Jack Glass

by Adam Roberts

  ‘It wasn’t money. He came from a wealthy family. He walked away from his inheritance – he was working as second engineer on a clapped-out sloop, after all. He disdained money. That was another part of the logic of his religion.’

  ‘Then why?’ Diana said. She slumped back in her chair. ‘This is insane. A moment ago I had no idea that such a thing was even possible! FTL! Good grief.’

  ‘You’re not thinking it through,’ said Iago, mildly.

  This stung. ‘Alright, I’ll think it through – professor. I’ll run through the possible negatives. But do you know what? I know, I know in advance that they are all massively outweighed by the advantages of opening up the whole universe to human settlement. So.’ She laid a thumb in at the cleft of her chin. ‘I suppose, a technology like this would be fought over. There might be struggles. Wars, even. The Lex Ulanova has preserved order in the system for so long we’ve forgotten what full-scale war is like, I don’t doubt. Is it that?’ But before Iago could reply, she answered herself. ‘But, no, that’s crazy. Who’s going to fight over it? Disseminate the data everywhere, place copies all over the IP, copy it a trillion times. Set it free and there’s nothing to fight over. So what else? Is it – is it that the drive is very polluting?’

  ‘Not so far as I know,’ replied Iago.

  ‘Then what? What is the downside of letting humanity spread through the stars? Are you worried about alien encounter?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Then I don’t understand. There! I said it.’

  Iago was looking through the window. ‘It’s snowing again,’ he said. And so it was: thinner flakes this time, and fewer. A few knocked themselves like cold moths against the window. Iago and Dia watched for a while. Then Iago said: ‘that last act of McAuley, his hymn, has become something of a myth. A story. Amongst those that know, I mean. Which is a select group. What precisely was he singing, with his terminal breath?’

  ‘How can we know?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Iago. ‘Exactly. But people speculate, nonetheless. One person I know has a whole elaborate theory – wrote it as a story. He thinks that McAuley was racked by the belief that his pride was sinful; that God had set the speed of light as a constant and that to exceed it was blasphemous.’

  ‘Really?’ said Dia. ‘That doesn’t sound very plausible.’

  ‘You say so because you don’t share the particular religious beliefs McAuley did. But, actually, yes, I agree with you. Perhaps it played a part. But it’s speculation. And we don’t need speculation. We don’t need to attribute his reluctance to disseminate his FTL technology to his religion. Because I don’t share his religious belief; but I do share his reluctance.’

  ‘You do?’ Dia was flabbergasted. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re not thinking it through,’ he said again, gravely.

  ‘I don’t see it,’ she agreed. ‘I don’t see the downside.’

  ‘We’re going to have to leave soon,’ said Iago. Then he said: ‘you learned about Einstein at kindergarten, of course. But as with lots of kindergarten stuff, we tend to forget what it means, in the fullest sense. We take it for granted.’

  ‘Forget what what means?’

  ‘Forget what it means to say “the speed of light is the fastest we can travel”. It’s not an arbitrary limit, like a speed limit on a road. Rather it’s an expression of the fundamental geometry of the universe.’

  ‘You sound like Eva,’ said Diana. ‘She always insisted vehemently on the impossibility of FTL.’

  ‘And why was that?’

  ‘If I had my bId, I’d recite all the relevant . . .’ Diana started to say. Then she said. ‘Not that I need it! OK, I’ll play along. All the vectors in spacetime are aspects of the same vector: an arrow that sums the total of your motion through the eight aspects – west/east, north/south, up/down, forward-in-time/backwards-in-time – those eight coordinates that altogether constitute spacetime. If you were completely motionless in space, the arrow would point directly along the axis forward-in-time, because you are travelling, one hour per hour, as “fast” forward in time as it is possible to go. If you start to move eastward, accelerating faster and faster towards the east, then the arrow swings a little towards the east axis, and the vector of your forward-in-timeness reduces a little. This is the time-dilation effect Einstein discovered. Move faster in an eastward direction and the arrow swings further that way, and accordingly you move less precipitously forward in the direction of forward-in-time. Eventually the arrow will be pointing directly ‘east’, and you will be travelling at c in that direction, and not moving forward in time at all. In order to travel “faster than light” you would somehow have to rotate the arrow more horizontally than horizontal. It’s easy to see how stupid that is. Saying “faster than light” is like saying “more straight than perfectly straight”. Looking for it is like looking for the fourth side of a triangle. Looking for it means that you haven’t understood what a triangle is. This is, as you said, kindergarten stuff.’

