“Actually,” I said, “they’d had evidence of their existence for thousands of years. But actually pinning one down took a while. I don’t know why that was. But yes, he was the guy who found it.”
“And what kind of result did we get from the discovery?”
“How do you mean?”
“What did we learn?”
“Well, there was one major breakthrough.”
“And what was that?”
“It happened two years after Octavia disappeared.”
“So what was it?”
“We have the media coverage, Gabe. If you like I can run it for you.”
We went into my office.
• • •
Two years after the loss of Octavia, DPSAR put a mission on board the Claymont and sent them out to examine the wormhole. As a result of Housman’s work, they knew where one opening into the wormhole was, so it had become simply a matter of inserting probes that would do analytic work. The probes were more complex than the ones Housman and Charlotte had used. Stacy Harper showed one of them to her audience on the day of the breakthrough.
Harper was an Earth reporter from the Interstellar Network, on board the Claymont with the scientists. She held one of the probes in her hand. It was about the size of a commlink, or maybe a flattened tennis ball. It had a drive unit and an autocontrol. They were planning to release eighty-six of them that day. The probes would enter the tunnel and begin immediately to analyze interior conditions. And to search for exits. “They’ll be able spot an opening,” she said, “which will become visible when struck by light penetrating the mist and the distorted space that form the wormhole. When that happens, the probe will exit into the other universe, spend about thirty minutes photographing everything in sight. Then it will return into the wormhole, if it can, and come back to us. When it arrives, we’ll be able to see what it found.” She was sitting with one of the physicists, identified as Cornelius Giusando, of MIT. “Cornelius,” she said, “is it true we don’t have radio contact when they’re in the wormhole?”
“Sometimes we do, apparently,” he said. “At least, Housman’s experience bears that out. But you can’t depend on it. And most of the time the answer is no, you have nothing. We’re still trying to figure out what the laws are inside that thing. We’ve got a long way to go.” He looked pleased, a guy in the right place at the right time.
She returned his smile. “Cornelius, do you really think there are other universes?”
“It’s still all guesswork, Stacy. That’s an issue that has evaded us for a long time. Nobody knows. But I’ll tell you the truth. I’ll be surprised if we’re the only one.”
Stacy was attractive, as all the female pundits are, and obviously quick on her feet. She was usually involved in covering politics, but she had no trouble adjusting to physics. She was also blessed with a sense of humor, and understood when the conversation was getting overly technical. “If there really is another universe, Cornelius, what would we expect to find? Will it be like ours?”
“Maybe,” he said. “The big question is whether the laws of physics would be the same.” Cornelius was small, with something of a weight problem and features that wouldn’t have stood out in a crowd. But his manner generated a sense that he understood what he was talking about.
“What might be different?” she asked.
“Everything. But all you’d need to prevent a universe from developing could be one variant. Gravity, for example. It wouldn’t take a major alteration to prevent stars from forming. Or maybe light would move at a different velocity.”
“Like what?”
“How about a hundred kilometers an hour?”
“Is that really possible?”
“I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.”
“So if you rode your skimmer you’d probably exceed light speed?”
“No, that wouldn’t happen.”
“Why not?”
“Nothing can travel faster than light. So your top speed would be a hundred kilometers.”
“But that’s only a physical law, right? Maybe it’s different in another universe. Maybe somewhere nothing can travel slower than light.”
Cornelius’s eyes widened. “You know, you might have a point. Let me think about it.”
Stacy smiled and let it go. She looked down at the probe, which she’d set on a table. “Cornelius, if we were able to ride in this thing, and we reached an opening, what would it look like?”
“Hopefully, the wormhole would simply have a hole looking out into sunlight. Or starlight.”
“Okay. And if we cross over into a different universe, how will we know that’s what it is? That it’s not part of this one?”
Cornelius checked the time. “We’ll be starting in a few minutes. But as to your question, if it functions like this one, if the rules are the same, we won’t know. At least not until we’ve had a chance to do some analysis. But the general view is that if it’s a different universe, we’ll be able to pick it up pretty quickly. Gravitational waves will be different. Radiation. You name it.”
“Do you expect any surprises?”
He grinned. “How about a black-and-white universe? No colors?”
“Is that really possible?”
“Maybe.”
I stopped it for a moment. “He’s got a surprise coming,” I said.
“What?”
“Stay tuned.”
“I have one more question, Cornelius.”
“Fire away.”
“What if there is no other universe? Everybody’s so excited about multiple universes that we don’t talk much about the possibility that ours is the only one.”
“Stacy, a lot of cosmological theories would go down the drain if it were to turn out that ours is all there is. But I don’t think, whatever happens, we’re going to be able to establish that we’re alone. Not today, anyway. What we may find out is that the wormhole goes nowhere. But I guess that’s not the same thing.”
A light rain was falling against the windows. And I could hear birds chirping. Despite all the missions I’d been part of, I’m not sure I ever appreciated more the sounds of that morning.
