“Are other heads of government receiving this briefing now?” Shenai asked.
“Yes.”
“Inform them that I vote to proceed.”
“Done.”
Shenai leaned back in her chair and placed her hands carefully atop the table.
“Assuming that we vote to proceed, how long will the preparations take?”
“Approximately nine days. Calculations must be checked, certain apparatus modified. I would advise against haste: a mistake could be catastrophic.”
In the brief silence that followed, Aristide could see the calculations behind Shenai’s eyes.
“Very good,” she said finally. She looked at the other members of the committee. “Friends,” she said, “would you all join me for breakfast at Polity House? I will send to the cellar for champagne.”
Aristide left the breakfast with the taste of caviar on his lips and champagne singing in his head and his heart. The euphoria lasted for two days, and then Pablo’s new hammer fell.
The platforms’ undignified dodging saved Gemma from complete destruction: she was struck off-center and lost about thirty percent of her mass and calculating power. As before, the bolt from the Kuiper Belt traveled so quickly that the Rogue Comet Detection Array had given less than thirty seconds’ warning. One pocket was lost: Midgarth. But the strange pocket, with its orcs and trolls, was not destroyed—the record showed that the wormhole had not been flooded with plasma, but had snapped shut when its controlling mechanism had been destroyed.
Midgarth was on its own. Its inhabitants could survive reasonably well, but the pocket was doomed to extinction when its little sun ran out of fuel. Unlike the pockets where high technology was possible, in Midgarth there was no way to build a wormhole and tunnel away to another world.
In the wake of Pablo’s strike, panic struck the worlds yet again. Governments tottered, governments fell. One royal family was chased from its palace, never to return.
Shenai fell from power, after one of her deputy prime ministers—Kiernan, the one with the curly hair—called for a vote of confidence within the executive committee of the Constitutional Party.
She was a victim of her own caution. Topaz was a world that had opted for transparency, where very little information could actually be hidden. The United Powers had kept their plans a secret, even though it cost them. The inhabitants of Topaz had been driven into a frenzy by the absence of their usual omniscience, and their own ruling party had panicked and wrecked itself.
Aristide called Shenai to offer condolences.
“If the wormhole trick works,” she said, “we’ve won the war, and who sits in the Polity House isn’t going to matter.”
“It will matter to you,” Aristide said, “and your aspirations. And,” he nodded, “to your friends.”
She gave a graceful nod. “Thank you for that,” she said.
Shenai was in an anonymous-looking room, with utilitarian furniture and pastel paintings broadcast on the walls: Aristide concluded that she was in a hotel room, or possibly a safe house hidden from any hypothetical rampaging mobs.
There was a half-empty bottle of wine on a counter behind her.
“I hope you haven’t been drinking alone,” he said.
“A dismissed politician is always alone,” Shenai said. She bent to straighten a stocking, her straw-colored hair falling over her face. She lifted her head and tossed her hair back.
“Kiernan won’t last,” she said. “He’s too young to know the ropes—he’s only fifty-seven, do you know that? In our civilization people have thousand-year-long memories, particularly for treachery. When he tries to take credit for winning the war, and the truth comes out concerning what decision was made when, he’ll be laughed out of his job.”
“Will you try to come back?”
She gave a half-smile. “Running Topaz in peacetime isn’t going to be nearly as interesting as trying to manage the war. Perhaps I’ll find something else to do with my life.”
“Do you have any ideas what course you’ll take?”
“Make sure Kiernan falls, for one thing,” Shenai said. “Which isn’t just vengeance-for-fun, it’s maintaining my own credibility. After that, I don’t know. P’raps I’ll emigrate.”
She straightened, her eyes suddenly abstract.
“I have a call from Shekure.”
“Give her my love.”
“I will.”
The wall screen blanked. Aristide told the walls to turn a softer shade of green, ordered the lamp to swing away on its boom, and then contemplated the rest of his own day.
The Loyal Nine, the vast incomprehensible scaffolds of quantum calculation that he, more than anyone, had caused to be brought into being, were all busy confirming, for the second time, his insight as to the nature of the structure of the universe. Assuming he was proven right—again—he would have saved civilization.
Which, he reflected in sadness, meant that he, too, was out of a job.
At the moment the wormhole encapsulated the inner solar system, Aristide was in the Golden Treasure‘s First Class ballroom with the Standing Committee, Kiernan, the elite committee of astrophysicists studying Pablo’s astronomical data, the entire diplomatic corps including a grumpy-looking Fred as well as emissaries from Earth and Luna, a former King and his current mistress, a select group of elite journalists, and assorted military, political, and scientific hangers-on.
It was a fact of modern life that any damn place could be a Secret Headquarters provided that it had large enough video walls.
Onscreen, an assortment of officials, scientists, and techs went through a lengthy series of checklists. In the ballroom—a vast emptiness surrounded by a lacy gallery of white pillars and Romanesque arches—people mingled in a near-party atmosphere. Only the lack of music and alcohol distinguished this from one of the ship’s normal cruises of the damned.
The woman from the Advisory Committee on Science spoke earnestly into Aristide’s ear. “So one of my aides came up with a new weapon.”
