The Gap into Madness: Chaos and Order by Stephen R. Donaldson Page A

or undermine his impression of Warden Dios as a man who lived
in the world of the real.

 
     
     
    ANCILLARY
    DOCUMENTATION
     
    GAP
TRAVEL
     
    The “Juanita Estevez Mass
Transmission Field Generator,” almost exclusively known as the “gap drive,” was
a revolutionary discovery. It virtually re-created the future of humankind. The
frontiers of human space were immediately and profoundly altered. Access to
desperately needed new resources, combined with the simultaneous wealth and
hazard of commerce with the Amnion, ended a prolonged period of economic
deterioration. Instead of being constricted by poverty and the sun’s gravity
well, the horizons were now limited only by the velocity of human ships, the
power of human gap field generators, and the scope of human imaginations. In a
sense, the entire galaxy of the Milky Way now lay within reach.
    However,
some of the gap drive’s effects were more subtle. For example, it produced an
insidious distortion in the perception of real space. The ability to travel
imponderable distances almost instantly created the pervasive illusion that
those distances were indeed effectively small. The entire galaxy of the
Milky Way now lay within reach. The implications of such a statement were
at once mind-numbing and misleading. In the erode spiral of the Milky Way,
Earth’s approximate distance from galactic centre was 26.1x10 16 kilometres: 2,610,000,000,000,000,000k. A ship travelling at a velocity of . 5C
would take roughly fifty-five thousand years to reach galactic centre. At the
speed of light, the trip would still take 27,500 years. Taken at an arbitrary
average, human ships could cross ten light-years with every gap crossing. Even
at that rate, 2,750 crossings would be required to cover the distance.
    Being
what they were, however, human beings found 2,750 a conceivable number.
Therefore the space between Earth and the centre of the Milky Way became
conceivable.
    The
fallacy in all this was so subtle that most people failed to notice it.
    In real
time, effective time, the light-years crossed by the gap drive didn’t exist. A
ship with a gap drive didn’t travel those light-years: it bypassed them through
dimensional translocation. But when the crossing was done, the ship returned to
normal space — and normal space was so vast that its scale was not truly
conceivable.
    Most
people thought, So what? The gap drive did exist. The only real time involved
in travel was taken up by acceleration to attain the necessary velocity and
then by deceleration at the other end. Amnion space was just a few days away at
the best of times.
    True:
Amnion space was just a few days away in a gap ship. And communication was
equally fast: messages conveyed by ship could arrive centuries or millennia
ahead of any speed-of-light transmission. But neither space nor time had
meaning in the strange physics of the dimensional gap. Ships didn’t encounter
each other there: they didn’t communicate or exchange shipments; they didn’t do
battle or give chase. Every action of any kind, human or Amnion, took place in
normal space, at space-; normal speeds. And at space-normal speeds even the
nearest stars were pragmatically out of reach.
    In
other words, the discovery of the Juanita Estevez Mass Transmission Field
Generator had a transforming effect on humankind’s relationship with vast
distances — and no effect at all on humankind’s place in normal space.
    The
dilemma of piracy was a case in point.
    Why was
piracy such a virulent problem? How had it attained such power in human space?
Ships could cross the gap in a matter of instants. If a pirate raided, say,
Terminus, the information could be transmitted to Earth by gap courier drone,
and within hours UMCPHQ could send out a cruiser to support the station. How
could any illegal flourish under these conditions?
    Quite
simply, piracy flourished because it took place in normal space. Like the UMCP,
illegals often had gap ships. Nevertheless their