Rahman waving the camera, insisting they could get back.
Zeq: But how do you know... that, gesticulating at the randomized dials, will prevent them from following us?
Rahman’s face very serious, very dark-eyed behind her glass faceplate: I do not.
Now, Ling said, “I am very hot in here.”
Alireza: “We do not know what we’re dealing with here. Poison gases. Microorganisms.”
Ling said, “If your analytical instruments are accurate, there are no poisonous elements in this air.”
He watched Inbar look down at the instrument pack strapped to his chest. Doubtless, the same numbers still glowed in their little windows: 740 millibars in a gravity field that seemed to be a little more than one-half gee. Oxygen partial pressure about like Earth’s at four thousand meters. A little bit of nitrogen, not much. Rather more helium, which seemed unlikely, making their voices sound strange. A little too much CO2. Not enough to do them permanent harm. Maybe just enough for headaches. Argon. A lot of argon. Inexplicable.
Ling listened to his backpack whine for another minute, then reached up and popped the helmet seal, listened to his air hiss out. Slid the faceplate up into its receptacle. Felt his nostrils crackle as he breathed in. Dry. Extremely dry. Cold. No jetting breath, though. Not all that cold. Maybe five degrees Celsius. Maybe a little higher. Faint, flowery smell. He shut off his suit coolant flow, opened the vents, turned off the oxygen valve, left the fan motor on. Felt his suit temperature go down, sweat evaporating rapidly into the sudden dryness. Stood looking back at four pale-faced Arabs. He said, “Seems all right.”
Still fear in Alireza’s eyes. And, surprisingly, Inbar was the first one to reach up and twist his bubble helmet loose from its moorings. He sneezed. Shook his head briefly, irritably. “Smells like wild carrots...” he said. Image of European hill country in the fall. White flowers with their little red dots growing everywhere. Hay fever. Inbar sneezed again. Grimace of dismay.
Silence of a sort. The distant wind, very distant wind moaning. Distant wind, perhaps, that lifted the dust that colored this most peculiar sky... perhaps. We know... nothing?
Finally, Omry Inbar said, “God damn it.”
More silence, underscored by that soft, distant sighing. Alireza said, “Maybe you’d better keep your Jewish profanity to yourself, Dr. Inbar.”
Said in English, thought Ling. For my benefit? Or just common courtesy? Or...
Inbar, face seeming to darken, said, “Colonel, we’ve been here for something like an hour already and no one’s said a God-damned word about what’s happened.”
Ah, yes. The lot of us walking across this dusty... alien landscape, staring, silent, baffled, eyes full of fear and wonder and... if this were and old American movie or an old book, what would we be doing? Reacting mightily. Screaming and crying. Running in circles like some Italian buffoon, huffing and puffing like an Irish washerwoman... Americans were good at reacting mightily...
Quietly, Rahman said, “I think it’s been obvious to all of us since the beginning. The Americans came to the Moon not to find fossil ice so they could be a self-sustaining base, but to locate their test center someplace safe. The energies necessary to operate a teleportation system...”
Awesome. They would have to be awesome. And. Yes. That other thing. Several other things. He said, “I don’t think I can make myself believe in faster-than-light transference.”
Rahman, eyes on his face: “Why make that assumption? Assume that sun,” a gesture at the bright bead overhead, “is, oh, Tau Ceti. Why assume it took less than 11.2 years to get here?”
Slight prickle of fear on the back of his neck. Do we tune the transceiver for home then and discover our friends and relatives are a generation older? Assuming we could get down from the Moon, of course.
Zeq said, “How much energy would it take to transmit a human being from the solar system to a planet circling Tau Ceti?”
Right. That’s the other thing. Ling said, “Approximately the same as it would take to accelerate him to the speed of light, push him through the interstellar medium to Tau Ceti, and decelerate him to relative rest.”
Silence.
Then Alireza said, “That can’t be right. Assume they found some way to convert us to radio waves, then convert the signal back to matter again. It’d be the same energy required to punch a high-powered laser to the receiver.”
