“We have arrived at coordinates zero, zero, zero, time zero—the center of the universe and the beginning of time! I give you the Star of Bethlehem at die very moment when the Rithians saved die Galaxy for us all.” He bowed. “I am reborn under this star. That is my fortune and my destiny.”
He was thinking of tucking the Egg under his shirt and running, but he didn’t expect he’d get away with that, so he gave the bauble back to his host. Then he backed out toward the door, his fam plotting all the escape routes. At the door, when escape was certain, he paused to appraise his host and hostess. “Are you the police?” he asked when they were near enough so that no one else would hear.
The woman smiled. She seemed to be die boss. “We were wondering the same thing. But I’ve determined that you aren’t the police, much to our relief. Tell your friends we are ready to meet them. We don’t know who they are, but I’ve determined to my satisfaction who they aren't, and that is enough for a beginning.”
Eron fled.
25
THE MARTYR'S CACHE, 14,791 GE
The Yani-Hotle fragment; recently deciphered by the Archaeologist Boeluki, entices us with the suggestion that the first man to rocket from the Prime Planet and live to walk on another planet was named Neel Halmstrun, but we do not know how many hairs he had under his left armpit and we cannot find out because that information has, by now, been lost among the quantum uncertainties of multiple possible yesterdays, none tagged by the laws of physics as the l,one true past—a unique computable past being as meaningless a concept as an absolute frame of reference.
A caterpillar on the leaf of a tree can climb down to the base of the tree with a simple set of instructions, but should he attempt to reclimb the tree, to find the leaf upon which he was born, a mere reversal of those instructions will not suffice to return him home. Reversal is a process which requires more information than is needed by time-symmetry.
Without information conservation, a perfectly time-symmetric physics will not imply reversibility: / would be willing to apply psychohistory to the reconstruction of the past, to any level of resolution, were you to gift me one additional tool. In setting up the boundary conditions for my equations so that they are sufficiently precise to the problem specified, one needs to be able to answer this question: given a right-angled triangle whose sides measure exactly ten Planck lengths, how do I compute the length of the hypotenuse? The answer is: you can't; the uncertainty in the length of the hypotenuse is a measure of the information you don’t have—and won’t get by posing the question to Mother Nature who disposed of such trifles during her housecleaning chores.
From the transcript of “The Fifth Speech” given by the
Founder to the Group of Forty-six at the Imperial University,
Splendid Wisdom, 12,061 GE
They had settled into their hotel room and were debating the safest way to make contact with their antique dealer when a gentle whisper in her fam told Nemia that she had received a Personal Capsule. She suspected her mother and was slightly annoyed, cracking the Capsule’s sphere in their room’s discreet communications alcove away from Hiran-imus. But it was from Eron. Once the message had been famfed, the sphere rapidly crumbled. She read from her mind’s screen:
“Nemia, I know I shouldn’t be contacting you but I just fell in a trap and thought you should know. I got invited to a party of new students”—he inserted the address—“and the old geezer had one of your Coron’s Eggs. I checked it out to see that it held info on Zural and it did, but I was doing this in front of everybody and had to do such a fast sleight-of-hand that I couldn’t get the coordinates—sorry. Then I cut and ran. Is this important? Faithfully, You-Know-Who.” Alarmed, she came to Hiranimus and famfed him the contents. Scogil assimilated the message, turning angrily to Nemia. “He should know nothing about Zural! Nothing! Did you tell him?”
“I most certainly did not!”
Hiranimus absorbed that grimly. “The contemptible little spy. He spies on everyone. And he’s good. Well, this upsets our little dance of acquaintance! They already know who we are. Not Eron’s fault. It means they are far more professional than I could have imagined. They’re good.”
“Fellowship Investigators? Shall we run?”
“They can’t be police. The police don’t think so deviously.” He laughed. “And police routines are my bright spot of expertise. If the Fellowship already knew where Zural was, they wouldn’t bother with us. They’d already be there. They have unlimited money; these people don’t.”
