Asimov's SF, Sep 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  * * * *

  Because, you know, we didn't have that bad a life. My father and I had lived all my life in the big house on the shore that my mother bought for the family just before she got killed. I loved the place. When Dad turned it over to Ron and me as a wedding present I cried. He said it was too much house for a single man. Even with the part-time help we'd always had from the town it was too much house for me, too, but then Ron hired a couple of refugees named Bruce and Rebecca so I could get on with school. Dad didn't move out. Ron wouldn't let him. So Dad took over the maid's quarters on the third floor, had his own sitting room and bath and, quite unnecessarily, kitchen. That meant that the servants had to sleep in the place we fixed up for them in the basement, but it wasn't that bad, really. Anyway they didn't mind. It was undoubtedly better than the plastic tents in the Hessa Hissa camp they'd lived in, back in the Sudan, until the lightning struck and they got that visa to America.

  By then I was twenty, going on twenty-one, and just about to start my second year at the local community college. My major wasn't physics. English lit. I still loved listening to Ron and Dad talk about the black holes and the quarks and all, though not enough to have any wish to follow in their footsteps. Thus, an English lit major. The war was going badly, as usual, but we had plenty to eat and plenty of time on our own—well, I mean when Ron hadn't been sent off to poke around Barcelona or Marseilles or Haifa or some other place that we had just recaptured from Islam, before the Islamists recaptured it back. And not counting the optional, but not very optional, third weekend of every month. That's what we spent in our voluntary (but not very voluntary) training with the Citizens’ Defense Corps, learning how to make a Molotov cocktail to throw at an Arab tank, if one ever appeared in New Jersey. None ever did. Even the servants had to sign up for the CDC, or risk losing their green cards. They didn't mind. They hadn't forgotten what it was like in Dafur. They had a pretty good practical idea of what Arab tanks could do, too, and anyway all the CDC stuff was entertainingly theoretical. None of us was likely to be called up.

  Dad wasn't teaching regularly any more, but he still took on one or two physics classes a semester. It would have made sense for him to take a little flat in Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights, but he wasn't willing to abandon the house Mom had bought for us. Commuting, though, was a problem. Mom had had her own arrangements, at least when the weather was halfway decent. A hydrofoil would come and pick her up at our little dock and whisk her right across New York Bay to the Battery Park City pier in lower Manhattan, and it didn't even cost her anything because the company paid for the whole thing. Dad wouldn't do that. He didn't have a rich company to pick up the check for him, though he really could have afforded it if he'd wanted to. He said it was because it was too extravagant, but I think it was because it reminded him too much of my mother.

  So he got up early every morning he had classes and drove himself in to Brooklyn across the Verrazano. That shot his whole coalcohol ration, but I never used all of mine up and Ron had a surplus—got a field-grade officer's ration to begin with, and was often enough deployed to somewhere where he couldn't use it. So Dad got all the coupons he needed. Besides, we walked a lot when the weather let us.

  That was one of the reasons I hated to see the summer come to an end. Well, that and the vine-ripe tomatoes and the corn, of course. Labor Day was pretty much the cutoff for us. We didn't celebrate the holiday by marching in any parade, but it was the alarm-clock ring that told us to get ready for cold weather and school. When I sat on the porch that day, I could see that the seed pods were beginning to drop off the catalpas. Dad and Ron were nursing their beers in one corner of the porch, talking particle physics, as usual, and debating whether to go in for what might be their last swim of the summer. I was on the porch steps trying to get a head start on the school year by reading the American lit text ahead of time. I heard somebody go “pssst"—yes, literally “pssst"—from behind the hydrangea bushes. The only person I knew who would say “pssst” was Billy de Blount. I sighed, turned the book off and stood up. I kept my voice low and said, “For God's sake, Billy, why don't you show yourself like a normal human being?"

  He stood up enough so that I could see his head. “Don't take the Lord's name in vain,” he ordered. “I just didn't want to disturb your dad and—” he jerked a thumb in Ron's direction—"him."