He looked at her. “Can we suppress it in time?”
It took a moment for her to realize that he was joking. She gave a mirthless laugh and plowed ahead.
“Thanks to all this,” she said, waving an arm at the ballroom, the video screens, the war itself, “we’re becoming experts at creating small pocket universes for specific functions. In this case we create a pocket with its own sun, surrounded by a Dyson sphere packed with solar collectors, and enough raw materials for robot workers to build a mass driver fifty-three kilometers long. We don’t have to give the pocket an atmosphere or much gravity, so our projectile would have neither weight nor atmospheric resistance to overcome, but the principal advantage is that Vindex wouldn’t be able to see us build it.” She laughed aloud. “The first thing he’d know would be when we rolled back the roof and fired a relativistic iron meteor straight at his head. The farthest Courtland would be is on the other side of the sun—there’s no way it could dodge the blow at that range.”
“How soon could we build one?”
“Between two and three weeks.” She smiled. “And the best part,” she said, “is that we can build a driver on each of the Loyal Nine. We can hit him with nine shots simultaneously—no chance for survival.”
Aristide considered the scheme. “I approve,” he said, “assuming that my approval is necessary. Have you spoken to the Prime Minister?”
“Not yet. All this—” Again she waved an arm. “—seemed a little distracting.”
“Yes.” Aristide frowned. “Let’s hope that Vindex hasn’t already anticipated this plan, the way he has everything else.”
The cold emptiness of space touched her eyes for a moment, and then she nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s hope.”
Maybe Bad Pablo won’t have thought of this one, Aristide thought, because it isn’t my idea.
Overhead, the great polarized skylight dimmed, and then switched over to a feed from outside Topaz, a starfiel
d with Earth and its satellites gleaming diamond-bright in one corner. The guests turned their attention to the brighter video walls, where a countdown was in progress.
Aristide found himself holding his breath as the countdown dropped to under ten seconds. He made himself exhale, then take in a breath.
Two. One. Zero.
People on the video walls began jumping up and down and congratulating each other. Aristide turned to look overhead. The starfield hadn’t changed.
He looked at the walls again. A countup had started, and they were six seconds into it.
Earth was 8.317 light-minutes from the sun, and the new pocket universe—the term “overpocket” had been proposed—had a radius of slightly over three AU, so over twenty-five minutes would have to pass before it became clear whether or not the trick had actually worked. A glance in the direction of the new Prime Minister showed that—smile flashing, curly head bobbing—he was accepting congratulations from a circle of his guests before anyone properly knew whether, like a tricksy cartoon rabbit hopping into his hole and pulling it in after him, the whole of local space had just jumped into its own private universe.
Time ticked by. The volume of conversation gradually rose. Aristide found himself disinclined to chat, and found a chair in one of the side galleries and sat there with a cup of coffee growing cold in his hand. He watched the crowd, the nervous smiles, the wet mouths laughing.
A roomful of frightened people, he realized, trying to work out whether or not they should remain terrified.
As the moment of confirmation approached, the nervous chatter began to fade. Aristide stood, walked into the ballroom, and looked up at the starfield again.
And then, right on schedule, the starfield vanished, all save bright Earth and its satellite, gleaming in a corner of the image.
Seconds pass, he thought, drop by slow drop.
As the universe fades, before the applause,
A long, universal sigh.
Nothing was heard from Vindex. For once he made no demands, he embarked on no lectures.
From this fact Aristide knew that Vindex was helpless, and that Vindex knew it.
He fired a barrage of missiles, each containing a hostile antimatter universe, but these were dealt with by antiproton weapons.
The worlds sensed victory. Threats against Aristide’s well-being faded, and the bodyguards were reassigned. Grax the Troll gave him a rib-crushing hug before going on to his next job.
Twenty-four days after the overpocket had swallowed near space and set the outer solar system sailing on in straight Euclidian lines, Aristide returned to the same ballroom and the same glittering company. He no longer sensed fear in the room; now he saw gleeful smiles and glittering eyes that anticipated a vast, triumphant catastrophe.
The eyes of those who, safe at home, now watched with intense pleasure as their most violent fantasies were brought to reality.
He wondered if he were the only person in the room who saw the destruction of Courtland as a defeat. It was only because everything tried before this had failed that the war could be considered anything less than a rout.
It wasn’t only Pablo’s dream that died this day.
Aristide wondered what Vindex thought as he saw the nine surviving AI platforms mounting over the sun’s disk like a series of black dawns, rotating to expose the caverns, black-on-black, that were the exits for the mass drivers built in accordance with the plans from the Advisory Committee on Science.
Courtland began a slow curving shift in its trajectory in a useless, last-minute effort to evade whatever Vindex imagined the United Powers might be about to hurl at him.
The mass drivers fired in absolute silence. Bad Pablo’s detectors would have had a few seconds to observe the blue-shifted trajectories of the vast iron missiles heading straight for him, would see the brilliant ionized tails as they skimmed through the sun’s corona; and Pablo might have just enough time to realize he was about to become one of history’s most spectacular and miserable failures.
