Chapter Four:

At a table in the Administration Building central to the Academy, Professors Ambergee, Viniker, Maglen and Grellin Esteve sat at a long wide wooden table with two of the Deans of the School, one from the department of Sciences, the other from Economics.

The event was noteworthy. Deans simply did not meet with Professors. Requests were made, requests were answered through a system of gate keepers, each another assurance that only the most sober and necessary communications would occur.

Otherwise, a Professor might say anything. Dean Edzig Acuff, of Economics, was almost certain that this would happen now.

“You are granted this interview,” he said to the collection of black robes, “because of the extraordinary nature of your request.”

“Not to mention the extraordinary conditions of your experiment,” Dean Credig Acuff added. Edzig’s older brother, he’d served as a Dean for over half of his eighty years.

Acuff was a notable family name – they ran banks, factories and, of course, the Academy. Both brothers were balding, grey-haired men with brown eyes and beak-like noses. Credig had a healthy paunch before him, while Edzig was almost spindly – a man of monies, afraid to spend any of them on such a superfluous thing as food.

“Brother,” Edzig warned.

“No,” Credig said. He glared at the Professors as if they’d stolen his seat on the Academy Council. “The laws of physics are not so casually broken. What is the speed of this – of this super-fliver you’ve developed?”

“The Fisherman,” Viniker inserted, “is approaching 90% of the speed of light.”

Credig shook his head. Edzig wondered if he shouldn’t be looking for the Physics Police to come breaking through the polished door to this office.

“I thought that was impossible,” Edzig said.

“It is,” Credig assured him.

“It was,” one of the Professors, Maglen, said, a slight smile touching his lips. “I would have thought it, as well, however we have a new Professor, and a scholar about to be elevated, who tell us otherwise, and yes, The Fisherman will soon exceed that speed.”

“How?” Credig demanded. “How is this possible?”

Ambergee opened her mouth to answer, however Grellin Esteve cut her off. Edzig was grateful – he was familiar with Ambergee and most of her time was spent cultivating hatred for anyone whom she believed exceeded her, and the rest on then exceeding them. Persons of name, in his experience, had less to prove, and then more facts to offer.

“Where the speed of light is a constant,” Grellin said, adjusting his robes at his shoulders as he spoke, “then where speed approaching the speed of light is achieved, the inertial mass of that object increases, resulting in the slowing down of the object. Eventually, the forward acceleration stops, and stasis is achieved.”

“Yes,” Credig agreed.

“But only in a closed system,” Viniker interrupted. Normally, this wouldn’t be tolerated, and Edzig would have had the young Professor removed from the room, however this young professor had given them the fliver, and the greatest influx of revenues in the history of the Academy. A building was already being constructed in the young man’s name.

Such a man bore listening to.

“A closed system?” Credig echoed.

Grellin grimaced, but Viniker pushed on.

“The math doesn’t mention it, however the situation is implied, and that gave us a rule that we could break,” Viniker continued. “We’ve put a receptor on The Fisherman, and we’ve fired a particle beam at it. Using the principle of magnetic induction, we’ve converted that beam to a voltage, applied the voltage to the acoustic drive on the craft, and added power to the system.”

“You’ve intruded on an enclosed system with energy, and then…” Credig’s voice tapered off.

To Edzig, it was no different from a business taking a loan, and then acquiring more resources than it normally could. However even he saw problems with it.

“As it goes faster,” he said, “how can you keep hitting it.”

“We can’t,” Ambergee chimed in. “So when we want to charge it, we fire a beam in its path, and let it fly through it.”

“Sometimes we’ve missed,” Maglen offered.

“Or we might have already achieved our goal,” Grellin Esteve admitted. “As it is, we don’t know what’s going to happen when we achieve that speed, because nothing ever has.”

“Nothing solid,” Credig said.

Edzig mind was already racing. What this meant was clear.

Travel at the speed of light, or near it, put other worlds in reach. This was a dream of previous societies for eons.

“Once you achieve that speed,” Credig said, “then, no matter what you do, you won’t be able to insert more energy into the environment, not matter how much you try.”

“We’re aware of that,” Ambergee admitted.

“We’re not,” Viniker countered. All eyes turned to him.

The expression on Ambergee’s face, before she wiped it away and replaced it we more serene curiosity, spoke of vengeance in Credig’s mind.

“We pick a destination,” he said, “and we decide where it’s going to be, when our particle beam will hit it.”

Maglen threw up his hands in an ‘of course’ sort of way.

“And we ride the beam,” Credig said, a smile wide on his face.

“You would have to begin the beam years before you began to travel along it,” Ambergee argued.

