Tomorrow and Tomorrow

motionless, feeling within himself the chaos of death. His final howl, the first sound that he had ever uttered, was a cry of anger. As he fell, he raged at the injustice of a universe that created a perfect fighting machine, then destroyed it before it had a chance to fulfill its destiny.

Chapter 21

“Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death.”

Drake hung in open space, six light-hours from the nearest star. Mel Bradley was at his side. While Drake would have been quite willing to receive a report and a display in the War Room, Mel insisted that he see this at firsthand.

Drake knew exactly where he was: out on the far side of the Galaxy, a safe distance from the spreading Silent Zone controlled (or destroyed) by the Shiva. The nearest star of the Zone was about sixty light-years away.

He was less sure of what he was. He had been transmitted here at superluminal speed, but not to any recognizable form of embodiment. He could maneuver in space and look in any direction, but he was unaware of the nature of his body.

“You’d have to ask Cass Leemu about that,” Mel said. He seemed unconcerned, his attention elsewhere. “It’s something she dreamed up.”

“Are we made of plasma?” Drake turned his own attention inward and saw nothing.

“Not the usual sort. We’re an assembly of Bose-Einstein Condensates. Cass says a BEC assembly has two great advantages. When we’re done we’ll be transmitted back without modification.”

“What’s the second advantage?”

Mel had no way to grin, but he radiated a wolfish sense of glee. “If something goes wrong, Cass assured me that dissolution from a BEC form is painless. Of course, she’s never tried it. Makes you think of the old preachers, talking about the delights of heaven or the torments of hell after you die. I always wanted to ask them, Did you die? How do you know what happens if you haven’t tried it for yourself?”

Drake was listening, but with only half an ear. He was looking outward again. Mel had said that something was ready to begin. Drake had very little idea as to what would happen next.

Partly that was Mel’s doing. He was perfect as the person to develop new offensive weapons, but he was also as awkward and cross-minded and independent as ever, wanting to do things in his own way. And partly it was Drake’s doing. He had been learning over the millennia that either you learned to delegate or you drowned in details. Worse than that, if you were involved in the process, you lost the power to be objective about the outcome. It was Drake’s job to review what Mel had done, then either approve or veto the next step.

But it was hard. The urge to meddle was deep-rooted in humans.

The nearby star was a white FO type, like the blazing giant Canopus that had troubled Drake so many aeons ago. From this distance it showed a definite disk, slightly smaller and whiter than the Sun as seen from Earth. Drake could see a slight asymmetry. A straight line had been ruled across the left-hand limb. Beyond that line, but within the star’s imagined circle, he could detect faint and scattered points of light. They were other stars.

“The caesura?”

Mel said, “You’re looking at it. It’s started.” Even he seemed subdued. The star they were watching might seem small from this distance, but it was thirty million miles across.

And it was being eaten. The dividing line was moving steadily to the right. Drake stared hard at the remaining portion of the star. It seemed unaffected, untouched.

“Are you sure it’s really happening, Mel? If the caesura is sending part of the star to another universe, why isn’t the rest of it in turmoil? Unless somehow the gravitational effect is left behind…”

“According to Cass, it’s not. The whole thing goes — mass, matter, gravitational and magnetic fields, everything. We verified that on the small tests of asteroids and planets. I see no reason to think she’s wrong this time.”

“So why isn’t there total chaos around the star?”

“Cheshire Cat effect. Cass doesn’t call it that — she uses a string of Science gibberish. But there’s a time lag before the field stresses disappear from our universe. It’s long enough to keep the star intact as it moves into the caesura. If there were colonies on the planets around the star — there aren’t, of course, they were moved long ago — and if the caesura hadn’t swallowed them, the colonies would see the star vanish but measure its residual gravitational field. That fades smoothly away over an eight-hour period.”

“Suppose the caesura moves slowly, and takes more than eight hours?”

“Then the part of the star that hasn’t been absorbed will collapse. If half of it is left behind, you’ll get an explosion with as much energy as a supernova. The nice thing is that this can be done with any type of star, and you can do it when you choose. And by picking the right caesura geometry you can beam the emitted energy in a particular direction. You can keep the beam collimated, so it doesn’t spread much over interstellar distances. Intergalactic, either, if you take extra care. And there’s your weapon.”

A weapon, indeed. The ultimate weapon. Drake stared at the doomed star, reduced now to a mere sliver of brilliance. Only a thin sector of the right-hand side remained. Then he turned to look outward, toward the galactic edge. The stars blazed there, undiminished, but they were silent. Uncommunicating, controlled by the Shiva.

He knew now the power that lay within his hands. His own idea had been to use the caesuras to create a no-man’s-land, an empty zone on the edge of Shiva territory. Even if the Shiva could cross that firebreak, the time it took would tell humans something more about the manner and speed of Shiva movement.

Now Mel was pointing out that they could do much more.

Pick a target star in the Silent Zone. Choose any planetless and expendable star in this region, or any other convenient place in the Galaxy. Create a caesura of the right dimensions and geometry.

Now if you moved the caesura to engulf your chosen star at the right speed, a tongue of energy from the stellar collapse would be thrown out into space. It would travel at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. When it reached the target star, any planets orbiting that star would become burned and lifeless cinders. The star’s outer layers on one side would be stripped off. There was a chance that the star itself would explode.

There were more than enough available stars in the human sector of the Galaxy for a one-on-one matching with stars in the Silent Zone. The Shiva, whatever they were, could be destroyed.

Whatever they were. That was the trouble. It was easy to examine the pattern by which the Shiva had entered and spread through the Galaxy from outside, and conclude from the long silence of the old human colonies that the Shiva were ruthless destroyers, inimical to anything other than their own kind.

And hence to propose the old human solution, stated by Rome but surely far older: Shiva delenda est; “the Shiva must be destroyed.”

Conclusion was not the same as proof. Suppose that the colonies throughout the Silent Zone still survived? Suppose there was some other reason for their failure to speak? The existence of the Shiva and the silence of the colonies were not the elements of a syllogism. They did not add up to a proof that the colonies no longer existed.

Drake wondered just what it would take to persuade him of that. Was he proving that the composites were wrong, when they called him back to consciousness? Maybe he was like them, lacking the resolve to do what had to be done.

He looked again at the sky, which now showed nothing at all where star and caesura had been. He turned to Mel Bradley.

“What happens to the caesura when it has done its work?”

“It just sits there, a permanent feature of space-time with zero associated mass-energy. It will never decay or go away. Don’t worry, though. I asked Cass Leemu the same question. Unless it’s activated in the right way it won’t absorb anything else. There’s no danger that the caesuras will keep going and swallow up the universe.”

“That wasn’t what I was thinking. I was wondering if a caesura could go on and eat up another star.”

“Any number. So far as we can tell there’s no limit to how much matter or energy you can put into a caesura and kick right out of the universe. But rather than move one caesura all over the place, it’s easier to make another