The stuff Billie had put together for him was good, but he still had to find the point that unified it all, that linked it seamlessly together. He ran through the things Billie had been telling him, turning them over in his head. Formulae, chemistry, philosophy. Science and space. Science stuff. He slapped his thigh. That was it! Stupid, Stein. Why didn't you think of it before? Billie had uploaded the contents of Van der Stegen's handipad, hadn't she? It was right there in front of him. All he had to do was call it up. He'd scanned it before, but before he'd been concentrating on the historical stuff. Easy to miss something if your focus is on an entirely different direction. The problem was, Billie wasn't here to call it up for him. What had she said? Nobody could get into it if she didn't want them to. Okay. He issued a command and ... the wall blossomed into life with Van der Stegen' notes.
Jack sighed in relief. The girl was smarter than he gave her credit for. With every new event that revealed something else about her, he was impressed by Billie's natural sharpness. He was in no position to let her know that right now, and that was yet another problem. Billie was turning out to be the key to so much. Just so much more than he ever imagined. Billie. Where the hell was she now?
“Where is your girlfriend now?”
No, that was wrong. That was just wrong.
It didn't matter. He'd find her.
The contents of Van der Stegen' handipad were more complex than he suspected. Jack had guessed some of the material might be beyond him, but the extent was frightening. He rapidly skipped past sections containing mathematical formulae and instead concentrated on the text, seeking a unifying thread.
There were copies of scientific articles among the scribbled notes, some of them old some of them new, and the notes connected one to the other by a set of unifying jump hotspots allowing him to rove through the text following various points. The notes made by Van der Stegen himself, were either commentaries on the article contents, or brief forays into one or another tangential trains of thought, that picked up some minor or major point throughout the text and expanded on it further. The notes were cross-linked to other sections and a multi-branching path of threads and cross threads wove throughout the text.
These were the ramblings of someone's internal dialogue, and Jack felt a slight sense of unease as he delved further. He was starting to become impressed with the depth and breadth of the man's thought processes. Still there was nothing that provided the link he sought. He spent two hours, stopped, and wandered into the kitchen to make a coffee, then wandered back to dive in again. It had to be somewhere here. Why else would he have the stuff? The clue hadn't been the handipad itself; it had to be its contents. It could have been either, with Jack’s ability to sense things from physical objects, but he should have seen, should have known. When he hadn’t gotten any impressions from the handipad in the first place, then he should have known.
Finally, he came upon a thread that seemed as if it might bear fruit. It made mention of the Greeks back on old Earth. Stuff about four elements: air, water, fire and earth. In the beginning, everything was made up of four elements, but with the application of analysis and thought, these could be broken down into smaller particles and components held together by particular energies. The energies were what bound existence together. Jack frowned. Four elements. Again, the dream words that Ronschke had spoken floated through his head. Cloud, water, air, earth — they could almost be the same thing. Just everything mixed up together. He returned to the text. Energies. There were different forms of energy as well. History had identified a number, and then gone further in its classification, breaking them down into different types, and seeking others. Various theories about the nature of these energies abounded, but they also stated that knowing how to manipulate those energies gave you power over the types of matter they controlled. Scientific theory up to a point had been incapable of explaining satisfactorily the interaction of the various forms of matter, until the emergence of a new theory which reduced all matter and energy into a series of tiny strings vibrating or resonating within a ten-dimensional universe.
Jack sat back on the couch and slowly read the passage again. Okay, matter, energy, he understood, but vibrating strings of energy in ten dimensions? Ten dimensions. It was that which had stopped him. There was something else that worked in ten dimensions, depending how you looked at it. The Tree of Life. It was the Kabala with its ten nodes. Each point resonating a power across a different plane. Planes, dimensions, the terms were interchangeable in certain circumstances. No, but it couldn't be. The link was tenuous at best. Or at least he thought so, until he came across the next section of scrawled notes. There was something hasty about the way they'd been written. He scanned them carefully.
Ten dimensional geometry allows the wormhole to be!!
Jack stared at the sentence, the two exclamation marks. The wormhole — what was that? This was some sort of revelation to Van der Stegen, important enough for the emphasis, important enough to express excitement in the eagerness with which he'd written it. Wormholes.
Suddenly he had an urgent need to find out what progress Alice had made at the Library. Now he had something else to add to the mix. He called up a communication link and called the library. Alice’s face swam into view.
“Oh, Jack. Hello. Calling to check up on me? I was beginning to despair of you ever calling back. I’ve put some things together for you. I don’t know how much help they’ll be.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Sorry about the delay. Something sort of came up. Actually, Alice, I’ve got something else to add to the mix. Do you feel like doing me another favor?”
“Tell me.”
“Okay, I’ve got a theory working here, but I need confirmation. Do you know anything about wormholes? About ten-dimensional geometry? I want to see how that links to the kabala stuff and the alchemy references.”
