At the closed door — a mundane oak panel in this plain carpeted corridor — he paused. “Be warned,” he said.
Emma’s hand crept into Malenfant’s.
Cornelius opened the door.
And Emma found herself on Cruithne: black sky, dull black surface curving under her feet, the light from a powerful sun, hanging above her, drowning the stars. And, in a neatly excavated pit in front of her, there was a blue artifact: thirty feet tall, shining, perfectly circular, like some piece of blunt municipal sculpture. Waiting.
She walked forward, hesitantly, her eyes slowly adjusting. When she looked down she saw that her feet were a little below the coal-black asteroid surface, as if she were paddling in a shallow pool. Of course, she felt nothing.
Cornelius said, “We papered the walls with softscreens. Not quite immersive VR. Much of the imagery comes directly from the various camera feeds we’re managing to operate up there. The rest is software extrapolation. I’ve been preparing our firefly robot probe. But—”
“But what?” Malenfant said.
Cornelius sighed. “An hour ago this happened.” He tapped at a desk surface.
A firefly robot materialized from a pixel hail in front of them. Using its cables and pitons to drag at the coarse surface, it made its painstaking way toward the artifact. Lines trailed back from it, out of their view.
Malenfant said, “That’s our robot?”
“No. Not ours. Just watch.”
And now an object like a huge beach ball, attached to the long lines, came washing into the virtual reconstruction, towed by the firefly. It was water, Emma saw: a droplet wrapped up in a shimmering golden blanket, complex waves molding its surface as it bounced gently on the regolith.
Within the blanket something was moving.
“It’s a squid,” Emma said.
“Yes.” Cornelius rubbed his nose. “We think it’s a Sheena. That is, from the faction that still inhabits the Nautilus. They, it, seem to retain some of the mission’s original imperative. Watch what happens now.”
The firefly, with a neat pulse of microrockets, leapt through the portal. It was briefly dwarfed by the great blue circle. Then it disappeared; Emma glimpsed a red flash.
The cables that trailed back to the beach ball oscillated, but they did not grow slack. The golden beach ball sat on the surface, quivering.
Malenfant stepped forward, hands on hips, studying the image. “Where did the firefly go? Did it come out the other side of the hoop?”
“We think so,” Cornelius said. “But the other side doesn’t seem to be on Cruithne.”
There was a long silence.
The squid in the golden beach ball jetted back and forth, patient. Then the cables grew taut again and began dragging the beach ball forward.
Watching the cables disappear into the artifact, apparently not connected to anything, was eerie.
It took just seconds for the beach ball to complete its series of awkward, slow bounces to the blue circle. Then, after a single liquid impact with the blue circle itself, the beach ball shimmered through the hoop. As the curved golden wall hit the dark disc, it seemed to flatten out, Emma thought, quickly reddening to darkness. At last the beach ball was squashed to an ellipse, dimmed to a sunset glimmer.
Then it was gone, not a trace remaining.
“Holy shit,” Malenfant said.
Cornelius held his hand up. “Wait.”
There was a screech, loud enough to sting Emma’s eardrums. “What was that?”
“A radio signal,” Cornelius said. “Very high intensity. Coming from the artifact. I cleaned it up, and got this.”
It was a TV image of a squid: coarse, the colors distorted, in golden gloom. She was repeating a simple sign, over and over.
“She’s saying reef” Cornelius said.
Cruithne’s wheeling black sky, legs crossed, sipping latte. bmma
watched Earth and Moon climb through Cruithne’s fifteen-
minute night, blue spark with pale gray-brown companion.
“I have only partial answers.” Cornelius’ face was heavily shadowed, its expression impossible to read. “The Sheena obviously survived. She used a camera in her hab bubble to send back that message. But she’s… somewhere else. I suspect we’re dealing with an Einstein-Rosen bridge here.”
“A what?”
