by John Scalzi
But this was Marce’s job now: Special Assistant for Science Policy to Emperox Grayland II, tasked with communicating the issues surrounding the imminent collapse of the Flow to Very Important People. These included but were not limited to imperial ministers, members of parliament, the heads of noble houses and their entourages, bishops and archbishops of the Interdependent Church and any other churches, scientists, journalists, high-ranking celebrities, “thought leaders,” noted public intellectuals and the occasional talk show host.
All day, every day, for the last month.
All day, every day, for the foreseeable future.
At this very moment, Marce had brought his now road-tried-and-tested presentation to the Imperial Society of Exogeology, which had convened for its biennial convention on Hub, biennial because it was difficult for members from across the Interdependency to haul their respective butts across Flow streams that took weeks and sometimes months to get them to where they were going, and at Hub because, simply, all Flow streams led to Hub.
(For now, some portion on Marce’s brain volunteered. Marce shoved that part of his brain back down into its hole.)
One might think that of all groups that Marce would address on the topic of the collapse of the Flow streams, it would be scientists who would be the easiest to convince. After all, what Marce had was data, three decades of data, researched and codified and presented in a format that nearly every scientist would understand. Charts and graphs and columns and footnotes and of course a digital file laden with all the raw information his father, the Count Claremont, had collected over thirty years.
But as it turned out the scientists were uniformly the worst audiences. Marce could understand Flow physicists being balky or dismissive: This was their field, after all, and now some minor lord and even more minor professor from an obscure university at the ass end of space was presenting them information, from his dad, informing all of them that everything they thought they understood about the Flow was entirely wrong. That was a real kick to the nether regions, intellectually speaking. Honestly Marce would have been surprised if Flow scientists had done anything other than attack, at least until they had time to sit with the data and recognize the terrifying truth of it.
But it wasn’t just the Flow physicists. Every group of scientists, in every discipline, had given him static about the data he and his father had collected and interpreted. Marce had been genuinely flummoxed by it until he thought back on his days in academia and what the chair of his department had once told him, about colleagues who were bound and determined to relate every new finding to their own area of expertise and that area only. “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” his chair had said.
This wasn’t a new turn of phrase, but the point was new to Marce: There were more than a few scientists who knew one little thing, and then thought that knowledge was universally applicable to every other problem, to the point of excluding or discounting information from people whose specialty was that other problem.
Marce didn’t particularly have that problem—he was all too aware of everything he didn’t know, which these days felt like everything that wasn’t about the collapse of the Flow—but he was increasingly aware of the number of scientists brandishing hammers, looking for the nail in his data, and in his presentation.
It was exhausting. More than once Marce longed to throw up his hands, say, Fine, don’t believe me or the data; enjoy being the first turned to jerky when the collapse comes. But then he remembered that he had promised Grayland—the emperox of the Interdependency, who had improbably and somewhat ridiculously also become his friend—that he would help her find a way to forestall the collapse of their entire civilization.
And that meant not bellowing to a theater of recalcitrant exogeologists that the Flow didn’t care whether they believed it was collapsing or not, and answering, for the innumereth time, the same damn basic question he received every single time he gave his presentation.
“No time at all,” Marce said, to the man who asked the question, a self-important bald fellow who Marce believed was no doubt the preeminent scientist in the entire Interdependency on some very specific type of igneous rock. Marce motioned to the schematic that floated in the air above him, showing the systems of the Interdependency and all the Flow streams that stretched between them all, pointing specifically to the stream connecting Hub, the capital of the Interdependency, and End, which as it happened was Marce’s home, and which he wondered if he would ever see again. “As I said, the stream from End to Hub has already started to collapse. It’s collapsing from End, in the direction of Hub. One of the last ships to come from End was the one I was on, as it happens. There have been no new arrivals from End in weeks. There will be no more arrivals, as best as the data can predict.”
“So End is sealed off,” another scientist asked.
“In one direction.” Marce pointed to the other stream arcing between Hub and End. “In the other direction the stream remains open for now. We can send ships to End. They just won’t be coming back.”
Marce then pointed to another stream, connecting Hub to Terhathum. “We’re pretty sure this, the Flow stream between Hub and Terhathum, will be the next Flow stream to collapse. We expect this to happen within the next few weeks. The emperox has assigned research craft to monitor the Flow shoal here, and we’re sending specialized drones through the shoal to gauge the soundness of the stream.”
“How do you do that?” another exogeologist asked.
“Well, it’s complicated,” Marce said. “The internal topography of the Flow doesn’t precisely correspond to the space-time we’re familiar with. In fact, if we didn’t wrap our own ships inside a little bubble of space-time before they entered the Flow, they’d just cease to exist, at least in a way we understand as existing. I could explain it better but I would need more time, and I have another presentation to give across Hubfall in two and half hours.” This got a small laugh.
“When the stream from Hub to Terhathum collapses, then Terhathum will be cut off, like End is,” said the bald probably-expert-in-igneous-rocks-of-some-sort.
