InterstellarNet 03 Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  Glithwah said, “Narrowing our choices to, more or less, a quarter of the stars in the galaxy. Billions of suns. How is that helpful?”

  “We’ll get there,” Joshua said.

  “A little faster, please,” Carl said. “And how do you know? Was the location in a part of the Xool database the rest of us hadn’t yet searched?”

  “Nothing so overt,” Tacitus answered.

  “Don’t be smug,” Joshua netted to his other half. “Or coy. Carl’s only human.”

  “Then you explain,” Tacitus netted back.

  Joshua said, “The Xool project, whatever it is, involves nearby solar systems. If light-speed is a limit, that argues for the Xool themselves being nearby. As do the surveillance vids we’ve seen. Grace and Helena expected to be around for the return of ‘their lords.’ ”

  “These beings shape worlds,” Carl said. “Their tech must far exceed ours. Light speed might not be a limit for them.”

  Tacitus said, “Light speed is almost certainly a limit for them, too. You have to picture their experiment in deep time. The few stars that comprise InterstellarNet are neighbors now. Relative to the Sun, Barnard’s Star”—native system of the Snakes—“is the fastest moving star. Barnard’s is passing by at about ninety kilometers per second.”

  “Deep time,” Carl echoed. “Hmm. The experiment began …?”

  “The first discernable synchronization among the InterstellarNet worlds happened around the time of our Cambrian Explosion,” Joshua offered. “Call it 550 million years ago.”

  “One and a half million light years?” Corinne said. “Barnard’s and Sol were that far apart when the experiment began?”

  “Your multiplication is correct,” Tacitus said. Her implant’s multiplication, more likely. “However …”

  “Please excuse my sarcastic and socially inept other half,” Joshua said, reclaiming his vocal cords. “Still, Tacitus is correct that linear extrapolation doesn’t apply. Had InterstellarNet stars ever been so far apart, they would not have had as much as a galaxy in common. Since the Cambrian Explosion, our Sun has more than twice circled the Milky Way’s core. Other stars follow their own orbits around that core.

  “But at a more basic level, Corinne, you are correct. When, ages ago, the Xool began their project, they chose stars that were widely separated. Stars that would, however, converge.”

  “And then diverge?” Glithwah asked.

  “For beings who plan in eons? Yes.” Joshua paused, let the others take that in. “And that perspective makes our era, in which the InterstellarNet solar systems are neighbors, all the more anomalous.”

  Glithwah said, “Our stars converge just as our civilizations achieve advanced technologies. That’s can’t be a coincidence.”

  “Advanced technology?” Joshua said. “That’s less than clear. The Xool might not consider what we’ve accomplished”—apart from computers—“in any way noteworthy. What Ir doubt is coincidental is that as these stars converged, the Xool intervened more and more often.”

  Carl grimaced. “I’ve lost the thread somewhere. And I’m still waiting for the where.”

  “Fair enough,” Joshua said. “It’s a very tangled thread. Why choose solar systems that will converge?” When no one ventured a guess, he offered his own. “Because there’s a desire, perhaps a need, to compare notes across those solar systems at a particular point in the project. And because at least at this stage of the project, light speed as a limit does matter.”

  “Suggesting the Xool world is close,” Corinne said. “Only there are what, about forty stars within twenty light-years of Sol?”

  “When you count binaries and triples as a single star,” Tacitus agreed, “and if you ignore brown dwarfs and free-floating planetary mass objects. But your twenty light-years are arbitrary. The farther out you look, the higher the count goes.”

  “Guys,” Carl said, “I promise to admire your brilliance later. Where are the Xool?”

  “We’re almost there,” Joshua said. “Ir needed first to establish that they must have a presence nearby. Corinne, when you and I first met, everyone else believed I was a hopeless drunk, a failure, a loser, slinking home after a weeks-long binge. You stuck with me. Why?”

  “Why do you change the subject?” Glithwah asked.

  “Ir am not.” Joshua said. “Corrine?”

