As it turned out, Marquoz was behind the times. The Council was composed of politicians, true, but neither great people nor fools. As the Dreel advanced, the Council members read the handwriting on the wall and their judgments were reinforced by their computers and military leaders.
The Com would lose. Worse, as the Dreel accelerated their advance they would build up a sizable reservoir of captive worlds whose resources would be theirs to use. With human populations under control—even immunized ones, the Dreel had a major advantage: they could breed whatever characteristics were required to render immunization worthless. If the Dreel continued at their present rate and were not countered within a year, they would not be withstood. They would be too many, wearing the bodies of their enemy and not only building the additional ships and armament the Dreel needed but using captured industries as modified by advanced Dreel technology. Humans would be flying those ships against the Com, too.
War may be the most efficient stimulus of innovation and technological advance, but there wasn't time for that sort of thing. It didn't matter if the ultimate weapon was developed if it could not be manufactured and deployed before the Dreel won. And so the only hope lay in past research, forbidden research, research and information classified by past generations as too dangerous to allow. Everybody knew that such things existed, somewhere, in the files—but no one knew what or why or how.
By a near unanimous vote of the Council the seals came off. Eager researchers pored over the files, often discovering that even the tools needed to understand such interdicted projects were hidden behind yet another set of seals. Much of it was, therefore, useless—and much more was useless because it didn't bear even slightly on the problem. Some of the material was truly shocking. Ways had been developed to remake humanity, its society and culture, into something alien, and every kind of insanity was represented there. It was this "Mad Scientist Catalog" that most interested the weapons researchers, though; they strengthened their stomachs and kept at it, looking for a quick and easy way to beat the Dreel.
Tortoi Kai was not a scientist but a historian looking in the records for clues to events carefully culled from the open references and filed away to be forgotten. She was chilled to learn how much of the past had been doctored by the historical boards appointed by past Councils. The farther back one went, the worse it got—wholesale attempts to change history by simply rewriting it or editing it to suit one's purpose—but even as she worked, restoring the past, entire staffs were distorting the present.
Kai was a typical historian; though her world was collapsing around her, she followed minor threads, becoming fascinated by the major and minor people and events that, when suddenly revealed, changed what she had been taught. It started in a thread, a name, encountered from a past 762 years dead; it was during the days of the sponge merchants, a dark time for the Com, long before the discovery of the first nonhuman race. The farther back she looked in the "window" encompassing that period, the more times the name appeared.
Everyone knew that humanity had originally evolved on a beautiful blue-white world called Earth, third planet from a yellow G-type sun. It was a world of conflicting ideologies, a world of rapidly rising population and rapidly diminishing resources, one that pushed out, almost at the last minute, into space. The ancient name of Einstein had decreed that none could surpass the speed of light; his physics held even today, refined and honed to the ultimate degree. But there were ways to circumvent Einstein's physics by removing oneself from the four-dimensional universe in which they operated. Tell scientists something's impossible and show them the math and nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand accept the declaration. The other one will devote his entire life to figuring out how to beat it. Add to this Earth's total acceptance of the necessity for outward expansion and you give that one man the funds and personnel and equipment to let him do it.
Human beings love to break laws, even natural ones.
And break Einstein's law they did—bent it, anyway—so objects could travel slower than light yet effectively progress at a rate thousands of times light-speed. Expansion was rapid. There were no Earth-type planets anywhere nearby, but within five years scouting expeditions located several toward the core that could be made habitable with some creative planetary engineering. Debris and space junk would provide the resources.
People carried their ideologies with them; utopians and dystopians all attempted to display their superior system on worlds where corrupting competition did not exist. Cloning, genetic engineering on a planetary scale, social engineering on scales even greater, all created a series of worlds—soon numbering in the hundreds—with the utopians dominating. Each was sure it had the perfect system; each was determined to bring perfection to the whole race.
Earth could not maintain control. Depleted, dependant on the colonies for her survival, she held power only through military dominance. But the new colonies developed their own industries using their own resources, then, in secret, created their own military machines and trained personnel. It was ultimately easy. Most of the colonies buried their ideological hatchets in a quest for colonial freedom and joined up first to attack Earth's forces and later Earth itself. The extent of the damage—whole worlds burned away—shocked even the toughest party leaders. But it appeared that in victory they were condemned to wage war against each other.
