by Bill DeSmedt
“Why am I still alive, in other words?” Mycroft hung his head sheepishly. “Jonathan, I must apologize for taking leave so abruptly. Even without the guns, crowds make me nervous. Exiting down the ventilator shaft behind my desk seemed the better part of valor.”
“But I saw you almost cut in two! I saw . . .” Knox paused, considering exactly what it was he had seen. Then, “Oh.”
“Yes, Jonathan, you saw my holographic doorman, running in real time courtesy of an auxiliary projector in the subbasement. I had little choice, you know: your assailants seemed the sort to burn Weathertop to the ground rather than leave witnesses behind. It was either provide them with a reasonable facsimile of a corpse or risk having them do the job in actuality. Fortunately, all that smoke was just the thing for projecting a nice, solid image.”
“Except when you walked through those oak beams. Try stepping around them next time. Incorporeality kind of spoils the effect.”
“I sincerely hope there is not going to be a next time, Jonathan. I’m not sure I’d enjoy working for these CROM people on a long-term basis. To say nothing of the places they transact business in.” His eyes nervously scanned the arched ceiling above their heads, as if expecting it to collapse at any moment under the hundreds of atmospheres of water pressure just outside.
“A client is a client, after all, Mycroft.”
Mycroft inclined his head, not so much in acknowledgement of this time-hallowed truth as to practice that biofeedback thing he did. When he looked up, the twitchiness was back in its box again. “Well, on the bright side, they do seem to get things done, in their way.”
“Uh-huh. Like showing up here in time to save our butts. How’d they manage that, incidentally?”
“Oh, readily enough, given that Euripedes had convinced the Office of Naval Research to loan him an experimental stealth submersible. The Piccard is quiet enough in silent-running mode that we were able to lurk right outside Antipode’s auxiliary airlock until we received Marianna’s All Clear. After that we just fitted the universal docking collar and cut our way in.”
One of CROM’s body-armored ’borgs walked up to them. A voice issued from behind the Vectran visor: “Dr. Laurence? Mr. Aristos would appreciate a word with you, sir.” A nod over to the guardrail ringing the gallery, where Pete was haranguing a dejected-looking Sasha.
“Yes, of course.”
The ’borg moved off, to Mycroft’s evident relief. Well, guns and crowds did make him nervous, and here he had to contend with both.
Mycroft sighed. “An analyst’s work is never done. Will you be all right, Jonathan?”
Funny to hear Mycroft asking him that.
“Yeah, sure; you go ahead.” Knox walked with his friend to the shattered control-room door and out into the bay. “And tell Pete to go easy on Sasha; he may be the only one left that can tell us how to keep this place running. Until you’ve done your own analysis, that is.”
“To be sure.” Mycroft smiled and made as if to leave, then paused. “Speaking of analysis, you seem to have done a fair job of it here yourself, in that idiosyncratic way of yours. You must tell me all about it when you get the chance.”
“Long as you’re buying the beer.”
“Oh, I suspect it will be Pete Aristos buying the beer for some time, Jonathan. Quite some time to come.” Mycroft turned and walked off in the direction of Archon’s new meal-ticket.
Two arms encircled his waist from behind. A new voice, decidedly female and very welcome, breathed a “Hi!” in his ear.
Knox worked his way around till he was facing Marianna, still locked in her embrace. She had thrown a lab coat over her torn blouse, but was otherwise just as disheveled, and just as magnificent-looking, as before.
“You’ve got to stop sneaking up on people like that!” he said, and kissed her.
“—Not that I minded you sneaking up on the late Mr. Geladze, of course,” he added when an opportune moment arrived. “Were you going to tell me how you got loose, or must I guess?”
“Guess away,” she said, her lips brushing his cheek.
“The way you staged that scuffle with the guard just before we left Rusalka? Great verisimilitude! Still and all, it did not entirely escape notice that the bottle of sticky-web solvent was gone from the desktop when the dust had cleared.”
“Wow.” Her breath tickled his ear again. “You must be a trained analyst.”
After another long moment, Marianna pulled away and glanced over to where Pete Aristos was eyeing them curiously.
