The labor involved makes it essential that the computations be made in no-time, and the records kept in no-space.
And one facet of the endless computation can be — as one range of probabilities begin to gain mutual access, what happens if such access is denied?
The finite computation of infinities is possible because infinity is merely a function of time and space. Only nothingness becomes endless.
Ever since the dreaded audience with Shain that had been so miraculously saved from disaster, Deralan was obscurely troubled. It was his nature and his profession to learn the background of all events and incidents. Long search for the girl who had handed him the object which had bought his safety was fruitless. He was almost glad that he could not find her. They had returned to Rael from Zeran with all haste possible. Either the object had been brought back on the pursuit ships, or it had arrived at Rael by faster means. And Deralan did not see how it was possible for the object to have been smuggled onto one of the ships. As to faster means of transport — there were none.
As he tried to pick up the threads of his responsibilities that had been disrupted by the revolt of Andro, third son of Shain, he found himself suffering from an inability to give his complete attention to his duties. The capital city was very much like a cage of wild animals. The animals detected the faint inattention of the trainer and crouched a bit lower on their haunches, ready to spring.
When two of his most trusted assistants were torn to bits by a mob, Deralan did not feel the old raw fury with which he had avenged similar previous incidents. His identification, capture and execution of the leaders of the mob was quick and effective, but without heat. His villa, protected almost as well as the very palaces of Shain, no longer was a place of revelry by night. He ceased the entertainment of those close to Shain, and knew that by so doing he was prejudicing his influence at court. He spent more and more time alone, and his thoughts were dark. Many times there was fear in him, but fear of something not quite understood.
He felt that somewhere in the city he would find an answer to all that troubled him. He began to listen more carefully to the talk of odd happenings in the empire. It seemed to be a time of strange occurrences that bordered on the supernatural.
On one sultry afternoon when most of the city slept, Deralan questioned a frightened girl who had been brought to him by his agents. She was a dirty, half-wild creature, seemingly poised on the very edge of flight. Her dark red hair was matted with filth and her tip-slanted eyes were of that distinctive lavender shade of the women of Vereen. Her rags barely covered her body. In her left armpit was the telltale gouge where the mark of the slave had been recently removed. Very recently removed.
Though she was frightened to the very borderline of unconsciousness, she would not speak. And such was her emaciation that it was immediately obvious to Deralan she would die at once if force were used. What intrigued him most was the freshness of the blisters along the calf of her left leg. Those were the distinctive blisters carried by one who has traveled in one of the old ships with their defective shielding.
Several isolated bits of information clicked into place in Deralan’s mind and convinced him that this girl held a clue to his own bafflement. The increasing numbers of escaped slaves on Rael — the fresh blisters — the girl’s obvious fright — the two month delay in customary reports from slave marts — all these things pointed to Simpar, from his agents on that planet of something only she could give him.
Her teeth were small and even and pointed. “Kill me and watch how a Vereen woman can die!” she whispered to him.
“What made you slave?” he asked, forcing a gentleness into his tone.
“I stabbed my husband. The court sentenced me. They said it was without cause. I was shipped to Simpar with hundreds of others.”
“And you escaped. How?”
She moved restlessly in the thongs which bound her, and turned her head from him, affecting casualness, though the cords stood out like wires in her lean throat.
“How would it feel,” he asked softly, “to be clean once more. To be scrubbed and cleaned and scented again. To feel the touch of silk. To recline beside a spiced fountain and have rich foods brought to you. Fine fruit from Vereen. Wines from Lell.”
She did not move. He saw a tear cut a channel of whiteness through the grime of her cheek.
He called the bored attendants and told them to free her and bring her to his villa. He turned his back on their knowing sneers and left. By the time the girl was brought through the innermost gates of the villa all was ready for her. The maids took her in hand. It was dusk in the wide gardens before she was brought to him. She stood with a new pride, tall and silent and quite lovely.
He watched her eat with the precise, almost vicious hunger of a half-starved animal. The wines were brought. She was wary but after a time she lost wariness and her lips grew swollen and her eyes grew vague and she emptied the glass each time he filled it from the flagon. Night came and he sat with her. She laughed with an empty sound as he caressed her.
“It wasn’t hard to escape, was it?” he asked.
“No. Not hard. Not with the gates broken and the guards dead and the ships waiting. Not hard.”
“Who broke the gates and killed the guards?”
She giggled. “Oh, but I am not supposed to tell anyone that, yet. Not until he is ready. Not until we receive word.”
“You can tell me, Leesha. You will stay here with me in comfort and in peace. There will be no secrets between us. You can tell me.” His tone was wheedling.
She giggled emptily again. Her eyes shuttered and she slumped out of the circle of his arm. He grasped her shoulders and shook her hard. “Tell me!” he shouted.
Her head wobbled loosely. He let her fall to the edge of the fountain. She lay on her hack and her breathing was loud between her parted lips.
At noon the next day, heavily guarded, Deralan shuffled up the ramp and through the port of the waiting ship. His face was deeply pocked and scarred, unrecognizable. Around him was the wailing of the newly enslaved. The inner door clanged shut. In the confined space Deralan’s nose wrinkled with distaste. At take off there was no warning. They slid into a tangled heap at one end of the lightless room.
As he fought free of the others, found a clear space on the floor, Deralan wondered what would become of him if he could not prove his true identity on Simpar.
Once Calna had committed herself to Andro’s plan, she resolutely forgot how far she had veered from the paths of her training. The only remaining indication of the extent of the conflict within her was the splitting headaches which blinded her at times, without warning.
Andro had showed surprising aptness as a pupil. At times she felt that he had taken all of her knowledge and combined it with his own to create a strength beyond anything she had ever before experienced. It was he who had selected Simpar as the symbol of everything he detested about Empire.
They had driven the golden ship deep into the planet crust and waited there for the thrum of directed energy which would tell them that they had been detected. Andro, using the device which collapsed the orbital electrons in matter without releasing the energy, had driven the long slanting corridor to the surface. The ship, completely shielded, lay behind them, deep in the skin of Simpar, utterly undetectable.
Together, disguised by his suggestion as slave buyers from Lell, they had visited the pens, the auction blocks. Though inured through training to the misery on savage planets, Calna felt emotionally staggered by the mere weight of the suffering around her.