“We passed through a different universe?” Leander asked.
“I don’t think so,” Charles said. “Something to do with changing our geometry, altering boson world-lines. Photons acquired slight mass.”
Leander said, “Is this something we can understand?”
“Maybe not,” Charles said.
“Are we damaged? I mean, permanently,” Leander said. He knew the questions to ask Charles, our oracular connection to the QL. I kept my mouth shut and listened. Galena seemed to be asleep. Hergesheimer hung in one apex of the star-shaped chamber, half-visible from where I stood, feet pressing with a pebble’s lightness against the floor. The astronomer’s eyes seemed listless, half-dead.
“Photons cut through matter, but not deeply. Only some photons acquired mass. Not complete.” Charles looked at me directly, then at Leander. “QL doesn’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t think we should waste time trying now. It won’t happen again.”
“How do you know?” Leander asked, bringing himself closer to Charles, staring at him intently.
“Because the QL got scared,” Charles said. “It won’t examine those truths again.”
We mopped up the droplets of blood as best we could and made new clothes while Hergesheimer worked alone with his instruments. In the tunnel to the shuttle pad, I stopped Leander to ask, “Do you know what might be wrong with Galena ? She’s still asleep.”
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“Will she recover?”
“I hope so.”
“Can we do what we need to do?”
“Ask Hergesheimer,” Leander said testily. “I’m worried about getting us back. Charles is exhausted. We’re all strung out. It’s been four hours already.” He tried to break loose from my hand, but my fingers clamped down like talons. He grimaced.
“It’s all over, isn’t it?” I said. “We can’t move Mars.”
He swallowed and shook his head, unwilling to face the obvious. “Charles says it won’t happen again.”
“The risk, Stephen.”
“It’s horrendous,” he admitted, looking away. “Horrendous.”
“Did you expect anything like this?”
“Of course not.”
Hergesheimer dragged himself through the tunnel hand over hand. “Not that it matters much,” he said, “but this goddamned system is ideal. It’s everything we thought it might be. The planets are rich with minerals, one is Earth-sized and has a reducing atmosphere but no detectable life… Ripe for terraforming. Two prime gas giants. Lovely young asteroids. The star is a long-term variable like the sun. No sign of intelligent life — no radio chatter. It’s beautiful.”
He showed me pictures and graphs and strings of numbers on his slate. Sludge-brown Earth-sized planet, very unappetizing; huge blue-green gas giants banded with orange and yellow, rich with hydrogen and deuterium; he had made estimates for the total mass of free minerals and carbonifers and volatiles available in the belt. Rich indeed. He switched the slate off abruptly. “To hell with it.”
“You’ve finished?” I asked.
“No, but the essential work is automatic and should be done in a few minutes.”
“Margin for error?” I asked.
“Certainty on broad descriptive grounds. All we could expect,” Hergesheimer said. “Does it matter, Casseia? Are we ever going to return?”
I shook my head. “Do it right anyway.”
“ Galena ’s awake,” Hergesheimer said. “She doesn’t behave.”
“Beg pardon?”
He waggled his fingers in front of his face, stared at me with eyes bulging, accusing, and said, “There is no behavior. She’s blank.”
“Did you see what happened to her?” Stephen asked.
“She was in the observation blister. She’d pulled back the armor and she was looking outside. I caught a glimpse and turned away. It felt like knives.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Leander said.
“You look at her, then,” Hergesheimer said angrily. “Talk to her. You pull her out.”
When I returned to the control chamber, Charles had unstrapped from his couch and exercised slowly, pressing feet against one wall, hands against an adjacent wall. The optic cables to his head had been disconnected. He turned to me as I came in and said, “It truly won’t happen again.”
“ Galena ’s in bad shape,” I said. “What can we do for her?”
“Bad information,” he said, pressing until he grunted. “Bad paths.” He floated free and fell slowly to the deck, landing on flexed knees. “She took in outside information without prior processing. We saw it through viewers that can’t convey the fullness. She’ll have to sort it out.”
“How could what she sees hurt her?” I asked.
“We assume certain things are true,” he said. “When we have visual proof they are not true, we become upset.”
“Hergesheimer says she’s totally unresponsive.”
“She’ll just have to find her way back.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“I have the interpreter modeling a human response to the QL’s re-creation of what was outside. Maybe that will tell us more. If we had stayed in that condition more than a few seconds, we would all have ceased to exist.”
“We can’t move Mars,” I said. “I won’t take the responsibility.”
“It won’t happen again. The QL was badly upset. It won’t look at those truths again.”
My frustration and anger peaked. “I will not send my people into a place like that! I don’t know what you’re talking about, ‘truths’ and that shit. The QL is too damned unreliable. What if it decides to do something even more dangerous and incomprehensible? Was it experimenting on us?”
“No,” Charles said. “It found something it hadn’t noticed before. It was a major breakthrough. What it found answers a lot of questions.”
“Shooting us off into an alternate universe — ”
“There are no alternate universes,” Charles said. “We were in our own universe, with the rules changed.”
“What does that mean?” My breath came in hitches and my hands opened and closed reflexively. I hid my hands behind me, clamping my jaw until my teeth ached.
“The QL discovered a new category of descriptors and tweaked one. This category seems to co-respond directly with every other descriptor on the largest scale. Wholeness. The destiny tweak. We changed the way the universe understands itself. Builds itself.”
“That’s stupid,” I said.
“I don’t understand it yet, myself,” Charles said. “But I don’t deny it.”
“What happened to the old universe?” I demanded.
“The new universe couldn’t conduct any business. It didn’t fit together. Rules contradicted and produced nonsense nature. Everything reverted to the prior rules. We came back.”
“The whole universe?” I folded myself up beside him, hugging my knees. “I can’t absorb that. I can’t take it in, Charles,” I said.
“I think Galena will be all right in a few hours,” Charles said. “Her mind will reject what she saw. She’ll return to what she was before.”
“What happens if we touch that descriptor again?” I asked.
“We won’t. If we did, we’d get another incomprehensible universe, and it would revert. The problem is for us, for now. The rules of our universe were created by countless combinations and failures. Evolution. We’d have to learn how to design all the rules to interact and make sense. That could take centuries. We don’t know anything yet about creating a living universe from scratch.“
“But we could do it, someday?”
“Conceivably,” Charles said.