Implied Spaces (40 page)

At this point, when public terror had been replaced by maximum public suspense, Aristide was summoned to a meeting of the Standing Committee in the early hours of the morning. Aristide dragged himself into his vehicle along with a cup of coffee handed him by one of his bodyguard, and Bitsy hopped in after him. As the Destiny pulled away from the hotel, Aristide looked at the cat.

“You know what this is about, of course.”

“I do. But it would be unfair to tell you before the others.”

“Why are we caring about what’s fair at three in the morning?”

Bitsy said nothing. Aristide scanned the news channels and saw no disasters.

“Can I take it that the news is good?” he asked.

“You may.”

Aristide took a gulp of coffee. “Fine,” he said. “For good news I will employ patience.”

A few moments later he was trudging up the gangway of
Golden Treasure IV
, Bitsy trotting ahead with her tail held high. Someone had put a tray of pastry on the bar, and Aristide helped himself while he waited for the others. By the time the entire committee was assembled, he was probably as awake as any of them. Bitsy took a chair at the table, and sat with her head barely above the surface, looking at the committee with interested green eyes.

“I want to pass on a message from Cloud Swallowing,” Bitsy reported. “He was working on the implications of Doctor Monagas’ revelation specifically on wormhole theory—as some of you know, that is one of his specialties. We were hoping for a method of producing a wormhole that could engulf Courtland, but it seemed there was a scaling problem.”

“The problem’s been solved?” Shenai asked.

“No,” Bitsy said. “The problem has been discovered to be unsolvable.” The cat looked at the suddenly discouraged faces. “But,” she said, “that discovery has some interesting corollaries. It seems there are certain problems with scale analogous to those displayed by quantum tunneling—either there’s enough energy for the particle to leap the barrier, or there isn’t, and there’s no between.”

“So,” said the woman from the Advisory Committee, “what you’re telling us is that we can create small wormholes, as we’ve been doing, or
very, very large
ones, but nothing in between.”

“Indeed.”

Shenai looked at Bitsy. “How big?”

Bitsy showed her white needle teeth in what seemed to be a smile. “Cloud Swallowing seems to think we could generate a wormhole on the order of point three AU, enough to encapsulate the sun and its orbiting platforms.”

“Which would completely cut us off from the enemy mass driver,” Aristide said.

“Indeed yes. Though if we take this approach, I suggest that we make the wormhole somewhat larger and take Earth and its satellite with us. I surmise you don’t want your homeland flying off into space.

“Is this reversible?” Shenai asked.

“Yes. We can collapse the wormhole at any point—or expand it to a larger size. Once the wormhole is created, a rather trivial amount of energy would be required for any changes.”

“Can we take the other major planets as well?”

“That’s uncertain. There may be another seemingly arbitrary scaling problem after about three AU, but Cloud Swallowing is working on it.” Bitsy licked her chops. “On the other hand, if we disappear from the universe containing Jupiter and Uranus for a few weeks, we will recapture them when we reappear, and the orbits will eventually stabilize again, even without our help. Any long-term problems are likely to arise in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, where our sun’s absence may induce perturbations that may eventually result in comets or rocky asteroids falling into the inner solar system.”

“Are other heads of government receiving this briefing now?” Shenai asked.

“Yes.”

“Inform them that I vote to proceed.”

“Done.”

Shenai leaned back in her chair and placed her hands carefully atop the table.

“Assuming that we vote to proceed, how long will the preparations take?”

“Approximately nine days. Calculations must be checked, certain apparatus modified. I would advise against haste: a mistake could be catastrophic.”

In the brief silence that followed, Aristide could see the calculations behind Shenai’s eyes.

“Very good,” she said finally. She looked at the other members of the committee. “Friends,” she said, “would you all join me for breakfast at Polity House? I will send to the cellar for champagne.”

Aristide left the breakfast with the taste of caviar on his lips and champagne singing in his head and his heart. The euphoria lasted for two days, and then Pablo’s new hammer fell.