“You know how this works by now, Jon.” She disengaged herself, gently. “Debriefing first, displays of affection later. Well worth the wait, I can assure you. Now talk: how did you do . . . whatever it was you did?”
So he did what he always did. He talked.
Epilogue
The Bridge
Like ships at sunset in a reverie,
We are shadows of what we are.
—F.D. REEVE, “COASTING”
JONATHAN KNOX STOOD on Rusalka’s flying bridge under the dim, frozen pyrotechnics of a North Atlantic midnight.
Piccard’s strike against Antipode Station had coincided with an assault on Rusalka herself. But, where improvisation had been the order of the day in the Antipode raid, the opposite was the case for Operation Tsunami proper.
In preparation for months, the game plan for invading the megayacht had gone off pretty much without a hitch. A low-level EM pulse had disabled the bulk of Rusalka’s electronics-based security countermeasures and disrupted its telecommunications. As an added bonus, keypads intended to limit access to restricted areas had ceased to function entirely, effectively segmenting the vessel into multiple sealed-off zones ready to be neutralized one at a time.
Trained to deal with attempted piracy and to repel other personae non grata boarders, the megayacht’s security forces proved no match for the SEAL teams that came grappling over the gunwales and dropping out of the sky in two-seater Flying Inflatable Boats. A hard core of ex-Alpha Group commandos had battled on, acquitting themselves well until a couple of dummy air-to-sea torpedoes slammed against Rusalka’s hull. Then, to a man, they chose surrender over treading water.
As the mercifully brief firelight wound down, a dozen or so GEI executives barricaded themselves in the megayacht’s panic room. Designed as an impregnable stronghold from which the owners could steer a hijacked vessel to safety via an auxiliary bridge, it became a holding pen for the shadow KGB’s remaining brass, once its control lines to the engine room had been severed.
By sundown, the short-lived skirmish was fading into history. When an exhausted Knox, debriefed to within an inch of his life, accompanied Marianna and an assortment of Aristos’s cyber-ninjas upstairs aboard a commandeered Navtilus, he found the giant vessel already well along in her transformation into a base of operations for CROM’s hastily-organized interagency Singularity Control Initiative.
The ripples continued to spread. Already there was talk of creating an international authority to oversee CROM’s operational administration of Antipode Station and its uniquely dangerous, uniquely valuable captive. Shoo-in Nobel laureate Dr. John C. “Jack” Adler had already been named the embryonic agency’s chief technical advisor.
Sasha was still down at Antipode Station showing the new proprietors how to work the cigarette lighter and sunroof, get the best gas mileage, that sort of thing. Cooperating fully, in other words—as why would he not? Together with Adler, he was still going to wind up one of the world’s two premiere black hole experimentalists. Had he known the likely outcome from the first? Had he just been manipulating Grishin, and everyone else, toward the most spectacular revenge ever visited upon the KGB by one of its erstwhile detainees?
Is that what Sasha had meant by “It has happened already?” Knox wasn’t sure he’d ever know.
But maybe there was a hint in what Sasha’d said when he’d seen Knox off: “Through everything, Dzhon, I always kept my faith in Novikov and his Conservation of Reali
ty principle. But, please believe, I never thought that the price of conserving reality would be Galya’s life.”
The Kremlin, leavening its public outrage at CROM’s piratical intervention with backstairs winks and nudges, had already launched a far-reaching investigation of Grishin Enterprises. At the same time, in a move calculated to play up the positive aspects of the Rusalka affair, the Duma posthumously awarded the Cross of Saint Vladimir to Galina Mikhailovna Postrel’nikova, savior of the Earth, defender of its future and all its children.
Knox didn’t know whether to laugh or cry—at Galya’s sudden secular sainthood, at Sasha’s ability once again to emerge from a pile of horseshit riding a pony. Time enough to think about all that later.
Time now, for remembrance. And for other thoughts.
“There you are.” Marianna had stolen up behind him. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Just saying goodbye to a friend.”
“She was a wonderful person, Jon. She came through, saved us all.”
“Maybe more than you know,” he said. He took Marianna in his arms and kissed her.
“Jon, what’s wrong? You’re shaking.”
“Just a momentary glimpse of the abyss, is all. It comes and it goes. Worse since this all started.”