Stacy thanked Cornelius for his help, then turned and faced us. “We’re about to launch. Stay on board.”
• • •
They ran ads for a detergent, for the recently released White Hawk skimmer, and for Colonial Cough Medicine. Then we were informed about upcoming programs. Finally Stacy was back. Cornelius was gone, and we could see two guys through a large window. They were at opposite ends of a long room, both talking into microphones.
“Where’s the surprise?” asked Gabe.
“It’s coming.” It had been a long time since I’d watched this. “By the way, it gets a little scary.”
Stacy smiled at us. “Okay, here we go, everybody.” She vanished and we watched swirling dark clouds take over the center of the office and begin to expand. “We’re seeing the wormhole entry as it would look if we were sitting inside one of the probes. If it’s nighttime where you are and you’d like to get a realistic image, turn off the lights.”
The clouds twisted and writhed. “It looks as if it’s trying to swallow us,” said Gabe. It opened and closed and churned and roiled. A large mouth. I pushed back in my chair. “What is that?” he asked.
“I’d guess it’s what space looks like when it gets distorted.”
We were getting sucked inside. I hung on to my chair arms as we slipped between the lips into darkness and gas. The probe’s navigation lights came on. The gas lit up, and suddenly Stacy was back, smiling broadly. “We’ve had a successful launch, ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “We are now inside the wormhole. Radio contact is breaking down so we’re losing our picture.” The churning darkness faded and Cornelius appeared beside her. She turned toward him. “Everything okay?” she asked.
“So far.”
It was all gone and the ship’s lights came back to normal.
“How long will th
is take, Cornelius?”
“We don’t know. Our probe might already be headed for an exit. On the other hand it may go all the way to the end of the tunnel. Assuming it has an end. That might take a while.”
“You’re kidding. I mean about whether it has an end.”
“The problem here, Stacy, is that we just don’t know what’s going on. We know the tunnel goes considerably farther than we’d originally thought because it was ejecting pods from the Housman team a lot farther out than we’d anticipated. And that’s just length in our local area. We’re in strange territory here.”
The conversation continued. I knew that the first results were still a few minutes away, so I fast-forwarded until Cornelius raised two fingers to an ear. “One of them’s back,” he said. “They’re looking at the pictures now.”
“Do we have access to them?”
“Let me check.” He produced his link and spoke into it. Then, after a moment: “Okay. We have it.”
A bright star-filled sky appeared across the ceiling. “I don’t recognize any of the constellations,” said Stacy.
“I’m not surprised. We’re far away from Earth. But it’s all local. The probe didn’t go anywhere new. But that’s pretty much what we— Wait.” He pressed his ear again. “We’ve got another one.”
Gabe looked at me questioningly. Was this the surprise?
“Not yet,” I told him. “We need to fast-forward some more.” I ran past more negative results until I recognized a moment when Cornelius’s face changed. And Stacy tugged on his sleeve. “They’re telling me we got something,” the physicist said. “Picture coming up.”
Gabe leaned forward in his chair, his attention riveted on Cornelius and Stacy. The picture revealed more churning space. Then it darkened and went black.
Cornelius said, “They’re saying that we may have another universe.”
The picture stayed black.
Stacy leaned over and spoke into her partner’s link. “We got nothing.”
“That’s what they’re reading,” said Cornelius. “That place has no stars.”
• • •
“Holy cats,” said Gabe. “Hard to believe. What about the other probes?”
“Most of them got to the end of the tunnel and emerged and came out near the black hole. Five others found exits along the way. Three of them led back into our universe. The other two took them out under that starless sky.”
“The same place?”
“Maybe. They have no way to tell. If they were different universes, it suggests that stars are an unusual feature.”
“Okay, Chase. That’s a good show. But it’s been a few years. We must have made some advances since then.”
“None that I know of. We’ve gone back a number of times, but the results don’t change. Some exits come out under starless skies. Two of the places that have stars have been identified as ours. There are seven or eight more with stars that we simply can’t identify. But you’d expect that. Our universe is pretty big. We haven’t seen that much of it yet.”
“I assume people were shocked when they saw the places with no stars?”
“There was a fairly strong reaction. I remember somebody on one of the networks asking what’s the point of having a universe if it doesn’t have any stars? The media went crazy.
“Every show brought in cosmologists, quantum physicists, theologians, you name it, to talk about it. The major issue surfaced immediately: Could we be sure it wasn’t our universe that the probes had blundered into, and just locked onto a part of the sky that was empty? Is there an area somewhere in which no stars exist? According to most astronomers, considering the wide angle lens the pod has, the answer is no. It had gone into a universe with no light.”
VIII.
Think not in terms of ultimate success,
Of plaques hanging on the wall
And trophies glittering on a shelf.
Concentrate rather on the first step,
The first obstacle,
And find a way to cast it aside.
—TULISOFALA, “MOUNTAIN PASSES,” TRANSLATED FROM ASHIYYUREAN BY LEISHA TANNER, 1202
Several days after our visit from Olivia Hill, Gabe came into my office carrying two packages. “What have you got?” I asked.
