LOKI’S REALM
by C. SANFORD LOWE & G. DAVID NORDLEY
* * * *
Illustrated by William Warren
Engineers must work with what they have....
Chapter 1
Broadford, Isle of Skye, Scotland,
12 March 2260
I suppose it’s more interesting when, in the words of Robert Burns, “the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley” than otherwise. I’ll have no quarrel with that, though I do have to say that, had everything gone according to plan, it still would have been quite an adventure. I’m Bruce Macready, historian of the Epsilon Eridani mission to build and launch one of the four impactors of the Black Hole Project.
The idea of the BHP was to accelerate four billion-ton iron-rod impactors from four different stars up to relativistic velocities, then crash them together to generate a pressure at their meeting point that far exceeds what even quantum mechanics can resist, the result being a miniature black hole. Though smaller than an atomic nucleus, it would mass a billion tons or so—enough to stay around long enough for the physicists to play with it and someday, perhaps, use its progeny to construct vast Faustian machines that would manipulate the very fabric of space itself to humanity’s purposes.
Aye, that was the hope.
How, you might ask, did a Scottish professor, who had not left the Isle of Skye more than a half dozen times in his 147 years—let alone go into space—become involved in this? Well, I had taught the history of science and technology at Broadford College for over half its existence, and held every position including chancellor at one time or another. I thought the human race was in a flat place of late, not making history like it had done before. Earth was pacified. Mars was nearly terraformed, and it would be centuries before Venus followed suit. So I sensed that, short of the possibility of alien contact, the BHP would be the signal event of this era.
I found that among the BHP principal investigators was one Bradford Adams, an Australian physicist who had attended Broadford for a year on exchange and had taken one of my classes. Year after year, in explaining our expansion into space, I unleashed the words of Tsiolkovsky to thunder down on Brad and my other students, telling them that one could not live in a cradle forever. Now he spoke to me.
I took it on myself to contact Brad and offer my services as an historian on the fifty-year expedition to Epsilon Eridani—a star about a third of the Sun’s luminosity, which, due to its extreme youth, was not suitable for a colony and thus had no indigenous historians. To my great surprise, the project leader, Dr. Zhau Tse Wen, showed up at Broadford to interview me. We hit it off well, and over a glass of fourteen-year-old Talisker, my proposal was accepted. So, with a little more fuss than I need relate here, I made my goodbyes to my older brother, to Macready Manor, to Broadford College, and to my past life.
I sent a few personal things ahead and began this journey of some thirteen light-years on foot, hiking the ten kilometers to Kyle of Lochalsh. One travels light among the stars, and I wanted to savor what little time I had left on Skye. It was October—clear, bright, and nippy—and the view of Skye from the height of the bridge almost made me turn in my tracks and head back.
But no, I have an inertia in me that is legendary, and my path I’d chosen. I sighed and marched down the mainland side of the span and into the transit station. There I caught a fan bus to Glasgow and took an orbital shuttle four hundred kilometers up to Sheffield Spaceport, the rotating toroidal space station near which the starship Admiral Byrd was then keeping station.
As I left the shuttle, a smiling attendant met me. “Dr. Macready?” he said. “You’re wanted on the starship.”
I was surprised; the Admiral Byrd wasn’t due out for two more days, and I’d anticipated some time to explore Sheffield Spaceport.
The attendant handed me a pair of somewhat old-fashioned looking spectacles. Smart glasses, I realized. They’d been around for a couple of centuries, but with an old-fashioned wrist comp for all my needs, I’d never used them before.
“They’re for those who haven’t had bioradios installed,” he said.
Of course. I’d been born a wee bit early to have the genetic modification that allows people’s brains to send and receive radio waves. The spectacles were a prosthesis for those of us so handicapped, and they’d known I was coming. I put them on with a frown. Nothing appeared.
“Speak the name of what you want to know as quietly as you like, or stare at something for more than a second, down the hall to the shuttle dock, for instance.”
I looked at the attendant. The glasses identified him as “Lane Woo, flight attendant, Cislunar Transportation Service.”
“Thank you, Mr. Woo. This will take some getting used to.”
He nodded with a smile and went about his business as I went about mine. The glasses led me to an elevator down to the 0.1 gee level, through a long park-like transit lounge to the shuttle gate. In a few minutes, a runabout whisked me off to the starship.
Up close, the Admiral Byrd was impressively weird. It had a hundred-meter-wide crown of six 120-meter-long icicles that were evenly spaced. At the wide end of each icicle was a ten-meter-radius sphere, which housed the habitable parts of the starship. This entire arrangement rotated majestically. From my point of view, the icicles occasionally eclipsed each other, separated, and eclipsed each other again, making me think of the blades on wool shears.
