by Greg Egan
Valeria stared at her. ‘You want to . . . ?’ She pointed upwards.
‘Yes. Eusebio? Will you come with us?’
He said, ‘If you’re sure you’re not too tired.’
‘I’m not a pilot; the photonics – the machines – will do everything for us. Silvio?’
Silvio said, ‘Thanks, but I should watch the truck.’
Clara led Valeria and Eusebio up the short flight of stairs and through the doorway. Valeria’s gut was squirming: she didn’t know what she believed any more, but just letting the woman take charge felt dangerous.
A little starlight entered through the cabin’s thick windows; Valeria could make out four couches and what looked like a tank of compressed air. Clara said, ‘Lights,’ and three large panels in the ceiling immediately began to glow. Valeria reached up and pressed her fingers to the illuminated surfaces; she could feel no heat, and the light was impossibly steady for any kind of lamp.
‘How . . . ?’ she pleaded.
Clara said, ‘Nothing I say would make any sense to you until you’ve learnt about the energy levels in a solid. But don’t worry, I’m sure I could bring you up to speed in about a stint.’ She gestured at the couches. ‘It shouldn’t be bumpy at all, but the protocol is to strap in during take-off.’
Valeria lay down on one of the couches and Clara helped her with the harness before attending to Eusebio.
‘There should be a reception at the university tomorrow, or the Council chambers,’ he babbled.
‘I’ll be happy to talk to anyone, anywhere,’ Clara assured him. ‘Anyone but jailers.’
She climbed onto her own couch. ‘Pilot?’ A diagram appeared on the wall, as self-luminous as the ceiling panels. After a moment, Valeria thought she recognised it as a topographical map of Zeugma’s environs.
Conjurors could do all kinds of things with lenses and hidden lamps. But they were getting close to the moment of truth, and if this woman had secreted a few hefts of sunstone above the smooth black panel in the floor with the hope of actually making this cabin fly, the only effect it was likely to produce would be to incinerate them all.
‘Pilot: plan a vertical ascent to an altitude of five slogs, followed by a return to our starting point, with a maximum deviation of one part in six from standard gravity.’
The topographical map tilted and became something like an artist’s rendering of the landscape. Then the viewpoint ascended to take in an ever wider portion of the desert, while a dashed red line rose up from the ground, sprouting strange annotations.
Valeria said hurriedly, ‘I believe you! We don’t have to do this!’ In truth she still doubted the woman’s story, but she did not want to be proven right and consumed by flames.
Clara buzzed mischievously. ‘Don’t be a killjoy. Pilot: execute the plan.’
Valeria felt a gentle pressure pushing her into the couch, as if someone had placed a young child on her belly. She looked to the window; they really were ascending, albeit with an impossible grace. No one could have done this but a traveller returned.
Clara dimmed the lights so that they could see out more easily, but once the hills by the roadside had dropped from view there was nothing in sight from their present vantage but the unchanging sky.
‘You can get up now if you like,’ Clara announced, unstrapping herself and rising to her feet. Eusebio did the same, then Valeria joined them by the window. The dark ground was receding rapidly; she could already see the lights of the city. But their motion was so smooth that it felt more like the product of ropes and pulleys than any kind of rocket.
Valeria said, ‘I’m sorry I doubted you. I’m sorry for what we’ve put you through.’
‘It’s all right,’ Clara assured her. The traveller put an arm around her shoulders.
‘Yalda’s really dead,’ Valeria said. ‘Years ago. Generations ago.’
‘Yes. But she had four wonderful children in the flesh, and in spirit you could call her the mother of us all.’
Eusebio leant against the window, covering his eyes.
Valeria composed herself. ‘When can we meet everyone? When are they coming to Zeugma?’
Clara said, ‘There’ll be other emissaries soon. Once I’ve reported back.’
‘But the Peerless—?’
‘The mountain itself won’t come down to the surface. People will be welcome to visit it, but most of the travellers won’t be settling on the home world.’
Valeria was astonished. ‘They’re going to stay inside?’