“A multiply connected space.” He waved his hands. “A bridge between two points in space and time, otherwise separated. Or maybe even between two different spacetimes altogether, different levels of the manifold.”
“The manifold?” Emma asked.
“The ensemble of possible universes,” Cornelius said. He took his softscreen and folded it over, pinching two places together with thumb and forefinger. “You must be familiar with the principle. If I take this flat space, two-dimensional, and fold it over in the third dimension, I can connect two points otherwise far separated. And the point where they meet, the place between my thumb and finger, is a circle, a flat place.”
“So if you fold over our three-D space in four dimensions—”
“The interface you get is three-dimensional. A box of some kind, where the two spaces touch.”
“You’re talking about a wormhole,” Malenfant said.
Cornelius said seriously, “A wormhole is only one possibility. An Einstein-Rosen bridge is a generic term for any such interface, which is Lorentzian. That is, it transforms like special relativity—”
Malenfant snapped, “I thought you needed a lot of energy to make a wormhole. Funny physics.”
Cornelius sighed. “You do indeed. To keep their throats open, wormholes have to be threaded with exotic matter.” He looked at them. “That means negative energy density. Antigravity.”
“I didn’t see any antigravity machines out there on the asteroid,” Emma said.
Cornelius shook his head. “You don’t understand. General relativity is barely a century old. We haven’t even observed a black hole directly yet. And we believe that relativity is only a partial description of reality anyhow. We have no idea how a sufficiently advanced society might set up an Einstein-Rosen bridge: what it might look like, how it might behave. For example, it’s possible the ring itself contains something like cosmic string. Channels of unified-force energy. Very massive, very powerful gravity fields.”
“How could you manipulate such stuff?” Emma asked.
“I don’t know.” He smiled.
“How that thing works is less important right now than what it does,” Malenfant said. “If the ring is some kind of wormhole, a gateway to somewhere else—”
“Orsomewhen.”
“Then the Sheena isn’t dead. And if she stepped through that gateway, she can step back again. Right?”
Cornelius shook his head. “We think this particular bridge is one-way. That’s theoretically possible. The Kerr-Newman singularity, for instance—”
Emma faced him. “Why do you think our portal is one-way?”
“Because we can’t see through it. Because light falling on it, even sunlight, is absorbed completely.” He gazed at her. “Emma, if it was two-way, we’d be able to see Sheena. Wherever she is.”
Malenfant growled, “So what do we do?”
Cornelius smiled. “Why, we send through our firefly, as we planned.”
They invested another hour while Cornelius finalized the setup of his firefly robot. It had been loaded up with every sensor Cornelius could think of, mostly stuff Emma had never heard of.
Emma stretched, paced around this strange VR representation ofCruimne.
None of this is real, she thought. It is a light show from the sky. None of it matters, compared to the mountain of mails that must be mounting up in her “In” tray even now, compared to the complexities of the human world in which she had to survive. And when it all proves to be some dumb illusion, then we’ll get back to work.
Or not.
Without warning Cornelius collapsed the VR walls. Emma found herself in a bare,
black-walled room illuminated by a single wall-mounted softscreen. The screen showed a slab of dark sky, a stretch of regolith; it was the single point of view returned by their firefly’s camera.
Cornelius, working at a desktop softscreen, sent a command.
Long time-delayed minutes later, the firefly started trundling toward the portal. The screen image shuddered, ground and sky lurching, as the firefly snaked its way across Cruithne’s battered surface. Data returned in a chattering stream to Cornelius’software.
Then the firefly stopped, maybe six feet short of the portal itself. The portal loomed against a star-scattered sky, bright blue, a hole of emptiness.
“This is it,” Cornelius whispered. “Well. I wonder what we’re going to see.” He grinned coldly.
The robot, autonomous, moved forward once more.
The portal surface loomed larger, the blue ring at its boundary passing out of the image, only a thin dusting of Cruithne regolith at the base of the image giving any sense of motion.
There was a blue flash. Then darkness.