“What shall we do?”
“You’ve already chartered a ship for us. I don’t know how you arranged that and I don’t want to know. It’s the Oversee, I presume. They will be professionals. Can you arrange with them an escape route in case things go sour?”
“I think so.”
“Let’s check out of here. Now. We disappear. It will give us time to think. If Eron and your grandfather are right and their Egg does hold the coordinates...”
But in the hotel corridor, not five apartments from theirs, a woman approached them, followed by a slightly anxious man. She was very abrupt in her introduction. “We already know that you are not the police. You will not know as much about us. Where would you like to discuss our affairs? Your choice.” Another shock. This was an encounter that wasn’t going to be played by a preset plan. “Let’s take a random walk and decide as we go,” said Hiranimus, thinking as he continued to move, checking the exits. Nemia tried frantically to signal something, then acquiesced.
“A lovely city,” said the slightly foppish gentleman, obviously relieved that no one was pointing blasters. His body language was that of deference.
Away from the hotel, lost in a crowd drifting down a verticule from an overhead monorail station, Scogil chose a small restaurant between towers. The table he picked was surrounded by plants and there they began an intricate maneuver of conversation, testing, evaluating each other, Scogil still wary of a trap. These people were talking like malcontents— with open innocence? or as the trappings of a deliberate ruse?
He and Nemia responded cautiously to their guests’ candor. “Those are sentiments that could get you into trouble,” Scogil commented neutrally.
The effete man only smiled. “Here on abandoned Faraway? On Faraway where they have yet to accept the rule of the Pscholars enthusiastically? Here where the inner mind still dreams of the galactic chutzpah they once had?”
“Point taken. But everyone within earshot isn’t a citizen. There are tourists like us—and other farmen whose purpose is inscrutable. I hear accents.”
The alert woman smiled as if she had been listening to every conversation within twenty meters. “... no one as inscrutable as we four.”
The atmosphere relaxed. Scogil poured the woman a drink from the large carafe. She was obviously the security professional, but the man was the driven eccentric, the one with the purpose, probably the leader. His speech was uncommon but it was certainly derived from the potpourri of Splendid Wisdom dialects—three of the key lilts used by his voice occurred nowhere else. That excited Scogil; any man from Splendid Wisdom was worth cultivating for a purpose Scogil was only beginning to map out for himself.
Caution might be lulled but caution was not expendable. Artfully he bypassed the seditionist thrust of the conversation. “We’re interested in your galactarium because we are trying to locate an obscure planet in this part of the Periphery, one originally staked out in early Imperial times, then evacuated as not worth terraforming.” Smythos had said as much, noting the hundreds of ghost towns on Zural II even if only in one offhand sentence of his scribblings. “Rumor places a treasure there. We’re on a treasure hunt.”
The man abandoned his proselytizing. “Names change over the centuries. A star can easily be hidden right in front of your telescope as the sages say. Do you have any tangible numbers or descriptions we could search on?”
Scogil made the plunge. “Zural.” Nemia kicked him under the table.
&
nbsp; “Ah.” Surprise. “And could the treasure be fifty bodies?”
He knew! “You seem familiar with that very obscure name.”
The man smiled hugely and placed his hand on Scogil’s in introduction. “I’m Hyperlord Kikaju Jama. The young lady wishes, for the moment, to remain anonymous.” The Hyperlord seemed to have lost all of his fearful doubt and was now the picture of total confidence, no longer in need of whatever expertise the young woman was providing. “I have a way of sensing certain things; in you I sense a subtie antagonism to the Pscholars, matching my own, which accounts for your interest in Zural. Indeed Zural is an obscure name. It does not occur in any of the archives of Splendid Wisdom. I was not aware of it myself until recently. I imagine it is obscure because the leaders of Faraway wished to bury and forget their crime of mass murder, and the Pscholars are ashamed of the con game in which they sent fifty of their brightest young psychohistorians to a certain and sordid death simply to make the perturbed output of their equations converge on an elegant solution. When victor and vanquished both have a passionate desire to forget something, it vanishes, and the centuries then proceed to compost whatever these ex-enemies forgot to forget. I think that in some physics text there is a law of entropy requiring every new bit of information created to overwrite an old bit. In this way it is the unattended details which get composted first.”
