The potato-shaped asteroid known as Phoenix Prime turned slowly on its long axis. Its interior, hollowed out by lavish use of clean, laser-detonated fusion devices, was little more prepossessing than its rugged surface—none of the parklike spaciousness visualized for asteroid habitats by space-colonization advocates of the last century. It merely provided the basics of habitability for those who labored, in shifts, to prepare the large ice asteroid called Phoenix for the journey that was its destiny.
DiFalco had often reflected that Phoenix was misnamed. The Phoenix of myth had arisen from the ashes. Its namesake would descend to the surface of Mars at interplanetary velocity and impact with the force of a billion average fusion bombs, blasting the planet's original atmosphere into space and triggering the seismic and volcanic cataclysms that would give it a new, dense one. In less than a generation, after the molten surface cooled, oceans would form and microorganisms would be introduced by the humans who would again be able to set foot on the surface. After another generation, a major human presence, and some oxygen-producing plants, would have taken hold and terraforming would enter a new stage. Less than a century after the initial impact, atmospheric oxygen should suffice for the formation of an ozone layer and large-scale soil fertilization would be underway. After another half-century, oxygen pressure would have reached Earth-like levels and simple genetically engineered animals would be released.
So, he reflected, maybe the name wasn't so inappropriate after all. A new, living world would arise from the wreck of the old, lifeless one. It was incomparably the greatest engineering project in human history, conceived in the heady decades after the turn of the century when Communism had fallen and free enterprise seemed to have taken a new lease on life in the young republics of Eurasia and on the high frontier of space.
It was the era into which DiFalco had been born—the full high tide of the Third Industrial Revolution—and he had often wondered, with an uncomprehending inner hurt, what had gone wrong with it.
With a beard and the right clothes, Brigadier General Sergei Konstantinovich Kurganov would have looked like an Eastern Orthodox saint. He was a Russian of the tall, slender sort, with a long, triangular face and a broad brow from which the gray-brown hair was beginning to recede. His English was only slightly accented—indeed, he spoke it better than most victims of American public education. And it was a source of constant embarrassment that he knew far more of the history of DiFalco's own nation than the American himself.
He came aboard Andy J. with full military formality, after which they proceeded to DiFalco's cabin and cracked a bottle from the latter's private stock of Scotch. (The general had once admitted, in strictest confidence, that he had never liked vodka.)
"Well, Eric," Kurganov began, "what is it you have brought me?"
"I can hardly wait to find out," DiFalco replied feelingly. "Believe it or not, what I sent you before our arrival represented all I know. This Varien—he's the only one of them I've actually spoken to except his daughter, and her English isn't as good as his—is playing it very close to his chest. He came over to this ship for part of the trip, and was insufferable about how delightfully quaint it all is, but told me essentially nothing." He shook his head slowly. "I'll never forget the first time he and I left his ship to transfer to our shuttle; he just stepped into the airlock wearing the skintight one-piece outfit they all wear shipboard. I was sure he was mad as a hatter. Then he proceeded to put on gloves and pull this clear plastic hood over his head from a flap behind the neck . . . and opened the airlock! The hood puffed out into a fishbowl helmet, but otherwise the suit still looked like a body stocking. He must have seen the look on my face; he condescendingly explained that they have heavy-duty vac suits for long-term or hazardous-labor EVA, but that this thing suffices for brief jaunts." He shook his head again and took a pull on his Scotch.
"But now," Kurganov prompted after a moment, "he wants to meet with both of us aboard his ship?"
"Right. It's parked in easy shuttle range, behind an asteroid—God knows why. Their stealth technology . . . well, the only reason we detected that ship was because they wanted us to. They can't defeat the Mark One Eyeball, but you know how much use that is in deep space."
"Indeed." It was Kurganov's turn to muse and sip. "Clearly, Varien is being very circumspect about approaching our governments. Thank God for that. It makes me wonder if he may have some inkling of what is happening on Earth." He turned grim, and set his glass down. "I must tell you, Eric, that we just received word that the Social Justice Party in America has held a special mid-term conclave in the wake of the recent Congressional election, and announced its intention of terminating the Project as the first stage in eliminating all private-sector activity in space . . . and, eventually, all activity of any kind. The resources are, it seems, to be turned to 'socially useful' ends."
