Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  Because what they had run into, apparently, was time travel, and travel in time, as Patience had doubtless portentously announced, had Serious National Security Implications . . .

  *

  “It’s all so bizarre,” Loren said. “It seems crazy almost.”

  Singh looked up at him. “Were you raised in any particular faith?” he asked.

  “I’m an Apostle.”

  “That’s a type of Christian, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. So as a Christian, you presumably believe in a young virgin conceiving by parthenogenesis, her son who healed the sick and raised the dead, who was executed by the Romans but who rose after spending three days retrieving some good folks who had been inexplicably misplaced in Hell, and who is now in Heaven but will in time return to Earth to rule as King.” Singh cocked his head and looked at Loren. “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard. Know what I mean?”

  Cold resentment buzzed through Loren’s brain. He could feel himself bristling. “I don’t know about that,” he said.

  “My point is that although your beliefs may not be strictly rational, you seem pretty rational to me, and your beliefs are rational to other believers. You’re not crazy.”

  “Thanks,” Loren said.

  “Physics isn’t crazy, either. It confounds common sense, but it’s self-consistent and provable, and that means common sense is flawed, not science.”

  “Okay.” Loren looked at the Greek letters rolling across the whiteboard. “But a man returned bodily from the dead—”

  “Your religion already accepts that.”

  “As a miracle.”

  “Science has been known to produce a miracle from time to time.”

  The Greek letters swam before Loren’s eyes. “It wasn’t just Randal,” he said. “It’s happened before. There were those cows.”

  “Yes. Tim told me about the cows. We had a laugh over it.”

  “Probably it happened to other things, too. But nobody notices a clump of cactus or a new cholla or a piece of rock. And the security people shot the cows because they were an embarrassment.”

  And that’s what they did to Randal, too, Loren thought suddenly, and his words dried unspoken on his tongue.

  “Virtual cows. Virtual cholla. A virtual vintage Thunderbird.” Singh’s look was still abstracted; he wasn’t amused by any of these apparitions.

  “Holes in transistors,” said Loren.

  “Your brother got a few things confused,” Singh said.

  “More than a few,” Loren said. “Believe me.”

  “I think he was getting virtual matter mixed up with Dirac’s notion of the universe being filled up with undetectable electrons. But he was more or less right.”

  “Okay.”

  “Virtual matter is matter that is created out of nothing— well, out of the uncertainty relation.”

  “Heisenberg. That was his, right?”

  Singh seemed surprised. “Yes.”

  “I asked people about your bumper sticker.”

  Singh smiled. “The point is that regular matter— an electron, say— can borrow energy from the uncertainty relation to create, say, a photon, but it has to reabsorb the photon almost instantly, within a tiny fraction of a second, before the universe takes notice of the fact that energy conservation has been violated. And protons within an atomic nucleus have to be continually creating and exchanging pions in order to transmit the strong nuclear force that holds the nucleus together; but this likewise violates conservation, so the pions can’t last long. Fortunately they don’t have to.” He put a dot on the whiteboard, then surrounded it with smaller dots. “You have to look at a particle as being surrounded by a cloud of virtual matter that we can’t detect, but that leaps into existence momentarily only to disappear again, the whole thing happening skadzillions of times every second.”

  “Excuse me.” Deciding to ignore the skadzillions. “The universe notices?”

  Loren could almost see the shift in Singh’s mind, as if he hit the Stop button of some internal recorder, rewound for a second, began again. Loren remembered Steffen’s doing the same thing when replying to a question, and smiled. “The uncertainty relation holds only for very small things, for very short amounts of time. You can create something out of nothing, get a free lunch as it were, but it’s a very small lunch, and you need a whole lot of specialized apparatus even to see it, and it doesn’t last long, so even if you manage to eat it, it’ll vanish from your stomach before digestion. That’s what I find intriguing about your Mr. Doe.” Singh tugged on his braided beard. “It’s like a fluctuation about a zero-point energy. The way he vanished so completely, and the timing of his disappearance . . .”

