Matter

He gave a single deep nod, as though he saluted them, then, before he could sit down and while only the vaguest hint of sound, as yet unidentifiable in its import, was forming in the throats of those present, Neguste Puibive — seated at the side of the dais — leapt to his feet and shouted at the top of his lungs, “WorldGod save the good Prince Regent Oramen!”

“Prince Regent Oramen!” the whole assembly — or very nearly the whole assembly — shouted in a great ragged cheer.

Oramen, who had been expecting quietly grudging respect at best and querulous alarm and hostile questioning at worst, was genuinely surprised. He had to blink back tears.

He remained standing, so that, before anybody else there, he saw the messenger dash into the rear of the marquee, hesitate and stop — patently momentarily bewildered by the tumult — then collect himself and rush forward to Jerfin Poatas, who tipped his head to listen to the message over the continuing sound of cheering before hobbling with his stick closer to the dais. Guards at the front — veterans of the Sarl army — barred his way but looked round to Oramen, who nodded Poatas through and stepped down to him to hear his news.

Shortly, he strode back, raising both arms into the air.

“Gentlemen; your various duties await! The object at the centre of the under-plaza, the very focus of all our energies, an artifact we believe has been buried there for deciaeons, has shown signs of life! I command and beseech you: to work!”

25. The Levels

The Liveware Problem had started out life as a relatively slim 3D delta shape like an elegantly pointed pyramid. After conversion to a Superlifter — a glorified tug, really — it took on a block-like brutality. Three hundred metres long, square-sectioned, slab-sided, only the vaguest implication of its older, more slender shape remained.

It had not cared about such aesthetic considerations then and it did not care now. The petalled surround of its field complex, abundant as any party dress wrapped in dozens of gauzy layers, could bestow a kind of beauty on it if the viewer chose to look for it, and its hull skin could take on any design, hue or pattern it desired.

All that was irrelevant anyway; the transformation had made it powerful, the transformation had made it fast.

And that was before Special Circumstances came calling.

It swung through hyperspace on what was in effect a near-straight attack path to the star Meseriphine, deviating only to keep the chances of detection low. It had snapped the humans and its own avatoid off the shuttle without incident and scour-turned about to head back in the direction of Sursamen at something uncomfortably over its design-parameter maximum allowed sustainable velocity. It felt the damage accruing to its engines like a human athlete might feel a cramp or a shin splint starting to develop, but knew it would get its little cargo of souls to Sursamen as fast as it sensibly could.

After some negotiation with Anaplian they had agreed it would push its engines to a profile consistent with a one per cent possibility of total failure, thus shaving another hour off their ETA, though even a one in one hundred and twenty-eight chance seemed quite shockingly risky to the ship. With this in mind it had massaged its own performance parameters and lied; the time saving was real but the failure profile was better than one in two hundred and fifty. There were some advantages to being a self-customised one-off based on an ancient Modified.

In one of the two small lounges that was all its rather miserable allocation of accommodation could afford, the ship’s avatoid was explaining to the SC agent Anaplian the extent to which the Liveware Problem would be limited in its field of operations if it had actually to enter Sursamen. It still hoped, rather fervently, this would not be necessary.

“It’s a hypersphere. In fact, it’s a series of sixteen hyperspheres,” the avatoid Hippinse told the woman. “Four D; I can no easier jump into it than an ordinary, non-HS-capable ship can. I can’t even gain any traction off the Grid because it’ll cut me off from that too. Didn’t you know this?” the avatoid said, looking puzzled. “It’s their strength, it’s how the heat’s managed, how the opacity comes about.”

“I knew Shellworlds were four-dimensional,” Anaplian admitted, frowning.

It was one of those things that she’d learned only long after leaving the place. In a sense, knowing this before she’d left would have been fairly meaningless; a so-what? fact. When you lived in a Shellworld you just accepted them for what they appeared to be, same as if you lived on the surface of an ordinary rocky planet or within the waters or gases of a waterworld or a gas giant. That Shellworlds had such a profound and extensive four-dimensional component only made any difference once you knew what four-dimensionality implied and allowed in the first place; access to hyperspace in two handy directions, contact with the universes-separating energy Grids so that ships could exploit their many fascinating properties and the easy ability of anything with the appropriate talent to shift something entirely into hyperspace and then make it reappear in three-dimensional space through any amount of conventional solidity as though by magic.

You got used to that sort of capability. In a sense, the more inexplicable and supernatural these skills seemed before you learned how they were done, the less you thought about them afterwards. They went from being dismissible due to their essential absurdity to being accepted without thought because thinking cogently about them was itself so demanding.

“What I had not realised,” Anaplian said, “is that that means they’re closed off to ships.”

“They’re not closed off,” Hippinse said. “I can move about inside them as freely as any other three- dimensional entity of my size, it’s just that I can’t move about in the extra fourth dimension that I’m used to and designed for. And I can’t use my main engines.”

“So you’d rather stay out?”

“Precisely.”

“What about Displacing?”

“Same problem. From outside I can Displace down into open Tower-ends. Line-of-sight within a level is possible too, if I can get inside somehow, but that’d be all. And of course once inside I couldn’t Displace back to outside.”

“But you can Displace items short distance?”

“Yes.”

Anaplian frowned. “What would happen if you did try to Displace into 4D matter?”

“Something a lot like an AM explosion.”

“Really?”

“Good as. Not recommended. Wouldn’t want to break a Shellworld.”

“They are not easily broken.”

“Not with all that 4D structure. What are in effect a Shellworld’s operating instructions say you can let off thermonuclear weapons inside them without voiding the warranty as long as you steer clear of Secondary structure, and anyway the internal stars are basically thermonukes and a bundle of exotic matter the most elderly of which have been trying to burn their way through the ceiling of their shell for deciaeons. All the same; anti-matter weaponry is banned inside and a misplaced Displace would have a highly similar profile. If and when I do have to do any Displacing, it’ll be very, very carefully.”

“Is anti-matter banned entirely?” Anaplian asked, sounding worried. “Most of the high-end gear I work with uses AM reactors and batteries.” She scratched the back of her neck, grimacing. “I even have one inside my head.”

“In theory as long as it’s not weaponry it’s allowed,” the ship told her. “In practice… I wouldn’t mention it.”

“Very well,” Anaplian said, sighing. “Your fields; will they work?”

“Yes. Running on internal power. So limited.”

“And you can go in if you have to.”

“I can go in,” the ship confirmed through Hippinse, sounding unhappy. “I’m preparing to reconfigure engine and other matter to reaction mass.”