Unconquered Countries-Four Novellas

by Geoff Ryman

  For you are human, and Humankind is the salvation of the universe…

  Three hundred years ago, in the stillness of history, there were only three homeworlds. The vast distances between stars had to be crossed in vessels made of metal. These tiny ships could only approach one half the speed of light. The voyage from Earth to Home took more than eight earthyears. The world of Nippon, now called Ruin, was effectively isolated. Radio messages from Nippon took 22 years to reach Home. New forms of transportation and communication were sought…

  In homeyear 872, an earthside research station at Ningsia involved in the investigation of time travel accidentally generated the first true particles of anti-matter. Unlike positrons, they mirrored the complex molecular structures of matter. A catastrophic explosion resulted. Chao Li Sing, working from the records of Ningsia, succeeded in generating true anti-hydrogen. It was kept separate from all forms of matter as plasma in a magnetic trap…

  The more complicated molecule of anti-helium was generated next. This time, matter and anti-matter were allowed to meet. They obliterated each other as expected. The results of the obliteration were not. Both matter and anti-matter were converted into previously unknown quanta. They were named after their discoverer as chaolis.

  The chaoli appeared to exist for mere nanoseconds. It was not, however, decaying into other particles or forms of energy. Since energy cannot be destroyed, Chao Li reasoned that it must therefore be going somewhere. Perhaps, he suggested, it was moving outside the universe, perhaps some substratum or subspace.

  It is hard for us to imagine the sensation this suggestion created. The discovery of subspace has long been looked to as the only hope for efficient interstellar travel. This was, however, the era of Consolidation.

  The Consolidationists were opposed to many forms of research on the grounds that it was necessary to bring together what had already been learned. The specialized branches of science had lost touch with each other. While many sincere and informed people were Consolidationists, there can be no doubt that it was also a movement of anti-science. Some of them would not even admit that an advance of the magnitude of the chaoli was still possible. All of them fought to halt further work with chaolis. Finally, in a compromise, the Consolidationist-controlled research councils agreed to finance work that might prove that chaolis in fact stayed within the known universe.

  Chao Li was given clearance to trace the paths of chaolis through matter. Helium and anti-helium were again annihilated. The resulting chaolis were allowed to bombard an adjoining pocket of helium plasma.

  It took the rest of Chao Li’s life to account for what happened next.

  All light in a rough sphere around the chaoli release disappeared. Playbacks of transmissions from the station showed that around the black sphere, gases in the air had frozen instantly. These had no time to fall as crystals, for the helium plasma had shot like a bullet out of the trap, through the walls of the station and out onto the Mongolian plain. A light scattering of tiny black spheres accompanied the helium bullet. Outside the trap, the plasma flared catastrophically to solar temperatures.

  Helium is the only known substance that will not freeze under normal vapor pressure. The playbacks showed what appeared to be solid helium shooting out of the black sphere and through the walls of the station. If helium plasma had frozen from a temperature of millions of degrees, then something like absolute zero must have been achieved. It would be like absolute zero, but even more effective at halting molecular motion.

  Chao Li, observing the experiment from a bunker hundreds of kilometers away, survived. By analyzing the trajectory of the helium bullet, he determined that it had traveled in a direction exactly opposite to that of Earth’s rotation about the sun and its own axis. The helium plasma had been, briefly, absolutely stationary. That is, it had stayed in place while the Earth moved away from it.

  Chao Li was able to demonstrate that the only way to root matter so firmly in the fabric of space was to also root it in time. Nothing could happen to it or within it. The helium had not been cooled—all motion within it had stopped. Gravity and inertia no longer affected it; neither did the magnetic trap, its basin and several concrete walls.

  Chao Li then made one of his mild but devastating suggestions. The substratum, he proposed, was possibly a region without time. It was a kind of a leftover from the beginning of the universe, some part of creation that time did not affect. Since it has not expanded with the rest of the universe, it would be in physical terms very tiny indeed, yet also existing everywhere, at the core of all existing space.

  If chaolis had the ability to almost push matter into the substratum, then, for the brief instant of its bombardment, matter almost existed without time. He concluded two things. First, that while light was pulled into the substratum by chaolis, matter was not. Second, that no one, certainly not himself, knew what existing without time meant.

  Then he died, leaving the body of scientific thought and Humankind’s hopes for interstellar travel in great disarray…

  Observe, gentle scholar, how duty may involve withstanding great opposition from those who are blind to Humankind’s high purpose. Study the humble strength of Chao Li Sing. There you will find a path to duty. There you will see how to take your rightful place in the center of things.

  For you are human, and Humankind is the salvation of the universe.

  from the letters of Raul Kundara

  Hola Mari,

  Thank you for the cast. It is better to talk than to write, and it was a fruitful discussion. My deepest apologies for my error in behavior. I meant only to tease Tamel in the closing of my letter. I meant no disrespect.

  I was sad also to learn that you think I came here to spite you. I have examined my actions and have found no cause for these thoughts. Please do not feel that you drove me away. Please do not feel guilty. I came to Hellespont for adventure and research and to do my duty. I have examined my motives and find no hostility on my part. I am sorry for the misunderstanding. Forgive any offensive thing I may have said.

