Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (37 page)

‘They sent me to fetch you,’ Harry was saying ruefully. ‘I told them it was a waste of time, that we’d argued since you were old enough to talk. But they sent me anyway. Maybe I’d have a better chance than anybody else of persuading you.’

Michael felt confused. ‘Persuading me to do what?’

‘To come home.’ The Virtual glanced around the cabin. ‘This old tub can still fly, can’t she?’

‘Of course she can.’

‘Then the quickest way for you to return is to come in voluntarily in this thing. It will take you about a year. It would take twice as long to send a ship out to fetch you—’

‘Harry. Slow down, damn it. Who are “they”? And why am I so important, all of a sudden?’

‘“They” are the Jovian government. And they have the backing of all the intergovernmental agencies. System-wide, as far as I know. And you’re important because of the message.’

‘What message?’

Harry studied his son, his too-young face steady, his voice level. ‘Michael, the portal has returned. And something’s emerged from the wormhole. A ship from the future. We’ve had one message from it, on microwave wavelengths; we suspect the message was smuggled out, against the will of whoever’s operating the ship.’

Michael shook his head. Maybe he
had
let himself get too old; Harry’s words seemed unreal - like descriptions of a dream, impossible to comprehend. ‘Could the message be translated?’

‘Fairly easily,’ said Harry drily. ‘It was in English. Voice, no visual.’

‘And? Come on, Harry.’

‘It asked for you. By name. It was from Miriam Berg.’

Michael felt the breath seep out of him, against his will.

His father’s Virtual crouched before him, one hand extended, close enough to Michael’s face for him to make out individual pixels. ‘Michael? Are you all right?’

A
gain Jasoft Parz was suspended in space before a Spline ship. The freighter was a landscape of grey flesh. Parz peered into an eyeball which, swivelling, gazed out at him from folds of hardened epidermis, and Parz felt a strange sense of kinship with the Spline, this fellow client creature of the Qax.

Parz was aware of a hundred weapons trained upon his fragile flitter - perhaps even including the fabled gravity-wave starbreaker beams, purloined by the Qax from the Xeelee.

He wanted to laugh. A wall of non-existence was, perhaps, hurtling towards them from out of the altered past, and yet still they brandished their toy weapons against an old man.

‘Ambassador Jasoft Parz.’ The Governor’s translated voice was, as ever, soft, feminine and delicious, and quite impossible to read.

Parz kept his voice steady. ‘I am here, Governor.’

There was a long silence. Then the Governor said: ‘I must ask your help.’

Parz felt a kind of tension sag out of him, and it was as if the muscles of his stomach were folding over each other. How he had dreaded this call to meet with the Governor - his first journey into orbit since that fateful moment a week earlier when he had been forced to witness the humiliation of the Qax at the hands of the rebellious rabble who had escaped through the Interface portal. Parz had returned to his normal duties - though that had been difficult enough; even the rarefied diplomatic circles which controlled the planet were alive with talk of that single, staggering, act of defiance. At times Parz had longed to walk away from the heavy cordon of security which surrounded his life and immerse himself in the world of the common man. He would be destroyed as soon as they discovered he was a collaborator, of course ... but maybe it would be worth it, to hear the delicious note of hope on a thousand lips.

But he had not the courage, or the foolhardiness, to do any such thing. Instead he had waited for the Governor to decide what to do. It would be quite within the imagination of the Qax to find a way to punish the planet as a whole for the actions of a few individuals.

Deaths would not have surprised Parz.

Paradoxically he had always found it hard to blame the Qax for this sort of action. To establish control of Earth and its sister worlds the Qax had merely had to study history and adapt methods used by humans to oppress their fellows. There was no evidence that the Qax had ever evolved such tactics as means of dealing with each other. The Qax were acting as had oppressors throughout human history, Parz thought, but still humanity had only itself to blame; it was as if the Qax were an externalized embodiment of man’s treatment of man, a judgement of history.

