The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “No. Not yet. Do you have a soul, Kyle?”

  Kyle nodded. “It’s called my original monitor. I’ve seen a printout, though of course I didn’t read it all; it was very long.”

  “Then when you’re destroyed it may be sent here. Here comes your demon, by the way.”

  Kyle nodded.

  “I suppose it may be put into one of these horrors. They seem more machine than human, at least to me.”

  “No,” Kyle told him. “They’re truly alive. They’re shadow life, Skip, and since this one is the only example we have, just now it must be the most precious life in the universe to you, to Marilyn, and to me. Do you think he sees us?”

  “He sees me,” Skip said grimly.

  “When I put my fingers into his brain, he opened his eyes,” Kyle mused. “It was as though he felt them there.”

  “Maybe he did.”

  Kyle nodded. “Yes, possibly he did. The brain is such a sensitive mechanism that perhaps a gravitational disturbance as weak as that results in stimulation, if it is uneven. Put your hand into his head, please. I want to watch. You say he’s a demon—pretend you’re going to gouge out his eyes.”

  “You think I’m crazy!” Skip shouted. “Well, I’m telling you, you’re crazy!”

  Startled, Marilyn twisted in her pilot’s chair to look at them.

  “I’ve explained to you that he sees me,” Skip said a little more calmly. “I’m not getting within his reach!”

  “Touch his nose for me, Skip. Like this.” Kyle lengthened one arm until his fingers seemed to brush the dark water several meters from the drifting shadow man’s hideous face. “Look here, Skip. I’m not afraid.”

  Skip screamed.

  —

  “Have I time?” Kyle asked. He was holding the grab bar of Marilyn’s control chair. In the forward port, the Shadow Show was distinctly visible.

  “We’ve a few minutes yet,” Marilyn told him. “And I want to know. I have to, Ky. He’s the father of my child. Can you cure him?”

  “I think so, Marilyn, though your correcting the simulator hues has probably helped Skip more than anything I’ve done thus far.”

  Kyle glanced appreciatively in the direction of the yolk. It was a translucent blue, as it should have been all along, and the shadow man who floated there looked more like a good-natured caricature of a human being than a demon. His skin was a dusty pinkish brown, his eyes the cheerful bright yellow of daffodils. It seemed to Kyle that they flickered for a moment as though to follow Polyaris in her flight across the hold. Perhaps a living entity of shadow matter could apprehend true matter after all—that would require a thorough investigation as soon as they were safely moored in the Shadow Show.

  “And he can’t really see shadow matter, Ky?”

  Kyle shook his head. “No more than you or I can, Marilyn. He thought he could, you understand, at least on some level. On another he knew he couldn’t and was faking it quite cleverly.” Kyle paused, then added, “Freud did psychology a considerable disservice when he convinced people that the human mind thinks on only three levels. There are really a great many more than that, and there’s no question but that the exact number varies between individuals.”

  “But for a while you really believed he might be able to, from what you’ve told me.”

  “At least I was willing to entertain the thought, Marilyn. Occasionally you can help people like Skip just by allowing them to test their delusional systems. What I found was that he had been taking cues from me—mostly from the direction of my eyes, no doubt. It would be wrong for you to think of that as lying. He honestly believed that when you human beings died your souls came here, to this shadow planet of a shadow system, in a shadow galaxy. And that he himself was dead.”

  Marilyn shook her head in dismay. “But that’s insane, Ky. Just crazy.”

  She has never looked this lovely, Kyle thought. Aloud he said, “Mental illness is often a way of escaping responsibility, Marilyn. You may wish to consider that. Death is another, and you may wish to consider that also.”

  For a second Marilyn hesitated, biting her lip. “You love me, don’t you, Ky?”

  “Yes, I do, Marilyn. Very much.”

  “And so does Skip, Ky.” She gave him a small, sad smile. “I suppose I’m the luckiest woman alive, or the unluckiest. The men I like most both love me, but one’s having a breakdown….I shouldn’t have started this, should I?”

