Wait a second. Sianna looked up from her plate of buttered, jamless toast and stared unseeing at the wall. The ancient, whimsical paradox was part of it, part of the whatever-it-was in the back of her mind that she was trying to tempt out into the open.
Time. Something about time. Her dreams had been about time, about gaps in time.
There. She had it. She knew. The Saint Anthony. There. There it was. Sianna crunched down on a biteful of toast, a feeling of triumph washing over her. She had known it would come to her. The Saint Anthony, the probe the people back in the Solar System had managed to drop through the wormhole just before contact was lost, five years before. The literature mentioned its onboard clock being wrong. Everyone had always assumed it was a malfunction, though one or two rather fringy theorists insisted that the time shift had been a real effect, a distortion in space-time caused by transit through a worm-hole. The unmanned probe’s onboard clock had been thirty-seven minutes fast, or some such number.
Conventional wisdom had it that the clock circuitry had been scrambled a bit during the probe’s admittedly rough ride. That didn’t make a great deal of sense, of course. Any malf that could scramble the clock circuit should have fouled up all sorts of other things. Okay, suppose it hadn’t been a malfunction? What had happened to those missing minutes? No, wait up. Think it through. Not missing minutes. Extra minutes. If the Saint Anthony chronometers were right, it had come from thirty-seven minutes in the future. It had experienced thirty-seven more minutes of time than Earth.
That was what reminded her of the White Queen’s rules concerning jam, except it was the thirty-seven minutes, and not the jam, that were always some when else, out of reach. One slice of time was forever missing, a gap between the Saint Anthony‘s experience of the Universe and Earth’s. Suppose the clock error was a real effect. Suppose the Saint Anthony’s clock was an accurate report of what time it was back in the Solar System. That, in turn, meant that the Solar System had somehow jumped thirty-seven minutes into the future as seen from Earth and the Multisystem.
In the yesterdays before the Charonians took Earth, Earth and the Solar System had kept the same time. The far-off dream of MRI was that maybe, somehow, the Earth could be taken home to the Solar System. Then Earth and Solar System could be to-gether in some far off time to-morrow. Sianna put the archaic hyphen in the words as she thought it out. So why did the two places not have the same time to-day?
Nice question, all right. But how to find the answer? Why thirty-seven minutes? Why not forty-two minutes, or three days, or 123 years? What if that duration, thirty-seven minutes, held the answers, or at least some guide to the questions?
Where had those minutes been lost—or gained? Which of the two—Earth or the Solar System—had gone forward or backward in time, and how, and why?
Had the Saint Anthony been thrown forward in time during its transit through the wormhole? Or had the Earth been thrown backward in time?
But no, she was getting muddled. The Saint Anthony had been sent through the same wormhole that had taken the Earth. All sorts of mathematical models allowed for a wormhole to induce time distortions—but none of them would cause the wormhole to be selective about it.
That was why no one believed the SA time data. Any time distortion should have hit the probe and the planet equally. Unless, of course, everyone had it wrong and Earth had not fallen through the same hole. If the Earth had arrived in the Multisystem through some other mechanism, instead of through the wormhole that linked Moonpoint here in the Multisystem and Earth point back in the Solar System, then all bets about how the Multisystem worked were off, and the Charonians had some completely unknown mechanisms up their sleeves. It was bad enough that they were the masters of gravity power. If they could control time as well, humanity might as well just quit now.
Alternatively, something had happened to Earth since its arrival. But what, and how? And how was it no one had noticed it happening? Sianna shut her eyes and shook her head to clear it. It was all too damned confusing. No wonder everyone had decided the on-board clock data had to be erroneous. If its clock was right, then it might mean that everything else of the precious little they knew about the Multisystem was wrong.
So what the devil had happened? Was the whole Earth missing thirty-seven minutes of its own existence? How could that be? And what alternative explanations might there be? Thoughtful, Sianna took a bite of toast and tried to keep from getting too excited. She had the very definite feeling that she was on to something.