‘Some will,’ Clara replied. ‘It’s what they’re used to. Some might settle on the sun, opposite the engines, if it proves safe there.’
Valeria gazed down at the crevasse that divided Zeugma; from this height, in the starlight, it looked like a faint scratch.
‘Tell me about your family,’ she begged Clara. ‘Your father, your brother and sister, your co.’
Clara hesitated. ‘I don’t have that kind of family.’
‘They all died?’ Valeria was horrified.
‘No, no! Of course not.’
‘So . . . you’re a solo?’ With no father, so her mother must have fissioned spontaneously, like Valeria’s mother Tullia. ‘But you didn’t even have a brother and sister?’
Clara said, ‘Most of us have just one child. My mother shed me; I shed my daughter.’
Valeria understood. She felt a slight giddiness at the implications, then it gave way to a glorious sense of a new world spreading out beneath her gaze.
Eusebio turned from the window. ‘And who has the sons?’
Clara thought for a moment. ‘I said mother and daughter, but they’re not the right words. We tried very hard to live as men and women, but we couldn’t make that work, so we folded the two into one. My “mother” raised me as a father would, as I raised my own “daughter”.’
‘So you’ve wiped out all the men?’ Eusebio asked numbly.
‘No more than all the women,’ Clara insisted. ‘If I can promise myself to a child, how am I a woman? If my flesh can become that child, how am I a man?’
Eusebio looked sickened, but he fought to maintain decorum. ‘These are your choices,’ he said. ‘If we’re to accept your help, we should respect your culture.’
Valeria buzzed. ‘Could I be the father of my own child – and live to see her do the same?’
Clara said, ‘Yes.’
‘But what about my co?’
‘Between you, you’ll have to decide. He could be the father of your child, if you both wanted that.’
‘And I could still live? He could trigger me, and I could survive?’
‘Yes.’
Valeria looked down at the speck of light that had been her city. ‘Who did all these things? We have to know their stories.’
‘You will,’ Clara promised. ‘We had some good archivists, but I think the translations will need to be a collaborative project.’
‘How many generations was the voyage?’ Eusebio asked.
‘About a dozen.’
‘A dozen,’ he repeated. ‘An era.’
All of this had grown out of Eusebio’s endeavours – and in one year from the launch, not four. Valeria thought it must feel as if he’d stepped out of his house for a day and returned to find his children replaced by a whole vast swarm of descendants, all of them with strange ideas of their own.
Valeria said, ‘And how many people lived and died in the mountain, without seeing the end?’
Clara squeezed her shoulder. ‘A lot.’
Valeria pictured them, generation after generation, lined up across the years. Farmers and physicists, inventors and instrument builders, maintenance workers, millers and cleaners, biologists and astronomers. Hidden behind her outstretched thumb, for ever out of reach. ‘I wish I could talk to them,’ she said. ‘I wish I could thank them. I wish I could tell them that it wasn’t for nothing, that it ended well.’
Clara said, ‘If that’s what you want, then I believe you’ll find a way.’
