Metaplanetary (A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War)

by Tony Daniel

  “Yes, I’m fine, but it was a pretty unsettling operation, let me tell you. Kind of violating.”

  “There’s going to be a lot more of that kind of thing soon enough. That’s why . . . well, we shouldn’t talk about such things here.” Kelly ordered himself up a brandy to match Danis’s scotch. The children each got fruit juices.

  “Can I go play in the Sliding Room?” Sint asked after he had downed his juice.

  “Why don’t we stay together for a while instead of watching the merci right now,” said Danis.

  “Okay,” Sint replied. “Can I have a gin fizz?”

  Kelly grinned, and Danis sighed and nodded. Sint was soon blowing bubbles through the straw of his drink. Danis had made sure that the gin’s intoxication algorithm was deactivated before it had materialized.

  Just before they arrived, everyone shunted back into actuality from the virtuality with practiced ease. Danis found the flow port for herself and plugged herself into the transfer reader that would take her across the Department of Immunity grist firewall at the top of the lift. She could have represented it all as stepping into a room with many lights or through a gate, but she was an algorithm, and representing occurrences in the virtuality as actual events took up computing room and was, in general, inelegant and looked down on by other free converts. So, she didn’t think of it as anything other than what it was. She was erased from the elevator’s memory core, the information was transferred by the Merced Effect to a similar grist-rich matrix on the outgoing cable from Mercury, and there Danis became herself again, instantly.

  Faster than the speed of light, in fact, and with no possibility of lost information. That was what the Merced Effectmeant .

  Danis felt far safer for herself making these quantum leaps than she did for her family’s aspects as they made their messy, Newtonian way among the planets—flight that would last until they had all satisfied her husband’s intuition of impending doom and the need to fly from it.

  Ten

  Kelly herded the children through yet another crowd after he got them off the lift up from Mercury. There shouldn’t have been a need for this. The other planets, even Earth, didn’t have these relic transfer bolsas, but through a combination of politics and inept management, Mercury still did. Some incoming visitors viewed it as another example of Mercurian snobbery. The pithways of the main cables were all lined with generation-four biomechanical grist, while Mercury’s south polar shaft had never been upgraded. The effect was much like the effect of having trains that ran on two different rail gauges back in the nineteenth century had been: Passengers would have to tediously move from one train to another or—worse—would have to wait while the wheel trucks were physically changed underneath them. Johnston Bolsa was the result of this foul-up. And of course it must have its own fusion power source to supplement the solar collection—and, of course everything inside must be spun to Mercury-normal weight.

  Maybe itwas all arrogance, Kelly reflected. There certainly was enough money and power concentrated on Mercury to get upgrades done if anyone had half a mind to. In any case, he must get the children transferred over to the pithway.

  The Mercury-Venus space cable, with its associated tributaries, knots, and fanlike extrusions, was known as the Dedo (and sometimes called the Finger by those whose particular variant of English included that profanity). The Dedo undulated at a crazy rate in comparison to, say, the stately waves of the Mars-Earth Diaphany. This was owing to Mercury’s odd ellipse of an orbit (the same strange perturbation that had originally led Einstein to work on his General Theory of Relativity) as it related to Venus’s nicely Keplerian transit. The Earth-to-Venus segment had come to be called the Vas, for obvious reasons. On the Earth, the short Earth-Moon extension was the Aldiss. Then there was the Mars-Earth Diaphany. The various tendrils that stretched out past Mars and into the asteroids had many different names. The asteroid belt itself had so far prevented the construction of a cable to Jupiter. The problem was not because of material or energy—it could, in principle, be built with the same microinstantiation process that had been used now for centuries. The problem was that the entire elliptic of the asteroid belt was taken up with—what else?—asteroids. Even though the belt occurred on a narrow plane that was just about in line with that of the other planets (think of it as a thin ring around the sun, just as Saturn has a ring around itself), there was no way to construct a cable so that it might avoid the belt at every point on its journey around the sun as either end of the cable followed the paths of Mars or Jupiter. Despite the amazing strength and elasticity of a cable’s structure, bending through the belt would mean innumerable ruptures that couldn’t be healed in time to prevent catastrophic loss of life. So there was no Met past the asteroid belt. And this was not just a physical, technological fact, either. The belt was a political line that marked the end of the complete rule of the Interlocking Directorate and the beginning of the outer-system frontier, where the vestiges of the old Republic still hung on to their quasi-independence from inner-system dominance.

  But the Met was not merely the main cables: the Dedo, Vas, and Diaphany. It was a vast profusion of branches and tendrils. There were even smaller “mycelium” clumps of space cables that only came into contact with the larger Met when the big cables undulated through periodically. There were also temporary extrusions that connected the sides of a bend in the cable when the bend became particularly acute. These occurred when the planets on either end were in opposition—that is, at their closest to each other. For the Diaphany, this happened about every two years and the grist-built connecting webwork was called the Conjubilation. It was the Conjubilation of 2993 that had led to the upheaval that resulted in the current Met government.

