by James Gunn
Moreover, this was not quite Federation Central but a barren companion world with abandoned structures where, she had learned from Asha during the long voyage from Earth, prisoners captured from the first human extrasolar voyages had been imprisoned and questioned for decades before the human/Federation war. Federation Central was not only secret but sacred, not to be contaminated by uninvited guests, and its scientists, and most of all its Pedia, suspected researchers not under their control of preparing noxious or explosive materials. But with the help of a few antique machines and a surly Pedia she had restored one structure into an adequate facility in which to create a replica of her father’s machine. Now had come the time to display it—to prove to the Federation representatives that the machine worked, that it could solve the Federation’s problem of communicating with its distant member worlds and, although it would not be apparent for some time, would create a new generation of transcendents to transform their species and the Federation.
The machine her father had built was not quite the legendary apparatus that Riley had described to them. Jak had taken those bare-bones possibilities and added features that appealed to his sense of symmetry, function, and style. To the larger space that seemed to be appropriate for an operator, Jak had added a message console with a receptacle to send and receive capsules along with a computer to receive and send verbal and digital messages, as well as a keyboard for identifying destinations. What the Transcendental Machine had lost over the million long-cycles since it was created was an instruction manual. Its means of controlling the destination of what it transported had been lost to the ages. Jak wanted the operation to be foolproof. Not only was he skeptical about the ability of others to follow simple directions, he also was cynical about their susceptibility to attractive technology.
What Jak did not want to be obvious was that the space provided for an operator also was capable of being used as a transmission device. The Jak Machine—he had renamed it in order to distance it from the mythology that had grown up around the Transcendental Machine but also out of the remnants of Jak hubris—was capable of transporting living creatures, like its predecessor. Or rather their electronic equivalents, stripped to their ideal state while their previous incarnations were turned into dust by the computer that analyzed them as they were being destroyed. In that it was identical in means and purpose to what the Transcendental Machine had accomplished. But a million long-cycles later the desperation that had moved pilgrims to seek refuge in its enigmatic embrace was unavailable. The member species of the Federation would have to be convinced that the Jak Machine worked and that the benefits of instantaneous transmission across light-years were worth the perils of being destroyed. It was a sales pitch that would be difficult to make and even more difficult to make persuasive.
At the heart of the Jak Machine, buried in its base, was a small black box that contained the indispensable ingredient for the entire process, not the computer, not the analytic ray that disintegrated the subject, but the entangled particles separated from their mates in secure compartments and tagged in ways that they could be identified by the Jak Machine’s computer. That was the indispensable contribution Jak had made to the machine Riley had described. The Transcendental Machine may have operated on the same principle, but how its creators had accomplished it was as mysterious as interaction-at-a distance itself, and Jak had to reinvent it and the means of separating the particles and yet making them addressable. Federation scientists could back-engineer the Jak Machine, but they couldn’t open the black boxes without allowing the separated particles to escape. They would have to reinvent the process for themselves, and Jak didn’t think they could do it. And if they wanted to try, they would find that it was easier and cheaper to get the black boxes from Jak.
Jak’s psychological problems, along with his physical condition, had been improved by his passage through his machine, but it had not changed his character. He still was supremely confident of his ability to understand the universe, and he never doubted his superiority over any possible competition.
Jer pressed the button on the keyboard in front of her. When she opened the door that had sealed the capsule in place, the capsule was gone. Only dust remained to be vacuumed automatically when the door was closed again. She got out of the Machine and moved to its replica on the other side of the laboratory. She sat down in it and pressed another button. The capsule door swung open, but the space behind was empty.
Jer sighed. She still had work to do.
* * *
Thirty cycles later she told the Pedia that was supervising, or spying on, her operation that she was ready for a demonstration.
“I have observed the progress of your work,” the Pedia said. “The appropriate scientists have been kept informed about its progress, although their interest, judged by their access to my reports, has diminished as time has passed without results.”
“And yet you have seen it work,” Jer said. She resented oversight by a Pedia and now she had to convince one that she had accomplished what she had promised.
“And I will so report,” the Pedia said. “Although there are a number of alternative explanations for what your experiment demonstrates, and I should caution you that convincing Federation scientists of results that their science tells them is impossible will be difficult.”
“Nothing’s easy,” Jer said. She had learned that bit of wisdom from Riley. He had applied it to learning Galactic Standard, which she had accomplished during the long trip to Federation Central.
The deputation that arrived, fifty cycles later, was a single, sullen Xiforan, a junior scientist who would be least missed on Federation Central and whose report, Jer knew, would be least regarded. Nevertheless, she prepared the demonstration as if she were going to present it to a senior delegation.
“You may inspect the message to be sent across the workshop”—she did not want to demean the term by calling it a “laboratory”—“to the unit on the other side.” She held out the message she had handwritten on a piece of paper. Paper was virtually nonexistent on Federation Central, and she had torn a sheet from her notebook.
