The Great Symmetry (29 page)

“Against my strong advice, you are not in custody. You are free to go at any time, and invited to return.”

“Are you serious?” Erickson jumped up. “Infoterrorists! They have been wanted for years – both of them!”

“That was the agreement,” put in Governor Rezar. “They may come and go as they choose.”

Axiom gave a pleased smile. “Governor, you might secretly be a man after my own heart. Tell me, when the truth came out, the real truth rather than a product, did it really hurt so much?”

“You mean, other than the fleet that’s about to kill every living thing on the planet?”

“Yes, Governor, apart from that detail. People, knowing. I do not think it distresses
you.”

“What was painful was watching these guys try to suppress the knowledge. What a disaster. It was a relief to just let it go.”

“If we survive, you might well be a great governor,” Axiom told him. “We could be friends. Even now, that is how I regard you, my friend.”

Admiral Incento excused himself and his staff, and they scurried off to fulfill their new homework assignment.

“I have one other request of all of you, but especially of Evan due to his time on the research station at Aurora,” the governor said. “Anything else you can tell us, from your direct experience with Affirmatix. And their commander, Arn Lobeck. I apologize for the indignity of confining you, but I hope you will recognize that that we share a common interest – in continuing to live.”

Sleepless on Aurora

The questioning was endless. Evan had agreed to help by providing any detail he could think of, about Affirmatix, his time on the research station, and the events thereafter. He only drew the line when it came to information about Axiom and the other infoterrorists. Mira and Kate kibbitzed and added details where they fit in.

“I’ve got most of the picture,” General Erickson told him. “But there’s just one missing piece.”

“Fire away,” Evan offered. “Whatever I’ve missed, I’ll tell you if I can.”

“When you were in the cave, you describe this conversation with Arn Lobeck of Affirmatix. And Lobeck said that you had run away from the research station on Aurora, stealing their secret. That you started the whole thing. So what really happened back at the research station? Please don’t leave anything out – you never know what might be important.”

“I was just doing what a scientist does,” Evan told Erickson. “I was proving my hypothesis to be true, or false.”

Evan struggled to reset his mind to the time when life had been simpler, scrubbing away what he had come to know since then.

It had been just over forty-eight hours before, and fifty six light years away, on Aurora. He had been unable to sleep. So close to fully confirming his discovery, he just had to know.

Just after 0300, Evan had completed the pre-flight checklist and lifted from the asteroid. The clock time was just a convention, followed by the crew of the research station in order to plan to be awake and work together for some time in each 24 hour cycle. Even the 24 hours was a remnant, a legacy system. It was still in use by crews in space due to a combination of sentimental attachment, cultural inertia, and the fact that no other cycle had been proven to be any better.

Evan had had a secret, one that he had planned to reveal later that “day” to his Affirmatix project partners. He had been saving it up until he was completely sure. A very significant discovery, even a breakthrough. He had decoded the writings of the Versari. The numbers, anyway.

It was all a theory, but the data fit very well. Extremely well. There was no doubt in his mind. But he could take it even one step further.

Evan knew a way to prove it, beyond a shadow of a doubt, in a matter of just a few hours.

Hypothesis: The decoded matrix represented the locations of many star systems over a rough cube of
about 14,000 parsecs on a side, plus the topology of the hyperspace glomes connecting them.

The first part was easy to demonstrate. Star locations had been known for centuries. The data extracted from the Versari artifact correlated to publicly available star atlases.

The second part would be harder to prove by poring over the data. The linkage between the star location data and the glome paths went through two intermediate data sets.

Experiment: Locate an entry for a glome, right here in the Aurora system, that is not yet known, go there, and check if it is present.

Evan had located such a record. If his analysis was right, the glome led to a spot in the inhabited and developed Kelter system. Not that he would be checking that part of it then. Just the existence of the glome, where none had been known before, and exactly at the predicted location, would be enough.

Picture going to a random location in the space of a solar system, in the quintillions of cubic kilometers of space, and pointing to one spot barely a kilometer across, and saying “exactly there.” The glome would be detectable at a range of 50,000 kilometers or so, depending on the strength of its signature.

Within inhabited systems, all the glomes usefully close to the star were found within a few years, although the destination of any given glome could remain a mystery forever. Unmanned scanners scoured in endless patterns on a 10,000 kilometer cubic grid. When the work was done, the scanners moved to another system, with just a few remaining to pursue coverage of space farther and farther from the star, or to re-scan regions where it could not be proven that the original scan had provided nine sigma coverage.

On Aurora, there was nothing but a few rocks and a gas giant, except that one of the rocks, for no discernable reason, had the remains of a sizeable Versari colony. That colony was special, because it extended into deep natural vaults in the asteroid, where the level of solar and cosmic radiation was vastly less than at any other known Versari location. This only mattered to Evan and a very small number of people who cared about the long-departed Versari.

To those who choose to spend money on such things, it had never been worth scanning for glomes beyond the first few million kilometers beyond the rock, so only one outbound glome was known, to Goodhope. Inbound came from Arrow and outbound went to Goodhope. A little inconvenient for supplies and communication since it was a further three hops from Goodhope back to Arrow. But it worked, and there had not yet been any reason to expend the very considerable resources required to find and explore any other glomes.

Course set, Evan had paced the tiny cabin, pretending to study the data matrix further, although trying to focus was hopeless. He had known
. He had known he would be right. Just 45 minutes now. Just forty minutes. Thirty nine. Thirty eight. Years spent chasing, digging, studying, decoding. Now, something at last. A leverage point to get into the minds of the long departed. Just the number system, and the formatting scheme for one of their storage devices, but it would do. For now.

