The Grapple

by Moshe Ben-Or

  “You’ve been studying, huh?”

  “Leo has an amazing library. His poncho is loaded with all kinds of books.”

  “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” remarked Yosi. “If I die tomorrow, will you still say the Shema the next day?”

  “You know I will. That place, in your dreams, it was alien to me. The orange sun, and the desert and the house. But those ancient words, they’re not.

  “All things come and go. Clothes change. Buildings crumble into dust. Whole civilizations rise and disappear. Even planets and suns die. But those ancient words, they’re forever. They are the ultimate belong. A place that you always take with you.

  “I’ll never give that up. If you are gone, I’ll have nothing left at all, but that.

  “But you know all this. I don’t have to say it. You already know. I don’t have to say anything with you, anymore. Not when we huddle this close. Not when it’s dark, and quiet and everyone around is asleep. That’s not the reason you won’t take me. You’re just making excuses.

  “You’re afraid, Yosi… Why are you afraid?”

  “I am afraid of Him,” answered Yosi. “Of Hashem. I don’t know what He will do. Every woman I love, dies. If I lose you, Miri…”

  The partition between them was suddenly gone.

  “Don’t, Yosi,” whispered Mirabelle as he brought up his poncho’s housekeeping icons. “Don’t restore it. You don’t have to have me. Just hold me. Hold me, and we’ll wait for dawn together, that’s all.”

  Yosi wrapped his arms around the warm, feminine softness of her. Her lips were salty with dried tears, but still somehow sweet.

  She completed him. It was that simple. She completed him like no other woman ever had. That partition didn’t belong. She belonged. Her skin against his. Her hair on his chest. Her breath mingling with his. The warm, inviting slickness of her against his leg.

  One night, this evening or the next or the next after that, a day or a week or a month from now, the fire inside him would burn too hot, and he would surrender to it. And she would draw him in with joy, and her eager body would be wax beneath his hands, and they would melt together once and for all. And there would never again be a Yosi Weismann, or a Miri Legraf. There would be only one. Forever. ‘Till death did them part. And that’s why he was afraid.

  The company was almost ready. Two weeks from now, operations would go kinetic. He had already written out the order. Casabuenos, Layos, Castle Diaz. Like dominoes, within three weeks’ time. March and fight and march again. Shock and awe, to establish Colonel Weismann’s credibility once and for all.

  And she would be right there, by his side, with naught but a paper-thin poncho to protect her as she ran to help the wounded, amid the flechettes and the pulse trains, and the flying shrapnel. There would be no time to be afraid then. Not for him and not for her. And so he was afraid now. Because it would only take a single stray flechette…

  * * *

  War in space hadn’t changed, fundamentally, for a millennium, thought Shlomo Bar-Illan as he rode the elevator up to the conference room. Truth be told, it hadn’t changed all that much in a good fourteen hundred years.

  A warship of the twenty-fourth Standard Century didn’t look all that different from a modern one. They had been restricted to Einsteinian spacetime only, back then, but the fundamental principles of ship design had already been set.

  Despite brief flirtations with sodium and the like, shipbuilders had always returned to doped water as primary coolant. The disadvantages of the exotic coolants had always ultimately outweighed their advantages. Materials matured. Dopants improved. Water always won. Ultimately, it would win once and for all.

  For a thousand years now, the coolant in the heatsink would start out at forty below, and for a thousand years its temperature could not be permitted to nose over the supercritical limit of two hundred. Better dopants and tougher pipes had merely meant lighter heatsinks and more mass for other systems. Fusion coils would eventually replace fission reactors, but nothing fundamental would change. Once the fight commenced, the heat clock started running. He whose heatsinks filled up first had the choice of baking to death or extending hull radiators and trying to surrender.

  By the twenty-fourth century, the drive to minimize all-around moment of inertia had made most warships’ hulls spherical. Only the heaviest capital ships, built around a cluster of powerful ramguns, had perforce remained cylindrical.

