Moving Mars

by Greg Bear

  The displays flicked back on. My arms seemed cold, my legs hot, but I did not feel ill. My companions blinked, opened their eyes as if from a brief nap.

  Charles moaned slightly, then apologized under his breath. "I'll be with you in a minute," he said.

  "Where are we?" Leander asked.

  I saw nothing in all the external views but stars. Mars had vanished. The background darkness, however, was enlivened by thick, interwoven wisps of faint color. Some of the stars seemed fogged, broader and less well-defined than pinpoints. I had never seen a sky like it in my life. Beautiful and terrifying. My blood pounded in my ears, my throat went dry, and I coughed into my fist. For a moment, I felt a rush of claustrophobia. This old tunnel, trapped in a moon tiny as moons go, but huge as rocks go.

  And this old battered black rock had gone very far, incomprehensibly far.

  There were no human beings within ten thousand light-years, ninety-five thousand trillion kilometers. We were surrounded by billions of kilometers of this vacuum-thin star mist and nothing else, could not know where we were, might be lost.

  I forced my fingers to unclench and took several deep breaths.

  Hergesheimer and Cameron worked quietly and quickly, drawing together all of their equipment to process the images and calculate position.

  Hergesheimer swore under his breath. "We need more specifics on family dispersion for this group," he told Cameron, pointing to five stars wreathed in blue haze, and she quickly calculated on her slate, forgoing the computers attached to the equipment.

  "That's group A-twenty-nine, EGO 23-7-6956 through 60," she said.

  "There's the target." Hergesheimer fingered a toggle beneath the display and swung our view, then pointed to a brilliant, tiny, unfogged spot centered in cross-hairs, barely more than a point against the wispy blackness. "We're off by sixty billion kilometers," he said, and then, admiringly, he added, "Not bad for a first approximation." His admiration quickly turned somber. "But this isn't horseshoes. We're outside the orbit of the farthest planet by fifty-four billion kilometers." He examined his equipment, nodded with an intense frown, and said, "Gentlefolks, if it matters after what we've just done . . . There are seven planets in our target system, three immense gas giants, very young, two to five times bigger than Jupiter, four small rocky worlds close to the star, and in between, lots of empty space situated just right for a comfortable orbit, with nothing to avoid but a diffuse asteroid belt.

  "But that won't mean anything if we don't make a slight correction." Hergesheimer looked at me, swallowed hard, and nodded, as if acknowledging this was all worth being slightly uncool over.

  "Charles?" Leander said.

  "QL's getting the corrections and translating now," Charles said. "We'll move again in five minutes."

  Deep within Phobos, something shifted with a grinding bass groan that sounded alive and monstrous. The station's insulated walls vibrated. All of us except Charles looked at each other uneasily.

  "We've heard that before, not as loud," Leander said. "We've jerked this moon around a lot recently. Different tidal stresses."

  "And more to come," Cameron said.

  "There shouldn't be any problems," Leander assured us. "The stresses are minor. But the noise is impressive ..."

  Cameron pushed up beside me. "There's a rec room with direct view," she said. "The miners must have added it before the last map update. I sent an arbeiter to dust it and see if the outside armor would open. Dr. Hergesheimer doesn't need more help until after we arrive — everything's automatic now. I'd like to experience the move ... I'd like company, too. Do they need you right here, right now?"

  Charles seemed oblivious, but I did not want to leave him. "Go ahead," I said. "I'll stay here." Cameron gave me an eager, anxious look, backed away, spun around with the expert grace of a Belter, and took a tunnel leading to the surface.

  Hergesheimer said, "She's young. I don't even look through optical telescopes any more; it's not worth the effort. The eyes see nothing."

  "I wouldn't mind seeing direct," Leander said. "We'll all take a peek when we finish moving."

  I still struggled to absorb the enormity of the region of space around us, the hundreds of thousands of stars, clouds of gas and dust.

  Distance not important. Distance does not exist except as values within descriptors.

