by Greg Bear
"I think Charles is the one in charge."
"Is he wise, Casseia?"
I smiled and shook my head. "I don't know. He wasn't very wise when we were younger. But then, neither was I."
"Cailetet's involvement concerns me," Ti Sandra said. "I would not put it past Achmed Crown Niger to know more than these scientists say he does. And if he knows, he will use the information. We have pushed him into a corner. He has gotten nowhere on Mars. He is trapped, politically and financially."
"We don't have guidelines for keeping government secrets," I said. "Whom do we trust?"
"Trust! I don't even trust myself." Ti Sandra made a sad face. "God help us all."
I lay beside Ilya that night, watching him sleep. He almost always slept soundly, like a child; I imagined his head filled with memories of the digs, thoughts of work yet to be done in the sulci ... I envied him so much it brought tears of childish frustration to my eyes.
We had shared a glass of port and fresh cheese, both made by Erzul families and donated to the new government. He had joked about the infinite privileges of being at the center; I had not reacted, and he had asked why I was so somber. "Everything is going well," he had said. "You deserve congratulations, all of you."
I tried to smile. The effort was hardly convincing.
"Do you mind if I pry a little?" he asked, pushing closer to me on the bed.
I shook my head.
"You've heard something upsetting," he said. "Something you can't tell me about."
"I wish I could," I said fervently. "I need advice and wisdom so much."
"'Is it something dangerous?"
"I can't even tell you that," I said.
He lay back on the bolster with his hands behind his head.
"I will be glad when — "
"You have your wife back?" I said quickly, fixing him with an accusing glare.
"No," Ilya said evenly. "Well, yes, actually." He smiled.
"Trick question. I haven't lost you yet."
"Yes," I said, unassuaged, "but I can't go on digs with you. We seldom spend time together. I wish I was with you all of the time. I'm getting sick of meetings and dinners and propaganda and being called 'the midwife of a New Mars.'"
Ilya refused to snap back. This angered me even more, and I jumped out of bed, marching back and forth along one short wall of the inn room, raising my fists at the ceiling. "God, God, God!" I shrieked. "I do not want this, I do not need this!" I turned on him again, hands outstretched with fingers curled in witch's claws. "We had things under control! We could do everything on our own! This only makes things so much worse."
Ilya watched me helplessly. "I wish — "
"But you can't."
The one-sided rant faded and I slumped by the wall, knees drawn up, staring blankly at a corner of the bed. Ilya kneeled beside me, hand on my shoulder. After, as a kind of apology, I forcefully made love to him. My false performance did not seem sufficient. I held on to him and we talked about the time after the interim government's term had expired.
I wanted to take a teaching position at an independent school, I said, and he reassured me, there would be no end of such appointments. I had only to ask. "Midwife to the New Mars," he had said softly. "It fits, really. Don't be angry at yourself."
I had watched him fall asleep, thinking of when we would have children, wondering now whether that time would come.
It was easy to imagine what so much power could lead to. Images of Achmed Crown Niger and Freechild Dauble, unwise leaders, memories of forceful, together Earth; how would they feel, knowing youthful, naive, dangerous Mars had such power?
Perhaps they already knew, and plans were in place, and there was nothing we could do.
The Olympians erected a small, remote laboratory in Melas Dorsa, using some of their own money and a bit of land donated by Klein BM. Melas Dorsa is moderately cratered land, cut from the south by shallow canyons, and swept by low dunes. There was little water and few resources.
Even on Mars, it was a desert.
I went alone to view the demonstrations. Ti Sandra had an emergency meeting in Elysium to shore up support for the new government among suddenly nervous delegates and a district governor of marginal competence and few brains. She trusted me to be her eyes and ears, but I also sensed she was terrified of what they might show us, of the magnitude of this unexpected and unwanted gift. I was no braver than Ti Sandra, but perhaps I was less imaginative.
