“Bear with me. We’ll run through our approach to the rock. Everything will be exactly as before. I’ve downloaded Torec’s structural analyses of the failure—”
“So we’ll fall apart, like before.”
“Maybe. But this time, Torec, I want you to fire the starbreakers as we go in.”
“What’s the use?” she asked. “They will only scratch the Rock’s surface. And if the cannon fails—”
“Just do it. But, Torec, I want you to cross the beams…”
They both grasped the idea very quickly. It took only minutes to program new instructions into their weapons and guidance systems.
Once again Pirius took the controls; once again the ship swooped along its invisible attack arc toward the Rock. They ran the whole thing in real time, and thanks to the simulator’s precise reproduction, the ship’s handling felt as clumsy as it had before.
But this time around, one second before the closest approach to the Rock, the starbreakers lit up. They swiveled and crossed at a point exactly a hundred kilometers below the ship’s position. So the Earthworm sailed in on its target through the sim’s imaginary space with an immense, slim triangle of cherry-red light dangling beneath it.
When the ship passed the rock, the crossed starbreakers dug deep into its impact-chewed surface. Dust fountained up: that point of intersection was lost in the rock’s interior layers. Too low, then. But the guidance system, slaved to the starbreakers, jolted the ship upward until the crossing point was touching the Rock’s surface, just stroking it, leaving little more than a furrow of churned-up regolith.
All this in the second of closest approach.
When the black-hole cannon fired, the projectiles sailed down the lines of the starbreakers and collided with each other at the point of their intersection, precisely one hundred kilometers below the ship.
The simulation software wasn’t up to modeling the collision of two black holes, or to show realistically the detonation of an asteroid. But the ship, suffering the same structural failures as before, blew up pretty convincingly. The Virtuals melted away, leaving Pirius, Darc, and Torec sitting side by side in a room walled with blank blue light.
Torec said, “So we’re going to use starbreakers as an altimeter. You think big when you want to, Pirius, don’t you?”
Darc brought up a rerun of the last moments. They had to see it with their own eyes before they believed it.
“I think it worked,” Pirius said.
Darc growled, “Pilot, you are learning understatement from that fat Commissary.”
Pirius allowed himself one second of self-congratulation. Then he stood up, pushing away the restraints of his couch. “We’ve a lot to do,” he said. “We’ll need to see what we can do about improving the accuracy of the starbreaker mounts. They weren’t intended for pinpoint work like this. And we’ll have to slave the guidance properly to the starbreakers.”
“Yes,” Torec said, and she added with feeling: “I’d also like to find a way to fire these damn cannon without killing myself.”
Nilis came bustling into the sim room. “Here you are!” he cried. He was cock-a-hoop. He grabbed Pirius by the shoulders and shook him; for Nilis this was a remarkably physical display. “My boy — my boy!”
Darc said dryly, “I take it the Grand Conclave endorsed your stance, Commissary.”
“In every particular. That polished oaf Eliun and his cronies have been ordered to cooperate with us, or else simply hand over their data to my technicians. The Conclave have backed me. They backed me! I have to pinch myself to believe it. Can you see what this means historically? The logjam at the top of human government is finally breaking up! Is the madness that has gripped us for so long at last falling away? And I couldn’t have done it without you, Commander!”
“Don’t push it, Commissary,” warned Darc.
Pirius thought this over. He was starting to get a sense of the drama unfolding around this strange project. Today a power center as old as the Coalition itself had suffered a historic reversal. However this mission turned out, nothing would be left the same: twenty thousand years of history really were coming to an end here. And, in a sense, it was because of him.
With one finger Torec gently closed his mouth, which was gaping open. “So we beat another bureaucrat,” she said. “Now all we’ve got to do is dive-bomb a black hole.”
“Yes. How soon can we set up a fresh test flight?”
“Tomorrow,” said Darc. “And then we’re going to have to think about a training program — how to fly this thing in anger… always assuming you can find the crew to fly.”
“We aren’t going to get bored, sir,” Pirius said.
Darc laughed.
They made their way out of the sim room, talking, planning.
Chapter 41
As the young universe unfolded, some of the spacetime-chemistry races developed high technologies. They ventured from their home “worlds,” and came into contact with each other. Strange empires were spun across galaxies of black holes. Terrible wars were fought.
Out of the debris of war, the survivors groped their way to a culture that was, if not unified, at least peaceable. A multispecies federation established itself. Under its benevolent guidance new merged cultures propagated, new symbiotic ecologies arose. The endless enrichment of life continued. The inhabitants of this golden time even studied their own origins in the brief moments of the singularity. They speculated about what might have triggered that mighty detonation, and whether any conscious intent might have lain behind it.
Time stretched and history deepened.
It was when the universe was very old indeed — ten billion times as old as it had been at the moment of the breaking of its primordial symmetry — that disaster struck.
Light itself did not yet exist, and yet lightspeed was embedded in this universe.