“Some bits survive longer than others,” said Scogil, thinking of the memoirs of that morbid recluse, Tamic Smythos, whose effects had lingered for centuries in storage before being accidentally unearthed.
“Indeed,” said Jama thinking of a spaceship wreck preserved at near-absolute zero far from the scenes of historical revision. He laughed mischievously. “Fortunately for both of us the police have never heard of Zural, either. Are you intent upon voyaging to this place?”
“It might make a nice honeymoon spot.”
“Hardly. The specs are dreary. But if you can see your way to an expedition, I can see the possibility of an alliance between our mutual avarice. But first we have an exchange to make under the auspices of the Red Sun. Not, of course, before dinner arrives.” Steaming plates were rising from the center of their table. “There will be plenty of time for troublemaking after dinner. Good food puts a queasy stomach at ease and promotes comradeship.”
The woman stayed his reaching hand. “Me first. I’m your official taster, remember?”
Kikaju Jama sighed. “It is such a bother to be paranoid!” But he waited.
Later that afternoon, suspicions surmounted, the deal was consummated. The four then proceeded to the Telomere space terminal to be transported via ferry to Nemia’s orbiting charter. It was a long trip. Crammed together in a pod and then in a low-orbit shuttle, they had good opportunity to further their trust in each other while contending with the routine distrust of other organizations with other cautious purposes. The last obstacle they faced was the charter’s bald and blunt-necked Starmaster, who personally met them at the shuttle to conduct his own thorough search of the Hyperlord and Katana for hidden mechs and nanomachines. He grunted his approval, then ferried them across space to his ship where he finally disappeared up a central shaft into the starship’s bridge, leaving them to acquaint themselves with their quarters.
The enthusiastic Hyperlord tagged after Scogil with his endless schemes as if he thought that Scogil was not a sufficiently committed anti-imperialist and needed prompting. He was full of amateur plots to overthrow a Galactic Empire that had, in his opinion, undeservedly survived the Interregnum paroxysm. Eventually Scogil had to remind him that they all needed sleep.
But the proselytizing began again in the morning. Scogil continued to humor their guest, building a friendship he intended to find a use for in the years to come. Nemia flirted with Jama, partly to stop his blathering so that her Hiran-imus could relax, partly because she was fascinated by his unctuous manners, the likes of which she had never met. She wasn’t sure whether his blatant propositions were serious or mere highly artistic twaddling. Katana was the observant one, seeming more interested in the mysterious crew of their charter than muting Jama’s excesses. The crew kept to themselves, and they saw the Starmaster only at dinner and he was not loquacious.
“Why so many jumps?” asked Scogil upon a chance meeting with the Starmaster.
“Zigzags. Routine security. We aren’t being followed but we always assume a tail.”
Within eighteen watches their jumping brought them to Zural, a dim, red star, where they spent the initial approach observing Zural II from afar and scanning the system for other ships. Zural I was barren and tidally locked; Zural III was a distant giant that had failed to become Zuml’s binary. There were no lurking ships. Satisfied of that, the Starmaster used his thrusters in a long cautious approach to their desolate destination, followed by a high-g aerobraking maneuver that dropped them into low orbit around Zural II.
From an altitude of three hundred kloms it was a forbidding world, small, with a seventy-three-hour rotation, perhaps a quarter glaciated, its eroded impact craters mostly erased by lava flows except in the high desert. The planet was at that borderline distance from its star where tidal friction begins to play with the crust, though Zural II did not seem, at the moment, to be afflicted by any active volcanoes. The atmosphere was thicker than Neuhadra’s, and from the pastel blush of the rocks had once been oxygenated by photosynthetic life, now long gone, billions of years gone, lost to who-knew-what catastrophe. Life was a common but transient phenomena on modest inner planets, most of the time not surviving for more than a billion years.
