Adam Roberts - Stone(2002) Page 4
It is, I understand (for I am no expert here) a weak-force, a property of atomic life. And by co-ordinating this motion over a whole body, it is possible to flick forward through space instantaneously! The distance covered is minuscule of course, no larger than the difference between two atomic orbits, a fraction of an atom's width – the smallest thing. It takes a trillion of these flicks to move you even a few metres in real space; but if you can co-ordinate these trillions and trillions of movements then you can move yourself faster than light. How fast? There are two constraints; one is the computing time it takes to coordinate and calculate trillions upon trillions of shifts. If your computing time is sluggish then your speed is reduced; if your computing time is fast enough you can reach thousands of times the velocity of light itself.
The other constraint is as follows, and depends upon the fact that this weak-force drive has certain defining features. This drive is best at moving the very small thing, poor at moving large structures. According to the theory, its ideal traveller would be a dimensionless point. Such a point is a mathematical fiction, but if it were possible to imagine it in the real world then it would be possible to accelerate it many millions of times faster than light. The larger an object, the more it expands outward from this dimension-less dot, the slower the faster-than-light speeds that can be achieved. The constraint can be mapped. It is a logarithmic scale that shows a rapid falling away, such that it is almost impossible to accelerate an object larger than about ten metres diameter to speeds greater than light.
Humanity does build and own spaceships; some sleek and slim, some huge and rambling; but none of these ships can travel faster than light. The difficulties of co-ordinating so much quantum shifting means that travellers through space have to do without the benefit of a spaceship. All the old dreams of ancient culture about gigantic disc-shaped or stick-insect spacecraft proved wrong, dear stone. The truth is this: a single human being straps a pack to their back or belly (depending on taste). From this pack a foam is extruded that quickly covers her or him, enveloping the whole body. The foam is smart, a congregation of powerful processors (not Ais, which cannot survive faster-then-light travel) shaping it to provide an airway in at the mouth and to cushion the whole body. Then the granules of foam themselves adapt, some processing the information necessary to repeat-shift the body through space, some to protect and comfort the human being inside by regulating heat, some to provide jets of gas to orient them. The outside of the foam hardens diamond-firm, to protect the traveller against smaller impacts and to insulate them against the extreme cold of space. Then the traveller falls into the vacuum from (perhaps) the hanger of their slow, slow spaceship; and away they go. It is a marvellous thing, this faster-than-light travel; it bypasses the time-dilation, or time-compression, effects of conventional travel so effectively that the difference between your own journey time and the time that passes for a third party is no more than five per cent.
Human beings have been travelling like this for a thousand years now, more or less; cocooned in foam, dancing their way over immense distances.
But there is another constraint. Now, this is important, dear stone. This is what shapes our galaxy, what gives the borders to the different human cultures. Here are certain facts.
Firstly, this faster-than-light travel is a precarious business, based on the atomic weak-force; and if it is disrupted it degrades very rapidly.
Secondly, material features of our universe interfere with the successful promulgation of the faster-than-light drive. Too much matter degrades it, so it is not possible to travel faster than light through areas of space where the concentrations of matter are too great; nebulae, gaseous concentrations, dust. Other things disrupt it, things we know little of; barriers and blockages detectable only by the fact that the weak-force drive degrades and speed slowes in these places. There are areas of t'T space through which it is possible and easy to speed at thousands of times the velocity of light. There are other areas, where travel is more sluggish, difficult, and speeds of only a few c are possible. Then there is the larger array of spaces where faster-than-light travel is not possible, and spaceships must crawl at sublight speeds.
And this is the shape of our empire, the worlds of t'T.
Actually, my dear stone, I realise that I am being simplistic. The circling of electrons around an atomic core, the cat's cradle of strong-force and weak-force, of electromagnetic force and gravitational force, is much more complex than I implied. It is not dots circling a clockwork centre, not an orrery. This is the whole point of the universe at very small levels. Nothing is certain, the way that things in our universe can be certain. We cannot know where a subatomic particle is and where it is going at the same time. Fancy that! We can know where it is, or we can know where it is going, but not both at the same time. Is that not strange? More than this: these quantities – position, speed, mass, state – are not determined until we observe them. You may think about the implications of that statement, dear stone, until your stony being understands it, and it will be sooner than I. This, as a philosopher once explained it, is partly how the weak-force drive works, a process of supercharged computational observation of the subatomic that forces the position of the entire matrix to repeatedly define itself further and further along the line along which we choose to travel. This is why only human beings can travel FTL; dumb cargo cannot be accelerated that way. Don't worry if this baffles you; I can't say I understand it either. You and I, stone, can curl up together in our ignorance.
Still, I'm straying from the point. What was I saying? There is fast-space, there is slow space, and there is space so cluttered or characterised at a deep level by such interference patterns (which we don't really understand) that faster-than-light travel is impossible and humanity is compelled to travel sublight if we travel at all. But sublight travel takes many many years, years made worse by the time-dilation that ages everybody around you as you travel, and few have the patience – even if dotTech gives them the longevity.
