Betrayals: twentyeight

  Even a baseline eye could see the object up ahead now as a disk; it was a brown dwarf, a strange reddish- blue colour but barely luminous at all. Three of the four Keter pursuit ships were already in orbit, and had been for some time. Once the destination of the fleeing craft was evident, they used their superior acceleration to arrive before the fugitive and investigate. So far they had apparently found nothing of interest.
This tiny failed star, given the prosaic catalogue number 887YTS 77656, was home to a few hundred thousand deep space dwellers, exploiting the ices and deuterium of the dwarf’s dust ring. These hardy folk were frugal and efficient, sharing aspects of the Deeper culture and the cult of Negentropy. For some time now Sallie had been communicating with the duty customs officer of Masha, the main port, but he seemed to be unwilling to talk very much.

   “Say again, Masha control. You have some sort of incident occurring in your system, is that correct?” she said. The light speed delay was down to twenty seconds; this gap was shrinking rapidly as the Necklace clipper approached, decelerating in phase with the pursued craft.

   The Necklace Librarian had hastily installed Sallie as Her avatar on board the clipper, and a few hours into the journey Sallie was joined by the human-level avatar of the Bailiff. He gave his name as Leftenante Kibban, and in the first few weeks of the pursuit he told her stories from the world of Old Daffy. When it became obvious that the chase was likely to take years, both avatars were put on standby. Only now, as the craft which they had followed from Rendell ring to this lonely dwarf neared its apparent destination, were they reactivated.

  Twenty seconds were up. The low-res image of a dust-dweller controller appeared in Sallie’s visual field.
    “---Incident, aye. The choice we have tee make. Do we go in, or run fer ouwer lives.”
  “Please give me more details, controller. You are making little sense. What is it you have to go into, and why do you have to run if you do not do so?”

   Twenty seconds.
   The Leftenante spoke to Sallie, “He is confused, and distracted, but he does not give the impression of someone who is in mortal danger. Notice that he seems to be packing various objects into a freefall bag as he talks to us; in the background I believe I can make out other individuals doing the same thing while he is talking to us. They are definitely evacuating the -”
  “We can go in, and gan where all the gods cannot follar. Or run from the collapse. Me, I think I’m ganning out-away. You had best think on what ye want to do yoursels.”
  Sallie replied “Where are you all going, controller? You cannot be entering the dwarf in your corporeal form, it has a gravity field more than  a hundred  times too strong for you. And if it is going to collapse, then you would be destroyed even in virtual form. Please give more details of your plight.”

   During the next twenty second pause the signal from Masha Control ceased, as the controller moved out of shot. After a minute or two several small ships left the gently rotating Masha habitat, descending towards the magenta dwarf in the distance. Slightly later a number of much larger ships departed the habitat headed away from the dwarf, and similar departures could be seen all over the dust ring.
  “They are certainly vacating the vicinity of this dwarf, Sallie; the larger ships must hold corporeal persons fleeing the system, while the smaller vessels can only hold data. No doubt those craft hold the virtuals who wish to go ‘in’.”
  “Whatever that means.” But Sallie was beginning to guess the answer already. She could call upon the ship’s processing substrate as an exoself; that extension of her consciousness had several strange theories about the nature of the object ahead.

   “Something is happening near the dwarf,” she said, simulating an elbow nudge into Kibban’s virtual ribs. They had begun to get quite intimate during this voyage, and maybe once the current crisis had passed they might find the time to become even more so. But that would have to wait.
  “The Keterist ships are morphing into assault mode- surely they are not going to shoot at the virtual lifeboats?”
  “No- they are firing upon each other. Gods! We had better prepare ourselves for attack!” The magenta dwarf was visible in a virtual projection in cyberspace before them; Kibban leant forward as if to examine the scene more closely.
  “I have a little magic which could help to protect us; watch.” Sallie opened another window, showing the front of the clipper ship they were in; a frail cloth umbrella opened at the front of the ship, concealing the craft completely as seen from the direction of the dwarf and its orbiting warships.
  "By the arrow of time- you have Ylem! You kept that well hidden.”
  “It is difficult to get hold of in these parts. I have been growing it for decades now but I still only have a few square metres.”

  The umbrella was indeed covered in black, dull Ylem fabric, a fabulous material created by some high god somewhere in the Orion Arm and carelessly dropped, to be gathered up by the lesser gods and mortals and used for protection. No lesser being knew how to make new Ylem; but it could be grown, only by exposing it to electromagnetic radiation. Ylem absorbed all photons and converted them to mass. In this way it increased in size, but very slowly; a lot of photons were required to make a very small amount of matter – the opposite of the conversion of mass to energy. This thin material also served as a nearly perfect defence against laser weapons and other electromagnetic attack.

