by Far Freedom
“I think you do.” Mai was absolutely sure Jon would be a good father. Maybe she would be a good mother, if she could just stop trying too hard.
“You did a medical screening of the Malay. How many children?”
“Only five.” Mai kicked off her shoes and moved past him to put them away. He watched her, stealing pleasure from seeing her, being near her, hearing her voice. He didn’t think to disconnect his mouth from his errant thoughts.
“Are they contagious?”
“They were perfectly healthy. Why would you think that?”
He gave up trying to be someone else. He would always say the wrong things to Mai. She could tolerate it or she could chastise him, just as long as she stayed near him. “I meant it in a different way. A poor attempt at humor.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Did your desire to have a child of your own increase when you saw the Malay children?”
Mai’s heart leaped and she almost stuttered. “Did Aylis talk to you about something?” She really didn’t want Aylis interceding for her, making Mai seem, well, less than perfect, but she would take whatever came of it with good humor. Even if it killed her with humiliation.
“About what?”
She was relieved Aylis had not revealed her biological error to Horss. Then she was angry with herself for even worrying about it. ” She didn’t? Why are you here? I visited you, now you pay a return visit?”
“To tell you I’m sorry,” he answered. Mai sounded dangerously irritated now. Something was wrong, to have her mood change so much. This was going to be very difficult. It would also be humiliating when Mai told him where to go.
” Sorry about what?”
“Makawee.”
“What is that?”
Jon now knew Mai had not read his personnel record, the one Demba - Zakiya - corrected from Navy Archives. “My daughter.”
She tilted her head as though a different angle would reveal the way to see through him. “Why? It doesn’t matter.” It didn’t matter to Mai. Although she hated to break the law, she could easily rationalize keeping Jon’s child because of the extraordinary situation. They might never return to Union space.
It did matter. He could hear it in her voice. It occurred to him this was an encouraging reaction, if he read it correctly. “It matters to me.” He looked around her small office, where she worked and lived. It wasn’t as clean and neat as he would have expected. Mai was probably too busy.
“Is there something you need to tell me?”
He thought she sounded hopeful. He plunged ahead, obliquely, like the coward he was. “I’m worried.”
“About what?”
“The ship.”
“Of course, you are. You’re the captain.”
“I mean, as a limiting factor.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m running out of time because of the ship.”
“To do what?”
“To be happy. That’s what the Freedom is all about: the pursuit of happiness.”
“I suppose it is, in a way. What would make you happy?” Mai thought he was trying to work his way around to something. How could men such as Jon pretend to be strong and decisive, if they were not in fact strong and decisive? Did he act this way only in her presence? Was that a sign of something she did to him emotionally? It would be humorous to her if she wasn’t so serious about everything.
There it was: the perfect question for him to answer. He would say, You would make me happy. He pursed his lips to get the “you” sound but nothing would come out. He never had this problem with women before. It was easier to lie to a casual acquaintance than it was to tell the truth to Old Lady Sugai.
” Some of those Twenglish words are hard to pronounce,” Mai said, taking a chance on humor. This was it, she thought - she would stop at nothing to bring this conversation to the point of truth between them.
“Especially the one-syllable words.” He hoped her remark was supposed to be humorous. “Words like you, me, us.”
“How about you, I, and we? Subjective rather than objective pronouns.”
“Grammar is for sissies if you speak Twenglish. Why do you suddenly know so much about it?”
“Because Sammy needs to understand what I say.”
“Oh. I thought I might be the reason.”
“When I learn all the curse words, Jon.”
“I can help you there!”
“Tell me about Makawee.”
“What?”
Mai sat down in a rocking chair and fixed him with a squinty stare. Nobody could squint like Mai. She didn’t seem too upset. He couldn’t track where her feelings went. “Makawee, Jon. Your daughter. I would like to know something about her. Does she look like you?”
“Makawee was an infant when I left. I think she did have some of her father’s features.”
Mai frowned at Horss. Frowned and squinted. “It’s impossible for me to imagine you abandoning your wife and child. You’re a starship captain. You’re the definition of responsibility.”
“I married Chumani because I thought I could be responsible for her. I was wrong.”
“Why?”
” She was a widow. Her husband was killed in a mining accident. She had too many emotional problems. I was too young to have the patience to help her.”
“And you left her with your baby, to make things even worse?”
“I was not the father.” He said it slowly and clearly, watching her squinting eyes open wide. “Chumani was already pregnant when I married her. Makawee was the real reason I married her. I was Makawee’s uncle.”
“But that means you aren’t a biological father!”
“That’s what it means.” Horss was relieved by what he heard in the sound of Mai’s voice.
“Why did you wait to tell me?”
“Can I claim mental incompetence due to sudden death? If I promise not to play my clarinet in your vicinity, will you come live with me?”
Mai got up from the rocking chair, almost knocking it over. She slipped into Horss’s arms and hugged him. “Yes! I will come live with you! But there are two of us.”
Section 021 1980 - Quantum Circuits, Part 2
“So, how’s the dissertation coming, Miss DuPont?” Sam asked.
