At last, he seemed ready to share his hypotheses with me; and he summoned me from my steam bath. I dried myself on my shirt and hurried after him to the Billiards Room; his small, narrow feet pattered on the hard floor as he half-ran back to the table. He was as excited as I could remember seeing him.
“I think I understand what this table is for,” he said, breathless.
“Yes?”
“It is — how can I express it? — it is only a demonstration, little more than a toy but it is a Multiplicity Generator. Do you see?”
I held up my hands. “I fear I don’t see a thing.”
“You are familiar enough with the idea of the Multiplicity of Histories, by now…”
“I should be; it’s the basis of your explanation of the divergent Histories we have visited.”
At every moment, in every event (I summarized), History bifurcates. A butterfly’s shadow may fall here or there; the assassin’s bullet may graze and pass on without harm, or lodge itself fatally in the heart of a King… To each possible outcome of each event, there corresponds a fresh version of History. “And all of these Histories are real,” I said, “and — if I understand it right they lie side by side with each other, in some Fourth Dimension, like the pages of a book.”
“Very well. And you see, also, that the action of a Time Machine — including your first prototype — is to cause wider bifurcations, to generate new Histories… some of them impossible without the Machine’s intervention — like this one!” He waved his hands about. “Without your machine, which started off the whole series of events, humans could never have been transported back to the Palaeocene. We should not now be sitting on top of fifty million years of intelligent modification of the cosmos.”
“I see all that,” I said, my patience wearing thin. “But what has it to do with this table?”
“Look.” He set the single ball rolling across the table. “Here is our ball. We must imagine many Histories — a sheaf of them — fanning out around the ball at every moment. The most likely History, of course, is the one containing the classical trajectory — meaning a straightforward roll of the ball across the table. But other Histories — neighboring, but some widely divergent — exist in parallel. It is even possible, though very unlikely, that in one of those Histories the thermal agitation of the ball’s molecules will combine, and cause it to leap up in the air and hit you in the eye.”
“Very well.”
“Now—” He ran his finger around the rim of the nearest pocket. “This green inlay is a clue.”
“It is Plattnerite.”
“Yes. The pockets act as miniature Time Machines — limited in scope and size, but quite effective. And, as we have seen from our own experience, when Time Machines operate — when objects travel into future or past to meet themselves — the chain of cause and effect can be disrupted, and Histories grow like weeds…”
He reminded me of the odd incident we had witnessed with the stationary ball. “That was, perhaps, the clearest example of what I am describing. The ball sat at rest on the table — our ball, we will call it. Then a copy of our ball emerged from a pocket, and knocked our ball aside. Our ball traveled to the cushion, rebounded, and fell into the pocket, leaving the copy at rest on the table, in the precise position of the original.
“Then,” Nebogipfel said slowly, “our ball traveled back through time — do you see? — and emerged from the pocket in the past…”
“And proceeded to knock itself out of the way, and took its own place.” I stared at the innocent-looking table. “Confound it, I see it now! It was the same ball after all. It was resting quite happily on the table — but, because of the bizarre possibilities of time travel, it was able to loop through time and knock itself aside!”
“You have it,” the Morlock said.
“But what made the ball start moving in the first place? Neither of us gave it a shove towards the pocket.”
“A ’shove’ was not necessary,” Nebogipfel said. “In the presence of Time Machines — and this is the point of the demonstration, really — you must abandon your old ideas of causality. Things are not so simple! The collision with the copy was just one possibility for the ball, which the table demonstrated for us. Do you see? In the presence of a Time Machine, causality is so damaged that even a stationary ball is surrounded by an infinite number of such bizarre possibilities. Your questions about ’how it started’ are without meaning, you see: it is a closed causal loop — there was no First Cause.”
“Maybe so,” I said, “but look here: I still have an uneasy feeling about all this. Let’s go back to the two balls on the table again — or rather, the one real ball and its copy. Suddenly, there is twice as much material present as there was before! Where has it all come from?”
He eyed me. “You are worried about the violation of Conservation Laws — the appearance, or disappearance, of Mass.”
“Exactly.”
“I did not notice any such concern when you dived into time in search of your younger self. For that was just as much — more! — of a violation of any Conservation Principle.”
“Nevertheless,” I said, refusing to be goaded, “the objection is valid — isn’t it?”
“In a sense,” he said. “But only in a narrow, single-History sort of way.
“The Universal Constructors have been studying these paradoxes of time travel for centuries now,” he said. “Or rather, apparent paradoxes. And they have formulated a type of Conservation Law which works in the higher Dimension of the Multiplicity of Histories.
“Start with an object like yourself. If, at any given moment, you add in a copy of yourself which may be absent because you have traveled away into past or future — and then subtract any copies doubly present because one of you has traveled to the past then you will find that the sum, overall, stays constant there is ’really’ only one of you — no matter how many times you travel up and down through time. So there is Conservation, of a sort — even though, at any moment in any given History, it may seem that Conservation Laws are broken, because there are suddenly two of you, or none of you.”
