The Disinherited by Steve White Read Free Book Online

intelligence. For almost a century, off and on, we've been 'listening' to the stars for broadcasts in the radio wavelengths, and the result has been consistent: zilch point zip!"
    For the first time in their acquaintance, Varien's jaw fell. I've finally managed to astonish him , DiFalco thought, just before the older man almost doubled over in his efforts to contain the loud belly laugh that was an impossible gaucherie in his culture. Miralann was undergoing similar contortions, and Aelanni was trying to look sternly disapproving of the other two while sputtering just a bit herself.
    " Radio broadcasts?!" Varien gasped when he had gotten his breath. "Why should you have detected radio broadcasts, of all things?" He finally recovered his composure and explained in his usual condescending way. "Use of radio transmissions for large-scale, long-range communications is a transitional phase in the history of technology, rather like fission power. We've been communicating by neutrino pulse for centuries. Radio broadcasts! Why didn't you watch the stars for smoke signals while you were about it?" DiFalco and Kurganov looked crestfallen. "You can be sure that we haven't been generating anything at Lir . . . Alpha Centauri that you could have detected."
    Kurganov pounced. "You're from Alpha Centauri, then?"
    "No, we're merely based there. Our home sun is called Tareil. You have no name for it—understandably, as it is somewhat less luminous than your sun and is roughly a thousand of your light-years away."
    "You've come a thousand light-years?" DiFalco asked faintly, thoughts of suspended animation and Einsteinian time dilation running through his head.
    "Not in the sense you mean, Colonel. Perhaps I'd better explain." He spoke a command in his own language, and a holographic display appeared over the raised platform. To his two guests, it suggested a stylized molecular diagram with golden atoms linked by pale-blue lines.
    "Is your civilization aware of the true nature of gravity, General?" Varien asked with seeming irrelevance.
    "Well," Kurganov spoke hesitantly, "in the present generation, Hartung's theory has reconciled Newton and Einstein . . . two of our greatest physicists. The first, three and a half centuries ago, postulated that gravity was a force that causes material objects to attract each other. The second, in the last century, described gravity as a curvature of space in the presence of large masses." Varien nodded repeatedly, as if approving of the orthodoxy with which Earth's knowledge had progressed. "Most recently," the Russian continued, "Hartung has demonstrated that both were right: a force inherent in matter and carried by massless subatomic particles—and hence instantaneous in its propagation—is what causes the Einsteinian curvature of spacetime."
    "Precisely! But I gather you have not yet carried the concept of curved space to its ultimate conclusion: the fact that a curve implies a circle, and that given the right conditions—involving a sufficient number of large masses, such as exist in the galactic spiral arms—space curves back upon itself in patterns caused by the interrelationships of those masses. Wherever the pattern is interrupted by a stellar mass, the local curvature of space causes a break in the pattern, which we call a 'displacement point' because of an effect which I discovered when I was considerably younger." He indicated the hologram. "This depicts, in very crude terms, the situation in our galactic neighborhood. The gold lights are stars that have one or more displacement points associated with them. The blue lines indicate the relationship between each such point and the next such break in the pattern. This all becomes of practical interest with the discovery of how to artificially simulate gravity. You see, if a ship heads into a displacement point at a heading identical to the bearing of the imaginary line, as plotted in realspace, to the next displacement point—normally,