Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (76 page)

“And if they
do
get in?”

The engineer and the Hamalki looked at him rather bleakly. “I’d prevent that if I could,” K’s’t’lk said. “For the time being.”

“Hope springs eternal,” Scotty said, smiling at K’s’t’lk a little grimly. “But Captain, the next recommendation is to start building solar orbiting facilities in every inhabited star system, heavily shielded for defense, carrying complements of photon torpedoes and lasers capable of disrupting any attacking ship’s attempts to ‘seed’ a corona.”

“That would take years!” McCoy said.

“Aye,” Scotty said. “Years we haven’t got. And any mobile platform can be destroyed if you bring enough power to bear.”

“‘For the time being,’ though,” McCoy said, looking over at K’s’t’lk. “I thought you were also looking for ‘remote solutions.’ Ways to handle this problem without having to chase around all over space. Orbital stations aren’t all that remote.”

Scotty and K’s’t’lk threw each other a regretful glance. “No,” K’s’t’lk said. “They’d be an interim solution at best. Remote solutions are a lot harder, because we’re still trying to write equations that will adequately express the problem. Mr. Spock has had a run at this…”

McCoy glanced over at Spock. “And you haven’t solved it already? You mean you hit a problem and
bounced?
” The look in his eye was not entirely regret.

“Doctor,” Spock said, “one must have a complete question before one can find answers. Even in your slightly chaotic science, you would not treat a patient before he had been properly diagnosed. In this situation—”

“Slightly chaotic—?!”

“—partial solutions are worse than none at all. The only way to affect stars remotely, without directly applying energy to them via phasers, photon torpedoes, and other such mechanical methods, is to alter the structure of the medium in which they are immersed—space and subspace themselves.”

“It’s not easy,” K’s’t’lk said, her chiming becoming more complex, a toccata scaling up in sixths. “Leaving out the use of supraphysical instrumentalities like elective mass to alter the shape of space—”

“You’d
better
leave them out,” Jim said sharply. “No messing around with my engines this time, Commander! We’ve got too much trouble in this reality to go getting ourselves immersed in some other one.”

K’s’t’lk contrived to look faintly embarrassed—a good trick for someone with no facial features to speak of, except all those hot blue eyes. “I did promise, Captain,” K’s’t’lk said. Jim settled back and tried not to look too stern. “At any rate, Sc’tty and I have been investigating some other possibilities for ways to stop a Sunseed induction. Some of them have to do with stellar ‘diagnostic’ techniques which go back a ways. The most promising of these involves atomic resonance spectrometry, and evaluation of the acoustic oscillation of a given star, with an eye to bending subspace so that it alters the frequency of that oscillation, changing the solar magnetic field’s influence on the corona and derailing the Sunseed effect that way—”

McCoy looked up suddenly. “Wait a minute. ‘Acoustic’? As in sound? You mean the whole thing—a whole star, a sun,
vibrates?
”

“Oscillates, yes, indeed, Doctor. Like a plucked string. As for sound, naturally you could not hear it in vacuum, there being no medium to transmit it, but acoustic vibration it remains nonetheless. Possibly the ‘music of the spheres’ your people used to talk about.”

“Now, hold on just a second—”

“But even your poets mention stars singing. I’d thought perhaps they were unusually perceptive of stellar physics in either the acoustical or nonphysical mode…”

“Uh,” McCoy said.

“Give up while there’s still time, Bones,” Jim said softly, and smiled.

“You mean they weren’t? Then they were inspired,” K’s’t’lk said. “But in any case, the oscillation is a phenomenon that has been known for centuries, even among your own people. Your astrophysicists have been using it for some time to analyze the general health of your stars, and to predict their moods.”

“Commander,” Spock said, looking interested, “this line of inquiry was not mentioned in this morning’s précis…”

“No. Scotty came up with it on the way here in the lift, and we’ve been discussing it since.”