  I have to admit that in some ways I didn't altogether mind having a teenager who had such a crush on me that he hated even to say my husband's name. Still, he really was a pest.

  "You disturbed me,” I informed him. “What do you want? And come out of those damn bushes."

  He didn't come out from behind the hydrangeas. If he had, Ron and Dad could have seen him, and that was something Billy tried to avoid. He did answer the question, though. He peered at a piece of paper in his hand that looked familiar—actually, it turned out to be a page from my father's notebook—and asked, “What is ortho-positronium?"

  I held out my hand. “Give me that."

  He made a face, but he passed it over. It was a list in Dad's sloppy handwriting:

  g

  c

  Fine structure constant

  Ortho-positronium decay

  Planck's constant

  The list didn't make a lot more sense to me than it had to Billy. “Where'd you get it?” I demanded.

  He hung his head, the way he did. “It was on the lawn. I picked it up. Anyway, when your dad and him were writing this stuff down they were talking about God, and I wondered—"

  "You wondered if they were getting religion?"

  He didn't answer that, just scowled. Then he said, “So what does it mean?"

  "How the hell would I know? Why don't you ask them?"

  That time he just pointed, but it answered the question, sort of. Ron and Dad had made their decision. They were already stripped to their shorts, on the way down to the river.

  Of course, Billy wouldn't have asked them anything anyhow, since that would have meant actually speaking to my husband. But it made his point. “All right,” I said. “I'll ask them when I get a chance. But next time you come to the door and knock. Okay? I'm tired of you sneaking around the house.” And then, as he started to turn away, still scowling—he scowled a lot, for a teenager—I had to add, “You sure they were actually talking about God?"

  * * * *

  Rebecca had made one of Ron's favorites for supper that night—hamburger Stroganoff, where it didn't matter how tough that range-fed beef was because it had been ground to about the consistency of a Big Mac. I didn't ask the question while we were eating. What we talked about was how muddy the river was getting, and whether our eel population was ever going to recover from the depredations we had waged on it in the bad times before rationing started, when you had to know somebody to get a pork chop at the Safeway. And then we talked about how I felt about starting another school year, and why Ron had to make a quick trip to some damn island in the Caribbean next week. He wouldn't say the “why,” of course. He wouldn't even say which island, but Rebecca had already been told to pack both his snorkel and his hill-climbing boots, so I was pretty sure it was Jamaica.

  Then Rebecca cleared everything away and Ron tipped the last of the bottle of Peruvian merlot into our glasses. I thought that was a good time to ask them about what Billy had said.

  They both looked puzzled. “He thought we were talking about God?” Ron said, and Dad said, “Let me see that paper."

  When he looked at it he began to laugh. He passed it to Ron, who laughed just about as much. Then Ron leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. He turned to Dad. “You want to show her the book, Steve?"

  Still grinning, my father reached over to where he had left his shoulder bag, and pulled out a book. What I mean to say here is a paper book. With the data printed on it in ink. The cover told me its title was The Universe Next Door, and it was written by someone named Marcus Chown. “I've had this for thirty years,” Dad informed me. “So when this story about
the Moon came along I remembered it and pulled it down to show Ron."

  "What story about the Moon?” I asked, but Ron was already talking.

  "A lot of it's out of date, of course, but the guy had some interesting ideas,” he said.

  "Always did,” Dad agreed. “Best science writer there was."

  I gave them both a look, about ten seconds apiece of my don't-be-such-pains-in-the-ass,—will-you? look. “Ortho-positronium,” I reminded them.

  "Oh, sorry,” Ron apologized. “It's just that it takes a little explaining. Ortho-positronium is—I guess you could call it an element? Sort of, anyway?” He was looking at Dad, who shrugged. “All right,” Ron said, “let's say it's some kind of an element. A very simple one. Like hydrogen. Only instead of being made of an electron and a proton, the way hydrogen is, positronium is made of an electron and a positron. You know what a positron is?"