  Today, ramguns were long obsolete. Moment of inertia was no longer an all-important consideration in warship design. It was the need to simplify shield control, and the related impetus to minimize hull surface area, that reigned supreme in the shipbuilder’s mind. And thus even the heaviest battleship was now spherical. Among vessels of war, only the carrier and its launched small craft still retained the traditional cylindrical hull.

  The twenty-fourth century missile launcher had used compressed gas or electromagnetic forces to eject a chemically boosted rocket. Today’s missile might possess a microjump drive, but it still retained a chemical booster. In fourteen centuries, the fundamentals of missile launch had changed not an iota.

  The twenty-fourth century fusion torch was still essentially in use. The same latticework containment cage with the same four square fletchings of solid-state radiator still sat at the tip of the mast. The same gas core fusion plasma still burned within it. The same disk of shadow shield behind the radiator still protected the ship’s hull from radiation, and the same hydrogen propellant would flow past the fusion plasma to produce thrust.

  Incremental improvements in torch efficiency had long ago hit the brick walls of fundamental physics and economics. Down to the range of attainable thrust and specific impulse, nothing about the modern warship’s fusion torch would be truly unfamiliar to the twenty-fourth century engineer.

  Even the things that made modern warships truly different from the ones of the late twenty-fourth century would be discovered, at least for the first time, less than a century later.

  By the early 2400s of the Universal Standard Era, professor Mordechai Abramovitz of the Rebuilt Technion would note that advances in the field of artificial gravity now made it possible to experimentally investigate the somewhat-indecent question of what lay beneath the veil of an event horizon. And by 2441, the last Jew in history to be grudgingly awarded the soon-to-be-defunct Nobel Prize would have his answers, and would stand all of physics on its head. Such was his contribution to the advancement of human knowledge that, even in the climate of the times, the Nobel Prize Committee had had no choice.

  After three centuries of antisemitic genocides, Professor Abramovitz would not have been welcome in Stockholm anyway. Though hundreds of thousands of would-be protesters had readied rocks and molotovs in preparation for his visit, he did not bother to take ship from Mars to Earth, there to stand among the monsters who had gleefully driven his ancestors from their homeland to the Kerguelen Islands, and thence completely off the planet, and smile politely as he accepted some worthless piece of metal from their blood-spattered paws. But he did bother to record an address for posterity. When the esteemed Nobel Prize Committee had discovered that the address was in Hebrew, they simply refused to play it at the ceremony.

  With a physicist’s dry humor, Professor Abramovitz had named the stubborn malfunction in his experimental setup “the snarkyon”. And when the “malfunction” had turned out to be a door into a whole new realm of physics, the good professor had seen no need whatsoever to alter its name.

  Spacetime, it turned out, was not a balloon expanding out of nothingness into nothingness. Inside the balloon there was an expanding foam. The foam exerted pressure, the effects of which physicists past had called “dark energy”. All things were made of strings whose bodies floated in the foam. The particles of the Standard Model were mere traces, just tips of a string. Thus the accelerating expansion of the universe, thus the entangled photons of the EPR paradox, thus the spooky action at a distance that had so unnerved the auth
or of Relativity.

  Among the many kinds of strings floating in the foam of subspace, one string was special. A composite string, unstable and full of mysterious potential energy. The mighty agent of Creation that had given the expanding early universe its amazing uniformity, without any magical, faster-than-light inflation. When unleashed, this strange string’s decay into other strings would whip its tips violently through the foam, taking bits of spacetime along for the ride. In an immeasurable instant, literally zero time, the potential energy would be expended and the strange string would be gone. Not a particle, not a photon, not a quantum would disappear in the process. But the bits of spacetime taken along for the ride, and their occupants, would not end up where they had started.

  In a mass decay of snarkyons, all vectors and relative positions would be randomized. Particles which had before marched in steady lockstep would suddenly careen off in random directions, speed intact and mass intact, but velocity dramatically altered. Molecules would fall apart into atoms and atoms into particles, as bits and pieces materialized randomly in space, still possessing the same energy but suddenly free of the influence of their erstwhile neighbors. The mass of the snarkyons themselves became a slew of fundamental particles, expelled with predictable speeds but thoroughly random velocities from the zone of quantum cataclysm. It was as if the hand of God had reached momentarily into the careful arrangement of the universe and randomly scrambled the dice.

