by Nancy Kress
“What if I need more time?” Anderson said.
“You don’t get it.” Odd—the man didn’t seem crazy. But, then, Martinez had never experienced so much as an abrupt mood swing. He knew himself unequipped to judge less steady temperaments, let alone delusional ones.
“But if—”
“Those are my orders.”
Martinez watched the madman descend to the thick clouds.
25
* * *
THE ELEVENTH GATE
In the Skyhawk scout, seated beside the pilot, Philip finally remembered the Eddington quote he had tried to recall for Julie, months ago. Arthur Eddington, brilliant maverick, physicist and mathematician and philosopher of science: “Consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into subconsciousness; and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature…the stuff of the world is mind-stuff.” A position ridiculed on several planets, starting with old Earth.
As the small craft pierced the clouds, Philip sensed nothing. No jolt of recognition, no transcendence. Only the faint claustrophobia of the s-suit, even before he put on the helmet. Only the hum of ship machinery. Only the glow of data- and viewscreens, one with Martinez’s doubting face and one with floaty, deadly clouds. Nothing more.
Impossible to meditate in this cramped, scornful space. Impossible to meditate with his agitated brain.
He closed his eyes, breathing deeply and steadily. His mind still skittered like a frictionless bearing. Unable to focus on the mystery of nothingness, he tried to focus on the mysteries of physics.
Matter is no more than condensed energy, a wave that has collapsed.
An observer at the quantum level changes the system, as the observer becomes part of that system. It is observation that creates matter by collapsing the wave.
At the Big Bang, unimaginable energy became entangled particles, creating a universe that is all one.
Matter is no more than—
The scout dropped below the clouds and landed.
A barren landscape, broken only by strange gray structures with sloped, ridged sides. The pilot said, her attempt at neutrality failing completely, “Here is where you get out, Mr. Anderson.”
Philip put on his helmet, the pilot ran a check on his s-suit, and he entered the tiny airlock. Outside, he walked toward the structures, almost stumbling in the light gravity. His infrared augments saw no heat emanating from the structures, or from anywhere else. Nothing grew, nothing moved but clouds, nothing but him made any sound. This planet was dead.
When he reached the first building, he touched it with one gloved hand, hoping for…what? Some unimaginable, transcending sensation, some signal, some recognition? There was nothing.
All right. He had to do his part.
He sat beside the structure and began to meditate. This time, it came easily. And after only a few minutes, it happened. He reached past his conscious thoughts, deeper than his subconscious, into…what? There was no name for this. “Metaconsciousness,” it turned out, was not even close. No. But whatever it was, he was there.
They were there.
The presences, again faintly surprised, and then not. Wordless, they recognized his existence. Wordless, he recognized theirs: not human, neither young nor old in a realm where time was interchangeable with space, non-local as entanglement was always non-local, and yet concentrated in places where they, observers, had collapsed the wave. Into matter? No. Into something indeterminately between matter and energy, as the quantum universe was until observed. Into probability.
The place was not inside the structures beside Philip. There was machinery there, of some unimaginable type, but not presences. The presences were in the gate above the alien planet.
No—in all the gates.
They had created the gates, long ago, when they learned enough physics to build the translation machinery behind these walls. The translation was from sentient consciousness to cosmic consciousness, perpetual observers who had died only in terms of matter. They had known that infant humanity shared sentient consciousness, in a very primitive form. They had created this gate for themselves, to inhabit, and other gates near planets habitable to humanity, should we ever need them. Even though they thought humans would never get that far.
Then, existing in the eternal now, they ignored Earth and its puny spawn.
Yet here Philip was, to their astonishment, and then their curiosity.
• • •
“Captain, incoming probe.”
Martinez had heard the Peregoy signal, followed now by the drone’s message: “Alert! Alert!” He read the data scrolling down the wall screen. Enemy ships approached the space side of the gate, a fleet of four—the Landrys were determined to take this gate. They had guessed, or learned, his strategy and were willing to lose a few ships in order to learn the position of his three vessels and annihilate them with their new beams. Martinez could not hold out against warships equipped with the new weapon.
He had three hours before making what had to be a suicide stand.
“Mr. DiCaria, Captains Vondenberg and Murphy, prepare for incursion, and then fire at will.”
Assents from captains of the Zeus and the Green Hills of Earth. Martinez did not have to tell them how this would end. They knew.
• • •
Philip understood now—although “understanding” was the wrong word for this wordless knowledge—what he had done before. The Quasar III had been returned from matter to energy and, later, gates had closed for eight hours, both events because he had briefly merged with the gates. Briefly and wrongly. Time was not the same within the gates; Philip had touched them so briefly that the gate presences had been aware something had happened but had not known what, or why. Only here, at the gate by the planet where they had once lived, was he clear to them. Here, by the machinery of translation.
