Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  “You were alive when they did that?” Yuri asked.

  “I’m not quite that old. That was back in the early twenties. I think the Farrell Group finished their work in the twenty-second century. Maybe even the twenty-first. I forget.”

  “Wow,” Steel shook her head. “It’s hard to even conceive.”

  “How did people talk?” Yuri asked. “How did they think?”

  ‘How do they think now?’ I wondered. But I said, “It was really Wickes’ work on dream states that made the big change.”

  “Wickes?” Steel puzzled, “I don’t think I’ve heard of him.”

  “Me neither,” Said Yuri. But he knew who Annette Funicello was. Were we getting wiser or just more bizarre?

  “Her,” I said, “She was the person who finally analyzed and codified pan-dimensional mental activity. You know, prescience and telepathy.”

  “You talking about Wickes?” Archie sauntered into the room, her hips gently swaying. In our heightened, post-Nav state, the three of us locked onto their warm, galactic curves as though her uterus was the source of all matter and energy. “Whoa! Settle down, folks. I just bonked Marcus’ brains out before he went on watch. I’m resting.” She sat down at the table. “Now what were we talking about?”

  With some effort I pulled my eyes back up to hers. “Uh, right. I was just saying that it was her work that made the net possible.”

  “I suppose so,” she replied, “although you certainly couldn’t have had it without bio-chips. And Wickes could never have understood pan-dimensional thought processes without the Farrell Group’s working model.”

  “Yeah,” said Yuri, “we were talking about them, too.”

  “But without Wickes’ discoveries the net would have been limited to speed-of-light information transfer,” I cut in. “We never would have been able to converse between Mars and Earth, never mind between star systems. Never mind freewheeling.”

  “I guess I never thought about it,” Steel said. “I get so used to something being there that I don’t question it.” She laughed. “I just complain when it’s not up to specs.”

  “What did she do?” Yuri asked.

  “Well, she studied dreaming—”

  I cut Archie off, “But what she really did was to figure out why people went pan-dimensional.”

  Steel: “How so?”

  Archie: “Well, there’d always been lots of anecdotal evidence of prescient visions and dreams—”

  Me: “But no one could ever make it happen with any consistency in a laboratory.”

  Archie: “Same with telepathy. They did all kinds of experiments with, I don’t know, with decks of cards. With all kinds of things.”

  Me: “Right. To see if someone could visualize what someone else was looking at.”

  Yuri: “What the hell were they trying to prove with that?”

  Archie: “Who knows.”

  Me: “The really brilliant question Wickes formulated was: what don’t people have telepathic and prescient experiences about?”

  Steel: “What do you mean?”

  Archie: “Well, the early research into this stuff was kind of scattered. They didn’t know what they were looking for. They were just acting on stories about how this or that person had had an experience. So they were trying to duplicate it in a laboratory.”

  Me: “Right. But Wickes was the first to realize that people always had visions about people, or things that were going to happen to people.”

  Archie: “And usually about people who were important to the person who had the vision.”

  Me: “Right. Nobody ever woke up in a cold sweat with the utter certainty that something was going to happen that wouldn’t affect anyone.”

  Archie: “Right. And if somebody had a feeling that someone was in trouble, it was almost always someone that the person cared deeply about.”

  Me: “Someone they felt close to.”

  Yuri hopped back in, “You see? Perspective! Just what I was saying. What is close to us looks important. What’s important to us looks close.”

  Steel smiled and rubbed Yuri’s shoulder. “You’re three steps ahead of me, Yuri, as usual. I still don’t see how this got us to the net.”

  “It goes all the way back to Bertrand Russell. Leonardo da Vinci! Plato! Lao-tse!” Yuri’s eyes were shining again.

  “Okay,” Steel said, still rubbing his shoulders. “We’ll get to them in a minute. Let’s finish up with this Wickes person, first.” She turned back to me.

  “What Yuri’s talking about, I think ...” I looked at him.

