The Fractured Void

by Tim Pratt

  “Almost nothing. We only want him because the Federation of Sol was willing to send a black ops team to snatch him, so that means he’s probably worth having. Do you agree?”

  “Mmm. I hate to say it, because his arrogance is so vast, but Phillip’s breakthroughs are legitimately galaxy-changing. With him – and me – in hand, the Coalition has now cornered the market on cutting-edge wormhole technology. You will soon have capabilities completely unheard of. The universe is a chaotic and strange place, isn’t it? Your faction could become the most powerful in the galaxy, entirely because your ship happened to be in the right place at the right time. Though you could lose that advantage just as easily, when the Barony comes for me. Or the Federation of Sol comes for Thales. Or the Creuss come for us all.”

  Felix blinked. “Why would the Creuss come for us?” Thales had mentioned the Creuss had wormhole tech already, but Shelma’s concern sounded more immediate.

  “You have no idea what you’ve gotten into, do you?” Shelma said.

  “Tell me,” Felix said.

  “Thales isn’t showing up in your database searches because he was originally a citizen of Jol-Nar, and Hylar systems are not as easy to infiltrate and penetrate as those of other factions. The twin planets are populated mainly by Hylar, of course, but there are a smattering of other species present – the Universities aren’t as cosmopolitan as the Coalition, but we value knowledge and learning above all else, and Phillip is the last son of a long line of scholars and researchers. He was still called Phillip back then, but he went by his real surname, Caruthers, not Thales.”

  Ah, the man’s real last name – that would have been more helpful before, since they were getting the dirty details about the man’s life now, but still, Felix made a mental note.

  “Phillip lived with his parents in a house grown of coral, partially above the surface, partially submerged. Never quite in or out – that’s the story of his life. Phillip demonstrated brilliance from an early age. We play a strategy game called Tides, one of the most sophisticated games in the galaxy, and Phillip is the only human who has ever attained master rank – which he did when he was only thirteen. On the strength of that showing, and his test scores, he earned a place in the physics department in our great city, Wun-Escha. He spent four years there, never breaking the surface, and the entire time he wore protective gear that allowed him to dwell at those depths underwater – he refused physical adaptations that would have allowed him to live beneath the waves more comfortably. Some considered that refusal eccentric. Others thought he was a bigot, a human supremacist in the midst of the Hylar, but those who got to know him well realized he had contempt for humans, too. He had contempt for everyone who wasn’t him.”

  Felix nodded. “That much hasn’t changed.”

  “I was the one exception to that contempt, for a while. We met in an advanced lab, working on improvements to starship engines. He watched me work for a while, and then said, ‘You’re not a complete idiot like the rest of them.’

  “‘You charmer,’ I said. ‘No wonder you’re the most popular boy in school.’ He laughed and said he didn’t need to be popular: ‘I’m smart, and that means I’ll be rich, and once I’m rich, I’ll be as popular as I want.’ I asked him how he expected to get rich in academia, which seemed to be the path we were both on.

  “He said ‘Bah’– actually said the word, like a human in a historical sim. He told me he was human, in case I hadn’t noticed: ‘I’ll never become Headmaster, and if you aren’t the one running the Universities, someone else will always tell you what to do.’ He said he’d had enough of taking orders from inferiors when he was a child. His parents weren’t as smart as he was, but somehow they got to decide what was best for him? That outraged Phillip. He fled their house as soon as he could, only to find he’d traded one bunch of authorities for another. Now he had to answer to professors, advisors, committee heads, all of them standing in his way.”

  “They were also the ones teaching him, supporting him, giving him opportunities, weren’t they?” Felix said.

  Shelma’s skin tinged softly blue; was that amusement? “Phillip has a tendency to discount the importance of advantages that don’t come wholly from within himself. He certainly discounted the value of my help often enough. He told me he didn’t intend to suffer under the yoke of oppression and so forth forever. His plan was to do his own research, invent something the galaxy would clamor for, sell it for an emperor’s ransom, and then, finally, take charge of his own fate. I told him that sounded good, but until he became master of the galaxy, maybe he could help me with the energy-flow problem we were working on? Back in the early days you could still poke fun at him, a little, if you were careful.”

