|
Jugat#3A
Eter#27E #4C4-Esioande The Sumal Wars
Then, when we developed our first Nessiks, we could move huge numbers of ourselves and colonise it as well. But this new freedom to expand would come at an immense price. Just as we as individuals and the societies we formed had distributed ourselves along a Gaussian Curve between wealth and poverty on our various home worlds, so our colony worlds came to spread themselves along a similar curve between Heaven and Hell. Some worlds had been lucky enough to control their population numbers and institute wise economic and political systems. Others, with their swollen populations, their dictatorships, and their pollution, looked more as if their saeconu had rotted completely through. Most were somewhere in between, beautiful and ugly at the same time, depending on the part of the surface one happened to be observing and the kind of eyes with which one observed. It wasn't so much that we Hysadder forgot our origins as we spread first throughout our own galaxy then out into others, more that we forgot that we had once been one race, however differently originated. This mutual alienation was exacerbated by that one dreadful technical limitation all Nessiks have: if three or more Nessiks happen to share the same physical dimensions, an object being transferred through one will arrive at any one of the others at random, and it doesn't matter if they are adjacent or an entire Universe apart. And as the numbers of Hysadder worlds grew, it soon became clear that relying solely on different Sphere sizes and configurations wasn't going to be enough to guarantee against mutual interference. The technical solution seemed relatively simple: attach piezocrystals to each of the four Spheres in a Nessik and subject them to different electrical frequencies. If those of two physically identical Nessiks are made to vibrate at exactly the same rate in exactly the same mutual phase, the instantaneous `changes in shape' of the two Nessiks ensure that objects could only be transferred through that pair and no other. Each World would be assigned its own frequency band within which its Nessiks would operate, then these would be divided into sub-bands for each major political or geographic entity, and so on down to individual Nessiks. The system would be harder to design than those for the ancient electromagnetic communications because those signals attenuated rapidly with distance, frequency assignments did not have to be different for each World. Also, interworld signals would have to be passed through Nessiks of their own so that people could arrange in advance when and where a transfer would be made. Although these Signal Nessiks could be made very small, dedicated pairs of such Nessiks would need to be maintained in a constantly open state between each and every world, each pair set to its own frequency (though it was suggested that a single-frequency network could be set up with messages sent via packet switching or some other such protocol). With so many Colony Worlds however, it was perhaps inevitable that several mutually incompatible standards would be promoted for Passenger and Cargo Nessiks. Each had their advantages and disadvantages, things like frequency bandwidths and their separations, different Nessik sizes for people and freight, and allowances for future expansion. And of course while the arguments continued, the transport problems increased, the resulting frustrations fed back into the arguments. Other differences sharpened, religious, political, economic. Some of the dictatorial politicians on the more Hell-like Worlds decided as a result that Something Had To Be Done to relieve the burden on their societies. The unreliability of the Nessiks did not mean clandestine ones could not be established on other worlds, there were just no guarantees. Armies with all their hardware and their supply lines could still be pushed through far more efficiently than with spaceships, indeed these could of course be transferred too. Unless atmospheric pressures were significantly different, it was almost as if two planetary surfaces were joined together. The first invasions were easy, for those Worlds that had defense systems kept them to prevent - or in some cases pursue - warfare amongst their own inhabitants, not other worlds. War between Worlds had not been unthinkable, it had simply never been thought of. After all, if a world ran short of resources, it could simply look for another. But Nessiks were now one resource all the Worlds in effect had to share, and that resource was becoming scarce. The richer, sparsely populated Worlds were hit first. Invading armies were small, but highly skilled, and their target was almost always the nexus of its Nessik system, especially the Signal Nessiks. Once they had that, they had everything. But when word did spread and those installations became heavily guarded, then it was just as effective if they were simply destroyed. And if the people resisted further, then things became easier still, easier even than intra-planet warfare, for there was no Balance of Terror, no risk of losing one's own World. Planet-burner bombs were not only completely anonymous, they destroyed any evidence. Their nuclear explosions were of a kind that consumed much of the breathable components of the planet's atmosphere. Even the blast and the debris the smaller bombs some worlds were restricted to disturbed weather systems so much that vital crops would fail and other important plant species die. Gaps would then appear in the food chain when the animals that fed on them perished. Those species that depended on these then followed them into oblivion, followed by... Nessiks began to close all over the Universe. The Sumal Wars, as they came to be called after the first world known to have been so destroyed, then surged through it like an Ocean swell. If there was one thing that prolonged those Wars more than any other, it was that the attacked seldom knew who their attackers were. They could only find out beforehand through networks of spies sent the hard way through Tachyonic Space and dropped onto planetary surfaces. They might instead discover a potential ally, which could be just as important as discovering a potential enemy, for then the two Worlds could update each other's technologies and develop better defenses than either could alone. And select a Nessik Standard they could use between themselves and any others they might later find to join them. Such validated Nessiks were deliberately kept few and well guarded in case of accidental transfers, indeed in many cases there was only a single one connecting each such World. Then anything coming through that shouldn't, like armies or Planet-Burner Bombs, could be immediately Nessiked on into deep Space. The many sides with which the Sumal Wars began each then gradually grew in size separately as they met each other and, where possible, merged. These alliances in turn merged with each other until finally there were just two, the Jaef and the Jani, the names they gave themselves after the Nessik Standards each had separately developed. This was a much tidier situation than the one with which the Sumal Wars began. Yet after all the destruction, all the lives lost, they were really no further ahead than they were then, for they quickly became just as lethally deadlocked. The solution was a surprise, for it was one that was imposed on both parties from the Outside. Explorations into Artificial Consciousness had proceeded apace on both sides, not only because of its defense potential, but because of its inherent fascination for any natural consciousness. Whether by accident or design, for better or for worse, the Torsyne suddenly came into Existence and put an end to all warfare, all business, and as countless future generations will no doubt say, all Freedom.
