Implied Spaces (35 page)

“Thoughtless humanity, be thankful that Vindex does not choose to avenge
this
discourtesy!

“Forgive me—I will make an effort to collect myself. I shall try not to shake any more fists under your nose.

“From this point I shall attempt a dispassionate, factual mode. From the very beginning of our expedition we knew that Epsilon Eridani was unstable. We knew the star’s energy levels flared and faded unpredictably. Our robust systems had been built with that in mind. All data, including the instructions to rebuild every citizen, were stored with massive redundancy.

“What happened was not a nova. Nothing so damaging as that. It was a hiccup, a throat-clearing—or yes, a belch. But still it was enough to overwhelm all our precautions.

“It was enough to fry Doria’s processor array and destroy his brilliant mind. The wormhole’s controls and anchors were destroyed, and Riverside with them. Though there is a small chance that the wormhole was destroyed before the pocket universe was cooked completely, at the very least the universe is now cut off from us, drifting in a microcosmos entirely its own. Daljit in her little ship died as well, though I was not certain of this till years later.

“As for me, at the moment of catastrophe I was on our world of Pleasaunce, analyzing Daljit’s data and waiting for her return. It was night where I dwelt, and it was that fact that saved me when the sky brightened with starfire. Everyone on the day side of the world died within seconds of the shock front hitting us, and most of those on the night side died within hours or days.

“In order to survive, we needed access to structures that would withstand the enormous surface storms that followed the flare, caused by the boiling away of a large part of the atmosphere, and the superheating of much of the rest. It also helped if the structure had a self-contained air supply.

“Fortunately these were not entirely uncommon. Pleasaunce had not always been as hospitable as it became later—once it had been a frozen moon pummeled by radiation and torn by tidal stresses, and we of the terraforming team had lived in strong, self-sealing structures. Most of these remained, scattered here and there over the world. It had not been worth our while to demolish or replace them.

“Those who could reach such a structure in time, lived. Most of those who failed, died.

“None of the dead came back. Our backups were in Riverside, on Doria’s array, or by purest chance stored on the day side of Pleasaunce. All were destroyed. Thus did our redundant systems mock us.

“The survivors, a little over seven thousand souls, were devastated. We had all lost friends and loved ones and hopes and, indeed, our entire civilization. We were alone on a devastated world in a stellar system that had just declared itself permanently uninhabitable. Many sank into despair, and the rest thought only of flight.

“Our remaining resources were put into building a ship to take us back to Sol, and uploading ourselves into that ship. The ship was built, the souls uploaded, and the ship spread its sails and left as fast as it possibly could. Which was not fast, as we lacked the Sol-based lasers that had pushed us to relativistic velocities on our trip out. The journey would take over two hundred years. All were terrified that another flare would destroy the ship before it could escape the system.

“The unstable star was merciful, but not interstellar space. Twenty-six years out, the starship joined the Lost Expedition, possibly due to the same cause. I fear no one will ever know for certain.

“As for me, I remained behind on Pleasaunce. I had calculated that Daljit might still live, at least in some form. Her returning craft was not within the zone of total destruction. It was possible that it had been damaged and would need time to mend itself, or would need to rendezvous with one of Daljit’s distant sensing stations before it could effect repairs. There was no one with the authority to order me to leave, and so I remained, the system’s sole remaining citizen.

“When the others left, I set nanomachines loose over the entire surface of the planet, which turned most of its skin into receptors and processors—receptors to strain the aether for a signal from Daljit, processors to confirm the conclusions of that tragic, triumphant, completely outrageous last message that she had sent along with her data.

“While I labored in my shelter, every analysis of the data only validated my sad, dead darling’s last thoughts. Her name will now be invoked alongside those of the immortals, with Galileo and Newton and Einstein, with Isabel and Chiau. Her instinct for the flaw in Chiau’s argument was now confirmed.

