Parz waved a hand. ‘Yes, yes. Just tell me what you did, boy.’
‘It’s technical, sir. At the quantum level all matter and energy, a beam of photons say, is naturally a mixture of positive and negative energy. Although the net balance is always positive, overall.’
‘All right. This positive energy is the ordinary stuff we use to heat our homes and power our flitters?’
‘Yes, sir. And negative energy is – well, it’s a gap where energy ought to be. And it’s equivalent to exotic matter. In a way – the mathematics is subtle . . . What you have to do is squeeze the vacuum – that’s the phrase we use – so that the negative component of the energy is separated out, and can be gathered. Here we do that by using the diamond splinters to manipulate photons in a light beam one by one. And we capture the negative energy in a mirrored cavity, which—’
Mara thought Jasoft’s eyes were glazing over. ‘Maybe you’d better just show the Ambassador how it works, Tiel.’
In fact, much of the experiment had to be taken on faith, since the wormhole mouths were too small to see. The boys had set up two fine laser beams, passing through a narrow vacuum chamber set up on the table: beams which cast spots of ruby light on a plate at the table’s far end. One beam was passed unimpeded, the boys said; the other was sent through a wormhole a metre long. And the photons in the second beam, travelling instantaneously between the wormholes’ tiny Interfaces, took a few nanoseconds less to travel the length of the table: a small interval, but sufficient for the boys to demonstrate with a precise clock.
‘I’m impressed,’ Jasoft Parz said. ‘Junk from a landfill, a home workshop – and you’ve built a stable wormhole. Very impressed.’
Chael beamed. ‘Told you so, Ambassador.’
Mara stepped forward. ‘Well, I’m still in the dark. Even if it’s possible somehow to scale all this up from a tabletop . . . The Qax want us to replicate Poole’s work, correct? To build a navigable wormhole, and then to drag one end across space in a slower-than-light GUTship. Why do they want to do this? And why a GUTship? It was great technology fifteen hundred years ago, but those ships are slower than light. The Qax have those Spline starships of theirs, capable of faster-than-light travel. So why would they want this?’
‘It certainly harks back to our past,’ Chael said quickly, evading the question, and evidently anxious to reassure the Ambassador. ‘Which is why it’s so valuable for morale. Hence my suggestion for the ship’s name, Endurance, used many times since but originally referring to a great exploration craft of the late second millennium—’
‘I can tell you what’s prompted the Qax to do this,’ said Engineer Tasqer, surprising them by speaking at all, Mara suspected. He stepped forward and searched the boys’ images on the wall. Most of them showed Poole and his colleagues, legendary names in their own right like Miriam Berg and Bill Dzik – faces with the eerie agelessness that came from decades of AS treatment, Mara thought, from a time when it was unimaginable that such a thing could ever be lost.
‘Here it is. Knew you boys would have got hold of a shot of this.’ Tasqer tapped an image, dark, grainy, much less impressive than the rest. But a glimmering tetrahedral form was clearly visible. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is a wormhole mouth. Poole era, a classic design. And this image isn’t fifteen hundred years old but, what, a month?’
Mara frowned, baffled. ‘A month old? How is that possible?’
‘This is Poole’s own design,’ Tasqer said. ‘Poole’s own ship! One of Poole’s last projects was to build a GUTship called the Cauchy, which he sent off on a fifteen-hundred-year loop out into space, towards the galactic centre. Towing a wormhole mouth, not to the planets, but to the stars and back. Fifteen hundred years, you see. The flight plan predicted it should arrive back home about now – we knew that, and looked out for it – and here it is, right on schedule, out on the edge of interstellar space. That’s what inspired you kids to fool around with wormholes, right?’
Juq grinned. ‘How could we not, sir? An authentic Poole wormhole, returning to the Solar System . . . I suppose I should have told you we have this, Mother. But everybody’s got the image, everybody’s talking about it.’
Mara pursed her lips. ‘Well, I didn’t know about this. The Poole ship.’
Tasqer leaned forward. ‘This is obviously why the Qax suddenly want us to build another wormhole ship. Because of this ghost from the past. But to what end, Ambassador?’
Parz hesitated before replying. ‘It’s complicated. And frankly it’s best you know as little as necessary about this. All of you. I’m afraid that going forward with this you’ll need to be vetted by the security services.’
Mara didn’t like the sound of that. ‘Vetted? For what?’
‘For any links to seditious groups.’ He glanced at Tiel. ‘I know that some in your family, Tiel, have links to a group called the Friends of Wigner. You have a cousin called Shira who is currently—’
Juq put a protective arm around Tiel’s shoulders. ‘You don’t need to worry about that, Ambassador. Tiel can stay with us from now on – I’ll vouch for him.’
Tiel looked shocked at this sudden appropriation of his life, as well he might, Mara thought.
But Parz nodded thoughtfully. ‘Good, good. I’m sure it can all be arranged. But I urge you to be circumspect. Cautious. Well, gentlemen, I can see there’s a long way to go and no assurance of success. But I think we have a commission for you. Though I’m sure that to build a navigable wormhole will take more than scavenged lasers and a tabletop.’
Tiel nodded. ‘We’ll need to make more exotic matter. A lot of it. More than we can fudge up with scrap optic cables.’
‘And what do you think you’ll need to achieve that?’
Without hesitation Tiel replied, ‘A Squeem hyperdrive unit.’
The Engineer laughed out loud.
Parz, showing admirable composure, asked, ‘Is that all?’
‘No. Also Xeelee construction material.’
2
The flitter rose from Occupied Earth like a stone thrown from a blue bowl.
Like most Earthborn humans of her era, Mara had only rarely travelled above the atmosphere. Now, as the ship settled into a low check-out orbit, the glowing innocence of the planet took her breath away. Two centuries of Qax Occupation had left few visible scars on Earth’s surface – far fewer, in fact, than the damage wrought by humans themselves during their slow, haphazard rise to technological civilisation. Away from the cities like Mellborn, rewilded Australe was a pale green-brown, the colour of scrubland populated by herds of immense beasts: the colours of life, of nature. But still it was disturbing to see how the Qax-run plankton farms bordered the coast in lurid purple-green. And on the land, scattered and gleaming fields of glass marked mankind’s brief and inglorious struggle against the Qax – at the site of SydCity, for instance, which was still left abandoned.
Mara sat with the Virtual of Parz, who was politely making this ride into space with her. The louring Engineer Tasqer sat opposite. Chael was riding up front in the cockpit, a backup in this pilotless craft. A month after Parz had initiated the Endurance project they were on their way to the Moon, to inspect the experimental exotic-matter production facility to whose design Tiel and Juq had been contributing.
But to get to the Moon, first you had to leave Earth. And Parz’s expression, in the bright light of Earth, was complex, she thought.
He caught her watching, and smiled. ‘You’re wondering what I’m thinking.’