“Not really grains,” Celia said now. “More like little loops in twelve-space. And the loops are so small, they can never be observed. Every probe we can devise is twenty orders of magnitude too big. The uncertainty principle guarantees that we will never do any better.”
“If you can’t hope to measure it, what’s the point of the experiment?”
“We look for what’s left over. Residual effects.” She was peering at a Mossbauer calibrator, locking the position of an array of magnetometers to one part in a million billion. “The individual twists can’t be observed, but there are residual effects of their interaction. Remember, things don’t have to be seen directly to have physical meaning. Think of black holes. Think of quarks.”
Soon after I found Celia, I had asked her what use the Germani theory and experiment could be. What did it matter what was going on, if it was happening at a scale a sextillion times too small to see?
Celia had chided me. “It doesn’t matter today, but in fifty or a hundred years it will change the whole world. We’re not talking a minor experiment, you know. This is a lot bigger than Michelson-Morley, it’s probing the roots of reality itself. What we’re doing will go into all the schoolbooks one day, like Newton’s apple and Einstein’s falling elevator. When experiment confirms our theory, we’ll kill all the quantum dragons with one thrust.”
Quantum dragons. The way Celia described them, the quantum paradoxes were real dragons, destroying physicists everywhere with their razor teeth and fiery breath. Schrodinöger’s cat, Wigner’s friend and infinite regression, Everett and Wheeler’s many worlds, Chang’s cascade, Ponteira’s dilemma; the dragons gnawed away at the roots of the tree of physics, and no one had been able to slay them. They all involved the same questions: what was the condition of the quantum state vector, before and after observation? How did observation change it? For most of a century, scientists had possessed a set of computational procedures that allowed them to make calculations of quantum phenomena. But it was a set of ad hoc methods that happened to give the right answers. Beneath them was the void, populated only by paradoxes.
If spacetime itself were quantized in a certain way, said the Germani theory, then all those paradoxes could be disposed of at once. The theory also suggested a crucial experiment, and until that was performed Vilfredo and Celia Germani had done no more man propose an interesting hypothesis. Fortunately the experiment was within reach of today’s technology—just. It called for the use of a large, minimally-active structure and a microgravity environment. There was exactly one known body that fitted the requirement: GOG.
The media found a certain irony in the fact that Germani could use Thomas Madison’s facilities on GOG to seek a truth that Madison himself would have hated. In his preaching, he had described science as a sinful delusion and a tool of Satan.
Germani, gifted fund-raiser that he was, could not afford to buy GOG, or even to rent its use. No one could. After Madison died his revenues had been declared taxable income, and the Church was hit for billions in unpaid taxes. It had no money left, and the top officials were lucky if they stayed out of jail. So the property had been taken over by the U.S. Government. But it was worthless—and inaccessible—to almost everyone. The habitat had a good orbit for an automated spacecraft, but a very bad one for most crewed facilities.
Vilfredo Germani had gone to the government with a clever proposal. He asked for the use of GOG and all its facilities, free, for six months. It would remain government property, and any inventions or patents that developed as a result of the experiment would belong jointly to the government and to Germani. The government would also share revenue from sale of media rights. More than that, Germani would pay all costs of the transportation and the experimental equipment. From the government point of view, it was a no-risk proposal.
From our personal point of view, though, it was far from risk-free. We would be generating a huge pulse of power, confined and applied in a novel way. Germani had made one fact very clear to me and to Malcolm McCollum: a second reason for performing the experiment out in space was because of possible unpredicted physical effects.
The experiment had been scheduled to take place when GOG was traveling over the United States. In addition to our live broadcast, television cameras in every major city would be pointed upwards, hoping to observe some visible evidence of the result—hoping also, I suspected, for unforeseen calamity and associated fireworks. Successful physics experiments make less interesting news than disasters.
Two hours before the experiment was scheduled to begin, we had evidence that GOG was still capable of producing its own surprises.
