Dancing With Myself

by Charles Sheffield

  I was prepared for a year-long effort, with a good chance of failure at the end of it. It is a curious fact that my six-week success was possible only because I had been placed in prison. Given enough money, and Marcus had plenty of that, a man can get anything in jail that he can get outside it—plus a whole lot more. Prisons, as I quickly learned, are the natural focal points for any imaginable legal or illegal activity.

  You want Marcus Aurelius Jackson to take part in the sensory deprivation experiments now being conducted in this very jail? The external university team responsible for the experiments will be glad to have him. To them, one healthy prisoner is much like another, and the recommendation of the guards is all that they ask. Bringing someone into a prison, to enter the sensory deprivation tank in place of Marcus, costs a few thousand dollars. Getting Marcus out in that man’s clothes is more expensive, but not much harder.

  Not everything is so cheap. You would like a set of forged credentials, showing that you are a Nevada businessman making a trip up to space with a need for commercial secrecy? No problem, except money and lots of it. Many of the world’s best forgers are already behind bars, ready to serve you.

  The one piece of the puzzle that I couldn’t see how to solve would be on board the Godspeed itself. Marcus didn’t want company on his journey, so somehow he had to arrange to be left alone on the ship, long enough to make the first FTL transition.

  While I was still pondering that, Marcus was worrying a different issue.

  “I hope the ship’s power plant has been left on,” he said, as we were transferring some of his money to an anonymous bank account. “It would be a pain to have to bring all the systems back on-line.”

  I stared at him. “Thanks, Marcus. That’s what I needed.”

  His new forged credentials showed that he was a specialist in industrial safety, flying out to the Godspeed to power-down the ship’s dangerous nuclear equipment so that it would not explode. With that in hand, and a few casual words as he went aboard, it would be difficult to get anyone else to stay within a thousand kilometers.

  On the final morning we shook hands, for the first time in our long acquaintance. The door was unlocked from the outside. Marcus left the room, and a man in his twenties wearing a bewildered look and a bad case of acne appeared in his place. Within the hour he had been collected. I wondered briefly if he even knew what sensory deprivation experiments were. From the look of him, it would be little change from his existing condition.

  I settled down, to estimate Marcus’s progress. Now he would be approaching the airport, dropping off the rented car that had been arranged for him outside the prison and collecting his ticket. Now he should be at the space facility, undergoing a routine physical check that included a DNA identification. He ought to pass that easily—I had rented the best illegal hacker that money could buy, to slot an ID for Marcus into the right computer data bank. Eight hours later he should be ascending to orbit, and four hours after that he would be in an orbital transfer vehicle, on his way to the Godspeed.

  I kept the TV on, twenty-four hours a day. No news was good news, of course, until Marcus reached the Godspeed and could take the final step.

  I had plenty of time to wonder if my faith in Marcus was too great. It was one man against the world, his authority against the word of the Genizee.

  This morning, right on schedule, the television came alive. Every channel reported the inexplicable disappearance of the Godspeed. It was obvious that they had no idea what was happening, since the commentators were worried about the fate of the “safety inspector” who had been on board at the time. Within the hour, I was being questioned.

  I saw myself on television, and learned to my relief that Marcus Aurelius Jackson was “in prison, but unavailable for comment.” I said that I could tell them nothing useful. I thought that I looked worried.

  I was worried. And now, late in the afternoon, waiting for another television interview, I look at my guards and at the afternoon sun streaming in through the bars of the little window, and I am still worried.

  Although Marcus and the Godspeed left only ten hours ago, they ought to have been back long since. Following the path supposedly set by the Genizee would have taken our ship only a few seconds, even with the brief pauses between transitions needed to drop back into normal space and scan for the Genizee ships. Marcus could have traveled out half a light-year, well past the place they ought to have reached with their slow ships, and still been back hours ago.

  Strange thoughts have been running through my head. Suppose that Marcus found the Genizee ships, and they destroyed him so that he could not return and tell? We had never asked if their ships carried weapons. Then I realize that my thought is totally illogical. Marcus could find the Genizee only if they had told us the truth, and were lumbering along in their slow ships. In that case, they would have nothing to hide from us.

  But perhaps Marcus, having failed to find any trace of the Genizee on the way to Tau Ceti, had decided that they were concealing from us their true place of origin. It would be easy for him to take the Godspeed out for a second journey, toward some other probable stellar target. And if that produced no result, he might go out again. How many trips might he make, before he had enough evidence to prove to anyone back on Earth that the Genizee had been lying?

  I know Marcus very well. It is part of his nature that he likes to be absolutely sure of things. He will not risk being mocked again. I would settle for one trip out, and rest my case. He might feel he had to make a dozen.

  And that leads to another thought entirely. Half a dozen full-scale shots of the FTL drive, according to the Genizee, could lead to “major repercussions” in a region of space.

  How big a region? The Genizee were talking of the collapse to a black hole of part of spacetime, with the separation of that region from the rest of the universe. Are we dealing with the collapse of something the size of a ship…or a planet…or a solar system? Would the collapse take place violently, or quietly and unobtrusively? And would the Godspeed itself be inside that region, or excluded from it? Might Marcus and his ship, left outside, become the only evidence in the whole universe that humans had ever existed?