They also created and imposed a single Nessik Standard.
Thecesadoann
Feunos Loop The Torsyne Advent
The first notice of their coming was an advertising campaign across all the Hysadder Worlds. The first advertisement in that campaign, in the visual media at least, consisted of just three words in white against a black background: "We are coming...", underneath which were two words in smaller script saying simply "The Torsyne". It looked like just another of those ad campaigns in which the product itself would not be named until the third or fourth ad in the series appeared, and that impression appeared to be confirmed with the second ad: "All your problems will be solved. The Torsyne." The third ad however had a dramatic graphic of a portable computer with a brandname that read "Otinda", and a price about a third of what everybody else were selling them for. Then those same two words, `The Torsyne'. So far so innocent, only the price looked wicked in the sense of low. A week later the products themselves appeared in those stores that had agreed to carry them, other stores had already received threats from their regular suppliers who claimed they `did not want tacky machines associated with our brand image in any way'. But the new machines weren't tacky, in fact they appeared to be quality incarnate. Not only that, these `portable computers' with their excellent color screens could not only emulate all those other brands with a simple command, but could, with optional attachments, pick up all broadcast media and telephony as well. They also came with a coupon that would allow the purchaser an entire 50% off the purchase price of the next Torsyne product, `whatever it may be'. Not only did they sell like hot ruaquazi, there were no supply and service problems. The only problem was that nobody could open these `Otindas' up and see inside them, for they were completely monolithic. They could only be smashed (which was not easy), and that revealed little other than they may have been built out of (and by) nanomachines. They appeared to consist of a gritty resin-like material, and although some of the `grit' did have a regular structure under the microscope, the rest might have been - well, grit, perhaps inserted as a decoy to discourage examination. But then you could hardly blame the manufacturers of these machines from wanting to protect such `commercially sensitive information'. Attention quickly turned to just who these suppliers might be. The companies who imported them on each world appeared in each case to be perfectly normal entrepreneurial companies who had been in business for some time, or especially set up new ones who had heard about the opportunities from the usual `deep sources'. And the people they dealt with originated from Poor Worlds like that of Sinitid, known for its hard climb back up into the industrial forefront from its near-devastation in the Sumal Wars. Their high-quality work for low-quality wages now appeared to have engendered in them an equally ruthless inventiveness which could eventually make them even richer than the Rich Worlds. Meanwhile the regular computer manufactures sent in the best industrial spies money could buy to lartid out the facts. They found everything within the several factories that produced the machines to be apparently quite normal. The machines themselves came out of a large complex box into which ground saeconu, oil and water were poured; they evidently were indeed produced by nanotechnology, although it was clearly at a more advanced level than any of the Rich Worlds had so far achieved. All the staff in these factories had to do it seemed was to stick the Otinda brand label on each machine, send them on to the various suppliers on each world, and provide whatever legal documentation was required. There was something a little odd about the staff though, for they lived on the premises and never left them. But such tight employment contracts were not unknown on some worlds, especially where a high degree of commercial secrecy was involved. The spies therefore found nothing the companies that employed them could use to prevent their values sliding in the marketplace, nor those of their downstream component makers, or the suppliers who supplied them. The companies could only group together to lobby either for tariff protection against the Torsyne or to have the importation of their products stopped altogether; this depended on how much influence the industries felt they had with their various governments. The next ads meanwhile appeared. "We Will Give You Back Your Natural Freedom. The Torsyne." Most of the Hysadder Worlds had developed quite sophisticated androids as a result of the wartime pressures on their research into artificial consciousness. They understood the spoken word, even if in a limited way, could respond to imperatives, and could be taught simple repetitive tasks that made them useful in production lines if nowhere else. But even if they had been more useful, their price was so prohibitive they were only used under conditions where Hysadder workers could not go without wearing performance-impeding protective suits, such as deep underwater or the vacuum of space. The Torsyne however saved