Ice Planet Read online

  “How did you know when it would be the right time to transport to us? We might have arrived here tomorrow or a year from now.”

  “That would have made no difference. The way it works, when we actuated the transporter cabinet, it transported us to the destination immediately, regardless of where and when that destination was, because the address of the destination is the receiving cabinet. That address includes the time coordinates. The function of the computer here was to send a signal in space and time that the transmitting cabinet homed in on. If that signal had been for a year from now, or a thousand years from now, the transporter would have gone there, as it would have if the difference in address had been in distance.”

  “That implies that all time is accessible at once.”

  “Yes, Cora. In the twelfth dimension, time is like a map, except that, instead of choosing ‘where’ to go, you choose ‘when’.”

  “So how long did you have to wait for the time window to open?”

  “We didn’t wait. We finished our work and then stepped into the cabinet. When the cabinet door closed, the transport was activated. The computer searched the particle universe for the signal that would serve as an invitation with a space-time address, and then homed in on that signal. From beginning to end, the whole process required considerably less than a second.”

  Savi felt himself drifting in a field of new facts. He understood intellectually what Aria and Bian had explained, but the process of fitting them into his instinctive understanding of time as a process required some thought.

  “What were the conditions like in your time when you left?”

  “They were very severe, Cora. The temperature was well below freezing, to the point that steel would shatter if you knocked it. I suppose, as humans, we were instinctively reluctant to leave our homes, everything in our lives, to travel to some unknown future without the possibility of returning. We delayed our departure much longer than was necessary, and then, when it became clear that we could not hope for any improvement in the conditions within our lifetimes, we sat down together and discussed the matter thoroughly. It was clear that a further delay might endanger the project, as well as our lives. As far as we knew, we were the only people of our race left alive in the universe, because we had discovered no sign that any of the other colonies throughout the universe still existed. After the discussion, we slept on the matter, and the next morning we put it to the vote. Our decision was unanimous, and we each made our final preparations before stepping into the transporter cabinets. Even so, it was a relief to see the two of you when I arrived. I believed that our work was correct, that the transporter would work as planned, but believing is not knowing.” Aria smiled at the two, her smile brightening the chamber.

  Savi thought of the courage that step must have required. He wondered whether he would ever be able to display that level of courage.

  “I would be interested to hear more of the world conditions now,” said Bian. “What is the political situation? It seems that politicians are always the first to cause problems, and they always blame the results that they bring about on others.”

  Cora smiled at that. It echoed her own thoughts on the matter.

  “We have nominally a democracy, but the political leaders have worked for years to bye-pass the provisions of the constitution that were put in place to protect the citizens. It seems that they found the answer they needed about a hundred years ago, when they came to an unofficial agreement with the main organized religion, under which the State supports the religion and the religious leaders support the State. Of course, a religion enjoys no special preference under the constitution, but the State compensated for that it by ensuring that it is strongly supported at the schools, where at least an hour every day is devoted to religious instruction, with the instructors provide by the religious organization. The school children are the easiest target, and the most vulnerable, because they have no basis of knowledge or reasoning against which to compare what they are being told by the people they should be able to trust. The religious leaders, in turn, support the actions of the State without question, and feed back information provided to them by the citizens. Where a citizen is accused of something that the State does not want, but is legal under the constitution, the religious leaders ensure that the people ostracize him, to the extent that businessmen lose their businesses, children of the victim are mistreated at schools, and even burial of a deceased family member becomes nearly impossible. The State controls most business activities, levying heavy taxes and fees. Where someone with good connections in the State desires to acquire a business, the State levies penalties against the owner, interrupts the supply of energy and water, and harasses the person in dozens of ways, until he recognizes the inevitable and sells at a very favorable price, or simply abandons the business.”

  “That seems to be very far from the ideal of a democracy. Why do the citizens tolerate it?”

  “I believe that the changes crept up on them, with small limitations of their rights coming into effect each time. Each one was not important enough to resist strongly, but, as a cumulative body, they have become overpowering. Of course, with each limitation of freedom, the citizen has become more powerless.”

  “Do the citizens have any right to vote for the people who represent them?”

  “They do, but the nomination of candidates is controlled by the people in power. In any event, the opposition political parties were abolished more than fifty years ago, and the only Party in existence is the governing one. It is possible, in theory, for an independent candidate to stand for election, but then he has to put down a very substantial deposit which is forfeited if he loses the election. As far as I can recall, no independent candidate has been elected in at least the past fifty years.”

