House of Suns (36 page)

But all of this was surmountable. Given time and money, there were very few problems in the universe that could not be solved.

Which was when I thought of a question, one that harkened back to a long-ago conversation with the little boy.

‘Why not go faster?’

‘I don’t think I follow you, Abigail,’ Ludmilla Marcellin said. She spoke to me nicely, for we had already been introduced.

‘I mean, why settle for eight-tenths of something that is already very slow?’

‘Each time we meet, our ships will be improved using locally acquired science. Within a few circuits, I don’t doubt that we’ll have moved beyond these ramscoops to something capable of taking us much closer to light. That will bring benefits, of course. If the subjective time interval can be reduced, we won’t need to spend so much time in deepfreeze. But we’ll always need some form of suspended animation - if our ships aren’t to crush us alive, there’ll be limits on how hard they can accelerate, which will mean they won’t be able to reach arbitrarily high speeds before needing to slow down again. The point is that we want to go places - we don’t want to just point our ships at the edge of the universe and keep accelerating all the way there.’

‘I don’t mean that - you’re still talking about being limited by the speed of light.’

‘It’s not called a fundamental constant for nothing, Abigail. All the same, perhaps you’re right - perhaps some emergent civilisation, some distant human splinter of the Golden Hour will develop the tools for faster-than-light travel. If it happens, it will clearly be of significance to us. We’ll embrace it wholeheartedly, have no fear. But it won’t change the nature of what we are, or the reason for our existence. The galaxy will still be too big, too complex, for any one person to apprehend. Shattering, turning yourself into multiple points of view, will still be the only way to eat that cake. I have to say, though, that I don’t consider the development of faster-than-light travel to lie within our future. Well-intentioned people have been chipping at that edifice for a thousand years, Abigail. They’ve never found a way to move a single useful bit of information superluminally - let alone anything as huge and unwieldy as a ship. The limit is hard-wired into the fundamental operating rules of the universe - it’s like trying to play Go on a chessboard. Can’t be done.’

‘Why not?’

‘Open your story-cube on the way home and ask it to tell you about causality violation. I did once, because I asked the same question you did. Why should I be limited? What right does the universe have to say what I can and can’t do? I’m intelligent. The universe is just a lot of hydrogen and dirt, going through the motions. But in this instance the universe has the final say. Read the cube. I think you’ll find it very illuminating.’

There was more to see, more to learn, but the rest of our visit to the shipyard passed in a blur. I shook hands with Ludmilla Marcellin and expressed my commitment to providing her with the cloning technology that would make her vision a reality. All the while, my guardians - Madame Kleinfelter and the members of the board of governors - looked on with indulgent smiles, as if I had just sung a song on stage.

The funny thing was, none of them could have had any idea what I was thinking.

An idea had formed in my head. It could have been a small, wavering flame that guttered out almost as soon as it had ignited. But instead the flame only burned more brightly, more strongly, as time went by.

Ludmilla Marcellin was going to scrawl her name across the sky. She was going to take giant steps across history, space and time. It was awesome and frightening, too much for one person to imagine, let alone bring into being. But she was going to do it anyway.

And the thought that was burning in my head was this:

If she can do it, why can’t I?

As the family shuttle sped us home, two things of note happened. I said to Madame Kleinfelter, ‘They’re going to pay us a lot of money for our expertise, aren’t they?’

‘Let’s just say the house will have no cause to worry for quite some time. And that’s not even assuming that others will follow where Ludmilla has led. But they will - mark my words. Even if she took those thousand ships and crashed them into the Sun, she would have her imitators. And each and every one of them will need Gentian science to complete the shattering.’

‘Then we are in a powerful position.’

‘For the first time in a while, yes.’

‘Have the terms of the Marcellin deal been finalised?’

She gave me a peculiar look, as if I had uttered the most shaming of profanities. ‘There are still details to be worked out, but the key elements of the arrangement—’

‘We must have their ships,’ I said.

‘The ships are for Ludmilla Marcellin. Once she has made enough for her fleet, she will stop production.’

