What’s going on?
[It’s a little difficult to say, Remontoire. We’re within the influence of the machinery now, and the bulk properties of matter here — all matter, even the matter in your body — have been changed. The field that the machinery generates is suppressing inertia. What do you think you know about inertia, Remontoire?]
He answered judiciously. As much as anyone, I suppose. It isn’t something I’ve ever needed to think about. It’s just something we live with.
[It doesn’t have to be. Not now.]
What have you done? Learned how to switch it off?
[Not quite — but we’ve certainly learned to take the sting out of it.] Skade’s head twisted around again. She smiled indulgently; waves of opal and cerise flickered back and forth along her crest, signifying, Remontoire imagined, the effort that was required to translate the concepts she took for granted into terms a mere genius could grasp. [Inertia is more mysterious than you might think, Remontoire.]
I don’t doubt it.
[It’s deceptively easy to define. We feel it every moment of our lives, from the moment we’re born. Push against a pebble and it moves. Push against a boulder and it doesn’t, or at least not very much. By the same token, if a boulder’s rushing towards you, you aren’t going to be able to stop it very easily. Matter is lazy, Remontoire. It resists change. It wants to keep on doing whatever it’s doing, whether that’s sitting still or moving. We call that laziness inertia, but that doesn’t mean we understand it. For a thousand years we’ve labelled it, quantified it, caged it in equations, but we’ve still only scratched the surface of what it really is.]
And now?
[We have an opening. More than a glimpse. Recently the Mother Nest has achieved reliable control of inertia on the microscopic scale.]
‘Exordium gave you all that?’ Felka asked, speaking aloud.
Skade answered without speaking, refusing to indulge in Felka’s preferred mode of communication. [I told you that the experiment gave us a signpost. It was almost enough to know that the technique was possible; that such a machine could exist. Even then it still took us years to build the prototype.]
Remontoire nodded; he had no reason to think she might be lying. From scratch?
[No… not entirely. We had a head start.]
What kind of head start? He watched mauve and turquoise striations pulse along Skade’s crest.
[Another faction had explored something similar. The Mother Nest recovered key technologies relating to their work. From those beginnings — and the theoretical clues offered by the Exordium messages — we were able to progress to a functioning prototype.]
Remontoire recalled that Skade had once been involved in a high-security mission into Chasm City, an operation that had resulted in the deaths of many other operatives. The operation had clearly been sanctioned at Inner Sanctum level; even as a Closed Council member he knew little other than that it had happened.
You helped recover those technologies, Skade? I understand you were lucky to get out alive.
[The losses were extreme. We were fortunate that the mission was not a complete failure.]
And the prototype?
[For years we worked to make it into something useful. Microscopic control of inertia — no matter how conceptually profound — was never of any real value. But lately we’ve had one success after another. Now we can suppress inertia on classical scales, enough to make a difference to the performance of a ship.]
He looked at Felka, then back to Skade. Ambitious, I’ll give you that.
[Lack of ambition is for baseline humans.]
This other faction…the one you recovered the items from — why didn’t they make the same breakthrough? He had the impression that Skade was framing her thoughts with extreme care.
[All previous attempts to understand inertia were doomed to failure because they approached the problem from the wrong standpoint. Inertia isn’t a property of matter as such, but a property of the quantum vacuum in which matter is embedded. Matter itself has no intrinsic inertia.]
The vacuum imposes inertia?
[It isn’t really a vacuum, not at the quantum level. It’s a seething foam of rich interactions: a broiling sea of fluctuations, with particles and messenger-particles in constant existential flux, like glints of sunlight on ocean waves. It’s the choppiness of that sea which creates inertial mass, not matter itself. The trick is to find a way to modify the properties of the quantum vacuum — to reduce or increase the energy density of the electromagnetic zero-point flux. To calm the sea, if only in a locally defined volume.]
Remontoire sat down. I’ll stop here, if you don’t mind.
‘I don’t feel well either,’ Felka said, squatting down next to him. ‘I feel sick and light-headed.’
The servitor turned around stiffly, animated like a haunted suit of armour. [You’re experiencing the physiological effects of the field. Our inertial mass has dropped to about half its normal value. Your inner ear will be confused by the drop in inertia of the fluid in your semi-circular canal. Your heart will beat faster: it evolved to pump a volume of blood with an inertial mass of five per cent of your body; now it has only half that amount to overcome, and its own cardiac muscle reacts more swiftly to the electrical impulses from your nerves. If we were to go much deeper, your heart would start fibrillating. You would die without mechanical intervention.]
Remontoire grinned at the armoured servitor. Fine for you, then.
[It wouldn’t be comfortable for me, either, I assure you.]
So what does the machine do? Does all the matter within the bubble have zero inertia?
[No, not in the present operating mode. The radial effectiveness of the damping depends on the mode in which we’re running the device. At the moment we’re in an inverse square field, which means that the inertial damping becomes four times more efficient every time we halve our distance to the machine; it becomes near infinite in the immediate proximity of the machine, but the inertial mass never drops to absolute zero. Not in this mode.]
But there are other modes?
[Yes: other states, we call them, but they’re all very much less stable than the present one.] She paused, eyeing Remontoire. [You look ill. Shall we return upship?]
I’ll be fine for now. Tell me more about your magic box.
Skade smiled, as stiffly as usual, but with what looked to Remontoire like pride. [Our first breakthrough was in the opposite direction — creating a region of enhanced quantum vacuum fluctuation, thereby increasing the energy-momentum flux. We call that state one. The effect was a zone of hyper-inertia: a bubble in which all motion ceased. It was unstable, and we never managed to magnify the field to macroscopic scales, but there were fruitful avenues for future research. If we could freeze motion by ramping inertia up by many orders of magnitude we’d have a stasis field, or perhaps an impenetrable defensive barrier. But cooling — state two — turned out to be technically simpler. The pieces almost fell into place.]