He was not from the worlds of the t'T, which may have been why my employers selected him to collect me. After all, they were (whatever their identity) planning a mass murder of t'T citizens, something worse than anything that had happened in human culture for thousands of years. They were clearly not well-disposed towards the t'T. Of course, the fact that Agif happened to be located relatively near to the jailstar was also a consideration.
He was, fie told me, from tne Wheah. This group of worlds is to be found beyond the Tongue, in the slow-space rimwards. Nobody in the t'T, I think, truly knows how far outwards the realms of the Wheah stretch. Perhaps all the way to the edge of the galactic arm – perhaps further, for surely if there are other stretches of fast-space they will be found beyond the matter-dense doldrums of the galaxy. But the t'T have had little to do with the Wheah. There is some intercourse, of course, but it is mostly individuals from the Wheah crossing the sublight Tongue at its narrowest stretch over many decades and coming to us. We in the t'T seem, historically speaking, to have had no desire to go the other way - and why would we be drawn to slow-space when we have our great stellar cavern of fast-space to explore?
Perhaps it is more than that; perhaps we in the t'T lack curiosity. A penalty of living in Utopia, I suppose.
The Wheah are a loose confederation of worlds linked by trade pathways that take many years of travel even at the speeds of (perhaps) three c their space allows. Despite this slowness of transport, or maybe because of it, they are traditionally known as warlike peoples; religious and superstitious, quick to imagine offence and slow to forget a grievance. How unlike the easy-going, edenesque worlds of the t'T!
And there is a more fundamental difference between the two Spaces. The Wheah have religious and superstitious reasons for despising dotTech. Some of them permit a certain, very basic level of medical nanotechnology in their bodies (to extend lifespan mostly – a necessity given the length of journey-times those travellers must endure). But they have none of the higher functions, the problem-solving capability, the 'intelligence', for want of a better word, of true dotTech. In many of their cultures, it seems, the t'T are an offence against god, or Gods, or the fraction-God who is most widely worshipped amongst the Wheah. I think the fraction-God's name is Verander, but I may have misremembered that. Agifo3acca had a shrine to him in part of his ship, but I was specifically forbidden to see it, one of the very few injunctions Agif laid upon me. The prohibition, of course, was a particular goad to me, and I tried several times to break in, or sneak through the door-guard. But Agifo3acca stopped me each time, not angry or violent but firm and un-get-aroundable.
'What harm can it do, me seeing the shrine?' I said.
'The fraction-God is not for the eyes,' he intoned, 'of the impure, of the infected.'
'Infected' meant dotTech. Agifo3acca was a large man, and I could not overcome him by force. Since losing my own dotTech I had grown weak and puny, so I doubt I would have been able to overpower him even had he been a frail individual.
'There's no dotTech in my body,' I told him. 'It's alright to let me in there.'
But he refused to be persuaded. 'You are not pure,' he told me. He was a strange figure, Agifo3acca.
He never told me, exactly, when he left the spaces of the Wheah; but thousands of his sort do so every year. I suppose he drifted at sublight across the Tongue at some point in his life, on purpose or randomly, actively seeking the t'T or actively fleeing some enemy of the Wheah. I suppose he found himself, eventually, older and alien, in the Nu Hirsch system. From there he had clearly travelled around widely, accumulating more of what he was looking for, and eventually was able to make his way down to Rain and out to the space near the Trench.
The Trench had been his obsession for a long time. That was obvious. He was drawn by it. It may be that he had heard of it in the space of the Wheah and had come because of it; it may be that he travelled to t'T for other reasons and, being here, had heard of it only to fallunder its spell. Whichever, here he now was, in his curious, accreted, gothic spaceship, flying as close to the Trench as he dared, sending in probes, gathering data.
And so, dear stone, let me tell you something about the Trench.
The Trench is an enormous natural structure in space. It stretches in a great arc, thousands of light years long, from the Bulk and its corewards accumulation of matter out into the centre of fast-space. It breaks for a hundred light years or so in the middle, but then starts again and curves round to the Wallows where it ends. Indeed, its end point is within a few light years of my jailstar.