  Felix smirked. “Oh, I don’t know, I poke fun at him pretty often now.”

  “Yes, but he probably wants to murder you for it, captain.” Shelma undulated in her tank, her large eyes looking beyond Felix, perhaps into the past. “We got along, strangely enough. I could keep up with him intellectually, which he appreciated, and when he began to rant and rave, I tuned him out – he was my own personal white noise generator. We also complemented one another as research partners. He was always better at the theoretical side of things, while I’m an engineer at heart – oh, I’ve made conceptual breakthroughs too, but I’m happiest when I’m tinkering, adjusting, and making the practical applications actually work, a process that is seldom smooth or easy. Those kinds of challenges thrill me. For Phillip, the only reason to move beyond the theoretical is because it’s easier to sell a product than the conceptual outline for one.” That blue tinge again. “Maybe that’s why he needs me now. He might have hit the limit of what he can build alone.”

  Maybe we can do without Thales entirely, Felix thought.

  Shelma gestured aft. “I’m fairly sure the engine powering this vessel is based on one Phillip and I created during our partnership. Our improvements are still the state of the art. We both received offers to work for the state shipyard, running their propulsion department as co-heads, but Phillip refused, because anything we created there would be property of the Universities, just like the design for this engine is. We received a generous bonus for the engine’s development, but Phillip railed about the injustice of having his work ‘stolen’ – if he’d received even one tenth of one percent of the price of every unit sold, after all, he’d be wealthy enough to buy a small moon. He wanted to do independent work, he said.”

  “What would he even do with a moon?” Felix said. “He’s barely emerged from the lab we gave him. He lived in a shack on Cobbler’s Knob. He seems to spend most of his time inside his head. Vast wealth would be wasted on him.”

  Shelma said, “It’s true, he’s a scientific ascetic in his way. You need to understand, the money is just insulation. A way to put himself above caring about the needs or opinions of anyone else. With enough money, he’ll never again have to put himself in someone else’s power. I was happy enough with the career advancement our work offered me, so I went to work for the shipyards, while Phillip took his bonus and set up his own lab. He found investors, too, though I’m sure it galled him to have even that much accountability, and he continued to work on propulsion systems, this time with the promise of a share in the profits... but he didn’t manage as well on his own. He made little incremental improvements, enough to keep his investors from dropping him, but nothing seafloor-shaking. The gossip among my colleagues was that Phillip was one of those prodigies who peaks early and then burns out. Such people often become fringe figures, railing against an unfair system and espousing horrible political views, which everyone agreed would be a natural fit for Phillip. I wasn’t so sure – I thought he was just bored. Small improvements didn’t interest him. He was always about revolutionary change. Phillip abruptly shut his lab a few years after it opened, having failed to become rich, and he largely withdrew from society.”

  “If only he’d stayed with
drawn,” Felix murmured.

  Shelma ignored him. “After about a decade – during which I thrived at the propulsion lab, I might add, and did make significant improvements – he suddenly published a slew of papers, a few in respectable venues, but others just released onto the net, presumably because they couldn’t pass peer review. He was attempting to achieve the ultimate aim of conceptual physics, a theory of everything that could reconcile the contradictions between general relativity and quantum theory, and he was publishing his intermediate steps. Some of the papers were promising, but others were either flawed, or inadequately explained. Phillip never had much patience for making things clear to those he considered his intellectual inferiors, which, as you might have gathered, is everyone. He would occasionally show up at a conference, usually to stand up in the audience and decry some other scientist he considered ill-informed or misguided.”

  “He really does make friends wherever he goes, doesn’t he?”