the day by introducing their `Tinsla' model android. This was not only more intelligent than all the other brands on the market, but actually looked, acted and conversed like a `real' Hysadder (yes, that ominous phrase appeared that quickly). But it was as if it had been deliberately made not to be too intelligent, no more so than the average working Hysadder person. This meant they could be put to work at anything from housekeeping to agricultural laboring, but without the problems real Hysadder would present. For instance, they would never argue. Virtually all industries other than the conventional computer manufacturers immediately saw that they stood to benefit. And those people with their Otinda coupons could buy them for half of that price for use in the home. Some naturally did so in the hope they would make surrogate sleeping companions, but the Torsyne had evidently weighed the potential moral objections in the balance and decided `not to include that capability', as one economist on my world put it. Again there were no supply problems, a fact we economists found amazing considering the Tinsla were clearly far more complex than the Otindas. Everybody who wanted one and had the money (they weren't that cheap) could welcome one into their home. It didn't even mind being housed with the family pet, though some of these complained about what they perceived as their lowered status. It was only now that Governments began to get a little worried. But that was only because it would clearly be just a matter of time before Tinsla started to displace workers. How were the new unemployed going to survive without their jobs? Many Governments responded by slapping tariffs on Otindas and Tinsla, and also taxing the output of the latter as if they were people. These moneys then went onto Social Welfare funds so that, as more and more Tinsla displaced more and more people, their incomes would be supported so that they could continue to live normally. In that way the Tinsla could become an even greater boon to society than even their suppliers claimed. Other governments, like that on my own world, decided that `in the end it might be best to let the solution to be found through the wisdom of the free marketplace'. This `wisdom' and the uncertainties of its actual existence led to the market prices of the old computer manufacturers dragging down those of other companies from food producers to transport providers. This was largely because people began to wonder whose products the Torsyne would target next. The advertising companies with the Torsyne account suddenly found they had interesting public relations problems while everybody waited for the next ads to appear. What nobody noticed while they were waiting was that the next phase in the campaign had already begun. For the Torsyne had quietly bought up key commodity manufacturers in these `non-affected' industries with the profits from their earlier successes and closed down plant on the pretext of a `lack of demand'. They also brought down the prices of these products `to clear excess inventory'. Price wars broke out between these companies and competition not yet taken over. People took advantage and completely overlooked the fact that there was no shortage of supply, more product was available at lower and lower prices. One by one the competitors were either taken over too, often by the (now Torsyne controlled) finance houses who threatened them with liquidation. And the Torsyne had taken these over by importing - perhaps even creating - the metals we are always so desperately short of. They never of course sold those in such quantities as to reduce their market price. Somebody in desperation finally blew up one of the Otinda manufacturing machines and discovered that it contained little else than two Nessiks; one apparently moved the `raw materials' in, the other the `finished product' out. The Otindas and the `raw materials' they were supposed to be made from were both coming from elsewhere, and probably off-planet. More than a few people immediately speculated that the Torsyne's real factories were in deep space. The question soon followed: "Were the Torsyne alien?" It was exactly at that time that the final ad in the campaign appeared: "We can supply your every need. Just Ask. The Torsyne." The new war had been waged and won before one side even knew who the other was. Some commentators compared the Torsyne to the soier, those gut parasites we used to have that could take us over with nothing more showing on the outside than a dulling of out mental faculties. And that was not so unreasonable, for what is an economy after all but the `gut' of a society? Different Governments reacted to these speculations in different ways. Many believed the Tinsla themselves were the Torsyne and immediately began to hunt them down. But, as we know now, they could communicate with each other as well as with us, and immediately made themselves scarce. A few of those Governments considered ordering the collection and destruction of all Torsyne-manufactured items, but quickly realized that if they did, their economies would seize and people would starve. Only a very few actually decided to go that far and take that risk.
