Author's note:
My usual apologies for tardiness in completing these chapters. Thanks to everyone who commented and voted. There are three chapters to go. Please bear with me.
Some of the things about the outworld settlements and hyperspace engineering learned in chapter 12 are relevant here.
I hope you enjoy the chapter.
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1New Exeter
In the twenty-fifth century, long-range communications through hyperspace were conducted by comms probes: cylinders packed with electronics, incorporating a parabolic transmitter at one end (called a 'burster') and shallow receiver dishes at the other end (known colloquially as 'sniffers').
On every hyperspace route, amid the passenger, freight and military traffic, innumerable comms probes tagged along for the ride, bouncing out of hyperspace to transmit their stored messages in high-frequency bursts, briefly sniffing out waiting messages, then bouncing back through the beacon into hyperspace, as if they were on elastic leashes.
Nearby the beacons were huge transmitting stations relaying the messages onto other comms probes or decoding them into normal radio waves to be beamed to their recipients on a nearby planet or space-station.
Even with nearly-instantaneous travel through hyperspace, however, there was a necessary delay as the probes talked to each other and the relay stations transmitted the signals.
The delay between Celetaris, where Danielle and her students worked on the Samothea Project, and Earth, where Roger worked on his video film, was about twenty minutes. It was even longer when Roger and his film-crew took trips to outworld planets, conducting interviews to learn how the settlements had fared after independence from Earth.
Because real-time conversation was impossible, Roger insisted that Danielle and he send each other a weekly video to watch at a set time. So every Sunday afternoon, at 6pm Galactic Standard Time, the lovers sat comfortably in their chairs to view each other's messages.
Danielle once tried to explain to her husband that they weren't really viewing the videos at the same time (there being no such thing as simultaneity in Einstein's relativistic universe); but Roger took the ceremony so seriously that she smiled and loved him all the more for his unshakable romanticism.
Her current video featured a guided tour of the University Campus, starting in her spacious apartment, with its simple decor and picture-window overlooking the gardens. From the apartment, she walked in bright sunshine around the recreation centre and shops and across a wide lawn to the Physics Faculty in the Science Tower, a vortex of plasti-glass and plasti-steel, twisting a thousand feet into the clear blue sky of Celetaris. Here her team worked in an open-plan office lined with charts, books and huge computer screens.
Down the corridor from her office was the laboratory. Like physics labs throughout the galaxy, there was more equipment crammed into it than could ever be profitably used. Danielle zoomed in on a 3-D printout of the first design for the motor by HyperStar Japan. It was only a toy - its flaring wave-guide a distinctive feature - but Danielle was proud of it, as a promise of something to come.
The video transformed into a series of cameos from her colleagues. Confronted early in the morning by a cheerful Danielle and her intrusive videophone, Professor Jakovs managed only a brief scowl before pointedly closing his door. Danielle met up with Professor Martlebury and her gentle unassuming husband walking in the rose-garden. They smiled kindly, not quite sure to whom they were sending a message but happy to oblige their bright young colleague.
Rosa and Herman (now officially an item) waved cheerfully to Roger from one of the student apartments and Li Qu Yuan smiled shyly from a desk in the well-stocked library. She added a recording from Jonathan Wright, talking from his laboratory on Earth about his ambitions for the new beacons.
After a tour of the canteen, showing the sumptuous dinners the university provided, the video ended in the gardens again, with their fountains, their box hedges cut in straight lines by fastidious robots and the rows of brightly-coloured bedding plants, beginning to bloom in the warm Celetaris spring.
Roger's video that crossed with Danielle's was different. It began in his usual way, with out-takes by the film-crew - Roger tapping the microphone, asking "Is this thing on?"; Roger walking off camera saying "Are we still filming?"; and, best of all, Roger stepping in a fresh cow-pat on Naseby battlefield - but he interrupted his own blooper reel with excited, unexpected and very welcome news.
"Darling!" he spoke rapidly, standing in his office. "I've got good news. I've persuaded the director that we need to include Celetaris in the program. We're coming to film there in three weeks, on the way home from New Exeter. I'm going to interview your President. We don't need to wait to meet up at Capella. I'm coming to you!"
The rest of the video was a travelogue of places Roger and his film-crew had already visited, ending with leisurely shots of the cows on Naseby field, idly munching grass as the sun set behind them.
Danielle was laughing, even crying a little from pleasure. She sent a joyful message to her husband, saying she'd meet him at the astroport and couldn't wait for him to arrive. Then she cancelled her trip to Capella. She was too agitated to do anything except go outside and walk off her excitement, pacing up and down without purpose on the lawn, neither seeing nor hearing those whom she passed.
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About three weeks later, Roger, his cameraman, sound-recorder and the director landed on New Exeter.
Once temporarily Marazonia, New Exeter was a small cold planet, originally dry and sandy, now with grey-blue oceans and green forests smothered in snow at the poles. On their way to the astroport, they flew over the main city, set beside a large river in the southern temperate zone, its arterial roads like the arms of an octopus, grasping hold of nearby settlements.
A smiling young man from the Mayor's office met the visitors on the landing strip, introducing himself as the Mayor's political aide. Like the astroport workers and customs staff, he wore a thick fur coat with fur gloves and a fur-trimmed hat. He took them to the capital in his ground car.
They drove past farmsteads and small settlements of single-storey houses with large cottage-gardens from the days when trade subsided and the colonists needed to become self-sufficient in food.
Small wildflowers glinted with dew in the weak morning sunlight, lining the way to the city. So did hundreds of political posters; evidence for a recent election.
"Re-elect Mayor Grandley!" the blue posters shouted; and "Turn on the generator: warm our planet!"
In response, buff posters announced: "Save our fur-trade!" and "No new taxes!"
"Who won the election?" Roger asked the young man.
"Mayor Grandley, of course," he said, proudly. "She always wins."