  "Are you all right?" Leander asked me, and I shook my head. My cheeks were wet; spherical glittering tears drifted slowly toward my feet in the weak pull of Phobos.

  "Sad?" Charles asked, turning toward me. His face seemed extraordinarily peaceful, unnaturally relaxed and unconcerned. I realized Leander's question had pulled him away from his concentration.

  "No," I said. "A sense of scale. Lost. I just don't know what will awe me any more."

  Charles turned away, eyes languid. "Making a mistake will awe every one of us," he said quietly. "Destiny tweak."

  That phrase again, so often denied. I faced Leander and poked a finger not gently into his chest. In a whisper, I said, "I've heard that before. You said it was nothing."

  "Charles said it was nothing," Leander said, shrugging. "He mumbles odd things when he's down there with the QL."

  "Do you know what he means?" I asked.

  Leander shook his head wryly. "I thought I did, once, years ago."

  "Well?"

  "We invoked a destiny tweak to clear up logical contradictions. Also, to explain why we could not travel in time, except as instantaneous travel in space affects our position in time. It seemed very classical and naive, and yet ... It was that simple."

  "What was simple?"

  "With your enhancement, you must understand what the problems are."

  "Travel at speeds that outstrip a photon is logically difficult in a causal universe," I said.

  "Nobody's much cared about a causal universe for over a century," Leander said. "But descriptor theory puts everything back on a different sort of causal basis, albeit cause and effect are ultimately limited to the rules governing descriptor interactions."

  I understood that much: all external phenomena, all of nature, is simply a kind of dependent variable, the results of descriptor function. Now I had lost myself in mathematical abstractions and had to backtrack. "So is mere logical contradiction or not?" I asked.

  "The rules of descriptor function are the only real logic," Leander said. "We don't need the destiny tweak."

  "What was it?"

  "We never found it," Leander said, shaking his head reluctantly. "I don't know why he mentioned it."

  "What was it?" I persisted.

  "A variation on the old many-worlds hypothesis," he said. "We thought that moving a mass instantaneously to a point beyond its immediate information sphere simply recreated the mass in a universe not our own. But we have no evidence for other universes."

  Charles said, "Stephen, I don't feel right about this one. The QL is looking at too many truths."

  Leander frowned. "What can we do, diaries?"

  "Hang on," Charles said, voice thin. His hand reached up. From behind his couch, instinctively, I grasped it. He sighed, squeezed my fingers painfully, and said, "Damn. We're missing something."

  Hergesheimer listened with his forehead creased. "What is he talking about?" he asked.

  "Get Galena in here," Charles said. "Please hurry. Don't let her look outside."

  Hergesheimer started down the tunnel.

  "Can I do something, Charles?" I asked, still holding his hand.

  "The QL has found a bad path," Charles said. "Don't look outside."

  I felt a directionless jerk. With my other hand, I grabbed the back of Charles's couch. Leander became indistinct, wrapped in shadow; he seemed to turn a corner. His mouth moved but he did not speak, or I could not hear him. A whining sound came from behind me, then enveloped me like a cloud of gnats in a nursery full of hungry babies. Bump, bump, bump, I seemed to keep running into myself, yet I did not move, there was only one of me. Collapsing forms around Leander gave m
e a clue to what I felt: he appeared to be wrapped in deflating balloon images, each slapping itself down around him, making him jerk and shiver: the momentum of colliding world-lines. The cabin filled with collapsing images of the past, but of course that made no sense at all.

  I turned my eyes to the displays and saw ghosts of images unsuited to electronics and optics, images that could not be reassembled correctly from their initial encoding. The math was failing. The physics of our instrumentality had become inadequate. We could not see, could not process the information, could not re-imagine reality.

  The feeble whining increased in pitch. Still slapped by my colliding past selves, I sensed a direction for the sound and turned to face it, the star-shaped chamber all corners and wrong sight-lines, angles senseless. I recognized a shape, saw Hergesheimer's face gone cubist and fly's eye multiple, and the face became Galena Cameron's, and I was able to put together an hypothesis that Hergesheimer was holding Galena and she was making the whining sound, eyes closed, hands floating around her face like pets demanding attention.

