by Paul McAuley
At last, his father said, ‘I gave you the gift of the neural network. And during our conversations I inserted copies of the results of Dr Gagarian’s research, and the research of his colleagues. Did you find those files?’
‘I don’t understand much of what they contain, but I hope I have made good use of them.’
‘There is one more file. It is bound with this representation,’ his father said. ‘Would you like to see it?’
‘Very much.’
A window opened in the air. It showed Aakash and Dr Gagarian sitting on canvas chairs inside the cave. A shaft of sunlight angled behind them, falling steeply from a cleft in the overhead and splashing on ferns and moss that grew on and around a spill of boulders.
Dr Gagarian was talking about his work, about refining measurements he had made several times before. ‘I remain confident that the perturbation of the Higgs field was created by asymmetrical generation of virtual particles,’ he said, ‘but the question of how the virtual particles were generated is still unanswered. As is the nature of the asymmetry – the imbalance between annihilation and creator operators.’
‘I thought time reversal accounted for it,’ Aakash said.
‘It accounts for the disappearance of the antiphotons, which travel backwards along the light curve to their inception point. But the creation of baryonic virtual pairs is another matter.’
‘So that is the next problem. A hard one, I suppose.’
‘I have some ideas about attacking it. Exploring Ioni Robles Nguini’s hypothesis about wave propagation of Heaviside functions, for instance.’
The two men talked about experiments and experimental apparatus. They leaned forward to study windows.
‘More time,’ Aakash said at last. ‘More time, and more credit. Nabhoj and Nabhomani will not be pleased.’
‘They complain that they have no work,’ Dr Gagarian said. ‘But this is work. Real work on a real problem.’
‘A hard problem in a series of hard problems. How close are we? How close are we to understanding this?’
Dr Gagarian sat back and looked up at the stony overhead of the cave. The leathery mask of his face was as inscrutable as ever. After a little while, he said, ‘Long ago, there was a program that beamed information to extrasolar colonies. And that was based on even older programs, from the time when human beings had barely reached orbit around the Earth, when they had just begun to search for signals from other civilisations. Non-human civilisations. Aliens. They did not find any. And those who’ve looked since haven’t found any, either. Either because intelligence is rare, or because in the future we’ll make the universe more hospitable to humans and less hospitable to anything else. And since any alien species would do the same, it follows that because we exist, there can be no other alien species.
‘But suppose that one existed, and we detected a message it aimed at us. It would not matter at first what the message meant. That we had received it would be enough. Perhaps the Bright Moment is like that. We don’t know what happened to Sri Hong-Owen, where she went or what she became. We don’t know how it was done. All we know is that she transformed into something beyond our comprehension. And in the moment of her transformation she manipulated space-time and sent a signal that did not attenuate as it travelled across twenty-five light years, and created an identical image in the minds of all those it touched.’
Aakash said, ‘We know that she altered the local Higgs field. And we will soon know how she did that. We’ll prove that it is no miracle, and confound the fools who believe otherwise. And we’ll start a new philosophical revolution, and make back all the credit we’ve invested in this, and much more. That’s what you promised, when we set out. And that’s what we’ll do. It’s too late to have doubts.’
‘There is a theory that when symmetry broke in the first few femtoseconds after the Big Bang, it determined not only the parameters of the four fundamental forces but also the limits of our intelligence,’ Dr Gagarian said. ‘One thing that we do know about Sri Hong-Owen, thanks to the observations of the colonists of the Fomalhaut system, is that she disappeared when she vastened. Her discorporate personality inhabited vortices and knots in the electromagnetic field of the gas giant Cthuga, and they moved away in a direction orthogonal to every known dimension. No one knows where she went, but the least worst guess is that she created a new universe that could support a higher level of intelligence, just as other universes in the calculable range of possible universes support different values for the fundamental forces, and other universal constants. The seraphs are rumoured to have done something similar. And if she did, it follows that we can never understand where she went, or what she became. Because we are constrained by the limits of this universe, and she slipped free of those constraints.’
After a short silence, Aakash said, ‘We have not yet reached the limits of things we can understand, so there is no need to invoke other universes and higher planes of consciousness. Which sounds to me perilously close to the kind of nonsense touted by the end-time sects.’
Dr Gagarian said, ‘Yet time and again we have seen how posthuman clades falter and fail, or become trapped in abstract and increasingly recursive speculation. Time and again they have demonstrated that boosting human intelligence may be of little or no benefit.’
Aakash said, ‘The True comforted themselves with that notion. It didn’t do them much good, in the end.’
‘The Trues were wrong about many things. It does not mean that they were wrong about everything.’
‘Are you are trying to tell me that you don’t think you can do what you said you could do?’
‘I am confident that it will be possible to understand how the message was sent, and how it was received. I am not confident about understanding anything else. Why it was sent. What Sri Hong-Owen was becoming, when she sent it. What she became, and where she went, afterwards.’
‘Well, as long as we can find out how to manipulate the Higgs field, the rest does not matter.’
‘It matters to me,’ Dr Gagarian said.
