Timelike Infinity

Chapter 3

Again Jasoft Parz was suspended in space before a Spline ship.

The freighter was a landscape of gray flesh. Parz peered into an eyeball that, swiveling, 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 including, even, the fabled gravity-wave starbreaker beams, purloined by the Qax from the Xeelee.

He wanted to laugh. A wall of nonexistence was, perhaps, hurtling toward 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 that 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 that 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 judgment 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 surety 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 implied 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 alternate 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 minideath, 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 program 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 coworkers had tried to evolve a philosophy in response to the fact that quantum physics, while universally accepted, was saturated with dazzling paradoxes that 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 commonsense 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 to 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 that 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.

"But Wigner took Schrödinger’s paradox further. Suppose the box was opened by a friend of Wigner’s, who saw whether the cat was alive or dead. The box, cat, and friend would now form a larger quantum system with a more complex wave function in which the state of the cat — and the friend — remained indefinite until observed by Wigner or someone else.

"Physicists of the time called this the paradox of Wigner’s Friend," Jasoft said. "It leads to an infinite regress, sometimes called a von Neumann catastrophe. The box-cat-friend system remains indefinite until observed, say by me. But then a new system is set up — box-cat-friend-me — which itself remains indefinite until observed by a third person, and so on."

The Qax pondered for a while. "So we have, in human eyes, the central paradox of existence, of quantum physics, as set out by this Wigner and his chatter of cats and friends."

"Yes." Jasoft consulted his slate. "Perhaps external reality is actually created by the act of observation. Without consciousness, Schrödinger wondered, Would the world have remained a play before empty benches, not existing for anybody, thus quite properly not existing?’ "

"Well, Jasoft. And what does this tell us about the mind-set of those who style themselves the Friends of Wigner?"

Parz shrugged. "I’m sorry, Governor. I’ve no hypothesis."

There was a lengthy silence then; Parz peered through the port of the flitter at the unblinking eye of the Spline.

Suddenly there was motion at the edge of Parz’s vision. He shifted in his seat to see better.

The Spline freighter was changing. A slit perhaps a hundred yards long had opened up in that toughened epidermis, an orifice that widened to reveal a red-black tunnel, inviting in an oddly obscene fashion.

"I need your advice and assistance, Ambassador," the Governor said. "You’ll be brought into the freighter."

Anticipation, eagerness, surged through Parz.

The flitter nudged forward. Parz strained against his seat restraints, willing the little vessel forward into the welcoming orifice of the Spline.

The flitter passed through miles, it seemed, of unlit, fleshy passages; vessels bulging with some blood-analogue pulsed, red, along the walls. Tiny, fleshy robots — antibody drones, the Governor called them — swirled around the flitter as it traveled. Parz felt claustrophobic, as if those bloodred walls might constrict around him; somehow he had expected this aspect of the Spline to be sanitized away by tiling and bright lights. Surely if this vessel were operated by humans such modifications would be made; no human could stand for long this absurd sensation of being swallowed, of passing along a huge digestive tract.

At last the flitter emerged from a wrinkled interface into a larger chamber — the belly of the Spline, Parz instantly labeled it. Light globes hovered throughout the interior, revealing the chamber to be perhaps a quarter mile wide; distant, pinkish walls were laced with veins.

Emerging from the bloody tunnel into this strawberry-pink space was, Parz thought, exactly like being born.

At the center of the chamber was a globe of some brownish fluid, itself a hundred yards wide. Inside the globe, rendered indistinct by the fluid, Parz could make out a cluster of machines; struts of metal emerged from the machine cluster and were fixed to the Spline’s stomach wall, so anchoring the globe. A meniscus of brownish scum surrounded the globe. The fluid seemed to be slowly boiling, so that the meniscus was divided into thousands, or millions, of hexagonal convection cells perhaps a handsbreadth across; Parz, entranced, was reminded of a pan of simmering soup.

At length he called: "Governor?"

"I am here."

The voice from the flitter’s translator box, of course, gave no clue to the location of the Governor; Parz found himself scanning the stomach chamber dimly. "Where are you? Are you somewhere in that sphere of fluid?"

