Then learning and experiment led to the emergence of science, engineering, new technologies, and the harnessing of revolutionary forms of energy. Machines opened up regions of vast untapped resources beneath the ice, and when the dream of artificial flight became a reality, followed rapidly by the development of regular air travel, the notion took root, inspired by the legend of the Giants, of moving the Lunarian civilization to Earth, closer to the Sun. This became the racial quest.
Most of the various tribes, clans, nations and so forth that made up the population were ruled by some form of the hereditary monarch or popular chieftain that Lunarians had traditionally turned to for ordering their affairs. As the goal of survival by migration became the common enterprise, the pattern of previous history led them to merge and combine their efforts until, apart from a few fringe communities, the map had consolidated into the two major groupings of Cerios and Lambia.
Kles and Laisha were Cerians. Why such things should matter much was a mystery as far as he was concerned, but as the pace of life quickened with the coming of the new technologies, and change seemed to become the rule for everything, Cerios had replaced its royal house with a president heading a congress of representatives that the people appointed. Some kind of theory that most Cerians apparently supported said that this would lead to a decentralized system of research and production in which many different groups competing with each other would produce better results faster. The Lambians, on the other hand, believed this could only result in chaos, duplication, and ruinous waste, and the old, proven methods of central direction and coordination were the only way of achieving any coherent program; in any case, this wasn't a time to be tearing down what had been shown to work and replacing it by something unknown that might not. So Lambia still had a king, with the people being represented by a limited parliament.
The two powers had coexisted in this way since Kles's father's time with neither demonstrating anything that was obviously superior. The advocates on both sides emphasized their own successes and the other's failures, while the critics of both said that ability and knowledge were what counted, not theories on how they should be motivated-as if the present circumstances required any additional motivation, anyway.
The more ominous development that Urg, Jud, and Rez were talking about was fairly recent. Taking the traditional Lunarian view that resources belonged to all, the Lambian king, Perasmon, had accused the Cerians of squandering a future that belonged to the Lambians as much as to themselves. If the Cerians were not going to safeguard it responsibly, Perasmon said, then the Lambians had the right to take charge of it themselves, forcibly if necessary. He was setting aside a sector of Lambian industry to develop appropriate equipment for a contingency force to be armed and trained accordingly. Now it sounded as if President Harzin was saying that Cerios had no choice but to follow suit.
Kles was still too numbed by the implications to even want to think about it. Kings, presidents, all other the kinds of leaders who had headed communities… were there to serve people, to organize ways to help them live better. It was why people had always listened to them and trusted them. But this talk now was about designing and making things to kill people. Not just hunting weapons, or the kind that sheriffs and town marshals and sometimes companies of volunteers needed for stopping criminals or dealing with the bandit gangs that appeared in outlying areas from time to time, but for threatening ordinary people who hadn't done anything.
Long ago, there had been barbaric tribes and even upstart nations that tried to live by violence and preying upon their neighbors. But they had never lasted long among a vaster majority once the majority was driven to take action, and civilized ways had spread to become universal to the point where most Lunarians were probably incapable of conceiving anything else. To hear a king talking now about organizing to violently attack another nation was like the thought of being ruled by bandits. Perasmon said he had no choice. Kles didn't know what choices kings did or didn't have, but it seemed unbelievable that the whole adult world with all its complexities and resourcefulness couldn't come up with some other way of resolving the problem. He had seen the corpses of animals felled by bullets and spears, and once, when he was younger, the charred remains of two occupants of a car that had gone off a cliff. His mind conjured up a picture of something like that happening to Laisha-not from an accident or one of the misfortunes that life brought sometimes, but inflicted deliberately by someone, with a device that others had designed and made for the purpose. The thought was so horrifying that Kles felt unable to finish his stew.
But it was only for a moment. The stew was Opril's best. He pushed the morbid images from his mind and buttered a hunk of crusty bread to mop the dish.
"How is it?" his uncle asked.
"Mmm… Good."
"You've gone very quiet. It's not like you."
"Just hungry, I guess. It's been a long day."
Urgran looked at him. "Don't take too much notice of all the talk, Kles. They're just posturing. It can't get that bad. Everyone knows that."
"Urg's right. Perasmon can't be serious," Rez said again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Multiporter project was taking on characteristically Thurien dimensions. The original Quelsang transfer chamber, built to handle no more than tiny specks of matter to prove the principle, had been scaled up to the version contained in MP2, which could accommodate devices like communications relays and instrument probes. MP2 was now superseded in turn by MP3, otherwise known as the "Gate."
It took the form of a volume of space defined by an array of sixteen projection generators hanging at controlled positions a few hundred miles from MP2, which was where the control center for MP3 was located. They were called "bells," although each was more the shape of a tapered cylinder flaring at the wider end into a truncated hollow cone-a shape vaguely suggesting a common pattern of desk-lamp shade. In both diameter and length, however, the bells measured almost a thousand feet. The power to drive them came via the Thurien h-space grid. They were positioned and oriented in a spherical configuration that focused their outputs onto a central "transfer zone" a little over a half mile in diameter. This configuration was the "Gate" from which objects projected out across the Multiverse were launched. The Gate transfer zone was large enough to accommodate the Shapieron.
Experiments had not reached the stage of sending the Shapieron anywhere yet. The ship had been moved from Jevlen, however, and was currently being refitted at a construction and overhaul facility elsewhere in the Gistar system. At the same time, it was being equipped with its own M-space bubble generator, which later tests performed at MP2 had shown would be necessary for transferring objects significantly larger than simple instrument platforms and communications relays.
With such a smaller device, the elongated dumbbell bubble that suppressed convergence effects at the sending end, at the same time preventing dispersion while the projected object was stabilizing at the remote end, was created using energy supplied by the projector. However, this method would not be adequate for producing a remote-end lobe large enough to contain something the size of the Shapieron. The connecting "umbilical" filament couldn't be made to carry the load. Therefore, an additional source would be necessary at the remote end, and the obvious way to get it there seemed to be to build it into the transferred object itself.