But, in the event, nothing of the sort had happened. And now Parz had been called to another secure orbital meeting.

‘Tell me what you want, Governor.’

‘We believe we have made the Interface portal secure,’ the Qax began. ‘It is ringed by Spline warships. Frankly, any human who ventures within a million miles of the artifact will be discontinued.’

Parz raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m surprised you’ve not destroyed the portal.’

Again that uncharacteristic hesitation. ‘Jasoft Parz, I find myself unable to determine the correct course of action. A human vessel, manned by rebels against the Qax administration, has escaped fifteen centuries into the past - into an era in which the Qax had no influence over human affairs. The intention of these rebels is surely to change the evolution of events in some way, presumably to prepare humanity to resist, or throw off, the Qax administration.

‘Parz, I have to assume that the past has already been altered by these rebels.’

Parz nodded. ‘And were you to destroy the portal you would lose the only access you have to the past.’

‘I would lose any possible control over events. Yes.’

Parz shifted his position in his chair. ‘And have you sent anything through?’

‘Not yet,’

Parz laughed. ‘Governor, it’s been a week. Don’t you think you’re being a little indecisive? Either close the damn thing or use it; one way or the other you’re going to have to act.’

And all the time you procrastinate
, he added silently,
the wall of unreality approaches us all at an unknowable speed . . .

Parz expected a harsh reply to his goad, but instead there was again that hesitancy. ‘I find myself unable to formulate a plan of action. Ambassador, consider the implications. These human rebels control history, over one and a half thousand years. I have tried to evaluate the potential for damage indicated by this, but no algorithm has been able to deliver even an order-of-magnitude assessment. I believe the danger is - in practical terms - infinite ... My race has never faced such a threat, and perhaps never will again.’

Jasoft pulled at his lip. ‘I almost sympathize with you, Governor.’

There had been a flurry of speculation about the effects of the rebels’ escape into the past among what was left of the human scientific community, too. Could the rebels truly alter history? Some argued that their actions would only cause a broadening of probability functions - that new alternative realities were being created by their actions. Others maintained that reality had only a single thread, opened to disruption by the creation of the rebels’ ‘closed timelike curve’, their path through spacetime into the past.

In either event, no one knew whether consciousness could persist through such a disruption - would Jasoft know if the world, his own history, altered around him? Or would he go through a mini-death, to be replaced by a new, subtly adjusted Jasoft? Nor were there any estimates of the rate - in subjective terms - at which the disruption was approaching, emerging from the past as if from the depths of some dismal sea.

To Jasoft such speculation seemed unreal - and yet it also lent an air of unreality to the world he inhabited, as if his life were all no more than a brightly painted surface surrounding a vacuum. He wasn’t afraid - at least he didn’t think so - but he sensed that his grip on reality had been disturbed, fundamentally.

It was like, he suspected, becoming mildly insane.

‘Ambassador, report on what you have determined about the rebels.’

Jasoft pulled his slate from his briefcase, set it up on the tabletop before him and ran his fingers over its surface, drawing data from its heart. ‘We believe the rebels constitute a group calling themselves the Friends of Wigner. Before this single, astonishing action, the Friends were dismissed as a fringe sect of no known danger to the regime.’

‘We have a conscious policy of ignoring such groups,’ the Qax said grimly. ‘Adapted from the policies of such human colonial powers as the Roman Empire, who allowed native religions to flourish ... Why waste effort suppressing that which is harmless? Perhaps this policy will have to be reviewed.’

Parz found himself shuddering at the menace implicit in that last, lightly delivered sentence. ‘I’d advise against it,’ he said quickly. ‘After all, as you say, the damage is already done.’

‘What is known of the vessel?’

Jasoft reported that the craft had been assembled underground on the small offshore island still called Britain.

During the decades of the Occupation there had been a programme to remove human capacity for space travel, and, systematically, ships from all over the Solar System and from the nearby stars - the small bubble of space embraced by humans before the Occupation - had been recalled, impounded and broken up in shipyards converted to crude wrecking shops. Nobody knew, even now, how many lone craft there were still avoiding the law of the Qax somewhere between the stars, but with the Solar System and the major extra-solar colonies invested, they could do little damage ...