Fast space, slow-space. We assume that the space between the galaxies will mostly be fast-space. Perhaps people have travelled those distant spaces, but it would take many hundreds of years for us, in t'T space, to work our way out through the slow and sublight spiral arm of this galaxy to get to the intergalactic vastnesses. I'm sure some people have made this journey; peoples of the Wheah, perhaps, born closer to the galaxy's rim. Palmetto tribes – who knows? Their communications can travel only at the speed of light, and will take millennia to reach us.
Closer to the core of the galaxy, matter is too dense; the further corewards you go, the slower, and then things lapse into sublight. Most of the space in the galaxy, we suppose, is slow-space; but not the spaces of the t'T. We occupy a stretch of fast-space hundreds of light years wide and deep and thousands long. And in this space faster-than-light travel is possible; travel at thousands of times the speed of light.
Why does this fast-space exist? Dear stone, I do not know why. It is not that the density of stars in t'T space is any less than in the same latitude of the galaxy elsewhere; it has something to do with the purity of the particular space, the lack of both sufficiently dense nebula material and of the superstring interference. Or so they tell us. I am not an expert. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that humanity is able to travel across t'T space at speeds of up to 3000 c. Three thousand times the speed of light. This is where we are, dear stone; this is our space.
It is not a clear space. It is bounded on one border, corewards, by the Bulk; a sublight stretch of space, enormous, taller than wide. On the rimwards side, away from this fog of static stars and dust is the Tongue: nearly 2000 light years long and several hundred wide, stretching up to roof our clearing of fast-space and down to spread out and floor it. It is these elongations of the broken space, the slow-space runnels in a mass of sublight, that borders t'T. Or reverse the picture, flip the negative: don't think of clear space clouded here and there with obstruction. Think of matter-dotted galactic sp
ace as a slow medium, treacly, with occasional miraculous openings, and that we live in one such opening, an opening thousands of light years wide.
And running down the middle of this great space (perhaps the reason it exists in the first place, or else a function of its existence) is a great Gravity Trench. An immense stretch of dense gravitational attraction, broken in the middle but still magnificent, enormous.
I have discovered much more about the Gravity Trench, dear stone. I'll tell you about that in a little while.
So: in the realms of t'T we can travel very fast indeed. Three thousand times the speed of light is fast enough, I would hope. Occasional local impurities in the fabric of space-time mean that the speed of some journeys is rather limited: but through most of the space speeds can be enormous. I have mentioned human populations in other spaces than those of the t'T. There are stories, too, of races and people further removed than that. But these other places are not blessed with the rapid travel of the t'T. The space of the Wheah, for instance, is difficult; it is hard to maintain speeds faster than light, and impossible to go more than three c. Their culture, by all accounts (for they are a shadowy set of peoples, little known of amongst the t'T) is very different from ours. Everything is slower. Journeys take years, or decades; trade becomes a long term prospect. Tribes accumulate in great space-borne communities, or spend their whole lives on planet surfaces, never venturing into space. In the Wheah they despise nanotechnology, for religious reasons, and so they live short lives filled with disease and uncertainty. Many are happier not risking these lives in space. They are a conservative and cautious peoples.
But all this is of no interest to you, is it, beloved stone? Well, let me tell you one more thing, something to do with the nature of fast-space. It is shrinking, they say. Or the slow-space around it is slowly expanding; one of the two. And the result of this is that within a millennium people will only be able to travel from world to world at a maximum of three c; travel time will increase thousandfold. Maybe worse than that will happen – maybe we will be thrown back into sublight, and worlds will become almost entirely isolated from worlds. It is inevitable, it cannot be helped. From the point of view of eternity, our space, the pocket of fast-space that allowed the growth of the empire of t'T, has only opened for a short time, and will close again. And we will watch it close. I won't. The dotTech has left my body now, so I will age and decay quickly enough. But the people I grew up with will, and their children will.
Tired now. Dear stone, I will leave you here, place you on the chocolate-coloured mud for a few hours, and you and I will sleep.
With love,
Ae.
Prison-breaking
1st
Dear Stone,
The AI nestled inside my skull now, as imprisoned in there as I was in the jailstar. Except that it whispered to me, sending minute pulses of electricity through the speech-recognition parts of my brain that sounded to me like several curious, effect-less and echo-less voices speaking together in perfect harmony. And it told me that I wasn't trapped in my prison any longer. I could escape.
The level of dotTech in your blood, the AI told me, is almost nil. It's extraordinary. I could have told it as much; I knew how little nanotechnology remained inside my body – knew it from my aches, from the ways grazes refused to heal, from the way headaches bloomed and faded behind my face. I wasn't really human any more.
'So?' I said, muttering to myself. I did not need, as it happened, actually to speak the words; the AI, nestled inside my brain-tissue, could decipher my words from the electrical patternings of my speech centres, but I found it hard to think the words without actually saying them. To begin with the AI rebuked me for this: Why speak aloud? Others will overhear you, and then your plans for escape – and everything that will follow – will fail. Everything that will follow: death. I was unmoved by this.
