Dark Mirror

by Diane Duane

  “If I understand correctly that you’re heading back into more populated areas,” Picard said, “then we wish you well on the journey. Our patrol duties lie in this area for a good while yet.”

  The Laihe’s head swiveled from side to side, like that of someone who’s sure you must be speaking to someone else. “Shift unpredictable dataless uncertainties dangerous!”

  That Picard thought he understood. “I thank you for your concern. The uncertainties are our business, though: there are few things more important to us, though they can be dangerous, as you say.”

  The Laihe looked at him mournfully. “Departure imminent, data dump imminent, locations safety, wellwish.”

  “We would appreciate all the data you have,” Picard said. “Please feel free to requisition anything from our data libraries that you may feel would be of help to you. And thank you again for your concern. We’ll do our best to look into this problem.”

  The Laihe nodded—that gesture she knew and understood—and raised a foreleg. The screen winked out, leaving a view of stars, and the dim-lit sparks of the many Lalairu ships lying thousands of miles away, ready to go into warp.

  Picard turned away from the viewscreen and sat down thoughtfully in his seat. “Now what did you make of that?” he said to Riker and Troi.

  Troi shook her head. “Certainly she was distressed, Captain. And she became more so as she got into the technical details… as if the more concretely she considered the problem, the worse it became to her. But she obviously seems intent on getting herself and her people out of here as quickly as possible.”

  “Suggestions?” Picard said, glancing from Troi to Riker.

  Riker shrugged. “Hard to make an evaluation without understanding the science involved… or, after a statement like that, even which parts of science are involved.”

  “The translation problem, yes…” Picard sighed. “As soon as he’s settled, I’ll ask Commander Hwiii to see if he can make more sense of the Laihe’s concerns. There may be idiomatic material in her statement that the computer couldn’t correctly analyze. We’ll have a briefing when he’s made his own assessment. Meanwhile, we continue as scheduled. How is the data acquisition going?”

  Riker tried not to make a face, and Picard caught him at it and smiled slightly. Their present mission was a little dry for Riker’s tastes, though Picard knew Riker was as much for the acquisition of pure knowledge as anyone else. Starfleet had sent them up into this empty area partly to do research on the energy emissions from their arm of the Galaxy as a whole. In particular, they were to seek corroboration for the presently mooted theory that the Galaxy occasionally threw up from its core and inner arms immense jets or prominences of charged matter, contributing (among other things) to the structure and movement characteristics of the Galactic arms, possibly even to the increased or altered genesis of stars in areas where the “prominences” of matter and energy fell back into the Galactic disk. The Enterprise’s usual exploratory duties were, of course, to parallel this research, but up here in the empty dark, there was precious little to explore, and Will was itching for something more interesting to occupy his time.

  “Slowly, Captain,” Riker said with a wry smile. “And it’s not just me saying that. The traces of the ‘matterspouts’ we’re looking for are going to be very slight, even if we should happen to run right into one. You’re talking about space so empty that it would make a comet’s tail look crowded by comparison. Subatomic particles scattered one to a cubic terameter—not much more closely. And places where the spouts once were are going to look much the same, except for very specific muon and antimuon decays—assuming we can catch any of the particles in question decaying.” The smile got slightly sour. “A very big haystack… some very small needles.”

  “But patience is the key, as usual,” Picard said.

  “Oh, yes,” Riker said, “there was some excitement yesterday. We caught two antimuons with their pants down, one after the other. The physics lab got so excited, they threw a party.”

  “I heard,” Picard said. “What did you say to Lieutenant Hessan that made her put the ice cream down your shirt?”

  Riker’s casual expression didn’t change, but he colored slightly. Troi grinned and turned away.

  “Yes,” Picard said, “quite.” He got up and stretched. “Well, keep at it, Number One. Find enough of those needles and Fleet will let us stop this particular roll in the hay and go somewhere livelier.”

