“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.
The way he looked at me, the way he spoke — reluctantly, afraid of hurting or disappointing me — made me, if such a thing was possible now, even more uneasy. I had been badly frightened just when I thought I was beyond caring for my personal existence.
I wondered what would have happened if we had died before the rules reverted.
Suddenly Charles seemed unspeakably exotic: not human, intellectually monstrous. “Can we go back?” I asked.
“I’ll hook up again in a few minutes. The interpreter should be finished and the QL should have sorted itself out. I’m sorry, Casseia.”
I stared at him owlishly, my neck hair pricking. “Why do you always feel the need to apologize to me?”
“Because I keep shoving bigger and bigger problems on your back,” he said. “All I really want to do is make things easier for you, take care — ”
“Christ, Charles!” I unfolded and tried to kick away, but he reached out like a cat and grabbed my ankle, bringing me down in an ungentle arc. I bumped against the chamber floor, but he had saved me from a serious head blow against the ceiling.
With a creeping horror I was immediately ashamed of, I kicked loose.
He shrank back, eyes slitted. Then he returned to his chair and attached the optic cables to his head. By now, he had become expert and did not need any help.
Charles took us home, putting Phobos into its old orbit around Mars, as if nothing had happened. By direct link, we were given a new landing site at Perpetua Station, five hundred kilometers east of Preamble, below the Kaibab plateau.
Charles asked for medical help to be ready to receive Galena Cameron and deactivated the tweaker equipment in preparation for leaving the old Phobos base.
Still ashamed of what had happened earlier, I helped him undo his cables and carry the thinker and interpreter to the shuttle. We said little. Galena ’s eyes focused on me as Leander and I guided her limp body to the shuttle. She stiffened slightly when we buckled her into her couch, then asked, “Have my eyes changed color?”
I really did not remember what color her eyes had been, but I said no. “They’re fine,” I said.
She shivered. “Is Dr. Hergesheimer alive?”
“We’re all fine, Galena ,” Leander said.
Hergesheimer leaned over her couch, hanging from the top of the passenger compartment. “We’ve been worried about you.”
“I don’t think I’ve been here very long,” she said, still shivering. “I know I wasn’t asleep. Did we get anything?”
“We got what we went there for,” Hergesheimer said. Then, looking at me, he added, “It was a wild goose chase. We can’t go back.”
“Because of me?” Galena asked, distressed.
“No, dear,” I said. “Not because of you.”
Ti Sandra Erzul and the Presidential entourage — all those privy to our plans — came to Kaibab and Preamble, and Charles, Leander, Hergesheimer and I made our personal presentations in the lab annex. Ti Sandra sat on the left side of the table, flanked by a medical arbeiter and three heavily armed security guards. Twelve kilos lighter than when I’d last seen her, the President appeared alert but distant. On the way into the annex, she had said, “I’ve been close to the reaper, Cassie. Saw his eyes and played a little canasta with him. Don’t blame me for being ghost-eyed.” I let Hergesheimer speak first. He presented a sadly glowing picture of the new stellar system. “It’s a beautiful choice,” he concluded. “A planet placed between these two apopoints,” he highlighted points interior and exterior to an elliptical shaded band, “would receive enough light and warmth to become a paradise. Even Mars.”
Faces became more and more grim as I described the difficulties of the second passage. Ti Sandra shuddered. “Charles gives me reassurance that such a thing will never happen again, but I take a more cautious view.”
Ti Sandra nodded reluctantly.
“Whatever our problems with Earth, in my opinion, we can’t take the extreme solution,” I concluded. “We have to find another way.” Leander looked down at the floor and shook his head.
Charles took it calmly. “We must have the full confidence of all involved,” he said. “I’ll transfer a technical report on the passages, but I see no need to go into details here. We accomplished what we set out to do. There was a major problem, and it injured all of us, and badly disoriented one of our people. Until this group is fully confident again, I concur with the Vice President.”
From most there rose an audible sigh of relief.
“I would like more experiments,” Ti Sandra said. Eyes turned back to her. “How quickly could Mercury travel to an unclaimed asteroid?”
‘To find an asteroid of sufficient size, rendezvous with it…“ Leander mused, and began figuring quickly on his slate.
“Two months,” Charles said, beating him to the answer. “Almost certainly, we’ll need to have our problems with Earth resolved before then.”
“If there’s so little time,” Ti Sandra said, “the risks of kidnapping a few asteroids might be too extreme.” She considered for a moment, weighing the options, and shook her head. “No. We can’t take the chance.”
Charles looked between us, a quiet, chastened little boy.
“I can’t thank all of you enough,” Ti Sandra said quietly.
“We feel as if we’ve failed them,” Leander said as the President’s entourage filed out. Ti Sandra stayed behind. She stood, steadying herself against the table. I approached her and she wrapped her arms around me.
“How does it feel to make history?” she whispered.
“Scary,” I whispered back. “Parts of it… indescribable.”
“I think I’d like to try it sometime,” she said, glancing at me conspiratorially. “But I agree. Not Mars. Not with things the way they are now.”
“It was never more than a pipe-dream anyway,” Charles said. “Was it, Casseia?”
I did not know how to answer. Ti Sandra stepped forward, her legs steady but gait slow, and shook their hands. “You’ve done momentous things,” she said, and her resonant voice and motherly manner gave the words impact beyond cliche. “Mars can never be grateful enough.” She clasped my hands in both of hers, laughed softly, and said, “And probably wouldn’t be grateful, even it if knew.”
“It was getting difficult to keep everybody in agreement,” Leander admitted.
“It’s difficult to realize the predicament we’re in,” Ti Sandra said.
“The predicament hasn’t gone away,” Charles said, sitting forward and clasping his hands. “We’ve learned some interesting things in the past few hours. There’s lots of activity on Earth’s Moon.”
“Lieh tells me Terrestrial authorities have taken over Ice Pit Station,” Ti Sandra said. “What does that mean?”