‘Thank you,’ the Vice President said. ‘All right, Brewster, if you would, please.’
The Presidential science adviser looked around the table. ‘There isn’t actually much I can add to the unisphere news reports, except to confirm that it’s real. At our request, CST has opened an exploratory wormhole in interstellar space beyond Tanyata, and used its own instruments to confirm the envelopment event.’
‘Our equipment is considerably more sophisticated than the telescopes used by Dudley Bose,’ Nigel said. He ignored the quiet snort from Thompson Burnelli. ‘Even so, there is very little raw data available. The entire process takes about two thirds of a second. We don’t believe the barrier can be a physical shell, it must be some kind of force field.’
‘One which cuts off the visual spectrum?’ Lee Ki asked.
‘In scale alone, this technology is way beyond anything we have,’ Brewster Kumar said. ‘The damn thing is thirty AUs in diameter. I wouldn’t even expect it to be anything like our molecular bonding shields, or even a quantum field.’
‘Are there any realistic theories about what the barrier is?’
‘We’ve got two dozen in every university physics department across the Commonwealth. But that’s hardly the point; it’s what it does which is interesting. It’s an infrared emitter, which means it’s preserving the solar system inside.’
‘How’s that?’ Gabrielle Else asked him.
‘Essentially: there is no build-up of energy inside the barrier. When the star’s electromagnetic output hits the barrier, it passes through to be emitted as heat. If it didn’t, if the barrier contained it, well, the effect would be like a pressure cooker in there. We believe the barrier also radiates the solar wind as infrared energy as well, although at this distance it’s difficult to tell.’
‘In other words,’ Nigel said. ‘Whoever put them up around the Dyson Pair is still living happily inside. The conditions in there haven’t changed from before.’
‘Which brings us to the next consideration,’ Brewster Kumar said. ‘Were these barriers erected by the aliens living at the stars, or were they imposed on them? Neither case is particularly helpful to us.’
‘How can isolationism be detrimental to us?’ Rafael Columbia asked.
‘Isolationism in our history is traditionally enacted in times of hostility,’ Nigel said. ‘Such a situation must have existed at the Dyson Pair when this happened. If it is the alien civilizations of these two star systems who erected the barriers, we have to consider the possibility that their motive was defensive. If so, that was one godawful weapon they were protecting themselves against. The alternative is just as bad, that some other alien species feared them so badly they wanted them contained. Either way, there could well be two alien species out there, both with weapons and technology so far ahead of ours it might as well be magic.’
‘Thank you, Sir Arthur,’ Ozzie muttered.
Nigel grinned at his old friend; he doubted anyone else in the room got the reference. They were all too young by at least a century.
‘I think you’re wrong in assigning them human motivations,’ Gabrielle Else said. ‘Couldn’t this simply be a case of stop the universe I want to get off? After all, the Silfen are fairly insular.’
‘Insular?’ Rafael Columbia exclaimed. ‘They’re so spread out we don’t even know how many planets they’re settled on.’
‘It is the purpose of this Council to take the worst-case scenario into account,’ the Vice President said. ‘And the hostile locale scenario is certainly plausible.’
‘Speaking of the Silfen,’ Ozzie said. ‘Why don’t we just ask them what’s going down here?’
‘We have,’ the Vice President said. ‘They say they don’t really know.’
‘Hell, man, they say that about everything. Ask them if there’s going to be daylight tomorrow and they’ll scratch their asses and ask you what you mean by “tomorrow”. You can’t just ask them a straight question like that. Goddamn loafing mystics, they’ve got to be chased down and fooled into giving us an answer.’
‘Yes, thank you, Mr Isaacs, I am aware of that. We do have a great many Silfen cultural experts, all of whom are still pursuing this avenue as a matter of urgency. Hopefully, they will coax a more coherent answer from the Silfen. Until that happens, we are left relying on our own resources. Hence the need for this Council meeting.’
Ozzie threw her a furious look, and snuggled down into his chair for a good sulk.
