Hogan, James - Giant Series 04 - Entoverse (v1.1)

by Entoverse [lit]

  For a few moments he sat back and contemplated the result with satisfaction tinged by a dash of undisguised amazement. He was tall and sparse in build, with a balding head and antiquated, gold-rimmed spectacles perched precariously on a hollowed, toothy face. The assistant seated on another chair called a set of neural mapping charts, heavily annotated with symbols, onto one of the auxiliary display screens while she waited.

  “There it is, Sandy,” Danchekker murmured. “The base sequence has altered. Run a delta—sigma on the code and correlate it against the map. But I have no hesitation in predicting, now, that you’ll find it embedded there. This is how it transfers.”

  Sandy Holmes leaned forward and studied the enhanced section of the molecule’s structure now being presented. “It’s a cumulative progression from what we had before,” she commented.

  Danchekker nodded. “Which is what one would expect. As the learned routine is registered by the nervous system, the encoded representation impressed into the messenger increases. We’re actually looking at transferable memory in action.”

  They had taught some anquilocs, brought from Jevlen, to adapt to artificial patterns of IR return signals resembling chiff evasion re­sponses. The changes written into the configuration of circulating electrical currents in the brain as a permanent imprint of the learned behavior could then be identified and mapped by the established techniques of neutral psychotopography.

  But the molecule that they were studying represented a step far outside the bounds of familiar terrestrial biology. It was created in specialized cells of the anquioc’s nervous system and carried a chemi­cal encodement of the changes recorded in regular memory. Acting as a messenger, it transported the code to the reproductive cells, where it was copied into the animal’s genetic control molecules as they replicated. Hence, it provided the equivalent of reprogrammable DNA.

  Danchekker went on, “The possibilities of further evolutionary refinement of such an ability are intriguing. For example, can you

  imagine-” The call-tone from the terminal on a table by the far wall interrupted him. “Damn. Go and see to the wretched thing, would you, Sandy?” he muttered.

  The girl got up, crossed the laboratory, and touched a key to accept the call. A woman’s face appeared on the screen, mid-fortyish, per­haps, with hair tied straight back in a matronly fashion that added to her years. She had a long, sober face with beady dark eyes, high cheeks, and a large nose, and stared out with a commanding sternness.

  “Is Professor Danchekker there, Ms. Holmes?” Her voice was shrill but firm, brooking no nonsense. “It is most imperative that I speak to him.”

  “Oh, God,” Danchekker groaned, over by the imager console. It was Ms. Mulling, the personal secretary who had come with his appointment as director of Alien Life Sciences, calling from her domain in his outer office on the top floor, from where she ruled the building. Danchekker shook his head and made frantic to-and-fro motions with a hand to indicate that he had spontaneously evaporated off the planet.

  But the movement in the background over Sandy’s shoulder only caught Ms. Mulling’s attention. “Ah! You are there, Professor. The budgetary review meeting is due to begin in M-6 in thirty minutes. I presumed that you would want reminding.” She rolled the rs and spoke with as much of a hint of disapproval in her voice as a personal secretary with a strict sense of propriety could permit.

  Danchekker rose from the console and advanced toward the termi­nal, stopping halfway across the floor as if wary of too close a proxim­ity, even to an image. Sandy withdrew discreetly out of the viewing angle. “Can’t Yamumatsu deal with it?” Danchekker asked irritably. “He understands convertible assets, depreciation ratios, and other such intricacies—I am only a scientist. I spoke to him this morning, and he said he’d be happy to substitute.”

  “It is customary for the departmental director to chair the quarterly review,” Ms. Mulling replied in a tone as yielding as the hull armor of a battleship.

  “How can it be customary?” Danchekker challenged. “The de­partment is new. The division itself is barely six months old.”

  “The precedent derives from UNSA Corporate standard proce­dures, which predate the new organizational structure and have not been changed.” Ms. Mulling’s eyes moved up and down to take in his full length. “What on earth are you doing in those?” she demanded before Danchekker could respond. Following her gaze, he looked down at his feet. To save time getting to a black-tie dinner that evening which he had been unable to evade, he was already wearing evening dress underneath his lab coat—except for his shoes, which were of white, rubber-soled canvas.

  “What do they look like?” he riposted. “They are popularly re­ferred to, I believe, as sneakers.”

  “I know. But why are you wearing them with evening dress?”

  “Because they are comfortable, of course.”

  “You can hardly appear at the Republican Society dinner like that, Professor.”

  The light glinted off Danchekker’s spectacles and teeth. “Madam, I have no intention of doing so. I shall be changing them before I depart. Do you wish me to produce my patent leather pair from the closet and show them to you as proof?”

  “That won’t be necessary, thank you. But such a combination wouldn’t be appropriate for the review meeting, I’m afraid. After all, both the deputy financial comptroller and the executive vice-presi­dent of planning will be attending.”

  Danchekker stood before the screen, seeming to crouch in the attitude of some scrawny bird of prey, his lab coat hanging from his hunched shoulders like a vulture’s wings and his fingers curling by his sides like talons, as if he were about to pounce on the terminal and tear it to pieces.

