by Tim Andersen
“How can they function without discriminating between things?”
“They function very well, and it’s not that they don’t discriminate. They just see the discrimination as illusion, and their language reflects that.”
“Can you give me an example?”
She shook her head. “It would be too difficult to be more specific. You’ll find out when you start working with the software.” She reached over and shut off the console. “Come and I’ll show you.”
She stood up and walked out of the room, turning right. I followed. She sat down at one of the black consoles, “these are supposed to work just like the ones in the office,” she said, as if I knew how those worked, having only had about two minutes with one.
She was about to sit down when I heard Crispin’s voice, “better hold on to something.”
“What’s going on?” I said.
Lika leaned over to the wall and grabbed the rail and motioned for me to do likewise. I felt lighter as if I was gently lowering myself into a pool and in a second I was weightless.
“Why’d he turn off the gravity?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “This is my first time on this ship.”
I heard Crispin’s voice again, “initializing electro magnets . . . magnets now at 50 kilo-Teslas, commencing Pipe.”
“That explains it,” said Lika, “we’re Piping.”
The Pipe, as it is explained to non-physicists, is not a jump, like in old movies, or a shift or an abrupt motion of any kind. Rather than move the ship from one location to another, the Pipe literally shortens the distance between one star and another for a brief time.
A couple of years ago, sitting around in our apartment in Boston with my roommate at the time, the subject had come up. He had been smoking on his pipe---an archaism that was so outdated the laws against it were no longer enforced. I suppose that was how the subject came up. He was the sort of follow who loved to sit around explaining things to people---the sort of person who ought to be in graduate school. I asked him if a Pipe was like a wormhole in the old movies.
He tapped the ashes into a bowl (an expensive one my mother had brought me from Polaris, actually) and turned the pipe in his hand. “No, we could never make a wormhole with a ship. It would take something as dense as a black hole and incredibly massive. Piping is more like reconfiguring space at the quantum level. Sort of like pushing a boulder up a mountain versus taking it apart molecule by molecule and reassembling it at the top.”
“Ok,” I said, confused. “You mean the ship gets disassembled?”
He shook his head. “No, space does. Look,” he said, “Einstein said that space is smooth.” He picked up a bowl with some leftover popcorn in it. “Like this plastic bowl here.” He tossed a handful in his mouth. “But if you looked close enough it’s made of long fibers, polymer chains all wound up together. So the smoothness is just because the polymers are so much smaller than we are. Get it?”
“Yeah,” I said. I took the bowl he was using as an ash tray and dumped the contents into the popcorn bowl. I handed it to him.
He popped some in his mouth and made a face, spat it back into the bowl and continued:
“Space is the same way. It seems smooth, but, at the smallest possible size, it’s made of interconnecting grid lines. But the lines are sort of like the squares on a chess board.”
“Huh?”
“Look,” he said and pulled his tablet and a stylus out. He touched the tablet and a chess game started. “How many moves does a pawn have to make to get to the opposite side?”
Not a chess player I guessed, “Six?”
“Five actually, but it doesn’t matter.” He touched the screen and zoomed the game board till the ends slipped off the screen, then he shrunk it till the pieces were almost invisible and the board was a tiny square. “No matter how big or small I make the board, it’s still the same number of moves, right? So, the size of the squares doesn’t affect the distance the pawn has to go. It’s the same with the interconnecting lines that make up space and time.” He made the board the normal size again. “The number of grid squares between one point and another is distance as we know it, not the sizes of the squares. They’re meaningless.”
“What does this have to do with Piping?”
“Well, what if I took out some of these squares?” He set to work touching the squares on the screen with his stylus. When he was done the two middle columns had been filled in to look like this:
“Now the pawn can get there in two moves instead of six. You take out the spaces between you and somewhere else and you can get there faster. That’s Piping.”
“Checkmate, eh?”
“Huh? I’m going out for tobacco,” he said and starting getting his coat on. He never did get my jokes.
“Wait, how do they get rid of the grid squares?”
He shrugged. “Oh, different ways. Sometimes they just stretch them. Sometimes they rub them out with a high energy beam. It’s all quantum physics.” And he left.
After that, I did some research on it. Early interstellar explorers had traveled through specially constructed, permanent conduits. One end of the conduit was dragged to a distant star system on an unmanned probe at close to the speed of light, taking many years. This had the effect of creating a “pipe” to another star system. The name still stuck. My grandfather had told me once about how rough the ride through the old Pipes was. The old Pipes had eventually collapsed, however, cutting Earth off from several colonies. Spontaneous Piping re-established contact.
In Spontaneous Piping, a high energy particle accelerator or a gamma ray laser pulses into a point in so-called “empty” space which is filled with the quantum grid lines. It disconnects the lines in the same way that cooking causes proteins in meat to unfold. The pulses erase the loops ahead, extending the Pipe until it is trillions of kilometers long, long enough to reach the stars. After the ship passes through, space tends to re-establish itself and the Pipe collapses.
