So she made her calls to Charlie, and exercised, and read books, and watched virtual dramas, her skin bathed in the sunlight that blew her toward the orbit of the Earth.
Before the time delays got too long, Myra spoke to Ellie, back on Mars.
“Ellie, you’re a physicist. Help me understand something. What is Mir? How can another universe exist? Where is my mother?”
“Do you want the short answer, or the long?”
“Try both.”
“Short answer—I don’t know. Nobody does. Long answer—our physics isn’t advanced enough yet to give us more than glimpses, analogies maybe, of the deeper truths the Firstborn must possess. What do you know about quantum gravity?”
“Less than you can imagine. Try me with an analogy.”
“All right. Look—suppose we threw your mother into a black hole, a big one. What happens to her?”
Myra thought about it. “She’s lost forever.”
“Okay. But there are two problems with that. First, you’re saying your mother, or more importantly the information that defines your mother, has been lost to the universe…” More importantly. That was classic Ellie. “But that violates a basic rule of quantum mechanics, which says that information always has to be conserved. Otherwise any semblance of continuity from past to future could be lost. More strictly speaking, the Schrödinger wave equation wouldn’t work anymore.”
“Oh. So what’s the resolution?”
“Black holes evaporate. Quantum effects at the event horizon cause a hole to emit a drizzle of particles, carrying away its mass-energy bit by bit. And the information that once defined Bisesa is leaked back that way. The universe is saved, hurrah. You understand I’m speaking very loosely. When you get the chance, ask Thales about the holographic principle.”
“You said there were two problems,” Myra said hastily.
“Yes. So we get Bisesa’s information back. But what happens to Bisesa, from her point of view? The event horizon isn’t some brick wall in space. So in her view, the information that defines her isn’t trapped at the event horizon to be leaked away, but rides with her on into the hole’s interior.”
“Okay,” Myra said slowly. “So there are two copies of the mother-information, one inside the hole, one leaking away outside.”
“No. Can’t allow you that. Another basic principle: the cloning theorem. You can’t copy quantum information.”
Myra was starting to lose the thread. “So what’s the resolution to that?”
“Non-locality. In everyday life, locality is an axiom. I’m here, you’re over there, we can’t be in two places at once. But the resolution of the black hole conundrum is that a bit of information can be in two places at once. Sounds paradoxical, but a lot of features of the quantum universe are like that—and quantum gravity is even worse.
“And the two places in which the information exists, separated by a ‘horizon’ like the event horizon, can be far apart—light-years. The universe is full of horizons; you don’t need a black hole to make one.”
“And you think that Mir—”
“We believe the Firstborn are able to manipulate horizons and the non-locality of information in order to ‘create’ their baby universes, and to ‘transfer’ your mother and other bits of cargo between them. How they do this, we don’t know. And what else they’re capable of, we don’t know either. We can’t even map limits to their capabilities, actually.” Ellie paused. “Does that answer your question?”
“I’m not sure. I guess I need to absorb it.”
“Just thinking through this stuff is revolutionizing physics.”
“Well, that’s a consolation.”
41: ARKS
“We found them, Mum. Just where your astronomers predicted.
“It wasn’t a great diversion for the Liberator. To tell the truth we were glad of a chance to give the main drive a shakedown—and for a change of view out of the windows. Up here it’s not like the dramas. Space is empty…”
It was a fleet of ships, slim pencils slowly rotating, glowing in the light of a distant sun. Moving through the wastes beyond the asteroids, they were moving too rapidly to be drawn back by the sun’s gravity; they were destined for an interstellar journey.
“They’re human,” John Metternes said.
“Oh, yes.”
John peered at the images. “They have red stars painted on their hulls. Are they Chinese?”
“Probably. And probably abandoning the solar system altogether.”
Edna expanded the image. The ships were a variety of designs, seen close to.
She downloaded analysis and speculation from Libby.
