Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire (2 page)

Shibura took it and carefully flattened the message against the sand before him. The calligraphy was hurried and inexact. Here and there the ink was smeared. Shibura noted these facets before reading it; often one could learn more from them than from the literal contents. He prepared himself for an unsettling point.

Slowly, he read. His thumbs bit into the parchment and crinkled it. His breath made a dry rasping sound. After perfunctory salutations and wishes of the day, the message was laconic:

They are coming. Prepare.

The great sphere rode through Jumpspace, unseen and unknown.

Its air was stale. The bridge was dark; hooded consoles made pools of light where men sat calculating, measuring, checking. The Captain stood with hands clenched behind him as the calculation proceeded. There were men sealed within the walls and wired forever into the bowels of the computers; the Captain did not think of these. He simply waited in the great drifting silence between stars, beyond real space and the place of men.

Silvery chimes rang down thin, padded corridors, sounding the approach of Jump. The bridge lay in dull red light. Men moved purposefully about it but everyone knew they were powerless to control what was coming.

Justly so. Converting a ship into tachyons in a nanosecond of realspace time is an inconceivably complex process. Men devised it, but they could never control the Jump without the impersonal faultless coordination of microelectronics.

A few earnest, careful men moved quietly about the bridge as they prepared to flip over into realspace. In the same way that a fundamental symmetry provided that the proton had a twin particle with opposite charge, helicity and spin—the anti-proton—there was an opposite state for each real particle, the tachyon.

The speed of light,
c
, is an upper limit to all velocities in the universe to which man was born; in the tachyon universe
c
is a lower limit. To men, a particle with zero kinetic energy sits still; it has no velocity. A tachyon with no energy is a mirror image—it moves with infinite velocity. As its energy increases it slows, relative to us, until at infinite energy it travels with velocity
c
.

As long as man remained in his half of the universe, he could not exceed
c
. Thus he learned to leave it.

By converting a particle into its tachyon state, allowing it to move with a nearly infinite velocity and then shifting it back to realspace, one effectively produces faster-than-light travel. In theory the process was obvious. It was Okawa who found the practical answer, some decades after the establishment of Old Nippon's hegemony. The Captain had often wondered why the Jumpdrive did not bear his name. Perhaps Okawa was born of impure strains. Perhaps he was an unfavored one, though passing clever.

A slightly audible count came through the padded rooms of the starship. Silvery chimes echoed, and the Captain closed his eyes at the last moment. A bright arc flashed beyond his eyelids, so he could see the blood vessels as he heard the dark, whispering sound of the void. A pit opened beneath him, he was falling—

Suddenly they wrenched from tachyon space and back into the real universe. There was really no difference between the two; each mirrored the physical laws of the other. There were stars and planets in tachyon space, surely—but no man had ever stopped to explore them. No one knew if a real spaceship transferred into tachyons could be maintained in the presence of dense tachyon matter. The physicists said it was doubtful, and no one cared to test the point.

The ship trembled slightly—or perhaps it was only his own reaction—and the Captain turned to the large screen of the foredeck. There was the F8 star, burning hot and yellow.

"A minute, Cap'n," the Executive Officer said. "Looks like we blew a few on that last one."

"What?"

"The ferrite banks. A lot of them failed."

"The Paralixlinnes, you mean," the Captain said precisely.

"Right. Some are showing flashover effects, too."

The Captain frowned. "I am afraid this might put us over the margin."

"What?"

The Captain grimaced at this insolence. "We may not have enough ferrite memory to make the transition back into Jump. I want a detailed report, if you please."

"Oh." The Executive Officer nodded and turned slightly away, fumbling at his fly. "You think it's that bad?" As he spoke he began urinating into the porous Organiform flooring. "I mean, it could trap us here?"

The Captain stepped away and clasped his hands behind his back. "Well, uh, yes, it might." He knew this public passing of water was acceptable practice on some worlds, the product of crowding and scarcity. He knew it was not supposed to be a sign of contempt. But something in the Executive Officer's manner made him think otherwise. Certainly actions like this were forbidden on his own home world . . .

