by Ian Douglas
“Andromeda?” St. Clair said. He shook his head. “I don’t buy it.”
Tsang was head of Ad Astra’s astronomy department. “The Andromedan Galaxy,” he pointed out, “is considerably larger than our Milky Way. An estimated one trillion stars. And the central core is more densely packed than ours.” He gestured at the sky. “It might well look much like this.”
“It’s also something like two and a half million light years away,” St. Clair said.
“But if the central black holes are connected by a wormhole, my lord—” Symm began.
“We would still have to pass through one SMBH ergosphere,” St. Clair pointed out, “and we would emerge inside the ergosphere of another.” He shook his head. “I get the theory, but damn it, we would be spaghettified going in, and whatever was left would not be able to escape coming out. It makes no sense.”
“There is another possible alternative,” the voice of Third Navigator said.
“We’re listening.”
“We might still be within our own Galaxy, but we have moved forward in time.”
“Time dilation?” St. Clair asked.
“Either relativistic time dilation, or we encountered a Lorentzian manifold through frame-dragging. We do not yet possess enough data to determine which, if either.”
“Relativistic time dilation I understand,” St. Clair said. “The deeper we fall into a gravity field, the slower time passes for us. From our point of view, time in the universe outside appears to pass more and more quickly. I don’t know about that manifold stuff, though. Can you put it into English?”
A different voice replied in their heads, deeper, and more sonorous—the voice of Newton. “Frame-dragging was predicted in a paper presented by two Austrian physicists, Lense and Thirring, in 1918,” the computer told them. “They predicted that the rotation of a massive object would distort the nearby spacetime matrix. Another physicist, Frank Tipler, predicted in a 1974 paper that the Lense-Thirring effect might open pathways, called closed timelike curves, or CTC, that would permit travel forward or backward in time, and across vast distances of space.”
“Tipler machines,” St. Clair said, remembering. “Yeah, Tipler said that an advanced civilization might build huge, extremely dense cylinders rotating around their long axes and use them as time machines. Except, didn’t later studies prove that the cylinder would need to be of infinite length to allow travel through time?”
“Yes. However, it is possible that a sufficiently massive black hole might generate a frame-dragging effect within its immediate vicinity.”
“Is that what happened to us?”
“It is impossible to say in our current situation, Lord Commander,” Newton replied.
“How can we find out?”
“Star densities in this region of space,” Newton replied, “together with the densities of gas and dust clouds in the area, make it impossible to see beyond the innermost region of this galaxy’s central core. We would need to shift at least fifteen to twenty thousand light years to get a perspective on our surroundings from outside.”
“Can’t we penetrate the dust with IR?”
Momentarily, the sky display shifted to the infrared view they’d been shown earlier. Vast swaths of red light blotted out huge stretches of sky, and myriad red stars glowed brightly everywhere else.
“Infrared lets us see through that crap a little,” Tsang said, “but we don’t yet understand what we’re seeing. We know it’s different. But we don’t know what anything is.”
The projected display returned to a view at optical wavelengths, showing the sky around the Ad Astra. It felt, St. Clair thought, terribly, achingly lonely.
“There’s not much we can do, then,” St. Clair said, “except wait for Engineering to complete repairs to the stardrive. Is there anything else on the agenda?”
There was not, and the meeting was adjourned.
“We need to talk, Lord Commander,” Adler told him as the others were filing out beneath that alien nebulae-crowded sky. “In my office, I think.”
Adler’s holographic flickered and winked off.
Here it comes, St. Clair thought.
GÜNTER ADLER’S office-residence was located in a different part of Ad Astra, in a villa located in the hills beneath the port hab endcap not far from Seattle. Getting there involved an elevator trip up one of the Carousel’s spokes to a transfer station at its hub, then a tube journey of more than two kilometers through endless gray passageways, angling to the left, then sharply right to emerge at the hub of the port hab.
