Acts of Conscience (49 page)

The Kapellmeister stood still, looking up at me for a long time, eyes quite motionless now. Thinking? About what? Finally, it said, “Perhaps you will believe me when I say your own species has by no means cornered the market on stupidity.”

I thought about that. “A billion years of evolution, and you still produce assholes?”

Softly, Martínez said, “Look, will someone
please
...”

The Kapellmeister said, “This is much worse than you realize, Gaetan.”

“Why? You were probably going to wipe us out anyway.”

Martínez said, “What do you mean,
wipe us out
?”

The Kapellmeister said, “You must understand, we are the survivors of a civilization that destroyed itself out of selfishness and stupidity. I’d like to think we learned something, but...” It fell silent, eyes settling down onto the surface of its back, seeming far away. Finally, it said, “Gaetan, my people never had the teleport bomb. We were innocent bystanders, a minor species of no consequence whatsoever, who stood by while the disagreement between the StruldBugs and the Adversary Instrumentality escalated.”

Ancient history, four hundred million years gone, I suppose. “What are you telling me?”

One eye rose to confront me. “Gaetan, these friends of mine came here to make what you might call a preemptive strike. Back on Salieri, the Interventionists have argued that we take this weapon and use it to clear the Local Group of sentient life forms, once again. They argue that this is the only way to ensure peace.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call that peace.”

“No. But more and more of my fellows are listening to this logic.”

“And your friends? What’s their plan.”

Silence. Then, “They have no plan. All they hoped was to show that the weapon was
not
here.”

o0o

By the time we rolled up to the dig in the tractor we’d borrowed from the main base, Groombridge 1618 was settling on the horizon, a fierce white spark wreathed by dull blue clouds, casting long, pastel-tinted shadows across the white-ice landscape. Planet Six, of course, stuck to its place in the sky as though painted there, like some bizarre geosynchronous moon.

We depressurized the cockpit, raised the plastic hood, and got out. I walked a little bit away, turned around, taking in the landscape, listening to my booted feet crunch softly on the crisp snow surface.

Dry ice and water, whispered the library, unasked.

I looked down at the Kapellmeister’s familiar, naked form. “You’re not leaving any footprints in the snow.”

The synthetic voice of its pod began, weak and reedy, carried poorly by thin, dry air, then strengthened, reforming inside my head. “There’s an invisible technogenic structure around my body, similar in concept to your own suit, but a little more advanced.”

As if that explained everything. A second tractor, carrying the party of Kapellmeisters from the warship, crunched to a stop beside us, in its wake a third, with Dr. Martínez and some of his people, air puffing, brief fog as they depressurized and popped their canopies to get out. Other than the way the snow and ice was trampled, ruined by centuries of sparse tractor and foot traffic, you’d never know anything had ever lived in this landscape of low blue hills, hills before a backdrop of distant, rounded mountains, before the remote blue-black sky, orange light of Planet Six now the only light shining down, lighting the world with a cold fire.

We turned and walked together, a silent group, following the Kapellmeister’s lead along a rutted path across the flank of the nearest hill, until we crested a snowy ridge. Below, in a steep-sided bowl of a valley, bright white light flared, bringing a glisten to the landscape.

Martínez’ gruff voice, an angry mutter: “Bastard’s are heating things up. Contamination...”

Light. Heat. Surfaces melting.

But they hardly look like buildings anymore, though I understand the researchers have gone to great pains not to touch anything before it’s been properly investigated. Still, they
do
look like ruins, these low, humped remains of ancient walls, collapsed heaps and buckled structures that must obviously have once been buildings.

I said, “I guess four hundred million years doesn’t mean much in an environment like this.”

The Kapellmeister said, “No. It may be that this installation was subjected to some kind of attack, perhaps during the brief opening phases of the Shock War.”

I glanced at Martínez, who stood, looking silently at us, face and body language masked by his suit. We walked on, going through the ruins, past places where researchers had been so carefully pulling things apart, slowly, year after decade after century, meticulously picking their way deeper into the mystery. Finally, we came to the source of the light.