  “Speak on, o Big Kahuna,” he said, smiling.

  “... is the difference between our perception of a thing and the thing itself.”

  “And which is more real,” Yuri laughed.

  “Or which can be demonstrated to be real,” Archie put in more sedately.

  Steel said, “I’m going to take a wild guess here and say the object itself. Right?”

  “Not according to Bertrand Russell.” Yuri was the Cheshire cat.

  Steel laughed, “Okay, okay. Back to Wickes—”

  “Wickes decided that the reason telepathy research never got anywhere was that they were looking for the wrong thing,” Archie stated.

  “Right,” I said. “That it didn’t have to do with ‘reading’ another person’s mind, or picking up their ‘vibrations’ or anything like that. It concerned the nature of what she called a ‘perceptual node’—”

  Archie: “Meaning any sentient being.”

  “—and its relationship to what it perceived. She postulated that, like Einstein’s description of gravity, space and time curved through yet another dimension. The dimension of perception.”

  “But there are lots of perceptual dimensions,” Steel said.

  Yuri: “One for each perceptual node.”

  Steel: “Right.”

  Me and Archie: “Exactly.”

  Archie continued, “She said that, like Einstein’s two dimensional model: you know, where all the stars and planets are like steel balls sitting on a stretched rubber membrane, causing little dimples that stretch it into a third dimension?”

  Steel: “Right.”

  Archie: “Well, Wickes made a model where the dimples weren’t made by an object’s mass, but by its importance to the observer. So that even a star as large as Betelgeuse would make only the tiniest dent to someone on Earth, even if they could look up in the sky and see it directly. Whereas their best friend or a close relation would make a huge impression, even if that person was on the other side of the planet.”

  “Or on a different planet,” I added.

  “She modeled this membrane as a sphere—”

  “With the observer in the middle.”

  “Right. And everything that was or had been perceived was out on the surface of the sphere. The more experience and value that surrounded any particular object, the heavier it became, the greater the impression it made on the surface of the sphere and the closer it dropped into the middle of the sphere where the observer was.”

  “So physical distance didn’t matter—” Steel started.

  “In the perceptual dimension it didn’t even exist,” Archie answered. “Time didn’t exist. All that existed was the perceptual relationship between the observer and the perceived.”

  “Well, this sure starts to sound like what we do on the net.” Steel’s eyes kept flicking back and forth from Archie’s to mine. Yuri was grinning like a tiger and kicking his legs under the table.

  “With this model she could go back to the people who claimed to have had these experiences and try to formulate them mathematically. Then she programmed them into the Farrell Group’s virtual brain and sat back to see what would happen.”

  “And it dreamt,” Yuri said.

  Archie nodded.

  “Wow,” said Steel, “that must have been something.”

  “Well,” I turned to her, “it turned ego-centrism into something that could be used, instead of just a fact of
human existence.”

  Yuri got up and poured himself a cup of coffee. “And when you hook up billions of these perceptual nodes on the net—bingo!—perspective vanishes.”

  Archie nodded, “The point of view ceases to be a point.”

  “That was the thing.” I was getting cranked again. “When Wickes’ discoveries were applied to the net time and distance could be bypassed. If you tapped into minds that were in the pan-dimensional dream state you could communicate instantaneously.”

  Steel shook her head, “And that eventually led to freewheeling. Hmm.” She got up and started cooking. That’s the second thing that hits you after a watch—hunger. But you have to kind of re-enter the material plane first.

  “Time dilation!” Yuri had put his coffee aside and was pulling things out of the pantry. “Perceptual nodes approaching the speed of light. Other perceptual nodes moving at planetary speeds. Dissonant frames of reference! Temporal perspective vanishes. No time, no space, no relevance—Wango! Off you go into the wild atemporal yonder.”

