“Anne has experienced a frustrating year,” he told Misha. “She has fought to preserve the Nun and the alien wilderness—”
“To no apparent effect at all,” growled Anne.
“But that isn’t true!” Aimi said. “I’ve followed your work in more detail than anyone, Anne, and I know how much you’ve accomplished since you came back from Junction the first time.”
“What, you mean all of the new social anxieties I cultivated?”
“I mean your international non-profit! You’re getting scientists and specialists into Junction, doing important research—” she raised her voice to stop Anne from interrupting, “– and most importantly, you’re highlighting the value that Junction’s intact ecosystems have. With every photograph of a treeworm or a toymaker, you’re creating interest back on Earth, changing the public dialogue!” Daisuke felt Anne shiver. She hated praise like this because she never knew how to respond.
He did his best to help. “And please extend our deepest thanks to Farhad, who has made it possible to do so much more.”
Aimi’s teeth were bright in the gathering darkness. “I made some personal donations as well.” She turned to Misha and Yunubey. “And I plan to raise the subject of Nun cultural preservation with Farhad. How about a cultural center in addition to a research station and zoo?”
Misha grunted. “Well, consider me bribed. But give me a moment to pass the buck. Yunubey-o, dan ern adya yuang ara wik kwanamsnanan?”
“Mm!” Yunubey rubbed his hands together and rattled off what sounded like a list.
“A lot of Indonesian and English words mixed in there,” said Anne. “I got ‘infirmary’, ‘school’, ‘electric generator’, and ‘ceiling’.”
“We’ll write up a list for you,” Misha said.
Aimi winked at him, and Daisuke entertained a fantasy that this fabulous wealth might actually materialize.
“What if the Nun had a hospital and a school?” he asked.
“And, for whatever purpose, a ceiling?” Anne said.
“He means a building with ceilings. A dormitory or barracks.”
Aimi leaned into Anne’s field of vision. “What’s your perfect future for the terraformed valley, Anne? What does it look like?”
That was a very good tactic. Daisuke would have to remember it.
“I don’t know,” Anne said. “I suppose what would be best for the Nun and the valley would be a sort of little town. It would be surrounded by terraforming pools and nothofagus forests? If the Nun have somewhere comfortable to live, we could get them off this hillside, anyway.”
Daisuke winced.
“Damn it, Anne,” Misha said. “The Nun have bigger problems right now than getting off your hillside.”
She wiggled against Daisuke’s back, waving her hands. “You know what I mean! It doesn’t have to be life for either the Nun or the Sweet Blood biome. The Nun’s ancestors lived here for forty thousand years without harming their neighbor biomes.”
“No, they just had to use very slow processes to harm their neighbor biomes. And they kept dying here and being replaced by more poor exiles from Earth. Now that they have flamethrowers, they stand a real chance!”
Anne overrode him. “When the Nun can move back into their own valley, we can repair this one! You transplant vegetation from the Sweet Blood planet and coax the native fauna back. Do the same for the Lighthouse and Treeworm biomes. Instead of having one big mess where everyone is dead and miserable, we could have lots of little functioning biomes that all work!”
“A win-win situation, you mean,” Aimi said.
“I mean something sustainable,” Anne said.
Moon snorted. Aimi elbowed him. “That’s exactly the sort of solution that Farhad is trying for,” she said. “That’s the direction we’re all pushing in.”
“Usually, I’d say a castle made of chocolate would be more realistic,” said Misha. “But I’m just drunk enough for optimism. Hand me another beer or two and I might work my way up to idealism.” He laughed and took the bottles that Aimi handed him. “Just take me home before I reach mysticism. Cheers!”
The sky to the north had become the sullen slate color of the North Pacific, but the warmth of the setting sun had turned the western sky tropical. When Daisuke looked up the valley, in the direction they would travel tomorrow, he saw the sort of clear turquoise you get over a coral reef.