One of the formatting schemes. One, out of over a thousand. Why so many? Evan had considered that question so many times. What kind of idiocy is that? Why not one interoperable way to store their data? No wonder they died out. Dumbasses.

Evan thought he had gained some insight into this question over the years. Efficiency, standardization, these were human watchwords. But even so, humans themselves failed to live up to even a basic glimmer of the concept, especially as measured over time. Once, for a presentation at the annual Fossil Exo Expo conference on Callis III, he had researched the number of distinct electronic storage formats that humans had devised over a benchmark century of time. His number was twenty three thousand five hundred. The twenty six Versari sites spanned over a hundred thousand years, with some individual locations showing evidence of habitation for over fifty thousand years.

Perhaps the question was not why they had so many formats, but why they had so few.

Evan had cataloged every Versari information storage device that, to his knowledge, was in existence. A vast majority had deteriorated under atmospheric conditions or millennia of incoming radiation so that only fragments could be read. The Aurora site, bless it, barren and free of any corrosive soup of gases, was the grail in so many ways, not the least this.

Just fifteen minutes now.

With a soft but unmistakable ping, the runabout had alerted Evan. A ship was gloming insystem. Nothing scheduled, but he was not in charge. Ships of his Affirmatix sponsors sometimes came and went. Go figure. He just wondered where they came up with so much money. It sure was the best grant he had ever latched on to;
two years of uninterrupted funding, no shortage of gear and crew. In fact, it seemed he barely had to hint at a need and it would be fulfilled.

Perhaps that was it. Never satisfied, he had been grumbling at the review last month that he could really use another 30 or 40 petaflops. They had come through again. It was great to get real support at last.

Three minutes. Two. One.

Almost exactly at the expected moment, the signature of the predicted glome had appeared. It had grown over several glorious minutes until it was beyond nine sigma of practical certainty. Glome, directly ahead, range 35,000 kilometers.

Evan had carefully checked and rechecked the position of the glome and set a course for a ceremonial circuit, range 10,000 kilometers. He wanted no part in getting near the glome itself. Did it go to Kelter? Perhaps it did. Evan believed so.

He could try it. What better way to triumphantly arrive, back in the commerced worlds, prize in hand? Appear from a previously unknown glome emergence, just a few million kilometers from the orbit of Kelter Four. Transmit the news to everyone at once!

Half way around the circuit of the new glome, Evan
had settled back to reality. Nobody cared about the Versari. They were, as he had been told many times, long dead. They were not just Exo, they were Ex. They were Ex Exo. Long, long Ex.

Anyway, leaping into an unknown glome was something that adventurers did on, well, adventure shows. They generally found alien civilizations that included a population of remarkably human-looking and attractive beings who spoke Standard and were at the cusp of some momentous conflict with the evil and far less attractive enemy aliens.

Of course, actual humans had piloted ships into glomes, on purpose, to see what was at the other end. The small subset who had returned were iconically famous, and in some cases extremely wealthy. It was the ultimate crap shoot.

These days, exploration was done by robot ships, in their thousands, going from glome to glome until they either returned to an inhabited system, or ran out of fuel or places to go, or failed for some other reason. In a vast majority of cases, the outcome was never known.

Before trying this one, Evan would at least check his math one more time. After a night’s sleep. Even then, he knew he was fooling himself. Someone else would go through first, after it had been proven by a robot. He was the science guy, not an astronaut.

He had proven his point. His log had it all. Time to head back.

Ping. Another ship? That was uncanny. Arrivals at this outpost system were generally separated by weeks of quiet.

Evan had set course back for the station. He would be admonished, no doubt, for his solo flight. The runabouts had been declared to be off limits, for some unspecified safety reason. Probably a sensor had gone bad, and they had grounded them until they could replace the component on all three. The hypercaution of bureaucrats. Evan had done the full checklist on his chosen boat, and everything was fine.

So, who were the new arrivals? Evan prepared a hail, then glanced at the detail on his navigation display.

Accelerating at over three gravities. Mass over a hundred thousand tons each.

Warships.

Perhaps it was better not to hail. Without thinking, Evan cut the jets. A small inert object, he could remain undetected by the newcomers for a time, although the station would have been tracking him.

Where were they going? One was heading directly for the research post. The other, to a completely empty spot in space, just over five million kilometers sunward from the post.

The glome to Goodhope.

Evan went through the motions of running the numbers, already knowing the answer. At three gravities, that ship would be at the glome several hours before he could get there.

Perhaps it was just leaving.

At that moment, another ship
had arrived insystem. A third warship. He had watched as it set course and engaged full acceleration.

Directly toward him.

Evan had had a decision to make.

“Ship,” Evan had asked, “at maximum acceleration, how quickly could we make it into the Alpha entry of the new glome?”

#

Kate had been listening intently to the story. “So let me understand something,” she said. “This all started because you couldn’t sleep?”

The Head Lifeguards

Kelter’s strategists had assembled their best available plan, and provided it to Rezar for his review. Officially he had the last word, and perhaps in reality he actually did.

In addition to the military plan, other avenues were being pursued. The diplomatic course was entirely fruitless. No top representative from Affirmatix could be found because they had all been evac
uated. Finally they had located and dragged in the highest ranked Affirmatix employee they could find, a mid-level marketing manager for personal care products in the Abilene area. The man had been useless. Tangibly frightened at being left behind on the surface, he told them he wasn’t sure he worked for Affirmatix anymore.

Transmissions to the Affirmatix fleet received no response
at all.

Rezar participated in the military planning, but largely left it to the admirals. He knew nothing of space maneuvers, and was smart enough to realize it. They were accustomed to calling the shots without getting approval from their young governor, and so it mutually worked out.