‘I don’t mean the ships themselves, but the blueprints to make them. We can find a metal asteroid if we look hard enough. If we can’t, we can always tear apart the one under the house. But we must have the plans, so that we can make our own fleet.’

Still not quite getting my point, Madame Kleinfelter said, ‘But we don’t need a fleet.’

‘I do,’ I told her. ‘I want what she has.’

With Ludmilla’s words still echoing in my head, I had the story-cube tell me something about causality. At first, all the cube would give me was a babyish definition of what the word meant, not how it related to Ludmilla’s plans for cosmic expansion. When I pushed the cube to explain to me how causality might be ‘violated’ I was rebuffed and discouraged, the cube deciding that it was a matter beyond my present conceptual horizon.

I persisted. I could be very persistent.

Faster-than-light travel, the cube eventually informed me, was problematic from a number of standpoints. From a mass-energy perspective, light was like a mountain summit that was always out of reach, no matter how high you climbed. A ship could expend an insane amount of energy and come within one or two per cent of that ultimate speed limit. But it would cost infinitely more energy to close that final gap, and even then the ship would only be travelling at the speed of light, not above it. In describing the properties of faster-than-light travel, the mathematics deliquesced into the Alice-in-Wonderland nonsense of imaginary numbers. Even then it could not tell you how to cross from one side of that barrier to the other.

But even supposing that barrier did not need to be crossed, and that there was an effective short cut through spacetime - something like a wormhole - there was a deeper, subtler objection. It was called the causal ordering postulate.

The postulate said that cause must always precede effect. It also said that the introduction into the universe of faster-than-light travel - the creation of what the cube called space-like causal connections - would lead to situations in which the causal ordering postulate might be violated. This was not just some theoretical nicety, but the opening of a door that would allow paradoxes to leak into reality.

With faster-than-light travel, I could witness the consequences of an event - say, a hole appearing in a robot’s armour because someone had shot a superluminal bullet at it - and send a superluminal message instructing the shooter not to fire.

As lucid as the story-book’s grudging illumination had been, I do not pretend that I understood all of this at the time. But I did grasp that the universe did not appear to be convivial to human dreams of effortless expansion. It said that we could have as much of the universe as we wished, but that the taking of it would demand an extraordinary kind of patience.

I brooded on this for the rest of the night, feeling hemmed in and tight-chested, as if my restraints had been drawn too tight. The odd thousand-year-old cathedral aside, patience was not something humans had been very good at, collectively.

Later - when the household’s planetoid was at last in view - I received a call from a distant well-wisher. Madame Kleinfelter, still grey-faced after our earlier conversation (it was as if I had slapped her across the cheeks) took a dim view of his attempt to contact me.

‘It’s not right,’ she said as my head was still ringing with causality. ‘They ruined any chance of a marriage, not us. What right does he have to taunt you now?’

‘Maybe he doesn’t want to taunt me. May I speak to him? In private?’

I took the call. Timelag must have stilted our conversation, dragged it across many minutes, but I remember none of that.

‘I hear you did well with the Marcellins,’ the little boy said. He looked older now, as if he too had been allowed to start ageing again. There was a roughness in his voice I did not recall from our afternoons in the playroom. ‘I’m happy for you. Sooner or later someone was going to require cloning expertise, and I’m sure this has not come a moment too soon.’

‘I didn’t think I’d hear from you again.’

‘It would be improper for us to meet now. I’m sorry, Abigail: really I am. Nothing that happened at the combine level had anything to do with me. Or you, I imagine. We were just pawns being moved around at the whim of adults. All I’m saying is, I’d have liked it if we could have stayed friends.’

‘We can’t.’

‘You say that as if you’re the one deciding things now. Have you really stepped into your mother’s shoes?’

‘It’s none of your business.’

‘For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for the way I talked about her to you. That wasn’t nice of me at all. But I suppose you had to know eventually. There was always something a bit lopsided in our relationship, with me knowing far more about you than you ever did.’