Slowly, carefully, methodically, she told herself. She set to work making a proper breakfast, oatmeal with milk, an orange, two sausages. It was the sort of day when she would forget to eat. Best to fill up now so she’d be able to work longer before she collapsed. Getting the automatics to make breakfast required only the tiniest fraction of her attention. She put the rest of her mind to work on the question at hand. By the time she had demolished her meal without tasting a bit of it, she had a good half-dozen ideas. She had to get down to the institute and start digging. She left the dishes for the kitchen to take care of.
She popped the crusts of her toast into her mouth and hurried on her way, the crunching in her mouth almost drowning out the thoughts in her head.
Naked Purple Habitat (NaPurHab)
In Orbit of the Moonpoint Singularity
“Round and round she goes, and where she stops, no-bo-dy knows,” Eyeball whispered to herself.
Eyeballer Maximus Lock-on, big cheeze of the astronomy section, stared out the observation port of the Naked Purple Habitat, out onto the cold black of space, and whispered the old patter to herself.
“Nobody knows,” she whispered again. More and more often, she found herself wishing for the old daze, for her old job, for the times back when that statement had made sense, even if it had not been strictly true.
Rare was the roulette wheel in Nevada Free State where someone didn’t capiche where she stopped. But the marks had dug that—the license fees for an honest house were way higher than those for a shady one. In the long run, the marks knew, you got a better deal in one of the clip joints. Folks were more pleasant, too. The only geeks who gambled in the honest houses were the flamers so raging they had been bounced out of all the dives.
But that was the past, and Nevada Free State was not likely to figure large in Eyeball’s plans for the future. NevFree was back in the old daze, back when they was all in the Solar Area. “Solar System” was the straight name, but “system” implied a logic and order, and MomNature was not big on too much order. Still, it was hard to devote your life to the battle against order and reason in a Universe that seemed intent on killing you for nogood reason. Didn’t used to be that way. Used to be e-z-r to be anti-reason back when the Universe seemed more reasonable.
Eyeball sighed as she thought of backhome Nevada. She glanced toward the number four monitor, showing a pic of Earth. So near and yet so far. Nothing was going to get from NaPurHab to Nevada no how, or to any other part of Earth, not when there was a fleet of big damn paranoid skymountains whirling around the planet, keeping anything from getting too close. Damned COREs.
No way no how no one would ever get back to the simple pleasures of running a dishonest gambling house. Still, the present circs had compensation for a gambler. At present, Eyeball was concerned with a roulette wheel of somewhat larger proportions, and a game with more serious stakes. She was more worried by orbital mechanics than gambling laws.
Five years ago, during the Big Drop, what the straights back on Earth called the Abduction, the Naked Purple Habitat had been dragged along with Earth when Earth was stolen. NaPurHab was sent wheeling across the sky in an unstable, decaying orbit.
In a desperation throwdice move, the Maximum Windbag had dropped the habitat into the only stable orbit the hab could reach. From then till now, the hab had ridden an orbit around the Moonpoint Singularity, an orbit so tight it was actually inside Moonpoint Ring.
NaPurHab had spent the last five years
in a fast, tight orbit of the black hole, the singularity, that sat at the center of the Moonpoint Ring.
That was how the hab had gotten into the game. Eyeball had just wrapped the calcs that old time and manner of its getting thrown out. “Round and round she goes,” Eyeball whispered to herself again. But she did not complete the little couplet this time. She knew exactly where this one would stop.
She glanced at the ticktock. Assuming the situation did not change, and the hab did not correct its orbit, NaPurHab would impact on the Moonpoint Singularity in 123 days, 47 minutes, and 19 seconds. That assumption, however, was a helluva big one. The situation had been doing nothing but change.
Moonpoint Ring’s swing around the hole was flopping up down all ways always, and that was bad. To put it another way, the orbit of the Moonpoint Ring around the wormhole was becoming more and more unstable, and that in turn was destabilizing NaPurHab’s orbital track.
