Reality Dysfunction - Expansion nd-2

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Ione nodded silent approval. Tranquillity’s background memories were revealing how hard the review teams were working.

  There were only five other people in the hall, as well as Lieria. They had all been working through the night, and now they were clustered round a tray from the canteen, drinking tea and eating croissants. Parker Higgens rose as soon as she came in. His grey suit jacket was hanging off the back of one of the chairs, revealing a crumpled blue shirt. All-night sessions were obviously something the old director was finding increasingly difficult to manage. But he proffered a tired smile as he introduced her to the other four. Malandra Sarker and Qingyn Lin were Laymil spaceship experts, she a biotechnology systems specialist, while his field was the mechanical and electrical units the xenocs employed in their craft. Ione shook hands while Tranquillity silently supplied profile summaries of the two. Malandra Sarker struck her as being young for the job at twenty-eight, but she had her doctorate from the capital university on Quang Tri, and references which were impeccable.

  Ione knew Kempster Getchell, the Astronomy Division’s chief; they had met during the first round of briefings, and on several formal social occasions since then. He was in his late sixties, and from a family which lacked any substantial geneering. But despite entropy’s offensive, leaving him with greying, thinning hair, and a stoop to his shoulders, he projected a lively puckish attitude, the complete opposite to Parker Higgens. Astronomy was one of the smallest divisions in the Laymil project, concerned mainly with identifying stars which had Laymil-compatible spectra, and searching through radio astronomy records to see if any abnormality had ever been found to indicate a civilization. Despite frequent requests, no Lord of Ruin had ever agreed to fund the division’s own radio-telescope array. They had to make do with library records from universities across the Confederation.

  Kempster Getchell’s assistant was Renato Vella, a swarthy thirty-five-year-old from Valencia, on a four-year sabbatical from one of its universities. He acted both excited and awed when Ione greeted him. She wasn’t quite sure if it was her presence or their discovery which instigated his jitters.

  “The Laymil home planet?” Ione asked Parker Higgens, permitting a note of scepticism to sound.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the director said. The joy that should have been present at making the announcement was missing, he seemed more apprehensive than triumphant.

  “Where is it?” she asked.

  Parker Higgens traded a pleading glance with Kempster Getchell, then sighed. “It used to be here, in this solar system.”

  Ione counted to three. “Used to be?”

  “Yes.”

  Tranquillity? What is going on?

  Although it is an extraordinary claim, the evidence does appear to be slanted in their favour. Allow them to complete their explanation.

  All right.“go on.”

  “It was a recording that was translated two days ago,” Malandra Sarker said. “We found we had got the memory of a Laymil spaceship crew-member. Naturally we were delighted, it would give us a definite blueprint for one of their ships, inside and out, as well as the operating procedures. Up until now all we’ve had is fragments of what we thought were spaceship parts. Well we found out what a Laymil ship looks like all right.” She datavised one of the nearby processor blocks; its AV pillar shone an image into Ione’s eyes.

  The Laymil ship had three distinct sections. At the front were four white-silver metal ovoids; the large central unit was thirty metres long, with the three twenty-metre units clustered around it—obviously life-support cabins. The midsection was drum shaped, its sides made up from interlaced stone-red pipes packed so tightly there was no chink between them, an almost intestinal configuration. Five black heat-radiation tubes protruded at right angles from its base, spaced equally around the rim. At the rear was a narrow sixty-metre-long tapering fusion tube, with slim silver rings running along its length at five-metre intervals. Right at the tip, around the plasma exhaust nozzle, was a silver foil parasol.

  “Is it organic?” Ione asked.

  “We think about eighty per cent,” Qingyn Lin said. “It matches what we know of their use of biotechnology.”

  Ione turned away from the projection.

  “It is a passenger ship,” Malandra Sarker said. “From what we can make out, the Laymil didn’t have commercial cargo ships, although there are some tankers and specialist industrial craft.”

