At this Dors became adept. She sent the WormMaster computers blurts of data and- whisk-theywere edging into orbital vectors, bound for their next jump.
Domains that encompassed thousands of light-years, spanning the width of a spiral arm, were essentially networks of overlapping worms, all organized for transfer and shipping.
Matter could flow only one way at a time in a wormhole. The few experiments with simultaneous two-way transport ended in disaster. No matter how ingenious engineers tried to steer ships around each other, the sheer flexibility of worm tunnels spelled doom. Each worm mouth kept the other “informed” of what it had just eaten. This information flowed as a wave, not in physical matter, but in the tension of the wormhole itself-a ripple in the “stress tensor,” as physicists termed it.
Flying ships through both mouths sent stress waves propagating toward each other, at speeds which depended on the location and velocity of the ships. The stress constricted the throat, so that when the waves met, a clenching squeezed down the walls.
The essential point was that the two waves moved differently after they met. They interacted, one slowing and the other speeding up, in a highly nonlinear fashion.
One wave could grow, the other shrink. The big one made the throat clench down into sausage links. When a sausage neck met a ship, the craft might slip through-but calculating that was a prodigious job. If the sausage neck happened to meet the two ships when they passed -crunch.
This was no mere technical problem. It was a real limitation, imposed by the laws of quantum gravity. From that firm fact arose an elaborate system of safeguards, taxes, regulators, and hangers-on-all the apparatus of a bureaucracy which does indeed have a purpose and makes the most of it.
Hari learned to dispel his apprehension by watching the views. Suns and planets of great, luminous beauty floated in the blackness.
Behind the resplendence, he knew, lurked necessity.
From the wormhole calculus arose blunt economic facts. Between worlds A and B there might be half a dozen wormhole jumps; the Nest was not simply connected, a mere astrophysical subway system. Each worm mouth imposed added fees and charges on each shipment.
Control of an entire trade route yielded the maximum profit. The struggle for control was unending, often violent. From the viewpoint of economics, politics, and “historical momentum”-which meant a sort of imposed inertia on events-a local empire which controlled a whole constellation of nodes should be solid, enduring.
Not so. Time and again, regional satrapies went toes-up.
Many perished because they were elaborately controlled. It seemed natural to squeeze every worm passage for the maximum fee, by coordinating every worm mouth to optimize traffic. But that degree of control made people restive.
The system could not deliver the best benefits. Overcontrol failed.
On their seventeenth jump, they met a case in point.
6.
“Vector aside for search,” came an automatic command from an Imperial vessel.
They had no choice. The big-bellied Imperial scooped them up within seconds after their emergence from a medium-sized wormhole mouth.
“Transgression tax,” a computerized system announced. “Planet Obejeeon demands that special carriers pay-” A blur of computer language followed.
“Let’s pay it,” Hari said.
“I wonder if it will provide a tracer for Lamurk?” Dors said over the internal comm.
“What is our option?”
“I shall use my own personal indices.”
“For a wormhole transit? That will bankrupt you!”
“It is safer.”
Hari fumed while they floated in magnetic grapplers beneath the Imperial picket ship. The wormhole orbited a heavily industrialized world. Gray cities sprawled over the continents and webbed across the seas in huge hexagonals.
The Empire had two planetary modes: rural and urban. Helicon was a farm world, socially stable because of its time-honored lineages and stable economic modes. Such worlds, and the similar Femorustics, lasted.
Obejeeon, on the other hand, seemed to cater to the other basic human impulse: clumping, seeking the rub of one’s fellows. Trantor was the pinnacle of city clustering.
Hari had always thought it odd that humanity broke so easily into two modes. Now, though, his pan experience clarified these proclivities.
Pan love of the open and natural had its parallel in the rustic worlds. This included a host of possible societies, especially the Femo-pastoral at tractor in psychohistory-space.
Its opposite pole-claustrophobic, though reassuring societies-emerged from the same psychodynamic roots as the pans’ tribal gathering. Pans’ obsessive grooming expressed itself in humans as gossip and partying. Pan hierarchies gave the basic shape to the various Feudalist at tractor groups: Macho, Socialist, Paternal. Even the odd thantocracies, of some of the Fallen Worlds, fit the pattern. They had Pharaoh-figures promising admission to an afterlife and detailed rankings descending from his exalted peak in the rigid social pyramid.
These categories he now felt in his gut. That was the element he had been missing. Now he could include nuances and shadings in the psychohistorical equations which reflected earned experience. That would be much better than the dry abstractions which had led him so far.
“They’re paid off,” Dors sent over the comm. “Such corruption!”
“Ummm, yes, shocking.” Was he getting cynical? He wanted to turn and speak with her, but their pencil ship allowed scant socializing.
“Let’s go.”
“Where to?”
“To…” He realized that he had no idea.
“We have probably eluded pursuit.” Dors’ voice came through stiff and tight. He had learned to recognize signs of her own tension.
“I’d like to see Helicon again.”
“They would expect that.”
He felt a stab of disappointment. Until now he had not realized how close to his heart his early years still were. Had Trantor dulled him to his own emotions? “Where, then?”
“I took advantage of this pause to alert a friend, by wormlink,” she said. “We may be able to return to Trantor, though through a devious route.”
“Trantor! Lamurk-”
“May not expect such audacity.”
“Which recommends the idea.”
7.
It was dizzying-leaping about the entire galaxy, trapped in a casket-sized container.
They jumped and dodged and jumped again. At several more wormhole yards Dors made “deals.” Payoffs, actually. She deftly dealt combinations of his cygnets, the Imperial Passage indices, and her private numbers.
“Costly,” Hari fretted. “How will I ever pay-”
“The dead do not worry about debts,” she said.
“You have such an engaging way of putting matters.”
“Subtlety is wasted here.”
They emerged from one jump in close orbit about a sublimely tortured star. Streamers lush with light raced by them.
“How long can this worm last here?” he wondered.
“It will be rescued, I’m sure. Imagine the chaos in the system if a worm mouth begins to gush hot plasma.”
Hari knew the wormhole system, though discovered in pre-Empire ages, had not always been used. After the underlying physics of the wormhole calculus came to be known, ships could ply the Galaxy by invoking wormhole states around themselves. This afforded exploration of reaches devoid of wormholes, but at high energy costs and some danger. Further, such ship-local hyperdrives were far slower than simply slipping through a worm.
And if the Empire eroded? Lost the worm network? Would the slim attack fighters and snakelike weapons fleets give way to lumbering hypership dreadnoughts?
The next destination swam amid an eerie black void, far out in the halo of red dwarfs above the Galactic plane. The disk stretched in luminous splendor. Hari remembered holding a coin and thinking of how a mere speck on it stood for a vast volume, like a large Zone. Here such human terms seemed pointless. The Galaxy was one serene symphony of mass and time, grander than any human perspective or pan-shaped vision.