* * *
THEIR PARADISE ENDED one morning when they encountered a clutch of cameramen standing outside Mariella’s office. “What’s all this?” she asked, thinking that there’d been a robbery or that somebody famous had died.
A microphone was thrust at her face. “Are you the woman who’s destroyed time?”
“What? No! Ridiculous.”
“Have you seen today’s papers?” A copy of the New York Times was brandished but she couldn’t possibly read the headlines with it waving around like that.
“I don’t—”
Richard held up both hands and said, “Gentlemen! Ladies! Please! Yes, this is Dr. Mariella Coudy, and I’m her junior partner on the paper. Dr. Coudy was absolutely right when she denied destroying time. There is no such thing as time. There’s only the accumulation of consequences.”
“If there’s no such thing as time, does that mean it’s possible to travel into the past? Visit ancient Rome? Hunt dinosaurs?” Several reporters laughed.
“There’s no such thing as the past, either—only an infinite, ever-changing present.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” somebody asked.
“That’s an extremely good question. I’m afraid that I can’t adequately answer it without using a lot of very complicated equations. Let’s just say that the past never really goes away, while the future exists only relative to the immediate moment.”
“If there is no time, then what is there?”
“Happenstance,” Richard said. “A tremendous amount of happenstance.”
It was all ludicrously oversimplified to the point of being meaningless, but the reporters ate it up. Richard’s explanations gave them the illusion that they sort-of kind-of understood what was being talked about, when the truth was that they didn’t even have the mathematics to be misinformed. When, eventually, the reporters ran out of questions, packed their equipment, and left, Mariella angrily said, “What the hell was all that about?”
“Public relations. We’ve just knocked the props out from under one of the few things that everybody thinks they understand. That’s going to get people excited. Some of them are going to hate us for what we’ve done to their world.”
“The world’s the same as it ever was. The only thing that’ll be different is our understanding of it.”
“Tell that to Darwin.”
* * *
THAT WAS THE bad side of fame. The good side was money. Suddenly, money was everywhere. There was enough money to do anything except the one thing Mariella wanted most, which was to be left alone with Richard, her thoughts, a blackboard, and a piece of chalk. Richard acquired a great deal of what was surely extremely expensive equipment, and hit the lecture circuit—“Somebody has to,” he said cheerily, “and, God knows, you won’t”—to explain their findings. So she was alone again, as often as not.
She used these empty spaces in her life to think about existence without time. She tried not to imagine he was with other women.
Whenever Richard returned from the road, they had furious reunions and she would share her tentative, half-formed thoughts with him. One evening he asked “What is the shape of happenstance?” and Mariella had no answer for him. In short order he had canceled all his speaking engagements and there was an enormous 3-D visualization tank in his lab, along with the dedicated processing power of several Crayflexes at his disposal. Lab assistants whose names she could never get straight scurried about doing things, while Richard directed and orchestrated and obsessed. Suddenly, he had very little time for her. Until one day he brought her in to show her a single black speck in the murky blue-gray tank.
“We have pinned down one instantiation of happenstance!” he said proudly.
A month later, there were three specks. A week after that there were a thousand. Increasingly rapidly, the very first map of reality took shape: It looked like a tornado at first, with a thick and twisting trunk. Then it sprouted limbs, some of them a good third as thick as what Richard dubbed the Main Sequence. These looped upward or downward, it seemed to make no difference, giving birth to smaller limbs, or perhaps “tentacles” was a better word for them, which wound about each other, sometimes dwindling to nothing, other times rejoining the main trunk.
Richard called it the Monster. But in Mariella’s eyes it was not monstrous at all. It had the near-organic look of certain fractal mathematical formulae. It flowed and twisted elegantly, like branches frozen in the act of dancing in the breeze. It was what it was—and that was beautiful.
It looked like a tree. A tree whose roots and crown were lost in the distance. A tree vast enough to contain all the universe.
Pictures of it leaked out, of course. The lab techs had taken snapshots and shared them with friends who posted them online. This brought back the press, and this time they were not so easy to deal with, for they quickly learned that Richard and Mariella were an item. The disparity of age and appearance, which would have been nothing were she male and he female, was apparently custom-made for the tabloids—louche enough to be scandalous, romantic enough to be touching, easy to snark about. One of the papers stitched together two pictures with Photoshop and ran it under the headline BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. There was no possible confusion who was supposed to be what. Another ran what even Mariella thought was an unfair rendering of her face alongside the map of reality and asked WHICH IS THE MONSTER?
It astonished her how much this hurt.
This time Richard was not so accommodating. “You bastards crossed a line,” he told one reporter. “So, no, I’m not going to explain anything to you or any of your idiot kind. If you want to understand our work, you’ll just have to go back to school for another eight years. Assuming you have the brains for it.” Furiously, he retreated to his lab, the way another man might have hit the bars, and stared at the Monster for several hours.