  As if he never existed. The M.I.’s words.

  “A virtual human?” Singh said. “A virtual duplicate of someone who existed at another location on the t-axis. So strange . . .”

  “But the universe noticed— well, I noticed— the duplication,” Loren said. “When I opened the coffin.”

  “And the virtual being disappeared. Along with his organs, and his blood, and even his clothes, which were being held in another location. When your perception held both the original and the duplicate, the duplicate had to disappear.”

  A wave of inspiration rolled through Loren. “And other stuff, too, I bet! His wallet, his ID, things like that! Things Patience would have taken off him and kept!” He pictured Patience reviewing his evidence just that morning, looking for the driver’s license and billfold and credit cards he’d taken off Randal, then discovering they’d all disappeared from wherever he’d locked them up, disappeared along with everything else, including the can of snuff taken from Randal’s back pocket. It must have seemed clear that there were other players involved, some near-omnipotent investigators who could walk through walls and make things disappear. No wonder Patience was ranting about men in black and traitors in his office.

  “There are any number of quantum actions that behave that way,” Singh said. “Matter acts both as particles and as waves— they’re particles when your experiment is designed to look for particles, waves when you’re looking for waves, but what are they when you’re not looking? According to the Copenhagen Interpretation they’re both, simultaneously, and maybe other things, too, and only when you look does the waveform collapse and the particle become one thing or the other— and then once you stop looking, what does a particle become?” Singh raised his hand, palm down, and oscillated it, indicating a wide Californian range of uncertainty. “A metaphor maybe? Nobody knows. Observation seems necessary for some of these processes to work. If you don’t see it, it doesn’t happen. And if you hadn’t opened up that coffin, John Doe might still be on his slab.”

  There was a gentle knock on the door frame. It was Singh’s wife, gazing at Loren with her pleasant blue eyes.

  “Will you be eating with us?” she asked.

  “I brought a sandwich with me.”

  “If you don’t mind barbecued short ribs? We’ve got plenty.”

  Loren smiled. “I don’t mind at all. Thank you.” He had anticipated some horribly strange Pakistani dish, goat eyeballs cooked in rancid butter or something; ribs were something he could get behind.

  “I just realized,” he said, “I never got your name.”

  “Cynthia.”

  “Cynthia. Hi.”

  “Hi.” She grinned. “I’ll set another place.”

  Cynthia left and Loren turned back to Singh. He was staring at the equations with a little frown of concentration, had maybe been staring at them all through Cynthia’s interruption. Singh stroked his bearded chin in time to his thoughts.

  “Virtual matter lasts a tiny fraction of a second, then disappears,” he said. “What I can’t figure is why John Doe lasted a matter of days.” He shook his head. “That second time dimension?”

  Loren could think of nothing to add. Singh’s fingers, stroking his chin, started to dig at his beard, picking long strands of hair out o
f his braids. “Weird shit,” he concluded. “I think that second dimension has to be the explanation. The collider energy has just been vanishing, right? What Tim called the energy sump. Suppose it dumps into the second time dimension somehow, reconstitutes itself as virtual matter that duplicates something farther down the t-axis. Maybe virtual matter just lasts longer in the second time dimension.”

  He glanced at Loren, his eyes bright. “Tim wouldn’t have known about Doe’s disappearance, which is to me the event that suggests virtual matter. To him it would have really looked like time travel rather than a virtual re-creation of an earlier moment.” He caught himself digging at his beard, looked at his hand with an irritated expression, then dropped the hand. He sighed. “I’ll have to work at it. Mess with some figures. I’ll call you?”

  “Better not,” Loren said. “I think they’re listening to my phone. I’ll call you.”

  “Fine.”

  “Dinner’s ready!” Cynthia’s voice carried to them from the dining room. Singh, still in his study, started for his door.

  Loren put a hand on his arm. “Listen,” he said. “Tim Jernigan died for this.”

  Singh’s frown deepened only slightly. “So you tell me.”

