Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 3

by Jim Baen's Universe! staff

  The captain gave a half laugh. "It's an odd question, but I suppose it won't harm to say, I was pretty hopeless. I was terrible with a map. Why do you ask?"

  Jodie smiled. "I have a theory. Stella has something to tell us. It's a little weird but I think you'll understand.

  "Stella, tell the captain what you told me and Daddy."

  Stella began to unfold her bizarre theory again. She was hesitant at first—a little scared of the captain—but she soon got into her stride. She started with the spaghetti. She explained how we were at one end of a piece of spaghetti and New World was at the other end. New World shone down the spaghetti and we could see it shining from the ship, so we followed the light. She said how every star was at the end of a different piece of spaghetti, and how it was silly to follow the light round all the curves and loops and knots, when it would be much quicker and shorter to travel in a straight line and go to New World directly.

  Then Jodie took over the narrative.

  "Is it possible that some of us can see the shape of space; but that on Earth, where gravity gives everything a top and a bottom, we get confused? Even out here we are confused because, after spending our lives living on Earth we're conditioned to straight lines and up and down."

  "Go on." The captain wasn't laughing, or shouting, or sneering. In fact she had that same eureka spark in her eye that I had seen in Jodie the previous evening.

  "I know this is a dodgy bit of gender stereotyping, but isn't it widely viewed that women have a poor sense of direction, even though everyone's scared to say it out loud? But could it be that women have the better sense of direction, that they can see the curves of space-time, but on Earth we are confused because the Earth's surface makes us think two-and-a-bit-dimensionally?"

  "Two-and-a-bit?" The captain and I spoke in unison.

  "Yeah. We could move around on the surface of the planet. It's hard to go up; it's even harder to go down. If you want to take the quickest way to the shops you don't usually pick up a shovel."

  The captain nodded, in a spooky, knowing way. I simply held up my hands in an Oh-my-God-they're-all-nutters kind of expression.

  "Stella isn't conditioned," Jodie continued. "She's a child of the stars. She sees what is plain to see and she believes we are all stupid not to see the obvious."

  "But there's gravity on the ship," I said. I had to say something to show that at least I wasn't a couple of bricks short of a wall.

  But the captain waved an impatient hand at me. "That's thrust," she said. "Nothing to do with gravity."

  She leaned over the table and pulled a rolled-up platter screen from a drawer. She tapped her fingers on the desk to activate her implants, then, with rapid finger movements, called up a star map on the screen. It showed Earth, and New World connected by a straight dotted line. A small pulsating red dot indicated the depressingly short distance along the line that Castor and Pollux had travelled in just under seven years. The captain began to explain the map to Stella, but before she had uttered more than a couple of sentences Stella was up on her knees, on the stool and pointing at the chart.

  "You see!" She shouted. "It's wong! You all keep getting it wong! It's the wong shape. It's all straightened out."

  Captain Blair reached up into a locker above her head. She brought down an ancient globe of the stars and set it on the table.

  "Is this better?" she asked.

  Stella stared at it for a long moment. Then she shook her head.

  "No. Worse," she said. "There's no inning or outing. There's no . . . through . . . or around. It doesn't even look like outside."

  Captain Blair clasped her hands together and pressed her index fingers to her lips. She spoke in a quiet voice.

  "She's talking about multi-dimensions, isn't she. She's six-years old and she can visualise the universe in multiple dimensions. In one short sentence she has explained the weirdness."

  Blair was right. We stared at the globe. It looked just like the sky seen from Earth, albeit inside out. But a few years ago, a year or so into the voyage, the weirdness had started. The stars had begun to shift out of position. The markers—the pulsars—had moved. We lost track of the galactic equator, completely. We'd all met in the galley and worked the problem. We decided that we were seeing some kind of relativistic effect—an optical illusion—but back then we weren't doing relativistic speeds . . . not really. We'd dismissed it. New World was still straight ahead. We could follow our noses. We'd be fine so long as we didn't have to make the return trip. A couple of the crew had decided to do a study of it, but they'd got nowhere. Now, here was a six year-old girl telling us why. As we'd moved through space our visual perspective had changed. We had moved into a different part of the spaghetti bowl and everything looked wrong to us.

  "Stella?" the captain leaned across the table and gently grasped both of Stella's hands. She peered into Stella's eyes, and in a quiet but firm voice she asked the question.

  "Stella, would you be able to show us the way to New World? Could you show us which way to turn?"

  * * *

  The captain's tough, but when she announced that she'd been told, by a six-year-old girl, that New World would be much closer if we made an eighty-degree course correction; that it would be the first of many such adjustments; that she couldn't be precise about it, because ever since the weirdness had started we didn't even know the direction in which the galactic equator lay; so we would now be guided by the six-year-old, who was to show us the way by pointing . . . When she announced this, there was mayhem. She then added that she would ask all the women in the crew for validation of the directions; but only those women who, on Earth, had displayed a serious lack of spatial awareness. Only those who could not read a map would be consulted.

  Mutiny was considered, by the men. But Captain Bligh is one scary person, and mutiny did not happen.

