Preparations
THE Concantation of Individuals was ending now. Tunnel Maker watched as the Individuals exited the enclosure of meeting. In the low gravity of this part of the Station some rolled, some flowed, some floated, and some undulated, depending on their individual perceptions of taste, style, and convenience. The variety of sizes, shapes, and metabolic support systems of the Individuals did not seem unusual to Tunnel Maker. The extreme conservatism of their decision did.
Perhaps Tunnel Maker should have expected this outcome. Many of the Individuals had their own programs and projects that competed for resources, and some resources were short supply at this remote outpost, so far from the Makers’ Sun. The Concantation had not been convinced by the evidence that he had been able to marshal. A vocal minority had favored no action at all until there was more conclusive data. But the majority had preferred a middle course.
The consensus had authorized the opening of a Bridge to the neighboring Bubble, but it would be only a microscopic one. If the proton-size ultra-high energy concentration that had been detected, it was argued, was truly the product of a high technological civilization, then the microscopic Bridge should, with a high probability, be sufficient to attract their attention and accomplish the initial contact at a moderate cost in resources. Even if no contact was established through the initial Bridge, it could at least be used to accumulate more data that could be carefully weighed before considering the expenditure of additional resources needed to expand the Bridge to macroscopic dimensions.
As Tunnel Maker floated to the equipment enclosure in which he would prepare the Bridge, he felt disappointment and frustration. He thought of the more compelling arguments that he might have made but had not. He had argued that the occurrence of the regions of ultra-high energy concentrations in the other Bubble had been very erratic. If the signals stopped altogether, it would be impossible to establish a Bridge. Therefore, it was important to establish contact at the next opportunity.
He had argued that by hoarding resources that were presently available, the Concantation was risking the very possibility of contact. He had pointed out that contact was extremely important to the progress and prosperity of the Maker civilization as well as to the civilization that was to be contacted. After all, the Makers had originally learned to Read and Write from another civilization that had been reached through such a contact, using such a Bridge.
Some Individuals countered with the argument that if the signals should stop as Tunnel Maker had suggested, there would be no need to protect their originators from the Hive. They also argued that, since seventeen civilizations in other Bubbles had already been contacted, the benefits to the Makers of a new contact would, in all likelihood, be minimal.
Tunnel Maker had not argued forcefully enough against these points, and now he regretted it. He might have reminded the Individuals that only a dozen gross of orbits ago the Makers had themselves been isolated, and by today’s standards had been impoverished both technologically and culturally. The paradox of the extreme rarity of the occurrence of intelligent life in the universe had at last been understood. Intelligent life was extremely rare and precious. Most Bubbles probably had none at all.
The Makers were unique and alone, isolated by vast distances within their Bubble. Inhabitable planets around well-behaved stars were a gross of light orbits away, and the speed of light was an insurmountable barrier. Their ancestors had despaired of ever being able to realize the dream of escaping the confining boundaries of their own planetary system or the dream of contact, of meeting and exchanging ideas, information, and techniques with another intelligent species that had evolved and developed through completely separate evolutionary processes and local conditions.
The Makers had simultaneously pursued other investigations, including the exploration of the realm of extreme energy densities and the search for new particle species that are the building blocks of matter and the keys to the fundamental forces. That investigation, most unexpectedly, had lead to the breakthrough of contact.
Another intelligent and advanced species, the Rovans, residing in a separate Bubble Universe had used a region of ultra-high energy density produced by the Makers’ experiments to open a Bridge to the Makers’ world. The result was an ongoing revolution of ideas and technologies that had now been rolling forward for a dozen gross of orbits and showed no signs of slowing down.
The Maker culture, having first learned the techniques of Bridge-making from the Rovans, had proceeded to use the technique to contact the Baltrons, from whom the all-important genetic skills of READING and WRITING had been learned and adopted by the Makers. The Makers had taken in hand their own biological evolution, which had previously been governed by random chance, and had placed it under the control of intelligence for the first time. They had subsequently located and contacted seventeen other civilizations in seventeen different Bubbles of the Cosmos. Each new contact had produced its own revolution in thinking and technology.
And then they had been contacted by the Hive, and everything had changed. It had been a desperate time, a time when his race had come very near to destruction. If one Individual had not Read the initial Hive probe when that contact had been established, the entire Maker civilization would have been destroyed, taken over by cunning Hive nano-machines designed to convert whatever they found into another Hive world. Their world would have become a new Hive Bridgehead in a new Bubble which could then initiate new Bridges of its own.
The Hive War had been brief. The Makers used an enormous allocation of resources to enlarge the Hive’s Bridge to large macroscopic dimensions, something the Hive apparently did not know how to do, and, with tragic losses and heroic sacrifices, had sent through Individuals and Similarica who had completely destroyed the Hive’s Bridge-making apparatus before retreating and sealing their universe off from further incursions by the Hive. Aside from that which had been READ during the initial attack, the Makers knew very little about the Hive. In subsequent contacts with other intelligent species, however, they had discovered that the Hive was continuing to use the Bridge-making process to systematically reach emerging civilizations and destroy them. To the Hive, this was simply a form of reproduction. It threatened every Bubble in the Cosmos as newly emerging civilizations were systematically located, contacted, and destroyed.
The Maker civilization and some of its contact allies had effectively frustrated this Hive practice by mounting a systematic program of contacting each emerging high civilization before it was reached by the Hive. It was Tunnel Maker’s job to accomplish this for the Makers. And he was now expected to accomplish it without the optimal resources that were needed.
He pushed his resentment to the back of his sensorium and busied himself with preparations for making the Bridge. For producing even a microscopic Bridge it would be necessary to accumulate a large quantity of antimatter in the storage receptacles, an operation requiring a time period of at least half a dozen rotations. When the antimatter energy level was sufficient, the waiting for another ultra-high energy concentration would begin. The apparatus would trigger on the next occurrence of a sufficiently large concentration in the target Bubble. When this happened, an unimaginably powerful stroke of topological lightning would flash between the universes, and a new Bridge between Bubbles would emerge from the quantum vacuum.