  Well, indirectly, I guess, Kelly thought. I don’t think those Meld participants of ’93 envisioned that Amés the composer would become Amés the Director. Just as the French Revolutionists hadn’t imagined what the rise of Napoléon meant—until it was too late.

  It’s like everyone just gottired of freedom, and wanted someone to tell them what to do, Kelly thought.

  It took nearly an hour to get the kids loaded into a bead. Transportation through the center pith of a major space cable took place in connected streamers of separate, oval cars that somewhat resembled blood cells flowing through capillaries—or, as their name implied, beads on a moving necklace. All of the beads were given Earth-standard acceleration rates until they reached their maximum velocity, at which time you traveled in free fall. Of course, there was still a slight change of direction in relation to the cable’s center of gravity, so you often experienced a trace of “weight” while at constant speed—but this was only noticeable as a drift in the cabin toward one side or the other. For all intents and purposes, following the acceleration period, when you rode the pithways, you traveled in a state of weightlessness.

  After another weapon-detector arch (this time, mercifully, without problems), Kelly and the children walked through a series of interlocking rooms, each spinning at a slightly higher rate than the Johnston Bolsa proper, and all tapering in toward the outer skin of the Dedo cable proper. The space cables averaged a kilometer across, and they, too, spun, just as the various sacs, bolsas, drums, and cylinders that were strung along them did. This centripetal spin (if you were standing on the inside of the outer wall of the Dedo, say) was Earth-normal. The bolsa was like a bead on a necklace that is spinning, while the string by which it is strung is also spinning inside the bead, but at a faster rate. So the path from Johnston Bolsa’s “ceiling” to the pithway led through higher spin gravity before it got to the zero-g state of the pith.

  Finally, he and the children queued up for their individual bead. Most of the travelers were not used to zero g, and the flight attendants helped each to his or her destination with a puff of air from a hose that the attendant controlled. Sint and Aubry joined hands, and the attendant puffed them both into their bead together. They flew through the intervening space careening end over end, g
iggling all the while. Kelly elected the more conventional puff-to-the-butt and entered the bead facing forward. They instructed their grist pellicles to form a kind of microscopic Velcro to hold them against the bead walls, and they all aligned themselves in a sitting position along what would soon be the bead’s “bottom” when it began accelerating.

  Danis was already present within the bead. There was a much more sophisticated grist environment here, and she was able to manipulate various properties of their surroundings, which she could not do in the elevator.

  “Finally, we’re all together,” Kelly said. “There must be fifty thousand people trying to get off Mercury all at once.”

  “I had to ‘volunteer’ for another security check,” said Danis. “And I don’t think I had any choice about whether or not I could decline.”

  “Did you see me and Aubry fly in here, Mom?” Sint was still in an excited state. “We did three full cartwheels!”

  There was no buildup of sound in the bead; it simply started moving. The acceleration was gentle, but insistent. Kelly felt the point where they sped past Mercury-normal and he prepared himself for the dreary pull of e-normal that was soon coming. There had been talk of changing all the pithway transport over to Mercury-standard, since Mercury was, now, the business and government center of the solar system, but studies had shown that such a changeover would slow transport times considerably, so the idea was abandoned, and e-normal acceleration was maintained in the pithways.

  The kids seemed just as delighted to be heavier than normal as they had been to be lighter. But neither one of them had ever had to endure weeks of earth-pull, Kelly thought. He had planned a wilderness trip to Africa when both of them were old enough, but now that might never come about.

  Finally, the bead reached its maximum acceleration and they returned to free fall conditions. Sint and Aubry tumbled around a bit within the bead’s generous confines, then settled down and “stuck” themselves to one of the curving walls. Kelly remained on the “floor,” although the letters marking it as such had been automatically absorbed back into the surface.

  Kelly sighed and felt a little of the tension go out of him that had been building once again after he and Danis made love. At least they were away from Mercury. He wouldn’t really feel at ease until they were aboard a cloudship that had passed the asteroid belt and was headed on past Jupiter to the reaches beyond.

  Eleven

  from

  Old Left-handed Time

  Raphael Merced and the Genesis of the Merced Effect

  a short history

  by Andre Sud, D. Div.

  Triton

  On Mars, after years of academic travail, Raphael Merced finally found a sympathetic instructor in the physics department of Bradbury, Chen Wocek. And it was Wocek who first suggested to Merced that he might look into the famousrenormalization problem that had been plaguing quantum physics for generations.

  Merced attacked the problem with a vengeance, and, as Wocek recalls, one day his young protégé came sheepishly into his office, and said in a low voice, “I think I figured something out.”

  What Merced had “figured out” was the link between quantum phenomena and gravity.

  For years, quantum theorists had puzzled over what to do with the mathematics involved when a quantum particle interacted with itself. Various ad hoc solutions had called for two infinite solutions to be subtracted from each other, and, since one was “more infinite” than the other, the result was a finite value—such as an electron’s spin or a photon’s momentum. This process was called renormalization, and it only worked if you knew the value you were trying to derive in the first place from experimental data. The twentieth-century theoretician Richard Feynman, who firmly established renormalization as a technique in quantum computations, himself claimed that the practice “is what I would call a dippy process.”

