Guardian of Night (46 page)

molt
: see
time terminology

momentia
: see
time terminology

naphthalene: this chemical provides Guardians a fast and steady drunk; see
nebulizer

nebulizer: Polymer bubbles that hold what is normally a gas in a pressurized, semiliquid state. A straw protrudes from one side of each bubble, and ends in a device similar to a perfume atomizer. The object is to squirt the contents directly onto the muzzle and suffuse the nasal membranes with what is, for a Guardian, a powerful stimulant, depending on the concentration. See
ammonium hydroxide, benzene, naphthalene,
and
Old Fifty-five
.

NH
₄
: ammonium hydroxide; this chemical gets Guardians drunk; see
nebulizer

Officer’s Arms: a military neighborhood in the Shiro; location of the Academy; made up of boxy, pre-fab units

Old Fifty-Five: the single-malt scotch of nebulizer content

perfluorodecalin: Guardian blood, milky-white in color

petty officer’s round: cyclic promotions for non-com rates

positor: Guardian penis, corkscrew shaped

quantum computer: part of a bicameral computer system on Sporata vessels, the quantum computer is referred to as Lamella; see
biomatrix computer

receptor: political operations officer

scleral muscle zoom: natural zoom lens in the Guardian eye

semanato
: see
time terminology

Shiro, the: an enormous habitat that serves as the Administration’s governing hub; its current location is in a distant orbit around Pollux b, 33.7 light-years from Sol and outward from the galactic center.

shriving: a combination mental “struggle session” and physical pain session delivered with various instruments as punishment

Sirius armada: Sporata fleet stationed in area of Sol. The invasion fleet.

SMELLS:

Souk, the: Shiro black market

Sporata, the: the space navy of the Guardians

Sporata Academy, the: space navy academy in the Shiro

SPORATA POSITIONS:

SPORATA UNIFORMS/INSIGNIA:

storekeep: quartermaster

tagato
: see
time terminology

thinking aft: officers not allowing the ship computer to read their thoughts

TIME TERMINOLOGY:

V-CENT: vessel central processing: the computer center on a Guardian vessel

variado
: see
time terminology

vitia
: see
time terminology

ASTRONOMICAL NOTES

Extry and Sporata vessels can travel at a top speed of 900 times the speed of light. This is 2.5 light-years per day.

Fomalhaut Limit = supposed 25-light-year territorial boundary sphere around Sol.

The Shiro’s current location is in a distant orbit around Pollux b, 33.7 light-years from Sol and outward from the galactic center.

Chief Seattle
–
Powers of Heaven
encounter is near the 82 Eridani system, approximately 20 light-years from Sol and at about the same distance as Sol from galactic center.

The Eridani gate of the Vara Nebula is invented, as is the existence of the Vara Nebula itself. It is supposed to be approximately two light-years from Sol.

AFTERWORD

First and foremost: this book is meant entirely for entertainment purposes! I wrote it to get a whispered “cool” out of you, and to avoid your scratching your head and muttering “huh?” At least, not
too
often. That being said, here are a couple of reflections on the ideas and science behind the science fiction storytelling.

FTL

Welcome to the dawn of the Quantum Age. Dear reader, it has already begun. The coolest extrapolated science I’ve come across in the past few years is the idea of magnifying the quantum properties of matter to create macroscopic, Einstein-Newtonian, normal-scale effects. This stuff is not merely the dream of a mad scientist in some future possible world. No, it’s being done today.

Split-mirror experiments building on the Aspect experiment and others of the 1990s have not only demonstrated quantum teleportation, they are being duplicated and expanded upon constantly. We can make quantum weirdness happen right before our eyes.

There’s more. Superconducting quantum-interference devices have long been used to measure vanishingly weak magnetic fields. But the most interesting application for SQUIDS may await. A SQUID is a superconductor made into a ring about half a centimeter across (big enough to see; big enough to handle) with a constriction narrowing down in the loop to about one ten millionth square centimeter. The constriction acts as a Josephson junction, an area where various quantum effects are produced.

What’s so great about that? This: the SQUID acts as a kind of magnifier, a bullhorn (or organ pipe, if you like) that transmits the quantum effects occurring at the junction to the whole structure.

In other words, a SQUID behaves as a single subatomic particle. All quantum mechanics, all the time.

What happens at the subatomic level that might be interesting to us up here in the world of Big Matter? For one thing, particles teleport from place to place instantaneously. They make quantum leaps. One of the more interesting of quantum leaps is the leap of a photon across the Planck distance, the so-called quantum foam, of space-time. If this instantaneous leap could be magnified, transmitted to entire conglomerations of matter . . .
 

To a spaceship, say . . .
 

You’re talking faster-than-light travel.

Actually, you’re talking
instantaneous
travel.