“Do you need to talk about it?”
He sighed. “We’ve been given a peek at the foundations of the Earth. The universe isn’t all these surface manifestations—” The arc of his hand took in the whole of the sky. “That’s just for show. Quantum reality is the only real reality, the ground of our being, the bedrock. And on that fundamental level . . .”
He trailed off, then exhaled a shuddering breath and finished, “. . . I think maybe we exist only provisionally, if at all.”
Marianna knew better than to laugh. There’d been one incident back in college where a freshman had telephoned his Philosophy 101 instructor late one night, after too much Descartes: Professor, I’m afraid I don’t exist. To her credit, the instructor had recognized the seriousness of the situation, had spent the next hour and a half on the phone talking the student down. The following morning he appeared in class and handed her, “for safekeeping,” the revolver he’d been holding to his temple throughout their midnight colloquy.
She wasn’t going to lose Jon to this. Not now. Not after what they’d been through.
Aloud, she said, “I’m not sure I understand.”
“Well, think about it: what sets this whole train of events in motion? That first damned timeprobe, is what. It’s that message from the future, the whole Tunguska Cosmologist Support thing, that gets Sasha seriously considering the possibility of a black hole impact, and eventually brings him—how did Grishin put it?—right to the KGB’s doorstep. And it’s Sasha who then convinces Grishin. Convinces him to bankroll a harebrained scheme, the ultimate outcome of which is to send back the message-needle that started it all, not incidentally using Yuri Andropov as a pin cushion. It’s a causal loop: Ourobouros eating its own tail. We are where we are right now only because we altered the past enough to put us here.”
“But the KGB had all the files from the original Tunguska expeditions.” Keep him talking! “Somebody would’ve pieced the picture together even without the probe.”
“Convincingly enough for Grishin and company to bet billions on a longshot of cosmic proportions? I don’t think so. I think what got the shadow KGB behind this project was Sasha’s mantra: It has already happened.
“It gets worse,” he continued bleakly. “Take all that away: no project, which means no probe, which in turn means no assassination. Now, what was the likelier outcome back then, in the mid-eighties? A world like ours, imperfect as it is? Or that nuclear-winter nightmare? I think the effect produced the cause. Without the timewarp, Andropov never would have been . . . never would have died. Not soon enough, anyway. And then what?”
He shook his head. “No, that nightmare was the odds-on reality. It’s all this that’s the dream.”
Marianna blinked back a tear. This was serious. Some sort of metaphysical cul-de-sac, a pitfall dug by a connoisseur of abstraction—for himself. Was he succumbing to this weird existential despair as a way of punishing himself? Out of some misplaced remorse over having caused the death of another human being? Couldn’t he see that killing Andropov had prevented World War III, had almost certainly saved the world? She gripped him tightly, willing him to come back, to believe. In her. In anything.
Just talk him through it. “If what you say is so, then why are we here at all?”
“Choices,” he said, so low she could barely hear the words. “Choices and dreams. Quantum theory’s riddled through with indeterminacies, loopholes where the individual conscious mind gets to call the shots. So many branching paths for the awareness to pick and choose among. Maybe Novikov’s Conservation of Reality principle only works when there are enough minds around to form a consensus about what’s real. Who knows whether the constraints would still hold if you were the last man left alive . . . or the last woman . . .”
He seemed to lose focus for a moment. Then, “I keep remembering something the Singularity showed me, just before I . . . just before things changed back. And I keep thinking: what if Galina—years ago on an alternate timeline, dying in a fallout shelter somewhere in a dying Russia, on a dying Earth—what if Galina dreamed us all? Dreamed the whole world back into existence? Out of compassion, out of love for the children . . .”
“But then we are real,” Marianna insisted, “as real as any other possible outcome. More real: we’re here!”
“It doesn’t alter the fact that reality has been shown up for the fraud it is, exposed as radically contingent, fundamentally undermined.” His voice had strengthened though. He was past the worst of it now, or resigned to it again. Maybe they were the same thing.
He paused to gaze up at the stars. Or down into the well of the night. It all depended on how you looked at it. “Like the man said, ‘If you choke on water, what can you wash it down with?’ If you can’t trust in reality to be real, what’s left?” He turned to her and tried to smile.