   From a telescope swung out on a boom they peered round this insubstantial shield and watched the Keterist ships. They started to fire on each other. After a while only one remained.
  “The Keterists do not seem to hold each other in very high esteem,” the avatar Kibban said.
  Sallie replied, “Since they each have multiple copies of their personality in several different locations they probably don’t care too much about terminating each other locally. They are quick to anger and quick to forgive, or so they say.”

  The remaining ship slowly furled a number of strategically placed black fabric sails into itself.

  “Hmm. Looks like you are not the only person round here to obtain some Ylem.”
  “Yes; but even the Keterists do not all have a supply, it seems. I wonder what will happen when this stuff is more readily available. Will it make warfare less common, or more so? Those few of us who have access to a supply of fabric have a distinct advantage over our opponents.” Sallie looked at her dark-skinned virtual companion with a wry smile, then looked back at the display with a start.

 “A powerful encrypted message is coming in now, from a location in deep space. Somewhere over there.” She pointed in a seemingly random direction. A display opened in cyberspace at the end of her finger, showing the many stellar and substellar objects along the direction of origin. “Hah! This beam seems to be coming from near the last known location of Lorca Alrami’s ship. A rough estimate of its content is a quadrillion bits. Enough to encode a low transapient’s higher functions. Perhaps Alrami has come to join the party.”

  “Yes; but a comm wormhole is so heavy; it means you have to throw out a lot of useful gear in order to conserve mass. No matter; I see you are packing Ylem; you have the advantage of us there. Now, I suppose you would like to know why we have come to this tiny forsaken system across so many petametres.”
  “I have a good idea, but please elaborate.”
  “Oh, you do have an inkling, do you? That is probably a good thing; I might not need to explain in excruciating detail in the limited time we have left. It might be a good idea to drop the ‘hole overboard when you leave the system, by the way; you might need the speed when this thing blows.”

  “We will manage, don’t worry. This ship can still go pretty fast in a pinch.”

  “Good. Well, where to start? You will know, of course, about the problems that the ancients had with autonomous, intelligent interstellar probes?”
  “Yes; they were often too self-aware to simply perform a survey of their target system, and many developed goals of their own, Many rogue probe minds exist throughout this galactic arm, some of which are dangerous to approach, “ said the avatar Kibban.
  “Ah, greetings to the partial Bailiff of the Negentropy Alliance. You two must be joined at the hip. Well, yes, some rogue ships are dangerous, others less so. Many millennia ago the entity which was recently the townmind of ArGartha –“
  “No longer,” said Sallie, sharply. The second or so of lightspeed delay between the two ships meant that Alrami did not respond immediately.
  “-was just such an intelligent probeship, one with no name just a serial number. Ah. No, indeed, no longer is e the controller of that small provincial town; quite a few of er trusted associates have come along for the ride, but I am afraid that ArGartha town is just a memory now.
  “As I was saying, if you will permit me, my Lady; the probe which first came to this system found nothing more than a quiescent T class dwarf and a dust ring; pretty soon a few hardy Backgrounders moved in and started to exploit the resources. Because of the fierce gravity the dwarf itself was not an economic source of material, but the intelligent probe mind was still fascinated by it. Careful measurements of the diameter of this failed star did not show any detectable contraction; so what was driving the luminosity?
  "By dropping a few well-armoured instrument packages into the star this probe mind found the unexpected; a hard surface several thousand kilometres beneath the gaseous skin. Eventually my friend, the intelligent probe with no name, found that this surface was artificial, a supported structure forming a hollow sphere; in this sphere there were a number of tightly closed apertures. One fine day e managed to persuade one of these apertures to open just a tiny little bit. Do you know what e found inside?”

  “A wild guess- a wormhole.”

  One second pause.

  “Well done. Yes; not just any wormhole, but an alien ‘hole. This little star is entirely artificial; the shell extracts just enough energy from the ‘hole to maintain itself and a little bit of purple luminosity; the gravity signature of the hole is disguised in a way that even my friend has never been able to understand. But where does this hole lead to?”

  “I haven’t any idea. Somewhere far from here, no doubt.”

  “Oh yes- very far. When my friend sent probes through the hole e could not recognise the location at the far end. After hundreds of years of observations e determined that the far end could not be inside the visible universe.”
  A longer pause; one of shock this time.

  “By chaos and disorder– that is surely impossible! How could such a connection form?” Leftenante Kibban seemed outraged by the very impossibility of this notion. “Any pair of wormhole mouths have to be taken to their destination through real space at sub-light speeds; there is no way that a mouth could be taken beyond the observable universe. Your ‘friend' must be mistaken.”

  “No, he has shown me the data and let me come to my own conclusions; that is his style. Either these unknown aliens were not limited to the speed of light-“

  ”Impossible!” said the dark Negentropist avatar, with conviction.