  In the years following Professor Abramovitz’s earthshaking discovery, the world outside his laboratory went, inexorably and very rapidly, from bad to worse. The Solar System was no longer large enough for Man, nor were its manifold resources distributed in a manner satisfactory to all claimants.

  The brutal holy wars of the past four centuries had rendered religion odious and religious morality unpopular. Again dominant instead were atheism, scientific morals and the impulse to organize society upon rational premises. Foremost among these being the rational premise that, in the merciless struggle for manifestly limited resources, the weak and unfit should rightfully perish at the hands of the fit and the strong. And so again in vogue were the pure Race and its all-powerful State.

  As early as the 2160s, the North American Freedom Party had used genetic testing to scientifically root out racial impurity. Such policies, too, were now back in vogue, bringing back with them the full gamut of typical measures for dealing with the impure. And again, as is usual in such times, the consensus of all respectable opinion held that the Jews, both individually and collectively, were certainly to blame for all the ills of Mankind.

  By the middle of the twenty-fifth Standard Century, a system-wide conflagration had become inevitable. The operative question was no longer if, but when. And decisions were being made accordingly.

  By the time Mordechai Abramovitz’s star pupil Abraham Mendler had discovered that the subspace foam underlying Einsteinian spacetime was a non-uniform thing possessing large-scale structure, and that said structure was affected by and in turn affected spacetime in potentially useful and interesting ways, the snarkyon had already been weaponized. Contained within a cage of protective atoms, it had become shield matter, stuff of the all-devouring clouds that would protect warships for generations to come.

  When a weapon, regardless of its nature, struck the cloud of shield matter that surrounded a ship, the protective atomic cages would break, and their snarkyons would be released in the direction of impact. And there they would, in the nature of free snarkyons, immediately decay en masse.

  Given sufficient distance and/or density, shield matter could stop anything. Directed bolts of coherent energy became showers of scrambled photons. Physical objects turned into clouds of basic particles. And, by the simple laws of probability, with every snarkyon decay most of the redirected particles would head away from the ship.

  Armed with the new snarkyon shield technology, the warships of Abraham Mendler’s Judea had brought, to many who had dreamt of yet another easy genocide, the renewed lesson that in every generation there is a Haman born to hang upon his own gallows. The evil they had plotted had recoiled upon their own heads. The slaughter they had gleefully anticipated turned out to be their own.

  But, alas, the early victories were not enough. Judea’s enemies were too many, and her resources too few. Some quickly duplicated Judea’s shield technology. Others had entered the conflict with similar fielded systems of their own. Yet others simply redoubled the output of their mighty factories, winning battles through quantity that had a quality all its own. The war became a multi-sided long-term slog, spanning the entirety of the Solar System. And in such a war, Judea’s destruction was inevitable. It was merely a matter of time.

  And this, too, Judea had known in advance. And for this, too, Judea had planned.

  Officially, it was called “Project Noah”. But, from the very beginning, it would be known simply as “The Escape Fleet”.

  By the time the opening volleys of the First System War were being fired, Abraham Mendler had already formulated his famous Conjecture. By the time the first victories had turned to stalemate, and thence to first defeats, the project the Conjecture’s experimental confirmations had spawned was rapidly nearing completion.

  Instantaneous teleportation of coherent matter on a large scale was possible. The speed of light might be a cosmic speed limit, but the Creator had left a sneaky shortcut for the clever. With careful arrangement of snarkyons and properly sequenced ignition, the chaotic cascade of mass decay became an ordered, self-reinforcing wave. An entire contiguous region of Einsteinian space could be made to instantaneously swap places with another. Vectors could be preserved and the random rearrangement of particles’ relative positions prevented. Ships could jump great distances in a single cycle of a drive. Explosive shells could be instantly teleported onto targets thousands of kilometers away. The same technology that had already produced shield matter could, with just a few modifications, produce jump fuel.