  “I want you to be careful. Patience is crazy and a killer, and if he knows I’ve seen you, you and your wife are both in danger.”

  Singh shrugged. “The more people who know,” he said, “the better. If I were you I’d just tell everyone. The more people that know what happened, the harder it’ll be to cover the whole thing up.”

  “But. But.” Loren hesitated for a moment. “Does this stuff have any applications? I mean, suppose time travel, even by a virtual human, turns out to actually be possible? Won’t that have the kind of national security implications that Patience is worried about? I mean, Dielh’s in Washington briefing somebody, right?”

  Singh gave Loren a mild look. “This is all just an accident, okay? An unforeseen consequence of high-energy physics. Maybe the result of a superconductor not properly aligned, not properly crystallized. It’s not even repeatable— the energy sump happens only in a fraction of the runs. We haven’t controlled any of this, and I don’t see a way to do it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No.” Singh gave a laugh. “I’ll find out when I try to publish, won’t I? Maybe I should try Nature first, something out of the country where the government’ll have a hard time suppressing it. Or just send a lot of copies attached to email before I do anything. Once ideas get out, they can’t be stopped.”

  Loren didn’t know if he wanted ideas to get out or not. All he wanted was an end to Patience and his gang. Somehow he couldn’t see himself, like Roberts the prophet, like the UFO devotees in their white robes, preaching his particular version of the truth up and down the length and breadth of his homeland. Standing on a stool at the Sunshine, holding forth to people like Len Armistead or Shorty Lazoya. See, folks, there’s this thing called virtual matter. With Bob Sandoval and Mark Byrne calling out comments from the back. The only kind of converts he’d make would be the kind he didn’t want, the kind who wouldn’t understand how crazy it all was.

  Numbly he followed Singh out of the living room, to the dining room, where Cynthia was tossing a salad. Singh stopped dead, then began to laugh.

  “Poor Dielh!” he said. “He wanted a Nobel so badly, and now his entire results will be classified!” He turned to Loren, his brows lifting in amusement. “That is a kind of revenge, right?”

  “There are better kinds,” Loren said.

  The ribs were very good.

  *

  Loren’s foot slammed on the brakes as pale forms wandered into his headlights. Tires skidded, screeched; the horn blared. Loren fought for control, felt the front tires sliding on gravel. Startled mule deer leaped for the side of the road, pouring downslope off the asphalt like a smooth brown and silver waterfall.

  The Taurus came to a halt in a rising cloud of startled dust. Loren’s pulse hammered in his ears, louder than the throb of fire-fighting helicopters overhead. He took a deep breath and shifted into first. In time his scattered thoughts drew themselves together.

  An hour or so after eating dinner, Loren thought, Randal2 had had enough. The guards with their superiority and contempt were bad enough, but the two dispassionate physicists, examining him as if he were a urine specimen in a bottle, had probably been downright spooky. Whoever came for the empty dinner tray had got careless and Randal clocked him, skinning his knuckles in the process. He took off out the back, through the fire door. The man at the front desk would have seen it on his cameras and alerted the troops. Maybe Timothy Jernigan was getting in his car after a conference with Patience, maybe he’d just arrived to talk to Randal. Loren could picture Randal hauling Jernigan out of his car, diving in, tramping the accelerator just as two ATL security men burst out of the door behind him with guns in their hands. Shots caved in the BMW’s windows, drilled through the door, bounced off Randal’s ribs, and nicked his descending aorta.

  Nazzarett was one of the shooters, Loren thought. His hand tested positive in the Shibano test.

  So Randal had driven the stolen car out the gate . . . But no. There was a problem there. Because there would have been two uniformed guards at the gate, and these presumably would have noticed a bullet-riddled car roaring past them at ninety miles per hour. So either there were two more ATL people involved in this, or something else had happened.

  Randal hadn’t bothered with the gate, Loren realized. He’d just driven the car right through the chain link perimeter fence. The BMW’s acceleration was doubtless superior to that of the guards’ Blazers, and he wouldn’t have given a shit for how many times he scraped his oil pan as he raced across the mesa.

