Pliocene Exile - The Adversary Part 108

"push," etc.) along the hyperspatial catenary deemed acceptable to nonprofessional s.p.a.ce travellers is about forty df. This is equivalent to forty light-years traversed, per subjective day spent in hypers.p.a.ce. Thus the CSS Queen Elizabeth III might take two subjec* The rho-field is still another primary manifestation of reality, which according to Milieu theoreticians consists of twenty-one "fields", or dimensional lattices, that interact to generate s.p.a.ce, time, matter, energy, life, and mind. tive (and actual, to the Larger Reality outside the hype) days to travel to a star system eighty light-years distant-or three hundred days to travel twelve thousand light-years. At each incremental jump, the riders would suffer pain.

Individuals have differing tolerances to the pain of translation.

Exotics generally have a higher threshold than humans. (The stolid Krondaku withstand 370 df, considered about the upper limit for Milieu races.) Richard Voorhees took 250 df for 136 days on his longest schuss, to Hercules Cl.u.s.ter (M13 or NGC6205 in contemporary catalogues). When he travelled to Orissa many years later, he was pus.h.i.+ng his luck to endure 110 df for 17 days in succession.

Obviously, both the time-elapse factor and the pain factor limit the range of superluminal transport. In the Milieu, the exotic races have already mapped and explored most of our Milky Way Galaxy (with the exception of the perilous Hub); and with more than 1000 potentially colonizable planets located within 20,000 light-years of Earth, there is little practical incentive for extremely long-range translations. Extragalactic travel is virtually proscribed. The Andromeda Galaxy, our closest neighbour, is 2.2 million light-years distance; it would take the hardiest human stars.h.i.+p voyager some twenty-four years to get there-and another twenty-four years to get back. Even in an era of multiple rejuvenations, such a trip would have little appeal except to the incorrigibly wanderl.u.s.tful. A few souls have tried it with uncertain results.

The exotic beings known as s.h.i.+ps, one of whom, Brede's mate, brought the Tanu and Firvulag from the remote Duat Galaxy to Pliocene Earth, have an extraordinary high df endurance. The s.h.i.+ps use a mitigator, a special mental programme that makes bearable the horrific pain of ultraluminal, or "very high speed," translation. s.h.i.+ps teach their pa.s.sengers, who travel within their bodies in a capsule the size of a conventional stars.h.i.+p, how to generate individual mitigator programmes of their own. This means that flight within the Duat Galaxy would be all but pain-free for s.h.i.+p pa.s.sengers. In addition, the s.h.i.+p is able to d-jump routinely at very tight catenaries. Most points in its galaxy are reached in minutes, or at the most, a few hours.

The d-jump is a single movement, never a series of shorter hops such as those taken by "slow" stars.h.i.+ps. It should be noted that Brede's s.h.i.+p fatally strained itself in making the jump from Duat to the Milky Way Galaxy, 270 million light-years distant.

Even the most highly talented minds have their limitations.

In making his d-jumps, Marc operates almost exactly like Brede's s.h.i.+p. His short jaunts about Earth are virtually instantaneous and do not involve more than a split second of subjective time spent in the grey limbo. (The process of breaking through the superficies at either end can take considerably longer, however.) As he d-jumps about the Milky Way, Marc is protected by the armour of the cerebroenergetic enhancer, which holds all portions of his body except the hyperenergized brain in the equivalent of suspended animation. The pain factor remains approximately what it would be in mechanical translation via stars.h.i.+p. He stated that he had just about reached his normal-function limit in making the jump to Poltroy. This would put his personal df threshold somewhere in the 18,000 range.

The mitigator is theoretically applicable to ordinary stars.h.i.+p travel, provided the riders were metapsychics trained in use of the programme. Extremely powerful superluminal translators would be required to "push" the craft to ultralight catenaries.

There seems no reason why ultraluminal stars.h.i.+ps could not be built. Milieu models are limited in range by the fragility of the minds carried, not by any mechanical factor.