Yet she looked again at those odd black roots under Parz’s white hair. The most cruel imposition of the Qax regime, like the Squeem before them, had been the removal of AntiSenescence treatments, which for millennia had enabled humans to postpone death. Though there were endless rumours of illicit sources of AS, and of secret groups of undying living among mortal humans, not even the most senior in the Qax’s human administration had legal access to such treatments. In theory. Now it seemed that wasn’t true. What was she being drawn into here? And – could she refuse the implicit offer, for herself and her family?
Jasoft Parz caught her looking at him, and smiled again.
‘Well,’ she said briskly. ‘Before we go any further with this conversation you’d better come meet the boys and see if what they’re building is actually any use to you. The staircase down to the cellar is this way . . .’
The townhouse was very ancient, and the cellar more so, perhaps millennia old, Mara suspected. But she’d had it renovated recently. Hovering light globes made the roomy chamber bright as day, illuminating walls now overlaid with the boys’ images of the heroic days of wormhole-building when Michael Poole and his colleagues had laced the Solar System with their faster-than-light transit tunnels.
Both Juq and Tiel waited for them here, dressed in clean coveralls, standing beside the long table on which they’d set up their latest experiment. The neatness had been Mara’s mandate; she wanted them to look like smart young engineers, not teenage hobbyists. They would always be an ill-matched pair, however. Though at seventeen Tiel was a year older than Juq, he was a good head shorter than Mara’s son, no doubt some consequence of diet and upbringing.
The Virtual Jasoft Parz greeted Juq with a smile. ‘It’s good to meet you, my boy. I did know your father – a good man.’ He spread his hands. ‘And I’m sorry I can’t be here in person.’
‘I’m pleased to meet you too, sir.’
Juq, tall, blond, blue-eyed, handsome, had never been short of confidence, Mara knew, even if he had never been academic. And he was instantly likeable, as she could see despite her mother’s bias. She’d never had any doubt that with such attributes, coming from such a family, he’d find a place in the world. But she’d never expected him to be caught up in spacecraft experiments – or at least she’d imagined it would be nothing but a boyhood fad . . .
Parz glanced around. ‘I’m surprised to find you working in a cellar. Why not above ground, in the daylight?’
Tiel and Juq glanced at each other uneasily.
Chael stepped forward. ‘Call it caution, Ambassador. I know from my own fond memories that my nephew here has been fascinated by the Poole era since he was small. Books, dramas, even the imagery you see here on these walls. We saw no harm in it – we should be proud of the human past – even if the Squeem did shut down the old Poole tunnels long before any of us were born. Then when he found it was possible, in principle, to build a wormhole in a home workshop—’
Juq took over. ‘Sir, I know experiments with spacecraft technologies are indicted under the Occupation.’ He glanced over at Tasqer the Engineer, who gazed back. ‘I wasn’t sure if this qualified. After all, a wormhole isn’t spaceflight technology in itself; in fact, to use a wormhole to travel through space, you would have to use a spacecraft to tug the Interfaces into position. But I didn’t want to get my family into trouble.’
Parz nodded. ‘And so you hid it all away down here.’
Juq squared his shoulders. ‘I am prepared to take full responsibility for any breach of regulations, Ambassador.’
Chael beamed. ‘You see, Jasoft? You remember what I told you about this boy? Smart, intelligent, and morally upright. What a credit to the family, to the race!’
Parz gave Mara the slightest of smiles, showing he wasn’t entirely taken in by this salesmanship. But Mara couldn’t blame Chael, she supposed, for working so hard to obtain for the family any benefits that might accrue from this peculiar opportunity.
Parz said now, ‘Perhaps you’d better show me this marvellous experiment of yours.’
Juq led him to the table, where Tiel stood waiting. Juq said, ‘Maybe you’d be best at talking the Ambassador through it, buddy.’
Suddenly Tiel looked terrified. Mara imagined the only figures of authority who had spoken to him before had been work supervisors and police. He opened and closed his mouth, and said, ‘Sir – Ambassador—’
‘Take your time,’ said Parz kindly. He stepped up to the table, which was low and long and topped by an airtight transparent cover, and cluttered with heaps of equipment. Parz passed a Virtual hand through the cover, making blocky pixels sparkle. ‘I understand this is a mere model.’
‘But it is a fully functioning wormhole,’ said Tiel, more confidently now. ‘A flaw in spacetime that enables faster-than-light travel from one end of the table to the other. You can’t see the Interfaces, of course, they’re microscopic. And all we can pass through is laser light. But—’
‘But the wormhole is stable, yes? I understand that’s the trick, the hard part. Wormholes tend to collapse on themselves—’
Tiel said too quickly, ‘In fact they get locked into causal feedback loops and detonate.’
‘You need a kind of antigravity to keep the wormhole throat open – is that correct?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Juq said. ‘More precisely you need what’s called “exotic matter”, a peculiar kind of matter with a negative energy density. Yes, it works like antigravity.’
By now even Mara had been forced to learn how wormholes worked – in particular that a wormhole without exotic matter in its throat was useless. Lethal tidal forces would bar the wormhole portals, the portals themselves would expand or collapse at light-speed, and the smallest perturbations caused by any infalling matter would result in instability and collapse. So, in their designs centuries ago, Poole’s team had learned to thread each of their wormholes with ‘exotic matter’, to provide an antigravity effect in the throat to keep it open. The wormhole was still intrinsically unstable, but with feedback loops it could be made self-regulating – but the negative energy levels Poole had needed were high, equivalent to the pressure at the heart of a neutron star. It had been a challenge for Poole, and was a challenge now.
Parz said, ‘I do know that fifteen centuries ago Michael Poole harvested his exotic matter from the orbit of Jupiter. Whereas here—’
‘We’ve had to be more subtle,’ Juq said.
Tiel said, ‘Actually, I had the idea when I was working on a landfill processing detail.’ Combing through millennia-old garbage, Mara knew, for reusable materials, chemicals, even artefacts; all over the planet the occupying authorities had people sifting the debris of their own past for materials the Qax could sell off-world. ‘And I found these.’ Tiel held up threads of very fine fibre on the palm of his hand. ‘There are splinters of diamond attached to these optic fibres, sir. Very small, very fine. I have no idea what kind of machine these came from, once. But I realised that with these I could make—’
Juq put in, ‘He got the proper permissions before removing the materials from the site, Ambassador. The threads were of no discernible value and had no weaponising potential.’