DiFalco was momentarily without the power of speech. So this is what it's like to go into shock, he thought with an odd calmness.
"'Socially useful'?!" he finally exploded. "Jesus H. Christ! What do they call the powersats that provide eighty percent of Earth's energy without polluting anything? What's going to replace them? And do they plan to go back to strip-mining Earth for the minerals we're now getting from the asteroids?"
"I doubt if the irrationality of their proposal will prevent the victory that the media has decreed for them in the presidential election year after next," Kurganov said dryly. "Any more than will their declaration that the election after that may have to be postponed, and the Constitution suspended, 'until the political process has been cleansed of capitalist and Zionist influence.' There was a time when that statement would have made them unelectable in America. Not now, of course. And Russia will, as always, follow along."
For a long moment, DiFalco sat stunned. When he spoke, his voice held a plaintive tone that no one but Kurganov was ever permitted to hear.
"Sergei, what the hell happened? How did we screw up? It wasn't supposed to be like this, you know. When you people kicked out the Communist regime two generations ago, everybody thought the Totalitarian Era was over!"
"Oh, yes; the collapse of the old Soviet Union should have permanently discredited coercive utopianism. But its Western followers and apologists—who, like the Bourbons, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing—retained their strongholds in academe and the media. And their opponents, for reasons I have never been able to understand, continued to be morally intimidated by them. So now they have, against all expectation, staged a comeback . . . hastened by their masterstroke of adding anti-Semitism to their repertoire." His blue eyes, usually mild, took on a hard glint, and his faint accent roughened. "The perfect selling point in my country, of course. I fear the Russian peasant is eternal in his follies." He sighed with infinite sadness, and took another sip of Scotch. "We wanted freedom so badly—my grandfather led his tank regiment to the defense of the Parliament building during the coup attempt of 1991, when we thought we had finally won it. And now we're willing to throw it all away the instant someone screams 'Death to the Jews!' "
"So," DiFalco asked bitterly, "all we're doing out here is pointless? We're readying a new world for mankind just when mankind begins to stampede back into the Dark Ages?"
"Oh, not altogether pointless, Eric Vincentovich." He smiled gently, and DiFalco snorted; it was a long-accustomed form of needling, and they both followed the well-worn grooves of habit. "Eventually—in generations or centuries—the Gods of the Copybook Headings will come crawling out from under the rubble and try to explain it all again." (Strange, the way Kipling was best remembered in Russia; most people there thought he had been a Russian.) "And if we and our successors are allowed to carry the terraforming process to the point where it becomes irreversible, then a living Mars will be ready when humanity—including recognizable Russians, I like to hope—is ready to come into its inheritance."
"But how can we? We've had to become self-sufficient in some things out here, but we're still dependent on Earth for a lot of what we need to complete the project. If they really want to do a Proxmire on us, they can."
"Who knows?" Kurganov shrugged eloquently. "The civilian management council has asked for an emergency meeting with the two of us to decide what our response should be. Of course, they don't know yet that a rather large new factor has just been added to further complicate matters!" He finished his Scotch, set his glass down with a click, and stood up. "Shall we go, Eric? I'm looking forward to meeting your rather surprising extraterrestrial!"
Hand-shaking was not a custom of Varien's people, but he bowed gracefully when Difalco introduced his commander.
"Welcome aboard my ship, General Sergei."
"Actually," the Russian smiled, "the conventional usage is 'General Kurganov.' "
"Yes, of course." Varien shook his head in annoyance, whether at his own forgetfulness or at the peculiarities of Earthly forms of address was unclear. "So, General Kurganov, Colonel Eri . . . DiFalco informs me that you are the senior government official here in this system's asteroid belt."