  “While the other is largely inorganic,” Kyle finished for her. “But it’s really not such a terrible thing to be loved by someone like me, Marilyn. We—”

  Polyaris shrieked and shrieked again—not her shrill cry of pleasure or even her outraged squawk of pain, but the uncanny, piercing screech that signaled a prowling ocelot: Danger! Fire! Flood! INVASION and CATASTROPHE!

  She was fluttering about the shadow man, and the shadow man was no longer a dusty pinkish brown. As Kyle stared, he faded to gray, then to white. His mouth opened. He crumpled, slowly and convulsively, into a fetal ball.

  Horrified, Kyle turned to Marilyn. But Marilyn was self-absorbed, her hands clasping her belly. “It moved, Ky! It just moved. I felt life!”

  Vacuum States

  GEOFFREY A. LANDIS

  Geoffrey A. Landis (1955– ) is a US scientist and Hugo Award–winning writer. As a scientist, he has worked for NASA, particularly on the Rover design for Mars missions. His first science fiction story was “Elemental” for Analog in 1984 and his work rapidly began to attract interest and attention. “Ripples in the Dirac Sea” (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, 1988), an engagingly human take on time travel and mathematics, won a Nebula Award. “A Walk in the Sun” (Asimov’s, 1991), describing the aftermath of a crash on the moon, won a Hugo Award, and the ambitious, fascinating “Approaching Perimelasma” (Asimov’s, 1998) examined unexpected consequences from the exploration of a black hole. Many of these stories were collected in Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities (2001), which showcased Landis’s ability to infuse hard science ideas with emotion and human dilemmas.

  Landis’s first novel, Mars Crossing (2000), which won a Locus Award, was similarly committed to scientific verisimilitude, although with a more conventional thriller plot. Landis has also published science fiction poetry throughout his career and has twice won the Rhysling Award. A wide sampling of his work appears in Time Frames: A Speculative Poetry Anthology (1991), but Iron Angels (2009) is his first substantive collection.

  “Vacuum States,” a 1988 story published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, poses a pointed set of questions about the risks of speculative physics research. As ever, it reveals an author fascinated by the detail of the universe and by the process of scientific discovery.

  VACUUM STATES

  Geoffrey A. Landis

  …the vacuum state must contain many particles in a state of transient existence with violent fluctuations…The total energy of the vacuum is infinite….

  —P. A. M. DIRAC, QUANTUM MECHANICS

  You open the door hesitantly, then walk into the laboratory where the two scientists wait for you. They seem to know you. Perhaps you are a science writer, well known for your ability to convey a sense of the excitement of even the most arcane scientific discoveries. Or perhaps you are merely a friend, someone who knows both of them from long ago. It doesn’t matter.

  The older scientist smiles as she sees you. She is a world-renowned physicist, and justly so, an iconoclast who laughingly destroyed the worldview of her predecessors and rebuilt the universe to match her own view of beauty. Some say that now, older, she has grown conservative, less open to speculation. Her hair is clipped short, just beginning to grey. Call her Celia. Whatever else she may be, she is a friend. Between you no titles or last names are needed.

  And the younger scientist, barely out of grad school, with an infectious enthusiasm and boundless energy; the new iconoclast, the barbarian storming the walls of the citadel of knowledge, already being compared to the young Einstein or Dirac. P
erhaps he is tall and lanky, with unruly black hair, wearing a grey sweatshirt emblazoned with a cartoon picture of Schrödinger’s cat. Or maybe he wears a three-piece suit; such an incongruity would appeal to his sense of humor.

  You were there when they first met. Perhaps you even introduced them, in the hopes of seeing sparks fly. If so, you were disappointed, since their conversation had quickly shifted to another language, a language of Hilbert spaces and contravariant derivatives. Perhaps the very language, you muse, of the Word spoken in the Beginning, before the world began.

  But sparks indeed flew, could you but have seen. And one of them had caught fire.

  “I came,” you say, “as soon as I could.”

  The younger scientist—perhaps his name is David?—takes your hand and shakes it vigorously. “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” he says, “I knew you would. I trust you are ready to see something, well…” He grins. “Earth shaking?”

