Hints of something called brane theory.
It was a model of the universe, an antique cosmological theory that had enjoyed a brief interlude of popularity seven hundred years in the past. So far as Quaiche could tell, the theory had not been discredited so much as abandoned, put aside when newer and brighter toys came along. At the time there had been no easy way of testing any of these competing theories, so they had to stand and fall on their strict aesthetic merit and the ease with which they could be tamed and manipulated with the cudgels and barbs of mathematics.
Brane theory suggested that the universe the senses spoke of was but one sliver of something vaster, one laminate layer in a stacked ply of adjacent realities. There was, Quaiche thought, something alluringly theological in that model, the idea of heavens above and hells below, with the mundane substrate of perceived reality squeezed between them. As above, so below.
But brane theory had nothing to do with heaven and hell. It had originated as a response to something called string theory, and specifically a conundrum within string theory known as the hierarchy problem.
Heresy again. But he could not stop himself from delving deeper.
String theory posited that the fundamental building blocks of matter were, at the smallest conceivable scales, simply one-dimensional loops of mass-energy. Like a guitar string the loops were able to vibrate—to twang —in certain discrete modes, each of which corresponded to a recognisable particle at the classical scale. Quarks, electrons, neutrinos, even photons, were all just different vibrational modes of these fundamental strings. Even gravity turned out to be a manifestation of string behaviour.
But gravity was also the problem. On the classical scale—the familiar universe of people and buildings, ships and worlds-gravity was much weaker than anyone normally gave it credit for. Yes, it held planets in their orbits around stars. Yes, it held stars in their orbits around the centre of mass of the galaxy. But compared to the other forces of nature, it was barely there at all. When the Lady Morwenna lowered one of its electromagnetic grapples to lift some chunk of metal from a delivery tractor, the magnet was resisting me entire gravitational force of Hela—everything the world could muster. If gravity had been as strong as the other forces, the Lady Morwenna would have been crushed into an atom-thick pancake, a film of collapsed metal on the perfectly smooth spherical surface of a collapsed planet. It was only gravity’s extreme weakness on the classical scale that allowed life to exist in the first place.
But string theory went on to suggest that gravity was really very strong, if only one looked closely enough. At the Planck scale, the smallest possible increment of measurement, string theory predicted that gravity ramped up to equivalence with the other forces. Indeed, at that scale reality looked rather different in other respects as well: curled up like dead woodlice were seven additional dimensions—hyperspaces accessible only on the microscopic scale of quantum interactions.
There was an aesthetic problem with this view, however. The other forces—bundled together as a single unified electroweak force—manifested themselves at a certain characteristic energy. But the strong gravity of string theory would only reveal itself at energies ten million billion times greater than for the electroweak forces. Such energies were far beyond the grasp of experimental procedure. This was the hierarchy problem, and it was considered deeply offensive. Brane theory was one attempt to resolve this glaring schism.
Brane theory—as far as Quaiche understood it—proposed that gravity was really as strong as the electroweak force, even on the classical scale. But what happened to gravity was that it leaked away before it had a chance to show its teeth. What was left—the gravity that was experienced in day-to-day life—was only a thin residue of something much stronger. Most of the force of gravity had dissipated sideways, into adjoining branes or dimensions. The particles that made up most of the universe were glued to a particular braneworld, a particular slice of the laminate of branes that the theory referred to as the bulk. That was why the ordinary matter of the universe only ever saw the one braneworld within which it happened to exist: it was not free to drift off into the bulk. But gravitons, the messenger particles of gravity, suffered no such constraint. They were free to drift between branes, sailing through the bulk with impunity. The best analogy Quaiche had been able to come up with was the printed words on the pages of a book, each confined for all eternity to one particular page, knowing nothing of the words printed on the next page, only a fraction of a millimetre away. And then think of bookworms, gnawing at right angles to the text.
But what of the shadows? This was where Quaiche had to fill in the details for himself. What the shadows appeared to be hinting at—the heart of the heresy—was that they were messengers or some form of communication from an adjacent braneworld. That braneworld might have been completely disconnected from our own, so that the only possible means of communication between the two was through the bulk. There was another possibility, however: the two apparently separate braneworlds might have been distant portions of a single brane, one that was folded back on itself like a hairpin. If that were the case—and the shadows had said nothing on the matter either way—then they were messengers not from another reality but merely from a distant corner of the familiar universe, unthinkably remote in both space and time. The light and energy from their region of space could only travel along the brane, unable to slip across the tiny gap between the folded surfaces. But gravity slipped effortlessly across the bulk, carrying a message from brane to brane. The stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies in the shadow brane cast a gravitational shadow on our local universe, influencing the motions of our stars and galaxies. By the same token, the gravity caused by the matter in the local part of the brane leaked through the bulk, into the realm of the shadows.
But the shadows were clever. They had decided to communicate across the bulk using gravity as their signalling medium.
