I was surprised to find it was done.
We had made a sail hundreds of meters across, stitched together from the invisibly thin immature Ghost hide. It was roughly circular, and it was connected by a dozen lengths of fine rope to struts on the panel we had wrenched out of the wreck. The sail lay across space, languid ripples crossing its glimmering surface.
Pael showed me how to work the thing. “Pull this rope, or this… “ the great patchwork sail twitched in response to his commands. “I’ve set it so you shouldn’t have to try anything fancy, like tacking. The boat will just sail out, hopefully, to the cordon perimeter. If you need to lose the sail, just cut the ropes.”
I was taking in all this automatically. It made sense for both of us to know how to operate our little yacht. But then I started to pick up the subtext of what he was saying.
Before I knew what he was doing he had shoved me onto the deck panel, and pushed it away from the Ghost ship. His strength was surprising.
I watched him recede. He clung wistfully to a bit of tangle. I couldn’t summon the strength to figure out a way to cross the widening gap. But my suit could read his, as clear as day.
“Where I grew up, the sky was full of sails… “
“Why, Academician?”
“You will go further and faster without my mass to haul. And besides—our lives are short enough; we should preserve the young. Don’t you think?”
I had no idea what he was talking about. Pael was much more valuable than I was; I was the one who should have been left behind. He had shamed himself.
Complex glyphs crisscrossed his suit. “Keep out of the direct sunlight. It is growing more intense, of course. That will help you… .”
And then he ducked out of sight, back into the tangle. The Ghost ship was receding now, closing over into its vast egg shape, the detail of the tangle becoming lost to my blurred vision.
The sail above me slowly billowed, filling up with the light of the intense sun. Pael had designed his improvised craft well; the rigging lines were all taut, and I could see no rips or creases in the silvery fabric.
I clung to my bit of decking and sought shade.
Twelve hours later, I reached an invisible radius where the tactical beacon in my pocket started to howl with a whine that filled my headset. My suit’s auxiliary systems cut in and I found myself breathing fresh air.
A little after that, a set of lights ducked out of the streaming lanes of the fleet, and plunged toward me, growing brighter. At last it resolved into a golden bullet shape adorned with a blue-green tetrahedron, the sigil of free humanity. It was a supply ship called The Dominance of Primates.
And a little after that, as a Ghost fleet fled their fortress, the star exploded.
As soon as I had completed my formal report to the ship’s commissary—and I was able to check out of the Dominance’s sick bay—I asked to see the captain.
I walked up to the bridge. My story had got around, and the various med patches I sported added to my heroic mythos. So I had to run the gauntlet of the crew—”You’re supposed to be dead, I impounded your back pay and slept with your mother already“—and was greeted by what seems to be the universal gesture of recognition of one tar to another, the clenched fist pumping up and down around an imaginary penis.
But anything more respectful just wouldn’t feel normal.
The captain turned out to be a grizzled veteran type with a vast laser burn scar on one cheek. She reminded me of First Officer Till.
I told her I wanted to return to active duty as soon as my health allowed.
She looked me up and down. “Are you sure, tar? You have a lot of options. Young as you are, you’ve made your contribution to the Expansion. You can go home.”
“Sir, and do what?”
She shrugged. “Farm. Mine. Raise babies. Whatever earthworms do. Or you can join the Commission for Historical Truth.”
“Me, a commissary?”
“You’ve been there, tar. You’ve been in amongst the Ghosts, and come out again—with a bit of intelligence more important than anything the Commission has come up with in fifty years. Are you sure you want to face action again?”
I thought it over.
I remembered how Jeru and Pael had argued. It had been an unwelcome perspective, for me. I was in a war that had nothing to do with me, trapped by what Jeru had called the logic of history. But then, I bet that’s been true of most of humanity through our long and bloody history. All you can do is live your life, and grasp your moment in the light—and stand by your comrades.
A farmer—me? And I could never be smart enough for the Commission. No, I had no doubts.
“A brief life burns brightly, sir.”
Lethe, the captain looked like she had a lump in her throat. “Do I take that as a yes, tar?”
I stood straight, ignoring the twinges of my injuries. “Yes, sir!”
ORACLE
Greg Egan
Looking back at the century that’s just ended, it’s obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of the Big New Names to emerge in SF in the nineties, and is probably one of the most significant talents to enter the field in the last several decades. Already one of the most widely known of all Australian genre writers, Egan may well be the best new “hard-science” writer to enter the field since Greg Bear, and is still growing in range, power and sophistication. In the last few years, he has become a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has made sales as well as to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon and elsewhere; many of his stories have also appeared in various “Best of the Year” series, and he was on the Hugo final ballot in 1995 for his story “Cocoon”, which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award. He won the Hugo Award in 1999 for his novella “Oceanic”. His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992; his second novel, Permutation City, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1994. His other books include the novels, Distress and Diaspora, and three collections of his short fiction, Axiomatic, Luminous, and Our Lady of Chernobyl. His most recent book is a major new novel, Teranesia. He has a web site at http://www.netspace.netau/gregegan/.