McCollum was concluding a full-scale dry run, feeding energy through the network. As the power input reached a maximum, every sound in the interior—even the ones that we were making ourselves—faded to inaudibility. In that unnatural hush, a whispering voice spoke in our ears, just loud enough to be understood, “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I will repay. Vengeance is mine.”
It was Thomas Madison’s recorded voice, we knew that. Just as we knew that the God of Thomas Madison was the rough god of the Old Testament, a deity of revenge, blood, and savage justice. “Vengeance is mine,” could have been the slogan of the Church, a leitmotif that ran through all the broadcasts and promotional materials. Madison had made the fate of unbelievers very clear. They would burn in hell—he described that hell in gruesome detail—for eternity, with no hope of salvation. Curiously, this seemed to be one of the Church of Christ Ascendant’s main attractions. The faithful sent letters in with their contributions, proposing new torments.
Madison’s enemies mocked him and denounced his miracles as expensive fakes. Just gimmicky effects. That was easy to do sitting in front of a television screen on Earth, but here on GOG, with that soft, menacing voice in your ear….
Well, we all shivered a little, I think, before McCollum could isolate the circuit involved, and cut it out of the power system. There was no thought of postponing the experiment. Germani had made commitments. The show must go on.
He had the action organized as tightly as a ballet, with himself at the center of attention. Celia had a minor role, and no one else would appear. I had been banished to the power control room with Vilfredo Germani’s direct order to “keep an eye on things.” And stay out of the way, said his tone. The experiment was in three phases, extending over a four-hour period. Germani did not want to see me in the main chamber with the recording cameras during that interval.
It suited my needs perfectly. I had decided that the best possible time for me to do what I had to do would be during the experiment. The others would be so focused on that, they wouldn’t even think of me.
I went to the power control room and waited. Forty minutes before zero hour, I left that assigned position and moved down the long axis of GOG, heading for a region that was supposed to be nothing more than unused storage space. Within two hundred meters I had come to the outer bulkhead and triple hull. Beyond them should be nothing but vacuum. I knew differently. Hidden power lines, concealed within ventilation shafts, ran on and through the thick metal wall. They had to lead somewhere.
It took five minutes to find the key. Electrically activated, part of the bulkhead slid aside, producing a circular opening six feet across. I had put on my suit before I left the power room, but I did not need it. The aperture led to another set of chambers, each with a breathable atmosphere. The different parts of GOG when we had arrived had been at wildly differing temperatures, depending on the orientation of each section relative to the Sun and on thermal coupling to other parts. This set of chambers had its own triply-redundant thermostats and was precisely controlled to twenty degrees above freezing point.
The first three rooms were concentric shells of living space, each well-equipped with entertainment materials and with receiving equipment for broadcasts from Earth. They also possessed heavy wall shielding against the effects of s
olar flares, but they were otherwise conventional.
The fourth, and innermost….
I opened the door, held my breath. In the center of the room stood the blue-gray barrel of a Schindler hibernation unit. Eighteen million dollars of desperation. Badly wounded or sick patients could live in one of these almost indefinitely, intravenously fed and with body functions ticking over at just a few degrees above zero, until donor organs or improved medical techniques gave them a chance of recovery.
But you didn’t have to be sick. I examined the settings and found a quintuply-redundant group of timing units, each set to trigger nine months from now. I overrode all of them, initiated immediate reawakening, and sat down on the floor in front of the unit.
Even at fastest reanimation, it would take a while. The heart activity trace had been showing one beat per minute. Now as drugs dripped in through the I/V’s, the body temperature crept up, a degree every hundred and forty seconds. The pulse rate rose with it.
The minutes dragged on. I waited. In half an hour the overhead lights flickered.
I looked at my watch. The first part of Germani’s experiment was in full swing, and I was seeing the effects of the power drain. Helical surges of magnetic field ran the length of GOG now, tightening on themselves. This was the most direct test of third quantization, but also the least sensitive. Celia didn’t hold out much hope for it—the second test, two hours from now, was the one she said she would bet her money on.
