The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(21)
This wasn’t a new turn of phrase, but the point was new to Marce: There were more than a few scientists who knew one little thing, and then thought that knowledge was universally applicable to every other problem, to the point of excluding or discounting information from people whose specialty was that other problem.
Marce didn’t particularly have that problem—he was all too aware of everything he didn’t know, which these days felt like everything that wasn’t about the collapse of the Flow—but he was increasingly aware of the number of scientists brandishing hammers, looking for the nail in his data, and in his presentation.
It was exhausting. More than once Marce longed to throw up his hands, say, Fine, don’t believe me or the data; enjoy being the first turned to jerky when the collapse comes. But then he remembered that he had promised Grayland—the emperox of the Interdependency, who had improbably and somewhat ridiculously also become his friend—that he would help her find a way to forestall the collapse of their entire civilization.
And that meant not bellowing to a theater of recalcitrant exogeologists that the Flow didn’t care whether they believed it was collapsing or not, and answering, for the innumereth time, the same damn basic question he received every single time he gave his presentation.
“No time at all,” Marce said, to the man who asked the question, a self-important bald fellow who Marce believed was no doubt the preeminent scientist in the entire Interdependency on some very specific type of igneous rock. Marce motioned to the schematic that floated in the air above him, showing the systems of the Interdependency and all the Flow streams that stretched between them all, pointing specifically to the stream connecting Hub, the capital of the Interdependency, and End, which as it happened was Marce’s home, and which he wondered if he would ever see again. “As I said, the stream from End to Hub has already started to collapse. It’s collapsing from End, in the direction of Hub. One of the last ships to come from End was the one I was on, as it happens. There have been no new arrivals from End in weeks. There will be no more arrivals, as best as the data can predict.”
“So End is sealed off,” another scientist asked.
“In one direction.” Marce pointed to the other stream arcing between Hub and End. “In the other direction the stream remains open for now. We can send ships to End. They just won’t be coming back.”
Marce then pointed to another stream, connecting Hub to Terhathum. “We’re pretty sure this, the Flow stream between Hub and Terhathum, will be the next Flow stream to collapse. We expect this to happen within the next few weeks. The emperox has assigned research craft to monitor the Flow shoal here, and we’re sending specialized drones through the shoal to gauge the soundness of the stream.”
“How do you do that?” another exogeologist asked.
“Well, it’s complicated,” Marce said. “The internal topography of the Flow doesn’t precisely correspond to the space-time we’re familiar with. In fact, if we didn’t wrap our own ships inside a little bubble of space-time before they entered the Flow, they’d just cease to exist, at least in a way we understand as existing. I could explain it better but I would need more time, and I have another presentation to give across Hubfall in two and half hours.” This got a small laugh.
“When the stream from Hub to Terhathum collapses, then Terhathum will be cut off, like End is,” said the bald probably-expert-in-igneous-rocks-of-some-sort.
“No,” Marce said, and was sure he heard a groan. “End is named ‘End’ in part because there’s only one stream in and one stream out, and both lead here, to Hub.” Marce pointed to where the Terhathum system was displayed in his floating image. “Terhathum is connected to Hub, but it’s also connected to three other systems as well: Shirak, Melaka and Paramaribo. So now instead of going directly to Terhathum from Hub, the quickest route will be going to Melaka first and then to Terhathum. That adds an additional nine days to travel.”
“But Terhathum won’t be isolated.”
“Not yet.” Marce went to his display controls and pressed a button to start an animation. “But the collapse of the stream from Hub to Terhathum is just the first. Shortly after that one collapses, we begin to lose more.” One by one, the streams dropped out of the display, marking fewer connections between planets. “Within three years some systems are already isolated.” The animation ran some more. “Within ten, all the Flow streams are gone.”
“And we have no way to get from one system to the next without them?” someone asked, after a moment.
“Not without taking hundreds of years at least,” Marce said. “Our ships’ engines are designed to move in-system, at a small fraction of the speed of light. Even if we built ships to go faster—say, ten percent of the speed of light—there would still be decades between the closest systems.” Marce saw a hand go up. “And of course as scientists I don’t have to remind you that going faster than the speed of light is a physical impossibility.” The hand went back down, quickly.
“And you’re sure about this?” the bald man said. “Because I mentioned to my brother-in-law, who is a Flow physicist, that we were meeting with you today, and he said, bluntly, that you were a crank and that you have somehow managed to scam the emperox.”
Marce smiled at this. He was used to this question, too. “Sir, I don’t think you understand,” he said. “I—and my father, whose work this is—would be delighted to be wrong. We would be delighted for every other Flow physicist to sit with the data, which we have provided to anyone who wants it, poke holes in it, and show definitively that we missed some pertinent bit of information that shows we’ve been reading the data wrong all this time. Isn’t that the way science works? You present a hypothesis to your peers, you show them all your measurements and observations and data, and you ask them to make you a liar. The best-case scenario, sir, is that my father and I are revealed as cranks and I go home to End in ignominy.