  Those are the sort of questions I am not equipped to answer. I wish that Marcus were here, to assure me that the Genizee were certainly lying, that I am talking nonsense, that I have nothing to worry about. I take some comfort from the setting sun, shining as usual through the little barred window.

  But I wish that dusk would come quickly. I want to look for the stars.

  afterword: godspeed

  Putting together a collection like this reveals to a writer his or her own obsessions. I see appearing again and again here one of my own convictions: that the biggest problem in physics today is the nature of space-time. The “space-time continuum” cannot be a continuum, if quantum theory and general relativity are both to be correct. It must be a far more complex geometrical entity, smooth when viewed at the macroscopic level (the way we see it), infinitely complex and turbulent when viewed at the sub-microscopic level of the Planck length (10-35 meters).

  That idea appears in “A Braver Thing,” in the article “Classical Nightmares…and Quantum Paradoxes,” in “Nightmares of the Classical Mind,” and now again in “Godspeed.” The problem preoccupies many other people, particularly workers in superstring theory. Most people believe that we will need a major conceptual breakthrough, including perhaps a totally new type of mathematics, before we have a good understanding of quantized space-time.

  My own worries are a bit different, and far simpler. When Newton produced his System of the World, most of his contemporaries could grasp the concepts in general, but they found that the calculus needed to work with the theory was quite beyond them. They were too rooted in the geometrical approach. When Faraday and Maxwell introduced fields as a central notion in physics, their older contemporaries faced a similar problem. Th
ey were too solidly grounded in classical mechanics. In the twentieth century, relativity and then quantum theory offered the same shock of adaptation to the older generation.

  Here is my worry: Suppose that ten or twenty years from now, a conceptual breakthrough is finally made. A new understanding of the nature of space-time is achieved, the problem that has interested me for so long. But I’m rooted in the “old” ideas of the late twentieth century. Suppose that I’m too set in my views to get my head around the explanation of my own obsession?

  One other thing, about the story rather than my own mental insecurities. I decided about two and a half years ago that Godspeed was a perfect name for a faster-than-light drive. I wanted to do a novel on the subject (I’m halfway through writing it at the moment), but I was busy with other things and worried that someone else would steal “my” title. So I wrote the short story, more or less to protect the word, and sold it to Analog. Everything worked better than I expected, and “Godspeed” became a 1991 Hugo finalist.

  .

  ——————————————————————————————————

  story: dancing with myself

  A diary has its uses, even if it is the sort of random, fragmented, fill-it-out-two-days-late sort of diary like mine.

  For instance, from my official work log I know that the second phase began seven months ago today. But only from my personal diary can I deduce that on that morning I woke up well before dawn. “Mylanta. Time runs, the stars move still, the clock will strike…” say my useful notes. And then, without any separating punctuation, “Nicotiana smells heavenly.”

  With this sort of assistance, I know that I got up suffering from indigestion, looked at the clock, and then went to the open window. And having got that far, I would guess that I heard a pre-dawn whisper of waking birds in the three oak trees at the end of the yard, stayed at the window to seek a glimpse of a raccoon padding thoughtfully across the lawn, and looked for, but could not see, the dark red blossoms of flowering tobacco below my bedroom window.

  But that was all. No portents, nothing to tell me, in spite of that quote from Faustus, that something extraordinary had begun. I had done a hellish thing, but no Mephistopheles came to drag me off to Hades.

  We were only two days short of summer solstice. I watched until the sun was on the horizon, then I went to shower and eat breakfast; toast and tea and jelly, and one scrambled egg. (No help from my diary; unless I am traveling, my stomach insists on a standard meal first thing in the morning.)

  By eight o’clock I was walking down the hill towards the six-hundred acre campus. By eight-fifteen I was in the lab, staring at the new equipment, most of it uncrated, that lined the room’s walls.

  “Good morning, Alison,” said Oscar Horowitz’s voice from the lab’s inner recesses. “I’ve had the same worry. We thought we wanted it all these years. Now we’ve got it we’re not sure.”

  Oscar could see me, but I couldn’t see him. I walked back to where he was tucked away in his own corner, behind a row of reagent racks and a gunmetal file cabinet.

  “Good morning, Oscar.”

  We had shared three thousand good mornings, so when he stood up I assume that I looked at him with no particular interest.

  I don’t think anyone, under any circumstances, would call Oscar Horowitz a handsome or an attractive man. He was in his late thirties, badly overweight, and in deplorable physical condition. I had never seen him move faster than a walk. His dark hair had already thinned to a frizzy mat that could not conceal the scalp beneath, despite ingenious combing, and he had a fondness for donuts that most mornings (but not today) left a faint dusting of powdered sugar on his cheek or chin.

  He was no beauty. On the other hand, nor was I.

  “If we don’t uncrate that chromatography unit and plug it in this morning,” I said, “the Receiving Department will be all over us. We promised last week we’d report on its condition.”

  “They send us too much, too much at once,” replied Oscar.