In the strange and eloquent story that follows, he takes us to a slightly altered version of our own familiar Earth in the days just after World War II, for a memorable battle of ideas between two of the smartest humans alive—a deceptively quiet battle, fought with words broadcast over the radio, that could nevertheless change our view of the universe forever and perhaps even change the universe itself.
1
On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.
He’d woken a dozen times throughout the night with an overwhelming need to stretch his back and limbs, and none of the useful compromise positions he’d discovered in his first few days — the least-worst solutions to the geometrical problem of his confinement — had been able to dull his sense of panic. He’d been in far more pain in the second week, suffering cramps that felt as if the muscles of his legs were dying on the bone, but these new spasms had come from somewhere deeper, powered by a sense of urgency that revolved entirely around his own awareness of his situation.
That was what frightened him. Sometimes he could find ways to minimise his discomfort, sometimes he couldn’t, but he’d been clinging to the thought that, in the end, all these fuckers could ever do was hurt him. That wasn’t true, though. They could make him ache for freedom in the middle of the night, the way he might have ached with grief, or love. He’d always cherished the understanding that his self was a whole, his mind and body indivisible. But he’d failed to appreciate the corollary: through his body, they could touch every part of him. Change every part of him.
Morning brought a fresh torment: hay fever. The house was somewhere deep in the countryside, with nothing to be heard in the middle of the day but bird song. June had always been his worst month for hay fever, but in Manchester it had been tolerable. As he ate breakfast, mucus dripped f
rom his face into the bowl of lukewarm oats they’d given him. He staunched the flow with the back of his hand, but suffered a moment of shuddering revulsion when he couldn’t find a way to reposition himself to wipe his hand clean on his trousers. Soon he’d need to empty his bowels. They supplied him with a chamber pot whenever he asked, but they always waited two or three hours before removing it. The smell was bad enough, but the fact that it took up space in the cage was worse.
Towards the middle of the morning, Peter Quint came to see him. “How are we today, Prof?” Robert didn’t reply. Since the day Quint had responded with a puzzled frown to the suggestion that he had an appropriate name for a spook, Robert had tried to make at least one fresh joke at the man’s expense every time they met, a petty but satisfying indulgence. But now his mind was blank, and in retrospect the whole exercise seemed like an insane distraction, as bizarre and futile as scoring philosophical points against some predatory animal while it gnawed on his leg.
“Many happy returns,” Quint said cheerfully.
Robert took care to betray no surprise. He’d never lost track of the days, but he’d stopped thinking in terms of the calendar date; it simply wasn’t relevant. Back in the real world, to have forgotten his own birthday would have been considered a benign eccentricity. Here it would be taken as proof of his deterioration, and imminent surrender.
If he was cracking, he could at least choose the point of fissure. He spoke as calmly as he could, without looking up. “You know I almost qualified for the Olympic marathon, back in forty-eight? If I hadn’t done my hip in just before the trials, I might have competed.” He tried a self-deprecating laugh. “I suppose I was never really much of an athlete. But I’m only forty-six. I’m not ready for a wheelchair yet.” The words did help: he could beg this way without breaking down completely, expressing an honest fear without revealing how much deeper the threat of damage went.
He continued, with a measured note of plaintiveness that he hoped sounded like an appeal to fairness. “I just can’t bear the thought of being crippled. All I’m asking is that you let me stand upright. Let me keep my health.”
Quint was silent for a moment, then he replied with a tone of thoughtful sympathy. “It’s unnatural, isn’t it? Living like this: bent over, twisted, day after day. Living in an unnatural way is always going to harm you. I’m glad you can finally see that.”
Robert was tired; it took several seconds for the meaning to sink in. It was that crude, that obvious? They’d locked him in this cage, for all this time … as a kind of ham-fisted metaphor for his crimes?
He almost burst out laughing, but he contained himself. “I don’t suppose you know Franz Kafka?”
“Kafka?” Quint could never hide his voracity for names. “One of your Commie chums, is he?”
“I very much doubt that he was ever a Marxist.”
Quint was disappointed, but prepared to make do with second best. “One of the other kind, then?”
Robert pretended to be pondering the question. “On balance, I suspect that’s not too likely either.”
“So why bring his name up?”
“I have a feeling he would have admired your methods, that’s all. He was quite the connoisseur.”
“Hmm.” Quint sounded suspicious, but not entirely unflattered.
Robert had first set eyes on Quint in February of 1952. His house had been burgled the week before, and Arthur, a young man he’d been seeing since Christmas, had confessed to Robert that he’d given an acquaintance the address. Perhaps the two of them had planned to rob him, and Arthur had backed out at the last moment. In any case, Robert had gone to the police with an unlikely story about spotting the culprit in a pub, trying to sell an electric razor of the same make and model as the one taken from his house. No one could be charged on such flimsy evidence, so Robert had had no qualms about the consequences if Arthur had turned out to be lying. He’d simply hoped to prompt an investigation that might turn up something more tangible.