Then he sought out Mariella and asked, “If time is unidirectional in Minkowski space, and there is no time—then what remains?” Initiating another long, sexless, and ecstatic night. After which he left the mapping project for his grad students to run without him. He obtained two new labs—exactly how was never clear to Mariella, who was so innocent of practical matters that she didn’t even have a driver’s license—and began to build another experiment. Half his new equipment went into one lab, which he called the Slingshot, and the rest into the second, on the far side of the campus, which he called the Target.
“If this works,” he said, “it will change everything. People will be able to travel from and to anywhere in the universe.”
“So long as there’s the proper machinery to receive them when they get there.”
“Yes, of course.”
“And provided it doesn’t simply blow itself to hell. I have my suspicions about the energy gradient between your two sites.”
There was that grin again—the grin of a man who knew that nothing could possibly go wrong, and that everything must inevitably work out right. “Don’t you worry about a thing,” Richard said. “You’re still the senior partner. I won’t do anything until you assure me that it’s perfectly safe.”
* * *
THE NEXT DAY there was an explosion that shook the entire campus. Mariella ran outside and saw people pouring from all the buildings. A black balloon of smoke tumbled upward over the rooftops.
It came from the Target.
Richard had told her he’d be spending the entire day there.
Somehow, Mariella was running. Somehow, she was there. The entire building had been reduced to smoldering rubble. Parts of what remained were on fire. It smelled like burning garbage.
A hand touched her arm. It was Dr. Inglehoff. Laura. “Maybe Richard wasn’t in the building,” she said. “I’m sure he’s all right.” Her expression was grotesque with compassion.
Mariella stared at the woman in perplexity. “Where else would he be? At this time of day? Why would he be anywhere else?”
Then people whom she had never before appreciated we
re, if not precisely her friends, at the very least close colleagues, were leading her away. She was in a room. There was a nurse giving her a shot. Somebody said, “Sleep is the best doctor.”
Mariella slept.
When she awoke and Richard was not there, she knew her romance was over. Somebody told her that the explosion was so thorough that nothing readily identifiable as human remains had yet been found. That same person said there was always hope. But that was nonsense. If Richard were alive, he’d have been by her side. He was not, and therefore he was dead.
Q., as he would have said, E.D.
The ensuing week was the worst period of her life. Mariella effectively stopped sleeping. Sometimes she zoned out and came to herself eight or ten or fifteen hours later, in the middle of frying an egg or sorting through her notes. But you could hardly call that sleep. Somehow she kept herself fed. Apparently her body wanted to go on living, even if she didn’t.
She kept thinking of Richard, lost to her, swept away further and further into the past.
But of course there was no past. So he wasn’t even there.
One night, driven by obscure impulses, she found herself fully dressed and hurrying across the campus at three a.m. Clearly, she was going to Richard’s lab—the surviving of the two new ones, the Slingshot. The building loomed up before her, dark and empty.
When she threw the light switch, mountains of electronic devices snapped into existence. Richard’s first experiment could have been run on a kitchen table. This one looked like the stage set for a Wagnerian opera. It was amazing how money could complicate even the simplest demonstration proof.
Mariella began flicking switches, bringing the beast to life. Things hummed and made grinding noises. Test patterns leaped to life on flat screens and then wavered in transient distortions. Something snapped and sparked, leaving the tang of ozone in the air.
This was not her bailiwick. But because it was Richard’s and because he had wanted her to understand it, she knew what to do.
There was, after all, no such thing as time. Only the accumulation of consequences.
But first there was a chore to do. All of Richard’s notes were on a battered old laptop lying atop a stack of reference books on his desk. She bundled them together and then attached the bundle to an email reading simply, “So you will understand what happened.” This she sent to his entire mailing list. Surely someone on it would have the wit to appreciate what he had done. Her own notes were all safe in her office. She had no doubt there would be people looking for them in the wake of what she had to do.
The experiment was ready to run. All she had to do was connect a few cables and then walk through what looked uncannily like a wrought-iron pergola, such as one might expect to find in a Victorian garden. It was entirely possible that’s what it was; Richard was never one to hold out for proper equipment when some perfectly adequate piece of bricolage was close at hand.
Mariella connected the cables. Then she checked all the connections three times, not because it was necessary but because that was how Richard would have done it.
She did not bother to check the setting, however. There was only one possible instantiation of happenstance the apparatus could be set for. And she already knew it would work.
She walked through the pergola.
In that timeless instant of transition, Mariella realized that in his own way Richard possessed a genius approaching her own. (Had she really underestimated him all this while? Yes, she had.) Crossing to the far side of the campus in a single step, she felt a wave of she-knew-not-what-energies pass through her body and brain—she actually felt it in her brain!—and knew that she was experiencing a sensation no human being had ever felt before.
The air wavered before her and Mariella was through. Richard stood, his back to her, alive and fussing with a potentiometer. For the second time in her life, she was absolutely, completely happy.
“Richard.” The word escaped her unbidden.
