"So," DiFalco asked bitterly, "all we're doing out here is pointless? We're readying a new world for mankind just when mankind begins to stampede back into the Dark Ages?"
"Oh, not altogether pointless, Eric Vincentovich." He smiled gently, and DiFalco snorted; it was a long-accustomed form of needling, and they both followed the well-worn grooves of habit. "Eventually—in generations or centuries—the Gods of the Copybook Headings will come crawling out from under the rubble and try to explain it all again." (Strange, the way Kipling was best remembered in Russia; most people there thought he had
been
a Russian.) "And if we and our successors are allowed to carry the terraforming process to the point where it becomes irreversible, then a living Mars will be ready when humanity—including recognizable Russians, I like to hope—is ready to come into its inheritance."
"But how can we? We've had to become self-sufficient in some things out here, but we're still dependent on Earth for a lot of what we need to complete the project. If they really want to do a Proxmire on us, they can."
"Who knows?" Kurganov shrugged eloquently. "The civilian management council has asked for an emergency meeting with the two of us to decide what our response should be. Of course, they don't know yet that a rather large new factor has just been added to further complicate matters!" He finished his Scotch, set his glass down with a click, and stood up. "Shall we go, Eric? I'm looking forward to meeting your rather surprising extraterrestrial!"
Hand-shaking was not a custom of Varien's people, but he bowed gracefully when Difalco introduced his commander.
"Welcome aboard my ship, General Sergei."
"Actually," the Russian smiled, "the conventional usage is 'General Kurganov.' "
"Yes, of course." Varien shook his head in annoyance, whether at his own forgetfulness or at the peculiarities of Earthly forms of address was unclear. "So, General Kurganov, Colonel Eri . . . DiFalco informs me that you are the senior government official here in this system's asteroid belt."
"I am," Kurganov explained, "the senior military officer in charge of the Russian-American Mars Project, a joint effort by my government and Colonel DiFalco's to terraform . . . ah, to render habitable our system's fourth planet. Much of the actual work is being carried out by a consortium of private corporations and research institutions, but no civilian governmental structure has ever been set up in the asteroids; Phoenix Prime, our base, is still legally a military installation. So you are correct; I represent the ultimate government authority short of my superiors on our home world—which you must know is the third planet, inasmuch as you know so much else. In particular, you have me at a disadvantage with your knowledge of the English language." He smiled again. "It is, I suppose, too much to hope that you also know Russian."
"I am afraid, General, that puzzling out even one of your languages from a study of your broadcasts was the limit of our capabilities. Let me introduce Miralann hle'Shahya, who was largely responsible for that achievement—and who I am sure would be fascinated to be introduced to 'Russian.' " The man who bowed in response was younger than Varien, a little shorter and plumper, and he did, indeed, look intrigued. DiFalco couldn't avoid the impression that what intrigued him were the service dress uniforms they had donned for the occasion—his own USSF black and Sergei's dark bottle-green, both with the red-and-gold RAMP shoulder patch.
"And my daughter, Aelanni zho'Morna, who is already known to Colonel DiFalco," Varien continued. Kurganov did a small bow of his own, complete with a soft heel-click, and she smiled tentatively.
Alright, Sergei, enough with the Old World charm
, DiFalco found himself thinking.
"And now," Varien said impatiently, "if you gentlemen will be seated, I will finally satisfy your curiosity." He indicated a semicircle of chairs around a slightly raised platform on one side of the spacious chamber. (At least it
seemed
outrageously spacious to DiFalco, considering that they were aboard a space vessel.)
"I will be most interested," Kurganov said as he took a seat. He had the look of a man trying to delicately impart a painful and embarrassing piece of news. "You see, Varien, I must tell you that from our standpoint you are, ah . . . impossible."
"So I have been told." Loftily: "I have chosen not to take it personally."
