Читать книгу Star Map - Fabienne Gschwind - Страница 3

Space travel in subspace is a complicated matter. The human mind can't imagine a curved dimension, and you can't see, feel or hear it with any human sense. There were spaceships equipped with windows, you couldn't really see anything... really nothing, nothing at all. And if you stare out too long, you just get sick.

The subspace ships need a huge battery of sensors to display subspace. To make it somehow understandable for the human mind, the many ones and zeros were converted into a kind of sea chart. Subspace used terms from seafaring. There were currents, reefs, waves, tides, sandbanks, bays, and much more. In fact, subspace travel was more like sailing, because even 400 years after the discovery of subspace, ships had no active propulsion. The dive generator was used to get the ship into subspace, where it had to find currents and winds to get around.

Three zones were distinguished in subspace: First, the "surface water." Here space was only slightly curved and there were no currents or other hazards. But without propulsion, one stood still in this zone and no one was interested in being there. If a propulsion system were eventually developed, this zone would also have little interest, because here space was only slightly curved and you could not travel as fast as if you were deeper in subspace. Second, the lowest zone was called Abyss, just like in the sea. But also, here there was no wind, only with propulsion it would be interesting here: hundreds of light-years would be crossable within a few minutes. But even this zone remained closed to humans, and they had to be content with meso-subspace for the time being. The part of subspace where there were winds and currents that could be used, but which was also full of dangers...

So how does subspace travel work?

Essentially, what was needed first was a mapping ship. This ship mapped subspace with its extremely sensitive sensors. Then a nautical chart was created and a safe course to a safe location was calculated. The next few days or weeks were spent drifting to this safe location. With careful surfacing in normal space, the crew determined where they were now, and both charts were superimposed.

"Surfacing" sounds very simple, but it was much more complicated than surfacing with a submarine. Many things had to be considered: not surfacing too close to a celestial body, otherwise, you could materialize directly inside it. But fortunately, you could see massive objects even from subspace. If wanting to arrive at a planet, the orbital mechanics had to be observed so that one arrived correctly in the orbit of a planet and the planet did not fly away from one. In that case, you could still use the sublight drives, but that was energy-consuming. And very important that you looked up when you surfaced and didn't crash into a quicksand bank from below, for example. So, subspace diving was a complicated discipline, and you had to have studied for years before you were put at the helm.

The subspace cartographers would then lay out some warning buoys or cairn and then set about mapping the next section. But after that, everything became easier; so-called road-building ships used the charts and determined where it was best to "lay roads”, that is, to equip the routes with radio buoys. The following ships did not need to calculate anything, they could simply follow the given routes. So, what cost a cartography crew years of work was later bridged within days or weeks.

Actually, cartography would be a perfect task for the advanced artificial intelligence that existed in the 24th century. But autonomous subspace ships had an above-average number of accidents and disappeared into subspace never to be seen again. Nobody really knew why this happened, and there were all kinds of hypotheses. But this did not help: So, there was nothing else to do than to send human crews on years-long journeys.

After fifty years of subspace travel, four planets could be colonized, and finally, Earth could be freed from extreme overpopulation. Gradually, other colonies followed. However, despite an intensive search, no other alien race willing to trade was discovered. The humans discovered what looked like ruins of civilization on an ice-covered planet, with an excessive amount of scrap metal in its orbit. But civilization had probably died out 20000 years ago. Another planet was also thought to have intelligence in the form of giant squids, but they didn't seem to have any technology.

The only one they found was the Tollan. They had a thriving civilization, and their orbit was filled with high-tech satellites. It took twelve years to make contact, as the Tollans ignored all attempts at communication. Even explorers wandering the planet were ignored. Only after twelve years a breakthrough; the Tollans sent a message to the observation ship. Actually, it was software that learned the human language in a few seconds and translated the following message: "We have seen you, but we are not interested in communicating with you."

So, the humans left the Tollans alone and returned with the only known piece of alien technology: this super-translation software that solved all language problems from then on.

That was in short words what happened in the last 400 years.