Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Cordelia took this all in, scribbling calculations, cross-checking everything to her own satisfaction. “Okay. So why does that have to break down? Why can’t we just keep being blue-shifted?”

  Vikram zoomed in on the diagram. “All phase shifts ultimately come from interactions — intersections of one world line with another. In the Kumar model, every network of world lines has a finite weave. At each intersection, there’s a tiny phase shift that makes time jump by about ten-to-the-minus-forty-three seconds … and it’s meaningless to talk about either a smaller phase shift, or a shorter time scale. So if you try to blue-shift a wave indefinitely, eventually you reach a point where the whole system no longer has the resolution to keep reproducing it.” As the wave packet spiralled in, it began to take on a smeared, jagged approximation of its former shape. Then it disintegrated into unrecognisable noise.

  Cordelia examined the diagram carefully, tracing individual components through the final stages of the process. Finally she said, “How long before we see evidence of this? Assuming the model’s correct?”

  Vikram didn’t reply; he seemed to be having second thoughts about the wisdom of the whole demonstration. Gisela said, “In about two hours we should be able to detect quantised phase in the experimental beams. And then we’ll have another hour or so before — ” Vikram glanced meaningfully at her — privately, but Cordelia must have guessed why the sentence trailed off, because she turned on him.

  “What do you think I’m going to do?” she demanded indignantly. “Collapse into hysterics at the first glimmering of mortality?”

  Vikram looked stung. Gisela said, “Be fair. We’ve only known you three days. We don’t know what to expect.”

  “No.” Cordelia gazed up at the stylised image of the beam that encoded them, swarming now with everything from photons to the heaviest mesons. “But I’m not going to ruin the Dive for you. If I’d wanted to brood about death, I would have stayed home and read bad flesher poetry.” She smiled. “Baudelaire can screw himself. I’m here for the physics.”

  ***

  Everyone gathered round a single window as the moment of truth for the Kumar model approached. The data it displayed came from what was essentially a two-slit interference experiment, complicated by the need to perform it without anything resembling solid matter. A sinusoidal pattern showed the numbers of particles detected across a region where an electron beam recombined with itself after travelling two different paths; since there were only a finite number of detection sites, and each count had to be an integer, the pattern was already “quantised”, but the analysis software took this into account, and the numbers were large enough for the image to appear smooth. At a certain wavelength, any genuine Planck scale effects would rise above these artifacts, and once they appeared they’d only grow stronger.

  The software said, “Found something!” and zoomed in to show a slight staircasing of the curve. At first it was so subtle that Gisela had to take the program’s word that it wasn’t merely showing them the usual, unavoidable jagging. Then the tiny steps visibly broadened, from two horizontal pixels to three. Sets of three adjacent detection sites, which moments ago had been registering different particle counts, were now returning identical results. The whole apparatus had shrunk to the point where the electrons couldn’t tell that the path lengths involved were different.

  Gisela felt a rush of pure delight, then an aftertaste of fear. They were reaching down to brush their fingertips across the weave of the vacuum. It was a triumph that they’d survived this far, but their descent was almost certainly unstoppable.

  The steps grew wider; the image zoomed out to show more of the curve. Vikram and Tiet cried out simultaneously, a moment before the analysis software satisfied itself with rigorous statistical tests. Vikram repeated softly, “That’s wrong.” Tiet nodded, and spoke to the software. “Show us a single wave’s phase structure.” The display changed to a linear staircase. It was impossible to measure the changing phase of a single wave directly, but assuming that the two versions of the beam were undergoing identical changes, this was the progression implied by the interference pattern.

  Tiet said, “This is not in agreement with the Kumar model. The phase is quantised, but the steps aren’t equal — or even random, like the Santini model. They’re structured across the wave, in cycles. Narrower, broader, narrower again … ”

  Silence descended. Gisela gazed at the pattern and struggled to concentrate, elated that they’d found something unexpected, terrified that they might fail to make sense of it. Why wouldn’t the phase shift come in equal units? This cyclic pattern was a violation of symmetry, allowing you to pick the phase with the smallest quantum step as a kind of fixed reference point — an idea that quantum mechanics had always declared to be as meaningless as singling out one direction in empty space.

  But the rotational symmetry of space wasn’t perfect: in small enough networks, the usual guarantee that all directions would look the same no longer held up. Was that the answer? The angles the two beams had to take to reach the detector were themselves quantised, and that effect was superimposed on the phase?

  No. The scale was all wrong. The experiment was still taking place over too large a region.

  Vikram shouted with joy, and did a backwards somersault. “There are world lines crossing between the nets! That’s what creates phase!” Without another word, he began furiously sketching diagrams in the air, launching software, running simulations. Within minutes, he was almost hidden behind displays and gadgets.

  One window showed a simulation of the interference pattern, a perfect fit to the data. Gisela felt a stab of jealousy: she’d been so close, she should have been first. Then she began to examine more of the results, and the feeling evaporated. This was elegant, this was beautiful, this was right. It didn’t matter who’d discovered it.