They did not know everything. In fact, they knew nothing. They didn’t know when ships passed through the gates, or failed to pass through. They could have known, but they chose not to—why?
He felt it. A deeper level of reality, a substrate to the universe, which they chose to not inhabit. Physicists—Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Bernard Haisch, Erik Verlinde, Anna Varennes—had long speculated that such a thing must exist, the field below the fields, the substrate to everything.
The presences knew it was there, and that it could control the gates. It was what Philip had touched—briefly, wrongly, disastrously.
• • •
Martinez positioned his ships close to the eleventh gate, for maximum ability to take out enemy vessels as they came through. He could do no more than that.
Eighteen minutes remaining.
• • •
He asked “them”: Why? And was surprised when they “answered.”
To merge fully with the deepest level of reality was to become pure energy. It was to lose all individuality. It was to become one with everything, and so lose oneself. Beyond satori, nirvana, moksha, enlightenment, beatitude, all of which were only pale and temporary shadows of the substrate.
So the presences remained half-committed to their own translation, half in and half out, neither matter nor energy, indeterminate and without control.
He could not imagine anything more human.
• • •
Five minutes.
Martinez, superb at keeping his mind focused on the task at hand, nonetheless had a momentary, regretful thought: I would have made a worthy heir to the Peregoy empire.
• • •
The wall, on which Philip rested one gloved hand, dissolved so suddenly that he nearly toppled over. No sound, no debris, nothing—a six-foot section of wall simply no longer existed.
Come.
He knew what they meant: not merely Come inside, but Come to us. Become one of them.
This was what he had sought for his whole life, had risked getting experimental brain implants for, had refused to give up in exchange for Julie. To
know their deeper level of reality. And yet it was not the deepest.
No, they said. Because if he went past them, if he let the machinery translate him fully, he could not ever be one with them again. They lived in the gates; he would become the gates, and everything else. There was no return from that state. He would be alone, the observer who collapsed the wave, so entangled with the multiple fields that generated the universe that he could never again communicate with those half-in, half-out.
Next to that unimaginable solitude, it hardly mattered that his body would die.
Over his helmet came the pilot’s voice. “Anderson, you have fifteen minutes of air-conversion microbes left. Return to the scout now.”
Fifteen minutes? He’d been here nearly ten hours? But next to the choice facing him, it hardly mattered to him whether his body died. It mattered far more that the interruption of the pilot’s voice had not shattered his trance.
That was the moment he realized he’d already made his choice.
• • •
Three minutes.
• • •
Philip walked into the structure, which immediately rematerialized behind. The pilot was yelling now, but her actual words didn’t register. They never would again.
No.
Yes.
The machinery wasn’t, really. It was shadowy arcs of…something. Probabilities, he guessed, and it was his last thought as Philip Anderson. The arc took him. There was no pain as he died. He slipped from the meat that had encased his consciousness as easily as shedding a winter jacket in spring.
No.
Yes.
They were there, the inhuman presences who seemed so human—but for only a nanosecond. Then the machinery, guided by his consciousness, slipped him deeper, and Philip Anderson merged with the most fundamental level of reality, beyond spacetime, beyond matter and energy, ineffable source of them both.
• • •
“Sir—the gate!”
On the viewscreen, the shimmer of the eleventh gate brightened so much that Martinez shielded his eyes with his hand. The light filled the bridge, almost a solid thing, before it faded as quickly as it had come.
The ship’s sensors showed nothing but the same quick, brilliant burst of inexplicable radiation in the wavelengths of visible light, a sun without heat or radiation.
• • •
He was the Observer in the system. He was alone now, forever.
He saw everything, and was nothing, beyond both matter and energy. He was pure probability, and he could collapse all probabilities.
There was no “he.”
The Observer sensed the presences in the gate—in all the gates—but they existed on a less fundamental plane, and were as different from the Observer as were all things made of matter, even approximate matter. The Observer could see the system, could change the system, but could not communicate with its microcomponents. The Observer was not a presence but instead was woven into everything, just as Philip-that-once-was had dreamed of.
Warships, machines of destruction, flew toward the tenth gate. Memory, connections between particles that were only condensed energy, was scattered across the universe, but still entangled into an intact whole, knowing what warships meant.
The Observer collapsed the wave.
• • •
One minute.
No minutes.
Nothing came through the gate. Why was the enemy delaying? Martinez and DiCaria exchanged glances. They waited, because there was nothing else to do.
The scout pilot radioed. “Sir—”
“Not now, Cassidy. Remain where you are.”
Two hours later, Martinez let the scout return to the Skyhawk. The pilot, shaken, reported that the bottle-cap-shaped building had opened, dragged Anderson inside, and closed again. The timing coincided with the gate data going haywire.
Martinez sent a probe to the gate. It could not enter. The gate had, once again, closed.
“Captain?” DiCaria’s voice vibrated with tension.