  As walls came crashing down one by one around the Jewish People’s last outpost in the Solar System, experiments became prototypes, and prototypes turned into barely-fieldable systems. The Escape Fleet took form just as Judea’s clock had run out at last.

  The Fleet had carried about a thousand people, who, along with the children they produced en route, would double as colonists on arrival. None of its ships could be classified as non-military, nor could any of its crew be properly called civilian.

  Selected for fanatical dedication to duty, supreme competence, utter ruthlessness and a willingness to lay down their lives unquestioningly for The Cause, the Escape Fleet’s crew formed an ultra-elite squadron of a military renowned for its skill. Dispersed, for safety, within the holds of their warships, sat armored pods containing millions of frozen embryos and countless frozen gametes. Within the ships’ databanks, just as dispersed and just as redundantly protected as the precious reserve of biological DNA, rested the sum total of cultural DNA, fruit of four millenia of history, faith and tradition.

  The Fleet carried the last, best hope of its People. It carried also all knowledge of the Mendler Conjecture and the marvelous technology based upon it.

  After an initial jump into a region of nicely-flat interstellar space located about four light-years out of the plane of the Solar System’s ecliptic, the Escape Fleet had traveled toward Alpha Centauri in leaps of about one light-second at a time. When they functioned properly, the microjump drives of the Fleet had cycled at approximately one quarter hertz, about as fast as the drives of modern heavy freighters. Like their modern equivalents, they worked with simple models of gravity and matter, calculating adjusting factors to the Short Distance Flat Space solution to the Mendler Conjecture on the fly and applying them to move the ships. The advances of the past twelve centuries had made drives more fuel-efficient, their mechanisms more reliable and their effects on the crew far less stomach-churning. But the fundamentals of the thing could not be changed.

  Since the errors in relative particle
position produced during jump built exponentially with distance and deviation from the model, it was the absolute cumulative error that determined the maximum safe distance to move. The adjusted solutions stopped corresponding to reality at distances greater than a light-second, for space is never perfectly flat nor identical from one spot to the next and the assumption of a uniform underlying subspace no longer held.

  Jump too far on the SDFS solution, or any other imperfect solution for that matter, and what comes out the other end is no longer a ship, a drive or a man. It is a soup of particles and molecules or, sometimes, a blend of freakishly dismembered corpses and randomly twisted metal.

  When the Escape Fleet arrived at Alpha Centauri after an epic journey spanning over three decades, its leaders were again able to use the other set of drives aboard their ships. The jump drives. Jump drives were based, in those days, on the Partial General Solution to the Mendler Conjecture, for the capacity to calculate the General Solution did not yet exist. The PGS, in all its many flavors and successive improvements, had assumed then and still assumed now the existence of flat space and uniform subspace on the exit end of the jump. Just as vitally, the deliberately self-correcting algorithms of the PGS were, even in their original Rosen-Mendler-Hertzog version, relatively tolerant of errors in modeling and surveying on the other, entrance end.

  After a year or so of gravimetric surveys, interferometric observations and negotiations with the People’s Republic of Centauri designed to buy time rather than produce results, the Escape Fleet jumped six light years toward its ultimate destination of Epsilon Indi, leaving the crews of the assembled warships of the People’s Republic and its various rivals to stare in astonishment at empty space.

  Products of an abortive space race aged between one hundred and seventy-four, and ninety-three, the states of Alpha Centauri had been much too busy settling the system and quarreling among themselves to devote scarce resources to abstruse realms of cosmology and particle physics. When the ships which would establish them had left the Solar System, gravity generators were mere theory and Mordechai Abramovitz was yet to be born. The Centaurans had never built any facility elaborate enough to duplicate Abramovitz’s experiments. The vagaries of politics and economics had prevented any meaningful communication with the home system even before the First System War. Despite all their efforts, Centauran scientists could find no explanation for the function of the Judean fleet’s drives and shields, for lack of theoretical underpinnings and scientific infrastructure.