Analog SFF, December 2006 Read online

  At his touch the aircraft banked left over the gigantic sharp-edged depression on the top of the mountain. They were cruising at fifteen kilometers above sea level, but the mountain was almost twelve kilometers, and a red-orange glow from a spot in the huge caldera was easily visible.

  "It has a lava lake!” Hilda exclaimed.

  "Ja, more than one. We will not build too permanently near that one! The next island west is not so active. The government and the university, they will go there. I call it Avonford Island, after your mother."

  "You miss her sometimes?"

  "I miss the good times. But, Hildy, you must remember she and I are two stubborn people who found we could not make always the compromises two people must make to live together. We both had to be in charge, and that was impossible. Impossible. The fights, those I do not miss."

  Together, they watched the icefields flow by below in silence. Hilda brought up the subject again.

  "Dad, the university..."

  "There will be a place for you there, Hildy, if you want it. Dr. Lobov will be glad to have you; he has many new ideas he would like to discuss with you."

  "Uh, Dad. I've looked at a couple of his papers. You don't have much in the way of peer review out here, and..."

  Wotan held up a hand, with a laugh. “Hildy, I cannot get into any physics discussions—not my area—but I am sure that is something you physicists will work out! Perhaps the experiments done with this black hole we are making will clarify things, no?"

  Hilda nodded, with the unspoken reservation that some people find it very hard to give up cherished ideas, even with contrary data staring them in the face.

  "Dad, I'm convinced there's something wrong with the delay message. The physics justifying it is wrong, but it's wrong in such a way that may not be clear to Dr. Lobov."

  "He is a good man, Hildy. You are suggesting that someone has deliberately sent a false message to sabotage the project?"

  "I think so. There's been no subsequent confirmation."

  "Hmmm. Hildy, would there be?"

  "It's such a major change, I'm sure I would have gotten a personal message from Tse Wen, Sarah, or Brad. The physics is such a departure from the standard model that it would be the most important thing happening in physics. But we have no news."

  Wotan was silent for a while, then said, “If we send our impactor at the wrong time, it would be bad."

  "Very bad."

  "I am looking forward to using mini black holes to make a new kind of world, like a ring world, but one that can use the energy conversion properties of a black hole to provide light and propel itself among the stars, or maybe even to another galaxy."

  "Dad, that would take millions of years."

  Wotan laughed. “When I was growing up, people got old and died in a few decades; everyone was in a hurry. ‘We aren't getting any younger, are we?’ they would say about delays. Now we say ‘we aren't getting any older, are we?’ There is time enough.” He reached out and touched her hand. “Hildy, people look up to me here. I have to be responsible and responsive."

  He chuckled as if he did not take it very seriously, but Hilda saw the steel in his eyes and thought otherwise.

  "I do very much want the black hole to be created,” Wotan continued, “and it is a unique honor to be chairman of the Erebus System Commonwealth Council when it is happening. But that means I am not free to do exactly as I please, even where you are concerned, my Hildy."

  "Dad, if our impactor is late, and the other impactors aren't diverted, they will make a beam of relativistic matter and radiation that could squirt out our way, spraying over this planetary system. Everyone will have to take shelter. Some of the larger pieces of debris could hit like nuclear warheads. It would be moving so fast that the first of it would arrive only hours after the flash of the explosion. Very little warning would be possible."

  Wotan thought for a while. “There is time,” he said finally. “The Impactor does not launch for eighteen months yet, even on the old schedule. So no changes need to be made now. We will discuss and evaluate this. Meanwhile, I have something to show you. Ahead, we approach the shadow line."

  Their aircraft had overrun morning, racing into night. As the sky darkened, Hilda saw the Vasili range rise before them, painted blood red by the rising star behind them.

  "Oh!"

  "Ja, but wait a moment now as we go over."

  Darkness fell and Hilda soon found the next planet out, Wilkes, rising over the peaks. Almost as bright as Venus from Earth, it was easy to spot over the mountaintops in the crystal clear sky.

