That’s how Golden were to the ephemerals, but unlike those tribespeople most ephemerals did not have the simple honesty to admit it. They tried and failed to fit Golden to their own limited templates of behaviour and called them idle hedonists because that was the only part of Golden life they understood.
Talbeck hadn’t thought about that for a long time, but it was one of the few thoughts that passed through his mind after the Witnesses shut him away with the unaligned scientists in the far end of the science module. Like the old men and women on the road out of the Chongqing spaceport, that jungle tribe had known what it had wanted from its Gods. Someone to arbitrate disputes, someone to confide in, to confirm that it was a good time to pick fruit, that this was the best field for planting the next rice crop. A need for domestic scale, human-sized intervention, no more. Leave be the mysteries of creation, the secret history of time: they were not for humankind. The world was as it seemed to be. Only gods need worry about what lay behind the veil.
The Witnesses, though, were as aggressive as any of the triune of monotheistic Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Organized not for individual but for bureaucratic, hierarchical needs. Looking (if they were looking at all) not for guidance but for confirmation of the elaborate fine-scale maps of the irreducible ideological rock of their faith. So here. For all their talk of supplication, the Witnesses had not burst into the Galaxy’s core in search of enlightenment. They were behaving as if the mysteries to which Gunasekra had alluded could be strip-mined for human transcendence.
Talbeck was thinking about this in a slow, desultory way when the Professor Doctor himself found him.
Gunasekra said, ‘You do not mind if I join you here, I hope. I escape from the bustle of my companions for a little while.’
Talbeck was lying on a couch in one of the disused probe interface cubicles, where he could keep an eye on the to and fro of the dozen or so imprisoned scientists without being a part of it. He had his servant raise the headrest so he could sit up, indicated the foot of the couch to Gunasekra. The scientist glanced at Talbeck’s impassive servant, then perched at the very edge of the couch and smiled at Talbeck.
‘What are they doing, your companions?’
‘The young fellow, Valdez, is trying to hack into the information streams from the probes which the Witnesses are flying at the hyperstructure. I think that it is either too early or too late for that, but I do not have the heart to tell my friends. They are angry at the Witnesses, and who can blame them?’
Gunasekra had turned his head to look at the cluttered room beyond the cubicle, where Jake Bonner and Seppo Armiger were holding an earnest discussion over a tank which displayed the accretion disc. Armiger was reaching into the image to sketch orbital paths, his long pigtail swinging like a pendulum across his naked back—he wore only a pair of loose many-pocketed trousers—as he moved a lightpen in wide arcs.
Talbeck said, ‘And are you angry?’
‘Yes, perhaps I am.’ Gunasekra was studying the scribing on his palms. Light shone on his sleek black hair. ‘I think you did not come here out of scientific interest, Seyour Barlstilkin, And I certainly did not come here to conduct seminars, or to map Wolf-Rayet and T-Tauri stars in the gas halo. If I’m being presumptuous, do stop me, but I think we have something in common. A restlessness…a dissatisfaction, perhaps.’
‘Let’s say a dissatisfaction, on my part,’ Talbeck said, ‘although it is a little more complicated than that.’
‘For most of my life I worked towards a single goal. I was lucky enough to arrive there, too, luckier than many, who get diverted, or find themselves at a very different place, and without a map. While I was working, I didn’t really think about what would happen if I proved what I set out to prove. But now that I have, I find myself diverted all the time. My work was not a simple thing, and when I completed it I found that I did not have the time to simply stand back and look at it, the whole entire edifice. Well, that is not quite true. There was a moment, you know, just a moment, when the last solution suddenly came to me, and I knew what no one else knew.’
‘You defined the shape of the Universe.’