The Trench is a gravity phenomenon, the strangest, most certainly, in the galaxy. In every other instance, gravity draws everything together into a sphere, and so the great objects of the universe are globes, from stars to planets and black holes. But the Trench is – something, nobody really knows what – a great linear phenomenon. It might be a superdense string of material stretching through space; or it might be a sharp crease in space-time itself. Nobody really knows.
The gravity of a star, or planet, or black hole, or galaxy – all these things draw over space infinitely. At great distances the pull is small, but closer to the object it increases on a gradient until it is highest at the surface. Space-time is dipped, curved and humped by the many objects within it. But the Trench is different; instead of the arcs and curves of usual gravity, this phenomenon is like a gash, a tear. Ten light years from it and it has no gravitational effect at all that can be measured; ten kilometres from it and the effect is minimal, like the pull of a string of asteroids. But within metres the gravity gradient shoots up suddenly, and the forces become so severe they crush life and matter as completely as a black hole. If space-time can be pulled and distorted by gravity, then perhaps also it can be pulled apart, leaving a mere gap. This is the Trench. Nobody has truly explained it.
Human beings have been travelling through fast-space for thousands of years. To begin with there was, I believe, a great deal of interest in this bizarre natural feature, this great gash in the universe, the single most important physical feature in t'T space. Many scientists studied it, many thinkers thought theories in relation to it. But the yield of data from it is low. We cannot travel into the Trench, for – whether because it is a phenomenon like a black hole or simply shares similar attributes – the gravity gradient is too high. A short distance over the lip of the Trench and everything is crushed. Unable to fathom the thing, humanity eventually lost interest in it. It is merely a feature, like stars or nebulae; like mountains or valleys on a planet's surface. We travel around it. We think no more of it.
But Agifo3acca thought of it. He circled his shanty spacecraft as close to it as he could, and tried – impossible though the task was – to understand it. You might pity him, stone; except that studying the Trench gave his life purpose.
Agifo3acca was flying at sublight speeds even though he was in fast-space. His tottering spacecraft was so big and ungainly it was, of course, impossible to co-ordinate its passage at faster-than-light speeds; my pursuers, who could wrap themselves tightly in foam, did not have this drawback; they could catch me at any time. I was growing nervous.
I had not entirely recovered from my life-threatening jailbreak, but I had to go. I couldn't wait any longer. Agifo3acca was taking his craft through the tip of theWallows, where faster-than-light speed was impossible and he would no longer be at a speed disadvantage in his enormous spaceship. Over a period of a year or so (for us, a month and more for him) he would pass through this patch of slow-space. This would put him on the other side of the Trench from the jailstar, and any repercussions for helping me: pursuers could not catch up with him. I, however, needed to fly faster-than-light, to get away, to fly to Rain and from there to other worlds.
I had to leave Agifo3acca's enormous craft before it entered the Wallows.
There was little time for pleasantries. I went down with Agif to one of his ship's many hangars, and prepared to leave the craft. This involved him helping me strap
on a Zhip-pack. With a finger's pressure on the top of this, froth started up out of its slats. The foam slewed up and enveloped me.
As the foam swirled up, hugging my legs and torso, my AI told me that I would see Agif again. 'It has been a pleasure,' I told him, with studied t'T charm. 'And my AI informs me we will meet once more.'
You'll make your way round the Trench, said the AI in my head. Return to Nu Fallow on the far side. Near Nu Fallow is the world you will depopulate, I think – don't tell him that, though.
'It seems,' I told Agif, angling my head, 'that I am to travel to Nu Fallow.'
He nodded.
'I suppose that is where we will meet again.'
'If we do,' he said, as the foam bubbled upwards, 'then I will receive more wealth from your employers, so I will be happy to see you again.'
And, before I could reply, the foam took my head. It blanketed me now from sight and sound, and formed itself quickest over my face.