“No,” Marce said, and was sure he heard a groan. “End is named ‘End’ in part because there’s only one stream in and one stream out, and both lead here, to Hub.” Marce pointed to where the Terhathum system was displayed in his floating image. “Terhathum is connected to Hub, but it’s also connected to three other systems as well: Shirak, Melaka and Paramaribo. So now instead of going directly to Terhathum from Hub, the quickest route will be going to Melaka first and then to Terhathum. That adds an additional nine days to travel.”
“But Terhathum won’t be isolated.”
“Not yet.” Marce went to his display controls and pressed a button to start an animation. “But the collapse of the stream from Hub to Terhathum is just the first. Shortly after that one collapses, we begin to lose more.” One by one, the streams dropped out of the display, marking fewer connections between planets. “Within three years some systems are already isolated.” The animation ran some more. “Within ten, all the Flow streams are gone.”
“And we have no way to get from one system to the next without them?” someone asked, after a moment.
“Not without taking hundreds of years at least,” Marce said. “Our ships’ engines are designed to move in-system, at a small fraction of the speed of light. Even if we built ships to go faster—say, ten percent of the speed of light—there would still be decades between the closest systems.” Marce saw a hand go up. “And of course as scientists I don’t have to remind you that going faster than the speed of light is a physical impossibility.” The hand went back down, quickly.
“And you’re sure about this?” the bald man said. “Because I mentioned to my brother-in-law, who is a Flow physicist, that we were meeting with you today, and he said, bluntly, that you were a crank and that you have somehow managed to scam the emperox.”
Marce smiled at this. He was used to this question, too. �
��Sir, I don’t think you understand,” he said. “I—and my father, whose work this is—would be delighted to be wrong. We would be delighted for every other Flow physicist to sit with the data, which we have provided to anyone who wants it, poke holes in it, and show definitively that we missed some pertinent bit of information that shows we’ve been reading the data wrong all this time. Isn’t that the way science works? You present a hypothesis to your peers, you show them all your measurements and observations and data, and you ask them to make you a liar. The best-case scenario, sir, is that my father and I are revealed as cranks and I go home to End in ignominy.
“There’s only one problem with this, which I’ve already covered.” Marce motioned again toward End. “It’s already begun, consistent with our predictions and data. At this point we’re still arguing about it only because only one stream has collapsed and we can still make other excuses for why those ships that should have arrived at Hub by now haven’t arrived. When the collapse of the Hub–Terhathum Flow stream happens, within weeks, the time for debate about the status of the Flow will be over. And when that happens, what we need to ask ourselves is what we will be prepared to do as scientists to help everyone else in the Interdependency to survive.”
“You say ‘as scientists,’ but the emperox has been claiming she is having visions about what’s coming,” complained an exogeologist.
Marce looked uncomfortable at this. “I can’t speak to those. I can speak to Emperox Grayland’s commitment to continuing and increasing scientific research on this subject, which was started by her father, Attavio VI.”
“But don’t you think it’s odd that she’s engaged in this mystical nonsense? I don’t think it helps her case at all.”
Marce paused for a moment to consider his words. “My colleagues,” he said, finally. “I have just given you an hour-long presentation on a hypothesis whose data fit the observed behavior of the universe, which has been peer-reviewed and which conforms to every accepted standard and stricture for scientific inquiry. Yet I can tell already that something less than half of you are more than half convinced by it. You’re scientists. If I can’t convince all of you with my data, then it’s possible I’ll do even less well with the general public.”
He glanced around at the exogeologists, who were silent. “Now, I’m not going to tell you I understand our emperox’s claim of visions and revelation,” Marce said. “I certainly can’t say I believe them, exactly. But I believe in the emperox. I believe that the emperox is committed to helping all of her subjects prepare for what’s coming. And if having a vision helps where the actual, observable and verifiable science doesn’t, then I’m open to visions. Given what’s at stake, maybe you might be, too.”
* * *
Marce sensed the woman before he saw her, or more accurately, he saw Nadau Wilt, his assistant/bodyguard, tense up as they walked to Marce’s waiting car, and step between him and someone who was clearly walking up on both of them. He looked up and saw the approaching woman, a bit older than he was, with an air of dishevelment, carrying a sheaf of papers.
The woman saw Wilt move and stopped a few meters out, hands up guardingly. “Did you tell the truth in there, Dr. Claremont?”
Marce smiled; it had been a while since anyone had called him “doctor.” “About the collapse of the Flow? Absolutely.”
“No, not about that,” the woman said, and the annoyed, dismissive tone came through clearly. “About being delighted to be proven wrong.”
Ah, thought Marce. Here we go. One persistent feature of giving these presentations on the Flow collapse is one or two attendees who would want to corner him later to share their own “scientific” theories, like how the Flow was actually the ghost plane or how the emperox was actually turning off the Flow stream at the behest of a heretofore never-discovered intelligent alien species, which looked like a cross between a shark and a poodle (that one came with art). Marce’s strategy in those situations was to be polite but to let Wilt shove him along to the next thing.
“Yes,” he said, politely. “In this case, I would be very happy to be proven wrong.”
“Are you sure about that? Because I have to tell you, Dr. Claremont, I wasn’t very pleased when you proved me wrong.”
