by Julian May
***
THE END OF
THE ADVERSARY
Thus concludes
The Saga of Pliocene Exile.
There are others,
most notably the Milieu Trilogy, which tells
the root-tales leading to this one,
in books titled
JACK THE BODILESS, DIAMOND MASK,
and MAGNIFICAT.
Gaudete.
Appendixes
Map of Northwestern Europe
During the Pliocene Epoch
Map of Western Mediterranean Region
During the Pliocene Epoch,
After the Gibraltar Rupture
Map of the Monte Rosa Massif
During the Pliocene Epoch
Some Aspects of Hyperspatial Translation
and D-Jumping
Appendix
Some Aspects of Hyperspatial Translation and D-Jumping
IN THE GALACTIC MILIEU, superluminal transport, or faster-than-light travel, is accomplished through the "warping" of normal space by means of an upsilon-field, one of the primary manifestations of reality. The field can be mechanically generated by a device called a superluminal translator (u-field generator, etc.)or—very rarely—by a metapsychic individual possessed of the "teleportation" faculty.
In a typical trip, a starship generates a u-field to break through the superficies (boundary) between normal space and the hyperspatial matrix. The latter is also called simply hyperspace, the "hype," subspace, the matrix, or the gray limbo. Sentient creatures experience varying degrees of pain during translation.
Once into the hyperspatial matrix, the starship's navigation equipment programs a hyperspatial catenary, or subspace vector (vulgarly called "limbo track," "slice of the hype," etc.). For a period of subjective time, the ship and its riders can be said to move along the catenary. Their position at any specified subjective moment is called the pseudolocus. Ships are quite capable of halting within the matrix or changing the catenary (with certain limitations) en route. When the catenary is fully described, the starship has effectively reached its destination and once again breaks through the superficies into normal space. A power breakdown during the hyperspatial portion of the trip strands the ship in the matrix. Similarly, a person attempting a d-jump might be stranded if his concentration failed to maintain the correct vector, "visualizing" the intended goal. The ruhherband effect is a complex phenomenon that must be neutralized, either mechanically or through mental programming, if the starship or d-jumper is notto be pulled back to the point of origin atthe completion of the translation.
Starships utilize superluminal translators of varying power. For slower-than-light, orsubluminal, transport—and invariably within the atmosphere ofinhabited planets—the ships switch to inertialess drive, madepossible by rho-field generators operating on gravomagnetic principles.* The upsilon-field is not usually generated within a planetary atmosphere. The "large aperture" u-field necessary to admit a starship into hyperspace generates collateral electromagnetic phenomena, especially ionization, thatmay constitute a nuisance or even an endangerment to civilized entities and their delicate contraptions. The much smaller u-field generated by a d-jumping individual mind would have a negligible effect upon the environment unless large numbers of people engaged in the activity. Since the faculty is so rare, the contingency is moot.
When a starship captain undertakes a voyage he must consider (a) How far am I going? (b) How fast do I want to get there? (c) How much pain am I, or my passengers and crew, willing to tolerate in the process?
A "slow" translation, or deep catenary, takes the longest subjective time to accomplish and causes the least amount of pain in the breakthrough. A "fast"translation, or tight catenary, (called also the "fast track," "tight leash," etc.) gets one to the destination more quickly, but at the expense of wear andtear on the nervous system. Hotdog spacers who habitually schuss must make use of medications or other anodynes to deal with the severe pain. Such stout hearts refer to slow-track travelers as bunny-hoppers.
On very long trips, the ordinary passenger-carrying starship would reach its destination via a series of slow jumps. The displacement factor (df, "speed," "warp factor," "push," etc.) along the hyperspatial catenary deemed acceptable to nonprofessional space travelers is about 40 df. This is equivalent to 40 light-years traversed, per subjective day spent in hyperspace. Thus the CSS Queen Elizabeth III might take twosubjective (and actual, to the Larger Reality outside the hype) days to travel to a star system 80 light-years distant—or 300 days to travel 12,000 light-years. At each incremental jump, the riders would suffer pain.
Individuals have differing tolerances to the pain of translation. Exotics generally have a higher threshold than humans. (The stolid Krondaku withstand 370 df, considered about the upper limit for Milieu races.) Richard Voorhees took 250 df for 136 days on his longest schuss, to Hercules Cluster (M13 or NGC6205 in contemporary catalogs). When he traveled to Orissa many years later, he was pushing his luck to endure 110 df for 17 days in succession.
Obviously, both the time-elapse factor and the pain factor limit the range of superluminal transport. In the Milieu, the exotic races have already mapped and explored most of our Milky Way Galaxy (with the exception of the perilous Hub); and with more than 1000 potentially colonizable planets located within 20,000 light-years of Earth, there is littlepractical incentive for extremely long-range translations. Extragalactic travel is virtually proscribed. The Andromeda Galaxy, our closest neighbor, is 2.2 million light-years distant; it would take the hardiest human starship voyager some twenty-four years to get there—and another twenty-four years to get back. Even in an era of multiple rejuvenations, such a trip would have little appeal except to the incorrigibly wanderlustful. A few souls have tried it, with uncertain results.
The exotic beings known as Ships, one of whom, Brede's mate, brought the Tanu and Firvulag from the remote Duat Galaxy to Pliocene Earth, have an extraordinarily high df endurance. The Ships use a mitigator, a special mental program that makes bearable the horrific pain of ultraluminal, or "very high speed,"translation. Ships teach their passengers, who travel within their bodies in a capsule the size of a conventional starship, how to generate individual mitigator programs of their own. This means that flight within the Duat Galaxy would be all but pain-free for Ship passengers. In addition, the Ship is able to d-jump routinely at very tight catenaries. Most points in its galaxy are reached in minutes, or at the most, a few hours. The d-jump is a single movement, never a series of shorter hops such as those taken by "slow" starships. It should be noted that Brede's Ship fatally strained itself in making the jump from Duat to the Milky Way Galaxy, 270 million light-years distant. Even the most highly talented minds have their limitations.
In making his d-jumps, Marc operates almost exactly like Brede's Ship. His short jaunts about Earth are virtually instantaneous and do not involve more than a split second of subjective time spent in the gray limbo. (The process of breaking through the superficiesat either end can take considerably longer, however.) As he d-jumps about the Milky Way, Marc is protected by the armor of the cerebroenergetic enhancer, which holds all portionsof his body except the hyperenergized brain in the equivalent of suspended animation. The pain factor remains approximately what it would be in mechanical translation via starship. He stated that he had just about reached his normal-function limit in making the jump to Poltroy. This would put his personal df threshold somewhere in the 18,000 range.
The mitigator is theoretically applicable to ordinary starship travel, provided the riders were metapsychics trained in use of the program. Extremely powerful superluminal translators would be required to "push" the craft to ultratight catenaries. There seems no reason why ultraluminal starships could not be built. Milieu models are limited in range by the fragility of the minds carried, not by any mechanical factor.
Footnotes
* The rho-field is still another primary manifestation of reality, which according to Milie
u theoreticians consists of twenty-one "fields," or dimensional lattices, that interact to generate space, time, matter, energy, life, and mind.
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