  “We had a drink once at one of those conferences. I asked a couple of clarifying questions about his latest paper. He told me being a cog in the University machine had made my mind ‘smaller than ever.’ I didn’t see him again for a while. After that flurry of activity, he went dark again for several more years. His parents died, he locked himself away in their coral house, and no one knew what he was doing, besides spending his meager inheritance on living expenses. I kept an ear out for news of him, because of our old relationship, and I heard he’d sold the house and used the proceeds to buy a second-hand spaceship capable of long-range travel. No one knew where he was going. No one was especially sorry to see him go. Years passed, and we all assumed he’d settled somewhere, or met with misadventure.”

  Thales was a cause of misadventures, not the victim of them, Felix thought. “He came back, though.”

  “Two years ago,” Shelma said. “He just showed up at my office. I was running the whole engineering department at the shipyard by then. It was a good position, plenty of perks, but it had been ages since I’d so much as laid a pseudopod on a wrench, and I often looked around and wondered how it was I’d come to manage engineers instead of being one. That’s why I was amenable to his offer. That, and the fact that he was almost humble. He said, ‘Shelma, I need your help.’

  “He needed my help! During our collaborations, he’d only grudgingly accepted my presence, calling me ‘an adequate sounding board’ and ‘more socially acceptable than talking to myself’ and ‘a competent grease-monkey.’ He found the latter endearment quite funny, since he was the primate, not me. I found it less amusing, but, as I said, I was good at tuning out his more objectionable qualities. I was flattered despite myself at his approach, and asked him what he needed. ‘I’ve been studying wormholes,’ he told me.

  “I wasn’t surprised. He’d always been interested in those. He thought understanding their nature was essential to understanding the universe. We can use wormholes to traverse vast distances in space, but we don’t really understand how they function. There are various competing and mutually incompatible theories, none of which Phillip found satisfactory. If he could figure out how wormholes worked, he always said, really worked, that would provide a key insight and maybe even unlock the theory of everything. I asked how a theory of everything was going to make him rich – or had he changed his mind about the value of academic accolades these days? Formulating such a theory would be good for a permanently endowed reefdom in the theoretical physics division, even for a human.”

  The thought of Thales shaping young minds made Felix shudder.

  “Phillip said I was being ridiculous. Didn’t I see it? A natural side effect of a total understanding of wormholes would be the ability to create them. I did my best not to laugh at him. I just said, ‘That’s impossible.’ Back then, I thought the rumors that the Creuss could create wormholes were just stories – part of the legend of the galaxy’s greatest bogeymen. The Creuss are energy beings, after all, with a strange relationship to matter, so I thought there were other explanations for their ability to show up in places where you wouldn’t expect them. But Phillip told me he’d gone out and studied the Creuss, met some of them, observed others, and that he’d seen them do it – open a wormhole where no wormhole existed before. Once he knew for sure it could be done, he devoted himself to figuring out how. He told me he’d nearly cracked it. He was just… having trouble with the practical side. ‘You need your old grease-monkey back,’ I said. He actually looked ashamed! He told me he’d always meant it as a term of endearment –

  “‘I was a lot cruder and crasser in the old days’, he explained. More sure of himself and his own importance. He’d come to realize he couldn’t do it all on his own. He flattered me, too – said, ‘I’ve tried to work with other engineers, but they lack your vision and your understanding of the deeper science.’ He told me he’d secured funding and had a top-notch lab. He looked around my office, and I saw a flash of that old contempt. ‘Could I really be happy here?’ he asked, ‘overseeing new strategic initiatives, when I could be tentacles-deep in the guts of a machine that would alter our fundamental understanding of space-time and make us rich’?”

  “It’s a pretty good pitch,” Felix admitted.

  “And I was tempted, captain! But I didn’t trust an apologetic Phillip. I asked who was funding him. He told me it was a wealthy human in the Federation of Sol. I asked what his patron planned to do with the technology, if we managed to create it, and Phillip said, ‘He’s in shipping. I imagine he’s going to demolish his competition.’”

