by Ian Whates
“Were going to say?”
“Well, it’s—I’m afraid it’s wrong. So your intuition has led you astray. But it’s a very bold attempt at...”
I interrupted him with: “wrong?”
“I’m afraid so. I’m afraid you’re coming at the question from the wrong angle. Not just you, of course. The whole scientific community.”
I laughed at this, but, I hope, not unkindly. Marija stirred. She twitched her little mitten-clad hands like she was boxing in her sleep, and fell motionless again. “You’d better let the Nobel Committee know,” I said, “before it’s too late!” It was all too absurd.
The late autumn sky was as blue as water, and as cold.
“Five minutes, you said,” I told him, nodding in the direction of the shop clock. “And you’ve had more than one of those five already.”
He breathed in, and out, calmly enough. Then he said: “Why is the universe so big?”
“Why questions rarely lead physicists anywhere good. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why was there a big bang? Who knows? Not a well-formulated question.”
He put his head on one side, and tried again. “How did the universe get so big?”
“That’s better,” I said, indulgently. “It got so big because fourteen billion years ago the big bang happened, and that one consequence of that event was the expansion of spacetime—on a massive scale.”
“All these galaxies and stars moving apart from one another like dots on an inflating balloon,” he said. “Only the surface of the balloon is 2D and we have to make the conceptual leap to imagining a 3D surface.”
“Just so,” I told him. “As every schoolkid knows.”
“Still: why expansion? Why should the big bang result in the dilation of space?”
I took another sip from my chocolate. “Three minutes to go, and you’ve tripped yourself into another why question.”
“Let me ask you about time,” he said, unruffled. “We appear to be moving through time. We go in one direction. We cannot go backwards, we can only go forwards.”
I shrugged. “According to maths, we could go backwards. The equations of physics are reversible. It just so happens that we go in one direction only. It’s no big deal.”
“Quite right,” he said, nodding. “The science says we ought to be able to go in any direction. Yet we never,” he said, stroking his own cheek, “do. That’s strange, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I can’t say it bothers me.”
“Time is manifold, like space. We can move in any direction in space. But we can only move in one direction in time.”
“This really is kindergarten stuff,” I said.
“What moves an object through the manifold of space?”
I was debating with myself whether to humour him further. After a moment, I said: “Force.”
“Gravity. Impulse. Those two things, and nothing else. Push-me, pull-you. You can push an object to give it kinetic energy, or draw it towards you. Kinetic energy is always relative, not absolute. The driver of a car passing by a pedestrian possesses kinetic energy from the pedestrian’s point of view; but from the point of view of the person in the passenger seat that same drive has zero kinetic energy.”
It was, in a strange sort of way, soothing to hear him elucidate elementary physics in this way. “All well and good,” I said.
“That’s how things go in the physical manifold, which we call spacetime. Relocate the model to the temporal manifold—let’s call it timespace.”
This was when the fizzing started in my stomach. “For the sake of argument, why not,” I said. I couldn’t prevent a defensive tone creeping into my voice. “Although it’ll be nothing but a thought-experiment.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked, blandly.
“We’ve centuries of experimental data about the actual manifold, the spacetime manifold. Your ‘timespace’ manifold is pure speculation.”
“Is it? I would say we move through it every day of our lives. The question is—no, the two questions are: why are we moving through it, and why can we only move through it in one direction?”
There was a blurry rim to my vision. My heart had sped itself up. “More why-questions.”
“Let us ask instead: what is drawing us towards it, through timespace?”
“Why must it be a what?”
“Now you’re asking why questions,” he noted, with a wry expression.
“The fact that we’re aware of the sensation of moving through time must mean we’re accelerating,” I mused. “If we were travelling at a steady speed, we wouldn’t feel it. It’s...” I stopped.
He didn’t say anything for the moment.
Time and space, like an Escher engraving. Look from one into the mirror of the other. Look from the other into the mirror of the one. So very obvious! Why hadn’t I thought of it before? But then I slapped those thoughts down, and my decades of conventional learning reasserted themselves, and I got a grip. A grip, a grip.
“Your theory,” I said, in a sterner voice. “The reason we feel time as a kind of motion, one hour per hour, is because something is drawing us in, with its gravitational pull—is that it? Because it seems to me that we might just as well have been launched forward by some initial impulse. Don’t you agree?”
“The reason I don’t agree is the fact that we’re stuck moving in one temporal direction.”
I saw, then, where he was going; but I didn’t interrupt as he spelled it out.
“Think of the analogue from the physical manifold. There’s no force that could propel an object, let alone a whole cosmos, so rapidly that it was locked into a single trajectory. But there is a force in the universe that can draw an object in with such a force—draw it such that it has no option but to move in one direction, towards the centre of the object.”
“A black hole.”
He nodded.
“Your theory,” I said again, in a just-so-as-we’re-clear voice, “is that the reason we move along the arrow of time the way we do is that we’re being drawn towards a supermassive temporal black hole?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” I said, with an insouciance I did not feel. “It’s an interesting theory. Although nothing more than a theory.”