  She chewed her lip, as if thinking back. “Your assets went untouched the entire time you were missing. The only ones who came forward claiming to have information, going after your family’s reward, were obvious cranks and con men. The police never found any trace of you.”

  “Maybe at first that’s what sold you. It surely didn’t keep you convinced.”

  “I suppose not.” Corinne smiled wanly. “Fine. You tell me why.”

  “Because,” Joshua said, “my disappearance fit a pattern. Bad things happened to historians who shared my curiosity, who might bring attention to the anomaly of InterstellarNet in an otherwise silent galaxy. It was the pattern you couldn’t explain away.”

  Corinne nodded. “Nor could Robyn Tanaka explain it away.”

  Once pointed in the right direction, no Augmented could miss such an obvious pattern—and getting involved had gotten her/them killed. But if humanity was to survive, an Augmented had had to get involved again.

  As now one was.

  You’re welcome,” Tacitus netted.

  Joshua continued, “There is a silent solar system, its sun of spectral class K, located well within the InterstellarNet bubble. A star that is speeding by almost as quickly as Barnard’s. And bad things happen, in statistically significant numbers, to astronomers who study it.”

  “Enough!” Carl said. “Just name it.”

  “You can name it. What nearby solar system is of unique scientific interest, was the consensus choice across the Discovery mission team, and yet politicians overruled it as a destination?”

  Just for a moment, everyone’s eyes glazed—diving into the ship’s library, following Joshua’s hints.

  “Epsilon Indi,” Carl said.

  “Epsilon Indi,” Joshua agreed.

  CHAPTER 48

  Clan governance was not democratic, not exactly, but it involved consultation.

  Abandon everything achieved on Ariel over twenty long years? Stake everyone’s lives on war against the United Planets? Those hard choices had been debated.

  Choose a particular nameless, unexceptional star? Commit generations to come to building a new civilization there? Those choices also had been debated.

  And whether to cast aside those decisions, to risk the freedom obtained against such daunting odds, to boldly go seeking out the Xool? Whether to roll the dice yet again with the lives of the clan? That must be thoroughly debated, as well.

  And it was.

  And was approved, by acclamation.

  Aware that while they might run, they could not hide.

  • • • •

  Unblinking, unforgiving, stars like specks of diamond dotted the planetarium dome. When Carl turned his head, an absence of stars, like some silhouette-shaped dark nebula, revealed Corinne. He guessed she was contemplating the way forward. Studying the unexceptional orange-white spark that was Epsilon Indi. Almost twelve light-years distant ….

  “Thirty years,” he said.

  “A long wait for answers,” she said. “A long while not even knowing if they’ll deign to speak with us, if we’ll get answers.”

  Or if they’ll squash us like bugs, offended by our temerity. “That it is.”

  “I shouldn’t complain. Glithwah isn’t.”

  And Glithwah would never have answers. If she were to become the oldest Hunter—other than a Xool agent—who had ever lived, still old age must claim her before Invincible would reach its destination.

  Whereas he, Corinne, and Joshua would merely be old.

  “Glithwah is exceptional,” Carl said.

  Corinne broke the awkward, lengthening silence. “And if the Xool don’t apprec
iate our showing up?”

  “We’ll reason with them.”

  “Tricky that, when not even Joshua has any inkling what they want.”

  “We have thirty years to prepare,” Carl countered. “They don’t know we’re coming.”

  “Uh-huh. And maybe they’ve anticipated for ages that someone would come.”

  He mulled over whether a particular conversation with Glithwah was in confidence, deciding it was more in the nature of a prophecy. And more like a curse. “Glithwah predicts I’ll reason with them.”

  “Not Joshua and Tacitus?”

  “No one argues that they’re smart,” Carl said. Smarter by far than him. “No one doubts they’ll be involved, but smart and strategic are very different concepts.”

  Especially from the perspective of a b’tok master.

  Minutes ticked by. The unblinking stars (or was it the unblinking gaze of imagined Xool?) continued to unnerve him.

