first slide’s title was “What Is the Flow?” Marce frowned. “You, uh, already know this part,” he said to Cardenia.
“Yes I do,” she agreed. “Why don’t you skip ahead to the new, complicated part.”
Marce flipped forward through several additional slides covering the very very basics of Flow physics and the astrography of the Flow and the Interdependency; Cardenia made a note to have one of her people ask one of the visual artists in the Imperial Information Office to help Marce pretty it up for general consumption. Marce might be a genius in many respects, but visual design wasn’t his forte.
“Right,” he said, finally, and stopped at a slide that featured a visual representation of a Flow shoal. “This is a Flow shoal as we typically know it. It’s where ships enter or exit the Flow, and it’s static, relative to the most massive object in its system, usually its star. Indeed, in a way you could say the Flow shoal is anchored by gravity—it’s why we find shoals in star systems but almost never outside them.”
Marce tapped his tablet and then another representation of a Flow shoal appeared, this one moving and shrinking, on a loop. “But then about two years ago”—Marce glanced up at Cardenia—“literally just before I got on a ship to come to Hub, in fact—”
Cardenia smiled at this.
“—a fiver that had unexpectedly been dropped out of a decaying Flow stream discovered this: an evanescent Flow shoal that, unlike the Flow shoals we typically see, both moved independently and shrank. In fact, given how small the time frame was in which it existed, it’s fair to say that it evaporated.”
Another slide, filled with equations Cardenia could not hope to follow. “How did this happen? I hypothesize that the decay of the Flow stream precipitated the existence of several localized evanescent streams that connected temporarily to the main stream—like fibers spinning out of an unraveling rope. There’s no gravitational source for them to anchor to, so they don’t last. We’ve never seen this before because usually when a ship unexpectedly falls out of a Flow stream, it’s stranded in deep space and is never heard from again. There’s no data.”
Tap, new slide. “But now that we have that data, and now that, thanks to Hatide Roynold, we understand the concept of and some of the physics behind evanescent streams, I think I have some potentially extraordinary possibilities to consider, with respect to how these evanescent streams will appear in local space.”
Marce stopped. “How is it so far? You following?”
Cardenia held her finger and thumb close together. “About this close to not following.”
Marce nodded and moved to another slide. “Then I’ll make this simple. I think when an evanescent Flow stream appears, its shoal does what our nearly doomed fiver saw the disappearing shoal do—but in reverse. It appears, tiny at first, and then moves and grows until it becomes anchored.”
A pause. “Actually I think all the Flow streams do this when they emerge into normal timespace, but the regular Flow streams have been so stable—well, until recently—that there’s just never been a chance to see it there.”
“Maybe leave that part out when you talk to other people,” Cardenia suggested.
“Got it.” Marce returned to his slides, and advanced another one, with more equations on it. “So, why does this matter at all? Because if the Flow shoals on emerging evanescent streams grow and move, then there may be a way to manipulate and even control that growth and movement—to position the Flow shoals closer to human habitats, and make them large enough to allow major structures to pass through.”
“So, more ships,” Cardenia said.
“No,” Marce said. Another slide appeared, showing a full-sized human habitat, one that could contain hundreds of thousands of people in it. “I’m thinking actual places.”
It took Cardenia a second before it hit her. “You want to put entire human habitats into the Flow?”
“‘Want to’ isn’t the phrase I would use,” Marce said. “But it might be possible. And if it’s possible, then suddenly things get interesting.”
“Interesting?!?” Cardenia exclaimed. Because now she got it. If you could stuff actual entire habitats into the Flow, then the biggest bottleneck issue humanity had—actually moving millions of people out of systems when starships could transport only a fraction of that number—became much less of a problem. You wouldn’t need ships anymore. You could just move people where they lived.
And you could save almost everybody.
“Let’s do this,” Cardenia said.
Marce held up his hands. “Hold on,” he said. “It’s not that