Home Random Page


CATEGORIES:

BiologyChemistryConstructionCultureEcologyEconomyElectronicsFinanceGeographyHistoryInformaticsLawMathematicsMechanicsMedicineOtherPedagogyPhilosophyPhysicsPolicyPsychologySociologySportTourism






Rirhath B / the Crossings 4 page

“So let me first explain the nature of our intervention and what’s caused us to upgrade it to emergency status.”

The walls of the auditorium at that point simply seemed to vanish, leaving the audience apparently sitting suspended in empty space. It was an effect that could have been produced by a particularly good planetarium, but the absolute precision and clarity of it made it clear to Kit that this was a live view of space quite distant from here.

They were looking at a bright blue-white star in the middle distance, and much closer to the point of view, the broad, partly shadowed limb of a green-golden planet. “This is Tevaral,” Mamvish said. “Tevaral has been home to the Tevaralti species for approximately eight hundred and seventy thousand years, and to its avian forebears for significantly longer. While hardly the oldest species in this part of the galaxy, they are certainly one of the oldest, and also a species of unusual longevity in comparison to other humanoid cultures and civilizations.

“Tevaral is a so-called ‘dual world’ that revolves around a common center of gravity with its very large satellite Thesba, a capture that settled into its present relationship with Tevaral approximately two point nine billion years ago, when Tevaral was still cooling after forming up around its primary star, Sendwathesh.”

The view switched to one of Thesba, a badly pockmarked and deeply fissured world splattered with big patches in dun and brown that Kit suspected were leftovers from old violent volcanic activity. Nita leaned toward him. “Look at that atmosphere,” she whispered.

“Sooner look at it than breathe it,” Kit whispered back. It was curdled yellow with what were almost certainly noxious gases from an oxygen-breather’s point of view.

“—both Tevaralti scientific investigation and manual data concur that Thesba was probably acquired from one of the shorter-lived stars in the local OB association. This large star became unstable within several billion years of formation and violently blew off a significant portion of its mass in the form of energetic plasma shells, thereby also dislodging various minor planets that were still in relatively early formative stages.”

“Uh oh…” Nita muttered.

The view shifted to a three-dimensional view of the interior of Thesba, produced either by wizardry or some technology more advanced than anything Kit was familiar with. Or possibly both… He squinted at it. “Wait. Has that got two cores?”

“Almost three,” Nita whispered back. “Wait till it rotates again. See that third lobe? What a mess.”

“—the irregularly formed core makes it immediately plain why Thesba’s rotational relationship with its primary has in the past been problematic,” Mamvish was saying. “The irregularity of the core masses imparts a significant wobble to the body, and its interactions with Tevaral’s mass have for many millennia involved long cycles of relative stability alternating with equally long cycles of unstable behavior in the volcanic and tectonic modes. Therefore ever since wizardry arose on Tevaral, its Planetaries have spent a great deal of time over millennia attempting to manipulate Thesba’s core masses into more stable, or at least more manageable configurations.”



“Oh no.” Nita shook her head. “Can’t have got them much of anywhere…”

The view backed off into a wider one of the two bodies, the green-gold planet and the dun-and-gold moon, swinging uneasily around one another. “These worlds have circled one another in this mode for the last few millennia without any serious alteration of their mutual status,” Mamvish said, “but over the last several hundred years both of them have become increasingly tectonically active. Indications are that Thesba’s mass irregularities have slowly been inducing non-ephemeral deep level weaknesses in Tevaral’s inner mantle structure, and these weaknesses have been becoming more serious over the course of the last century. Noting this, the then-Planetary Wizard of Tevaral urgently requested the assistance of the Interconnect Project based here at Rirhath B. It was decided that a number of world-surrogates should be located and terraformed to serve as relocation loci for the planet’s ecosystems, and possibly also as temporary havens for the planetary population when it was decided how best to intervene to stabilize Thesba’s core once and for all—since naturally the planetary population could not be left in place when so dangerous an intervention was being enacted.”

