Xeelee: Endurance (29 page)

‘And what will I meet there?’

‘The one known in your human rumours as the Seer.’

Kanda laughed. ‘You lucky cuss . . . Go, man. Go!’

But still Donn hesitated. ‘I’ll come with you if you let these others go. Not back to their cave under the ice. Send them home. Don’t harm them further.’

The Ambassador didn’t pause. ‘Done.’

‘Thank you,’ whispered Hama Belk.

Kanda grinned. ‘A brief life, Hama?’

‘Not that brief, thanks.’

Donn said, ‘One more thing, Ambassador.’

The Ambassador rolled. ‘Jack Raoul would have admired your courage in negotiating.’

‘Find my brother. Benj Wyman. He’s here somewhere, one of your “Samples”.’

‘Not mine. The faction who—’

Donn cut him off. ‘Find him. Send him home too.’

‘Done.’

‘All right.’ Donn took a step towards the Ambassador.

‘Wait.’ It was Five. ‘Take me with you, virgin. If you’re to meet the Seer, I want to be there.’

‘Why? To kill it?’

‘If it’s necessary, you’ll need somebody to do it.
You
won’t, that’s for sure.’

Donn asked, ‘Ambassador?’

The Ambassador rolled. ‘Abandon your weapons, Sample 5A43.’

‘Five. My name is Five.’

‘Abandon your weapons.’

Five was obviously reluctant. But she took her heavy projectile weapon and her quiver of arrows and her stabbing sword, and handed them all to Hama.

Donn held out his hand to her. ‘Come, then. But no more of the “virgin”.’

She clasped his hand; he could feel her strength through the double layer of Ghost fabric. Then they walked together, following the Silverman and the Ambassador, back into the devastated city.

The flow of Ghosts into the dodecahedral transport terminal had stopped, perhaps disrupted by the chaos the humans had caused. But, everywhere, Ghosts poured back into the crumpled heart of their city, as a purposeful operation of recovery began. Donn found it hard not to flinch, as if all those shining globular bodies in the air might come tumbling down on his head. The Ambassador assured them they would be safe.

But Five’s gloved hand grasped Donn’s, hard.

Donn asked, ‘So how are you feeling?’

‘Like I’m two years old again,’ she said. ‘Stripped of everything I built up for myself. They’ve got me back, haven’t they?’

‘No,’ Donn said firmly. ‘You walked into this – your choice. And you’ll be walking back out of it too.’

She thought about that. ‘You promise?’

‘I promise.’ And you were wrong, Hama, he thought. I did get to save her after all – or at least there’s a chance I will. ‘So, Ambassador. This device – is this how you’ve been snatching people?’

‘Shall we avoid such loaded words, Donn Wyman? We have been developing a new non-local transportation technology. It is the outcome of a wide-ranging programme of physical research . . .’

He told Donn that the Ghosts’ origin, under a failing sun, had led them to believe they lived in a flawed universe. So they wished to understand its fine-tuning.

‘
Why are we here
? You see, there is only a narrow range of the constants of physics within which life of
any
sort is possible. We study this question by pushing at the boundaries – by tinkering with the laws which sustain and contain us all. Thus we explore the boundaries of reality.’

‘While snatching children,’ Five said.

‘Get to the point, Ambassador,’ Donn said.

‘We have found a way to adjust the value of Planck’s constant: the number which gives, in human physics, the scale of quantum uncertainty.’

Five just stared. ‘What are you
talking
about?’

Donn stared at her, remembering how she had been brought up. ‘Planck’s constant
–
a small number, very small, one of the fundamental constants of physics. It’s to do with the Uncertainly Principle. But in real terms
–
suppose you measured an electron’s position to within a billionth of a centimetre. Then the momentum uncertainty would be such that a second later you couldn’t be sure where the damn thing was to within a hundred kilometres. The Principle is describing a fundamental fuzziness in reality
—’

‘So what?’

Donn frowned. ‘Well, what if you could change that fuzziness? Make it more, or less . . . Everybody knows that Jack Raoul got himself involved in a situation where Ghosts messed with Planck’s constant. They reduced it—’

‘Yes,’ said the Ambassador. ‘We were endeavouring to produce an AI of arbitrarily large capacity.’

‘It was a disaster.’