The Qax laughed. "Where am I indeed? Which of us can ask that question with confidence? Yes, Ambassador; but I am not in the fluid, nor am I of the fluid itself."

"I don’t understand."

"Turbulence, Parz. Can you see the convection cells? There am I, if ‘I’ am anywhere. Do you understand now?"

Jasoft, stunned, stared upward.

The home planet of the Qax was a swamp.

A sea, much like the primeval ocean of Earth, covered the world from pole to pole. Submerged volcano mouths glowed like coals. The sea boiled: everywhere there was turbulence, convection cells like the ones Parz saw in the globe at the heart of the Spline.

"Parz, turbulence is an example of the universal self-organization of matter and energy," the Qax said. "In the ocean of my world the energy generated by the temperature difference between the vulcanism and the atmosphere is siphoned off, organized by the actions of turbulence into billions of convection cells.

"All known life is cellular in nature," the Governor went on. "We have no direct evidence, but we speculate that this must apply even to the Xeelee themselves. But there seems to be no rule about the form such cells can take."

Parz scratched his head and found himself laughing, but it was a laughter of wonder, like a child’s. "You’re telling me that those convection cells are the basis of your being?"

"To travel into space I have been forced to bring a section of the mother ocean with me, in this Spline craft; a small black hole at the center of the Spline sets up a gravity field to maintain the integrity of the globe, and heaters embedded at the core of the fluid simulate the vulcanism of the home sea."

"Not too convenient," Parz said dryly. "No wonder you need a Spline freighter to travel about in."

"We are fragile creatures, physically," the Governor said. "We are easily disrupted. There are severe constraints on the maneuverability of this freighter, if my consciousness is to be preserved. And there are comparatively few of us compared to, say, the humans."

"Yes. There isn’t much room, even in a planet-wide sea…"

"The greatest of us spans miles, Parz. And we are practically immortal; the convection cells can readily be renewed and replaced, without degradation of consciousness… You will understand that this information is not to be made available. Our fragility is a fact that could be exploited."

This warning sent a chill through Parz’s old bones. But his curiosity, drinking in knowledge after years of exclusion, impelled him to ask still more questions. "Governor, how could the Qax ever have got off the surface of their planet and into space? You’re surely not capable of handling large engineering projects."

"But we are nevertheless a technological race. Parz, my awareness is very different from yours. The scales are different: I have sentience right down to the molecular level; if I wish my cells can operate as independent factories, assembling high technology of a miniaturized, biochemical nature. We traded such items among ourselves for millions of years, unaware of the existence of the rest of the universe.

"Then we were ‘discovered’; an alien craft landed in our ocean, and tentative contact was established—"

"Who was it?"

The Governor ignored the question. "Our biochemical products had enormous market value, and we were able to build a trading empire — by proxy — spanning light-years. But we must still rely on clients for larger projects—"

"Clients like humans. Or like the Spline, who cart you around in their bellies."

"Few of us leave the home world. The risks are too great."

Parz settled back in his chair. "Governor, you’ve known me for a long time. You must know how I’ve been driven crazy, for all these years, by knowing so little about the Qax. But I’m damn sure you haven’t shown me all this as a long-service reward."

"You’re correct, Ambassador."

"Then tell me what you want of me."

The Governor replied smoothly. "Parz, I need your trust. I want to travel to the future. I want humans to build me a new time Interface. And I want you to direct the project."

It took Parz a few minutes to settle his churning thoughts. "Governor, I don’t understand."

"The revival of the ancient exotic matter technologies should not be difficult, given the progress of human science in the intervening millennium and a half. But the parameters will differ from the first project…"

Parz shook his head. He felt slow, stupid, and old. "How?"

Through the flitter’s tabletop the Qax transmitted an image to Parz’s slate: an appealing geometrical framework, icosahedral, its twenty sides rendered in blue and turning slowly. "The new Interface must be large enough to permit the passage of a Spline freighter," the Governor said. "Or some other craft sufficient to carry Qax."