He seemed to be coming out of it. As if he’d made a conscious choice, choosing to turn away from that bottomless pit, to turn back toward the only world there was.
Choosing to turn back to her, to reach out for her.
She came into his arms. In the last few moments, she’d made a conscious choice too.
“Love is real,” Marianna kissed him and held him close, the ancient light of faraway suns glistening in her tears. “Trust in that.”
Further Reading
you might be surprised
at just how much of this stuff
I didn’t make up.
—PETER WATTS, Starfish
IT TOOK A lot of books to make this one. But this one started with a TV program. Perils of couch-potatohood, I guess.
WISH I DIDN’T KNOW NOW . . .
It was years back, a rainy Saturday afternoon in mid-summer. I was sitting around watching a rerun of Cosmos, Episode IV: “Heaven and Hell”—the episode that deals with meteor and cometary impacts.
So, about midway through, Carl gets around to the Tunguska Event. And from there to the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis: that the event was a collision between the Earth and an atom-sized black hole. And then he’s refuting J&R, citing the standard missing exit-event objection—namely, that the black hole should have cut through the Earth like a knife through morning mist, and come exploding up out of the North Atlantic about an hour later, wreaking all manner of havoc. Never happened. QED. And, next thing you know Carl’s gone on to Meteor Crater in Arizona or some such.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting there, staring at the TV. “But, Carl,” I say slowly, “what if the damn thing never came out?”
Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then. The idea wouldn’t leave me in peace. It kept rattling around in my hindbrain, gradually accreting mass as more and more pieces from my personal history fell into place: my bac
kground in Sovietology, my career as a consultant, just enough physics to glimpse what the KGB might want to do with a captive black hole . . . Over the next couple years, that one minuscule germ of an idea grew into a plotline.
Finally, on an equally rainy Saturday over a lost Memorial Day weekend, I sat down at the word processor, and Singularity began to write itself!
. . . WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW THEN.
It was at that point that all those other books came in. It didn’t hurt that I’d always read a lot of popular science: cosmology, relativity, quantum mechanics, all in the “physics for poets” vein. Singularity, though, called for more breadth and more depth, beginning with . . .
THE TUNGUSKA EVENT
A good friend once remarked that more trees have been destroyed in publishing books and articles about Tunguska than in the event itself. I don’t know about that, but there have been a bunch over the years. Even an unambitious bibliography can easily run to a couple hundred titles. My publisher’s frowning, though, so here I’ll stick to some of the more readily available book-length ones, in English.
Roy A. Gallant’s The Day The Sky Split Apart: Investigating a Cosmic Mystery (Atheneum, 1995) is both history, science, and travelogue, Roy having been one of the first Western astronomers to visit the impact site after the fall of Communism and live to write about it. TDTSSA is aimed at younger readers, but Roy’s recently come out with a version for grownups, too: Meteorite Hunter: The Search for Siberian Meteorite Craters (McGraw-Hill, 2002). Its chapter-length discussion of Tunguska cribs a lot from the kiddies’ book, while omitting a good deal of (mostly inessential) detail. A summation generously declares the question of what caused the Tunguska Event to be “still open.” Privately, though, Roy’s own assessment of the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis remains a resounding “Ugh!”
That about wraps it up for serious, book-length treatments of late. Most of the debate action has shifted to the pages of scholarly journals, or to that same arxiv.org Internet site where Jack Adler broke the news of his earthshattering (literally!) discovery. Among the most recent articles are: Luigi Foschini, “A Solution for the Tunguska Event,” (www. arxive.org/astro-ph/9808312v2, 2001), which backtracks the cosmic object’s trajectory in an attempt to prove it had to be a meteorite; V. Bronshten, “On the nature of the Tunguska meteorite,” (Astronomy and Astrophysics, No. 359, 2000), which uses the lack of physical evidence on the ground to prove it couldn’t possibly have been a meteorite; and back again to Zdenek Sekanina’s “Evidence for Asteroidal Origin of the Tunguska Object,” (Planetary and Space Science, vol. 46, No. 2/3, 1998). It gets so it’s like watching a tennis match.