"I am," Kurganov explained, "the senior military officer in charge of the Russian-American Mars Project, a joint effort by my government and Colonel DiFalco's to terraform . . . ah, to render habitable our system's fourth planet. Much of the actual work is being carried out by a consortium of private corporations and research institutions, but no civilian governmental structure has ever been set up in the asteroids; Phoenix Prime, our base, is still legally a military installation. So you are correct; I represent the ultimate government authority short of my superiors on our home world—which you must know is the third planet, inasmuch as you know so much else. In particular, you have me at a disadvantage with your knowledge of the English language." He smiled again. "It is, I suppose, too much to hope that you also know Russian."
"I am afraid, General, that puzzling out even one of your languages from a study of your broadcasts was the limit of our capabilities. Let me introduce Miralann hle'Shahya, who was largely responsible for that achievement—and who I am sure would be fascinated to be introduced to 'Russian.' " The man who bowed in response was younger than Varien, a little shorter and plumper, and he did, indeed, look intrigued. DiFalco couldn't avoid the impression that what intrigued him were the service dress uniforms they had donned for the occasion—his own USSF black and Sergei's dark bottle-green, both with the red-and-gold RAMP shoulder patch.
"And my daughter, Aelanni zho'Morna, who is already known to Colonel DiFalco," Varien continued. Kurganov did a small bow of his own, complete with a soft heel-click, and she smiled tentatively. Alright, Sergei, enough with the Old World charm, DiFalco found himself thinking.
"And now," Varien said impatiently, "if you gentlemen will be seated, I will finally satisfy your curiosity." He indicated a semicircle of chairs around a slightly raised platform on one side of the spacious chamber. (At least it seemed outrageously spacious to DiFalco, considering that they were aboard a space vessel.)
"I will be most interested," Kurganov said as he took a seat. He had the look of a man trying to delicately impart a painful and embarrassing piece of news. "You see, Varien, I must tell you that from our standpoint you are, ah . . . impossible."
"So I have been told." Loftily: "I have chosen not to take it personally."
DiFalco squirmed uncomfortably in the chair that insisted on trying to conform itself to the contours of his butt. "Look, Varien, it goes beyond the fact that you people are human, which you've admitted is a stumper—one of our science fiction writers once compared the chances of the same species evolving on two planets to the chances of one locksmith making a lock while another locksmith working independently on another planet makes a key that fits it, and I imagine he was understating the improbability by several orders of magnitude. But aside from that, our scientists have decided that we're the only technological civilization—and probably the only tool-makers—in the history of the galaxy."
"Whatever led them to this extraordinary conclusion?" Varien was frankly curious.
"Well . . . for one thing, we've never been visited by anybody else."
"But you have. Now. By me." Varien spread his hands in a gesture of bogus self-deprecation. "Someone had to be the first, after all."
"I think," Kurganov put in, "that Colonel DiFalco is referring to Fermi's Paradox: the fact that our planet has never been colonized during all the hundreds of millions of years it has existed as a life-bearing world—which seems inexplicable if civilizations are as numerous as they ought to be if life is a normal occurrence in a galaxy of four hundred billion suns."
"But," Varien said with an air of fully stretched patience, "the same objection applies: there has to be a first. Even if no star-travelling race has existed heretofore, the fact dosen't logically preclude the possibility of one or more now. And your astronomers must be aware that your sun, like ours, is an exceptionally old star of its generation—which is the first stellar generation to have formed from a medium enriched with heavy elements by numerous supernovae. Planets suitable for life are very common, and in the normal course of events they will give birth to it; but relatively few are old enough to have done so to date. Highly-evolved, sentient life is a recent galactic phenomenon."
"Okay," DiFalco resumed doggedly, "so there was nobody around to colonize Earth during the Precambrian. But what about the total failure of our SETI programs?" Seeing Varien's blank look, he amplified. "Search for extraterrestrial intelligence. For almost a century, off and on, we've been 'listening' to the stars for broadcasts in the radio wavelengths, and the result has been consistent: zilch point zip!"