  “This would seem to be correct,” Lieria said, speaking through the small white vocalizer block held in one of her tractamorphic arms. “The Laymil at this cultural stage did not have economic commerce. Technical templates and DNA were exchanged between clan units, but no physical or biotechnology artefacts were traded for financial reward.”

  “The thing is,” Malandra Sarker said, sinking down into a chair, “it was leaving a parking orbit around their home planet to fly to Mirchusko’s spaceholms.”

  “We always wondered why the ship fuel tanks we found were so large,” Qingyn Lin said. “There was far too much deuterium and He3 stored for simple inter-habitat voyages, even if they made fifteen trips in a row without refuelling. Now we know. They were interplanetary spaceships.”

  Ione gave Kempster Getchell a questioning look. “A planet? Here?”

  A wayward smile formed on his lips, he appeared indecently happy about the revelation. “It does look that way. We checked the star and planet positions gathered from the spacecraft’s sensor array most thoroughly. The system we saw is definitely this one. The Laymil home planet used to orbit approximately one hundred and thirty-five million kilometres from the star. That does put it rather neatly between the orbits of Jyresol and Boherol.” He pouted sadly. “And here I’ve spent thirty years of my life looking at stars with spectra similar to this one. All the time it was right under my nose. God, what a waste. Still, I’m back on the cutting edge of astrophysics now, and no mistake. Trying to work out how you make a planet disappear . . . ho, boy.”

  “All right,” Ione said with forced calm. “So where is it now? Was it destroyed? There isn’t an asteroid belt between Jyresol and Boherol. There isn’t even a dust belt as far as I know.”

  “There is no record of any extensive survey being made of this system’s interplanetary medium,” Kempster said. “I checked our library. But even assuming the planet had literally been reduced to dust, the solar wind would have blown the majority of particles beyond the Oort cloud within a few centuries.”

  “Would a survey now help?” she asked.

  “It might be able to confirm the dust hypothesis, if the density is still higher than is usual. But it would depend on when the planet was destroyed.”

  “It was here two thousand six hundred years ago,” Renato Vella said. “We know that from analysing the position of the other planets at the time the memory was recorded. But if we are to look for proof of the dust I believe we would be better off taking surface samples from Boherol and the gas giant moons.”

  “Good idea, well done, lad,” Kempster said, patting his younger assistant on the shoulder. “If this wave of dust was expelled outwards then it should have left traces on all the airless bodies in the system. Similar to the way sediment layers in planetary core samples show various geological epochs. If we could find it, we would get a good indication of when it actually happened as well.”

  “I don’t think it was reduced to dust,” Renato Vella said.

  “Why not?” Ione asked.

  “It was a valid idea,” he said readily. “There aren’t many other ways you can make something that mass disappear without trace. But it’s a very theoretical solution. In practical terms the energy necessary to dismantle an entire planet to such an extent is orders of magnitude above anything the Confederation could muster. You have to remember that even our outlawed antimatter planetbuster bombs don’t harm or ablate the mass of a terracompatible-sized planet, they just wreck and pollute the biosphere. In any case an explosion—multiple explosions even—wouldn’t do the trick, they
would just reduce it to asteroidal fragments. To turn it into dust or preferably vapour you would need some form of atomic disrupter weapon, probably powered by the star—I can’t think what else would produce enough energy. That or a method of initiating a fission chain reaction in stable atoms.”

  “Perfect mass-energy conversion,” Kempster muttered, his eyebrows beetled in concentration. “Now there’s an idea.”

  “And why wasn’t the same method used against the Laymil habitats?” Renato Vella said, warming to his theme. “If you have a weapon which can destroy a planet so thoroughly as to eradicate all traces of it, why leave the remnants of the habitats for us to find?”

  “Yes, yes, why indeed?” Kempster said. “Good point, lad, well done. Good thinking.”

  His assistant beamed.

