The Slowest Spacecraft (part 5)
The brilliant yellow blaze of the First Light of Yansmar poured through the ceiling viewport into the galley, but it failed to illuminate me as I stared at the diagram Vortex projected over my dinner. The meat had gotten cool on the plate, the vegetables warm.
I picked at one of the cubes of brown with my fork absentmindedly, staring at the results of Vortex's computations. Given three points in time and space, it hadn't taken Vortex long to produce a probability distribution of the path of the object.
A twisted, curving three-dimensional volume floated holographically above the long wooden dining table, sliding around a half-meter diameter sphere representing the First Light of Yansmar. The black marble marking Yansmar itself was a void near the Monet print on the forward bulkhead. Some have called me old-fashioned, but Vortex is my home. Just because she's capable of extended scouting missions doesn't mean she has to look like something out of one of the old vids.
"There's nothing you can do to shrink the search volume?" The piece of brown reached my mouth. It was lukewarm, and I couldn't tell if it was a piece of beef or one of the Olendrian orda beans I'd thrown into the mix.
"Without an idea about the mass of the object, I am unable to narrow the volumes. We have assumed a constant velocity, which agrees with the three known data points."
I pushed the plate of food away, unwilling to eat the slowly congealing brownish lumps.
"Two of those datapoints are on opposite sides of the planet. What could possibly have gone through without slowing?"
"Maggie, you've asked that question several times now. I am still unable to answer it."
"I know, I know. It's just that we've been out here for three standard weekcycles now, and we've should have found something - some sign. This thing is barely crawling through space, at a tiny fraction of the speed of light. It wrecked a planet. It can't just disappear. We must be missing something."
I pushed the chair back, picking up my plate. Everything went into the recycler except for the half-finished glass of Beaujolais and the bottle it came from. You could survive eating the reconstituted proteins constructed by the recycler, but it wasn't living. That's why I always try to carry fresh food and maintain a well-stocked wine cellar.
"Vortex, I have an idea. Drop into hyperspace and get us close to Yansmar. Rattle the Prefecture if it's necessary to get the traffic clearances. Fire up the hyperfield mapping sensors while you're at it."
"What are you looking for?" Vortex is smart, and she has hunches of her own. Each of us knows to trust the other's crazy intuition.
"I'm not sure, but I'll be on the bridge in a minute."
I grabbed my copy of Carpenter's Hyperfield Mechanics from the library as I headed forward. The tablet, in its familiar niche, was well worn, the paging buttons rounded from frequent use. Sure, Vortex could just call the hypertext up from her memory, but I preferred the tactile sense of holding a real hyperbook tablet.
When I reached the bridge, the pastel swirls of hyperspace billowed silently across the main viewport. With Vortex in control and the pilot's consoles dim, I can sit back in my comfortable pilot's chair and stare out into the shifting expanses for hours on end. I just hoped I would eventually be able to see the patterns outside the Yansmar system once again. I was beginning to tire of this endless search.
"I think you may be on to something. Take a look at this." Vortex threw a hyperfield terrain into the air.
Hyperspace is all about energy differentials. Some paths through hyperspace are much easier to travel than others. It's like the difference between going along a valley and crossing over a mountain range. It's far more economical for spacecraft to follow the paths of least resistance - that's why most ships use well-defined routes. F'nordalp'leen's is here because nine major hyperspatial valleys meet at McCutcheon's Nebula. If you want the detailed explanation behind it all, read through Carpenter. That's why her hyperbook was in my hands. I don't keep this stuff in my head unless I have to.
Hyperfield terrains are always changing, but at a rate where it takes centuries for significant decimals to be affected. There have only been a few exceptional cases that Carpenter's noted.
"And your name seems to be associated with most of them," interrupted Dugar. Maggie smiled. With a flourish, she sipped the last of the port in her glass. A tentacle shot through the air to pick up the bottle and refill her drink.
There was a cheer at the bar. A party of a dozen Tamtam traders quietly wept formal Tears of Insistence for a round of something brown and revoltingly viscous. The Hetherhol triad had drifted back over the bar, insisting on a refill of their buoyancy sacs despite remaining hopelessly knotted together. The Jewel of Her Father's Eyestalks had moved out of sight, preparing to leave - and those who had been watching had turned to the bar for refreshment. The demand on the bartender was great. The tentacle that hovered over Maggie's glass was the twenty-third. The record had been tied; money changed hands, feet, beaks, flippers and pseudopods.