  “Or perhaps the hole was made when the universe was a lot smaller. Have you heard of the Alpha conjecture?”

  “Of course. The possibility of intelligence existing in the early universe before the decoupling era, before the inflation era even; superstitious nonsense.”

  “Well, perhaps there is something to it; this hole is an artefact which can only be explained by some chain of events before the inflation era itself. Perhaps this hole was made long ago, by an intelligent entity consisting of strings and loops of spacetime, and found billions of years later by another race, who put this shell around it to protect it. Who knows. At the end of the day, it exists, we are going to use it to escape, and we are taking a few billion minds in storage with us for company. It’s empty, in there- no sign of civilised life at all. A new start.”
  “Escape? Why are you so hell-bent on getting away from this galaxy? This is probably the most important discovery I have heard of since first contact with the To’ul’h race, seven thousand years ago. You and your friend will be famous beyond imagination. Just release the stolen backups to us and we will recommend amnesty for you all.” 
  Sallie knew she had no real chance of changing the other’s mind at this late stage, but she had to try.
  “Ha. An amnesty, is it? With a good transapient counsel we could get off scot-free, because of your clumsy attempts at entrapment. But we have many active minds on board, and they all want to flee your frantic excuse for a civilisation. Once we activate the billions of back-ups we liberated from the hell hole-you created they will, no doubt, be glad they came with us.
  “If you don’t believe me, here is one of our willing fellow travellers. I am sure you are acquainted with him.”

   A new personality came on line; there was no image, but Sallie recognised Auguste Cis-trans-su Gienah immediately.

  “Hi there,” he said quietly.

  “Gienah. Some spy you turned out to be.” Sallie was sarcastic, but not unsympathetic.

   “Well, quite. The trouble is, it is all true. The Orion Arm is getting far too crowded; you can’t breathe there anymore. Every star, every moon, every asteroid has someone sitting on it and beavering away. And it is full of squabbling petty gods pulling tricks on each other. Look at that nasty little trap you set for Lorca and the Town mind. All they were trying to do was gather a few billon souls to start a new life in a new universe; you treated them like mind smugglers.”

 "To be fair to my higher self, that is what we thought they were, at first.” Sallie was aware of the commlink sending her words and thoughts back to the transapients in the Necklace and beyond; she hoped they understood her presumption.

  “In any case, we are going in to this hole, and the Townmind has it rigged up so that we only have one shot. Are you coming in or what? They tell me you will have to drop the communications hole, or you will be ripped apart inside by tides, or something along those lines. We will be arriving in a couple of minutes now- just time to make your mind up.What do you say?” Gienah sounded optimistic about his imagined life in the new universe.

  Sallie considered her options; if she destroyed the ArGartha ship now the wormhole might remain open, and the gathered scientific might of the Terragen civilisation could be brought to bear upon it, no doubt stabilising it for future use. The galaxy would suddenly be twice as roomy; with no other civilisations around the expansion of human-derived culture could continue for ever.

  But she would be killing hundreds of active mentalities and billions of inactive ones. She couldn’t do it.

  “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  A message screamed at her down the comm-hole – ‘Destroy the ship!’,  but she ignored the familiar voice. She manouvred the Ylem-umbrella back into postition just in case. Quite rightly too, as the remaining Keterist ship in orbit began to fire at the clipper almost immediately; the other Keter ship which had been flying in formation with them broke away and fled. Then the firing stopped.

  An expendable camera-eye peeked round the edge of the umbrella; the Keterist ship was nowhere to be seen. A strange crater-like depression in the glowing magenta surface below told the tale.

   “The hole is open- and the Keterists have gone inside!” Kibban was running on virtual adrenaline; time was short, so their subjective time was speeding up. Every second was a minute, every minute an hour. Now, very slowly, the ArGarthan ship began to break apart; the wormhole must have a limiting internal diameter, and it would be necessary for the Town mind’s vessel to separate into sections in order to pass through. It looked like the minimum throat radius was too small for Sallie’s clipper anyway, so she couldn’t go through even if she wanted to. If the Keterists were lucky they might just make it, the first to arrive at the new galaxy at the far end. If the probe with no name- who had gone on to become the unspeaking ArGarthan Town mind- had left a booby trap or two at the far end they might be met with a shower of antimatter. Even Ylem couldn’t protect them from that.

   As the chunks of the ArGathan ship shot into the face of the magenta dwarf, Sallie navigated into a hyperbolic orbit around the little star. The clipper accelerated away from the object with its hidden secret inside and she observed the surface as it began to shrink. Now, after untold years, this dwarf was beginning to contract at last, and as it did so it became brighter.  She swung the trusty Ylem umbrella round to protect the clipper as the star shrank, contracted into a bright disk, and with a gigantic gamma ray burst became a black hole.

  She hoped the ships from Masha habitat had gotten far enough away to survive the blast.

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