Flinx Transcendent (55 page)

“I guess the Xunca,” Sylzenzuzex observed hours later as they forced themselves to break away from the eye-numbing view out the foreport long enough to eat and drink something, “liked to get around.”

Seated across from her, Clarity was hand-feeding Scrap slightly burnt bread crumbs. The minidrag would rear back and strike from her shoulder, dispatching one piece of toast after another as if he were stalking prey deep in the sweltering jungles of distant Alaspin.

“I wonder where we're going?” she ruminated.

“I think I can hazard a guess.” Tse-Mallory sipped the hot drink the ship had prepared for him. “The end of the road. The last station on the line. The definitive terminus.” He peered over at Flinx. Their host was neither eating nor drinking as his imagination worked overtime. “The place that the Tar-Aiym Krang told Flinx was coupled to the Xunca warning system on Horseye. The locality of…”

“… the defense,” Truzenzuzex finished for his friend.
“If
we are lucky. And maybe also if we are not lucky.”

Clarity blinked at the thranx. “I don't follow you, Tru.”

The philosoph looked back at her. “We are traveling through a transportation system whose technology is at least as old as the last of the Xunca. Say, roughly half a billion terrestrial years.” A truhand gestured toward a projection hovering conveniently nearby. It displayed the view forward of the ship: a seemingly infinite corridor of energy and light.

“That something so old still functions is in itself almost beyond belief. Yet if Flinx's exchange with the Krang was accurate, it is conveying us toward a construct, a device, beside which this astonishing
example of ancient engineering must appear little more than a sandy path by comparison.”

Clarity nodded pensively as she passed Scrap a piece of crust. “I wonder when we'll get there. Wherever ‘there’ is.”

“I will happily settle for arriving before we're dead,” Sylzenzuzex volunteered.

It took nearly a month. Given the speed at which they were traveling (or not traveling, if the seriously confused shipmind was to be believed), the expanse they must have crossed exceeded anything previously traversed by humans or thranx by many, many orders of magnitude.

“I think we're slowing down.”

Flinx's general call caused everyone to drop what they were doing and race to the control room. Finding him seated in the command chair, his companions joined him in staring out the foreport. At first glance nothing seemed different: it looked as if they were still traveling inside the endless tunnel of glowing plasma. As everyone's perception adjusted, however, a number of other realizations became obvious.

Most immediately, it appeared that the diameter of the channel had been greatly enlarged. Though the
Teacher
was still fully enveloped, the enclosing walls were farther off. The corridor had ballooned into a bubble big enough to hold a hundred ships the size of the
Teacher
. Set alongside other megastructures Flinx had encountered in his journeying, the spherical structure of shimmering iridescent energy was not large. Compared to something like the Tar-Aiym weapons platform its dimensions were downright modest.

What
was
impressive was what could be discerned just beyond the borders of the bubble that enclosed them: an all-pervasive luminosity.

They were surrounded, insofar as he could see, by light. Beyond the barrier of the plasma sphere there was only radiance. He queried the ship.

“I have already been analyzing the omnipresent broad-spectrum phenomena—or attempting to do so, given that my instrumentation is exceedingly inadequate for such a purpose,” the
Teacher
explained. “It is virtually impossible to impart an explanation in words. I myself can
only just begin to appreciate the true nature of the phenomenon through the application of pure mathematics.”

“Give it a try,” Flinx urged his ship. “In words. Simple words.”

“A contradiction that I fear may be impossible to resolve,” the shipmind replied. “Outside the enclosed plasma spheroid in which we presently find ourselves, in all directions and to a distance I am unable to measure, there is nothing but a solidity of gravitons.”

Tse-Mallory blanched at the explanation. “That really is a contradiction in terms. Gravitons have zero mass and no charge. They're closed strings in special low-energy vibrational states. You can't catch them, you can't see them, and you certainly can't collect them in one place, much less in anything resembling a ‘solidity’”

The
Teacher
was not perturbed. “I told you that the reality I am perceiving crosses over into the inexplicable. Remember that as closed strings without endpoints, gravitons are not necessarily restricted to this brane. Or if you prefer, to what is referred to as the immediate physical universe in which we exist. They are perfectly capable of existing in and traveling through other branes as well as the greater Bulk.”