The weasel-like Xiforan glanced at it without giving it the respect of a careful examination.
“I’m going to place it in this capsule,” Jer said. “The capsule is flimsy because it is used only to contain the message and will be destroyed.”
The Xiforan looked more interested when she said the Galactic Standard word for “destroyed.”
Feeling already that she was wasting her time as well as boring the Xifor, Jer sat down in the Jak Machine, inserted the capsule into the receptacle for it on the control panel, and pushed the button that closed the door. “Now, I’m going to push this button that will initiate the process,” she said. She pushed the button. A muffled hissing sound came from the control panel. She opened the door to the round slot.
“You see?” she said. “Only dust.”
“You have invented an incinerator!” the Xiforan said, with what might have been irony in a human.
“Come with me,” she said, and after getting out of the Jak Machine she led the way to the machine on the other side of the workshop. She sat down and opened an identical capsule door. Behind it was a capsule. She held it up to the Xifor, who looked not so much startled by the revelation as surprised that this would seem remarkable. Jer opened the capsule and showed the piece of paper to the Xifor with the message she had written. “See?” she said. “The message I showed you over there.”
“How do I know you did not write the message twice and leave one here to be discovered?” the Xiforan said.
“Perhaps I should have started in a different place,” Jer said. “But you didn’t seem”—she was going to say “interested” but decided to change it—“involved. Here. Write something down on this sheet of paper.”
“Xifora do not write,” the Xiforan said.
“Make a mark—something only you are aware of,” Jer said. “Insert it in the capsule and put the caps
ule into that round space. I’ll turn my back.”
When she turned around again, the Xiforan was inserting the capsule. “Close that little door with the button beside it,” she said, “and then push that button.” She pointed to the button on the other side of the panel. The Xiforan wedged itself into the machine, and Jer gave herself a mental note to make the bench adjustable. The Xiforan pushed the button. “Now open the capsule door,” Jer said. “The button beside the little door opens it, too.” The capsule door opened. There was only dust behind it.
“Now come with me,” she said, and led the Xiforan to the machine from which they had started the experiment. “Now open the capsule door.” The Xifor slid into the seat—more skillfully this time—and pushed the button beside the door. Behind the door was the capsule. “Open it,” she said. The Xiforan opened the capsule and removed the sheet of paper. It looked at the paper with something approaching awe.
“That’s a great trick,” it said. “How did you do it?”
* * *
At the end of a dozen more trials, the Xiforan seemed convinced that something other than trickery—of which it claimed to be an authority—was involved. “You may be able to send a message across the room,” it said, “but I can speak loud enough to be heard, or, even better, use a communication device to serve the purpose more quickly and with far less equipment.”
“The virtue of the machine,” Jer said, “is that it works across any distance, to the farthest worlds of the Federation as quickly as it works across the room.”
“Ah,” the Xiforan said, “and how do you plan to prove that?”
“Send one of the machines to Federation Central,” she said, “and I will demonstrate that the millions of kilometers that separate these worlds are no more significant than the few meters across the room.”
The Xiforan submitted its report to the scientific committee of the Federation Council that had sent it. Jer did not think the committee would respond, but perhaps it would give more weight to the Pedia’s evaluation. And so it proved. Five cycles later the Pedia announced that the committee had given permission for one of the machines to be shipped to Federation Central, on the assurance of the Pedia—it did not mention the Xiforan—that the machine contained nothing toxic or explosive.
Fifty cycles later the machine had arrived on Federation Central and the committee had been assembled in a carefully prepared laboratory equipped with two-way vision screen communication monitored by the Pedia. Communication, however, was handicapped by the eight-minute delay caused by the distance between the two planets. “Proceed with your demonstration!” one of the committee members said. Jer was sure it was the director of the committee: it was a Dorian.
Jer went through the same series of demonstrations that she had performed for the Xiforan but with the improvements suggested by the Xiforan’s reactions to the first tryout. She persuaded the Dorian to write a message, insert it in a capsule, and send it off. Eight minutes later she reported that the capsule had arrived and asked the Xiforan to read the message back.
“Xiforans do not read,” it said. Jer read the message aloud.
Eight minutes later the Dorian responded that the message was correct. “However,” it said, “it would have been just as quick to send a message by more customary methods.”
“What you did not take into account,” Jer said, “is that your message was received as soon as you sent it, and it was only the built-in delay of more customary methods that made the report take longer.”
“So,” the Dorian said, “your machine, if it works as you say, buys us eight minutes.”
“Not only eight minutes,” Jer said, “but eight light-years or eighty or eight hundred, or as far as the Federation can reach.”
“A statement that would take many long-cycles to demonstrate,” the Dorian said.
“But one that, if true—and it is easy to prove that instantaneous over the millions of kilometers that separate our two planets would be the same over light-years—would revolutionize Federation communication and bring the farther worlds into a new and intimate connection with Federation Central.”
Communication with the committee over eight-minute breaks was like a conversation in which each of the parties took short naps between statements, and Jer found it beyond annoying, and perhaps disastrous.