The imagery shifted to show one after another of a series of six planets, all orbiting stars similar to Sendwathesh and barren to begin with, as they were quickly altered by teamed science and wizardry to suit the Tevaralti climatic, atmospheric and soil requirements. The dominant blue-green of Tevaralti foliage crept across them, burgeoning, and all of those worlds then settled in to “cure”, waiting for their guest species to arrive. “However,” Mamvish said, sitting down dispiritedly on her back two sets of legs, “events have now unfortunately started moving faster than anyone was expecting. Approximately ten years ago, volcanic activity on both Thesba and Tevaral began spiking irregularly. More generalized tectonic activity began to spike as well. Since Tevaral is astahfrith and has been for many thousands of years, the various nations and clan/territory affiliations on Tevaral met with the Planetary to investigate possible interventional action. But the last two years have produced numerous disastrous earthquakes on Tevaral that have killed millions of Tevaralti, and it became plain that there was no alternative to a full-fledged rafting operation. The planet was going to have to be evacuated.”

Mamvish stood up again, her eyes revolving in what Kit recognized as distress. “And then, eleven days ago—”

The view flicked back once more to that image of Thesba’s interior. As suddenly as cracks in ice running across a frozen lake bed from some dropped rock, massive discontinuities picked out in blood-red in the diagram began stitching themselves across the underside of Thesba's mantle layer. In places, the crust of the great moon began to wrinkle and crack, while underneath it the mantle writhed and shivered unpredictably. Kit winced just looking at it, finding it impossible to understand how Thesba hadn’t blown up already.

Mamvish looked down into the space occupied by the simulation of Thesba, her head weaving from side to side in a gesture of distress. “There’d been some hope of saving Thesba, or at least stabilizing it long enough to allow an orderly evacuation taking weeks or even months. But that’s now impossible. The last ten days’ work has shown us that Thesba’s internal integrity has been too severely damaged for any such intervention to succeed, no matter how powerful the wizards associated with it. Also considered was the possibility of opening a very large spatial portal through which Thesba could be removed from orbit around Tevaral, followed by the insertion of a stable substitute mass as a temporary solution. But the extreme delicacy of choreographing such an intervention, and the substantial damage already done to Tevaral’s tectonics, means there’s no guarantee the result wouldn’t be just as severe as leaving Thesba in place to do this.”

With terrible inevitability the diagram of Thesba shuddered massively apart into five huge jagged chunks, and tens of thousands of smaller ones—both old solid material, and vast volumes of new magma spewed into space and swiftly chilled to stone—began raining down onto the planet. And quite exclusive of the destruction caused by chunks of the moon falling out of the sky, the view now extended to Tevaral and showed how the ensuing tidal effects from Thesba’s breakup would devastate that world. All the coastal cities and conurbations below were drowned or wrecked by earthquakes and tsunamis, quickly or slowly: food sources were wiped out in the short term by terrible storms and weather disruptions, water tables were disrupted and the composition of the entire atmosphere denatured by volcanic activity.

Tevaral was going to die. It was just a matter how of how quickly, and whether all or even most of its population could be evacuated before it did.

Kit realized that he’d stopped breathing for a short time. Beside him, Nita had stopped watching and was actually hiding her eyes.

“So, my cousins,” Mamvish said as the auditorium’s normal interior and lighting came back. “You see the problem. Our choice of ways to intervene has been drastically curtailed. Normally, in situations like this where threat to a planetary population is extreme, we install sufficient numbers of very-wide-aperture worldgates on the planet to evacuate the entire planetary population within hours, not days. Such gates can remove terrain as well as the beings living on it, and can relocate both nonliving and living matter great distances with tremendous accuracy when wizardry is guiding them. But in this situation, that solution is denied us. Very-wide-aperture gating is only possible when powered by a SunTap conduit system that pulls energy directly from the nearest star, and Tevaral is too far from its primary for a SunTap conduit to reach the planet’s surface. Therefore we must fall back to a more old-fashioned type of intervention in order to successfully move all these people off Tevaral quickly enough to save their lives. We’ve already installed a hundred and twenty terminus gates on the planet, with their far sides anchored on each of the six new homeworlds. Each of the terminus gates is served by a transport tree of feeder gates eight to ten layers deep. Locked in open configuration, and operating at full capacity—which they must—the terminus gates will channel between fifty and a hundred thousand Tevaralti per hour off the planet to their new homes. The feeder gate trees are not yet complete; hundreds more feeder complexes will be installed on Tevaral over the course of the next several days. And as we shepherd the Tevaralti population through them to safety, you will be gatekeeping those new worldgate installations for us.”