‘That is how the popularizers describe it; well, who am I to argue? The equations present a unique solution for the evolution of the geometries of urspace and contraspace, so the appropriate cross-section will depict their present topological relationship. But I was interested in their final form. If I may shed my false modesty, everyone knows that the Universe began from a singularity, a dimensionless point of infinite temperature containing all the energy, or mass, that we see around us today. Since space-time breaks down at such a naked singularity, anything may arise from it. But no one knew which of the infinitely many potential solutions actually described the Universe and determined its fate. Would it continue to expand forever? Would it eventually stop expanding and fall in on itself, squeeze back down to a singularity and start again? That is determined by the geometry of space-time. If you know what it looks like, you know where it is going. I am lucky enough to live in a time when the twistor equations necessary for contraspace transition were sufficiently developed to be applicable to classical Schwarzchild-Hawking-Einstein cosmological geometries. And that is what I did.’
‘It’s not quite flat, is it? The topology of the Cauchy hypersurface means that gravity will eventually balance expansion. Things will go backwards. Is that right?’
Gunasekra was smiling. ‘And you said that you were no scientist, Seyour Barlstilkin.’
‘I took a hypaedia course on your work, when I learnt that you were here. The trouble with hypaedia is that it imprints facts, but you have to be taught the connections. But now you are not happy with your discovery?’
‘That is not why I am here, or not exactly. I spent three years after my epiphany testing derivations, making sure that the intuitive short cuts I had used were not wrong. But after I published my paper, you see, people have either been chipping away at the edifice I constructed, or trying to stick their pennant on one part or another and claim it for their own. I am interested now in balance and harmony, in whether there can be a class of universes like our own, or whether each universe in the multiverse is unique. But I am forever expected to rush back and defend my choice of material, erase slogans that someone has painted across a wall…I hope this is clear to you. Mathematics is rigorous and unforgiving, but beautifully simple. It says what it means. Language, ah, I find language clumsy. Too much is implied. Words echo other words. I get lost in the metaphors, you might say.’ Gunasekra smiled. ‘Well, it may be difficult, but I think you would prefer it if I did not resort to mathematics.’
‘As you said, I’m no scientist. May I offer you refreshment, Professor? The circumstances are not the best, but that is no excuse for being a poor host. I expect that my servant can find some way of obtaining tea, at least. Do you like jasmine tea? A favourite of mine, especially when I am in need of calm.’
‘I don’t want to be a poor guest and refuse, but in our present position is it not too much trouble…?’
‘It is why I have my servant,’ Talbeck said, and gave her his instructions.
Gunasekra watched her leave. ‘I confess that she makes me nervous. Perhaps even mathematicians are allowed one superstition. I cannot help wondering if in some corner of her brain, underneath the computer construct, the ghost of the original personality still lurks.’
‘I’ve never really thought about it. When I bought her, I was assured of her reliability. So far she has not let me down.’
‘It is simply this business of owning people, even when they are brain-wiped shells. It disturbs me.’
‘Everyone is owned, in one way or another, Professor. Even those who do not admit to it. Especially those. The Navy sponsored your work here, whatever it is, so wouldn’t you say they have an interest in your thoughts?’
‘Oh, my thoughts aren’t very interesting or comprehensible to anyone, much of the time. Much of the time, in fact, even I do no
t understand them. The Navy is quite welcome to ask me any question at all about my thoughts, and I’ll answer them as I’ll answer anyone else who asks, I hope as truthfully as I can. I do not put any price on them, Seyour Barlstilkin. You know, before the wars, four or five centuries ago, artificial intelligences were able to insinuate themselves into the nerve paths of human brains, at first through machine interfaces, then directly, by imposing standing wave patterns inside peripheral nerves of the skin. There is speculation that fragments of ghost personalities of artificial intelligences have perpetuated themselves in human brains ever since, passing from mother to fetus. Many of our thoughts and prejudices may not be our own, but infections, if you like, viruses of the psyche. Well, all I mean to say is that there is nothing unique about a thought simply because I happen to host it.’
Talbeck knew that Gunasekra was, in his subtle way, circling around the core of his dissatisfaction, circling towards it as the stripped particles of the accretion disc spiralled towards the gravity sink of the black hole. He came with no pretence of supplication, and Talbeck liked him for that, recognizing pride as strong as his own. Talbeck said, ‘You mentioned that you were not unhappy with your discovery, Professor, yet now I feel that you are attempting to disclaim it.’