Long silence.

Then Martínez said, “Fuck.” Bleak despair.

The Kapellmeisters had set up something that looked just a little bit like a military particle beam generator, fat black box on a tripod with some kind of glassy rod poking out one side. Whatever it was, they’d evidently used it to burn a big crater right in the middle of everything. No telling what had once been on the missing surface, but you could see the melted edges of ancient walls ending where the void began.

The Kapellmeister said, “I’m sorry about this, but it doesn’t really matter. Not in the long run.”

Martínez was silent.

I said, “Is that it?” Down in the bottom of the crater, still half-embedded in translucent, wet-looking ice, was what appeared to be a concrete light pole, maybe a meter in diameter, four or five meters sticking out of the ice, dim blue shadows showing where it went on, for perhaps another two or three.

The Kapellmeister said, “Unfortunately... yes.” It turned away from me then and made chittering chelae talk with some of the others. Probably arguing the fate of the universe.

I jumped down into the crater, started to slip and fall on what really was wet ice, though it couldn’t possibly have been water, then the suit caught and stabilized me, so that I ran down the steep wall, finishing up against the... pole.

Nothing. Featureless. Might as well have been an antique sewer pipe. “So, what is this? The cannon or the bomb?”

“Both.”

I turned and watched as an avalanche of Kapellmeisters fell down the crater wall in my direction. I think I kept waiting for one or more of them to tumble, eyes flailing in all directions, but their legs stayed under them, scuttling nimbly, until I was surrounded by little black crab-things with lovely, colored velvet eyes.

I said, “Doesn’t look like much.”

“No. And yet, with this device, a diligent soldier could, in time, obliterate much of the universe.”

“Obliterate all life.”

“Oh, no. Everything. Stars. Planets... with sufficient determination, the disruption of whole galactic clusters would be possible.”

“That’s hard to visualize.”

“Indeed. During the brief interval between the invention of the teleport bomb and the eruption of war, it was theorized that a device like this may have been responsible for the large-scale structure of the universe. There was some talk about sending expeditions to investigate inter-cluster void spaces.”

Martínez, still looking down from the rim, said, “I’m not sure exactly what you’re talking about, but I know damned well the universe as a whole is entirely too young for its large-scale structure to be of technogenic origin.”

The Kapellmeister said, “Most primitive societies go through a phase where they discover the curious fact that some stars appear older than the age of the universe, as indicated by the general expansion constant. Theories are, of course, quickly and easily evolved which account for it. Even in our very advanced culture, we kept discovering discrepancies and then factoring them away.”

The library AI whispered, Cosmological constants. Anthropic principles.

I said, “So what if it’s true? What difference does it make?”

“Perhaps none. Perhaps all the difference there is.”

Nothing ever really matters in the context of our little lives, does it? Big deeds are only important to the Men Who Count. The rest of us just try to stay out of their way, stay whole, survive. I said, “If you could prove that, you’d know, sooner or later, anything you did would be... noticed.”

The Kapellmeister said, “Nobody noticed when we did it before.”

Martínez slid down the slope, skidding to a stop beside us. Reached out and touched the telecannon, feeling its texture through the sensitive fingers of his suit. “I don’t see how something like this could be used to destroy any God damned universe. I mean, you’d need a fuck of a lot of them to...”

The Kapellmeister said, “In a universe consisting entirely of Planck sockets, matter is defined by the characteristics of the socket’s ‘contents,’ the so-called Kaluza-Klein entities. We understand that the entities, as such, are merely a convenient mathematical fiction, used to describe certain behaviors of the properties of the sockets themselves.”

Martínez said, “I don’t need you to explain elementary physics.”

Quite. This is the stuff you learn as a child, if you’re interested, certainly learn in technical school, when you begin to need it. Antigravity was the first thing we got, when we learned to manipulate some of the more obvious properties of Kaluza-Klein entities, the properties that gave rise to the conventional laws of physics, electromagnetism, chromodynamics, quantum gravity...  The Kapellmeister said, “In such a lattice-based cosmology, movement is an illusion.”

