Transvergence

by Charles Sheffield

  "So you accept those ideas. But apparently only in some abstract sense. You reject them at a practical level."

  "I do not." Darya's outrage was enough to burn away—temporarily—her lethargy.

  "So you accept the central idea that a particle, or a system of particles, such as an electron or proton or atomic nucleus, can be in a 'mixed' quantum state. In essence, it can occupy several different possible conditions at once. An electron, for example, has two permitted orientations for its spin; but it cannot be said to have either one spin state or the other, until it is observed. Until that time, it may be partly in both possible spin states. Do you agree?"

  "That's a standard element of the theory. It's well established by experiment, too. I certainly accept it. What is all this, E.C.? Get to the point."

  "I am at the point. That is the point, the whole point. You were the one who told me that all researchers of the Torvil Anfract accepted the instantaneous interchange of pairs of Anfract lobes as evidence of quantum effects. The Anfract, you said, possesses macroscopic quantum states, of unprecedented size. You said that to me before we ever entered the Anfract.

  "Then we flew in, with Dulcimer as pilot. Do you recall a time when the ship's motion became choppy and irregular?"

  "Of course I do. I was scared. I thought for a moment that we were hitting small space-time singularities, but then I realized that made no sense."

  "And you asked Captain Rebka what was happening. Since humans appear to have trouble recalling events exactly, let me repeat for you his exact words. 'Planck scale change,' he said. 'A big one. We're hitting the quantum level of the local continuum. If macroscopic quantum effects are common in the Anfract we're due for all sorts of trouble. Quantum phenomena in everyday life. Don't know what that would do.' You accepted his statements without question. Yet you apparently remain unwilling to face their implications. As I said, organic intelligences do not have faith in their own scientific theories.

  "There are large-scale quantum phenomena inside the Anfract; and the Builder sentient constructs have learned how to utilize them." Tally pointed to J'merlia. "He, like you and me, consists of a system of particles. We are each described by a quantum-mechanical state vector—a very large and complex one, but still a single state vector. Isn't it obvious that J'merlia existed in a mixed quantum state when he was—simultaneously—here and on Hollow-World and in several places on Genizee? And isn't it clear that his total wave function did not resolve and 'collapse' back to a single state—to a single J'merlia—until he returned here on the seedship?"

  Darya stared at the others—and saw no reaction at all. She found Tally's words mind-blowing. They appeared to accept what he was saying without question. "But if that happened to J'merlia, why didn't it happen to all of us?"

  "I can only conjecture. Clearly, the actions of Guardian were of central importance. If the development of mixed quantum states in organic intelligences is a borderline event in the Anfract, something which occurs only rarely or under specially contrived circumstances, then a trigger action may be needed. Guardian knows how to provide that trigger. And perhaps J'merlia is by his nature unusually susceptible to accepting a mixed quantum state."

  "Oh, my Lord." Hans Rebka had been lolling back in the pilot's chair as though he were half-asleep. Now he sat upright. "Unusually susceptible to a mixed state. Tally's right, I'm sure he is. That's what's been wrong with Julian Graves, ever since we got here. His two personalities were integrated back on Miranda, but we always knew it was a sensitive balance. They're still liable to disruption. He was already on the borderline, it wouldn't take much to push him over. No wonder he said he couldn't think any more! No wonder he sent out a distress signal. His mind was divided—too much me. Two parallel quantum states in one body, trying to make decisions and control the Erebus."

  "Those are my thoughts exactly." Since E.C. Tally lacked emotion or intellectual insecurity, his display of pleasure at Rebka's support was a tribute to simulation modeling. "And it means that it is not necessary to seek a treatment for the councilor's condition. He will automatically return to normal, as soon as we exit the Anfract and are again in a region of space-time where macroscopic quantum states cannot be sustained."

  "So what are we waiting for?" Hans Rebka glanced around the group. "We can leave the Anfract at once. We've got the evidence of Zardalu we came for"—he nodded to where the infant land-cephalopod was systematically destroying the seat of the control chair—"the best evidence we could possibly have. The sooner we leave, the sooner Graves gets back to normal. Can anyone think of a reason why we shouldn't leave at once?"

  With Julian Graves incapacitated, Rebka was in charge. He did not need approval from the others for a decision to leave the Anfract—except that he had learned, long before, that unanimous group decisions guaranteed a lot more cooperation.

  He automatically looked for Louis Nenda, the most likely source of opposition. And he noticed his absence, and that of Atvar H'sial, just as Dulcimer came bouncing into the chamber.

  This time the Polypheme had hit it exactly right. His skin was a clear, bright green, his master eye and scanning eye were alert and confident, and he was delicately balanced on his coiled tail. He was in fine physical shape.

  He was also in an absolute fury.

  "All right." He bobbed forward until he was in the middle of the group. "I've put up with a lot on this trip. I've been near-drowned and chased and starved and had my tail chewed half off—none of that is in my contract. I put up with all of it, brave and patient. Only this is too much." The blubbery mouth scowled, and the great eye glared at each of them in turn. His voice rose to a squeak of rage. "Where's my ship? What have you done with the Indulgence? I want to know, and I want to know right now."

