Splinter Faction, page 23
Silence stretched. I glanced at Linulla, who gave me a rattling Conoku shrug. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, Van, so don’t look at me.”
I said nothing. If I understood even a little about how Matterforge perceived space and time—and trust me, it would be only a little—it should be apparent to it what I was talking about, even if Linulla didn’t get it. We were talking about stars disappearing, for cryin’ out loud. Something on that scale should be “forest” enough that it wouldn’t matter if Matterforge couldn’t make out the individual “trees.”
That was still, in the end, an assumption on my part, of course, and it was massive. But I wasn’t sure where else I could turn for answers. Or answers I wasn’t going to have to wait months, possibly even years for.
The silence stretched on. After a full minute, I was starting to think that Matterforge had terminated or otherwise left the channel. I was about to sigh and give up when the mysterious being abruptly spoke up.
“I can discern nothing similar to what you describe, Van Tudor.”
I stared at the image of Struve 2398 and its looping prominences. “Nothing? We’re talking about stars simply disappearing, Matterforge. How could you possibly not be able to see that?”
“I have no explanation for you. From my perspective, the events you describe do not occur.”
I turned to Perry. “Give Matterforge all the data we’ve got on those missing stars.”
“Okay. Uh, is Matterforge USB-compatible, or what? How should I do this? Can I just plug into that terminal and upload stuff to it?”
“I haven’t ever tried to upload data to Matterforge,” Linulla replied. “It’s just never come up.”
Perry hopped over to the terminal. “Okay then. Matterforge, I’m going to try transmitting a star chart and some associated data to you. I’m not sure about format and transmission rates and such, so—hell, this may all just be nonsense to you. But here goes.”
Perry interfaced with the terminal, uploaded the data as though it was a standard transfer using standard protocols, then disconnected. He turned to Linulla and me. “Okay, done.”
Again, silence. Again, we waited.
“Damn, I hope I didn’t break Matterforge,” Perry finally said.
I glanced at him. “I think it’ll take more than a wonky data transfer to break an immortal being who calls the surface of a star home—”
“I have no explanation for this phenomenon,” Matterforge announced.
I frowned at the terminal. “I’m assuming you don’t mean you can’t understand what Perry just sent you.”
“I understand the information. But I have no explanation for it, nor can I perceive the disappearance of the celestial bodies in question. They simply cease to exist, with no cause, and no aftereffects or consequences that I can perceive.”
“You mean that, from your perspective, those stars are there and then they’re just, what, gone? They just wink out of existence?” I asked.
“To wink out implies a moment when the star vanishes from existence. From your limited perspective, you would presumably experience this as the star fading into non-existence over the course of a finite period of time. I do not perceive that. I can perceive the stars in question, and then I cannot perceive them. There is no corresponding passage of time between existence and non-existence.”
I scratched my head. “How is that possible?”
“As I said, Van Tudor, I have no explanation.”
“Well, shit. Okay, what about the no-consequences thing? The disappearance of these stars has no impacts whatsoever? The galaxy and everything in it just keeps chugging along as though nothing has happened?”
“No. That is never the case. The future is a continuum of possible cause-and-effect relationships. Events, as they occur, are themselves instances of cause-and-effect, and they render parts of the continuum more or less likely to subsequently occur. This is, of course, a dramatic oversimplification, but it should accommodate your constrained, linear experience of space-time.”
“Well, don’t I feel special now,” Perry said.
I ignored him and focused on the terminal. “What you’re saying is that you can’t discern these stars disappearing. That one instant they’re there, and the next they’re gone. You don’t actually see them vanish. And despite all that, the disappearance of these stars will have no significant impact on the future, at least insofar as you can see it.”
“That is a substantially correct summary of the situation, yes,” Matterforge replied.
“And there’s nothing else you can say about this. You have no other insights or observations about it.”
“Nothing of substance, no.”
