by Joe Horan
The land might be in dire straits, but it had the first requirement for getting out of trouble – good rulers. They complimented each other; a scholar to do the hard thinking and a crazy bitch with a sword to fight the battles. She tried not to remember the reason they were in trouble; the blast wave caused when the Colossus blew up. But then again, it seemed as if the blast wave had turned the course of the war and prevented everyone in the city from being killed. It was a nasty little conundrum and it needed someone a lot further up the command chain than her to deal with it.
Shania arrived for work early. At first all talk was of the Ancestor who had arrived last night. Nyassa let it go for half an hour and then got them back to work. Shania was put on a team who were entering data on a master map of the area around Ochira City as it came in, ready for transfer to the map in the palace. It was not good. The harvest was ruined, many trees were down and dwellings were damaged. There was no information from the distant provinces yet, but no one expected it to be any better.
And there, in Tolkien’s Bog just outside the town of Stains, a little triangular mark indicated where the Ancestor’s ship of fire landed. Or crashed. A copy of Oriol Eanus’ eyewitness report had been sent to the Institute and there was something about it that made her think it had not come down under full control.
They brought breakfast to Steph’s room. Afterwards she had a look round and found the library. The books were written in alphabetic Atumcarian; very close to how the language was written today. Some were handwritten, most were printed. There were a few novels, but she eschewed these for something more informative. She discovered a book on mathematics and found they had calculus and complex numbers. They understood vectors. She found a chapter on the laws of motion, including the standard law of gravity. They knew the planet went round the sun and even understood why. She knew there was a scientific discipline that dealt with the comparative development of human civilisations. She knew nothing about it, she wasn’t even sure of its name, but she was certain that this level of knowledge should not be present with this level of development.
Something she found in another science book startled her. They knew the planet was old – millions of years – and were trying to work out how the sun managed to shine for that long. There was speculation that it was somehow managing to convert matter into energy. She came upon a familiar formula. The symbols were different, but she was almost certain it was E = mc2. After a long search she found a figure for the speed of light. It was in units she didn’t recognise so she had no idea how accurate it was, but someone had found a way to measure it and come up with a number. Or perhaps they hadn’t. Another thought had occurred to her. These people were speaking Atumcarian, which meant they were descendents of colonists or perhaps of a group of castaways who had crashed, so perhaps the knowledge had been preserved. Whatever the case, she was sure they shouldn’t be riding horses and fighting wars with swords and bows. She wished she knew more about this stuff. Give me a recalcitrant drive train any day, but thinking about this is like trying to build a wall out of treacle.
She tried to find a book on history and failed. Science, astronomy – amazingly, considering how advanced they were in other fields, they didn’t know what the stars were. In geography there were good maps of the continent they were on and a number of large islands close to it, but they knew nothing about the rest of the planet. (She tried to remember what was on the globe she had seen on the flag. Now she thought about it, it was just the one continent in the north and nothing in the south.) Ochira claimed the western half of the continent, Kaun the east, the border followed the Yabok River which ran north-south down the middle of the continent, rising in the Mountains of Amorn in the north and running into the sea in the south. The territory each claimed was large, but most of it seemed to be uninhabited mountain or desert. The inhabited area was about a quarter of the land area. A large island off the south coast was the Kingdom of Whesthan. The population appeared to have spread out from a central point, but stopped when it came up against desert or mountains.
But absolutely no history books whatsoever. She wondered why not.
Joaquin and Desiree were busy. The farmers who had taken refuge in the city were returning to their land to salvage what they could of the harvest. Scouts were being sent further afield to discover the state of the country and messengers were arriving from the provincial governors. A company of a hundred men were sent all the way to the Yabok River to find out what had happened there; they would not be back for at least two se’ennights. Famine planning was taking place. Grain reserves were too low to see them through to the next harvest, so rationing had already been introduced. Very few herdbeasts had survived; meat would be off the menu for a considerable time to come. A few days later good news arrived from the north. There had been heavy cloud up there when the sun scorch struck and most animals had survived. The news from the south was bad. People were out working the fields as usual and there had been a lot of deaths. To add to the trouble a huge tsunami had inundated the southern coastline. The sea withdrew ahead of it and the warning bells sounded; people had long been taught that if the bells rang they must flee to high ground without delay, but the wave was so large that many places considered safe had been overwhelmed. To the west the sun was very low in the sky and Sun Scorch was not so bad. Storm damage all over the country was bad, though it seemed to be worse in the east; that was what had devastated the harvest.
Desiree was organising the reconstruction of the army. Volunteers were coming forward and many of the veterans who had served during the siege were staying on to train them. Desiree spent an hour a day helping; amongst other things it gave her a chance to hone her battle skills. The women’s company was vastly oversubscribed so she organised a second one; mixed companies were still a step too far. The swordsmiths were making weapons and armour to equip them.