‘I don’t believe the barrier could have been imposed on those stars by an external agency,’ Lee Ki said. ‘It’s not logical. If you fear someone so much and have the ability to imprison entire stars, then you would not make the barrier permeable. You would use it as a pressure cooker, or do worse than that. No, for my money it was defensive. Something very nasty was heading towards the Dyson Pair, and they slammed the gates shut in its face.’
‘In which case, where is it now?’ Thompson Burnelli asked.
‘Exactly,’ Brewster Kumar said.
‘It no longer exists,’ Ozzie said. ‘And you guys are all far too paranoid.’
‘Care to qualify that?’ Thompson Burnelli said impassively.
‘Come on, man; the Dyson Pair are over twelve hundred light-years away from Tanyata. This all happened when the fucking Roman Empire ruled the Earth. Astronomy is history.’
‘It was closer to Genghis Khan than the Romans,’ Brewster Kumar said. ‘And no culture as powerful and advanced as the Dyson Pair or their aggressor is going to fade away in a single millennium. We certainly won’t, and we’re nowhere near that technology level yet. You can’t just bury your head in the sand over this and hope it all blew away all those years ago.’
‘I agree,’ the Vice President said. ‘Far Away is only five hundred and fifty light-years from the Dyson Pair, and they’re observing the barrier still intact.’
‘One other piece of information which CST hasn’t made public yet,’ Nigel said. ‘We also used our exploratory worm-hole to track down the envelopment time for Dyson Beta. Unfortunately, our first guess was the right one.’
Rafael Columbia was suddenly very attentive. ‘You mean they’re the same?’
‘Yes. As seen from Tanyata, the Pair have a two light-year linear separation distance. We opened a wormhole two light-years closer to Beta from where we made our observation of Alpha’s enclosure. We saw Beta’s enclosure, which is identical to Alpha’s. They occur within three minutes of each other.’
‘It’s defensive,’ Eugene Cinzoul said. ‘It has to be. A civilization inhabiting two star systems was approached by an aggressor.’
‘Curious coincidence,’ Ozzie said.
‘What is?’ the Vice President asked.
‘Something aggressive and immensely powerful closes in on the one other civilization in this part of the galaxy that was technologically savvy enough to protect itself from them. I don’t believe it, man. Galactic timescale simply won’t allow that to happen. We only co-exist with the Silfen because they’ve existed for like millions of years.’
The Vice President gave the SI portal a troubled look. ‘What is your interpretation of this?’
‘Mr Isaacs is correct in stating that such a conflict between two balanced powers is extremely unlikely,’ the SI said. ‘We know how rare it is for sentience to evolve on any life-bearing planet; as a consequence, technological civilizations rarely co-exist in the galaxy – although the High Angel is an exceptional case. However, the proposition cannot be excluded simply because of this. We also acknowledge Mr Kumar’s point, that any civilization capable of performing such a feat will not quickly disappear from the galaxy.’
‘They can evolve,’ Ozzie said quickly. ‘They can throw off all their primitive instincts. After all, we leave a lot of our shit behind us.’
‘You also generate a great deal of new “shit”,’ the SI said. ‘All of which is depressingly similar to your old “shit”. And no primitive culture could erect these barriers round the Dyson Pair
. But again, we concede the point. The barrier mechanism may simply be an ancient device that has been left on for no good reason other than its creators have indeed moved onwards and upwards. There are endless speculations which can be made from the presently observed data. None of which can be refined as long as that data remains so scarce and so old.’
‘What are you suggesting?’ the Vice President asked.
‘That is obvious, is it not? This Council was brought into existence to formulate a response to any perceived threat to the Commonwealth. No coherent response to the Dyson Pair can be made based on the currently available data. More information must be acquired. You must visit the Dyson Pair to ascertain their current status, and the reason behind the enclosures.’
‘The cost—’ exclaimed the Vice President. She gave Nigel a quick guilty glance.
He ignored it; the SI had made things considerably simpler for him. ‘Yes, it would cost a lot to reach the Dyson Pair by conventional methods,’ he said. ‘We’d have to locate at least seven H-congruous planets, stretched out between the Commonwealth and the Dyson Pair, and then build commercial-size wormhole generators on each of them. It would take decades, and there would be little economic benefit.’