I saw it, on thinking it through. “There is only a paradox if you restrict your thinking to a single History,” I observed. “The paradox disappears, if you think in terms of Multiplicity.”
“Exactly. Just as problems of causality are resolved, within the greater frame of the Multiplicity.
“It is the power of this table, you see,” he told me, “that it is able to demonstrate these extraordinary possibilities to us… It is able to use Time Machine technology to show us the possibility — no, the existence — of Multiple, divergent Histories at the macroscopic level. Indeed, it can pick out particular Histories of interest: it has a very subtle design.”
He told me more of the Constructors’ Laws of the Multiplicity.
“One can imagine situations,” he said, “in which the Multiplicity of Histories is zero, one, or many. It is zero if that History is impossible — if it is not self consistent. A Multiplicity of one is the situation imagined by your earlier philosophers — of Newton’s generation, perhaps — in which a single course of events unfolds out of each point in time, consistent and immovable.”
I understood him to be describing my own original — and naive! — view of History, as a sort of immense Room, more or less fixed, through which my Time Machine would let me wander at will.
“A ’dangerous’ path for an object — like you, or our billiard ball — is one which can reach a Time Machine,” he said.
“Well, that’s clear enough,” I said. “It’s been obvious that I’ve been splitting off new Histories right, left and center since the moment the Time Machine was first switched on. Dangerous indeed!”
“Yes. And as the machine, and its successors, delve ever deeper into the past, so the Multiplicity generated tends towards infinity, and the divergence of the new copies of History grows wider.”
“But,” I said, a little frustrated, “coming back t
o the matter at hand — what is the purpose of this table? Is it just a trick? — Why have the Constructors given it to us? What are they trying to tell us?”
“I do not know,” he said. “Not yet. It is difficult… The Information Sea is wide, and there are many factions among the Constructors. Information is not offered freely to me — do you understand? — I have to pick up what I can, make the best understanding of it, and so build up an interpretation that way…
I think there is a faction of them who have some scheme — an immense Project whose outlines I can barely make out.”
“What is the nature of this Project?”
Nebogipfel said for answer, “Look: we know that there are many — perhaps an infinite number — of Histories emerging from each event. Imagine yourself, in two such neighboring Histories, separated by — let us say — the details of the rebound of your billiard ball. Now: could those two copies of you communicate with each other?”
I thought about that. “We have discussed this before. I don’t see how. A Time Machine would take me up and down a single History branch. If I’d gone back to change the rebound of the ball, then I would expect to travel forward and observe a difference, because, it seems, if the machine causes a bifurcation, it then tends to follow the newly generated History. No,” I said confidently. “The two versions of me could not communicate.”
“Not even if I allow you any conceivable machine, or measuring device?”
“No. There would be two copies of any such device — each as disconnected from its twin as I was.”
“Very well. That is a reasonable, and defensible, position. It is based on an implicit assumption that twin Histories, after their split, do not affect each other in any way. Technically speaking, you are assuming that Quantum-Mechanical Operators are linear… But,” and now that note of excitement returned to his voice, “it turns out there may be a way to talk to the other History — if, on some fundamental level, the universe and its twin do remain entangled. If there is the smallest amount of Nonlinearity in the Quantum Operators — almost too small to detect—”
“Then such communication would be possible?”
“I have seen it done… in the Sea, I mean… the Constructors have managed it, but only on the smallest of experimental scales.”
Nebogipfel described to me what he called an “Everett phonograph” — “after the twentieth-century scientist, of your History, who first dreamed up the idea. Of course the Constructors have another label — but it is not easily rendered into English.”
The Nonlinearities of which Nebogipfel spoke worked at the most subtle of levels.
“You must imagine that you perform a measurement — perhaps of the spin of an atom.” He described a “Nonlinear” interaction between an atom’s spin and its magnetic field. “The universe splits in two, of course, depending on the experiment’s outcome. Then, after the experiment, you allow the atom to pass through your Nonlinear field. This is the anomalous Quantum Operator I mentioned. Then — it turns out you can arrange affairs so that your action in one History depends on a decision taken in the second History…”
He went into a great deal of detail about this, involving the technicalities of what he called a “Stem-Gerlach device,” but I let this wash past me; my concern was to grasp the central point.
“So,” I interrupted him, “is it possible? Are you telling me that the Constructors have invented such inter-History communication devices? Is our table one such?” I began to feel excitement at the thought. All this chatter of billiard balls and spinning atoms was all very well; but if I could talk, by some Everett phonograph, to my selves in other Histories — perhaps to my home in Richmond in 1891…
But Nebogipfel was to disappoint me. “No,” he said. “Not yet. The table utilizes the Nonlinear effect, but only to — ah — to highlight particular Histories. At least some selection, some control, over the processes is displayed, but… The effects are so small, you see. And the Nonlinearities are suppressed by time evolution.”