The view out along the interior of one of the hab modules was stunning, one that always made the breath catch a bit in St. Clair’s throat. The interior of the cylinder was brilliantly lit by the sunbeam running down its length. Land—parkland, woods, terraced fields, villages and hamlets and the far-off gleam of larger cities—stretched across the hab’s inner surface. The curving expanse of land was broken here and there by the gleam of water—lakes and ponds, several small rivers, and even a more generous stretch of water dividing the interior surface in two near the middle. Clouds floated between sunbeam and surface, casting scattered shadows across open ground.
Since St. Clair had emerged at the cylinder’s hub, he was currently in zero-G, and distinctions like “up” and “down” were arbitrary courtesies. He used handrails to pull himself into a nearby transparent slidetube and accelerated gently down the inner curve of the cylinder’s aft endcap, all the way to the director’s villa about halfway down.
Adler enjoyed his comfort. The villa, at the half-G level, had pretty much the same spectacular view as at the hub, with the cylinder’s inner surface curving up and around in a complete circle, and following the lines of perspective into the far, hazy distance—the forward endcap some thirty-two kilometers down the tube. The city of Seattle was almost directly in front of St. Clair, but overhead, stretched across the upper arc of the tube’s surface, upside down from his current vantage point.
Adler and a couple of women were waiting for him on the villa’s extensive deck, all three of them naked.
Great, St. Clair thought. He’s in one of those moods. . . .
CHAPTER
FIVE
St. Clair had no problem with casual social nudity, which, after all, had been the norm on Earth for well over a century now. What he objected to was Adler’s attitude, which assumed that others were there solely to enhance his position and authority. It was well known that the Director thought of the women in his household as possessions. The old term “trophy wife” might have been coined to describe Clara Adler, and people in Ad Astra’s upper social strata assumed that he programmed his gynoids to engage in blatantly lascivious behavior in public. Of the two women on the deck with him, one was Clara, a dark-haired human, but the blond was an sw-series gynoid, an identical model to his own Lisa.
What St. Clair disliked was the way he treated them as “his” women, a means of displaying his personal power.
The villa’s gate opened for him and he stepped onto the deck. “Welcome, Lord Commander,” Adler told him. “Make yourself comfortable! A soak, perhaps?” He gestured at the nearby pool and hot tub. “Tina! Help our guest get comfortable.”
St. Clair was feeling seriously overdressed, but he shook his head. “Thank you, Lord Director. No.” He waved the gynoid off. “You asked to see me, sir. What did you want to talk to me about?”
“Come on inside.”
Director Adler’s office was in the upper floor of the villa, with broad, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the spectacular hollow of the port-side hab. A storm was coming up the valley. St. Clair could see the cloud, halfway between sunbeam and surface, and the long, dark gray haze of rainfall curving away beneath. Coriolis force, generated by the module’s rotation, caused falling objects to appear to curve; a rain cloud could drop its load of precipitation directly above a city . . . but the rain would water the ground well outside the city limits.
Still naked, Adler enter
ed the office, but he picked a uniform pack from a bowl by the door and slapped it against his chest. The nanofibers inside swiftly wove him a new uniform as he walked across the room, complete with medals, ribbons, and gold braid against the dress black; boots; and the elaborate sunburst gorget of the Imperial Order of Earth. From nude to peacock, St. Clair thought, in two point three seconds. Not bad.
St. Clair now felt seriously underdressed in his shipboard utilities, which were bare, save for the gold-star rank tabs at his throat. And that, of course, was the whole idea. Adler never did anything without carefully considered purpose, usually one involving dominating others in one way or another.
“Drink, Lord Commander?”
“No, sir.”
“I wanted to talk to you, St. Clair, about your unwillingness to embrace certain basic . . . amenities of protocol. Having your subordinates stand as you enter a room, having them refer to you as ‘Lord Commander’ or ‘my lord,’ those all are marks of respect which are your due. And waiving them creates a serious lapse in good order and discipline.”
“While adhering to them too diligently gets in the way of both efficiency and common sense. Sir.”