“And maintain it on target,” Maglen added, “but, once you did –“

“Once you did,” Credig finished for them, “you could travel at well over the speed of light and, at the end, you could stop.”

“The cost,” Edzig thought to himself. To focus a particle beam at a target for years, then to move a ship, supposedly with people, along the beam…

“But the reward, brother,” Credig said, turning to him.

Edzig nodded to himself. Yes, he thought. The reward.

The Fisherman, alone in the frozen waste of space, caught The Fish in the course of its travel.

Dutifully, it measured its distance to the target, pushing ever-closer, gaining ever faster, now with its receptor array always extended, receiving pulses of power and using them to create its own music, to whistle its own tune into the void, and to go faster.

If The Fisherman could have been impressed, The Fish wouldn’t have done it. It was barely more than a dish in the void that beeped. It moved through space at a constant momentum, doing nothing but saying that it was doing nothing.

The Fisherman flew past its target at several times its speed, turned a wide circle and then passed it again. As it passed the second time, The Fisherman engaged its anti-grav drive and give The Fish a push.

The latter, having been battered by space debris for months, broke into a dozen pieces, and beeped no more. The former, in an equal and opposite reaction, received the little kick it needed to exceed the speed of light.

At that point, pointed back toward Syriahs, it began to overrun its own transmissions and scramble them with its own receptors. It received instructions, but passed through them – simple electro-magnetic waves – before it could interpret them, and then did nothing. It registered and reported error after error. Its deflector continued to work, but was now firing a barrage of debris ahead of it at a speed near its own, off in random directions, as it was designed. Those particles smashed into each other and created other debris and more collisions.

Essentially flying blind through space, it wasn’t long before something with some mass got into its way – in this case, a comet. The Fisherman’s weak deflector wasn’t designed to defend it from something so huge, and it instead crashed into it, destroying itself and sending the comet spinning into the star Sol.

Sol absorbed the comet’s energy without a flicker.

Not so, the people of Syriahs.

Scholars and Professors, Administrators and a few representatives from the news scrambled in Ambergee’s Observatory, and in the satellite offices that now supported it.

“Confirmed,” said a blond woman at a console responsible for communications to and from The Fisherman. “We have no telemetry.”

The last report from The Fisherman was that it had destroyed The Fish with its EM drive. Then had come a series of scrambled reports that looked like remodulated transmissions – as if it had tried to send its messages, and then corrected them in the middle unsuccessfully.

Then, a report that might have been from its proximity sensors, then silence. Master Assessor Almott Shrew crowded the Professors Viniker, Maglen and Grellin, demanding answers.

Maglen rubbed the sweat on his bald pate. Similarly, Grellin ran his fingers through his fine, white hair, while Viniker held a portable pad and stylus, gathering information for the consoles of the scholars who’d been monitoring what was becoming ‘the event.’

Shrew had spoken to both of the Acuffs, mostly with Edzig, about the hopes that the Academy placed on this adventure. Wealth was pouring into the Academy from the popularity of the fliver, if that was only a preliminary step to space travel, then this could exceed all bounds of avarice.

Viniker shook his head, looked to Maglen and Grellin, then back to his pad. A young woman in scholar’s yellow and white approached him, timid of the others, and pushed her shoulder under his arm, allowing her to see the pad as well.

Shrew cocked an eyebrow. In all of this, Viniker appeared to have found himself a woman. Well, with the wealth at his command, he’d certainly imagined to find himself a good one – however if he couldn’t keep her out of his science, then this might quickly need to be discouraged.

Viniker put an arm around the female, she studied the pad.

“It exceeded light speed,” she said, softly.

All eyes turned to her – even those from Professor Ambergee. From his personal experience, that brittle hag disliked scholars on principle and other women as a practice, especially the beautiful ones. Ambergee’s thick, black-and-grey hair was bound up in a bun at the top of her head today, her robes open to the waist, her upper body either naked underneath, or contained in some tortured, low-hung outfit. It was hot in the Observatory, now overloaded with monitoring devices and people on a summer day. Shrew felt a bead of sweat on his own sideburn.

Viniker was nodding. “When it did that,” he said, “it overran its own transmissions, and then absorbed part of their energy in its own receptors.”

“A comet has changed trajectory and will strike Sol,” another scholar, a very young man at a simple monitoring counsel, announced to the open air.

How could these people get work done, if others shouted nonsense? Shrew wondered.

Maglen waddled across the room, the dusty hem of his black robe trailing behind him, saying, “That’s not right?”

Grellin was right behind him. “Replay!” he demanded.