“Grumble grumble grumble,” Milly replied, shoving her wheels in opposite directions to turn and face Sam in the hallway outside her office. She smiled wanly. “Haven’t seen you for a couple of days.” That was supposed to suggest that she missed him but she would be damned if she would be any more obvious.
“My brain seems to be on a very imaginative mission. I don’t think I’ve slept four hours in the last two days.”
“Can I claim any credit for your inspiration?”
“Yes, and if you can tolerate it, I have a few more ideas to bore you with.”
” Sure, but I was hoping you could inspire me as well. Your place or mine?”
“Mine is on the third floor with no elevator.”
“Better be my place. Your bathroom probably doesn’t have all the monkey bars I need.”
Milly took too long in the bathroom, worrying over every detail of her appearance she could do anything about. When had she ever done this, after her first prom? Sam was just so damned nice. She realized his first installment of his quantum circuits theory was probably just so much science fantasy and her reaction to it was influenced by the situation, by her brainless desire to be in Sam’s presence. She was a little worried that he still seemed to be serious about it. When she finally wheeled herself out of the bathroom she was surprised and a little dismayed by the stack of papers on her kitchen table.
“Sorry.” Sam saw Milly’s reaction to all the papers he pulled from his briefcase and stacked on her table. “I left your apartment last time wondering what the hell I had actually said to you. How could I take it all back? Unfortunately, being less than fully indoctrinated in modern physics, I lost control of my imagination.”
�
�You really think you have something?” Milly asked it hopefully.
“And maybe a way to test it, but it’s going to require more math and geometry than I think I can manage.”
“Geometry? That was always my favorite area of math. Why geometry?”
“It’s going to be hard to explain. That’s why all the drawings. Also, I have pertinent equations from about a hundred years of physics. I’m hoping you can help me spot something that will make my test possible.” Sam looked up from his stack of papers and tried to decipher the look on Milly’s face. He looked back at the papers. His wild theory began to fade in importance when he remembered Milly’s situation, especially her need to finish work on her doctorate. Why was he so fixated on something so impossible? Fixated on two things: the theory and Milly. “I’m still sorry, Milly.” He shook his head. “Is there any possible way I can help you finish your dissertation?”
Milly gazed at Sam for several quiet moments, wondering why this was happening to her. She was actually prepared to give up her doctorate, if it was a choice between it and Sam. She could see the consequences. The doctorate was a piece of paper that would give her some security and prestige for the rest of her life. Sam was a more important possibility, but still only a possibility. He could vanish from her life tomorrow. She could see herself grasping at the short-term pleasure of being with Sam, taking a chance, taking a big chance.
Quantum was a popular word. It made people think of something scientific and advanced. Milly sighed and tried to hang back from making a wrong decision. “Why the word quantum, Sam?”
“The quantum is a package of energy, a step up or down.” Sam sensed a seriousness to the question. “I’ve borrowed it simply because I don’t have another term that better identifies where the action is taking place. My quantum is a quantity of force that rides a circuit. I don’t even imagine the quantization is real or important. Geometry is important. The quanta exert force on other circuits and the circuits intersect other circuits, with varying effect according to angle. At steep angles they can pass through each other, at shallow angles they slide past and exert force. And it’s complicated by the quantum being in constant oscillation.”
Milly tried to absorb the lecture and Sam watched her hopefully. “But this is all invisible stuff. Subatomic. How can you test anything?”
“I’ll never have the funding to investigate what I’ve just described. But there is a kind of brute-force experiment that would prove a basic assumption of my theory.”
“I’m listening.” Milly wondered why Sam hesitated to reply.
“Quantum circuits are the essence of matter, even though they’re infinitessimal. If I can bring a bunch of them to a sudden enough meeting, at a certain angle, they may fuse.”
“Fuse? Combine? What would happen?”
“There could be an explosion.” He was hoping for a very big explosion or at least a very weird explosion, anything other than his test apparatus flying apart due to design failure. He could almost visualize the shape of the component that would plunge the magnetic field lines into critical density. He needed Milly to help him determine the exact geometry.
“What would this prove, Sam? It sounds dangerous.”
He hesitated again to reply. He didn’t know if Milly knew enough physics to see the implications. He didn’t want to spell it out for her because it would sound like madness or utter conceit. “It will be dangerous if it proves I’m on the right track.”
“How big an explosion? My brother is an Air Force officer and I think he might know where to blow things up.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
She repeated the question. “How big an explosion, Sam?” She was beginning to get a notion that Sam was hiding some fact from her. She was beginning to think this was a large explosion. Too large. He wouldn’t respond to her repeated question. “Nuclear?”
Sam tried to shape an answer that still avoided saying what he didn’t want to say plainly. “I’m trying to prove that my quantum circuits - in the form of magnetic or electrostatic lines of force - are a basic form of matter. When matter fuses - as in a hydrogen bomb - energy is released. I feel that the energy of any nuclear bomb is provided simply by quantum circuits being broken. Fusing magnetic lines of force may break their circuits and release quite a lot of energy.”
“Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light?”
“It isn’t clear to me that the equation fits quantum circuits.”