As to howcum Moonpoint Ring’s swing around was failing, Eyeball couldn’t say. It was almost as if the big Windbag Charonians didn’t give no more of a damn. Moonpoint Ring’s orbit had never been more than metastable since the Big Drop, but used to be it had always gotten a noodge back toward equilibrium when things were looking bad. Not now, not no way. Charonians weren’t lifting a finger, or a tentacle, or whatever was they had.
And doing all the correct it burns was getting tough. The tanks were getting low. Ever time, it took a bigger and bigger swig of propellant to hold the hab swingaround together. Meantime, it was getting more and more difficult for Earth to top the tank, send refills. God or whoever or whatever bless the straights back on Earth for doing what they could, but weren’t much they could do.
Eyeball could see lines on a chart move good as anyone. Sooner or later, they would not be able to hold it together and the hab would pile it in. And the way things were falling apart, Eyeball had a deep hunch NaPurHab was going to go down soonerthanlater.
Sucked up by a black hole. Not a good way to check out.
Notcool notcool notcool.
“Where she stops, no one wanna know,” Eyeball whispered to herself.
Six
Grail of the Sphere
“Denial is a remarkable thing. With it, all things impossible are made possible, and vice versa. In the years following the Abduction, denial—the refusal to accept the facts of reality—came to be a major survival mechanism not only for individuals, but for society as a whole. Coupled with the refusal to see the Universe as it existed was the determination to see it as it was not, a will to build castles in the air out of what ought to have been.
“After a time, of course, the question became whether the cure was worse than the disease, whether it would indeed be possible for individuals—or society—to survive the survival mechanism.”
—Dr. Wolf Bernhardt, Director-General, U.N. Directorate of Spatial Research, address on the occasion of dedicating the Hijacker Memorial, June 4, 2436
Multisystem Research Institute
New York City
The Multisystem Research Institute at Columbia University in the city of New York was a goddamned big hole in the ground, but that was not much of a novelty in mid-twenty-fifth-century New York. Belowground construction had been popular even before the Abduction. Automated Lunar excavating technology had proved to be quite practical on Earth, environmental control was easy underground, and there weren’t many prime abovegrounds available.
After the Abduction, of course, the fad had really taken hold. Post-Abduction New York was even moodier and more paranoid than the city had been in times past. People wanted to hide.
Some people had—or pretended to have—reasons for going underground that had nothing to do with the Charonians. Many people felt safer underground. Well, maybe they were safer from street crime and bad weather and that sort of thing. But no one was really thinking about those dangers, even when they talked about them. They simply served as a nice series of plausible reasons for going underground.
Even if there was no real safety underground, people who lived and worked below street level did not have to see the sky. That was the major attraction. Underground living was downright fashionable.
However, there was such a thing as overdoing it—and that’s what MRI had done. Such was Sianna’s first thought every morning as she stepped into the high-speed elevator. She was early this morning, and all alone in the elevator car. Somehow that made it worse. She stood with her back to the rear wall of the car and reached out to either side. She wrapped both her hands tightly around the waist-high guardrail, and let her breath out slowly.
“Main Level,” she said to the elevator, and braced herself as best she could against the stomach-knotting drop. MRI main level was three hundred meters below ground level, and the speed with which the elevators could make the run was an inexplicable point of pride among the staff. Sianna would just as soon have gone twice as slowly and gotten half as queasy.
The motors whirred, the car started its descent, and Sianna was suddenly strongly aware of just what size—and flavor—breakfast she had had. She shut her eyes, determined not to listen to the air whistling past the car, the humming of the motors, the deeper vibration of the car’s drop down into the depths, a deep thrumming noise that seemed to be making the unconvincing promise that it would be over soon, over soon, over soon. The imaginary voices were never much comfort. After all, Sianna was afraid the ride would end too soon— and too suddenly.