  She also explained the plan to Captain Schiffer on Pollux. He is a man. His speciality is astral navigation. We only got to hear of his response through gossip and rumour. There was talk of a pirated audio file that started doing the rounds, but it was intercepted and destroyed, so we only have canteen-talk as to the range of colourful adjectives that were used. Pollux would not be joining our ship of fools.

  * * *

  Over the following weeks the crew formed into four distinct groups. Those who could read maps back on Earth—most of the men—became known as the mappies. They sulked. The idea that this strange new way of looking at the universe might have some credibility was an affront to them. They were offended by it. There were some women who were also a little mappy, but they tended to keep quiet about it; they felt a little left out. There were a handful of non-mappy males who probably knew what was going on but stayed out of it, finding the whole thing to be a challenge to their manhood.

  Then there were the non-mappy females. The Stella camp. I tended to hang out with this group, for, although I was one-hundred percent mappy, I believed them. Stella was my daughter. I believed her and I was proud of her.

  For the Stella camp, a new era had dawned. They were excited and moved by the realisation that they had been the true possessors of an innate, accurate sense of direction all along. The scientists among them wanted to explain things, and there developed a small sub-sect called the Stella Theory Cosmology Group. Catherine Blair, the captain, was a leading light amongst them. It took them a little over three weeks to come up with a credible theory that explained the new universe.

  "Dark Matter is the key," Catherine explained at one of their lectures. "The shape of the universe that we see: star clusters, galaxies, expansion . . . these are how the universe used to be, or should have been. We see it this way because we see light as straight lines, whether it is straight or not. But then Dark matter got in between and wrinkled everything up. The real universe is being contracted; packed into an ever smaller can of spaghetti by the gravitational pull of dark matter, even though the individual strands, along which we can see, are getting longer, giving the illusion (
to the mappies) that we are in an expanding universe."

  I put my hand up. I'd been attending STCG lectures right from the start, even though this alienated me from most of the other men on the crew.

  "I have a question. If there is all this heavy dark matter between the strands, what's to prevent us plunging into a black hole, or something, as soon as we turn off the star track?"

  Blair nodded. "That's a fair point. I think the key is to always head for a star—any star. So long as we can see a star in front of us we are on a star track and we can free-wheel along between the dark matter. We just have to avoid heading towards the parts of the sky that are empty."

  "So, we have to skip from strand to strand, where the spaghetti meets, and we stay out of the sauce." Stella grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. I smiled down at her. I was getting the hang of this non-mappy stuff.

  * * *

  When we made the turn the sky went wild. It was like Guy Fawkes night. There were blue-shifts and red-shifts, and stars stretched, smeared and splattered all over the sky. The mappies huddled in dark corners of the ship and moaned. Some of them turned to drink, others went to their databases and rediscovered religion.

  The women had a party. Five of the non-mappy men came out of the closet and went along. They had a great time. I was with Jodie and Stella, so I had to behave.

  It took seven years. We actually did our first fly-by of New World after only eighteen months, but we arrived at a fair clip, and had a lot of speed to lose. Stella's good, but she hadn't thought of the dynamics of losing relativistic velocities, so we had to wander around our new star system for a while, decelerating like crazy by sitting on our weakened engines. Once we'd lost enough of our velocity we did a few close passes by some of the system's gas giants, using first their gravity, then later, when we felt we wouldn't be ripped apart, we used their atmospheres for a bit of pants-on-fire aero-braking.

  * * *

  New World's a fine place to call home. A warm, orange sun; oceans, mountains, trees and plenty of indigenous wildlife that we cannot eat and that does not want to eat us -the genetic and protein differences are too great—so we are safe from one another.

  We sent a message to Pollux. Captain Blair told them that we'd put the kettle on for them. They'll get the message in about eight years, but it won't help them, they will have started the deceleration phase of their voyage by now, so short-cuts won't work. They should be with us in about twenty years. They'll be much younger than us of course.

  I'll tell you what I like about New World the most, though. I know my way around. I've drawn a few maps, and it's become a bit of a hobby. They're no use to the women, though. The women haven't a clue . . . forever getting themselves lost, especially Stella. But nobody says anything about this to them, not to their faces, anyway.

  * * *

  Countdown to Armageddon, Episode One

  Written by Edward M. Lerner

  PROLOGUE

  O true believers, take your necessary precautions against your enemies. . . .

  —the Koran

  Lebanon, 1983 (amid civil war)

  The village baked under the late-morning sun.

  A few small homes, some generations old, clustered around the dusty bazaar. Each dwelling had been painstakingly assembled by hand, stone upon stone. Here and there could be seen a scrawny goat, grazing to the limits of its tether.

  Two dhows bobbed on the gentle blue Mediterranean. The young men of the village laughed as they worked, for the breeze was cool and their nets heavy. Ashore, their fathers and grandfathers studied the Koran in the small mosque while veiled women worked in their kitchens or tended to their sewing, smiling at the sounds of children at play.