Marce was confused by this comment for several seconds, until he wasn’t. Then his mouth literally dropped open. “You’re … Hatide Roynold.”
“Yes.”
“You told the Nohamapetans that the Flow streams are shifting, not going away.”
“Yes.”
“You were wrong about that.”
“Yes, yes,” Roynold said, irritably. “Maybe I wouldn’t have been wrong if your father had bothered to answer my correspondence to him on the subject, but he never did.”
“He was told by the emperox to keep his research to himself,” Marce said.
“I understand that’s his excuse, yes.”
“The Nohamapetans used your data to attempt a coup.”
“Well, they didn’t tell me that’s what they had planned,” Roynold said. “Any more than I imagine the emperox told you she was using your data for that ridiculous ‘vision’ scheme of hers.”
Marce looked back at the conference building they had just come from. “How … did you see today’s presentation? You’re not an exogeologist.”
“I grabbed a nametag and snuck in.” Roynold motioned to herself, almost dismissively. “I look like this. The other exogeologists aren’t exactly fashion plates. I fit in.”
“Lord Marce, we should go,” Wilt said, knowing when to move things along. Marce turned, allowing himself to be moved.
“You’re not right, Dr. Claremont,” Roynold said, stepping forward again, and then stopping once more when Wilt gave her a take-the-hint glare, but not walking away.
“What do you mean?” Marce asked.
Roynold pointed to Marce’s briefcase, which held his tablet, display projector, and papers. “Your work. It’s not right. It’s not wrong, not entirely. But it’s not right. Fully. It’s incomplete.”
“Incomplete.”
Roynold nodded. “That’s right.”
Marce took a step toward Roynold, much to Wilt’s consternation. “My father’s data predicted the collapse of the End Flow stream to an extremely high level of confidence,” he said. “I checked the math myself.”
“Yes,” Roynold said. “It’s correct. And you’ll be correct with the Hub to Terhathum collapse, too. Look, I said you weren’t wrong.”
“But how is that incomplete?”
“That part isn’t incomplete. But your theory is. You and your father have been working on a general theory of Flow collapse.” Roynold rattled the papers in her hand. “This is the special theory.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that your father is accurately predicting when Flow streams are collapsing, and you checked the math on that. But he missed that in the process the Flow would open some streams too. You never checked that because he missed it.”
Roynold held the papers out to Marce, who stepped forward and took them.
“I got things wrong because I started out with a few bad assumptions that I didn’t check,” Roynold said as he read. She shrugged. “Having peer review would have helped, but I was being paid not to tell anyone else. It turns out my process was right, I was just plugging in the wrong initial conditions. When I got your data, I saw that your father and I were studying different aspects of the same problem. Related but nearly independent. And I incorporated his findings into my process.” She pointed to the papers. “And got this.”
Marce looked up from the papers and blinked mutely at Roynold.
“Right?” Roynold said, and waved at the papers. “It’s all preliminary, of course. But still.”
“Lord Marce,” Wilt said, more insistently this time.
Marce acknowledged his bodyguard, and then turned back to Roynold and held up the papers. “Can I keep these?”
“I brought them for you.”
“My contact information is on the cover sheet.”
“Is there a good time to call?”
Roynold smiled awkwardly. “There’s not a bad time to call, Dr. Claremont. I’m between opportunities at the moment.”
Marce frowned. “I thought you were a professor.”
“Yes, well,” Roynold said. “It turns out when your work is used by traitors as the reason to undermine the Interdependency and attempt to assassinate the emperox, it makes going into work at an imperial university … problematic.”
“It’s not your fault they used your data like this. They didn’t tell you what they had planned.”
“No,” Roynold agreed. “On the other hand, I didn’t really ask, either, did I.” She shrugged. “And anyway I had a lot of free time to work on this. Not entirely sure how I’m going to eat after next week. But I suppose that’s what the Interdependency minimum benefit is for.”
Marce looked up at this. “Really?” he said.
“That last part was probably too much, wasn’t it. Sorry. I have a hard time knowing where the line is sometimes.”
Marce smiled and handed the papers back to Roynold. “Come on. I’ve got another one of these presentations across town, which I’m now late for. We can talk on the way there. And then we can talk after.”
“All right.” Roynold took the papers. “You really don’t mind being proven wrong. I wasn’t actually expecting that.”
“You said it, Dr. Roynold. I’m not wrong. I’m just not right.”
Chapter
6
The Flow stream from Hub to Terhathum collapsed.
The collapse was ahead of schedule but within the penumbra of the prediction cone that Marce Claremont had offered Emperox Grayland II. The last ship through the Flow shoal from Hub to Terhathum was the House of Nohamapetan fiver I’ll Always Remember You Like a Child, which entered the Flow stream six hours ahead of the collapse. The captain of the Child had been cautioned prior to entering the Flow stream that the emperox’s science advisor was predicting its collapse and further warned that the collapse was likely to spread from random points within the stream and not, as had happened with the collapse from End to Hub, beginning at one end and moving forward like a wave to the other. Hub’s traffic control suggested routing through Melaka and then to Terhathum.