Collected short fiction.., p.63
Collected Short Fiction of Greg Egan, page 63
As they spoke, a wave of scout mites swam inside the camouflage fish and docked with the insect. They had found Jake; he was being held in an isolated burrow, almost three thousand kilometers away.
Azar gave Rahul the position. He said, “We have no one close. Do you know how many Circlers are guarding him?”
“Our machines saw twenty.”
“Then I don’t know how to help him,” Rahul confessed. “When he broke you out it was easier, everything was still in a state of confusion. Half the people around you had no declared allegiance; Jake and Tilly were not known as Spiral Out before, it was your presence that forced them to take sides. But all twenty people with Jake now will be resolute Circlers, committed to that philosophy for centuries.”
Shelma said, “The invasion has been repelled! What would the Circlers have to gain now by harming him?”
“It would set an example for future collaborators.”
They swam together to the closest intercept point on the trunk line; the scouts were piggy-backing their own data onto the fiber, using methods too subtle for the lizards to detect. Azar and Shelma watched through the scouts’ senses, and passed on the Circlers’ chemical conversation to Rahul. Jake was in one chamber, along with four guards; in a nearby chamber the other Circlers had gathered to discuss the latest news and plan their next move.
Shelma spoke to Azar privately. “I’ve got the nanotech primed to go in and digitize him, if it comes to that. But if we wait for them to kill him it might be too late; if they mutilate the body or use corrosive chemicals we won’t have time to capture him properly.”
Jake hadn’t given them explicit consent to do anything, but Azar swallowed her objections. According to Juhi he had wanted to be part of a delegation to the Amalgam, and if he turned out to be displeased about being snatched into the infosphere without warning, they could always write him back into ordinary flesh once they’d smuggled his software to safety. The real danger here was jumping in too soon or too late. Too soon and they risked re-igniting tensions with an unmistakable alien intervention. Too late and Jake would be dead.
Among the Circlers in the other chamber were two that Azar recognized from their first encounter: Omar and Lisa. Most of the talk here so far had been petty squabbling, but now the subject turned to Jake.
“We should release him,” Omar insisted. “The fleet has been destroyed or turned back; it doesn’t matter what he does now.”
“Spiral Out need to know what happens to traitors,” Lisa replied. “He set New Passengers free among us. He put everyone in danger.”
Another Circler, Silas, said, “You saw their technology; they could have escaped anyway. Whatever Spiral Out do, we’re never going to be sure that we’re safe, that we’re alone. That’s the reality now, and we need to find a way to live with it.”
Half a dozen other Circlers responded to this angrily, swimming around the chamber in tight, anxious loops. “We need to kill him,” Judah declared. “We need to draw a clear boundary between the right of Spiral Out to make their plans to leave Tallulah, and our right to live here safely and defend our own world.”
Omar said, “If we kill him we’ll start another war. Do you know how many people died in the last one?”
“Better a million die than we lose the whole world to the New Passengers,” Lisa replied.
“Better nobody dies,” Omar retorted, “and we spend our efforts on something that can help us all. We’ve been living like fools. We don’t deserve to feel safe, and killing our own people won’t change that. We don’t even know with certainty where the closest world really lies! And we have no idea what kind of life there might be around the bright stars; I doubt that the aliens were telling us the truth, but none of us really know what’s possible.”
“We’ve been caught sleeping,” Judah conceded. “That much is our fault. But what do you suggest we do about it?”
Omar said, “We need to work together with Spiral Out to explore the nearest worlds, before any more of their inhabitants reach us themselves. If we send out small robots to gather information, the results can serve everyone: defenders of Tallulah, and those who want to leave.”
Lisa was scornful. “After this, you’re going to trust Spiral Out as our allies?”
“Jake freed two aliens that you were threatening to kill,” Omar replied. “They had done us no harm, and we don’t even know for sure that they were lying. Because of that, we should slaughter all of Spiral Out? Or treat them all as our enemies? If everything that’s happened wakes them from their sleep the way it should wake us, we can benefit from each other’s efforts.”