  A young Arab dressed in Levi's, a Grateful Dead T-shirt, and Nikes took a place at the nets, ignoring the gentle jibes at his soft hands and city clothes. There was pride in his friends' teasing voices, and unarticulated delight that someone from their little village had gone to college. In the village he was famous; the villagers imagined in their simple goodness that such talent as his must also be renowned in the great outer world.

  The visiting youth had not forgotten his roots, or the hard, physical labor of the boats. The lapping of the waves, the rhythm of work, the honest tiredness and dreamless sleep at the end of the day—they would always be a part of him. Occasionally, as he hauled in the nets, the breeze would bring snatches of a child's happy voice. He liked to imagine it was Leila's voice. Of everyone and everything in the dear, sweet village, he most missed his baby sister.

  An eerie, high-pitched whistle, scarcely audible above the crashing surf, gave the only warning of impending doom. The first shells blasted harmless geysers from the unresisting beach, but hidden artillerymen quickly corrected their aim. The fishermen watched in horror as the next three salvos walked up the shore into the defenseless village. The fifth salvo bracketed the mosque, toppling the slender minaret. The terrified screams of women and children filled the gaps between explosions.

  Frantically, the village fishermen turned their boats for the beach. Abandoned nets sinking behind them, they cursed as the wind failed them. They cursed again when trucks and armored personnel carriers roared out of the hills toward the village. It was the hated Phalange.

  Salvo after salvo pounded the village until the motorized column approached within a hundred meters. Most houses had crumbled by then. Shell-shocked survivors emerged to dig through the rubble with their bare hands.

  Using erratic puffs of wind, their desperation, and the skills passed on over generations, the fishermen urged their boats homeward. They stared in disbelief as an antitank rocket collapsed the mosque that had heard the prayers of their grandfathers' grandfathers. They howled at the trucks careening madly through the rubble-strewn streets, as sadistic Christian butchers machine-gunned fleeing women and children at point-blank range.

  As their dhows neared the shore, the fishermen came under attack. Machine-gun fire shredded hulls and flesh alike. A few made it whole and alive into the sea, only to be blasted from the water by hand grenades. Corpses bobbed obscenely amid the flotsam. One by one the young men died, the last sounds they heard in this world the maniacal laughter of the accursed Christians.

  * * *

  "Leila!"

  Images that would not leave sustained the tormented voice. Great gulps of caustic salt water could not silence his cry, nor hours of agonized screaming, nor even absolute exhaustion. The young, city-dressed Arab lay half across a bit of broken mast, his hands, without any direction from a conscious, reasoning mind, clutching the tangled cordage.

  He drifted.

  The tide dragged him, raving, far out to sea. He was rescued two days later by a passing Cretan freighter. The honest seamen had to pry his fingers from the ropes to which he clung. He wanted to kill these Christian dogs; deranged from dehydration and sunstroke, he could not even stand. His feeble lunge was mistaken for a stumble.

  He awoke in a swaying hammock. A pale, unwelcome clarity, if not quite sanity, had asserted itself as he slept. He would have preferred lunacy had it meant that he could forget.

  His parents, slaughtered. Grandfather, crushed in his own beloved mosque. His childhood friends shot like so many clay pigeons.

  And little Leila . . .

  He had watched helplessly as so many children died. Indistinct with distance, every face became Leila's face. Every death, Leila's death—over and over and over.

  The sole survivor of a nameless Lebanese town knew one thing to the core of his being. Some day, terribly, he would redeem his baby sister's many deaths in a bottomless ocean of Christian blood.

  PART I

  When great causes are on the move in the world . . . we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.

  —Winston S. Churchill

  NEW YORK CITY, 2009

  "That's not how time travel really works."
<
br />   Harry Bowen regretted the words almost before they left his mouth.

  It wasn't the margaritas talking, although he did have a pleasant buzz, or even the congenial company. He couldn't put his finger on it until long after. It was a nostalgia trip, pure and simple, that lowered his guard and brought the long-repressed story to his lips.

  The night had become too much like college. Not the classes, certainly not, but the late-night bull sessions. Three, four, maybe five guys in the dorm lounge up way past the witching hour, feet on the furniture, snarfing pizza and chugging smuggled beer, just talking and talking. What was the meaning of life? What existed before the universe, or before God, take your pick? Was "before the universe" a meaningful concept, anyway, you drooling cretin?

  The conference's welcoming cocktail hour had been standard down to the regulation two complimentary drink tickets that had come paper-clipped to his name tag, the miniature overcooked hot dogs on plastic cavalry-saber toothpicks, the soggy Triscuits, and the zillion desiccated cheese cubes. The corporate scientists who had traveled together stuck together, earnestly debating their restaurant choices over their free drinks before drifting out to expense-account dinners. Academics who had refereed each other's papers for years and attended the same conferences since before the Flood warmly greeted each other. They, too, soon vanished. That left the grad students, some federal researchers on per diem, and a few lonely, unaccompanied, small-company types like him. Even though Harry was presenting a paper at the conference, Solid State Science, Inc. considered its payment of his airfare an act of almost mythic generosity. Meal allowance? Wouldn't he have eaten at home?