  Riker leaned back in his chair. “All the same, we may not need to. I really want to know what made the Laihe so nervous.”

  “Doubtless we’ll find out,” Picard said.

  CHAPTER 2

  The briefing happened just after shift change. Riker chuckled a little while setting it up. “A buffet briefing,” he said; “this might be setting a dangerous precedent.”

  Picard smiled. “If civilization is the ability to slide gracefully into customs not our own,” he said, “let’s get out there and slide.”

  Food at the briefing was simply courtesy to their guest. While there were species who did not discuss business over food, most of the cetaceans, except under most unusual circumstances, didn’t discuss business without food. To them, food was business—had been, for a long time, the only business they had. Everything else—song, love, birth, death—was counted play—in much the same way, scientists theorized, as Earth’s cetaceans had regarded the universe centuries before. When Triton’s cetacean species came into the Federation and discovered all the other kinds of business there were, they dove into them gladly, but they insisted on taking a lunch.

  The buffet was, in their guest’s honor again, mostly a fish dinner. There were turbot, bream, sea trout, salmon fresh and smoked, glinting mackerel, herring in what Picard thought was almost too many kinds—as usual, it reminded him of that Nobel Prize weekend on Earth, at the end of which he thought he would never want to see a herring again. But lobster, crab, fresh mussels, all those were there, too, as perfect as the replicator could make them. Commander Hwiii came gliding in and looked the spread over and squeaked with delight. “Down to business,” he said, “please!”

  Everyone laughed and started to fill their plates. Hwiii had brought up from his luggage a set of the manipulators he used to manage control panels geared to the ten-fingered. Now Picard watched with interest as Hwiii flicked his watery “sleeves” up and slipped his fins into the manipulators, which promptly sprouted long graceful tendrils of metal, five from each glove. “There’s a neural-transfer net installed just under the skin of each flipper,” Hwiii said, flexing the tendrils. “It transfers even very small movements of the phalangeal bones to the waldoes.”

  “‘Cyclic’ metal?” Picard said.

  “Yes, the only moving part is the long-chain molecule in the metal itself. It’s like the Clissman ‘self-trimming’ struts they use these days in solar-sail craft. Useful on the rubber-chicken circuit.” Hwiii dropped his jaw in the genuine delphine grin. “There are people who aren’t surprised that a dolphin can talk, but zut, are they surprised to see one use a knife and fork!”

  “I would imagine. Caviar, Commander?”

  “I haven’t seen you take any yet,” Hwiii said virtuously. “Rude to start before one’s host, even among my people.”

  Picard served out the beluga. “Bon appétit,” he said, and for a while there was only small talk, Data querying Riker about the smoking method used on the original salmon, Geordi trying to analyze the wine, as usual, and missing the year by a mile, also as usual. People found seats, got comfortable, while Hwiii floated comfortably on his pad by the captain’s chair and talked old neighborhoods and common acquaintances with him, research fellows at the Sorbonne whom they knew in common, gossip about the last year’s olive harvest in Provence. But Hwiii could not stay away from his topic for long, and Picard didn’t want him to. “It’s hardly a specialty for me,” he said. “Starship captains can’t afford to have too many specialties, by and large. But you’ve been doi
ng some rather controversial work, if I understand it.”

  The others had settled back to pay attention, recognizing the sound of their captain calling the meeting to order without seeming to do so. “It has been controversial,” Hwiii said, “and to tell you the truth, there are colleagues of mine who are happier to see me out here and out of touch than back home making their lives difficult in the symposia and the journals. I’m seen as a bit of a troublemaker, I’m afraid.”

  “Noooo,” Riker said, grinning. Picard smiled to himself: that mischievous look in Hwiii’s eyes could hardly be mistaken for anything but what it was.

  Hwiii glanced at Riker with the mischief very much in place. “Well, thank you for the vote of confidence, Commander. But I have been troublesome, and so far there’s not enough evidence to find out whether I’m right or wrong, which would resolve instantly the question of whether the trouble’s been worth it.”