At any given moment, only a finite time had passed since the singularity, and an object traveling at lightspeed could have traversed only part of the span of the cosmos. Domains limited by lightspeed travel were the effective “universes” of their inhabitants, for the cosmos was too young for any signal to have been received from beyond their boundaries. But as the universe aged, so signals propagated further — and domains which had been separated since the first instant, domains which could have had no effect on each other before, were able to come into contact.
And as they overlapped, life-forms crossed from one domain into another.
For the federation, the creatures that suddenly came hurtling out of infinity were the stuff of nightmare. These invaders came from a place where the laws of physics were subtly different: the symmetry-breaking which had split gravity from the GUT superforce had occurred differently in different domains, for they had not been in causal contact at the time. That difference drove a divergence of culture, of values. The federation valued its hard-won prosperity, peace, and the slow accumulation of knowledge. The invaders, following their own peculiar imperatives, were intent only on destruction, and fueling their own continuing expansion. It was like an invasion from a parallel universe. Rapprochement was impossible.
The invaders came from all around the federation’s lightspeed horizon. Reluctantly, the federation sought to defend itself, but a habit of peace had been cultivated for too long; everywhere the federation fell back. It seemed extinction was inevitable.
But one individual found a dreadful alternative.
Just as the cosmos had gone through a phase change when gravity had separated from the GUT force, so more phase changes were possible. The GUT force itself could be induced to dissociate further. The energy released would be catastrophic, unstoppable, universal — but, crucially, it would feed a new burst of universal expansion.
The homelands of the invaders would be pushed back beyond the lightspeed horizon.
But much of the federation would be scattered too. And, worse, a universe governed by a new combination of physical forces would not be the same as that in which th
e spacetime creatures had evolved. It would be unknowable, perhaps unsurvivable.
It was a terrible dilemma. Even the federation was unwilling to accept the responsibility to remake the universe itself. But the invaders encroached, growing more ravenous, more destructive, as they approached the federation’s rich and ancient heart. In the end there was only one choice.
A switch was thrown.
A wall of devastation burned at lightspeed across the cosmos. In its wake the very laws of physics changed; everything it touched was transformed.
The invaders were devastated.
The primordial black holes survived — and, by huddling close to them, so did some representatives of the federation.
But the federation’s scientists had not anticipated how long this great surge of growth would continue. With the domain war long won, the mighty cosmic expansion continued, at rates unparalleled in the universe’s history. Ultimately, it would last sixty times the age of the universe at its inception, and it would expand the federation’s corner of spacetime by a trillion, times a trillion, times a trillion, times a trillion. Human scientists, detecting the traces of this great burst of “inflation,” the single worst catastrophe in the universe’s long history, would always wonder what had triggered it. Few ever guessed it was the outcome of a runaway accident triggered by war.
As the epochal storm continued the survivors of the federation huddled, folding their wings of spacetime flaws over themselves. When the gale at last passed, the survivors emerged into a new, chill cosmos. So much time had passed that they had changed utterly, and forgotten who they were, where they had come from. But they were heirs of a universe grown impossibly huge — a universe all of ten centimeters across.
Quin Base shocked Pirius Red.
Chapter 42
He was dismayed by the cramped corridors and heaped-up bunks of the barracks, the crowding, the stink of shit and urine and semen, the metallic odors of failing life-support systems. The people swarmed through their cavernous lairs, feeding and sleeping, shouting and wrestling and rutting. The only difference he could see between privates and cadets was the gleaming metallized pupils of the “veterans.” He thought their silvery stares made them seem inhuman, like huge, lithe rats, perhaps.
If he had been faced with hostility in the barracks back at Arches, here he was regarded with undisguised loathing. In fact, the station commander, a stern prosthetic-wearer called Captain Marta, insisted that he and Pila were accompanied by guards wherever they went.
Pila, oddly, didn’t seem disturbed by this squalor. “What did you expect? Pirius, you are a pilot; you are relatively skilled and intelligent, and in battle you would be expected to show individual initiative. The conditions of your upbringing and training reflect that. These cadets are animals to be thrown onto some dismal Rock to dig and fight and die. This is a war of economics, remember. How much do you think it is worth spending on their brief, wretched lives?”
Pirius wondered if she was wearing nose filters.
“You just don’t fit in,” said Enduring Hope.
“Thanks,” said Pirius dryly.
Hope and Pirius Red faced each other across the small room in Quin’s cramped Officer Country that had been commandeered for Pirius’s use. This engineer, who had flown with Pirius Blue aboard the Assimilator’s Claw in a different destiny, was one of the first candidates selected by Pila. Pirius Red had only met Hope from across the courtroom, during the hearing on the magnetar episode.
Hope seemed to regard Red as an inferior version of Blue. It was deeply disconcerting to be known so well by somebody Pirius had never properly met before — known, and judged, and found wanting.
“You don’t belong here,” Hope said. “Your adjutant doesn’t either, but she looks like an earthworm, and you can see she doesn’t care.”
“How perceptive,” murmured Pila.
“You, though — you’re neither one thing nor the other. You’re not an earthworm, but you walk around like one. You want us to accept you, to take you back. Everyone can see it in your face. You’re needy. But you can’t come back. You’re polluted.”
