“I wouldn’t mind seeing direct,” Leander said. “We’ll all take a peek when we finish moving.”
I still straggled to absorb the enormity of the region of space around us, the hundreds of thousands of stars, clouds of gas and dust.
Distance not important. Distance does not exist except as values within descriptors.
“Are you all right?” Leander asked me, and I shook my head. My cheeks were wet; spherical glittering tears drifted slowly toward my feet in the weak pull of Phobos.
“Sad?” Charles asked, turning toward me. His face seemed extraordinarily peaceful, unnaturally relaxed and unconcerned. I realized Leander’s question had pulled him away from his concentration.
“No,” I said. “A sense of scale. Lost. I just don’t know what will awe me any more.”
Charles turned away, eyes languid. “Making a mistake will awe every one of us,” he said quietly. “Destiny tweak.”
That phrase again, so often denied. I faced Leander and poked a finger not gently into his chest. In a whisper, I said, “I’ve heard that before. You said it was nothing.”
“Charles said it was nothing,” Leander said, shrugging. “He mumbles odd things when he’s down there with the QL.”
“Do you know what he means?” I asked.
Leander shook his head wryly. “I thought I did, once, years ago.”
“Well?”
“We invoked a destiny tweak to clear up logical contradictions. Also, to explain why we could not travel in time, except as instantaneous travel in space affects our position in time. It seemed very classical and naive, and yet… It was that simple.”
“What was simple?”
“With your enhancement, you must understand what the problems are.”
“Travel at speeds that outstrip a photon is logically difficult in a causal universe,” I said.
“Nobody’s much cared about a causal universe for over a century,” Leander said. “But descriptor theory puts everything back on a different sort of causal basis, albeit cause and effect are ultimately limited to the rules governing descriptor interactions.”
I understood that much: all external phenomena, all of nature, is simply a kind of dependent variable, the results of descriptor function. Now I had lost myself in mathematical abstractions and had to backtrack. “So is there logical contradiction or not?” I asked.
“The rules of descriptor-function are the only real logic,” Leander said. “We don’t need the destiny tweak.”
“What was it?”
“We never found it,” Leander said, shaking his head reluctantly. “I don’t know why he mentioned it”
“What was it?” I persisted.
“A variation on the old many-worlds hypothesis,” he said. “We thought that moving a mass instantaneously to a point beyond its immediate information sphere simply recreated the mass in a universe not our own. But we have no evidence for other universes.”
Charles said, “Stephen, I don’t feel right about this one. The QL is looking at too many truths.”
Leander frowned. “What can we do, Charles?”
“Hang on,” Charles said, voice thin. His hand reached up. From behind his couch, instinctively, I grasped it. He sighed, squeezed my fingers painfully, and said, “Damn. We’re missing something.”
Hergesheimer listened with his forehead creased. “What is he talking about?” he asked.
“Get Galena in here,” Charles said. “Please hurry. Don’t let her look outside.”
Hergesheimer started down the tunnel.
“Can I do something, Charles?” I asked, still holding his hand.
“The QL has found a bad path,” Charles said. “Don’t look outside.”
I felt a directionless jerk. With my other hand, I grabbed the back of Charles’s couch. Leander became indistinct, wrapped in shadow; he seemed to turn a corner. His mouth moved but he did not speak, or I could not hear him. A whining sound came from behind me, then enveloped me like a cloud of gnats in a nursery full of hungry babies. Bump, bump, bump, I seemed to keep running into myself, yet I did not move, there was only one of me. Collapsing forms around Leander gave me a clue to what I felt: he appeared to be wrapped in deflating balloon images, each slapping itself down around him, making him jerk and shiver: the momentum of colliding world-lines. The cabin filled with collapsing images of the past, but of course that made no sense at all.
I turned my eyes to the displays and saw ghosts of images unsuited to electronics and optics, images that could not be reassembled correctly from their initial encoding. The math was failing. The physics of our instrumentality had become inadequate. We could not see, could not process the information, could not re-imagine reality.
The feeble whining increased in pitch. Still slapped by my colliding past selves, I sensed a direction for the sound and turned to face it, the star-shaped chamber all corners and wrong sight-lines, angles senseless. I recognized a shape, saw Hergesheimer’s face gone cubist and fly’s eye multiple, and the face became Galena Cameron’s, and I was able to put together an hypothesis that Hergesheimer was holding Galena and she was making the whining sound, eyes closed, hands floating around her face like pets demanding attention.
Hergesheimer’s lips formed shapes: I did not look.
And then, Outside.
And, She did.
Leander had moved and I could not locate him in the diverging angles. I still held Charles’s hand. The fingers wrapped in mine became external. Charles held an inverse of my hand. It didn’t matter.
The whole popped. The final slap was horrendous, soul-jarring. My bones and muscles felt as if they had been powdered and reconstituted.
Drops of blood floated in the air. I took a deep breath and choked on them. Something had scored my skin in long, thin, shallow razor passes. My clothing had been sliced as well, and the interior surfaces of the chamber seemed to have been lightly grooved, as if a sharp-tipped flail had thrashed through the cabin. Leander moaned and held his hands to his face. They came away bloody. Hergesheimer hugged Cameron to his breast. She lay in his arms unresisting and unmoving. All slashed, all bloody.
Charles let go of my hand. Where we had held hands, there were no cuts. The back of my hand might have been a picture of cat practice, except where his fingers had covered.
The interior of the chamber felt deadly cold. The displays and electronics still did not function. Then, they returned, and outside, we saw stars, and the brightness of a much closer sun.
For a moment, nobody said anything.
“We need medical attention,” Leander said, holding out his hands and inspecting his bloody clothing. We had brought a fresh medical kit in the shuttle. I went to fetch it. It seemed imperative that I take charge and become nursemaid.
Otherwise, I thought, I might end up just like Galena , limp as a doll, eyes shut tight, lips drawn in endless riddle.
Leander had plunged deep in conversation with Charles when I returned. I applied medicinal nano directly from a vial with a sterile sponge. Everyone stripped down to receive my ministrations. Hergesheimer undressed Galena , who did not resist. We wiped each other, the touch itself reassuring, healing, an orgy of medicinal tenderness.
I applied swift strokes of sponge to Charles’s arms and face. He closed his eyes, enjoying my attentions.
Hergesheimer suspended Galena in a sling net. She drifted lowly down and settled. “Where are we?” he asked.
“Where we want to be,” Charles said.
“What the hell went wrong?” Hergesheimer asked.
“The QL took us through a bad path,” Charles said. “It couldn’t disengage from some compelling truths. I’m sorry. That must not be any explanation at all.”