightly. “However, we did make the transport over ten thousand years with no problems, and here we are to prove that it is possible.”

  “It seems that you and Cora are very special people, Savi, to have satisfied all the tests.”

  Savi looked a little uncomfortable at the implicit praise, but Aria answered for him.

  “More special than you think, Genok. To have found just one person with the qualities we needed would have been unusual, but to find both Cora and Savi was close to miraculous.”

  “Geoffrey mentioned that you could not produce a particle-enabled probe, Aria. Why was that so?”

  “It is necessary to have a recognized particle at the target end of a transport, Mian, so that you can instruct it to act as you require. In order to have that, you either need a defined ‘address’ as a target, or you need to know precisely where the particle in question is at a particular time. A particle probe is really a transport of energy on a comparatively small scale, so it requires the same target.” Mian nodded her understanding. “With the huge number of relative movements to which we are subjected all the time, it is almost impossible to define the physical location of a particular place at any moment, even to the degree of probability required by the quantum theory. We have to take account of the rotation of the planet around its axis as well as the wobble of the axis itself and the eccentricity of the spin of the planet caused by variations in its density. You also need to know exactly the course and speed of the planet around its sun, as well as perturbations in that caused by other massive objects, such as a moon, another planet or set of planets, another sun, as in our case, and the rotation, expansion or contraction of the galaxy, as well as of the universe. In the case of transport through time, it is also necessary to know what the changes will be in the rate of flow of time, caused by gross gravitational and other events. And you need to know all of that for both locations, the originating end and the receiving end. There are tens of thousands of variables, all changing from moment to moment, often unpredictably. It seems that the only sure way to know an address exactly is to plant a particle where you want to act. That is what Derlet, Jirgt and Jeff did when they made first contact with Rendl, but to do that requires enormous energy input, even if only for a short time. We on Kinair did not have that energy available to us, so we had no way to produce a working probe that could act at great distances. We had probes, but they were restricted in that they had to move from particle to particle, and that requires considerable time even over relatively short distances.”

  “That is exactly the problem I had on Vikton,” declared Benia. “I’m sure that is the case with most scientists experimenting with particle transport, which is why they have had to rely on sending a general message via the particles or on trying to identify an incoming message, in order to make contact with the outside universe.”

  “I’ve been thinking about my theory of transport over time,” said Aria. As she spoke, Genok’s face brightened.

  “Of course! There is a flow of time in the direction from past to future. Your device worked in that direction because you were going with the flow. To go against it, you need a much higher power input to counter the flow of time, something of the order of that required to place a particle as a target on another planet.” Genok’s smile broadened as her memory of the near future came into play.

  “I can see that I am going to enjoy working with the two of you,” said Aria.

  The group settled down to enjoy their breakfast, knowing that they were on the brink of a major breakthrough in their science.

  Chapter 21

  Aria, Cora and Savi returned home late that afternoon, their minds buzzing with thoughts. Aria had been appointed as Joint Professor in the Department of Time Science, working alongside Benia. Savi had been appointed Professor of Archaeology and Cora as his deputy, with the responsibility of setting up the new Department and defining the contents of the courses it was to offer, which included the research needed to turn it from a study of speculation about the distant past, into a science based on the study of artefacts supported by the observations of that past when Aria, Benia and Genok completed the construction of the time probe.

  They had gone into considerable depth on what the limitations of the ability to transport back to the past should be, taking into account the dire prognostications of theorists on the time travel paradox. They agreed, at the end of the discussion, that movement backwards in time would be restricted to a viewing of that time until the questions had all been satisfactorily answered.

  “This is no sinecure,” warned Tressin at the end of the discussion. “Your work will define the future of time travel as well as of archaeology. We can’t afford to take that lightly.”

  “We need to plan our work carefully,” said Cora. “I suggest that we pull in your whole team to do that, Aria. The work that Savi and I will be doing will rely to a considerable extent on what you and Benia plan.”

  “I will draft a rough statement of our objectives tonight, and then we can discuss them as a group tomorrow. I would like Genok to be a part of that group. She has an uncanny ability to predict what route will be the best. I really need to understand how the bodas can see the future as they do, and how that arose.”

  “I would guess that being hunted constantly by giant predators would be a good reason to develop such an ability,” Cora laughed. “I understand that the grain that grows on Kirona, her home planet, contains substances that promote intelligence, and that the bodas have a lot of that grain in their diet, so that probably helped.”

  “On another subject, Cora, how is your relationship with Petros going?”

  Cora smiled broadly.

  “Very well, Aria. Perhaps not as quickly as you and Savi, but we’re not far behind. I suspect that, when you tell him that he and the rest of your team will be working at the University of Setlen, he will ask me to marry him. He’s wanted to know that he will be able to support a family before he takes the plunge.”

  “That is how I know him, Cora. He always makes sure that every big step he takes is the right one, before he makes the move. He’s a good man. Will you tell him about the offer from the university?”

  “No, I think that is for you to do, Aria. It is your team, and I don’t want to act in any way to disturb that relationship. It has worked wonderfully well as it is, and we can’t afford to jeopardize that. However, I don’t think that I’ll be able to hold back from telling him about my new job for too long.”

  “Why don’t we invite the team and your father to a celebratory dinner tonight, Cora? We owe him that, and it would be a good opportunity to break the news to them all.” Aria thought for a moment. “Perhaps we can go to that restaurant in Vidia, where you all had your dinner with him. Was the food good there?”

  “It was excellent, and the atmosphere as well. I’ll ask my dad to arrange it.”

  *~*

  The meal got off to a good start. Everyone was in a happy mood, and that was boosted a little by the announcement by the proprietor that he would be establishing a restaurant in Munich, in the premises previously used, apparently, by one of the best restaurants in that city.

  “The facilities are much better than we have here, and the availability of food from all over the universe will make it possible for me to offer a much bigger range of meals. I have already spoken to Hera about the idea, and she’s been very helpful. I have no doubt that the restaurant will be a success. The bread we’ll be serving you tonight is made by a Kironan baker in Maranello, from flour grown on Kirona. All of my guests love it.” He took their orders for the meal, and withdrew to ensure that it was as good as it could be.

  “There’s an illustration of what particle transport can do for us,” said Phelan. He took a nibble of the bread and his smile brightened. “It really is good.�
� Phelan paused to take another small bite. “I know Cora well enough to know that there is something we should know, Aria. Am I correct?”