As I got closer, I could see that the band of the crown that joined them all was thick enough for people to pass through. Closer still, I saw the forward ring sitting about a quarter of the way between the bases and the tips of the icicles. Thin “legs” slanted in and forward to attach this smaller ring to the rest of the ship. That forward ring was a magnetic choke that would increase the ship’s ability to reflect the ions that would push it along—the design actually dated back to the twentieth century, though not realized until the twenty-second. It also helped deflect charged debris in front of the ship. It is one thing to study the history of such things, or see them on some video display, and entirely a different thing to see them with one’s own eyes. I was awestruck. This was a real starship and I was going to ride on it.
The runabout set down on the inside of the small ring in a complicated maneuver, which its AI handled flawlessly, leaving me with about a tenth of a gee of spin gravity. I wondered if that maneuver could even be attempted manually.
Dock and seal were quickly announced, and the smart glasses guided me down a long, sloping corridor that ran inside one of the choke ring supports to the passageway in the main ring and something approaching lunar gravity. From there they conducted me into the middle of Sphere One, a living roomlike common area surrounded by doors to private quarters and a fireman’s pole in the center leading to decks above and below. I had barely begun to wonder which door was mine when one to my left opened unbidden. An AI somewhere was responsible, of course.
The cabin was tiny; a fold-down bunk two meters long took up the entire outboard side. A well-disguised lavatory sat to the right of the door at the foot of the bed, and a small desk and chair sat to the left of the door at its head. I checked to see if my personal stores had been stowed, and they had—as part of the shield mass. Included was a precious case of my native island whisky, Talisker. I pursed my lips and set aside my thirst for the nonce.
“Hello, Dr. Macready. Rumor is I’m in charge of this zoo.”
I turned. Outside my door was our expedition commander, George P. Weaver, a tall man with close-cropped steel gray hair. By his biography, he was a horseman, a Texan, with Ph.D.s in animal husbandry and systems management. He still had vestiges of a Texas accent, but this was well smoothed toward an aerospace standard English that sounded not too unlike the Canadian of the Toronto region. He offered me the callused hand of a sincere physical hobbyist, with a correspondingly firm grip.
“Glad to meet you, sir,” I replied, wondering what he’d think of my rather unsmoothed Scots accent, “and there’ll be no need for the ‘doctor’ so far from the classroom. It’s Bruce.”
He gave me a long look as if judging whether he was ready to be on a first-name basis.
“Right, Macready ... uh, Bruce ... Brad Adams arranged for you to have this stateroom.”
“Aye.”
“Will you be riding out the acceleration with us?”
Others had described that experience well enough for me. “No, I’ll be in cold sleep unless something noteworthy happens. Project management’s arranged for me to be woken up in that event.”
Weaver raised an eyebrow. “Project management will soon be a long, long way away. We’ll have ninety-six scientists with us who want to study the Epsilon Eridani system in detail. They’re in cold storage and will stay there until we’re ready for them.”
“I hope my arrangement meets with your approval, then,” I added.
His face remained impassive.
“Ah, once I’ve sorted myself, I hoped to ask Dr. Davra about the finer points of what the robotic minions at Epsilon Eridani can do on their own and what might require our direction.” Davra, a comely lass, was the chief roboticist.
He looked at me a bit, then nodded as if making a judgment. “I see you’ve homed in on the central issue already. The short answer is, their programming can’t anticipate everything. That’s why Doc Zhau sent us.”
Dr. Zhau and Weaver had a history that went back several decades, and when Zhau had wanted someone he could completely rely on to ensure the Epsilon Eridani impactor went on time, he’d picked Weaver, as he’d told me over a whisky at our interview.
“Bad luck on Davra, though. She’s on ice already.” Weaver smiled and gave me a wink. “So you do your research, heed that data, and plan for contingencies. Those are survival traits out here.”
I took that as high praise. “Thank you, sir.”
“We’ll have you on ice tomorrow and you’ll wake up in the space colony being built to house us at Epsilon Eridani. So settle in and make your calls today.”
I did so, but before turning in, I poked around the ship a bit. If things went according to plan, this would likely be the last I’d see of it.
Chapter 2
Aboard the Admiral Byrd,
in route to the Epsilon Eridani System,
9 November, 2272
I woke to a low-pitched thrum and a slight metallic taste in my mouth, presumably a legacy of my cold sleep experience. Otherwise, I might have had an afternoon nap. Our trip to Epsilon Eridani should be over, and I should be in some kind of house or apartment in the great rugby-ball-shaped habitat that the robots had been building for us, along with about a hundred other freshly thawed people. Every second or so, I heard a distant hollow thump—a construction device of some sort, perhaps. I was not entirely motionless, but the accelerations were slight; had I not been on a mattress, I doubt I’d have felt anything.
