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51.
Amy and Tedda rode together in the back seat of a black, armored limousine flying only Watka's colonel colors on the front fenders. They had an escort of twelve ordinary West Gotha traffic cops on motorcycles, but armed with burp guns over their shoulders and grenades on their belts. With their thick leather uniforms and white belts and helmets, plus huge goggles, the policemen looked like a formidable defense for any street engagement, but the trip was uneventful.
"I didn't want to speak of this, Princess," Amy said quite seriously, "but there is another gift I can give you."
"What is that, Queen to be?"
"I make you a solemn promise." Amy raised her right hand, the index finger and middle finger raised and the thumb crossed over the other two fingers, folded down. "I swear on my sacred new appointment, as Queen to be, that I will forever terminate the science of rules."
"Oh, thank you, that would be so nice," Tedda said.
Amy folded her arms pragmatically and said in that dead-on Gotha manner, almost brutally, with her own hyper-rational coldness layered on top: "I believe that if we continue the rule class, we will be creating a nation of slaves and masters."
Offended and hurt, but comprehending the logic, Tedda listened.
Amy continued: "Slavery rots a nation from inside. Slavery causes a disease in the human spirit that may never be cleansed. It is an offense to the human soul. For this reason, Princess, I will make it my first order of business tomorrow to begin destroying the technology, and all the knowledge, involved in what we have been doing with femtoworlds and rules."
Tedda thought of Hedrock, where he must be right now in a darkening and ever more silent city of ruins, growing cold as the chill of utter annihilation descended upon it and its remaining citizens. She wiped a tear from the corner of her right eye, and fought to stop herself from sniffling.
"You can choose to remain with us," Amy said. "We welcome you and we have already bestowed honors on you. I meant what I said back at the hunters' guild hall. I will declare you a princess of the realm, with your own servants and castles and anything you may need."
Tedda was silent.
Amy added: "Child, you will surely find another man to love. Trust me, Hedrock was charming and slippery, but he was about as trustworthy as any other Gruen Syndicate spy."
Tedda nodded, but didn't answer, and continued to think of the man she had so passionately kissed with outside the hospital in the fortress world after he'd killed the Major Gruen rule on the white horse.
The convoy ran cautiously behind two outriders on motorcycles. The car and cycles had their lights dimmed. Only as they approached the flickering East-West border, and Tedda saw the looming fastness of sprawling Fortress von Tedda on the hills above, did the drivers turn on their flashing lights and martin's horn sirens. Speeding up, they came into a wide highway lit up as bright as day under closely spaced, powerful bluish streetlights built into the block walls rising on either side. The enormous portals of Fortress von Tedda yawned in the darkness ahead. As they swung open, light from inside spilled out onto the highway, revealing a great complex of domes, cubes, and stone defense works.
For a minute or so, the canyon echoed deafeningly with the massed too-tah-too-tah of blaring martin's horn sirens. The motorcycles and limousine pulled into the fortress and grew silent. Only a mass of blue and red lights continued to flash as the limousine pulled into a vast underground bunker and came to a wide stairway. In the cavernous garages and recesses of yard-thick concrete, a military band played various ruffles and flourishes, then airs and anthems. It was all very solemn as the combined hunters, policemen, soldiers, and civil servants of the new regime welcomed their ruler.
From the limousine stepped Amy I, ruler of all the Gothas, soon to be Queen of the Mark, Lady of the Reich, Mistress of the World. At the moment, she was still only Baroness von Tedda, but dozens of representatives of the high houses of Gotha were present and knelt before her. Watka was already there, and he had with him a combined honor guard of colonels and generals from both East and West Gotha. Tedda swept along in the wake of Amy's triumph, and many gray heads and jeweled ladies bowed to both royal women. Ceremonial halberdiers, grenadiers, and color bearers stood by.
Chamberlains escorted Amy and Tedda into the calm and peace of the central keep. It was like coming into a luxury hotel, Tedda thought. They installed her in a luxury suite with six rooms, in which she felt lonely and ill at ease despite the many amenities. She had her own gymnasium, a library, an office with a great glass-topped desk that had gryphons on all the corners, a smoking room in which probably nobody had lit a cigar in 100 years or more, and a well-stocked kitchen and bar. The only thing that appealed to her was the heated swimming pool, in a walnut-paneled room with glass doors. The floors and pool were done in fine greenish mosaic tiles, as was the Jacuzzi capable of holding about eight persons.
It was quiet in Tedda's suite, and Tedda relished that. It was good to be away from the horses, the smells, the brutality of ordinary Gotha life. Tedda sat about, dressed in thick white terry robes, turban, and matching slippers. She wallowed in soft leather couches that smelled like fine shoes. She ate fruit and drank a small cognac, which made her feel relaxed. Making sure all the doors were locked, she slipped into a huge bed with fresh linens and fell asleep.
