With slow insolence, Mace said, “It’s your mission, policeman.”
Without returning to the yacht Kapur had Mace download more human datasets and propositions; and he learned quickly how to input new material — his own reflections and feelings — into his Eye stores.
That took most of a day.
Kapur slept briefly, nestled within the meadow scents of his cold-suit.
When he turned to the ’Flake once more, he had six hours left.
The Snowman had not changed. The human proof of Godel remained lodged within its abstraction of a belly, a cold, primitive lump.
Kapur began to download data to the probes: more and more, as rapidly as he could. Mathematics first. He found data on an ancient, failed, experiment, a life form based on the Incompleteness theorem, a bizarre disaster which had resulted in the destruction of a moon, a loss of human life…
Then, on a whim, music — he watched as ancient compositions frosted into veils of blue ice within the ’Man.
Human history. He told the ’Man of the Xeelee, humanity’s vast, implacable foe; and of how mankind was seeking to mobilize the resources of a Galaxy in its war.
He told the ’Man what the humans on board the Spline ship planned to do to the Snowflake.
He told of his own fears, doubts — his awe, here before the Snowflake, with the Galaxy a cloud beneath him; of his almost superstitious response to Godel; of his fear of failure, and his petty relationship with Mace.
The ’Man was like a mirror, one part of his mind told him, or like a Virtual psychoanalysis program. There was no one there to respond, he knew now, but he told it all anyway.
He told the ’Man of his own, tenuous, qualifications for this Assimilation mission. That he was a policeman; that he specialized in the resolution of the cruel, the vicious, the most bizarre crimes. His job was to work through the sites of crimes, trying to see the smashed property, the bones and scattered flesh, through the eyes of the perpetrator.
Kapur was qualified enough to seek the motivation of the Snowmen, after twenty-five years striving to unravel the minds of aliens within his own species.
All of this shivered into the heart of the Snowman, without comment or reaction, without praise or disgust.
Kapur, his time spent, grew ashamed. He fell silent, arms akimbo, before the maw of the Snowflake.
The ’Man watched steadily.
And, at last, Kapur understood.
Something like a ripple passed under Kapur; it was as if space were a lake on which his encased body floated, passive.
“Kapur.” Mace’s voice was strained. “The Spline.”
Kapur felt enormously tired. “What about it?”
“…It’s gone.”
Time had run out. The Spline had opened its laser-cannon orifices.
…The ship had been torn aside, dragged from its site like an eyeball from a socket, thrown a million miles across space; it had been left spinning, bruised and torn.
Kapur returned to the yacht.
“Were there injuries?”
Mace’s face was wide, blank, angry. “What do you think? But the automatics are functioning; the ship’s returning to pick us up. What did you do to the damn ’Flake, Kapur?”
“It was not I who tried to open fire on it,” Kapur said softly. “What happened?”
“Gravity waves,” Mace said. “Like a tractor beam.” Suddenly fear broke to the surface of Mace’s hard features; his Eyes seemed even more incongruous, metal islands in a sea of human emotion. He pointed through the viewport, picking out a palm-sized patch of darkness. “From the direction of the Virgo supercluster; although that’s probably coincidence…”
“I caught an echo of the beam.”
“Kapur, I think I know how they did it.”
“The Snowmen?”
“Mach’s principle. I think they can manipulate Mach’s principle.”
Kapur shook his head.
With a kind of irritated patience, Mace said, “The Spline is embedded in a Universe of matter. That matter tugs at the Spline with gravity fields — but the fields surround the ship uniformly; they are equal in all directions, isotropic and timeless.”
Kapur frowned. “And you think the Snowmen have a way of making the field — unequal?”
Mace laughed uneasily. “I guess you learn a lot in fourteen billion years.”
Kapur turned the concept over in his mind. The Mach beam was spectacular, he decided. But the Universe was filled with spectacular weapons and technologies.