Azar looked to Rahul for a reading of the situation, but he was motionless, his posture offering no verdict. Jake’s fate could go either way.
After forty minutes of discussion with no clear consensus, Omar said, “I’m releasing him.” He paused for a few seconds, then left the chamber. Lisa squirted wordless, dissatisfied noise, but nobody moved to stop him.
Omar entered the chamber where Jake was being held and spoke with the Circlers who were standing guard.
“I don’t agree,” said Tarek. “You’ve come alone to demand this. Who else is with you?”
Omar and Tarek went together to the other Circlers. Omar said, “I repeat, I’m releasing Jake. If anyone here wants a war, I will be an enemy of the warmongers, so you’d better kill me now.”
Judah said, “No one’s going to kill you.” He swam with Omar to Jake’s chamber and spoke with the remaining guards. Then all five of them departed, leaving Jake alone.
Jake circled the chamber nervously a few times, then headed out of the burrow. Azar sent a swarm of scouts after him, but they had no data channel back to the fiber, and Jake was soon out of sight.
Almost an hour later, a message came through from the scouts; Jake had reached a nearby colony where the scouts could tap into the fiber again. Azar told Rahul their location.
Rahul said, “He’s safe, he’s with friends. It’s over for now.”
Azar sat on the flight deck weeping, hiding her tears even from Shelma.
10
Launched from a rail gun on Tallulah’s highest mountain, Mologhat 3 spent six seconds plowing through the atmosphere before attaining the freedom of space. Its heat shield glowed brightly as it ascended, but if the Old Passengers’ machines noticed it they found no reason to molest this speck of light as it headed out of harm’s way. When it reached an altitude of a thousand kilometers it fired its own tiny photonic jet, but the radiation was horizontal and highly directional; nothing on Tallulah had a hope of detecting it.
Jake, Tilly, Rahul, Juhi and a fifth delegate, Santo, swam across the flooded observation deck, looking down on their world for the first time. Azar swam among them, but not as a lizard in anyone’s eyes. Her words would come to them as familiar chemicals, but they could cope with the sight of her as she really was.
As Azar gazed upon Tallulah, she dared to feel hope. There would be no war, no pogrom, but there was still a daunting task ahead for the millions of Spiral Out who remained. They would need to prepare the Circlers for the truth: for the eventual return of this secret delegation, for trade with the Amalgam, for a galaxy that was not what they’d imagined at all. For a future that didn’t follow their script.
Jake said, “Do you think we’ll ever meet Shelma again?”
Azar shrugged; he wouldn’t recognize the gesture immediately, but he’d soon learn. “She once told me that she could choose for herself between solitude and a connection with her people. If she wants to come back, she’ll make those connections as strong as she can.”
“No one’s ever returned before,” Jake said.
“Did Spiral In ever really want to?”
When the moles finally hit pay dirt beneath the ocean floor, their mass spectrometers had detected more than a hundred billion variants of the hoop, and that was only counting the stable forms. The deep rock was more complex than most living systems; no doubt much of that complexity was fixed by the needs of the heating process, but there was still room for countless variations along the way—and room for a new passenger hitching a ride on the hoops as they turned iron and nickel into heat.
If you had to become deep rock in order to understand it, Shelma had decided, she would become it, and then come back. She’d drag the secrets of the hoops out of the underworld and into the starlight.
“What if you can’t?” Azar had asked her. “What if you lose your way?”
“There’s room in there for a whole universe,” Shelma had replied. “If I’m tempted into staying, don’t think of me as dead. Just think of me as an explorer who lived a good life to its end.”
Jake said, “Tell me more about your world. Tell me about Hanuz.”
“There’s no need,” Azar replied. She gestured at the departure gate. “If you’re ready, I’ll show it to you.”
“Just like that?” Jake twitched anxiously.
“It’s fourteen quadrillion kilometers,” she said. “You won’t be back for three thousand years. You can change your mind and stay, or you can gather your friends and swim it with me. But I’m leaving now. I need to see my family. I need to go home.”