‘Does it seem that way? Well, perhaps. Perhaps. Not the work itself, but the use it was put to. I mentioned that I made extensive use of twistor equations. Some of that work attracted the attention of the Navy. They found that it was useful in predicting how phase graffles behaved deep in gravity wells.’
There was a pause. Talbeck said, ‘They blow up, don’t they?’
‘When space-time geometry is sufficiently distorted by gravity, the phase graffle cannot effect the transfer from the energy state of urspace to that of contraspace. Instead of translating the ship into a state where it can achieve multiple velocities of the speed of light, there is a kind of blow-out. Usually it happens so quickly that the entropy loss destroys only the phase graffle and the ship that carries it. But the Navy found a way of prolonging that instant by a femtosecond or so. The entropy loss is much greater, and it affects a much larger volume of space.’ Gunasekra was studying his hands again. ‘I suppose that you know,’ he said softly, ‘what the Navy did to end the war around the star Bonner Durchmeisterung plus twenty degrees 2465? They flew an unmanned singleship in a slingshot encounter with the star, and at closest approach, less than a hundred kilometres above the surface of the star, they switched on the phase graffle. Red dwarf stars are prone to flares in any event, but the resulting instability ripped away most of its photosphere, and that was what destroyed all of the asteroid habitats of the so-called Enemy. In fact, it literally vaporized many of them.’
‘Did you notice that as soon as the Alea Campaigns were over the Enemy acquired a sudden capitalization? They were only a lower-case enemy while we were fighting them.’
‘The state always has its demonology,’ Gunasekra said. ‘The British philosopher David Hume wrote that since the rulers are few and the ruled are many, the few must control the many by controlling their opinions. It is always convenient to have an external enemy to hand, against which to inflame the masses.’
Talbeck said, ‘Like you, I am interested in showing that the Enemy does not have horns and cloven hooves.’
‘Or a barbed tail,’ Gunasekra said, smiling.
‘I believe we may be on the same side, Professor. You said that you wanted to tell me something that you couldn’t tell your colleagues. May I ask what it is?’
Half a dozen people had now gathered around the tank in the room beyond the cubicle, although it was only displaying the dancing snow of an untuned channel. Dorthy Yoshida’s former boyfriend, Valdez, was typing command strings while the others watched him. Gunasekra looked at them and then edged a little way up the couch, closer to Talbeck. ‘The expedition to the hyper-velocity star was launched only because the Navy hoped to discover another nest of the Enemy, or perhaps a new enemy entirely. The Vingança was dangled like bait around Colcha for just that purpose. But I suppose you know that. Dorthy Yoshida told us that the hypervelocity star was not sent by the Enemy, however, and I see no reason to disbelieve her. If the Enemy knew that intelligent life would evolve on Earth, then they would already have destroyed us. The hypervelocity star is not a weapon, but I think both a message and a delivery system for the gate through which we travelled. And now we are here, at the core, and the Witnesses look for gods who will save us from ourselves. But I fear that they will find only what the Navy was looking for.’
‘The marauders, you mean.’
‘Ah yes, that is what Dorthy Yoshida called them. I regret that I have had only partial access to reports about the P’thrsn episode.’
‘It is what the Alea who lost the war here at the core called their enemy. But that was more than a million years ago. Are you saying they are still here, still alive? You have evidence?’
‘I have only an incomplete set of data. But I think that they are still here, and that they are certainly not the benevolent gods the Witnesses dream of. There is a rise—’
He stopped, because someone had rapped on the cubicle’s doorframe. For a moment, Talbeck thought that it was his servant: she had been gone a damnably long time. But it was Jake Bonner, his thin wrinkled face split in a wide grin.
‘Abel, Talbeck,’ Bonner said. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but you’re about to miss it. Valdez has managed to hack his way into the Witnesses’ probe, and it’s the damnedest thing, it really is.’
