Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  Questions plagued her. Why did it have to be so? Why must she die? Why should she have been born at all?

  Why was there something in this universe, rather than nothing?

  She longed for another to discuss these profound questions. There was no other like her, not in all this universe.

  Not yet.

  One was born, inchoate, utterly lacking symmetry. A mind formed immediately, like a snowflake crystallising from moist air, with questions: Where am I? What is this place? What must I do?

  Others gathered around him. Answers slotted into the empty spaces of his mind.

  Eight dimensions of space and one of time characterised this particular universe. That and symmetry.

  Yet the symmetry was incomplete. There was an array of two hundred and forty-eight places to be filled, by ones like himself, as if you ascended to take a place in a constellation. That was the purpose of life, to ascend, to take your place, to contribute to the greater symmetry.

  And when that vast symmetry was completed, the universe would end.

  Even as he realised this, as he grasped the essential structure of his universe only moments after he was born, he was troubled by a faint doubt.

  But in the meantime there was work to be done. Many of those two hundred and forty-eight places were already filled, and there were far more candidates than there were remaining places. All around him other young were gathering in simple clusters of four, eight, sixteen; others, more ambitious, sought to impress with explorations of twenty-three and thirty-one.

  To shine in such gatherings was the only way to progress. A process of selection had to be gone through if you were to attain the heaven of perfected symmetry.

  Grimly he got to work.

  Morag’s flight from Edinburgh was diverted to Luton because of flooding at Heathrow, but she was able to catch a short-haul connection to City Airport.

  The plane took Morag over London along the line of the Thames and past the City, where her father had worked five years before. The ageing office blocks rose like thistles from the flood, and choppers flitted before impassive glass cliffs. Each of these huge developments contained as many people as a small town, stacked up into the sky; in the context of the latest London-wide flood emergency, each would require a major rescue operation of its own.

  At the airport, passport control was perfunctory despite Scotland’s independence. She caught a cab to the hotel at Hampstead, safely above the waterline, where her father was staying.

  Joe was pacing around his tiny room, shirt rumpled as ever, tie loosened, shoes off, socks with holes in them. He looked as if he was longing for a cigarette. He was evidently wired on in-room coffee.

  The remnants of his presentation to the government’s Science and Technologies Facilities Council were scattered on the small table and on the bed. Slides played over a slim laptop, mostly bullet-point argument summaries. There was one extraordinary image like a mutated sea anemone that Morag had come to recognise as a representation of a Calabi-Yau space, a possible configuration of the Bulk, the greater nine-dimensional continuum within which the universe swam.

  ‘I’m sorry I missed your show,’ Morag said. ‘The plane, the flooding—’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Joe said. Making an obvious effort to calm down, he came and kissed her cheek, took her coat and hung it on the back of the door. ‘Not that you missed anything but another ritual humiliation. There’s something else I want to talk about anyhow. You want a coffee?’ He rummaged in the litter on the table, the little packets of granules and the plastic milk cartons. ‘I’ve burned through most of it but there might be a packet of that fucking decaff stuff. Sorry.’

  ‘I’m fine. Your need is greater than mine.’ She pulled out the room’s one chair from under the table and sat. ‘I take it you didn’t go down well, then.’

  ‘Oh, hell, it’s not just me. They announced another across-the-board cut in research spending last month. I was hoping to get hold of some American money, they’re always more flush over there, but it’s the same story, cuts to the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Office of Science at the Department of Energy. They’re even making lay-offs at Fermilab.’

  She pulled at her fingers. ‘It’s tough all over, Joe. There’s money in ecosystem research but even that’s getting tighter.’ That was the direction she wanted to go herself, when she finished her first degree in biological sciences; she was twenty years old now and a couple of years into her course. ‘And that’s obviously applicable.’

  ‘“Applicable!” How I hate that word. If your research doesn’t have obvious “applicability” in flood defences or desalination or food production or, better yet, defence systems, you’re screwed.’

  ‘Well, you can understand it, Joe. The world can’t afford as much as it used to. These are tough times.’

  ‘The times are always tough,’ he snapped back. ‘There are always excuses not to spend on fundamental research.’

  She reached over for the laptop and tapped a key to page through his slides. ‘The trouble is, everything you ask for is just so expensive. This is big stuff …’

  Over the years she’d learned something about the technologies Joe needed to give him the data that would confirm or refute his theoretical meta-cosmic models. Evidence for other universes came in exotic and subtle forms, such as patterns in the cosmic background microwave radiation, a relic of the Big Bang which, Joe believed, had itself been caused by the close approach of one brane-universe to another, or even their collision. Other distortions in the radiation pattern could show the effect of more recent approaches to other branes – holes in the sky, such as a vast gap eight billion light years from Earth and all of a billion light years wide, where few galaxies swam. You needed satellite observatories to pick that up.

