I looked at him in astonishment. I could not believe there was anything he and I could ever share as a confidence. Then he said, “It’s about that guy your old girlfriend is married to.”
“Oh,” I said. That didn’t seem to satisfy Cassata, so I added, “I never met him before, but his name’s Harbin Eskladar, I think.”
“His name’s Eskladar, all right,” Cassata said savagely, “and I know. I hate his effing guts.”
I can’t deny that that perked me up right away. The topic of what a lousy person Klara’s husband might be was quite congenial to me. “Have a drink,” I said.
He looked hesitant, then shrugged. “Just a quick one,” he said. “You don’t remember him? Well, do you remember me? I mean, like thirty or forty years ago, when we first met? I was a brigadier at the time?”
“I remember that, sure,” I said, producing drinks.
He took what I offered without looking to see what it was. “Did it ever occur to you to wonder why it took me all these years to be promoted a lousy two grades?”
Actually, I never had. I hadn’t even thought about Cassata very much, far less about how he was doing in his job, because he had been nothing but bad news even back in the High Pentagon, when I was still meat and all the armed forces had to worry about was human terrorists. My opinion of Cassata at that time was that he was a wart on the face of the human race. Nothing had changed it since, but I said politely, “I guess I never knew why.”
“Eskladar! Eskladar was why! He was my aide-de-camp, and I damn near got thrown out of the service because of him! The son of a bitch was moonlighting, and what he did for an after-hours job was terrorism. He was part of General Beaupre Heimat’s old secret terrorist cell in the High Pentagon!”
After a moment, I said again, “Oh,” and this time Cassata nodded angrily, as though I had said it all.
In a sense I had, because anyone who had been through the days of misery and terrorism needed no discussion of what they were like. It was not something you forgot. For twenty years and more the whole planet had been bombed, raped, ravaged, and gouged by people whose fury had so exceeded their judgment that the only thing they could think of to do to express their discontent was to kill somebody. Not just one somebody; hundreds of thousands had died, one way and another, in virus-poisoned water supplies or wrecked buildings or bombed cities. And not even any particular somebody, because the terrorists had struck at anyone, the innocent as well as the guilty—or the ones they considered guilty, anyway.
And the worst part of it was that trusted people, high-ranking military officers and even heads of state, had been secret members of terrorist groups. A whole nest of them had been uncovered in the High Pentagon itself.
“But Eskladar broke up the ring,” I said, remembering.
Cassata tried to laugh. It came out more like a snarl. “He turned over to save his own skin,” he said—and then, reluctantly, “Well, maybe not just to save himself. He was an idealist, I guess. But as far as I was concerned, it didn’t matter. He was my ADC, and he cost me promotion for twenty years.”
He finished his drink. Brightening, he said, “Well, I don’t want to keep her waiting—” And then he stopped, but a little too late.
“Keep who waiting?” I asked, and he winced at the way I said it.
“Well, Robin,” he said abjectly, “I didn’t think you’d mind if I, uh, if besides me there was—well—”
“A woman,” I said, cleverly deducing. “We’ve got a stowaway on board.”
He looked unrepentant. “She’s just a canned deader, like you,” he said—diplomacy had never been Cassata’s strength. “I just had them put her store on along with mine. It won’t take up much room, for God’s sake, and I’ve only got…”
He stopped there without quite saying just what he’d only got a little of left. He was a little, just a very little, too proud to beg.
He didn’t have to. “What’s her name?” I asked.
“Alicia Lo. She’s the one I was dancing with.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s only for this one flight. All right. Go keep your friend company.”
I didn’t add, “Just stay out of my sight.” I didn’t have to. That was exactly what he was certain to do, and if I had been in his position I expect I would certainly have done exactly the same thing myself.
And then there was nothing to get through but the interminable trip itself.
In the True Love, it takes only twenty-three minutes for a faster-than-light trip from Wrinkle Rock to JAWS. That’s actually real slow. In fact, it isn’t even faster than light, because eleven and a half of those minutes go into getting up speed at one end, and eleven and a half to slowing down again at the other; the actual trip time is, oh, a wink and a half. Still, twenty-three minutes isn’t much—by meat-person standards.
We were not on Meat Standard Time. But, oh, how many milliseconds a single minute holds.
By the time we were well free of the asteroid, and Albert was setting course for the satellite, I was (metaphorically) biting my metaphoric nails. We keep True Love pretty much in the Earth solar system, hardly ever very far from the Earth itself, and so I always have contact with all the many projects I’ve got going on Earth to keep me amused—slow, yes, but only seconds slow, not eternities. Not this time. This time there was the radio blackout. I could have sent messages, all right (though Cassata forbade it furiously), but answers I could have none.
What I had to entertain me was Essie, and Albert, and my memories. Cassata wasn’t much good. My memories are plentitudinous (they include, after all, everything we could fit into True Love’s datastores, which is a lot), but the memories on top were largely Klara and largely sad.