He turned and saw her and in the instant before the inequality of forces across the gradient of happenstance grounded itself, simultaneously destroying both laboratories a sixteenth of a mile and eight days apart and smashing the two lovers to nothing, a smile, natural and unforced, blossomed on Richard’s face.
NAHIKU WEST
Linda Nagata
Linda Nagata “grew up in a rented beach house on the north shore of Oahu. She graduated from the University of Hawaii with a degree in zoology and worked for a time at Haleakala National Park, on the island of Maui, where she continues to live with her husband in their longtime home. She’s been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven Web sites, and lately a publisher and book designer.” She is the author of novels and stories, including The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and the novella “Goddesses,” winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novella. Though best known for her science fiction, she also writes fantasy, exemplified by her “scoundrel lit” series Stories of the Puzzlelands. Her most recent work is a near-future military science fiction thriller, The Red: First Light.
“Nahiku West” was published in the e-book anthology Solaris 1.5. It is a complex, intricate science fiction mystery story in a future setting that is carefully revealed as the story progresses. It is an interesting contrast to the Cadigan story earlier in this book.
A RAILCAR WAS ferrying Key Lu across the tether linking Nahiku East and West when a micrometeor popped through the car’s canopy, leaving two neat holes that vented the cabin to hard vacuum within seconds. The car continued on the track, but it took over a minute for it to reach the gel lock at Nahiku West and pass through into atmosphere. No one expected to find Key Lu alive, but as soon as the car re-pressurized, he woke up.
Sometimes, it’s a crime not to die.
* * *
I STEPPED INTO the interrogation chamber. Key had been sitting on one of two padded couches, but when he saw me he bolted to his feet. I stood very still, hearing the door lock behind me. Nothing in Key’s background indicated he was a violent man, but prisoners sometimes panic. I raised my hand slightly, as a gel ribbon armed with a paralytic spray slid from my forearm to my palm, ready for use if it came to that.
“Please,” I said, keeping the ribbon carefully concealed. “Sit down.”
Key slowly subsided onto the couch, never taking his frightened eyes off me.
Most of the celestial cities restrict the height and weight of residents to minimize the consumption of volatiles, but Commonwealth police officers are required to be taller and more muscular than the average citizen. I used to be a smaller man, but during my time at the academy adjustments were made. I faced Key Lu with a physical presence optimized to trigger a sense of intimidation in the back brain of a nervous suspect, an effect enhanced by the black fabric of my uniform. Its design was simple—shorts cuffed at the knees and a lightweight pullover with long sleeves that covered the small arsenal of chemical ribbons I carried on my forearms—but its light-swallowing color set me apart from the bright fashions of the celestial cities.
I sat down on the couch opposite Key Lu. He was a well-designed man, nothing eccentric about him, just another good-looking citizen. His hair was presently blond, his eyebrows darker. His balanced face lacked strong features. The only thing notable about him was his injuries. Dark bruises surrounded his eyes and their whites had turned red from burst blood vessels. More bruises discolored swollen tissue beneath his coppery skin.
We studied each other for several seconds, both knowing what was at stake. I was first to speak. “I’m Officer Zeke Choy—”
“I know who you are.”
“—of the Commonwealth Police, the watch officer here at Nahiku.”
The oldest celestial cities orbited Earth, but Nahiku was newer. It was one in a cluster of three orbital habitats that circled the Sun together, just inside the procession of Venus.
Key Lu addressed me again, with the polite insistence of a desperate man. “I didn’t know about the quirk,
Officer Choy. I thought I was legal.”
The machine voice of a Dull Intelligence whispered into my auditory nerve that he was lying. I already knew that, but I nodded anyway, pretending to believe him.
The DI was housed within my atrium, a neural organ that served as an interface between mind and machine. Atriums are a legal enhancement—they don’t change human biology—but Key Lu’s quirked physiology that had allowed him to survive short-term exposure to hard vacuum was definitely not.
I was sure his quirk had been done before the age of consent. He’d been born in the Far Reaches among the fragile holdings of the asteroid prospectors, where it must have looked like a reasonable gamble to bioengineer some insurance into his system. Years had passed since then; enforcement had grown stricter. Though Key Lu looked perfectly ordinary, by the law of the Commonwealth, he wasn’t even human.
I met his gaze, hoping he was no fool. “Don’t tell me anything I don’t want to know,” I warned him.
I let him consider this for several seconds before I went on. “Your enhancement is illegal under the statutes of the Commonwealth—”
“I understand that, but I didn’t know about it.”
I nodded my approval of this lie. I needed to maintain the fiction that he hadn’t known. It was the only way I could help him. “I’ll need your consent to remove it.”
A spark of hope ignited in his blooded eyes. “Yes! Yes, of course.”
“So recorded.” I stood, determined to get the quirk out of his system as soon as possible, before awkward questions could be asked. “Treatment can begin right—”
The door to the interrogation room opened.
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