The following day, the CID had paid Robert a visit. The man he’d accused was known to the police, and fingerprints taken on the day of the burglary matched the prints they had on file. However, at the time Robert claimed to have seen him in the pub, he’d been in custody already on an entirely different charge.
The detectives had wanted to know why he’d lied. To spare himself the embarrassment, Robert had explained, of spelling out the true source of his information. Why was that embarrassing?
“I’m involved with the informant.”
One detective, Mr Wills, had asked matter-of-factly, “What exactly does that entail, sir?” And Robert — in a burst of frankness, as if honesty itself was sure to be rewarded — had told him every detail. He’d known it was still technically illegal, of course. But then, so was playing football on Easter Sunday. It could hardly be treated as a serious crime, like burglary.
The police had strung him along for hours, gathering as much information as they could before disabusing him of this misconception. They hadn’t charged him immediately; they’d needed a statement from Arthur first. But then Quint had materialised the next morning, and spelt out the choices very starkly. Three years in prison, with hard labour. Or Robert could resume his wartime work — for just one day a week, as a handsomely paid consultant to Quint’s branch of the secret service — and the charges would quietly vanish.
At first, he’d told Quint to let the courts do their worst. He’d been angry enough to want to take a stand against the preposterous law, and whatever his feelings for Arthur, Quint had suggested — gloatingly, as if it strengthened his case — that the younger, working-class man would be treated far more leniently than Robert, having been led astray by someone whose duty was to set an example for the lower orders. Three years in prison was an unsettling prospect, but it would not have been the end of the world; the Mark I had changed the way he worked, but he could still function with nothing but a pencil and paper, if necessary. Even if they’d had him breaking rocks from dawn to dusk he probably would have been able to day-dream productively, and for all Quint’s scaremongering he’d doubted it would come to that.
At some point, though, in the twenty-four hours Quint had given him to reach a decision, he’d lost his nerve. By granting the spooks their one day a week, he could avoid all the fuss and disruption of a trial. And though his work at the time — modelling embryological development — had been as challenging as anything he’d done in his life, he hadn’t been immune to pangs of nostalgia for the old days, when the fate of whole fleets of battleships had rested on finding the most efficient way to extract logical contradictions from a bank of rotating wheels.
The trouble with giving in to extortion was, it proved that you could be bought. Never mind that the Russians could hardly have offered to intervene with the Manchester constabulary next time he needed to be rescued. Never mind that he would scarcely have cared if an enemy agent had threatened to send such comprehensive evidence to the newspapers that there’d be no prospect of his patrons saving him again. He’d lost any chance to proclaim that what he did in bed with another willing partner was not an issue of national security; by saying yes to Quint, he’d made it one. By choosing to be corrupted once, he’d brought the whole torrent of clichés and paranoia down upon his head: he was vulnerable to blackmail, an easy target for entrapment, perfidious by nature. He might as well have posed in flagrante delicto with Guy Burgess on the steps of the Kremlin.
It wouldn’t have mattered if Quint and his masters had merely decided that they couldn’t trust him. The problem was — some six years after recruiting him, with no reason to believe that he had ever breached security in any way — they’d convinced themselves that they could neither continue to employ him, nor safely leave him in peace, until they’d rid him of the trait they’d used to control him in the first place.
Robert went through the painful, complicated process of rearranging his body so he could look Quint in the eye. “You know, if it was legal there’d be
nothing to worry about, would there? Why don’t you devote some of your considerable Machiavellian talents to that end? Blackmail a few politicians. Set up a Royal Commission. It would only take you a couple of years. Then we could all get on with our real jobs.”
Quint blinked at him, more startled than outraged. “You might as well say that we should legalise treason!”
Robert opened his mouth to reply, then decided not to waste his breath. Quint wasn’t expressing a moral opinion. He simply meant that a world in which fewer people’s lives were ruled by the constant fear of discovery was hardly one that a man in his profession would wish to hasten into existence.
When Robert was alone again, the time dragged. His hay fever worsened, until he was sneezing and gagging almost continuously; even with freedom of movement and an endless supply of the softest linen handkerchiefs, he would have been reduced to abject misery. Gradually, though, he grew more adept at dealing with the symptoms, delegating the task to some barely conscious part of himself. By the middle of the afternoon — covered in filth, eyes almost swollen shut — he finally managed to turn his mind back to his work.
For the past four years he’d been immersed in particle physics. He’d been following the field on and off since before the war, but the paper by Yang and Mills in ’54, in which they’d generalised Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism to apply to the strong nuclear force, had jolted him into action.
After several false starts, he believed he’d discovered a useful way to cast gravity into the same form. In general relativity, if you carried a four-dimensional velocity vector around a loop that enclosed a curved region of spacetime, it came back rotated — a phenomenon highly reminiscent of the way more abstract vectors behaved in nuclear physics. In both cases, the rotations could be treated algebraically, and the traditional way to get a handle on this was to make use of a set of matrices of complex numbers whose relationships mimicked the algebra in question. Hermann Weyl had catalogued most of the possibilities back in the ’20s and ’30s.
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