  Or you could look for gamma rays, which might be relics of other exotic events. A supernova could produce gravitons, gravity-force-carrying particles, some of which, called Kaluza-Klein gravitons, were able to travel out of the ‘surface’ of a brane and into the greater Bulk. Falling back to a brane, such gravitons could produce a shower of high-energy gamma rays – which again, mostly, could only be detected from space. But NASA was mothballing its elderly gamma-ray satellite, called GLAST, the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope. You could even look for gravity waves, ripples in spacetime, more evidences of influences from beyond the universe’s three-dimensional plane. But again those effects were subtle, minute, fiendishly difficult to track down.

  You needed a big budget for any of this. And, in a world fraying under the multiple assault of climate change, resource depletion, disease and war, big budgets for cutting-edge physics experiments were hard to come by. Joe knew this as well as Morag did. It didn’t make the results of his pitch any less disappointing.

  She came to one striking image. It was geometrical, like a sphere picked out by a regular array of golden points, each apparently connected to the rest by a silver thread. It turned and pivoted in the computer’s animation, its symmetries obviously profound. ‘This is beautiful. What is it?’

  ‘E8,’ Joe said. ‘A somewhat complicated mathematical pattern in eight dimensions. Two hundred and forty-eight points. It’s a way of encapsulating the unification of physics. It’s all to do with string theory, as is the whole idea of brane-universes … You place a fundamental particle or force at each of the points, say an electron or a quark, and if you get it right, the symmetries express the particles’ relationships to each other.’ He made the figure swivel this way and that, and projected various subsets of the particles down to two dimensions. ‘See? This projection shows how the colour charge of a quark changes under the influence of the strong force carried by a gluon …’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’

  ‘It’s a bit of research from the noughties I’ve been following up, called the Lisi synthesis. The
thing is, the same mathematical structure can be used in some models to describe the Bulk, the Calabi-Yau manifold. Remarkably rich, tens of thousands of interaction types expressed in the internal symmetries. Look, this is my theoretical underpinning. The core of my expression of physics, which in turn I’m using to construct my models of the Bulk.’ He stared at the turning images in the laptop screen. ‘I feel I’m close, at least to expressing the right questions, if not to getting the answers. All the other branes out there, all with their own time axes, or multiple times, or none at all … Time can pivot, you know. The time signature of a universe can change. You can have a static universe with several dimensions of space – a scrap of eternity – but then a space dimension evolves into time, and wham, you have the whole package, Big Bang and Big Rip, birth and death. Our universe could have been eternal once. Something could have happened to pivot the axes, to change the signature, to make it temporal, finite. Something bad.’

  That word surprised her. ‘Bad?’

  ‘Of course, bad. God wouldn’t have made a finite, short-lived universe. Finitude isn’t perfection. Even a trillion years isn’t enough, if eternity is available.’

  ‘That sounds like something Granddad might have said.’ She had always wondered if Joe’s obsessive quest for cosmological truth was really all about unresolved issues from his Presbyterian childhood.

  ‘Well, that old monster asked some of the right questions, even if he didn’t have the right answers.’

  ‘Joe, you said there’s something else you wanted to talk about.’

  ‘Yes. Plan B.’ He sat on the edge of the bed and faced her.

  ‘Plan B?’

  ‘Even if the research councils and governments won’t fund me, I’m not giving up. Well, I can’t.’

  She looked around at the untidy room, the litter on the bed, the dirty clothes roughly shoved away on a wardrobe shelf. ‘Joe, you can’t fund high-energy physics research by yourself.’

  He grinned. ‘Can’t I? We’ll see. I do need a bit of money. Which is where you come in.’

  She laughed. ‘Joe, I’m a student. I don’t have any money!’

  ‘I know. But it’s not you I’m tapping up,’ he said bluntly.

  ‘Then who? Oh. Not Sheena.’

  ‘Your Auntie Sheena might look on the purchase of a bit of land as an investment,’ he said. ‘If it’s put to her the right way. Such as by you …’

  There were other worlds in this dark sky. She felt their gravitational tug, a pull deep in her belly. Sometimes she even felt a rain of meteorites, fragments blasted from the surfaces of those sister worlds and scattered through the void. But few of those worlds carried life of any kind, and none an ecology as complex as hers, none a mind as rich as her own.

  There was a way to put that right.

  It took an aeon of concentration, of a subtle shepherding of tensions.

  Then an immense supervolcano ripped open one side of the planet. A wave of ash and dirt and toxic gases inflicted mortality on a global scale. No matter. The ecosystem would recover from this event, as it had from others.

  And, briefly, as this one world shone like a star in the dark sky, from it spread a spray of rock and ash, blasted to escape velocity. Most of these fragments were inert, baked and smashed to sterility. But in a few of them life clung, hardy spores. And a few of those precious seed-carriers would fall on sister worlds.

  It would take an aeon for new ecosystems to arise on barren worlds, for consciousness to arise on its multiple levels. To a world mind, that wasn’t long to wait.

  She rehearsed what she would say to the newborn.

  Symmetries! Symmetries of squares and cubes! Symmetries of primes and perfect numbers! All these and more he fought to join and mould, while others, weaker or less determined, fell back into shapelessness – and new generations of novices, younger and still more hungry, fought to take away what he had achieved.