‘Well, yes. But in the end a useful technology was derived – Ghost hide, as you call it.’

Five was struggling to follow all this. ‘And is this what you’ve done here? You’ve decreased this Planck number again?’

‘No. This time we have
increased
it, Sample.’

Donn saw it. ‘You’ve increased the uncertainty in the universe – or a bit of it.’ He thought fast. ‘A particle has a quantum function, which describes the probability you’ll find it in any given location. But the probability is non-zero
everywhere
, throughout the universe. And if you increase Planck then you increase all those probabilities.’

‘You’re beginning to see it,’ the Ambassador said. ‘It is hard to imagine a more elegant mode of transport, in theory: you simply make it more likely that you are at your destination than your starting point.’

Donn was stunned by this audacity. ‘
In theory
.’

‘The engineering details are soluble.’

Donn laughed. ‘Evidently. Or we wouldn’t be standing here, would we?’

‘“Soluble.” “Evidently.”’ Five stared at Donn. ‘You’re talking to this Ghost as if all this is
normal.
As if you’re discussing a new kind of stabbing sword.’ She turned to the Ambassador. ‘
How
do you change the laws of physics?’

‘Quagma,’ said Donn immediately.

He understood some of this. The principle of the GUTdrive, which had powered ancient ships like his mother’s own
Miriam Berg
, was related. Quagma was the state of matter that had emerged from the Big Bang, a magma of quarks. And at such temperatures the fundamental forces of physics unified into a single superforce. Quagma was bound together only by that superforce. When quagma was allowed to cool and expand, the superforce decomposed into the sub-forces of nature, nuclear, gravitational, electromagnetic. But by controlling the decomposition, you could select the ratios between those forces, ratios that governed the fundamental constants – including Planck’s constant.

Humans knew the importance of quagma. In Donn’s father’s family legend, nearly two hundred years ago, Joens Wyman had been involved in a jaunt in some kind of impossible ship as humans had raced Ghosts across space to retrieve a lode of this primordial treasure.

Donn said, ‘You scare us, with what you do, you Ghosts. You always have and always will.’

The Ghost rolled and bobbed. ‘Sometimes we scare ourselves, believe it or not. Shall we proceed?’ And it swept boldly into the open dodecahedral chamber. Doors dilated closed around it, and when they opened, only a second later, the Ghost had gone, a tonne of spinning flesh vanished.

Donn and Five were left alone, surrounded by anonymous shoals of Ghosts. Donn grabbed Five’s hand again. ‘Together?’

‘Let’s get on with it.’

The chamber was a blank-walled box, silvered like all Ghost architecture. When the doors closed behind them, they were suspended in the dark, just for a heartbeat.

And when the doors opened, they were not in the dark any more.

‘Do not be afraid,’ said the Sink Ambassador.

The Ghost hovered before them, bathed in dazzling light. Behind it Donn saw the silent figure of the Silverman, the stump of its severed arm a jarring asymmetry.

Five squeezed Donn’s hand. ‘Virgin—’

‘It’s all right. I mean, if they were going to kill us they’d have done it by now. And stop calling me “virgin”. Come on.’

Deliberately he stepped forward, into the light. Keeping tight hold of his hand, Five followed.

Donn found himself standing on a silvered platform, three or four metres across. The Ghost hovered before him. He couldn’t see any support for the platform, though gravity felt about normal. They were entirely bathed in pure white light, above, below, all around, an abstraction of a sky. The light was bright, not quite dazzling. And as Donn’s eyes adjusted he gradually made out structure in the light – billows like clouds, all around, slowly evolving, vacuoles boiling.

When he glanced back, he saw the dodecahedral transit chamber had vanished, leaving just the platform they stood on. Somehow he wasn’t surprised.

The Ambassador said, ‘Where do you think you are?’

‘In the heart of a star,’ Five said. ‘Where else?’

‘But not just any star.’

‘The Boss,’ Donn said. ‘But that’s impossible. Isn’t it, Ambassador?’

‘How did you phrase it earlier? “Evidently not. Or we wouldn’t be standing here, would we?”’

The Silverman said, ‘I understand your reluctance, Donn Wyman. I am human enough to fear falling. Don’t be afraid. Step to the edge. Look down.’