“With,” said Rahman, “sufficient redundancy to get not less than something like ten-nines reliability?”
Ling thought, Been reading our science fiction, have we Colonel Alireza? The genre had been increasingly popular in the UAR since the inception of the Lunar program. Popular in Green China as well. He said, “How much data processing power would you need, how fast a switching system, to scan and transmit something as complex as a human being?”
More silence.
Zeq: “Too much. Too damned much.”
Right. The problem of information density.
Rahman said, “There are other ways. A wormhole, for example...”
Inbar snarled, “Have you all become unhinged? Where the Hell are we?”
Silence resumed, the wind seeming a bit louder than before. Maybe I’m just imagining that. Goosebumps on the back of my neck. Fear suppressed because... there’s no other choice. I...
Alireza said, “We just don’t know.”
People doing no more than looking at one another. Not, Ling told himself, reacting mightily at all.
Zeq said, “Do we really think the Americans really built the stargate? I mean, the English labels looked like they were affixed later.”
“And,” said Rahman, “those bones...”
Stargate. How easily we slip into that old, old jargon.
After a while, they started walking again, walking along the narrow, rutted track, the same one they’d been following since deciding to move away from the... what? Transmitter station? The little cluster of hardware and corrugated vinyl buildings out in the middle of a veritable nowhere.
Someone’s been going this way. Or did, in the past. Yellow dust drifted over the tracks now. Walking toward the distant city whose spires they could only glimpse ‘til the first row of hills was surmounted. Not a normal city. Not an... Earthly city.
Ling smiled to himself, feeling sweat trickle across his forehead and gather in a wet left eyebrow, wishing he could take off his suit. But the suit was his water supply. His oxygen supply, if necessary. His armor. His warmth if it got colder than this at night, as it likely would.
Nightfall. Golden sun sloping toward the edge of the world.
At least, I wish I could take off my helmet like everyone else. Even Alireza, who’d scowled and shrugged and given in last. Reminds me of Chang Wushi. Regulations. Always regulations. Chang Wushi, who was dry scraps of leather and bone now, lying under an airless sky, baked dry, cooked by a naked sun.
Below, as they walked down onto more level ground, the city was resolving itself. Big tan buildings, looking like they were made from brick, coated with sandstone stucco maybe. Smaller ones, shiny yellow-gray, more in tune with this world of not so many colors. An occasional colored hut, red, green, orange. American buildings, he suddenly realized. Things they put up for themselves, when they were here.
Lost cities. Lost cities in the desert. Xian? No. Old stories. Stories from Arabia and Persia and Europe. The only other book I ever read by Mr. Thimble Valley, book found in the graduate school library, translated into old-style literary Chinese ideographs, difficult to read even by an educated adult, with its thousands of interrelated signs.
Desert Rider. About the dying world of Il Xad, of how its savants struggled to build spaceships, so they could colonize the neighboring world of Yttedra, seize it from its barbaric inhabitants. How interesting, I’d thought, that he chooses to show us these worlds through the jaundiced eyes of a high-ranking nonhuman scientist-bureaucrat. I can almost remember the made up name, spelled out in grass writing, footnoted in pinyin. Yes.
Rondar i’Huiôn. Impossible to pronounce. Ideophonic characters in the text going “lóng-bah lî-wi-yàng.”
Strange that I remember these things, when so many other details of my youth have faded into the mist. Renewed moment of thrill. I was so happy, merely to be going to the Moon. What would I have thought had you told me, back then, that one day I’d be going to a real alien world...
Nothing. I would have laughed. These things are impossible. Can’t happen. There are no real alien worlds. Oh, maybe out among the stars, worlds so alien that nothing would be familiar, comprehensible. But out of reach. Forever out of reach...
Scientist-mind speaking up: What does this mean for the Standard Interpretation? Answer: Big trouble. Impossibly big trouble. No matter how things resolve themselves, we’re going to have to take a look at that.
Near the edge of the city now. They stopped, mopping their brows, shadows growing longer as the sun scraped the top of the hills. Stopped and looked at the wreckage. Wheels. Crumpled white wings. Cockpit with jumbled bones. Tilted tailplane, rudder broken away and lying on the ground nearby. Traces of fire here and there.