“Oh my God,” Kit muttered under his breath.

“Archivist,” someone behind Nita and Kit said. “A question? Isn’t it normally quite dangerous to have too many world gates open on a planet at the same time, especially if they’re artificial? Something to do with disturbances in the local spacetime continuum?”

“Yes, that’s true,” Mamvish said. “There would always be a question as to whether or not the tectonics of the host body could remain undamaged by the presence of so many gates for very long, due to the gravitic anomalies routinely associated with gate function when portal interfaces are open for prolonged periods. There’ll be an entire team of wizards monitoring the planet for problems of that kind. But right now time is so much of the essence that the presence of the anomalies is a risk we unfortunately must take, because there’s a biological component to this problem that we hadn’t anticipated.”

Silence fell across the room, as no one seemed to have any ideas as to what this might be. “It turns out,” Mamvish said, “that there’s a complication as regards the cooperation of the dominant species.”

Kit could hear people in the audience turning to one another in confusion. Mamvish’s tail had begun lashing, and she sat down rather abruptly again on her back two pairs of legs again, this time apparently in an attempt to get the tail under control. The attempt was only partly successful.

“The Tevaralti are quite scientifically advanced, and perfectly able to perceive what’s going on with their moon,” Mamvish said. “And in the earliest stages of this intervention, they were quite willing to be moved out of harm’s way until Thesba could be stabilized. But when the situation changed, and it became plain that the relocation was probably not going to be temporary, but permanent, the opinion of a significant percentage of Tevaralti regarding the intervention, approaching nearly ten percent, shifted as well.” She blew out a long, annoyed breath. “They have revealed themselves to be far more… attached than anyone anticipated.”

The Speech-word she used for “attached”, lavemuist’hei, was obscure enough that Kit had to pull his manual open to get a reading on it. He blinked at the length of the entry on the faintly glowing page as he realized how profoundly nuanced the word was. Everybody was attached to their homeworld, their own culture, their own “earth”, their own sky: that was naturally taken for granted. But lavemuist’hei indicated something well past that—a relationship that more closely resembled the symbiotic.

“The affected percentage of the Tevaralti have expressed a desire not to leave their home world, regardless of its imminent fate,” Mamvish was saying when Kit looked up again. “While the Troptic Stipulation allows us some latitude in interfering with or constraining the actions of life forms further down on the sentience scale when the system of which they are part is threatened, it does not allow us to force fellow sentients of this level into actions that violate their sense of personal validity or dignity. If they choose to die with dignity, then that’s their right, and we need to leave them the opportunity to do that.” Her face screwed itself into a very pained expression. “And all too soon, those whose intention is bent that way will have more than enough opportunity.”

The room was very still. “As yet we aren’t clear about what has so exacerbated their normal sense of lavemuist’hei,” Mamvish said. “We hope to discover that, so as to make it possible to save more lives. There are some early indications that because the Tevaralti are humanoid, that other humanoids may be able to discover what’s going on with them and share it with us so that we can apply that discovery to this problem and save them all. But in the meantime, we must concentrate on saving those from the planet who presently consent to be saved… And that’s where all of you come in.”

Mamvish gazed around the room. “Each one of you will be either supervising or assisting in managing one of the worldgates presently being installed. Many of you were asked to participate in this in the intervention because you have previous experience, sometimes significant experience, with worldgating in your daily work, especially off planet or elsewhere on the High Road—”

Kit looked over at Nita in shock, suddenly realizing why they were there. Nita looked back at him, shaking her head, and whispered, “We are so screwed.”