  “Very well,” he granted, finally conceding. “Would you kindly arrange for the agenda, and whatever figures I might need, to be ready for me to collect?”

  “I’ve already seen to it,” Ms. Mulling replied.

  Ten minutes later, Danchekker exploded through the door into Caldwell’s office high up on the far side of the complex. “You’ve got to do something!” he insisted. “The creature isn’t human. Can’t you transfer her to one of the Martian bases or a deep—space mission probe? I cannot continue with my work under these conditions.”

  “Well, maybe it doesn’t matter too much anymore,” Caldwell said over his interlaced fingers. “Something else has come up, and—”

  “Doesn’t matter!” Danchekker stormed. “I’d sooner be married to one of the Gorgons. The possibility of retaining any modicum of sanity at all is utterly out of the question.”

  “I talked to Vic yesterday afternoon. He’s probably been looking for you. There’s—”

  “The situation is preposterous. Now I’m even being subjected to dress inspections, for God’s sake. I am adamant: She has to go.”

  Caldwell sighed. “Look, transferring her wouldn’t be so simple. She was with Welland for thirteen years and came with his personal recommendation. He might be retired, but he still has a lot of pull through the old-buddy net. It could cause complications—especially at a time like this, when we’ve got all kinds of people looking for career opportunities and slices of the new action.”

  “I have no interest in the adolescent attention-seeking antics and Machiaveffian inanities of other people. If this woman—”

  The door opened and Solomon Cail from the public-relations office appeared. “Oh . . . excuse me, Gregg. I didn’t realize. Mitzi thought you were alone.”

  “I was away for a couple of minutes,” Mitzi’s voice called from outside.

  “It’s all right, Sol,” Caldwell said. “Chris just stopped by. Is it something urgent?”

  “As a matter of fact, it was Chris that I wanted to talk about,” Cail said.

  “Me?” Danchekker looked suspicious. “What for?”

  “Senator Greeling’s wife has been onto us again. It’s this women’s discussion group that she runs. We’ve as good as promised them a tour of the alien-life-form labs,
and she wants the director to look after them personally—mostly to impress her friends, I guess.” Cail shrugged and showed a palm. “I know it’s a drag and all that, Chris, but Greeling did a lot of work for us, getting the college sponsorship program through. We don’t want to upset a friend like him if we can help it. She’d like an afternoon next month, maybe?”

  “God help us,” Danchekker moaned bleakly.

  A call-tone sounded in the outer office. Mitzi answered, and a moment later Ms. Mulling’s voice rang stridently through. “Is Profes­sor Danchekker there, by any chance? He has an imminent appoint­ment, and it is most imperative that I find him.”

  And then Hunt appeared in the doorway on the far side of Mitzi’s desk, carrying a sheaf of papers in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. “Hello, what’s going on here? Ahah, Chris! Just the man.”

  “Sol, give us a minute, would you?” Caldwell said, at the same time relieving Cail of any choice in the matter by rising and coming

  around the desk to steer him back toward the outer office. He waved Hunt in and closed the door behind him, holding up a hand to stay Danchekker before Danchekker could start talking again. “Yes, I’ve been aware of the problem for some time, Chris. But we needed a tactful solution that wouldn’t create more hassles than it cured.”

  Danchekker shook his head and waved a hand impatiently. “I’m being turned into a club treasurer. We’ve got enough tally clerks and ledger keepers who can take care of that kind of thing. I was under the impression that this establishment was supposed to be dedicated to the advancement of the sciences. I’ve seen more—”

  “I know, I know,” Caldwell said, nodding and raising a hand. “But something’s come up that—”

  “Now they want to make me a tour guide for women’s tea-party outings. The whole thing has become farcical. It’s a—”

  “Chris, shut up,” Hunt interrupted calmly. “Delegate the lot. That’s what being a director is all about. You haven’t got time, now, anyway. Gregg’s got an off-planet assignment for the two of us.”

  “And not only—” Danchekker stopped abruptly and sent Hunt a questioning look. “Off-planet? Us?”

  Caldwell grunted and nodded at Hunt to continue.

  “On Jevlen,” Hunt said. “There’s a Thurien ship in orbit that’s due to go back there shortly. Just think of it: a whole planetful of alien biology, literally light—years away. I think that a director of life sciences should be breaking new ground in the field, don’t you?” But it was clear already that Danchekker needed no further convincing. His expression had the rapture of a revivalist seeing light through the parting of the clouds.

  They came out of Caldwell’s office a few minutes later. “I think we’re going to have to come up with some other arrangement,” Caldwell said to Solomon Call, who was still waiting. “Chris is going to be tied up on a priority project.” He indicated the door of his office with a nod, and Cail disappeared inside.

  Danchekker strode over to the terminal where Mitzi was still holding Ms. Mulling at bay. “Ah, there you are, Professor,” the image on the screen began. “The review meeting—”

  “Find Yamumatsu and get him there,” Danchekker said. His voice rang with the newfound confidence of the reborn. “Also, contact the secretary of the Republican Society and give them my apologies, but I shall be unable to attend. Maybe Yamumatsu would like to stand in for me there, too.”