  Joe Denham might have recognised the form to which he aspired. The structure of this cosmos was not unlike the E8 mathematical construct Joe used to model the fundamental forces and particles of his own universe. And indeed in this universe there were some advanced minds who posited a construct not unlike Joe’s cosmos to serve as an analogical model of their own world. There was a duality in all things, a symmetry even across the branes.

  But to one inhabitant at least, this universe had come to seem like a beautiful prison.

  Very rapidly the remaining places among the two hundred and forty-eight elect were being filled. Yet even as he worked frantically to secure his own place, he was distracted by doubt.

  The universe would end when the array of two hundred and forty-eight was filled, the symmetry completely expressed. And he, indeed, would die with it. Why? Why should this be so? Why should he be born, only to die? Why should the universe begin and end at all? And why so soon? If the universe were more complex it would last longer before its perfection were complete. Why should it not have been so?

  More mysteries. There were other universes than this. Symmetry demanded it, the greater symmetry of the Bulk in which all cosmoses floated like fresh-born novices. He could see the other cosmoses, or at least he saw the necessity of their existence, in the way that a human theoretical physicist could gain insights into wider realities from the symmetries of his models and equations. Other universes were arrayed around his own, in pretty patterns. They too lived and died, those nearby.

  Yet there was a cluster of other branes, further away, characterised by a different sort of symmetry. And they did not die.

  Even as he fought for his place in the sky, he strained to understand how this could be so. And why.

  Morag took the monorail from Edinburgh to Dunbar. From there she hired a pod car, fed in the coordinates her father had given her, and sat back.

  In the car’s electric silence she was driven south from Dunbar through arable country. This was a gently rolling landscape of dry stone walls. To the east the land fell away, affording a long view towards the Tweed valley, while to the west the land rose towards the Lammermuir Hills. But the road was empty of traffic, and it was heavily fenced off from the fields, even though there wasn’t a sheep or a cow in sight, and the fields themselves were visibly unkempt.

  It was the year 2046. Morag, in her mid-thirties now, was occupied full-time by her own ecosalvage projects in Africa, and rarely came home. It was difficult to absorb the changes this Scottish countryside had seen since Joe had first used Sheena’s money to buy his few acres up here (and Sheena, long dead, had never seen a penny of it back). First had come the pathogen panics as bluetongue and other nasties, driven by shifting climate zones, had overwhelmed the farms. The countryside had walled itself off, hundreds of miles of barbed wire isolating the fields from spores carried on tyres and feet. But soon after that had come the pricing-out of private transport, the end of traffic, and then the great revolution in artificial food production that had led to the collapse of traditional agriculture everywhere. Now, even in Scotland and England, swathes of countryside were reverting to a state not seen since the Mesolithic, and ecologists like Morag mapped the changes as a depleted ecosystem tried to reassemble itself.

  And in the middle of all this Joe Denham continued his patient, obsessive data-gathering, year after year.

  Morag saw his installation from a rise a half-mile before the pod car reached it. Joe’s cosmic-ray telescope was an array of several hundred tanks of water, each as tall as Joe was himself, gathered in a rough polygon nearly a mile across. Each tank was attached to a sensor pack and a communications antenna, and four big optical telescopes were set up around the perimeter of the array, including one that stuck out of the top of Joe’s control centre, which was a garden shed with the roof cut open.

  Morag knew the principle. The array was based on a properly funded design called the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina. It was designed to detect co
smic rays, high-energy particles coming in from space. When they hit the atmosphere such particles would create a shower of secondary particles, and as these passed through the tanks they would create tiny flashes of light in the water. From these bits of information, Joe’s computers could reconstruct the nature and trajectory of the original cosmic rays – and he was able to use a subset of that data as evidence of the nature of the greater multiverse of the Bulk, and its interaction with the human universe.

  It was a bold project, and it seemed to work, as far as Morag could tell. But it had taken Joe around fifteen years to get this far. His water tanks, scavenged one by one from oil refineries and other abandoned industrial facilities, were all shapes, sizes and colours, and his array looked less like a science project than an art installation. Or even just a folly, the obsession of a madman.

  He met her outside his shed. He was in his mid-sixties now, but if anything he looked older than that. In his quilted coat and elderly boots and with his self-cut hair, he was like an eccentric hermit-like farmer.

  He showed her into his shed and made her a coffee. There was a little bunk bed, and basic kitchen stuff, a fridge fed by a generator somewhere, a heap of clothes. But most of the space was taken up by science gear. A ferocious draught came in through the open roof, where the telescope peered out like some long-legged animal.

  The ‘coffee’ was revolting. She wondered where he had got it. But she drank it for the warmth.

  ‘It’s good of you to come,’ he said. ‘Adam, the kids—’

  ‘They’re all fine. With me in Africa.’

  ‘It’s been too long.’

  ‘Yes, it has,’ she said fervently. ‘Look at the state of you.’

  ‘Oh, don’t fuss,’ he said, with a throaty old man’s cackle. ‘You’re as safe out in the countryside as in the gated cities, they say. It’s the shanty towns you have to avoid.’