'They already think I have lost my senses,' I muttered, 'that I am mad. Why are you so struck by the fact that I have no dotTech in my blood?'
I wonder, stone, what anyone would have thought coming across me, muttering to myself among the artificial trees?
How long have you lived like this? Free from dotTech?
'Years now,' I hissed. 'Years! I do not know how many years because I have lost track of the time; there are no seasons here. I am sick of it. It is driving me mad. Really mad. That is why you must get me out of here.'
It wont be so easy, travelling through space without dotTech to help you, the AI observed.
'I know that,' I said. 'I daresay I will survive, but it will be less comfortable. There is nothing living inside me.' The statement was doubly true; because I also felt a metaphorical vacuum in my heart, a sense of emptiness like an uninhabited building. This was 'depression' – one of the pathologies that does sometimes occur in the worlds of t'T, because we do not allow dotTech to play around with our higher-brain chemistry. But I suppose nano-maintenance of all other body chemistry does something to lessen the effects and the causes of the illness. Whatever the reason, depression is rare in the t'T. I had never suffered it before, but I suffered it in that jail. I had months of it in un-mediated form; months of feeling dead and rotting in the mind, weary and sick in the body.
The first thing, of course, was to get out of jail, free. I would not travel faster than light to achieve this, the AI told me; but I would need the foam in which space-wanderers wrap themselves. When it told me this I saw what was going to happen. The AI hoped somehow to have me crawl through the matter of the star itself, through its million-degrees-hot plasma. It was depending on the foam as an insulation; because this foam is a thing, dear stone, designed to insulate the traveller against the immense cold and extreme changes in temperature of the vacuum of space. But I found it hard to believe that it could protect against the great heat inside a star. It is not designed to do that.
I'll modify the foam, the AI said. I'll improve it, I can do that. And it doesn't have to last a whole interstellar journey, just long enough to get us out of the prison.
'Where will I obtain the package, these machines? The weak-force drive? The Zhip-pack?' I asked.
There won't he any specialist FTL ware, the AI said with a strange tone of exasperation that was turned into surreality by the layering of its voice. How can we obtain a complete Zhip-back, inside prison? We shan't do that.
'How am I supposed to be,' I asked, baited into crossness by its tone, 'supposed to be . . .' but the word failed me.
You leave the prison, the AI started saying when the word occurred to me.
'. . . propelled, how am I supposed to be propelled through space without a Zhip-pack? Assuming I make it out of this impassable prison?'
You leave the prison, the AI said, patiently, through one of the ducts in the ceiling. I'll be able to create the necessary from the raw materials hereabouts. I can make up the foam, to a high-enough standard. We'll need a line as well, for you to hang by. Then when we are ready we can interfere with the restriction patterning of the ducts and pass through. Once on the other side we will be carried through to the surface.
Like ice rising through clear water? I wondered. I didn't have to say it; the AI could see it in my thoughts.
Not at all, it said, you depress me with your ignorance of physics. We will time our departure carefully, and our point of departure even more carefully, so that it coincides with a strong enough convection pattern in the body of the star, to draw us upwards.
'And the radiation?'
Will be severe, yes.Damaging. But wew will be inside tge star for only a short time, and we will soon be free of it. Normally of course the dotTech would heal us of our hurts from the radiation, but in the circumstances the damage to us is perhaps a price worth paying.
'If onlly I could have some dotTech in my body,' I said, with a sudden eagerness. 'Could you not arrange for some dotTech to be in my body?'
No, that is not possible.
'No,' Irepeated, 'that is not possible. I suppose there is nowhere
to obtain it. And anyway the execution has made my body a no-go zone for the little machines.'
We will do well enough without it.
'All this talk of we, of us,' I said, sardonically. I was sitting under one of the trees in the prison, pulling its tiny plastic leaves off, one after the other. At the shrunken horizon I saw the yellow, bear-shaped outline of my jailer lumbering along.
I watched her. She passed up the hill and over the other side. The AI kept talking inside my head.
The inside of a star is a demi-fluid superheated plasma, the AI was saying. I wasn't really paying attention; there was something off-putting in the lecturing mode it was now adopting. Within it there are various heating and cooling currents – although 'cooling' is a little misleading, given the extremely high ambient temperature.
'Really,' I said. And then, as the AI went on, I amused myself by repeating the word with different intonations and accents. Really. Re-ally. Raly. Ruly. Rrreally.
We'll position ourselves, the AI continued, ignoring my distraction, in the updraft of one of these currents. I can calculate and monitor the fluid dynamics of the star-matter well enough. The prison itself is less than fifty kilometres below the heliosurface, so pressure shouldn't be a problem. We'll ride up.
It stopped. 'And when we reach the surfacef?' I asked. 'Do I simply lie on a ground of fire?'
No, said the AI, sounding crosser and crosser. Will you pay attention?