David Brin - Infinity's Shore

They may be crazy — Lester especially. Probably the effort will backfire and make the aliens more vicious than ever Dedinger would look at this — along with all the semaphores, gliders, balloons, and other innovations — and call it the futile thrashing of the damned.

Yet the attempt is glorious. If they pull it off I’ll know I was right about the Six. Our destiny was not foretold by the scrolls, or Dedinger’s orthodoxy … or Lark’s, for that matter.

It was unique.

Anyway, if we’re to be damned, I’d rather it be for trying.

Just one thing still puzzled her. Sara shook her head and murmured aloud.

“Why me?”

Kurt, the Tarek Town exploser, had acted as if this project desperately needed Sara, for her professional expertise. But Uriel’s machine was already nearly functional by the time the party arrived from Xi. Prity and Emerson were helpful at making the analog computer work, and so were books Kurt hand-carried from Biblos. But Sara found herself with little to contribute.

“I only wish I knew why Uriel asked for me.”

Her answer came from the entrance to the computer vault.

“Is that truly the only thing you wish to understand? But that one is easy, Sara. Uriel did not ask for you at all!”

The speaker was a man of middling stature with a shock of white hair and a stained beard that stood out as if he were constantly thunderstruck. Kawsh leaves smoldered in his pipe, a habit chiefly indulged in by male hoons, since the vapors were too strong for most humans. Politely, Sage Purofsky stood in the draft of the doorway, and turned away from Sara when exhaling.

She bowed to the senior scholar, known among his peers as the best mind in the Commons.

“Master, if Uriel doesn’t need my help, why was I urged to come? Kurt made it sound vital.”

“Did he? Vital. Well, I suppose it is, Sara. In a different way.”

Purofsky’s eyes tracked the glitter of rays glancing off spinning disks. His gaze showed appreciation of Uriel’s accomplishment. “Math must pay its way with useful things,” the sage once said. “Even though mere computation is like bashing down a door because you cannot find the key.”

Purofsky had spent his life in search of keys.

“It was I who sent for you, my dear,” the aged savant explained after a pause. “And now that you’re recovered from your ill-advised spill down a mountainside, I think it’s high time that I showed you why.”

It was still daytime outside, but a starscape spread before Sara. Clever lenses projected glass photoslides onto a curved wall and ceiling, recreating the night sky in a wondrous planetarium built by Uriel’s predecessor so that even poor urrish eyesight might explore constellations in detail. Sage Purofsky wore stars like ornaments on his face and gown, while his shadow cast a man-shaped nebula across the wall.

“I should start by explaining what I’ve been up to since you left Biblos … has it really been more than a year, Sara?”

“Yes, Master.”

“Hmm. An eventful year. And yet …”

He worked his jaw for a moment, then shook his head.

“Like you, I had grown discouraged with my former field of study. At last, I decided to extend the classical, precontact geometrodynamic formalisms beyond the state they were in when the Tabernacle left the solar system.”

Sara stared.

“But I thought you wanted to reconcile precontact Earth physics with Galactic knowledge. To prove that Einstein and Lee had made crude but correct approximations … the way Newton preapproximated Einstein.”

That in itself would have been a daunting task — some might say hopeless. According to reports brought by the Tabernacle, spacetime relativity was ill regarded by those alien experts hired by the Terragens Council to teach modern science to Earthlings. Galactic instructors disdained as superstition the homegrown cosmology humans formerly relied on — the basis of crude star probes, crawling along at sublight speeds. Until the Earthship Vesarius fell through an undetected hyperanomaly, ending humanity’s long isolation, Einstein’s heirs had never found a useful way to go faster — although some methods had been recorded in the Galactic Library for over a billion years.

After contact, humans scrimped to buy some thirdhand hyperships, and the old mathemetric models of Hawking, Purcell, and Lee fell by the wayside. In trying to show validity for precontact physics, Purofsky had taken on a strange, perhaps forlorn, task.

“I had some promising results at first, when I restated the Serressimi Exalted Transfer Shunt in terms compatible with old-fashioned tensor calculus.”

“Indeed?” Sara leaned forward in her chair. “But how did you renormalize all the quasi-simultaneous infinities? You’d almost have to assume—”

But the elder sage raised a hand to cut her off, unwilling to be drawn into details.

“Plenty of time for that later, if you’re still interested. For now let’s just say that I soon realized the futility of that approach. Earth must by now have specialists who understand the official Galactic models better than I’ll ever hope to. They have units of the Great Library, and truly modern computer simulators to work with. Suppose I did eventually manage to demonstrate that our Old Physics was a decent, if limited, approximation? It might win something for pride, showing that wolflings had been on the right track, on our own. But nothing new would come of it.”

Purofsky shook his head. “No, I decided it was time to go for broke. I’d plunge ahead with the old spacetime approach, and see if I could solve a problem relevant to Jijo — the Eight Starships Mystery.”

Sara blinked.

“You mean seven, don’t you? The question of why so many sooner races converged on Jijo within a short time, without getting caught? But isn’t that settled?” She pointed at the most brilliant point on the wall. “Izmunuti started flooding nearby space with carbon chaff twenty centuries ago. Enough to seed the hollow hail and change our weather patterns, more than a light-year away. Once the storm wrecked all the watch robots left in orbit by the Migration Institute, sneakships could get in undetected.”

“Hr-rm … yes, but not good enough, Sara. From wall inscriptions found in a few Buyur ruins, we know two transfer points used to serve this system. The other must have collapsed after the Buyur left.”

“Well? That’s why the Izmunuti gambit works! A single shrouded access route, and the great Institutes not scheduled to resurvey the area for another eon. It must be a fairly unique situation.”

“Unique. Hrm, and convenient. So convenient, in fact, that I decided to acquire fresh data.”

Purofsky turned toward the planetarium display, and a distant expression crossed his shadowed face. After a few duras, Sara realized he must be drifting. That kind of absentmindedness might be a prerogative of genius back in the cloistered halls of Biblos, but it was infuriating when he had her keyed up so! She spoke in a sharp tone.

“Master! You were saying you needed data. Is there really something relevant you can see with Uriel’s simple telescope?”

The scholar blinked, then cocked his head and smiled. “You know, Sara … I find it striking that we both spent the last year chasing unconventional notions. You, a sideline into languages and sociology — yes, I followed your work with interest. And me, thinking I could pierce secrets of the past using coarse implements made of reforged Buyur scrap metal and melted sand.

“Did you know, while taking pictures of Izmunuti, I also happened to snap shots of those starships? The ones causing so much fuss, up north? Caught them entering orbit … though my warning didn’t reach the High Sages in time.” Purofsky shrugged. “But to your question. Yes, I managed to learn a few things, using the apparatus here on Mount Guenn.