Appendix 1:
Units and measurements
Distance
In strides
1 scant
1/144
1 span
= 12 scants
1/12
1 stride
= 12 spans
1
1 stretch
= 12 strides
12
1 saunter
= 12 stretches
144
1 stroll
= 12 saunters
1,728
1 slog
= 12 strolls
20,736
1 separation
= 12 slogs
248,832
1 severance
= 12 separations
2,985,984
Home world’s equator = 7.42 severances
22,156,000
Distance from Peerless to the Object = 193 severances
576,294,912
Home world’s orbital radius = 16,323 severances
48,740,217,000
Time
In pauses
1 flicker
1/12
1 pause
= 12 flickers
1
1 lapse
= 12 pauses
12
1 chime
= 12 lapses
144
1 bell
= 12 chimes
1,728
1 day
= 12 bells
20,736
1 stint
= 12 days
248,832
Peerless’s rotational period = 6.8 lapses
82
In years
1 year
= 43.1 stints
1
1 generation
= 12 years
12
1 era
= 12 generations
144
1 age
= 12 eras
1,728
1 epoch
= 12 ages
20,736
1 eon
= 12 epochs
248,832
Angles
In revolutions
1 arc-flicker
1/248,832
1 arc-pause
= 12 arc-flickers
1/20,736
1 arc-lapse
= 12 arc-pauses
1/1,728
1 arc-chime
= 12 arc-lapses
1/144
1 arc-bell
= 12 arc-chimes
1/12
1 revolution
= 12 arc-bells
1
Mass
In hefts
1 scrag
1/144
1 scrood
= 12 scrags
1/12
1 heft
= 12 scroods
1
1 haul
= 12 hefts
12
1 burden
= 12 hauls
144
Prefixes for multiples
ampio-
= 123 = 1,728
lauto-
= 126 = 2,985,984
vasto-
= 129 = 5,159,780,352
generoso-
= 1212 = 8,916,100,448,256
gravido-
= 1215 = 15,407,021,574,586,368
Prefixes for fractions
scarso-
= 1/123 = 1/1,728
piccolo-
= 1/126 = 1/2,985,984
piccino-
= 1/129 = 1/5,159,780,352
minuto-
= 1/1212 = 1/8,916,100,448,256
minuscolo-
= 1/1215 = 1/15,407,021,574,586,368
Appendix 2:
Light and colours
The names of colours are translated so that the progression from ‘red’ to ‘violet’ implies shorter wavelengths. In the Orthogonal universe this progression is accompanied by a decrease in the light’s frequency in time. In our own universe the opposite holds: shorter wavelengths correspond to higher frequencies.
The smallest possible wavelength of light, λmin, is about 231 piccolo-scants; this is for light with an infinite velocity, at the ‘ultraviolet limit’. The highest possible time frequency of light, νmax, is about 49 generoso-cycles per pause; this is for stationary light, at the ‘infrared limit’.
Afterword
Gravitation and cosmology in the Orthogonal universe are governed by essentially the same equation that governs the geometry of our own universe: the relationship between the curvature of space-time and the density and flow of matter and energy that was proposed by Einstein in 1916. The solutions of Einstein’s equation that describe our universe have three dimensions of space and one of time, but the equation itself can easily accommodate four space-like dimensions.
As in our own universe, Newtonian gravity with its inverse-square law of attraction serves as a good approximation to the effects of mass on curvature. The only departures on the scale of planetary systems are in the very same subtle effects that were ultimately understood through general relativity in our own history – but here they are reversed. The precession of close orbits goes backwards in the Orthogonal universe, compared with the precession of Mercury’s orbit that Einstein’s theory explained. And where Einstein predicted twice as much deflection of starlight by the sun than would be expected under Newtonian gravity, the degree to which light is bent is less in Lila’s relativistic theory than in the classical version attributed here to Vittorio.
In cosmology, the solutions with and without a time dimension have much more radical differences. For example, there is no equivalent in our own universe of the kind of high-entropy state where the world lines of star clusters are equally likely to be pointing along any direction in all four dimensions, and the arguments in the novel over the inevitability or otherwise of the entropy gradient are very different from arguments over possible explanations for the low entropy of our own universe at the Big Bang.
But it’s the necessity for the Orthogonal universe to be finite in all directions that has the most striking consequences, requiring the entire history of the universe to return eventually to its initial state – wherever one starts from, and whichever direction in four-space is treated as ‘time’.
Supplementary material for this novel can be found at www.gregegan.net.
Also by Greg Egan from Gollancz:
AXIOMATIC
DISTRESS
LUMINOUS
PERMUTATION CITY
QUARANTINE
TERANESIA
DIASPORA
SCHILD’S LADDER
INCANDESCENCE
OCEANIC
ZENDEGI
THE CLOCKWORK ROCKET
THE ETERNAL FLAME
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Greg Egan 2013
All rights reserved.
The right of Greg Egan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2013 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10579 9
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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