On the video screens Aristide saw Courtland’s end, the neatly spaced flares as the missiles struck home. Brilliant spheres of plasma expanded from the impacts, their glow picking out the cracks that had spiderwebbed across Courtland’s structure.
What was left of Courtland came apart like a polished black china plate striking a black marble floor.
The audience in the ballroom cheered, as if the home team had just scored a winning goal.
The flying bits of Courtland, now defenseless, would be rounded up, rendered inert, and used to rebuild Gemma, Aloysius, and eventually a new Courtland—a Courtland neutered, deprived of Pablo, and probably having been granted a name change.
Analysts reported that none of Courtland’s pockets survived, at least in this universe.
The great disk-shaped bodies of the Loyal Nine began to swing, the mass drivers now pointed away from the sun.
A volley of projectiles was fired, and then another and another. Smaller antimatter-powered drones launched into the darkness like whole migrations of birds.
After calculating the trajectories of its two shots, the location of Bad Pablo’s mass driver was pretty well known. What wasn’t known were the driver’s instructions—would it fire on its own, without orders from Pablo? Or did Pablo’s Kuiper Belt headquarters contain a pool of life, that would resurrect him should Courtland fail?
These last shots were designed to solve these problems. The planetoid where the mass driver was housed would be hit repeatedly until it was turned into a ball of molten lava. Anything left would be targeted by antimatter missiles. And then a third wave would arrive, robots that would construct a new presence in the Kuiper Belt, a base that would house uploaded humans who would be in charge of the effort to eradicate Bad Pablo completely from the outer reaches of the solar system.
Relieved chatter sounded in the galleries. The Prime Minister was surrounded by a circle of well-wishers. Sous-chefs in white coats marched into the great room, pushing buffet tables gleaming with chafing dishes and loaded with tubs of snow, the necks of champagne bottles protruding from the drifts of white like the barrels of triumphant artillery.
“Damn chatter.” Aristide overheard the sour remarks of the Ambassador from Fred. “Damn people. To hell with this.”
The ambassador grumped out, hands in his pockets. Aristide stayed until the overpocket was shrunk down and the star field came back on, the familiar constellations reappearing to great applause from the audience. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, the hundreds of Tombaugh Objects, lots of dirty ice, and many smaller objects would now abandon their straight trajectories and swing again into gentle curves as the sun’s gravity once again embraced them.
Orbits twenty-four days farther out. The war had altered even the shape of the solar system.
The overpocket had not been dissipated, but shrunk down to microscopic size, and was now held ready in the Physics Annex of the Nanjing Institute in Nanjing, the Western Paradise, Swallowing Clouds. In the event of any more hostile projectiles from the Kuiper Belt, the handy little universe could be instantly inflated until the menace had passed.
For a few moments Aristide absorbed the starlight, and then he made his way out. When he stepped through the hatch to the outside promenade, he had to pause to let his eyes adjust. The dim starlit ballroom had obscured the fact that here on Topaz, it was bright morning.
He had an appointment to keep.
He was going to a Celebration of the Recently Unemployed.
Bitsy waited in Aristide’s car; together they drove to the Tellurian House restaurant, where they were taken to the chef’s table. The walls were covered in fountains that used not water, but a superfluid that flowed upward from floor-level pools, moving in an uneasy, creeping fashion that Aristide didn’t find entirely comfortable.
The table was covered in hammered copper. The chairs were an authentic re-creation of Mission Style, and therefore uncomfortable.
Aristide greeted Shenai, who headed
the table as if chairing a meeting of her shadow cabinet. Flanking her were former members of the Standing Committee who had fallen from power along with their leader: there were the ex-Ministers of Industry and Biological Sciences, the erstwhile Chancellor, and her onetime deputy prime minister.
Commissar Lin attended as well. He hadn’t lost his job exactly, but would be returned to his former duties once the Domus began to downsize and resumed its search for criminals instead of hidden networks of pod people.
Tumusok would have been invited, had he not already followed his new job to another pocket.
“Barring a few hundred more explosions,” Aristide said, “the war seems to be over.”
“We heard,” said Shenai.
Aristide seated himself. A menu appeared in the air before him, and he banished it with a wave of his hand.
Bitsy jumped onto the empty end of the table, opposite Shenai, and sat on her haunches, directing her green-eyed stare down the table.
“We were discussing,” Shenai said, “how the war has altered our perceptions of… well, everything.”
“Beginning at the foundations of the universe,” said Aristide, “and stretching onward from there.”
“The last time our civilization had this comprehensive a scare,” Lin said, “we built all this.” With a wave of his pipe that encompassed a good deal more than the copper table and the reverse waterfalls. “We’ve lost two-elevenths of everything… worlds, people… you can rebuild both worlds and people, but what of the society they belonged to?”
“Speaking as someone who had as much to do with building that society as anyone,” Aristide said, “I’d be sad to see it go.”
“Yet it may be wounded severely, if not mortally. It was based on a sense of security that no longer exists.” Lin opened an envelope of tobacco and began packing his pipe. “People may demand leaders who promise them absolute security—and the sort of leaders who promise absolutes are not, historically speaking, the kind you actually want running your nation.”
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