  Hwiii paused for a bite of mackerel. “Starfleet took us on as navigations-research specialists particularly because of our ability to know where we were without recourse to maps or charts. They thought that this would be a useful art to incorporate into a starship’s repertoire. Now, some of our navigational and orienting ability in water has to do with the perception of local magnetic and gravity fields. But as soon as we went into space, where those fields either fell off to microstrengths or vanished entirely, it turned out that we could still navigate. And later investigation showed that we had some ability to perceive and orient ourselves by ‘hyperstring’ structures in space…. What’s that, please?”

  “Seafood sauce,” Riker said, passing the bowl. “Tomato sauce with spices.”

  “Thank you. Mmmmm…. Without oversimplifying, hyperstrings are hyperdimensional, nonphysical structures on which the matter and the energy of the physical universe are more or less ‘strung’ like beads. They aren’t anything to do with the strings you already know about, the strands of dense ‘cold’ matter that drift about in realspace; but the name was so appropriate that it stuck.”

  Hwiii put his knife and fork down crosswise on his plate and studied them for a moment. “Now, hyperstrings are, or have been, of no particular use. They’re just there. Their properties—density and so forth—have been thought to be only marginally affected by objects and occurrences in the physical universe, so there’s been some study of them to see whether hyperstrings themselves can be used as the determinants for an ‘absolute’ coordinate system against which the movements and locations of things in the physical universe, like stars and planets, can be plotted. However… my mathematical work is leading me in another direction. I believe that our previous assumptions are wrong, and that hyperstrings are profoundly affected by objects in the physical universe… even to the point where they might be usable to predict changes in it. It’s still unproven, but my reading of the theoretical work done so far suggests that when something happens to a physical object, the hyperstring structures it’s ‘attached’ to resonate with the change. But they resonate both forward and backward in time. Like a string, plucked, vibrating both back and forth.”

  “I bet astrophysicists would find that useful, if it were true,” Geordi said. “You could tell if a star was about to go nova—because the hyperstrings it was ‘attached’ to would be vibrating with the star’s explosion before the star itself blew up.”

  “That’s exactly right, Mr. La Forge. And there are endless other possibilities for what comes down, quite simply, to predicting the future, if my conclusions are correct. But there are problems.” Hwiii grinned, and Picard smiled wryly at the look of someone so thoroughly enjoying the prospect of “problems.” “Especially on the quantum level, the matter of reading hyperstrings and their data becomes more difficult the more hyperstrings, and henceforth matter and energy, there are in an area. Instead of one harpstring vibrating in the stillness, producing a single clear note, imagine many sounding all together, all on different notes.”

  “Harmonic interferences,” Data said. “Dissonances, canceling and partially canceling waves, chaotic sines—”

  “Chaotic,” Hwiii said, “is the operant term. You hear confusion, a buzz; nothing comes through clearly, especially not the datum you most desire, the one pure note. Interference from matter itself isn’t the problem, though hyperstrings and matter are inextricably associated. But the more matter and energy there are in an area, the more hyperstrings there are, and the harder it gets to clearly read any one of them in order to find out what its properties mean.”

  “Clear-hyperstring studies, then, would involve getting out somewhere where there aren’t many hyperstrings because there isn’t much matter or energy?” said Troi.

  “That’s exactly it, Counselor. Our studies of hyperstrings are still in their infancy precisely because no one has spent enough time out this far, taking the kind of measurements that will allow us to understand what hyperstring properties mean. Once obtained, we can take that information and apply it to hyperstrings closer to the populated worlds, eventually using hyperstring detection and analysis to build a navigational system which will exist independent of the moving Galaxy: an absolute coordinate system, utterly dependable.”