Essie, on the other hand, is always rewarding…or almost always. The only times she isn’t rewarding is when I’m stuck in a tangle of irritation or worry or misery, and I’m afraid that’s where I was just then. After she’d arranged our Johore surround, pretty palace overlooking the straits and Singapore, and I just sat glumly, ignoring the Malaysian meal she’d ordered up, she gave me one of her searching Oh-God-is-he-getting-gloopy-again looks. “Something is bothering you,” she asserted. I shrugged. “Not hungry, I guess,” she offered, spearing a ball of rice with some kind of black things in it and chewing lustily. I made the pretense of picking up something in a leaf and chewing it. “Robin,” she said, “have two choices. Talk to me. Or talk to Albert-Sigfrid—any damn body, only talk. No sense twisting poor old head around alone.”
“I guess I will,” I said, because it was true. I was getting gloopy again.
Albert found me back on Wrinkle Rock, or anyway the simulation of it I had created to match my mood. I was on Level Tango, where the ships docked, wandering around and looking at the places where people I knew had departed from and never come back.
“You seemed a little depressed,” he said apologetically. “I thought I’d just see if there was anything I could do.”
“Not a thing.” I said, but I didn’t tell him to go away. Especially since, I was sure, Essie had sent him there.
He pulled out his pipe, lit it, puffed thoughtfully for a while, and then said, “Would you like to tell me what is on your mind right now?”
“Not a bit,” I said.
“Is it because you think I’m tired of hearing the same old things, Robin?” he asked, and there was real affection in those make-believe eyes.
I hesitated, then took the plunge. I said, “What’s on my mind is everything, Albert. Now, wait, I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say which of all the things in everything is right on top. Okay. That’s the Foe. They scare me.”
He said peacefully, “There is a lot to be afraid of in that context, yes, Robin. The Foe certainly threaten us all.”
“No, no,” I said impatiently, “I don’t mean the threat, exactly. I mean it’s so hard to understand.”
“Ah,” he said, smoking his pipe and gazing at me.
“I mean, I just don’t hav
e any good idea of what’s going on with the universe,” I said.
“No, Robin,” he agreed kindly. “You don’t. You could, though. If you’d let me explain nine-dimensional space and a few of the other concepts—”
“Shut up about that,” I ordered, knowing I was making a mistake. I have a right to be humanly capricious, everybody agrees to that, but sometimes I think I carry it too far.
You see, there’s an infinity of knowledge reachable to me, because I’ve been vastened.
I don’t like to speak of what happened to me as being “vastened” when I talk to meat people, because it makes them think I feel superior to them. I don’t want them to think that, especially because, of course, I really am superior. That infinite resource of data is only one part of the difference between me and meat.
The available datastore wasn’t truly infinite, of course. Albert doesn’t let me use words like “infinite” for anything that can be counted, and as all of that knowledge existed in chip, fan, or track storage somewhere, certainly someone could have counted the stores. Someone. Not me. I wasn’t about to try to count the quantum bits of data, and I wasn’t about to try to absorb it all because I was scared.
Oh, God, I was scared! What of? Not just the Foe, though they were fearsome. I was frightened by my own vastness, which I dared not fully explore.
I feared, I hugely feared, that if I let myself expand to absorb all that knowledge I would no longer be Robinette Broadhead at all. I feared I would not then be human. I feared that the tiny parcel of data that was me would simply be drowned in all that accumulated information.
When you are only a machine-stored memory of a human being, you do your best to defend your humanity.
Albert has often got impatient with me about that. He says it is a failure of nerve. Even Essie chides me now and then. She says things like, “Dear dumb Robin, why not take what is yours?” And then she tells me little stories from her own childhood to buck me up. “When I was young girl at akademy, pounding brain over some damn nonsense reference volume on maybe Boolean algebra or chip architecture in Lenin Library, would often look around me in horror. Oh, real horror, dear Robin! Would see all ten million volumes surrounding me, and feel sick. I mean, Robin, sick. Almost physical sickness. Almost to point of throwing up at thought of swallowing all those gray and green and yellow books, to know all that could know. Was impossible for me!”
I said eagerly, “That’s exactly it, Essie, I—”
“But is not impossible for you, Robin!” she cut in severely. “Chew, Robin! Open mouth! Swallow!”
But I couldn’t.
At least, I wouldn’t. I held tightly to my physical human shape (however imaginary), and to my meat-human limitations, however self-imposed.
Naturally I dipped into that vast store from time to time. Just dipped. I only nibbled at the feast. When I wanted, as you might say, one particular volume, I would access that file. I kept my eyes resolutely fixed on that single “volume” and ignored the endless shelves of “books” all around.
Or, better still, I would call on my retinue of savants.
Kings used to do that. I had all the prerogatives of any king. I did what kings did. When they wanted to know something about counterpoint, they would send for Handel or Salieri. If they had a moment’s curiosity about the next eclipse, Tycho Brahe would come running. They kept on hand a lavish retinue of philosophers, alchemists, mathematicians, and theologians. The court of Frederick the Great, for instance, was almost a university turned upside down. There was a faculty of all the experts in all the disciplines he could afford to feed, and a student body of one. Him.
More kingly than any king who ever lived, I could afford better than that. I could afford every authority on every subject. They were cheap enough, because I didn’t have to feed them or pay off their mistresses, and it wasn’t even a “them.” They were all subsumed into my one all-purpose data-retrieval program, Albert Einstein.