DiFalco squirmed uncomfortably in the chair that insisted on trying to conform itself to the contours of his butt. "Look, Varien, it goes beyond the fact that you people are human, which you've admitted is a stumper—one of our science fiction writers once compared the chances of the same species evolving on two planets to the chances of one locksmith making a lock while another locksmith working independently on another planet makes a key that fits it, and I imagine he was understating the improbability by several orders of magnitude. But aside from that, our scientists have decided that we're the only technological civilization—and probably the only tool-makers—in the history of the galaxy."
"Whatever led them to this extraordinary conclusion?" Varien was frankly curious.
"Well . . . for one thing, we've never been visited by anybody else."
"But you have. Now. By me." Varien spread his hands in a gesture of bogus self-deprecation. "
Someone
had to be the first, after all."
"I think," Kurganov put in, "that Colonel DiFalco is referring to Fermi's Paradox: the fact that our planet has never been colonized during all the hundreds of millions of years it has existed as a life-bearing world—which seems inexplicable if civilizations are as numerous as they
ought
to be if life is a normal occurrence in a galaxy of four hundred billion suns."
"But," Varien said with an air of fully stretched patience, "the same objection applies: there has to be a first. Even if no star-travelling race has existed heretofore, the fact dosen't logically preclude the possibility of one or more now. And your astronomers must be aware that your sun, like ours, is an exceptionally old star of its generation—which is the first stellar generation to have formed from a medium enriched with heavy elements by numerous supernovae. Planets suitable for life are very common, and in the normal course of events they will give birth to it; but relatively few are old enough to have done so to date. Highly-evolved, sentient life is a recent galactic phenomenon."
"Okay," DiFalco resumed doggedly, "so there was nobody around to colonize Earth during the Precambrian. But what about the total failure of our SETI programs?" Seeing Varien's blank look, he amplified. "Search for extraterrestrial intelligence. For almost a century, off and on, we've been 'listening' to the stars for broadcasts in the radio wavelengths, and the result has been consistent: zilch point zip!"
For the first time in their acquaintance, Varien's jaw fell.
I've finally managed to astonish him
, DiFalco thought, just before the older man almost doubled over in his efforts to contain the loud belly laugh that was an impossible gaucherie in his culture. Miralann was undergoing similar contortions, and Aelanni was trying to look sternly disapproving of the other two while sputtering just a bit herself.
"
Radio
broadcasts?!" Varien gasped when he had gotten his breath. "Why should you have detected radio broadcasts, of all things?" He finally recovered his composure and explained in his usual condescending way. "Use of radio transmissions for large-scale, long-range communications is a transitional phase in the history of technology, rather like fission power. We've been communicating by neutrino pulse for centuries. Radio broadcasts! Why didn't you watch the stars for smoke signals while you were about it?" DiFalco and Kurganov looked crestfallen. "You can be sure that we haven't been generating anything at Lir . . . Alpha Centauri that you could have detected."
Kurganov pounced. "You're from Alpha Centauri, then?"
"No, we're merely based there. Our home sun is called Tareil. You have no name for it—understandably, as it is somewhat less luminous than your sun and is roughly a thousand of your light-years away."
"You've come a thousand light-years?" DiFalco asked faintly, thoughts of suspended animation and Einsteinian time dilation running through his head.
"Not in the sense you mean, Colonel. Perhaps I'd better explain." He spoke a command in his own language, and a holographic display appeared over the raised platform. To his two guests, it suggested a stylized molecular diagram with golden atoms linked by pale-blue lines.
"Is your civilization aware of the true nature of gravity, General?" Varien asked with seeming irrelevance.
"Well," Kurganov spoke hesitantly, "in the present generation, Hartung's theory has reconciled Newton and Einstein . . . two of our greatest physicists. The first, three and a half centuries ago, postulated that gravity was a force that causes material objects to attract each other. The second, in the last century, described gravity as a curvature of space in the presence of large masses." Varien nodded repeatedly, as if approving of the orthodoxy with which Earth's knowledge had progressed. "Most recently," the Russian continued, "Hartung has demonstrated that both were right: a force inherent in matter and carried by massless subatomic particles—and hence instantaneous in its propagation—is what
causes
the Einsteinian curvature of spacetime."