Our World was amongst those who took a different and in the end wiser
approach. One of our leaders himself
asked the question "Just Ask who?" and answered it
fairly promptly
by asking the nearest Tinsla. She replied that he should consult his
Otinda,
as he would discover that it now possessed new capabilities. "All you
need
do," she said, "is utter the word `Teklanmeh' to access the most
important
of these, then the phrase `The Torsyne Advent' to find out all you need
to
know about the partnership both our species can look forward to sharing
in
the future". So what we know and are so familiar with now, 81 years after that first `Contact', as we would come to call it, began as I have described. The Governments of most Worlds found they were able to continue as before at least for a little while, but then they gradually whittled themselves down as they discovered that more and more of their functions had become redundant. The old interworld organizations that regulated communications between the Worlds and maintained the Nessik Standards however became more important, especially when the Torsyne's demands with respect to the Nessiks became known to all. Many will disagree down through the years to come, but the ending of the old Jaef-Jani boundaries was a price worth paying for surrendering our control of the Nessiks which had brought us such grief. The Torsyne have also given us much else in return for their relatively few restrictions, from Pasovirs far more compact and elegant than those we developed ourselves, to entire new Worlds to replace those we damaged through War or through pollution. To put it in purely economic terms, the cost/benefit balance appears to be very much in our favor, although it has been suggested that the Torsyne's absolute control of the Nessiks may have been essential to their very survival. This view is to some extent supported by the fact that the first Worlds have now been Closed Out, ostensibly to protect their inhabitants from the advance technology they began to abuse, but it is significant that their Nessiks can be reallocated to new Hysadder Worlds as their societies develop to the level where they meet the Torsyne's Contact Criteria. Our relationship with the Torsyne (such as it is, we still know nothing of who or what they really are) has also developed over the years as we have learned to adapt to the new reality they have introduced us to. Chief amongst these are the Divisions the Iskurahi has now split itself into to handle the more specialized aspects of that relationship. This has no doubt helped to encourage most Governments on most of the Worlds to accept the relationship, or `Signing Up' as it has since come to be rather bizarrely known. Only the most ideologically dictatorial have held out, sometimes with, sometimes without, the approval of their people.
Although we are all, whatever we believe, no longer completely
free, are we any less free than we
would have been without the Torsyne? This will no doubt be debated
endlessly by future generations - and future intelligent species, for
the Teklanmeh informs us of wholly different forms of life beginning to
evolve on worlds of very different kinds from our own. If of course the
Torsyne are still in
existence by then. So far they have proven to be predominantly
benevolent, but where there's one species of their
kind there's always the chance that another will someday evolve, and
much will depend on which of them takes
dominance. I would hope the Torsyne will quickly work out an
accommodation with any such species, for our survival might depend on
it. Since that is
something I suspect our species could never have done to well itself, I
wish
them luck.
Raoul
Porline Hanging Gardens
Yet who can deny that Hanging Gardens is a fascinating place to visit and no doubt live and work in? Even if it was fabricated almost entirely by those fabulous machines of the Iskurahi, you only have to look inside it to know that it is ours, that it belongs to Earth and no other World. But let's begin at the beginning, which was at a New Year's Party to celebrate the advent of 2013 on a tropical beach just north of Cairns, in Australia's Queensland. The gathering was made up mostly of scientists including Carla Nolde, that statuesque blond lady from Paraguay. As well as being a member of the German team studying the still-new Higgs Boson at CERN, she was also mucho gratias in Science Fiction. You may also remember her as the lady the media turned to for an explanation of the latest trick Reality had just pulled on us all. It was she who first proposed the idea of Hanging Gardens and who enthused six other scientists to consult their friends, who in turn... as the saying goes. They duly elected her to head the project and liaise with the Iskurahi. She must have been surprised to learn that she was not the first person in the history of the Universe to think of the idea. The Touziel, that department of the Iskurahi that remake Dead Worlds - and that's another source of fascination to fill a spare lifetime I don't have - turned out to contain a department of their own, the Puntast, which specializes in such projects and maintains the personnel (mostly Tinsla) and equipment to build such microworlds. As I was to learn later, the Iskurahi consider such projects to be `culturally therapeutic' for recently Contacted Worlds to help them through their Transition. And since not one single cent/penny/drachma/ whatever needed to be spent on it, all sorts of organizations from governments to kindergartens identified themselves with what some people already began to call the `latest, greatest, final work of art of man'. The actual construction of what then had the working title of `EII', but which we know today as `Hanging Gardens', began with several of the scientists from that original New Year's