  Louis Nenda and Atvar H'sial were asking much the same question. They had carefully drifted the ship free of the Erebus, leaving the drive off so that no emergency telltales would flash on the bigger ship's control panels.

  After a few minutes of floating powerless, Nenda again scanned his displays. The Indulgence's complete trajectory for exit from the Torvil Anfract had already been set in the computer, needing only the flip of a switch to send the ship spiraling out. A few kilometers away on the right, steadily receding, the Erebus was a swollen, pimpled oblong, dark against the pink shimmer of the nested singularities. On Genizee, a hundred thousand kilometers below, it was night, and the high-magnification scopes showed no lights. If the Zardalu were active down there they had excellent nocturnal vision, or their own sources of bioluminescence. The only illumination striking the surface from outside would be the faint aurora of the singularities and the weak reflected light of the hollow moon, glimmering far above the Indulgence to Louis Nenda's left.

  He turned to Atvar H'sial, crouched by his side. "We're far enough clear. Time to say good-bye to Genizee. There's a lot of valuable stuff down there, but if you're anythin' like me you'll be happy if you never see the place again. Ready to go?"

  The Cecropian nodded.

  "Okay. Glister, here we come." Louis Nenda flipped the switch that set in train the stored trajectory. For a few seconds they surged smoothly outward, heading for the constant shimmer of the nested singularities.

  And then Nenda was cursing and grabbing at the control panel. The Indulgence had veered, and veered again. Atvar H'sial, blind to the display screens, clutched at the floor with all six legs and sent an urgent burst of pheromones.

  "Louis! This is not right! It is not what I programmed."

  "Damn right it's not! And it's not what's bein' displayed." Nenda had killed the program and was trying to assert manual control. It made no difference. The ship was ignoring him, still steadily changing direction. "We're goin' the wrong way, and I can't do one thing about it."

  "Then turn off the drive!"

  Nenda did not answer. He had already turned off the drive. He was staring at the left-hand display screen, where Hollow-Moon hung in the sky. A familiar saffron beam of light had spear
ed out from it, impossibly visible all along its length, even in the vacuum of space. The Indulgence was caught in that beam and was being directed by it.

  "Louis!" Atvar H'sial said again. "The drive!"

  "It's off."

  "But we are still accelerating. Do you know where we are going?"

  Nenda pulled his hands away from the useless controls and leaned back in his seat. Genizee was visible in the forward screen, already perceptibly larger. The Indulgence was arrowing down, faster and faster.

  "I'm pretty sure I know exactly where we're going, At." He sighed. "An' I'm pretty sure you're not gonna like it when I tell you."

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The definition of reality; the meaning of existence; the nature of the universe.

  The philosophies of the spiral arm on these subjects were at least as numerous and diverse as the intelligences who populated it. They ranged from the Inverse Platonism of Teufel—What you see is all there is, and maybe a bit more—to the Radical Pragmatism of the Tristan free-space Manticore—Reality is whatever I decide it should be—all the way to the Dictum of Inseparability espoused by the hive-mind of Decantil Myrmecons—The Universe exists as a whole, but it is meaningless to speak of the function of individual components.

  Darya had no doubts about her own view: The universe was real, and anyone who believed otherwise needed a brain tune-up. There certainly was an objective reality.

  But could that reality ever be comprehended by a living, organic being, one whose intelligence and logical faculties had to operate in the middle of a raging cauldron of glands and hormones and rampant neurotransmitters?

  That was a far more subtle question. Darya herself was inclined to answer no. If one wanted a good example, all one had to do was examine recent events.

  Look at yesterday. On her return to the Erebus from the surface of Genizee, the objective universe had been an old and worn-down and shabby place, a weary present grinding its way forward into a pointless future. She had been swept by the random tides of exhaustion from confusion to anger to total languid indifference.

  And now, one day later? Twelve hours of forty-fathom slumber had pumped ichor into her veins. She had followed that with a meal big enough to stun a Bolingbroke giant, and discovered that the universe had been remade while she slept. It gleamed and glowed now like the lost fire-treasure of Jesteen.

  And she glowed with it.

  The Erebus was winding its way slowly and quietly out of the depths of the Torvil Anfract. Darya sat knee to knee in silent companionship with Hans Rebka, staring at the panorama beyond the hulk of the ship. He was more relaxed than she had ever seen him. The view from the observation bubble helped. It was never the same for two seconds: now it showed a lurid sea of smoky red, lit by the sputtering pinwheel fireworks of tiny spiral galaxies rotating a million billion times too fast to be real; a few moments later all was impenetrable blackness, darkness visible. But by then touch had substituted for vision. The ship moved through the abyss with a shuddering irregular slither that created a tremor in Darya from hips to navel. An invisible something caressed her skin—caressed her inside her skin, with the most delicate and knowing of sensual fingers.

  "More macroscopic quantum states," Hans Rebka said lazily. He waved his hand at a Brownian-movement monitor. "But they're getting smaller. Another few minutes and we'll be back to normal scale."