“Let me say that Daljit was not alone in finding Professor Chiau’s theory unsatisfactory. It was riddled with concepts that at first blush seemed clumsy: a structure built on the notion of unexplained ‘universal constants’ appeared, if nothing else, supremely lazy. But Chiau’s Theory of Everything withstood every test devised by the most subtle human and machine minds, and finally it was reluctantly concluded that universal constants were necessary because some things were actually, universally, constant.

“It took Daljit’s genius to conclude that these constants were signs not only of fact, but of purpose. They were
intentional.

“Consider what happens when we create a pocket universe of our own. We have to create a small sun that will act as if it were a large one, and on the outside of the spherical universe we have to keep the inhabitants’ feet on the ground: tampering with the long-range and short-range components of Yukawa gravity accomplishes both these aims. In Midgarth, where technology is deliberately kept in the iron age, it is impossible to cause a fast enough chemical reaction to produce a successful explosion or industrial process. They are deliberately marooned in the Iron Age.

“Assume you were a native physicist of Midgarth, investigating the principles by which your world operates. Assuming that with the primitive methods available, you could construct the equipment to make the measurements, you’d discover that gravity varied wildly depending on the distance from the sun, and that anything halfway between the sun and the ground below was barely affected by gravity at all. If you were investigating the properties of heat, you’d discover that heat could rise up to a certain temperature, but would refuse to rise any higher.

“If you were a scientist in Midgarth, you’d find that the universe was governed by certain arbitrary conditions that barely made sense at all.

“Ah—I see a light dawning in your eyes. You know perfectly well where I’m going with this.

“Yes, both Professor Chiau and Daljit found the universe filled with illogical and annoying arbitrary conditions. Universal constants, massive amounts of matter that we can’t see but that nevertheless affect the matter that we
can
see, hidden energies ditto. Chiau accepted all this with reluctance, but Daljit saw it as evidence that our grand, galaxy-filled universe was created in the same way as our little pocket universes, by
deliberate intent
.

“To prove her thesis she had to strain her detectors for those early nanoseconds of the Big Bang, in order to
see the very moment
when those arbitrary conditions were imposed on the dawning universe.
And she found them!

“The universe isn’t a natural phenomenon at all. It’s artificial. It’s an
artifact
.

“Our sprawling universe is a sad, lumpish, illogical machine, poorly imagined and poorly built. But at least, for whatever unimaginable reason, someone
wanted
the universe the way it is.

“That’s not the case with us. We, poor creatures, were never intended. We’re just accidents, byproducts of whatever experiment our founders projected. We are implied people living in an implied space.

“And that, my friend, is as far as meaning goes, and that’s where our tragedy begins and ends.”

19

“Interesting, if true,” Aristide said, after he was allowed to speak. “Of course I’d have to see the data.”

Pablo stooped over the table to mash out a cigaret. “You miss the
point
.”

He had stalked all over the room during the course of his harangue; he’d lit a half-dozen cigarets but stubbed them out before he finished them; he’d called to Courtland, or whatever was monitoring this conversation, for a glass of water, and had it delivered by a polite, silent woman whose eyes shone with adoration at the sight of her chief. He’d picked out books from the shelf and flipped through them, his glance barely grazing the pages as he talked on. His mood had swung from exultation to fury and back again.

Aristide had the idea that Pablo hadn’t had anyone to talk to in a very long time.

“When
we
create a universe,” Pablo said, “we do it with extreme calculation and care, to make certain there are no mistakes. There are implied spaces, to be sure, and living things adapt to them; but there are no implied
sentient beings
that
just turn up
.

“Contrast
our
shambles of a universe, filled with peril and accident.
Our
creators weren’t careful, they were
criminally negligent
.”

He wheeled on Aristide. “There are a number of classic explanations for human suffering—all of which I’ve found inadequate, for one reason or another. One is that it’s a result of the Almighty’s providing us with free will. Another is that the gods disagree and have different purposes, and that bad things result. Another is that it’s all chance.”