In the morning, girls' laughter, and beams of sunlight, awakened Tedda. She sat up, rubbing her eyes, and marveled as a half dozen of the horsy-pretty, scrubbed and red-cheeked young Gotha maids wearing white linen caps unlocked the door with their master key and brought in trays of steaming coffee, pastries, fruit, and fragrant rolls with butter and jellies. One of the girls even brought with her a pair of frisking, long-haired shaggy dogs that jumped over the furniture and one peed on a little foot rug. The girls all laughed and faced Tedda. They curtsied all at once. Only the girl with the dogs didn't curtsy, but wailed as the dogs made her turn in circles.
Through the open main door, Tedda glimpsed rolling greens and trees and dozens of busy groundskeepers. She saw a man smoking a pipe and carrying a ladder, boy carrying a beehive, and a girl with flowers and shears. It was the bird-sung and aristocratically out of touch paradise in which she knew she could spend the rest of her life, if she wished.
A stern clapping of hands made the girls scurry out of the room. Last to vanish were the wagging tails of the two dogs, out a side door, which then closed. In the main door stood Amy. She wore grape-red corduroy riding clothes, including tan knee-boots and a black helmet, which she left on the carpet near the door along with gloves and riding crop. She stepped inside and closed the door. "Did you sleep well?"
"Yes, sister. Come join me for breakfast."
"Thank you. That's what I had in mind. Well, Moss committed suicide this morning in his keep, and our soldiers accepted their garrison's surrender."
"It all ended very quickly," Tedda said, buttering a roll.
Amy poured coffee for both of them. "It was a great rotten house of cards. We planned all this very discreetly and very well. I am queen in all but name, and you will be princess as soon as I am crowned."
"Thank you."
Amy grinned. "Be thankful that, until that happens next week, you don't have to stand when I enter, and call me Your Majesty."
"I didn't know about such things," Tedda said.
"I am sure it will all take getting used to again."
They ate quietly. "I would have us do this on the patio overlooking the gardens next time. I just wanted a little time alone with you, away from nosy servants."
"Suits me just fine. I did enjoy the Jacuzzi last night."
"Oh, good. So you are a water nyx, a nymph."
They both giggled. And so they ate a light-hearted breakfast, speaking of nothing too serious. Afterward, Amy said: "Throw on your clothes, my dear. I have something to show you."
Soon, wearing jeans, a blouse in fine green and white vertical stripes, and soft deck shoes, Tedda followed Amy through a tight paneled doorway amid books and carved devices, down a narrow flight of stone steps, into a more central carpeted corridor lit by milky glass wall sconces, and into a large library with high windows. Some of the window panes bore manorial symbols in stained glass. Amy rushed about, closing windows and pulling long, heavy red curtains shut.
The walls were covered with older books and the newer e-discs. Newest of all was the cryogenically cooled server in one corner, which could access databases and information around the globe. There were several comfortable looking old leather couches and chairs in the room, plus a small refreshment bar, and some tables and stools. One corner consisted of a viewing table in a ring of plush chairs.
In the middle of this room, on a thick carpet, stood an odd device: a wood frame surrounded by a maze of criss-crossing wires. Tedda tried to make out the shape of the thing, but it seemed blurry around the edges.
"This is what you asked for," Amy said. "It is a doorway into the Monopol City world. I can't believe you wish to go there, and perish." She pointed to a spot high up. There, surrounded by coils of bare copper wire and blinking green and blue lights, was the chip Tedda had brought up from downworld.
"Is there any way you could save just Monopol City?" Tedda pleaded.
Amy shook her head. "I wish I could, sister. The problem is that the technology is new, and femtoworlds are inherently unstable. There is a certain balance among the underlying Go-dots that we know very little about maintaining. Think of it as being like crossing a great chasm on a fine wire. You hold a stout pole across your chest, taking one step at a time. If you find yourself swinging a little to the right, you move the pole left and the weight shift balances everything. A wind blows you a little off balance to the left, and you move the pole to the right. Then, at some point, the oscillations become too much, and the pole can no longer save you. You tumble screaming into the abyss. That's what we face with this technology. If it begins to fall out of control, the femtoworld starts growing rapidly until it reaches critical mass and explodes, destroying itself and our world. I cannot permit that to happen."
Tedda stood staring helplessly at the maze of wires and the glowing chip. She stared at the black doorway beyond which she could only see a thick haze with a few tiny lights winking in it. That was the doorway into the world below.
"Once you go there," Amy said, "I have to close it up and be done with it. There is no way back for you. I will miss you if you go."
"I will think about it," Tedda said.