  “That is certainly not the sort of society that I would want to be part of. It seems to be a dictatorship of the worst type.” Selon’s words were spoken in a sharp tone.

  “I wonder what happened to the ideals of the people who brought us to this planet. What you have described, Savi, sounds like the society in Kiron, before the original transport to the colonies took place.”

  “Please tell us about that.” Cora was excited. “We’ve been told that Kinair was created about seven thousand years ago, to serve as a home for Humanity, and that humans were created at the same time. Of course, that is ridiculous. There is overwhelming evidence of civilizations existing before that, and there are tens of thousands of fossils that were discovered over the years, mainly in strata that were laid down long before the creation of the planet. Those discoveries were made before the ice build-up made that sort of exploration practically impossible, and it proved that numerous types of animals existed on the planet that are no longer here. Many of those fossils are at least hundreds of thousands of years old. Those animals probably evolved before the twin sun was captured by the gravitational field of our sun.”

  “We have a well-documented history of the founding of or civilization on this planet about fourteen thousand years before our time. The scientists on Kiron, our home planet, discovered that a wandering giant star was heading towards the place their planet would be in about twenty-five thousand years. They set about developing a technology, based on quantum physics, to evacuate the population of the planet. The announcement of the threat posed by the star, couched in the careful wording that the scientists used, was seized on by a particular religious leader, who proclaimed that the star, the ‘Death Star’ as they termed it, was sent by their Creator. His following grew with each progress report confirming more accurate details, and the religious leader used the situation to lay the blame at the feet of the scientists, claiming that they had transgressed the rules of the Creator in wanting to learn about the origin of their race, and of the universe itself, in effect questioning the veracity of the word of the Creator, as interpreted by the religious leaders. The confrontation grew, and the scientists were obliged to cut back on the parts of their work that were not strictly n
ecessary to achieve their main objective, the development of a system to evacuate the population of the planet to a safe place. They managed to achieve that objective shortly before the religious confrontation reached the point of bringing an end to the project. They evacuated tens of thousands of citizens to numerous planets. We were the two hundred and thirty-first group to leave, with over a thousand people in our group. The haste governing the work was such that most of the elements of equipment that would have enabled contact with the other colonies and with the home planet were omitted. Although we were uncommonly well-endowed with the scientific knowledge used to develop the transporter system, the daily problems of establishing a civilization on an empty planet took most of our people’s efforts, and much of the scientific knowledge was lost. The recovery efforts suffered a further set-back with the first cold cycle we endured. The scientists on Kiron had undertaken extensive investigation of the planet before it was chosen as a possible home to a new colony, but they were not able to detect the threat posed by the twin sun, which was far away from our own sun when the transport was made. It appeared to be no more than an unusually bright star. To detect that threat, they would have had to observe the system over a period of thousands of years, and that length of time was not available. Fortunately, we had considerable time to adapt to the increasing cold, but much of what our people had gained in the early years was lost in that ice age. The conditions were bad at that time, but not as bad as they have since become, and the recovery was relatively quick, but we did lose at least five thousand years of progress. The extreme conditions provided a fertile ground for the growth of extremist politicians and beliefs, and it required some centuries for full democracy to reassert itself, although we, as scientists, were aware that the lunatic notions of the religion that prevailed on Kiron had also taken root in our society. The numbers of adherents at that time were not large, not sufficient to pose any particular threat to the society. It seems that they have flourished since then.” Aria fell silent, reflecting on the history of her people. Bian continued the story.