Adler scowled as he settled into place behind his broad, horseshoe desk with its built-in workstation. “Nonsense. Protocol, proper protocol, is the lubricant upon which military command moves. Without it, we have anarchy.”
“I’m sure you believe that to be true,” St. Clair replied. “But I respectfully submit, my lord, that according to this mission’s charter, exactly how I run my command is up to me.”
He was picking his words carefully now. Adler had the power to replace him—or the UE Civilian Directorate Council he headed did. At the same time, however, Adler was trespassing on St. Clair’s bureaucratic territory. If he caved on this issue, he might as well turn military control of the expedition over to the CDC.
“You’re a connie, aren’t you?” Adler asked, his voice mild . . . and perhaps a touch guarded.
“I’m a constitutionalist, sir, yes. That’s hardly a secret.” It was listed as such in his personnel records.
“Rule of law, and all of that.”
“Yes . . .” Where was the man going with this?
“Meaning you don’t care for the Directorate. For the idea of the Directorate.”
Ah. That was what he was getting at. “I don’t like the idea of autocrats who can get around established legal systems and precedents with a signatory thumbprint. That’s tyranny . . . in my opinion, sir. I don’t like the idea of bureaucrats who use fear—fear of prison, fear of military force, fear of taxation or legal penalties—to enforce their will on the populace. That is also tyranny. And I don’t like demagogues who enforce their will by stirring up the citizenry through appeals to democracy. That inevitably leads to tyranny. Sir.”
Adler feigned surprise. “You don’t care for democracy?”
“I don’t care for mob rule, Lord Director. And mob rule is where fifty-one percent of the population can deprive the other forty-nine percent of its most basic rights.”
“Ah. You know your Jefferson.”
“Actually, my lord, we don’t have any proof that Jefferson said that. But he could have. In any case, a republic runs the state through representative government under law—a constitution. A democracy runs the state directly, through majority rule—and tends to appeal to the largest and loudest groups to do so.”
Adler sighed. “Lord Commander, I really didn’t call you here to have you give me a civics lecture. The fact is you’re on record as having opposed certain Imperial decisions.”
“Absolutely. But having made my opposition known, as is my prerogative as a lord and an officer, I have continued to obey the orders given to me.”
The legal orders, he amended to himself, but he didn’t say that aloud.
“Yes, yes you have,” Adler said, thoughtful. “Your loyalty is not in question here, Commander St. Clair. But your, ah—call it your sense of decorum—is. That, and perhaps your common sense as well. I will not have you generating anarchy within this command through your republican sensibilities.”
“We threw the Republicans out with the Democrats, Lord Director.”
That had been almost a century ago, during AR II, the bloody Second American Revolution. A slow deterioration of the long-running American experiment with a constitutional republic had ended in wholesale corruption, weak and venal leadership, the steady erosion of the original U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, and eventually with mob rule. The revolution had succeeded in bringing down an entrenched, utterly corrupt government, but the attempt to restore the rule of law ultimately had failed. After two decades of anarchy, the establishment of the First CyberDirectorate, in 2101, had brought about peace and at least the semblance of normality.
So far as St. Clair was concerned, however, there was no difference whatsoever between Imperial decrees and the executive orders used by the corrupt American presidents of years past to get around Congress or the Supreme Court. The Cybercouncil in Clarkeorbital One had decided to pursue an alliance with the Galactics after a closed session, with no discussion, no input from the scientific community, and no public debate—a classic case of Big Bureaucracy assuming that they knew what was best for all.
In short: tyranny.
“Yes, we threw them out. The Directorate,” Adler told him, a teacher lecturing a somewhat backward child, “was inevitable. Attempts to create a new constitution were foundering in confusion and bickering. Keller and the First Directorate stepped in and brought order out of anarchy.”
Which, St. Clair thought, could equally be said of Napoleon, Hitler, or Stalin. He decided not to say so, however. This was not an argument he could win.