“Others of our cousins will either be accompanying you or are already on site,” Mamvish said, “to support you in doing what needs to be done to help you micromanage these gates. I use the word purposefully here, because though they’ll be very automated and carefully tailored to match the locations where they’re installed, they’ll also require constant supervision while in use.”

Mamvish looked around the room in what Kit thought was meant to be a reassuring way. He was not reassured. “All your manuals or other errantry-sensitive information storage instrumentalities will be supplied with a set of nominal-operation parameters for the gate you’ll be managing. If its behavior starts to slide outside those parameters, or exhibits other atypical behaviors, don’t waste time; call for help at once. There’ll be plenty of it around… lots of wizards involved in this intervention who are specialists in gate management. Many members of the four species of the Interconnect Group, specialists in gatings and in rafting projects big and small, will also be on Tevaral, ready to assist. So don’t err on the side of caution, cousins. If something starts looking strange to you, get assistance immediately, as in this situation we have no margin for error. The last thing we need right now is for one gate to start malfunctioning in such a way as to affect those around it with portal contagion.”

The term made Kit suck in breath at a sudden memory. Rhiow had mentioned portal contagion to him once when he’d been passing through Grand Central and they were standing around on Platform 23, idly chatting and waiting for the gate there to go patent. At the time her description of the phenomenon had made him flash on a scene from a long-ago science show he’d seen. It had featured a single ping-pong ball dropping onto a big floor covered with mousetraps all loaded with more ping-pong balls. The dropped ball set one off, and that ball a couple of others, and then ten were going off, fifty, a hundred, more…

The demonstration had originally been a paradigm for nuclear fission, and while it had been amusing to watch at the time, Kit was having trouble finding the humor in it now. Especially when each of those “mousetraps” was a worldgate that had been working correctly a moment before, until the contagion effect from the nearest gate nearest it hit and made the portal explode uncontrollably wide, killing everybody who was near the gate and anyone presently in transit. And the effect would spread and spread—

Kit shivered. “Beyond that,” Mamvish said, “all you have to do is help the Tevaralti who are going through your gates, and keep them going through your gates. We have excellent support waiting for them on the far side, on their new homeworlds. Just help them make it through. That’s the whole of your job in this intervention: keep your gate running, get them through. When we’ve gotten as many people off the planet as will go, our work will be done. If the Powers are kind, it will be everybody, all the Tevaralti; that’s what we’re striving for. But until we find the key to that result—the reason behind the resistance of those who won’t leave—our job is to get the ones out who are ready to go.”

The whole room sat quiet for a few moments.

“You’ll find that your manuals and other instrumentalities have been loaded with coordinates on Tevaral corresponding to the gates you’ll be managing,” Mamvish said. “I regret that some of you who are used to working together must be separately assigned for this work: it’s numbers working individually that we need, with personnel in possession of higher power levels or proficiency levels being assigned to assist those with lower ones. You’ll be assigned gating hexes here to take you within the next hour or so to your initial staging points on Tevaral. Check your various instrumentalities for your gate assignment, and please be patient with us as regards transit times; we’re spacing the traffic load to avoid putting too much stress on the reception area on Tevaral. Down the concourse, close to the gates that have been signed for Tevaral transit, you’ll find a large hologlobe tagged with all the gate locations, both those emplaced and those pending, with coordinates for your own assignment areas so that you can keep in touch with your cousins while we’re all working there. And as I said, any of you can reach me virtually during this intervention; so don’t hesitate. I won’t be sleeping until this business is complete, and your contact will be welcome.” She looked around. “In the Powers’ names, then, and the One’s, let’s go forward and do the work before us.”

A low murmur went through the room. “And one last thing, cousins,” Mamvish said. “The Planetary of Tevaral has asked to speak to you before you go.”

She moved off to one side of the stage and turned toward the center, waiting.

