NH4: ammonium hydroxide; this chemical gets Guardians drunk; see nebulizer
Officer’s Arms: a military neighborhood in the Shiro; location of the Academy; made up of boxy, pre-fab units
Old Fifty-Five: the single-malt scotch of nebulizer content
perfluorodecalin: Guardian blood, milky-white in color
petty officer’s round: cyclic promotions for non-com rates
positor: Guardian penis, corkscrew shaped
quantum computer: part of a bicameral computer system on Sporata vessels, the quantum computer is referred to as Lamella; see biomatrix computer
receptor: political operations officer
scleral muscle zoom: natural zoom lens in the Guardian eye
semanato: see time terminology
Shiro, the: an enormous habitat that serves as the Administration’s governing hub; its current location is in a distant orbit around Pollux b, 33.7 light-years from Sol and outward from the galactic center.
shriving: a combination mental “struggle session” and physical pain session delivered with various instruments as punishment
Sirius armada: Sporata fleet stationed in area of Sol. The invasion fleet.
SMELLS:
Bergamot
conveys sadness, regret
Fruity perfume
overpowering, mind-voice of Governess
Sulfide
conveys victory over high odds and long distance
Phenol blast
“Thrive the Administration”
Bile rising in nostril
conveys anger, rancor felt
Citrus
voice of Lamella
Musk and oranges
Ricimer’s name
Lemon
chuckle
Carbolic acid
wail of pain and/or fear and/or dying cry
Souk, the: Shiro black market
Sporata, the: the space navy of the Guardians
Sporata Academy, the: space navy academy in the Shiro
SPORATA POSITIONS:
Sporata enlisted
rates
Sporata officers
officers, ranks
Sailor
any Sporata member
Academy student
Plebe
SPORATA UNIFORMS/INSIGNIA:
Silver scabbard
captain’s knife, always worn
Titanium wreath
captain’s circlet, always worn
Silver-corded belt
captain rank
Doubled silver-corded belt
receptor
Sleeveless black tunic, silver-rimmed
Sporata officer
Black tunic
Sporata rate
storekeep: quartermaster
tagato: see time terminology
thinking aft: officers not allowing the ship computer to read their thoughts
TIME TERMINOLOGY:
UNIT
GUARDIAN EQUIVALENT
APPROXIMATE HUMAN EQUIVALENT
vitia
1/3 second
momentia
125 vitias
2/3 minutes
atentia
125 momentias
1.5 hours
tagato
25 atentias
1.5 days (36 hours)
semanato
5 tagatos
1 week (7.6 days)
variado
5 semanatos
1 month (38 days)
molt
5 variados
6 months (190 days)
cycle
5 molts
2.6 years (950 days)
cinc
5 cycles
13 years
cinqueta
5 cincs
65 years
50 cincs
650 years
V-CENT: vessel central processing: the computer center on a Guardian vessel
variado: see time terminology
vitia: see time terminology
ASTRONOMICAL NOTES
Extry and Sporata vessels can travel at a top speed of 900 times the speed of light. This is 2.5 light-years per day.
Fomalhaut Limit = supposed 25-light-year territorial boundary sphere around Sol.
The Shiro’s current location is in a distant orbit around Pollux b, 33.7 light-years from Sol and outward from the galactic center.
Chief Seattle–Powers of Heaven encounter is near the 82 Eridani system, approximately 20 light-years from Sol and at about the same distance as Sol from galactic center.
The Eridani gate of the Vara Nebula is invented, as is the existence of the Vara Nebula itself. It is supposed to be approximately two light-years from Sol.
AFTERWORD
First and foremost: this book is meant entirely for entertainment purposes! I wrote it to get a whispered “cool” out of you, and to avoid your scratching your head and muttering “huh?” At least, not too often. That being said, here are a couple of reflections on the ideas and science behind the science fiction storytelling.
FTL
Welcome to the dawn of the Quantum Age. Dear reader, it has already begun. The coolest extrapolated science I’ve come across in the past few years is the idea of magnifying the quantum properties of matter to create macroscopic, Einstein-Newtonian, normal-scale effects. This stuff is not merely the dream of a mad scientist in some future possible world. No, it’s being done today.
Split-mirror experiments building on the Aspect experiment and others of the 1990s have not only demonstrated quantum teleportation, they are being duplicated and expanded upon constantly. We can make quantum weirdness happen right before our eyes.