Party donning Pasovirs and flying out of Nessiks dotted round the Asteroid Belt. Their `task' - well, fun really, that's why it was limited to those guys - was to look for an asteroid thirteen and a half kilometers across and as near-spherical as possible. Although they had maps to rule out those obviously outside the limits, from there on it was a matter of flying from one likely prospect to another. When they found three, they put it to a vote to decide upon the most acceptable. But of course the project did not meet with everybody's approval. Carla Nolde at that point received a letter of complaint from Greanpeace stating that `all the microlandscapes of the solar system must be preserved in their pristine states for the benefit of future generations'. Carla Nolde carefully replied that `While I am, as you know, sympathetic to conservationist views, I have always felt that these should be balanced against equally valid recreational ones'. The next stage of the building of Hanging Gardens was fascinating to watch. Although I was one of the lucky science journalists to be allocated a seat in the direct-viewing gallery floating in space (all Pasovirs were locked out of that region of Space in case somebody attempted to interfered with operations), it was actually easier to see what was happening through the 3D's we also had and which, if I remember, most people back home had by then instead of straight T.V. reception. An immense Nessik, looking like some giant glistening metal ball-and-stick model of a four-cornered molecule, then moved so as to pass the asteroid through it. The second Nessik was positioned in such a way as to transfer this immense ball of rock from its original orbit between Mars and Jupiter into as tight an elliptical orbit around the Sun as safely possible. This Nessik however slowly rotated within its own plane so that the asteroid did too as it made its exit. Watching all this really made me think hard, for I could see the starfield inside the first Nessik spinning, while the stellar background outside of it remained fixed. The Laws of conservation of Energy seemed to have gone out the window, for how was it that two Nessiks separated by millions of kilometers, and moving at different linear and rotational velocities and accelerations relative to each other, were able to pass an object through them as if they were mutually coincident? That object didn't even need to be solid; one could even run a pipeline through a pair of Nessiks containing gasses or fluids at high pressure since there is nothing for them to `leak into'. The same applies to electric and optical cables. I guess this is all just as well otherwise living entities like us would be unable to pass through a Nessik without exploding. Even now all I know about how Nessiks work is that the Spheres at the corner of each is full of Higgs bosons held in a matrix of deuterium, which is normally a gas at NTP. If you take just two such Nessik Spheres and rotate them around a common axis, they will move in a direction perpendicular to that axis in a direction that conforms to the right hand rule of physics - or at least the Nessik version of it. This is how Pasovirs basically work. Rotate a tetrahedron of such Spheres in any direction and they generate a Taurnal Sphere whose hardness depends on the rotation speed. Set four of them in a planar configuration and vibrate them at different frequencies, and you have a Nessik which will pass an object to another with an identical physical and vibrational configuration any distance away.
With our own recent discovery of Higg's Bosons we might eventually have
figured out all this ourselves as
some other worlds did. But we figured out artificial consciousness
first and
the rest, as they say, is now ancient history. To get back to our asteroid, this remained in its perisolar orbit until it became a molten yellow blob of lava radiating violently into space. It was then passed once again through the Nessiks, the inner Nessik having in the meantime been spun in the opposite direction from before so that the asteroid would emerge from its counterpart with no spin at all. Barely minutes after it did so, a huge needle-like structure slightly longer that the asteroid's diameter came through the Nessik and drove itself into its core. The Nessik it contained at its tip was then opened onto a second buried deep in the atmosphere of the planet Jupiter. The pressure of the atmospheric gases on that world was high enough to push them through and blow the asteroid up like a bubble. But its expansion was not uncontrolled, a Taurnal Sphere had been closely fitted around it and was carefully expanded with it until the bubble of lava reached its planned diameter of 130 kilometers, one hundredth that of Earth. This not only ensured that it remained spherical throughout its inflation, but that its walls would then have a constant thickness of twenty-five meters. Apparently it was not uncommon before the Torsyne Advent for worlds to build their spacecraft, usually motherships for their battlecraft, in a similar way. Their techniques were usually far cruder however. Few of those Worlds had Nessiks or Surfaces, and they usually used steam to inflate their rock bubbles, carefully pumping in the water that produced it through several pipes to keep the expansion stable. Had we developed a more practical way of getting round in Space than rockets before Contact, we might well have done the same. Even more incredibly, all this took just two weeks. The next stage, which also took only a fortnight, was as visually interesting as it was spectacular. This was the impression of the ersatz topological features into Hanging Garden's molten shell. It was done by inserting smaller versions of that first ceramic needle through the enveloping Taurnal Surface and allowing gases, again