Godel’s theorem, though. That was something else. That was truly terrifying. Mace, young, unimaginative, had responded more to the blazing of a zap gun than to the fact of a Universe without bottom or top, without meaning, unknowable. Kapur almost envied him.
“I think I’ve figured it out,” he said to Mace.
“What? Their motivation?” Through his fear, Mace looked briefly interested. “Tell me, policeman. I knew there had to be something; every sentient species has goals.”
“We had the pieces of the puzzle, almost from the start,” Kapur said. “In their design of the ’Flake, the Snowmen had already made near-optimal use of matter, by recording information right down to the thermodynamic limit… which is set by the background temperature of the Universe. But they knew from Godel that there will always be more events to record.”
Mace’s face crumpled sourly. “Oh. Are you telling me that they are waiting for the Universe to cool down… just so they can store more data?”
Kapur smiled. “The idea is pleasing. In the aeons since the building of the Snowflake, they’ve already achieved a six-fold increase in capacity! And in another forty billion years the capacity will double again…
“Patience, Mace. That is the key.”
Mace stared into Kapur’s face, the lines around his Eyes betraying hostility. “Policeman, sometimes you frighten me.”
Kapur, obscurely pleased by this reaction, did not reply. Mace said, “Do you think there’ll be another attempt?”
“To Assimilate?” Kapur shook his head. “I doubt the ’Flake would let us come so close again.”
He turned to face the emptiness of the viewport. With eyes no more than human he looked beyond the filmy sails of the laser yacht and saw the Spline coming to collect them. It moved cautiously, all weapons orifices open.
Vacuum Diagrams
Paul opened his eyes.
His body ached. He lay facedown on a surface that glowed with white light. Grass, or fine hair, washed over the surface.
His face grew slick with sweat; his breath sawed through his mouth. He perceived the shape of answers, like figures seen through a fog. He writhed against the shining ground.
The answers floated away.
A meaningless jingle ran around his mind: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here…”
The grass vanished. He waited, hollow.
Three men walked slowly through Sugar Lump City. Paul trailed Taft and Green, their urgent talk washing past his awareness. The sights, sounds and smells of the new City poured into his empty memory.
The embryonic street was lined with blocky buildings of foamed meteorite ore. Most of the buildings were still dark, silent. Paul passed a construction site. Huge machines with ore spouts like mouths clawed aside meteorite debris and sprayed out floors and walls. The cold air was filled with dust, the stink of machine oil — and an incongruous tang of fresh-cut wood. Four workmen stalked around the site, shouting at the huge devices which did their bidding.
Taft and Green had paused at the knee-high lip of a light well. Paul joined them and peered into the well. The exposed surface of the Sugar Lump, twenty feet down, was a shining disc. A beam of light thrust straight up from the well and splashed against curved mirrors above their heads, illuminating the surrounding streets.
Shadows passed beneath the exposed plane like fish in a light-filled pond.
The sky was blue-black. Above the City’s thin layer of air Spline warships prowled, visibly spherical.
Paul felt he was floating, suspended between mysteries above and below.
“Coexistence with the Xeelee,” Taft was saying. “That’s what the colony is about. The meteorite impact which smeared rock over this Face of the Lump was a miraculous break. By terraforming this region and colonizing it we can prove to the Xeelee we don’t have to go to war with them.” He was a tall, heavily-built man of about physical-forty; the well’s under-lighting gave his bearded face a demonic power, and when his metallic Eyes fixed on him, Paul felt a psychic shock.
“And isn’t your mysterious waif here going to endanger that?” Taft demanded.
…And one day, Paul realized, this man would try to kill him. He edged closer to Commander Green.
Green interposed his short, blocky frame between Taft and Paul. Well light glittered from his ornate Navy epaulets. “Your colonization project isn’t under question at present, Dr. Taft,” he said briskly.
“Isn’t it?” Taft raised bushy eyebrows. “Then call off your Spline war dogs. Spend your resources on my terraforming efforts down here.”
