A Larger Universe (38 page)

Wormholes!  I saw a discussion of this on television. 
The same program also talked about strings and "branes."  Those could
be Leegh's filaments and sheets.  Physicists on Earth are working on this same
theory right now!

And that meant the Kadiil could visit Earth at any time. 
When they do, would Earth choose the "gift" or be destroyed?
 

He thought he knew.  Feral humans, at least some of them,
were a lot more curious than the humans on this ship.  World governments would
take the gift, but the research would continue in secret.  Except the
experiments needed to verify the theory couldn't be hidden.  Curiosity had
driven his interest in the drive.  Curiosity would drive the humans of Earth to
their destruction.

His focus changed halfway through the second day, when he
found a pile of printed telemetry sent by the satellites during the fatal
experiment.  Maybe he would find something new in this.

The pile stood two feet high.  Trying to make something of
that, one page at a time, would be a waste of time and effort.  That's what
computers were for.

An hour later he had a scanner unboxed and attached to
Leegh's computer.  All of the raw data printed on the yellowed pages used the
same base sixty-four numbers he had become accustomed to.  The scanner read the
pages as images.  He needed an optical character-recognition program capable of
converting the characters imbedded in those images to something he could work
with.  Digging through the pallets of software in his warehouse uncovered a
program that would pattern match to a specified TrueType font and convert
character by character to some other character set.  With the font he had
created for Valin and his team of translators, he had what he needed.

The next morning, stinking of two days work in the same
clothes, no bath, and little sleep, he went to his lord's quarters to see
Sisle.

"You said you want to learn something about
computers?"

"Yes."

"I can't promise you'd learn much, but I need some
help, and you would be working at a computer.  Will you help me?"

"You're asking me?"

"Yes, asking, not telling."

"Of course, I'll help you," she caught a whiff of
his sour body odor.  "Excuse me, Tommy," she said with a smile,
"but you told me to take a bath once.  Do you mind if I tell you the same
in return?"

A bath did help and not just with the smell.  He was more
alert and back at work in Leegh's chamber an hour later with Sisle beside him,
feeding telemetry pages into the scanner while he wrote a program to
graphically display the data.

By the time Sisle had scanned all the pages, he had written
a program that subtracted the light speed interval from each satellite to
My
Flowing Streams
and displayed the telemetry as lines on his computer
screen.

He started as he felt Sisle close behind him.  “What do the
lines mean?” she asked.

Her warm, slightly musky aroma washed over him.  He looked
up at her, then back at the screen.  “The lines?” he stammered.

He could see her reflection on the face of the monitor, her
head cocked to the side.  Her arm extended over his shoulder, brushing his face
as she pointed.  “They look like the contour maps we studied as part of our
military training.”

For a moment, his tongue glued itself to the roof of his mouth,
and he realized he was holding his breath. 
I wonder if she knows what she
does to me?
  He took a breath.  “That’s actually a very good analogy, but
instead of showing the steepness of the slope, the lines show the strength of
the gravity field in that area.”

“So, where gravity is stronger, the lines are closer
together?” she asked.

He turned his chair to face her.  Something in his
expression made her take a step back.  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing’s wrong, but are the other women like you?”

She shrugged and smiled.  “Taller, but you know that.  I
don’t know, otherwise.  Why?”

“If they are,” he said, “the women’s talents are being
wasted on this ship.”

He pulled Leegh’s chair, high backed with the seat near the
floor, beside him next to the computer.  “Sit down,” he said.

She hesitated.  “I shouldn’t be sitting in a Nesu chair.”

He patted the chair cushion.  “Sit down,” he repeated.

He turned back toward the computer and typed on the
keyboard.  “This is the telemetry from the satellite closest to the moon,” he
said as the data from one of the satellites displayed in real time on the
screen.

“Why are the lines moving?” she asked.

“You said that where the lines are closer, gravity is
stronger?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“So?”

“Gravity is changing where the lines are moving?” she asked.