“Main screen,” Ambergee ordered. All eyes turned to a set of four viewing screens at the center of the room, where the images from The Fisherman had been playing, and then static.

A satellite feed replayed the image of a comet suddenly surrounded in sparling dust, then careening onto an altered path toward Sol, the largest of the two suns in their binary system, and the one around which Syriahs revolved. The comet’s tail seemed to go on for much longer than the ones he’d seen before, however those were usually just video display for emphasis, provided by news groups, and were subject to interpretation.

But the Professors and some of the scholars were pointing at the tail, as well. One near Shrew commented, “That’s too long.”

A young man with long, brown hair and concerned brown eyes set in a flat face, he seemed approachable to Shrew – at least, more approachable than one of the Professors right now.

“How long should it be?” Shrew asked.

The scholar turned to him. Young scholars all dreamed of being Professors, and were usually eager to show how much they knew. This one was no different.

“There’s no set length,” he said, then pointed to the main screen. “But look at that – how does a comet’s gravity, especially one that size, keep so long a tail? The end would have fallen off centuries ago.”

Shrew nodded as if he understood what that meant.

“And for that matter,” he said, “comets don’t just plummet into the sun. They circle. This one had to have been hit by something.”

“You think The Fisherman hit it?” Shrew asked.

The scholar regarded him. “Normally, I would say that one of our craft don’t have the mass to knock a comet out of orbit,” he said. “But, at the speed of light? Maybe. Maybe…”

The scholar turned back to his panel and accessed what looked like a calculator program.

Shrew turned back to the room and realized that Grellin was approaching him. White-haired Grellin was a man of name. As another from an ancient family, it was easier for Shrew to talk to him.

“What is happening?” Shrew demanded, when the other was close enough for private conversation.

Grellin looked over his shoulder to where the Professors and one scholar were pointing and presenting their cases. Assured that they were occupied, he returned his attention back to the Master Assessor.

Grellin would appreciate the value of keeping the non-academic portion of the Academy informed. Professors tended to be more linear in their thinking.

“I believe that scholar Maree is correct,” he said, softly, putting his shoulder to Shrew’s, “and that our craft achieved or exceeded light speed.”

That was good news, Shrew thought. Certainly, a league of physics scholars would have to relearn their craft, but this pushed space flight into the foreseeable future.

“And it hit that comet?” Shrew asked.

Grellin grimaced. “Let’s hope so,” he said.

Shrew frowned. Grellin looking him in the eyes.

“We’d just pointed the craft back to Syriahs,” he said. “I’d rather not see something traveling at the speed of light, and flying blind, strike my home. How about yours?”

Shrew’s mouth dropped open. He hadn’t even considered that.

“We’ve been sending ‘slow down’ commands on The Fisherman’s frequency and getting no response, not even a garbled one. However, we don’t know how to communicate with something travelling faster than the signal sent to it.”

“Shouldn’t that have been a consideration?” Shrew began, but Grellin shook his head.

“This is new territory,” he said, “and there’s been pressure from the Academy, the Government and the Great Families to move into it quickly. I think, normally, we might not have done what we’ve done in the last few months, in the space of five years.”

Shrew understood that. Academes sought knowledge and enlightenment, and they never asked who was paying for them to sit around, sip strong coffee and grow fat as they contemplated these things.

Men and women who, intellectually speaking, couldn’t manage a fast jog were now being asked to sprint. They didn’t realize that there were others, betting on the outcome.

“Your thoughts?” Shrew asked.

Grellin shrugged. “I’m out of my element here,” he said. He turned back to the arguing Professors. “Young Viniker believes that we were lucky, and that The Fisherman, after destroying The Fish, wrecked on the comet. If this is true, then we’re going to spend a week calculating the size and the momentum of that comet, and its trajectory, and what it took to change it.

“That I can do for you,” Grellin continued, smiling, “and when I’m done, I’ll be able to tell you what speed the craft was moving at, if it was, in fact, the craft that hit the comet.”

“And if not?” Shrew asked.

Grellin shrugged, “Then we were doubly lucky, because even at its last speed, the craft would have struck or passed Syriahs by now, and there’s been no report of a giant crater forming, smoking, in the middle of one of our cities, followed by a series of sonic booms.”

The enormity of what he was hearing shook Shrew. He knew he had to report this to the Acuff’s, and he knew that this was going to sharply affect the future of this experimentation.

He could hear them now. “Irresponsible! Negligent! Careless!” One thing to nearly create a power source that stalled the planet’s turning in their space of their grandchildren’s life time – certainly another to aim a missile at their one home, light the fuse and then speculate on what would happen next.