  Dad gave him an indignant look. “Of course she knows what a positron is."

  I did, more or less—it was like an electron, only it had a positive charge, like a proton, instead of the electron's negative one. I nodded because I was actually understanding what they were talking about. And then, all of a sudden, I wasn't, because they began talking about mirror matter and it didn't really sound as though they were talking to me. “Oh, hell,” I said, holding out my hand. “Why don't you just give me the damn book?"

  * * * *

  Having the actual book in my hands was better, but not a whole lot better. I was getting lost in stuff about time running backward and baby universes being born, and my father's thirty-year-old scribblings in the margins of the pages didn't help. Then it occurred to me to use the index. That was a lot like looking something up on my screen, though a lot slower, but then I did find out what they were talking about.

  There turned out to be more than one kind of positronium, but the kind they were talking about was called ortho-positronium, never mind why. Ortho-positronium was something that got made in particle accelerators, and after it was made it didn't stick around very long. It lived for.000000142 of a second, after which it blew up into three photons and was gone. Or, anyway, that's when it was supposed to do it, but when they came down to measure the time exactly, the damn thing dissolved into photons one tenth of a percent faster than that.

  Big deal, right? But they seemed to be sure about the numbers, God knows why, so I kept on reading and—after a lot of really weird stuff about mirror universes and such—I came to some talk about a man named Edward Harrison.

  Harrison had an idea that might explain the discrepancy. Suppose, he said, that there's a really advanced race of space aliens, off somewhere in infinite space and time. Suppose one of them wants to understand how the whole universe works. How would they go about it?

  Well, if they were like human scientists, Harrison reasoned, they would make something like a computer model that they could study. Only, since they were really advanced superbeings, they would make a really good model. In fact it would be so good in all its details that it would contain every last aspect of the real universe.

  Including, for example, us.

  And the “us” in that model universe would have no idea they were nothing but computer simulations, as indeed we did not.

  All right, I thought that was kind of interesting. Scary, even, although only in the way that ghosts and vampires were scary when you were eight years old and already pretty sure that such things didn't really exist. What I didn't see was what had made it interesting to Ron and Dad right now.

  Then I took another look at Dad's scribbles. One of them had a date next to it, and the date was a recent one: Woomara, 24 August 2022.

  It only took a moment of searching on my omnibook to find what that meant. A couple of weeks earlier some radioastronomers at the old radio-telescope in Australia were doing some routine testing of their equipment. What that amounted to was just bouncing radar off the corner reflectors that early astronauts had left on the Moon a couple of generations before. And then they reported that, gosh, funny thing, the radar reported that the Moon now seemed to be about 350 meters closer to the Earth than it was supposed to be.

  Well, that was peculiar, though what it meant I could not say.

  So then I tried to track down every one of Dad's scribbles in the margins of the Chown book. There were dozens of them. Most of them were only updating a lot of things Chown had got wrong, because he had written about them way back before the turn of the century and a lot had happened since. Some were just kind of puzzling, like a note about something called the heavy neutrino that was supposed to be like a hundred million billion times the mass of a proton—but when they finally caught one and measured it it was only about ten billion times heavier.

  Then I hit a man's name—John D. Barrow—and when my searcher finally located him it produced a paper he had written that answered all the questions.

  If some superbeings did make that kind of a model and we were in it, Barrow said, they might not get everything straight on their first try. They would want to know if that was the case, of course, so they would be careful to build some kind of an error-checker into their model. Something that could detect mistakes ... and then correct them.

  So, to do its job, every once in a while the error-checker would make little changes in the model universe's programming—that is, in its basic physical laws.

  What that meant was that until the error-checker did its job, sometimes things wouldn't exactly add up in the model. Computation and observation might give numbers that were a tad different from each other—I don't mean big time, I mean like maybe a difference in the tenth or twelfth decimal. Like, Barrow said, the afore-mentioned apparent variation of a few parts per million in the fine structure constant.

