Starburst

20

My name is Willis Becklund, deceased. I am an engineer, a soliton, an astronaut, and a ghost—depend­ing on how you look at me, and providing you can see me at all. You can see me when I want you to, though, because unlike most of us dead I have a foot on either side of Chandrasekhar's other limit. Do you think that is an advan­tage? It is not. It means only that I am not wholly in either your here or that other here; I have no home anyhere, and so I wander.

This is what demonstrates that I am a ghost.

What demonstrates that I am an engineer is that I was trained that way, long ago when I was alive and young, and I'm still good at it. Better than all of them. Shef could never have deployed his dis-ray without me, not to mention building the O'Neill we all live in—no, make that reside in. Not to mention even the rebuilding of the drive long and long ago. None of this would have happened without me, although I do not usually claim credit. In some of those cases I am not sure there is any credit to claim.

What demonstrates that I am an astronaut, of course, is that dirty Dieter manipulated me into being one, and what demonstrates I am a soliton is that there is no other way to account for the fact that I am here. A standing wave. I don't dissipate. I just keep on being a wave.

Now, I know this is all very difficult for you. See, it is not what you don't know, it is what you think you do know that gets in the way. Take the dis-ray. That was very elementary. (Ha-ha. In the sense of elementary particles, do you see?) "Dis" doesn't mean disintegration. It's an acronym. The kaons break up atoms. They don't do it through fission in the normal way—they don't fiss—they do it through deep inelastic scattering, which we call DIS for short The DIS weakens the bonds, and electrostatic repulsion breaks the heavy atoms up; could anything be more simple?

The best way to understand, really, is to roll the bones and absorb the hexagrams, but as most human beings are too lazy for that, let me simply say that your big problem is to avoid getting lost in the miasma of things like Einstein separability, which, when you come right down to it, I suspect is the single dumbest question Man has propounded to Man since the days of counting angels on a pin. Take the simplest case, that is, the question of spin in quantum mechanics, all right? Perform a simple experiment:

First steal two protons. Put them together in the singlet state, then break them up. Well, now, experiment will show you that every time one of them will turn out to have + spin and the other has - spin, whatever axis of the proton you measure spin on. Wow! How strange! How can that be? you demand. I mean, how can this proton over here, with a plus spin, know that that one over there has a minus, so it knows what to be?

See, that's your foggy thinking for you. It comes of using words like "spin" to mean rotation (my gosh, the little devils certainly don't rotate!), and even more it comes from using words like "there." There is no "there"! There are only a lot of different "heres"! So if you find that the Bell inequality is unequal, don't you see?, it is only because you are measuring it with two bent tools!

Now, with that basis for your understanding, I think I can tell you what it is that makes me sad. Then you can go back to listening to poor dumb little Eve. Eve has very little to recommend her, but she has an option open to her—the option of growing, and changing, and then of dying—which is no longer open to me. Someday, perhaps, she can do what Shef and Flo and the others have done; she may even be able to do what Ann has done. And I never can.

You know that when we arrived in the Alpha Centauri system we built ourselves a habitat out of bits and pieces of debris, and if you know anything at all you will know that we did not by any means use all the pieces. Even a loner like Alpha has quintillions of tons of matter floating around it. Ultimately we found that there were actually three asteroid belts, nearly an equal mass in comets, and about a Moon's worth of other trash, and some of us wanted to push them all together to make a real world. The wiser ones laughed. Building a world is not a matter of sticking bricks together with mortar, they said. There is a dynamic balance. The interior must be squeezed and heated into magma so that the oxygen and hydrogen can migrate to the surface. The surface must cool, so that the water can stay there and the rapid gas molecules will not spin off into space. Not hundreds of years, at least millions!

So causality doth capture us all . . . until we transcend it.

It had taken all this time for Ann to transcend it; and that was why I envied Ann Becklund, who was once my mortal wife.