Until now. The rebel craft had apparently been constructed around the purloined remains of a broken, impounded freighter.

‘And why the name?’ the Qax asked. ‘Who was this Wigner?’

Parz tapped his slate. ‘Eugene Wigner. A quantum physicist of the twentieth century: a near-contemporary of the great pioneers of the field - Schrödinger, Heisenberg. Wigner’s subject was quantum solipsism.’

There was a brief silence from the Qax. Then: ‘That means little to me. We must determine the intentions of these Friends, Jasoft; we must find a way to see through their human eyes. I am not human. You must help me.’

Parz spread his hands on the tabletop and gathered his thoughts.

Wigner and his co-workers had tried to evolve a philosophy in response to the fact that quantum physics, while universally accepted, was saturated with dazzling paradoxes which suggested that the external world had no well-defined structure until minds observed it.

‘We humans are a finite, practical species,’ Jasoft said. ‘I live in my head, somewhere behind my eyes. I have intimate control over my body - my hands, my feet - and some control over objects I can pick up and manipulate.’ He held his slate in his hands. ‘I can move the slate about; if I throw it against the wall it bounces off. The slate is discrete in itself and separate from me.’

But this common-sense view of the universe began to fall apart as one approached the smallest scales of creation.

‘Uncertainty is at the heart of it. I can measure the position of my slate by, say, bouncing a photon off it and recording the event in a sensor. But how do I record the position of an electron? If I bounce off a photon, I knock the electron away from where I measured it ... Suppose I measured the electron’s position to within a billionth of an inch. Then my uncertainty about the electron’s momentum would be so high that a second later I couldn’t be sure where the damn thing was within a hundred miles.

‘So I can never be simultaneously sure where an electron is
and
where it’s going ... Instead of thinking of an electron, or any other object, as a discrete, hard little entity, I have to think in terms of probability wave functions.’

Schrödinger had developed equations which described how probability waves shifted and evolved, in the presence of other particles and forces. Parz closed his eyes. ‘I imagine space filled with probability, like blue ripples. If I had vision good enough, maybe I could see the waves in all their richness. But I can’t. It’s like looking through half-closed eyes; and all I can make out is the shadowy places where the peaks and troughs occur. And I say to myself - there; that’s where the electron is. But it isn’t; it’s just a crest of the wave ... Where the wave function has its peaks is where I’m most likely to find my electron - but it’s not the only possibility.’

‘But the wave functions collapse on observation, of course,’ the Qax prompted.

‘Yes.’ The link between quantum reality and the world of the senses - human senses - came when measurements were made. ‘I run my experiment and determine that the electron is in fact, at this instant’ - He stabbed the tabletop with a fingertip - ‘right there. Then the position wave function has collapsed - the probabilities have all gone to zero, except in the little region of space within which I’ve pinned down the electron. Of course as soon as the measurement is over, the wave functions start evolving again, spreading out around the electron’s recorded position.’ Parz frowned. ‘So, by observing, I’ve actually changed the fundamental properties of the electron. It’s not possible to separate the observer from the observed ... and you could argue that by observing I’ve actually evoked the existence of the electron itself.

‘And there lies the mystery. The paradox. Schrödinger imagined a cat locked in a box with a single unstable nucleus. In a given period there is a fifty-fifty chance that the nucleus will decay. If it does, the cat will be killed by a robot mechanism. If it doesn’t, the cat is allowed to live.

‘Now. Leave the box aside for its specified period, without looking inside. Tell me: is the cat alive or dead?’

The Qax said without hesitating, ‘There is no paradox. One can only give an answer in terms of probabilities, until the box is opened.’

‘Correct. Until the box is opened, the wave function of the box-cat system is not collapsed. The cat is neither alive nor dead; there is equal probability of either state.’