The Adversary - 4 (67 page)

Basil Wimborne looked at Chief Burke and Chief Burke looked at Commander LeCocq, who shrugged.

"That's the last?" Burke said, without believing it. "The very last one?"

"So it seems," the officer said.

"How many?" Basil enquired. "I lost count after the third day."

"A total of eleven thousand, three hundred and thirty-two,"

LeCocq replied. "Rather less than we anticipated. And only a handful of Howlers and Tanu." He allowed himself a superior smile. "Most of the returning humans were bareneck, of course."

"Which leaves the two of us," said Burke. He looked up at the gazebo, which was now sheltered beneath a striped tent fly.

Over at the control console, Phronsie Gillis yawned. "Anyone got a ticket to ride better hop it. It's been a long, long trick and I'm ready for some rest and recuperation. Especially the latter."

Basil studied the Guderian device, frowning thoughtfully. "I could write a most amazing book if I went back."

Burke said, "I suppose young Mermelstein would take me into the old law firm in Salt Lake City."

Basil said, "But Commander LeCocq says there are some really remarkable peaks in the inner Pyrenees. One or two may exceed eight thousand metres."

Burke said, "But who needs the last of the Wallawallas shmoozing around the office, boring the pants off of everybody with fantastic stories that couldn't possibly have happened? And the kid doesn't even speak Yiddish."

"Shut it down, Phronsie," said Basil. "It looks as though we'll stay after all."

"Shall we see if Mr. Betsy's willing to fly the lot of us down to Roniah to my place for high tea?" Commander LeCocq suggested.

Phronsie flicked off the power on the Guderian device, extracted the electromagnetically encoded glass key, and handed it to the officer. "Hell, I think ol' Bets will be tickled pink at the suggestion!" She thought for a minute. "Pink-or maybe puce."

He said: We approach the superfices for the last time.

She said: Thank God. Seven of these giant steps and each one worse than the last even with the mitigator ... how Brede's Ship ever managed the entire journey in a single leap is beyond my comprehension.

He said: Not mine. Brede's Ship was attempting to avoid capture. Under the circumstances one is inspired.

She said: The Ship ... it knew all along. About Earth and its people. It may have been instinctive for it to seek a world with compatible germ plasm and a similar metapsychic pattern but perhaps it really knew.

He said: Anatoly would say it was led. But his philosophy is rather simplistic. Appealing though and definitely anxietycalming.

She said: Anxiety? You?

He said: Even me. As your friend Creyn noted the challenge rather exceeds that of my Mental Man vision: reorientation of an entire Galactic Mind condemned to a dead end of mental evolution because of the golden torcs. It should occupy our attention for some time.

She said: Will we have it? Time?

He said: I trust so. Both of us.

She said: You're leaning toward the simplistic.

He said: Jack often remarked on it. But the mind-set of one's youth is not rejected with impunity. We were both taught to trust. Shall we Elizabeth?

She said: Yes. Yes Marc ...

He said: Come then. I'll support you as we make the penetration. Have courage. It's the last step.

She said: The first I think.

They emerged, and the Duat Galaxy swirled around them-smaller than the Milky Way, but still enfolding more than eleven thousand Duat daughterworlds in its far-flung starry arms. The two suits of black armour hung in space and the enclosed brains saw a nearby expanse of nebulosity that glowed red and royal blue from the double star forming within its heart.

Those two stars were still without planets, mindless. But in every direction lay suns with living worlds, of a number too great to count.

"Listen!" Elizabeth cried. "It's not true Unity, but they're close, Marc. Really very close. Perhaps it won't be so hard after all."

"It will be hard, but we'll manage."

He called.

The star-strewn sky was suddenly alive with enormous crystalline creatures and the aether rang with Song.

THE END OF THE ADVERSARY

Thus concludes The Saga of Pliocene Exile.

There are others, most notably the Milieu Trilogy, which tells the root-tales leading to this one, in books titled JACK THE BODILESS, DIAMOND MASK, AND MAGNIFICAT.

Gaudete.

Appendix

SOME ASPECTS OF HYPERSPATIAL TRANSLATION AND D-JUMPING In the Galactic Milieu, superluminal transport, or faster-thanlight travel, is accomplished through the "warping" of normal space by means of an upsilon-field, one of the primary manifestations of reality. The field can be mechanically generated by a device called a superluminal translator (u-field generator, etc.) or-very rarely-by a metapsychic individual possessed of the "teleportation" faculty.

In a typical trip, a starship generates a u-field to break through the superficies (boundary) between normal space and the hyperspatial matrix.

The latter is also called simply hyperspace, the "hype," subspace, the matrix, or the grey limbo. Sentient creatures experience varying degrees of pain during translation.

Once into the hyperspatial matrix, the starship's navigation equipment programmes a hyperspatial catenary, or subspace vector (vulgarly called "limbo track", "slice of the hype", etc.).

For a period of subjective time, the ship and its riders can be said to move along the catenary. Their position at any specified subjective moment is called the pseudolocus.

Ships are quite capable of halting within the matrix or changing the catenary (with certain limitations) en route. When the catenary is fully described, the starship has effectively reached its destination and once again breaks through the superficies into normal space.