  “What do you know about guts?” says the older scientist.

  “Yes,” you say, speaking to the scientist whose name is perhaps David, and “GUTs? Grand Unification Theories? Just the barest bones,” you say to the other.

  “But you do know that the quantum vacuum is quite full of energy?” she asks, in her slightly British accent. “That, according to quantum mechanics, even empty space must have a large ‘zero-point energy’?”

  “Alive with virtual particles,” he interjects, “bursting with the energies of creation; constantly afroth and aboil with the boundless, countless, infinite dance of creation and annihilation below the Heisenberg limit.”

  “Yes,” you say, slowly. You’ve tried to understand quantum mechanics before. Somehow, though, the vital essence has always managed to elude you. “But it’s not real energy, is it?”

  “Indeed,” she says, “most respectable”—she pronounces the word as if it were somehow dirty—“physicists will tell you that zero-point energy is just a mathematical artifact, a figment of the formalism.”

  “So goes the conventional wisdom,” he says. “But it’s there, nevertheless.”

  “Maybe,” she says dryly, “you should show the apparatus.”

  “Yes, of course. This way.” He turns and walks with a bounce across the room, not even looking to see if you are behind him. You follow him into an adjoining room where a large, complicated piece of experimental apparatus fills most of the available space. “What do you think?”

  You hate to admit it, but all physics experiments look alike to you. A shiny stainless-steel vacuum chamber, large storage tanks of liquid nitrogen and helium, racks of digital meters, an oscilloscope or two, with brightly colored wires strung all about and the ubiquitous computer sitting in front. “Very pretty,” you say, hoping he won’t notice your indifference. Experimenters all think that their apparatus is beautiful. “What is it?”

  “A device to extract energy from the vacuum,” she says.

  “What?”

  “An endless energy source,” he says. “A rabbit that pulls itself out of a hat. A perpetual motion machine, if you will.”

  “Oh.” You are impressed. “Does it work?”

  The two scientists look at each other. David sighs. “We haven’t tried it.”

  “Why not?”

  “There is a question we disagree about, and we thought we’d ask your opinion,” Celia says, slowly. For a moment you think this is funny; there is no way that you could hope to answer a question that they could not. Then it seems less funny, then not funny at all. So you hold your silence. “A philosophical question: if we take energy out of the vacuum, what do we have left?”

  “Nothing!” he interjects, barely waiting for her to finish speaking. “That’s the symmetry of the vacuum. Since the zero-point energy is infinite, no matter how much energy is extracted there is always an infinite amount left.”

  “So goes conventional wisdom,” she replies softly. “But the infinity is a renormalized infinity, and the only thing of importance is differences in energy. If we remove energy, what is left must be a vacuum with lower energy.

  “Therefore, if we can extract energy, the physical vacuum must be a false vacuum.”

  She makes this pronouncement seem portentous, as if it were the most important thing in the world. “True vacuum?” you say. “False vacuum?”

  “Right,” she says. “It’s simple. A ‘true vacuum’ by definition is the lowest-energy state of empty space. If you put anything into it—remember, mass has energy!—the energy must increase, and it’s no longer the true vacuum.”

  You plop yourself down onto a lab stool, a spidery metal thing with a round metal seat, slickly enamelled in nondescript light brown. Through your jeans you feel it cool against your buttocks. You swivel slightly, back and forth, like a compass needle uncertain of true north.

  “The GUT theory postulates that when the universe was young there existed a vacuum that was just as empty of matter, but had higher energy. This ‘false’ vacuum decayed into our ‘true’ vacuum by a process we call spontaneous breaking of symmetry.”

  Her colleague leans back against a rack of equipment, smiling slightly. He seems willing to let her do the explaining. She glances at her watch. “We don’t have a whole lot of time, so please pay careful attention.