"You are free to spend all the time here that you wish," Amy said. She looked about fondly. "This is the library in which I started my secret research into Intereality about ten years ago. How quickly it all led to all the things that came next!" She held up an e-disc. "Here is the very book that got me started."
Tedda reached out for the disc, but Amy instead took it to the viewing table put it in a player. "Sit down," Amy said, and Tedda sank into a cool leather easy chair facing the viewing table. The viewing table was round, about four feet in diameter, and smooth on top. It was raised to a comfortable viewing height. As Amy adjusted the controls, she gave Tedda some brief instructions on how to access the global knowledge base, as well as operating the more primitive local disk players. A man's voice spoke as the holographic text opened in midair. The controls appeared holographically beside each of the four chairs, and they were intuitive and easy to figure out. They consisted of amber buttons amid green frames, all virtual and glowing with delicate fineness. "You can speak the commands also," Amy said, "back, forward, stop, rewind, et cetera."
Amy left Tedda to view the book that had started it all. She rewound it to the beginning, which looked like an old fashioned paper and ink book. In fact, it appeared the book had originally appeared in such an antediluvian format under the title (which a gentle male voice now spoke) Pseudopolyhedral Constructs in Two-Dimensional Plane Space, With Applications in Probability and Production Theory, based on the question What is the smallest number of flat planes on a three-dimensional real (not ideal) construct (other than the one plane on a sphere)?
Tedda blinked and replayed this several times until she thought she grasped the general drift of the title. Could she pull any of Amy's mathematical, scientific, and technological genius from inside her memory? Was it there at all in her genes?
The beginning of the book was easy enough to follow. Shifting diagrams and images moved about in the air over the viewing table as the voice spoke: "Picture a flat plane, which has by definition two dimensions. Now for a recreational moment, imagine constructing an imaginary set of values on this plane, such that the values are antithetical to the coordinate system and cannot actually exist on it but must therefore represent points off the plane, in a space that does not actually exist within the reference world of the plane." As the voice spoke, rectangles and other constructions of dotted lines grew like tumors on the unbroken white surface of the plane. "Notice now that we go from a two-dimensional world, with one plane, to an imaginary world containing a dome or sphere, which can be argued as having one surface, although technical arguments can be made that in fact a physical dome or sphere also has at a minimum F faces, as opposed to a seamless ideal dome or sphere. We can image a type of cone that is pyramidal (four-sided) but if we cause two of its faces to blend into one by rounding a full edge, then it becomes a three-plane three-dimensional construct..."
The voice droned on and on, and shapes moved about. Tedda's eyes became blinded by dizzying arrays of symbolic representation, often interspersed with Greek, Hebrew, Gothic, and other foreign alphabets. Boolean operators intermixed with counters, flags, and switches on computational paths. Arrays appeared and disappeared depending on flashing multi-colored conditionals. Arrays grew or shrank, depending on energy inputs and reactions. Tedda watched all this until she grew tired. She stopped it several times and stepped outside for fresh air. The fortress was quiet. Its dark walls loomed all about while the gardens sprawled on forever, filled with wind and birds and sunshine. She called down to a gardener for a glass of cool fruit juice, and the man hurried to do the bidding of Princess Tedda Roule.
Soon, a grimy urchin with grapevine clippings in his hair appeared. He was barefoot and carried a torn straw hat in one hand and a large, frosty glass of freshly mixed water and berry pulse in the other. Tedda patted the boy's head, closed the door, and took her drink back to the chair. She sipped fresh boysenberry and raspberry pulse sweetened with honey while watching the spark of Amy's genius over and over again.
One thing bothered her. While she couldn't follow all the fine detail and the preciously wrought minute reasoning, she brought to it a newcomer's naïve overview. As she became familiar with the greater flow of hypergeometrical reasoning, she started following certain logic paths back and forth, until it became apparent to her that either she was wrong, or there was a serious flaw in Amy's reasoning.
She called Amy and begged her to come. It was late in the day, and Amy appeared in the uniform of an Imperial Guard lieutenant general, complete with riding crop, high boots, black jodhpurs, and white tunic with crossed leather belts, oblique sash in national colors, and rows of medals. She wore shoulder boards with epaulets, three stars, and a coronal device. Putting aside a high black bicorn hat of Napoleonic fashion, complete with crown and tricolor, Amy strode over to the viewing area. "I see you have been hard at work."
Tedda grinned tiredly at the uniform. "You too, sister."
"I would much rather sit and quietly do math, rather than fool with all the diplomats and chamberlains." She plopped into a chair and sat back. "Play it for me. I am too tired to move."
"I'm too bleary to keep on much longer," Tedda said, "but I think I may have found an important error in your declarations."