“We wait some more,” Martinez said, because there was nothing else they could do.
Six days later, they were still waiting.
26
* * *
NINE WORLDS
Sloan was finally ready to leave Polyglot for home. He had set up the networks of financials, business holdings, and fortified bunkers necessary if Peregoy Corporation lost the war. Now he would go home to ensure that did not happen. Only a coward would stay in safety on Polyglot, and he was no coward. He had a duty to lead the citizens of the Peregoy worlds.
However, he was also not stupid. Arrangements were in place to secretly convey him and Sophia back here if Jane Landry’s forces prevailed. So far, she had not attacked. Still building K-beams? He hoped they required scarce resources, took a long time to manufacture, malfunctioned in test flights, exploded aboard Landry warships.
He told the wallscreen. “Summon a car for the spaceport.”
“Yes, sir, car sum—priority one alert!”
An ear-damaging alarm sounded—really, Polyglot systems had been programmed with such exaggerated drama—and then a voice said, “Planetwide alert. All four Polyglot gates have become inoperable. Repeat—all four Polyglot gates have become inoperable.”
Inoperable? What did that mean: that they had closed again? If so, they would re-open in a few hours, as they had before.
Wouldn’t they?
• • •
Rachel lay back on the bed in her penthouse on Galt. Her strength was returning more slowly than she would like. Right now, however, that hardly mattered.
Philip had done it.
No one would believe that, of course. Physicists would puzzle, religion would have a resurgence, conspiracy theories would spring up like sprouts after rain. But Rachel knew the truth. Philip had closed the gates to stop the war.
The disruption would be massive. People would be marooned on planets hundreds of light-years from where they wanted to be, and now could not go. Interplanetary trade agreements would vanish. Each world, Peregoy and Landry, was going to have to subsist on its own. Rachel would never again see her granddaughter Celia, directing mining operations on New Hell, nor Jane, overseeing weapons development on Rand for battles that now would not happen. Jane would be furious at having been deprived of her war.
But millions would live instead of die, and civilization would not crash—again—in the same fiery, incredibly stupid catastrophe that had destroyed Terra.
When Rachel was stronger, she would take back the position of CEO from Annelise, never as fractious as Jane. Annelise would see, as Rachel now did, that Galt would have to change if it was going to survive. There would be no more refugees from Rand, and no way for Caitlin to send the remaining refugees back. They would have to be incorporated into a governing structure that moved away from pure Libertarianism into something that fit these new circumstances, without causing revolution. Caitlin, over several visits, had made Rachel understand that much.
And someday, Rachel was sure, Philip would reopen the gates. She knew it.
Now, however, she owed a difficult explanation. It was only right that she make it, as soon as she was strong enough to travel to the hospital. Tara had a right to know that she was never going to see Philip again.
• • •
After three weeks stranded on the planet side of the closed gate, Martinez put his ships on two-thirds rations, trying for survival as long as possible. Each of the eight worlds was hundreds of light-years away. There was nothing to eat on the desolate planet below. Their only hope was that the gate might open again. It had done so before, although not after so long a delay.
He sent a probe to the gate every few hours, then once a day. It always came back.
Dying in battle was one thing. Starvation was quite another. His fleet could hold out for months, but not years. Toward the end, it might be better to fly all three warships into the star.
But not yet.
Except that what
if—
Not yet.
• • •
In the gates, and everywhere else, the Observer watched.
PART II
“Consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into subconsciousness; and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature…the stuff of the world is mind-stuff.”
—Arthur Eddington
27
* * *
POLYGLOT
Sloan was dreaming more than ever before. Not nightmares, which might have been expected. Not of the closed gates that had marooned him here on Polyglot for three months, with no end in sight. Not of his lost stewardship of the Peregoy worlds. Not even of Sophia, whom he missed. Not of Luis Martinez, stranded somewhere in space.
Sloan dreamed of wolves.
He saw the stuffed wolves in his office on New California, shaking themselves into life, running free in a landscape transformed into open grassland, leaping and hunting and nursing cubs. Multiplying. Bringing down prey. Flourishing.
Sometimes he woke with tears on his face, which was sheer nonsense. Ridiculous! After all, wolves had been gone for centuries and he, Sloan, was not at all in danger of either extinction or despair. His great-great grandfather Samuel Peregoy had come to a new planet with far less than Sloan had on Polyglot, and Samuel had built an empire. Sloan was at least the man that his ancestor had been.
During the day, he was busy every minute, with multiple projects. During the three months on Polyglot, he’d used his holdings here to set up the Futures Institute, which was exploring possible ways to open the gates because there had to be a rational explanation for their closing. Not Rachel Landry’s stupid mystic explanation about Philip Anderson, but something based on science. Sloan would find that explanation. He had already recruited some of the best physicists on Polyglot for the Institute, and they would find a way to reverse the closings. There was always a way, if you had enough money and power.