"Precisely! But I gather you have not yet carried the concept of curved space to its ultimate conclusion: the fact that a curve implies a circle, and that given the right conditions—involving a sufficient number of large masses, such as exist in the galactic spiral arms—space curves back upon itself in patterns caused by the interrelationships of those masses. Wherever the pattern is interrupted by a stellar mass, the local curvature of space causes a break in the pattern, which we call a 'displacement point' because of an effect which I discovered when I was considerably younger." He indicated the hologram. "This depicts, in very crude terms, the situation in our galactic neighborhood. The gold lights are stars that have one or more displacement points associated with them. The blue lines indicate the relationship between each such point and the next such break in the pattern. This all becomes of practical interest with the discovery of how to artificially simulate gravity. You see, if a ship heads into a displacement point at a heading identical to the bearing of the imaginary line, as plotted in realspace, to the next displacement point—normally, nothing happens. But if the ship generates an artificial gravity 'pulse' which warps space still further at the displacement point, then it experiences an instantaneous transition to the next displacement point, in the vicinity of another star."
"Then," DiFalco breathed, "you're saying you can travel faster than light?"
"Of course not," Varien snapped. "For a material object to exceed the velocity of light is not merely impossible . . . it is a mathematical absurdity! What I am describing is, to repeat myself, an instantaneous transposition without crossing the intervening realspace distance, possible only at certain locations determined by the gravitational patterns—the 'shape,' if you will—of space. So, for example, it is possible to transit from Tareil"—he aimed a wandlike instrument at one of the golden star-symbols, from which four of the blue bands radiated, and a bright white dot appeared in mid-air beside it—"to
this
star system." The cursor, as DiFalco decided to think of it, flashed along one of the blue light-bridges to another sun. "One then proceeds via normal space to another of the second star's displacement points, and transits to
this
star . . . and then
this
one . . . and finally to the one you know as Alpha Centauri." He held the cursor steady at the indicated star.
Kurganov leaned forward raptly. "So you came a thousand light-years in only the time it took to travel between the various displacement points in these star systems. But," he continued, perplexed, "Alpha Centauri appears to be a cul-de-sac; where is the further displacement connection that enabled you to come to this system?"
"Well," Varien spoke apologetically, "I'm afraid there isn't any." He raised a forestalling hand as the Russian and the American both tried to talk at once. "As I have indicated, displacement points only occur under rare conditions; all of those we know of are at least a hundred light-years apart, usually much more. So the vast majority of stars are without them. Including yours."
"So," DiFalco spoke very slowly and deliberately, "how did you come here?"
"Ah, well, that's another story, which will also provide the answer to the related question of
why
I came here. Attend, please.
"As I mentioned, some time ago I discovered the secret of interstellar travel via displacement points. Subsequently, my planet—called Raehan, by the way—began exploring rapidly." A quick sentence in his tongue, and arrowlike lights moved illustratively from Tareil along three of the four spokes of blue light extending from it, through star after golden star. "Too rapidly, in fact. Permit me a digression on the history of Raehan.
"Five of your centuries ago, Raehan was almost as advanced as it is now, following two centuries of explosive technological development accompanied by constantly escalating war and social disintegration. At that point, what was left of our people came collectively and spontaneously to the conclusion that change in general must be halted to allow civilization to recover and unify. Over the centuries, there was much refinement but virtually no innovation. Finally, in my parents' time, the strictures began to give way; the chance discovery of artificial gravity set unstoppable changes in motion. I imagine our exuberant and headlong exploration through one displacement point after another, without pausing to consolidate, was partly a release of impulses too long pent up. Also, we could imagine no danger in the stars—we were firmly convinced, on the basis of our own history, that any civilization advanced enough to constitute a potential threat must surely have given up military aggression in order to survive.