In the sudden shade, Pael was starting to stir. His moans were translated to stark bioluminescent icons.
“Help him,” Jeru snapped. “Make him drink.” And while I did that she dug into the med kit on her belt and started to spray cast material around the fingers of her left hand.
“It’s the speed of light,” Pael said. He was huddled in a corner of our LUP, his legs tucked against his chest. His voice must have been feeble; the bioluminescent sigils on his suit were fragmentary and came with possible variants extrapolated by the translator software.
“Tell us,” Jeru said, relatively gently.
“The Ghosts have found a way tochange lightspeed in this fortress. In fact to increase it.” He began talking again about quagma and physics constants and the rolled-up dimensions of spacetime, but Jeru waved that away irritably.
“How do youknow this?”
Pael began tinkering with his prisms and gratings. “I took your advice, Commissary.” He beckoned to me. “Come see, child.”
I saw that a shaft of red light, split out and deflected by his prism, shone through a diffraction grating and cast an angular pattern of dots and lines on a scrap of smooth plastic behind.
“You see?” His eyes searched my face.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“The wavelength of the light has changed. It has been increased. Red light should have a wavelength, oh, a fifth shorter than that indicated by this pattern.”
I was struggling to understand. I held up my hand. “Shouldn’t the green of this glove turn yellow, or blue…?”
Pael sighed. “No. Because the color you see depends, not on the wavelength of a photon, but on its energy. Conservation of energy still applies, even where the Ghosts are tinkering. So each photon carries as much energy as before-and evokes the same ‘color.’ Since a photon’s energy is proportional to its frequency, that means frequencies are left unchanged. But since lightspeed is equal to frequency multiplied by wavelength, an increase in wavelength implies-”
“An increase in lightspeed,” said Jeru.
“Yes.”
I didn’t follow much of that. I turned and looked up at the light that leaked around our Ghost-hide canopy. “So we see the same colors. The light of that star gets here a little faster. What difference does it make?”
Pael shook his head. “Child, a fundamental constant like lightspeed is embedded in the deep structure of our universe. Lightspeed is part of the ratio known as the fine structure constant.” He started babbling about the charge on the electron, but Jeru cut him off.
She said, “Case, the fine structure constant is a measure of the strength of an electric or magnetic force.”
I could follow that much. “And if you increase lightspeed-”
“Youreduce the strength of the force.” Pael raised himself. “Consider this. Human bodies are held together by molecular binding energy-electromagnetic forces. Here, electrons are more loosely bound to atoms; the atoms in a molecule are more loosely bound to each other.” He rapped on the cast on my arm. “And so your bones are more brittle, your skin more easy to pierce or chafe. Do you see? You too are embedded in spacetime, my young friend. You too are affected by the Ghosts’ tinkering. And because lightspeed in this infernal pocket continues to increase- as far as I can tell from these poor experiments-you are becoming more fragile every second.”
It was a strange, eerie thought: that something so basic in my universe could be manipulated. I put my arms around my chest and shuddered.
“Other effects,” Pael went on bleakly. “The density of matter is dropping. Perhaps our structure will eventually begin to crumble. And dissociation temperatures are reduced.”
Jeru snapped, “What does that mean?”
“Melting and boiling points are reduced. No wonder we are overheating. It is intriguing that bio systems have proven rather more robust than electromechanical ones. But if we don’t get out of here soon, our blood will start to boil…”
“Enough,” Jeru said. “What of the star?”
“A star is a mass of gas with a tendency to collapse under its own gravity. But heat, supplied by fusion reactions in the core, creates gas and radiation pressures that push outward, counteracting gravity.”
“And if the fine structure constant changes-”
“Then the balance is lost. Commissary, as gravity begins to win its ancient battle, the fortress star has become more luminous-it is burning faster. That explains the observations we made from outside the cordon. But this cannot last.”
“The novae,” I said.
“Yes. The explosions, layers of the star blasted into space, are a symptom of destabilized stars seeking a new balance. The rate at whichour star is approaching that catastrophic moment fits with the lightspeed drift I have observed.” He smiled and closed his eyes. “A single cause predicating so many effects. It is all rather pleasing, in an aesthetic way.”
Jeru said, “At least we know how the ship was destroyed. Every control system is mediated by finely tuned electromagnetic effects. Everything must have gone crazy at once…”
We figured it out. TheBrief Life Burns Brightly had been a classic GUTship, of a design that hasn’t changed in its essentials for thousands of years. The lifedome, a tough translucent bubble, contained the crew of twenty. The ’dome was connected by a spine a klick long to a GUTdrive engine pod.
When we crossed the cordon boundary-when all the bridge lights failed-the control systems went down, and all the pod’s superforce energy must have tried to escape at once. The spine of the ship had thrust itself up into the lifedome, like a nail rammed into a skull.
Pael said dreamily, “If lightspeed were a tad faster, throughout the universe, then hydrogen could not fuse to helium. There would only be hydrogen: no fusion to power stars, no chemistry. Conversely if lightspeed were a little lower, hydrogen would fuse too easily, and there would beno hydrogen, nothing to make stars-or water. You see how critical it all is? No doubt the Ghosts’ science of fine-tuning is advancing considerably here on the Orion Line, even as it serves its trivial defensive purpose…”
Jeru glared at him, her contempt obvious. “We must take this piece of intelligence back to the Commission. If the Ghosts can survive and function in these fast-light bubbles of theirs, so can we. We may be at the pivot of history, gentlemen.”
I knew she was right. The primary duty of the Commission for Historical Truth is to gather and deploy intelligence about the enemy. And somy primary duty, and Pael’s, was now to help Jeru get this piece of data back to her organization.
But Pael was mocking her.
“Not for ourselves, but for the species. Is that the line, Commissary? You are so grandiose. And yet you blunder around in comical ignorance. Even your quixotic quest aboard this cruiser was futile. There probably is no bridge on this ship. The Ghosts’ entire morphology, their evolutionary design, is based on the notion of cooperation, of symbiosis; why should a Ghost ship have a metaphorichead? And as for the trophy you have returned-” He held up the belt of Ghost artifacts. “There are no weapons here.
These are sensors, tools. There is nothing here capable of producing a significant energy discharge. This is less threatening than a bow and arrow.” He let go of the belt; it drifted away. “The Ghost wasn’t trying to kill you. It was blocking you. Which is a classic Ghost tactic.”
Jeru’s face was stony. “It was in our way. That is sufficient reason for destroying it.”
Pael shook his head. “Minds like yours will destroyus, Commissary.”
Jeru stared at him with suspicion. Then she said, “You have a way. Don’t you, Academician? A way to get us out of here.”
He tried to face her down, but her will was stronger, and he averted his eyes.
Jeru said heavily, “Regardless of the fact that three lives are at stake-does duty mean nothing to you, Academician? You are an intelligent man. Can you not see that this is a war of human destiny?”
Pael laughed. “Destiny-or economics?”
I looked from one to the other, dismayed, baffled. I thought we should be doing less yapping and more fighting.