There were a thousand ways they might have done it. The specifics didn’t matter. They might have manipulated the orbits of a pair of degenerate stars to produce a ripple of gravitational waves, or learned how to make miniature black holes on demand. The only important thing was that it could be done. And—equally importantly—that someone would be able to pick up the signals on this side of the bulk.
Someone like the scuttlers, for instance.
Quaiche laughed to himself. The heresy made a repulsive kind of sense. But then what else would he have expected? Where there was the work of God, would there not also be the work of the Devil, insinuating himself into the schemes of the Creator, trying to robe the miraculous in the mundane?
“Quaiche?” the suit asked. “Are you still here?”
“I’m still here,” he said. “But I’m not listening to you. I don’t believe what you say to me.”
“If you don’t, someone else will.”
He pointed at the scrimshaw suit, his own bony-fingered hand hovering in his peripheral vision like some detached phantasm. “I won’t let anyone else be poisoned by your lies.”
“Unless they have something you want very badly,” the scrimshaw suit said. “Then, of course, you might change your mind.”
His hand wavered. He felt cold suddenly. He was in the presence of evil. And it knew more about his schemes than it had any right to.
He pressed the intercom control on his couch. “Grelier,” he snapped. “Grelier, come here this instant. I need new bloods.
TWENTY-SIX
Hela, 2727
The next day Rashmika got her first view of the bridge.
There was no fanfare. She was inside the caravan, in the forward observation deck of one of the two leading vehicles, having forsworn any further trips to the roof after the incident with the mirror-faced Observer.
She had been warned that they were now very close to the edge of the fissure, but for all the long kilometres of the approach there had been no change in the topography of the landscape. The caravan—longer than ever now, having picked up sever
al more sections along the way—was winding its ponderous way through a sheer-sided ice canyon. Occasionally the moving machines scraped against the blue-veined canyon walls, which were twice as high as the tallest vehicle in the procession, dislodging tonnes of ice. It had always been hazardous for the walkers making their way to the equator on foot, but now that they had to traverse the same narrow defile as the caravan, it must have been downright terrifying. There was no room for the caravan to steer around them now, so they had to let it rollover them, making sure they were not aligned with the wheels, treads or stomping mechanical feet. If the machines didn’t get them, the falling ice-boulders probably would. Rashmika watched with a mingled sense of horror and sympathy as the parties vanished from view beneath the huge hull of the caravan. There was no way to tell if they made it out the other side, and she doubted that the caravan would stop if there was an accident.
There came a point where the canyon made a gentle curve to the right, blocking any view of the oncoming scenery for several minutes, and then suddenly there was an awful, heart-stopping absence in the landscape. She had not realised how used she had become to seeing white crags stepping into the distance. Now the ground fell away and the deep black sky dropped much lower than it had before, like a curtain whose tangled lower hem had just unfurled to its fullest extent. The sky bit hungrily into the land.
The road emerged from the canyon and ran along a ledge that skirted one wall of Ginnungagap Rift. To the left of the road, the sheer-sided canyon wall lurched higher; to the right, there was nothing at all. The road was just broad enough to accommodate the two-vehicle-wide procession, with the right-hand sides of the right-hand vehicles never more than two or three metres from the very edge. Rashmika looked back along the extended, motley train of the caravan—which was now thrillingly visible in its entirety as it had never been before—and saw wheels, treads, crawler plates, piston-driven limbs and flexing carapacial segments picking their way daintily along the edge, scuffing tonnes of ice into the abyss with each misplaced tread or impact. All along the caravan, the individual masters were steering and correcting like crazy, trying to navigate the fine line between smashing against the wall on the left and plunging over the side on the right. They couldn’t slow down because the whole point of this short cut was to make up valuable lost time. Rashmika wondered what would happen to the rest of the caravan if one of the elements got it wrong and went over the side. She had seen the inter-caravan couplings, but had no idea how strong they were. Would that one errant machine take the whole lot with it, or fall gallantly alone, leaving the others to close up the gap in the procession? Was there some nightmarish protocol for deciding such things in advance: a slackening of the couplings, perhaps?
Well, she was up front. If anywhere was safe, it had to be up at the front where the navigators had the best view of the terrain.
After several minutes during which no calamity occurred, she began to relax, and for the first time was able to pay due attention to the bridge, which had been looming ahead all the while.
The caravan was moving in a southerly direction, towards the equator, along the eastern flank of Ginnungagap Rift. The bridge was still some way south. Perhaps it was her imagination, but she thought she could see the curvature of the world as the high wall of the Rift marched into the distance. The top was jagged and irregular, but if she smoothed out those details in her mind’s eye, it appeared to follow a gentle arc, like the trajectory of a satellite. It was very difficult to judge how distant the bridge was, or how wide the Rift was at this point. Although Rashmika recalled that the Rift was forty kilometres wide at the point where the bridge spanned it, the ordinary rules of perspective simply had no application: there were no visual cues to assist her; no intermediate objects to offer a sense of diminishing scale; no attenuation of detail or colour due to atmosphere. Although the bridge and the far wall looked vast and distant, they could as easily have been five kilometres away as forty.
