Not that she had kept entirely out of the line of fire. Bernie handled most things, but she had to meet with some committees and explain herself, just to get more resources. The vice chancellor for research had given her help, including the armed guard. To get this, with Dad’s teaching she had learned a few moves in the academic meeting game, such as slowing to breathe in the middle of her sentences. This let her rush past her last words and plunge into the next sentence, so that those waiting to pounce did not know where to smoothly interrupt. That was actually fun, in a way, but like going to a sporting event just because you liked to eat hot dogs.
She went into the chairman’s office and Onell asked again about what they were measuring. When she put him off and again brushed away the old bit about serving on committees, Onell settled back and his face closed off, eyelids drooping. His smooth jowls bulged against the restraint of a tony cotton broadcloth shirt, she noted abstractly, setting off nicely against a gray worsted jacket; he was as sleek as a beaver, even when slouched in an executive chair.
He began with a rather airy generalization about how physicists liked those who did the conventional sort of lab work. She wondered what this had to do with her until she saw that, of course, he meant the Cosm. Onell implied that the “controversy” would only count against her in the short run, but unfortunately, the short run was where they were all currently living. All this was a run-up to his news: she had been denied the merit increase that she had applied for last winter.
She had been an assistant professor, II, for two years now and wanted the usual merit increase move up to III. In principle she could be promoted to tenure and become an associate professor by now, but the waiting periods and protocols were time-honored, hardening like arteries as the University of California aged. Not getting the routine merit increase did not bode well for the coming, crucial vault to tenure.
She used her command of language by remaining silent. Certainly among some other faculty this would seem a ripe comeuppance, principally for those for whom the university was mostly like a chat show with more guests. As she walked out of Onell’s office, still without a word, she was surprised to find that not getting a step up the ladder did not even measure on her emotional scale. A year before it would have been rattling. Now it was like reading about a flood in China; bad news, no doubt, but for somebody else.
4
“This is great,” Max said. He had braved the freeway traffic to get down here as soon as he heard. After Onell, she had been okay for a few hours, but then found she needed cheering up.
She wished she could watch his face, but they sat in the utter blackness of the observatory, watching the swirl of color from the Cosm. “A cosmic light show,” he murmured slowly.
“Not a show. The real thing.”
“Yes,” he whispered, “the real thing.”
As if he still did not quite believe it, she thought. And yet she knew what he felt. They had been throwing every diagnostic at a metallic bowling ball, behaving like good scientists, reasoning all around it, but until now there was no direct, firm confirmation that made you feel the presence of a whole other space-time. The grand dance of radiant dust and stars, wheeling in gravitational gavottes, finally did it for her. And him, she could sense.
“I still don’t understand why we can see it,” she said.
“Me either. The neck is stretching, getting thinner.”
“Will we lose it?”
“Well, it’s held this long, through the rough first stages of its expansion.”
“In other words…”
“Right. I haven’t a clue.”
They sat and watched and an odd, warm sensation of intimacy crept into her. Max knew when to say nothing, to be humble before the huge facts of the world; maybe that was essential to being a true scientist. Pleasant, very.
“It’s accelerating,” he said, voice distant in the dark. “Running faster all the time.”
“I wish we could measure time on the other side, get some—”
“Can’t you feel it?” he said suddenly. “I almost think I can see the globular clusters swooping through space.”
She knew what he meant, some gut-level perception she had when the masses of luminous raw gas gave way to spinning crowds of pearly stars, only to be swept away moments later by tides of dark dust that blotted out the furious luminosities of Creation. Speed. The spectacle on the other side moved almost with… “Haste.”
“Yeah, impatience.” He sighed. “To be born.”
“It was born over four months ago.”
In the utter blackness, their eyes never leaving the swirl and rhapsody before them, she could read his mood from tone alone. “I mean life. Struggling to be born.”
She blinked. “Already?” Stellar evolution was one thing, but—
“There’s an old saying in popular astronomy courses,” Max said remotely. “Why was the Earth 4.5 billion years old? Because it took that long to find that out.”
“With everything else changing, the mass and so on, is your first fit to the time shift still good?”
He turned to his laptop and updated the curve with the new measurements Zak had made of the background radiation temperature, the cooling haze of the emission that had killed Brad. He printed out the new curve and added his hand-drawn labels and axes. On this scale the early weeks were squashed into the bottom axis. All that remained was the remorseless steep curve, taking the Cosm time frame into an accelerating future. Brad and the recombination era were far down, where the slope met the axis. QUASARS marked where the bright cores of galaxies burned, then had quickly ebbed away. NOW showed the present, with the Cosm aged about 4.5 billion years. His graph was now a steep exponential in coordinates of lab time versus Cosm time.
“Ummm. A billion years in the Cosm—”
“Took about twenty weeks for us to reach. But now, for the Cosm to add a billion takes just a week or so. The Cosm’s clocks are running away from us.”
“Can we be sure of that?”
To her surprise, he gave a dry laugh. “Of course we can’t. There’s really no other way to calibrate their time rate. Things like galaxy formation are coming in at just about when astronomers think they should, though. Y’see, we don’t have a reliable hold on what kind of cosmological model fits their universe—”
“Their?”