“Exactly.  Now let’s overlay the other satellites’ telemetry
on top of the first and start over.”  His fingers flew over the keyboard.  A
grid appeared where nearly parallel lines had been before.

A striped pattern emerged in one part of the grid.  “What’s
that?” she asked, pointing at the dispersed moiré on the screen.

Tommy checked the coordinates that had been recorded with
the data.  “That’s the moon where the experiments were being conducted.”

“And that?”  Her finger left a smudge on his screen.

Even as he was looking at the notes that had been left with
the telemetry, the tiny shimmering moiré under her fingerprint disappeared and
reappeared, almost instantly, on another part of the screen.

“That has to be
My Flowing Streams
transiting from
its original location to its position at the beginning of the experiment,”
Tommy answered.  “Nothing else fits the data.”  He checked the scale shown on
his monitor.  “The ship moved over a million kilometers.”  He turned to look at
her.  “Those satellites had to be part of the experiment.  The sensors detected
and instantly reported a ship’s drive moving over a million kilometers.”

Sisle remained focused on the screen.  “Does this mean
anything?” she asked, pointing to a dim moiré that had appeared approximately
halfway between the moon and
My Flowing Streams
.

Again, Tommy checked the notes written by Lant, over two
thousand years before.  “That’s the experiment.  They created a gravity field!”

Five minutes later, a bright, shimmering moiré appeared next
to the moon.  Thirty seconds later, the first moiré faded until it became
identical with the pattern shown by the drive of
My Flowing Streams
.

“Is that the Kadiil ship?” asked Sisle.

Tommy’s voice was grim.  “I don’t know what else it could
be.”

A new moiré pattern, different from either the drive or the
Kadiil arrival pattern emerged where the Kadiil ship had been.  Five seconds
later, bright, shimmering stripes covered where the moon had been.  The new
moiré again covered the Kadiil ship, and the left side of the screen flashed
again and again.

“Stream?”  Sisle’s voice was a whisper.

“Yes.”

Still another moiré pattern covered the location of the
Kadiil, and, five seconds later, the ship’s drive pattern disappeared.  Thirty
seconds after that, the telemetry ended.

He leaned back in his chair.  “Well, now I know how to
detect a Kadiil ship before its arrival, and how to track Kadiil drive-equipped
ships from at least several light seconds distance.”  He paused.  "And I
know how to detect an artificial black hole, or I would if I had one of the
satellite sensors the Nesu used in this experiment.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Sisle.

“I’m going to talk to Leegh.  Maybe she has some answers.”

#   #   #

That one of the satellites still existed after two thousand
years was too much to hope for, but he asked Leegh anyway.

"All were destroyed when Stream was destroyed,"
Leegh told him, "but the plans are buried somewhere in the stack in my
chambers.  We would need many specialized components, though.  Why do you
ask?"

"I think I have found something in the data you may
have overlooked, if I may show you?"

An hour later he had convinced Leegh. 

"The Kadiil did hide more advanced technology from
us.”  She voiced a grinding, low pitched whistle.  “And from everyone who
accepted their drives.  They hid how to create tunnels through the other
dimensions.  They gave us the transit but denied us near instantaneous travel."

Her back curved until her eyes looked straight into Tommy’s
face.  “We must locate those plans!”

When the plans were found, Leegh called in two of her close
relatives who were also familiar with their foremother's work.  Some of the
People on
My Flowing Streams
hadn't all fallen into the same trade and
travel routine as those on
The People's Hand
.  None of them called it
work, however.  To each of them, and to their peers, their interest was a
hobby.  At Tommy's insistence and after Ull's intervention, three artisans of
the Communications Guild also attended the meeting.  The parts needed to build
the detector might be on the ship, and that was something only the artisans
would know.

Rather than meeting in the water, as they usually did, they
sat in chairs in front of a white board and computer screen, both obtained from
Earth.