Aimi held out her bottle, gleaming against the turquoise. “To the mission!”
What followed was the corporate drinking familiar to Daisuke from a hundred projects. Everyone tried to get so plastered that when they woke up the next morning with both kidneys, they concluded that they must be surrounded by trustworthy comrades. Aimi seemed to already have Moon well in hand. He was blushing furiously and gave more than one-word responses to Daisuke’s questions.
“So,” Daisuke said, “you studied in America?”
“I went to Tufts.”
“I was at the University of Montana. I hear the weather in Boston is very snowy.”
“Ask him what he thinks he’ll learn from the portals,” said Anne.
Daisuke hesitated. Why didn’t she ask her own question? Clearly, she didn’t feel comfortable talking to the other scientist, and Daisuke didn’t want to highlight that fact. The best thing to do would be to stay silent and wait. Moon would pretend Anne’s question hadn’t been weird, and smooth over her faux pas.
Moon said nothing. He just looked sourly at Anne until Aimi said, “I’m curious too.”
Moon took another swig of beer and shrugged. “Everything.”
Aimi gave him a gentle shove with her shoulder. “I knew that. The theory of everything, right?”
“Hm,” said Anne.
“Ah?” Daisuke wished he had studied for this interview. “I don’t know what that is.”
Moon looked down into the mouth of his bottle.
“They’ll understand,” Aimi said. “I understood when you explained it to me, didn’t I?”
Moon looked at her and straightened his shoulders. Daisuke hid his grin. Misha didn’t.
“Well.” Moon’s voice was suddenly softer and deeper. “On the one hand we have gravity.” He thumped his bottle on the mat. “Einstein and so on. Relativity. The interactions of huge things over vast distances. On the other hand we have quantum physics.” He chopped the air with the edge of his left hand. “Uncertainty. Fuzziness. Tiny things over tiny distances. One predicts the movements of planets and stars.” Thunk went the beer bottle. “The other predicts the behavior of electrons.” Swish went his hand. “But neither system can explain the other. Plug quantum-scale objects into Einstein’s field equations and you get a divide-by-zero error. At least one of these systems is wrong.” Moon took a drink. “Probably both.”
Anne hummed again, and Yunubey asked Misha to translate. Misha gave a belch and a one-word response that couldn’t possibly be a translation.
Daisuke decided to dig deeper. “I think I follow that, but what does it have to do with portals?” He was careful to use the expert’s preferred terminology.
“Obviously, portals are the key to transcending the quantum and relativity models because they violate the rules of both.” Moon waved his bottle. “They fly in the face of pretty much everything we’ve discovered for the past hundred and fifty years.”
“And yet here they are,” said Anne. “Here we are on another planet.” She moved against Daisuke’s back and the others looked up. She must be pointing at the sky. “And there’s a ring system made of wormholes.”
Daisuke looked up.
It was as if someone had organized the stars. White, red, yellow, blue, the wormholes followed each other in lines that curved gently across the southern sky, fading into the last light of the sun. If Daisuke waited long enough, he would see those points of light move up the sky, or wink in or out of
existence as something – what? – passed through them?
“Ch!” Moon said. “Do you expect me to deny their existence? I’m not an idiot. I know when I’m looking at proof that I’m wrong.”
“But back in the caravan you said that the wormhole in the Howling Mountain won’t lead to orbit around Junction.”
“It won’t.”
“Well, where’s it going to go other than up there?” Daisuke felt a jerk against his back as Anne gestured at the Nightbow. “We have a wormhole on the ground that spits out space-dwelling creatures and a ring of wormholes in orbit, swallowing space creatures.”
“If you say the creature you found comes from space, I suppose I have to believe you.”
“Goddamn right you do,” Anne said.
“But it can’t have come from the Nightbow. Not from anywhere we can see in the night sky.”
“Wait,” said Misha. “You mean our expedition isn’t going to the wormhole that leads to space?”