Charles and Stephen Leander accompanied me on the shuttle flight from UMS. The shuttle had been marked with government symbols — the flag and "FRM 1" to signify it was carrying VIPs. We were to meet two impartial scientists from Yamaguchi and Erzul, flying separately from Rubicon City, at the Melas Dorsa lab.
There were no trains through Melas Dorsa, no stations within four hundred kilometers of the lab, and Charles warned me there would be few amenities.
I stared at him accusingly. "Luxury is not very important to me, certainly not now," I said. Leander sensed the charged atmosphere and conspicuously studied the landscape passing several dozen meters below. The craft flew over a low ridge, then continued its ascent to avoid a chain of diffuse dust devils.
Charles blinked at me, surprised by my tone, then reached for his slate. "We have a lot to catch up on."
"I've read your papers," I said. "Most of it's way beyond me."
Charles nodded. "The ideas are simple enough, however." He drew his lips together and raised an eyebrow. "Are you prepared to take some things on trust?"
"I'll have to, won't I?"
"Yes."
"Then I suppose I'm prepared for it."
"You're angry."
"Not with you specifically," I said.
Leander unharnessed himself and stood. "I'm going forward for a better view," he said. We ignored him. He shrugged and took a seat out of earshot.
"That's not what I meant. You're angry about our giving you so much responsibility."
"Yes."
"I wish we could have avoided it."
"You wanted to change the universe, Charles."
"I wanted to understand. All right, I wanted to change it. But I didn't want to make you responsible."
"Thanks for nothing."
Charles drew back and looked away, hurt and irritated. The slate rested on his lap. "Please be fair, Casseia."
"You know," I said, fairness far from my thoughts at the moment, "it was you who scuttled our first initiative on Earth. You Olympians. You made everybody so very nervous . . . You put us under so much pressure — and we did not even understand what you were planning."
"Planning?" He chuckled. "We didn't know ourselves. Apparently the implications were more clear to people on Earth than they were to us."
"Maybe," I said. "Did you think you could do all this in a vacuum?"
He shook his head. "Vacuum?"
"Ethics, Charles."
"Oh . . . Ethics." His face reddened. "Casseia, now you're being very unfair."
"Dust unfairness. Do you know what this is going to do to us?"
"What kind of decision could I make? To back away from knowledge? Casseia, I've tried to be as ethical and straightforward as I can. Our whole group has stuck with very high standards."
"That's why you worked for Cailetet."
"They are — were — hardly villains. As soon as Achmed Crown Niger came on board, we prepared to close up shop. And Cailetet actually helped us. With a push from Earth. Crown Niger was less concerned with what we could offer him than with satisfying his bosses on Earth."
"You left when they cut funding."
"We told them nothing even before that."
I smiled. "Are you sure they don't have your results locked away somewhere? Before Crown Niger?"
"It's possible. But if they look over that material, they won't have a clue about what we've discovered since. It will be very misleading. We explored a lot of blind canyons, Casseia. Earth is still chasing up blind canyons."
For a few se
conds, I had nothing to say. Then my anger collapsed and I shivered. "Charles, aren't you frightened?"
He considered cautiously, looking at me. "No," he said. "You've put our house in order, Casseia — or it's on its way to being put in order. A responsible government — "
"In its infancy, uncoordinated and frail and new. We don't even know whether the interim government can flow smoothly into an elected government. We haven't tried it out yet, Charles."
"Well," he said. "I have faith in you."
"In Mars?" I asked, wrapping my arms around myself to control my shivering. He reached out to touch me and I gave him a withering glare. He pulled his hand back. "Charles, you're giving us the power to destroy our enemies, and we don't know who our enemies are. Earth has very subtle means of persuading us . . . and all you're offering is a sledge hammer!"
"Much more than that," Charles said softly. "Huge supplies of power, remote control of resources. We are limited in significant ways, but that doesn't mean we can't defend ourselves against almost anything."
"By threat, perhaps. You can convert matter to antimatter. Remotely. From a very great distance. With pinpoint accuracy."
He nodded.
"We could fry Earth's cities. You've brought back the horror of the twentieth century."