  “Here’s an example. Consider a beaker of perfectly pure liquid water. The water has perfect symmetry, which means if you start from one water molecule, you have just as much likelihood of finding another water molecule in one direction as any other. Now, cool the water down. Cool it past the freezing point, and keep cooling it. If it’s really pure water, it won’t freeze. Instead, it supercools. That’s because ice has lower symmetry than liquid water; all directions are not the same. Some directions are along the crystal axis, others aren’t. Since pure water doesn’t have any way to ‘pick’ a preferred direction to orient the crystals, it can’t crystallize.

  “Now drop in a tiny crystal of ice. One little seed of ice, no matter how tiny, and whamo! Suddenly the whole mass of water crystallizes, releasing energy in the process. Explosive crystallization, it’s called.

  “That’s symmetry breaking.

  “Now, symmetries exist in empty space as well, although a bit more abstract ones. According to GUTs, the big bang itself was caused by symmetry breaking. In the beginning, the universe was unthinkably small, and unimaginably hot, but empty. Everything was supersymmetric, all the four forces were the same, and all particles were alike. The universe cooled, and then supercooled. After a while the supersymmetric vacuum wasn’t the true vacuum anymore, but a false vacuum, laden with potential energy. Nobody knows what triggered the crystallization, but suddenly it happened, and the universe flipped over into one of the lower-energy states.

  “A lot of energy was released. Everything that is, was created from that explosive transition to a lower-energy vacuum.”

  “Oh,” you say, since you can’t think of anything else.

  “Sometimes I dream of it,” she says. “Perhaps before the big bang, there were intelligent creatures in the universe. What they were like we couldn’t possibly imagine. Their world was hot, and dense, and tiny; their entire universe would have been smaller than the point of a pin, and they would have lived a trillion generations in the shortest time we can measure. Perhaps one of them realized that the vacuum they were living in was a false vacuum, and that they could create energy from nothing. Perhaps one of them tried it. One tiny seed, no matter how small…”

  Your head is spinning, trying to imagine little tiny scientists before the big bang. You picture them as something like ants, but smaller, and moving so fast that they’re like blurs. And hot, don’t forget hot. You give up trying to picture it, and go back to listening. She is saying something about cubic potentials, comparing the universe to a marble on top of a hill—if the marble is right exactly at the top, it doesn’t know which way to roll.

  “The question is,” she continues, “if energy can be extracted from the vacuum, why doesn’t it happen spontaneously, al
l by itself? The answer has to be, because some symmetry forbids it. But if that symmetry is broken…

  “Since the big bang, the universe has cooled a lot. Perhaps our vacuum has cooled out of the lowest-energy state. If the symmetry is broken, all the energy of the vacuum would be released at once. It would be the end, not only of the Earth, but of the universe as we know it.

  “And now David, here, wants to do exactly that.”

  “As it turns out, her worries are pointless,” he says. “There are plenty of energetic objects in the universe that would trip such a transition. Quasars, black holes, Seyfert galaxies. If the universe were a false vacuum, it would have transitioned billions of years ago.”

  “Have you ever wondered about the Fermi paradox?” she asks. “How it is that we’ve never seen any signs of other intelligent life in the universe? I can tell you the answer. If any alien civilizations more advanced than ours existed, they would have already found the secret to extracting vacuum energy. Sooner or later, they’d try it, and, wham! The end of the universe. So the universe wouldn’t exist, unless we’re the first.”

  You notice that they are both waiting for you to say something. You scuffle your feet against the rough concrete floor. You’ve figured out why they called you here, and are desperately trying to think of what to say. “So you have cold feet? You want me to tell you whether you should do the experiment?”

  “No,” he tells you. “We already have started the experiment.” He gestures at a digital readout. “I turned it on when you first walked in the door. The field is building up now. When it hits ten thousand teslas, the generator is programmed to flip on automatically.” You look at the LED indicator. Nine point four, it tells you, in a cheerful cherry-red glow.

  “But,” says the other.

  “But?” you say. David takes your hand, and wraps it around the handle of a switch, a large old-fashioned knife switch, the kind that you privately think of as a “Frankenstein switch.” You briefly pretend that you are the obsessed doctor, with life and death subjugated to your power. You’ve watched too many old monster movies. “This turns it off?”