Timescape (25 page)

'qehzure" and "shedule" were certainly far better than the mechanical quack-quack of American administrators, who would call any information an "input," were always "addressing a problem," submitted proposals as a

"package" but didn't always "buy it," and who engaged in "dialogue" with audiences; if you objected to such deliberately clanky talk, they answered that this was "only semantics."

Markham thrust his hands into his jacket pockets and tramped on. He had been irked by a balky calculation in mathematical physics for days now, and wanted a long, solitary walk to help sweep his irritation away.

He passed a construction site, where over-alled chimps carried stonework and did the odd heavy job. Remarkable, what the tinkering with the DNA had done in the last few years.

As he approached a bus queue something caught his attention. A black man in tennis shoes was standing at the end of the line, eyes dancing, his head jerking as if on wires. Markham came up close to him and muttered,

"Bobby round the corner," and moved on. The man froze. "Huh? Wha?"

He looked wildly around. He eyed Markham. A hesitation, then he decided–he raced off in the opposite direction. Markham smiled. The standard tactic was to wait until the bus hauled up and the queue's attention was focused on getting aboard. Then you grabbed purses away from a few women and left in high gear. Before the crowd could redirect its attention you were streets away. Markham had seen the same maneuver in Los Angeles. He realized, a bit ruefully, that he might not have recognized the setup if the man hadn't been black. He strolled down the High Street. Beggars' hands appeared magically when they saw his American jacket, and then disappeared quickly as he scowled. On the corner of St. Andrews and Market streets was Barrett's barber shop, a faded sign proclaiming, "Barrett is willing to shave all, and only, men unwilling to shave themselves." Markham laughed. This was a Cambridge insiders' joke, a reference to the local logical trickery of Bertrand Russell and the mathematicians of a century ago. It yanked him back towards the problem that was bothering him, the tangle of reason surrounding Renfrew's experiments. The obvious question was, "But what about Barrett? Who can shave poor old Barrett?" If Barrett were willing to shave himself, and if the sign were true, then he was not willing to shave himself.

And if Barrett wouldn't shave himself, then according to his sign he was willing to shave himself. Russell had devised this paradox, and tried to solve it by inventing what he called a "meta-sign" which said, "Barrett shall be excluded from the class of all men to whom the first sign refers."

That sewed up the problem nicely for Barrett, but in the real world things weren't so easy. Peterson's suggestion this morning, about not sending the message about the bank, had disturbed Markham more than he had wanted to show. The trouble with the whole tachyon theory was that the causal loop idea didn't fit our own perception of time as moving forward.

What if they didn't send the bank message? The neat little loop, with arrows passing from future to past and back again, was flawed. It didn't have any human beings in it. The aim of a modern physical theory was to talk about reality as independent of the observer–at least, as long as quantum mechanics was left out. But if Peterson was in the causal loop, he had the ability to change his mind at any time, and change the whole damn thing. Or did he? Markham paused, looking through the filmed glass at a boy getting his amber hair cut. Where was human free will in this puzzle?

The equations were mute. If Renfrew succeeded, how would the things around them change? Markham had a sudden, sinking vision of a world in which the ocean bloom simply had not happened. He and Renfrew and Peterson would emerge from the Cav to find that no one knew what they were babbling about. Ocean bloom? We solved that ages ago. So they would be madmen, a curious trio sharing a common delusion. Yet to be consistent, the equations said that sending the message couldn't have too great an effect. It couldn't cut off the very reason for sending the tachyons in the first place. So there had to be some self-consistent picture, in which Renfrew still got his initial idea, and approached the World Council and yet ...

Markham shook himself out of the mood, feeling an odd chill run through him. There was something deeper here, some crucial missing physics.

He walked rapidly away, disturbed. A cricket game lazily wound through the afternoon on the large pie-shaped ground known as Parker's Piece. The mathematician G. H. Hardy had watched games there a century before, Markham mused, and often lazed away the afternoon just as he was doing now. Markham could understand the motivation of the game, but not the details. He had never got straight the cricket jargon–square leg, silly mid-on, silly mid-off, cover point, short extra cover–and still never quite knew when a good play was made. He walked behind the ranks of spectators, who were slumped in their canvas chairs, and wondered what the cricket watchers of a century ago would've thought of the England of now. He suspected, though, that like most people even today, they assumed that tomorrow would be pretty much the same as the present.