When fanatics moved to do just that, though, wiser heads prevailed and the Com—the Council of the Community of Worlds—was created. The great weapons were placed in the weapons locker; the Council alone controlled and guarded it—and any technology that might break that control was automatically broadcast to the automated factories of the weapons locker of every Com World's patent registration computer complex, or destroyed. Research applying to such stored weaponry was placed under an interdict so absolute that near unanimity of the Council was required to get at it. Each planet was free to develop its own social system; the Council had no power there. But a planet could not spread its ways by force to other worlds. There the Council, through its weapons locker and through the Com Police, prevailed. The only ideological battles possible were on the developing worlds of the frontier; the only individuality, the only free souls, left were those who plied the space ways to maintain the trade between worlds, those who served them, and those on the frontiers.
In the course of interstellar exploration, a microorganism was encountered that interacted with some otherwise harmless synthetic foods to produce a horrible mutation within the brain; a person's ability to think would slowly be diminished, until he was reduced to a mindless vegetable unable even to feed himself. The only known antidote was a spongelike lifeform native to the home of the microorganism. It contained an arresting agent that the best computers and best medical minds had not been able to duplicate.
The world was interdicted, of course, guarded by automated sentinels so none could reach it. All cultures of the microorganism were destroyed, and it was thought the problem had been solved. However, some of the organism and the sponge from the early researches fell into the hands of the underworld elite on a number of the Com Worlds and quickly was adopted as a means of furthering the aims of their interplanetary organization. By introducing the disease to a planet's leadership, by letting some examples of deterioration be made and by possessing the only means of arresting that decay—the sponge they now grew in their own secret labs—the syndicate came to control more and more of the Com Worlds.
On the communal, genetically engineered world of New Harmony had lived the syndicate leader, a man not just born but engineered to rule. His name was Antor Trelig. Trelig was the perfect conqueror—a human being with a great intellect and in perfect physical condition, but one totally without morals, scruples, or other inconvenient inhibitions. As the Councillor for New Harmony, he knew who ran what everywhere. Gradually, he and his criminal syndicate had assumed control of world after world, their aim the eventual control of a majority of the Council. Com expansion was slowed, so that as each frontier world became "ripe," Trelig's sponge syndicate could wrest control. Furthermore, the slower the expansion the easier it was to attain a majority on the Council. Then from his luxurious and well-guarded planotoid, New Pompeii, the self-styled Emperor of a new Roman Empire had tried to gain control of literally everything.
Not a word of which, historian Tortoi Kai noted with increasing horror and fascination, could be found in the history books. The wars, the weapons locker, yes—but sponge was discussed only as an amok alien disease whose cure had been discovered about seven hundred and fifty years before, a cheap and easily distributed cure that had sent sponge the way of smallpox, polio, cancer, and other earlier ills.
Kai couldn't resist something like this. She burrowed further into the records. Trelig, she found, had discovered the researches of an obscure scientist named Gilgam Zinder, who worked for some long-gone science institute. Somehow this Dr. Zinder had made a mammoth discovery, one so powerful that Trelig believed it would give him absolute control of the Com in a matter of months. So he had kidnapped Zinder's young daughter, Nikki, and blackmailed Zinder into quitting the institute and moving to New Pompeii to continue his researches. Some recalcitrant Councillors had then been invited for a demonstration; a few had gone, the rest sent agents or representatives. Three days later not only they, but Trelig and the entire planetoid of New Pompeii, simply vanished. None ever returned. Ever.
This Tortoi Kai pieced together from thousands of bits of information. Obviously the experiment, the great demonstration, had somehow gone wrong—but how? And why? And what was the demonstration to have been? Trelig was no fool; Zinder had something, all right, somehow, somewhere. What was it?
Zinder was the best clue. His early lab research and theories were all filed, but they were technically beyond her. So she asked the computer for a basic statement of his theories in layman's terms.
Basically, the computer explained, Zinder didn't believe in the absolutes of any physical laws. All matter, all energy, he theorized, was an unnatural state whose existence was maintained by a set of mathematical equations. The natural state of the Universe was a thing at rest, a constant and evenly distributed "ether" or single type of energy. The matter and the energy that we know were caused by the transformation of this single, primal energy into the forms obeying the laws we know.