The platforms’ undignified dodging saved Gemma from complete destruction: she was struck off-center and lost about thirty percent of her mass and calculating power. As before, the bolt from the Kuiper Belt traveled so quickly that the Rogue Comet Detection Array had given less than thirty seconds’ warning. One pocket was lost: Midgarth. But the strange pocket, with its orcs and trolls, was not destroyed—the record showed that the wormhole had not been flooded with plasma, but had snapped shut when its controlling mechanism had been destroyed.

Midgarth was on its own. Its inhabitants could survive reasonably well, but the pocket was doomed to extinction when its little sun ran out of fuel. Unlike the pockets where high technology was possible, in Midgarth there was no way to build a wormhole and tunnel away to another world.

In the wake of Pablo’s strike, panic struck the worlds yet again. Governments tottered, governments fell. One royal family was chased from its palace, never to return.

Shenai fell from power, after one of her deputy prime ministers—Kiernan, the one with the curly hair—called for a vote of confidence within the executive committee of the Constitutional Party.

She was a victim of her own caution. Topaz was a world that had opted for transparency, where very little information could actually be hidden. The United Powers had kept their plans a secret, even though it cost them. The inhabitants of Topaz had been driven into a frenzy by the absence of their usual omniscience, and their own ruling party had panicked and wrecked itself.

Aristide called Shenai to offer condolences.

“If the wormhole trick works,” she said, “we’ve won the war, and who sits in the Polity House isn’t going to matter.”

“It will matter to you,” Aristide said, “and your aspirations. And,” he nodded, “to your friends.”

She gave a graceful nod. “Thank you for that,” she said.

Shenai was in an anonymous-looking room, with utilitarian furniture and pastel paintings broadcast on the walls: Aristide concluded that she was in a hotel room, or possibly a safe house hidden from any hypothetical rampaging mobs.

There was a half-empty bottle of wine on a counter behind her.

“I hope you haven’t been drinking alone,” he said.

“A dismissed politician is always alone,” Shenai said. She bent to straighten a stocking, her straw-colored hair falling over her face. She lifted her head and tossed her hair back.

“Kiernan won’t last,” she said. “He’s too young to know the ropes—he’s only fifty-seven, do you know that? In our civilization people have thousand-year-long memories, particularly for treachery. When he tries to take credit for winning the war, and the truth comes out concerning what decision was made when, he’ll be laughed out of his job.”

“Will you try to come back?”

She gave a half-smile. “Running Topaz in peacetime isn’t going to be nearly as interesting as trying to manage the war. Perhaps I’ll find something else to do with my life.”

“Do you have any ideas what course you’ll take?”

“Make sure Kiernan falls, for one thing,” Shenai said. “Which isn’t just vengeance-for-fun, it’s maintaining my own credibility. After that, I don’t know. P’raps I’ll emigrate.”

She straightened, her eyes suddenly abstract.

“I have a call from Shekure.”

“Give her my love.”

“I will.”

The wall screen blanked. Aristide told the walls to turn a softer shade of green, ordered the lamp to swing away on its boom, and then contemplated the rest of his own day.

The Loyal Nine, the vast incomprehensible scaffolds of quantum calculation that he, more than anyone, had caused to be brought into being, were all busy confirming, for the second time, his insight as to the nature of the structure of the universe. Assuming he was proven right—again—he would have saved civilization.

Which, he reflected in sadness, meant that he, too, was out of a job.

At the moment the wormhole encapsulated the inner solar system, Aristide was in the
Golden Treasure
‘s First Class ballroom with the Standing Committee, Kiernan, the elite committee of astrophysicists studying Pablo’s astronomical data, the entire diplomatic corps including a grumpy-looking Fred as well as emissaries from Earth and Luna, a former King and his current mistress, a select group of elite journalists, and assorted military, political, and scientific hangers-on.

It was a fact of modern life that any damn place could be a Secret Headquarters provided that it had large enough video walls.

Onscreen, an assortment of officials, scientists, and techs went through a lengthy series of checklists. In the ballroom—a vast emptiness surrounded by a lacy gallery of white pillars and Romanesque arches—people mingled in a near-party atmosphere. Only the lack of music and alcohol distinguished this from one of the ship’s normal cruises of the damned.