  The way of duty is hard and instructive. After four certs and a placement in biology, I am now learning what the maintenance of basic order means. Every fifthday I wash dishes. I enjoy it because of a very funny regular called Stavakanda, from Achilles. We call him Chief. He makes work easy by singing dirty songs, by throwing food at us, by squirting us with water jets. He is the only fat man in the station.

  I throw food back at him. (Do not be alarmed, we also clean it up.) We were called into Senior Talsman’s room. He is a man of long service, perhaps worn down by it, thin and precise. When he carries food canisters, the muscles of his neck pop out. He reminded us of the waste and the cost of the thrown food. Stavakanda reminded him that the food had already been wasted by those who did not eat it. The Senior became emotional. “I have pressures from above, pressures from below,” he said. “Then you are a sandwich,” said Stavakanda. I was worried for a time. I thought the Senior might damage my chances for research work. Chief called him a cosmic lightweight and told me not to worry. It is strange for me to be seen as a troublemaker. It must be dreadful for a Senior not to be respected by his workmates.

  I have spoken to Senior Thoroughgood as you asked. My term of five years cannot be shortened. I now have a duty to complete, as he explained. He is a firm, polite man of wide interests. It will be some time before the Angels will be free for research work, he told me, but said I might conduct some informal investigations of my own. I asked him about Angelwork, and he said that it is not difficult. He called them “surprisingly human.” I think he is fond of them. I found the meeting reassuring. Please, there is no need to worry on my behalf. I think this is an excellent posting.

  My usual respects, especially to Tamel.

  Love,

  Toni.

  from Remembrances of Bee

  We did many things together, Bee and I. That was a sweet time, when our work and our wishes seemed to coincide.

  We traveled the Hor
se Head nebula, in the belt of far Orion the Hunter. We drifted through its cool dust, sampling it for them. So vast and peaceful, the great rolling masses of darkness.

  We pushed a fistful of dwarf star to them. They caught it in midspace and nibbled its edges like frightened fish.

  We wandered the stars, great glowing bullies without souls. We loved the stars. We fed them.

  On Ceti, we bathed in a sunspot. The gas roared up in billows away from the center, like a great river, in all directions. It raged uphill, cooled by motion, to high and distant mountains, then poured over their peaks, warming again to a needle-hot white. The sky overhead was a blaze-haze of light. Shreds of flame drifted past like clouds. Beyond the mountains, fire-arms swept the horizon, ragged like feathers.

  The churning, slowly boiling plains of firestorm stretching into the distance. Fiery distance and constant motion all about us—that was Ceti.

  When we arrived, the Cherubim dived and wove about us, screeching in a flock until we gave them places. “Minus ten! Minus ten!” one of them would cry. “Fifty-five! Fifty-five! Fifty-five!” called another. We strung them in lines so that their shouting would tell us where we were inside the sun.

  We saved him, snarling Ceti. He was getting old. We siphoned off his helium and replaced it with hydrogen. It came shuddering out of the Slide, dead and gray; suddenly it would come alive with light and twist away. The work took one hundred years.

  We waited together, Bee and I, calling the Slides and watching unwatchable skyscapes. He sang to me through the depths of a star. When we could, we made love, bathing and mingling in each other.

  Oh, Bee. The warbling of your touch and the shiver of your joy! Can they destroy such things?

  On ripening Daphne, you found a brother.

  from Entropy Control and You

  The Consolidationists gained control of the ruling Secretariat in 894. That same year, the Dangerous Experiments Protocol was agreed by all research councils. It declared that, along with many other forms of research, chaoli investigation was illegal. The ban included even mathematical modeling of chaoli behavior.

  A colleague of Chao Li’s, Dr. Anthony Black, braved the eight-year voyage to Home in an attempt to convince the Five Cities that chaoli experimentation was in the interest of all new homeworlds. A more flamboyant personality than Chao Li Sing, he managed to persuade the Five to finance his research on the first of the hanging platforms.

  The story of the design and construction of the first platform would easily by itself fill a narrative of this size. The core idea was that the research station be kept safely away from homeworlds and from all motion itself. To achieve this the platform was oriented around a core chaoli eruption. Thus work could be done with absolutely stationary, time-frozen matter.

  The first platform unleashed the kind of rapid-fire sequence of discoveries the Consolidationists most dreaded. It allowed Dr. Black to see for the first time that chaolis did not disappear into the substratum forever. Some of them returned, nanoseconds later, only to disappear again. The cycle was repeated until only a light scattering of chaolis returned. These chaolis, nicknamed Charlies, became a permanent core of returning particles.

  If Charlies were being thrown out of the universe, the substratum was hurling them back.

  Dr. Black’s team found nothing—no substance or particle—that could deflect or slow the chaoli. The force of the explosion that created it was not large enough to account for this, and the chaoli itself was not frozen in time. Either the chaoli was propelling itself, or something else was.