Leon Coghlan:
Did you see it? It was on all the channels. Jesus Christ. If this is
real — Spike, think about the implications.
If Reid Malenfant’s light show from Bootstrap has any validity at all — and our experts here at the think tank, e and otherwise, have a consensus that it does — then the old arguments about mutually assured destruction, the nuclear winter and so forth, no longer apply. We know that no matter what we do today, the species will emerge strong and destined for a long and glo-riousfuture.
The only question is who will control that future.
We know, Spike, that our enemies are war-gaming this, just as we are. We’re already in a game of chicken; we’re in those two onrushing cars locked eyeball to eyeball with the other guy, and it’s a game we have to win.
Many of us think our best strategy right now is to throw out the steering wheel.
And that’s why we must consider a first strike.
I know this is a controversial view, Spike. But you have a seat on Marine One. If anybody has a chance to enact this, to press it on the president, it’s you.
Emma Stoney:
The image broke up into static, restabilized.
Emma felt bewildered. “Has the firefly gone through?”
“We lost a couple of systems,” Cornelius said. “Overloads. I think…”
Emma leaned forward. The screen was empty, dark… No, not quite. Something at the base. Broken ground, regolith, asteroid soil.
The firefly seemed to be rolling forward. A spot of ground directly in front of it was lit up by the small floodlights it carried. Farther out the ground was illuminated by a softer glow: not sunlight, or even starlight, she realized. The light seemed diffuse, as if from some extended source, a glowing ceiling somewhere out of her view.
There were no stars in the sky.
Suddenly a bright yellow light washed over the regolith, drowning the firefly’s feeble glow.
Emma was dazzled. “What’s that? Is something wrong?”
“No. I just turned on the floods. We can’t see into the portal, but we can fire light beams through from the other side.”
Malenfant said, “I think the firefly is panning the camera.”
The image crept sideways: empty sky, broken regolith in a wash of light.
“Shit,” Malenfant said. “It looks like Cruithne.”
“I think we are still on Cruithne. Or a version of Cruithne. The firefly has a gravimeter, and instruments to study the surface material. The data’s patchy. But the composition looks the same as Cruithne’s, at first glance. The gravity strength is actually a little down, however.”
“What does that mean?”
“Cruithne has lost a little mass.”
“How?”
Cornelius just glared.
A blue ring scanned slowly into the picture. Its interior was shining, bright, and yellow.
“The portal,” Cornelius said. “That light is our flood, shining through. In fact when the sun comes up on our side, the sunlight should reach the far side—”
“If this is Cruithne,” Malenfant said, “where the hell are we? The far side, the pole?”
“You don’t understand,” Cornelius whispered.
The firefly was moving its own small spotlights. The glowing ellipses swept across the regolith and fell on the portal.
Malenfant grabbed a softscreen and began flicking through camera angles. “If it is possible to get back through that portal—”
“We should be able to see the firefly’s glow, coming back through this side,” Cornelius said. “Good thinking.”
They found a stable external image of the portal from this side; the asteroid ground here was littered with instruments and fireflies. The portal stayed dark. Emma stared hard, hoping to see a twinkling glow, like a flashlight shone out of a dark pit. There was nothing.
Cornelius nodded, looking pleased.
“Damn it, Cornelius,” Emma snapped. “This means the Sheena won’t be able to get back. Doesn’t it?”
He seemed surprised by her anger. “But we knew that already. This just reinforces the hypothesis.”
“And that pleases you.”
“Of course it does.” He was puzzled.
Emma took a breath to calm herself.
“If the firefly’s light isn’t making it back,” Malenfant said, “how come its radio signal is?”
“I don’t think it is. I think the portal — the far end — is picking up the firefly’s transmissions and rebroadcasting them, maybe through some kind of Feynman radio. And I think the portal at our end is picking up the Feynman stuff, and transmitting it again as radio signals, which we can pick up.”