"What happens if we try it without getting more ferrites?" the Executive Officer said, looking back over his shoulder. His urine spattered on the Organiform and quickly disappeared. Many spots in the ship had such floors and walls; in the long run it was the only way to ensure cleanliness. Dust, liquid, odd bits of paper—all were absorbed and gradually bled into the fuel reserve, to be chewed apart in incandescent fusion torches and converted into thrust.

"The ship's mass will not trigger coherently."

"So?"

A political appointee, the Captain guessed. "We would emerge into tachyon space with each particle traveling at a different velocity."

"Ah, I remember." The man finished and zipped his fly. "Tear ourselves apart. Grind us to atoms."

"Uh, correct."

The Executive Officer had made no attempt to hide himself from view while urinating. The Captain wondered whether the man had any convention of privacy at all. Did he defecate in public? It seemed impossible, but—

"Okay, I'll get that report. Might take a while." The man did not bother to salute.

"See that it doesn't," the Captain said sharply and returned his attention to the phosphor screen. He expanded scale a hundredfold and found the banded gas giant planet. It was enormous, he knew, and radiated strongly in the infrared. At the very center of it, according to theory, hydrogen atoms collided and stuck, fusing together and kindling weak fire. But this vast giant of a world was not their aim. There, not far from the methane-orange limb of the planet, gleamed a blue-white moon: Seascape. He smiled.

Shibura sat, feeling the exquisite rough texture of the floor mat on his ankles and yet at the same time not feeling it at all. There was no sound, and all was sound. He was listening and shimmering in the sweet air of incense, relishing the sticky pull of damp robe on his flesh.

"Thus we proceed to fullness," finished the Firstpriest. "Quit of our tasks. Gathered once more into the lap of sunlight."

Shibura studied the old man's weathered brown face, receptive. The morning had begun with sainted rituals among the crowds of Priestfellows and Priestsisters. As the quiet rhythm of the day wore on, each was assigned a task of convergence, expressed gratitude, rose and departed. The damp of the suntide gradually seeped into the high vaulted room. The cold stone walls became clammy at first and then warmed, adding their own moist breath to the layered smoke of incense. From the rear of the great hall the singing reeds brought a clear, cutting edge of sound that aided the mind to become fixed.

"So we come to the end. All roles are suited but one." The Firstpriest paused and looked into Shibura's eyes. "There is left the place of him who stands on the right hand."

Shibura felt a momentary jolt of surprise. Then he extended his hearing and sensing behind and around him. True; he had not noticed the fact, but the other Priestfellows were gone. Only he remained. He felt a swell of elation. That implied—

"It passes to you as it once came to me," the Firstpriest said. From beneath the folds of his robes he produced a copper talisman and handed it to Shibura. It was deceptively heavy. Shibura tucked it into his side pouch and straightened the cloth. He knew no reply was necessary.

The ripples of excitement and surprise smoothed and vanished. The Firstpriest began the ritual passes Shibura had heard described but never seen. The old man's hands slipped through the torchlight, now visible, now unseen. Shibura entered into a state of no definition, no thought, no method. To put aside the thousand things and, in stillness, retain yourself. So the motions led and defined him. And inside, the soft tinkling chuckle of joy.

After a time they rose and moved from the great hall. They did not use the usual passage of exit. Instead, they walked slowly through the Organic Portal, as convention required. Shibura had been here only once before, when he was learning the intricate byways of the temple. Their sandals made echoing clicks in the great hall, but when they stepped into the Portal there came a sudden quiet, for they now walked on a firm softness of green. The Portal was a long, perfectly round passage that muffled all sound. It had no noticeable weave or texture, save the uncountable small pores. There were no torches, but the cushioned walls seemed to provide light. It was a hushed and holy place. It was the enduring gift of the Starcrossers.