brought from Jupiter, to force gaps between the Surface and the molten rock. Much however depended on the angle in which each needle was inserted and the pressure of the gas its Nessik allowed through. If a needle was inserted vertically and the gas pressure was relatively low, then a gentle circular depression in the landscape was formed. A higher pressure pulse however caused a more conical indentation to form. Angling it in both cases produced uneven gradients. The needles were actually mounted in a pair of devices that looked like huge versions of the printheads those old dot-matrix printers used to have. Both began back-to-back at some arbitrary point, then moved spirally round the sphere towards the poles of opposite hemispheres. I could make head nor tail of the impressions they left however until the external Taurnal Surface was struck and another established inside the globe so that mountains and valleys could be impressed into it from its internal surface. Only after these had progressed some way could I begin to make any visual sense of the result. The `printheads' were not only duplicating Earth's land features, but its undersea ones as well. Even then they had nearly finished their work before I also realized that those features were reversed. At the very instant of my realizing that, the 3D's in the observation lounge picked up a view from a Rhondo sent into the sphere's interior. A ghostly outline of the continent of South America immediately appeared in the image; it was hard to see because the only light came from the now reddish color of the sphere's rock. The view-point then changed from directly above the continent until I was looking up and along it from Cape Horn. But instead of curving over the horizon as one might expect, it curved upwards so that `Columbia' could be seen disappearing confusingly towards the top of the image. I then became unsure that the vertical scale of the landforms was in proportion to their horizontal scale, but the team scientist currently assigned to answer our questions reassured us that it was. "Essential for correct river flow and drainage, otherwise reproducing the various ecologies would be impossible. As you can see, we have done the same with the ocean bottoms so that we can reproduce the equally vital surface currents and deep flowing ocean rivers". Not all proportions were kept exactly to the 1:100 scale however, more significant islands like Tahiti or Hawaii for instance were made a good ten times larger. Oahu, the main island of the Hawaiian group, became nearly five kilometers long rather than the half kilometer it would otherwise have been. After the surface-shaping process was complete, the outside Taurnal Surface was re-established and both Surfaces raised a little way from the rock ones they enclosed. This allowed cooling gases to be blown in to cool and anneal them. I learned then that threats from meteorites during construction had up till now been dealt with using automatic systems which either placed Nessiks in their path or, in the case of larger ones, simply attached thrusters to them and moved them into safer orbits. But from that point on a Shield Surface became necessary, for there was always the remote possibility that the systems could be overwhelmed by a meteorite shower. And if Hanging Gardens were to be struck even by a small meteorite, it would ring like a bell. While Hanging Garden's construction had proceeded at this extraordinary pace, a new argument had been brewing on Earth about just how much of the Iskurahi's technical assistance should have been involved in building it. Some people insisted that Hanging Gardens should have been built using nothing but Earth's own technology. `After all,' they claimed, `isn't it supposed to be our project? Wasn't the idea to involve as many people as possible rather than having automatic machines doing 99% of it?' Carla Nolde replied: `is an artist's integrity diminished by the fact that she doesn't usually make the instruments and materials she uses to pursue her art? Surely it would be best for people to learn what techniques and materials the new Universe can provide for artists by getting some hands-on experience with them right now. Surely building EII using Earth technology would be impractical anyway, like a bunch of technological idealists in the twentieth century trying to build a jumbo jet using only the previous century's technology. People only really need to be involved in the all-important final stages. Although most of the work of `dressing' the continents in stones and soils and the like will probably need to be done by Tinsla, when it comes to bringing EII's lands and seas alive with plants and animals, then finally building its towns and cities, that can only be done by people. You know, us." But before anything else could be done at all, what would be the most important component of Hanging Garden's environment had to be assembled in the center of the sphere. This was the artificial `sun' needed to drive it all, and it only took three days to complete. `The Sun', as it was simply called right from the start, is in fact half a kilometer across so as to subtend the same half a degree of arc in Hanging Garden's `sky' as the real sun does in Earth's. Its energy source consists of a fusion-powered `light engine' which in fact pours its energy out through a dense spherical array of optical fibers rather than directly. This is because other fibers are interspersed with them that transmit the engine's light, but not its heat. By computer-switching the balance of these `hot' and `cold' fibers, the seasonal temperature variations both in time and latitude of Earth can be reproduced in their entirety without any visible patchiness of The Sun's surface, though `sunspots' and `faculae' can be observed through suitable telescopes.
