Exultant (51 page)

“But you’re not
engineers,
” Darc said contemptuously. “Not if you resist innovation. You’re museum-keepers.”

Eliun said, “Commander, our technologies reached their plateau of perfection millennia ago. There can be no innovation that does not worsen what we have. We Engineers preserve the wisdom of ages—”

“You pore over your ancient, unchanging designs, polished with use—”

“—and we standardize. Have you thought about that? Commander, your pilots fly greenships of
identical
design from one end of this Galaxy to the other. Think of the cost savings, the economies of scale!”

Nilis was as angry as Pirius had ever seen him. “But your perfect designs and your standardized parts lists are not winning the war, Guild-master! And—yes, I’ll say it now—in your obstructionism you seem bent on ensuring that this project, which might hasten the war’s end, never gets a chance to fly.”

Pirius laid a hand on Nilis’s threadbare sleeve. “Commissary, take it easy.”

Nilis shook him off. “If there’s one thing I can’t bear, Pirius, it is the hoarding of knowledge as power. There’s too much of that on Earth—too much! And I won’t have it here.”

Eliun said coldly, “And I won’t take lectures in duty from rogue Commissaries and junior Naval officers.”

“Then we are at an impasse. I suggest we adjourn this meeting until I’ve heard from Earth.” Nilis turned to Pila. “Adjutant, would you please open a channel to Minister Gramm’s office on Earth? I think we must appeal to the Minister, and through him to the Plenipotentiary for Total War and the Grand Conclave itself, where I hope this issue will be resolved.”

Eliun laughed in his face. “Commissary, don’t you understand?
The Engineers have seats on the Conclave, too.
”

“We will see,” said Nilis darkly, and he stalked from the room.

Pirius felt oddly calm. He had sat through too many meetings like this. And he had been distracted from these fireworks by his vague thoughts about intersecting laser light. As the meeting broke up, he tapped Darc and Torec on the shoulders. “Listen. I have an idea. . . .”

As they left the room they passed the Silver Ghost, which hadn’t moved or said a word during the interrupted meeting. Pirius wondered what emotions swirled beneath that glistening, featureless hide.

On the way, Pirius called ahead for a sim room to be set up.

Only a few minutes after ducking out of Nilis’s adjourned meeting, the three of them were once more sitting in their crew blisters, at the end of the outstretched limbs of the
Earthworm.
The Virtual simulation around them was faultless, although the target Rock looked a little too shiny to be true.

As they waited for the sim to finish booting up, Darc growled, “This is bringing back unhappy memories. Whatever you’re planning, Pirius, I hope it’s worth it.”

Pirius said hesitantly, “Commander—can I speak freely?”

Darc laughed.

“The way you took on the Guild-master. I was surprised.”

“Did you enjoy watching me blow my career?”

“No, sir.”

“Not that there’s much left to blow,” Darc said. “Marshal Kimmer will see to that, once this project is over.”

Pirius said frankly, “When we started this, I’d never have thought you would come out fighting for the Commissary like that. With respect, sir.”

Darc grunted. “I don’t much like Nilis. I think he’s an irresponsible idiot, and his project is almost bound to fail.
Almost.
But in that ‘almost’ is a universe of possibility. If there’s a chance we can win the war with it, we have to resource the project until the point at which it fails. That’s our clear duty. And I never imagined the kind of crass reactions and ass-covering conservatism that we have come up against, over and over. I’ve seen a side of our politics I don’t like, Pilot, even inside the military.”

Torec said, “I suppose we have all come on a long journey.”

Darc said, “But if either of you repeat any of this to Nilis I’ll rip off your heads with my bare hands. Do you understand me?”

“Received and understood,” Pirius said.

With a soft chime the sim signaled it was ready to run.

Darc said, “It’s time you explained what we’re doing here, Pirius.”

“I want to try an idea,” Pirius said. “It came to me when Torec used those laser pointers in the meeting.”

She sounded baffled. “Lasers?”

“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 the 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.