Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Piano Man looked at him with sudden seriousness, the mirrored facets of his glasses like holes punched through to some burnished silver realm. “Because of what you just said. Because of the questions you want answered."

  "You think a load of physics books is going to make a difference?"

  "That's up to you. It's all a question of how much you want to understand. How deep you want to go."

  Piano Man turned back to the keyboard and started playing Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting.

  * * * *

  Piano Man was right. It was a question of how deep he wanted to go.

  But surely there was more to it than that. Something else was spurring him on. It felt like a weird sense of obligation, an onus that weighed upon him with pressing, judicial force. He was certain now that he was the last man alive, having long since abandoned hope that anyone was left on Earth. Was it not therefore almost required of him to come to some final understanding of what it meant to be human, achieving some final synthesis of all the disparate threads in the books before him? There could only be one witness to his success, he knew, but it seemed that if he were to fail he would be letting down the billions who had come before him. He could almost feel the weight of their expectation reaching to him from the past, urging him to come to that difficult understanding that had always eluded them. They were dead but he was still alive, and now they were looking over his shoulder, anxiously waiting to see how he solved the puzzle that had bettered them.

  "Hey, genius?” Piano Man asked, a week into his study. “Solved the mysteries of the universe yet?"

  "Don't be silly. I've only just begun."

  "OK. But I take it you've made at least a smidgeon of progress.” Piano Man wore a sparkling white suit and enormous star-shaped spectacles. He was grinning a lot and playing some of his weaker material.

  "Depends what you mean by progress,” Renfrew said. “If you mean absorbing what I've read, and not being thrown by anything so far...” He shrugged. “In that case, so far it's been a piece of piss."

  "Ah-ha."

  "But I'm under no illusions that it's going to stay that way. In fact I'm well aware that it's going to get a lot harder. So far all I'm doing is catching up. I haven't even begun to think about moving beyond the existing theories."

  "All right. No point trying to run before you can crawl."

  "Precisely."

  Piano Man swept his fingers down the keys in an exuberant glissando. “But you can still tell me what you've learned, can't you?"

  "Are you sure you're interested?"

  "Of course I'm interested, luv. Why else would I ask?"

  * * * *

  He told Piano Man what he had learned so far.

  He had read about the dual histories of cosmology and quantum mechanics, two braids of thought that had their origins in the early twentieth century. The one dealt with the vast and ancient, the other with the microscopic and ephemeral. Cosmology encompassed galaxies and superclusters of galaxies, Hubble flows and the expansion of the universe. Quantum mechanics dealt with the fizzing, indeterminate cauldron of subatomic reality, where things could be in more than one place at once and where apparently rock-solid concepts like distance and the one-way flow of time became almost obscenely pliant.

  Handling the concepts of classical cosmology required an imaginative leap, and the ability to think of space and time as facets of the same thing. But once he had made that mental adjustment, which became slightly easier with practise, Renfrew found that the rest was merely a question of elaboration of scale and complexity. It was like holding the architecture of a vast, dark cathedral in his skull. At first it required a supreme effort of will to imagine the basic components of the building: the choir, the nave, the transepts, the spire. Gradually, however, these major architectural elements became fixed in his mind and he was able to start concentrating on the embellishments, the buttresses and gargoyles. Once he was comfortable with the classical cosmological model he found it easy enough to revise his mental floor plan to accommodate inflationary cosmology and the various models that had succeeded it. The scales became vaster, the leaps of perspective all the more audacious, but he was able to envisage things within some kind of metaphoric framework, whether it was the idea of galaxies painted on the skin of an expanding balloon, or the ‘phase transition’ of water thawing in a frozen swimming pool.

  This was not the case with quantum mechanics. Very quickly, Renfrew realised that the only tool for understanding the quantum realm was mathematics; all else failed. There were no convenient metaphors from everyday human experience to assist with the visualisation of wave-particle duality, the Heisenberg principle, quantum non-locality, or any of the other paradoxical properties of the microscopic world. The human mind had simply not evolved the appropriate mental machinery to deal with quantum concepts in the abstract. Trying to ‘understand’ any of it in workaday terms was futile.

  Renfrew would have found this hard to accept had he not been in good company. Almost all of the great thinkers who had worked on quantum mechanics had been troubled by this to one degree or another. Some had accepted it, while others had gone to the grave with the nagging suspicion that a layer of familiar, Newtonian order lay beneath the shifting uncertainties of QM.

  Even if quantum physics was ‘correct', how did that fuzzy view of reality join up with the hard-edged concepts of General Relativity? The two theories were astoundingly successful at predicting the behaviour of the universe within their own specified areas of application, but all attempts to unify them had collapsed in failure. QM produced absurd results when applied to the kinds of macroscopic objects encountered in the real world: cats, boxes, Bösendorfer grand pianos, galactic superclusters. GR collapsed when it was used to probe the very small, whether it was the universe an instant after the Big Bang, or the infinitely dense, infinitely compact kernel of a black hole.