Pablo clenched a fist and raised it like a hammer. “Daljit showed that suffering isn’t any of these things.
It’s all someone’s fault!
Every woman who died in childbirth, every body stricken by a wasting disease, every atrocity in every war. Every agonizing death by malnutrition. Every accident in the womb. Every plague.
Every last soul burned to a crisp by Epsilon Eridani and lost forever!”
His voice rose to a shout on this last, and broke.

“You have an interesting case,” Aristide said, “but you may have trouble finding a court with jurisdiction.”

Pablo glanced at him stonily. “I will make my own jurisdiction. The human race will unite behind me, and we will seek satisfaction from our accidental creators.”

Aristide couldn’t suppress the astonished bark of laughter.

“You’re going to demand satisfaction from
God?”

Pablo gave him a steely look. “I refuse to use that term. He—or they—are the Inept.”

“Inept they may be,” Aristide said, “but the statute of limitations has pretty clearly expired. Their misdeeds were committed something like fourteen billion years ago.”

“Thirteen point two two,” Pablo said, “according to Daljit’s calculations. But you forget something—wormholes are capable of bridging
time
as well as distance. We don’t use them that way, since when we travel from Sol-space to a place like Greater Zimbabwe, it hardly matters whether the place is ten minutes in the past or ten million in the future: we deal with the place as we find it. If we can send a wormhole to our universe’s point of origin, we can theoretically send its terminus billions of years back in time. The wormhole would evaporate if we tried to violate causality by going back
before
the creation of the universe, but we could arrive any time afterward.” He laughed. “Imagine their surprise when we turn up moments after their ridiculous experiment, and demand they pay for their crimes.”

Aristide gazed at him. “You have a way to project a wormhole from here in your mad doctor’s sanctum to where the Inept live, outside our universe altogether?”

Pablo’s cheek twitched. “Once the human race is united,” he proclaimed, “and we have all of us and all the AIs working on the answer, we’ll solve that problem.”

“You might have tried to solve that one
first,
” Aristide said. “Then you would have known whether you should have even bothered with this scheme of yours.”

Pablo raised a condescending eyebrow. “Unlike you,” he said, “I have enormous faith in the capacity of our species to solve problems—under proper guidance, of course.”

Aristide watched his other self in fascination. “I concede that your project has merit,” he said, “but why be so fascist about it? Why do we all have to follow you blindly into this?”

Pablo turned to him. Aristide could see fists forming in the blazer pockets.

“Because our entire species must confront the Inept!” Pablo cried. “No backsliding! No hesitating! We
all
demand justice, or none!” He laughed bitterly. “Can you imagine me taking this to a
committee?
Listening to them debate about this bit of evidence or that, and defer to the tender religious feelings of people from the likes of New Qom and New Jerusalem, who would prefer not to know that their God is a vile fraud, and who would almost certainly attempt to veto any suggestion that we talk to Him and point out His shortcomings.”

“You wouldn’t need to get
everyone
behind it. Even a few of the pockets…”

“And then I explain to the Inept that as a result of their stupidity, my species has been tortured, harried, and killed for a million years, but
only a minority of us care?
And that billions have responded to the Inept’s malevolent neglect by
worshiping
them?” He snarled. “No—I think not.”

Aristide regarded him. “Might I have something to drink?” he said. “Despite the humidifier my mouth is dry.”

Pablo straightened. Surprise showed in his eyes.

“Ah. Pardon my poor hospitality.”

He said nothing, but in a moment the same worshipful woman entered with a glass of water on a tray. Without speaking to her, Pablo took the glass and pressed it into Aristide’s fingers.

Aristide considered hurling the contents into Pablo’s face, but decided against it. He really
was
thirsty.

He drank to his satisfaction and lowered the glass. The worshipful woman had gone.

“How long did you spend alone on Pleasaunce?” he asked.

“Six years. Long enough to confirm Daljit’s researches, and confirm as well the fact that she no longer existed.”

“And then?”