Mission to Minerva g-5

by James P. Hogan

  "Well… okay, I guess."

  "Attaboy. There's still some things the Iskois can't get right." He passed over a glass with a shorter measure. Kles sipped it, coughed and choked, and hoped the tears in his eyes didn't show.

  "Went down the wrong way," he said.

  "Yeah, right." This was Uncle Urgran, Kles reminded himself. Who did he think he was kidding?

  The TV up on its corner shelf was on, but with the sound turned down. It was showing the Cerian president, Marlot Harzin, looking serious and talking against the backdrop of a picture of Minerva. The caption at the bottom read, division threatens concerted space effort. "What's this, something new?" Urgral gestured with his glass.

  "It's a repeat of what he said this afternoon," Jud told him.

  "What'd he say this afternoon? I've been up at the hole all day."

  "They just can't seem to get their act together with the Lambians. They're serious, Urg. Harzin says we're going to have to be better prepared-as a precaution. Perasmon is saying our ways won't work, and going half and half is just going to take everyone down. It's their survival as well as ours."

  Urgran downed half his measure and shook his head. "So his answer is to start diverting part of what they've got? Now we have to do likewise? Doesn't that strike you as just a little bit crazy? Or is it me? Every functioning brain and pair of hands on the planet should be working to get us off of here. But when you've got leaders starting to talk crazy… I never heard the like of that. What do you do if they're not making sense? Aren't they supposed to have it all figured out for the rest of us?"

  "I don't know, Urg. I just fly the spinner. Maybe when things get this serious, having that kind of responsibility drives you to it."

  "Perasmon can't be serious," Rez declared. "Not at a time like this. It has to be a bluff. Not the kind that I'd say was very smart. Even being able to conceive something like that should be enough to disqualify him from office. Maybe it's because nobody's quite sure yet what the right way is to deal with our kind of system. But it can't be for real."

  Urgran scowled and leaned across the table to top up his glass.

  Kles stayed out of it, occupying himself by ladling out another bowl of the stew, which was still hot. He raised his eyebrows inquiringly toward his uncle and indicated the pot. Urgran shook his head. "Not for me… Thanks."

  Kles didn't follow the politics that the adult world seemed to spend half its time talking about these days. Giants and buried cities, life in the fringe regions, and finding out about animals was more interesting. He didn't understand why they couldn't all get along the way the archeologists and geologists got along with the Iskois.

  Minerva had two major populated land areas, called Cerios and Lambia, each straddling the equatorial belt between oceans that became ice-locked in the north and south alternately with the winters. It hadn't always been that way. Long ago, when the ice caps had been much smaller, the oceans had connected all around the planet. The civilization of the Giants had extended into regions that were now covered by permanent ice sheets, which was why so little of it had been found. There were probably the remains of whole cities and who knew what else still waiting to be discovered. The mix of gases in the atmosphere, along with a thin crust that permitted a high flow of heat from the interior, had kept Minerva significantly warmer than it would otherwise have been at its distance from the Sun, for as long as reliable records of the past could be reconstructed. But in recent centuries that had been changing. Towns that had once flourished lay abandoned to the snow, and former farmlands turned into frozen deserts as year by year the advancing ice sheets pushed the populations centers relentlessly back to the equatorial belt.

  Earlier peoples, aware of the trend and under no illusions as to the fate that it portended, had resigned themselves to accepting that, like all things and every individual, their world would eventually come to an end and nothing they could do was going to change it. Amassing vast fortunes or striving to gain fame and prestige for themselves in the future was all pretty pointless, since there wasn't going to be one. They applied themselves instead to the arts of civil and harmonious living, the enjoyment of culture, catering to the needs of the young, the sick, the elderly, and the unfortunate, generally pooling what they had to make the experience of life as comfortable as possible for all while the time lasted. Some said that it should never have changed, that people had never been better than in those days. Trying to fend off the natural end to the spell that had been allotted to a world was like propping up a wilting flower that had lived out its days, and in the end just as futile. Didn't the skies show that new flowers were forever budding? The Lunarian word for universe meant "never-ending garden."

  Then learning and experiment led to the emergence of science, engineering, new technologies, and the harnessing of revolutionary forms of energy. Machines opened up regions of vast untapped resources beneath the ice, and when the dream of artificial flight became a reality, followed rapidly by the development of regular air travel, the notion took root, inspired by the legend of the Giants, of moving the Lunarian civilization to Earth, closer to the Sun. This became the racial quest.

  Most of the various tribes, clans, nations and so forth that made up the population were ruled by some form of the hereditary monarch or popular chieftain that Lunarians had traditionally turned to for ordering their affairs. As the goal of survival by migration became the common enterprise, the pattern of previous history led them to merge and combine their efforts until, apart from a few fringe communities, the map had consolidated into the two major groupings of Cerios and Lambia.