“Like Sheena’s initial screech.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of Feynman radio? Neutrinos?”
“There is a higher neutrino flux coming from the portal since we started this,” Cornelius said. “But I’m guessing. We’re dealing with capabilities far beyond our own.”
The firefly’s camera angle continued to scan across the asteroid’s horizon; the eerily glowing portal, standing alone, started to move out of the picture.
A crater came into the field of view: so vast and deep only its near rim, high and sharp, was visible.
“Look at that,” Malenfant said. “It must be a mile across. That isn’t on our Cruithne.”
“Not yet,” Cornelius murmured.
“Not yet? You think the Sheena has gone into the future? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Think about it. If there had been a crater like that on Cruithne in the past, what could have erased it?”
“How far in the future?”
“I’ve no way of telling,” Cornelius said. “There’s no sign of residual radioactivity from that crater. If it was caused by a nuclear weapon the detonation must have been ten, a hundred thousand years ago.”
“A hundred thousand years? “
“That’s a minimum. The maximum…” He checked another datum. “The firefly is carrying thermocouples. I programmed it to check the background radiation temperature of the universe. The cooling glow of the Big Bang… I can’t see a change within the tolerance of the equipment from the present value, three degrees above absolute.”
“What does that mean?”
“Hard to say. We’ve gone forward less than a billion years, perhaps.”
Emma said, “My God, Cornelius. You expected this. You were prepared to track giant jumps in time by measuring changes in the temperature of the universe?”
“I didn’t know what we would find. I didn’t want to rule out anything.”
“How can you think that way?”
He smiled slyly. “I’m an obsessive. You know me, Emma.” He tapped his forehead.
“There,” Malenfant said, pointing at the big softscreen. “The Sheena.”
The golden beach ball was sitting on the asteroid ground, under the bl
ack sky. And something was reflected in the golden meniscus: something above the frame of the image, up in the sky. Swirling light, washing across the gold.
A shadow swam within the beach ball.
“Can we speak to her?” Emma said.
“We can pass radio signals into the portal, like our floodlights. The Sheena should be able to pick them up.”
“And presumably she can speak to us, through the Feynman mechanism.”
“If she wants to.” Cornelius tapped his softscreen. “Just speak. The software will translate.”
“Sheena?” Malenfant said. “Sheena, can you hear me?”
They waited patiently through the time delay.
On the screen, the squid turned to look at the firefly. Cornelius’ software picked up a sign: simple, iconic.
Dan.
“Not Dan. Friends. Are you healthy?”
They waited out another long pause.
Reef.
Malenfant said tightly, “What in hell is she looking at? How can I ask her—”
“We can do better than that,” Cornelius said. He tapped his softscreen.
At Cornelius’ command, the firefly’s camera swiveled away from the beach ball and tipped up toward the sky, the way the Sheena was looking.
A ceiling of curdled light filled the camera’s frame.
“Shit,” Malenfant said. “No wonder there were no stars…”
Emma found herself staring at a Galaxy.
It was more complex than Emma had imagined. The familiar disc — shining core, spiral arms — was actually embedded in a broader, spherical mass of dim stars. The core, bulging out of the plane of the disc, was bigger than she had expected — a compact mass of yellowish light. Delicately blue spiral arms — she counted them, one, two, three, four — wrapped tightly around the core were much brighter than the core itself. She could see individual stars blazing there, a granularity, and dark lanes traced between each arm.
There was a surprising amount of structure, she thought, a lot of complexity; this Galaxy was quite evidently an organized system, not just some random mass of stars.
“So, a Galaxy,” Malenfant said. “Our Galaxy?”
“I think so,” Cornelius said. “Four spiral arms… It matches radio maps I’ve seen. I’d say our viewpoint is a quarter of a galactic diameter away from the plane of the disc. Which is to say, maybe twenty-five thousand light-years away. Our sun is in one of the spiral arms, about a quarter of the way from the center.”
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