“They don’t seem to have anything like our antimatter drive,” she read. “Even if they did, the journey time would still be years. There are probably only a few, if any, conscious crew aboard each of those ships. The rest may be in suspended animation; the ships may be flying Hibernacula. Or they may be stored as frozen zygotes, or as eggs plus sperm…” She scrolled down through increasingly baroque suggestions. “One exotic possibility is that there is no human flesh at all aboard the arks. Maybe they’re just carrying DNA strands. Or maybe the informational equivalent is being held in some kind of radiation-tolerant memory store. Not even any wet chemistry.”
“And then you’d manufacture your colonists at the other end. Look, my bet is they’re using a variety of strategies for the sake of a robust mission design,” said John the engineer. “After all their bid for Mars failed. So they are giving up on the solar system.”
“Perhaps it’s a rational thing to do, if the Firstborn are going to keep on hammering us. Ah. According to Libby, since we found them, we’ve had some contact with the Chinese authorities. The flagship is called the Zheng He, after their great fifteenth-century explorer—”
“Do you think they will make it?”
“It’s possible. We’re certainly not going to stop them. I’m not sure if we could; no doubt those arks are heavily armed. I think I rather hope they succeed. The more mankind is scattered, the better chance of survival we have in the long term.”
John said, “But it’s also possible the Firstborn will follow them to Alpha Centauri, or wherever the hell, and deal with them in their turn.”
“True. Anyhow it makes no difference to our mission.”
“It’s another complication for the future, Mum, if the world gets through the Q-bomb assault: an encounter a few centuries out, our A-drive starships meeting whatever society the Chinese managed to build out there under the double suns of Centauri.
“Maybe Thea will have to deal with that. Give her my love. Okay, back to business, we’re now resuming our cruise alongside the Q-bomb. Liberator out.”
42: CYCLOPS
As they neared Cyclops Station Myra glimpsed more mirrors in space. They were lightships, swimming around the observatory. After many days suspended alone in the three-dimensional dark, it was a shock to have so much company.
The Maxwell pushed through the loose crowd of sails and approached the big structure at the heart of the station. Alexei said it was called Galatea. It was a wheel in space.
The Maxwell bored in along the axis of the wheel, heading straight for the hub. Galatea was a spindly thing, like a bicycle wheel with spokes that glimmered, barely visible. But there were concentric bands at different radii from the center, painted different colors, silver, orange, blue, so that Galatea had something of the look of an archery target. Galatea turned on its axis, in sunlight every bit as bright as the light that fell on Earth itself, and long shadows swept across its rim and spokes like clock hands.
Alexei said, “Looks luxurious, doesn’t it? After the sunstorm an awful lot of money was pumped into planet-finder observatories. And this was how a good deal of it was spent.”
“It reminds me of a fairground ride,” Myra said. “And it looks sort of old-fashioned.”
Alexei shrugged. “It’s a vision from a century ago, of how the future was supposed to be, which they f
inally got the money to build, just for once. But I’m no history buff.”
“Umm. I suppose it’s spinning for artificial gravity.”
“Yep. You dock at the stationary hub and take elevators down to the decks.”
“And why the colors—silver, red, blue?”
He smiled. “Can’t you guess?”
She thought it over. “The further you go from the hub, the higher the apparent gravity. So they’ve painted the lunar-gravity deck silver—one-sixth G.”
“You’ve got it. And the Mars deck is orange, and the Earth-gravity deck is blue. Galatea is here to serve as a hub for the Cyclops staff, but it has always been a partial-gravity laboratory. There are pods suspended from the outermost deck—see? The biologists are trying out higher gravities than Earth’s, too.” He grinned. “They’ve got some big-boned lab rats down there. Maybe we’ll need that research someday, if we’re going to go whizzing about the solar system on antimatter drives.”
As the wheel loomed closer Myra lost her view of the outer rim, and her vision was filled with the engineering detail of the inner decks, the spinning hub with its brightly lit ports, the spokes and struts, and the steadily shifting shadows.