Rashmika judged the bridge to be still some fifty or sixty kilometres away as the crow flies—more than two-hundredths of the circumference of Hela—but the road along the ledge took many twists and turns getting there. She could easily believe they had another hundred kilometres of travel to go before they arrived at the eastern approach to the bridge.
Still, at least now she could see it—and it was everything she had ever imagined. Everyone said that photographs could not even remotely convey the true essence of the structure. Rashmika had always doubted that, but now she saw that the common opinion was quite correct: to appreciate the bridge, it was necessary to see it.
What people appeared to find most dismaying about the bridge, Rashmika knew, was its very lack of strangeness. Disregarding its scale and the materials that had been used to build it, it looked like something transplanted from the pages of human history, something built on Earth, in the age of iron and steam. It made her think of lanterns and horses, duels and courtships, winter palaces and musical fountains—except that it was vast and looked as if it had been blown from glass or carved from sugar.
The upper surface of the bridge described a very gentle arc as it crossed from one side of the Rift to the other, and was at its highest in the middle. Apart from that it was perfectly flat, unencumbered by any form of superstructure. There were no railings on either side of the road bed, which was breathtak-ingly shallow—from her present angle it looked like a rapier-thin line of light. It appeared broken in places, until she moved her head slightly and the illumination shifted. Fifty kilometres away, and the movement of her head was enough to affect what she could see of the delicate structure! The span was indeed unsupported for most of its width, but at either end—reaching out to a distance of five or six kilometres from the walls—was a delicate tracery of filigreed stanchions. They were curled into absurd spirals and whorls, scrolllike flourishes and luscious organic involutes catching the light and throwing it back to her, not in white and silver, but in a prismatic shimmer of rainbow hues. Every tilt of her head shifted the colours into some new configuration of glories.
The bridge looked evanescent, as if one ill-judged breath might be sufficient to blow it away.
Yet they were actually going to cross it.
Ararat, 2675
As soon as he had washed and breakfasted, Vasko set off to report for duty at the nearest Security Arm centre. He had slept for little more than four hours, but the alertness he had felt the night before was still there, stretched a little thinner and tighter. First Camp was deceptively quiet; the streets were littered with debris, some premises and dwellings had been damaged and the evidence of fires smouldered here and there, but the vast numbers of people he had seen the night before seemed to have vanished. Perhaps they had responded to Scorpio’s pronouncement after all and returned to their homes, having grasped how unpleasant it was going to be on the Nostalgia for Infinity.
Vasko realised his error as soon as he turned the corner next to the Security Arm compound. A huge grey mob was pressed up against the building, many hundreds of people crushed together with their belongings piled at their feet. A dozen or so SA guards were keeping order, standing on railed plinths with small weapons presented but not aimed directly at the crowd. Other Arm personnel, in addition to unarmed administration officials, were manning tables that had been set up outside the two-storey conch structure. Paperwork was being processed and stamped; personal effects were being weighed and labelled. Most of the people had obviously decided not to wait for the official rules: they were here, now, ready to depart, and very few of them looked as if they were having second thoughts.
Vasko made his way through the crowd, doing his best not to push and shove. There was no sign of Urton, but this was not her designated Arm centre. He stopped at one of the tables and waited for the officer manning it to finish processing one of the refugees.
“Are they still planning to start flying them out at noon?” Vasko asked quietly.
“Earlier,” the man replied, his voice low.
“The pace has been stepped up. Word is we’re still going to have trouble coping.”
“There’s no way that ship can accommodate all of us,” Vasko said. “Not now. It’d take months to get us all into the sleep caskets.”
“Tell that to the pig,” the man said and went back to his work, stamping a sheet of paper almost without looking at it.
Sudden warmth kissed the back of Vasko’s neck. He looked up and squinted against the blinding-bright underside of a machine, an aircraft or shuttle sliding across the square. He expected it to slow and descend, but instead the machine curved away, heading beyond the shore, towards the spire. It slid under the clouds like a bright ragged flake of daylight.
“See, they’ve already begun moving ‘em out,” the man said. “As if that’s going to make everyone else calmer…”
“I’m sure Scorpio knows what he’s doing,” Vasko said. He turned away before the man was able to answer.
He pushed beyond the processing tables, through the rest of the crowd, and into the conch structure. Inside, it was the same story: people squeezed in everywhere, holding paperwork and possessions aloft, children crying. He could feel the panic increasing by the minute.
He passed through into the part of the building reserved for SA personnel. In the small curved chamber where he usually received his assignments, he found a trio of people sitting around a low table drinking seaweed tea. He knew them all.
“Malinin,” said Gunderson, a young woman with short red hair. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
He didn’t care for her tone. “I came for my duties,” he said.
“I didn’t think you mixed with the likes of us these days,” she sneered.
He reached across the tea-drinkers to rip the assignment sheet from the wall. “I mix with whoever I like,” he said.
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