‘Don’t lose any sleep over it.’

‘Oh, I shan’t. Had the roles been reversed, I have no doubt that you’d have been just as cruel as I was. But there is unfinished business between us, wouldn’t you say?’

My head was still spinning with fantasies of interstellar conquest, of shattering myself into a thousand gemlike shards and imbuing each of them with the vital spark of my own personality. The little boy was a knock on the door from a past I no longer cared about. I wanted him to go away, and take my childhood with him.

‘I don’t think we have unfinished business.’

‘We never completed Palatial,’ he said.

It was ages since I had given that green cube more than a moment’s thought. The world inside it was frozen in the configuration it had held when we last emerged from the portal.

‘That’s over now.’

‘It doesn’t have to be. I can’t visit you, obviously, but there’s another solution. One of the copies of Palatial - one of the prototypes - happens to have fallen into my possession.’

‘We still can’t meet.’

‘We don’t have to. The games can be synchronised. I can go into my version of Palatial and share the same narrative space as yours. I’ll be in the Black Castle and you’ll be in the Palace of Clouds, but they’ll both be part of the same landscape. If I send out a messenger, he’ll show up at your gates. Send an army to me and I’ll meet them with my own forces. It was always meant to work this way, Abigail. It’s how they designed it. There’ll be timelag, of course - but that won’t matter unless we end up having a face-to-face conversation. Everything else takes hours in Palatial anyway - it’s called being pre-industrial.’

‘We can’t do this.’

‘We must! I didn’t go to all the trouble of finding another copy for nothing. I was always thinking of you ... of the game we still had to finish.’

‘They won’t allow it.’

‘Then make them allow it. You have the authority now, Abigail - or you soon will. Use some of it. Throw your weight around. Demand the right to connect your version of Palatial with mine.’ He leaned back from the camera. ‘Count Mordax will be waiting. Please don’t let him down.’

At the appointed time, Purslane and I were ready on the eighteenth-level landing stage. We had brought Hesperus with us, in the open rear compartment of a personal flier belonging to Gentian Line. A wind was whipping in from the west, flags rippling and dancing on the bridges and walkways between the towers. Dust stung my cheeks and clawed at my wind-slitted eyes. Not many Ymirians were in the air this afternoon, unless they were inside the shelter of machines. I was glad to be away from Mezereon’s interrogation room, but misgivings were tying knots in my stomach.

‘Here he comes,’ Purslane said, pointing to an insect-bodied craft fluttering towards us, its wings a blur of pastel colours. The flying thing hovered against the sun, forcing me to raise my hands against the glare. For a moment it looked as if it was about to turn around and fly away.

‘Who’s in it?’

‘Someone from the study council is all Jindabyne would say.’

As if the occupant had made up his mind, the craft lowered its nose and approached the landing stage. It touched down and a figure emerged from the pearl-shaped cabin at the front, grasping handrails and stepping down with his back to us before turning around. It was a male, dressed in a padded black outfit with fur-lined collar and cuffs. There were many pockets, straps and nozzles on the outfit, which was festooned with thick, ribbed airlines leading to a heavy, snout-like breathing mask suspended below the creature’s goggled face. He walked to us with an impatient, slightly waddling gait.

‘I’m Purslane,’ my co-shatterling said. ‘This is Campion, a fellow shatterling. It’s good of you to help us.’

‘I was ordered to help you. I had no say in the matter.’ He had the same honey-coloured fur as Magistrate Jindabyne, but his fur was flecked with little dabs of white - perhaps the sign of age, stress, or some genetic irregularity in his pigmentation.

‘Do you approve?’ I asked.

‘Most definitely not. If I had my way you’d never have been allowed into our atmosphere in the first place.’

‘That’s a bit extreme,’ I said.

‘I’ve been studying the Spirit my entire adult life, shatterling. I have never known it be as agitated, as unpredictable, as when your ships started appearing around our planet. It doesn’t care for you. It would rather you left. So, frankly, would I.’