The White-Hole Situation

The True Believer

"But what you really want to know," Gerard hurried on, "is the true story of how mankind finally came to terms with the Reddick Minority and achieved the Great Truce that still holds today, if barely and if somewhat worn around the edges. How did we ever manage to deal with those fiends?"

"We know all about it," Roddy said. September sat shaking her head. What had he said before that? Why had Gerard answered the question instead of her own customized voice?

"You think you know," Gerard said, "but you don't know. You were children, babes at the time."

"No," Roddy said, "I was already 42 and Zeppo's just a year or so younger than me. We were there. We were right there."

"You think you were," Gerard disagreed, "but let's go back, back to the beginning. If you don't know how a thing begins, how can you begin to understand how it ends?"

"By using my brain?" Roddy interjected sarcastically.

"We were a divided people," Gerard continued, ignoring his son. "This planet was chopped into influence zones, remember? The North West, the Far East, The Great South, The Rambling Coalition. By this time the populations were so mixed you'd think there'd be no way to have such boundaries. You couldn't tell one Earth person from another by looking at them, and the language issue had been solved for good. Everyone spoke the same, except for some dialects and slang but you know how that goes, especially you, September."

She nodded. She knew exactly how that goes.

"And yet, still the politics, still the mistrust, still the suspicions of conspiracies. Would we ever get past it? Was there something simply endemic in the human condition? Well, maybe this and maybe that. Sure, there's a natural biological need to bond, to belong, but the definition of the group, that can flex, that can change. You can always expand the in-group to include former outs, and to think we'd got it all down to just four regions, after all. What a great accomplishment considering the history, the hundreds of nations and thousands of tribes, finally distilled down to such a small number, and yet not good enough. There had to be just one, otherwise what was to stop the cultures from diverging uncontrollably, including the languages, the customs, the allegiances, religions and creeds, spinning right back out of control. It seemed inevitable as long as we were all confined to just this one little rock in space. We had to go beyond."

"What do you mean when you say 'we'?" September asked and Gerard paused and gave her a strange look.

"All of us," he replied, not really answering the question. "All of us, together. It was during the great orbit junk cleanup that we realized the big solution. It was right there the whole time, surrounding us, among all that crap that generations had flung up into the atmosphere and beyond, all that useless garbage using ancient tech. We had to get beyond our natural limitations and what better way than to simply go beyond. Just go, out there, wherever it was. Of course, there were natural laws in effect - time, space, distance, the sheer enormity, the scale, but if we could, then oh my, what problem couldn't we solve?"

"And that was fine, that was good. We could do all that. We can invent. We can solve. We can figure it out. We can find a will and a way and a story and a reason. People want to go. They like that stuff. Adventure, exploration, but then what? Some people like to go and look at stuff. They're fine with that. Sightseers, you know. Other people, though, maybe most people, they want to do stuff, not just look. They want to find things, not just notice them. They want encounters, the new, the unexpected. It was all out there, waiting for us to go. So we went, and we saw, and we found, and there were things to do, things to be done, things to be overcome."

"Not least of which," Gerard smiled, "were the enemies. Like us they were, at least a bit, but not too much. They were like the worst of us, the bad without the good parts. Of course they were there. They had to be. If we could go, they could go. If we could exist, they could too. Like a goldfish meeting his reflection in a bowl. The Reddick Minority were the worst of these, or the best, depending on how you look at it. There were some others, like the Begonian Empire, who were simply no match for us. They were under-developed, over-achievers. We could handle them and did with ease, but the Reddick Minority. That was a problem."

"You see, they had the deadly quasar beams and could hide behind the smoky nebulae. They were translucent beings, very tall, and rather attractive with their glowing auras and rainbow-tinged stylings. They had our same genders, because the universe is a fractal repeater, loving its math and its dedicated patterns. They were a foe worth reckoning with. They hated us, and in that simple fact they united us, once and for all. We became a federation, abolishing the regional factions forever. We hated them right back and so the galactic war began. You say you were there, but where? The war was on and off, hit and miss, here and there, for decades. I was on the front lines from the very beginning. I saw them face to face. I met with them. I spoke with them. I even, well, let's just say your mother was not the only, ahem, well, moving on."

"I wish you would move on," Roddy grumbled, poking at the now smoldering logs. September was memorizing every word. There was more here than just a story, she was sure of it. Gerard was trying to tell her something bigger, something deeper, than the grade school history lesson everyone knew by heart. If only I could hear it! she scolded herself.

"How could we ever end it?" Gerard said looking right at her. "Such a necessity. We could never do without it. So the Great Truce, it can't be final, can it? Something has to change, unless ..."

"Unless what?" she asked, feeling as if he were finally on the verge of blurting it out, that thing he'd been trying to say all along. But instead of speaking, the old man began to sing, softly and slowly, while tapping out a rhythm on his thighs with the palms of his hands.

A single note is all you need,

If it's the note you want to hear.

A single message, a simple take,

can take you where they want you.

can you be the true believer,

can you hear the tune.

if you are the true believer,

the end is coming soon.