That the Universe had limits was well accepted in physics; it had been born of a massive explosion of a "white hole" that opened from an alternate Universe into ours for no known reason. Zinder believed that the matter and energy gushing through this white hole had somehow transmuted the rest-state primal energy, the ether of our own Universe, creating the seeds for the Universe as we know it. Generally, Zinder's theory was in agreement with those of most of his colleagues except on the nature of the ether, the primal energy, of which there was no evidence. Powerful telescopes looking beyond the edge of the Universe had registered literally nothing. Besides, the scientists argued, if this Universe was naturally at rest, as Zinder proposed, then now, almost fifteen billion years later, we should observe signs of a return to the rest state. Our Universe had been nothing, a blank, until the white hole had opened.
Oddly, Zinder agreed that there should be signs of a return to the rest state; the fact that there wasn't any didn't convince him that he was wrong. He was the one scientist in a thousand who refuses to believe. Once created, Zinder argued, the matter and energy in our Universe were frozen, somehow, by the imposition of physical laws from outside. These laws were imposed and enforced, preventing our Universe from "damping out" the white hole intrusion as it should have. What agency could impose and enforce the posited laws? his critics had asked derisively. Was he suggesting that there was an omnipotent god, who caused the breakthrough and imposed such laws? Metaphysics! they sneered.
In fact, Zinder believed in such a god and believed he might be the one to prove scientifically the existence of such an intelligence. Other white holes must have broken through from time to time; there was physical evidence that some still did. They were damped out. Why wasn't the big bang of the Creation damped?
Although a brilliant scientist, Zinder was somewhat practical, too. If science would not allow him to proceed, perhaps metaphysicians would. Endowed by a religious foundation he found personally distasteful, he had set up his lab on Makiva, a huge for-hire science complex, and built on entirely new principles he had developed a huge self-aware computer, with the sole aim of locating the primal energy, discovering why it couldn't be seen or measured, and then, if possible, divining the imposed equations for those things we think of as real—divining them and, ultimately, rewriting them.
Tortoi Kai did not need to be a scientist to understand the implications of all that. Suppose, just suppose, Zinder had been right? If a thing could be analyzed to the nth degree so that the whole of it could be reduced to the mathematics of its existence, and then sufficient force was applied to change that math ever so slightly . . .
You'd be a god yourself. You'd be able to tailor-make whatever and whoever you needed. With the transmutation of any matter and any energy into anything else, you could have anything you wanted just for the asking. Anything.
Suddenly Kai recalled the Markovians. A galaxy-wide race of beings who had arisen so long ago they must have been the first intelligence to develop after the Creation explosion. They left tantalizing structures on worlds billions of years dead, yet no minor artifacts of any sort. And beneath each of their planets was an artificial layer, up to two kilometers thick, a mysterious quasi-organic computer, purpose unknown.
If Zinder was right, then the Márkovians may have had no need for artifacts of any kind—their food, their art, their furnishings, anything they wanted they had only to wish for. Perhaps the computer gave whatever they desired to them.
The records implied that Zinder believed that to be the answer to the Markovian riddle. He had even postulated that our own worlds were generated by a Markovian-created singularity, a singularity of a far different sort than that at the heart of black and white holes. The place where the rules were made—and enforced. A secondary singularity in imitation of the greater one that maintained the Markovians.
But the Markovians were long dead. Zinder believed that they had reached such a point that they were absorbed into the god who created their own Universe. They had become gods themselves, and had risen to join their father.
Right or not, Zinder's theories accounted for a lot. Even eliminating the metaphysics, Tortoi Kai thought, suppose he'd been right about the basics? Antor Trelig, the would-be emperor of the galaxy, had believed Zinder right, had believed him right enough to have kidnapped his daughter, moved his project to Trelig's own world, and been confident enough to arrange a show of power.
But something had gone wrong.
The science teams jumped on the problem within hours of Tortoi Kai's discoveries. Although tremendously skeptical of Zinder's metaphysical theories, they nonetheless admired his grasp of esoteric science, his evident massive genius, and they recognized, as did Kai, that Trelig had believed it would work and someone high up had been so convinced it had worked that Zinder's unfortunately incomplete notes—even the fact of his existence—were sealed in the security computers.
The scientists alerted by Tortoi Kai had Zinder's theories and his math but not his computer—the concept for which he managed, somehow, to hide from everyone—or the results of any of his experiments. Trelig had seen to that, obviously.
What had happened on New Pompeii? Tortoi Kai worked at that problem while the science teams were hurriedly using their seven hundred years of subsequent know-how to learn if Dr. Gilgam Zinder really had something.
