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Chapter 1

The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a
number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep
track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very
muddling things have been happening anyway.
One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and
the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing
travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception
of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel
people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were
powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and
were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere
that there wasn't really any point in being there.
So, by and large, the peoples of the Galaxy tended to languish
in their own local muddles and the history of the Galaxy itself
was, for a long time, largely cosmological.
Which is not to say that people weren't trying. They tried
sending off fleets of spaceships to do battle or business in
distant parts, but these usually took thousands of years to get
anywhere. By the time they eventually arrived, other forms of
travel had been discovered which made use of hyperspace to
circumvent the speed of light, so that whatever battles it was
that the slower-than-light fleets had been sent to fight had already
been taken care of centuries earlier by the time they actually got
there .
This didn't, of course, deter their crews from wanting to fight
the battles anyway. They were trained, they were ready, they'd
had a couple of thousand years' sleep, they'd come a long way
to do a tough job and by Zarquon they were going to do it.
This was when the first major muddles of Galactic history set
in, with battles continually re-erupting centuries after the issues
they had been fought over had supposedly been settled. However,
these muddles were as nothing to the ones which historians had
to try and unravel once time-travel was discovered and battles
started pre-erupting hundreds of years before the issues even
arose. When the Infinite Improbability Drive arrived and whole
planets started turning unexpectedly into banana fruitcake, the
great history faculty of the University of MaxiMegalon finally
gave up, closed itself down and surrendered its buildings to the
rapidly growing joint faculty of Divinity and Water Polo, which
had been after them for years.
Which is all very well, of course, but it almost certainly
means that no one will ever know for sure where, for instance,
the Grebulons came from, or exactly what it was they wanted.
And this is a pity, because if anybody had known anything about
them, it is just possible that a most terrible catastrophe would
have been averted - or at least would have had to find a different
way to happen.

Click, hum.
The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently
through the black void. It was travelling at fabulous, breath-
taking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background
of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one
dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night.
On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia,
deeply dark and Silent.
Click, hum.
At least, almost everything.
Click, click, hum.
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
Hmmm.
A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher
level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent
cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it
got was a hum.
The higher level supervising program asked it what it was
supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said
that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably
more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know
what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was
getting.
The higher level supervising program considered this and
didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what
exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program
said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something
that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which
usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error
look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted
the higher level supervising program to the problem .
The higher level supervising program went to consult one of
its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising
program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn't find the look-up table .
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried
to look up the error message in its error message look-up table
and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds
to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its
sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It
called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few
millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some
for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the
ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none
of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level,
vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to
do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing,
were also missing.
Small modules of software - agents - surged through the
logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly
established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central
mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could
determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mis-
sion module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with.
Replace the central mission module. There was another one,
a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be
physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no
link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the
central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the
reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all
would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission
module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it,
to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and
protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authen-
ticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that
all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central
mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the
storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into
the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that
was wrong.
Further investigation quickly established what it was that had
happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The
ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had
neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment
which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a
meteorite.

The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole. This turned
out to be impossible, because the ship's sensors couldn't see that
there was a hole, and the supervisors which should have said that
the sensors weren't working properly weren't working properly
and kept saying that the sensors were fine. The ship could only
deduce the existence of the hole from the fact that the robots
had clearly fallen out of it, taking its spare brain, which would
have enabl

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  - alef1 © © © © © © © © © © 27.06.02, 22:51
    