Body temperature, seventy-eight degrees. The bronchospirometer showed that breathing was at normal levels and had near-normal gaseous composition. There ought to be stirrings of consciousness within the Schindler unit. I peered in through the narrow plastic cover on the upper rim, and could see nothing. The heartbeat was strong at forty-seven. My own pulse was up over a hundred. I closed my eyes, and told myself that three quarters of an hour was nothing compared with six years.
I had never seen a Schindler unit in operation before. When the reawakening cycle was complete, what happened? The reanimated subject was not likely to pop out like a piece of bread in a toaster, but I dared not open it from the outside in case I was too soon.
Finally there was a sigh from inside the unit, a protest at sleep disturbed. The lock on the front of the unit clicked. The door did not open, but it was now unsecured. I reached out a cold and trembling hand, pulled gently, and a moment later I was staring in on the dazed face of Thomas Madison.
“Jack?” he said uncertainly. He lifted his head a few inches from the supporting web. “Jack?”
“Jack Burdon is dead, Eric.” I spoke slowly and clearly. “This is Jim.”
He gasped, and his face took on the expression I had waited years to see. “Where am—what did—” He could speak, but only just.
“You’re up here on the Glory Of God, Eric. Everything worked out just the way you planned.”
He was doing his best to move forward, but he was still feeble. I thrust him back with one hand. He shivered and cowered away within the unit. “But Jack—what happened to Jack?”
“Vengeance is mine, Eric. Remember? Your favorite line. You want to know how I found out? There were rumors, they came through the grapevine even when I was in prison. Wild talk of resurrection. It made no sense, not with Thomas Madison dead. But they never found a body, did they? That made me think. And then I learned that they never found the Church’s money, either. I went to see Jack when I got out, and he told me everything he knew.”
He shook his head.
“He wouldn’t talk, you mean?” I said. “Not loyal old Jack. Ah, but you’re wrong. He just needed persuasion, some of the treatment he gave his wife. Why did you make Jack an insider, Eric, and not me? I was with you longer than he was.”
He couldn’t speak, but I knew the answer. Even Jack Burdon had been told only a small part of it. When you plan something so big, the fewer people involved, the better.
“Jim, I couldn’t tell you. Don’t you see that, I had to keep everything tight—keep it secret.” His voice was coming back, his face showed a trace of color, and with that came a little more courage. “It was falling apart on us, you knew that as well as I did. We had to wrap it up, lie low and start over. But I wouldn’t have forgotten you.”
I leaned forward and pressed his windpipe, not hard enough to cut off breathing. “Now that, I’m prepared to believe. I know the grand design. Want me to tell it to you? I had it from Jack when he was too far gone for lying.”
It was clean and simple. Thomas Madison dead and gone, vanished for seven years, until the heat was off the Church. Jack Burdon and a couple of others with enough money and resources to make sure that the Glory Of God went unvisited. Then, the whispers around the Earth. Thrilling words, of death and transfiguration. After exactly seven years (numbers are important) the Glory Of God, long dead and lifeless, blazes forth again in the night sky. Thomas Madison, resurrected on GOG, broadcasts again to all the people of Earth.
“The New Dawn,” I said. That would be the Word. And for anyone from the old order? Most of us died in prison, the way we were supposed to. Special bad treatment, bought and paid for with Church funds. But you wouldn’t have forgotten the rest of us—until we were gone, and it was safe to forget us.”
He didn’t bother to deny it. His eyes looked from side to side, avoiding me. I noticed that his appearance was slightly different. He had been enhanced, features thinner, eyes wider and more gleaming to fit the image of a reborn prophet.
“I wouldn’t have hurt you, Jim,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t. Not my own brother.”
“Wouldn’t hurt me? Five years in that stinking South American prison, with the filth and the lice and the bad water.” I pressed harder on his throat. “I was supposed to die there. But we’re tough, aren’t we, the Kravely boys? You don’t kill us with rat bites and with rotting garbage instead of food. We thrive on it. We lie in our rags, and we think.”
