N-Space Part 48

"But there's no tramline from the Mote to New Caledonia! Not even theoretically possible. Only link to the Mote has to start inside the Eye. Murcheson looked for it, you know, but he never found it. The Mote's alone out there."

"Och, then how could there be a colony?" Edwards demanded in triumph. "Be reasonable, Thad! We hae a new natural phenomenon, something new in stellar process."

"But if someone is is calling-" calling-"

"Let's hope not. We could no help them. We couldn't reach them, even if we knew the links! There's no stars.h.i.+p in the New Cal system, and there's no likely to be until the war's over." Edwards looked up at the sky. The moon was a small, irregular half-disk; and a circular crater still burned red in the dark half.

A brilliant violet streak flamed high overhead. The violet light grew more intense and flared white, then vanished. A wars.h.i.+p had died out there.

"Ah, well," Edwards said. His voice softened. "If someone's calling he picked a h.e.l.l of a time for it. But at least we can search for modulations. If the beam is no modulated, you'll admit there's n.o.body there, will you not?"

"Of course," said Potter.

In 2862 there were no stars.h.i.+ps behind the Coal Sack. On the other side, around Crucis and the Capital, a tiny fleet still rode the force paths between stars to the worlds Sparta controlled. There were fewer loyal s.h.i.+ps and worlds each year.

The summer of 2862 was lean for New Scotland. Day after day a few men crept outside the black dome that defended the city; but they always returned at night. Few saw the rising of the Coal Sack.

It climbed weirdly, its resemblance to a shrouded human silhouette marred by the festive two-colored eye. The Mote burned as brightly as Murcheson's Eye now. But who would listen to Potter and Edwards and their crazy tales about the Mote? The night sky was a battlefield, dangerous to look upon.

The war was not really fought for the Empire now. In the New Caledonia system the war continued because it would not end. Loyalist and Rebel were meaningless terms; but it hardly mattered while bombs and wrecked s.h.i.+ps fell from the skies.

Henry Morrissey was still head of the University Astronomy Department. He tried to talk Potter and Edwards into returning to the protection of the Langston Field. His only success was that Potter sent his wife and two sons back with Morrissey. Edwards had no living dependents, and both refused to budge.

Morrissey was willing to believe that something had happened to the Mote, but not that it was visible to the naked eye. Potter was known for his monomaniacal enthusiasms.

The Department could supply them with equipment. It was makes.h.i.+ft, but it should have done the job. There was laser light coming from the Mote. It came with terrific force, and must have required terrific power, and enormous sophistication to build that power. No one would build such a thing except to send a message.

And there was no message. The beam was not modulated. It did not change color, or blink off and on, or change in intensity. It was a steady, beautifully pure, terribly intense beam of coherent light.

Potter watched to see if it might change silhouette, staring for hours into the telescope. Edwards was no help at all. He alternated between polite gloating at having proved his point, and impolite words muttered as he tried to investigate the new "stellar process" with inadequate equipment. The only thing they agreed on was the need to publish their observations, and the impossibility of doing so.

One night a missile exploded against the edge of the black dome. The Langston Field protecting University City could only absorb so much energy before radiating inward, vaporizing the town, and it took time to dissipate the h.e.l.lish fury poured into it. Frantic engineers worked to radiate away the s.h.i.+eld energy before the generators melted to slag.

They succeeded, but there was a burn-through: a generator left yellow-hot and runny. A relay snapped open, and New Caledonia stood undefended against a hostile sky. Before the Navy could restore the Field a million people had watched the rising of the Coal Sack.

"I came to apologize," Morrissey told Potter the next morning. "Something d.a.m.ned strange has has happened to the Mote. What have you got?" happened to the Mote. What have you got?"

He listened to Potter and Edwards, and he stopped their fight. Now that they had an audience they almost came to blows. Morrissey promised them more equipment and retreated under the restored s.h.i.+eld. He had been an astronomer in his time. Somehow he got them what they needed.

Weeks became months. The war continued, wearing New Scotland down, exhausting her resources. Potter and Edwards worked on, learning nothing, fighting with each other and screaming curses at the New Irish traitors.

They might as well have stayed under the s.h.i.+eld. The Mote produced coherent light of amazing purity. Four months after it began, the light jumped in intensity and stayed that way. Five months later it jumped again.