He grimaced. "That's melodramatic," he said.
"Do you think Freechild Dauble would have hesitated to abuse such power?"
Charles said, "I know that you will use it wisely. We would not have told you if I thought otherwise."
For a moment, I was speechless. I waved my hands and finally pointed a finger at him, not knowing whether to laugh or scream. "My God, Charles, I'm glad I made such an impression on you! Maybe I am a saint. But what about those who come after — for generations?"
"Long before then, everybody will know. There will be a balance. Look, Casseia, this is irrelevant — "
"I don't see that," I muttered.
"It's irrelevant because the knowledge is here and it won't go away." His face fell into an expression of weariness. "There is no peace, no end to the new and frightening in this life."
I bit my tongue to keep from saying. Philosophy comes late, Charles.
"I know," he continued. "I've thought about this for years. What happens if we complete the theory, I asked myself, and find a way to get into the Bell Continuum. To manipulate descriptors. We all worried about it."
Leander came back and sat, looking between us. "Do we have any agreement?" he asked.
I laughed weakly and shook my head. "Bad dreams," I said.
Charles said, "'O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.'"
"We think of that quote a lot," Leander said, settling into his seat. "The universe is bounded in a nutshell. Distance and time mean nothing, except as variations in descriptors. Knowing that, we could be kings of infinite space."
"And the bad dreams?"
Leander's expression abruptly grew stern, even sad. "Charles put me up front because I look the part and because bureaucrats respond to me better. That doesn't mean I can be circumspect all the time. We're in this together. Miss Majumdar. You can stand on your high mountain and accuse us of naivete and intellectual hubris and tell us nothing we haven't pondered a thousand times in private."
"Don't assume, Stephen," Charles said. "Casseia isn't so simplistic."
Leander controlled himself with visible effort, smiled brightly and falsely, and said, "Sorry. I happen to think that focusing on 'bad dreams' points to a lack of imagination."
"Why didn't the President come with you?" Charles asked. "This should have taken precedent."
"There's a major problem. If she doesn't solve it, the cloth might unravel, and there will be no constitutional government to decide what to do with your work. She trusts me to tell her what happens."
"She's afraid, isn't she?" Charles said.
I sniffed.
"I saw it in her eyes," Charles said. "She's human-scale. She's not comfortable with this kind of immensity."
I nodded. "Perhaps."
"What about you? Can you overcome your fear and look with a child's eyes?"
"Don't expect too much, too soon, Charles," I said.
The test area had been equipped with a temporary shelter for twenty people, built by arbeiters the day before. Four of the Olympians — Leander, Charles, Chinjia, and Royce — were present, Chinjia and Royce having flown in even before the shelter was finished to prepare their apparatus.
The landscape around the site was as barren as I remembered from vids seen in areological studies in second form. Melas Doras had none of the drama of the sulci, none of the color of Sinai, no fossils, no minerals . . .
An hour after we arrived, the scientists we had chosen to witness the demonstration flew in on yet another shuttle. Ulrich Zenger and Jay Casares were avid supporters of the constitution, with impeccable academic credentials. They were professors of theoretical physics from the University of Icaria, an independent research school funded by six BMs. We were introduced in the shelter, and Charles immediately briefed them on the experiment
The test bed itself lay beneath an unpressurized tent-dome. In suits, Charles, Chinjia, Royce, Zenger, Casares and I walked from the shelter to the dome. Charles removed a cylinder of pure hydrogen prepared and delivered by Zenger and Casares, and carefully placed it in a sling hanging from the apex of the dome. Zenger and Royce men brought forward a neutron counter and other equipment. Arbeiters recorded the preparations on vid.
"What are we doing to see?" Casares asked Charles as the final arrangements were made.
"You've studied our theory papers, and you understand what we claim we've done?" Charles asked in turn.
Casares nodded.
"Are you convinced?"
Casares shook his head. "It's fascinating, but I resist switching paradigms."