  Hergesheimer's lips formed shapes: I did not look.

  And then, Outside.

  And, She did.

  Leander had moved and I could not locate him in the diverging angles. I still held Charles's hand. The fingers wrapped in mine became external. Charles held an inverse of my hand. It didn't matter.

  The whole popped. The final slap was horrendous, soul-jarring. My bones and muscles felt as if they had been powdered and reconstituted.

  Drops of blood floated in the air. I took a deep breath and choked on them. Something had scored my skin in long, thin, shallow razor passes. My clothing had been sliced as well, and the interior surfaces of the chamber seemed to have been lightly grooved, as if a sharp-tipped flail had thrashed through the cabin. Leander moaned and held his hands to his face. They came away bloody. Hergesheimer hugged Cameron to his breast. She lay in his arms unresisting and unmoving. All slashed, all bloody.

  Charles let go of my hand. Where we had held hands, there were no cuts. The back of my hand might have been a picture of cat practice, except where his fingers had covered.

  The interior of the chamber felt deadly cold. The displays and electronics still did not function. Then, they returned, and outside, we saw stars, and the brightness of a much closer sun.

  For a moment, nobody said anything.

  "We need medical attention," Leander said, holding out his hands and inspecting his bloody clothing. We had brought a fresh medical kit in the shuttle. I went to fetch it. It seemed imperative that I take charge and become nursemaid.

  Otherwise, I thought, I might end up just like Galena, limp as a doll, eyes shut tight, lips drawn in endless riddle.

  Leander had plunged deep in conversation with Charles when I returned. I applied medicinal nano directly from a vial with a sterile sponge. Everyone stripped down to receive my ministrations. Hergesheimer undressed Galena, who did not resist. We wiped each other, the touch itself reassuring, healing, an orgy of medicinal tenderness.

  I applied swift strokes of sponge to Charles's arms and face. He closed his eyes, enjoying my attentions.

  Hergesheimer suspended Galena in a sling net She drifted slowly down and settled. "Where are we?" he asked.

  "Where we want to be," Charles said.

  "What the hell went wrong?" Hergesheimer asked.

  "The QL took us through a bad path," Charles said. "It couldn't disengage from some compelling truths. I'm sorry. That must not be any explanation at all."

  "We passed through a different universe?" Leander asked.

  "I don't think so," Charles said. "Something to do with changing our geometry, altering boson world-lines. Photons acquired slight mass."

  Leander said, "Is this something we can understand?"

  "Maybe not," Charles said.

  "Are we damaged? I mean, permanently," Leander said. He knew the questions to ask Charles, our oracular connection to the QL. I kept my mouth shut and listened. Galena seemed to be asleep. Hergesheimer hung in one apex of the star-shaped chamber, half-visible from where I stood, feet pressing with a pebble's lightness against the floor. The astronomer's eyes seemed listless, half-dead.

  "Photons cut through matter, but not deeply. Only some photons acquired mass. Not complete." Charles looked at me directly, then at Leander. "QL doesn't understand. I don't understand. I don't think we should waste time trying now. It won't happen again."

  "How do you know?" Leander asked, bringing himself closer to Charles, staring at him intently.

  "Because the QL got scared," Charles said. "It won't examine those truths again."

  We mopped up the droplets of blood as best we could and made new clothes while Hergesheimer worked alone with his instruments. In the tunnel to the shuttle pad, I stopped Leander to ask, "Do you know what might be wrong with Galena? She's still asleep."

  "I'm not sure," he said.

  "Will she recover?"

  "I hope so."

  "Can we do what we need to do?"

  "Ask Hergesheimer," Leander said testily. "I'm worried about getting us back. Charles is exhausted. We're all strung out. It's been four hours already." He tried to break loose from my hand, but my fingers clamped down like talons. He grimaced.

  "It's all over, isn't it?" I said. "We can't move Mars."

  He swallowed and shook his head, unwilling to face the obvious. "Charles says it won't happen again."