The artisans' knowledge proved to be critical.  At various
times, pieces of what was needed had been on the ship as trade goods.  None
were on the ship now, but could be obtained at Toblepas. 

Leegh's tail twitched rapidly from side to side behind her
chair.  "We can do this!” she said.  “We can reproduce the science of our
foremothers.  We can even extend it!"

"But should we," said Leenh, one of her relatives.

"This science caused the destruction of everything they
knew,” said Leesh, the other relative.  “It could do the same to us."

"No!" Leegh said.  "Your thinking is flawed. 
Our foremothers did not cause their destruction.  The Kadiil caused their
destruction."

"As they will cause ours," Leenh said.

"We know much more now," Leegh said, "and we
have the wizardry of this feral human to aid us.  Doing this will be dangerous,
but we must end two thousand years of ignorance.  The science of The People
must be restored.  With it will be restored our honor, and, perhaps, a home for
all of us."

Tommy decided to enter the argument.  "This feral human
wizard would like to ask what you are thinking of doing.  Are you expecting to
defeat the Kadiil somehow?  How could you?"

"No, we cannot defeat them," Leegh said.  "We
are too few, even if we knew what other weapons they might have.  But with
dimensional tunneling we could go anywhere!  Somewhere in this galaxy or some
other, we can escape the Kadiil!

"We have wasted enough time at Baugh.  I will call a
meeting of the council."

In spite of the warmth of Leegh's chamber, Tommy shivered as
he watched her leave.  His curiosity and his concern about Earth were driving
them all either to a confrontation with the Kadiil or to a leap into the
unknown.  Either way, he might never go home again.

Leenh and Leesh remained in Leegh’s chamber after the human
left.

“Surely, the council won’t allow this,” said Leesh.

“You are wrong,” said Leenh.  “Ull controls the council and
she is besotted with the feral human.  He shows her something new and Ull
insists that we do it.  Leegh’s support will make building the sensors even
more certain.”

“The Kadiil will detect these sensors as soon as we turn
them on,” said Leesh.

“And, according to the telemetry, Stream was destroyed less
than ten minutes after the satellite sensors began operating,” Leenh responded

Leesh began softly whistling a mournful tune.  After the
first few notes, Leenh joined in harmony, her whistle weaving around Leesh’s
basic melody.  They finished together, the last note echoing around Leegh’s
chamber.

“We last sang that song together after the raiders disabled
our ship,” said Leenh.  “We survived that.”

“Raiders are not the Kadiil,” responded Leesh.  “The Kadiil
will show no mercy.”  

After the meeting with Leegh and her relatives, Tommy
returned to his artisan quarters and gathered Potter and a change of clothes. 
When the elevator door closed behind them, Tommy looked down at his cat then
squatted and sighed.  "Well Potter, I may have done something to get us
both killed.  Again.  Enjoy yourself while you can.”  He scratched behind the
cat’s ears.  “I bet I know what you’d like.  You haven't been on a good mouse
hunt for a long time.  How about I drop you off for a while at Jack's stable? 
I bet they've had a population explosion since you were there last."

In his lord's quarters, he put Potter down and called for
Sisle.  She answered in a shout from across the pond, "I'm up here, taking
a bath."

"Have you eaten yet?" he shouted back.

"No.  I'll be right down."

He settled down on the flat rock with his back to the top of
the hill. 
I really need to put a chair over here.  This rock is
uncomfortable.

   Her voice came from behind him.  "Why don’t you ever
look at me?  Am I ugly?"

"What?” he stuttered.  I...  I--."  He turned to
find her standing behind him, dressed in an unbelted tunic and barefoot, her
wet hair wrapped in a towel. "I don't know what you mean," he
continued.

She tilted her head to the side and a hint of a frown pulled
at the side of her face.  "You never look at me.  You're always looking
off to the side, or down at my feet, never directly at my face.  What is it
about me you don't like?"

"You're not ugly.  Can we not talk about this?"

"Yes, Lord Tommy," she said in a neutral tone.