“Wow,” she said. “This is getting better all the time. No, nothing off the top of my head, but I can certainly put something together for you.”
“Could you do that? And then can I come and see you? It might take a couple of hours to get up to the library. Will that give you enough time?”
“Sure. Come on up. I’ll see what I can put together in the meantime. I look forward to seeing you, Jack.” She gave a brief smile.
Jack felt himself smiling back. “Yeah, me too,” he said.
oOo
“Jack, come on in. I’ve put together some things for you. Stuff that I think will explain it most easily. Come on over here.”
He joined Alice over by her screens, trying to keep his attention away from the annoyingly distracting ranks of data cubes quietly humming around them, There was a fresh floral scent near the bank of screens. It was Alice. She was wearing something. He was sure she hadn’t been wearing any scent last time.
“First,” said Alice. He dragged his attention back to what she was saying. “Wormholes are sort of like gateways in space, in the real universe. A lot of theories say that they require ten dimensions to be able to operate, dimensions that we can’t perceive, hence the ten-dimensional geometry.”
Jack stared at her. Gateways. Doorways. That was it! Whatever Van der Stegen was working on involved passing through ten dimensional space, transcending normal space and passing through that place where everything was mixed up to get to another point. Shit, they were working on some type of travel. That was the connection and Outreach was doing the same thing. Had to be. The creature passing through the rock walls in the mine, Ronschke's talk of a place where everything was mixed up, the doorway symbols, they all pointed to the same thing. Jack had just been too far away from the ideas the images had been pointing him to.
“Jack?” said Alice.
“Yeah, yeah, sorry.”
And the mining crew had disappeared to ... where? The cloud place, the air place, the water place, the place of dark earth. Wherever that might be, it was through the doorway, through the gateway that opened up a passageway through ten dimensions. If R
onschke had gone through that doorway, then he could be anywhere. The dreams had told him that Ronschke was still alive, but how could he be sure? How could anyone survive that?
Maybe the notes Alice had put together would tell him something else.
“I’m really grateful, Alice,” he said. “This stuff is really good. What else have you got for me?”
She called up something on one of the screens with a couple of quick taps.
“There, the easier material first,” she said.
He leaned over and peered at the screen, following the text. The scent of her was stronger.
First, the only way to hold the wormhole open is to thread the wormhole with some sort of material that pushes the wormhole's walls apart, gravitationally. I shall call such material exotic because, as we shall see, it is quite different from any material that any human has ever met.
“Now, you see that one,” she said, looking at his face. “That’s interesting, because if you think about the other material you had on alchemy, I can see a parallel there. This special stuff that makes things happen. It’s like the Philosopher’s Stone is to alchemical work. A lot of alchemical writings were symbolic anyway, pointing to means of transcendence. They weren’t actually literal descriptions of chemical reactions, but code for other forms of transformation. Do you follow?”
Jack nodded slowly. That was the unifying link. Exotic material to hold the wormhole open. Something unusual. Exotic material was like the Philosopher's Stone in the ancient texts. It was the key that opened the gateway represented by the Ouroboros, just like in the dream. Jack looked at the next excerpt.
We also know that if an infinitely advanced civilization somehow acquires a wormhole, then the only way to hold the wormhole open (so it can be used for interstellar travel) is by threading it with exotic material. We know the vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field are a promising form of exotic material: They can be exotic (have a negative energy density as measured by a light beam) in curved spacetime under a wide variety of circumstances. However we do not yet know whether they can be exotic within a wormhole and thereby hold the wormhole open.
Jack stood back. Space and time. Interstellar travel. There it was. Just like in the earlier passage. He felt like he was completely out of his depth, that the concepts, the materials, were more than slightly beyond him. He didn't understand any of the stuff about negative energy density or vacuum fluctuations, but the underlying threads were tenuously starting to come together. He also knew that they were starting to come together for one reason only, and that was because he was finally starting to use his head as well as simply relying on his extended senses. Of course he had Alice’s help, but he too was making the connections. There was some small satisfaction in that knowledge at least.
“Alice, thank you. Really. This is great. You know, there’s another link, and I just wanted to make sure. Some of the kabalistic stuff was talking about resonating energies along the points of the Tree of Life. Do you see where I’m going with this?”
She grinned. “Of course. Ten points — ten dimensions. Yes, I can see the link. No doubt about it.”
“Hmmm,” said Jack.
“I hope I’ve been some help, Jack, but I’m intrigued. Where exactly is this taking you?”
That was the question all right. Where was it taking him?
He reached out and put a hand gently on her shoulder. She didn’t resist. “I’m not sure yet. I wish I knew. Maybe you can help me work that out.”
“I don’t see…”
“Okay, I think you might be able to access stuff that I might not be able to get to.”
He took his hand from her shoulder and ran it back through his hair. “You know what would really help? If you could get whatever you can on the Van der Stegen family. There have to be records, right?”
