Blanck held up a book he had brought for the Chairman. “You said you were going to do some reading.” He opened the worn, but well-preserved, dark brown kathedine cover to the title page. “This was written three centuries ago. It is an autographed copy of the memoirs of Bela Sarius, the Carrallon General who won their civil war. He was a daring and imaginative soldier. And,” Blanck added with emphasis, “absolutely relentless. He would be a great captain at any place or at any time in history.
“One week after the rebels surrendered, Sarius convened a tribunal where he sat as judge and jury. Justice was swift. The prosecutor spoke for ten minutes, and the accused were each given ten minutes to defend themselves. There were no appeals; Sarius’ word was final. He had the ten most important leaders of the rebellion executed immediately. Ten more were sentenced to life imprisonment and fifty were sentenced to prison terms of various lengths, although many sentences were later commuted. Another hundred were put on probation; anything out of line, and they were in the hoosegow.
“But,” said Blanck with an air of finality, “what you must read is how he treated everyone else, even those who had borne arms. There was no capricious display of temper, no viciousness. They were treated as brothers and sisters, with generosity. All that was destroyed in the war, the homes and factories, was rebuilt within five years. Metetet,” he quickly corrected himself, “Mr. Chairman, Carrallon’s greatest warrior was their most compassionate healer.”
As he stepped away, Blanck said, “I’ll leave the book on the table for you.”
Rommeler in fact,, had already read and studied the work closely but was personally touched that Blanck would make such an effort, loaning him a treasured autographed copy, the sort of book that would be the proud centerpiece of any museum’s collection. “I look forward to reading it,” he said to Blanck. “Thank you very much. And you can be sure I’ll take very good care of it.”
To the Chairman’s right was General Tsav Raton, Chief of the Orian Armed Forces. In the shadows, behind the General, were two Army officers in fatigues. Everyone immediately recognized one of the men; no one recognized the other, slightly older gentleman. No Committee member exchanged verbal greetings with either officer.
After being greeted by the Chairman and General Raton as they entered, everyone went to their predesignated seats at the pedestal table in the middle of the room. The table was made from a single piece of wood, carved from a lotton tree planted 732 years ago by General Fronzfunn Suppay, Oria’s greatest military hero of the pre-Rankin times. The black, reticulated, almost-luminescent grain was striking and appeared so bold that anyone who saw it for the first time felt almost perversely compelled to run their hand over the surface to be sure it really was smooth. They would then, almost sheepishly, look around to see if anyone had seen their apparent indiscretion. If they hadn’t been noticed, they might even do it again.
The table was made to seat the ten military members of the Committee of One Hundred. Today Chairman Rommeler was at the head of the table, the position designated by the flat rather than round edge. General Raton was on his right.
Time: 1254.
“Since everyone is here and we have a great deal to discuss, we’ll get started,” said the Chairman. “I call this emergency meeting of the Committee of Ten to order. Please be seated.” The two soldiers pulled up chairs to sit behind General Raton.
The Chairman looked at the empty seat on the far side of the table. “Dr. Slaytorre, the representative of the Medical and Biological Sciences, is on Feara Bata, chairing the meeting of the Inter-Galactic Society of Medicine. She was too far away to reach this meeting in time. She has given her proxy to Mr. Wir-Gardena.
“We’ll get straight to business: the reason you’ve been called here. Two days ago, our intelligence service, with a bribe of just one thousand horas, learned that the leader of the revolutionaries, Rennedee, has implemented an audacious, and I must admit,” said Rommeler with a hint of grudging admiration, “a brilliant and ingenious plan that could change the course of this war which we are now so close to winning. His plan involves a planet called Earth.”
Rommeler paused just long enough to press a button on a small device on the table in front of him. The lights dimmed. The faces of those around the table were still well illuminated, but the two soldiers seated behind General Raton were now barely more than apparition-like silhouettes. The holographic images that appeared above the table could not be traced back to their point of origin, as in a smoke-filled movie theater. Multiple images could be displayed anywhere in the room. If the images were associated with a sound, such as a person speaking, it appeared that the voice came right from their mouth—because it did. To further add to the perception of reality, the image was like a scotomata; the viewer could not see through or beyond it. It did appear that real people and real things were right there, hanging in mid-air.
The first image was a familiar one. There was the binary, the black hole and its sister star Mhairi, which orbited each other at the center of the Orian solar system. Mhairi had received its name in antiquity, before the written word, probably even before its image was painted on cave walls or carved into rocks.
From Oria, the black hole is invisible to the naked eye. With an event horizon of only fifty-four kilometers and the absence of any light to further disguise both its existence and its power, even now the black hole itself can’t be seen. Its presence was only inferred from the surrounding matter, the accretion disk, after the invention of the first powerful telescope by Lineck. For centuries many could not accept the concept that something could “swallow light.” Many thought for sure they had found heaven, which God kept dark to disguise his (or a few thought her), presence. Because of the disagreement, the skepticism that such an otherwise unimaginable creature even existed, and the religious significance attached by some, the black hole remained unnamed. Even today, it is still just, even without capital letters, “the black hole.”
Dominating the image, surrounding the binary, was the Rankin Cube. The interior and sides of the Cube were open. The margins were 314,159.26 kilometers thick and 5,332,467.394 kilometers long, with some thickening at the corners for support. The yellowish appearing, but actually white, twinkling Mhairi could be easily seen, but appeared smaller than a cat’s eye marble compared to the tennis ball-sized Cube. The only visible evidence of the black hole was the flat, swirling rainbow-colored accretion disk and the stream of colored gases extending in a perpendicular plain above and below the black hole, giving it the appearance of a galactic-sized top. A swirling, funnel-shaped trail of stellar dust, the 4.5 million tons of ashes per second spewing from Mhairi’s stellar furnace, appeared to tether the tiny black hole to the giant star. In fact, however, it was just the opposite.
On the next image, and all that followed, an area of less than 3 percent of the previous image was first denoted with broken lines and then quickly magnified. Only a small bit of the now tiny Cube was visible in the lower left hand corner. On the third image, the Cube was no longer present. As the Chairman spoke, the process was repeated, but at a faster and faster pace. The images were shown just long enough so that the observers could recognize that another parsec had been traversed. Planets, stars, nebulae, even whole galaxies flew by in what seemed like an abbreviated tour of the Universe. After the 13th enlargement, a small area of space was magnified showing Earth’s solar system. Again the image was magnified and the blue and white Earth, with its single gray/white moon, were brought into sharp focus. Oria, with its two moons, the green Alcuinn and the golden yellow Auric, were shown for comparison.
“The Earth,” began the Chairman, “is approximately three-quarters the size of Oria, and its star is size 2, class B.”
The difference was obvious. A set of numbers below Earth represented its standard cosmologic notation—414:826:009:716:825:326, 1, 1, 23. The first six numbers are the coordinates from universal zero, the star of Hold. The next number denotes if the planet rotates—zero if it does not, one if it does. The next number signifies if the rotation is positive or negative—one if positive, zero if negative, with the planet Tante as reference. The last number is the cosmological mass in Kwin-Kenee units.
“Until