Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [70]
“The Scyther War broadened our horizons. Martian astronomers had become intensely interested in a question that you yourselves are still wrestling with. I mean dark matter. The speed with which galaxies rotate suggests that 98.333 percent of any given galactic mass is invisible and unaccounted for. We went through all the hoops you’re going through, and more. What was the dark matter? Massive neutrinos? Failed stars? Slain planets? Black holes? Resonance residue? Plasma fluctuation? Then we kind of flashed it. The answer had been staring us in the face but we had to overcome a mortal reluctance to confront its truth. There was no dark matter. The galaxies had all been engineered, brought on line. Including our own. Many, many cycles ago.
“With cosynchronous unanimity it was decided that this subjection was not going to be tolerated. Despite the odds against. It was believed that we were up against a type-n world or entity—maybe even type-m. I now know that we were actually dealing with a type-q world, though one obscurely connected to a power of the type-j order. Apart from the bare fact of their existence, incidentally, nothing is known—in this particle horizon—about worlds -a through -i.
“Our idea was to launch a surprise attack on the galactic core. We figured that our small but measurable chance of success was entirely dependent on surprise—on instantaneity. None of that Scyther shit was going to be any help to us here. There was no question of idling coreward at ninety thousand miles per second—we’d just have to be there and hit them with absolutely everything we had. Now. To be clear. In your technological aspirations, on Earth, you are restricted by various inadvertencies like lack of funds but also by your very weak grasp of the laws of physics. We were restricted by the laws of physics. Period. So take a guess. How were we going to do it?”
“Wormholes,” said Paolo Sylvino (wormholes).
“Wormholes. Evanescent openings into hyperspace—or, more accurately, into parallel universes with different curvatures or phase trajectories. Ultraspace was the word we preferred. In crude form the idea’s been knocking around on Earth since Einstein. Though I venture to suggest that you have a way to go on the how- to end of it. For us of course it was largely a stress-equation problem. You fish a loop out of the quantum foam and then punch a tunnel in spacetime, flexibilizing it with the use of certain uh, exotic materials. We worked on this problem for seven and a half million years.
“Here was the setup. We knew that at the core there lay a black hole of some 1.4237 million solar masses, and we knew it had been ringed and tapped. As you’re aware, the energy contained within the black-hole inswirl is stupendous, but it’s wholly insufficient to drive a galaxy. The true energy source was something other. And that was the prize we sought. While fitting out the initial strike force we sent recon probes to the galactic core at roughly million-year intervals. Many missions were lost. Those that returned did so with wiped sensors. One way or another, preparations for the strike consumed 437 million years. Then we made our play. On Earth, around now, let it be noted, what do we get but the emergence of organisms visible to the naked eye.”
The janitor on Mars sat down and leaned backwards and folded his claws behind his head. Ruminatively he continued, “No one ever thought of this move as a—as a ‘mistake’ exactly. Everybody was deeply convinced that this was something we absolutely