“Not at all. Consider the data.”
“What data?”
“I understand your resistance, Ana,” he said, gently. “But you can do better than this. Who knows the data better than you? What happens to time as a physical object approaches the event horizon of a physical black hole?”
“Time dilates.”
“So what must happen as a temporal object approaches the event horizon of a temporal black hole? Physics dilates. Space expands—until it approaches an asymptote of reality. From the point of view of an observer not present at the event horizon itself, space would seem to expand until it appeared infinite.” He looked through the big glass again. “What else do we see, when we look upwards?”
Look.
“So we’re still,” I said, my voice low, “outside the event horizon?”
“If we were outside the event horizon, the rate of apparent expansion of space would be an asymptote approaching a fixed rate—a simple acceleration. And until a few decades ago that was what the data showed. But then the data starting showing that the rate of apparent expansion of the universe is speeding up. That can only mean that we’re approaching the event horizon itself. That also explains why we’re locked into the one direction of time. In the timespace manifold, generally speaking, we ought to be able to go forwards, backwards, whatever we wanted. But we’re not in the manifold generally; we’re in a very particular place. Like an object falling into a black hole, we’re locked into a single vector.”
I thought about it. No—that’s not right. The truth is I didn’t need to think very hard. It fell into place in my mind. I grokked its rightness. Like the others I found myself thinking, how could I not see this before? It is so very obvious. “But if you’r
e right—wait,” I said. “Wait a moment.”
I pulled out my phone, and jabbed up the calculus app. It took me a few moments to work through the relevant equations. Of course everything fitted. Of course it was true.
I looked at him, feeling distant from myself. “When we reach the actual temporal event horizon,” I said, “tidal forces will rip us apart.”
“Or rip time apart,” he said, nodding slowly. “Yes. Of course, that amounts to the same thing.”
“When?”
“You’ve got the equations there,” he said, looking at my phone as it lay, like a miniature 2001 monolith, flat on the table. “But it’s hard to be precise. The scale is fourteen billion years; the calculation tolerances are not seconds, or even days. Years. I calculated seven years, plus or minus four. That was a decade ago.”
I shook my head, the way a dog shakes water of its pelt; but there was no way this idea could be shaken out of my mind. It was true; it was there. “It could be—literally—any day now,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Not for you, so much, as for—you know. The fact of you having a small kid.”
“That’s why Noo-noo was so circumspect with me,” I said. “I see. He kept glancing at my belly. And, yes, alright, I see why you haven’t published this. It’d be akin to wandering the highways with an End-Is-Nigh sandwich board.”
“Not that,” he said, his glittering eye meeting mine. “More that it’s so obvious. When you think about it, how could the expanding universe be anything other than this? We know what physical conditions cause time dilation; so we ought to know what temporal conditions cause space dilation.”
“Not the big bang.”
“The big bang was an effect, not prime cause.”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. I’m going home now,” I told him. But I embraced him before I left, and felt the sharkskin roughness of his unshaved cheek against my own. Then I wheeled Marija home. I called M. and told him to leave work and join me. He was puzzled, but acquiesced.
He hasn’t gone back.
:6:
THE EQUATIONS DEPEND upon precision over prodigious lengths of time—since the big bang, or (rather) since the dilation effect first affected what until then must have been a stable cosmos existing within an open temporal manifold. But I’ve done my best. Tessimond’s 7 +/-4 years was, I suspect, deliberately vague; erring on the side of generosity, to ease his own mind. I think the timescale is much shorter. Download the data on the rate of acceleration of cosmic expansion, and you can do your own sums.
It’s a matter of days. Just that.
Of course I never flew to Stockholm. Why would I waste three days away from my child? None of that matters. We realised what money we could, and bought a small place by the sea. I won’t say what sea. That doesn’t matter either; except that, when the dusk comes each day, and the net curtains are sucked against the open windows and go momentary starch-stiff; and when the moths congregate to worship their shining electric deities; and when the moon lies carelessly in the sky near the purple marine horizon like a pearl of great price—when Marija is fed and happy and M. and I take our turns holding her, and then lay her down and hold one another—there is a contentment spun from finitude that my previous, open-ended existence could not comprehend. I have busied myself writing this account, although only a little every day, for there is no rush, or else there is too much rush and I don’t wish to be troubled by the latter. And as for everything else, it helps to know what is really important. For the whole of the larger world could end at
TWO SISTERS IN EXILE
ALIETTE DE BODARD
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, in a flat with her husband, more computers than people, and two Lovecraftian tentacled plants in the process of taking over the living room. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction: her stories have appeared in Asimov’s,Interzone and other venues, and her series of Aztec noir fantasies, Obsidian and Blood, is published by Angry Robot. She has won the British Science Fiction Association Award, and been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Visit aliettedebodard.com for more information.
