COSM

by Gregory Benford

She punched him and giggled. “I’m serious. My therapist—”

  He groaned, buried his face between her breasts.

  “Well, she says people don’t ever really change, not fundamentally, so—”

  “So what’s the point of going to a therapist, then?”

  “I think you need to know your emotional posture, where you stand in the world—”

  “Until we know where we stand, let’s stay lying down.”

  “Gee, this seems a lot like the last time I had déjà vu.”

  He laughed. “That’s a teenage joke.”

  “If you were a teenager, we could do it again right now.”

  “If I were a teenager, I’d have been finished an hour ago.”

  He seemed to definitely like the “ampleness” of her, as he put it. Even her “fantastic bottom,” which she duly told him was “pronounced lordosis, like the !Ko tribeswomen”—and felt enormously embarrassed, then suddenly not at all. “I’m awful damned arrogant, aren’t I?” she asked soberly. It was as if she could ask him all the questions now, all the parts of the Big Problem.

  “More like grand.”

  “You’re tense, the antisocial form of being not relaxed. I’m nervous, the social form.”

  “You pay a therapist for this sort of stuff?”

  “My medical covers it,” she said defensively.

  “When you’re dancing, don’t look at the dance.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I’m being yin.”

  2

  They drove into UCI and she had to keep remembering about the driving part. She wanted to look at him and talk and admire the fresh way the world kept looking outside the windows, all at the same time.

  Zak had been working most of the night, improving the time resolution of the optical data-gathering. He was good at it and they were having to store so many gigs of raw images now, Zak was stacking boxes of high-speed digital tape outside the observatory simply for room. Months before they had set up storage in a secure room in the central files office of UCI. The data rate was so high now that she and Zak had to run tape disks over nearly every day.

  Max stayed in her office to do some calculations. He was still being mysterious about his thinking. This had irked Alicia in the last few weeks, but now it was fine, just an oddity of his otherwise generally wonderful self. She did not puzzle at her emotional swerve of these last few hours; she basked in it, heart elated. Understanding, in matters of love, was inevitably the booby prize. Was that what he meant about not looking at the dance? The man was enticing.

  The Cosm was alight and afroth with fire now, the churn of great galaxies visible to the eye. She used high-power binoculars on a secure mount to watch the specks of light. Spirals spun like luminous Frisbees, winging across the blackness.

  They had tracked nearby stars as well. She replayed some of the data tapes with Zak, viewing time-chopped segments on a high-quality screen tucked into a corner of the observatory. Stars blazed as they arced, their immense reservoirs of energy dissipating as quickly as their bulk allowed. A few weeks before they had found a star that spectral lines said was over ten billion years old, nearing the end of its life span. Already it was beginning to burn heavier and heavier elements at its core, growing hotter. Its atmospheric envelope of already incandescent gas heated, swelling as they watched. From a mild-mannered, yellow-white star, it bloated within minutes into a reddened giant.

  “If it has planets,” Zak said, “they’re being swallowed right now.”

  Alicia tried to imagine first Mercury, then Venus, then Earth beneath a glaring red sky, its crust roasting, its oceans and air boiled away by a huge angry sun.

  Then the star whirled away, swept out of view by the rotation of its galaxy. If it had a solar system, then its planets, once a grand stage, would be withered relics beside a guttering campfire.

  During the last week, the Cosm’s point of view at its other end had slowly drifted down into the plane of a giant elliptical galaxy. An astrophysicist’s career could be made with the data on that process alone, as the invisible frictions of dust and magnetic fields nudged matter into the bee-swarm blender of a thousand billion suns. Until now, astronomers had been able to take only snapshots of the stellar dance and from that had to deduce the music of the spheres. Now the Cosm’s time acceleration gave entire concerts as masses swept together and apart, bristling with suns both fresh and dying in furious gulfs.

  Zak loved to examine under high magnification the flaring of supernovae as giant stars blew bubbles in the surrounding dusty mist, returning heavy elements to the mix, where collapsing clouds would harvest such chemical riches to make the next generation of stars.

  Watching these matchheads flare amid sheets of luminous gas, he said, “Until now, doing cosmology was like taking a picture halfway through a fistfight and figuring out who must’ve started it.”

  “And why,” Alicia said.

  Far above the teeming throng of stars and burning nebulae, she and Zak could witness the stabbing lances of jets that poked up and out from the galactic nucleus. These apparently came from a black hole abuilding at the very center of the entire bee-swarm rotation. They saw violet beams jut into the spaces between galaxies and carve paths for later ruby flows of hot plasma.

  Her grandmother had always termed God Providence. There was even a Baptist hymn about that, which she had learned one summer when forced to go to Sunday school. Now Alicia wondered about an entity that spattered the night sky with endless stars, gaudy gaseous nebulae, whole long chains and super clusters of pale galaxies, all silent and glowing without apparent purpose, and thought a better name was Improvidence: extravagant impulse lavishing its abundance in wasteful display.

