Moving Mars

by Greg Bear

  "And how do you change the descriptors?" Casares asked. Charles grinned almost shyly. "I'm sorry. Can't say just yet."

  Zenger said, "So what is there to evaluate? You might show us a splendid magic trick. Everything could be rigged ..."

  "We hope you trust our reputations enough to accept that what you see is legitimate," Leander said.

  "We can't pass judgment without evaluating the theory behind the effect," Casares said, folding his arms. "Science is about reproducible results. If only one group has done the work and gotten results, it isn't science. What I've heard so far isn't encouraging."

  Charles looked between us, clearly frustrated. "I'd just as soon tell you all there is, but for obvious reasons, it's up to Vice President Majumdar."

  I felt completely out of my element, but I could not afford to be indecisive. "Key parts of the theory must be kept confidential," I said.

  Charles held out his hands. What can I do?

  Zenger and Casares shook their heads. Zenger finally waved his fingers as if dismissing me, but said, "All right. I don't like it, but show us what there is to see, and we'll argue details later."

  "Thank you," Charles said. He nodded to Leander. "Let's project the sample as our thinker sees it."

  Leander touched the insubstantial control panel. A surface of peaks and valleys appeared, arrows dancing from peak to peak and finally settling on one, which promptly grew. A small red cube appeared, and within the cube, blue lines sketched the cylinder. Again the cylinder filled with colors, and within the colors, flashing numbers and Greek letters moved like bottled flies.

  "The QL thinker evaluates the sample," Charles said. "Everything is in the hands of the thinker now. We should see energy produced within the sample in a few seconds."

  We looked out the window; the suspended cylinder, beneath the dome, was not visible except in a vid projection. The room filled with a whine and distinct clicks and growls and howls. "Atoms of matter and mirror matter meeting," Chinjia explained, adjusting the sound. "They're bouncing around within the cylinder. The cylinder's heating up, and ..." Her finger traced a new graph on the display. "Here's gamma ray production. We expect about ten percent efficiency, and of course some interaction with the bottle . . . Neutron flux now."

  "So far, we've created about a trillion molecules of mirror hydrogen," Charles said. "The reaction has produced about fifty-four joules."

  "That should be enough," Zenger said. "There seems to be heat and neutrons."

  Charles told Leander to stop the experiment. Leander touched the control panel and the red cube and graph disappeared.

  "We've thought of ways to increase efficiency," Charles said. "We can convert half of the molecules in the cylinder to mirror matter in a shape that interlocks with the normal hydrogen. The ambiplasma pressure will push fleeing molecules and particles into optimum configuration for further interaction. Ninety percent destruction would occur. But that would vaporize the cylinder and part of the apparatus and dome."

  Zenger nodded. "To the extent that we can make any judgments, it seems you've done something interesting."

  Charles said, "We'll have an arbeiter remove the cylinder and put it in the back of the lab. You can examine it remotely."

  Zenger said, "I assume we can't take it with us?"

  All heads turned to me. "It should stay here," I said.

  "Very exciting indeed," Zenger said flatly.

  An arbeiter moved the cylinder to an isolation box at the rear of the lab. While Zenger and Casares looked it over, muttering quietly to themselves, Charles sat across from me in the dining booth. I forked through an uninspired bowl of nano food.

  "Bit of a letdown?" he asked.

  "Not at all," I said, looking up with what I hoped was calm dignity. "I didn't expect Trinity."

  He smiled briefly. "You've been reading history, too. Mind if I eat with you?"

  I shook my head. He returned with his own bowl. I was nearly finished, but clearly, he wanted to talk.

  "Do you still resent what we've done?" he asked.

  "I've never resented any of this," I said.

  "No," he said, suspending his tone between statement and question. "It's only going to get more stressful."

  "You said that years ago."

  "Was I right?" he asked.

  "You were right."

  He tasted the paste, made a face and dropped his fork into the bowl. "Not the best," he said. "It's a tradition. Scientists on Mars must eat stale nanofood. Something to do with creativity. Remember the terrible wine at Tres Haut Medoc? I'm still sorry about that."

  "The wine," I clarified.

  "Not just the wine."

  I leaned my head to one side, determined to avoid the subject, and pulled out my slate. "Do you have any other demonstrations? This one — "

  "Isn't going to impress politicians. I know. We can vaporize Olympus Mons if you wish."

  For a moment, I couldn't tell whether he was joking. "That would be . . . mature," I said.

  Charles laughed and toyed with his bowl, tipping it with a finger. "We can do a lot more. As Stephen said on the way here, we can build a super-efficient, high-acceleration mirror matter drive, better than the best Earth can make. We can install it in a standard Solar System liner and zip around like hornets. Make a planetary tour in months instead of decades. With a fully equipped engineering plant, we could put it all together in sixty or seventy days."

  "A ship like that would be very bright, visible across the Solar System," I said. "How about something that won't upset Earth?"

  Charles put his elbows on the table. "Of course," he said. "Stephen and I have been planning a number of demonstrations, with varying degrees of sophistication. Experts to yahoos. Bring them on."