Two weeks later, Sol rose on Viniker working in his new apartment, over what might have been a dining table but had been pressed into service as a study area. He had returned to his practice of working through the night, denying himself food and fretting over the details of his theories.

Maree had done her best to be at his side, but had dozed off hours earlier. Rising when Sol’s light burst through their living room window and struck her shut eyelids, she stretched on the luxurious blue couch she’d personally ordered for Viniker, and wondered if he’d noticed her going to sleep, her waking, the addition of the couch or that she’d been living with him for a week.

She doubted it.

“Anything?” she asked.

He barely reacted. He stood at the table, both hands on its surface, glaring at a pad filled with his own calculations. He grunted, she waited, and finally he roused.

“Just what I already know,” he informed her. He looked out the window and smiled.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning,” she returned, and stood. She wore one of his old shirts that she liked (more to force him to wear the new clothes she’d made him buy than for any other reason) and little else. Her hair was flat on one side but she couldn’t think that he cared.

She’d always wanted a man who wanted her for her mind, she thought. Well, she had one.

It wasn’t as good as she’d hoped.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“Please,” he said. He sat himself down where the couch would still be warm from her body. He did that, she’d noticed. As if he didn’t want her warmth, just what warmth she’d left behind and wasn’t using anymore.

She spooned grounds into their machine. Their machine – they’d picked it out together, before this calamity with The Fisherman. Now, she wondered, if she replaced it with an orange juice squeezer, how long would it take him to notice?

“The craft hit the comet, the comet will hit the sun,” she said.

They were sure of this. The math was perfect. At the moment of impact, The Fisherman was traveling at just over the speed of light, and then it made impact.

If it hadn’t, it would have struck Syriahs – quite possibly in a populated area. Even with its tiny mass, it would have devastated as much as ten spherical miles – the damage to the planet and its atmosphere were impossible to calculate.

The panic this had set off at the Academy, in the Government and with the Great families, however, could be calculated easily. Suddenly, there was a moratorium on launching anything into space. Regulations fell like rain on everything they did, and proof was required that, even in its worse-case scenario, no fliver could either leave the atmosphere nor travel past a certain, safe speed.

The excitement of space flight had been exceeded by the fear that the Academy was going to accidentally kill them all.

“We aren’t ready to send a craft into deep space, anyway,” Maree said.

Viniker looked across the room at her, the irritation plain on his face.

“We’re not,” she reaffirmed. Brown fluid drained from their coffee maker, the rich smell of coffee filling the apartment. She picked them both out a cup – another thing she’d insisted on, to replace his one cup, one plate and chipped bowl that was the entirety of his dishware.

“We have more hurdles,” she informed him, pouring. “How will we protect a crew from radiation? Can we store food? What food? How will weightlessness affect us, long term?”

“We won’t be weightless,” Viniker grumbled.

“Not at first,” she said, “but we won’t come in screaming toward a new planet at so-many times the speed of light and then try to land. Deceleration could take as much as a third of any journey-“

“All right,” Viniker agreed. She smiled, and carried the cups out to their living area, handing him his, and sitting next to him on the couch.

“We were going too fast, and you know it,” she informed him. “Now we slow down, and we practice science.”

He drank, she drank. He listened to her. She argued and he didn’t give in, she proved her point. She wasn’t always right, but she always had the opportunity, and that’s almost all that she wanted.

Almost.

“We will be years studying what we’ve already learned,” she said. “We’ll be a decade planning, building.”

He sighed and sipped again, looking at her.

“Years,” he repeated.

She set down her cup, and looked directly into Viniker’s eyes.

“I have no plans to be a Professor like Ambergee,” she informed him.

He snorted into his cup. “I hope not,” he said.

She frowned. “No, I have no intention of being thrown entirely into my work, into the politics of the Academy, ignoring the rest of life, ignoring my personal needs.”

He set his own cup down. “What personal needs?”

“You’ve never even kissed me,” she told him.

The tiny animal in a bright light look came over him – clearly he’d not been thinking these thoughts.

It was time he did.

“You know the only thing I’m wearing is this shirt,” she pressed him, “and you haven’t even tried to –“

“Maree!”

“No,” she said. “I can’t walk out into the square and not have almost every man ogling me – and the only one who never does is the one I care about.”

“Maglen?”

She punched him in the shoulder and moved to stand up.

He took her by the lower arm and pulled her back down. Her nose was less than an inch from his.

He kissed her, timidly at first, then more aggressively. He’d clearly never done this before. Fortunately for the two of them, she couldn’t say the same. Boys and later men had sought her out – just not the one she wanted.

As it turned out, Viniker was a particularly good student.