Genar-Hofoen glanced round at the mistretl. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s get going.’ The little mistretl blinked quickly, still staring up the street. Another bellow echoed off the surrounded buildings. Genar-Hofoen looked back again.
The charging pondrosaur reached up with one fore-limb and ripped its eye-cups off to reveal huge, faceted blue eyes like chunks of ancient ice. With its other limb it gripped the mahout by one shoulder and wrenched him off its neck; he wriggled and flailed but it brushed him to one side and onto the pavement; he landed running, fell and rolled. The pondrosaur itself thundered on down the street; people threw themselves out of its way. Somebody in a bubblesphere didn’t move fast enough; the giant transparent ball was kicked to the side, smashing into a hot food-stall; flames leapt from the wreckage.
‘Shit,’ Genar-Hofoen said as the giant bore down upon them. He turned to the mistretl driver again. He could see the face of the ysner, turned back to look up the street behind too, its big face expressing only mild surprise. ‘Move!’ he shouted.
The mistretl nodded. ‘Goo’ i’ea,’ it chirped. It reached behind to slip a knot on the rear of the ysner and jabbed its bootheels into the animal’s lower neck. The startled ysner took off, leaving the trap behind; the vehicle tipped forward as the ysner-mistretl pair disappeared down the rapidly clearing street. Genar-Hofoen and Flin were thrown forward in a tangle of harnesses. He heard her shout, ‘Fuck!’ then go oof as they hit the street.
Something hit him hard on the head. He blacked out for a moment then came to looking up at a huge face, a monstrous face, gazing down at him with huge prismed blue eyes. Then he saw the woman’s face. The face of Dajeil Gelian. She had blood on her top lip. She looked groggily at him and then turned to gaze up at the huge animal face looking down at them. There was a sort of buzzing sensation from somewhere; Genar-Hofoen felt his legs go numb. The woman collapsed over his legs. He felt sick. Lines of red dots crossing the sky floated behind his eyelids when they closed. When he forced his eyes open again, she was there again. Somebody looking like Dajeil Gelian who wasn’t her. Except it wasn’t Flin either. She was dressed differently, she was taller and her expression was . . . not the same. And anyway, Flin was still draped unconscious over his legs.
He really didn’t understand what was going on. He shook his head. This hurt.
The girl who wasn’t Dajeil or Flin stooped quickly, looked into his eyes, whirled the cloak off her shoulders and onto the street beside him in one movement, then rolled him over onto it, heaving Flin’s immobile body out of the way as she did so. He tried waving his arms around but it didn’t do much good.
The cloak went rigid underneath him and floated into the air, wrapping round him. He cried out and tried to fight against its enclosing black folds, but the buzzing came again and his vision faded even before the cloak finished wrapping itself round him.
8
Killing Time
I
The usual way to explain it was by analogy; this was how the idea was introduced to you as a child. Imagine you were travelling through space and you came to this planet which was very big and almost perfectly smooth and on which there lived creatures who were composed of one layer of atoms; in effect, two-dimensional. These creatures would be born, live and die like us and they might well possess genuine intelligence. They would, initially, have no idea or grasp of the third dimension, but they would be able to live perfectly well in their two dimensions. To them, a line would be like a wall across their world (or, from the end, it would look like a point). An unbroken circle would be like a locked room.
Perhaps, if they were able to build machines which allowed them to journey at great speed along the surface of their planet - which to them would be their universe - they would go right round the planet and come back to where they had started from. More likely, they would be able to work this out from theory. Either way, they would realise that their universe was both closed, and curved, and that there was, in fact, a third dimension, even if they had no practical access to it. Being familiar with the idea of circles, they would probably christen the shape of their universe a ‘hypercircle’ rather than inventing a new word. The three-dimensional people would, of course, call it a sphere.