"Oh?" Amy sat forward, her eyes luminous, her concentration total, her curiosity sharp as a razor's edge. Absently, she called for food and drink as Tedda described her thoughts.
"So," Tedda concluded later that evening, "either I'm wrong, or the critical mass event plays out somewhat differently. See the original plane there? If we take the femtoworld to be more like a sphere, then it is joined to the plane at a single point."
"Yes?"
"In purely physical terms, that is a stress point. Initially it is a point of attachment on which the entire femtoworld depends."
"Yes." Tedda's points were turning Amy's responses less into questions and more into tones of hesitant agreement.
"As the femtoworld reaches critical mass, and critical volume, density, and so forth, it is not going to explode."
"Right," Amy said intently. It wasn't an agreement so much as an agreement to follow the logic of Tedda's presentation, wherever that might lead. "And where does it find all that energy and/or matter?"
Tedda said: "My guess is that it originates in the subquark monopol Go-dot foam, which is like the ocean floor of infinitely many universes."
"I see," Amy said. "The slush for making universes is all around us, but it doesn't have all the attributes of stuff in the {universe} set so it's got one leg in and one leg out." She added, grinning: "Or one dot in, one dot out."
"Gray dot, black dot?" Tedda said quizzically.
"We're thinking on the same wavelength, sister."
Tedda nodded. "When this newly enlarged femtoworld grows past a certain critical point, like a cosmic dust mote gathering dots at a runaway pace that gets exponentially faster, then nothing can stop it from becoming a universe all of its own."
"A Big Bang."
"Yes, effectively. The point of origin of the expansion is not on the two dimensional plane, but at the origin, the center, of the sphere. At that point, the connection to the source plane vanishes because, mathematically, the new universe no longer shares any dimensions with its source. Without a trace of energy exchange, that single point connection vanishes. The two universes are separate entities."
"Astonishing," Amy said, chewing on an orange slice.
"A new universe is born," Tedda said, unwrapping a fine small block of semisweet chocolate, "which we no longer want to call a femtoverse."
"Bingo. It's an entire huge 15-billion light-year mambo all its own."
"Right. What we've looked at is mathematical and to some extent allegorical, but this is what I am hoping will happen if you let the Monopol City world expand to critical mass."
"Oh sister," Amy said regretfully, "I can't allow that."
"It's a dilemma for you, isn't it?" Tedda grumbled sadly.
"It's a dilemma for us both." They sat and stared at the frozen image of a sphere—whose surface was shaded with dotted lines, but its outline was now a solid line—rising away from that flat plane. "I'd have no way of running the numbers in time to verify that your hypothesis is correct. I could end up blowing up our world."
"What if you manage to get the East Gothans to shut down their femtoworlds and stop mining, now that there is a truce? We could do the same on this side, except for Monopol City?"
Amy shook her head. "Definitely and absolutely not. We are in very delicate negotiations, and they don't trust us at all. Why would they, after a century of corporate lies and deceptions by the Moss and Gruen new world order? I couldn't possibly convince them that we have some reason to ask them to shut theirs down, but we keep one of ours going. Nope, Tedda, sorry. No go."
"I understand," Tedda said. "I've made up my mind, in any case. I'm going in. I will find Hedrock and have my day with him."
"As you wish."
"Kind as you are, I must do this." She wanted to add something else, but didn't.
Amy spoke the thought out loud for her: "I don't believe you will ever feel really comfortable here, and I can't blame you. You will be a princess, but of a dying breed, because I will permit no more rules. It will be difficult to change Gothan thinking…"
Tedda finished that thought for her source: "…To many Gothans, I will always be a freak, a caricature, some sort of slave, a rule."
Amy nodded. "You can't abide that, and neither would I."
"I have one more idea," Tedda said.
"Try me," Amy said.
Tedda told her, and Amy brightened. "It's worth a try."
"It's fifty-fifty," Tedda said.
"It will either work, or it won't. Thank you for a brilliant idea, though."
Tedda rose. "I have no more time to waste, then. I'll get a few belongings together and then I must step through the doorway. Thank you for everything." She held out her arms, and Amy embraced her.
"I would have enjoyed doing mathematics with you and having a sister," Amy said before releasing her from their affectionate embrace. "Sometimes we realize too late what is good in our lives."
"I know," Tedda said wistfully. She knew that their final goodbye would be emotional, but was not to be avoided or put off. "I'm going through within the hour."
"You're not going to spend the night and rest up?"
Tedda shook her head. "There isn't any time to waste. God only knows what is going on in there."
Amy said: "Go carefully. We don't even know if the gate will work properly, since Monopol City was femto within yet another femtoworld, that of the fortress."
Tedda thought of the fortress where she'd roomed with Lindy and walked to the university to work every night in the Bit Cave. She shrugged. "I'll take my chances."
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