Markham angled down Regent Street and past the University Botanic Garden. Beyond lay a boys' school. Dispensing the norms and graces of the upper classes, in a king's ancient phrase. He strolled through the arched entranceway and paused at the school announcements board.
The
following have lost their personal possessions. They will call at the
Prefect's Study by Thursday 4th June.

No "please." No unnecessary softenings; simply a direct statement.

Markham could imagine the brief conversation: "I'm sorry, you see ..."

"Standard punishment. Fifty lines, best handwriting. I'll have them tomorrow at break." And the student would grind out,
My carelessness
with my personal property will cease
.

The fact that the student might well use one of the recent voice-writers for nearly all his school work didn't matter; the principle reigned.

Odd, how forms held on when everything else buildings, politics, fame fell away. Maybe that was the strength of this place. There was a timelessness here, too fragile for California's dry air to hold. Now that full summer had arrived with a flourish, the mannered ways of the schools and colleges seemed even older, a slice of worn time. He found his own spirits lifting at the release from the endless raw winter and the rainy spring.

He felt his mind veering away from the tachyon question, seeking refuge in this comfortable aura of the past. It was different for him here, he knew. Englishmen were fish swimming in this sea of the past. For them it was a palpable presence, a living extension, commenting on events like a half-heard stage whisper. Americans regarded the past as a parenthesis within the running sentences of the present, an aside, something out of the flow.

He walked back towards the colleges, letting this feel of the press of time seep into him. He and Jan had been to High Table at several of the colleges, the ultimate Anglophile experience. Memorial plate that gleamed like quicksilver, and crested goblets. In the after-dinner room of polished wood, gilt frames held glowering portxaits of the college founders. In the great dining hall Jan had been surprised to find de facto segregation: Etonians at one table, Harrovians at another, the lesser public schools'

alumni at a third, and, finally, state school graduates and everyone else at a motley last table. To an American in such a citadel of education, after the decades of ferocious equality-at-all-costs politics, it seemed strange.

There persisted a reliance on inherited advantages, and even the idea that such a system was an inherited virtue as well. The past hung on. You could be quite up to the minute, quite knowing about the zack-o latin riffs of Lady Delicious, and yet sit quietly and comfortably in choir stalls of King's College chapel listening to cherubic lads in Elizabethan ruffs try to shatter the stained glass with treble attacks. It seemed that in a muzzy sense the past was still here, that they were all connected, and that the perception of the future as a tangible thing lived in the present, as well.

Markham relaxed a moment, letting the idea inside drift up from his subconscious. Walking was the gentle jog his mind needed; he had used the effect before. Something ... something about the reality needing to be independent of the observer ...

He glanced up. A swarming yellow cloud, moving fast and low over the gray towers, pressed shadows against the flanks of Great St. Mary's church. Bells pealed a cascade of sound through momentarily chilled air; the cloud seemed to suck heat from the breeze.

He watched the curling fingers of fog that dissolved overhead in the trail of the cloud. Then, abruptly, he had it. The nub of the problem was that observer, the guy who had to see things objectively. Who was he? In quantum mechanics, the equations themselves told you nothing about which way time should run. Once you made a measurement, an experiment had to be thought of from that moment on as a thing which generated probabilities. All the equations could tell you was how probable a "later" event was. That was the essence of the quantum. Schroedinger's equation could evolve things either forward in time, or backward. Only when the observer poked his finger in and made a measurement did something fix the direction of the flow of time. If the all-powerful observer measured a particle and found it at position x, then the particle had to be given a small push by the observer, in the very act of observing. That was Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. You could not tell precisely how much of a push the observer had given the wretched particle, so its future position was somewhat uncertain. Schroedinger's equation described the set of probabilities about where the particle would appear next. The probabilities were found by picturing a wave, moving forward in time and making it possible for the particle to appear in many different places in the future. A probability wave. The old billiard-ball picture, in which the particle moved with Newtonian certainty to its next point, was simply false, misleading. The particle's most probable location was, in fact, exactly the same as the Newtonian position–but other paths were possible. Less likely, yes, but possible. The problem came when the observer next poked his finger in and made a second measurement. He found the particle in one place, not spread out among a choice of spots.

