“Do Tiamat and the Serpent Swarm know of this?”
“They will have got the messages as we did.”
“Have you contacted them?”
“Not yet. Why?”
“Might it not be a good idea. This is surely going to mean some…special executive action.”
“That is the purpose of tonight’s meeting.” said the mayor. “To decide what action.” She looked us up and down and there was something curiously hesitant in her manner.
To decide what action! They don’t know what they’re doing! I realized suddenly, looking from one blank and bewildered face to another. They’re making it up as they go along. A sudden, unexpected moment of panic for me, and then a reflection that was somehow calming: Well, the situation is pretty unprecedented. And then I thought suddenly and quite certainly: She’s lying. They’re all lying. And I remembered my thought of the previous evening of how busy the spaceport had become.
I suppose I’m at the making of history, I decided a few moments later. This could be a late night. The next question, when it came, seemed almost bizarrely irrelevant:
“What do they call them?” Instead of telling the questioner not to waste everyone’s time, the mayor answered seriously.
“The aliens? ‘Dinofelids’ was one idea, but apparently there’s already a Dinofelis among Earth’s fossils. Not something one would have wanted to meet, by all accounts. The Angel’s Pencil crew officially named them Pseudofelis sapiens, and the Earth term now seems to be Pseudofelis sapiens ferox. Bit of a mouthful. However, computers have translated some of their script, and it seems they call themselves”—she had difficulty in pronouncing it—“Kzin.”
Another man on his feet now amid the flurry of whisperings. Without knowing his name I recognized him as a politician. One of van Roberts’s allies in the Progressive Democratic Party who had weakened the grip of the Herrenmanner on city politics and were moving to weaken it in the countryside.
“You say this will mean special executive action. What exactly does that mean? More power for you and your friends?”
“It’s obvious we’ll have to do a number of things. It may mean radical measures. Obviously government must have appropriate powers to deal with an emergency! We are looking at questions of military security.”
“Military!” Another hubbub. It was a bizarre word.
Van Roberts was on his feet: “This is all very convenient for you. What do we know of the bona-fides of this message?”
“You know what interstellar communication costs. Who do you think would send it but the authorities?”
“You mean the precious ARM! Since when have they been friends of democracy? And how do we know the message is real at all?”
Quite obviously people did not want to believe in such a message. There were sudden shouts from all over the hall: “Yes! how do we know it’s real!” I saw some Herrenmanner joining in. Somebody should be taking this in hand, I thought. And then I thought: Who is there to take it in hand? Us. Only us. I think it was easier for us than it would have been for Flatlanders to take it in, but a lot of us were stunned, all the same.
“Excuse me!” That was van Roberts again. He pointed to a date at the corner of one picture.
“These are more than four years old. Much more.”
“They were taken light-years from Earth. Then, apparently, they were dead-filed for years. It was thought they were some sort of hoax. About the time it was decided that they weren’t, other ships began disappearing. Closer to Earth.”
“And if these aliens are real,” someone was saying, “when can we expect them here?”
There was a moment’s silence. It was, I thought, one of those stupid and meaningless questions somebody had to ask. The mayor replied:
“Well, obviously, they could be here…now.”
Grotius turned to the Meteor Guard officer with von Thetoff. “Commander Kleist, have there been any…anomalous events that…are worth commenting on in this context?”
Kleist was a tough, fit-looking young man, typical of the somehow almost feral deep-spacer type. But he spoke carefully now.
“There are always anomalous events in a system as full of debris as this one is.”
“The Sol reports say the Aliens have gravity control. Do you know of any gravity anomalies?”
“There have been things on our mass detectors, yes. And we have seen new monopole sources.”
“When and where!” That was Grotius, with a snap in his voice I had never heard before.
“Continually. But more so lately, I must say. As a matter of fact, we’ve got extra ships on alert now. We can predict meteors fairly well but we thought gravitic anomalies might herald a comet shower. There is an increase in anomalies. Out in the cometary halos at first. But they are moving closer.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“A few days. That’s all.” His hand went up to his mouth and his eyes darted to Grotius. I knew he was lying and was not used to doing so. My major feeling was total puzzlement.
“Can’t we reason with them?” That was Peter Brennan, much taken up with good works and a bore of planetary and possibly interplanetary reputation, a leading light of the local Rotary Club and also of my lodge, a purveyor of pharmaceuticals.
“With whom?”
“These people?” Only Peter Brennan, I thought, would refer to threatening aliens as “these people.” One of his more futile projects was publishing a small Internet newspaper called The Friend, retailing stories of acts of kindness between Herrenmanner and Prolevolk and between Teuties and Tommies. But he had inherited money and had a good business sense and could afford his hobbies.
The mayor was speaking again.