“If it isn’t inhabited yet, it could be within weeks. If”—a finger jab at the Cosm’s swirl—“it’s a universe built like ours.”
She whispered, “How would we know?”
“Impossible. We’ll never know.”
Again to her surprise, she felt relief at this. “We’re getting all this down, Zak and I. Miles of data storage, canisters—”
“You’re doing a great job. Generations of cosmologists and astronomers will pore over every jot of it, spectra and images and Dopplers. So much…”
She could tell he was smiling in the blackness, though she did not know how she knew. A long silence passed between them as the streaming, shimmering violence went on in the face of the sphere.
Then Max’s voice carried a note of analytic distance, as though he too had passed through a stretching moment where words were useless and now wanted to come back to the comforting human world of discourse, of method.
“Look, there’s plenty we don’t even know about our own cosmology. For us to be here at all demands a hell of a lot of fine-tuned coincidences. If there had not been a one part in a billion inequality between matter and antimatter, all coming somehow out of the Big Bang, then there would be nothing but light buzzing around. And if nuclei weren’t much massier than the electrons weaving about them to make atoms, then there’d be no stable structures. Sploosh! Same result if the electron charge didn’t exactly balance the proton charge. And that’s all atomic stuff! Add to that: if the expansion of the universe wasn’t nearly exactly equal to the gravitational attraction of the matter that happened to be in it, so that even though the whole universe expands, local gravity stil
l manages to hold things together—”
She had to laugh. “You’re getting carried away.”
A rueful chuckle in the dark answered her. “Yeah, well, the arguments go on, right down to prosaic points such as ice floating in water, so that unlike every other common fluid, it makes a protective skin of ice. Beneath winter ice in lakes, life can ride out a cold season. Even that might be basic to making any life survive in even this universe.”
“I see…” Let him talk it out.
“Fine-tuning, everywhere you look! For weeks I’ve been trying to find ways of telling what sort of thing the Cosm is, and I keep coming back to the basic facts that we don’t even know what makes our universe work so well.”
He was agitated over an entirely abstract point, which meant, she judged, that he had been putting in a lot of time and getting nowhere. She patted his arm, still keeping her eyes on the endlessly moving radiance of the sphere. “Well, then, a universe that didn’t satisfy these ifs could exist, but with nobody with a brain to witness it.”
“Which makes a cosmologist wonder why ours seems so well designed. Some great designer at work? Cosmologists talk about God a lot, but we can’t invoke Him to solve our problems. I’ve tried to figure out some general way of attacking this…” His voice trailed away in quiet frustration.
“So what’s our little Cosm going to do?”
“Hard to say. You can scarcely find out if ice floats in there. Hell, we were lucky to see stars.”
“Lucky how?”
“Well, not really, uh…”
Silence in the blackness.
“There’s something you’re not telling me,” she said.
“I… I figured out why Brad died.”
“The recombination radiation…? Why was it suddenly so strong?”
“Same reason we’re seeing globular clusters, stars, dust. There was plenty of matter near the other end of the Cosm’s neck. It recombined and gave us a burst of radiation. The other end of the Cosm’s neck somehow flared open, too, letting lots more through. It fried Brad.”
“Why?”
“Remember, right about that time in our universe, matter and light were on nearly equal footing. When mass got the upper hand, I think the Cosm’s other end suddenly grew.”
“You’re sure?”
He sighed. “It checks out with the equations, if I assume a universe expanding pretty much the way ours did. There were mass concentrations by that time in our universe, too, with spaces in between. The Cosm’s other end must’ve been swept up in one of them.”
“A galaxy starting to form?”
“Probably. We’ll wait and see.”
“Then if the Cosm had been in one of the voids between concentrations…”
“There wouldn’t have been so much radiation. Brad might’ve lived.”
“And the Cosm would be in an empty, uninteresting place. So that we wouldn’t be seeing stars and clusters nearby now.”
“Right.” His voice was heavy, slow. “The Cosm gives and the Cosm takes away.”
5
She got ready for Dinner with Dad by playing the radio and working on her ensemble. It always paid to dress up for him. And she enjoyed it, had always gotten a warm feeling from the preparations. She had the conversation with Max to think over, too, and let herself spend an hour trying on different combinations of outfits, skirts and blouses piling up on the bed. Like a rummage sale—though, of course, for people with exquisite taste.
She opened a bottle of merlot and wished for a cigarette. One of the better aspects of aging was that she no longer practiced dragging on cigarettes before the mirror, striving to get the right dissipated look, or tried on sunglasses until she found the kind the latest hip singer wore. Had she really worn those mirrorshades? Perfect holdovers from the Me Decade, because they let the viewer watch himself.
What else had she gained with the piling on of years, just as she was now piling up clothes to find the mythical perfect combo? No more looking for the perfect man, homo sensitivus. Good riddance! And after the Clinton years, an indifference to politics. The 1990s had taught some useful lessons, most of them inadvertent. Given a choice between existential despair and rapt religious fervor, her crowd chose marijuana.