‘The Commonwealth treasury can hardly subsidize CST,’ Crispin Goldreich said.
‘You did for Far Away,’ Nigel said mildly. ‘That was our last alien contact.’
‘One station on Half Way!’ the senator said hotly. ‘And if nothing else, that convinced me we should never do such a thing again. Far Away has been a total waste of time and effort.’
Nigel resisted the impulse to comment directly. The Hal-garths had direct allies around the table in addition to Rafael, and their family were the main beneficiaries from Far Away. Not, as they’d be the first to admit, that there were many benefits.
‘I would like to propose something a little more practical than consecutive wormholes,’ Nigel said. Everyone around the table looked at him expectantly, even Ozzie, which was quite an achievement. The Vice President’s expression of interest tightened at the simple demonstration of true political power.
‘I’m in total agreement with the SI that we need to know exactly what has happened at the Dyson Pair,’ Nigel continued. ‘And we can neither afford the cost nor the wait to build a chain of wormholes to take us there. So I suggest we build a starship instead.’
The idea was greeted with several nervous smiles. Ozzie simply laughed.
‘You mean a faster than light ship?’ Brewster Kumar asked. There was a strong note of excitement in his voice. ‘Can we actually do that?’
‘Of course. It’s a relatively simple adaptation of our current wormhole generator system; instead of a stable fixed wormhole which you travel through, this will produce a permanent flowing wormhole that you travel inside of.’
‘Oh man,’ Ozzie said. ‘That is so beautiful. Whadoyaknow, the space cadets won after all. Let’s press the red button and zoom off into hyperspace.’
‘It’s not hyperspace,’ Nigel answered, slightly too quickly. ‘That’s just a tabloid name for a very complex energy manipulation function, and you know it.’
‘Hyperspace,’ Ozzie said contentedly. ‘Everything we built our wormhole to avoid.’
‘Except in cases like this, when it makes perfect sense,’ Nigel said. ‘We can probably build this ship inside of a year. A crack exploratory team can go out there, take a look round and tell us what’s happening. It’s quick, and it’s cheap.’
‘Cheap?’ Crispin Goldreich queried.
‘Relatively, yes.’ The starship proposals had been sitting dormant in Nigel’s personal files for over a century. Always an exercise in wishful thinking, one he hadn’t managed to fully let go. He’d never quite forgotten (nor erased) his feeling of admiration when he watched the Eagle II fly gracefully out of the Martian horizon to settle on Arabia Terra. There was something noble about spacecraft voyaging through the vast and hostile void, carrying with them the pinnacle of the human spirit, everything good and worthwhile about the race. And he was probably the last human alive who remembered that. No, he corrected himself, not the last. ‘The CST corporation and Augusta Treasury would be prepared to fund up to thirty per cent of the hardware costs.’
‘In return for exclusivity,’ Thompson Burnelli said scathingly.
Nigel smiled softly at him. ‘I believe that precedent was established during the Far Away venture.’
‘Very well,’ the Vice President said. ‘Unless there’s an alternative, we’ll take a vote on the proposal.’
Nobody was against it. But Nigel had known that from the start, even Burnelli raised his hand in approval. The ExoProtectorate Council was basically a rubber stamp for CST exploration and encounter strategy. With Nigel’s blessing, CST had started practical design work on the starship three days earlier. All that remained were the thousand interminable details of the project, its funding and management. Details they would all delegate back down to their deputies. This meeting was policy only.
‘So are you going to captain this mission?’ Rafael Columbia asked as they stood up to leave.
‘No,’ Nigel said. ‘Much as I’d like to, that position requires various qualities and experience which I simply don’t have, not even lurking in secure storage at my rejuve clinic. But I know a man that does.’
*
Oaktier was an early phase one planet, settled in 2089. Its longevity had produced a first-class economy which ran smoothly in conjunction with a rich and impressive cultural heritage. The crystal skyscrapers and marble condo-pyramids that comprised the centre of the capital, Darklake City, made that quite obvious to any observer arriving fresh at the CST planetary station from Seattle.