"Is there any way your hydrogen-filled cylinder can produce energy?"
"In its present state, no," Casares said.
"We're going to make it produce a great deal of energy."
We returned to the shelter, removed our suits, and joined Leander and Zenger in the equipment room. Here, once again, waited a broad steel table and the white thinker with no affiliation. Several small black boxes were connected to the thinker by optical cables.
Leander asked the thinker whether all the equipment was working properly. It replied, in a young man's voice, that all was well.
Charles sat on a stool beside the table. "Our thinker provides an interface with a Quantum Logic thinker, also contained within the box. Both were grown on Mars, by Martians."
"Who?" Zenger asked, clearly interested in this development.
"Myself," Leander said, "and Danny Pincher. At Tharsis Research University."
"This by itself is worth the trip," Zenger said. "If the thinkers are stable and productive."
"They're dedicated and not very powerful," Leander said. "Danny and I are growing better ones now. We've probably violated several laws by building them the way we have, but we needed QL control of the apparatus, and we exhausted all legal means of procuring a QL thinker."
Zenger nodded. "Please go on," he said.
"Some of our work was inspired by a pretty famous scientific mystery. We've all studied the Ice Pit accident. That was almost fifty years ago. A Lunar scientist named William Pierce tried to reduce the temperature of a small sample of copper atoms to absolute zero. He succeeded, with disastrous consequences. Pierce and his wife were killed. One observer managed to escape, but he was badly injured. The Ice Pit cavern became an incomprehensible void."
Zenger seemed unimpressed. "So what are you going to do with our hydrogen?" he asked. "Send it to Wonderland?"
"We've never duplicated his experiment," Casares said. "It's never been proven that absolute zero was reached. Something else may have happened."
"We know that zero temperature was achieved," Charles said.
> Zenger turned down his lips and thumped his fingers on the arm of his chair. "How do you know?"
"No details for now," Leander said.
"We're going to convert some of the hydrogen in the cylinder to mirror matter," Charles said. "The reaction between normal hydrogen and mirror hydrogen will produce neutrons, gamma rays, and heat."
"Let's do it," Casares said impatiently.
Charles sat beside the thinker. A control panel was projected above the white box. "The thinker is fixing the descriptor coordinates for the sample," he said. "The descriptors do not use absolute measures or coordinates. Every space-time descriptor is relative to the descriptors of the observer. In some ways, that makes our job easier. When we've located our sample, we can confirm by querying other descriptors, which will tell us what the sample is made of . . . And we'll know we're tweaking what we want to tweak."
"You won't tell us how it's done," Zenger said, pointing to the apparatus. "But you're doing it, whatever it is, remotely . . . What's your maximum distance?"
"That's not going to be discussed today, either," Leander said. "Sorry."
Zenger turned to me, grim-faced. "We can't make an evaluation if we don't have enough information."
"We've asked the group not to reveal certain facts," I said.
Zenger drew his chin back and shook his head. "You've called us in to give expert testimony, but by keeping us ignorant, you might as well impress a couple of chimpanzees."
Casares was less prickly. "Let's see what there is to see," he said. "If you produce energy from our sample, we have something interesting. We can debate secrets later."
Part of me had hoped for more drama. There was expectation in that little room, curiosity, skepticism — but very little drama. Charles did not try for emotional effect. Instead, he worked quickly and quietly with Leander. Both passed instructions to the thinker, and we were invited to observe.
The display above the thinker projected a 3-D diagram of the cylinder, filled with colors showing temperature gradients. The cylinder, Charles explained, was still cooling to the ambient temperature, about minus sixty degrees Celsius. The gas within churned slowly.
"Charge is conserved, of course," Leander said. "We can't convert charged particles except in pairs with particles of the exact opposite charge. Neutral atoms and molecules are ideal. The descriptors distinguishing mirror matter and matter are tied to other descriptors describing a particle's spin and time component. We have to access these linked descriptors all at once. The result is a conversion that violates no physical laws. But since matter will meet with mirror matter, energy will be released."