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    Chapter 1
    
    The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a
    number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep
    track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very
    muddling things have been happening anyway.
    One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and
    the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing
    travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception
    of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel
    people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were
    powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and
    were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere
    that there wasn't really any point in being there.
    So, by and large, the peoples of the Galaxy tended to languish
    in their own local muddles and the history of the Galaxy itself
    was, for a long time, largely cosmological.
    Which is not to say that people weren't trying. They tried
    sending off fleets of spaceships to do battle or business in
    distant parts, but these usually took thousands of years to get
    anywhere. By the time they eventually arrived, other forms of
    travel had been discovered which made use of hyperspace to
    circumvent the speed of light, so that whatever battles it was
    that the slower-than-light fleets had been sent to fight had already
    been taken care of centuries earlier by the time they actually got
    there .
    This didn't, of course, deter their crews from wanting to fight
    the battles anyway. They were trained, they were ready, they'd
    had a couple of thousand years' sleep, they'd come a long way
    to do a tough job and by Zarquon they were going to do it.
    This was when the first major muddles of Galactic history set
    in, with battles continually re-erupting centuries after the issues
    they had been fought over had supposedly been settled. However,
    these muddles were as nothing to the ones which historians had
    to try and unravel once time-travel was discovered and battles
    started pre-erupting hundreds of years before the issues even
    arose. When the Infinite Improbability Drive arrived and whole
    planets started turning unexpectedly into banana fruitcake, the
    great history faculty of the University of MaxiMegalon finally
    gave up, closed itself down and surrendered its buildings to the
    rapidly growing joint faculty of Divinity and Water Polo, which
    had been after them for years.
    Which is all very well, of course, but it almost certainly
    means that no one will ever know for sure where, for instance,
    the Grebulons came from, or exactly what it was they wanted.
    And this is a pity, because if anybody had known anything about
    them, it is just possible that a most terrible catastrophe would
    have been averted - or at least would have had to find a different
    way to happen.
    
    Click, hum.
    The huge grey Grebulon reconnaissance ship moved silently
    through the black void. It was travelling at fabulous, breath-
    taking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background
    of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one
    dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night.
    On board the ship, everything was as it had been for millennia,
    deeply dark and Silent.
    Click, hum.
    At least, almost everything.
    Click, click, hum.
    Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
    Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
    Hmmm.
    A low level supervising program woke up a slightly higher
    level supervising program deep in the ship's semi-somnolent
    cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went click all it
    got was a hum.
    The higher level supervising program asked it what it was
    supposed to get, and the low level supervising program said
    that it couldn't remember exactly, but thought it was probably
    more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know
    what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was
    getting.
    The higher level supervising program considered this and
    didn't like it. It asked the low level supervising program what
    exactly it was supervising and the low level supervising program
    said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something
    that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which
    usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error
    look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted
    the higher level supervising program to the problem .
    The higher level supervising program went to consult one of
    its own look-up tables to find out what the low level supervising
    program was meant to be supervising.
    It couldn't find the look-up table .
    Odd.
    It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried
    to look up the error message in its error message look-up table
    and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds
    to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its
    sector function supervisor.
    The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It
    called its supervising agent which hit problems too. Within a few
    millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some
    for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the
    ship. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none
    of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level,
    vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to
    do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing,
    were also missing.
    Small modules of software - agents - surged through the
    logical pathways, grouping, consulting, re-grouping. They quickly
    established that the ship's memory, all the way back to its central
    mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could
    determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mis-
    sion module itself seemed to be damaged.
    This made the whole problem very simple to deal with.
    Replace the central mission module. There was another one,
    a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be
    physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no
    link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the
    central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the
    reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all
    would be well.
    Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission
    module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it,
    to the ship's logic chamber for installation.
    This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and
    protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authen-
    ticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that
    all procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central
    mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the
    storage chamber, fell out of the ship and went spinning off into
    the void.
    This provided the first major clue as to what it was that
    was wrong.
    Further investigation quickly established what it was that had
    happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The
    ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had
    neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment
    which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a
    meteorite.
    
    The first thing to do was to try to seal up the hole. This turned
    out to be impossible, because the ship's sensors couldn't see that
    there was a hole, and the supervisors which should have said that
    the sensors weren't working properly weren't working properly
    and kept saying that the sensors were fine. The ship could only
    deduce the existence of the hole from the fact that the robots
    had clearly fallen out of it, taking its spare brain, which would
    have enabl

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