  Tamika wandered in and joined the fracas. I hadn’t spent much time with her to that point, but she was nice—high energy. Kind of a female Yuri. She looked at him as she walked in and said, “It sounds like someone is still violating causality.”

  Yuri’s reply was concise, if somewhat inelegant. “Bite me,” he said. “If you bite me, I will be bitten. If I am bitten, I will bite you back. If I bite you back, we will have sex. If we have sex, we will go to sleep. Cause and effect.” He stuffed a lettuce leaf into his mouth.

  “Mo?” Steel asked me, “Do you know when they first noticed the effect of time dilation on the net? You must have been around th—Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” I replied, “I’m getting used to it. Again.”

  “You’re just such a treasure trove of experience.”

  “Walking history book, that’s me.” My voice was not utterly free of ironic inflection.

  “It was the first interstellar flights, wasn’t it?” Tamika sat down across from me.

  I nodded. “They expected it to have an effect. They didn’t think it would provide anything beneficial.” A bowl of Yuri’s special salad appeared before me. I gave it the attention it deserved. “I mean, Yuri’s right—”

  “Kowabunga!” he set out glasses and started pouring the wine.

  “—in that it really was just a matter of perspective, or the triumph over perspective.” That sounded pompous to me even as I said it. Oh, well. More salad.

  “Leonardo da Vinci!” Yuri helped himself to the piece of art Steel had produced and passed the bowl. “He knew that if you wanted to make a two-dimensional painting look like a three-dimensional perception of the world, you had to lie about size relationships. You had to deliberately and systematically distort the truth. Seeing isn’t believing.”

  “The same turned out to be true for time,” I said between mouthfuls. “It was just a lot harder for us to understand that because, whereas spatially every person had their own unique point of view—”

  Yuri: “Everyone sees their own rainbow.”

  “—everyone was at the exact same point in the time continuum. Our view of time was just as distorted as our view of space, but every individual’s perspective on time was identical.”

  Yuri: “Temping isn’t believing, either.”

  Archie: “Until people started to experience time dilation.”

  Me: “Right.”

  Tamika: “That must have turned people’s minds completely inside out, the first time it happened.”

  Me: “The thing that surprised us was that we didn’t fall out of contact. The contact just got really strange.”

  Steel: “I’ll bet.”

  Tamika: “How did people react to the experience?”

  The others turned to me as well. It made sense, I guess. This was probably the juiciest gossip they’d heard in centuries—how the human race lost its virginity. They wanted all the details.

  I thought for a moment. “We didn’t know what to think, at first. We couldn’t figure out what we were looking at.”

  “Kow - a - bunga!” Yuri was kicking his legs again.

  I laughed, “Yeah. It was ...” I searched for an image and suddenly tears came to my eyes. “It was like losing your family.”

  They got very quiet. Intense. Focused.

  “You know?” Maybe they didn’t know. “Everything came unhitched. Nothing was perceivable. Our minds were so geared to being temporal ... sequential. I guess it must have been like before a baby learns to see. Lots of input— overwhelming amounts of input—but no way to make sense of it.”

  Tamika said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what that word means.”

  “What word?” I asked.

  She tried to get her mouth around it, “B—bebby?”

  “Oh,” I said, “its like a newbie.”

  “Oh, okay. I’m with you.”

  I thought some more. “It was just—we didn’t have—I mean, now, we have a whole rational, spiritual framework to place the experience in, you know? Then—we were just winging it.”

  “Yeah!” Yuri was grinning again.

  Archie shook her head. “It’s just unfathomable to me how people could think that space-time was it.”

  “A few centuries earlier they thought the sun went around the earth and the universe was made of nested crystalline spheres.”

  “Yeah,” she nodded, “I guess so.”

  “But it wasn’t just the way we thought of the universe,” I started again. “It was the way we thought of ourselves.”

  “Mm,” Yuri said, “Humanism.”

  “Right,” I agreed. “You have to remember that it was a pre-perceptualist culture. The concepts ‘important to me’ and ‘important’ were almost universally thought of as congruent.”