  With a netted command he could have sent meteors streaking overhead. He could have stretched a comet—its head ablaze, its tail shimmering—across the dome. He could have evoked the well-remembered majesty of Uranus in Ariel’s sky, or Earth as he had admired it from the Moon, or the stark beauty of a tumbling asteroid.

  He made none of those changes, letting that pitiless, cosmic stare instruct him.

  “Me,” he said. Days after, Glithwah’s prediction still felt unreal. “Reason with them.”

  “If Glithwah said it, she’s probably right.”

  “That’s what worries me.” Carl laughed, just to show he was kidding.

  If only he were. Because Glithwah did tend to be right. And because he had witnessed how she had “reasoned” with the United Planets to take control of a starship.

  To prepare for his encounter with the Xool, Carl foresaw a great deal of b’tok in his future …

  WAR AGAINST THE XOOL

  CHAPTER 49

  Ceding fine-motor control to his other half, Joshua observed yet another calibration. Over the past thirty years, sometimes from boredom, as often with an eye to mundane practicality, he and Tacitus had acquired many new skills. Not that, so far, today’s exercise gave proof of any skill, for this fine-tuning had accomplished no more, if instruments were to be believed, than their previous five tweaks or, for that matter, the wholesale swap-out of components.

  And as much as Joshua would have liked to blame his pressure suit and its bulky gloves, he doubted sausage fingers were the underlying problem here.

  “Nothing,” he summarized.

  “Nothing?” Carl echoed. He waited nearby, twice tethered to a catwalk. Exit Invincible’s main hull—no matter if only by centimeters, where not even the slightest bit of sky could be seen—and safety protocol demanded a suited-up buddy.

  “Could Carl be any more literal?” Tacitus netted. “Quaint, limited, Mark I humans—”

  “Built you,” Joshua interrupted. Aloud, he said, “Nothing modulated, to be precise. Solar RF noise and Jupiter RF noise come through loud and clear.”

  “As before your adjustments?”

  “As before,” Joshua said.

  He reclaimed control over his right arm, scratching an itch on his right thigh as best he could through the sturdy fabric of his pressure suit. The itch, as though provoked by his ineffectual efforts, sidled toward his knee. The tip of his nose, beyond reach within his helmet, began to itch, too.

  “What’s left to try?” Carl asked.

  “Ir am thinking.” While trying not to channel an ant trapped between nested bowls. Hangar bay two’s concave roof, underfoot, and the convex underside of the antenna, looming overhead, both seemed enormous.

  “Because,” Tacitus reminded gratuitously, “they are. The antenna dish is 599.4 meters in diameter and 101.95 meters deep.”

  “Well,” Joshua retorted, “if you’re of a mind to be precise, don’t call the attenna a dish.”

  Because the minutest irregularities within a unitary structure would degrade the antenna’s focus. Instead, plainly visible from the instrumentation node at which they labored, the antenna was comprised of many small panels. (“10,448,” Tacitus offered. “Just to be precise.”) The minuscule gaps among so many discrete panels were what kept this enclosed workspace in vacuum.

  Still no bright ideas. Joshua kept looking around, daring inspiration to strike.

  He stood in a forest of plasteel pylons. The pylons supported a complex latticework that in turn supported thousands of servomotors (“10,448,” Tacitus re-netted), one motor to anchor and individually position each panel. Work lights and his helmet lamps glimmered off pylons, motors, and panel backs. Hidden from his sight, suspended far above the dish, hung an instrument platform massing almost a thousand tonnes. Everything on that platform, including its ultrasensitive receiver elements, had checked out flawless, too.

  For a wonder, Tacitus did not recite the platform’s mass to fifteen decimal places. Instead his friend teased: “Above?”

  Because, for the nonce, Invincible was in freefall.

  The dish trembled, if only a little, whenever the main drive ran. Had the instrument platform been deployed before now, tremors would have jiggled its suspension cables, too. Even the residual quivers that got past multistage shock absorbers would have spoiled the dish’s capacity to aim across interstellar distances.

  “Don’t be difficult,” Joshua netted back. “Above is a valid synonym for overhead.”

  “You’re certain about our pointing?” Carl interrupted, oblivious to their internal dialogue.