A pod came squirting out of an open portal right at the center of the hub. When it emerged it was spinning on its own axis, turning with the angular momentum of Galatea, but with a couple of pulses of reaction-jet gas it stabilized and approached the Maxwell cautiously.
“Max isn’t going in any closer,” Alexei said. “Lightship sails and big turning wheels don’t mix. And you always take Galatea’s own shuttles in to the hub rather than pilot yourself. They have dedicated AIs, who are good at that whole spinning-up thing…”
The docking was fast, slick, over in minutes. Hatches opened with soft pops of equalizing pressure.
A young woman came tumbling out of the shuttle, and threw herself zero-gravity straight into Alexei’s arms. Myra and Yuri exchanged mocking glances.
The couple broke, and the girl turned to Myra. “You’re Bisesa’s daughter. I’ve seen your picture in the files. It’s good to meet you in the flesh. My name is Lyla Neal. Welcome to Cyclops.”
Myra grabbed a strut to brace herself and shook her hand.
Lyla was maybe twenty-five, her skin a rich black, her hair a compact mass, her teeth brilliant white. Unlike Yuri and Alexei, like Myra, she wore an ident tattoo on the smooth skin of her right cheek.
Myra said, “You evidently know Alexei.”
“I met him through his father. I’m one of Professor Carel’s students. I’m up here, ostensibly, to pursue academic projects. Cosmological. Distant galaxies, primordial light, that sort of thing.”
Myra glanced at Alexei. “So this is how you spy on your father for the Spacers.”
“Yeah, Lyla is my mole. Neat, isn’t it?” His tone was flat; perhaps there was some guilt in there under the flippancy.
They all clambered into the shuttle with their bits of luggage.
Once aboard Galatea, they were hurried through the hub structure and loaded into a kind of elevator car.
Lyla said, “Grab onto a rail. And you might want your feet down that way,” she said, pointing away from the axis of spin.
The elevator dropped with a disconcerting jolt.
They passed quickly out of the hub complex, and suddenly they were suspended in space, inside a car that was a transparent bubble dangling from a cable. As they descended the centrifugal-acceleration pull gradually built up, until their feet settled to the floor, and that unpleasant Coriolis-spin sensation faded. They were dropping through a framework of spokes toward the great curving tracks of the wheel’s decks below. All this was stationary in Myra’s view, but the sun circled slowly, and the shadows cast by the spokes swept by steadily. But there was no ground under this huge funfair ride, no floor but the stars.
Lyla said, “Look, before we go on—elevator, pause.”
The car slowed to a halt.
Lyla said, “You ought to take a look at the view. See what the station is all about. It’s much harder to see from within the decks. Elevator. Show us Polyphemus.”
Myra looked out through the hull. She saw stars whirling slowly, the universe become a pinwheel. And an oval of gold lit up on the window and began to track upward, slowly, countering the rotation to pick out a corner of the star field. There Myra made out a faint disc, misty-gray and with rainbows washing across its face. A smaller station hung behind it, a knot of instruments.
“That,” Lyla said, “is a telescope. One big, spinning, fragile Fresnel lens. Nearly a hundred meters across.”
Myra asked, “Wasn’t the sunstorm shield a Fresnel lens?”
“It was…”
So this was yet another technological descendant of the tremendous shield that had once sheltered the Earth.
Lyla said, “They call that fellow Polyphemus, the Cyclops, after the most famous of the one-eyed giants of the myths. Galatea was actually the name of the Nereid he loved, according to some versions of the stories. Polyphemus is the oldest but still the most impressive instrument they have here.”
Yuri, an instrument man himself, was fascinated, and peppered Lyla and Alexei with questions.
Big mirrors were on the face of it easier to manufacture than big lenses, but it turned out that a lens was the preferred technology for building really huge telescopes because of its better optical tolerance; the longer pathways traversed by light rays gathered up by a mirror tended to amplify distortions rather than to diminish them, as a lens would. A Fresnel lens was a compromise design, a composite of many smaller lenses fixed into a lacy framework and spun up for stability. Lyla said the sub-lenses at the rim of the structure were thin enough to roll up like paper. There were technical issues with Fresnel lenses, the main one being “chromatic aberration” they were narrow-bandwidth devices. But there was an array of corrective optics—“Schupmann devices,” Lyla said—installed before the main lens itself to compensate for this.