  ‘What follows?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I’m asking you to think through the implications.’

  ‘Of FTL? You mean – hypothetically? I suppose that to travel faster than light would mean generating a new, localised spacetime geometry.’

  Iago waved that aside with a condescending gesture. ‘Obviously that. I don’t mean that.’

  ‘Alright,’ said Dia, crossly. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You can’t exceed c, any more than you can rotate through more than three-sixty-degrees. So the only alternative is: to change c. And that means . . .’ She was about to say ‘freedom’ when the truth of it clattered, shockingly, into her mind. ‘Oh,’ she said, her face falling. ‘Oh!’

  He nodded. ‘You make your McAuley machine. OK. Then what? You might make it into a spaceship and travel to Orion. Or you might make it into—’

  ‘A bomb,’ she breathed.

  She understood, finally, the stakes for which they had been playing.

  ‘Drop it in the sun,’ he agreed. ‘Think about E=mc2. Say your McAuley machine resets c a million times higher – the sort of ratio you’d need to cover interstellar space in a reasonable time: 120 light years is a million light-hours, after all. So you reset c a million times higher. Feed that into Einstein’s equation. Think what it would do to the energy output of our star.’

  ‘A bomb,’ she said again.

  ‘The biggest bomb there’s ever been. Such ordnance is the necessary correlative of FTL. It’s an inevitable feature of the technology.’

  ‘Good goddess,’ said Diana, in a low voice.

  ‘You can see what I mean when I say that the stakes are high. You can see why the loss of one life, or even dozens of individual lives, might be a price worth paying – to save trillions.’

  Diana shivered.

  ‘I believe that when McAuley developed his technology he was thinking in terms of unlocking the prison door, and letting humanity out into the cosmos. Like you said. Maybe that thought blinded him. But he was no fool. I’ll tell you what he actually invented. He had invented a way of increasing c. Of course that meant he had invented a way of turning E=mc2 into a species-killing weapon.’

  ‘Nobody would use it,’ said Diana. ‘You would have to be insane! Nobody would be so mad.’

  ‘Is it a chance we can take?’ said Iago. ‘You think it would be a good idea for this technology to fall into Ulanov hands? Or – anybody else’s?’

  ‘Oh Lady of the Cosmos.’

  The question dominated the afternoon, hanging in the air, buzzing at Dia’s mind even though, or perhaps because, its answer was so obviously no.

  She located a cache of woollen and plasfabric sweaters, coats, hats and scarves under the stairs, dressed herself in them (though they were rather too short for her upland-lengthened limbs) and went outside for a walk. Sharply cold. Hers was a slow, cumbrous procession; the ground uneven beneath her feet. When the path went up it was enormously strenuous work
ascending it, and left her gasping in pseudo-asthmatic panic. And when the path went down it was perhaps even harder, although in a different way: her passage always on the alarming edge of tripping and tumbling towards a painful fall and probably a broken bone. The air seemed something the opposite of a clean and penetrable medium: cold to an almost gelid degree, spotted with drifting ice-flakes falling languidly towards the beige ground. On the other hand, being in amongst the mountains, rather than seeing them from her usual perspective of high above, gave her some insight into why mountains had, historically speaking, so obsessed humanity. Their prodigious size and mass had a sort of divine indifference about it. They had the appearance of a kind of absolute solidity. Impossible to imagine them ever passing away. And yet – she reminded herself, not only the mountains but the entirety of the Earth, and its moon, and Mars, and the trillions upon trillions of people living in their various mansions and houses and shanty bubbles orbiting the sun – all of it could be wiped out in moments, if what Iago said was true.