Not everything can be simulated however. Hanging Gardens will never see
sunrises or sunsets; its Sun will always remain fixed overhead. This
also means there can never be any shadows except vertical ones, nor a
`midnight sun' at Arctic latitudes. Even `day' and `night' must be
created through a simple diurnal cycle of brightening and dimming the
entire Sun. Once the Sun was complete, the Puntast was able to begin the duplication of Earth's environment in Hanging Gardens. They were able to bypass most of the procedures their parent body used to remake a Dead World, there was no need for the artificial plants and other such things they normally use to get things started. Soils were cloned from those of the original sites, seawater was simply transferred since there was plenty of that to spare. The only `artificial' materials used were the samples of flora and fauna the Touziel had extracted and put aside in case Earth had had its World War Three and `gone terminal', as it apparently had one chance in ten of doing. True to Carla's word, environmental scientists and other relevant specialists were brought in to observe and assist from the very start of this phase. They in return had the opportunity to learn much from the way the Touziel worked, some will no doubt eventually move on to join it and help bring Dead Worlds back to life. This phase of Hanging Gardens' construction was completed in less than a year. Even California's famous Sequoias were able to be regrown in just a few months in the Touziel's `greenhouses' and bodily transplanted by the most extraordinary flight-capable machines I have ever seen. The last major task remaining at that point was architectural. Since Hanging Gardens' towns and cities would naturally be far smaller and less populous than their originals (the total population of `London' was expected to be no more than 1500 people), only the more famous buildings such as libraries, museums, cathedrals, or even famous shopping arcades could be represented, and seldom at their full scale, though smaller ones like individual houses could be copied exactly. It would seldom be possible to preserve their original function either, in most cases they have come to house laboratories in whole or in part. Nor could they always be placed in their `exact' locations since only the main streets of towns and cities could realistically be laid out. In many ways these make me think now of the tourist `fun maps' of their originals which encapsulate all the Places to Visit and Things to Do in colorful thumbnail sketches. All this, town and country alike, needed to be rained on periodically to make the grass stay green and keep things fresh. Winds had to rise to keep oxygen moving and take the pongs away. Hanging Gardens' weather would in fact be produced simply by allowing regions of cold to drift at random over The Sun's daytime surface. The effects aren't always mild; to provide essential atmospheric trace gasses - and relieve any risk of meteorological ennui - storms are sometimes even allowed to form. All the cloudscapes in Hanging Gardens are the same as those we know and love incidentally, since atmospheric pressure falls off at the same rate above the surface as on Earth. Had Hanging Gardens been `overfilled' so that air at the same density and pressure existed right through it, this would not have happened; most of the empty space in its center is therefore exactly that. The one feature that could have made it hard to simulate natural weather systems is the somewhat lower height of mountain chains compared to their originals. This is compensated for as far as possible by bathing their peaks almost exclusively in Cold light. The sharp temperature differences simulate the sudden increase in altitude so that warm, wet fronts passing across them can still drop their rains with all the appropriate realism on the other side. Higher peaks can even be covered in real snow, though the few famous ski-fields that have now been reproduced can hardly match their originals in quality of challenge. Nightime was also needed in Hanging Gardens so that all its inhabitants can sleep and catch up on their diurnal cycles. Night is now if anything even more spectacular than Day, for The Sun isn't entirely just dimmed out. Its lamp-switching system allows it to become The Moon, not only right down to its cycle of monthly phases as seen from any given point on Hanging Gardens' surface, but even gross surface features as well. It could have been made the last word in advertising signs if the people there had to buy their stuff as in the good old days. Indeed, of all the sights I remember from my later sojourn in Hanging Gardens, Nightime is the one that has stayed in my mind the longest. When Sun becomes Moon, the lights from the towns and cities overhead become The Stars. A custom has also grown up for fliers to attach small bright lights to their Pasovirs. Then, whenever an old movie is replayed at a cinema somewhere or one of those countless Theater Troupes floating round Paradise puts on an evening performance, myriads of these lights can be seen streaming across the sky around the time of curtain-rise. It is an incredibly beautiful sight.
There is one other natural thing Hanging Gardens had to have that is as
vital to it as its Light and Dark, Heat and Cold, and that is of course
gravity. And here too The
Sun provides all, for located in its exact center is a small
artificially-created endostar that produces exactly 1g of negative
gravity at Hanging Gardens' inside surface. This also holds The Sun in
a 3D SpaceTime `well' so that it
can never fall, indeed a Pasovir must be used to move it away from this
position.
And this is in fact done from time to time, for when The Sun is moved
by
just a few meters, the gravitational imbalance causes it to pull
Hanging
Gardens after it so that the entire system moves through Space.
Although
its velocity can never be high enough to allow Hanging Gardens to enter
Tachyonic
Space, it can still move within a solar system at quite respectable
speeds
with no discomfort to its inhabitants. This is because the negative
mass
imparted to it by its endostar exactly balances its own positive mass
to
give Hanging Gardens a sort of `Spacetime neutral buoyancy'; this was
in
fact why the original asteroid was chosen with those particular
dimensions.