Numbers on the crushed fuselage, black paint on white metal. NCD4044. Meaningless. They went on into the city, Ling Erhshan looking up at the darkening pink sky once again: Just where the Hell are we?
o0o
Sunset on Mars-Plus. That was what they’d called the place, back in the beginning, when they’d popped open the Gate for the first time and there it was. Sunset. Sky deep pink, swiftly darkening to lavender. Bright stars just beginning to wink on, sun no more than a golden-purple shine on the haze above the horizon where it’d gone down.
So many sunsets like this. I was just a girl then. Happy young girl, though I didn’t know it. Thought of myself as the old-bag noncom lady, pushing forty... Image of the soccer field they’d set up in one of the deserted plazas of Koraad, kicking the black and white ball around. Futból in those days, because so many of us were... Hispanic. We said Hispanic. Later image, standing, watching the lavender turn to lilac to purple to indigo to black, fields of unfamiliar stars spangling the night, magic jewels. The pale white lozenge of a nearby spiral galaxy spread out, eight degrees across, behind that starfield. Dale’s arm around my waist, just holding me, watching, not saying a word...
Corky Bokaitis coming up to stand beside her now, looking at the sky above the hills, trailed by her two blond brethren, handsome blond Neanderthal Men whose tunics said Fred and Barney in neat white letters against black cloth tape. All right. I get the joke. Everybody gets the joke, even people who weren’t alive when there was still TV, complete with fifty-year-old reruns, get the joke. So why do they think it’s a joke? Play-acting at being soldiers. Playacting at being cavemen. Playacting at everything.
Bokaitis said, “Where is this place, Sarge?”
Good question. In the old days, we brought in astronomers, big telescopes, bigger telescopes... memory of bringing through a mobile launcher, of using a portable lightsat launcher to pop arrays of instruments into orbit. Scientists looking farther and farther out into space, not seeing a damn thing they recognized. “Don’t think they ever figured that one out, Corky. We wound up calling it Mars-Plus. Because of the pink sky.”
“Hmh.” Swarthy cavegirl looking up at the stars, one arm around each caveman’s waist. “That so?” Polite amazement.
But then, I was first out the Gate on Alpha Centauri, looking up at familiar stars, watching two suns come up, thinking about it, realizing, God damn, I knew where the fuck I was...
Then scientists coming in, jubilant, setting up their instruments...
And one of the first things they’d done was point those instruments back at a bright star on the constellar boundary between Perseus and Cassiopeia, peek-a-boo, I see you! Because, you see, we have to, just have to have moved some four-plus years into the temporal past right now...
Jubilant. Expecting to find a brilliant radio beacon in the sky, astrometric binary oscillating back and forth, with a period of just one year. Close enough, in fact, that we’d be able to pull meaning out of the static with our computers. Scientists already planning what messages they’d soon be handing to their past selves. And then back, through the gates, to their now-selves, and then...
Jubilant. Fucking time travel, God damn it!
Time travel? What the fuck are we talking about here?
She’d gone to Dale Millikan, science-popularizing journalist, for a simplified layperson’s explanation.
Dale hemming and hawing and scratching around the roots of the dense gray beard on his throat. Well. Duh. Hmmmm... Well, look at it this way: When we come through the gate to Alpha Centauri, we must be moving 4.3 years into the past.
We do? Why? I mean, when we go back through the gate...
Well, that’s it. The rules of relativity, I think they call it “composition of velocities,” or something like that, say if you move faster than light, you have to be moving into the past...
I don’t understand.
Shit. Um. Take my word for it, then.
All right. So where does time travel come in?
OK, we’re four years plus in the past, right now, on this side of the gate. So the light from the Sun, up there in the sky, left the vicinity of the Earth 8.6 six years before we stepped through the gate to come here. Right?
I guess so.
So. What happens if we build a new gate, here at Alpha Centauri, and punch through to the Earth?
Well, assuming we figure out how to build gates of our own... Oh. We arrive on Earth 8.6 six years before we left.