“Maybe,” Pirius said tightly. “But I had no choice about what happened to me.”
Hope shrugged. “Doesn’t change the fact.”
“And whatever you think about me, I have a job to do. I want you to help me do it.” He outlined the assignment he wanted Hope to take. On Rock 492, Hope would be in overall charge of the ground crews. He knew Hope had been assigned to artillery batteries here on Quin, and he imagined Hope, a born engineer, would be attracted by the idea of getting back to working on ships.
But Hope said, “Why me? There are plenty of other engineers stranded on this rock.”
Pirius shrugged. “I — I mean, Pirius Blue — once selected you for his crew. I have to trust my own judgment.” He forced a smile at his own weak joke. “And remember, our duty isn’t to do what we want—”
Hope leaned forward, suddenly angry. “Don’t patronize me with crиche slogans, you desk jockey. I know all about duty.”
“I’m sorry. Look, Hope, I won’t have you assigned if you don’t want it. I want to work with you, not against you.”
Enduring Hope stood up. “I’ll do it if Pirius does it. I mean,” he said caustically, “the real Pirius.”
Pirius Red faced other problems when he interviewed other candidates.
He was brought a young woman called Tili, who, it was said, had shown intuitive promise as a navigator before she had been banished to this dismal place for some irrelevant misdemeanor. Her condition shocked him. She had been wounded in action, and though her physical injuries were healed, her eyes were wide and filled with an inchoate pain. He got off to a bad start when she wouldn’t even respond to her name. It seemed she had been one of a set of triplets; since the other two had been killed, she had insisted on being known only by her “family” number, Three.
She wouldn’t volunteer for his squadron, but she would follow orders, she said. “But it makes no difference whatever we do.”
“Of course it does—”
“No. Ask This Burden Must Pass.”
“Who?”
She shrugged, and sat apathetically until he released her.
After similar experiences with other cadets, as Burden’s name came up repeatedly, Pirius realized that to penetrate the strange, deviant culture of this Base, he was going to have to meet this frontline prophet.
And, as he had always known, he was going to have to confront his own future self.
This Burden Must Pass — or Quero, as Pila insisted on calling him — didn’t fit into this colony of child soldiers. He was too tall, too old, too experienced. He sat in Pirius’s commandeered office with a relaxed calm, and yet somehow dominated the room. He was centered, that was the word; he made Pirius feel young, unformed.
Pirius said, “You’re a good flyer. Your training record is clear about that.”
“Thank you.”
“And you’re good at keeping yourself alive. I’d want you in my squadron for those qualities alone.”
Burden nodded. But as he took in the notion that Pirius was offering him a flight post he avoided Pirius’s gaze, oddly. “Whatever you say.”
Pirius delivered his standard line. “I’m reluctant to draft you. I want volunteers, if I can get them; the mission is going to be tough enough as it is without reluctant conscripts.”
“You’re wise.”
“But the point is,” Pirius said, “there are many others here on Quin who won’t consider coming with me unless you are there. I don’t understand the hold you have over them.”
“I suppose I give them hope,” Burden said.
“It’s this philosophy of yours, isn’t it? You’re a Wignerian. You believe that all of this,” he waved a hand, “will be wiped out when—”
“When we reach timelike infinity,” said Pila coldly. She regarded Burden with undisguised loathing. For all her cynicism, she was a strict Druzite, a
nd Burden’s non-conformity shocked her. “You’re only here because you’re an opinion former.” She waved manicured fingers. “Out there, in that pit you call a barracks.”
“I don’t want to form anyone’s opinion. I’m only myself.”
“Garbage,” Pila said. “I’m astonished the commanders here tolerate your deviance. I wouldn’t, for a second.”
“You’ll get used to it. And after all, it doesn’t matter. This burden must pass,” Burden said, and he grinned.
“In any case,” she said, “it doesn’t make any difference if you join us or not. Because whatever we do, all of this will be erased anyhow, won’t it? And so what’s the point of getting out of your bunk?”
“There is always a point,” Burden said mildly. “All the worldlines contribute to the whole, in some sense beyond our understanding. And of course there are always the people around you. You must care for them, as they care for you. I do believe in timelike infinity, in the final convergence—”
Pirius nodded. “But we have a duty to behave as if it’s not so. As if this is the only chance we get.”
Burden eyed him. “You understand. You and I — I mean, Pirius Blue — have had long discussions about these points. You’re deeper than you look, Pirius Red.”
“Thanks,” Pirius said. “Look, I’m not interested in your endorsement for myself. But it seems I need it to get my job done. Will you fly with me?”
Now the moment of commitment had come, and Pirius, watching Burden closely, thought he saw a flash of fear in his eyes. There were depths to this strange man, he realized. “You can refuse if you want,” he said, groping for understanding.
But the instant had passed, and Burden’s smiling control returned. “I think you know I will accept.”
Pila snorted her disgust. But she turned another box in her checklist from red to green.
As Burden made to leave, he turned back. “One more thing.”
Exultant dc-2 Page 42