“Doesn’t that bother you, Matterforge?” Linulla asked. “That there’s something causing stars in one region of the Milky Way Galaxy to just vanish, but you don’t, or maybe even can’t see what that something is? Or the effects it will have on the future?”
“It is not a case of it concerning me. Rather, it puzzles me, and will warrant a deeper investigation, clearly.”
I nodded. “Well, that’s what we’re doing. We’ve undertaken some investigation to see if we can figure out what’s going on. Does this mean you’re going to do the same?”
“To the extent that I am able, yes. It is the logical manner in which to proceed.”
“Okay. And, do you have any idea how long that will take?”
“Again, I acknowledge your constrained ability to perceive space-time, which is the reason for your question. I cannot give you an answer that would neatly conform to your perception of time, so the best answer I can give you is no, I have no answer for you.”
“Based on past experience, Van, Matterforge may have an answer for you sometime in the next few seconds, or in the next several years. It once abruptly answered a question I’d forgotten I’d even asked it something like five years before.”
I tensed at that. It seemed there were no answers forthcoming today, only more questions.
“Well, thank you for your time, Matterforge,” I said, then grimaced a little. Thanking this being for its time just felt odd, since it seemed to have an infinite supply of it and experienced it wholly differently from me anyway. “If you do learn anything about the missing stars, what caused them to go missing, anything at all, please let me know through Linulla.”
“I will do so.”
And, just like that, we were done. We turned and left the lonely little chamber containing Matterforge’s terminal and headed back to the surface of Starsmith and the waiting Frankie.
On the way, though, Linulla stopped in a steamy grotto. “Van, I can’t let you leave without at least taking a stab at asking you about all of this.” His eyestalks were both swiveled toward me, suggesting I had his undivided attention. It was otherwise challenging to read anything in the black, literally beady eyes of a Conoku. All their emotions were in their voice and crustacean body language, at least as far as I could tell. Conoku really got a lot of mileage out of claw positions and burbles, but not their eyes.
“You essentially know what I know, Linulla,” I said. It was yet another lie, of course, but if I wasn’t prepared to reveal things to my own wife or my crew, I wasn’t likely to pull back the curtain for Linulla, either. All I could tell was that he kept his eyestalks pointed at me. It was, I assume, an appraising stare.
“I don’t quite believe you,” he finally said. “But this is far from the first time someone has come here with secrets and left with them unshared. In fact, I sincerely doubt it’s the first time for you to do that.”
“I’m sorry, Linulla, there’s really nothing more I can say.” I glanced at Perry. “We have suspicions, I guess, and maybe some conjectures, but that’s about it.”
“Suspicions and conjectures about disappearing stars? Yes, well, I’m sure I’d have suspicions and conjectures about something like that myself.”
I smiled. “Linulla, look, as soon as we learn anything of substance—”
“It’s fine, Van. We’ve known one another a long time. I respect and trust your judgment. And you know that I’m here, ready to help however I can.”
My smile widened, got a little warmer. “I know you are, Linulla. Thank you.”
“All of that said, though, you seem surprisingly unfazed by the real revelation here today,” he said.
My smile faltered, and I cocked my head at him. “The real revelation? Did I miss something?”
“Apparently so. Van, are you not struck by how very remarkable, even stunning it is that you apparently are aware of something that Matterforge isn’t?”
I stared back at him. Holy shit. That was true, wasn’t it? But how was that possible? How could a being that could see through both space and time in some fashion be unaware of anything? Okay, I didn’t expect Matterforge to know what I got Torina for her last birthday, or Abel’s score on the firing range the last time he qualified with his sidearm. Those kinds of details were very much in the realm of the “trees” in that “forest” that the enigmatic alien couldn’t readily discern. But disappearing stars?
How could Matterforge not be aware of something like that?
For that matter, it seemed that Matterforge hadn’t even realized those stars had gone missing until we asked about it, and Perry transmitted the data describing it. Matterforge seemed blind to the whole situation. But how was that possible? How could we see it, know about it, and Matterforge couldn’t and didn’t?