“Your quantum circuits have energy because they have mass, but not a lot of mass. How would there be much energy released?” She saw Sam was uncomfortable with what she said. She thought through the terms of Einstein’s equation. It was almost as if Sam was implying there was something wrong with it. “The speed of light, that’s all that’s left.”
“The speed of information, to be more precise.”
” So, what’s wrong with it?”
“I can’t define it.”
“You don’t know what’s wrong with it?”
“I didn’t want to get into this so soon, or ever, depending on whether I could test my theory. If Einstein’s equation applied to quantum circuits, the value of c would not be a constant. It would be undefined at best and infinite at worst. I don’t have another equation to replace it. The mass term is meaningless as well. Like Newton’s equation for gravity, Einstein’s equation is an approximation for much larger aggregates of mass, an aggregate composed of myriad complex entities, many kinds of quantum circuits. I’m not trying to define entities yet - what we call atomic particles - except to say they must be closely related to quantum circuits, connected by quantum circuits. The concept I’m trying to work out first is what I call reluctance, which is somewhat akin to the electronic term. Reluctance is the property needed to provide the fulcrum upon which force can be exerted by circuit quanta. Reluctance would be the only restraint on the speed of information.”
Milly sat quietly for a long time, thinking. She could almost see what Sam was trying to explain. She picked up some of the drawings from the kitchen table: pictures of hollow tubes crisscrossing at various angles and vectors, sinusoidal waves in thread-like loops colliding with various interference effects and resulting force vectors. It was obvious how geometry was necessary. It was a rather simple principle that led to almost infinite complexities. She then realized geometry could be a solution to her dissertation problems. She could use geometry. Wasn’t geometry the ultimate reason for doing math? Math was how reality was measured, and reality could only be perceived as geometry. “OK, Sam. Once more, from the top. I like blowing things up.”
Section 022 The Bass Player and the Happy Captain
Direk watched her, when he should have paid more attention to the engineering work that was being done. He seldom was bothered by such distraction, but he was bothered now. He watched Zakiya and could only see her as Ruby Reed, singing in the spotlight, as he and Harry played their instruments. He was never happier than when he played bass and listened to Ruby and Harry. He was disappointed Zakiya didn’t mention that period of their lives together. Harry was missing. He knew he should be here, helping with the engineering. Was Harry - Pan - the cause of his mental insubordination? Something else was wrong, something he needed to discover, and there were too many distractions to frustrate his attempt to solve the problem. He needed to resolve his emotional problems first, one at a time, and they had names: Zakiya, Jamie, Mother.
“What is it?” Zakiya noticed Direk, noticed his distraction.
“How long have they worked on this pylon?”
“About two days.”
“Are they finished? It looks fine to me.”
“The integrity of the repair tests good but there is a question about its accuracy.”
“Tell them to quit the pylon and move on. The gate connections can adapt to any reasonable error in geometry. If that’s the last ship’s fitting to need attention, we can begin the connection process.”
“The gate hemis
pheres can adapt?”
“I should have informed Iggy. I apologize for the mistake. My copy and I had the better part of a century to modify the gate hemispheres. We tried to allow for some error in ship geometry.”
Zakiya hurried to the repair team and gave them Direk’s news. She returned to Direk and they began walking. They followed a lighted pathway among the massive pillars of field emitters which dominated the space between the inner hull and the lower surface of the jump-shell hemisphere now enclosing the ship.
“Have you gained control of your on-ship gate?” Zakiya inquired.
“I didn’t know there was one. Do you need it?”
“It was vital to us once.” Direk’s copy had used it to gain access to Admiral Etrhnk’s shielded facilities at Headquarters, to retrieve her and Sammy. She related the story to Direk.
“I’ll work on it. I’m surprised Iggy hasn’t mentioned it to me. I’m sorry I neglected my duties. I may have cost us as much as a day’s delay. I need to have a conference with Iggy and his staff, to see if I’ve forgot to do something else.”
“Are you distracted by memories? The rest of us are.”
They hurried through the cold air to an access in the inner hull. They entered a transmat node and winked to the central biosphere of the Freedom.
“Yes. Memories have bothered me. And the lack of them.”
“Can I help?”
“Yes. Tell me you remember me.”
It was dawn in the biosphere. Zakiya and Direk climbed stone steps to an English garden. Just beyond it lay the hospital. Direk halted. Zakiya stopped ahead of him and turned around. “How would I not remember you?”
“I shouldn’t waste time with imprecise language, but I seem to be far different from who I used to be. I suspect that one of my copies, not me, should be here instead. I need you to remember Dick, because it bothers me that you may not.”
“Dick?”
“Your bass player, Ruby.”
It was as though he hit her. He started to apologize, realizing how their hidden memories could pounce on them so forcefully. She made a pivot on the top step and started to reach for him, as though off-balance and seeking support. “But Dick was dark, like an African. And funny. And… I didn’t know he was you. He was you! My God! I can see it now! This is wonderful! But does this mean… What does it mean? Dick was always a happy fellow, or so it seems from a glimpse. Is that what you remember? Is that what you were? How could you be… happy?”