  "That one is near opposition. A pretty sight. But look down."

  The ice below glowed red as far as she could see, as if lit from beneath. A network of brilliant yellow lines could be seen here and there.

  "You have heard of the Deccan Traps of India?” Wotan asked.

  "The huge lava field?"

  He nodded. “Something like that is happening here, beneath the ice. We have removed an immense weight from the local geology. New Antarctica is smaller, denser, and younger than Earth and the demons of its core are less tame.” He chuckled at the metaphor. “We have loosed their chains, and this ice is now melting from both below and above. It will be gone here in a few weeks, I think."

  "And with it the clear skies,” Hilda remarked.

  "Ja, for a while, cloudy it will be."

  A meteor streaked through the dark sky, and then another. Soon the sky was full of them.

  "More nitrogen,” Wotan said, “that was once ammonia ice in the Krietzerbelt."

  The planet was transforming before her eyes. How many years would she live, Hilda thought, how many star systems might she see, before she saw the likes of this again!

  * * * *

  Hilda caught her breath as she approached the nearly completed impactor with staff members Phil Stavros, Shira Hassan, Naomi Abila, and her brother Ted Abila. From ten kilometers out, it looked like an incredibly long, thin beam of light with a spiderweb at one end.

  "How did it go with your dad?” Naomi asked Hilda as they approached its dull gray cylindrical surface.

  "I was awed by the progress he's made,” she answered softly, thinking about progress in all its various guises.

  "What about the project schedule?"Phil Stavros asked, swiveling his seat around. He was nominally their pilot, but he handled everything through AIs and the net. A youngster of forty, he'd mastered the ability to carry on a verbal conversation while interfacing visually with the net.

  "We can keep going for now, but he's not convinced the message is phony. The physics rationale is apparently credible to Dr. Lobov, whom he trusts."

  "But Lobov doesn't have...” Naomi paused and started again. “He's a nice avuncular showman and students love him, but I know physics better than he does!"

  "I know, Naomi. But Lobov has a Ph.D. from Earth. That makes him a god as far as Dad is concerned."

  Ted shook his head. “A rather imperfect god, if you ask me. I have an idea."

  "Yes?"

  "We can add another deflector ring to the design. It will let us push 50 percent harder and give the control system 50 percent more drag to use when it reaches the vertex. We may need some added flexibility—in case there are schedule problems."

  Hilda thought long and hard. There was only one thing more important than not getting into a contest of wills with her father, and that was the BHP itself. She closed her eyes. If Wotan were held responsible for the failure of the BHP, his reputation would be ruined forever. Humanity had not yet gotten used to the implications of that word “forever.” The ancient words came to her mind: Cattle die, kinsmen die, a man himself must likewise die, but one thing lasts forever, the doom on each man's life. Nowadays, one could not even count on death for escape from one's critics. It would be up to her to keep her father from becoming the laughingstock and fool of history.

  But even fighting for his own doom, Wotan Kremer could be a formidable opponent. And he was the law,
here. Hilda touched Naomi's hand. “We need more of a contingency, and one that is less obviously a challenge to his authority."

  "What did you have in mind?"

  Hilda shook her head. She tried to remember what she could about leadership. An American general, Patton, had once said something like, Don't tell people how to do something, tell them what you want done and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. That seemed to fit the circumstance.

  "It's probably best that I don't know,” Hilda went on. “Dad can be very clever, and I don't think I could lie if he asked me a direct question. Meanwhile, Ted, I need a favor. You're more attuned to AIs and what they can and can't be made to do."

  He nodded, looking at her with dark shiny eyes from beneath a mop of short, wavy black hair. He was, she thought, very handsome.

  "What do you want me to do?” he asked.

  "I've sent you a link to the postponement message. I'd like you to analyze it front and back. See if you can find anything suspicious at all that might indicate a fake—besides the content, of course."