  Cordelia was looking dazed, left behind. Vikram ducked out from the clutter he’d created, leaving the rest of them to try to make sense of it. He took Cordelia’s hands and they waltzed across the scape together. “The central mystery of quantum mechanics has always been: why can’t you just count the ways things can happen? Why do you have to assign each alternative a phase, so they can cancel as well as reinforce each other? We knew the rules for doing it, we knew the consequences — but we had no idea what phases were, or where they came from.” He stopped dancing, and conjured up a stack of Feynman diagrams, five alternatives for the same process, layered one on top of the other. “They’re created the same way as every other relationship: common links to a larger network.” He added a few hundred virtual particles, crisscrossing between the once-separate diagrams. “It’s like spin. If the networks have created directions in space that make two particles’ spins parallel, when they combine they’ll simply add together. If they’re anti-parallel, in opposing directions, they’ll cancel. Phase is the same, but it acts like an angle in two dimensions, and it works with every quantum number together: spin, charge, colour, everything — if two components are perfectly out-of-phase, they vanish completely.”

  Gisela watched as Cordelia reached into the layered diagram, followed the paths of two components, and began to understand. They hadn’t discovered any deeper structure to the individual quantum numbers, as they’d hoped they might, but they’d learnt that a single vast network of world lines could account for everything the universe built from those indivisible threads.

  Was this enough for her? Her original, struggling for sanity back in Athena, might take comfort from the hope that the Dive clone had witnessed a breakthrough like this — but as death approached, would it all turn to ashes for the witness? Gisela felt a pang of doubt herself, though she’d talked it through with Timon and the others for centuries. Did everything she felt at this moment lose all meaning, just because there was no chance to carry the experience back to the wider world? She couldn’t deny that it would have been better to know that she could reconnect with her other selves, tell all her distant family and friends w
hat she’d learnt, follow through the implications for millennia.

  But the whole universe faced the same fate. Time was quantised; there was no prospect of infinite computation before the Big Crunch, for anyone. If everything that ended was void, the Dive had merely spared them the prolonged false hope of immortality. If every moment stood alone, complete in itself, then nothing could rob them of their happiness.

  The truth, of course, lay somewhere in between.

  Timon approached her, grinning with delight. “What are you pondering here by yourself?”

  She took his hand. “Small networks.”

  Cordelia said to Vikram, “Now that you know precisely what phase is, and how it determines probabilities … is there any way we could use the experimental beams to manipulate the probabilities for the geometry ahead of us? Twist back the light cones just enough to keep us skirting the Planck region? Spiral back up around the singularity for a few billion years, until the Big Crunch comes, or the hole evaporates from Hawking radiation?”

  Vikram looked stunned for a moment, then he began launching software. Sachio and Tiet came and helped him, searching for computational shortcuts. Gisela looked on, light-headed, hardly daring to hope. To examine every possibility might take more time than they had, but then Tiet found a way to test whole classes of networks in a single calculation, and the process sped up a thousandfold.

  Vikram announced the result sadly. “No. It’s not possible.”

  Cordelia smiled. “That’s all right. I was just curious.”

  Mind Vampires, by Greg Egan

  There are moments when my mind misses a beat. I find myself, in mid-step or mid-breath, feeling as if delivered abruptly into my body after a long absence (spent where, I could not say), or a long, dreamless sleep. I lose not my memory, merely my thread. My attention has inexplicably wandered, but a little calm introspection restores my context and brings me peace. Almost peace.

  I suppose I am a detective, a private investigator, for why else would I be prowling the corridors of a posh girls’ boarding school, softly past the doors of the dark-breathing dormitories?

  I suppose the headmistress rang me, hysterical. I’m sure that’s right. She was sixty-two and had begun to menstruate again. What a surprise for her, what a strange shock. No wonder she went straight to the telephone and dialled my number.

  She was calm in her office when I arrived in person, if a little embarrassed. Women have problems, she said. These things do happen, she explained. Rarely, but one cannot attach any significance. I find it very irritating to be told one minute to hurry and the next to get lost; I could have shrugged and walked out, abandoned her right then, but I have my code of ethics. My reputation. My pride. For her sake, for the sake of those in her charge, I frightened her into hiring me.

  I described the next few stages to her. Prepubescent girls, even infants and newborn babes, would also start to menstruate. Sweat, tears, saliva, urine, mother’s milk and semen would all turn to blood. Dead rats and birds would be found everywhere. Water pipes would issue blood, and every container of any kind of fluid, from disinfectant to dye, from vinegar to varnish, from wine to window-cleaner, would be brimming with blood.

  There is definitely no semen on school premises, she said. I think she was trying to make a joke. I showed her a colour photograph from a previous case, the kind the police don’t like me carrying about. She turned pale and then wiped the perspiration from her face with (oh yes) a white lace handkerchief, which she carefully examined for any trace of red. Then she signed.

  New England. Connecticut? How?

  Young soldiers come home with bad dreams.

  Atrocities in a muddy trench, a bloody trench.

  Young soldiers who would rather be dead than return to their friends and families bearing this European curse. A horrible embrace, a horrible feast. Much better to feed the rats and the worms.