For the first time in their acquaintance, Varien's jaw fell. I've finally managed to astonish him, DiFalco thought, just before the older man almost doubled over in his efforts to contain the loud belly laugh that was an impossible gaucherie in his culture. Miralann was undergoing similar contortions, and Aelanni was trying to look sternly disapproving of the other two while sputtering just a bit herself.
"Radio broadcasts?!" Varien gasped when he had gotten his breath. "Why should you have detected radio broadcasts, of all things?" He finally recovered his composure and explained in his usual condescending way. "Use of radio transmissions for large-scale, long-range communications is a transitional phase in the history of technology, rather like fission power. We've been communicating by neutrino pulse for centuries. Radio broadcasts! Why didn't you watch the stars for smoke signals while you were about it?" DiFalco and Kurganov looked crestfallen. "You can be sure that we haven't been generating anything at Lir . . . Alpha Centauri that you could have detected."
Kurganov pounced. "You're from Alpha Centauri, then?"
"No, we're merely based there. Our home sun is called Tareil. You have no name for it—understandably, as it is somewhat less luminous than your sun and is roughly a thousand of your light-years away."
"You've come a thousand light-years?" DiFalco asked faintly, thoughts of suspended animation and Einsteinian time dilation running through his head.
"Not in the sense you mean, Colonel. Perhaps I'd better explain." He spoke a command in his own language, and a holographic display appeared over the raised platform. To his two guests, it suggested a stylized molecular diagram with golden atoms linked by pale-blue lines.
"Is your civilization aware of the true nature of gravity, General?" Varien asked with seeming irrelevance.
"Well," Kurganov spoke hesitantly, "in the present generation, Hartung's theory has reconciled Newton and Einstein . . . two of our greatest physicists. The first, three and a half centuries ago, postulated that gravity was a force that causes material objects to attract each other. The second, in the last century, described gravity as a curvature of space in the presence of large masses." Varien nodded repeatedly, as if approving of the orthodoxy with which Earth's knowledge had progressed. "Most recently," the Russian continued, "Hartung has demonstrated that both were right: a force inherent in matter and carried by massless subatomic particles—and hence instantaneous in its propagation—is what causes the Einsteinian curvature of spacetime."
"Precisely! But I gather you have not yet carried the concept of curved space to its ultimate conclusion: the fact that a curve implies a circle, and that given the right conditions—involving a sufficient number of large masses, such as exist in the galactic spiral arms—space curves back upon itself in patterns caused by the interrelationships of those masses. Wherever the pattern is interrupted by a stellar mass, the local curvature of space causes a break in the pattern, which we call a 'displacement point' because of an effect which I discovered when I was considerably younger." He indicated the hologram. "This depicts, in very crude terms, the situation in our galactic neighborhood. The gold lights are stars that have one or more displacement points associated with them. The blue lines indicate the relationship between each such point and the next such break in the pattern. This all becomes of practical interest with the discovery of how to artificially simulate gravity. You see, if a ship heads into a displacement point at a heading identical to the bearing of the imaginary line, as plotted in realspace, to the next displacement point—normally, nothing happens. But if the ship generates an artificial gravity 'pulse' which warps space still further at the displacement point, then it experiences an instantaneous transition to the next displacement point, in the vicinity of another star."
"Then," DiFalco breathed, "you're saying you can travel faster than light?"
"Of course not," Varien snapped. "For a material object to exceed the velocity of light is not merely impossible . . . it is a mathematical absurdity! What I am describing is, to repeat myself, an instantaneous transposition without crossing the intervening realspace distance, possible only at certain locations determined by the gravitational patterns—the 'shape,' if you will—of space. So, for example, it is possible to transit from Tareil"—he aimed a wandlike instrument at one of the golden star-symbols, from which four of the blue bands radiated, and a bright white dot appeared in mid-air beside it—"to this star system." The cursor, as DiFalco decided to think of it, flashed along one of the blue light-bridges to another sun. "One then proceeds via normal space to another of the second star's displacement points, and transits to this star . . . and then this one . . . and finally to the one you know as Alpha Centauri." He held the cursor steady at the indicated star.