“Some artifacts. Do you have time to take these over to the University Museum?”
“I’m a little bit on the run, Gabe. Do they have to go today?”
“No. It’s all right. Let it go. I’ll take them.”
I was involved in an afternoon of boring, purely administrative routine details, and I didn’t want to go home with them still hanging over my head. That was the only reason I dodged his request. “It’s okay, Gabe,” I said. “I’ve got it.”
“No, Chase. Finish your work.”
I looked at the packages. “What are they?”
“A picture and an electronic log. I picked them up on a research outing a couple days before I got on the Capella. In fact, come to think of it, you were with me at the time.”
It had something to do with the ninth-century biologist Daniel Grantner. That’s Rimway’s ninth century, of course. What I remembered mostly was that we’d gotten something, but two days later Gabe was gone.
Grantner had been originally from Chippewa. He’d come to Rimway as a teenager, and eventually written numerous tracts on human behavior, primarily concentrating on why a creature capable of such compassionate behavior could also commit acts of extreme cruelty. In his view, it came down to a clash among forces released by the empathy gene, the basic drive for survival, and a human capability to overlook reality. “In other words,” he once added in an address to a graduating class, “being stupid.”
His most celebrated work is Life As It Is. Gabe had gone through a library in the town where Grantner had lived. I couldn’t remember the name of the town, but he’d come across the electronic log, which had belonged to him. It contained a first draft of Life As It Is, notes on several of his seminal works, an avatar, and photos of Grantner and his family. When we showed it to the librarian, she told us it was of no use that she could see, and we could have it.
The library also owned a framed portrait of him, which had found its way into a storage room. Gabe was invited to take that as well. “Poor woman,” Gabe had said. “She has no idea.” He was still talking as if that had happened only a few weeks ago.
“Is that what you have in the packages?” I asked. “The log and the portrait?” The portrait depicted Grantner as a young man, probably in his mid-twenties, kneeling by a tree with a Dalmatian at his side.
“Yes. I spoke to Amanda at the museum a few minutes ago. She’s pretty excited.” He grinned. Amanda would be walking on the ceiling.
“What’s going on?” It was Alex’s voice. I hadn’t noticed him standing in the doorway.
“I’m headed for the museum,” said Gabe, “with a first draft of Life As It Is—”
It was as far as he got. “Daniel Grantner’s book?”
“Yes. It’s in a log.”
“And what else?”
“An avatar. Letters. You name it.” Gabe couldn’t resist smiling. Alex’s attention focused on the packages. “Gabe, those would be worth a fortune. You’re donating them?”
“Sure.”
He came the rest of the way into the office and slowly lowered himself into a chair. “Is this what you were really doing when you said you were out wandering around on Bowman’s World?”
I thought about jumping in and changing the subject at that point but decided to stay out of it.
“No. I got them eleven years ago.”
“They’ve been here all this time?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, Gabe. They’re yours, so you can do what you want with them. You’ll get no objections from me.”
“Funny. I thought I was just getting one.”
“I’m sorry. Let it go.”
Gabe kept his voice level: “Maybe it’s not such a good idea that I’m her
e.”
“No. I just hate seeing us throw away this kind of money.”
“I’m not throwing it away. I never had it.” He picked up the two packages and walked out the door.
Alex turned in my direction. His displeasure was palpable. He left the room without saying another word. I walked over to the window and watched Gabe climb into his skimmer. Moments later it lifted into the sky. He never looked back. I hated seeing these two guys at odds with each other. And I’d have loved to be with Gabe when he turned the Grantner log over to Amanda.
• • •
He came back with an expression that tried to project casualness while concealing a smug sense of accomplishment. The world was his oyster. “Hi, Chase,” he said, pausing at my office door.
I said hello. He smiled and turned away, but I knew he was expecting me to stop him. “How’d it go?”
“I thought Amanda was going to have a heart attack. You know Grantner never had an avatar anywhere on the net. Other than when he was about twelve years old.”
“I think I did know that. You might have mentioned it to me when we were coming home that last time.”
“Okay. Anyhow, yes, everybody down there was pretty excited.” He was glowing.
“Well, congratulations.”
“Thanks, kid. Congratulations to us both.”
“Have they offered to give you your job back?” Gabe had been a professor in the archeology department at the university to which the museum was connected.
“Oh, they did that two weeks ago. I’ll be starting in the fall.”
“Beautiful.” It reminded me of something I’d forgotten. “When you were missing, the news media reported that your PhD was in history, not archeology.”
“That’s correct.”
“How come you’re in the archeology department?”
He grinned. “I think it’s because I’m lazy.”
“You want to explain that?”
“Chase, we have thirteen thousand years of history. A lot of it’s missing. Places and times where we don’t really know what happened. But most of it is on the record. It’s just overwhelming. It’s hard to make it interesting for students when there’s so much out there. So when I got the opportunity to jump ship, I took it.” He sat down. “More important issue: Is Alex okay?”
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