He was slowly suffocating. His hands were pushing at me, but he was too weak.
“I got out of prison, Eric, and I did what I had to.” I couldn’t help myself, I was pressing harder on his windpipe. “I had my talk with Jack Burdon. Found out about Vilfredo Germani, then fawned and groveled to meet him, that egocentric little Italian shit. Screwed Celia Germani until she couldn’t see straight, even though she’s hairy and sweaty and I’ve had more fun fucking the monkeys they brought in to the Sao Paulo jail. Ass-kissed and fornicated my way up here. I did it, Eric. I did it all, whatever it took. You wouldn’t hurt me, you say? Then I’m not hurting you.”
He was dying, jerking in the harness. I wanted to slow down, to keep him alive, to make it last. I had looked forward to this moment for a year, savoring the idea. But I couldn’t hold back. When I had myself under control he lolled already lifeless in the Schindler hibernation unit.
I looked at his starting eyes and swung the unit closed. All my anger drained away as I turned to leave the chamber. And there, in the doorway, stood Celia Germani.
Her face was pasty-white and her eyes lacked focus. She was not wearing a suit, and I could see her midriff quivering. “I came to find you,” she said tonelessly. “The second phase of the experiment is going to start. I wanted you to be there with me. There were signs from Phase One that this will give us just what we need, so I wanted you with me to see it.”
Celia was on autopilot, babbling randomly because she did not know what else to do. But I knew exactly what to do. She had seen me kill my brother, probably heard what I said, knew who I was.
She had to go out of the airlock. I could snap my suit closed, take her there, and hold her during evacuation. Accident, someone new to space. Nothing to point to me.
I started forward.
She must have read my face, because she turned and tried to flee. Too late. I grabbed a fistful of her blond, curly hair and stopped her before she could move two feet. At that point her legs and a
rms went limp and I was able to drag her along with me easily.
No point in speech. I reached up with one hand to close my suit, holding her firmly in the other, and moved as fast as I could. It was more than a hundred meters to the nearest lock, back the way I had come. We seemed to take forever, but I did not expect to meet anyone. Germani and McCollum were too wrapped up in the experiment. When we had gone maybe fifty meters, a whining sound came from the walls of GOG.
Celia began to struggle in my grasp. “Phase Two,” she cried, in the tones of a prayer. “Oh, Phase Two.”
We were close to the maximum point of field intensity. The whine became a shriek, the shriek an insane howl; the whole structure went into rapid vibration. The oscillation continued. The outlines of walls and fixtures softened like a tuning fork at the moment of striking.
I froze and tightened my grip on Celia. After a few more seconds our surroundings steadied and firmed.
But Celia was no longer distinct to my eyes. She blurred, split, became two fuzzy images. One of them was pulling hard to free herself, the other slumped hopelessly in my arms. The images shivered, split again.
Celia was free, flying away down the corridor.
Celia was pulling hard against my grip.
Celia had bent her head to my right hand and was biting it hard.
Celia was fainting in my arms.
Celia was stabbing at my eyes with a knife from the pocket of her uniform.
Celia lay senseless where I had flung her against the corridor wall.
Celia…
…blurred and split, blurred and split, blurred and split. The chamber was filled with phantom Celia’s, running, turning, struggling, attacking, biting, fainting, bleeding, weeping, screaming.
I tried to grapple with them, all of them. But now I was dividing, holing Celia with a hundred hands that became a thousand hands that became an uncountable infinity of hands. I beat at the flying shapes and felt myself spread all along the corridor. I willed my body—all my bodies—to turn and fly back the way I had come. The spectral Celia’s suddenly vanished. At last I could move. There was a wrenching, sideways jerk as I encountered and passed through some central focus of the field, then I was coalescing once more to a single body.
Dancing With Myself Page 20