  Kles and Laisha were Cerians. Why such things should matter much was a mystery as far as he was concerned, but as the pace of life quickened with the coming of the new technologies, and change seemed to become the rule for everything, Cerios had replaced its royal house with a president heading a congress of representatives that the people appointed. Some kind of theory that most Cerians apparently supported said that this would lead to a decentralized system of research and production in which many different groups competing with each other would produce better results faster. The Lambians, on the other hand, believed this could only result in chaos, duplication, and ruinous waste, and the old, proven methods of central direction and coordination were the only way of achieving any coherent program; in any case, this wasn't a time to be tearing down what had been shown to work and replacing it by something unknown that might not. So Lambia still had a king, with the people being represented by a limited parliament.

  The two powers had coexisted in this way since Kles's father's time with neither demonstrating anything that was obviously superior. The advocates on both sides emphasized their own successes and the other's failures, while the critics of both said that ability and knowledge were what counted, not theories on how they should be motivated-as if the present circumstances required any additional motivation, anyway.

  The more ominous development that Urg, Jud, and Rez were talking about was fairly recent. Taking the traditional Lunarian view that resources belonged to all, the Lambian king, Perasmon, had accused the Cerians of squandering a future that belonged to the Lambians as much as to themselves. If the Cerians were not going to safeguard it responsibly, Perasmon said, then the Lambians had the right to take charge of it themselves, forcibly if necessary. He was setting aside a sector of Lambian industry to develop appropriate equipment for a contingency force to be armed and trained accordingly. Now it sounded as if President Harzin was saying that Cerios had no choice but to follow suit.

  Kles was still too numbed by the implications to even want to think about it. Kings, presidents, all other the kinds of leaders who had headed communities… were there to serve people, to organize ways to help them live better. It was why people had always listened to them and trusted them. But this talk now was about designing and making things to kill people. Not just hunting weapons, or the kind that sheriffs and town marshals and sometimes companies of volunteers needed for
stopping criminals or dealing with the bandit gangs that appeared in outlying areas from time to time, but for threatening ordinary people who hadn't done anything.

  Long ago, there had been barbaric tribes and even upstart nations that tried to live by violence and preying upon their neighbors. But they had never lasted long among a vaster majority once the majority was driven to take action, and civilized ways had spread to become universal to the point where most Lunarians were probably incapable of conceiving anything else. To hear a king talking now about organizing to violently attack another nation was like the thought of being ruled by bandits. Perasmon said he had no choice. Kles didn't know what choices kings did or didn't have, but it seemed unbelievable that the whole adult world with all its complexities and resourcefulness couldn't come up with some other way of resolving the problem. He had seen the corpses of animals felled by bullets and spears, and once, when he was younger, the charred remains of two occupants of a car that had gone off a cliff. His mind conjured up a picture of something like that happening to Laisha-not from an accident or one of the misfortunes that life brought sometimes, but inflicted deliberately by someone, with a device that others had designed and made for the purpose. The thought was so horrifying that Kles felt unable to finish his stew.

  But it was only for a moment. The stew was Opril's best. He pushed the morbid images from his mind and buttered a hunk of crusty bread to mop the dish.

  "How is it?" his uncle asked.

  "Mmm… Good."

  "You've gone very quiet. It's not like you."

  "Just hungry, I guess. It's been a long day."

  Urgran looked at him. "Don't take too much notice of all the talk, Kles. They're just posturing. It can't get that bad. Everyone knows that."

  "Urg's right. Perasmon can't be serious," Rez said again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Multiporter project was taking on characteristically Thurien dimensions. The original Quelsang transfer chamber, built to handle no more than tiny specks of matter to prove the principle, had been scaled up to the version contained in MP2, which could accommodate devices like communications relays and instrument probes. MP2 was now superseded in turn by MP3, otherwise known as the "Gate."

  It took the form of a volume of space defined by an array of sixteen projection generators hanging at controlled positions a few hundred miles from MP2, which was where the control center for MP3 was located. They were called "bells," although each was more the shape of a tapered cylinder flaring at the wider end into a truncated hollow cone-a shape vaguely suggesting a common pattern of desk-lamp shade. In both diameter and length, however, the bells measured almost a thousand feet. The power to drive them came via the Thurien h-space grid. They were positioned and oriented in a spherical configuration that focused their outputs onto a central "transfer zone" a little over a half mile in diameter. This configuration was the "Gate" from which objects projected out across the Multiverse were launched. The Gate transfer zone was large enough to accommodate the Shapieron.

  Experiments had not reached the stage of sending the Shapieron anywhere yet. The ship had been moved from Jevlen, however, and was currently being refitted at a construction and overhaul facility elsewhere in the Gistar system. At the same time, it was being equipped with its own M-space bubble generator, which later tests performed at MP2 had shown would be necessary for transferring objects significantly larger than simple instrument platforms and communications relays.

  With such a smaller device, the elongated dumbbell bubble that suppressed convergence effects at the sending end, at the same time preventing dispersion while the projected object was stabilizing at the remote end, was created using energy supplied by the projector. However, this method would not be adequate for producing a remote-end lobe large enough to contain something the size of the Shapieron. The connecting "umbilical" filament couldn't be made to carry the load. Therefore, an additional source would be necessary at the remote end, and the obvious way to get it there seemed to be to build it into the transferred object itself.