All through the years while she had worked on her physics, she had nonetheless cocked an ear for the baying of the social hounds. Her twenties had been a time when women didn’t have affairs, they sported “sexual friendships,” during which they didn’t fall in love but rather built relationships. She had devised a smooth carapace of detachment and beneath it a rickety emotional scaffolding. On odd-numbered days love was a disease looking for a cure, and on even-numbered ones she longed for it.
“Been there, done that,” she summed up matters brightly to herself, then added, “Or maybe, Been done to.”
But now, she reminded herself, she was on a roll. Mistress of Universes! “Fine,” she said aloud, “but why does it make you uneasy, girl?”
She burned off some of her anxiety with a flurry of straightening up, on the way to finding her pearl pin, just perfect for the azure blouse she had picked out. Of course it was not where she remembered putting it.
She spun around the apartment, singing, twirling, finishing off another glass of the merlot; quite good stuff, actually. She thumbed the radio to an AM “soul station” and hummed along to an ancient classic, “Annie Had a Baby,” hips swinging, getting into the Black Thang.
While she picked up her bedroom (Dad would frown if he saw it), the show gave way to a collection of rap crap and she turned it off. Time to meet the Dad…
Which turned into a heavy-duty session, just as she had feared. Dad had flown down and seen Bernie Ross and was full of advice. There were legalities: Brad’s parents’ lawsuit, which named about half of UCI, just to be complete; a suit from Brookhaven, plus a separate but equal suit by the Department of Energy; a nuisance suit by a church of some sort, claiming that the Cosm was a violation of—
“Church and state?” Alicia asked disbelievingly.
“They claim through you the U.S. government usurped God’s laws. Forget that one; it’s crazy.”
“And Bernie can handle the others without my being there?”
“For now. But not forever, girl.” Dad reached out a big hand and laid it on hers.
“I don’t want to lose a second to this… stuff.”
“It’s okay, you can say ‘shit’ in front of me.”
“No shit?” she asked wonderingly.
His crinkly-eyed smile. “You’re all grown up.”
“And getting in big-time trouble proves it?”
“No, keeping your head up and proud does.”
A long moment during which she took refuge in her vodka collins. “Ummm. How much is this costing me?”
“Don’t worry. That’ll come later.”
“I didn’t even pay Bernie a retainer.”
“Okay, so I did. You can’t afford him right now.”
“I’ll never be able to.”
“Once you write your bestseller about this, you’ll sleep in thousand-dollar bills.”
“Bestseller?”
“You’ve been sticking your head so far into the sand, you can’t feel the hurricane blowing your tail feathers around?”
“I have to tune out the noise right now.”
“I know. How much longer will you need?”
She told him about the accelerating pace of the Cosm, of seeing into it, of what might be coming.
“Then the religious people who’re writing all these opinion pieces about the Cosm, the ones I answered for you—”
“Oh yes, thanks a lot for doing that.”
“They’ve got a case.”
“What kind of case?”
He spread his hands, palms out, a familiar gesture to mollify her hard tone. “There are really big issues here. If this Cosm spawns life, intelligence—”
“We’ll never know that. The Cosm neck’s other end is at one isolated point
in a whole universe. If it passes near a livable planet, that’ll be a miracle.”
“Could happen, couldn’t it?”
“No. The Cosm neck’s other end is way out in the middle of nowhere, not even a star closer than a few light-years.”
He frowned. “You’re sure?”
“I’d stake my reputation as a goddess on it.”
She got the laugh she hoped for. Then Dad sobered, hesitating. They were in an Italian joint with so many ceramic surfaces inside, great acoustic reflectors, that sitting at tiny tables outside on Broadway was quieter. Headlight glows skated across the ebony facets of his broad, troubled face. “Thing is, honey, we were never very religious—”
“Not since I was in grade school, actually.”
Baptist fundamentalism had dominated the other wing of the family, the sort of people of whom her father once said, “When a relative buys a new house, you go over to help take the wheels off.” But he had relented, and she had dim memories of going to church in a crisp white dress, sporting a wrist corsage at Easter.
“Not since your mother…” His face went carefully blank and she guessed that he knew that would get them back on the dangerous territory of his remarriage. He took a sip of red wine and began again. “See, I get a feeling for these things, just listening to people in the trade.”
She let herself smirk. “Journalists? For theological insights?”
“Okay, but they do have a sense of how people think. They’re edgy about this Cosm of yours.”
She allowed herself a long pull on her vodka collins; Dad was watching how much she drank, she noted; better take it easy. “Edgy? Yes, I can feel it, too. Even at the university.”
“See, people don’t want some remote God who set the universe going and walked away on other business. They want an interested God. But all you scientists work in the opposite way, toward a downright chilling vision.”
“Ummm. The impersonality in nature’s laws.”
“Honey, religion—Holy Roller or High Church, it doesn’t matter—didn’t just occur to men and women musing about infinitely removed first causes and all that. It came from heartfelt longings, girl. From people who wanted continued intervention by a God who thought we were important.”
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