Youready? came the uncanny voice of my AI. To Rain!
To Rain, I thought. I sensed the lurch as I was manhandled over to one of the depressions in the floor of the hangar, and slipped down into the sphincter that would release me into space. This gripped me. But in my imagination I could see Agifo3acca leaving the hangar and returning to his observations. His daily accumulation of evidence; his strange personal habits, worshipping his fraction-God, eating his bizarre food. I wondered, also, whether I really would see him again, for all that the AI promised it.
Then there was another lurch, and the craft had shed me from the hangar into black space. Then just the weightless floating sensation that is so peaceful, so calming that you forget even to pay attention to being alive. I was hurtling at impossible speeds through space, faster than any natural thing, but all I could sense was a gentle tuned-out floaty sort of nothingness.
Rain
1st
Dear Stone,
Rain. I was always nervous at Rain, the whole time I was there – three weeks, maybe? Four? I slept poorly the whole time. I wanted to leave as soon as I arrived. The AI rebuked me for this, told me not to be so stupid. Nothing could be more suspicious, it pointed out, than somebody arriving and immediately leaving. This is just not how space travel happens in t'T: to put oneself at the physical inconvenience, and even danger, of moving through space – the days-long thawing-out afterwards, only immediately to climb back into the foam and zip off somewhere else. A person would need to be crazy to do that. No – any traveller spends a month or two unwinding, relaxing, visiting the interesting places of the planet they have arrived at. Even if their eventual destination is somewhere else, they will still spend time at their stop-overs. Experiencing the place, meeting new people. Some travellers would spend a year or more; perhaps, if they had some pressing reason to move on, as little as ten days.
But we do not want, said the AI, to give people the impression that you are in any sort of hurry, not with the jailstar so near, not with 'police' searches on the verge of being instituted. Stay here, blend in, lie low. Stay a month, the AI urged. Stay more. Wait for the fuss to die down a little.
But although I recognised the wisdom of these words I was too . . . scared, Isuppose, would be the best word to describe it. I no longer possessed a full load of dotTech that could have taken the edge off my extreme hormonal flush. That could have balanced my adrenaline, instead of having great jagged spikes of the stuff coursing through my bloodstream. Without the nanotechnological tweaking of my emotions I lived fear. I sweated for no reason – I was not too hot, but nevertheless I sweated. My heart abandoned its regular beat; it tumbled, sprawled, rushed, thumped. I could not sleep for any extended length of time. I kept waking up, stung awake by strange dreams (although strange dreams are no novelty to me) – but more than dreams, paranoid twists in my mind and belly that the jail was right behind me, that they were reaching out their hands to seize me, drag me back through space and back through the portal into prison. Sometimes I woke scrabbling at my sheets, the bed so drenched with my sweat that I wondered at first if I had lost control of my bladder in the night.
I must leave, I muttered to myself. I must leave now.
No, whined the AI. No! No! Not yet!
But the sad truth was that the AI had degraded a great deal. Faster-than-light travel interferes with the neural patterning of AIs. Linear processors can handle the trillions of quantum jolts easily enough, and organic consciousness, though scrambled, recovers rapidly. But neural pattern processors get permanently confused, fractalised. They lose coherence. I was surprised, in fact, that my AI had lasted as well as it had done. Eighty-four light years, most of which was covered at very high speeds indeed. The higher the super-light speed, the more the AI degrades. I did not expect mine to last (I almost, dear stone! - said live but it was never really 'alive', I suppose) – I certainly did not expect mine to last all the way to Nu Fallow, but I hoped it might have maintained a tolerable coherence on Rain. I hoped it would be ableto advise me. It did try to do this, but it was increasingly incoherent. On this one point – that I not leave the world too soon – it was clear enough. But otherwise it meandered, increasingly senile.
Ae, it would say.
What? I would subvocalise in reply, but it had nothing to add to this.