Why? Because the observer was always considered essentially Newtonian himself–a "classical measurer," as the tech chat went. Markham grinned broadly as he turned up King's Parade. There was a trapdoor in that argument. The classical observer didn't exist. Everything in the world was quantum-mechanical. Everything moved according to waves of probability. So the massive, untouched experimenter himself got pushed back on. He received an uncertainly known push from the outraged particle, and that meant the observer, too, was quantum-mechanical. He was part of the system. The experiment was bigger, and more complex, than the simple ideas of the past. Everything was part of the experiment; nobody could stand apart from it. You could talk about a second observer, bigger than the first one, who was unaffected by the experiment–but that simply removed the problem one step further. The final fallback was to regard the whole universe as the "observer," so that it was a self-consistent system. But that meant you had to solve the entire problem of the motion of the universe at once, without breaking it up into convenient, separate experiments. The essence of the problem was, what made the particle appear in only one spot? Why did it pick out one of the possible states and not another? It was as though the universe had many possible ways it could go, and something made it choose a particular one. Markham stopped, studying the dizzy height of Great St. Mary's. A student peered over the edge, a knobby head against the steel blue. What was the right analogy? The tachyon beam brought up the same problem. If his ideas were right there was a kind of probability wave traveling back and forth in time. Setting up a paradox kept the wave going in a loop, setting the system into a kind of dumbfounded frenzy, unable to decide on what state it should be in. Something had to choose one. Was there some analogy here, a kind of unmoved observer, who set time flowing forward rather than backward? If there was, then the paradox had an answer. Somehow the laws of physics had to provide an answer. But the equations stood mute, inscrutable. As was always the case, the basic question answered by the mathematics was how, not why. Did the unmoved mover have to step in? Who was he? God? He might as well be.

Markham shook his head in frustration. The ideas swarmed like bees, but he could not pin them. Abruptly he growled and swerved across a lane of bicycling students, into Bowes & Bowes.

The selection was getting thin; the publishing business was in trouble, retreating before the TV tide. A woman tending the register caught his eye; quite sexy. Beyond his age range, though, he thought ruefully. He was getting to the stage where ambitions nearly always exceeded his region of probable success.

The tachyon thing troubled him as he walked home, across the Cav and through the bathing grounds. A greensward, named Laminas Land for some ancient reason, lay beneath a moist, warm afternoon. There was a stillness, as though the year were poised motionless at the top of a long slope up which it had climbed out of winter's grip, and from which it must soon descend. He turned south, towards Grantchester, where the nuclear reactor was still a-building. It seemed that with all the delays they would never finish the squashed ping-pong ball that would cup the simmering core. The meadows around it were a pocket of rural peace. Cows standing in the inky shade of trees swished their tails to banish flies. There were drowsy sounds, murmurs of wood pigeons, a drone of a plane, buzzings and clickings. The air was layered with scents of thistles, yarrow, ragwort, tansy. Colors leaped in ambush from the lush grass: yellow camomile, blue harebells, the scarlet pimpernel of literary fame.

Jan was reading when he arrived home. They made a lazy sort of love in the close upper bedroom, dampening the sheets. Afterward, the image of the woman in Bowes & Bowes flickered through his dozing mind. A musky fullness hung in the air. The long day stretched on to ten in the evening, holding off the night. Markham was reminded, as he checked a calculation in the pale late light, that elsewhere on the planet someone else was paying for these longest of summer days in the hard coinage of frozen winter nights. Debts mount, he thought. And as he read that evening of the spreading bloom, it seemed a vast one was coming due.