“It is a fascinating concept,” Spock said, folding his hands, steepling the fingers. “A star treated in such a manner might be made to produce oscillations that would cancel out those induced by the Sunseed routines, along the ‘canceling sines’ principle.”

Scotty looked uncertain. “I follow you, Mr. Spock, but you’ve still got the problem of the complexity of the waves induced in the first place. They’re not so simple as sines, either in the original generation or the way they interact with one another after induction. It’s not one standing wave you’d have to cancel, but ripple after ripple in the solar ‘pond,’ all washing through one another and altering one another’s frequencies and amplitudes. And then there’s the matter of how the star’s chromosphere reacts to the stress. Depending on the class of the star and the balance of the various heavy metals—”

“I grant the validity of the concern,” Spock said, “but more to the point is the manner in which subspace is caused to make this alteration in the star’s acoustical ‘body.’ Again one comes up against the logistical difficulties attendant on needing to build, deploy, and defend a mobile field generator of some kind.”

Scotty raised his eyebrows, and bent over the computer console again, which chirped softly as he started doing some calculations. “It’s possible that such a generator might not actually have to be near the star,” Scotty said, “if you were using subspace to transmit the information about how subspace was itself going to be altered elsewhere. Like throwing a rock into the water. The ripples start here, but they wind up there…”

“That would take quite a while,” K’s’t’lk said, her chiming going minor-key. “Unless you feel like invoking the equivalence heresy, and I’m not sure that’s appropriate with our present data. Now if, instead, you altered subspace string structure by using the Gott III hypothesis to—”

“Sorry, K’s’t’lk, you lost me,” Jim said. “‘Heresy’? Kind of an odd term to come up in a discussion of astrophysics…”

“Oh, it’s not just astrophysics, Captain,” K’s’t’lk said, “it’s physics in general. The simplest way to explain the heresy—if indeed it is one, the tests of the theory have all been equivocal—would be as an outgrowth of those parts of quantum theory that suggest that it’s possible to make a particle over
there
do something by doing something to a particle over
here
…the effect propagating to the distant one in some way we don’t understand. Early versions of the heresy mostly appeared because of the limitations of physics in earlier times, when science hadn’t yet come to understand as much as we do now about the nature of subspace and its complex relationship with some of the more exotic subatomic particles. Now we’re a little better informed—”

“A wee bit,” Scotty said, looking as if the information wasn’t enough for
him.
He hit a control on the computer to save the calculations he had just done, and it chittered softly in response.

“But there are still large areas where we’re unsure of what’s going on, especially as regards the curvatures of subspace, whether those curvatures are isotropic, or permanently isotropic…” K’s’t’lk waved a couple of forelegs. “And the equivalence heresy springs from one of these. Some theoreticians have suggested that, if small-scale shifts like those of one quark affecting another at a distance can happen, then larger-scale ones happen too…and we should be able to
cause
them to happen. If cause is the right word, when something is done to a particle, or atom, or molecule here, and another particle does the same without it being even slightly clear
why.
”

“Sounds like magic to me,” said McCoy.

“But not to me, sirs and ladies,” said Master Engineer tr’Keirianh suddenly, and everyone turned to look, even Ael. “The mathematics of our physics would suggest that such could happen. But our physics also has an ethical mode which suggests that the Elements are one in Their nature, straight through the universality of being…and there is no way such ‘plenum shifts’ could
not
happen: ‘as at the heart of being, so at the fringes and out to the Void.’” He frowned a little, his look for the moment closely matching Scotty’s. “I will agree, the mathematics involved is thorny. Finding a way to describe accurately what we think might be happening…” He shrugged, a purely human gesture, and Jim looked at the graying hair and the lined face and suddenly, he couldn’t tell why, conceived a liking for this man. “It is challenging. And also disturbing.”

K’s’t’lk chimed soft agreement. “Yes,” she said. “It has been very controversial among my people’s physicists. There have been some unplanned reembodiments over the issue.”