  “It has always been an obsession of the scientific community to recover the science that brought our people to this planet. It has become clear to us that the conditions here are not conducive to the realization of our people’s potential, and the knowledge that a large number of Kiron’s people were transported to other planets in other galaxies made us believe that we could find another planet where our people could escape these cold cycles. A long line of scientists devoted their lives to rediscovering the science, but the breakthrough was made only when Aria commenced her research, early in her university career. She applied her mind to the facts, and did not try to rediscover what had already been discovered by our ancestors. Her new insights, coupled with a high intelligence and excellent leadership qualities, enabled her to perfect first a device that could transport matter, based on the mining machines that had been in operation for thousands of years. That device was put to work to excavate this chamber and to construct the structures that attracted your attention. While that work was progressing, Aria perfected the quantum computer that was essential to analyzing the structure of living beings at a sub-atomic, particle, level. That differs from the computers that controlled the transport of inert matter, because the speed required for the processing is much faster, by several orders of magnitude. She applied that to the matter transporter, and proved that it was possible to transport living beings without causing them harm. By then, the cold had become so intense that it was not possible to venture outside this chamber. Aria’s work was somewhat frustrated by the fact that we were unable to make contact with anyone via the particle world, a factor on which we had pinned so much hope. Unlike our ancestors on Kiron, we had not achieved the capability of sending a particle probe blind, a necessity to investigate the conditions on any target planet in the absence of a communication with that planet, as well as to place a known particle in a defined place, to use to construct there the object that was being deconstructed by the transporter here. We seemed to have reached a dead end in our work, until Aria had an inspiration. Her work had shown her that a time location is, in essence, the same thing as a place location. If we knew precisely the address of the target’s physical location, we needed only to place a transport receiver in that location to signal via the particle world when the time location was suitable. The work to put that in place needed less than a month, and then we were able to experiment, using an animal to test the system. We set the transporter here to send a time signal to a date a week later, and then transported the animal to that signal. The wait until the animal arrived was the longest week that I have ever experienced! The animal arrived exactly as planned, and we knew that we were in a position to transport ourselves to safety. The only thing that remained was to leave the transporter in a state that would be fully functional several thousand years in the future. It was never possible to anticipate every possible problem that might arise over a span of several thousand years, but we did what we could, and trusted to good fortune for the rest. When the work was done, we were ready to transport to the future, and it was not a moment too soon. In the last hours of our stay in our own time, the cold conditions intensified, and the temperature plunged a hundred degrees. For all we knew, that was the end of our world. We had our final discussion, ventilating every question we could raise, and then went to our beds. When we arose in the morning, we voted on the decision. The agreement was unanimous, that we should transport immediately, rather than wait and hope for an improvement that we knew could not come in our lifetimes. We made our final arrangements and transported out. Aria’s setting was that she should be the first to arrive. Only if she found the conditions here acceptable, would the individual computers in the transporters here accept the transport of the other members of the team. If that did not happen, the computers in our time would search further into the future to find the signal, in the hope that Aria had been able to transport there as well. She insisted on that precaution, claiming that she had been responsible for the devices and she should be the one to take the risk. If she did not accept the conditions as being safe, she would not authorize the receipt of the rest of us, and she would transport to another point in the future, if that were possible.”

  “I would say that the conditions here, on the face of it, are acceptable. Bian. We obviously need to investigate further, particularly the matter of the deteriorating weather. It seems to me that we cannot rely on the weather becoming more benign in the short term, and this time might be a good opportunity to continue our research in placing a probe on another planet.”

  “I agree with Solon. Making another transport into the future will be another gamble, and we should not take that chance unless it is necessary.” Adin’s face was earnest.

  “I agree, too. I will authorize the computer to accept the transport of our food and equipment.” Aria walked back to the desk where Cora had activated the computer. “Computer, activate the matter transporter.”

  There was a sudden arrival of dozens of boxes and crates in the open area at the back of the chamber, each pile simply appearing soundlessly and without fuss.

  Aria returned to the group and smiled at Cora and Savi.

  “We must thank you for your assistance in bringing us here, Cora and Savi, and I apologize for burdening you with the sudden arrival of so many of us. If you wish to leave us, we will not stop you, but I believe that we can work together to solve the problems that face our people. I would welcome that.”

  “I think that I can speak for Savi, Aria. We would love to be part of your project. I’m not sure what we could contribute, but we will do what we can.”

  “I agree totally with Cora. We would be mad not to want to be associated with you and your work. It could easily be the salvation of our people. However, I would like to ask one further question. You seem to know the early history of our settlement on Kinair. Do you know how long ago that was?” Savi asked apologetically. It was a matter of supreme unimportance
to most people, who had been told that the planet and the race had been created seven thousand years ago. What difference would it make if it was ten thousand years ago, or a thousand? Any time longer than the span of a human life was not really comprehended by most people, a fact that he believed contributed to the willingness of so many people to accept the problems that would result in the distant future from their actions now. However, his passion was archaeology, an understanding of the distant past.