  Loren would have to ask Rivers whether he knew if any part of the perimeter fence had been repaired in the last few days . . .

  The Taurus surged through a depression, swung into a rising switchback turn, headlights tracking across juniper scrub, and then red and blue lights swept across Loren’s vision, and blazing halogen intensity burned his retinas . . . The Taurus slowed as Loren raised a hand to block the stabbing spotlight. A black state police car was drawn across the narrow road, the reflective shield on its side glowing gold.

  Loren came to a full stop, the Taurus’s engine idling. The array of colored lights rotated silently atop the black car, drawing blue and red across the junipers on either side of the road. Distant helicopters filled the air with their thrum. Loren couldn’t see anything against the glare of the spotlight. He rolled down his window and heard the sound of feet on gravel.

  “Don’t move, sir.” The voice was taut with tension and seemed to come out of nowhere. Loren recognized the tone and his heart gave a leap. He glanced at the shotgun lying propped on the next seat.

  “Keep your hands on the wheel.”

  Loren did as he was told and felt sweat gather under his collar. Something loomed off to his left and he turned just in time to see the smooth black barrel of a gun, its muzzle silvered with use, slip into his window.

  The cool gun barrel prodded Loren’s forehead. Loren tried not to jump at the contact and give the man excuse to fire. It was a Thompson, Loren saw, the venerable submachine gun beloved of Al Capone . . . a heavy, solid, totally intimidating thing, unmistakably a gun that could really hurt you, especially when compared with the toy-department look of mini-UZIs and Mac-11s.

  The man behind the gun was Spanish, dark-skinned and pale-eyed, in the black and silver uniform of the state police. He seemed very young. There was a pimple on his chin. His knuckles were white as he clutched the gun’s foregrip. Loren thought wildly of Latin American death squads, Patience contracting murders with old Special Forces cronies from Salvador.

  “Listen,” Loren began. His tongue was dry.

  “Get out of the car, sir, okay? Then put your hands on the car’s roof.”

  The gun barrel eased out the window. Loren considered throwing the car into gear and ru
nning for it, or swinging the door open wildly, hoping to knock the barrel aside for just a few seconds.

  The look at the kid’s eyes told him these were very bad ideas.

  Loren opened the door nice and easy and got out of the car. Warm wind burned his face. He put his hands on the cool roof of the car. Helicopters throbbed across the sky. Loren couldn’t decide whether or not to tell the other man his name— the man could have been sent just to find him, and was reluctant to kill unless he had a positive ID.

  “That your shotgun, sir?”

  “Yeah.” Hopelessly.

  “Get down on your knees, okay? And lace your hands behind your neck.”

  Loren did as he was told.

  “Put one ankle over the other.”

  Damn, Loren thought. The guy was going right by the book.

  He crossed his ankles and then the state cop came up behind him, kneeling carefully with one shin across both Loren’s ankles, controlling him. In order to handcuff someone you had to give up your weapon, and the kid was taking no chances. The Thompson jabbed Loren’s right kidney and he jumped. Then Loren heard the jingle of handcuffs and a cold metal touch as his right wrist was cuffed. The kid hauled the right hand down to the small of the back, then the left hand, and then there was a rasp as he cuffed the other wrist.

  The state trooper let out a long sigh. He stood Loren up, patted him down, then took his shoulder and spun him around.

  “What are you doing with the shotgun, sir?”

  “I’m supposed to have it. I’m—”

  “You’re supposed to have it? Is that it, sir?”

  “I’m chief of police of the city of Atocha.”

  The other man’s eyes flickered. He frowned, tilted his head. “You got ID?”

  The terror poured out of Loren like out of a flooding sluice gate. The man hadn’t been looking for him.

  “In my hip pocket.”

  The state cop turned him around again, reached into the pocket, pulled out the little folder he normally wore in the breast pocket of his uniform. He took the card from its plastic window and looked at it in the glare of his spotlight.