  Thinkers had spent three quarters of a century chasing that fabled unification, without success. But what if all the pieces had been in place at the time of the Catastrophe, and all that was needed was someone to view them with a fresh eye?

  Some chance, Renfrew thought to himself. But again he smiled. Was it arrogant to think that he could achieve what no one had managed before? Perhaps: but given the uniqueness of his situation, nothing seemed improbable. And even if he did not succeed in that task, who was to say that he would not pick up one or two useful insights along the way?

  At the very least it would give him something to do.

  Still, he was getting ahead of himself. He had to understand QM before he could demolish it and replace it with something even more shiny and elegant, something which at the same time would be utterly consistent with every verified prediction of GR and at the same time nicely resolve all the niggling little details of observational mismatch ... while at the same time making testable predictions of its own.

  "Are you sure you still want to go through with this?” Piano Man asked.

  "Yes,” Renfrew told him. “More than ever."

  His companion looked out toward the burial zone. “Well, it's your funeral."

  And then started playing Candle in the Wind.

  * * * *

  Renfrew powered up the antenna again. Once more it laboured into life, gears crunching against the resistance of infiltrated dust as it steered onto target. It was twilight and Earth was a bright star a few degrees above the horizon. The antenna locked on, Renfrew sighting along the main axis to confirm that the device really was pointed at the planet, and wasn't misaligned due to some mechanical or software fault. As always, as near as he could judge, the dish was aimed at Earth.

  He waited to see the lights on the status board, never quite able to kill the hope that the flickering signal LED would harden into a steady, insistent green, indicating that the antenna had picked up the expected carrier transmission.

  Never quite able to kill the hope that someone was still sending.

  But the board told him the sam
e thing it always did. No dice: it wasn't hearing anything beyond the random snap and crackle of interplanetary static.

  Renfrew tapped the buttons to tell the dish to stow itself until his next visit. He stood back from the operating panel as the machinery moved, waiting to see it stow itself safely in readiness for his next dutiful visit.

  Something shone on the panel: a momentary brightening of the LED. It only lasted an instant, but it caught Renfrew's attention like a glint of gold in a prospector's stream. He'd seen the antenna slew back countless times before, and he'd never seen more than a glimmer from the LED. It had been too hard, too clear, to be caused by random contamination, and he certainly hadn't imagined it.

  He told himself to be calm. If the LED had brightened when the antenna was locked onto Earth—well, that might be worth getting excited about. Might. But as it slewed back to stow, the antenna was just sweeping over empty sky.

  All the same: plenty of cosmic radio signals out there, but none of them should be outputting in the narrow frequency range that the antenna was built to sniff. So maybe it had picked up something, unless the electronics were finally going south.

  One way to tell.

  Renfrew told the dish to track back onto Earth. He watched the board carefully this time, for he hadn't been paying attention the first time the antenna had moved.

  But there it was again: that same brightening. And now that he'd seen it twice, he saw that the LED brightened and dimmed in a systematic fashion.

  Exactly as if the dish was tracking across a concentrated radio source.

  Exactly as if something was out there.

  Renfrew backed up and repeated the cycle, using manual override to guide the antenna onto the signal. He waggled the dish until he judged that the LED was at its brightest, then watched the steady green light with a growing and cautious amazement.

  He noted the coordinates of the source, remembering that he had only chanced upon it by accident, and that the same slew operation wouldn't necessarily pick up the mystery signal a day or a week from now. But if he recorded the position of the source now, and kept an eye on it from hour to hour and then day to day, he should at least be able to tell if it was an object moving inside the solar system, rather than some distant extragalactic radio source that just happened to look artificial.

  Renfrew dared not invest too much hope in the detection. But if it was local, if it was coming from something within the system ... then it might have serious implications.

  Especially for him.

  * * * *

  Renfrew's excitement was tempered with caution. He vowed not to speak of the matter to Piano Man until he could be certain that the object was all that he hoped it might be: some tangible sign that someone had survived.

  He'd expected that the discovery might make it hard for him to keep his mind on his studies, like a student distracted by something more interesting out the window. But to his surprise exactly the reverse was the case. Spurred on by the possibility that his future might hold surprises, that it was not necessarily pre-ordained that he would die alone and on Mars, Renfrew found that his intellectual curiosity was actually heightened. He redoubled his efforts to understand his predicament, gulping down pages of text that had seemed opaque and impenetrable only days before, but which now seemed lucid, transparent, even childlike in their simplicity. He found himself laughing, delighted with each tangible instance of progress towards his goal. He barely ate, and neglected some of the less pressing matters of base maintenance. And as the radio source refused to away—as it looked more and more like something approaching Mars—Renfrew was gripped by the sense that he was engaged in a race; that he was in some way obliged to complete his task before the source arrived, that they would be waiting to hear what he had to say.

  By night he dreamed cosmology, his dreams becoming ever more epic and ambitious as his knowledge of the science improved. With a fever-like sense of repetition he recapitulated the entire history of the universe, from its first moment of existence to the grand and symphonic flourishing of intelligence.