  "You mean like using a different version of the spread-spectrum encoding protocol?"

  "The what?” Hilda touched the net and was greeted by a two-line definition, half the words of which she didn't know, and a menu of menus, the titles of which would require a trip to a dictionary. She shivered. Just as soon as you think you're hell on wheels in this universe, something comes along to humble you.

  "Uh, a spread spectrum protocol is something that determines which bits go where on which frequency,” Ted said. “Different protocols work better than others, depending on what part of the solar system the beam is going through and what the solar activity is—separate AIs might differ on what protocol to use, so an abrupt change in protocol could indicate a different choice, or just a change in conditions. But it could be an indicator of a different source."

  "Yeah, that kind of thing,” Hilda said. “Indicators. Lots of good, solid indicators."

  A slight tug on their seat harnesses told them the runabout had reached the end of the impactor. The lines holding the superconducting loops that would pull the impactor up to a gamma of ten looked exceedingly thin, but up close, Hilda could see they were more complex.

  "The stays are like lace tubes."

  "Yup,” said Ted, “almost two meters across. The lacy pattern is due to cross-connections—you could cut any of these stays in a thousand different places, and still tow the impactor. The carbon nanotubes that bear the weight are even thinner. Most of what you see is matrix and shielding. The Groombridge 34 system is fairly young still, 2.734 gigayears by the last measurements, and there's a fair amount of debris around. So we have to design for more contingencies. By the way, have you looked at Bee?"

  "Bee?"

  "Our other red dwarf. Out that way.” Ted waved toward the rear of the impactor.

  Hilda followed the motion of his arm and soon spotted a very brilliant orange-ish star.

  "Pull up a visual from astroview and zoom in,” he told her.

  Hilda did so.

  "It's only about a tenth the brightness of A,” Ted said. “Not much more than a brown dwarf, and the biggest thing in its planetary system is a micro-giant with a Mars-sized core, about three Earth masses of ice on top of that, and two Earth masses of hydrogen, etcetera, on top of that. But it's got a huge asteroid belt—almost a ring system, really—about two tenths of an AU out."

  Hilda noticed a dark curved line across the southern hemisphere. “That thick dark band?"

  "Yup. The first planet out is a bit off the equatorial plane—probably an escaped moon, an interloper. Anyway, it makes the ring thicker than it would be otherwise."

  "Anyone out there now?"

  "Less than a hundred researchers and the usual infrastructure,” Naomi said. “The main habitat is a toroid—only three hundred meters across.” She grinned. “It contains the smallest population of any inhabited star system that we know of. My other brother's out there and says they're lost in it. It's a good place for independent minds that want to get away from it all."

  Hilda thought about the opportunity such seclusion would give her. Time to think. Time to wrestle with the universe without having to worry about projects, schedules, and politics.

  "You look wistful,” Ted said, laughing. “Are we already such a pain?"

  She shook her head. “No, no. It's just that, well, not everyone is made for what they have to do in life.” She sighed.

  Their craft rounded the impactor in silence.

  "I may have to oppose Dad to make the project happen,” Hilda finally said. “I'll need your support and it won't be without risk. Tolerating disobedience isn't one of Dad's virtues; he can be gentle, but only when his control isn't threatened."

  "Wotan's our elected leader,” Naomi said. “You can't just say no, Hilda. You have to think about the rest of the colony and your responsibility to them!"

  "Oh, God, Naomi! I've thought of nothing else. But that's the point, isn't it? That message is bogus. If we follow it, we'll have had a role in sabotaging the most important project humanity has ever attempted. It passes all the authentication tests; but Tse Wen and all would never send out something like that without a viable explanation."

  "I can't remember any group, never mind an individual, openly defying the Council president before,” Ted said in a hushed voice.

  Shira Hassan spoke up. “We made him give in on allowing traditional clothing."