Five wouldn’t move. She stood there, her hide suit still stained by Ghost blood, bathed in starlight. But Donn stepped to the rim of the floating disc.

And he looked down on a Ghost base in the heart of the star. It was a hollowed-out moon, a rock ball that must have been a thousand kilometres wide, riddled with passages and cavities.

The disc began to descend. The motion was smooth, but now Five lunged forward and grabbed at Donn’s arm.

The moon turned into a complex machined landscape below them. Ghost ships and science platforms swept over the pocked terrain, tangles of shining net. And Ghosts themselves drifted up from the chambers and machine emplacements, bobbing like balloons, shining in the star’s deep light. All over the moon’s surface, vast cylindrical structures gleamed. The Ambassador said these were intra-System drives and hyperdrives, engines that had been used to fling this moon into the body of this star and to hold it here.

And there was quagma down there, the Ambassador said, little packets of the primordial stuff, buried in the pits of ancient planetesimal craters. I knew it, Donn thought.

Meanwhile, behind the moon, Donn saw, there were threads of a more intense brightness, just at the limit of visibility, dead straight.

‘The work here is hard,’ the Ambassador said. ‘Often lethal. We have poured workers into this mine of light endlessly.’ And Donn thought of the stream of Ghosts he had seen filing patiently into the transportation booth on Ghostworld. ‘Not all come back, despite all our precautions. But now the work is nearly done.’

Five asked, ‘So how come we aren’t all burned up? We’re in the middle of a
star
.’

‘Perhaps you can see those illuminated threads, beyond the moon? Those are refrigeration lasers. By making ourselves hotter even than this star’s core, we can dump our heat into it. Of course all that you are seeing is a representation, heavily processed. Starstuff is in fact very opaque . . .’

Donn said, ‘You are messing with physics again, aren’t you, Ambassador?’ He thought back to the Coalition’s recent observations of the Boss. ‘We’ve been observing flares. Are you trying to mend the star, to stop the flares? No, not that. Sink Ambassador,
are you destabilising this star
?’

The Ambassador rolled. ‘How would Jack Raoul have put it? “Guilty as charged.” What do you understand of stellar physics?’

‘A little . . .’

Every star was in equilibrium, said the Ghost, with the pressure of the radiation from its fusing core balancing the tendency of its outer layers to fall inwards under gravity. A giant star like the Boss, crushed by its own tremendous weight, needed a
lot
of radiation to keep from imploding. So it ran through its hydrogen fusion fuel quickly, and a detritus of helium ash collected in its core.

‘But that “ash” can fuse too,’ the Ambassador said. ‘The fusion process produces such elements as carbon, oxygen, silicon, each of which fuses in turn . . . The chain ends in iron, which cannot fuse, for if it did so it would
absorb
energy, not release it. And so an inner core of iron builds up at the heart of a star like this. A core bigger than most worlds, Donn Wyman!’

Five asked, ‘So how come it doesn’t just collapse?’

‘Its components are already crushed together as far as they will go. This is a property of atomic matter. Humans know it as the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Of course, in time, as the dead zone spreads through the heart of the star, the repulsion will finally be overcome. Electrons will be forced to merge with protons, producing neutrons – a neutron star will be born, smaller and denser than the iron core. And then there will be a collapse of the outer layers, a catastrophic one. But not yet, not for a long time; for now this star is stable.’

‘Or it was before you came along,’ Donn said. ‘But now you’re changing things, aren’t you? Planck’s constant again?’

‘Jack Raoul would be proud of you, Donn. Like you, he was a good guesser.’

‘If you were to use your moon-machine to reduce Planck in the star’s core—’

‘Then Pauli repulsion would be reduced. The iron core would collapse prematurely.’

The Ghost showed them a Virtual representation of what would happen next. The implosion would rapidly mutate into an explosion. Shock waves would form and rebound from the inner layers, and a vast pulse of neutrinos would power further expansion.

‘The Boss will be blown apart,’ said Donn, wondering.

‘Yes. A detonation over in seconds, after years of preparation . . . But the explosion will be asymmetrical, because that layer heated by the neutrinos is turbulent. This is the key to such explosions, and it is this turbulence we are hoping to control. For the asymmetry will blast the neutron star out of the debris of the Boss – it will leave with a significant velocity while releasing a pulse of gravitational wave energy which we would hope to tap and—’