The Hundred-Light-Year Diary
From Axiomatic by Greg Egan; Millennium, London, 1995. First published in Interzone # 55, January 1992.
* * * * *
Martin Place was packed with the usual frantic lunchtime crowds. I scanned the faces nervously; the moment had almost arrived, and I still hadn’t even caught sight of Alison. One twenty-seven and fourteen seconds. Would I be mistaken about something so important? With the knowledge of the mistake still fresh in my mind? But that knowledge could make no difference. Of course it would affect my state of mind, of course it would influence my actions—but I already knew exactly what the net result of that, and every other, influence would be: I’d write what I’d read.
I needn’t have worried. I looked down at my watch, and as 1:27:13 became 1:27:14, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned; it was Alison, of course. I’d never seen her before, in the flesh, but I’d soon devote a month’s bandwidth allocation to sending back a Barnsley-compressed snapshot. I hesitated, then spoke my lines, awful as they were:
‘Fancy meeting you here.’
She smiled, and suddenly I was overwhelmed, giddy with happiness—exactly as I’d read in my diary a thousand times, since I’d first come across the day’s entry at the age of nine; exactly as I would, necessarily, describe it at the terminal that night. But—foreknowledge aside—how could I have felt anything but euphoria? I’d finally met the woman I’d spend my life with. We had fifty-eight years together ahead of us, and we’d love each other to the end.
‘So, where are we going for lunch?’
I frowned slightly, wondering if she was joking—and wondering why I’d left myself in any doubt. I said, hesitantly, ‘Fulvio’s. Didn’t you…?’ But of course she had no idea of the petty details of the meal; on 14 December, 2074, I’d write admiringly: A. concentrates on the things that matter; she never lets herself be distracted by trivia.
I said, ‘Well, the food won’t be ready on time; they’ll have screwed up their schedule, but—’
She put a finger to her lips, then leant forward and kissed me. For a moment, I was too shocked to do anything but stand there like a statue, but after a second or two, I started kissing back.
When we parted, I said stupidly, ‘I didn’t know … I thought we just … I—’
‘James, you’re blushing.’
She was right. I laughed, embarrassed. It was absurd: in a week’s time, we’d make love, and I already knew every detail—yet that single unexpected kiss left me flustered and confused.
She said, ‘Come on. Maybe the food won’t be ready, but we have a lot to talk about while we’re waiting. I just hope you haven’t read it all in advance, or you’re going to have a very boring time.’
She took my hand and started leading the way. I followed, still shaken. Halfway to the restaurant, I finally managed to say, ‘Back then—did you know that would happen?’
She laughed. ‘No. But I don’t tell myself everything. I like to be surprised now and then. Don’t you?’
Her casual attitude stung me. Never lets herself be distracted by trivia. I struggled for words; this whole conversation was unknown to me, and I never was much good at improvising anything but small talk.
I said, ‘Today is important to me. I always thought I’d write the most careful—the most complete—account of it possible. I mean, I’m going to record the time we met, to the second. I can’t imagine sitting down tonight and not even mentioning the first time we kissed.’
She squeezed my hand, then moved close to me and whispered, mock-conspiratorially: ‘But you will. You know you will. And so will I. You know exactly what you’re going to write, and exactly what you’re going to leave out—and the fact is, that kiss is going to remain our little secret.’
· · · · ·
Francis Chen wasn’t the first astronomer to hunt for time-reversed galaxies, but he was the first to do so from space. He swept the sky with a small instrument in a junk-scattered near-Earth orbit, long after all serious work had shifted to the (relatively) unpolluted vacuum on the far side of the moon. For decades, certain—highly speculative—cosmological theories had suggested that it might be possible to catch glimpses of the universe’s future phase of re-contraction, during which—perhaps—all the arrows of time would be reversed.