But Tortoi Kai wasn't satisfied. Despite the accolades falling her way, she went to her superior, Warn Billie, with her worries. Her supervisor, a kindly, balding little old man who fit perfectly the stereotype of the stuffy academic historian, listened attentively.
"I don't like the extent of the burial of this information, Supervisor Billie. It's far too deliberate, done by someone with a keen knowledge of how to fool even a researcher with a good computer."
Billie nodded then said, "But a man like Trelig would naturally take such pains."
"No, not Trelig," she responded. "From what I can see he had been so fanatic that, if this were his doing, there wouldn't be a trace of information in the files. Besides, it couldn't be Trelig since much of the information was recorded after his disappearance and that of New Pompeii—and he could hardly have mounted such a campaign after he, we must assume, died. No, the rest of the story's in there someplace—I know it. Somebody, somebody big, wanted the record preserved, thought it was important enough for that, yet so dangerous that this individual buried the information so completely that most researchers would reach a dead end. The computer refuses to correlate it with the rest. In order to dig the information out, someone must ask precisely the right questions."
In the age of paper you could have dug out the information with a large team of researchers. And Tortoi Kai could have had thousands of people poring over the written documentation, trying to correlate it with what they already had. Probably they would have found the key. But the idea never occurred to her. After all, that was what computers were for.
Supervisor Billie, to whom such a procedure also would not occur, and for the same reason, tried to think. Anything so well obscured probably implied the Presidium. He suggested it.
She shook her head. "No, that's a dead end, too. I considered a Com Police link but I've searched the files for ten years afterward with every name I had and could find nothing."
Billie was not a stupid man, nor an unimaginative one. "What about—more than ten years?" he mused slowly.
She shrugged. "What use is that?"
The supervisor was warming to the task. After years of attention to administrative detail, he felt he was once again taking part in the adventure of history.
"Let's try a given," he suggested, still speaking slowly, deep in thought. "From your work it is apparent that there are still loose ends to be traced, loose ends that could save the labs time and lives. But how can there be loose ends? We have the whole story, all that was entered in the files—but only up to the experiment! Hence, something must have happened afterward. Why cover up a public theory and a demonstrably fatal failure at all? Why do so unless the experiment did not fail?"
Kai gasped. "But . . . that's impossible! We know—"
"Only half the story," he corrected her. "Now, let's go to the console and see what factors we might use for data correlation."
Billie walked to his office and sat in a padded chair facing the console screen. Kai stood beside him. "Free association," he said. "Go!"
"Antor Trelig . . . sponge . . . New Pompeii . . . New Harmony . . . Gil Zinder . . . Nikki
Zinder . . . " She continued, rattling off as many of the possible key words as she could recall. As she uttered them they appeared on the monitor. Then the supervisor called up the names of all Councillors and their representatives who were invited to Trelig's demonstration. He asked for correlation with Presidium posts later and other jobs.
The correlations took seconds but the printout was still spewing minutes later. Together the two historians pored over the massive output. By the early morning of the next day, after a sleepless night, they had some interesting puzzles and some new trails.
"Look—this Councillor Alaina," he pointed to her. "She was Secretary of Com Police on the Presidium when Trelig held his demonstration—she didn't attend, though. Just sent her assistant. Good thing for her—later she became Council President! And see?" His eyes moved down eleven meters of print, paper flying. "Here! It was she who announced the sponge-cure formula to the world some thirteen years later. A sponge cure! The syndicate broken. And here was Trelig, with whom she was connected thirteen years before, head of the sponge syndicate—as she, as Secretary of Police, had to know. And what two posts are best for burying anything?" He paused but Tortoi Kai was already ahead of him, at the console.
"Correlation!" she demanded. "History of research on a cure or arresting agent for the drug 'sponge' later than 1237." The date would bar retrieval of the early research on the subject.
The computer came up with the answer after a surprising delay, but it confirmed their theories very well.
In the thirteen years between Antor Trelig's disappearance and President Alaina's announcement of the sponge breakthrough, there was no research of any sort on the subject. The syndicate itself nipped that in the bud. A cure had been produced without work of any sort by a powerful individual connected with the earlier Trelig incident.
Supervisor Billie beamed, although now the investigator would probably get tough. They were down to the deliberately disguised material. Until they had everything just right it would be a guessing-game with the computer.
"Where was the sponge cure developed?" Kai asked, also excited.
UNKNOWN, the machine replied.
"Who developed it?"
COMPUTER
"Whose computer?" Tortoi asked.