  "The risk, Stephen."

  "It's horrendous," he admitted, looking away. "Horrendous."

  "Did you expect anything like this?"

  "Of course not."

  Hergesheimer dragged himself through the tunnel hand over hand. "Not that it matters much," he said, "but this goddamned system is ideal. It's everything we thought it might be. The planets are rich with minerals, one is Earth-sized and has a reducing atmosphere but no detectable life . . . Ripe for terraforming. Two prime gas giants. Lovely young asteroids. The star is a long-term variable like the sun. No sign of intelligent life — no radio chatter. It's beautiful."

  He showed me pictures and graphs and strings of numbers on his slate. Sludge-brown Earth-sized planet, very unappetizing; huge blue-green gas giants banded with orange and yellow, rich with hydrogen and deuterium; he had made estimates for the total mass of free minerals and carbonifers and volatiles available in the belt. Rich indeed. He switched the slate off abruptly. "To hell with it."

  "You've finished?" I asked.

  "No, but the essential work is automatic and should be done in a few minutes."

  "Margin for error?" I asked.

  "Certainty on broad descriptive grounds. All we could expect," Hergesheimer said. "Does it matter, Casseia? Are we ever going to return?"

  I shook my head. "Do it right anyway."

  "Galena's awake," Hergesheimer said. "She doesn't behave."

  "Beg pardon?"

  He waggled his fingers in front of his face, stared at me with eyes bulging, accusing, and said, "There is no behavior. She's blank."

  "Did you see what happened to her?" Stephen asked.

  "She was in the observation blister. She'd pulled back the armor and she was looking outside. I caught a glimpse and turned away. It felt like knives."

  "That doesn't make any sense," Leander said.

  "You look at her, then," Hergesheimer said angrily. "Talk to her. You pull her out."

  When I returned to the control chamber, Charles had unstrapped from his couch and exercised slowly, pressing feet against one wall, hands against an adjacent wall. The optic cables to his head had been disconnected. He turned to me as I came in and said, "It truly won't happen again."

  "Galena's in bad shape," I said. "What can we do for her?"

  "Bad information," he said, pressing until he grunted. "Bad paths." He floated free and fell slowly to the deck, landing on flexed knees. "She took in outside information without prior processing. We saw it through viewers that can't convey the fullness. She'll have to sort it out."
>
  "How could what she sees hurt her?" I asked.

  "We assume certain things are true," he said. "When we have visual proof they are not true, we become upset."

  "Hergesheimer says she's totally unresponsive."

  "She'll just have to find her way back."

  "I still don't understand."

  "I have the interpreter modeling a human response to the QL's recreation of what was outside. Maybe that will tell us more. If we had stayed in that condition more than a few seconds, we would all have ceased to exist."

  "We can't move Mars," I said. "I won't take the responsibility."

  "It won't happen again. The QL was badly upset. It won't look at those truths again."

  My frustration and anger peaked. "I will not send my people into a place like that! I don't know what you're talking about, 'truths' and that shit. The QL is too damned unreliable. What if it decides to do something even more dangerous and incomprehensible? Was it experimenting on us?"

  "No," Charles said. "It found something it hadn't noticed before. It was a major breakthrough. What it found answers a lot of questions."

  "Shooting us off into an alternate universe — "

  "There are no alternate universes," Charles said. "We were in our own universe, with the rules changed."

  "What does that mean?" My breath came in hitches and my hands opened and closed reflexively. I hid my hands behind me, clamping my jaw until my teeth ached.

  "The QL discovered a new category of descriptors and tweaked one. This category seems to corespond directly with every other descriptor on the largest scale. Wholeness. The destiny tweak. We changed the way the universe understands itself. Builds itself."

  "That's stupid," I said.

  "I don't understand it yet, myself," Charles said. "But I don't deny it."

  "What happened to the old universe?" I demanded.

  "The new universe couldn't conduct any business. It didn't fit together. Rules contradicted and produced nonsense nature. Everything reverted to the prior rules. We came back."