Just what in the hell was going on here?
21
Perry and I mused over the situation on the return trip to Earth, but really, neither of us knew anything more than we had coming here, so the musing didn’t get very far. After that, a pensive silence settled over the Frankie, me brooding over all of it, really. The things we knew, and more importantly, the things we didn’t. The list of the latter was far, far longer than the former. Perry, for his part, did what beings with his sort of prodigious computational capacity did to pass the time. I don’t know, solving quadratic equations, calculating precise orbital trajectories, down to the meter, or—
Hell, this was Perry. He was probably rerunning Citizen Kane, The Rocky Horror Picture Show or old episodes of Law and Order for himself. Maybe all of them at once.
My own thoughts were pulled inexorably back to Matterforge. Over the years, I’d come to assume the strange being was effectively omniscient. It could seemingly see anywhere in space-time, or maybe even live and experience anywhere in space time, with the usual proviso regarding forests and trees. Still, I just assumed all of the information was still there, even if Matterforge couldn’t tease out the specifics. The mental model I used for myself was a crowd at a rock concert. In my case, it was specifically the 1994 “Pulse” concert series by Pink Floyd, because those concerts had been attended by massive crowds awash with color and sound and light. And a big flying pig, I think, but then again, it was Pink Floyd.
Anyway, in this mental model of how Matterforge might perceive space-time, the more I concentrated on David Gilmour, say, the less I saw of the surrounding crowd, stadium, and overall context to the concert. But the more I pulled back to see all that, the more Gilmour became a tiny, unrecognizable figure on a distant stage.
It wasn’t a perfect analogy, I’m sure, but the point was that the information was always there, even if I wasn’t currently seeing it. Just because I focused on Gilmour, it didn’t mean the rest of the band, the crowd, the venue or the world outside the venue had ceased to exist. But Matterforge seemed to be saying that’s exactly what was happening with those missing stars. The information about what had happened to them simply didn’t exist. It would be like looking away from Gilmour, back at the crowd, and finding that ninety percent of them simply weren’t there anymore. Whether they had left, been teleported, or been raptured away, where they stood, I didn’t know.
All I knew was that they’d been there, and then they weren’t.
How could a being like Matterforge be blind like that? Was it some natural phenomenon and in some weird, cryptic way, Matterforge simply couldn’t be aware of it because that was the fundamental nature of said phenomenon? Or was it lying? I’d never before considered if Matterforge even could lie. But I’d certainly done enough lying about this whole affair, for what I genuinely believed were very good reasons. Could Matterforge be doing the same thing?
Of course, there was another possibility—a truly disturbing one. Perhaps something or someone had the means of blinding Matterforge to what was going on. That implied not only intent, but holy shit, it meant that out there was some power, some agent, that could blinker Matterforge, preventing it from being able to even discern parts of space-time. Add that to the things Alexander Hawkes had shared, and yeah, okay, that was truly terrifying.
“Van, you okay?”
I blinked and turned to Perry. “Sorry, what?”
“You’ve been sitting there, totally zoned out, for nearly an hour. Gotta admit, I sometimes wonder what goes on in that beautiful noggin of yours to pass that kind of time.”
I stared for a beat or two, then laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Perry asked.
I just shook my head. “Oh, nothing. Anyway, an hour?” I checked the flight controls. “Well, holy shit, we’re already almost at our twist point!”
“Uh, yeah. The rest of the universe keeps ticking along even if you’re off in your own little world.”
I shot him another searching glance. That was twice Perry had alluded to what was actually going on in my mind. It was probably just coincidental, but maybe he was somehow a little psychic, or maybe we just spent way too much time together. Like Linulla, though, you can’t really tell me much about the motives of a mechanical bird just by looking at it. Perry’s happy face, sad face, angry face, and for that matter, all of his other faces were pretty much one in the same. Beak open, beak closed, eyes flashing, Perry.