Yunubey must have understood that, because he spat a question at Misha, who stammered an answer in the tone of ‘hell if I know’.
Aimi cleared her throat. “What you mean, Moon, is that while you do believe the Howling Mountain wormhole – portal – leads to space, you think that space must be somewhere very far away?”
“Somewhere with the same momentum as the Howling Mountain,” Moon agreed. “Because otherwise you’d be squashed.”
Daisuke startled. “Squashed?”
“It’s the only way momentum can be conserved,” Moon said.
Misha wiped his hand down his face. “How am I supposed to translate that?”
“But you always come out of a wormhole with the same momentum you had when you went in, relative to the wormhole,” Anne said.
“Bullshit.”
“What’s bullshit?”
Aimi gave Moon another shoulder-bump. “Would you explain it to them like you explained it to me? The ladder to orbit?”
Daisuke smiled to see the physicist’s spine straightening.
“Oh. All right. Look.” Moon held up two fists side by side, as if holding an invisible ladder. “Let’s say you climb to orbit.” He moved his hands as if pulling himself up rungs. “That would take a lot of energy, right?”
“Yes?” said Daisuke as Misha stumbled through a translation. “But what does that have to do with momentum?”
Moon turned his head and scowled off at the eastern mountains, hissing between his teeth. “Because momentum is mass times velocity,” Moon said eventually. “And when you change momentum, that’s mass times acceleration. Force.”
“Think of a rocket taking off,” Aimi said. “That’s a lot of force you need to get from the ground to orbit, right?”
“And where does it come from?” Moon demanded.
“Well, it comes from the wormhole, of course,” Anne said. “It must add or subtract the force to you as you travel through it.”
Moon raised his hands as if beseeching the heavens for a blessing. “In what time? The time it takes to transit a portal is so small we haven’t been able to measure it. That means that the force applied to you in order to change your momentum would have to be enormous.”
“It would squash you,” Aimi summarized.
“Slow down,” Misha said. “I’m still working out how to translate rocket.”
Anne threw up her hands. “Then congratu-fucking-lations, Moon, you’ve disproved that wormholes exist.”
“Wormholes don’t exist! Why do you think I call them portals?” Moon took a deep breath. “The only way a portal might work is if the momentum on both of its faces is equal.”
“Wait,” Anne said. “You’re telling me you think that the wormhole in Papua, which is spinning around with the Earth, which is spinning around the sun, which is going wherever the sun is going…that wormhole is moving in exactly the same speed and direction as the Earth wormhole over there?” She moved, probably pointing back into the Deep Sky valley.
“Yes,” said Moon. “It has to be. Otherwise we’d be squashed.”
“How does that make sense?” Anne asked. “You said that there are no special reference points. The Earth wormhole is spinning around the center of Junction as the planet turns, and Junction is spinning around its sun—”
“So how can it have the same velocity relative to those reference points as anything else?” interrupted Moon. “Exactly! It can’t.”
Anne swore and Moon looked startled. Misha had given up and was sucking on his bottle while Yunubey pestered him for more translation.
“He means you’re right,” Aimi said. “The place on the other…did you say the ‘face’ of the portal? It must not share any reference frame at all with the near face.”
“Exactly. Junction must be outside the Earth’s light cone.”
“Light cone?” Daisuke asked.
“He means Junction is outside of the universe that’s observable from Earth,” Anne said. “Yeah, I read A Brief History of Time. But if Junction and Earth are in different universes, then Junction and, say, the Lighthouse planet must also be in different universes, and while the Howling Mountain wormhole might take us into space, it’ll be space in yet another universe. So that’s one new universe per wormhole?”
“Maybe.”
Anne rocked behind him. “That’s ridiculous. You’re saying it’s impossible that an infinite force acts on you inside a wormhole, so to solve that problem you postulate an infinite number of universes.”
Aimi cut off Moon’s sputtering. “Isn’t that what we’re going to test? We go through the Howling Mountain wormhole—”
“Portal!” said Moon.