“One way or another, we here represent the leaders, responsible people and relevant experts of Wunderland who could be gathered quickly. I don’t need to tell you that we may be facing a situation that is unprecedented. As soon as the message was received—earlier today—I called Chief Grotius, Commander Kleist, Herrenmann von Diderachs and others who I could reach quickly. Hence this meeting.” I was sure she was lying too.
The mayor continued: “We have agreed that the first thing to do is form a group of interlocking committees to formulate aspects of policy. Recommendations will be implemented by an executive committee composed of representatives of the Nineteen Families, the existing exco including special interest nominees, and the City Council.”
“Point of order, Madam Mayor!” It was one of the politicians. “Giving executive powers to such a committee without the normal procedures is simply unconstitutional!”
“Yes!” From another part of the hall, “With due respect, Madam Mayor, what you are proposing sounds like a simple exercise in administrative lawlessness!”
“We have both a Constitution and a Constitutional Court. Any proposals of this nature should go to that court for a ruling. To side-step Constitutional procedures for administrative convenience is simply the way to chaos!” That another dark-haired, professional-looking man. “I’ve never heard anything like it.”
“None of us have heard anything like this!”
“That’s just the point!”
There were voices rising all over the room. The mayor banged her gavel. I saw her ears were flat and wondered if that was an uncontrollable sign of anger or a deliberate reminder to us that she too was a Herrenfrau of the Nineteen Families. Yet she was speaking in broad hints of the Platt dialect—was that to remind us she also had a foot in the Democrat camp?
“I note your objections. But the point is, I think, that putting some administrative structures into place to deal with this matter may be urgent! The best I can do to reassure you is to suggest that we entrench a provision that the situation be reviewed—radically reviewed if necessary—after one month. By that time we should have more information from Sol and know a bit more about what we are trying to do to solve this tanj snafu.”
That last was Tommie slang. Was she putting that in deliberatel
y also? There was a lot of muttering. Then Grotius played a trump card.
“Before the resolution foreshadowed by Madam Mayor is put to the meeting,” he said, “I should point out that it is envisaged that all invited to be present here tonight will have positions on at least one of the committees. Therefore if anyone is unhappy about policy he or she will be in a position to make a direct input in policy direction.”
That quieted a lot of objections. Most of the people at the gathering were not going to do anything to compromise prospects of their own power, I thought. No politician or Constitutional expert myself, I found I was on something called the Biology Committee and something else called the Defense Committee. Peter Brennan had us set up a Friendship Committee.
It went on a long time. At length I got home for a few hours’ sleep.
Chapter 4
“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”
—Edmund Burke.
I found Dimity Carmody at the Lindenbaum Kafe, sitting at her usual table between the chess players and coffee addicts. With her better-than-fashion-model looks and quietly correct if obviously Tommie clothes among the eternally scruffy students, she was always easy to find, even, or especially, hiding behind those sunglasses she generally wore. I hoped I could talk to her now.
I hadn’t always been able to. We had almost been lovers once, and would have been if it had not been for the difference in our intelligences. It was not a good idea to have a gap of more than 40 IQ points between oneself and one’s partner. A few halting conversations between us had made that difference painfully clear. She enjoyed coming on field trips with me occasionally, but interaction in the deeper aspects of life was a different matter. I was a professor of biology with some chemistry and physics, and she was…what she was. Well, to use an old phrase, she wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist.
Born with an abnormal brainwave, thought to be something in the Asperger’s syndrome family, she had now learned to adopt a protective social coloration. It hadn’t always been that way. Her father told me she had hardly spoken till she was seven years old. He was an outstanding mathematician and physicist—late in life he had worked on Carmody’s Transform—and to have such a child had hurt him badly then, though things improved eventually. Now she could just about cope with normal people. Among her more normal socialization activities, she loved music boxes and had a little collection of them.
She was sitting drinking coffee, something she did a lot of. She didn’t play chess, though, and I remembered the embarrassment when the president of the University club, an Aspirant Master, misled by her appearance of normality, had offered her a game here. He thought someone had set him up. She was doodling on some paper, one of her music boxes tinkling quietly on the table beside her. She signed for me to sit down, and stretched absentmindedly, staring at what she was doing. There was an ordinary notebook in front of her on the table, with many Brahmabytes of capacity available and connection to a really big brain if needed, but she was using pen and paper.
As she stretched I was reminded again that, despite the tricks Wunderland’s gravity can play on the bones and tissue of the lazy and careless, she was near the epitome of human standards of beauty. Her body was a living version of the marble Venus of Cyrene, loveliest of all the statues of antiquity, who makes the Venus de Milo look heavy and clumsy by comparison, but as she stretched her attention remained fixed on the paper. Behind the sunglasses her face looked vacant. “Big tits and little wits/Do often go together” a rude old poet had once written. But it was not as simple as that. She had a pink hibiscus flower in her hair which, I thought, really made me understand what was meant by that term overkill. It seemed to attract the flutterbys, and there was a small cloud of them round the table, their delicate multicolored wings brushing the gold bell of her hair with its pink headband.