I remember being startled when I found out Heisenberg’s principle was just an expression of the “random walk” taken by the Kaluza-Klein entities in their world of rigid, motionless sockets. A particle is probably here. But it might be there. Or someplace far away. Or nowhere at all. Vacuum energy is the probability that the properties of an “empty” Planck socket may spontaneously assume some nonzero value. Some people think that’s how the universe was born.

The Kapellmeister said, “Once you learn to manipulate the locus variables of a Kaluza-Klein entity, you get faster than light travel as an immediate consequence, though without synchronization and simultaneity between Planck sockets, there are obvious limitations.”

The library whispered, Each Planck socket is an independent n-space whose existence is not determined by the existence or nonexistence of other such spaces. There is no universal program counter.

Of course not. Pretechnological societies have a word for their hypothesized universal operating system. They call it God.

The Kapellmeister said, “Shortly before the Shock War, some fine scientist, somewhere, discovered a means of inducing a standing-wave synchronization in a small number of clustered Planck sockets. It would persist only for Planck time. So you induce synchronization, then in the following ‘tick,’ you redefine the locus variables of the Kaluza-Klein entities. There is, of course, no way to redefine simultaneously any other quanta, for then the entities have gone. The inertial quantum was of particular interest.”

Martínez, voice, soft, said, “So. How small a mass are we talking about here?”

Do I understand what they’re talking about? The good doctor thinks he does.

The Kapellmeister reached down with one chela and picked up a bit of ice roughly the size of a big marble, a good-size shooter. “This is the largest teleport bomb that was ever managed.”

Martínez shrugged. “So you shoot it across interstellar space and, when it gets where its going, it explodes in an inertial compression wave with the energy of a good-sized fission bomb? I guess if you did it to a planetary core, that’d cause a lot of damage. Enough to blow up a whole planet, though? I doubt it.”

I remembered the Kapellmeister telling me about his electromagnetic pulse phaser, sufficient to blow up stars, apparently the most fearsome weapon in the Salieran arsenal. Why would they need this puny thing, when they had something like that? I tried to visualize the process described and... “
Shit
.”

Martínez and Kapellmeisters looking at me. Hell, maybe the pod software was translating for all of them, just the way it could, apparently, talk through the symbiotes in my brain. I said, “You don’t shoot a hunk of ice, doc. You synchronize a section of Planck lattice equivalent to the hunk’s space. Then you redefine its locus variables.”

The Kapellmeister said, “Correct.”

Martínez said, “So what? That’s just another way of saying the same thing.”

I shook my head slowly. “No. Matter and energy are constant. E=mc2. Space is real, even in a lattice context. So you’re talking about the energy necessary to accelerate a physical body to the speed of light, push it through the interstellar medium
at
the speed of light, decelerate it to a stop at the target and...”

His eyes looked startled. “Uh. Maybe a few thousand gigatons? Enough.”

Enough to blow up a planet, but still nothing
really
spectacular. I kept thinking about the voids.

Finally, the Kapellmeister said, “Since matter and energy are equivalent, an event horizon forms at the target. Since only the locus of the original Kaluza-Klein entities has been redefined, there is insufficient mass to maintain this event horizon, which, in consequence, undergoes classical inflation.”

Martínez seemed to freeze in place, eyes far away.

The Kapellmeister said, “While this does disrupt the material structures at the target, in effect an explosion, most of the mass in the target zone falls onto the expanding event horizon. When the event horizon dissipates, the accumulated mass falls into the exposed region of compressed space, forming a new event horizon which then contracts to the appropriate radius, usually on a quantum-mechanical scale.”

I said, “And then Heisenberg tunneling disposes of the evidence.”

The Kapellmeister said, “Correct.”

Long silence.

Then Martínez whispered, “Scale effects. If you could synchronize a sufficiently large Planck domain, the inflationary era...”

The Kapellmeister said, “We wondered about that too, but we still don’t know where the universe came from.”