The situation was similar for people living in three dimensions. At some point in any civilisation starting to become advanced it was realised that if you set off into space in what appeared to be a perfectly straight line, eventually you would arrive back at where you started, because your three-dimensional universe was really a four-dimensional shape; being familiar with the idea of spheres, people tended to christen this shape a hypersphere.
Usually around the same point in a society’s development it was understood that - unlike the planet where the two-dimensional creatures lived - space was not simply curved into a hypersphere, it was also expanding; gradually increasing in size like a soap-bubble on the end of a straw which somebody was blowing into. To a four-dimensional being looking from far enough away, the three-dimensional galaxies would look like tiny designs imprinted onto the surface of that expanding bubble, each of them, generally, heading away from all the others because of the hypersphere’s general expansion, but - like the shifting whorls and loops of colour visible on the skin of a soap bubble - able to slide and move around on that surface.
Of course, the four-dimensional hypersphere had no equivalent of the straw, blowing air in from outside. The hypersphere was expanding all by itself, like a four-dimensional explosion, with the implication that, once, it had been simply a point; a tiny seed which had indeed exploded. That detonation had created - or at least had produced - matter and energy, time and the physical laws themselves. Later - cooling, coalescing and changing over immense amounts of time and expansion - it had given rise to the cool, ordered, three-dimensional universe which people could see around them.
Eventually in the progress of a technologically advanced society, occasionally after some sort of limited access to hyperspace, more usually after theoretical work, it was realised that the soap bubble was not alone. The expanding universe lay inside a larger one, which in turn was entirely enclosed by a bubble of space-time with a still greater diameter. The same applied within the universe you happened to find yourself on/in; there were smaller, younger universes inside it, nested within like layers of paper round a much-wrapped spherical present.
In the very centre of all the concentric, inflating universes lay the place they had each originated from, where every now and again a cosmic fireball blinked into existence, detonating once more to produce another universe, its successive outpourings of creation like the explosions of some vast combustion engine, and the universes its pulsing exhaust.
There was more; complications in seven dimensions and beyond that involved a giant torus on which the 3-D universe could be described as a circle, contained and containing other nested tori, with further implications of whole populations of such meta-Realities . . . but the implications of multiple, concentric, sequential universes was generally considered enough to be going on with for the moment.
What everybody wanted to know was whether there was any way of travelling from one universe to another. Between any pair of universes there was more than just empty hyperspace; there was a thing called an energy grid. It was useful - strands of it could help power ships, and it had been used as a weapon - but it was also an obstacle, and - by all accounts so far - one which had proved impenetrable to intelligent investigation. Certain black holes appeared to be linked to the grid and perhaps therefore to the universe beyond, but nobody had ever made it intact into one, or ever reappeared in any recognisable form. There were white holes, too; ferociously violent sources spraying torrents of energy into the universe with the power of a million suns and which also seemed to be linked to the grid . . . but no body, no ship or even information had ever been observed appearing from their tumultuous mouths; no equivalent of an airborne bacteria, no word, no language, just that incoherent scream of cascading energie
s and super energetic particles.
The dream that every Involved had, which virtually every technologically advanced civilisation clove to with almost religious faith, was that one day it would be possible to travel from one universe to another, to step up or down through those expanding bubbles, so that - apart from anything else - one need never suffer the final fate of one’s own universe. To achieve that would surely be to Sublime, truly to Transcend, to consummate the ultimate Surpassing and accomplish the ultimate empowerment.
The River class General Contact Unit Fate Amenable To Change lay in space. It was locally stationary, taking its reference from the Excession. The Excession was equally static, taking its reference from the star Esperi. The entity sat there, a few light minutes away, a featureless dot on the skein of real space with a single equally dull-looking strand of twisted, compressed space-time fabric leading down to the lower layer of energy grid . . . and a second leading upwards to the higher layer.