It jumped once more, four months later, but Potter and Edwards didn't see it. That was the night a s.h.i.+p from New Ireland fell from the sky, its s.h.i.+eld blazing violet with friction. It was low when the s.h.i.+eld overloaded and collapsed, releasing stored energy in one ferocious blast.

Gammas and photons washed across the plains beyond the city, and Potter and Edwards were carried into the University hospital by worried students. Potter died three days later. Edwards walked for the rest of his life with a backpack attached to his shoulders: a portable life support system.

It was 2870 on every world where clocks still ran when the miracle came to New Scotland.

An interstellar trading s.h.i.+p, long converted for war and recently damaged, fell into the system with her Langston Field intact and her hold filled with torpedoes. She was killed in the final battle, but the insurrection on New Ireland died as well. Now all the New Caledonia system was loyal to the Empire; and the Empire no longer existed.

The University came out from under the s.h.i.+eld. Some had forgotten that the Mote had once been a small yellow-white point.

Most didn't care. There was a world to be tamed, and that world had been bare rock terraformed in the first place. The fragile imported biosphere was nearly destroyed, and it took all their ingenuity and work to keep New Scotland inhabitable.

They succeeded because they had to. There were no s.h.i.+ps to take survivors anywhere else. The Yards had been destroyed in the war, and there would be no more interstellar craft. They were alone behind the Coal Sack.

The Mote continued to grow brighter as the years pa.s.sed. Soon it was more brilliant than the Eye, but there were no astronomers on New Scotland to care. In 2891 the Coal Sack was a black silhouette of a hooded man. It had one terribly bright blue-green eye, with a red fleck in it.

One night at the rising of the Coal Sack, a farmer named Howard Grote Littlemead was struck with inspiration. It came to him that the Coal Sack was G.o.d, and that he ought to tell someone.

Tradition had it that the Face of G.o.d could be seen from New Caledonia; and Littlemead had a powerful voice. Despite the opposition of the Imperial Orthodox Church, despite the protests of the Viceroy and the scorn of the University staff, the Church of Him spread until it was a power of New Scotland.

It was never large, but its members were fanatics; and they had the miracle of the Mote, which no scientist could explain. By 2895 the Church of Him was a power among New Scot farmers, but not in the cities. Still, half the population worked in the fields. The converter kitchens had all broken down.

By 2900 New Scotland had two working interplanetary s.p.a.cecraft, one of which could not land. Its Langston Field had died. The term was appropriate. When a piece of Empire technology stopped working, it was dead. It could not be repaired. New Scotland was becoming primitive.

For forty years the Mote had grown. Children refused to believe that it had once been called the Mote. Adults knew it was true, but couldn't remember why. They called the twin stars Murcheson's Eye, and believed that the red supergiant had no special name.

The records might have showed differently, but the University records were suspect. The Library had been scrambled by electromagnetic pulses during the years of siege. It had large areas of amnesia.

In 2902 the Mote went out.

Its green light dimmed to nothing over a period of several hours; but that happened on the other side of the world. When the Coal Sack rose above University City that night, it rose as a blinded man.

All but a few remnants of the Church of Him died that year. With the aid of a handful of sleeping pills Howard Grote Littlemead hastened to meet his G.o.d . . . . . . possibly to demand an explanation. possibly to demand an explanation.

Astronomy also died. There were few enough astronomers and fewer tools; and when n.o.body could explain the vanis.h.i.+ng of the Mote . . . . . . and when telescopes turned on the Mote's remnant showed only a yellow dwarf star, with nothing remarkable about it at all and when telescopes turned on the Mote's remnant showed only a yellow dwarf star, with nothing remarkable about it at all . .

People stopped considering the stars. They had a world to save. The Mote was a G-2 yellow dwarf, thirty-five light-years distant: a white point at the edge of Murcheson's Eye. So it was for more than a century, while the Second Empire rose from Sparta and came again to New Caledonia.

Then astronomers read old and incomplete records, and resumed their study of the red supergiant known as Murcheson's Eye; but they hardly noticed the Mote.

And the Mote did nothing unusual for one hundred and fifteen years.

Thirty-five light years away, the aliens of Mote Prime had launched a light-sail s.p.a.cecraft, using batteries of laser cannon powerful enough to outs.h.i.+ne a neighboring red supergiant.