“My head's starting to hurt,” Clarity muttered.

“It does not matter,” Truzenzuzex objected. “What Bran said about gravitons holds true.”

“In this universe, yes,” the
Teacher
agreed. “But much as we know about this brane, we know nothing of others. As has long been theorized, the laws of physics in other branes may be completely different from those in ours. A proton in another brane, for example, might have no mass. A wave or particle like a photon that could possibly exist in both might exhibit entirely different properties in another brane. In the L-brane, O-brane, or another, such a particle might possess mass, charge, or both.

“Some physicists and mathematicians have long believed that branes are not fixed within the infinity of the multiverse or Bulk, but that they are in constant motion—at least at the edges of the branes themselves. Where the ripples of two such branes impinge upon one another insistently enough, you get a bang. Sometimes a Big Bang. If that theory is to be believed, new universes contained within their own new branes are being born all the time—universes upon universes within universes.

“Envisage a technology so advanced that it could bring about such an interaction between a pair of branes, but under controlled conditions and on a manageable scale.”

Truzenzuzex's mind was awhirl with the possibilities.
“Cr!!lk
, perhaps that's where the Xunca went. Through a congruency of two branes, from this one into another. The ultimate escape. Perhaps they traveled in craft propelled by focused gravitons—or composed of them.”

An equally enthralled Tse-Mallory was not averse to taking the impossible another step further. “If they could influence such processes on such a scale, maybe they manipulated the degree and extent of the interaction in order to generate their own made-to-order Big Bang.” Raising a hand, he brought thumb and forefinger toward one another to illustrate his point. “A little Bang, say. The result would be the creation of a new small universe contained within a customized brane. Nothing ostentatious. Insignificant, really. Say, a thousand available and unoccupied new galaxies they could explore and colonize at their leisure.”

“An entire civilization?” Clarity was whispering without knowing why. “To escape what's coming toward the Commonwealth they moved their whole civilization to another
dimension
?”

Tse-Mallory smiled softly. “Tru and I are just speculating. If there was a Xunca around, I'd ask it. But they're not here anymore. As Flinx says, they went away. Only some of their works remain behind to hint at what little we know of them.” With a wave of his arm he encompassed the view forward. “The plasma tunnel transport system. This place. The quantum impossibility it somehow holds at bay.”

The shipmind was not finished. “But before they learned how to do whatever it was that they finally did, they rendered this brane and another barely proximate in an attempt to try and accumulate what they thought would be enough energy to counter the oncoming menace, which itself I have come to believe is quite likely an intrusion of another kind of matter-energy from still a third brane.”

Truzenzuzex whistle-clicked softly. “I would need to do the math, but the juxtaposition of our brane with another could possibly provide an explanation for the Great Attractor's unbelievable energy.”

“All that effort and science to create a defensive weapon became unnecessary,” the
Teacher
continued, “when the Xunca found a way to
step from this brane to another, or to create their own. Either means of escape would have rendered this weapon superfluous.”

“But,” Flinx pointed out, “they left it behind.”

“Yes,” the shipmind concurred. “They left it behind.”

“Too big to move,” Flinx found himself thinking aloud. “No need to move it, anyway.” He eyed his companions. “Or maybe—maybe they left it behind, and intact, so that whatever civilizations and intelligences arose after them would have a chance to fight this thing that's coming toward us.”

Clarity was not convinced. “If they wanted to help, why didn't they leave a signal that would lead us to the same brane where they've taken refuge?”

Tse-Mallory chuckled softly, shaking his head. “It wouldn't have mattered if they had, m'dear. In order to get to an island, you first have to have a proper boat. Maybe a quantum boat. It's not just that humanxkind is still learning how to swim: we don't even know what the water is like.” He looked over at her. “What's the point of a signal you can't follow?”