  “God is on our side,” Yuri again.

  “What’s that mean?” Tamika was like a shark smelling blood when there were new concepts in the air. New to her.

  Archie answered, “You know, paternalism? Paternal power hierarchies headed by quasi-parental deities?”

  Tamika: “Whoa, you lost me.”

  “Well, it was—let’s see, how to put this—”

  Yuri: “Static belief systems.”

  Yuri’s obtuseness was helpful as always. “What?” Tamika said.

  Yuri asked her, “Do you have a concrete, unchanging system of beliefs about your relationship to the cosmos?”

  “What are you yapping about?” she replied. “Of course not.”

  “People used to.” He was the Cheshire cat again.

  “A concrete, unchanging system of beliefs.” She wasn’t buying it.

  “Mm-hmm,” Yuri grinned.

  “How the hell did that work?” she asked. “What did they do when they learned something new?”

  “You have to remember,” I hopped back in, “people used to live only a few decades.”

  “And there were whole centuries where they didn’t learn anything at all,” Yuri added.

  “Hmm.” She was starting to buy it.

  “Some really insightful person would come along and say some wonderful things that no one had thought of before. Someone else would write them down in a book and that was it. The word had been received from the fountain of absolute, unchanging truth and people would fight wars over which book was right.” Yuri could be quite eloquent when he bothered.

  “I guess they couldn’t see how ignorant they were,” Tamika mused.

  “They were so alone,” said Steel. “The only ways they had to get to know each other were conversation and sexuality.” Then she looked at me. “What are you grinning about?”

  “Oh, sorry,” I answered. “I was just thinking: this sure beats the conversations I had back at ’Burbs’ place.”

  Her smile had history in it. Our history, I thought. I hoped.

  It was a great meal. It wasn’t until the end of it that we sort of collectively realized that Drake was still gone. />
  And he wasn’t coming back.

  Chapter 13

  The boost watch-list was a modified watch-in-three with either Steel, Marcus or Tamika heading the watch and the other two positions filled from the remaining five crewmen. In the three-and-a-half day boost there were fourteen six-hour watches, so we got mixed together pretty well. The only two people I didn’t get a chance to work with before we started freewheeling were Archie, whom I felt I knew, at least a little, and Alice, who was one of those people that the more I got to know her, the less I got to know her.

  She was very quiet most of the time, but unlike Jemal, I always felt like she had something to say. She just usually didn’t say it. Her hair was a thick, tousled blond mop, strands of which she would regularly brush out of her eyes. She was quite a bit shorter than the rest of us, but she seemed tall. Her limbs were long for her body, like a dancer’s. Kind of a miniature Steel without the fur. But at the same time she often seemed smaller than she was, sometimes in a way that made me want to take care of her, sometimes in a way that made me want to watch my back.

  Alice didn’t spend as much time in the common room as the rest of us. I ran into her a couple of times hanging out with Ham in the corridor. She’d wrestle with him or chase him around, but when she saw me coming she’d stop until I’d gone by. It wasn’t that she was unfriendly, but there always seemed to be something in front of her eyes, a dark thing that never went away. She could be very funny, with a biting insight that could really take me by surprise; then, other times, she wouldn’t say anything at all.

  And she had this uncanny quality as if—I don’t know—as if she wasn’t quite used to her body. She wasn’t ungraceful, but sometimes her hands would wander around like a cat’s tail, rubbing her arms, brushing at her hair, not knowing quite where to rest. And there were strange gaps in her knowledge. Odd stuff, like the Extasya story. Where could she have been to have missed that? It seemed like there had been decades and decades when you couldn’t log on without getting lurid details shoved into your cortex, and yet she obviously had never heard of Extasya.

  One time when Yuri and I were coming off watch together I asked him about Alice. He looked at me with that ‘Is this joke on you or on me?’ look of his and said, “What do you want to know?”