When the cheering died down, Maggie looked over to Dugar.
"As I recall," she said, picking up the thread that had been interrupted, "there's at least one of those in Carpenter's hyperbook with your name on it as well. Now be quiet and let me tell the rest of the story."
The hyperfield analysis that Vortex projected showed a series of eddies spiraling outward from an unnaturally straight line. The line, an unnatural gash in the terrain, showed up on the sensors like some giant had plowed a furrow, perfectly straight and very deep, through the heart of the local hyperfield.
"Next, I bet you're going to tell me that little disturbance in dimensional geometry follows the trajectory of our mysterious object, right?" I plopped into my familiar piloting chair, paging through the index of the hyperbook. I was looking for something that might shed further light on the effect.
"Correct, Maggie."
"Follow it." The familiar thrum of the engines vibrated through the ship, into the padding of the faded black quasiplastic, comforting and relaxing. Vortex turned up the brightness on two of the displays, showing our flight vector and time to target.
"Maggie?"
"Yes?"
"The path of the object does not fall within the probability volume I computed. I cannot account for its trajectory unless I ignore the laws of physics. How can this be?"
"I'm thinking." My finger in the air, I traced the path of the object in my mind through the projected terrain. My finger slid past the gradient representing the First Light of Yansmar without wavering. Something clicked in my head. "It's not affected by gravity. That explains why we couldn't find it."
"Maggie, we are closing on our intercept approach."
"Drop back into normal space, and let's have a look." The pinks and purples of hyperspace faded to the familiar star-studded blackness of the Yansmar system. Vortex projected a circle onto the viewport. Somewhere in that volume was the object that killed Yansmar.
"Distance?"
"Ten thousand kilometers. No gravity gradient detected." If this was some kind of singularity, we'd be feeling something. Probably. Singularities are strange; if this was one, it would be the strangest one on record.
"Close to eight thousand." No difference. None of the normal sensors were picking up anything out of the ordinary. The hyperfield detectors started to show the eddies. If we had to jump to hyperspace, it would be a very bumpy ride.
"Shall we try six thousand?" Why couldn't Vortex or I see it? This thing had devastated a world. "You're sure you're not detecting anything, right?"
"Correct. This is not a singularity or black hole. It does not match the parameters of any other space hazard in my databanks. It does not match the parameters of anything known." I could swear there was a hint of frustration in Vortex's voice. She hates riddles as much as I do.
"Bring us closer, then. Continue closing until we can see something, or you detect something out of the ordinary."
A shimmer of dull gold caught my eye.
"Five thousand kilometers. I am now getting a faint radar reflection. I estimate the object at between two and four hundred meters in diameter."
"That's quite a variance, Vortex." I called up the manual sensor pod controls and made a few selections. "I can see why you're confused. The mass sensors aren't reading anything, which can't be right. The object is not radiating any energy, despite having recently passed through a planet and passing close to First Light of Yansmar. It's almost as if it wasn't there."
"Bring us closer. Slowly." Harmless-appearing objects had caused the death of far too many friends and acquaintances. In space, nothing is harmless.
At a hundred kilometers, I swear that I heard Vortex gasp in astonishment. At fifty, I know she heard mine. It's a good thing that she kept her wits about her despite what we were seeing. Vortex stopped us when we were within a kilometer of the object. The sensor readings were still completely impossible - and it was far closer than I really wanted to be.
It was beautiful, mesmerizing to look at. The symmetries were hypnotic and tantalizing, drawing the eyes (and sensors) from one arc to the next. It wasn't quite spherical; four gentle lobes bulged slightly, stretching the orb ever so subtly into an elegantly tetrahedral set of curves. The surface was completely seamless and solid. There wasn't a dent, a scratch, or a hole - not a single flaw in the painfully euphoric geometry.
It was impossible to assign a single color to the object. Burnished, shining in the molten yellow of the First Light of Yansmar, the object should have been golden. Instead, a million different colors danced across that incredible surface, rhythmically, waxing and waning, shimmering, burning, darkly illuminating and brightly infuriating. There were colors I could not name, colors that should have been improbable to the human eye - or Vortex's sensors - yet there they just were.
There were subtle impressions of somehow darker traceries scribbled sinuously over the entire object, a single line of contrasting colors that somehow evoked all of the mythical magic and mathematical truth of the universe. The line shifted and danced in my mind; I swore that if I watched it long enough, it would summarize everything that was, is, and will be.