Chen charged up a light detector to saturation, and searched for a region of the sky which would unexpose it—discharging the pixels in the form of a recognisable image. The photons from ordinary galaxies, collected by ordinary telescopes, left their mark as patterns of charge on arrays of electro-optical polymer; a time-reversed galaxy would require instead that the detector lose charge, emitting photons which would leave the telescope on a long journey into the future universe, to be absorbed by stars tens of billions of years hence, contributing an infinitesimal nudge to drive their nuclear processes from extinction back towards birth.
Chen’s announcement of success was met with virtually unanimous scepticism—and rightly so, since he refused to divulge the coordinates of his discovery. I’ve seen the recording of his one and only press conference.
‘What would happen if you pointed an uncharged detector at this thing?’ asked one puzzled journalist.
‘You can’t.’
‘What do you mean, you can’t?’
‘Suppose you point a detector at an ordinary light source. Unless the detector’s not working, it will end up charged. It’s no use declaring: I am going to expose this detector to light, and it will end up uncharged. That’s ludicrous; it simply won’t happen.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Now time-reverse the whole situation. If you’re going to point a detector at a time-reversed light source, it will be charged beforehand.’
‘But if you discharge the whole thing thoroughly, before exposing it, and then…’
‘I’m sorry. You won’t. You can’t.’
Shortly afterwards, Chen retired into self-imposed obscurity—but his work had been government funded, and he’d complied with the rigorous auditing requirements, so copies of all his notes existed in various archives. It was almost five years before anyone bothered to exhume them—new theoretical work having made his claims more fashionable—but once the coordinates were finally made public, it took only days for a dozen groups to confirm the original results.
Most of the astronomers involved dropped the matter there and then—but three people pressed on, to the logical conclusion:
Suppose an asteroid, a few hundred billion kilometres away, happened to block the line of sight between Earth and Chen’s galaxy. In the galaxy’s time frame, there’d be a delay of half an hour or so before this occultation could be seen in near-Earth orbit—before the last photons to make it past the asteroid arrived. Our time frame runs the other way, though; for us, the ‘delay’ would be negative. We might think of the detector, not the galaxy, as the source of the photons—but it would still have to stop emitting them half an hour before the asteroid crossed the line of sight, in order to emit them only when they’d have a clear path all the way to their destination. Cause and effect; the detector has to have a reason to lose charge and emit photons—even if that reason lies in the future.
Replace the uncontrollable—and unlikely—asteroid with a simple electronic shutter. Fold up the line of sight with mirrors, shrinking the experiment down to more manageable dimensions—and allowing you to place the shutter and detector virtually side by side. Flash a torch at yourself in a mirror, and you get a signal from the past; do the same with the light from Chen’s galaxy, and the signal comes from the future.
Hazzard, Capaldi and Wu arranged a pair of space-borne mirrors, a few thousand kilometres apart. With multiple reflections, they achieved an optical path length of over two light seconds. At one end of this ‘delay’ they placed a telescope, aimed at Chen’s galaxy; at the other end they placed a detector. (‘The other end’ optically speaking—physically, it was housed in the very same satellite as the telescope.) In their first experiments, the telescope was fitted with a shutter triggered by the ‘unpredictable’ decay of a small sample of a radioactive isotope.
The sequence of the shutter’s opening and closing and the detector’s rate of discharge were logged by a computer. The two sets of data were compared—and the patterns, unsurprisingly, matched. Except, of course, that the detector began discharging two seconds before the shutter opened, and ceased discharging two seconds before it closed.
So, they replaced the isotope trigger with a manual control, and took turns trying to change the immutable future.
Hazzard said, in an interview several months later: ‘At first, it seemed like some kind of perverse reaction-time test: instead of having to hit the green button when the green light came on, you had to try to hit the red button, and vice versa. And at first, I really believed I was “obeying” the signal only because I couldn’t discipline my reflexes to do anything so “difficult” as contradicting it. In retrospect, I know that was a rationalisation, but I was quite convinced at the time. So I had the computer swap the conventions—and of course, that didn’t help. Whenever the display said I was going to open the shutter—however it expressed that fact—I opened it.’