He was, in his own way, eternal.
I finally gave a shrug of defeat. “Just chewing on all this,” I said, looked at the flight controls again, then turned back to Perry. “Bird, what do you think about the possibility that Matterforge knew nothing about our disappearing stars because something was preventing it from knowing about it?”
“Well, if you mean is there some subtle quality or quirk of space-time that prevents it from knowing this stuff, I’d say sure, that’s a possibility. But that’s not what you mean, is it?”
“No, it’s not. I mean something with intent. Something sapient.”
“Something that could pull the wool over the all-space-time-seeing eyes of a thing like Matterforge? Yikes.”
“Yikes? That’s it? That’s all that you have to say about it?”
“What are you expecting, Van? Oh no, it’s the end, we’re going to die? No? Okay, how about, eh, whatever, no biggie?”
“Yes, fine, I get it, Perry. Yikes it is.”
“Kind of an all-purpose word, yikes,” he said. “You find a bowl of leftover casserole you forgot about in the back of the fridge, and there’s enough mold on it to form a fuzzy nativity scene? Yikes. Realize that something out there is powerful enough to slip a blindfold onto an inscrutable, immensely powerful star-dwelling entity without it realizing? Yeah, that’s a yikes, too.”
“Kind of a generous use of the word, isn’t it, to describe those two things?”
“Would you prefer to hear that the very thought of it terrifies me?”
I turned to him and met his amber gaze squarely. Just a moment ago, I’d thought about how that mechanical gaze communicated nothing to me but awareness, and barely even that. But I somehow saw something in those flat golden eyes anyway. It was truth.
I took a breath, eased it out, and nodded. “Yeah, bird, it terrifies me, too.”
We twisted back into the Solar System. I really wanted to get back to Earth and get caught up on things, but I also wanted to stop by Fort Cantullin. We had time. The Stillness apparently hadn’t yet moved their fleet, or else I’d presumably have heard something about it. Perry checked with Netty, who informed him that the Canadians were still holding the Northwest Passage’s flight countdown at T-minus two days as they struggled with their ship’s fuel system. We were talking antimatter here, after all, so a less-than-perfect system simply wasn’t an option. You couldn’t let antimatter leak and live with it the way I did the tractor back at the farm, which had leaked small amounts of diesel fuel for years and apparently just couldn’t be fixed. Anyway, the Northwest Passage was being serviced at Fort Cantullin, so that was another reason to drop by.
“Hmm. This is getting awkward,” I said, looking at a zoomed image of the Northwest Passage hanging in space near Orcus, the dwarf planet hosting Fort Cantullin. “I really want to use the Canadians for the first part of our plan, but I’m… concerned that the Stillness are going to up and leave with their fleet. We’d end up having to chase them wherever they go.”
“There’s an advantage to that,” Perry offered. “Away from NTX, the Stillness don’t have the added firepower of their fixed defenses.”
“I suppose.” I mulled it over for a few minutes, then nodded. “If the Canadians can’t restart their countdown in another two days, then we’ll plan to launch our attack on NTX anyway.” I looked at Perry. “Make sure that gets drafted as an update to the plan and promulgated.”
“You got it, boss.”
Torina otherwise confirmed that everything was coming together the way it should be. All the ships tagged for the operation were fully fueled and loaded with ordnance and other combat supplies, and were either in their starting positions or could be quickly. With the “wait” button still pushed on it all, I set the Frankie’s flight controls to take us in to Fort Cantullin.
The Fort had become our forward operating base, our springboard for operations outside the Solar System. A few of the ships tasked for the upcoming op were here, in fact. My focus was the base itself, though. As the old truism goes, no plan survives contact with the enemy. If things went badly, or even just in some unexpected way, I wanted to satisfy myself that Fort Cantullin was ready to defend itself, and more broadly, the Solar System itself.