At last the response came. “We cannot rule out the possibility of illusion. We are aware of the human fondness for trickery of the senses, something the rest of the Federation finds disturbing and perhaps infantile.”
“What can I do to convince you that the process works and that it could work to make the Federation a better organization,” Jer said, feeling frustrated and that failure of her project—and more important, Jak’s—was imminent.
“Even if everything you say were true,” the Dorian said, “can you imagine the consequences of objects like this arriving at Federation Central ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times a cycle? And what mischief, what toxic substances, what explosives might be included? It would be a nightmare.”
“Surely Federation ingenuity could come up with suitable arrangements,” Jer said. “Messages could be received on a remote planet like this one and processed by your Pedia, or on a satellite, or an office in orbit. Or almost anything! Or you could confine communications to oral only—any, yes, the Machine is capable of that as well.”
Eight minutes later, the Dorian’s reply arrived. “We will take that under advisement.”
Jer felt her hopes sink beneath the weight of bureaucracy. She knew what that meant. “Maybe we need to speak without this delay,” she said and pushed another button on the control panel of the Jak Machine.
She materialized in the Jak Machine on Federation Central. “Like this,” she said.
CHAPTER TEN
Tordor was tiring as he approached the area where the city might be located. Walking in the gravitational field of a heavy planet that reminded him of Dor in many ways was not the pleasant jaunt that he remembered from his youth, and his muscles ached. He also found himself looking behind at regular intervals to see if he had been pursued by saber-toothed predators or some other creature that had not yet evidenced itself. But there was nothing.
He was almost upon the city before he recognized it. At first it seemed like a rise in the purplish-green vegetation that coated the prairies, but as he got closer Tordor could see low walls and roofs that extended for kilometers in every direction. It was like no city Tordor had ever seen, appropriate perhaps for a species that spent its life close to the ground, and for a heavy world that made raising objects to heights not only difficult but dangerous. Even so, his people, the Dorians, were grazers on a heavy planet, and they had built tall cities in the highlands as if defying their limitations. Tordor thought about the advantages of hands over trunks. Dorians had coped with their handicaps by maximizing the capabilities of their one major tool in challenging the limitations of their origins. The centaurs, on the other hand, had to contend with a treacherous and unstable world: he had experienced another centaurquake as he made his way across the prairie toward this place. Two of those a day would make any builder choose stout walls and single-level structures.
Even so, some of the buildings had fallen, perhaps from the quakes, perhaps from lack of attention. The neglect suggested that the city had been abandoned.
Walls surrounded the city as if to keep out strangers or perhaps predators like the saber-toothed tigers that he had seen at the edge of the forest. Openings broke the symmetry of the walls every few kilometers, but they were sealed with heavy wooden gates that did not yield to his pounding, even from his heavy hooves, and, even if he could climb, he did not want to risk an injury or even death, which would surely result from a fall from a height of more than a body length on this world. He circled the walls looking for an opening until he finally found a gate that had been splintered and partially destroyed. The splinters bulged out, some of them opening into holes, which meant that the gate had been att
acked from within.
He squeezed his body through one of the holes, which was only large enough after he had enlarged it with kicks from his hooves. Inside, he stopped. Scattered in front of the damaged gate were heaps of bones, and Tordor remembered Riley’s account of the meeting hall on Nepenthe. Only here some of the bones were broken and appeared to bear the marks of teeth. Tordor imagined panicked centaurs, trapped inside a city they could no longer understand and from which they could not escape, trying gate after gate until they finally found one they could kick their way through—only to let into their sanctuary the saber-toothed tigers that waited for them on the other side.
Tordor made his way through the boneyard into a broad avenue between low, one-story buildings constructed of wood or prairie mud colored by the purplish green of the native vegetation, and occasionally a kind of orange metal with which he was not familiar. Most of the buildings were small units, like individual stables; a few—the metal ones—were larger and extended into the ground farther than they rose above it. They seemed to be working places, factories perhaps, and one seemed to be for the construction or storage of vehicles that moved on thick, metal legs. Another housed what seemed like the beginning of an airship or perhaps a spaceship, though of an unusual design perhaps meant to accommodate heavy quadrupeds.
The boulevards extending toward what seemed like the center of the city were intersected at regular intervals by avenues that curved in what might be complete circles. The centaurs were—or had been—a species concerned with precision, it seemed, and they had laid out their city, maybe all their cities, with geometric regularity, although, at the end, their disciplined minds had done nothing to save them from whatever had attacked. Bones were piled at the other gates to the city, still closed though dented by the blows of hooves. Here, though, the bones were still in heaps, unscattered, most of them without tooth marks, and the smell of decayed flesh still lingered, perhaps after it had been absorbed by the porous stones on which they lay. The tigers, apparently, had gorged themselves at the gate they entered or had reached the other gates after the bodies had decayed too much even for their tolerance for carrion.