  Dr. Black decided that the universe itself was doing the work, the very fabric of space. He postulated a quality of resistance in both the universe and the substratum which he called elasticity. Once generated, a Charlie was thrown back and forth between space and subspace. Black compared elasticity to a wall that does the bouncing for the ball. This bouncing is not perpetual motion because the Charlie is propelled afresh with each bounce. It merely goes on until the end of time.

  Black noted one other phenomenon of utmost importance. Light waves, radio waves, X and gamma rays could all be swept into subspace by Charlies, and matter could be time frozen, but only at times. Sometimes Charlies did not produce this effect, or “swiss-cheesed” matter by only affecting parts of it.

  Black’s team demonstrated that an eruption of chaolis had points of utmost efficacy, analogous to the focus of a beam of light. The random movement of unleashed chaolis often prevented focus from being achieved, and certainly from being predicted. Control of the movement of chaolis would have to be attained if the discovery was to be of practical use. But how, when nothing seemed to have any effect on them?

  In 918, chaolis from two neighboring annihilations were allowed to bombard each other. Most of the chaolis simply rebounded off each other or escaped without colliding at all. Particles closer to the center had multiple collisions. These particles, during the brief instant left to them in the universe, sorted themselves into parallel lines. The result was a coherent beam of Charlie particles. This beam returned from the substratum without the loss of any particles. The scattering effect of incoherent Charlies had been overcome…

  A coherent Charlie beam is thrown into the substratum. Unlike its counterpart, its member particles all move together though the substratum in the equivalent of a straight line. They reemerge into the universe at a point some distance from where they left it. They are then hurled back across the substratum to their point of origin. Thus is a permanent highway between two points in space forged across the substratum. Because of elasticity, the flow of Charlies in both directions is “downhill.” No additional energy need be added to the system. This pathway became known as the Charlie Slide…

  The Consolidationists withdrew their ban on chaoli research in 925. That year Earth began the construction of its own platform…

  Much remained to be done. In 951 the Earth platform showed how the distortion wave could prepare matter for Sliding. The distortion wave had been noted for some time without importance being attached to it. Time is defined as the expansion of space. Space, all space, continues to expand as time goes on. Time-freezing blocks this expansion. This results in a buildup of potential energy in the form of elasticity. When the time-freezing is over, the space occupied by the freeze violently expands to fill the area it would have occupied if the flow of time had not been interrupted.

  The result is a ripple in the fabric of space itself, a wavelike effect that is similar to that on the surface of a pond when a stone is dropped into it. Matter in a distortion wave ripples. Each individual molecule, embedded in space, is distorted as the wave passes. No heat is generated because the molecules themselves are not moving—space itself is. Matter in this state is called soft. Soft matter can be snatched up by a Slide and carried into the substratum. Removed from the distortion, it is expelled by the substratum, along the line of least resistance—the Slide.

  Thus the basic process of Sliding was established, at least in theory. Much further practical work needed to be done, but in 976 enough of these problems had been solved for a copper plate to slide between the Earth and Home platforms. The plate bore a portrait of Chao Li Sing and the inscription “The Modern Prometheus.” Dr. Black was still alive to view its arrival. For all practical purposes, casting was instantaneous…

  Now a net of Charlie Slides has been flung across the stars. Platforms hang without motion near the orbits of over 50 homeworlds. Before that could be achieved, a means of aiming the Slides, of sending beacons to guide them, had to be found. But there was another problem.

  A suicidal civil war had destroyed Nippon, one of only three inhabited worlds. Science could peel open space like an orange, but it could provide no answers to moral dilemmas. Consolidation had shown itself to be able only to limit the freedom of science. All other philosophies seemed stale, impotent. Humankind seemed sickened by the possibilities that now opened up, unable to find another kind of platform from which to launch itself, as thoug
h distrustful of itself, the universe.

  Some new direction, some spark of faith was needed. Faith was found by Our Master in the form of the Regimen.

  II

  from The Syriac Bestiary,

  a Text of Ancient Earth

  There is an animal called the dajja, extremely gentle, which the hunters are unable to capture because of its great strength. It has in the middle of its brow a single horn. But observe the ruse by which the huntsmen take it. They lead forth a virgin, pure and chaste. When the animal sees her, he approaches and throws himself upon her. The girl offers him her breasts and the animal begins to suck the breasts of the maiden and to conduct himself familiarly with her. Then the girl, while sitting quietly, reaches forth her hand and grabs the horn of the animal’s brow. The huntsmen come up and bind the beast and go away with him to the king.

  Likewise the Lord Jesus Christ has raised up for us a horn of salvation in the midst of Jerusalem, in the house of God, by intercession of the Mother of God, a virgin pure and chaste, full of mercy, immaculate and inviolate…

  from the Angelogs of Entropy Control, Hellespont,

  Transcripts of the Proceedings of 1363/13/5

  Time

  in metric time

  Recorded Material

  1/1649

  B

  Look at it, Zoe!

  1651

  Z

  Yes, my love.

  1653

  B

  Soft and big and gentle!

  A docile star!

  1657

  Z

  It is dying.

  1661

  B

  Wisps of gas,