There’s more. Superconducting quantum-interference devices have long been used to measure vanishingly weak magnetic fields. But the most interesting application for SQUIDS may await. A SQUID is a superconductor made into a ring about half a centimeter across (big enough to see; big enough to handle) with a constriction narrowing down in the loop to about one ten millionth square centimeter. The constriction acts as a Josephson junction, an area where various quantum effects are produced.
What’s so great about that? This: the SQUID acts as a kind of magnifier, a bullhorn (or organ pipe, if you like) that transmits the quantum effects occurring at the junction to the whole structure.
In other words, a SQUID behaves as a single subatomic particle. All quantum mechanics, all the time.
What happens at the subatomic level that might be interesting to us up here in the world of Big Matter? For one thing, particles teleport from place to place instantaneously. They make quantum leaps. One of the more interesting of quantum leaps is the leap of a photon across the Planck distance, the so-called quantum foam, of space-time. If this instantaneous leap could be magnified, transmitted to entire conglomerations of matter . . .
To a spaceship, say . . .
You’re talking faster-than-light travel.
Actually, you’re talking instantaneous travel.
And how might this magnification be accomplished? Well, that’s what SQUIDs do now. If SQUIDs could be refined, perhaps networked . . .
A SQUID of SQUIDs?
Might we not be able to make instantaneous leaps over distances far greater than the smallest distance possible, the Planck length? Miles. Astronomical units. Light-years.
Anyway, that’s the idea behind the FTL in Guardian of Night. Possible? We may find out sooner rather than later.
And speaking of which: The craft suture movements and quantum-wake effects? Let’s just say my goal was to stay plausible—which is all a poor science fiction writer can ever really hope for when exploring the outer reaches of a particular idea. If one is going to tell stories of space naval maneuvers involving quantum effects, one should be allowed a few wild-ass guesses!
COMMUNICATION
The beta, the communication system used by the Guardians (and adopted by humans), is also the extrapolated product o
f a quantum effect. Quantum teleportation of coded and meaningful information has not been accomplished yet, so far as we know. Some have declared it theoretically impossible. Quantum teleportation of known information has. If you create a pair of electrons or photons in the same subatomic process, their quantum states—their electrical spin properties, their quarky color properties, etc.—become causally entangled. If you do an experiment to determine what the spin of one particle might be, you immediately make its entangled twin take on the opposite spin. It’s as if neither particle has decided which way to swing until one of them is hit on in the Rick’s Café Americain of physics. At that point, the particle, merely from being observed, will resolve into one or the other spin state. You can’t be an electromagnetically bi electron in this observable universe. And that particle’s entangled twin, even if the twin is across the room or even across the galaxy, will also resolve into a determined value—and that resolution will occur not at the speed of light, not faster than light, but instantly. How could it be otherwise? Nonlocality is fundamental to quantum mechanics.
If this resolution of entanglement could be used to convey information, you’d have yourself an instantaneous radio system.
What I do herein is to posit that such instantaneous communication has been achieved, but over a limited distance due to the fact that particles are damn hard to retain unentangled—and finding which particle might be entangled with another a few parsecs distance away might be a bit difficult to accomplish.
LANGUAGE
What about the sceeve language? Well, this is very much an invention. My science fiction influence in the matter, however, is rock solid. Back in the 1980s I discovered, somewhat to my own chagrin, that I wasn’t going to be a brain surgeon or rocket engineer, but that, due to the roll of the dice that resulted in my peculiar brain structure, the writing life was for me whether I wanted it or not. At about that time, I came across an amazing novella by Greg Bear. It was called “Hardfought,” and it changed my world, so far as storytelling was concerned.
In “Hardfought,” humanity is fighting aliens so completely, well, alien that we essentially cannot experience reality in the same manner as they do. We (that is, us real live humans today) live in the third generation of star production in our universe. Population III stars, the first stars in the universe, were hydrogen monsters. They are the stars that began baking the heavier elements in their ovenlike hearts. The universe suddenly had the lighter gases. From the exploded nebula formed by these stars were born Population II stars.
These stars made metal.
And heavier elements still.