“Oh, right,” she murmured in sudden realization.

Turning away from the statistical illogicality visible through the foreport, Truzenzuzex spoke without looking at any of them. “The ship's speculations offer explanation not only for the Xunca defense, but perhaps also how the destructive Evil that we must confront can exist in our brane. It is background independent.”

Flinx regarded the two scientists. “What does that mean? From a practical standpoint?”

Tse-Mallory explained. “It means that the oncoming menace flows through our brane without being a part of it, swallowing up matter and not acting like a normal part of our universe because it's
not
a part of it. It—leaked in. Or punched its way in. Or for all we know, deliberately gnawed its way in from some incredible, impossible, much larger 3-brane where such perversions of physics are an accepted and natural occurrence. As such, not being subject to the physical laws of this universe, it likely cannot be destroyed. Not in the sense that we understand destruction. Therefore the only way to stop it is by forcing it back out. Back into its own brane, or into another.”

Flinx slumped in the command chair. Clarity came up behind him
while Pip's tongue flicked out from her perch on her master's shoulder to lightly caress his cheek.

“I don't,” he mumbled wearily, “feel much like a plumber.”

Tse-Mallory offered a hopeful, encouraging smile. “Try not to let yourself become overwhelmed by the scale involved.” Turning, he gazed out the foreport. “We've moved beyond that, anyway.”

Flinx looked at his old friend and mentor. “No worries there, Bran. How can I be overwhelmed by something that's beyond comprehension?” He murmured under his breath, “So I was right all along: certain kinds of evil
are
quantifiable.” Raising his gaze, he looked toward the nearest visual pickup.

“Ship, why haven't we been torn apart, crushed down to nothingness, or snapped out of this existence and into another one by the kind of forces that are at work here?”

“The unique bubble of energy that encloses this one small sphere of normal space shields us,” the
Teacher
informed him. “Otherwise we would no longer be. All here—you, your companions, myself—would be compacted down to a single subatomic particle. Or something less than a waveform. Or perhaps we would be kicked out of this universe and into another one. My own feeling is that by compressing our protective bubble, the energy of the solidity that surrounds it actually makes it stronger by forcing its bonds tighter together.”

Tse-Mallory was nodding to himself. “The Xunca not only knew how to fashion one hell of a transportation system, they knew how to build walls.”

“To keep the ‘water’ out,” Truzenzuzex added.

“Maybe they had to go elsewhere and didn't use this defense because—it doesn't work,” Clarity could not keep from wondering.

Tse-Mallory nodded. “That's possible. I believe, however, that in addition to everything else they abandoned, they also left behind the means by which we may find out.” Moving to the foreport, he leaned to his right and pointed.

No one had noticed the object before. Or maybe it had not been present until just then and it was their arrival that had caused it to appear. Or possibly, Flinx thought a little wildly, it had drifted out of this brane and into another and back again. If Bran, Tru, and the
Teacher
were to be believed, anything was possible here. They were in a space-place
unprecedented, a minuscule bruise on the skin of the space-time continuum that teetered on the cusp of outrageous calculation. Anyone attempting to state for certain why something was happening, or even why something
was
, might as easily be right dead as dead right.

Careful, he told himself. Concentrate on the knowable. The
Teacher
. Pip. Clarity. Those were solid things, those were real things. They consisted of actualities he could hang on to. Or were they and himself and everything else he believed to be real nothing more than transitory expressions of the tortuous, convoluted physics and mathematics of some whimsical long-vanished species?

At least what Tse-Mallory had singled out looked real enough.

It was a hemisphere. Translucent red, it was so dark it was almost brown. Flinx was not surprised when the
Teacher
revealed that it occupied the exact center of the plasma bubble. At his direction, the ship cautiously adjusted its position to move closer—but not too close. That the
Teacher
could maneuver at all in such an outré environment was in itself surprising—and encouraging. It was with relief that he saw that not every law of nature had been abstracted in this place.