‘You want every question answered, everything squared away. It’s in your nature. But if you started asking why people do the things they do, you’d never get to the end of it. And even if you could answer those questions, what use would those answers be?’
‘I do not share your utilitarian outlook.’
‘Perhaps not, but we do have an agreement that most would call utilitarian. I help you with your research, and we divide the profits.’
‘I have not forgotten it. I do not forget anything.’
‘Then you remember what we agreed about your colleagues.’
‘I do. But it is not yet time. I still need their help.’
‘You’ll have to manage without it,’ Aakash said. ‘We’re close to cracking this problem. If your colleagues know everything we know, it will be hard to make any kind of profit from it. They’ll undercut our price, or give away the information. We still need Worden’s help. And besides, he’s my friend, and the partner of my broker. But your friends – Ioni Robles Nguini, Salx Minnot Flores, Ivanova Galchan – we’re cutting them loose. You knew the time would come when I invoked that part of our agreement. Here it is.’
‘And if I refuse to cooperate?’
‘We’re planning to make a run to Porto Jeffre for resupply as soon as you finish this present run of measurements. If we can no longer work together, I think we should head there at once. And when we arrive, you can disembark and begin to look for another sponsor. I’ll keep all the equipment, of course. The probes and the rest. I paid for them; my son built them. Maybe Worden and I can find some use for them. Maybe we’ll find another philosopher who can complete your work. I’d rather not do it. I hope I don’t have to. But there it is.’
Dr Gagarian stared unblinkingly at Aakash. At last, he said, ‘You know that I cannot leave. Not now. Not yet.’
‘Good. We both have a lot invested in this thing of ours. I would hate to see you throw it away on a poi
nt of principle.’
‘My colleagues have invested much time and credit, too.’
‘You can finish your work without them.’
‘I think so. Yes.’
‘But they can’t finish it without you.’
‘Of course not.’
‘There it is. I hope you see why it’s the right thing to do.’
‘I see why you are doing it.’
‘We will go on together. We will put an end to all the nonsense that surrounds the Bright Moment, and get filthy rich.’
Dr Gagarian smiled his small, stiff smile. ‘Yes, why not?’
The window closed and Hari saw that the robot was standing behind his father. Its silvery flanks and the glass turret of its head gleamed in the hot sunlight.
‘I had hoped your father would be a lion,’ it said. ‘It seems that he was no more than a weak soul who tried and failed to match the reach of his ambition. He wanted to change the world, but only because he hoped to make a profit from it.’
Hari said, ‘Have you or anyone else here taken up Dr Gagarian’s research?’
‘We have no interest in going where Sri Hong-Owen went. If she went anywhere.’
‘My father wanted things to change, but you’re stuck. You reached your limits long ago.’
‘You aren’t really angry with me,’ the robot said. ‘You’re angry with your father.’
Aakash was watching them with a mild and somewhat quizzical expression, like a child trying to follow the conversation of adults.
‘No, not with him,’ Hari said.
It was true. He wasn’t angry with his father: he was angry with himself for holding on to a last, foolish hope that it had been Dr Gagarian, not his father, who had started the long chain of causation that had led, step by step, with grave and terrible logic, to Mr Mussa’s daughter approaching Nabhomani in Porto Jeffre, the deal with Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters, the hijack . . .
His father had not changed after he passed over because the dead did not change. Aakash had so often talked about using the hard logic of philosophy to undercut the crazy beliefs of the end-time cults, about using technology derived from the Bright Moment to bring about a second age of expansion, and so on and so forth, but his idealism had been no more than a peg for a sales pitch. At bottom, he had only been interested in how he could profit from Dr Gagarian’s research. He had been, as he had always been, a shrewd, unsentimental trader.
The robot said, ‘I think we are finished here.’
Hari said to Aakash, ‘Do you have anything else to tell me?’
‘You know about the neural network and about the files it contains.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘And you saw and understood the record of the last meeting.’
‘It has given me much to think about.’
‘I always wanted to do what was best for my family,’ Aakash said.
‘I know you tried, in your fashion.’
The robot said, ‘We can take care of him. This viron does not take up much space, and he will be able to interact with other incomplete personalities. He might even be able to develop, if you could supply additional memories of his original.’
‘No,’ Hari said. ‘He has done what he was supposed to do. It is time to let him go.’
‘You would have me erase him?’
‘He’s already gone. What’s left is no more than an eidolon.’
‘And you will go on with this work?’
‘I hope that someone will,’ Hari said, and woke up in the hammock aboard the ship.
‘That didn’t take long,’ Rubber Duck said. ‘Did you get what you wanted?’
4
At one point on the short voyage to Earth, Hari asked Rubber Duck if he’d ever been tempted to head into the outer dark.
‘When I can’t get any more business, or if I acquire a debt I can’t pay off, then maybe I’ll decide it’s time to go on the drift,’ the tanky said. ‘Hitch a ride on a long-period comet and go to sleep, wake up every century or so to see what’s going on back in the system. Or maybe I’ll go look for the Grey Harbours.’
‘The place where old ships go to die?’
