Macroscope

by Pierce Anthony

  There was a silence.

  “I am, as you know, from a far system,” Schön said after an interval. “Possibly my perspective differs from yours.”

  They waited noncommittally, grudgingly allowing him to make his case.

  “As I understand it, Ram has historically had good relations with Lion. Both hegemonies rose to sapience about a million years before the Traveler appeared, and because of their proximity — within a hundred light-years of each other — an intense dialogue was feasible. The development of spacefold transport was hailed as the beginning of an era of splendor, now that these longtime and compatible correspondents could meet physically and without a time delay of centuries.”

  “Ancient history,” snorted the Admiral.

  “Yet instead of a mutually beneficial interchange — trade — you developed antipathy. You were at war within a thousand years, and have fought intermittently and inconclusively ever since, just as Tyre fought with Sidon.”

  “Tyre? Sidon?” the Admiral inquired. “Where in the galaxy are they? What kind of fleets do they have?”

  “Mixed fleets: war galleys and merchanters,” Schön replied straight-faced. “The point is, they depleted their resources and discommoded their navies by striving senselessly against each other, instead of mobilizing against their mutual enemies.”

  “That’s an oversimplification,” the Minister said. “We have had numerous encounters with other systems—”

  “Three wars with Centaur, two with Swan, altercations with Eagle, Horse, Dog, Hare—” Schön put in.

  “Alliances with Bear, Beaver, Dragon—” the Minister interposed in turn, retaining his equanimity.

  “All of which were violently sundered. Why? What happened to the mighty era of knowledge and prosperity heralded by the availability of interstellar travel?”

  “Our neighbors disappointed us.”

  “They all were unworthy. Sure. And now Lion has issued an ultimatum demanding your conditional surrender. Surely they had provocation?”

  The Admiral and the Minister rustled their scales discordantly.

  “There was a border incident,” the Chief admitted after a small delay.

  “Of what nature. Practically speaking, you don’t have a border with Lion. You have to use spacefold — and you can’t just rub up against your neighbor by accident. Not when you have to compress an object of near-planetary mass into its gravitational radius in order to poke through. For that matter, spacefold transport and accurate coordinates make the entire galaxy your neighbor. Light velocity limitation means nothing anymore.”

  “It was a reconnaissance mission,” the Admiral said.

  “A two-thousand-mile diameter moon on reconnaissance? Equipped to service several thousand warships, each potentially armed with planet-busters? Your euphemism hardly becomes the situation. And I’ll bet you planted it within five light-seconds of their homeworld.”

  “Three light-seconds,” the Admiral said almost inaudibly.

  “And you didn’t bother with any ultimatum, did you? Just a nice, neat fait accompli. You thought. Sneak your battlemoon right within range of their capital-planet, while their own ships were elsewhere. So what happened?”

  “They were ready for us,” the Minister said. “They had complete information.”

  “Incredible bungling,” the Chancellor of the Exchequer muttered. “Have you any idea what a battlemoon costs?”

  “Obviously there was a leak,” Schön said. He was beginning to get bored.

  “Obviously.” The Admiral glared at the Chief, who averted his facets.

  “So now Lion has your, er, expedition, and the balance of power has shifted in its favor. Thus the ultimatum.”

  None of them replied.

  “I have,” Schön continued after a pause, “been doing a little research. I find that this entire question is unimportant.”

  Their eyes appraised him stonily.

  “Ram and Lion are two principalities amid a galaxy of kingdoms, federations and empires. The only reason neither has been gobbled up yet is that there is insufficient wealth between you to warrant the trouble. However, the flux of major powers is at the state where it has become economically feasible to absorb you both, rather than tolerate your petty raids on civilized installations any longer. You Phoenicians and Greeks are ripe for Egypt or Assyria — or even Alexander.”

  The Monarch contemplated him sadly through a golden facet. “Are you ready now to inform us whom you represent? This Alexander, perhaps?”

  “I represent no one but myself. I am merely stating facts that should be obvious to any objective party. Your shortsightedness is destroying you. You are wasting each other’s resources while the wolves look on, and they are only waiting until you are at your weakest stage before snapping you up. You would be far better off to make an honest alliance with Lion — even to the extent of accepting that so-called contract — and thus perhaps postpone a more final loss of identity.”

  Still they did not comment.

  At last the Monarch looked up. “What you say makes sense to us, Captain. We are in the wrong, but it is not too late. We shall accept the contract.”

  There was no dissent, of course. The Monarch of Ram had spoken.

  Two weeks later Schön’s ship berthed within the transport satellite: another moon of minimum effective mass. It had been stripped, the Chief informed him, and was nothing but a ball of rock, with the exception of the tube leading down into the compression mechanism compartment. The equipment, Schön knew, was far more sophisticated than that constructed by the human party on Triton; this could make use of a far smaller mass, and the location perceptors were precise. This, together with the up-to-date spacefold maps of this area of the galaxy, made a controlled jump routine. He had done his homework here, too, and was familiar with the equipment.