As for why they did it that way, and why it looked like that, and what the bejeesus is going on . . . . . . explanations follow. explanations follow.

Most hard science fiction writers follow standard rules for building worlds. We have formulae and tables for getting the orbits tight, selecting suns of proper brightness, determining temperatures and climates, building a plausible ecology. Building worlds requires imagination, but a lot of the work is mechanical. Once the mechanical work is done the world may suggest a story, or it may even design its own inhabitants. Larry Niven's "Known s.p.a.ce" stories include worlds which have strongly affected their colonists.

Or the exceptions to the rules may form stories. Why does Mote Prime, a nominally Earthlike world, remind so many people of the planet Mars? What strangeness in its evolution made the atmosphere so helium-rich? This goes beyond mechanics.

In THE MOTE IN G.o.d'S EYE (Simon and Schuster, 1974) we built not only worlds, but cultures.

From the start MOTE was to be a novel of first contact. After our initial story conference we had larger ambitions: MOTE would be, if we could write it, the epitome epitome of first contact novels. We intended to explore every important problem arising from first contact with aliens-and to look at those problems from both human and alien viewpoints. of first contact novels. We intended to explore every important problem arising from first contact with aliens-and to look at those problems from both human and alien viewpoints.

That meant creating cultures in far more detail than is needed for most novels. It's easy, when a novel is heavy with detail, for the details to get out of hand, creating glaring inconsistencies. (If civilization uses hydrogen fusion power at such a rate that world sea level has dropped by two feet, you will not have people sleeping in abandoned movie houses.) To avoid such inconsistencies we worked a great deal harder developing the basic technologies of both the Motie (alien) and the human civilizations.

In fact, when we finished the book we had nearly as much unpublished material as ended up in the book. There are many pages of data on Motie biology and evolutionary history; details on Empire science and technology; descriptions of s.p.a.ce battles, how worlds are terraformed, how light-sails are constructed; and although these background details affected the novel and dictated what we would actually write, most of them never appear in the book.

We made several boundary decisions. One was to employ the Second Empire period of Pournelle's future history. That Empire existed as a series of sketches with a loose outline of its history~ most of it previously published. MOTE had to be consistent with the published material.

Another parameter was the physical description of the aliens. Incredibly, that's all we began with: a detailed description of what became the prototype Motie, the Engineer: an attempt to build a nonsymmetrical alien, left over from a Niven story that never quite jelled. The history, biology, evolution, sociology, and culture of the Moties were extrapolated from that being's shape during endless coffee-and-brandy sessions.

That was our second forced choice. The Moties lived within the heart of the Empire, but had never been discovered. A simple explanation might have been ~o make the aliens a young civilization just discovering s.p.a.ce travel, but that a.s.sumption contradicted Motie history as extrapolated from their appearance. We found another explanation in the nature of the Alderson drive, discussed later.

EMPIRE TECHNOLOGY.

The most important technological features of the Empire were previously published in other stories: the Alderson Drive and Langston Field.

Both were invented to Jerry Pournelle's specifications by Dan Alderson, a resident genius at Cal Tech's Jet Propulsion Laboratories. It had always been obvious that the Drive and Field would affect the cultures that used them, but until we got to work on MOTE it wasn't obvious just how profound the effects would be.

THE ALDERSON DRIVE.

Every sf writer eventually must face the problem of interstellar transportation. There are a number of approaches. One is to deny faster-than-light travel. This in practice forbids organized interstellar civilizations.

A second approach is to ignore General and Special Relativity. Readers usually won't accept this. It's a cop-out, and except in the kind of story that's more allegory than science fiction, it's not appropriate.

Another method is to retreat into doubletalk about hypers.p.a.ce. Doubletalk drives are common enough. The problem is that when everything is permitted, nothing is forbidden. Good stories are made when there are difficulties to overcome, and if there are no limits to "hypers.p.a.ce travel" there are no real limits to what the heroes and villains can do. In a single work the "difficulties" can be planned as the story goes along, and the drive then redesigned in rewrite; but we couldn't do that here.

Our method was to work out the Drive in detail and live with the resulting limitations. As it happens, the limits on the Drive influenced the final outcome of the story; but they were not invented for that purpose.

The Alderson Drive is consistent with everything presently known about physics. It merely a.s.sumes that additional discoveries will be made in about thirty years, at Cal Tech (as a tip o' the hat to Dan Alderson). The key event is the detection of a "fifth force."