  “We still think the habitats destroyed themselves,” Parker Higgens said. “It fits what we know, even now.” He looked at Ione, visibly distressed. “I think the memory may show the start of the planet’s destruction. There is clearly some kind of conflict being enacted on the surface as the ship leaves orbit.”

  “Surely that was an inter-clan dispute, wasn’t it?” Qingyn Lin asked dubiously. “That’s what it sounded like to me.”

  “You are all mistaken in thinking of this problem purely in terms of the physical,” Lieria said. “Consider what we now know. The planet is confirmed to have been in existence at the same time the habitats were broken. The Laymil entity whose memory we have accessed is concerned about the transformation in the life-harmony gestalt which is being propagated across an entire continent. A drastic metaphysical change which threatens nothing less than the entire Laymil racial orientation. Director Parker Higgens is correct, these events cannot be discounted as coincidence.”

  Ione glanced round the group. None of them looked as though they wished to contradict the Kiint. “I think I’d better review this memory myself.” She sat in the chair next to Malandra Sarker. Show me.

  As before, the Laymil body hardened around her own, an exoskeleton which did not—could never—fit. The recording quality was much higher than before. Oski Katsura and her team had been working long hours on the processors and programs required to interpret the stored information. There were hardly any of the black specks which indicated fragmentary data drop-outs. Ione relaxed deeper into the chair as the sensorium buoyed her along.

  The Laymil was a shipmaster, clan-bred for a life traversing the barren distance between the spaceholm constellation and Unimeron, the prime lifehost. It hung at the hub of the ship’s central life-support ovoid as the drive was readied for flight. There was nothing like the human arrangement of decks and machinery, present even in voidhawks. The protective metal shell contained a biological nest-womb, a woody growth honeycombed with chambers and voyage-duration pouches for travellers, creating an exotic organic grotto. Chambers were clustered together without logic, like elongated bubbles in a dense foam; the walls had the texture of tough rubber, pocked with hundreds of small holes to restrain hoofs, and emitting a fresh green radiance. Organs to maintain the atmosphere and recycle food were encased in the thicker partitions.

  The all-pervasive greenness was subtly odd to Ione’s human brain. Tubular buttress struts curved through the chamber around the Laymil body, flaring out where they merged with a wall. Its three hoofs were pushed into holes, buttocks resting on a grooved mushroom-stool; its hands were closed on knobby protrusions. A teat stalactite hung centimetres from the feeding mouth. The position was rock solid and immensely comfortable, the nest-womb had grown into a flawlessly compatible layout with the shipmaster’s body. All three heads slid around in slow weaving motions, observing small opaque composite instrument panels that swelled out of the wall. Ione found it hard to tell where the plastic began and the cells ended; the cellular/mechanical fusion was seamless, as though the womb-nest was actually growing machinery. Panel-mounted lenses projected strange graphics into the Laymil’s eyes, in a fashion similar to human AV projectors.

  As the heads moved they provided snatched glimpses into other chambers through narrow passageways. She saw one of the Laymil passengers cocooned in its voyage-duration pouch. It was swaddled in translucent glittery membranes that held it fast against the wall, and a waxy hose supplying a nutrient fluid had been inserted into its mouth, with a similar hose inserted into its anus, maintaining the digestive cycle. A mild form of hibernation.

  The Laymil shipmaster’s thoughts were oddly twinned, as though the recording was of two separate thought patterns. On a subsidiary level it was aware of the ship’s biological and mechanical systems. It controlled them with a processor’s precision, preparing the fusion tube for ignition, maintaining attitude through small reaction thrusters, computing a course vector, surveying the four nest-wombs. There was a similarity here to the automatic functions a human’s neural nanonics would perform; but as far as she could ascertain the shipmaster possessed no implants. This was the way its brain was structured to work. The ship’s biotechnology was sub-sentient, so, in effect, the shipmaster was the flight computer.

