Martin Amis - Heavy Water and Other Stories

“Can I ask you a question?” He seemed to be addressing Miss World. “Did they laugh just now because they thought he was funny or because they thought he was full of shit? No. Never mind. Let me tell you, Lord Nobel Laureate, that Jupiter wasn’t always a gas giant. Originally it was much smaller and denser. Rock mantle on an iron silicate core. But that was before they fucked with Mars.

“The storm system that you call the Great Spot? The Earth-sized zit in its southern tropic? That was ground zero for an NH4 device we sent their way.”

“Ammonia?” asked Voronezh, with a glint in his eye.

“Right. It’s something we were very proud of, for a while. We turned their place into a colossal stink bomb without altering its mass. To avoid perturbation problems further down the line. Some said at the time that the War with Jupiter might have been bypassed quite easily. Mars overreacted, some said. I mean, a type-w planet, hundreds of millions of years away from posing any plausible threat. Whatever, the War with Jupiter was wrapped up in six months. But then we faced perceived disrespect from another quarter, and turned our attention to—”

“Don’t tell me,” said Lord Kenrick. “Venus.”

“Wrong direction. No, not Venus. Ceres.”

The janitor on Mars waited. Fukiyama (superstrings) said dutifully, “Ceres isn’t a planet. It’s the biggest rock in the asteroid belt.”

Calmly inspecting the tips of his talons the janitor on Mars said, “Yeah, right. They wanted to play rough and so…” He shrugged and added, “It was as our expeditionary force was returning from Jupiter that it picked up the ambiguous transmission from Ceres, another type-w world, though well behind Jupiter. It’s possible that in the heat of the moment the Martian commander mistakenly inferred an undertone of sarcasm in the Cerean message of tribute. The War with Ceres, in any case, ended that same afternoon. Then for several weeks, on the home planet, there reigned an uneasy peace. Plans were drawn up for a preemptive strike against Earth. Some Martians sensed aggressive potential there. Because—hey. Action on the blue planet. Photosynthesis. Photochemical dissociation of hydrogen sulphide, no less. Light energy used to break the bonds cleaving oxygen to hydrogen and carbon. Bacteria becomes cyanobacteria. Gangway. Where’s the fire? But then something happened that changed all our perspectives. Suddenly we knew that all this was bullshit and the real action lay elsewhere.

“In the year 2,912,456,327 B.C., by your calendar, the Scythers of the Orion Spur sent a warning shot across our bows. They compacted Pluto. Pluto was originally a gas giant the size of Uranus. And the Scythers scrunched it. Without a care for mass-conservation—hence the perturbations you’ve noticed in Neptune. You thought Pluto was a planet? You thought Pluto was supposed to look like that? In the Scythers of the Orion Spur I suppose you could say that Mars had found an appropriate adversary. A type-v world. Same weaponry. Same mental-health problems. Rather superior cosmonautics. The War with the Scythers of the Orion Spur—the combatants being separated by twenty kiloparsecs—was, as you can imagine, a somewhat protracted affair. Door to door, the round trip took 150,000 years: at even half-lightspeed, achievable with our scoop drives, relativistic effects were found to be severe. Still, the great ships went out. Wave after wave. The War with the Scythers of the Orion Spur was hotly prosecuted for just over a billion years. Who won? We did. They’re still there, the Scythers. Their planet is still there. The nature of war changed, during that trillennium. It was no longer nuclear or quantum-gravitational. It was neurological. Informational. Life goes on for the Scythers, but its quality has been subtly reduced. We fixed it so that they think they’re simulations in a deterministic computer universe. It is believed that this is the maximum suffering you can visit on a type-v world. The taste of victory was sweet. But by then we knew that interplanetary war, even at these distances, was essentially bullshit too. Oh and meanwhile, in that billion-year interlude, all hell has been breaking out on Earth. Oxygen established as an atmospheric gas. Cells with nuclei. All hell is breaking out.

“The Scyther War broadened our horizons. Martian astronomers had become intensely interested in a question that you yourselves are still wrestling with. I mean dark matter. The speed with which galaxies rotate suggests that 98.333 percent of any given galactic mass is invisible and unaccounted for. We went through all the hoops you’re going through, and more. What was the dark matter? Massive neutrinos? Failed stars? Slain planets? Black holes? Resonance residue? Plasma fluctuation? Then we kind of flashed it. The answer had been staring us in the face but we had to overcome a mortal reluctance to confront its truth. There was no dark matter. The galaxies had all been engineered , brought on line. Including our own. Many, many cycles ago.

“With cosynchronous unanimity it was decided that this subjection was not going to be tolerated. Despite the odds against. It was believed that we were up against a type-n world or entity—maybe even type-m. I now know that we were actually dealing with a type-q world, though one obscurely connected to a power of the type-j order. Apart from the bare fact of their existence, incidentally, nothing is known—in this particle horizon—about worlds -a through -i.

“Our idea was to launch a surprise attack on the galactic core. We figured that our small but measurable chance of success was entirely dependent on surprise—on instantaneity. None of that Scyther shit was going to be any help to us here. There was no question of idling coreward at ninety thousand miles per second—we’d just have to be there and hit them with absolutely everything we had. Now. To be clear. In your technological aspirations, on Earth, you are restricted by various inadvertencies like lack of funds but also by your very weak grasp of the laws of physics. We were restricted by the laws of physics. Period. So take a guess. How were we going to do it?”

“Wormholes,” said Paolo Sylvino (wormholes).

“Wormholes. Evanescent openings into hyperspace—or, more accurately, into parallel universes with different curvatures or phase trajectories. Ultraspace was the word we preferred. In crude form the idea’s been knocking around on Earth since Einstein. Though I venture to suggest that you have a way to go on the how- to end of it. For us of course it was largely a stress-equation problem. You fish a loop out of the quantum foam and then punch a tunnel in spacetime, flexibilizing it with the use of certain uh, exotic materials. We worked on this problem for seven and a half million years.

“Here was the setup. We knew that at the core there lay a black hole of some 1.4237 million solar masses, and we knew it had been ringed and tapped. As you’re aware, the energy contained within the black-hole inswirl is stupendous, but it’s wholly insufficient to drive a galaxy. The true energy source was something other. And that was the prize we sought. While fitting out the initial strike force we sent recon probes to the galactic core at roughly million-year intervals. Many missions were lost. Those that returned did so with wiped sensors. One way or another, preparations for the strike consumed 437 million years. Then we made our play. On Earth, around now, let it be noted, what do we get but the emergence of organisms visible to the naked eye.”

The janitor on Mars sat down and leaned backwards and folded his claws behind his head. Ruminatively he continued, “No one ever thought of this move as a—as a ‘mistake’ exactly. Everybody was deeply convinced that this was something we absolutely had to do. But the consequences were somewhat extreme. So long in preparation, the Involvement of the Initial Strike Force with the Core Power was over in nine seconds.