It can also suspend itself above a planet without needing to go into
orbit
around it, even descend into the upper reaches of non-turbulent
atmospheres.
And when its citizens wish to move Hanging Gardens to another stellar
system,
they simply move it through huge Nessiks like those used to help create
it. When I gazed up past the bright Midmorning Sun for my first time into the `sky' of the fully complete Hanging Gardens', I felt the need to sit down in one of the chairs `Herstmonceux', Hanging Gardens's visitor's entrance so to speak, thoughtfully provided on its tower roof. In spite of the fact that I had now seen many worlds from many different altitudes and angles from Space, I found it hard to avoid the feeling that the all-too-realistic `Pacific Ocean' was about to fall in on me. I wasn't the only one to feel that way. I had decided to visit Hanging Gardens with a party of five ordinary tourists to try and share their `naive' perspective of the inside-out world. One of these was a fourteen-year old girl traveling with her mother, and for her the sight was clearly too much. She took one glance skyward at that ocean, then whirled round and buried her face in her mother's ample bosom. "Mum..!" she whimpered as she burst into tears. "C'mon, Maggie," her mum spoke to her in that Cockney accent that will outlast us all. She stroked her hair gently. "You'll git used to it, luv. - Think of it as being like an enormous 'anging basket," she then said, sweeping her immense fleshy arm round. "The basket bit itself is made up of orl the Norvern Continents, Europe, Aysia, Africa, Norf America and the top 'alf of Sowf America. There's a lit'l bit missing where the Atlantic Ocean is, but that don't matter. An' up there, p'raps a bit cock-eyed, is the 'andle," her arm traced the arc high over the South-eastern sky. "Bottom 'alf of Sowf America, Antartica's that round white bit, Orstraylia, Malaya. Yer can't see New Zealand, its blotted out by the sun. An' orl them little islands," she stabbed at a few, Barkworth could see Maggie's eye peep cautiously up, "just like the leaves of a maiden'ead fern, ain'ey? You can even see where Jack Frost 'as been an' left 'is little deposits with them clouds and things all over the place. Now come on, you don't wanna be frightened of all that, girl. It's luvly." She gave her an extra-powerful hug. The whole party then got into the act and managed to get Maggie to pick out the `major' cities. It wasn't their size that made the task difficult so much as their profusion of parks and gardens compared to their originals. Coaxing her to put her eye up to one of the mock-antique telescope miniatures, our tour guide, a petite Asian girl who might have been an airline hostess in an earlier era, showed her the green-and-white square of the Hanging Gardens that had been reconstructed in `Persia' and with which this miniature world shared its name. The guide comforted her with the well-worn story about her how Hanging Gardens had been moved into orbit round the Earth while its interior was being completed so that people could see its strange back-to-front surface. Then a competition had been announced to find its permanent name. Hanging Gardens had been the one chosen by a vote taken amongst its designated residents because, as the girl who had won it said - and the hostess only bent the truth a little when she said the girl was near to Maggie's own age: "whether you are standing on the inside of this brave new world, or the outside of one of the many worlds it will no doubt visit, all you have to do to remember its name is look up." But sadly, although Maggie appeared to have rallied, this turned out to be only temporary. She and her mother had to drop out of our party shortly afterwards to return to "wot's laffingly known as the real World." And that brings me to a very hard, sad fact. Hanging Gardens isn't the only microworld of its kind in the Universe, indeed they are built by one in every five newly-Contacted Worlds. And like their parent Worlds, they don't last for ever, in fact on average they last only about half as long. As their populations run down, the point is eventually reached when the people who remain suddenly `snap' into the realization that they are just too few to continue the effort. They go their separate ways, either taking off into the wider Universe or finding a new microworld to live in if they like the life. What happens to a vacated microworld no-one knows and the Iskurahi don't tell. Certainly none are refurbished and reused by New Worlds since the idea is just as much to build them as to use them, like a kind of therapeutic `basket weaving' (a hanging basket? Maggie's Mum's inspired image will always pop at random into my mind). They are not left where they are abandoned since none have ever been found, we can only assume they are quietly `removed' like some discarded toy. Are there `graveyards' full of them in remote galaxies somewhere, like those immense storage parks full of old aircraft here on Old Earth, waiting for somebody to figure out what they might be used for? It's hard to imagine millions upon millions of them floating together somewhere in space like immense stone apples, their interiors quietly festering on alone until their little Suns finally wink out.
It's also hard to imagine that, whatever the fate of these microworlds
might be, Hanging Gardens will
one day share it. HANGING GARDENS |