So when I complained to Essie, “I wish I understood what all this talk about shrinking the universe meant,” she simply looked at me for a moment.
Then she said, “Ha.”
“No, I mean it,” I said, and I really did.
“Ask Albert,” she said sunnily.
“Oh, hell! You know what that means. He’ll tell me anything I want to know, but he’ll go on telling me until it’s a lot more than I want to know.”
“Dear Robin,” she said, “is it not possible that Albert knows better than you how much is enough?”
“Oh, hell,” I said.
But, standing there with Albert in the gloomy metal tunnel of the (simulated) asteroid ship docks, it seemed to me that the time had come. There wasn’t any help for it anymore.
I said, “Albert, okay. Open my head. Dump everything into it. I guess I can stand it if you can.”
He gave me a sunny smile. “It won’t be that bad, Robin,” he promised, and then corrected himself. “It won’t be wonderful, though. I admit it’s going to be hard work. Maybe—” He glanced around. “Maybe we should start out by getting a little more comfortable. With your permission?”
He didn’t wait for the permission, of course. He just went ahead and surrounded us with the study in our house on the Tappan Sea. I began to relax a little. I clapped my hands for the butlerthing to bring me a tall drink, and I sat back in comfort. Albert was watching me quizzically, but he didn’t say a word until I said to him, “I’m ready.”
He sat down, puffing on his pipe as he regarded me. “For what, exactly?”
“For you to tell me all the things you’ve been wanting to tell me for the last million years.”
“Ah, but Robin—” he smiled “—there are so many of them! Can you be specific? Which particular thing are you willing to let me explain now?”
“I want to know what the Foe have to gain from collapsing the universe.”
Albert thought that over for a moment. Then he sighed. “Oh, Robin,” he said sorrowfully.
“No,” I said, “no, ‘Oh, Robin,’ no telling me I should have done this long ago, no explaining to me that I have to learn quantum mechanics or something before I can understand. I want to know now.”
“What a hard taskmaster you are, Robin,” he complained.
“Do it! Please.”
He paused to reflect, tamping tobacco into his pipe. “I suppose I could just tell you the whole enchilada,” he said, “as I have tried to do before, and you have refused to listen.”
I braced myself. “You’re going to start with your nine-dimensional space again, aren’t you?”
“That and many other things, Robin,” he said firmly. “They are all involved. The answer to your question is meaningless without them.”
“Make it as easy on me as you can,” I begged.
He looked at me in some surprise. “You’re serious this time, aren’t you? Of course I’ll try to do that, my dear boy. Do you know what I think? I think the best way to start isn’t to tell you anything at all. I’ll just show you the pictures.”
I blinked. “Pictures?”
“I will show you the birth and death of the universe,” he said, pleased with himself. “That’s what you asked for, you know.”
“It is?”
“It is. The difficulty is that you simply refuse to grasp what a complicated question you are asking. It will take quite a while, several thousand milliseconds at least, even if you try not to interrupt—”
“I’ll interrupt whenever I want to, Albert.”
He nodded in acceptance. “Yes, you will. That’s one of the reasons it will take so long. But if you are willing to take the time required—”
“Oh, do it, for heaven’s sake!”
“But I already am doing it, Robin. Just a moment. It takes a little work to set up the display—there we are,” he finished, beaming.
And then he disappeared. Beam and all.
The last thing I saw was Albert’s smile. It lingered for a moment, and then there was nothing. r />
“You’re playing Alice in Wonderland games with me,” I accused—accused nothing and no one, because there was nothing to taste, see, feel, or smell.
But there was something to hear, because Albert’s reassuring voice said: “Only a bit of fun to start off with, Robin, because it gets very serious from now on. Now. What do you see?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Quite right. That is what you see. But what you are looking at is everything. It is the entire universe, Robin. It is all the matter, energy, time, and space there ever was or will be. It is the primordial atom, Robin, the monobloc, the thing in the Big Bang that banged.”
“I don’t see a goddamn thing.”
“Naturally not. You can’t see without light, and light hasn’t been invented yet.”
“Albert,” I said, “do me a favor. I hate this feeling of being nowhere at all. Can’t you let me see a little something?”
Silence for a moment. Then Albert’s beaming face came shadowily back. “I don’t suppose it would do any real harm if we could at least see each other,” he admitted. “Is that better?”
“Worlds better.”
“Fine. Only please remember there’s no real light yet. There is no light without photons, and all the photons are still in that single, invisible point. Not only that,” he went on, enjoying himself, “but if you could see, there’d be no place to see it from, because there isn’t any space to have a ‘place’ in. Space hasn’t been invented yet, either—or, to put it a bit more precisely, all the space, and all the light, and all the everything else is still in that single point right there.”
“In that case,” I said, sulking, “what do you mean by ‘there’?”
“Ah, Robin!” he cried in gratification. “You’re not so dumb, after all! That’s a really good question—unfortunately, like many of the best questions, it’s meaningless. The answer is that the question is wrong. There isn’t any ‘there’ there; there is only the appearance of a ‘there’ because I am trying to show you what by definition cannot be shown.”