  “Such a thing would be an explorer’s dream,” Picard said. “Besides the limitations of the speed of today’s warpdrive engines, the other main problem hindering exploration out of the Galaxy has been the lack of navigational fix points close enough to a passing ship to be read accurately.” Picard reached out to his wineglass, smiling slightly: the prospect was exhilarating, even though it would not be his generation of starship captains who would experience it. “No need to sow thousands of beacons or squint at Cepheid variables that are too distant to be read reliably… or to hope the supernova you’re steering by in the next galaxy over will keep on behaving itself.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Hwiii said. “Alternatively, we can learn to use hyperstrings to examine matter itself… even, perhaps, to predict what matter will do. That will come much later, and the implications for all the humanities are tremendous. But for the moment, the one x2-track of hy-lepton decay in the right place, the one string sounding the one note, will be enough for me.”

  “The recurrent musical idiom, Commander,” Picard said, “is it the poetry of the scientist or the species?”

  Hwiii chuckled. “Something specifically delphine? Probably not. All our peoples are musical to one degree or another; but the great singers are the humpbacks and blues—they’re the philosophers, music is everything to them. Us, though, we’re too practical: we and the orcas. Music is talk, yes, but the talk is more interesting… with each other or you or other species.” He looked over at the buffet table with an expression of satisfaction. “That salmon, now…”

  He glided over to help himself. “Lemon,” he said, expertly squeezing a slice over the salmon. “Mmmm…. But anyway, the hyperstring researches. It’s early to be analyzing my data, but I’m seeing signs that the theory I came out to prove, of retrotemporal hyperstring oscillation, is true. That alone will create some noise when I get home, for some of my colleagues claim that such oscillations either cannot exist, because of some of the principles of quantum mechanics, or that they exist but are unreadable and unidentifiable as such because of the oscillations’ complexity. There’ll be trouble in the journals… if there’s not more immediate trouble here.”

  “The Laihe’s statement to us,” Picard said. “Have you been able to make more sense of it than we have?”

  “Some, I think, though translation is still a problem. I’ve been with these people for nearly nine months, and most of that time was spent trying to solve the linguistic and semantic difficulties. The rest was spent trying to get a version that I could use of their data on the general ‘stringiness’ of this space. About two months ago, I got what I believed to be a reliable baseline—I think. The Lalairu’s methods of taking readings are as different as their coordinate system.”

  Hwiii frowned—this expression looking almost exactly like a hum
an one. “Anyway, I then started taking my own readings and barely got a baseline set of my own before the Lalairu changed course away from the ‘empty’ spaces—not bothering to tell me why… or if they did, I didn’t understand them. However, if I’ve correctly translated the statement you copied to me, the Laihe is nervous about remaining in this space because the Lalairu’s own baseline measurements of this area, taken fairly recently hereabouts, are suddenly no longer viable. Hyperstring structures do not match what they ‘should be’ for this space—what they were as little as a year ago. For space so empty, the hyperstrings are becoming very tightly packed together. Something has been happening to derange the normal structure.”

  “What does it mean?” Picard said.

  “I don’t know.”

  Picard breathed out softly. “If you don’t know, who do we ask?”

  Hwiii laughed somewhat helplessly. “Me… later. Sorry, Captain, Starfleet would probably tell you that I’m the best expert they’ve got. And I don’t have enough data yet to give you a better evaluation, which I know is what you want. I have good hopes that, with a starship’s resources to aid me, I can find out… at which point I’ll tell you everything I can. Meanwhile, Mr. Data’s reputation as a researcher is a matter of fame. I would hope that with his help in analysis, and possibly Mr. La Forge’s to help me tune and install my detection equipment, we can quickly produce some answers for you.”

  “Well,” Picard said, “clearly there’s no point in considering any change in our patrol schedule just now. And at this distance, pausing long enough to notify Starfleet and get a response would be a waste of time. We’ll continue as planned. Commander, I will expect some news from you at the earliest possible moment as to how your former baseline data match present conditions in these spaces. Meanwhile, please see Commander Riker about any technical assistance you need.”