Kurganov leaned forward raptly. "So you came a thousand light-years in only the time it took to travel between the various displacement points in these star systems. But," he continued, perplexed, "Alpha Centauri appears to be a cul-de-sac; where is the further displacement connection that enabled you to come to this system?"
"Well," Varien spoke apologetically, "I'm afraid there isn't any." He raised a forestalling hand as the Russian and the American both tried to talk at once. "As I have indicated, displacement points only occur under rare conditions; all of those we know of are at least a hundred light-years apart, usually much more. So the vast majority of stars are without them. Including yours."
"So," DiFalco spoke very slowly and deliberately, "how did you come here?"
"Ah, well, that's another story, which will also provide the answer to the related question of why I came here. Attend, please.
"As I mentioned, some time ago I discovered the secret of interstellar travel via displacement points. Subsequently, my planet—called Raehan, by the way—began exploring rapidly." A quick sentence in his tongue, and arrowlike lights moved illustratively from Tareil along three of the four spokes of blue light extending from it, through star after golden star. "Too rapidly, in fact. Permit me a digression on the history of Raehan.
"Five of your centuries ago, Raehan was almost as advanced as it is now, following two centuries of explosive technological development accompanied by constantly escalating war and social disintegration. At that point, what was left of our people came collectively and spontaneously to the conclusion that change in general must be halted to allow civilization to recover and unify. Over the centuries, there was much refinement but virtually no innovation. Finally, in my parents' time, the strictures began to give way; the chance discovery of artificial gravity set unstoppable changes in motion. I imagine our exuberant and headlong exploration through one displacement point after another, without pausing to consolidate, was partly a release of impulses too long pent up. Also, we could imagine no danger in the stars—we were firmly convinced, on the basis of our own history, that any civilization advanced enough to constitute a potential threat must surely have given up military aggression in order to survive.
"We were wrong."
He spoke a command, jarringly harsh for the language of Raehan, and the star-diagram vanished, to be replaced by something that brought the two Earthmen to their feet in horror.
"That," Varien stated somberly, "is a life-sized image of a Korvaasha. One of our exploration ships blundered into an outpost of their empire . . . an empire that has been slowly expanding for more centuries or millennia than we know, dedicated to imposing its own kind of unity on all the accessible galaxy. It is expansionism that has nothing to do with greed or glory, ambition or anger—rather, it has taken on a dour and leaden life of its own, and continues long after it has ceased to be profitable or even practical. Dismiss any thought of decadent overlords living in luxury on the labor of slaves. In fact, they've impoverished themselves to maintain a centralized state over a range whose frontiers take years of travel to reach even through the displacement points. Their empire is nothing more than a vast logistics base, a means that has become an end."
DiFalco, like Kurganov, couldn't tear his eyes from the startlingly lifelike hologram. It wasn't precisely ugly, for ugliness implies deviation from an accepted and recognizable standard. Rather, there was a fundamental and indefinable wrongness about the thick two-and-a-half-meter image.
"I assure you that you're seeing the species at its best—that is, at its most natural. This is a non-specialized leader type. The lower orders are bionically enhanced to make them efficient modular units of the runaway machine that is Korvaash civilization, and no resources are wasted on disguising the artificialities." Varien restored the star-diagram, to DiFalco's relief.
"When they captured our scout ship, they captured our complete body of astrogational data—the concept of computer security was, of course, foreign to us. It was a windfall for them: all those displacement points we had already surveyed, plus our highly advanced civilization to be welded into the machine. Their unvarying rule mandates planetary extermination as the penalty for attacking or successfully rebelling against the Empire, but not for merely encountering it; we're earmarked for enslavement instead." Varien actually smiled. "The odd thing is that they're fair-minded by their own lights. Unfortunately, by our standards their lights are few and dim."
Baleful red flares moved along one of the blue displacement-chains, branching off onto others as they made their cancerous way toward Tareil.