I broke an awkward silence. “What’s this?”
Dimity had an almost squeaky voice. A Dimity voice, I called it privately.
“Sums. Difficult sums.”
I was sorry I had asked. Her idea and mine of difficult sums reflected our respective intelligences: embarrassingly different. She went on, with that inevitable tone of patience:
“You know the theories that have been explored here and in Sol System about the ancient stasis fields? That they are somehow uncoupled from the entropy gradient of the Universe?”
“They haven’t got anywhere, have they? It’s all still just speculation.”
“No. Not unless there’s been anything new done in Sol System. But it gave me a notion. It’s…difficult to explain…but it’s to do with gravity as a function of time…”
“N-space?” I hesitated.
“No. But as you know they learned to open a stasis field long ago on Earth with relatively primitive time-retarding technology.”
“Yes. But the result was a disaster. I’m told there were a lot of casualties. And apparently it was nearly worse.”
“That wasn’t the fault of the technology. It was because there was something dangerous inside the field that got out. If we can make time precess at a different rates…well, my theory is that within a gravity field we can’t, or not at the scale I’m talking about. But outside a gravity field—I mean a gravity field like the singularity associated with a star…The singularity acts as a massive governor…Look, does this explain what I mean?”
I recognized some conventional mathematical symbols on her paper along with others that appeared to be her creation. Her father had told me once of how, one day at the end of a childhood that had been near-silent near-inactivity, he had found her playing with the keyboard of his computer, and of his flash of hope that she might grow into a normal child after all (“Who’s a clever little girl, then?”) which had died as he raised his eyes to the screen. They had published her first paper jointly. After that she had been on her own. His work on Carmody’s Transform had brought him praise and when she was given her own department he had helped set it up but he had been little more than her assistant.
“What’s that?” I asked, stabbing at random at one esoteric symbol to cover my embarrassment.
“It stands for the occurrence of Miss Bright’s Paradox.”
“Miss Bright?”
“Yes. You know:
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light.
She went out one day
In just such a way
And arrived the previous night.
“But you see”—she pointed again—“I’ve eliminated it. Or rather I depend upon it: upon the fact that the universe will not permit such a paradox to occur.
“I have always thought that, doing what the tnuctipun did, time could be made to precess at different rates over a much larger scale,” she went on. “You need an engine to generate your second field, of course, which is a problem. Caught between those fields you would be squeezed away from them, like a wet orange seed squeezed between two fingers. I calculate one of the results would be negative mass.”
Stanley the waiter brought us two coffees. The Lindenbaum had de luxe human service in this section and put its prices up accordingly. Gazing at Dimity, he tripped over a neighboring table as he backed away. She went on:
“Within a gravitational singularity, that would be the end of you. You might become something like your own wormhole, millions of miles long, the length depending on how much mass you originally had, and less than the width of a subatomic particle. But beyond the singularity, and if you had a certain velocity, you’d move. Without an increase in mass. If what happens then can be described in terms of physical structure it might be called creating your own big wormhole. A sort of shunt rather than a drive…” She saw she was not getting through and made another attempt. “A matter of getting away from a greater impossibility by being pushed into a lesser one if you like.”
“I don’t understand.” But I believed her.
She gestured
at the symbols again, as if it was all obvious. She had, as I had thought that sad day when I realized our brains couldn’t match, given that phrase “not exactly a rocket scientist” a whole new dimension of meaning.
“If you were moving at sufficient speed already…I think you’d be projected out of the Einsteinian universe…Greenberg was able to tell us a bit of what happened with the ancient drive, the preconditions, but of course he didn’t know how it worked, except that the speed had to be sufficient to affect the average mass of the universe. I think the two major achievements of the ancient technologies were connected. The stasis field was a byproduct of their drive technology, or their drive was a byproduct of the stasis-field technology…”
“Does that mean…?” I couldn’t say it, somehow.
She paused, and then there was something new that was hard and defiant in her voice, a challenge: “We know the tnuctipun could do it! There would be a bending effect of space and…”
“How fast?”
“How fast do you want?”
“Where do you get the energy?”
“From the Big Bang. Space is still full of it…Look at the rest of the universe as the norm, and the singularities as the exception. In terms of getting from one singularity to another, I calculate—it’s on the computer at home—a light-year in about…” She paused. I think she felt herself shy of what she was about to say “…about three days…It doesn’t break the light barrier, it shatters it, because once you move into that…dimension or aspect of space you can keep accelerating!”
There had been theories before. The first major modifications to the Special Theory of Relativity were more than four hundred years old. Things happened, or were thought to happen, at the edges of black holes. Nothing practical so far…but it has been done before, once before, by a race within an empire which, it was thought, had controlled most of the Spiral Arm at least and which had vanished before life emerged from the seas of Earth.