  He was alone. He had been selected to make the trip to Lion bearing the capitulation message. “They would not trust any sizable party,” the Chief had explained. “But you, an alien, can negotiate the details, and return with their expeditionary party. We shall be ready, then.”

  Yeah, sure, bugeye.

  Schön entered the control compartment and examined the telltales. The mechanism had been set and locked: transport was scheduled to occur within the hour, and this had been timed exactly. The express position of the object was important, as the human explorers had known; what the dull-witted humans had not suspected was that the precise time of transport was equally critical. For the universe was not stable; it had been expanding, and now was in a state of flux preparatory to contraction, and this affected every part of it. Some sections were still expanding, while others were already contracting, and special stresses acted even on the interiors of galaxies and stellar systems that appeared to the fleeting animate observer to maintain their original sizes and positions. And this flux caused a drift between adjacent surfaces of jumpspace; the loops were fairly constant, but their fabric continued to stretch, eventually forming new loops of similar size or abolishing old ones. As a result, the differential between adjacent surfaces could be a swift current. In some instances, as shift piled upon shift and jumpspace warped frantically to compensate, the passage of minutes meant a similar number of light-minutes deviation from the calculated location of emergence.

  So his journey had been carefully calculated in advance, and the equipment sealed to prevent potentially disastrous distortion. Emergence at the wrong point in space, even if only a few million miles off, could be taken as an indication of betrayal, and the waiting warships would open fire.

  Schön unlimbered the special equipment he had brought (smuggled) and powdered the locking devices with single applications of his limited-slip laser. The panel opened, exposing the intricate circuitry. He manipulated his tools with the dexterity and competence he naturally possessed and made certain minor adjustments.

  He was not traveling quite where the good Monarch of Ram had arranged.

  He returned to his ship, sealed hi
mself in, and entered the melting chamber. The ten-second melt-radiation warner sounded; then—

  He came out of it whole, knowing that many hours had passed while his body melted, vaporized and finally compressed along with the ship and moon into a comparative speck — and then reversed the process at the other end of the jump.

  He set himself before the ship’s macroscope and looked out at the universe.

  There was no destroyer signal, as he had known. The ship’s computer shifted through the configurations and matched his present location: approximately one light-hour away from his scheduled rendezvous in the home-system of Lion.

  He smiled. It had worked.

  He had set the contraction mechanism for a triple sequence with a delay of only minutes between each effort. Thus the moon had made the first jump to Lion, hesitated momentarily, and gone into the return cycle before protoplasmic reconstitution could start. The brief interim and the relative motion of the two surfaces of space had sent it back at an angle, and it had emerged several light-minutes from its origin. Before the home-crowd could respond, since it took minutes for them even to see it, it had gone into the third compression, to emerge at its present spot. Its route had been a kind of N figure, the displacement magnified by the stress exerted on the fabric of space by adjacent punchthroughs. Dangerous — but what were heroes for, if not to brave danger?

  Only then had the reconstitution process commenced. This had taken hours — but his displacement in space should have been sufficient for security. Just about now things should be popping.

  They were. The sweep showed the traces that indicated an armada encircling the inhabited world of this system: battleships traveling at speed. The Lions had anticipated treachery.

  And the anticipation had been well fulfilled. Two uncharted moons drifted within the system, light-hours apart, and he knew that at least one more was present on the far side, too far from his own location to register yet. Observation by optics or macronics was so slow! It was an all-out attack; the inundation strike the Ram Admiral had urged.

  What of the Lion second-strike capability the Chief had so carefully mentioned? Schön smiled again. The solution to that inhibitor was obvious. The Rams had underestimated the perspicacity of the stranger, thinking to set him up as a duped emissary. They had staged a mock meeting and made a mock decision, while the war preparations moved ahead full-scale. There had never been a true capitulation, and probably not even a genuine ultimatum. This thrust had been decades in the making.

  Lion ships still cruised in the vicinity of the supposed emergence, though the bulk of that fleet was already heading toward him. They had thought that his moon was merely another unit in the invasion — as indeed it was. But it had not stayed long enough to allow their planet-busters to score, and now was in an unscheduled location. Doubly unscheduled: naturally the Ram schedule differed from that set up for the truce mission, and his own schedule differed from Ram’s.

  He adjusted the macroscope to focus within his own moon and took a look on sweep. Sure enough, the buried warships were already coming to life, their crews having emerged from mass gasification. He had at least done them the favor of saving them from the planet-busters; Lion intelligence was better than Ram’s. Not that it made any difference to him.

  Strange that they had trusted him with the spacefold mechanism. Perhaps they had feared that he would recognize a dummy-panel — a correct assumption — and had felt that the lock sufficed against incidental mischief. If they really thought he was an important Lion spy, verisimilitude required that he be allowed to observe the setting for himself.

  There were hundreds of simpler and surer ways of doing it, naturally. But the military mind had never been noted for its subtlety or efficiency, fortunately. Fortunately? It would not be the military mind if it were clever. Most likely, the Ram strategists had simply underestimated him by a factor of two or three.