A traveler through a wormhole interface suffered gravitational tidal stresses on entering the exotic-matter portal framework, and on passing through the wormhole itself. Parz had been shown, now, that a Qax was far more vulnerable to such stress than a human. "So the throat of the wormhole must be wider than the first," he mused. "And the portals must be built on a larger scale, so that the exotic-matter struts can be skirted—"

Parz touched the slate thoughtfully; the geometrical designs cleared.

The Qax hesitated. "Parz, I need your cooperation on this project." There seemed to be a note of honesty, of real supplication, in the Governor’s synthesized voice. "I have to know if this will cause you difficulty."

Parz frowned. "Why should it?"

"You are a collaborator," the Qax said harshly, and Parz flinched. "I know the ugliness that word carries, for humans. And now I am asking you to collaborate with me on a project whose success may cause great symbolic damage to humans. I am aware of how much the small success of the time-journeying rebels has meant to humans, who see us as oppressive conquerors—"

Parz smiled. "You are oppressive conquerors."

"Now, though, I am asking you to subvert this emblem of human defiance to the needs of the Qax. I regard this as an expression of great trust. Yet, perhaps, to you this is the vilest of insults."

Parz shook his head, and tried to answer honestly — as if the Qax were an externalization of his own conscience, and not a brooding conqueror who might crush him in an instant. "I have my views about the Qax Occupation, my own judgments on actions you have taken since," he said slowly. "But my views won’t make the Qax navies go away, or restore the technologies, capabilities, and sheer damn dignity that you have taken from us."

The Qax said nothing.

"I am a practical man. I was born with a talent for diplomacy. For mediation. By doing the job I do, I try to moderate the bleak fact of Qax rule into a livable arrangement for as many humans as possible."

"Your fellows might say that by working with us you are serving only to perpetuate that rule."

Parz spread his age-pocked hands, finding time to wonder that he was speaking so frankly with a Qax. "Governor, I’ve wrestled with questions like this for long hours. But, at the end of it, there’s always another problem to address. Something urgent, and practical, which I can actually do something about." He looked up at the ball of slowly seething liquid. "Does that make any sense?"

"Jasoft, I think we are of like mind, you and I. That is why I chose you to assist me in this enterprise. I fear that the precipitate actions of these rebels, these Friends of Wigner, represent the gravest peril — not just to the Qax, but perhaps to humanity as well."

Parz nodded. "That thought’s occurred to me too. Meddling with history isn’t exactly a proven science… and which of us would wish to trust the judgment of these desperate refugees?"

"Then you will help me?"

"Governor, why do you want to travel forward in time? How will that help you with your problem from the past?"

"Don’t you see what an opportunity this technology represents? By constructing a portal to the future I can consult with an era in which the problem has already been addressed and resolved. I need not make a decision on this momentous matter with any uncertainty about the outcome; I can consult the wisdom of those future Qax and refer to their guidance…"

Parz wondered vaguely if some sort of time paradox would be invoked by this unlikely scheme. But aloud he said, "I understand your intention, Governor. But — are you sure you want to do this? Would it not be better to make your own decisions, here and now?"

The Governor’s interpreted voice was smooth and untroubled, but Parz fancied he detected a note of desperation. "I cannot take that risk, Parz. Why, it’s entirely possible I will be able to consult myself… a self who knows what to do. Will you help me?"

The Qax is out of its depth, Parz realized. It genuinely doesn’t know how to cope with this issue; the whole of this elaborate new Interface project, which will absorb endless energy and resources, is all a smokescreen for the Governor’s basic lack of competence. He felt a stab of unexpected pride, of chauvinistic relish at this small human victory.

But then, fear returned through the triumph. He had been honest with the Governor… Could he really bring himself to trust the judgment of these Friends of Wigner, to whom accident had provided such power?

And, surely, this victory of procrastination would increase the likelihood that they’d all be left helpless in the face of the wave of unreality from the past.

But, Parz reflected, he had no choices to make.

"I’ll help you, Governor," he said. "Tell me what we have to do first."