IN SPITE OF her name (an elegant, whimsical female name which meant Perfumed Winter, and a reference to a long-dead poet), Nguyen Dong Huong was a warrior, first and foremost. She’d spent her entire life in skirmishes against the pale men, the feathered clans and the dream-skinners: her first ship, The Tiger Lashes with His Tail, had died at the battle of Bach Nhan, when the smoke-children had blown up Harmony Station and its satellites; her second had not lasted more than a year.
The Tortoise in the Lake was her fourth ship, and they’d been together for five years, though neither of them expected to live for a further five. Men survived easier than ships—because they had armour, because the ships had been tasked to take care of them. Dong Huong remembered arguing with Lady Mieng’s Dreamer, begging the ship to spare itself instead of her; and running against a wall of obstinacy, a fundamental incomprehension that ships could be more important than humans.
For the Northerners, however, everything would be different.
“We’re here,” The Tortoise in the Lake said, cutting across Dong Huong’s gloomy thoughts.
“I can see nothing.”
There came a low rumble, which distorted the cabin around her, and cast an oily sheen on the walls. “Watch.”
Outside, everything was dark. There was only the shadow of The Two Sisters in Exile, the dead ship that they’d been pulling since Longevity Station. It hung in space, forlorn and pathetic, like the corpse of an old woman; although Dong Huong knew that it was huge, and could have housed her entire lineage without a care.
“I see nothing,” Dong Huong said, again. The ground rumbled beneath her, even as her ears popped with pressure—more laughter from The Tortoise in the Lake, even as the darkness of space focused and narrowed—became the shadow of wings, the curve on vast surfaces—the hulls of two huge ships flanking them; thin, sharp, like a stretch of endless walls—making The Tortoise in the Lake seem small and insignificant, just as much as Dong Huong herself was small and insignificant in comparison to her own ship.
A voice echoed in the ship’s vast rooms, harsh and strong, tinged with the Northerners’ dialect, but still as melodious as declaimed poetry. “You wished to speak to us. We are here.”
ALL DONG HUONG knew about Northerners were dim, half-remembered snatches of family stories that were almost folk-tales: the greater, stronger part of the former Dai Viet Empire; the pale-skinned people of the outer planets, a civilisation of graceful cities and huge habitats, of wild gardens on mist-filled hillsides, of courtly manners and polished songs.
She was surprised, therefore, by the woman who disembarked onto The Tortoise in the Lake. Rong Anh was indeed paler than she was under her makeup, but otherwise ordinary looking: though very young, barely old enough to have bonded to a ship in Nam society, she bore herself with a poise any warrior would have envied. “You have something for us.”
Dong Huong made a gesture, towards the walls of the room: the seething, ever-shifting mass of calligraphy; the fragments of poems, of books, of sutras, a perpetual reminder of the chaos underpinning the universe. “I... apologise,” she said at last. “I’ve come to bring one of your ships back to you.” To appease them, her commander had said. To avoid a declaration of war from a larger and more developed empire, a war which would utterly destroy the Nam.
Anh did not move. “I saw it outside. Tell me what happened.”
“It was an accident,” Dong Huong said. The Two Sisters in Exile—a merchant vessel from the Northerners’ vast fleet—had just happened to cross the line of fire at the wrong time. “A military exercise that went wrong. I’m sorry.”
Anh hadn’t moved; but the ceruse on her face looked less and less like porcelain, and more and more like bleached bone. “Our ships don’t die,” she said, slowly.
“I’m sorry,” Dong Huong said, again. “They’re as mortal as anyone, I fear.” The v
ast majority of attacks on a ship would do little but tear metal: a ship’s vulnerable point was the heartroom, where the Mind that animated it resided. Unlike Nam ships, Northerner ships were large and well-shielded; and no pirate had ever managed to hack or pierce their way into a heartroom.
But fate could be mocking, uncaring: as The Two Sisters in Exile passed by Dong Huong’s military exercise, a random lance of fire had gone all the way to the heartroom on an almost impossible trajectory—searing the Mind in its cradle of optics. They’d heard the ship’s Mind scream its pain in deep spaces long after the lance had struck; had stood in stunned silence, knowing that the Mind was dying and that nothing would stop that.
Anh shook her head; looked up after a while, and her mask was back in place, her eyebrows perfectly arched, like moths. “An accident.”
“The people responsible have been... dealt with.” Swiftly, and unpleasantly; and firmly enough to make it clear this would be not tolerated. “I have come to bring the body back, for a funeral. I’m told this is the custom of your people.”
Nam ships and soldiers didn’t get a funeral, or at least not one that was near a planet. They lay frozen where they had fallen—stripped of all vital equipment, the cold of space forever preserving them from decay, a permanent monument; a warning to anyone who came; a memory of glory, which the spirits of the dead could bask into all the way from Heaven. It would be Dong Huong’s fate; The Tortoise in the Lake’s fate, in a few years or perhaps more if Quan Vu, God of War, saw fit to extend His benevolence to them both. Dong Huong had few expectations.