  Frost on a boulder looked like scales. On she went, struggling against her own limitations. It didn’t bear thinking about, but she couldn’t stop thinking, and that meant she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Eventually, panting like a dog, she reached the edge of the estate: a brick wall twice her height, and an old iron gate – brown metal speckled all over with tomato-coloured rust. She sat on an old stone stump and got her breath back, wondering if it was a portion of some ancient Greek temple column, or a piece of modern masonry, or perhaps just a chunk of rock shaped by random action into a cylinder. No way to tell. Through the bars of the gate she saw the road going down into a shallow valley of cold, dry stones.

  She got back to the house in time for supper. ‘Good,’ she said in a hearty voice, as Sapho put bowls on the table. ‘I have worked up an appetite.’

  But all three were in a sombre mood that evening. In the darkness of its mountainous location, the interior of the house illuminated only by a couple of light poles, it felt terribly remote.

  ‘I realised something,’ said Diana. ‘When I was out walking.’ Iago and Sapho looked at her, patiently, expectantly, and she thought: this is what I do. This is what they expect of me. Seeing through the tangle to the heart of the mystery. Her whole torso tingled. ‘I realised that Eva was right.’

  ‘Right?’ repeated Iago.

  ‘She had a dream in which she learned that the solution to the murder mystery was directly connected to her own research. Her latest PhD on those “Champagne Supernovae”, those instances of stars that explode with supernova brightness even though they lack the necessary mass?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Iago, nodding his head very slowly. An ocean tide was turning about in his gaze. ‘Yes,’ he said again, putting a hand to the side of his face. ‘Of course.’

  He looked, in the polelight, very old.

  Diana said: ‘She refused to believe it herself, but she was right! Every Champagne Supernova, every single one – is the funeral pyre of an alien civilisation. Each one marks a life-form that advanced to the point where they discovered whatever it was that McAuley discovered. And then, and then, by accident or by deliberate act of war, by malice or through misguided religious beliefs, the technology was turned on the life-form’s own home star. Its energy output increased instantly by a million times: just as you said! Goddess have mercy.’

  For a long time they were silent. Then Iago said, with a wry smile: ‘I have to say, that had not occurred to me.’

  ‘You don’t think it is right?’

  ‘I’m sure it is. It explains the otherwise inexplicable supernovae that Miss Eva was studying. I’m sure it explains some more conventional supernovae as well. Only, think of it! Whole civilisations burnt up in an instant. On old Earth they used to worry that simple atomics would destroy humanity. But atomic weapons are firecrackers compared to this.’

  ‘It is a monstrous thing,’ said Sapho. Diana looked from her to Iago, and back again. Here she was, with two actual murderers; yet both were touched in their tender consciences by the possibilities of human death. And she, who had never murdered anybody in her life, felt a blankness in her heart when she contemplated it.

  ‘It makes me feel,’ she said, groping for the right word. ‘Old.’

  Iago nodded sombrely.

  ‘Maybe it is inevitable,’ Diana said, carefully. ‘This McAuley fellow – he discovered the technology. And those, those, whoever-they-were, those unknown alien scientists too. Even if we don’t locate the revenant of McAuley’s research, the datachip, the thing everyone is looking for – well, even then, eventually somebody amongst our trillionfold population of ingenious monkeys will replicate McAuley’s research. Maybe we are simply . . . doomed.’

  ‘The Fermi paradox,’ said Iago.

  ‘The what?’ asked Sapho.

  ‘Imagine,’ Diana agreed, ‘that life is common in the universe, and that when it reaches a certain level of technological advance it inevitably develops FTL capacity. But that in doing so it inevitably destroys itself. That would be why we have never encountered the aliens.’

  Sapho shook her head, slowly. ‘Goddess preserve us,’ she said again.

  ‘It’s not a consoling thought,’ Iago agreed. ‘But it doesn’t mean we should just give up. On the contrary, I tend to feel that any effort, any cost, is worth it – if it preserves mankind from this threat.’

  ‘Even the cost of people all across the system thinking you are a monster?’ Diana asked him.

  ‘A small price to pay,’ he said. ‘Considering the stakes. Besides – there are people who know the real me.’

