Jerri looked at Shearer. He shrugged. “Okay, I’ll concede it,” she said.
“Let me try refining it a little,” Uberg came in. “A living system selects materials from its environment that it builds into more complex components, from which it manufactures a replica of itself. How would that do?”
“I’d say that what Nick just mentioned is borderline,” Wade answered. “And there are already designs for self-replicating sambot-factory combinations that will go all the way from raw materials extraction, on up. That would have to make them living, by your definition, wouldn’t it?”
Uberg thought about it and nodded glumly. “I suppose it would,” he admitted. “Although I can’t say I like it.” He looked back at Elena. “Very well. You tell us,” he invited.
Everybody was listening intently by now, although in the case of the two Cyreneans more out of fascinated curiosity, since the concepts involved were unfamiliar to Chev and still relatively new to Eckelan. “We’re agreed that all plausible futures exist and possess equal attributes of reality?” Elena checked.
“Okay.” Shearer acknowledged. The others nodded.
It was one of the implications that fell out of the multiple dimensions of Heim physics, and connected with the earlier “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. All the futures that might be experienced actually existed “somewhere” — in a way, somewhat like the superimposed images of a composite hologram, but of stupefyingly greater complexity. Exactly how was still the subject of endless debates among philosophers and physicists. Although the mathematical formalism permitted all possible configurations of matter that were compatible with physics, it was generally acknowledged that not every reality that it was possible to construct in theory was necessarily represented. It was inconceivable, for example, that the inhabitants of any reality would spend their lives exchanging meaningless noises instead of conversing, or fill their bookshelves with volumes of blank pages, or one would exist in which birds built their nests upside down. This was what Elena had meant by “plausible.”
Elena went on, “Then here’s my proposition. What makes living and nonliving objects different is the way in which they come to experience the particular futures that they do. The future that, say, a rock lying on a hill gets to experience is determined totally by chance and forces external to itself. It’s like the hero of a Greek tragedy — resigned to enjoy or endure whatever the gods choose to inflict.
“But a living organism, while still subject to those factors, is able in addition, by altering its behavior, to change the probabilities of what would otherwise have happened. In many-worlds terms, you can think of it as being able to steer itself toward futures that it senses as being more ‘desirable’ as determined by some criterion.” She looked around just a Shearer raised a hand to stop her there.
“I could show you lots of automatic devices that take some kind of action to avoid hazards or gain a benefit,” he said. “A boiler safety valve. The soft-landing system of a space probe. Are you telling me they’re alive?”
Elena nodded as if she had expected it. “Two points against. First, you’re projecting your subjective ideas of what constitutes a hazard or a benefit into those mechanisms. Survival or destruction have no inherent value or meaning to them. Their behavior is imparted by the designers. Therefore it qualifies as an external force that they’re subjected to.”
“Hm, hm....” Shearer made a to-and-fro motion with his hand and rocked his head, saying that he’d have to think about that.
“It doesn’t arise from the inside,” Uberg said. “I agree.”
Elena continued, “And the second point has to do with how the steering toward a more desirable future comes about. Western tradition explains the world in terms of one-way cause-and-effect relationships propagating forward through time.” Suddenly Shearer was all attention. This sounded as if it had some bearing on his work at Berkeley. Work that Wade had been involved in. Elena nodded at him, as if she could almost read his thoughts. “And it works well in describing the mechanical world of energy, particles, rocks, boiler valves, and space robots. But it falls short when it comes to accounting for processes that are inwardly directed toward a purpose. To work toward a goal, you are seeking to attain some condition that hasn’t yet come about, but which exists in the future — are you not?”
“Aristotle’s final cause,” Uberg murmured.
Jerri shook her head. “Sorry. What’s that?”
“I’m not much up on Aristotle,” Elena confessed.
“He distinguished various ‘causes’ that bring an event about,” Uberg explained. “What he called the final cause is the result that it’s aimed at.” Jerri looked little the wiser. Uberg sought around for an example. “In the immediate sense, what causes a house to be built is people laying bricks. But you could also say that what ‘causes’ them to lay the bricks is the desirability in their minds of the benefits they stand to enjoy from the end product.”
“Hence, you could think of the future as affecting their present behavior,” Elena completed.
Wade had been containing himself for long enough. “Or to put it another way, organisms working toward some desired end are sensitive to an influence traveling backward in time,” he suggested. “Because isn’t that what ‘affecting present behavior’ means?” He sat back and regarded Shearer challengingly.
“Are we talking advanced quantum waves here?” Shearer asked. “A-Waves?” Wade nodded. By now there was no need to spell out for Jerri or Uberg what they meant.
Shearer jerked his head to look back at Elena. The pieces were starting to come together. Wade had said she was a specialist in biophotonics — which involved the sensitivity of living organisms to radiation.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Please....” Uberg put a hand to his brow as if making sure that he was hearing correctly. “Marc has told me about these impossible waves that are supposed to travel back in time.”
“Oh, they’re real,” Wade assured him.
“From the things I hear about the experiments at Berkeley, I don’t see how you can sound so confident.”