  ***

  The test "raft" centered in the Gate was a dummy structure half the size of the Shapieron, containing an instrument and sensor platform, and a duplicate installation of the Shapieron's intended on-board M-wave gear. It also carried a selection of plant and animal specimens for ascertaining the effects on biological processes. Hunt sat in the MP3 Control Center at MP2, taking in the situation from screens commanding the floor, plus VISAR-supplied avco visuals. He was here physically once more. There was no nonexistent observation room, complete with virtual bar, this time.

  Almost a year had passed since the group's first arrival at Thurien. However, with acceptance of the new mission that Calazar had called for in his dramatic presentation to the Thurien Grand Assembly, the workload had not only intensified but widened, as everything that had been pieced together concerning Lunarian Minerva suddenly became relevant. On top, there had been Eesyan's insistence on reverifying the engineering from the ground up. Without Thurien methods and the computational resources of VISAR to back them up things, things would never have gotten even close to progressing this far.

  All the same, most of the group had managed to fit in at least one trip back to Earth during this time. Sandy and Duncan had broadened the interpretation of their role of assisting Danchekker and Hunt to involving themselves with the Thuriens in analyzing as much as was known of Minervan history in the period leading up to its destruction, but at the same time managed to fit in a couple of weeks skiing in the Andes as well. Danchekker had spent most of the interim at Thurien immersed in his biological and philosophical pursuits, returning once or twice in response to summonses from Ms. Mulling involving official duties that he was unable to evade. Sonnebrandt was currently back there, having been called home on some family affair, and when he would be returning was as uncertain. Mildred had completed her researches and returned to Earth to work on her book, while Chien had not been back at all, but stayed on to follow the progress of construction at the MP3 Gate. She was the only other Terran present with Hunt at MP3 to observe the test.

  In fact, Hunt's work had taken him back to Earth the most, involving long sessions with Caldwell to redefine Tramline's part in the new overall strategy. Caldwell was patched into the proceedings too, coming through from Earth in an avco window. Hunt was pretty sure that more had gone on behind the scenes to all this that involved Caldwell somehow. Caldwell was showing more interest in the day-to-day details than was usual for his kind of management style. Hunt had picked up rumors among the Thuriens that the vision with which Calazar had dazzled the Assembly owed much to Caldwell in its earliest stages of conception. But when Hunt tried to raise the subject out of curiosity, Caldwell had been evasive. Hunt knew from long experience that when Caldwell decided he didn't want to talk about an issue, that was the end of the matter.

  Since Minerva at the time the mission was aimed at had been inhabited by human Lunarians, it had been agreed humans should be included in the team to be sent on it. Anyone suggesting otherwise would have had a tough time dealing with Hunt and the others who had been there from the beginning, in any case. Caldwell had made it clear that no one among them needed to feel any commitment to the new mission, but the thought of not going hadn't entered any of their heads. As was to be expected, when the news went around back on Earth, various other interests had made their presence felt, wanting to get in on the act and send people too. But they would have been negative assets, resented as an intrusion into the team. Caldwell was alive to the mood, and since disruptions at this point would have compromised the effectiveness of his people who were on the spot, he took it as part of his business to mount defenses on the home front. Hunt could only conclude that in this Caldwell was fully successful, since none of the wrangling and background politics had percolated through to Thurien.

  The object of the present experiment was to send the test raft to a marked alternate reality of the Multiverse, and then bring it back-a
pretty important prerequisite to have mastered if they were going to be sending Thuriens and Terrans. It was still not possible to "map" the Multiverse in terms of the attributes pertaining to a particular reality, for example, "A universe where Genghis Khan wasn't recalled after defeating the Prussian defenders of Europe, overran the West, and the dominant civilization that arose to colonize the world was Asiatic." No ready way had been found to connect "change," as perceived subjectively in the countless directions making up the Multiverse, with anything that could be measured as physics; indeed, whether such a connection existed at all was by no means certain. VISAR had been trying to refine the concept of "affinity," which yielded rough measure of how far a different reality was from the familiar one, but it could be notoriously unspecific when it came to indicating how they were different. A universe where Earth had no Moon, one in which Mars still possessed oceans, and another where Jupiter was missing two of its principal satellites all registered comparable affinity indexes. Why this should be, nobody even had a theory. At this stage it was impossible to say if sense would ever be made of it.

  The affinity index was useful nevertheless in that it provided a crude way of marking off the swathe of Multiverse in which realities possessing a certain family resemblance-the Minerva of fifty thousand years previously, for example-were likely to lie. The approach was a bit like highlighting a newspaper ad with a tar brush, but in a situation where it reduced possible solutions numbered at "almost-infinity" by an amount "almost-infinity-minus something," the result was a problem that VISAR could generally find manageable. In short, while it wasn't possible to hit a specific target by its characteristics, they could usually lob a shell onto more or less the right continent.