A moment later, there was a small man standing there looking out at them, brightly lit as if spotlighted. He was wearing a sort of woven red kilt, and what seemed to be leather leggings reaching down to clawed feet; an ornate harness of polished leather was wrapped around his feathered chest. His head, too, was shaggily feathered in dull pale gold, and he held a short brassy-colored rod in his hands, possibly a wand. His was a sharp face, a fierce one, with big orange-golden eyes set above a nose that reminded Kit of a beak without actually being one; and for all his narrow waist he was broad-chested, like someone whose ancestors you could believe had had wings once. Kit looked at him and immediately thought of Irina Mladen, even though Earth’s Planetary and this one were physically nothing alike. What was immediately evident about them both was a sense of their personal power—of the passion with which they held the position and the intensity that they brought to their work.

“My cousins,” the Tevaralti Planetary said in a soft scratchy voice, “my name is Hesh; I serve and speak for Tevaral. I beg your indulgence for not addressing you in person, but right now my world needs me at home, concentrating on my work.”

He looked down at the floor, then up again. “I can’t briefly express the grief that this intervention is causing us. We know it must be done; we know we have no recourse. There is no greater anguish than to know that your world is coming to an end, and you must leave it. Very many of my people understand this necessity and are more than willing to comply: on their behalf I thank you. Very many others of them understand the need to leave, but their compliance… is subject to change without notice. Many of my folk are bitterly torn, as yet undecided whether to leave their world, or die with it.”

Once more Hesh looked down, then up. “I would not have you think them ungrateful for your pains. They know they must leave if they want to live. The problem right now is that many of them are not sure which option they prefer… and that choice, as we all know, is between them and the One.”

Hesh gazed out across the auditorium’s assemblage of wizards as if he could see them all. As he turned, seemingly taking in the room, the gaze of those round fierce eyes swept across Kit’s in passing, and it was genuinely as if the Planetary was there, looking at him. “We’ve been a long time living on Tevaral as a species,” Hesh said, “as have the commensals who share it with us. Our parting with Tevaral comes hard. I understand well that some of you will find difficulty in grasping why, when our world is dying around us, we cannot bear to go. Yet still I ask that you will be as gentle with my kind as you would be with your own, were your people in such case.”

He stood there gripping his wand-rod, and for a moment his shoulders slumped and his claws clenched, a gesture that made Kit think of someone who was wishing he could start a fight with something he could win against. But then up went Hesh’s head again, and as if in defiance up went the crest of his head-feathers, too, that until now had been lying smooth. “But now we have work to do, my cousins. At any time, at any hour, if you need speech with me, don’t hesitate. If there are non-urgent messages that require my attention, direct them through the supervisory structure which will be laid out for you in your various versions of the Knowledge. The One willing, we’ll all get through this together. Though I will be very busy, I may yet be able to come to thank some of you. But whether or not I may, know that your names will become the matter of song in our history—all your names—for millennia to come.”

He bowed his head to them all, that bright crest catching the light that shone down on him. Then he was gone.

On Earth, Kit would half have expected the room to break into applause at the end of that. But the mood here was too somber. There was a sort of murmur around him, the release of held breath.

Mamvish’s eidolon looked out over the auditorium. “That’s it, my cousins,” she said. “Let’s get to our work, and the One be with us. Meanwhile, send in the next group, please?”

And her eidolon-projection vanished.

People started to stand up and head for the doors. Nita was already on her feet, standing and looking at the stage with her arms wrapped around her in a rather defensive gesture. It wasn't the kind of thing Kit was used to seeing from her; he moved a little closer and nudged her with one elbow. "You okay?"

"Yeah," she said after a moment, and let go of herself, pushing her hair back before she met his eyes. “This is going to be really intense, isn’t it?”

“Looking that way,” Kit said.

“Right,” Nita said. “Well. Let’s get out there and see where they’re sending us.”

***

 

They headed out and onward down the concourse to where the Tevaral transit gates had been emplaced. Even from down here they could see the huge holographic globe rotating gently in the middle of the concourse, with a huge crowd of wizards gathered around it, looking it over to identify the places to which they were being sent. Kit was very surprised when, way down there in that crowd, he could see Mamvish. “Look, she’s here too—”

Nita peered down in that direction. “Yeah,” she said, “but she’s moving pretty fast. If we want to say hi to her before she goes somewhere else, we’d better hurry.”