Dale Millikan’s eyes brightening with pleasure. Pleasure because I turned out to be smart enough to get it, sort of, or just pleased because he could explain it successfully to a dumbfuck noncom girl?
Still puzzling over the whole business, she’d gone to one of the scientists for another try, sitting with a bird-like old man who seemed to take great pleasure in eying her breasts while scribbling equations on the screen of his electronic notepad, things with lots of x’s and y’s and u’s and v’s and Greek gammas.
Look, Sergeant, this business is really very simple. I don’t know why it gives people such fits. Einstein’s principle of relativity states that the analytical form of physical laws is the same in all inertial reference systems. And the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light states that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. Does that make sense?
Duh. Sure.
Well now, Sergeant, Einstein understood that two spatially separated localized occurrences are simultaneous when the readings of two identical clocks adjacent to the events are the same, and it is known that the clocks are synchronized. However, when the clocks are not near each other, they’re synchronism must be defined. Right?
Bright, bright, beady lizardman eyes staring at her tits, as if they held her sentience somehow.
So, Einstein’s particular genius was understanding that two identical clocks, cee and cee-prime, situated at two distant points, pee and pee-prime, fixed in a given inertial frame ess, synchronize in ess, when the respective cee and cee-prime times tee-one and tee-one-prime of the sending of a light signal at pee and its arrival at pee-prime are connected by the formula tee-one-prime minus tee-one equals tee-two minus tee-one-prime with the cee time tee-two of its return to pee after reflection at pee-prime back to pee...
Holy. Fucking. Christ.
Lizardman writing on his little flatscreen, holding it up for her tits to see, going, Now, gamma is equivalent to one divided by the square root of one minus vee-squared, divided by cee-squared, times delta-ecks-prime, so...
Maybe if I just pop my shirt open, I’ll be able to see better and...
Lizardman: On the other hand, if you-sub-ecks-prime equals cee, and hence, you-sub-why-prime equals you-sub-zee-prime equals zero, then you-sub-ecks equals cee and you-sub-why equals you-sub-zee equals zero, in accordance to the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light. Clear?
; Duh. Sure.
OK. That cee does represent the maximum speed of energy propagation is indicated by Einstein’s 1907 argument using these same equations, Lizardman tapped his screen, pointing at all the various yous and vees and ekses and gammas, which, he said, shows conclusively that in the contrary case it would then be possible to transmit information into the past. Q.E.D. Smug little lizardman, shaking a finger at those selfsame tits.
Time travel. Right. I get it now. Thanks, Doc. Be seein’ ya.
Only one little problem. That bright, first-magnitude star on the edge of Cassiopeia was silent. Solar radio waves, sure. Oh, you could even pick up Jupiter, farting and whistling away, but...
First order fear: Did something... happen to us? A reassuring glance back through the still-open stargate. Second order fear: Is the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum cosmology wrong? What if?
Impossible.
But what if?
Dale brought up Bohm’s alternative first, but he wasn’t a scientist and they were to afraid to listen anyway. He’d be pleased to see the literature now, learned articles in journals, by men and women with degrees dating from the twentieth century...
Still afraid after all these years.
General Athelstan, his cronies on Earth in a panic, ordering her to destroy the Gate, plant explosives that would collapse the cavern. God damn it, woman, we gave you fucking nuclear weapons for a reason. Use them!
Calling me “woman” like that, for Christ’s sake. What old fantasy can he have been living in for the past three-quarters of a century? Well. I hope he shit his pants when I told him I was making a router call to the trace packager routine, reopening the Gate to Mars-Plus.
She patted a breast pocket, where her own annotated copy of the ten-thousand gigabyte Scavenger manual on the Colonial Stargate operating system nestled, a flat square the size of a turn-of-the-century floptical disk. More than a million toolbox calls into an information system that, apparently, lay snuggled against the keelblocks of Creation, of which we humans have learned to understand and manipulate precisely six.
Just enough to let us get around. Sort of. Get back to places we’ve found by accident, that’s all.
The Transmigration of Souls Page 9