  On an ascendant level its mind was observing the planet below through the ship’s sensor faculty. Unimeron was remarkably similar to a terracompatible world, with broad blue oceans and vast white cloud swirls, the poles home to smallish ice-caps. The visual difference was provided by the continents; they were a near-uniform green, even the mountain ranges had been consumed by the vegetation layer. No piece of land was wasted.

  Vast blue-green cobweb structures hung in orbit, slightly below the ship’s thousand-kilometre altitude. These were the skyhavens, most two hundred kilometres in diameter, some greater, rotating once every five or more hours, not for artificial gravity but simply to maintain shape. They were alive, conscious with vibrant mentalities, greater than that of a spaceholm even. A combination of spaceport and magnetosphere energy node, with manufacturing modules clumped around the hub like small bulbous tangerine barnacles. But the physical facets were just supplementary to their intellectual function. They formed an important aspect of the planet’s life-harmony, smoothing and weaving the separate continental essence thoughts into a single unified planetwide gestalt. Mental communication satellites, though they contributed to the gestalt as well, sang to distant stars. That voice was beyond Ione completely, both its message and its purpose, registering as just a vague cadence on the threshold of perception. She felt a little darker for its absence, the Laymil shipmaster considered it magnificent.

  The skyhavens were packed close together, with small variants in altitude, allowing them to slide along their various orbital inclinations without ever colliding. No segment of the planet’s sky was ever left open. It was an amazing display of navigational exactitude. From a distance it looked as though someone had cast a net around Unimeron. She tried to gauge the effort involved in their growth, a planet-girdling structure, and failed. Even for a species with such obvious biotechnology and engineering supremacy the skyhavens were an awesome achievement.

  “Departure initiation forthcoming,”the shipmaster called.

  “Venture boldness reward,”the skyhaven essence replied. “Anticipate hope.”

  Unimeron’s terminator was visible now, blackness biting into the planet. Nightside continents were studded with bright green lightpoints, smaller than human cities, and very regular. One southern continent, curving awkwardly around the planet’s mass away from the ship’s sensors, had delicate streamers of phosphorescent red mist meandering along its coastal zones with exploratory tendrils creeping further inland. The edges were visibly palpitating like the fringes of a terrestrial jellyfish as they curled and flowed around surface features, yet all the while retaining a remarkable degree of integrity. There was none of the braiding or churning of ordinary clouds. Ione considered the effect quite delightful, the mist looked alive, as though the air currents were infected with biofluorescent spoors.

  But the Laymil shipmaster was physically repelled by the sight. “Galheith clan essence asperity woe.�
�his heads bobbed around in agitation, letting out low hoots of distress. “Woe. Folly acknowledgement request.”

  “No relention,”the skyhaven essence answered sadly.

  As their orbits took them over the continent, the skyhavens would hum in dismay. The life-harmony of Unimeron was being disrupted, with the skyhavens refusing to disseminate the Galheith clan essence into the gestalt. It was too radical, too antagonistic. Too different. Alien and antithetical to the harmony ethos that had gone before.

  A tiny flare of sharp blue-white light sprang out of the red mist, dying down quickly.

  “Reality dysfunction,”the shipmaster called in alarm.

  “Confirm.”

  “Horror woe. Galheith research death essence tragedy.”

  “Concord.”

  “Impetuosity woe release. Reality dysfunction exponential. Prime lifehost engulfed fear.”

  “Reality dysfunction counter. Spaceholm constellation prime essence continuation hope.”

  “Confirm. Hope carriage.”the shipmaster quickly reviewed the other Laymil hibernating in the nest-wombs; both mental traits converging for the evaluation. “Essencemasters condition satisfactory. Hope reality dysfunction defeat. Hope Galheith atonement.”

  “Hope joined. Rejoice unity commitment.”

  Where the flare of light had sprung, the jungle was now alight. Ione realized the glimmer of orange must be a firestorm easily over ten kilometres wide.