“The lens itself is smart,” she said. “It can correct for thermal distortions, gravitational tweaks…With this one big beast alone you can detect the planets of nearby stars, and study them spectroscopically, and so on. And now they are working on an interferometer array. More mirrors, suspended in space. Elevator, show us…”
More tracking ovals lit up on the wall.
“They’re called Arges, Brontes, and Steropes. More Cyclops giants. Working together they are like a composite telescope of tremendous size.
“It’s no coincidence that she came here. Athena, I mean. Her transmission back home was picked up by Polyphemus. Very faint laser light. Elevator, resume.”
The elevator plunged without slowing through the first of the decks. Myra glimpsed a floor that curved upwards, a décor of silver-gray and pink, and people who walked with slow bounds. “The Moon deck,” she said.
“Right,” Lyla said. “You understand that Galatea is centrifugally stratified. We’ll be stopping on the Mars deck, where you’ll be meeting Athena.”
As Myra absorbed that, Yuri nodded. “It will help if we can stay in condition in the G conditions we’re used to.”
“Yeah,” said Lyla. “Not many go further than that. Nobody but our ambassadors from Earth, in fact.”
“Ambassadors?” Myra asked.
“Actually cops. Astropol.” She pulled a face. “We encourage them to stay down there, in their own lead-boot gravity field. Keeps them from getting in the way of the real work.”
“They don’t know we’re here, do they?”
“No reason why they should,” Alexei said.
Myra guessed, “And they don’t know about Athena.”
“No, they don’t,” Lyla said. “At least I don’t think they do. They really are just cops; they should have sent up a few astronomers.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Myra confessed. “Where Athena has ‘been.’ How she ‘came back.’ And I don’t understand why I’m here.”
“All you
r questions will be answered soon, Myra,” a voice spoke from the air.
It was the second time Athena had spoken to Myra. The others looked at her curiously, even a little enviously.
43: CHICAGO
Emeline, Bisesa, and Abdi traveled the last few kilometers to Chicago in a western-movie-style covered wagon. It was drawn by muscular, hairy ponies, a round-bodied native stock that turned out to be particularly suited to working in the deep cold. The road followed the line of a pre-Freeze rail track, but Emeline said it wasn’t practical to run trains this far north, because of ice on the rails and frozen points.
By now Bisesa was wrapped up like an Inuit, with layers of wool and fur over her thin Babylonian clothes, and her phone lost somewhere deep underneath. Emeline told her that the russet-brown wool came from mammoths. Bisesa wasn’t sure if she believed that, for surely it would be easier to shear a sheep than a mammoth. It looked convincing, however.
Despite the furs, the cold dug into her exposed cheeks like bony fingers. Her eyes streamed, and she could feel the tears crackling to frost. Her feet felt vulnerable despite the heavy fur boots she wore, and, fearing frostbite, she dug her gloved hands into her armpits. “It’s like Mars,” she told her companions.
Abdi grimaced, shivering. “Are you sorry you came?”
“I’m sorry I don’t still have my spacesuit.”
The phone, tucked warmly against her belly, murmured something, but she couldn’t hear.
Chicago was a black city lost in a white landscape.
The disused rail track ran right into Union Station. It was a short walk from the station to Emeline’s apartment. In the streets, huge bonfires burned, stacked up under dead gas-lamps and laboriously fed with broken-up lumber by squads of men, bundled up, their heads swathed in helmets of breath-steam. The fires poured plumes of smoke into the air, which hung over the city like a black lid, and the faces of the buildings were coated with soot. The people were all bundled up in fur so they looked almost spherical as they scurried from the island of warmth cast by one bonfire to the next.