And so the universal epoch of metalicity dawned—or, as you might like to call that epoch, the Age of Heavy Metal. From the deaths of Population II stars emerged Population I stars such as the Sun, and rocky, element-rich planets such as our own.
Greg Bear’s genius was to extrapolate on the sort of life that might have evolved under the light of a Population II star. And thus were born the Senexi of “Hardfought.”
Very creepy and cool aliens, indeed.
So brilliant was the entire concept, and Bear’s execution of it, that I decided then and there that to become a science fiction writer might be the coolest damn thing I could possibly do as a writer. To attempt to approximate the greatness of a story like “Hardfought” myself would be incredibly fun.
And, over the years, trying to do so has been exactly that.
So thank you, Greg Bear.
But back to the Senexi. Bear’s aliens communicated by chemical transfer—by, essentially, smell. Life on Earth does the same, of course. In fact, chemical communication is far more common than visual signal or audible yack in nature. Why wouldn’t a sentient alien species, particularly one that evolved in airless space, also make use of it? Seems like a no-brainer to me.
But how to describe such communication? How to make it plausible? There’s the rub. And the fun part. You can judge whether or not I succeeded, but I can tell you for sure I had a blast attempting to work out the implications.
TECHNOLOGY
Technology progresses because people want it to progress. In my opinion, there is no such thing as “culture”—at least in the sense of some supra-human thoughtweb that transcends the individual. Like DNA in cells, culture comes in one size and one size only: the human being.
This is why freedom is essential for survival and why totalitarian societies are ultimately doomed. It isn’t really a moral question—or, at least, it isn’t only a moral question—at all. Freedom is logically necessary for sentience to develop and to prosper. It is, as certain old dead dudes once put it, a self-evident conclusion concerning life.
Technology is the knife edge of culture. When we are hard-pressed as a species, it progresses more quickly. Nothing presses us so hard as war.
So, do I think it unlikely that we will see such advances as depicted in the book in a relative blink of the galactic eye?
No way. It’ll be even weirder. I think I’ve erred on the conservative side as far as the extent of change to come is concerned. Whether I’ve guessed the right direction is another matter entirely, however. Therein lies the danger and fun of writing science fiction.
Anyway, I’ve never bought the “humanity disappears into its own navel” idea that we are destined (or doomed) for a virtual existence in a virtual world. On the contrary, virtual reality as we currently experience it is real reality that augments our current senses, experiences, and thinking processes. Will a futuristic virtual reality alter us? Absolutely. Will it make us somehow less than human? Hardly likely.
The chroma and salt in the book are my idea for such a virtual reality. Life is not an app. We are always going to remain in this beautiful, dangerous material universe. But, like the weather guy on the evening news, our virtual overlays will give us current readings and, more importantly, the extended forecast.
Why not take the analogy literally and extend our senses with the special effects of the television weather forcaster or the filmmaker? If you could make a portion of observed reality as it falls on your corneas (say, a less used bandwidth of light) into something like the green screen the weatherman is physically standing in front of in his studio, you might then be able to filter in (using those same excluded wavelengths) helpful new material before those images landed on your retina. Now apply the same principle to your other senses. . . .
That’s the idea behind the chroma. Not particularly mind-shattering as a concept. The fun part was positing it in mid-development. Like the original television with antennas you sometimes had to bend into heiroglyphics in order to get good reception, it seemed like it would be fun to extrapolate an idea of true virtual reality, but VR in a clunky, earlier stage of development where all the kinks haven’t been worked out.
And those are some of the ideas that animated me while writing Guardian of Night. I hope you liked the book.
—Tony Daniel
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Lucas Johnson, Lauren Dixon, Sean Sutherlin, Olivia White, Matthew Bynum, Abigail Manuel, David Afsharirad, John Gonzales, Justin Boyd and V.J. Boyd make up Junto, my writing group (we’re named after Ben Franklin’s group and you say it with a j and not an h sound). They put hours into reading the book in draft and gave me notes, notes, notes. My best friend Michael Taylor, scriptwriter of many a Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica episode, has pitched ideas back and forth with me for years and was a great help. Finally, my wife Rika read the book aloud and gave me suggestions—and my kids, Cokie and Hans, kept getting hungry again with each sunrise and drove dad onward to THE END.
Table of Contents
PROLOG
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOU
RTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
GUARDIAN GLOSSARY
AFTERWORD