Knowing what he knew about the Hamalki life cycle, Jim wasn’t sure whether this translated exactly as “suicides.” He hoped it didn’t. “K’s’t’lk,” he said, getting up and walking around the table to where she sat, “how do you mean ‘controversial’ exactly? Your people have been rewriting physics cheerfully for centuries, on the local scale anyway…something that other physicists find distressing, but that doesn’t seem to bother you people in the slightest. But
this
is ‘controversial’?” He shook his head. “After all, you could just do it if you wanted to.”

“If,” K’s’t’lk said, looking up at him. “Of course we could. But our physics, like that of the Rihannsu, includes an ethical mode as well as a strictly mathematical one. The math tells you how…and the ethics tell you whether you
should.
In this case…” She jangled a little, an uneasy sound. “If equivalences on this scale are indeed possible, they might break the unwritten ‘first law of space.’”

“You mean there are
written
ones?” McCoy said, with his eyebrows up.

“In the form of the clearly expressed physical behavior of the universe, of course there are,” K’s’t’lk said. “‘Don’t let go of a hammer above your feet while standing over a gravity well. Don’t breathe vacuum.’ How large does the print have to be?” She chimed laughter. “But Doctor, this is something else. The inferred, inherent right of being to be
otherwise.
”

“
That
I understand,” McCoy said emphatically.

“You may,” Jim said, “but now
I’m
lost.”

Scotty folded his arms and leaned on them. “Captain,” he said, “have you ever heard the saying ‘Time is God’s way of keeping everything from happening at once’?” Jim nodded. “Well then,” Scotty said, “there’s a corollary to that law: Space is God’s way of keeping everything from happening in the same place. God or not, space seems to violently resist physical objects coinciding—say by sharing the same volume, like someone beaming into a wall—”

“Doctor,” Ael said, concerned, “are you cold?”

“No, Commander,” McCoy said. “Not yet, anyway. But thank you.”

Jim smiled. “—or by being forced into synchronization in other ways. Some have called it a reaction against the oneness of all matter and energy or the ‘ylem’ of pre-time, before the Big Bang. Whatever, the general tendency of the universe is presently away from order, toward chaos. That’s just entropy. But it can also be expressed in another way. Things don’t want to be the same, or stay the same; they want to be different, and get more so.”

“No
‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’…?”

“In life, yes. In this area of physics, no….”

The communicator went.
“Bridge to Captain Kirk,”
said Mr. Mahasë’s voice from the bridge.

Jim stepped over to the table, hit the comm button. “Kirk here.”

“Sempach
has just dropped out of warp, Captain, and is closing. ETA five minutes.”

“Hold that thought,” Jim said. “Not the one about
Plus ça change:
the other one. I know you’re still feeling your way through this, but we need solutions fast.” He looked down the table at Ael. “Commander, would you walk with me briefly?”

She rose and accompanied him out the door. When it closed behind them, Jim said, “Ael, the commodore in command of
Sempach
is likely to have mixed feelings about your crew at large spending any more time aboard
Enterprise,
even as controlled as the circumstances have been. You, and your senior officers, under supervision, I can now justify…but no one else for the time being. And things may change without warning. I hope you’ll understand.”

“Captain,” Ael said, “I understand better than you think. And I thank you for trusting us so far…when I have sometimes misstepped in that regard.”

Jim nodded; then said, “I should go see the commodore. Spock will assist you with anything you need in the meantime; I’ll see you later.”

“We will be moving out for the rendezvous point,” Ael said, “after the rest of the task force arrives?”

“That’s the plan as I know it. If the commodore gives me different news, I’ll see that you know about it as soon as possible.”

“Very well,” Ael said. “I shall be on
Bloodwing
for the time being. With another Federation ship in view, and more coming, my place is with her. Until matters stabilize.”

They stepped into the lift together. “Until they do…”

“Till then, luck and the Elements attend you,” Ael said.