  He was being a shade too flippant, given the nature of our problem, but I had tired of bringing him up short. "I'm still not well versed on physics," I said.

  "You really should be," he chided. "I don't use one, but I could recommend a good enhancement. Martian-made."

  "No thank you. Not right now." I made sure the others were still out of hearing. "But I'm curious. How did you manage all this?"

  Charles leaned forward, face as bright and eager as a child's, and placed his hands on the table. "I've always wrestled with stupid problems — the really big problems. It's stupid to wrestle with them, because many of them circle back to the language used to state them — and that's a fool's chase.

  "But one problem seemed truly big and truly interesting — fundamental. Mathematics is powerful. We can create equations to use as tools to describe nature. We can use them to predict what will happen. What gives mathematics such power? It took me years to come to a conclusion, and when I did, I told nobody — because the conclusion was so simple, and I was too young, and there was no way to prove anything.

  "So I waited. I studied the Ice Pit, all I could find about William Pierce and his work, his fatal discovery. I knew that my simple solution fit into his theories — explained and supplemented them, in fact. I joined other people who seemed in tune with me, worked with them and prodded them . . . My ideas became testable.

  "Mathematics is made of systems of rules. The universe seems to operate by a set of rules, as well — not so precisely, but then, measurements aren't ever precise in nature. That in itself should have given everybody a clue.

  "The rules of math give it the quality of a computational machine. We can design computers using mathematical concepts and rules, because math is a computational system. The computer's operation is not so different from math itself — it's math operating in light and matter. And math is useful in describing and predicting nature because nature itself uses a set of rules. Nature behaves as if it is a computational system.

  "When we do math in our heads, we store results — and the rules themselves — in our heads or on paper, or in other kinds of memory. Our brains become the computer.

  "The universe stores the results of its operations as nature. I do not confuse nature
with reality. At a fundamental level, reality is the set of rules the results of whose interactions are nature. Part of the problem of reconciling quantum mechanics with larger-scale phenomena comes from mistaking results for rules — a habit built into our brains, good for survival, but not for physics.

  "The results change if the rules change. Our universe evolved ages ago out of a chaos of possible rules . . . An original foundation or ground that simply bubbled with possibilities. Sets of rules vanished in the chaos, because they were not consistent — they could not survive against more rigorous, meaningful sets. I don't mean 'survive' in time, either — they simply canceled and negated in a time-free eternity. But sets of rules did come into existence which were not immediately contradictory, which could work as free-standing, computational matrixes.

  "Those which strongly contradicted — whose rules could not produce long-lived results — were simply not 'recorded.' They vanished. Those whose results could interact and not contradict, at least for a while, survived.

  "The universe we see uses an evolved, self-consistent set of rules, and the rules of mathematics can be made to more or less agree.

  "Mathematics is a computational matrix. Its power to describe and predict is no puzzle if the observed universe is the result of a computational matrix. No mystery — a fundamental clue."

  I listened to him carefully, trying to follow his reasoning. Some of it was clear enough, but I could not track his leaps of intuition.

  Charles squinted up at the ceiling. "I've never told anybody that before," he said. "You're looking at my theoretical underwear, Casseia."

  "I'm not embarrassed," I said. "I hardly know what I'm seeing."

  "We've been around and around about responsibility for discovery, about the problems descriptor theory has caused you and everybody else. I thought I'd tell you more about my excuses. God is not necessary in all this — but that doesn't mean I haven't been searching for God. I just haven't found the key yet. Maybe there isn't any. But when I contemplate these things, when I work on these problems, that is the only time I feel worthy.

  "I've lived my life well enough, and I'm no monster, but I have sufficient emotional problems for any human. When I work, I transcend those problems. I am pure. It's like a drug. I can't stop thinking just to become responsible and put a halt to change. I need the purity of that kind of thought, that kind of discovery. I may never know a redemptive love, I may never have complete self-understanding, but I will have this, at the very least: the moments when I've asked questions about reality and gotten meaningful answers."

  "When did you first think your theory was justified?" I asked.

  "I put the Olympians together. Stephen was crucial with the politics, especially when we went to work for Cailetet. First, we duplicated William Pierce's experiment. We redesigned his apparatus, improved field damping, used more efficient force disorder pumps. We used a smaller sample of atoms. And we brought the atoms down to absolute zero. At zero temperature, the Bell Continuum becomes coextensive with space-time. They merge. Descriptors within particles can be changed."

  "That's all?" I asked.

  "That's something all by itself," Charles said. "But you're right. It still wouldn't be enough . . . Earth thinks descriptors are simple yes-no switches. But I decided they couldn't be simple. First, I tried to think of them as smoothly varying functions. That didn't work, either. They weren't yes-no toggles, but they weren't smooth waves, either. They were codependent. Each referred to the others. They networked. Every particle having mass contains the same number of descriptors. But that number is not an integer. It isn't even rational. Descriptors obey Quantum Logic from beginning to end." He looked at me with some concern. "Am I boring you?"

  "Not at all," I said. I found myself attracted by the sound of his voice, boyishly enthused and powerful at once. Children playing with matches. The fascination of fire.