The company that had been sent to the Yabok River returned. The further east they went, the worse the damage became. Not only was the sun higher in the sky, the storm seemed to have been worse. They crossed a short way into Kaun and reported that the country had been absolutely devastated. Everyone who was not under cover at the time of the Sun Scorch had perished and many who were in shelter were suffering from a strange wasting disease. Every tree had been brought down by the storm and houses had been flattened. If the damage extended throughout the kingdom they would have no threat from that source for a long time to come. (This made reconstruction of the army less imperative and it was accordingly scaled back, though Desiree argued for and managed to keep both of her women’s companies.) They also found the site of the battle. The bodies had been left on the ground to rot. They could do nothing about this, but they did locate the remains of King Astur and give him a decent burial.
Collating all the information together, Joaquin estimated that about forty percent of the population had perished. This was a terrible figure, but at least it meant that the food shortage problem was eased slightly. With careful rationing they might get through to the next harvest. He did the calculation; food in storage against mouths to feed against time until the next harvest came in. He could add in a small amount of fish caught along the southern coastline, but not much – the fishing fleets had been destroyed by the tsunami. It would be desperately close. By next summer they would be down to starvation rations, but it could be done. Joaquin and Desiree set the example themselves by consuming no more than the official ration.
Shania looked at the numbers. There was a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. If they were telling her what she thought they were then the World was badly damaged, perhaps fatally so. Or it might mean nothing at all. She didn’t know, except that she couldn’t shake this feeling of foreboding.
What caused the Great Storm? Where had all the energy come from? She couldn’t let go of the problem, but how did you calculate something like that? There were just too many unknown variables. It couldn’t be done. But then she remembered something:
When she f
irst came to the Institute of Cartography they put her to work in the archives, conserving old documents. There was something she had seen. It made no sense at the time, but with six years of experience behind her it might. So she went down to the archives and searched through the shelves until she found it; a musty old book containing pages of dense mathematical notation interspersed with paragraphs of explanation. It was centuries old, possibly even from the time of the Ancestors. The title on the cover was Quantum Probability Theory, and as she turned the pages she saw it was a totally counterintuitive means of obtaining results with little or no data simply by understanding how the universe distributed probability. This couldn’t possibly work, could it? But whoever wrote this book thought it could. So she collected all the facts she could about the Day the Sky Fell and started work.
Fact 1: There was an earthquake.
Fact 2: At the same time Shydor suddenly shone unnaturally bright.
Fact 3: Fifteen minutes later the sun threw off a shell of hot gas.
Fact 4: Twelve hours later came the Great Storm, which lasted for a sevenday.
How could these facts all be connected? She worked every moment she could spare, staying at the Institute late into the night. Then suddenly she realised she had missed something. Carefully she wrote down:
Fact 5: Light travels at a constant speed.
The Institute’s mathematicians had managed to measure this speed by observing the reflection of a lantern in a mirror on a distant mountain through a rotating wheel with slits in it. Now it all fell into place. She came up with a hypothesis:
The far side of the World had been struck by some sort of energy wave propagating through space. This caused the earthquake; at the same time it heated the surface of Shydor and caused it to shine. Seven minutes later it reached the sun and caused it to throw off a shell of hot gas, but the light from this event took eight minutes to reach the World so fifteen minutes elapsed between the earthquake and the sun scorch.
Her brow furrowed as she did the calculations in her head. If they had accurate figures for the speed of light and the distance to the sun then the energy wave had been travelling faster than the speed of light. Was that possible? She had no idea, but if it happened it must be.
That was the easy part. The wave had imparted enough energy to Shydor to melt the surface; the Institute had a couple of large distance glasses for observing the heavens and a look through one of them confirmed that the side of Shydor which faced towards the energy wave had melted, though now it was solid. What effect would it have on the far side of the World? The problem was complicated by the fact that the World had an atmosphere and oceans. There was only one way to do this. She fed all her data into the equations of quantum probability theory and did the calculations again and again. Each time gave a different answer, but if you expressed the answers as vectors in an infinite dimensional space eventually you would arrive at a governing vector that expressed the most probable overall outcome.
So she laboured hour after hour, day after day, neglecting her other duties until Nyassa called her in to reprimand her. And now she had it. An answer. The energy imparted to the atmosphere explained the Great Storm, but an enormous amount had gone deep into the planet and it was still there.
And for no accountable reason the strange, esoteric, counterintuitive equations of quantum probability theory had suddenly given her a terrible answer: The World has one year to live!
“Shania! Where are you? It’s mid afternoon and you’re not back from lunch yet.”