“Yes,” I said with impatience, “but what is your guess? By placing this table here, is our Constructor trying to tell us that all this stuff — Nonlinearity, and communication between Histories — that it’s all important to us?”
“Perhaps,” Nebogipfel said. “But it is certainly important to him.”
[7]
The Mechanical Heirs of Man
Nebogipfel reconstructed something of the history of Humanity, across fifty million years. Much of this picture was tentative, he warned me — an edifice of speculation, founded on the few unambiguous facts he had been able to retrieve from the Information Sea.
There had probably been several waves of star colonization by man and his descendants, said Nebogipfel. During our journey through time in the car, we had seen the launch of one generation of such ships, from the Orbital City.
“It is not difficult to build an interstellar craft,” he said, “if one is patient. I imagine your 1944 friends in the Palaeocene could have devised such a vessel a mere century or two after we left them. One would need a propulsion unit, of course — a chemical, ion or laser rocket; or perhaps a solar sail of the type we have observed. And there are strategies to use the resources of the solar system to escape from the sun. You could, for instance, swing past Jupiter, and use that planet’s bulk to hurl your star-ship in towards the sun. With a boost at perihelion, you could very easily reach solar escape velocity.”
“And then one would be free of the solar system?”
“At the other end a reverse of the process, the exploitation of the gravity wells of stars and planets, would be necessary, to settle into the new system. It might take ten, a hundred thousand years to complete such a journey, so great are the gulfs between the stars…”
“A thousand centuries? But who could survive so long? What ship — the supply question alone—”
“You miss the point,” he said. “One would not send humans. The ship would be an automaton. A machine, with manipulative skills, and intelligence at least equivalent to a human’s. The task of the machine would be to exploit the resources of the destination stellar system — using planets, comets, asteroids, dust, whatever it could find — to construct a colony.”
“Your ’automatons,’ “ I remarked, “sound rather like our friends, the Universal Constructors.”
He did not reply.
“I can see the use of sending a machine to gather information. But other than that — what is the point? What is the meaning of a colony without humans?”
“But such a machine could construct anything, given the resources and sufficient time,” the Morlock said. “With cell synthesis and artificial womb technology, it could even construct humans, to inhabit the new colony. Do you see?”
I protested at this — for the prospect seemed unnatural and abhorrent to me — until I remembered, with reluctance, that I had once watched the “construction” of a Morlock, in just such a fashion!
Nebogipfel went on, “But the probe’s most important task would be to construct more copies of itself. These would be fueled up — for example, with gases mined from the stars — and sent on, to further star systems.
“And so, slow but steady, the colonization of the Galaxy would proceed.”
“But,” I protested, “even so, it would take so much time. Ten thousand years to reach the nearest star, which is some light years away—”
“Four.”
“And the Galaxy itself—”
“Is a hundred thousand light years across. It would be slow,” he said. “At least at first. But then the colonies would begin to interact with each other. Do you see? Empires could form, straddling the stars. Other groups would oppose the empires. The diffusion would slow further… but it would proceed, inexorably. By such techniques as I have described, it would take tens of millions of years to complete the colonization of the Galaxy — but it could he done. And, since it would be impossible to recall or redirect the mechanical probes, once launched, it w
ould be done. It must have been done by now, fifty million years after the founding of First London.”
He went on, “The first few generations of Constructors were, I think, built with anthropocentric constraints incorporated into their awareness. They were built to serve man. But these Constructors were not simple mechanical devices — these were conscious entities. And when they went out into the Galaxy, exploring worlds undreamed of by man and redesigning themselves, they soon passed far beyond the understanding of Humanity, and broke the constraints of their authors… The machines broke free.”
“Great Scott,” I said. “I can’t imagine the military chaps of that remote Age taking to that idea very kindly.”
“Yes. There were wars… The data is fragmented. In any event, there could be only one victor in such a conflict.”
“And what of men? How did they take to all this?”
“Some well, some badly.” Nebogipfel twisted his face a little and swiveled his eyes. “What do you think? Humans are a diverse species, with multiple and fragmented goals — even in your day; imagine how much more diverse things became when people were spread across a hundred, a thousand star systems. The Constructors, too, rapidly fragmented. They are more unified as a species than man has ever been, by reason of their physical nature, but because of the much greater Information pool to which they have access — their goals are far more complex and varied.”
But, through all this conflict, Nebogipfel said, the slow Conquest of the stars had proceeded.
The launching of the first star-ships, Nebogipfel said, had marked the greatest deviation we had yet witnessed from my original, unperturbed History. “Men — your friends, the New Humans — have changed everything about the world, even on a geological — a cosmic scale. I wonder if you can understand—”
“What?”
“I wonder if you understand, really, the meaning of a million years — or ten million — or fifty.”
The Time Ships Page 41