Then came that blissful moment when her knees half-buckled and her weight suddenly spiked high and then slowly reduced itself to normal. The elevator car decelerated to a smooth and perfect stop, once again not dropping like a stone and smashing into the bottom of the shaft, once again not reducing Sianna to a shapeless, hideous blob the consistency of strawberry jam.
That was the rule. Sianna smiled weakly to herself as the doors opened and her ears popped with the change in pressure. Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.
Well, maybe not—but she never would trust that damned elevator.
With a distinct sense of relief, Sianna stepped out of the car and onto the observation platform. The elevator banks opened up onto a raised stonework observation platform ten meters above the main level. Two long, wide stairways in front and two long swooping ramps at the sides led down to “ground” level. The MRI designers had been deeply concerned no one be reminded of the endless megatons of rock overhead, of the fact that this grand, well-lit place was in reality an artificial cave deep in the Earth.
But for Sianna, who had no illusions about MRI’s location, something was still tickling the back of her head, telling her that this was it, today was the day. Today things were going to happen. She felt obliged to approach the day with a certain sense of occasion. Sianna forced herself to savor the moment, the view. Somehow, she knew that she would want to remember this day hereafter. She would want to remember what this place looked like now, today.
The MRI Main Level was not in and of itself a building. It was only a shell, a container to hold the actual labs and offices, a dome 150 meters wide and 300 meters long.
The ceiling of the chamber was done up in an absurd and deeply comforting imitation of a blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds. A combination of active-matrix paint and hidden projectors allowed the clouds to move across the sky. A brilliant yellow-white dazzle of light, too bright to look upon, tracked across the ceiling in place of the Sun. Now it hung in the eastern end of the ceiling, a bit redder than it would be when closer to the middle.
At night, the dome was lit up with the night sky of the Solar System, with the Moon and stars and planets all precisely as they would be as seen from New York City—if New York were back in the Solar System, and if New York City produced no light pollution. Illusions within illusions. No one had seen that many stars in New York’s night sky since the invention of the light bulb.
Endless effort and design had gone into making the stone sky seem to lift away toward infinity. None of it
fooled Sianna, however.
She did not, did not, did not like enclosed places. Maybe that was why she hated the Charonians so much—they had put the Earth in a box, closed it off from the Universe, sealed the whole world off from the outside.
Sianna had been to Cambridge in England and wandered the ancient quadrangles of King’s College, Queens’ College, Jesus College and all the rest, and been fascinated by how they all conformed to the same basic design, the same layout of student rooms, dining hull, library, office and chapel laid out around a quadrangle. She had loved the feel of age and centuries hanging off the colleges, the sense that they had stayed the same here while all else had changed. She had loved the worn stones of the walkway, the way the present had been set down in whatever odd corners the past was not taking up. MRI had been laid out to the same pattern, a new and strange change rung on the same pattern twelve hundred years later. But was it conscious praise of the past, or self-deceptive denial of present reality? No centuries had molded this place. It was artificial.
Sianna had heard someone describe MRI as a campus-under-glass, and that was pretty close. The buildings themselves ranged from the ivy-covered brick of the Simulation Center to the mushroom-shaped biocrete of the Main Operations Building. Sianna could almost imagine Alice’s Caterpillar sitting on top of the Ops Building, gravely smoking his hookah. She smiled to herself. She had Carroll on the brain this morning, she did.
One side of the campus was given over to a fair-sized lawn, and most incongruous of all, a duck pond. A mama duck and her ducklings were moving across the water. The two swans were still snoozing in the shade of one of the pondside trees.
Sianna turned and made her way down the stairs and onto the pathway that led past the pond to the Main Ops building.
The unreality of the place suddenly seemed the most palpable thing about it. Piped-in air treated to smell like fresh air, the errant breeze created by computer-controlled ductwork, the springiness of the thick-growing, robot-tended lawn beneath her feet all suddenly seemed too real, like the over-vivid hallucinations of a fever-dream.
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