  That was one of the things that had been on Dad's little list, I remembered. It wasn't all. There was also the way the Moon had suddenly seemed to jump into a closer orbit. Or the heavy neutrino thing. Or the way this ortho-positronium stuff decayed a little bit too fast. So I turned off my book, and closed Dad's paper-and-print one, and went out to the kitchen to see how Rebecca was coming along with dinner. And I thought, no matter what Dad thought of my career choices, it might be a good idea if I tried to sign up for some physics or astronomy courses this semester.

  * * * *

  Because Labor Day was late that year, Tuesday was the first day of school. It rained. Cold breezes came in off the ocean. Summer looked like it was finally, definitely over.

  That is always a pretty sad time of the year for me, though not for the reasons my husband thinks. It's really just because of the weather. September means that pretty soon the ice and snow will be coming, and all those lovely green landscapes will turn to brown and black, and all the butterflies will be heading for Cape May and the long flutter across the bay to Delmarva and their winter home in Mexico.

  What Ron thinks it is, of course, is because of what 9/11 means to me. He doesn't want me sitting around the house on the day when I might accidentally catch a glimpse of the pictures the government makes the newspeople show on every anniversary of the day, so we citizens won't forget to hate the Islamic terrorists. It's always the same scene they show, too. The two towers are standing there with one of them on fire already. Then the second jet slides silent and deadly across the sky. Until it passes behind the tower that's burning, and, a few moments later, a great big tulip of flame pops out of the middle of the other tower. That was the scene that had sent shivers of horror over a thousand audiences, over the decades since it happened. Especially—yes, Ron wasn't totally wrong—especially for me. Because I knew very well that what that flame jet contained, among a whole lot of other things, was the few puffs of thousand-degree plasma that were all that there was left of my mom.

  So I can't deny that the subject crossed my mind now and then on that day. I didn't cry, though. Not even once. Not even when I was in the ladies’ room, in the break between World Lit 211 and Poli Sci 218, and no one was there to hear. And I wasn't su
rprised when I came out of my last class for the day and Ron was standing there with a white-rose wrist corsage in one hand and my dancing shoes in the other. “Feel like a couple of lesginkas tonight, hon? Maybe dinner first at that oyster place down by the water?"

  As I say, he was a sweet man.

  So we did have the dinner—bluefish for him, pepper shrimp for me—and Ron was just paying the check when his phone chirped. The voice was my father's, upset, shouting so loud that I could hear the phone across the table. “It's crazy, Ron,” he yelled. “Jesus! Can you believe it?"

  For some reason my husband reached over and put his arm around me then. His voice was tight when he asked, “Believe what, Steve?"

  "You didn't hear? Christ, turn your damn omni on! All the labs are reporting it—Argo-Fermi, Caltech, four or five others. The spectra went nuts for all of them at the same time. It's the fine structure constant, Ron! It isn't constant any more!"

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Brigadier General Ronald R. Khoshaba

  Even now I have trouble believing that what Steve Avedon told me was true, but there it was. Every lab was confirming it—not only what was left of the American labs but ultimately CERN and Bologna and Beijing as well. And not just the fine structure constant, either. That radar measurement that put the Moon closer than it should have been wasn't because the Moon had moved, it was because c, that utterly unchangeable speed of light called c, had gone and changed on us and was now just that little bit faster. Half a dozen other numbers that had been holy writ for generations were suddenly in doubt, too. And so the question that we faced—and that the whole scientific community faced, and before long that the whole world faced—was: who was doing this? And was it possible that all those long-ago speculations had any conceivable basis in fact?

  Common sense said “No!” Well, that wasn't really it. What common sense actually said was, “Holy crap, man, are you out of your mind?” I mean, ideas like that weren't science. They were the stuff of the electronic games the little kids were playing when their parents weren't paying attention, because they were busy on their own computers. Comic-book stuff. Nothing that any sensible person would believe in for a single second.