And how might this magnification be accomplished? Well, that’s what SQUIDs do
now
. If SQUIDs could be refined, perhaps networked . . .
 

A SQUID of SQUIDs?

Might we not be able to make instantaneous leaps over distances far greater than the smallest distance possible, the Planck length? Miles. Astronomical units. Light-years.

Anyway, that’s the idea behind the FTL in
Guardian of Night.
Possible? We may find out sooner rather than later.

And speaking of which: The craft suture movements and quantum-wake effects? Let’s just say my goal was to stay
plausible
—which is all a poor science fiction writer can ever really hope for when exploring the outer reaches of a particular idea. If one is going to tell stories of space naval maneuvers involving quantum effects, one should be allowed a few wild-ass guesses!

COMMUNICATION

The beta, the communication system used by the Guardians (and adopted by humans), is also the extrapolated product of a quantum effect. Quantum teleportation of coded and meaningful information has not been accomplished yet, so far as we know. Some have declared it theoretically impossible. Quantum teleportation of known information
has.
If you create a pair of electrons or photons in the same subatomic process, their quantum states—their electrical spin properties, their quarky color properties, etc.—become causally entangled. If you do an experiment to determine what the spin of one particle might be, you immediately make its entangled twin take on the opposite spin. It’s as if neither particle has decided which way to swing until one of them is hit on in the Rick’s Café Americain of physics. At that point, the particle, merely from being observed, will resolve into one or the other spin state. You can’t be an electromagnetically bi electron in
this
observable universe. And that particle’s entangled twin, even if the twin is across the room or even across the galaxy, will also resolve into a determined value—and that resolution will occur not at the speed of light, not faster than light, but instantly. How could it be otherwise? Nonlocality is fundamental to quantum mechanics.

If this resolution of entanglement could be used to convey information, you’d have yourself an instantaneous radio system.

What I do herein is to posit that such instantaneous communication has been achieved, but over a limited distance due to the fact that particles are damn hard to retain unentangled—and finding which particle might be entangled with another a few parsecs distance away might be a bit difficult to accomplish.

LANGUAGE

What about the sceeve language? Well, this is very much an invention. My science fiction influence in the matter, however, is rock solid. Back in the 1980s I discovered, somewhat to my own chagrin, that I wasn’t going to be a brain surgeon or rocket engineer, but that, due to the roll of the dice that resulted in my peculiar brain structure, the writing life was for me whether I wanted it or not. At about that time, I came across an amazing novella by Greg Bear. It was called “Hardfought,” and it changed my world, so far as storytelling was concerned.

In “Hardfought,” humanity is fighting aliens so completely, well,
alien
that we essentially cannot experience reality in the same manner as they do. We (that is, us real live humans today) live in the third generation of star production in our universe. Population III stars, the first stars in the universe, were hydrogen monsters. They are the stars that began baking the heavier elements in their ovenlike hearts. The universe suddenly had the lighter gases. From the exploded nebula formed by these stars were born Population II stars.

These stars made metal.

And heavier elements still.

And so the universal epoch of metalicity dawned—or, as you might like to call that epoch, the Age of Heavy Metal. From the deaths of Population II stars emerged Population I stars such as the Sun, and rocky, element-rich planets such as our own.

Greg Bear’s genius was to extrapolate on the sort of life that might have evolved under the light of a Population II star. And thus were born the Senexi of “Hardfought.”

Very creepy and cool aliens, indeed.

So brilliant was the entire concept, and Bear’s execution of it, that I decided then and there that to become a science fiction writer might be the coolest damn thing I could possibly do as a writer. To attempt to approximate the greatness of a story like “Hardfought” myself would be incredibly
fun.

And, over the years, trying to do so has been exactly that.

So thank you, Greg Bear.

But back to the Senexi. Bear’s aliens communicated by chemical transfer—by, essentially, smell. Life on Earth does the same, of course. In fact, chemical communication is far more common than visual signal or audible yack in nature. Why wouldn’t a sentient alien species, particularly one that evolved in airless space, also make use of it? Seems like a no-brainer to me.

But how to describe such communication? How to make it
plausible
? There’s the rub. And the fun part. You can judge whether or not I succeeded, but I can tell you for sure I had a blast attempting to work out the implications.

So thank you again, Greg Bear.

TECHNOLOGY

Technology progresses because people want it to progress. In my opinion, there is no such thing as “culture”—at least in the sense of some supra-human thoughtweb that transcends the individual. Like DNA in cells, culture comes in one size and one size only: the human being.

This is why freedom is essential for survival and why totalitarian societies are ultimately doomed. It isn’t really a moral question—or, at least, it isn’t
only
a moral question—at all. Freedom is logically necessary for sentience to develop and to prosper. It is, as certain old dead dudes once put it, a self-evident conclusion concerning life.