The Year's Top Short SF Novels 8 by Allan Kaster

Author:Allan Kaster [Kaster, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781794320680
Publisher: AudioText
Published: 2019-02-14T06:00:00+00:00

Lilija had warned Kir about the next phase. “Attraction is biology. You genuinely share traits with this unrelated other person, and it feels wonderful. Except he’s not your twin, he’s himself. When you realize that, you can quarrel out of pure disappointment. Be careful.”

Lilija the loner was her own soul mate, what did she know about relationships? But she was right. One day Bill asked Kir to lunch early, when the canteen was quiet. “Tell me about the Needle,” he said. “You never talk about your work, I notice. Is it all top secret?”

“Ask me anything, crewmate.”

“Right. For starters then: How close are you? I mean, to faster-than-light travel?”

Shaking her head, Kir smiled. “There is no faster-than-light travel.”

“The warp drive. Whatever you want to call it.”

She shook her head again.

“You’re not going to tell me?”

“You’ve got the wrong idea. Um, remember what Neh said about Space-Time, that night in the canteen? There are no empty spaces and time does not pass? In a sense, the Needle doesn’t move at all. When it shifts, everything shifts with it: everything reforms, and it’s somewhere else.”

“Define ‘somewhere else’?”

“One of your exoplanets, if you like. Defining a pinpoint relative location in the local universe isn’t a hard problem.”

Bill mugged disgust. “I think I won’t start saving for my ticket. This is a long, long way off, isn’t it?”

She realized he had a hangover, and scraped her fingers into her hair, exasperated. “Bill, I’m just a server-farm, what do I know, but yeah, you’re right. The Needle experiment is about science, not mass emigration. What we’re doing is fantastic, it’s thrilling, I wish I could make you understand; but I thought you had more sense! We’re not building a starship!”

“Because this hard problem you can’t tell me about is in your way.”

“There’s no hard problem, not for us. Okay, it’s like this. Information Space is a powerful idea, because it explains more things than the Standard Model, although the Standard Model hasn’t gone away. It still works, for most things. One of the things IS explains, far more clearly than before, is that you can’t get rid of travel time, the way people used to imagine, without cost. You can’t zoom off to your fourteen-thousand-light-years-from-home exoplanet, zoom back next day, and find planet Earth exactly where you left it. Or looking the way you left it. What we’re doing is fine. The ‘volume’ is tiny, our shift is infinitesimal, and size matters. If there was ever a Needle starship in development, that’s another big puzzle we’d have to—”

“A puzzle that wouldn’t worry your precious director. She’d be happy to have us teeming masses suffer a catastrophe.”

“Huh?”

“Margrethe Patel. The one who stuck the hardware in your head, and nobody could stop her, because a scav kid has no legal status. I want to like you, Kir. I want to more than like you, but I’m getting sick of the way you worship that woman—”

“Hey, calm down! I don’t worship Margrethe—”

“She’s spent her life schmoozing the MegaCorps, in one superrich haven after another.

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