Charles Sheffield - Tomorrow and Tomorrow

“Do you mean out of the Galaxy?” Drake wondered if he was misunderstanding what he was seeing and hearing.

“No. Out of the universe.” The interactive list replied in Drake’s own voice.

“Throw them out of the universe to where ?”

“That remains unresolved. Most probably, to a universe like our own, perhaps to one with different constants of nature. These conjectures are based on theoretical analyses only. Many probes have been sent through a caesura, but none has ever returned.”

“Is it possible that the Shiva are sending our colonies through a caesura?”

“It is quite impossible. We know from numerous observations that the suns and planets in the silent zone remain exactly where they were before. They merely refuse to respond to us in any way. When we send a probe to them, it remains active and returns signals all the way. After its arrival at the planet, it falls silent.”

Drake fell silent, too. He was persuaded; the Shiva were not making use of the caesuras. But as for the caesuras themselves…

He did not understand them, but he could not get them out of his mind. He called for Mel Bradley. In the short term, the colonies would have to be protected with whatever was to hand. He was not optimistic about that, when the shields had not worked. What could penetrate a total shield?

He would ponder that question. And in the meantime — which might be a very long time — he and Mel would work on another option.

“Lord of our far-flung battle line”

Waiting.

Drake considered himself an expert on waiting. What else had he been doing for the past six billion years but waiting and hoping?

This time, though, it was different. This time he could not drift dormant through the ages; this time he must remain conscious, day after day, waiting and watching and wondering.

Cass Leemu and Mel Bradley, with Drake’s guidance and close direction, had taken existing technology and adapted it to provide planetary defenses. Superluminal signals had been sent out to the colonies; not only to the ones that according to Par Leon were in the most immediate danger, but to the next line back.

The main focus was going to be on that second line. Drake had made the decision and kept it to himself, knowing that he dare not discuss it with the others. His action was going to doom billions of thinking beings to extinction. The composites would not be able to handle such an idea. Drake, however, had no choice. If he were right, this was going to be a war of long duration. Before he could produce a long-term strategy, he needed to see exactly what happened when the Shiva became active in a region; then he needed time to build a wall of defense, observation posts, and lines of communication. Except as information sources, he had to write off planets that would probably fall in the next year or two.

The outgoing messages to the colonies gave precise instructions on fabricating and installing the defense systems. Within a few months, the superluminal S-wave messages came flowing back. Defenses had been built and tested on thousands of worlds. Shields were in place. Fusion, fission, cavitation, and particle beams sat prepared for instant use. The colonies were nervous, but they claimed to be ready for anything.

That worried Drake more than it heartened him. In every resurrection he had believed himself ready for anything; each time, he had been astonished by events.

What else could he do while he was waiting? The little villa had become a headquarters for galactic action. He prowled it, night and day. The living room was now a War Room for the whole Galaxy, where reports from a billion suns were sifted, analyzed, and summarized by the multiple working layers of composites. The placid view of the Bay of Naples had long since gone. In its place was an ever-changing display of the “battle front.” Drake thought of it that way, although there was still no sign of conflict; only reports from the colonies and regular messages from the probes that were observing them from a safe distance. A copy of Par Leon was on each of those probes, transmitted as S-wave signals and downloaded to permanent storage as part of the resident composite.

Everything was ready. Ready for anything? Drake watched and wondered.

And then the silence began. One of the front line planets stopped transmitting.

It was almost too much for that copy of Par Leon. The returning messages from the probe took on a hysterical overtone. “We can see the planet, it looks just the same as it always has. There’s no sign of damage or change. But they don’t reply! We keep sending, and they won’t reply!”

Underneath Par Leon’s words, like a carrier wave, was the suppressed terror of a billion more voices. Drake itched to be part of the probe composite, to see things at firsthand. But that would break one of his prime rules: he had to remain separate and aloof, a primitive throwback to earlier times uncontaminated by the gentler present. Otherwise he would be no more useful than a hundred trillion others.

“It’s all right, Leon. Keep calm. How far from the planet are you?”

“Two and a half light-hours.”

Drake called for a conversion to a measure more familiar to him: nearly three billion kilometers. “You’re probably safe. Is that the best image you can send us?” The War Room display showed a grainy and fluctuating picture of a gray-green blob.

“The best we can do from this distance. We’re observing at our highest magnification.”

“It’s not good enough. I can’t see any detail at all. You have to take the probe closer. But don’t take risks. Turn around and run if you sense any kind of trouble.”

“Trouble? Do you think it’s safe to go closer? We sent hundreds of messages to them, and they don’t reply anymore.”

“You said yourself, the planet looks just the way it did before it went quiet.”

It sounded like an answer to Par Leon’s question, but it wasn’t. If Drake had to guess, he would say that any probe approaching a silent planet was not safe at all. It was in terrible danger. But he could not mention

that to anyone. If he was to save trillions, he might have to sacrifice billions. He had to have information.

He told himself that he was not sending anyone to a real death. The composite represented by Par Leon would still exist here, even if every probe copy was annihilated. And yet he recognized that as a bogus logic. The death of a clone was a real death — to the clone.

Drake asked to be informed when the probe came within ten light-minutes of its planetary goal, and turned his attention elsewhere. Other messages were streaming in from other places. It was more of the same bad news: planets and their colonies, unaffected in appearance, were vanishing from the universe of communication. They were becoming part of a great and spreading silence.

He measured the total time for fifty more cases of signal loss: a little less than six hours. Allowing for statistical error, Par Leon’s estimate of two hundred lost worlds a day was spot on.

Drake did not try to examine each situation in detail. Melissa and Tom would be doing that, and they would provide their analyses later. He turned his attention back to the first world. The probe was within ten light-minutes. While it flew closer, Drake called for backup planetary data.

This was one world in a triple dwarf-star system of over a hundred. And it was the only one that was even remotely habitable, with native life-forms and an oxygen atmosphere. That gave it a certain distinction: planetary orbits in multiple systems were normally too variable for life to develop, sometimes sweeping in searingly close to one of the stars, then wandering off for cold years in the outer darkness. This world had been lucky — its name translated to Drake as “Felicity.” It had hovered in the middle region, not too close and not too far, for the billion years that life needed.