"Their technology evidently stopped developing as soon as they discovered the secret of displacement points, for it is less sophisticated than ours—though more so than its apparent crudity would suggest. And the defender of a displacement point enjoys the advantage of knowing where the attacker must emerge, and at what heading. These factors have enabled us to delay their advance, even though we had to improvise defense forces after five centuries of peace. But their resources are effectively limitless, and their orientation military to the last detail of their lives. The result is not in doubt. We cannot stop them."
For a long moment, they all sat in funereal silence. Then DiFalco finally decided what had been bothering him about the display.
"Hey," he spoke suddenly. "All these little lights—your white ones and the red Korvaasha ones—haven't come anywhere near that route you pointed out earlier, the one that leads from Tareil to Alpha Centauri. What's the matter with those displacement points?"
"The matter with them, Colonel, is that no one—Raehaniv or Korvaasha—knows about them. Except, of course, myself and my friends. Again, perhaps I'd better explain.
"You'll remember that I invented the technique of displacement point travel. I also pioneered other applications of artificial gravity, although I hadn't originated it. Our economy is what I believe you would call liberal-capitalist: society has no objection to vast personal wealth as long as it is acquired by the rules, particularly the rules against technological innovation—but this latter restriction, as I mentioned, had been breaking down even before I came on the scene. To be brief, I am what you would call a multibillionaire several times over. Private explorers in my employ discovered Tareil's fourth displacement point. I decided to investigate the systems beyond—the 'Lirauva Chain' is the term we use—for potential opportunities before making it public. I established a base on a habitable planet of Lirauva . . . excuse me, Alpha Centauri. There, we became aware of your civilization. It was in order to come here and study you that I invented a new interstellar drive, which evades the light-speed barrier without recourse to displacement points."
"So you can travel faster than light!" DiFalco declared triumphantly.
"No, no, no! What is involved is a series of very short instantaneous displacements, which can be repeated millions of times a second, allowing our most efficient ship to date to transit from Alpha Centauri to this system in just over six of your days. Most of our ships take five times that."
DiFalco looked mulish. "Well if that's not travelling faster than light, I'd like to know what is!"
Varien visibly controlled himself. "If I may continue," he said frostily, "I will come to the purpose of my presence here. You see, my discovery of the new drive coincided with the beginning of the war . . . no, let us be honest: the annexation. I have special sources of information which enabled me to see, more clearly than most of my compatriots, that we were doomed. So instead of turning my secrets over to the Raehaniv government, I faked my own death and came here." He paused portentiously. "I am here to offer your governments all our scientific knowledge, the entire panoply of our technology—to offer you, in fact, the stars—in exchange for your help!"
"Our help?" and "Our governments?" came, faintly and simultaneously, from Kurganov and DiFalco respectively.
"Yes! Remember, the Korvaasha know nothing of Tareil's fourth displacement point. Once they are settled into their occupation of Raehan, a liberating fleet could enter the system from an entirely unexpected direction—an unheard-of occurrence and a shock to their hidebound professionalism! And once we have captured some of their astrogational data, the new drive—which I have also kept secret, lest it fall into Korvaasha hands—can be used effectively to counterattack!" His enthusiasm suddenly waned. "Used effectively, that is, by you. The Raehaniv have been strangers to war for centuries too long; our new military barely qualifies as a joke. I can show you how to build weapons and equipment, and provide you with those components your technological base cannot yet manufacture, but your people have abilities mine have lost. It is for these that we are prepared to pay you very well indeed. Due to our ignorance of the nuances of your politics, I have approached you first, rather than announcing our presence directly and publicly to your home world." He looked proud of himself for this uncharacteristic subtlety; Aelanni's expression suggested that she might have had something to do with it.
The Russian and the American looked at each other, neither trusting himself to speak.
"Varien," Kurganov finally said, carefully, "we must have time to consider this. We and certain of our colleagues are already scheduled to meet on Phoenix Prime in connection with . . . political developments on Earth, our home world. I believe your proposal will be very relevant in this context."
"Of course, General."