  "If you want to tweak a descriptor, you must first persuade it to exist," Charles said. "You have to separate it out from the cloud of potential descriptors, all of them codependent. And to do that, you need a QL thinker."

  "But how do you reach them?" I asked.

  "Good question," Charles said. "You're thinking like a physicist."

  "More like mud pies to me," I said.

  He smiled and tapped my hand with his finger. "Don't underestimate yourself."

  I withdrew my hand. "How?" I asked.

  "When we bring a sample of atoms down to zero, the coextensive space around it takes on the characteristics of a single large particle, what we call a Pierce region, or a 'tweaker,'" he said. "It has its own charge and spin and mass, e times the mass of the original sample of atoms. Its extra mass is pseudo, of course, and the traits are pseudo as well. We suspended the pseudo-particle, the tweaker, in a vacuum. We found that when we manipulated the tweaker, we were actually choosing a descriptor, pulling it from the cloud, and changing it directly. But nothing happened. The accident was stumbling upon the unique identity descriptor that keeps a particle separate from all others."

  "So?"

  "Tweaking unique identity could convert our pseudo-particle into any particle, anywhere. The pseudo-particle itself doesn't actually exist in the matrix — the matrix doesn't recognize it. So another particle takes on the traits we assign. It can be a single particle far away — or all the particles within a well-defined volume."

  It almost made sense. "The tweaker, the coextensive space, becomes a surrogate for others. What you do to it, you do to them."

  "Right," Charles said. "There are no particles, you understand — no such thing as space or time. Those are just fragments of the old paradigm now. We're left with nothing but descriptors interacting within an undefined matrix." He looked over my shoulder at Casares and Zenger, visible as moving shapes behind the translucent curtain. Chinjia and Leander helped them. "We can excite a distant particle in a way that can be interpreted as a signal."

  "How fast?" I asked.

  "How fast can the signal travel? Instantaneously," he said. "Remember. Distance doesn't exist."

  "Don't you violate a few important laws?"

  "You bet," Charles said enthusiastically. "Paradigm shift. And I don't say that lightly. We've thrown causality right out the door. We replace it with an elegant balancing act in the Bell Continuum. Bookkeeping." He rounded his lips, sucked in a deep breath, folded his hands on the table and rapped the surface lightly with a knuckle. "That's the explanation, In a nutshell."

  "All of it?" I asked. He was holding something back.

  "All of it that's relevant for now — and certainly as much as you'd care to hear."

  "You mean, as much as I'd understand. One more question. What's the 'destiny tweak'?"

  Charles lowered his eyes. "You've read the letter from Stanford," he said.

  "Yes."

  "That's why you sent me that message a few years back."

  "Yes."

  "It was speculation. Pure and unfounded."

  "Nothing more?"

  He shook his head. "How's your husband's work going?"

  "Very well," I said.

  "You've a curious taste for scientists, Miz Majumdar," Charles said with an enigmatic smile.

  Before I could respond, Leander and Casares pushed through the curtain. They sat in the booth and Casares said, "We're finished. The inside of the container is scarred — as if it's been baked and etched. I'm convinced energy was created by a mirror matter interaction in the sealed sample. Doctor Zenger is convinced, as well."

  Zenger came forward and said, "I'll go along for the time being."

  "We can send our report directly to the President, or ..."

  "I'll take it to her," I said.

  "Have you made security arrangements yet?" Leander asked. "We need to know whom we can talk to."

  "We're still working out details."

  "Government's in the details," Charles said.

  On the shuttle back from the lab, I looked at Charles and Chinjia, observing the
ir postures, the play of their glances at each other and at me, Zenger, and Casares. Flying over Solis Dorsa, avoiding the edge of a thin but wide dust storm, I experienced a quick shiver of unease.

  Something very important was being left unspoken, undescribed.

  More than government lay in the details.

  I fell into a darker mood. The less I understood, the less I could interpret what was being said, the weaker Ti Sandra and I would be. We could not afford weakness. We would have to understand more fully — and anticipate as much as we possibly could.

  There was only one way for me to do that. I lacked Charles's native ability. I could not track his leaps of intuition. I would have to take at least a step toward being more like Orianna. Charles had made the suggestion. It was obvious, it was necessary, but I still strongly resisted.

  I would need an enhancement.

  I would have to reach Charles's level of comprehension, if not brilliance, and as soon as possible.

  Part Four

  2182-2183 (M.Y 59)

  Outwardly, the social structure of Mars — where people lived, whom they associated with — changed little. The greatest upheavals came for officials in the birthing government, who flocked over Mars like birds in search of a nest. The nest was found, selected without much ceremony by the interim President. Ti Sandra chose Schiaparelli Basin between Arabia Terra and Terra Meridiani, and the tiny station of Many Hills spilled over with activity. This would be the capital of Mars.

  Such a grand denomination required more than a digging of tunnels and erection of domes; it required a new architectural renaissance, something that would impress the entire system and serve as symbol for the new Republic. All the families in the Republic wanted to contribute funds and expertise. The difficulty was selecting from a wealth of enthusiasm and advice.