The two of them broke into a trot, dodging and weaving through the crowd. Mamvish came plowing along toward them at the same time, surrounded by people who drifted in from around about (or just appeared next to her), hurriedly asked or told her something, and went off or vanished again. “She’s so busy…” Kit said.

“She’s always so busy,” said Nita. “But she did say she was sorry to send an eidolon instead of being more personal with that message. Ought to let her know it was okay.”

“There you are,” Mamvish said as they got within earshot. “It’s good you’re here so soon!”

When they got close enough Nita grabbed Mamvish around the head and patted her. “Are you okay? You look like they’re running you ragged.”

Nita let go and both she and Kit reversed course so they could keep walking with her. “It’s always like this,” Mamvish said, breathless, her eyes revolving in opposite directions and her hide positively boiling with whole paragraphs in the Speech. “Nothing new. And you two, my thelefeih, are you all right?”

“Just fine,” Kit said, and patted her too, touched and surprised that she was using the specially-close form of “cousin” on him. Probably because of Nita bringing her tomatoes all the time. Still kind of an honor, though... “But Mam, is it just me or is does it seem like every time we see you you’re trying to get some species to let you save their lives and they’re giving you trouble about doing it?”

Mamvish abruptly stopped short—so suddenly that Kit wondered if he’d said something wrong—and spent the next few moments stamping all her feet, first in sequence and then alternately in several different patterns. “Yes,” she hissed, “yes, definitely yes, One-all-about-us yes!!” And though she sounded annoyed, she also seemed gleeful that someone else had noticed. “Seriously! It’s enough to drive you wild, sometimes I wonder why I bother…”

As Mamvish started walking again and kept on ranting about the way things weren’t working the way she’d expected, Kit felt less concerned about having misspoken. It wasn’t like it was hard to tease Mamvish into losing her temper. She came of a culture on her homeworld of Wimst in which hiding how you felt was seen as no particular advantage, and plainly she enjoyed venting with them. In fact, Kit thought, she does it every time she sees us. Maybe we’re an excuse? Because even though she’s a couple of thousand years old, and incredibly smart and gifted, she’s still really young for a lot of the wizards she works with, and we’re a lot closer to her age than most…

“But it doesn’t matter,” Mamvish was saying, “there’s no point in getting judgmental about it when we don’t even understand why it’s happening. And maybe we never will. Nothing to do but cope. Have you got your assignments yet? I’m so sorry the logistics team will have had to break you up, we’ve no choice but to maximize the effectiveness of the microgroups working on this…”

“Mam, it’s okay,” Nita said, “we work separately lots of times at home! We’ll be fine. Will we see you there?”

“It’s possible,” Mamvish said. “Depends on how Thesba behaves. I’ve spent endless hours holding the wretched thing together, this last tenday, and I expect to spend many hours more.” She hissed in annoyance. “Message me when you’re settled in your postings, I’ll get back to you if I can…”

And with a wave of her tail she was off down the concourse with other wizards of various ages following in her wake, all talking at her at once. Kit watched her go in slight amazement, shaking his head. “She’s always running around and being put under pressure like this,” he muttered. “When does she get time to just sit still?”

“Not sure she’d know what to do with that if she had any,” Nita said. “Come on, let’s see where they’ve stuck us…”

They turned to head back the way they’d come, making their way down the concourse again to the big holographic globe of Tevaral that was rotating gently in the center of the meeting area, all the planet’s five great continents gradually revealing themselves to them as the simulation turned. Kit was having trouble looking at this living, dynamic landscape, the beautiful greens and golds of it here and there touched with the white of snowcapped mountains and the glint of seas shining under the hot white light of its sun, and realizing that soon all of this would be uninhabitable…

“Big planet,” Nita said under her breath, walking around the display with her manual open in one hand. “Three times the size of Earth, nearly. Gravity’s a little less than Earth’s…” She paused, looking up at the simulator with some concern.


Date: 2015-12-24; view: 707


<== previous page | next page ==>
Rirhath B / the Crossings 3 page | Rirhath B / the Crossings 5 page
doclecture.net - lectures - 2014-2024 year. Copyright infringement or personal data (0.014 sec.)