The two men stopped midway. Near the floor on a small yellow patch was the place of dedication.

Shibura had learned some fragments of the Starcrossers' written language, but he could not decipher all that the patch contained. No one could. He and the Firstpriest squatted together for a long moment and regarded the yellowed print.

ORGANIFORM.
47296A index 327. Absorbent multilayer.

They passed out of the Portal and through the temple corridor. The Firstpriest began to unfold his memories of the last Starcrosser visit. There were preparations, always extensive and complex. The citizens of the city had to be prepared, and the Priestfellows themselves would have to see to their own personal states of mind as the event approached.

"I received word from the Farseer only this morning. They had been studying the motion of the central band in Brutus, but of course they set aside the usual five time spaces for observation of the Great Bear. That is the ordained place from which the Starcrossers speak."

"But it is not time," Shibura said. "We expected the audience in my third decade."

"I know. I never expected to see another Starcrossing. The last came when I was a boy—almost too young to hold the talisman you now carry. The Firstpriest of that time assured me I would pass through the lens—die—before the Captain came again."

"Why, then?"

"We must remember our place. The Captain is forever Crossing and his path is not so simple that we can understand."

"The men of the Farseer could not be mistaken? They
did
see the lights?"

Shibura knew a few of those patient watchers of the sky. He did not understand the great tube they seemed to worship and saw no true interest in what they did. The stars were but points of light and told nothing. Only the sun and Brutus held any interest for a man of religion, for they alone revealed their structure. The stars were great candles and might possibly say much, but they were too far away. Only through the Crossing did contact with the mightier places come, and then solely in the form of the Captain and his fellows. Nonetheless, only with the Farseer could the dancing of lights be seen and preparations made for the coming of the Captain.

"I have every trust in them. The Farseer was built in the far past, at the command of the Captain. The role of the Farseer is ordained and it is not for a Firstpriest or Priestfellow to question the tenders of the Farseer." The old man's head bobbed in the gesture of instruction. He smiled to show that his words carried no sharp edge and were meant only for reminding. Between the two men there had come a feeling of closeness. The Firstpriest's joy that he would again see a Crossing conveyed itself to Shibura and lightened his step.

After a pause Shibura said, "Was there any message in the dancing light?"

"The tenders of the Farseer said only that it was the ritual message. They come. They are now within the grip of our sun and we must be ready."

Shibura padded ahead and put his weight against the great door of the temple. They passed out into sunlight. Going down the steps, the bare baked stone face of the temple at their backs, the murmur of life swelled up around them. The great square before them was host to hundreds of people. Knots of friends drifted past amid the flicking echoes of hundreds of sandals.

The shops which lined the tiled walkways were small and displayed their wares with abandon, letting robes spill from their holders; beads and books and spices competed for the same spot in a display case. The two men passed through the crowd. Shibura relished the grainy feel of this uncomplicated existence: talking, laughing, some barterers greeting the price of items with a feigned sharp bark of disbelief.

The sun lay on the horizon, burning a hole in heaven. A few men and women clad in religious raiments spoke of their missions in life, advising of the latest revelation. Shibura bore them no malice, for they were simple people who followed their own blind vision.

Five of the women formed a circle and chanted:

I am

Not great or small

But only

Part of All.

Shibura smiled to himself. It was comforting to know that the purpose of their world was writ large even in the minds of the most common. These people were, of course, no less than he. They formed the base of the great pyramid at whose peak were not priests or merchants or the men of government, but a holy article; the Paralixlinnes. Shibura had learned much from those infinitely detailed and faceted cubes. As objects of meditation they were supreme; how fitting that they played the crowning role even in the vast universe of the Starcrosser.

The Firstpriest made a gesture and they turned down a bumpy avenue of black cobblestone. Rice bins towered over them, their great funnels pointing downward to the rude shop where the grains were sold. The tubs carried indecipherable scrawls in red denoting the strains.