  For a few seconds Ms. Muffing was too shocked to reply; she stared back at him from the screen, open-mouthed, like a mother superior who had just heard the Pope proclaim his conversion to atheism. She recovered herself falteringly. “I don’t understand . . . What’s hap­pened? Is something wrong?”

  “Wrong?” Danchekker repeated lightly. “Not at all. Quite the contrary, in fact. Effective immediately, I shall be preoccupied with other matters. Have Brady come to my office, would you? Get out all the plans, charts, budgets, and other wastepaper that holds up the walls over there, and tell him he’ll be deputized as from tomorrow morning. I—” Danchekker spread both hands in a careless throwing-away motion, “—shall have flown.”

  Ms. Mulling looked confused. “What are you talking about, Pro­fessor Danchekker? There are urgent things to be attended to.”

  “I have no time for anything urgent. There are too many important things to be done, instead.”

  “But—where are you going?”

  “To Jevlen. Where else can a science of alien life be practiced?” Danchekker lifted a leg to dangle a sneaker-shod foot in view of the screen and waggled it provocatively. “Far, far away, Ms. Mulling. Beyond the horizons of imagination of the entire Republican Soci­ety, the verbal compass of a gaggle of senators’ wives, and even, if you are capable of comprehending such a thing, beyond the reaches of the sacred UNSA Corporate Procedure Manual.”

  “Jevlen? Why? What are you going to do there?”

  But Danchekker wasn’t listening. Hunt and Mitzi could hear him singing tunelessly to himself as he ambled away down the corridor beyond the open door.

  “Far, far away. Far, far away . .

  CHAPTER TEN

  Earth’s physicists were having to do a lot of rethinking to accommo­date the new facts brought by the Ganymeans. Some of the most far-reaching revelations had to do with the fundamental nature of matter itself.

  As some Terran scientists had suspected and been investigating without conclusive result since the late twentieth century, the perma­nency of matter turned out to be just another illusion to be thrown overboard with such notions as classical predictability and absolute, universal time. For all forms of matter were continually decaying away to nothing, although at a rate immeasurably small by the tech­niques so far available on Earth—it would take ten billion years for a gram of water to vanish completely.

  The fundamental particles of which matter was composed an­nihilated spontaneously, returning to a hyperrealm governed by laws different from those that operated in the familiar universe. It was the tiny proportion that was disappearing at any instant that gave rise to the gravitational effect of mass. Every annihilation event produced a minute gravity pulse, and the additive effect of large numbers of these pulses occurring every second gave the apparently steady field that was perceived macroscopically.

  Hence, gravity ceased being a thing apart in physics, a static effect, passively associated with a mass, and fell instead into line along with other field phenomena as a vector quantity generated by the rate of change of something—in this case, the rate of change of mass. This principle, together with means of artificially inducing and controlling the process, formed the basis of early Ganymean gravitic engineer­ing—the drive system used by the Shapieron was an example of its application.

  Small though it sounded, such a rate of disappearance was not trivial on a cosmic time scale. The reason there was much of the universe left at all was that, throughout the entire volume of space, particles were constantly being created spontaneously, too. And in a converse way to that in which particle-annihilations induced gravity, particle-creations induced “negative gravity.” Since a particle could only disappear from where it already existed, extinctions predomi­nated inside masses and induced an attractive curvature into the local vicinity of space—time; but in the vast regions of empty space between galaxies, creations far outnumbered extinctions, and the resultant effect was a cosmic repulsion. It all made a rather tidy and symmetric, satisfying kind of sense.

  A fundamental particle, therefore, appeared, lived out its allotted span in the observable dimensions of the known universe, and then vanished. Where it came from and where it returned to were ques­tions that the scientists of Earth had never had to face, and which even the Ganymeans on Minerva at the time of the Shapieron’s departure had only begun delving into. It was their subsequent work in this direction that had given the Thuriens the technologies that made possible their interstellar civilization.

  The hyperrealm that particles temporarily emerged from was the same domain
that matter—energy entered when it disappeared into a black hole. That an object no longer continued to exist where it had when it entered a black hole, Terran physicists had known theoreti­cally for some time. Therefore, it had to be either somewhere else in the known universe; or in another universe; or, conceivably, in some other time. Logic admitted no other alternatives. Remarkably, it turned out, all three were possible. The Thuriens had realized and applied the first two; they were still looking into and puzzling over the third.

  An electrically charged, rapidly spinning black hole flattened into a disk and eventually became a toroid with the mass concentrated at the rim. In this situation, the singularity existed not as an impenetra­bly screened point, but as the central aperture itself, which could be approached axially without catastrophic tidal effects. Through a sym­metric effect, creating such an “entry port” also gave rise to a coupled projection elsewhere in normal space, at which an object entering the aperture would appear instantaneously by traversing what had come to be known as “i-space.” The location of the “exit port” depended on the dimensions, spin, orientation, and certain other parameters of the initial toroid and could be controlled up to distances of several tens of light-years. That was how the Thuriens moved their craft between stars.