  In due course his Ram escort would get around to dispatching him as superfluous. His ship was unarmed — theoretically in accordance with the negotiations setup — and lacked working fluid for any extended trip. They were sure they had him penned safely; their immediate concern was the approaching fleet of Lion.

  He refocused the scope on the farther reaches of the system. Sure enough: the third expedition had appeared. No moonlet, this; Ram had transported its entire home-world! That was their answer to Lion’s second-strike capability, as he had suspected. Removal of the target from the target-system.

  A third time he smiled. Such naïveté!

  For now the Lion home-planet was gone, leaving only the massed offensive arm to attack the Ram planet before its inhabitants could be reconstituted. Two could play at this game of treachery and system-jumping!

  Oh, the fragments would be small, very small, when the first accredited empire came collecting!

  Now it was time to make contact with Lion, on the way to larger things. In three hours the jumpspace mechanism would initiate its fourth and final cycle, with disastrous consequences for any unprepared troops in the vicinity. Those outside the field of compression would be smashed by the moon’s collapse and displacement; those still within it would be preserved — but not in animate state. Only the resilient gas-form could sustain that terrible implosion alive.

  Schön paused before the chamber entrance. Exactly how grateful, he wondered, would the opposing monarch — the Pride of Lion — be for a complete undamaged military moon, together with a number of serviceable warships?

  Not grateful enough, he decided. Lion would attempt to string him along as had Ram, exercising the eternal governmental prerogative of amorality and fallibility. Meanwhile the internecine struggle would continue, each home-world in orbit about its neighbor’s sun, its native life suffering from the unfamiliar radiation.

  No, the real rewards for the entrepreneur would not occur until an empire made its move.

  Perhaps such a move could be hastened by a little judicious manipulation…

  Still smiling, Schön stepped into the chamber. “Alexander, where are you?” he murmured as the warner sounded.

  “A velvet flute-note fell down pleasantly upon the bosom of that harmony…” And Ivo was that flute, or of it, and the chambers he descended into were liquid. First he encountered the scorpion resting on the beach, not a horror, huge as it was, but rather with an aspect of creativity and fairness. Then he passed the crab, who watched patiently from under the surface, housed beneath a shell. At last he stopped at the tank wherein the fishes were swimming, like twin animate feet wading under the wave. Upon the one was written SYMPATHY, and upon the other HEART.

  “From the warm concave of the fluted note Somewhat, half song, half odor, forth did float, As if a rose might somehow be a throat…” Ivo said to Pisces in the prescribed mode.

  And the first fish replied: “Yea, Nature, singing sweet and lone Breathes through life’s strident polyphone…”

  And the second fish continued: “Yea, all fair forms, and sounds and lights, And warmths, and mysteries, and mights, Of Nature’s utmost depths and heights…”

  And the first: “So Nature calls through all her system wide, Give me thy love, O man, so long denied…”

  And the second: “Trade! is thy heart all dead, all dead? And hast thou nothing but a head? I’m all for heart,” the flute-voice said.

  And on the bottom of the tank was written in sand and shell:

  Physical contact between the stellar cultures of the galaxy in fact meant chaos. All species had needs and ambitions, and few were ethical in galactic sense when subject to meaningful temptation. Prejudices submerged during the long purely-intellectual contact reappeared now with renewed force. It developed that certain warm, liquid-blooded species had an inherent aversion to certain cold mucous-surfaced species, however equivalent their intellects, and many other combinations were similarly incompatible. Certain species turned pirate, preying on others and taking wealth, slaves and food without fair recompense; others inaugurated programs of col
onization that led rapidly to friction. Not all encounters were violent; some were mutually beneficial. But the old, stable order had been completely overturned, and power shifted radically from the intellectual to the biological and physical. Highly civilized cultures were overrun and annihilated by barbarians.

  A new order arose, dominated by the most ruthless and cunning species. Greed and distrust acted to split and weaken the empires of these new leaders, forcing further change and breakup, in an ever more dissolute spiral. In the course of half a million years, galactic civilization as an entity disappeared entirely, submerged in the tide of violence; no macroscopic broadcasting stations remained except the extragalactic Traveler. Isolated by their own released savagery, all species declined. It was the Siege of Darkness.

  Approximately one million years after its inauguration the Traveler beam terminated. The siege was over — but the progress of galactic civilization had been set back immeasurably. As time passed, macroscopic stations began again to broadcast, and a new network was established — but the scars of the Siege were long in healing. Love, once denied, recovered slowly.

  “You are better now,” the voice said hopefully.

  Beatryx opened her eyes, that were still stinging from the salt, and squinted into the warm sunlight. She was wearing a black bathing suit somewhat more scant than seemed appropriate. “Oh, yes!” she agreed, a little dizzy from her recent immersion. It had seemed she was drowning…

  The young man’s face seemed to shine. “Lida! Persis! Durwin! A paean, for she who was lost is healed!”

  Three handsome young persons bounded across the sand. “Joy!” the leader cried, a muscular giant, sleek with the water dripping from his torso.

  In moments they stood before her: two bronzed young men, two lovely girls, each radiating vitality. All had lustrous black hair and classically sculptured features.