The Excession was doing exactly what it had been doing for the past two weeks; nothing. The Fate Amenable To Change had carried out all the standard initial measurements and observations of the entity, but had been very forcefully advised indeed not to do any more; no direct contact was to be attempted, not even by probes, smaller craft or drones. In theory it could disobey; it was its own ship, it could make up its own mind . . . but in practice it had to heed the advice of those who knew if not more than it, better than it.
Collective responsibility. Also known as sharing the blame.
So all it had done after the first exciting bit, when it had been the centre of attention and everybody had wanted to know all it could tell them about the thing it had found, had been to hang around here, still at the focus of events in a sense, but also feeling somehow ignored.
Reports. It filed reports. It had long since stopped trying to make them different or original.
The ship was bored. It was also aware of a continuing undercurrent of fear; a real emotion that it was by turns annoyed at, ashamed of and indifferent to, according to its mood.
It waited. It watched. Beyond it, around it, most of its small fleet of modules and satellites, a few of its most space-capable drones and a variety of specialist devices it had constructed specifically for the purpose also floated, watching and waiting. Inside the vessel its human crew discussed the situation, monitored the data coming in from the ship’s own sensors and those coming in from the small cloud of dispersed machines. The ship passed some of the time by making up elaborate games for the humans to play. Meanwhile it kept up its observation of the Excession and scanned the space around, waiting for the first of the other ships to arrive.
Sixteen days after the Culture craft had stumbled upon the Excession and six days after the discovery had been made public, the first ship appeared, its presence noted initially within the Fate Amenable To Change’s main sensor array. The GCU moved one state of readiness higher, signalled what was happening to the Ethics Gradient and the Not Invented Here, fastened its track scanner on the incoming signal, began a tentative reconfiguration of its remote sensor platforms and started to move towards the newcomer round the perimeter of the Excession’s safe limit at a speed it hoped was pitched nicely between polite deliberation and alarm-raising urgency. It sent a standard interrogatory signal burst to the approaching craft.
The vessel was the Sober Counsel, an Explorer Ship of the Zetetic Elench’s Stargazer Clan’s Fifth fleet. The Fate Amenable To Change felt relief; the Elench were friends.
Identifications completed, the two ships rendezvoused, locally stationary just a few tens of kilometres apart on the outskirts of the safe limit from the Excession the Culture vessel had set.
~ Welcome.
~ Thank you. . . . Dear holy stasis. Is that thing attached to the grid, or is it my sensors?
~ If it’s your sensors, it’s mine too. Impressive, isn’t it? Becomes greatly less so once you’ve sat looking at it for a week or two, take my word for it. I hope you’re just here to observe. That’s all I’m doing.
~ Waiting on the big guns?
~ That’s right.
~ When do they arrive?
~ That’s restricted. Promise this won’t go outside the Elench?
~ Promise.
~ A Medium SV gets here in twelve days; the first General SV in fourteen, then one every few days for a week, then one a day, then several a day, by which time I expect a few other Involveds will probably have started to show. Don’t ask me what the GSVs will consider a quorum before they act. How about you?
~ Can we talk off the record, just the two of us?
~ All right.
~ We have another ship heading here, two days away still. The rest of the fleet are still undecided, though they have stopped drawing further away. We lost a ship somewhere round here. The Peace Makes Plenty.
~ Ah. Did you indeed? About when?
~ Some time between 28.789 and 805.
~ This is still confidential within the Elench, then?
~ Yes. We searched this volume as best we could for two weeks but found nothing. What brought you here?
~ Suggestion by my home GSV, the Ethics Gradient. That was in 841. Wanted me to look in the Upper Leaf Swirl Cloud Top. No reason given. Bumped into this on the way there. That’s all I know. (And the Fate Amenable To Change thought coldly about that suggestion. The Cloud Top volume was a long way from here, but that meant nothing. What mattered was that it had been given a relatively precise location within the Cloud Top to head for, and been given the subtlest of hints to watch out for anything interesting while en route. Given where it had been when it had received the suggestion from its home GSV, its route had inevitably taken it near the Excession. . . . Thirty-six days had elapsed between the date the Elench knew they might have lost a ship and the time when it had been dispatched on what was starting to look a little like a set-up . . . It wondered what had taken place in between. Could some Elench ship have leaked word to the Culture? But then how had such a leak apparently produced such accuracy, given that it, a single ship, had practically run straight into the damn Excession, while the Elench had spent two weeks here with seven-eighths of a full fleet and spotted nothing?) ~ Feel free to ask the Ethics Gradient what prompted its suggestion, it added.