“Yes, sir.”
“I want you to put more effort into proper decorum and protocol,” Adler went on. He gestured at St. Clair’s utilities. “Wear uniforms appropriate to your rank when you’re on duty, for God’s sake. The way you’re dressed now, you could be mistaken for an enlisted man.”
“Oh, and that would be horrible. Sir.”
Adler ignored the sarcasm. “You also will accept the appropriate honorifics and addresses.” He must have seen the pained expression cross St. Clair’s face. “What? What in God’s name is so wrong with Imperial titles?”
“Excuse me, my lord, but it’s all nonsense. When we picked up those first alien transmissions in ’eighty-eight, we realized that just about everyone we met out among the stars would be way beyond us. Maybe so far beyond that we didn’t have a chance of understanding them, and so we developed a whopping great inferiority complex. To counteract that, we began pushing to unify the planet, and developed this myth of the Directorate as some kind of an empire, complete with imperial titles and forms of address and military ranks all designed to make us feel good about ourselves.”
“Lord Commander—are you in fact a sociologist?”
“No, my lord.”
“Then don’t blather about what you patently do not understand. It demonstrates your ignorance.”
“Not to mention how neolithically primitive I truly am.”
“I also want you to pay more attention to your exchanges with the Liaison,” Adler said, ignoring St. Clair’s snide remark once more. “Don’t risk offending him! We need him, need his cooperation out here.”
“ ‘It,’ sir.”
“What?”
“The Liaison is an ‘it,’ my lord. Not a ‘he.’ It’s a hermaphrodite, or at least that’s what we believe to be the case. So we either call it ‘it,’ or we use the formal ‘shehe’ and ‘hiser’ pronouns.”
“Whatever. In any case, don’t press himher on matters shehe obviously doesn’t wish to discuss. Understand me?”
“Perfectly, sir.”
“Excellent. We’ll say no more about it, then.”
“Thank you, my lord.”
“One thing more.”
“My lord?”
“I was disturbed at the loose talk in the b
riefing just now. Tsang, especially. And Holt.”
“What do you mean, sir?” For once in this conversation, St. Clair was genuinely perplexed.
“That crazy talk of theirs about having jumped to another galaxy.”
Oh—that. “We need to consider every possibility, my lord. The truth is, we don’t know where we are. Or even when. We need to get that sorted out if we’re ever to get back home again.”
“But that sort of talk could easily spread panic throughout the colony. Same for this nonsense about having moved into the future.”
“As I recall, Lord Director, it was Third Navigator who first raised that possibility. The AIs on board are under the direction of Newton. Shall we reprogram them to steer clear of alarming possibilities? To think only happy thoughts?”
“Don’t be smart with me, Lord Commander.” St. Clair had apparently crossed a line with Adler. “I want you to pass the word through your command—all department heads and senior personnel—that such speculation should be considered classified. They are not to share it with civilians, not even those they live with.”
“My lord . . . we’re all on this vessel together. All of us. We can’t hide the truth—”
“We can and we will . . . unless you seriously want to entertain that mob rule you say you don’t care for.”
“I don’t have access to Newton’s programming or security codes, sir.”
“Never mind. I do, and I’ll take care of that. Now . . . anything else? Any problems you wish to discuss?”
“No, my lord.”
“Good. I’m glad we had this little talk. You may go, now.”
St. Clair managed to control the slow burn of his anger. The arrogant, condescending bastard.
He decided to take the straight-line path back to his home in the starboard hab, rather than wending his way back up the port-side endcap and into the CCE section. He took the slidetube near the villa and continued down into the port cylinder’s landscape. An inter-cylinder pod station was located at the slidetube’s terminus.
The no-frills pod was cramped and spartan to the point of being starkly utilitarian. It was, he thought, just the thing to reconfirm his anti-aristocratic bias. He took a seat inside, told the computer his desired destination, and then waited as the O’Neill cylinders ground on in their slow and stately revolutions, one turn every forty seconds.