That was Nyassa, and she sounded angry.
Tell her. You have to tell her. But she was not sure. With this theorem you were never sure. You just got more and more certain but probability never reached one hundred percent. I might be wrong. I could make a massive fool of myself, lose all the respect I worked so hard to gain. But I have to tell her. Fear is an enemy that can be defeated.
Nyassa came into the little storeroom where she was working.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you, Shania,” she said. “You neglect your duties, disappear for hours at a time and then I find you skulking in here. If the job’s too much for you…”
Just tell her!
“Nyassa, I have discovered something terrible. I think the World is dying.”
Nyassa looked into her eyes, then at the pages of calculations littering the boxes in the storeroom.
“Are you certain?” she asked.
“No. I can’t be certain. The theorem I am using does not allow for certainty, but every time I do the calculation the probability increases.”
“What do you need?”
“Five mathematicians, the best we’ve got. The more times we can do the calculation the more certain we will be. And I have to be lead mathematician on the project.”
“You look so fragile, Shania, but underneath there’s pure steel. Yes you shall have your mathematicians and yes you will be lead mathematician. Just keep it secret for now. There’s no point alarming people until we have to.”
Three weeks had passed (or se’ennights as they called them here). Steph was sleeping badly, tormented by a recurring dream in which she was once again in the Garatomba’s number three tube. It started to twist sideways as the support strut failed. She saw the other members of her team looking at her, waiting for her to save them, but she could do nothing. She would wake up soaked in sweat and with her heart pounding. The Atumcarian Spacefleet trained its personnel to expect things like this after a traumatic experience. Normally she would report to the ship’s psyche doctor, who would help her to deal with it; if necessary she would be sent for what was euphemistically called orientation training. Here she had to deal with it on her own, using the techniques she had learnt in her training.
Joaquin and Desiree were too busy to speak to her, so Steph spent most of the time rattling round the palace trying to get information out of the staff. When she asked about the kingdom’s history she got a number of contradictory accounts. She was referred to the Chronicles, which were kept in the records room on the ground floor. This was locked. She was told only the chroniclers had the key, and when she found one of these and asked to see them he looked down his nose at her and said, “It is forbidden.” Even being an exalted Ancestor wasn’t enough to get her in.
Everyone was on short rations, herself included. Meat had completely disappeared from the menu; all that remained was bread, vegetables and some fruit with a horrible bitter taste, which everyone else seemed to like.
She was fed and clothed and had an allowance of two credits a day, which turned out to be quite a bit of money. A credit was divided into a hundred bits, and five bits was enough to buy you a loaf of bread. (You also needed a special card issued in your name; they were taking this rationing thing seriously.) All the money was coins; copper for the small denominations, silver for the large. Most of the coins had the head of a bearded man on them; King Astur III, Joaquin and Desiree’s father, who had been on the throne for twenty-two years before dying in the Battle of the Yabok River. A few of the older ones had the head of the previous king, Thun IV. Joaquin and Desiree had yet to issue their own coins; in fact they hadn’t got round to being crowned, but when they did it was expected that they would rule jointly as king and queen.
She made a couple of forays into the city. It wasn’t big by modern standards; on most League of Planets worlds it would be called a town. The most impressive building was the Institute of Cartography. She saw no temples, no idols, nothing to indicate what religious beliefs the Ochirans followed. She also saw women doing the same work as men, even helping to repair a building, which (so she was told) was damaged by a stone from a trebuchet that had come over the wall during the siege. And no slaves. Everyone was free; the workers all seemed to be paid employees. The League of Planets publications she had read about Grade 1 civilisations all said that they were characterised by slavery and bad treatment of women. Ochira looked like Grade 1, the technology was Grade 1 but she was beginning to suspect that
their way of thinking was more advanced. Hopefully that would get her off the hook if and when she ever got home.
There were also three theatres which seemed to be doing good business. She even saw a musical. She couldn’t follow the plot (it presupposed a lot of local knowledge that she didn’t have) but the singing was quite good. She suspected that she was being followed, which considering the friendly warning Desiree had given her was not too unlikely. It stopped her from going into the city again, however. At the moment she felt she was just marking time, waiting for something to happen.
Chapter 6
The Ractaz
Steph was in the library again. She had found that the length of the Ochiran year was 353·9427 days, a remarkably accurate figure for a civilisation that did not seem to possess even a rudimentary mechanical clock. Her personal chronometer died when she fell out of the escape pod (designed for use in space, it was heat-proof, shock-proof, radiation-proof and would continue to work in a vacuum, but somehow no one had foreseen that it might be immersed in muddy water), but judged subjectively the days seemed about the same length as a standard Atumcarian day.