“Things have been happening that Marc and I haven’t had a chance to talk about yet,” Wade replied. He turned his head toward Shearer. “I said in my letter that more incredible things have been going on here than anyone ever imagined.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Shearer said.
Uberg was staring disbelievingly. “Are you telling us that living systems are sensitive to these waves somehow? That they respond to them?”
“Exactly so,” Elena came in again. “A purposeful organism needs a means of steering toward futures that it senses as being more desirable — a ‘compass,’ if you like. The subjective experience of such influences might be described by words so commonplace that we don’t think twice about them: ‘imagination’; ‘vision’; ‘apprehension’; ‘instinct.’ But the mere fact that these words exist in the language is significant in itself. The choices that an organism faces have meaning because it ‘feels’ such motivations. A rock does not.”
A long silence ensued while the newcomers absorbed this proposition. Shearer’s excitement at what he thought he was hearing must have showed. Did it mean that the work he had once dedicated himself to, and then had to resign himself to seeing written off as a lost cause, was resurrected? Wade’s confidence couldn’t have arisen from anything that had taken place at Berkeley.
Jerri seemed to be grappling with the implications and looked as if she was going to need time to come to terms with it. Uberg, whose field was the most directly impacted, was looking incredulous, while the two Cyreneans just shrugged at each other with baffled grins.
At last, Uberg, after staring at Wade fixedly for several seconds as if searching for a catch, said again, “Living organisms respond to waves propagating backward through time.”
“Yes,” Wade confirmed simply.
“Then could you explain how this is possible?”
“Better tha
n that. I’ll show you,” Wade replied. “But we’ll need to wait a few more hours. And I refuse to talk any more about it while we’re eating.”
“But we want to know!” Chev protested.
“Oh, you already know what Evan’s talking about,” Nick told him. “All Cyreneans do. It’s just that you don’t know how it works yet.”
“Enough for now,” Wade pronounced in a tone of finality. “We should be getting to know one another. Marc, tell us about how you got across from Florida to California while the Breakup was going on. It’s quite a story. That was when he and I first met, you know....”
CHAPTER THIRTY
It was well into the period of full darkness after Ra Alpha’s setting, which on Cyrene at this time of year equated to the small hours of the morning, when Wade led the way through to the rear portion of the house. Shallow steps descended through a connecting passageway to an adjoining structure. An Ibennisian from the north, called Dijen, had joined the party that had eaten earlier. He had experimented in chemistry over the years and was at Linzava learning something of the underlying physics.
The talk had turned back to the subject of biological systems being sensitive to A-waves. However, as Wade and Elena had pointed out using Uberg’s earlier analogy, simply drawing up the plans and embarking on the building of a house doesn’t guarantee that the goal will be achieved. All kinds of chance factors will affect the outcome, as well as the actions of others pursuing goals of their own that might conflict. As with bacteria attracted toward sunshine in a pond, all that could be “sensed” were changing patterns of relative light and dark in a fog of the various futures that might come about. And this was precisely what the mathematical formalism of quantum physics described. The traditional Copenhagen interpretation saw the actualizing of one possibility out of many as the collapse of a wave function, while the later many-worlds view held it to be the experiencing of one universe out of an ensemble, all equally real. This is why the past is remembered but not the future: What has been experienced is clear and unambiguous, whereas the future is still a haze of unrealized possibilities.
Wade had long maintained that the proper context for describing biological processes — from their ability to manipulate single entities like electrons and ions — was quantum physics, not classical physics. This had led him to seek guidelines for the design of an A-wave detector in the realm of biological emitter-absorber molecules. It was clear now how Elena’s work dovetailed in. But the work at Berkeley had never yielded a satisfactory demonstration. Now it sounded as if Wade was promising to deliver just that. So what did it mean?
Wade opened one of a set of double doors at the end of the passage and stepped through. A moment later he clicked a switch and the lights came on.
Electric?
Chev jumped back from the doorway with a cry of alarm and raised his arms protectively. Shearer, Jerri, and Uberg stared, stupefied, and then turned together toward Wade with looks that demanded an explanation. He smirked back at them unapologetically. Eckelen said something to Chev in Yocalan that sounded reassuring. Chev, looking slightly sheepish, came inside, shifting his gaze warily up and down and from side to side.
“Well, we could hardly get on with our work without some of the technical necessities from home,” Wade explained. “Might as well throw in a few comforts as well, eh?” He was evidently enjoying having kept this as a little secret.
“So where are you getting it from?” Shearer asked, still not recovered from his astonishment.
“We, er, borrowed one of the fission modules that they use back at the base,” Wade replied. “With our rate of usage, it should keep us going for years. But we’ll let them have it back then, I promise. It’s in a little building out back.”
“The ones we saw,” Shearer said to Jerri, who was looking at him inquiringly. “About garbage-can size.”
“They must still weigh a few hundred pounds,” Uberg said. “Don’t tell me you brought it over from Revo, the way we came.”
“Around by sea,” Wade answered. “The Woohosey is navigable all the way up to Ulla, which is the town at the bottom of this valley. The road from there is not too bad.... Actually, it was here before I was. Elena was the one who masterminded that, if you really want to know.”
