Диана Дуэйн - Lifeboats

Kit sat considering that for a bit. Dairine nodded. “The weird thing,” she said, “like there’s only one weird thing about Temalbar, is that the other three species don’t know where the Fourth came from. And there’s nothing about that in the manual, either. They didn’t evolve there; there’s no evidence of them in the fossil record. They just turned up.”

Carl nodded. “And thereby hangs a tale,” he said. “Whether their appearance was due to an accident in transport or an experiment that went wrong, or they were explorers from somewhere a lot further away who went astray and wound up on Temalbar… at this end of time there’s no telling. But it was a good thing for all of us that they did wind up here, because one way or another they saved us a lot of time.”

“Problem is,” Tom said, “we tend to think of worldgating as something commonplace, a normal function of wizardry. And at the wizardly end of things, naturally it is. But worldgating in the mechanical sense is much harder to achieve—very energy intensive, and requiring a very high level of technological expertise.”

“Which the Fourth seemed to have brought with them from wherever they came from,” Carl said. “Which no one’s sure of, and no one’s managed to find out. Not even they seem terribly certain—insofar as anyone can really figure out what they’re thinking.”

“Well, we’ve got the Speech,” Nita said, looking puzzled. “It’s not like we can’t ask them.”

Tom gave her a thoughtful look. “I invite you to try,” he said, “when you meet up with one or more of them. Let me know how that turns out.” There was something to his voice that seemed to suggest he was both amused at the possibility and genuinely wondering what Nita might turn up.

She rubbed her eyes. “Tell me that somehow or other this isn’t going to mean I wind up doing more paperwork.”

Tom shook his head and smiled, looking rueful. “No guarantees… just see how you do.” He looked over at Dairine again. “Sorry,” he said. “Do go on.”

Dairine gave him another annoyed look, but Kit glanced at Nita for a moment and saw from her expression that she was amused at how restrained Dairine was being. “Anyway!” Dairine said. “So the Fourth started sharing their expertise at mechanical worldgating with the other three species. And all together they made all kinds of breakthroughs, so that their technology started spreading all over among the spacefaring species in that part of space. Gating tech got really small and compact, and implementing the basic equations got easier and easier. Then one or another of the four Temal species got the idea of starting to build a standalone network of ‘hard’ worldgates among planets in their part of the galaxy. One or two of those gates were on Earth; early explorers used them to look the place over. There wasn’t that much interest in us, because this was… maybe twenty thousand years ago, this first bit? And there wasn’t a lot going on back home, so they just sort of classified us and went away.”

Ronan grunted. “Only because they didn’t know yet that there was chocolate there.”

Kit pursed his lips and did his best to keep his expression otherwise neutral. Ronan and Kit’s sister Carmela were still in the early stages of working out the kinks in the business plan for their interstellar chocolate-trading company. Half the time the very idea of this joint venture left Kit full of a nameless dread. The rest of the time it left him profoundly relieved that Carmela wasn’t getting into intergalactic arms trading instead. Kit had lately begun to realize that his sister had a near-piratical instinct for where profit lay, and apparently—after a long weekend spent examining a couple of years’ worth of figures from the cocoa futures markets based on Rirhath B and on Earth—had decided there was a lot more profit in chocolate running than in gunrunning. …Thank God.

“That could even be true,” Dairine said. “Anyhow, as they kept improving the tech, the Temal got to the point where they could not only move small numbers of living beings great distances almost instantly, but they could move very large numbers of beings shorter distances without requiring the kind of energy outlay that would cripple a whole planet.” Dairine reached down to Spot, flipped his lid open. “And that was where the Interconnect Project began—”

“Would group 5611GH,” a mechanical voice said in the Speech, echoing in the air all around them—

Everyone’s heads snapped up together.

“—please report to the 500 hexes; your outward transport is programmed and ready. Group 5611GH to the 500 hexes please…”

“Okay, a bit closer than planned,” Tom said, pushing away from the counter. “No complaints about that…”

Everybody grabbed their bags or whatever else they’d come with, thanked the Rirhait who’d been taking care of them, and headed off after Tom and Carl. “So I’m sure we can finish this another time…” Dairine said, falling in behind them next to Ronan.

“What, you can’t walk and lecture us at the same time?” Tom said. “Nelaid will be sorry to hear that.”

“Not to mention skeptical,” said Carl. “With so much evidence to the contrary.”

Behind Dairine and Ronan, Kit glanced over at Nita, who glanced back, biting her lip to keep from laughing. Kit carefully kept his face straight, but even so Nita had to turn away from him to keep from losing it. Meanwhile Dairine was leveling a look at Tom’s back that should have burned through it like a pulse rifle, but the effect was somewhat ruined by Tom casually turning toward her and walking backwards for a bit as they all made their way toward the 500 hexes.

Dairine rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “Not much more to tell, anyway. All the Temal species realized that a really great way to use the technology would be to remove whole planetary populations from endangered venues, where before you’d have had no choice but to do potentially world-saving interventions with the whole population stuck on site. And with the SunTap technology they developed, you could install large-aperture mass-movement gates on the surface of any planet close enough to its primary, and get everybody who was in danger out of there—and not have to do something invasive and really taxing in terms of wizardly power like full-species archival.”

“Like what Mamvish does,” Nita said.

Carl nodded. “You need a very high-powered wizard for that kind of work,” he said, “the kind who’s not born all that often and has an intuitive grasp of how to archive life and matter without them losing their connection to each other. Or else you need hundreds of wizards who don’t mind taking a fifty-fifty chance that they can save half a million or two million or ten million lives at the cost of their own.” He shook his head. “Lifeprice is never cheap…”

For a change Dairine didn’t protest at the interruption, just looked down rather somberly at Spot, presently tucked under her arm. “So they started putting together a force to do that,” she said. “Not of wizardly people, mostly, though there were wizards involved. That was the beginning of the Interconnect Project. And it got bigger, and spread all through that part of inhabited space… which is when things got ugly.”

Tom, who’d turned around as they started getting near the 500 hexes, nodded and sighed.

“Because all of a sudden a black hole came sailing through the Alterf system,” Dairine said. “A lot of people got the idea that maybe the Lone Power thought too many lives were getting saved due to the species based there. So the story goes that in a fit of spite It chucked a singularity through the system…”

“Well, it is just a story,” Carl said. “We’re short on data about the actual causes. And you can’t blame the Lone Power for everything—”