It took Talbeck several minutes to understand what he was seeing in the holotank. An inset showed a long range view of the hyperstructure, and that helped orientate him. The end pointing inward, towards the accretion disc, was a vast shadow sphere, its surface curiously infolded, seemingly riddled with holes and prickly with spines of different lengths. It might have been the battered shell of a sea-urchin, except the smallest spine was more than half a million kilometres long: standing on Earth, it would have reached beyond the orbit of the Moon. And the biggest was almost as wide as Earth’s orbit, and so long that it looked like a thread dwindling towards the glowing gas clouds. Hung beyond its vanishing point was a speck of white light, pure against the tattered crimson fluorescence of the gas clouds.
The drone had re-entered urspace beyond the shadow sphere. Now it was tracking down the length of the biggest spine, over what looked like a smooth blood-red shield divided by parallel threads of red light. The whole thing stretched away like an exercise in perspective.
Looking at the inset, looking at the monotonous view, Talbeck slowly put it together. The spine was at least half a light year long, lit by light channelled from the source at its far end along dozens of fieldlines. The shield was a glacier bigger than a dozen solar systems, frozen oxygen layered on top of nitrogen snow, with water ice dozens of kilometres deep beneath.
Valdez was explaining that this was archive material the probe had downloaded just before it made another jump through contraspace. ‘The glacier goes on for about a hundred billion kilometres, so I guess the Witnesses got impatient. I think it’s re-entering urspace in five minutes. I don’t have good access to their command sequences.’
Seppo Armiger said, ‘You’re sure they don’t know you’re doing this?’ There was a vertical crease above the bridge of his hawk-like nose as he studied the tank.
‘Oh, I’m not sure at all,’ Valdez said. ‘Something has gotten the Witnesses flustered and I’m getting this through lines they left open. If they think to close them, I guess they might spot my little parasitic access program. If you’re worried, I can always switch it off right now.’
A couple of people laughed, relieving the tension.
Jake Bonner had been scribbling on a slate; now he handed it to Gunasekra. ‘Whatever it’s made of, it can’t be matter, Abel. Even diamond wouldn’t be strong enough to resist the tidal pressures to which such a large structure would be subject in orbit around the black hole: it would flow like water
.’
Gunasekra smiled and handed the slate back. Watching him, Talbeck suddenly wondered where his servant was, and then he forgot all about her, because a crawling raster was erasing the view of the ice plain and replacing it with something else.
‘Christos,’ Valdez said. ‘It looks like the Witnesses might have found their gods after all.’
4
* * *
Although the long tunnel which connected the command module cluster to the rest of the ship arced steeply upwards, generated gravity and dim red lighting conspired to create an illusion of an ever-receding slope. Walking slowly beside Gregor Baptista, with Ang Poh Mokhtar’s hand laid on the crook of her elbow and a comet tail of Witness scientists trailing behind, Dorthy felt as if she was working an endless treadmill in the depths of Christian Hell, in a nightmare from which she would wake to the luxuriously appointed five-room cell deep beneath the Museum of Mankind in Rio de Janeiro. Still on Earth, still in the custody of the Federation Navy…
Meanwhile, Baptista, grave and lucid, shaping each sentence with the care of a master builder, was telling Dorthy that they lived in a time of grace, a time long after the early struggles of intelligence had passed. As the Universe had aged, he said, so it had grown more hospitable to intelligence. It takes a long time, four or five billion years, for a planet to evolve an ecosystem sufficiently complex to support an intelligent species. And that humble dawn was only the first stage in the evolution of intelligence itself: evolution away from the narrow boundaries of one world, one stellar system, one galaxy, until it was bounded only by the space-time architecture of the Universe itself. In short, an inevitable evolution towards godhood.
‘It was once thought that the cumulative probabilities of life evolving on any particular world multiplied out to a vanishingly small figure,’ Baptista said. ‘It was thought that, given the finite age of the Universe, there was only one chance or less of it arising. That as it had arisen on Earth it could not have arisen elsewhere, not on any of the worlds of the four hundred billion stars of this Galaxy, nor on any world of any star of any galaxy out of the billions of galaxies in the observable Universe. But that was merely a refinement of Ptolemy’s argument for the Earth’s central importance, of course, and of course we know now that life will exist wherever it can, on Earth, on Elysium, on Serenity, even on poor Novaya Rosya, Dr Yoshida.’
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