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dragging, heart-thumping moments.
Matter could flow only one way at a time in a worm-hole. The few
experiments with simultaneous two-day transport ended in disaster. No
matter how ingenious engi-neers tried to steer ships around each other, the
sheer flex-ibility of worm-tunnels spelled doom. Each worm mouth kept the
other informed of what it had just eaten. This information flowed as a
wave, not in physical matter, but in the tension of the wormhole itself a
ripple in the stress tensor, as physicists termed it.
Flying ships through both mouths sent stress waves propagating
toward each other, at speeds which depended on the location and velocity
of the ships. The stress con-stricted the throat, so that when the waves met,
a clenching squeezed down the walls.
The essential point was that the two waves moved dif-ferently after
they met. They interacted, one slowing and the other speeding up, in highly
nonlinear fashion.
One wave could grow, the other shrink. The big one made the throat
clench down into sausages. When a sau-sage neck met a ship, the craft
might slip through but calculating that was a prodigious job. If the
sausage neck happened to meet the two ships when they passed
crunch.
This was no mere technical problem. It was a real limitation, imposed
by the laws of quantum gravity. From that firm fact arose an elaborate
system of safeguards, taxes, regulators, and hangers-on all the apparatus
of a bureau-cracy which does indeed have a purpose, and makes the most
of it.
Zeb learned to dispel his apprehension by watching the views. Suns
and planets of great, luminous beauty floated in the blackness.
Behind the resplendence, he knew, lurked necessity.
From the wormhole calculus arose blunt economic facts. Between
worlds A and B there might be half a dozen wormhole jumps the Nest was
not simply connected, a mere astrophysical subway system. Each worm
mouth im-posed added fees and charges on each shipment.
Control of an entire trade route yielded the maximum profit. The
struggle for control was unending, often vio-lent. From the viewpoint of
economics, politics, and his-torical momentum which meant a sort of
imposed inertia on events a local empire which controlled a whole
constellation of nodes should be solid, enduring.
Not so. Time and again, regional satrapies went toes-up. As
Governor, he had been forced to bail some of them out. That amounted to
local politics, where he had proved reasonably adept. Alas, Kafalan
pursued them for global, galactic reasons.
Many worlds that feasted on the largesse of a wormhole mouth
perished, or at least suffered repeated boom-and-bust cycles, because
they were elaborately controlled. It seemed natural to squeeze every worm
passage for the maximum fee, by coordinating every worm to optimize
traffic. But that degree of control made people restive.
The system could not deliver the best benefits. Over-control failed.
On their seventeenth jump, they met a case in point.
* * * *
Vector aside for search, came an automatic command from an Imperial
vessel.
They had no choice. The big-bellied Imperial sentry craft scooped
them up within seconds after their emer-gence from a medium-sized
wormhole mouth.
Transgression tax, a computerized system an-nounced. Planet
Alacaran demands that special carriers pay A blur of computer
language.
Let s pay it, Zeb said.
I wonder if it will provide a tracer for Kafalan s use, Fyrna said over
comm.
What is our option?
I shall use my own personal indices.
For a wormhole transit? That will bankrupt you!
It is safer.
Zeb fumed while they floated in magnetic grapplers be-neath the
Imperial picket ship. The wormhole orbited a heavily industrialized world.
Gray cities sprawled over the continents and webbed across the seas in
huge hexagonals.
The Empire had two planetary modes: rural and urban. Farm worlds
were socially stable because of its time-hon-ored lineages and stable
economic modes. They, and the similar Femo-rustics, lasted.
This planet Alacaran, on the other hand, seemed to cater to the other
basic human impulse: clumping, seeking the rub of one s fellows, a
pinnacle of city-clustering.
Zeb had always thought it odd that humanity broke so easily into two
modes. Now, though, his political experi-ence clarified these proclivities.
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