ZINDER'S
Pursuing their leads was still like pulling teeth, though, until they had the information to ask the right question.
"What year was it developed?"
UNKNOWN
"What year did the computer give it to Councillor Alaina?"
1250
She heard the supervisor slowly exhale behind her. So there it was. Gil Zinder's computer had given the powerful woman the sponge cure some thirteen years after the computer was supposed to have been destroyed.
"What is the location of Zinder's computer today?" Kai asked.
DESTROYED BY COM POLICE ACTION, 1250 SEE COM POLICE RECORDS FOR 9-2-1250
"We got it!" the supervisor whooped.
The records were clear. One day thirteen years after its disappearance, Zinder's computer and the planetoid into which it had been built reappeared at their former coordinates. Com Police received a call for assistance from a New Harmony shuttle, and everything they learned went straight to then-President Alaina's desk. One look and she sped to the area.
The ship had contained three aliens of unknown type and eleven stunningly beautiful women. Except for hair and eye color, all of the women looked exactly alike. But nine of them had large, graceful horse tails.
"The Olympians!" Tortoi Kai exclaimed.
Of the aliens, one was a blue-skinned creature whose human torso was topped by a devil's horned head and who sat atop goatlike legs; another resembled two fried eggs sunny-side up and oozed around creating tentacles as needed from the orange sacs atop its body. The third, which was only dimly perceived, appeared to be an energy creature of pale red, resembling a hooded cloak in which nobody could be seen.
And President Alaina received answers. At the demonstration, Zinder double-crossed Trelig at the last minute by activating a field—based on his theories—that removed New Pompeii from reality. But unexpectedly the planetoid was drawn like a magnet to orbit a strange planet—the Well World—one composed of hexagonal biospheres, each containing its own unique, dominant lifeform. The world's computer transformed anyone reaching its surface into one of the dominant creatures—as the blue satyr said he had been changed—along with Trelig, Trelig's assistant Ben Yulin, the Zinders (father and daughter), and Mavra Chang, who had been Alaina's personal representative. After years trapped on the Well World's surface, Chang and the blue satyr Renard, Ben Yulin, Nikki Zinder, and a few others made it back to New Pompeii, whereupon Yulin took command of the computer. Yulin then remade most of the people on New Pompeii into what he considered to be beautiful love-slaves. At the cost of Chang's life, Chang's group managed to kill Yulin and break his hold on the transformed women, then flee to the Com. The sponge cure had been a last legacy of Zinder's computer.
"So Zinder was right all the time," the supervisor breathed. "There was a singularity somewhere, Markovian-built, that kept the rules! The Well World! A laboratory for the gods!"
Tortoi Kai nodded gravely. "He was entirely correct. The records indicate that the three aliens seized a ship, flew off, and vanished completely—the ship was eventually recovered. Somehow they had returned to their home world. The others—with Alaina's financial help—founded Olympus. Eleven superwomen. Incredible!" She halted for a minute. "I wonder? Eleven superwomen? How did they breed—cloning?"
Billie shrugged. "Or else Yulin impregnated them and some bore males. No wonder they call their founders the First Mothers!"
"This also explains their odd religion, at least partly," Kai pointed out. "They have a kernel of the truth—but they have it the way centuries of isolation and telling and retelling would distort it. All except this Nathan Brazil business, anyway, which is almost certainly a later addition."
The supervisor agreed. "Yes, if Zinder was proved right, and the Olympians seem to be living proof, you could accept a god easily—they just went shopping for one and found him. I'll bet if we key Nathan Brazil into the computers we'll find the connection." He suddenly stopped his enthusiastic babble and looked toward his assistant. She was frowning. "What's the matter?" he asked. "This is proof Zinder was right! It means, I suspect, the end of the Dreel threat."
She nodded dully. "Yes, it does. But then what? This kind of power—in full public view, in Com hands. What sort of thing are we unleashing on ourselves after the Dreel defeat? Remember—the Com Police destroyed New Pompeii and its computer, and all the files were thoroughly hidden. Back then they were scared of such power. Aren't you? According to the records on New Pompeii, Zinder designed a dish-shaped object to remake an entire planet in seconds—to specification! Doesn't that scare you?"
He nodded. "It does, but so do the Dreel. After . . . well, you and I will write the history of it and watch the next act unfold, as always. It's too late to forget our rediscovery. For better or worse, Gilgam Zinder's legacy is back. It is real, it is here, and it will not be buried again."