Transit and reschedule and transit and and, it would say. Out of the window I can see dead leaves ticking over the flatland, it would say.
What? I asked. What can you mean? What window? There are no leaves! But it would go silent for a long time.
It might start out of nowhere, don't go, don't leave, but that swiftly metamorphosed into don't don't don't go-go gogo-gogo and other such sound patterns. Once on Rain, one morning as I lay on a pallet of treated leaves that were rubbery to the touch and squeaked when I shifted my half-awake weight, the AI spoke a single sentence: What is the difference between light and lightning? But when I asked it questions, trying to work out what it meant, it was silent.
I slept on these beds when on Rain. It is one of the things the planet is famous for. The culture on the planet prides itself on creating entirely organic and organic-adapted products. Their beds are woven of these strange alcohol-treated leaves. But I am getting ahead of myself, dear stone.
What?
What was I saying?
Rain was the name of the world. The star was called after some stuttering conglomeration of letters and numbers, I forget exactly which.[6] Or else, in the manner of most settlements, the star was only called 'the Sun'. But of its five planets the one inhabitable body was called Rain – by all the Glice-speaking peoples. It was called Rain for a good reason.
The planet had two moons, neither of them large but both dense and therefore possessing great mass. It also crossed orbits with a second planet, and both were inclined notably from the plain of the star. The result was that the world was subject to repeated gravitational tugs and side-slams. Rain is a watery world, mostly ocean, and the pulling and pushing of its orbit heats and agitates the atmosphere, bringing on enormous seasonal storms, shifting great gouts of water into the air where it rains down, rains down; rain falling from the sky all year round.
It is well-named: scarcely a day in its eighty-four-day year goes by without rainfall all over the planet. In any given location on the world, there is a ninety per cent chance of Rain at any time. It is not unusual for rain to fall continually for years on end. Some people would find such a climate depressing; but the people who choose to live on Rain relish it, rejoice in it. Theirs is a wet culture, a culture that values being slippery.
I arrived, my faster-than-light velocity petering into sublight as soon as the gravitational gradient of the star was steep enough to break up the weak-force action. Then, still in a distraught mental state, I drifted rapidly, my smart foam switching from FTL to sublight navigation. It calculated my position, shifted and manoeuvred me by popping foam to push out mini-explosions of gas. A few days, maybe less, and I started to feel the tug in my belly as I veered into orbit around
the planet. Then there was the curious crackling sound, or sensation, of aero-braking; a flush of heat from the feet – just the vaguest blush – and a stronger tug in my belly. Shortly after this there was the humming that meant an orbital station had identified me as a new arrival. Then the dat jets ignited, with a judder, ana velocity shifted again, leading me into an orbital hangar.
Coming out of the strange half-trance occasioned by super-c travel is the least pleasant part of all, dear stone. Some arrival hangars break open the foam like shelling a nut; others wash the foam off with a special solvent. Of the two, stone, the latter is preferable, in my opinion. It is less sudden, the light smashing across your eyes, the jump up (or fall) in temperature, the ghastly phlegm-drowned first attempts to breathe properly again – coughing, gasping, spluttering.
Then you find yourself, lying on the curiously angled soft couch. I remember my arrival at Rain more than many of my space-travelling arrivals, because as the stunned mental sluggishness of super c travel retreated I was actually aware of a feeling of profound terror. I realised with a start that I was expecting to be greeted by the 'police', by representatives of the jail who somehow (impossible though it would have been) had beaten me to Rain.
I was not greeted by the 'police'. I was greeted by a fresh young individual, clearly only recently having reached adulthood.
'Wellhello!' he said. 'Welcome!'
'Where am I?' I bleared.
'The planet Rain, traveller. Welcome!'
He slid a straw between my teeth and fed me a little slop, some reviving sugar drink. It was little enough, but with a body full of dotTech (as obviously he expected me to have) I would have been on my feet in a very short while. Instead I lay on the couch, moribund. I felt terrible.
Adam Roberts - Stone(2002) Page 7