  Merced was pondering this problem one day in his student carrel at the Bradbury library when he absentmindedly began dropping two dice that he is said to have obtained on a trip to Las Vegas with his friend Beat Myers. One of these dice was big and fuzzy, as light as a feather. The other was hard and compact and illegally weighted with lead.

  “I was sitting there wondering why the hell inertial mass and gravitational mass were exactly equivalent—in other words, why both these dice fell onto my desk at exactly the same rate, at exactly the same time—when I happened to notice that the little die kept coming up snake eyes. Two, I mean. Of course, it was a cheater’s die and was designed that way, but I had forgotten about that at that moment. Suddenly all these thoughts about quanta and gravity and craps suddenly came together in my head. I spent a few hours transcribing what I was thinking onto a pressure pad then I walked over to Wocek’s office and asked him whether I was crazy or not. He still hasn’t given me a satisfactory answer.”

  Of the three fundamental forces known to science, two had, until Merced’s time, revealed themselves to have particles which, in a sense, carried the force. The photon was the force carrier for the electroweak interaction and the family of gluons served as the elastic between the quarks in an atomic nucleus. But where was the force carrier for gravity, the graviton? Its existence had been predicted, and plenty of indirect evidence for its presence had piled up, but so far no one had been able to actually find one. At first the reason was thought to be because it was so small—perhaps as small in comparison with atoms as atoms are in comparison with the solar system. But the particle accelerators of even the late twenty-first century were able to gauge such minute distances, and, alas, no graviton emerged. A plethora of explanations arose to explain this lack, the most interesting being a kind of modern reintroduction of the Newtonian idea of the “ether” as a kind of invisible substrate through which gravity propagated. Most scientists, including Merced, rejected such thinking. But where was the graviton?

  “Where it was,” Merced wrote, “was in the immediate past and the immediate future. We were looking in the right place, but not at the right time.”

  In order to understand this reasoning, we must consider one more odd component of quantum physics—the so-called quantum leap. In two classic experiments performed in the twentieth century, scientists confirmed that there was indeed what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” that occurred on the atomic level. The first experiment is known as the double-slit demonstration and it works like this: A beam of light is shot through an opening, one photon at a time. On the opposite side of the hole, at some distance away, is another barrier, this one with two holes—the double slit.

  You would expect the photon, being a particle, to travel through one of the holes or the other—and that is exactly what it does. On the other side of the two slits is a detector—say a computer screen—that records, as a dot of light, where each proton strikes it. Now you would expect the photons, being particles, to pile up in a clump directly in front of the two slits. That is exactly what they do, forming two bright circles of light right in line with the slits that they passed through.

  They do this, that is, with one other special condition to the experiment: You have to have a detector at either slit that either confirms or denies that a photon has passed through that slit. The detector in no way affects the flight of the photon; it just says whether or not a photon passed by it. So, with two slits, and a method of detecting which slit a particular photon passed through, you get two clumps of light.

  What happens when you take away the detector?

  Remember that you are still firing one photon at a time. You might put another detector near the light source to confirm this—as long as it is before the double slit. One photon at a time one after another. And what pattern builds up on the final screen?

  If you said two clumps of light you would be absolutelywrong. Instead, what builds up is an interference pattern, just as a wave would make.

  The greatest concentration of light is not in front of the two slits, but actuallybetween them, where no particle could possibly
hit. If the light were a particle. But waves travel around sharp corners all the time.

  “So what?” you say. “Light is both a wave and a particle.”

  But the fact is that you know with a certainty that the photon you are shooting is a single entity. The only thing you have changed is where you chose to look at it. And, by that change, you get a completely different buildup pattern on your final display screen. It is as if the photon “knows” whether or not you are watching it in flight. If it “sees” that you are trying to trick it into being a particle by having a look at it as it passes through one of the other slits, why then, it will behave as a particle to suit you, and pile up, one particle at a time, right in front of the slit after it has passed through. But if you’re not looking at it, the photon “decides” to be a wave, and does its part to create an interference pattern, as if it were two particles that had gone through each of the slits simultaneously.

  There’s more. Say you put a detector after the slits, but before the final display screen. Rig your detector to turn on randomly—but only after the photons have passed through the slits, and they’ll pile up in clumps. Turn it off, and an interference pattern forms.

  You are forced to the conclusion that each single particle of light “knows” about your whole experiment, past and future. Before it even leaves the light source, it “knows” whether or not you are going to try to detect it, and changes its flight path accordingly.

  In the early twenty-second century, a version of this experiment was done with single photons from a quasar at the edge of the known universe. The results were the same. It seems that the photons “knew” ten billion years ago exactly whether or not the experimenter was going to switch on his detection apparatus ten billion years into the future. Clumps of light formed with it on, interference patterns with it off.