A power breakdown during the hyperspatial portion of the trip strands the ship in the matrix. Similarly, a person attempting a d-jump might be stranded if his concentration failed to maintain the correct vector, "visualizing" the intended goal. The rubberband effect is a complex phenomenon that must be neutralized, either mechanically or through mental programming, if the starship or d-jumper is not to be pulled back to the point of origin at the completion of the translation.

Starships utilize superluminal translators of varying power.

For slower-than-light, or subluminal transport-and invariably within the atmosphere of inhabited plants-the ships switch to inertialess drive, made possible by rho-field generators operating on gravomagnetic principles.* The upsilon-field is not usually generated within a planetary atmosphere. The "large aperture" u-field necessary to admit a starship into hyperspace generates collateral electromagnetic phenomena, especially ionization, that may constitute a nuisance or even an endangerment to civilized entities and their delicate contraptions. The much smaller u-field generated by the djumping individual mind would have a negligible effect upon the environment unless large numbers of people engaged in the activity. Since the faculty is so rare, the contingency is moot.

When a starship captain undertakes a voyage he must consider (a) How far am I going? (b) How fast do I want to get there?

(c) How much pain am I, or my passengers and crew, willing to tolerate in the process?

A "slow" translation, or deep catenary, takes the longest subjective time to accomplish and causes the least amount of pain in the breakthrough. A "fast" translation, or tight catenary, (called also the "fast track,"

"tight leash," etc.) gets one to the destination more quickly, but at the expense of wear and tear on the nervous system. Hotdog spacers who habitually schuss must make use of medications or other anodynes to deal with the severe pain. Such stout hearts refer to slow-track travellers as bunny-hoppers. On very long trips, the ordinary passenger-carrying starship would reach its destination via a series of slow jumps. The displacement factor (df. "speed,"

"warp factor,"

"push," etc.) along the hyperspatial catenary deemed acceptable to nonprofessional space travellers is about forty df. This is equivalent to forty light-years traversed, per subjective day spent in hyperspace. Thus the CSS Queen Elizabeth III might take two subjec* The rho-field is still another primary manifestation of reality, which according to Milieu theoreticians consists of twenty-one "fields", or dimensional lattices, that interact to generate space, time, matter, energy, life, and mind. tive (and actual, to the Larger Reality outside the hype) days to travel to a star system eighty light-years distant-or three hundred days to travel twelve thousand light-years. At each incremental jump, the riders would suffer pain.

Individuals have differing tolerances to the pain of translation.

Exotics generally have a higher threshold than humans. (The stolid Krondaku withstand 370 df, considered about the upper limit for Milieu races.) Richard Voorhees took 250 df for 136 days on his longest schuss, to Hercules Cluster (M13 or NGC6205 in contemporary catalogues). When he travelled to Orissa many years later, he was pushing his luck to endure 110 df for 17 days in succession.

Obviously, both the time-elapse factor and the pain factor limit the range of superluminal transport. In the Milieu, the exotic races have already mapped and explored most of our Milky Way Galaxy (with the exception of the perilous Hub); and with more than 1000 potentially colonizable planets located within 20,000 light-years of Earth, there is little practical incentive for extremely long-range translations. Extragalactic travel is virtually proscribed. The Andromeda Galaxy, our closest neighbour, is 2.2 million light-years distance; it would take the hardiest human starship voyager some twenty-four years to get there-and another twenty-four years to get back. Even in an era of multiple rejuvenations, such a trip would have little appeal except to the incorrigibly wanderlustful. A few souls have tried it with uncertain results.

The exotic beings known as ships, one of whom, Brede's mate, brought the Tanu and Firvulag from the remote Duat Galaxy to Pliocene Earth, have an extraordinary high df endurance. The Ships use a mitigator, a special mental programme that makes bearable the horrific pain of ultraluminal, or "very high speed," translation. Ships teach their passengers, who travel within their bodies in a capsule the size of a conventional starship, how to generate individual mitigator programmes of their own. This means that flight within the Duat Galaxy would be all but pain-free for Ship passengers. In addition, the Ship is able to d-jump routinely at very tight catenaries. Most points in its galaxy are reached in minutes, or at the most, a few hours.

The d-jump is a single movement, never a series of shorter hops such as those taken by "slow" starships. It should be noted that Brede's Ship fatally strained itself in making the jump from Duat to the Milky Way Galaxy, 270 million light-years distant.

Even the most highly talented minds have their limitations.

In making his d-jumps, Marc operates almost exactly like Brede's Ship. His short jaunts about Earth are virtually instantaneous and do not involve more than a split second of subjective time spent in the grey limbo. (The process of breaking through the superficies at either end can take considerably longer, however.) As he d-jumps about the Milky Way, Marc is protected by the armour of the cerebroenergetic enhancer, which holds all portions of his body except the hyperenergized brain in the equivalent of suspended animation. The pain factor remains approximately what it would be in mechanical translation via starship. He stated that he had just about reached his normal-function limit in making the jump to Poltroy. This would put his personal df threshold somewhere in the 18,000 range.

The mitigator is theoretically applicable to ordinary starship travel, provided the riders were metapsychics trained in use of the programme. Extremely powerful superluminal translators would be required to "push" the craft to ultralight catenaries.

There seems no reason why ultraluminal starships could not be built. Milieu models are limited in range by the fragility of the minds carried, not by any mechanical factor.