  “Oh, sure,” Felix said. “And the inventor of the plasma rifle was just interested in using it to kill flies. No obvious military applications at all.”

  Shelma went bluish again. “I wasn’t an academic, captain, not really. I worked in the shipyards, which means I worked with the military, which means I fully grasped the implications of the work Phillip proposed. Even if he was funded by some civilian businessperson, I knew the tech would eventually end up in the hands of the military, and then it could be used against my people. I told Phillip I was interested. It took a bit of organizing, but I took a leave of absence from the shipyard and went with him to his lab, on a remote moon, and we got to work. I mostly went to… assess him. I thought maybe Phillip’s reach was exceeding his grasp again. It wouldn’t be the first time. But if he was close to perfecting practical wormhole technology, I wanted to be there when he did it. Not because I was intrigued by the technical challenges and the opportunity to work on truly transformative science, though that didn’t hurt – but because if anyone had that kind of tech, I wanted to make sure my people had it too… or had it first. I could watch his work, contribute enough to keep him happy, but hold him back from creating a working prototype. When the time came, I could give the technology to my people, who have a long track record of using new technology responsibly. Phillip doesn’t understand patriotism, or loyalty, to individuals, or governments, or species. He doesn’t comprehend any bond that isn’t based on self-interest, which is disturbing, but it also makes him predictable. He wouldn’t expect me to join his team in order to slow down or limit his research, because he assumed I wanted wealth and glory too.”

  “An impressive declaration of patriotism and loyalty to your homeworld,” Felix said. “Which makes me wonder how the hell you ended up on a Barony of Letnev station?”

  Shelma was quiet for a long moment. “Because of what happened after the Creuss found us, captain.”

  Chapter 12

  Felix, Calred, and Tib sat together on the bridge, all deep in their own thoughts. The viewscreens displayed darkness and a smattering of distant stars. They were hurtling through space on a trajectory generated by the ship’s computer specifically to stymie any extrapolations the Letnev might have made about their route or destination. Evasive maneuvers were easier because they didn’t know their actual destination yet. Thales said he had to consult with Shelma before he explained their next step
s, and Shelma said she’d been through a traumatic experience and needed to rest before she talked to Thales about anything.

  “The Ghosts of Creuss,” Calred said, breaking the silence. “I have a cousin who saw one, once – the Ghost was just strolling through a bazaar out in the Ilanan system, dressed in that weirdly ornamental armor they wear. All the vendors and customers ran away, because even the ones who didn’t know it was Creuss knew it was dangerous… or wrong, somehow. The Creuss didn’t seem to notice everyone flee. A street kid watched it through a crack in a wall, and he said the Creuss went to a stall and touched a bunch of the rugs. How can they feel anything when they don’t have bodies, and their hands are armored? He said the Creuss picked up one of the rugs and threw it over its shoulder. It left something sparkly on the counter of the stall – a jewel that glowed with its own inner light. Some idea of payment, everyone figured. The merchant had the jewel mounted under glass and proudly displayed it, called himself ‘rug-merchant to the Creuss.’”

  “Was that good for business, or bad?” Tib asked.

  “My cousin didn’t say. She was more fixated on the fact that two weeks later, the rug merchant was dead from a previously unknown form of cancer, and half the customers who’d visited the stall needed extreme oncological treatments. The gem didn’t trigger any radiation sensors, but there was something wrong with it – something that caused the flesh to corrupt itself. The rug merchant’s family buried the gem in a hole deep in the desert, in a casket lined with lead. I imagine it’s still there. The opposite of a buried treasure.”

  “Ghost stories,” Felix said. “Lots of people have them. Usually second- or third-hand, though. You can’t take them too seriously.”

  Tib said, “I heard one that was first-hand, supposedly. Felix, do you remember that ambassador from the Yin Brotherhood, Errin, the one we met at academy graduation?”