“Well, I grew up surrounded by water,” she said, meaning Seattle.
Shearer wasn’t sure if they were in a laboratory or a flower garden. The area inside the door was familiar enough in a general kind of way, with several long tables serving as benches, and shelves of boxes and equipment — even a couple of computer stations. But the far end of the room resembled more a greenhouse. Banks of flowers of all sizes and colors stood in boxes beneath large glass panes forming a sloping roof. For a moment he was puzzled as to why the view past them should be dark, since it had been a clear evening when they arrived. Then he realized that the outsides were covered by shutters. Of course — Terran surveillance satellites.
The middle part of the room was a mixture of both. There were pieces of Terran equipment and instrumentation, including a couple of microscopes, electrical meters, and an oscilloscope, clustered in what looked like experimental setups; also things like vessels, glassware, wire, and terminals that appeared to be of local origin. But intermingled among it all were more flowers, some standing in pots, others attached to wires, probes, and other apparatus, or immersed in fluids, while some lay scattered on work tops and in dishes, exhibiting various stages of dissection.
“Moon flowers,” Jerri said, picking out a row along by the far wall. They were dark red, their nocturnal petals fully open.
“You know them already,” Elena commented.
“Oh yes. They’re everywhere. The Cyreneans associate them with wisdom and good fortune,” Jerri answered.
“They have good reason to,” Elena said.
There were also animal cages, emitting scratching and mewling noises from occupants awakened by the intrusion. Shearer turned to Wade with a baffled expression. Wade ignored the question written across his face said to Nick, “Do you think Brutus will mind if we disturb him?”
“When did Brutus ever mind getting some attention?” As he spoke, Nick made his way over to one of the cages and undid the catch of the door. An excited flurry of activity greeted him as he reached inside. “Hey, fella, how’s it going? Got some friends here who’ve come a long way to say hello. Want a crel nut? Here.”
Smiling, Wade led the others over to one of the display stations. It was a peculiar arrangement, with a small benchlike seat facing the screen, and a simple layout of a few large buttons, somewhat like a child’s play panel.
Nick rejoined them a few seconds later. Perched on the crook of his arm and clasping his shirt with fingered hands was an orange-furred animal about the size of a large cat, with a flat face, enormous round eyes, and a button nose. It was chewing something with evident relish and accepted another while it regarded the newcomers curiously. It supplemented its facial expressions with semaphorelike changes of the long ears protruding from the sides of its head, which it was able to move independently.
“An extraordinary species,” Wade remarked as Nick set the creature down in the seat and secured it with a restraining harness. “Arboreal for most of the time. They build themselves tree houses out of branches and leaves — like nests, but more elaborate and with roofs. Then every nine years, when the hottest period comes with Cyrene between the two suns and at its closest to the primary, it becomes aquatic for about six months.”
“Oz genes,” Nick said over his shoulder. “A natural yen for beaches.”
Brutus obviously knew the routine and was fiddling with the buttons on the panel. “This is a demonstration of responses to emotionally significant stimuli,” Wade told his listeners. “A pretty standard kind of routine... you would think. But this has a very unusual aspect to it, as you will see.”
Nick moved back to enter some codes into a pad connected to the panel, while Wade continued, “We present Brutus with pictu
res taken from two categories: Things that he likes...” Frames appeared in turn of baby individuals of the same species; another that was presumably an adult female in an unmistakably available pose; a selection of fruits and nuts; and something that looked like a cuddly toy. Brutus greeted each with a series of whooping and chattering sounds that were clearly approving. “And some things that he doesn’t.” There was a quick flash of an ugly, black, eellike form on scorpion legs with a gaping mouth showing ferocious fangs. Brutus yelped in terror and would have leaped out of the seat had it not been for the restraint. A multi-legged spider form crouching in the fork of a tree produced a similar reaction.
“We don’t show him too many of those,” Nick commented.
“Now we’re going to show him a series selected by a randomizer,” Wade said. “Brutus has two buttons. One prolongs the exposure. The other reduces it to a brief glimpse. A red light will come on when the randomizer has made its choice. Now watch.” A green light came on at the top of the panel. “That means we’re into a live run,” Wade commented, gesturing. The red light showed, followed an instant later by sunshine and trees. Brutus held and admired the scene until a timer extinguished it. Next, after a short pause, was the alluring female, who received a similar rating.... As did the cuddly toy. Then came the legged eel-snake. Brutus yipped and hit the other button to cut it off.
But already, Shearer had noticed something very strange. He checked it again, when the screen showed the face of Elena smiling, which Brutus prolonged. He had been right. Brutus was making his choice before the red light come on! Before the randomizer had even decided which category would be used.
Jerri and Uberg had seen it too, but Chev seemed to be missing the point — no doubt because the concepts were unfamiliar, and he didn’t know what to look for. Uberg’s mouth was hanging half open speechlessly. Nick lengthened the delay between the light and the display, so there could be no mistaking what was happening. Jerri looked from Shearer, to Elena, and then at Wade. “He knows!” she whispered. “You don’t need electronics to time anything. There’s no way you can mistake it. He’s pushing the buttons before the picture comes up.”
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