Looking out the window, I saw the beam pulse out from the ship's bow. The space ahead of us rippled and warped, the stars appearing to stretch and twist. As the beam continued pulsing, boring its way through space like a drill, the warping became more and more extreme.
The beam shut off now and the ship began to move toward it. As we moved through the opening, the stars around us blurred and then faded. There was a burst of blue light and then a blurring again. New stars shifted into view, and I knew that we had left Earth far behind.
I heard a shout, not over the PA but through the door to the control room. It was Crispin. “Somebody get Smith. We’ve had a Pipe failure. We’re in the wrong place.”
Lika shouted back, “Lars, you fool, turn the gravity back on first.”
“Hold on again,” he said. I had never let go so I held on, this time with a white-knuckle grip. My weight reappeared, and my feet hit the floor. This time I kept my balance. Crispin came out. I noticed he did not look at Lika. “Sorry about that, fellers,” he said. “Engineers didn’t know if the grav would work with our Pipe engines so they asked me to shut it off before I ran up the mags. Where the hell is Smith?” I could see he was agitated.
“Well Crispin, let’s see. Come on now.” I whirled and saw an angry Smith standing behind me.
“Sure thing, Mr. Smith,” said Crispin. “The best view’s in the control room.” That confused me. If we had had a Pipe failure, we should be in empty space. The chances of ending up near any astronomical body other than the one we were aiming for was negligible. We all followed him into the control room.
The control room was filled with switches, buttons, read-out screens, etc. The designers had put the console in the center of the room. The entire front of the room was clear, and, as everyone except Crispin pressed themselves against the window, we beheld a majestic sight. Below was what appeared to be an amorphous mass of shifting shades of magenta, blue, green, yellow the size of a planet.
“’Tis no planet. That’s for sure,�
� said Crispin.
“It looks like a cloud,” I said.
“Or a flock of birds,” said Lika, smiling.
Smith snickered. He turned to us and, with a sort of glee that I had never seen on his face or in his voice, he said, “you are all right in a sense, but also wrong.”
Crispin and I shook our heads. Lika simply stared.
“Those are the Amida,” he said.
“You mean you knew that there was no planet and didn’t tell me?” said Crispin. “I thought we were at the wrong Pipe coordinates!”
“No, the Amida never mentioned anything,” said Smith. “Our long-range scans did show planets in this system. We simply assumed that they lived on one of them. They might not have thought it significant to correct us. No, there is no doubt in my mind that those are the Amida, and they are waiting for me to establish contact. Send the greeting that I’ve prepared Crispin.”
A few minutes later, Crispin said, “we’re receiving a reply.”
“Quickly Lika, run it through the interpretation codes and find out what they said,” said Smith, walking back into the sitting area.
Lika and I followed and Lika sat down at one of the consoles. She worked on it for a few minutes, apparently too long because Smith complained, “what’s taking so long?” She worked for another few minutes until Smith began to pull her almost bodily out of the chair. “Let me do it!” he said.
A few seconds after he sat down, he laughed and said, “Lika, no wonder the codes didn’t work. Always, always look at the original before putting it through the program. Look at the message they sent.” He tapped a few buttons on the console and then turned around to look at something behind us.
Chapter 3 – The Amida
Projected above the console in the center of the room was the head of an elderly man wearing what appeared to be a red robe. He was speaking. “To our good friends from Earth. Welcome on behalf of the Amida. We invite you to land your ship so that we may welcome you in person.”
As the face faded out, we all looked at each other, for a moment all speechless.
“What?” said Lika. “I don’t understand.”
“See for yourself,” said Smith. “The Amida are a most remarkable race. Clearly they have mastered the art of being human far better than we have mastered Amidan.”
“But all those communications with them, every contact with them. They were always totally alien,” she said. “They never once implied that they were capable of communicating like us.”
“Maybe they needed time to learn to approximate our behavior,” I suggested.
“What evidence do you have for that, Fenn?” said Smith.
“It’s a theory,” I said.
“An unfounded conclusion, Fenn,” said Smith. “Don’t be so hasty.”
Smith stood up before I could respond and called, “Crispin!” Crispin came out of the control room. “Crispin, make preparations for landing.”
“Landing?” said Crispin.
“Yes! The Amida have invited us to land, and I want to do so immediately.”
Crispin grinned and leaned against a rail. “And where, Mr. Smith, do you propose we do that? There’s nothing down there to land on. It’d be easier to land in a bucket of gelatin.”
Smith frowned, annoyed. “Well, the Amida have invited us to land so I suggest you check again.”
Crispin went back into the control room, and Smith followed him. Lika and I and followed too and again were faced with the shifting mass of color below. Crispin went to the controls. “Radar doesn’t register it at all,” he said. “It’s like it goes right through it. I swear, Mr. Smith, there’s nothing solid down there. If it weren’t that we were in orbit around it, I would say it’s not there.”
“Why don’t we send them a message and ask how to land?” I said.
Smith turned to me. “Again, you are jumping to conclusions. The message we received was obviously recorded. It could have taken them any amount of time to prepare, even months or years. There’s no evidence that they can communicate in real-time.”