  "Mmmph." The intellectual part of Darya nodded and tried to look serious. The idiot rest of her grinned and drooled in sheer delight at the sybaritic pleasures of the world. Nothing ought to be allowed to feel so good. Wasn't he feeling it, the way that she was? Something wrong with the man, had to be.

  "And according to Dulcimer's flight plan," Rebka continued, "it's the last time we'll meet macro-states. Another few minutes and Graves should flip right back to normal. He's feeling better already, just knowing what it is that's wrong with him."

  "Ummm." If you were to run tourist ships out to this part of the Anfract, and keep them here for a few hours—assuming that anyone could stand such a wonderful feeling for so long—you could make your fortune. And maybe you could be on the ship yourself, for every trip.

  "Hey." He was staring at her. "What are you looking so pleased about? I thought you'd feel down today, but you're wall-to-wall grin."

  "Yeah." Darya gazed into his eyes and amended her last thought. He wasn't feeling it. You would run ships of female tourists out here.

  But the tingle inside her was fading, and at last she could speak. "Why shouldn't I grin? We found the Zardalu, we all escaped from Genizee, we've got the live infant as evidence for the Council, and we're on the way home. Don't we have a right to smile?"

  "We do. Graves and Tally and me do. You don't."

  "Hans, if you're going to start that nonsense again about me and Louis Nenda . . . he was only trying to explain what they were going to do with the Indulgence, I'm sure he was. And then when I wouldn't listen to him, he put his hand on—"

  "That's not a problem anymore. We know what happened to the Indulgence. While you were snoring your head off, Kallik located a flight plan in a locked file in the Erebus's backup computer. Nenda and Atvar H'sial are heading for Glister and Nenda's old ship."

  That stopped Darya for a moment. She had been hoping to return to Glister herself in the near future, but it was not the right time to mention it. "Well, if you think that I'm smiling because Nenda and I had been—"

  "Haven't thought about that all day."

  He had, though, Darya was sure of it—he had answered much too fast. She was getting to know Hans Rebka better than she had ever known anyone.

  "I'm not worrying about you and Nenda, or you and anyone." His face was no longer lazy or lacking emotion. "I'm worrying about you, and only you. You didn't come here to find the Zardalu, I know that."

  "I came to be with you."

  "Nuts. Maybe a little bit of that, and I'd like to think so. But mainly you came to find the Builders."

  So she had! It was hard to remember it that way now, but he had pinpointed her original motives for leaving Sentinel Gate. Whether she liked it or not, he was getting to know her, too, better than anyone had ever known her. The flow through the empathy pipe ran both ways. It had been open for only a year. How well would they know each other in a century?

  "And now," he was continuing, "you're going home with-out a thing."

  "Nonsense! I have a new artifact to think about. An amazing one. The Torvil Anfract is a Builder creation, the strangest we've ever seen."

  "Maybe. But can I quote what a certain professor told me, back on Sentinel Gate? 'There was nothing more interesting in my life than Builder artifacts—so long as the Builders remained hidden. But once you meet the Builders' sentient constructs, and think you have a chance to find the Builders themselves, why, the past is irrelevant. artifacts can't compete.' Remember who said that?"

  He was not expecting an answer. Darya had one, but she did not offer it. Instead she looked again out of the observation bubble. In the sky outside, the blackness was breaking to a scatter of faint light. A view of the spiral arm was coming into view; the real spiral arm, as it ought to look, undistorted by singularity sheets or quantum speckle or Torvil chimeras. They must be almost out of the Anfract.

  "But you're no closer to the Builders now than you were a year ago," Hans went on. "Farther away, in some ways. When we were dealing with the Builder constructs on Glister and Serenity, you thought that The-One-Who-Waits and Speaker-Between held the key to the exact plans and intentions of the Builders. Now we find that Guardian and World-Keeper agree completely with each other—but they don't agree with the other constructs at all. It's a mess and it's a muddle, and you have to be disappointed and miserable."

  Darya didn't feel the least bit miserable or disappointed. She had questions, scores of them, but that was what the world was all about.

  She smiled fondly at Hans Rebka—or was she just smiling at the warm feeling inside her? Surely a bit of both. "Of cour
se Guardian and World-Keeper agree with each other. You'd expect them to—because they are the same entity. They are one construct existing in a mixed quantum state, just the way J'merlia existed. But in their case, it's permanent." And then, while Hans jerked his head back and stared along his nose at her in astonishment, she went on. "Hans, I've learned more about Builders and constructs in the past year than anyone has ever known. And you know what? Every new piece of information has made things more puzzling. So here's the central question: If all the constructs are earnest and industrious and incapable of lying, and if they are all busy carrying out the agenda of their creators, then why is everything so confusing?"

  She did not expect an answer. She would have been upset if Hans Rebka had tried to offer one. He was going to be the tryout audience for the paper she would write when she returned to Sentinel Gate. Their departure from the research institute had hardly been a triumph. She laughed to herself. Triumph? Their exit had been a disaster; Professor Merada, wringing his hands and moaning about the artifact catalog; Glenna Omar, her neck covered in burn ointment and bandages; Carmina Gold firing off outraged messages to the Alliance Council . . . The next paper that Darya produced had better be really good.