I lifted my head and opened my eyes. The light level was quite low, but enough for me to see that I was still in my stateroom aboard the Admiral Byrd.
“Admiral? Why am I not in the habitat? Haven’t we made it to Epsilon Eridani?”
Do you hear me satisfactorily?
“Aye, but not in my ears! What have ye done to me?”
You’ve been given an implant. It’s a necessary safety item aboard a starship. In a few days, you’ll be able to communicate subvocally on the local net, but for now, continue to talk; this lets your chip learn the impulse patterns of the nerves to your vocal cords.
I had just been getting used to the glasses! I blinked hard, shook my head, and stretched to wake myself. Something had happened! I could complain about the surgery later.
You have a message from Dr. Weaver.
“Aye?”
Weaver’s voice sounded in my head. A very violent and entirely unpredicted collision in the Epsilon Eridani system has increased the amount of meteoric debris in the system by three or four orders of magnitude, two orders of magnitude more than the array-building system had been designed to withstand. We will be meeting in the Sphere Three Park at 1400 to discuss the situation and make plans.
“Well!” They must have known this for some time, I thought. So much for my arrangement. “Let’s see what’s out there. Forward view.”
I saw a glowing Medusa—a black disk surrounded by curling wavy streams of light. It took me a few seconds to register what I saw with what I knew.
“We’re in the shadow of this habitat?”
Yes, the Admiral answered. The outward end of the shell has been covered—that is the black disk. I can amplify it if you like, but it is smooth and featureless at this magnification.
“Never mind. All those streams?”
Those are comets. There are 973 of them in your field of view.
“They’re all heading right into the star?”
That is mostly perspective, the AI answered. Only 311 have perihelia within the photosphere. All but fifteen of those are actually ammonia-saturated slag balls from our mining and solar power station construction operations.
The Admiral’s comments not withstanding, I was in awe of this picture, of all this cosmic debris falling toward the star, and feeling not a little uneasy. How did the artificial intelligences building the array cope with this? What plans should we make? Was the project itself in jeopardy? I got myself up to speed as much as I could.
Then it was time to go to the Sphere Three Park. Getting there was no problem: the hollow main ring led through the center of each sphere. A woman by the name of Jill Davenport, head of biology, soon followed me on the pole and assured me this was the way.
As I came up the pole I was greeted by a shapely lass wearing a glossy purple shipsuit that looked as if it had been painted on her body. It had a white shoulder-to-hip band, broken by a triangle of well-tanned skin nearly down to her navel.
“Hello, Dr. Macready.”
“Dr. Davra, I presume?”
She smiled and motioned to a spot on the grass. “We’re about ready to start.”
I nodded, sat down on the grass like everyone else and looked up at displays of comets and collisions spread all over the dome.
“Damn it, Emma,” Weaver said at length, “how’d this happen?”
Emma Lewis, our astrophysicist, stood up so she could see everyone. She reminded me of my kindergarten teacher so many years ago, save for a London accent. She was dressed, much as I was, in plain walking shorts and a loose pullover tunic that gave little hint of any figure.
“Bad luck, isn’t it? The big collision followed a bolometric luminosity spike of almost twelve percent—a huge flare by solar standards—that occurred the year we left. This flare increased cometary activity, causing more random nongravitational accelerations. That caused changes in previously settled orbits, increasing collision rates which increase debris, which increase the number of collisions, and so on. It’s a feedback process—exponential as long as a reservoir of material exists; and the giant planet Loki’s eccentric orbit continually stirs things up. But a collision that big might not have happened for tens of thousands of years. Instead, it happened now.”
“So, what do you think we should do about it?” Weaver asked.
“Study it for now,” Lewis answered, somewhat hesitantly. “Something is going on we don’t quite understand. We’ll come up with a better solution when we do.”
“Meanwhile, we’re losing ground,” Davra complained. “Simulations show the response of the AI systems is to divert power array production to beam drivers, up to the point where that’s all that’s being made. Without replacement array panels and any new arrays, we’ll be falling behind. We’ll need to do some creative thinking.”
She was answered by a tall, angular, light-skinned man with a shock of dark boyish hair falling on his forehead. After a moment’s cobweb-cleaning in the cold-sleep-dusty cells of my memory, I recognized Dr. Daggert Dickson, an engineer, expert in propulsion systems.
“The AIs won’t? I thought these systems were fairly creative,” he said.
“We constrained their creativity,” Davra responded. “We didn’t want them thinking up new purposes in a thirty-year management control loop....”
“Oh, of course not,” Dickson agreed. “If we don’t watch out they might invent sex....”
“Humpf,...
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