Training Base
Mission Time: 34.5 days and counting
In which no one really wants to go to Vinylhaven.
Jela continues to dream of the days when the tree’s planet lived; we learn that this tree is too young to have known the branches-with-wings except through the memories of its elders.
In this chapter, we get the crystal to go with our soldier, as Jela learns that someone (“and we must assume that someone equals the enemy“) is dismantling portions of the universe itself, in a process the mathematicians call “decrystallization”. Somehow involved in the process is timonium, a mysterious semi-stable transuranic element of which we’ll be hearing more later. We’ll also be hearing again about the mathematician who did the pioneering work on the problem before he “had unfortunately come to the attention of those who found his theories and equations anathema”.
The elder of the two anonymous men who instruct Jela in the problem implies that it may potentially threaten the entire universe, and hints that his own thoughts tend in a remarkable direction: his studies, he says, show that there are other universes…
Jela has an M’s natural curiosity and a new block of time — due to needing even less sleep than before — in which to focus his curiosity on the wealth of data he’s been handed by the two mysterious mathematicians. As a pilot, he has sufficient math to independently follow the instructors to their conclusions.
Does he get some help from the tree? It has fought the same enemy and has deep racial memories, which it seems to be sharing in some way with Jela. Perhaps he does, but Jela seems to be unusual on his own.
Interesting. I’ve read this book three or four times now, but the problem set Jela and the information the two instructors give him never seemed to gel in my memory before. This time I could see it. The enemy makes a giant bubble around the designated area of space and simply transitions it elsewhere. And the pattern Jela finds is timonium. Why does no one theorize that the enemy specifically takes the systems that contain timonium because it needs timonium? Are we so set on the evil of their senseless destruction of everything around them that purposeful destruction escapes us? And while the enemy themselves, with their godlike powers, may not need timonium, certainly at least some of their created servants and probably all of those they have recruited from the humans themselves do
Not only is this Tree too young to have know flyers, but apparently even many of the “elders upstream” did not have direct experience with “the seed carriers, the branch tenders.” It is not until we go far enough upstream to reach the “true elders” that we find trees who actually remember these flyers and “grieve their loss.” I wonder how many standard years it’s been since there were any flyers on Tree’s planet?
I laughed when I read the name Vinyhaven. It sounds like a good name for a shop specializing in vintage phonograph records.
Argh! Now I laughed in my ignorance. The authors were no doubt making a subtle comment about Vinalhaven, Maine (pop. appx. 1000)…an island that can be reached only by a long ferry ride or by air taxi.