“It couldn’t hurt, Tolan,” said Lika.
He looked at her, paused for a moment, and then spoke to Crispin. “Send a message, in English for now. Request landing instructions.” Smith meanwhile stood over the radar screen which indeed was totally blank.
“Transmitting,” said Crispin. We waited, watching as the surface below shifted, colors moving, shimmering, and coalescing in a never-ending dance.
After fifteen minutes, Smith said, “ha! Look Crispin, their response.”
Crispin looked down at the transmitter’s output screen and said, “there’s nothing received, Mr. Smith.”
“No, no Crispin, look here,” he said, pointing to the radar screen.
Crispin, Lika, and I all crowded around Smith and there on the radar was a small blip indicating a solid surface at least as large as a mountain. “Well,” said Crispin, “I can’t believe it. What is it?”
“Don’t just stand there, man,” said Smith. “Get the telescope on it.”
“We should be able to see it,” said Crispin, shaking his head. “It’s only about twenty clicks away.”
We all looked up at the window at the same time, and there was the strangest ship I had ever seen. It was not so much a ship as a kind of asteroid but not a barren chunk of rock. This asteroid was green and blue like Earth with wispy white clouds above it.
“How?” I said, but nobody answered.
“Land us, Crispin,” said Smith.
Crispin sat down at the console, touched some buttons, and I saw that we were approaching the asteroid. We floated straight down, slowly like a feather. As we entered its atmosphere, I could hear a rushing noise as air passed by the ship, and the window began to show blue sky instead of black, the bluish Amidan sun dazzling us and warming our faces.
I felt no acceleration as the ship descended, which made me feel as if we were not moving at all. Quickly, though, the land came into view. It was in fact much larger than a single mountain. It was a narrow valley with a river running through the middle and snowcapped mountains on either side. The valley appeared to be cultivated with strips of freshly plowed Earth in evidence. Up on one mountain slope was what appeared to be a large complex of structures built of reddish stone surrounded by a high wall.
“Land us as close as you can to that,” said Smith, pointing at the complex.
Crispin gaped. “I thought I’d seen everything in space, but this . . .”
We drifted gently towards the complex and landed, just at the point where the land began to curve up towards the mountain. “Can’t get much closer than that,” said Crispin.
“All right, now let’s shut off the ship’s gravity,” said Smith.
Crispin touched a button but nothing appeared to happen. I felt the same weight.
“What happened? Why isn’t the gravity off?” said Smith.
“It’s off, Mr. Smith. This is the local gravity.”
“Outstanding,” said Smith.
“What?” said Lika.
Smith turned to her. “Artificial gravity! It allows one to build spaceships, even colonies without an enclosing structure. Any asteroid can become habitable with a full g to hold in the atmosphere.” He turned back to Crispin. “Open the hatch. I must meet our hosts.”
Crispin kept us waiting another few minutes while he tested the outside atmosphere, which appeared to approximate Earth standard quite well, except for a conspicuous lack of dust. “Very clean,” said Crispin. Smith waited by the hatch impatiently, grumbling about making our hosts wait. When Crispin announced that the air was breathable and no toxins had been detected, Smith started to open the hatch. “Wait,” said Crispin. “Standard procedure calls for breathing filters.”
“Crispin,” said Smith, “the Amidans aren’t about to let us be poisoned or infected.”
Crispin passed Lika and me each a face mask and then put his on covering his mouth and nose. “You can’t trust them to know, Mr. Smit
h. Remember the incident with the Persephonians. You were in bed for two weeks and would’ve died if they hadn’t been able to work up an anti-viral that worked on humans. As I recall you still ended up with a blood transfusion to get rid of whatever they put into you.”
Smith snatched the mask out of Crispin’s hands and stuffed it in his pocket like a difficult child. “The Persephonians were idiots. I’ve never encountered a stupider race. The Amidans are different. I won’t wear it.”
Smith wrenched open the hatchway leading into the airlock. We quickly followed and Crispin slammed the inner door shut and sealed it, which released the mechanism for the outer door. Smith now spun the wheel and the outer hatch released with a slight hiss as pressures equalized.
The air smelled strongly of mountain pastureland, and, for a moment, I realized how stale the ship’s air was in comparison. The air was cool, perhaps 10-15 degrees Celsius, and the sun was bright, just like a Spring day on Earth.
We stepped out onto wet-green grass, as if it had recently rained, and surveyed around us. The mountains seemed to form a kind of bowl, blocking any horizon view. The sky was clear blue, but the mass of shifting colors was also still visible overhead, signaling that, no matter how much like Earth this was, we were in an alien environment.
Smith took great gulps of the air as if to further flaunt regulations. I was personally glad for the mask. In the movies, people who went about on alien worlds without protection invariably caught some bizarre disease that turned them inside out or caused them to slowly melt or maybe even turn into aliens and forget their lives as humans. Smith surely knew all about the dangers of trusting an alien race.