She frowned. “Well, sure. But I don’t see how that relates.”
“Trust me,” he said. “It may help tie everything together, but I need to be sure. Can you keep it quiet and send it to me?”
She bit her lip and nodded.
“I’ll let you know when I’ve pulled things together a bit more. I can’t really say anything just yet. And listen, Alice, I really do appreciate everything you’ve done.”
“Oh, I’m happy to help, Jack.” She lifted a hand to push her hair into place, though not a strand was out of place.
“Thanks again. I’ll see you soon, I hope.”
“Bye, Jack,” she said. “I look forward to it.”
He really did like her and he felt a little guilty for using her like that. There was an obvious attraction there, but he wasn’t in a position to do anything about it right now. Maybe. Maybe when things had settled down a little and he’d done something about getting himself together. Maybe. He needed to do some other things first before even thinking about it. Outreach. Billie. By then, he might know where he stood.
oOo
"Answer."
He glanced up at the wall as his visitor's image bled into view. Anastasia Van der Stegen. What the hell was she doing here? He frowned, considered just letting her think he wasn't in and then thought better of it. She had to be here for a reason. And this time it looked like she was alone again. Not like her father — no hired bodyguards to stand in the background like moronic pillars. So, what did she want? He flipped between her image and the notes, debating and finally gave the command for the latter to be closed down, waiting for them to fade from view before he was ready to admit her. It didn't hurt for her to wait a few moments, though she probably wasn't used to waiting for anything.
"Open," he said and headed for the front door. In a way, this was lucky. Anastasia Van der Stegen was bound to be one of his next ports of call anyway, one way or another.
"Jack Stein," she said, a deep huskiness in her voice. "I'm so glad I've found you here."
"Miss Van der Stegen, I ... "
"No, Jack. I can call you Jack? I've already told you, it's Tasha."
This was like some of the worst dialogue from the old vids. He had to keep his head on straight, especially with his latest revelation about her floating around in his head. He wasn't going to let her know his suspicions.
"Tasha, then. What brings you here? You can hardly have just been passing. So what can I do for you?"
"Well, Jack," she said leaning against the doorframe sinuously. It seemed there was more than one sort of snake in Jack's world. After an uncomfortable pause, she spoke. "Aren't you going to invite me in?"
"Ah, yeah. Sure." She was certainly playing it up.
He stepped back to allow her to enter, waited as she slid past him and he closed the door behind them. He took a moment to watch appreciatively as she sauntered into the living room, closed his eyes, shook his head, and then followed. What the hell was she really doing here and how stupid did she really think he was?
"Does your father know you're here, Miss Van der ... ah, Tasha?"
"It's no business of his."
She stopped in the room's center, gave the entire area a sweeping, dismissive glance — the same sort of look her father had given Jack's offices — then turned her attention back to him. They stood staring at each other for what seemed like several seconds before Jack got a grip of himself and cleared his throat.
"Um, why don't you sit down? Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Something else?" Not that he had anything else to give her.
"No, that’s all right." She settled herself on the edge of the couch and ran her palms from side to side along the edge on either side of her. She was gazing at him, her head tilted downward so she was looking up at his face. Her features were unreadable. "So don't just stand there. Come and sit down, Jack," she said, patting the couch beside her.
"Right." He crossed to sit awkwardly in the chair opposite her. He deliberately chose the chair rather than the position on the couch. "So what can I do for you, Tasha? Have you a job for me? Or is it something else?"
"You know, Jack Stein, ever since t
hat day at the house, I haven't been able to stop thinking about you. So mysterious. Intriguing. I wanted to find out some more about you. You left me your card and, well ... " She shrugged. "So here I am."
"You're sure I can't get you a drink or something?"
"No, really. I'm fine."
"Okay, Tasha. What can I do for you? What would you like to know?"
"So, you're a Psychic Investigator are you? What does that mean? You play on hunches."
"More or less. It's a bit more complex than that. They're more than hunches. And I guess a bit hard to explain. Sometimes it's just about being in the right place at the right time." He shrugged.
"But all of life's like that."
"Yeah, well, more or less. I just happen to be in the right place at the right time a little more than most. Sometimes it's the wrong place too."
Anastasia Van der Stegen watched him as he spoke, barely moving her gaze from his face. She ran the tip of her tongue over her lips before continuing.
"What else, Jack?"
"Well, some of the stuff I get comes from dreams, or from impressions given by physical objects, or even sometimes from people themselves."
"What sort of stuff?"
"You know. I guess you’d call them visions. Dream images. Flashes that come to me when I touch something. I use those to guide me in certain directions."
She nodded and moved her hand to one thigh, leaning forward ever so slightly. "So you see things when you touch things?"
"Sometimes."
“Hmmm.” It was a low, animal sound, full of suggestion, and despite everything, Jack felt himself responding.
She held the moment, and then finally continued. "So what did you see from Daddy's handipad?"
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