  Alicia:

  You’re impossible to reach by phone, and I can figure why, but I have to warn you about the attitude of people here. We’re seeing plenty of development in what we can see in our Cosm. I’ll try to compile it and get you a summary, but what the director is insisting on here is *your* data. We need it to guide us.

  Dave

  Dave:

  I’ve just been too busy to organize our work. Your Cosm is still exponentiating in time, right? Our rate is still slower than yours, but we’re further along in the exponential. If our numbers and yours are still right, you should overtake us in a few weeks. But by then ours will be really old.

  As ours speeds up more and more, our data flow rate is taking off, nearly beyond our capabilities, gigabytes per minute. I’ll try to get some to you within a day.

  If only we could do the physics and forget everything else! At least you have a lab staff and admin types to insulate you.

  A

  Alicia:

  Thanks. Yes, the exponential time shift continues. Ours has a different mean growing time, though, close to 1.74 weeks. With yours holding steady at 2 weeks, we’ll catch up to you eventually, I guess.

  What we need right away is certain spectral line measurements; see the attachment document following, specifying lines.

  As for politics, we’re worse off than you. The Lab approach is to keep our work intradisciplinary, not inter-. A short way of saying nobody knows the whole story. They wanted it this way from the start because they can manage the news better that way. Nobody going off half-cocked. You’re their horrible example, you’ll be happy to hear.

  Dave

  Dave:

  I checked your numbers on the carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen lines. I measured these pretty carefully when we first started getting enough light through to make the numbers reliable. I see the same frequencies that anyone can get out of the CRC handbook. In other words, our Cosm is looking at stars with exactly the same atoms in them as our own.

  What I take your data to mean is that you aren’t. Your carbon frequencies are all shifted down, relative to the nitrogen, for example. What gives?

  A

  Alicia:

  That’s what I wanted to hear. Forgive me for being mysterious, but I didn’t belie
ve our own results and wondered if you saw the same. Those carbon lines clinched it. Since all these spectra are all from the same star, the differences can’t be due to some Doppler shift. The carbon atoms really are different!

  How can that be? I was sure we’d made some dumb mistake, but it’s not that. We burned a lot of time rechecking, believe me.

  The shift is only a tenth of a percent, but it’s not an error. We’re checking other elements now, too. The conclusion is clear, though. This universe we’re looking into has different physical constants.

  How can it? This is crazy. Any ideas? What’s that guy I saw talk at your press conference, Max Jalon, say about this?

  Dave

  Dave:

  I haven’t got a clue. Our Cosm seems to have ordinary elements in it; their spectral lines are ok. I’ll look again, but I’ll bet this is still true, even though our Cosm is billions of years older than when I last looked at details like that. Thanks for the warning!

  We can see very rapid cosmological and stellar evolution here now. Has your Cosm gone transparent yet? It’s quite a show. Be prepared. If it does, you’ll be scrambling like we did. I’ll attach a list of the diagnostics you’ll need.

  A

  Alicia:

  Thanks for the suggestions. We’ll follow them right away. The exponential rate is holding and our going transparent might come pretty soon. That’s assuming our Cosm (might as well use your term, though everybody here frowns if you do; hell, I’ll even capitalize it, like you) is keeping to the exponential shift scaling. We check that against the cosmic microwave background, and it seems to hold.

  There’s something more, too. Your people at UCI are going to get a formal request, through the Department of Energy. We want to run tests on both Cosms. That will be much easier here. Start planning to bring yours here soon.

  Dave

  ONLOOKERS CROWD BROOKHAVEN LAB SITE

  Change in ‘Cosm’ Rumored Coming;

  Thousands Flock to Long Island

  Planes, Balloons, Hang Gliders Fly Over Object

  “Professor Butterworth?”

  She had opened the observatory door unwarily, thinking it was just the security guards notifying her that they were changing shift. The strange face brought back a sudden spike of fear, memories from the kidnapping, her throat tightening. Then she realized that the face was not strange; it was Detective Sturges.

  “Oh. Ah, I’ll come out.”

  She stepped into the brilliant sunshine, blinking. The observatory interior was utterly black and she had been in it for a long time, savoring the spectacle. The crisp, dry tang of the sage was bracing after the air-conditioned dark.

  Sturges’s face was angular in the strong sun, his brown suit out of place among the coastal scrub desert. His car in the gravel lot bore no official markings. “You’re doing okay?”

  “Oh, you mean putting the kidnapping behind me? I suppose so.”

  “It takes time, it does.” He shuffled uncomfortably. “I came over to ask if you know of any connection between Brad’s parents and some religious groups. People who might have been involved in your kidnapping.”

  “No. I only met them at the funeral.”

  “Brad never said anything about his religious views? Or theirs?”

  “It’s not the kind of thing physicists usually discuss.”

  Sturges lifted one side of his mouth in a wry gesture that instantly lapsed, like a formal gesture. “Some federal officers paid us a call, wondered if there was a link.”