  At the beginning there was always nothingness, an absence not only of space and time but of existence itself, and yet at the same time he was aware of a trembling pre-potential, a feeling that the nothingness was poised on the cusp of an awesome instability, as if the unborn universe was itching to bring itself into being. With nightly inevitability it came: less an explosion than a kind of delicate clockwork unravelling, as cunningly-packed structures unwound with inflationary speed, crystallising out into brand new superluminally expanding vacuum. He dreamed of symmetries snapping apart, mass and energy becoming distinct, force and matter bootstrapping into complex structures. He dreamed of atoms stabilising, linking to form molecules and crystals, and from those building blocks he dreamed the simple beginnings of chemistry. He dreamed of galaxies condensing out of gas, of supermassive young suns flaring brilliantly and briefly within those galaxies. Each subsequent generation of stars was more stable than the last, and as they evolved and died they brewed metals and then coughed them into interstellar space. Out of those metals condensed worlds—hot and scalding at first, until comets rained onto their crusts, quenching them and given them oceans and atmospheres.

  He dreamed of the worlds ageing. On some the conditions were right for the genesis of microbial life. But the universe had to get very much older and larger before he saw anything more interesting than that. Even then it was scarce, and the worlds where animals stalked ocean beds before flopping and oozing ashore had a precious, gemlike rarity.

  Rarer still were the worlds where those animals staggered toward self-awareness. But once or twice in every billion years it did happen. Occasionally life even learned to use tools and language, and look towards the stars.

  Toward the end of one particularly vivid cosmological dream Renfrew found himself focussing on the rarity of intelligence in the universe. He saw the galaxy spread out before him, spiral arms of creamy white flecked here and there by the ruby reds of cool supergiants or the dazzling kingfisher blues of the hottest stars. Dotted across the galaxy's swirl were candles, the kind he remembered from birthday cakes. There were a dozen or so to start with, placed randomly in a rough band that was not too near the galactic core nor too close to the outer edges. The candles wavered slightly, and then—one by one—they began to go out.

  Until only one was left. It was not even the brightest of those that had been there to begin with.

  Renfrew felt a dreadful sense of that solitary candle's vulnerability. He looked up and below the plane of the galaxy, out toward its neighbours, but he saw no signs of candles elsewhere.

  He desperately wanted to cradle that remaining candle, shelter it from the wind and keep it burning. He heard Piano Man singing: And it seems to me you've lived your life...

  It went out.

  All was void. Renfrew woke up shivering, and then raced to the suiting room and the airlock, and the waiting antenna, seeking contact with that radio signal.

  * * * *

  "I think I understand,” he told Piano Man. “Life has to be here to observe the universe, or it doesn't have any meaning. It's like the idea of the observer in quantum mechanics, collapsing an indeterminate system down to one possibility, opening the box and forcing the cat to chose between being dead or alive..."

  Piano Man took off his glasses and polished them on his sleeve. He said nothing for at least a minute, satisfying himself that the glasses were clean before carefully replacing them on his nose. “That's what you think, is it? That's your big insight? That the universe needs its own observer? Well, break out the bubbly. Houston, I think we have a result."

  "It's better than nothing."

  "Right. And do how did this universe manage for fifteen billion years before we dropped by and provided an intelligent observer? Are you seriously telling me it was all fuzzy and indeterminate until the instant some anonymous caveman had a moment of cosmic epiphany? That suddenly the entire quantum history of every par
ticle in the visible universe—right out to the furthest quasar—suddenly jumped to one state, and all because some thicko in a bearskin had his brain wired up slightly differently to his ancestor?"

  Renfrew thought back to his dream of the galactic disk studded with candle light. “No ... I'm not saying that. There were other observers before us. We're just the latest."

  "And these other observers—they were there all along, were they? An unbroken chain right back to the first instant of creation?"

  "Well, no. Obviously the universe had to reach a certain minimum age before the preconditions for life—intelligent life—became established. But once that happened..."

  "It's bollocks, though, isn't it, luv? What difference does it make if there's a gap of one second where the universe is unobserved, or ten billion years? None at all, as far as I'm concerned."

  "Look, I'm trying, all right? I'm doing my best. And anyway...” Renfrew felt a sudden lurch of intuitive breakthrough. “We don't need all those other observers, do we? We have observed the entire history of the universe, just by looking out at higher and higher redshifts, with increasing look-back times. It's because the speed of light is finite. If it wasn't, information from the very further parts of the universe would reach us immediately, and we'd have no way of viewing earlier epochs."

  "Fuck me man, you almost sound like a cosmologist."

  "I think I might have become one."

  "Just don't make a career of it,” Piano Man said. He shook his head exasperatedly, then started playing Benny and the Jets.

  * * * *

  A week later he told him the news. Renfrew's companion played the tentative ghost of a melody on the keyboard, something that hadn't yet crystallised into true music.

  "You waited until now to tell me?” Piano Man asked, with a pained, disappointed look.

  "I had to be certain. I had to keep tracking the thing, making sure it was really out there, and then making sure it was something worth getting excited about."

  "And?"

  Renfrew offered a smile. “I think it's worth getting excited about."