Most of the original settlers had arrived from Canada and Hong Kong, with a goodly proportion of Seattle’s residents joining up with them. As such, its influences were memorably varied, with ultramodern trends sitting comfortably alongside carefully maintained old traditions. Given such roots, formality and hard work had seeped into the population’s genome over the centuries. As a people, they’d flourished and expanded; two hundred and forty years after settlement, the population was just over one and a quarter billion, spread out over eight continents. The vast majority working diligently and living well.
With the Seattle legacy perhaps weighting the decision, Darklake City had been sited in a hilly area of the sub-tropics. With its slopes of rich soil, constant heat, and abundant water from rivers and lakes, the area was ideal for coffee growing. The lake shore which made up the south-eastern edge of the city now sprawled for thirty-five kilometres, incorporating marinas, civic parks, expensive apartment blocks, boatyards, leisure resorts, and commercial docks. At night, it was a gaudy neon rainbow of colour as holographic adverts roofed the roads like luminescent storm clouds, while buildings competed against each other to emphasize their features in raw photonic energy. Bars, restaurants and clubs used music, live acts, and semi-legal pleasure-tingle emitters to entice the party people and it crowds in off the street.
Some forty years before Dudley Bose made his vital discovery, the night she was due to be murdered, Tara Jennifer Shaheef could see it all laid out before her from the lounge balcony of her twenty-fifth-floor apartment in the centre of the city. The shoreline was like the glimmering edge of the galaxy, falling off into complete blackness beyond. That was where life and civilization ended. The only thing out there was a few sparkling cruise ships which slid across the deep water like rogue star clusters lost in the deep night.
A gentle evening breeze stirred her hair and robe and she leant against the balcony rail. There was a sugary scent of blossom in the air, which she relished as she inhaled. Oaktier had long ago banned combustion engines and fossil fuel power stations from the planet; local politicians boasted that its atmosphere was cleaner than Earth’s. So she breathed in the air contentedly. There was no noise. At this height she was well insulated from the low buzz of electric vehicles on the streets below, and the bustli
ng shoreline three kilometres away was too far for its racket to carry.
If she turned her head left, she could see the bright grid of city lights stretch out into the foothills. A pale light cast by the grey-blue crescent of Oaktier’s low moon was just strong enough to reveal the mountains behind them which formed a low wall across the night sky. In the daytime, long terrace lines of coffee bushes were visible banding the slopes. White plantation mansions nestled in lush groves of trees, set back from the thin roads which snaked up to the summits.
Two rejuvenations ago, she’d made her life out there, away from the more frenetic urban existence. Sometimes, she dreamed of reverting, heading back into the countryside for a quieter, slower existence. An existence away from her intense, driven husband, Morton. After a couple more rejuvenations, she would probably do it, just to recharge herself. But not just yet, she still enjoyed the faster mainstream life.
She went back into the apartment, and the balcony doors slid shut behind her. Her bare feet padded quietly on the lounge’s hard teakwood floor as she made her way across to the bathroom.
In the apartment tower’s basement, her killer entered the power utility room. He removed the cover from one of the building management array cabinets, and took a handheld array from his pocket. The unit spooled out a length of fibre optic cable with a standard v-jack on the end, which he plugged into the cabinet’s exposed maintenance socket. Several new programs were downloaded, and quickly piggybacked their way onto the existing software. When it was done, he pulled the v-jack out and replaced the cover with the correct locking tool.
Tara Jennifer Shaheef’s bathroom was decorated with large brown marble slabs on the floor and walls; while the ceiling was a single giant mirror. Recessed lighting around the rim of the bath cast a warm rose-pink glow across the room, flickering in an imitation of candlelight. The bath itself was a sunken affair big enough for two, which she’d filled to the brim and added a variety of salts. When she got in, the spar nozzles came on, churning the water against her skin. She sank into the sculpted seat, and rested her head back on the cushion. Her e-butler called up some music from the household array. Tara listened to the melody in a pleasant semi-doze.