In this scene, our protagonist sees the Redlines for the first time, and gains understanding of Dr Jane Wildbird’s name. I’ve also changed him from Fr Ellis Simpson to Fr Elias Banks.
Part 4
Let there be light
“Elias is here to see the Redlines,” Bright said, interrupting Banks’ thoughts. Alois nodded and tapped at the console adjacent to his chair, bringing the forward screen into glowing life. Elias stepped forward, peering at the displayed star-scape. As a child he would often run up the hill at the back of his parents’ farm after dinner and chores, and lie, spreadeagled, looking at the skies’ panorama. It was this wonder in all its haughty beauty that eventually brought him to God. There was nothing in the human experience to compare with a such a scene. It was, for Elias, an uncountable gift from God.
Here, in the airless void, its magnificence was amplified, and Elias felt a settling of peace in his heart. He could easily spend an hour just counting the spangles of light in one tiny corner of the screen, never approaching an end other than the satisfaction of knowing this was a job well done that was beyond the ability of humanity to fully comprehend.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Alois whispered as he stood next to Elias, two fingers hooked into the handle of a microgee mug. The faint scent of coffee drifted invitingly. Alois held up the cup. “Want one? I’ll get it sent up.”
“No, it’s okay, Caradoc,” Elias replied. “Thank you though. I’m sure whoever is on galley duty has enough to do feeding the troopers without having to bother with an old priest.”
“I’ll get it,” Bright said as he joined them. “I’m at a loose end here.”
Wildbird stepped forward, “I could do with a cup. I’ve never seen the Redlines either, and I suspect I’m going to need it.”
“Okay then, thank you,” Elias smiled at the thought of Bright being coffee-boy. “I have mine without milk or sugar.”
Bright nodded and turned to leave without asking Wildbird.
“He knows,” she said with a wink. “I’ve had him running errands ever since we docked.”
Alois tapped the controls on the console below the monitor. “I’m just going to zoom in to the co-ordinates and adjust the field depth.”
The screen span dizzily for a moment and then settled on an almost empty patch of space, with just a few background stars hovering at the edge of the view.
“This,” Alois went on as he tapped the centre of the screen, “is where the Redlines are located. Of course, in the visible spectrum, we can see nothing.”
He touched a control, and the screen flickered momentarily. “It is in the high ultra-violet where we see the first inkling that something is there.”
A spider’s web of blue lines, rotating around a central point of darkness appeared.
“Maybe we should have called them blue lines,” Elias said. The spider’s web analogy troubled him, because despite its beauty, all webs have one thing in common. Sitting at their heart was the spider and he wondered what kind of spider waited for them at the heart of this web.
“The colours are artificial, Elias,” Alois said. “The web’s strands are radiating force lines, comprising a variety of exotic particles leaking from the space-time rent left by the sun’s mass as it orbits the galaxy. They could be any colour, but the convention is to show them in blue to indicate they are only slightly warmer than the surrounding space.”
“So, a space-time tear is already there?” Elias asked. “Can’t we send something through that?”
Wildbird chuckled, “It’s so small, we could not send anything engineered through the hole. We are the first to get this close, and my measurements show it is little more than a single Planck length. To give you some idea of scale, a proton is about one hundred trillion times larger than a Planck length.”
“Yet still, something gets through.” Elias looked puzzled. “How is that?”
“We don’t know, but at Planck scales the four fundamental forces, gravity, the weak force, electromagnetism, and the strong force, probably merge into one. What we might be seeing here is the most fundamental force of all. Of course, it will only exist for a short period, and then it breaks down into the other forces. Most of what we are seeing here are free electrons and their anti-particles, positrons. The Planck length is one sextillionth the size of an electron’s diameter. So, there must be some kind of action where the forces return to their normal state.”
“And you intend shooting a high-powered laser into that?” Elias looked sceptical.
“Yes, we’re confident we would need much more power than we have available to cause the rent to widen permanently, but applying a controlled force for a limited time should force the rent to widen enough for us to send small probes in.” Wildbird emphasised her point by spreading her hand wide across the point of emergence. For the first time, Elias noticed some small tattoos on the back of her hand. They were symbols reminiscent of those he saw once when exploring caves in the Mojave Desert. She saw him looking.
“They’re my father’s tribal symbols,” she said resting three fingers on her inscribed hand. “This one is my father’s name, this one represents my family, and the last my tribe.”
“I wondered about your surname,” Elias replied. “It doesn’t quite go with your given name and your accent.”
“No,” she conceded. “My mother was a refugee from the Občina Šalovci fallout incident and met my father in a UN camp in Devon. He was working as doctor in the camp. He always had a penchant for learning languages and was the only person who spoke Slovene. Well, after a fashion. And as luck would have it, the one he learned was my mother’s dialect.”
Elias nodded his understanding. He too had worked the camps, finding translators was a major task for the UN at the time, and although many of the refugees spoke English, German, Hungarian, or Italian, as well as their native Slovene, they were too traumatised to act as go-betweens. It was further complicated by the simple fact there were seven dialects of the language, all of which were sub-divided into even more localised dialects. Neighbours speaking the same language would often be incapable of comprehending each other. The chances of two people from opposite sides of the world, from different cultures, being thrown together by mutual comprehension in a strange land, must be infinitesimal. Then for them to find love and produce a daughter with a mind like Wildbird’s, which could juggle the stuff of the universe, spoke of the hand of providence.
“So, when do we start?” Elias waved at the spider’s web.
“I have already fitted out the shuttles,” Wildbird said. “We go in the morning.”
Part 5
And by night he was a pillar of fire
TBC
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