~ Thank you.
~ You’re welcome.
~ I’d like to try contacting the Excession. This might be where our comrade disappeared. At the least it might have some information. At most, and for all we know, our ship is still in there. I want to talk to it, maybe send a drone-ship in if it doesn’t reply.
~ Madness. This thing is welded into the grids, both directions. Know anything that can do that? Me neither. I’m not even going to start feeling safe until there’s a fleet of GSVs round here. Heck, I was pleased to see you there; Company at last, I thought. Somebody to pass the time with while I sit out my lonely vigil. Now you want to start poking this thing with a stick. Are you crazy?
~ No, but we might have a ship in distress in there. I can’t just sit here doing nothing. Have you attempted to contact the entity?
~ No. I sent back a pro forma to its initial Hello, but . . . wait a moment. Look at the signal it sent (signal enclosed).
~ There. You see? I told you! That was probably an Elench-sourced handshake burst.
~ Meatshit. Yes, I see. Well, maybe your pal did find the damn thing first, but if it did, it probably did exactly what you’re proposing to do. And it’s gone. Disappeared. You seeing where this is leading?
~ I intend to be careful.
~ Uh-huh. Was your comrade vessel notoriously careless?
~ Indeed not.
~ Well then.
~ I appreciate your concern. Was there any sign of contention in the volume when you got here? Emergency or distress signals? Voyage Event Record Ejectiles?
~ There was this, here (material analysis/location enclosed), but if you want to mention any of this stuff on record you’d better make it look like you just stumbled across
the debris, all right?
~ Thank you. Yes, of course. . . . Looks like one of our little-drones was caught up in something. Hmm. Sort of . . . smells subsidiary somehow, don’t you think?
~ Possibly. I know what you mean. It’s untidy.
~ Back on record?
~ Okay.
~ I hereby give notice I intend to attempt to contact the entity.
~ I beg you not to. Let me make a request that you be allowed to take part in the Culture investigation when it takes place. I’m sure there is every chance you will be welcome to share in the relevant data.
~ I’m sorry, I have my own reasons for considering the matter urgent.
~ Off record again?
~ All right.
~ My records show you to be - to all intents and purposes - identical to the Peace Makes Plenty.
~ Yes. Go on?
~ Don’t you see? Look, if this thing jeopardised your comrade with no more fuss than an escaped little-drone, what’s it going to be able to do now that it’s had a chance to pick over the structure and mind-set of your sister craft for at least sixty-six days?
~ I have the benefit of being forewarned. And the entity may not have been able entirely to take over the Peace Makes Plenty yet. The ship might be inside there, under siege. Perhaps all the entity’s intellectual energies are being absorbed in the maintenance of that blockade. That being the case my intervention may lift the siege and free my comrade.
~ Cousin, this is self-delusion. We have already dealt with the issue of the minimal extra safeguarding provided by you having been alerted to the entity’s potential danger; the Peace Makes Plenty could hardly have been less prepared. I appreciate your feelings towards your fellow craft and Fleet-mate, but it rends the bounds of possibility to believe that something capable of perpetuating E-grid links in both directions is going to be substantially troubled by craft with the capabilities of ourselves. The Excession has not troubled me but then I did not trouble it; we exchanged greetings, no more. What you propose might be construed as interference, or even as a hostile act. I have accepted a duty to observe and won’t be able to help you if you get into trouble. Please, please reconsider.