“– and we see whether Junction is on the other side or not. Farhad’s nanosat will transmit a signal, and if we can pick it up on the ground, it will prove Moon wrong.”
Moon hissed air through his teeth. “It would prove that things make even less sense than they seem to now. We’d have to throw out all physics, not just the last hundred years.”
“And when you figure out how to explain it, you’ll become the father of the new physics, won’t you?” Aimi said.
The warmth in her voice should have melted Moon like butter, but instead he shuddered, shoulders drawing in, air hissing through his teeth.
Daisuke’s bottle stopped on its way to his mouth. Why had the compliment frightened Moon so badly?
Aimi seemed to know. “Oh, Moon, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to mention your father.”
“You didn’t. I should go.” Moon pushed off the mat, but stopped halfway up, wobbling.
Aimi caught him. “Don’t you dare. You owe me at least one more drink. Daisuke, Anne, more beers?” She lowered Moon back to the mat. “Something stronger?”
Daisuke smiled in recognition of Aimi’s tactics. Revealing terrible secrets was an excellent way to bond. He’d steer Anne in that direction too, bring her out of her spiny shell, and this whole trip would go much more smoothly. Did Moon have a famous father? There was time enough to find out.
“Let’s drink!” he said.
Aimi was a pleasure to work with. Between them, they kept the alcohol flowing, guiding the conversation to hiking, life in America, and the exploration of Junction. It turned out Misha and Moon had the same taste in music, and Aimi’s maternal grandfather came from the same village as Daisuke’s best friend from high school. Everyone but Aimi and Yunubey agreed that root beer was disgusting, then Anne attempted to defend the concept of Vegemite. Even Misha’s anecdotes seemed funnier.
“Okay, okay,” Aimi said much later. “Okay. New game. Tell me something you’re afraid of.”
After consultation with Yunubey, Misha declared that the Nun chieftain was afraid of nothing. He, Misha, was afraid of Yunubey. “He is the worst boss!”
“Ha!” said Aimi. “You know what I’m afraid of? Not having
a boss anymore. Now you, Anne.”
“The destruction of Junction, of course.”
Daisuke decided he was sick of hearing about that topic. “I am afraid,” he said before Anne could elaborate. “I am afraid alien monsters will eat me.”
Anne cackled. Her head was in his lap now. “Dice, that’s what you’re not afraid of! That’s what you jump on.”
“So, what do you jump away from?” Aimi asked.
Daisuke considered lying. But he understood what Aimi was doing. They should build trust.
“Yes. I’m afraid that I’m bad for Anne,” he said. “I’m afraid I can’t protect her.” He looked down, caught her eyes, and jerked his gaze back up. He took another drink. “I came to Junction to prove that I can protect her.”
“At least you two are together,” Misha said.
“Well, shit,” said Anne, and Daisuke’s face heated. He’d put her in a terrible position.
“It’s okay,” he told her in Japanese. “I’ll work hard, I said. It’s okay!”
“Daisuke, I don’t know. Shit.” Anne fell silent.
Aimi leaped into the silence. “Whoa! That’s way better than mine. Let me try again: I’m afraid I don’t have it in me, too. I’m afraid all of my accomplishments are because, you know.” She framed her face with her hands. “I’m pretty. People are programmed to be nice to me. I’m not sure if anything that happens on Junction can convince me otherwise.”
Moon swayed closer to her, clearly having a very hard time focusing. “You’re not sleeping with Farhad?”
“No. And you see my problem. You assumed I was.” She shushed his slurred apologies. “Now you’ve got to tell me the truth about you, Moon.”
“The – well. I don’t know.”
“Moon. Tell me. You insulted my honor. This is how you make up for it.”
Although she must have already known, to have maneuvered Moon back into this position. This drinking game was intense!
“I suppose I am afraid that I won’t make my name,” said Moon.
Interchange Page 9