On this scrabble world humanity hadn’t been able to revive that once-verdant era. During the first five low passes their sensors picked up evidence of more than four hundred abandoned man-made sites. A quick erosion analysis suggested an age of at least ten thousand years for the failed colony—good camouflage for a more recent prison.
“Will we find it?” asked Jama anxiously.
The Starmaster grunted and continued scanning. His other crew members all seemed to be part of the analysis team and chattered among themselves. One of them turned to Jama. “It takes time.” Then he was gone.
A sophisticated algorithm gradually subtracted the oldest and the newest features from the images, leaving selected sites to be re-imaged at higher resolution. These were reiterated through the analysis until there were so few likely sites left that it made sense to send down investigation teams. The bald Starmaster was caught smiling again when the third lander brought back conclusive evidence for an old prison, abandoned to wind and snow for the last twenty-two centuries. It was built inside an old mining community on a plateau in the mountains which itself had been abandoned for ten millennia. There were glaciers crawling down the distant peaks, and patches of snow still lingered in the shady spots not reached by the feeble summer sun.
It took more time to organize a landing party, but once down the crew swiftly inflated a command bubble next to the prison, sheltered from the wind. They did not bury their gawky pressure-supported home; the atmosphere was thick enough to protect them from cosmic rays. Hiranimus soon noted that this was a party of experienced archaeologists. Within a span of watches they had cleared away the accumulated sand and laid out the operational modes of the ancient prison routine. Nemia had said nothing about their expertise. Even the old roads were swept clean down to the plasteel mesh hardpack.
No time for a honeymoon. After a decawatch of careful sifting they found the graveyard with its forty-two coffins, containing thirty skeletons and twelve leathery mummies preserved by the cold and lifelessness of Zural. No grave markers, no identification, nothing. All but one prisoner had died of old age. One blaster death. Forty-one life sentences carried out. Counting the seven whom Tamic claimed were executed before reaching Zural, all fifty martyrs were thus accounted for.
No one had been allowed to take possessions to their grave except an old woman, young once, whose arthritic finger was frozen to a single ring. That would be Tamic’
s sweetheart. He had mentioned nothing about her except his gift to her of the ring at sunrise the day before he had been spirited away from Zural by the corrupt associates of a corrupt and frightened Faraway Chancellor. The Chancellor thought he needed some minor psychohistoric meddling to insure the continuance of his threatened rule. The girlfriend’s diminutive was Jan. Her surname was unknown. None of the martyrs had names, neither in the records on Splendid Wisdom nor in the archives of Faraway. Tamic himself had not bothered to record their names. But that is the fate of all men—gravestones, memoirs, memories turn to dust in time. In another billion years, even the names of the Emperors will be gone.
The Helmarian archaeologists took apart the prison ruins with meticulous care, layer by layer, looking for the fabled Martyr’s Cache. For a while they were elated when they dug into the floor and found a secret basement that must have been excavated surreptitiously by the martyrs—but there was nothing in it but a calendar etched into the wall and a crumbling table. Thousands of years ago the room had been stripped bare—by the guards or by the inmates? Who would ever know?
The dig crew, except for the busy Hyperlord, began to give up hope of finding anything. Jama’s nagging optimism became annoying to the others. Furthermore Kikaju persisted in his role as pest around the camp, and was finally declared off limits by the archaeologists, ostensibly because of the careless way he scrabbled among the ruins chasing down his hunches. He cared nothing for the laborious documentation of layers and the reverence with which each caked bolt and toothpick was dusted off and salvaged—he just wanted to find something. Rebuffed, he took his enthusiasm to the hills. And as the others grew still more discouraged, Kikaju Jama became wildly manic about the possibilities. It was his nature to wax into unrealistic optimism in the midst of gloom.
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