I wanted to sit in my pilot's chair and just stare, taking it all in for as long as I could stand it.
"Maggie?" Vortex slowly dimmed the viewport to opacity. "It's quite beautiful, isn't it?" A glance at the display panel showed me that she'd turned her sensory input down as well.
"Yes, it is." I shook my head, to try to clear the image of the object from my eyes. "It also killed Yansmar. We can't forget that. The question is how?"
Something from that elegantly explanative tracery triggered a thought. I nudged the hyperbook, urging its index to reveal the same kinds of truth I'd seen out beyond the viewport. Carpenter described hyperfields in her own intuitive manner; the mathematics are simple and beautiful, as are most of the important things in the universe.
"Vortex, put up a diagram of near-Yansmar space, just prior to the impact." A hologram formed before me. "Show the vector of motion of the object." An arrow appeared, aimed at the heart of the planet. Since Yansmar was the center of the diagram, it had no relative motion.
"Now subtract the relative motion of Yansmar around its primary. Factor this into the vectors for the object and the planet." The vector for the orb shrank considerably. The vector for Yansmar appeared, aimed at the orb.
"Subtract the relative motion of the First Light of Yansmar system with respect to the Second Light of Yansmar." The orb's vector shrank again. Yansmar's vector grew.
"Now factor in the Second Light of Yansmar's motion with respect to the local sector. Take into effect any known nova effects contained in your records." There was another similar change in the vectors, mostly from the expanding front of a gas bubble formed in the explosion of a nearby star three hundred thousand yearcycles past.
"Subtract the relative motion of this part of the Galactic arm." The vectors changed still further. Yansmar was moving quickly towards a very slow orb.
"Now subtract Galactic rotation." The vector of the orb was almost zero.
"And Galactic motion relative to the local Galactic cluster and supercluster. What do you see?"
"It appears that the orb did not run into Yansmar. From the vectors in this diagram, it was Yansmar that collided with a nearly-stationary orb."
"Not nearly-stationary. I bet if we do the calculations using Carpenter's Final Conjectures connecting hyperfields and space-time, we'll find that the orb is anchored to a fixed location. That's also why the mass and energy readings are wrong. This thing doesn't deform space-time because it's somehow connected to it, in ways that Carpenter and the others have only started to guess at. This thing is not moving at all. Everything is moving around it. When you add up all those relative motions, you get Yansmar meeting the classic immovable object."
Maggie turned to J'orrr, staring up at the sentient violet plant sitting next to her.
"The orb was the slowest spacecraft. It had a velocity of zero. Anchored to the very Universe itself, it did not and could not move. Everything moved around it."
Dugar looked over at Maggie, shaking his head. He turned to J'orrr.
"You would think I would learn, after all these yearcycles." The retired Goshan Imperial Marine, always one who knew when it was time to concede the battle, raised his hand to signal to the bartender.
It was not necessary. The twenty-fourth tentacle of the evening was already cradling a bottle of the rare vintage port over the table. The first splash of the dark reddish-black wine into a crystal decanter held by the twenty-fifth tentacle revealed a hint of blackberries to the air. As the remainder of the bottle was carefully poured out, a dozen other flavors wafted past, earthy, sweet, and tantalizing. The decanter filled quickly, leaving only thick flakes of purple sediment behind in the dark, dusty glass bottle. The tentacle set the bottle down, picked up the decanter, filled a small crystal glass fresh from behind the bar, and handed it to Maggie.
She took the glass reverently. Closing her eyes, she slowly swirled the new glass beneath her nose. She could smell the rich, musty soil of Freedman's Planet. The aroma of the morning dew rolling off of the fat grapes native to a world half a galaxy away was there as well, mixed in with the scents of the native woods from the casks that aged the wine. It was a symphony of scent, a joy just waiting to be tasted.
"Captain Human Maggie Gale?" The sound of irresistible curiosity was clear in J'orrr's deep voice; it would not be stopped by an immovable object, or by the protocols of celebrating a wonderful glass of victorious port. "What happened to the slowest spacecraft? Who constructed it? Why did they do it? Was it a weapon to use against Yansmar?" The words tumbled out in a barrage of enthusiasm.
Opening her eyes, Maggie looked up at the alien, her communion with the spirits interrupted. The glass went back to the table, unsipped.
"Those last three questions were exactly what the Prefecture's Office wanted to know when I reported my find. They insisted that I follow the trail back to wherever it led."