‘The place where old tanky pilots like me go to merge with a heaven box that runs a parallel universe. Our own version of the Memory Whole, where a hundred thousand worldlets teem with every kind of civilisation, the free-trading spirit flourishes, and the running is free and easy. But not yet, not yet. I’m still interested in people. I want to find out what happens next. This thing you’re caught up in, maybe it will shake things up.’
‘Maybe,’ Hari said.
The white pearl of Earth swelled in the window, an equatorial belt of ocean and land clamped between the fretted margins of two huge caps of ice and snow. And then Hari was down, amongst its cities and people and the weary weight of its gravity and history.
At first, he lived with his cousin, Aamaal, and her family. It took several months for his body to adapt to Earth’s gravity and overcome assaults by viruses and allergies. He spent the time learning about the family business and absorbing the various protocols for dealing with representatives of the governments and co-ops of the nations and city-states of Earth. Aamaal was much older than him, a strong intelligent woman in her sixties, with two husbands and three children and five grandchildren. It had been her idea, not her father’s, to set up the import/export business. She suggested to Hari that he could take charge of the Belt end of things. It was a kind offer, but Hari knew that her crew of factors were experienced and trustworthy and dependable, and he would be an unnecessary addition. And so he declined, saying that he wanted to see something of Earth before he could begin to think about returning to the Belt.
‘You’re worried that those weird sisters will catch up with you,’ Aamaal said. ‘Or that the Saints will.’
‘If they were planning to come after me, they would have done so already. But perhaps I should move on, just in case. I’ve caused so much trouble to so many people . . .’
Hari was thinking of his dead, as he often did. His father and Agrata and Nabhomani. Dr Gagarian and his colleagues. Eli Yong and Levi, Sri Hong-Owen’s daughters. And then there was Nabhoj, exiled on his lonely little rock . . .
He said, ‘It doesn’t seem right that I should have survived.’
‘We’re all glad that you did.’
‘You don’t know me. I wanted revenge, and the price was paid by others.’
‘Hush,’ Aamaal said. As if speaking to her youngest, soothing him after a nightmare. ‘You’re here now, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.’
In the spring, Hari went out into the world and travelled through the ruins of the True Empire’s hubris, through landscapes damaged by the Long Twilight. He attempted to drum up business, and delighted in the new places he saw, the new people he met. He tried to contact Ioni Robles Nguini, but the mathematician’s family said that he had given up his research and did not want to be disturbed, and Hari did not press the matter. He found work for Rubber Duck, hauling cargoes between Earth and the Belt, and intermittently exchanged gossip with the old tanky, but he never went back up.
Ten years passed. Twenty. Twenty-two.
5
One night, Hari started awake with a fresh image printed in his mind: a pure white space resonant with arcane significance. People were shouting, somewhere outside his guest-house room. Angry, panicky voices. He rose and stepped to the window and looked out across the dark, low-rise city. Bamako, the capital of the Azawalk Fealties. It was a clear, cloudless night. Stars leaned over the city and the black ribbon of the Niger river. Lights were flickering on everywhere. Bells ringing out above a growing and restless murmur. A woman’s voice below Hari’s window asking the same question over and over. What happened? What just happened?
Hari knew what had happened. He knew what had passed through this world, and all the others.
Soon, the news was everywhere. It had been a second Bright Moment. As before, its wavefront had expanded a
cross the Solar System at the speed of light, and everyone awake or asleep had been affected by it. But this time its origin had not been outside the Solar System, but within it. At Saturn, where the seraphs had vanished.
In the days that followed there were riots, several instances of mass suicide, flare-ups of old enmities, and other disturbances, but the trouble was localised and ended quickly. Humanity had survived the first Bright Moment; the second was disquieting, but lacked the shock of the unknown. People weren’t asking what it was, but what it meant.
Hari’s bios filtered messages from people who wanted to contact him, wanted to discuss the research that his father and Dr Gagarian and the others had done so long ago. One message immediately caught his attention. It was from Ioni Robles Nguini.
Fifteen days later, Hari arrived at Portlandia, an arcology on the western coast of what had once been the northernmost extent of Greater Brazil. He hired a scooter and travelled into the wilderness, following a broad valley that cut through a mountain range. The scooter was a blunt, powerful machine with a teardrop canopy that sheltered him from the freezing headwind. He flew above a river mostly covered in ice. Channels of open water smoked in the cold. Tall fir trees crowded the steep banks on either side. Green trees and white ice and black rock under a clear blue sky. Flying through this cold, clean landscape reminded him of riding with Riyya, in Ophir. The wild chase after Mr Mussa’s daughter.
There was a series of falls bearded with enormous icicles. Hari jockeyed the scooter above them, flew across a broad gravel pan cut by braided, ice-choked channels. Presently, following the instructions he’d been given, he landed at the edge of the pan and walked up a steep path through stands of Douglas fir. Smaller trees grew in breaks in the thick cover. Yellow pine, sugar pine. Hemlock, incense cedar, maul oak. Hari began to sweat inside his heavy sweater and blue jerkin. It was very quiet under the trees. An intimidating silence broken only by soft slides of sloughed snow. No wind. His breathing and pulse loud in his ears.