  After Sapho had cleared the bowls, and was washing them in the kitchen, Iago said: ‘we can’t stay here much longer. We need to go upland.’

  ‘Are they coming?’

  ‘It’s awkward keeping tabs on what’s going on in the wider world without letting the Ulanov forces know that I’m doing so. But I have the sense they’re narrowing in. They’re devoting enormous resources to finding us, after all. Because they believe we have the blueprint. They believe you know it, or you know where I am – Jack Glass, that is to say – and that I know it.’

  ‘And do you?’

  ‘Of course not. But that doesn’t matter; the important thing is that the Ulanovs believe it to be the case. They’ll do anything – absolutely anything – to get hold of us.’

  ‘They want it in the first instance to stop anybody else getting it,’ Diana said, automatically. ‘And in the second instance because they think faster-than-light travel will unlock prodigious new opportunities for wealth and power. Do you think they realise the destructive potential, though?’

  ‘You realised it, a very short time after being told about the technology,’ said Iago. ‘You think they won’t make the same deduction? We are talking about massively increasing c; and E=mc2 is hardly an obscure or little-known equation, after all. I realised it as soon as I became aware of the possibility. I didn’t make the connection with your sister’s research, although now that you point it out, it acts as a terrible confirmation.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be naive,’ Diana said. ‘Of course, realising its destructive power only makes them want it more. Of course. Even more than great wealth, power craves technologies of destruction. Good to be wealthy, but better to remain in power – and the more awe-inspiring the weaponry at your disposal, the better able you are to do that.’

  Iago nodded. ‘The surface of the Earth is extensive,’ he said, ‘and I have many friends here. But a better hiding place is in amongst the greenbelt.’

  ‘You mean, the Sump?’

  ‘In amongst the trillions, yes. Tomorrow.’

  ‘Sapho too?’

  ‘She can come with us, or we can leave her to make her own way across the uplands. But the important thing is – to get away.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Diana, thinking of Eva’s Champagne Supernova stars: each one the candle lit upon the mass grave of an entire civilisation – maybe seve
ral civilisations, on several planets, but all eliminated together, at a stroke. Her breath caught in her throat. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said again.

  part III

  •

  THE IMPOSSIBLE GUN

  So it ends

  As it begins

  Off we climb

  And no one wins.

  Thom Gunn, ‘Seesaw’

  1

  The Mystery of the Rogue RACdroid

  ‘It is about going back in time to an age when democracy was the way humanity governed itself! It is about going back to that Eden, one human one vote!’ Those physically gathered about the speaker began chanting, a low murmur, more like a religious ritual than a political rally, ‘OHOV, OHOV’. The speaker wasn’t really addressing them, of course; he was speaking through technology to the thousands in every suburb of the large sphere – and also to the seven bubbles linked by scramble tunnels, and to any other habitations or communications in the local area.

  It was happening in real-time, in the open air. There were of course many more efficient ways of addressing a large audience, in a variety of secure worldtuals. But the imitation of an old-style Earth democratic hustings was an integral part of the performance.

  ‘Democracy is our birthright as human beings!’ the speaker cried, raising her voice to be heard clearly over the murmurous chant of the crowd. ‘It has been stolen from us, by the Gongsi, by the MOHfamilies, but above all – by the Ulanovs!’ At this, the chanting was replaced by a great cheer. Badmouthing the MOHfamilies might not be politic, but it wasn’t illegal: but badmouthing the Ulanovs was, legally, treason. That was what the crowd wanted to hear. Here in the depths of the Sump, they felt safe enough openly to flout the Lex Ulanova.

  ‘They call it revolution!’ cried the speaker, over the hoots and chants, through which the chants of OHOV could still be heard. ‘They call it revolution and say it is against the law! I say it is the law – the true law of humanity. I say it is revolution – as planets and worlds revolve about the sun and return to the original point on their circle, so humanity shall return to its true inheritance! Ancient Greece! The Roman Senate! The British Parliament! The American Revolution! The Velvet and Jasmine Revolutions! A return to our birthright!’