  In Joshua’s mind’s eye, the spark that was Sol was centered in the crosshairs of a netted image from the ship’s optical sighting telescope. “Yes, Ir am certain. If things weren’t aligned, the dish wouldn’t be picking up solar RF.”

  “Then why not manmade RF, too?”

  That was the big question, of course. No one had any reason to beam signals toward Epsilon Indi, but it should not have mattered. This was an InterstellarNet-class transceiver. The chatter back home among three planets, dozens of moons, hundreds of asteroids, and however many thousands of ships (“Do not quibble with my numbers, Tacitus, because whatever database you access is thirty years out of date”) should have merged into an unmistakable background roar. Hell, the Leos had detected humanity from the RF murmurs of mid-twentieth-century Earth. Using vacuum tubes.

  “If Ir knew …”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Carl said, “you’d have told me, if not already have fixed the problem. Speculate.”

  “Something Ir haven’t yet thought to check. Something not formally a part of the transceiver, or of this dish, but that nonetheless interacts with one or both of them.”

  “Something knocked out of kilter back when Grace blasted her way aboard,” Carl interpreted glumly. “Only I felt certain we’d found and fixed all those problems.”

  A not unreasonable expectation, Joshua agreed. This was their second go at diagnosis and tweaking. Their first go had come years before, at turnover, when the Foremost had permitted them a brief listen—and when they had failed to detect even the broad-spectrum radio noise that every active star emits. That silence had proven to be merely an alignment problem.

  “Either that,” Joshua said, “or our earlier repairs were incomplete, or we must separately remediate the effects of more years of engine vibrations.”

  “What sort of something might it be? I don’t suppose you would care to hazard a guess.”

  “Ir do not.”

  But even less did he/they care to give voice to what they most feared: that the Xool or their agents had, once more … intervened. If the solar system ahead had emitted any modulated RF, that inference might have been inescapable. But Epsilon Indi, now little more than ten light-hours removed, seemed as devoid of artificially produced radio emissions as the home system, 11.8 light-years in their wake.

  If the Epsilon Indi system was empty of Xool, could they rely upon any of the reasoning that had led them here?

  “Leaving what?” Tacitus
challenged. “Some weird software defect? Undetected irregularities in power generation or transmission with the improbable effect of disguising only modulated RF signals?”

  “If I knew what,” Joshua thought wearily, “I would have already—”

  Ping! The change in Carl’s facial expression suggested he, too, had gotten a priority interrupt. A summons from the Foremost.

  • • • •

  Interstellar drive: more formally, the T’Fru long-range drive, after T’Fru Lei, the Centaur physicist whose theory of gravitation underpins the technology. (See related article, T’Fru theory of gravitation, an extension to Einsteinian general relativity.)

  A T’Fru drive propels a spaceship by manipulating the gravitational field: the local curvature of space-time itself. The drive, because it does not rely upon expelling reaction mass, is an efficient—and, to date, the only—practical means of travel among the stars.

  T’Fru drive technology can, in concept, operate anywhere, but practical considerations limit its use to interstellar domains. Any perturbation to the artificially reshaped gravitational field will contort nearby space-time and, in the process, tear the vessel to shreds. Between stars, where space-time is all but flat, occasional passing gravitational waves necessitate complex, real-time rebalancing. Within a solar system, the motion of planets and moons in their orbits continuously alters the local curvature of space-time; there, the dynamic rebalancing required to stabilize a T’Fru drive remains unachievable.

  Circumstantial evidence suggests that the interstellar drive of a lifeboat, activated within the Jupiter system, triggered the destruction in 2165 of the first United Planets antimatter factory, and with it the moon, Himalia. (See related article, Himalia Incident.)

  —Internetopedia

  • • • •

  In speckles and splotches and interlocking whorls—the terrestrial greens vivid, almost psychedelic, against K’vithian black—a field stretched out around Corinne. At this stage of the voyage, apart from one small sector of one deck (and this was not the deck), soy and corn were weeds. She did not need an agronomist’s input to deduce matters had gone awry.