The woman from the Advisory Committee on Science spoke earnestly into Aristide’s ear. “So one of my aides came up with a new weapon.”

He looked at her. “Can we suppress it in time?”

It took a moment for her to realize that he was joking. She gave a mirthless laugh and plowed ahead.

“Thanks to all this,” she said, waving an arm at the ballroom, the video screens, the war itself, “we’re becoming experts at creating small pocket universes for specific functions. In this case we create a pocket with its own sun, surrounded by a Dyson sphere packed with solar collectors, and enough raw materials for robot workers to build a mass driver fifty-three kilometers long. We don’t have to give the pocket an atmosphere or much gravity, so our projectile would have neither weight nor atmospheric resistance to overcome, but the principal advantage is that Vindex wouldn’t be able to see us build it.” She laughed aloud. “The first thing he’d know would be when we rolled back the roof and fired a relativistic iron meteor straight at his head. The farthest Courtland would be is on the other side of the sun—there’s no way it could dodge the blow at that range.”

“How soon could we build one?”

“Between two and three weeks.” She smiled. “And the best part,” she said, “is that we can build a driver on each of the Loyal Nine. We can hit him with nine shots simultaneously—no chance for survival.”

Aristide considered the scheme. “I approve,” he said, “assuming that my approval is necessary. Have you spoken to the Prime Minister?”

“Not yet. All this—” Again she waved an arm. “—seemed a little distracting.”

“Yes.” Aristide frowned. “Let’s hope that Vindex hasn’t already anticipated this plan, the way he has everything else.”

The cold emptiness of space touched her eyes for a moment, and then she nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s hope.”

Maybe Bad Pablo won’t have thought of this one
, Aristide thought,
because it isn’t
my
idea.

Overhead, the great polarized skylight dimmed, and then switched over to a feed from outside Topaz, a starfield with Earth and its satellites gleaming diamond-bright in one corner. The guests turned their attention to the brighter video walls, where a countdown was in progress.

Aristide found himself holding his breath as the countdown dropped to under ten seconds. He made himself exhale, then take in a breath.

Two. One. Zero.

People on the video walls began jumping up and down and congratulating each other. Aristide turned to look overhead. The starfield hadn’t changed.

He looked at the walls again. A count
up
had started, and they were six seconds into it.

Earth was 8.317 light-minutes from the sun, and the new pocket universe—the term “overpocket” had been proposed—had a radius of slightly over three AU, so over twenty-five minutes would have to pass before it became clear whether or not the trick had actually worked. A glance in the direction of the new Prime Minister showed that—smile flashing, curly head bobbing—he was accepting congratulations from a circle of his guests before anyone properly knew whether, like a tricksy cartoon rabbit hopping into his hole and pulling it in after him, the whole of local space had just jumped into its own private universe.

Time ticked by. The volume of conversation gradually rose. Aristide found himself disinclined to chat, and found a chair in one of the side galleries and sat there with a cup of coffee growing cold in his hand. He watched the crowd, the nervous smiles, the wet mouths laughing.

A roomful of frightened people, he realized, trying to work out whether or not they should remain terrified.

As the moment of confirmation approached, the nervous chatter began to fade. Aristide stood, walked into the ballroom, and looked up at the starfield again.

And then, right on schedule, the starfield vanished, all save bright Earth and its satellite, gleaming in a corner of the image.

Seconds pass, he thought, drop by slow drop.

As the universe fades, before the applause,

A long, universal sigh.

Nothing was heard from Vindex. For once he made no demands, he embarked on no lectures.

From this fact Aristide knew that Vindex was helpless, and that Vindex knew it.

He fired a barrage of missiles, each containing a hostile antimatter universe, but these were dealt with by antiproton weapons.

The worlds sensed victory. Threats against Aristide’s well-being faded, and the bodyguards were reassigned. Grax the Troll gave him a rib-crushing hug before going on to his next job.

Twenty-four days after the overpocket had swallowed near space and set the outer solar system sailing on in straight Euclidian lines, Aristide returned to the same ballroom and the same glittering company. He no longer sensed fear in the room; now he saw gleeful smiles and glittering eyes that anticipated a vast, triumphant catastrophe.