  Hilda nodded. If it had been up to Wotan, there would probably have been a dress code. As it was, the colony colorfully reflected the varied national origins of its people. Her father was stubborn and autocratic, but not impossible when others were clearly in the right.

  "He may not feel free to do what he suspects should be done,” Hilda said. “You would be saving his name and his reputation as well, though don't expect to be thanked for it."

  "Well,” Ted said, “it hasn't come to all that yet, and we'll proceed as if this delay order is going to go away. I've got a feast programmed back at the construction shack. Strap in!"

  Hilda laughed and had barely gotten her belt around herself when the runabout leapt forward at what must have been a full gee. The construction shack, a golden ring spinning on top of what looked for all the world like a beehive of robots, grew before them. Now that she thought about it, she was hungry.

  Most of the crew were there to meet her, and over coffee after lunch, she laid it out for them. A younger woman laughed nervously. “We're just going to buy some time, right, Dr. Kremer? Until something from project HQ clears this up. That's not defiance; I mean we wouldn't really be doing anything irreversible. It's not any worse than, say, pretending you're out of touch when someone rings you. Once it gets cleared up, we say, ‘Oh, sorry, there must have been some miscommunication,’ and because shutting down would have been a disaster, they wouldn't look any deeper than that."

  Hilda shook her head. “That impactor has to be on its proper vector come whatever, or the project may be dead for a long, long time. The Consolidationists are within a razor's edge of a majority back in the Solar System. We may never get another chance."

  One of the older researchers raised a hand. Hilda nodded.

  "Jake Jabowsky, Dr. Kremer. What if we're all wrong? What if we send our impactor into that asteroid against legitimate orders? What then? Our collective butts will all be persona non grata here from now to kingdom come!"

  "Cool it, Jabowsky,” Phil Stavros said. “That would be nothing compared to what would happen if we're not wrong and don't send an impactor!"

  Hilda shook her head. “We're not wrong, and I'll be available here for the next ten days to walk anyone interested through the physics. But that's a good point about the consequences. I know we all believe in this project. We wouldn't be here if we didn't believe in it. But those of you who don't think you can survive the consequences should leave now before you are further involved. I hope I can trust you enough to not talk about our intent premat
urely.” Hilda looked at each of her team members in turn. And then she looked at them again. “Who's with me?"

  Jake grabbed his jacket and headed for the exit. He might be a useful witness when this is all over, she thought ruefully. No one else left.

  Ted raised his coffee cup. “To launching on time, come honor or chaos."

  "To launch!” a dozen voices cried, and they all clinked their coffee cups together.

  "Looks like we're in with you, Hilda,” Ted declared.

  Hilda allowed a few nanoseconds for relief to drain tension from her shoulders. Then she smiled at her team. “Let's get back to work then, and be thinking about how we'll do this."

  * * * *

  Weeks full of quiet tension became months of quiet tension. Finally, just to ease the stress, she agreed to go swimming with Sasha in the dome's center lake where she had swum as a child. Too late, she realized that swimsuits were forty years out of style here. She looked studiously straight ahead as she walked naked into the icy water and quickly submerged her body up to her neck. It couldn't have been this cold when I was a kid, she thought, between ragged gasps. Finally, she got used to the temperature and began to relax.

  "Something's bothering you,” Sasha said, swimming over next to Hilda. “Something more than cradle robbing, I hope?"

  His young impetuousness made her laugh. It was much needed. “Cradle robbing? If you were sixty-five and I were twenty, would that be cradle robbing?"

  "I guess so. It's okay as long as it's fun, I think. I mean, we'll live forever, and if I were a million and eighteen and you were a million and sixty-five it wouldn't make much difference."

  Hilda laughed. “It's hard to imagine what we'll think when we're a million years old."

  "Are you cold? Do you want to warm up on the sand?” Sasha asked. He began to lead the way toward the shore.

  She shook her head and glided back away from the shore. Sasha joined her. He took one of her hands and rubbed it as if warming it. The floor of the lake had fallen away and they were treading water.