There are four known forces in modern physics: two sub-nuclear forces responsible respectively for alpha and beta decay; electromagnetism, which includes light; and gravity. The Alderson force, then, is the fifth, and it is generated by thermonuclear reactions.

The force has little effect in our universe; in fact, it is barely detectable. Simultaneously with the discovery of the fifth force, however, we postulate the discovery of a second universe in point-to-point congruence with our own. The "continuum universe" differs from the one we're used to in that there are no known quantum effects there.

Within that universe particles may travel as fast as they can be accelerated; and the fifth force exists to accelerate them.

There's a lot more, including a page or so of differential equations, but that's the general idea.

You can get from one universe to another. For every construct in our universe there can be created a "correspondence particle" in the continuum universe. In order for your construct to go into and emerge from the continuum universe without change you must have some complex machinery to hold everything together and prevent your s.h.i.+p-and crew-from being disorganized into elementary particles.

Correspondence particles can be boosted to speeds faster than light: in fact, to speeds nearly infinite as we measure them. Of course they cannot emerge into our universe at such speeds: they have to lose their energy to emerge at all. More on that in a moment.

There are severe conditions to entering and leaving the continuum universe. To emerge from the continuum universe you must exit with precisely the same potential energy (measured in terms of the fifth force, not gravity) as you entered. You must also have zero kinetic energy relative to a complex set of coordinates that we won't discuss here.

The fifth force is created by thermonuclear reactions: generally, that is, in stars. You may travel by using it, but only along precisely defined lines of equipotential flux: tramways or tramlines.

Imagine the universe as a thin rubber sheet, very flat. Now drop heavy rocks of different weights onto it. The rocks will distort the sheet, making little cone-shaped (more or less) dimples. Now put two rocks reasonably close together: the dimples will intersect in a valley. The intersection will have a "pa.s.s," a region higher than the low points where the rocks (stars) lie, but lower than the general level of the rubber sheet.

The route from one star to another through that "pa.s.s" is the tramline. Possible tramlines lie between each two stars, but they don't always exist, because when you add third and fourth stars to the system they may interfere, so there is no unique gradient line. If this seems confusing, don't spend a lot of time worrying about it; we'll get to the effects of all this in a moment.

You may also imagine stars to be like hills; move another star close and the hills will intersect. Again, from summit to summit there will be one and only one line that preserves the maximum potential energy for that level. Release a marble on one hill and it will roll down, across the saddle, and up the side of the other. That too is a tramline effect. It's generally easier to think of the system as valleys rather than hills, because to travel from star to star you have to get over that "hump" between the two. The fifth force provides the energy for that.

You enter from the quantum universe. When you travel in the continuum universe you continually lose kinetic energy; it "leaks." This can be detected in our universe as photons. The effect can be important during a s.p.a.ce battle. We cut such a s.p.a.ce battle from MOTE, but it still exists, and we may yet publish it as a novella.

To get from the quantum to the continuum universe you must supply power, and this is available only in quantum terms. When you do this you turn yourself into a correspondence particle; go across the tramline; and come out at the point on the other side where your potential energy is equal to what you entered with, plus zero kinetic energy (in terms of the fifth force and complex reference axes).

For those bored by the last few paragraphs, take heart: we'll leave the technical details and get on with what it all means.

Travel by Alderson Drive consists of getting to the proper Alderson Point and turning on the Drive. Energy is used. You vanish, to reappear in an immeasurably short time at the Alderson Point in another star system some several light-years away. If you haven't done everything right, or aren't at the Alderson Point, you turn on your drive and a lot of energy vanishes. You don't move. (In fact you do move, but you instantaneously reappear in the spot where you started.) That's all there is to the Drive, but it dictates the structure of an interstellar civilization.

To begin with, the Drive works only from point to point across interstellar distances. Once in a star system you must rely on reaction drives to get around. There's no magic way from, say, Saturn to Earth: you've got to slog across.

Thus s.p.a.ce battles are possible, and you can't escape battle by vanis.h.i.+ng into hypers.p.a.ce, as you could in future history series such as Beam Piper's and Gordon d.i.c.kson's. To reach a given planet you must travel across its stellar system, and you must enter that system at one of the Alderson Points. There won't be more than five or six possible points of entry, and there may only be one.