  The smell of the trenches drawing them for hundreds of miles. They devour the gangrenous parts. Later the healed will attribute this to the rats. Struggles in the mud, the blood rains down. Screams are natural enough. Nobody will ever guess, they’ll be lost amongst the shell-shocked.

  “I’m responsible for the girls. You must be discreet.”

  “Discreet? There’ll be no discretion when the snow turns red.”

  I may be wrong. Sometimes there is no carnival of horrors; fear of detection dampens their natural flamboyance, their love of dark theatre. But it’s a new moon tonight, the nadir of their strength, and already they have announced their presence. Whatever shows so little caution is afraid of no one.

  “You mustn’t cause a panic.” Her chin trembled, she pleaded with her eyes. “You know what I’m concerned about.”

  I knew, all right.

  “If there were nothing to fear but fear itself,” I said, “wouldn’t life be sweet?”

  ***

  So I prowl the corridors, watching for signs, preparing for the fight. My reputation is the highest, I have never lost. My clients shake my hand, hug and kiss me, shower me with gifts and favours. No wonder.

  A thin young girl, a somnambulist, wanders past me and my heart aches at her vulnerability. In my mind her swan neck becomes a giraffe neck, a single throbbing artery tight with blood ready to gush and sate the hugest appetite. How sickening, when the skin of her neck is so pale and delicate and, I am certain, cool as the night.

  In the prisons, where they mutilate their limbs with razor blades, there is feeding every month. The gatherings in the alleys of abortionists are indescribable. The torture cells; well who do you think runs them? I stay away from all of these. I am no fool. Large old families in large old houses, the better schools, the quieter, cleaner asylums call for me. My reputation is the highest.

  The gardener’s apprentice, a quiet young lad named Jack Rice, disappeared two days ago. The headmistress thinks it’s just a coincidence (such a helpful boy). Nobody knows his family’s address, but his father is said to be a veteran and to shun the light of day.

  A legless spider moves its mandibles in distress.

  A girl cries out: “Whoa, nightmare!”

  Strange, dark flowers appear in the fields. They open at midnight to send a sickly sweet narcotic scent to corrupt the most innocent of dreams.

  Fear comes to me, but only as an idea. I think about terror, but I do not feel it. Fear has saved my life many times, so I do love and respect it, when it knows its place.

  I enter the dormitory itself, I walk quiet as a nightgown between the tossing beds. Over one bed, two heavy men in dark coats shoulder a fluttering kinematograph machine with the lens removed, while a third man holds open a girl’s right eye. The pictures flash into the empty spaces of her brain. Fear will not save her life; it has seduced her, possessed her, paralysed her, as it has done to thousands, sweeping the countryside like fire or flood wherever that one dread word is whispered. Even far from the sites of true danger, men and women hear that word, form that image, and choke on the terror that rushes up from their bowels. It is a plague in itself, a separate evil with a life of its own now. I nod at the men, they nod (so very slightly) back at me, then I walk on.

  I find Jack Rice easily enough, his hobnailed boots protruding from the end of the bed. I call to the men in dark coats to come and hold him still, for that is what they do best of all. His girl’s disguise fades as he struggles. I wonder what revealed the boots. Perhaps his guard was down as he slept. Perhaps he dreamt he was discovered, and so blurred the borders of the dream by bringing on its own fulfilment. I smile at this idea as I drive in the stake.

  The tales they later tell me are familiar: the girl he killed, the girl whose form he took, had mocked him cruelly. We find her body, the lips and tender parts consumed, in one of the many damp basements, crawling about gnashing its fangs, but very weak. A matchstick would do for a stake. I hope her parents will not be awkward.

  The headmistress tries to thank me and dismiss me with her chequebook, but the ink of her fountain pen has
changed colour, and she cannot sign the cheque with her trembling bony hand. Oh dear. Jack’s father will be angry. Jack’s mother will be grieved. I hope he was an only child, but the odds are against it.

  The dark-coated men, unperturbed, move from bed to bed with their sawn-off projector. Their enemies are different, but sometimes they will pause to come to my aid. They’re fighting mind vampires.

  ***

  Breakfast is dismal the next morning, for all the milk had to be thrown out. The heated swimming baths are closed, but the cloying odour escapes from the steam-dampened, padlocked wooden doors.

  I ask around the village (of course a village) for word of Jack and his family. Oh, the young vampire lad, they say merrily. He never gave an address, of course. Hardly the thing to do. I mean, would you?

  I hunt the old, dark-hidden, overgrown houses as the fortnight slips away from me. Jack’s walking in sunlight and feeding so far from the full moon are disturbing. What will his father be like when he decides to strike? Every cellar I breach nearly stops my heart, but they are all empty and peaceful; cool air and silence protest their pure innocence to me as I scour cobwebbed corners with lamplight. I smile at the unfairness: I cannot rejoice that a place is clean, that I smell no evil, that I will face no risks for a few kind minutes, for every safe house is a failure, every moment without threat only postpones the danger I must face in the end. I’d rather not be who I am, but my reputation is the highest.