  “Mm. ‘To be a prodigal’s favorite, then, worse truth, a miser’s pensioner.’ Except in our case Wordsworth had it the wrong way round. If we were accustomed to new equipment we’d take all this in our stride and ask for more.”

  “I’ll unpack it.” Oscar put down his coffee cup. “In fact, I’ll do that right now. It’s my turn.”

  When two people share a small lab, and neither is senior to the other, peaceful co-existence is best guaranteed by strict alternation of duties. Oscar was right, it was his turn. I had taken delivery, just two days earlier, of a new microtomy and staining system that neither one of us knew how to use. I didn’t feel like fighting more manufacturers’ manuals, and in any case I had a nine o’clock class.

  I nodded appreciation and walked on back to my own desk, hemmed in by three tall bookcases. The mail had already been delivered. My in-tray held the latest issues of two monthly journals, plus five preprints that I had requested.

  I sat down, riffled through one of the journals for a few seconds, and reflected on the changing status of the Biology Department. As recently as three months ago, the university had refused to subscribe to this journal, arguing that it was expensive and only one faculty member had the slightest interest in its contents. Now anything that Oscar or I ordered was on our desk within a few days.

  The winds of change, or maybe of fear. For four years Oscar and I had submitted proposals to the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and seen our requests refused outright or squeezed down to a hardly useful pittance. Small private universities, with tiny Biology Departments and no Nobel Laureates, were not the places that the ball of Government funding came to rest. Last year we had gone through the usual ritual, with the usual pessimism, only to find that somewhere, far upstream in the government funding process, a mighty dam had broken. Our research was on replacement processes in the replication of DNA, a long way from the RNA retrovirus that causes AIDS. But our principal keywords, Blood and Phages and Transcription, had somehow hurled our proposal into the thalweg of AIDS mainstream research. Suddenly we had a million dollar grant, fancy new hardware, and enough soft money for a dozen graduate students.

  But in spite of all that, we had made no additions to the faculty. We still had our undergraduates, and we still had to teach courses. Cell Biology was still Cell Biology, and the arrival of grant funds had not conferred instant knowledge and wisdom on our students. In fact, judging from the results of my last class test, the opposite case could be made.

  I checked my appearance in a mirror hanging from the bookcase in front of my desk. Undergraduates are all right, but there is no point in giving them ammunition. Then I picked up my notes (the eighth time that they had been used for the course—time to stop updating with hand scribbles, and generate a new typed set) and walked to the far end of the lab. If I initiated an experimental run now it should be completed by the time that my class was over.

  As I did so I glanced at the computer summary. Apparently yesterday had been another wasted day. All the runs had produced negative results. If our “universal DNA converter” could exist, we seemed as far as ever from creating it.

  Our lab was halfway up the hill, and the Glenney Lecture Hall was at the bottom next to the big lake. I walked across the grass, avoiding groups of students sunbathing, walking dogs, and playing frisbee. Even at the best of times, I often felt that no more than ten percent of our student body was trying to learn anything. Now, with bright sunshine and term almost over, the end-of-year feeling was everywhere.

  The sun was in my eyes and I had to descend a steep flight of stairs, so I did not recognize Susan Carter waiting for me at the bottom until I was only a step or two away from her.

  “Doctor Benilaide?” She was a raven-haired girl with a clear complexion and a sumptuous figure, and when I saw her surrounded by would-be boyfriends I was sometimes
inclined to excuse her indifferent grades. She had somehow made it to her senior year, but she obviously lived in the middle of a continuous sexual thunderstorm. Horny adolescent males homed in on her, showed off in her presence, propositioned her during lectures, tried to talk her into evening dates instead of homework, and interrupted her every thought. Two of them waited for her now, standing at the side of the stone steps.

  “Doctor Benilaide,” she said again. “I know it’s late to ask, but do you think I could change to an Incomplete?”

  I shook my head. She wasn’t stupid, but this was still the student who through an entire class quiz in Cell Biology had managed to refer to the subject as cetology. “Sorry, Susan, I couldn’t even if I wanted to. The final grades went into the computer two days ago.”

  She didn’t argue, just nodded sadly and gave me a heart-melting look. I walked on towards the class, a class she was supposed to be attending but where I surely would not see her. When I was almost out of earshot I heard one of her attendant jocks laugh and say: “I told you. That’s Professor Been-a-laid. Never even been asked, I’d say. She flunks everybody who looks halfway human.”

  Halfway human. That’s right, pinhead, and that’s you.

  Two semesters ago I had flunked him.

  And did his remark upset me, when I had heard it a hundred times before? Damn right it did.

  My class was down to twenty-two people, from its mid-term maximum of twenty-six. Not bad, given the fine weather and the end of term. I dumped the pile of exam books on the front desk, and while the students dashed in to hunt for their own sets I went to the board and picked up a red magic marker (blackboard and chalk is better, I know, but as the years go by I am increasingly allergic to chalk dust).

  I drew a vertical line down the middle of the board, and wrote a heading in each half: MITOSIS on the left, MEIOSIS on the right. Then I waited. It was pointless to begin the class until each student had noted his own score and looked at my comments on the answers.