Star systems and planets can be thought of as continents and islands, then, and Alderson Points as narrow sea gates such as Suez, Gibraltar, Panama, Malay Straits, etc. To carry the a.n.a.logy further, there's telegraph but no radio: the fastest message between star systems is one carried by a s.h.i.+p, but within star systems messages go much faster than the s.h.i.+ps.

Hmm. This sounds a bit like the early days of steam. Not Not sail; the s.h.i.+ps require fuel and sophisticated repair facilities. They won't pull into some deserted star system and rebuild themselves unless they've carried the spare parts along. However, if you think of naval actions in the period between the Crimean War and World War One, you'll have a fair picture of conditions as implied by the Alderson Drive. sail; the s.h.i.+ps require fuel and sophisticated repair facilities. They won't pull into some deserted star system and rebuild themselves unless they've carried the spare parts along. However, if you think of naval actions in the period between the Crimean War and World War One, you'll have a fair picture of conditions as implied by the Alderson Drive.

The Drive's limits mean that uninteresting stellar systems won't be explored. There are too many of them. They may be used as crossingpoints if the stars are conveniently placed, but stars not along a travel route may never be visited.

Reaching the Mote, or leaving it, would be d.a.m.ned inconvenient. Its only tramline reaches to a star only a third of a light-year away~-Murcheson's Eye, the red supergiant-and ends deep inside the red-hot outer envelope. The aliens' only access to the Empire is across thirty-five lightyears of interstellar s.p.a.ce-which no Empire s.h.i.+p would ever see. The gaps between the stars are as mysterious to the Empire as they are to you.

LANGSTON FIELD.

Our second key technological building block was the Langston Field, which absorbs and stores energy in proportion to the fourth power of incoming particle energy: that is, a slow-moving object can penetrate it, but the faster it's moving (or hotter it is) the more readily it is absorbed.

(In fact it's not a simple fourth-power equation; but our readers surely don't need third-order differential equations for amus.e.m.e.nt.) The Field can be used for protection against lasers, thermonuclear weapons, and nearly anything else. It isn't a perfect defense, however. The natural shape of the Field is a solid. Thus it wants to collapse and vaporize everything inside it. It takes energy to maintain a hole inside the Field, and more energy to open a control in it so that you can cause it selectively to radiate away stored energy. You don't get something for nothing.

This means that if a Field is overloaded, the s.h.i.+p inside vanishes into vapor. In addition, parts parts of the Field can be momentarily overloaded: a sufficiently high energy impacting a small enough area will cause a temporary Field collapse, and a burst of energy penetrates to the inside. This can damage a s.h.i.+p without destroying it. of the Field can be momentarily overloaded: a sufficiently high energy impacting a small enough area will cause a temporary Field collapse, and a burst of energy penetrates to the inside. This can damage a s.h.i.+p without destroying it.

COSMOGRAPHY.

We've got to invent a term. What is a good word to mean the equivalent of "geography" as projected into interstellar s.p.a.ce? True, planetologists have now adopted "geology" to mean geophysical sciences applied to any planet, not merely Earth; and one might reasonably expect "geography" to be applied to the study of physical features of other planets- but we're concerned here with the relations.h.i.+p of star systems to each other.

We suggest cosmography, but perhaps that's too broad? Should that term be used for relations.h.i.+ps of galaxies, galaxies, and mere star system patterns be studied as "astrography"? After all, "astrogator" is a widely used term meaning "navigator" for interstellar flight. and mere star system patterns be studied as "astrography"? After all, "astrogator" is a widely used term meaning "navigator" for interstellar flight.

Some of the astrography of MOTE was given because it had been previously published. In particular, the New Caledonia system, and the red supergiant known as Murcheson's Eye, had already been worked out. There were also published references to the history of New Caledonia.

We needed a red supergiant in the Empire. There's only one logical place for that, and previously published stories had placed one there: Murcheson's Eye, behind the Coal Sack. It has has to be behind the Coal Sack: if there were a supergiant that close anywhere else, we'd see it now. to be behind the Coal Sack: if there were a supergiant that close anywhere else, we'd see it now.

Since we had to use Murcheson's Eye, we had to use New Caledonia. Not that this was any great imposition: New Scotland and New Ireland are interesting places, terraformed planets, with interesting features and interesting cultures.