  “Federal officers?”

  “They said they were looking to see if the kidnapping had a religious motivation, maybe linked to Brad. The kidnappers’ methods fit something done in other states, they said.”

  When she shrugged, he looked at her significantly. “They went through our files, got a lot of the background information on the place here.”

  Was there a veiled implication in his gaze? “About the observatory?”

  “How you’re conducting operations here, the whole thing.”

  “Why would they want that?”

  Sturges gave her another long stare, as if his pauses told more than his words. “I’m sure I don’t know. Thanks for your time.”

  Though it was just another interruption in another long day, she remembered his studied expression, as if trying to give something away.

  3

  “Wow,” Max said, reading her e-mail on her laptop in her office. “This stuff from Dave is great.”

  “You mean about their carbon lines not fitting ours?” She had not been all that thrilled. Compared with the wealth of images flickering over the face of the Cosm, a dry number for a spectral line was forgettable, and she had barely remembered to bring it up.

  “It means their Cosm, call it Cosm II, is fundamentally different from ours. There must be ‘genetic’ differences, variations, in the natural constants.” He stared off into space. “Maybe some shift in an electromagnetic constant, so it shows up in carbon particularly…”

  “Wait.” She wanted to kiss him, just on general principles, but it seemed the wrong moment. “Where do you get ‘genetic’?”

  “Think like a biologist. This universe of ours has now made two more. But its children aren’t exactly like it—that’s what Dave is saying, though he doesn’t know it.”

  “In biology you get different children because both parents contribute genes.”

  He grinned. “Okay, so the analogy isn’t exact. But look, you made the Cosm by exciting a fluctuation in space-time, and the quark-gluon plasma, it tunneled through to another equilibrium for matter—”

  “But for matter in its own space-time, sure.”

  “—and Dave’s spectral lines, they say that in this process you can wind up with a slightly different universe on the other side.”

  She sat on her desk, knocking off a tall stack of mail. “Our Cosm, though, so far looks just like its… parent.”

  Max had that distant look she had come to know in these months, his mind whirring along new paths. Even this trait, normally the sort of thing that drove women to distraction, seemed endearing. He had crept up on her, slipping under the defenses she had so long ago erected against men scientists. At the time, she remembered, she had described it to Jill as “too much like, well, incest.” Max’s eyes snapped back into focus and he got up and came around the desk, taking her in his arms, kissing her expertly. “Which means ours has an excellent chance of sustaining life.”

  “So I’m going to be a grandmother.”

  He pulled back an inch, blinked. “Aaaahhh… yes.” His eyes went distant again. Other women would feel insulted at this, but she understood. There was more than a little of her in him.

  Saul Shriffer, Inc.

  Dear Professor Butterworth:

  I understand from repeated calls to your Physics Department that you are not currently represented in the fields of visual media. Certainly your astounding discoveries have excited the entire world, not least the world of entertainment and education. This avenue is the most powerful gateway for spreading the word of your work, and certainly can be the most profitable.

  My agency represents many of the leading figures in modern science. I would like to speak with you about undertaking…

  “Playing at Being God,” cover article, November Atlantic Monthly:

  … Science can be blind to moral and especially religious views, seeing them as mere noise. Indeed, many vast social movements have rejected rationalism, experimental checks, logic, and even facts. Objectivity, as a mode of thinking, only slowly integrated with older systems. As well, hasty imposition of technologies destroyed the fabric of meaning knitting together communities.

  Human life can only be sustained afloat on a sea of meaning, not upon a network of spare information. Stir this sea with detached logic and unrooted data, and you are asking for trouble. Cast people into the cultural void—which the elite endure only by filling it with endless diversions—and you inevitably condemn everyone to a pe
rpetual consumer culture. And that is if all works according to plan, and social unrest can be contained.

  Meaning came only from the inner world. When technology intrudes upon this sanctum, its logically compelling face bares a grotesque, mechanical sneer. That is the principal lesson of the Cosm, like it or not.

  … offer you a cohost position on Saturday Night Lively. Your cohost would be Roberta Lasky, hit comic. While a sense of the dignity of your work will be present, we hope you understand that this is not an educational show. Our offer is contingent upon your bringing on the air your discovery, the Cosm, so that for the first time the television audience can see just what…

  From: rachelm@pict.com

  To: butter@uci.edu

  “All nature is but art, unknown to thee,

  All chance, direction which thou canst not see;

  All discord, harmony not understood;

  All partial evil, universal good;

  And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,

  One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.”

  SETI INSTITUTE

  Menlo Park, CA

  … if life does emerge in your Cosm, this is an unprecedented opportunity to detect radio waves from civilizations emerging there. If, as rumors have it, the pace of time in your Cosm is accelerating, then soon we might be able to directly detect radio beacons from…

  Northrup Grumman is proud of its role in the creation of your discovery. As the world’s leading quality magnet makers, we wish to photo your Cosm with our magnets that “got the job done,” and are willing to offer $20,000…