“Understood,” Charles said.
“The tidal bulge,” Abdi continued.
“It’s in the calculations,” Stephen told him.
“Where’s my station, my instrument hookup?” Hergesheimer asked. I heard but could not see Leander directing him toward the far side of the lab, where all of the exterior instruments of Preamble would direct their flow of data.
“Let’s do it,” Charles said.
I dropped my head back and stared into the projectors. Suddenly my neck hair rose and I nearly screamed. I felt some one standing beside me, opposite Leander and Dandy; I knew who he was, but did not want to accept that I was still so close to the edge.
I could not see him, but his presence was as real as anything else in the room, more real perhaps, more believable. His name was Todd, and he was about five years old, with fine brown hair and a ready smile, cheek smooth and downy and brown, fingers nimble, face flushed, as if he had just come back from exercise or play. He wanted to tell me something. I could not hear him.
He would have been my son. Ilya would have been his father.
I must have made a sound. Charles asked if something was bothering me.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Let’s go.” I wanted to reach out and hold my son’s hand, but he was no longer there.
I would never feel his presence again.
“Go,” Stephen echoed.
“Going,” Charles said.
Staring into the projectors, my head wrapped in neutral sound from the immersion bands, I saw Mars mapped above me as a highly detailed sphere, elevations exaggerated, all of our remaining trackers marked by pinpricks of red. By turning my head, I could see Phobos and Deimos. The map had not been recently updated, for Many Hills and other stations I knew to be gone were plainly marked as well.
“We’ll lose all our satellites,” Dandy murmured. He seemed far away, as did the rumbling howl.
Charles’s voice spoke in the middle of my head, startling me. “First frame shift in two minutes,” he said. “Hear me, Casseia?”
“Yes,” I said. “I see Mars.”
“Would you like to see what the QL is doing?” he asked. “When I go in, I’ll be part of its processing. You’ll be outside, watching.”
“Okay,” I said.
I tried to relax my rock-tense muscles. Best to die relaxed, I thought; the universe seemed unpredictable enough that such a distinction might be important.
The image of Mars changed radically as I was drawn into the QL’s perspective. What I saw was not a planet, but a multi-colored field of overlapping possibilities, the planet as a superposited array. The QL’s assessment changed every few seconds, colors shifting, assignments of the Pierce region flashing at blinding speed: all of Mars scoped and measured using a logic no human could follow, a logic lying outside or beneath the rules of the universe.
I saw more clearly now the value of the QL’s contribution. That it was in fact self-aware, despite these distortions, gave me a chill. What sort of self-awareness could function when consciousness had no shape, no specified purpose?
Who could have designed such a mind? Humans had — famous and less famous; and QL thinkers had played a small role in human affairs for a century and a half — but no human, not even the designers, could encompass the QL mentality. It was not superior — in some respects, it operated much more simply than any human or thinker mind — but what it did, it did superbly — and unpredictably…
If I was a spectator, watching this odd and beautiful horse perform its dressage, Charles was the rider.
“We’ve measured and drawn the first orthonormal base,” Charles said. “Now we measure the translation of conserved descriptors to the larger system.”
With the help of my enhancement, I understood part of what I saw: massive number-crunching through the interpreter’s computer portion, cheating on nature by pulling the “energy” required to shift Mars from the total energy of the larger system, the Galaxy. In fact, the energy would never be expended, not in any real sense; the universe would simply have its demanding bookkeeping balanced, under the table, while it wasn’t looking.
“Twenty seconds until the first frame shift,” Charles told me. Our link seemed more and more intimate. He spoke solely for my benefit. “QL is now reassigning all descriptors to the first destination.” We would move everything in the “space” to be occupied by Mars, at the same “time” we shifted the planet itself, in effect trading places. This was the easiest part of the process to understand, though not to accomplish.
“The tweaker is beginning to radiate,” Stephen said outside. “Fluctuation in the Pierce region.”
I saw the two frames — our present frame and the frame we would translate ourselves to. They overlapped, and then, for an instant, I could not see Mars at all. What I saw instead was horrifying in its simplicity.
Mars had been reduced to an ineffable potential. It could be anything, and we were with it — we had been drawn outside of the rules, away from the game. This was the blanking, when systems that relied on moment-to-moment correlations — minds, computers, thinkers, electronic systems — had to jumpstart themselves, to assume that there had at one time been a reality, and that all of the rules had been what they seemed to be now.
In the potential, I saw — though fortunately, I did not feel — the attraction of what seemed to be choice. We could choose other sets of rules. The QL danced through these with great haste. I wanted to linger, to sample; what if this were changed, or that, or that — such fascinating prospects!
“Frame shift,” Charles said. The potential vanished and I saw again a simple representation of Mars. Hergesheimer took quick measurements of our position.
The rumbling howl died to a faint shiver, barely heard or felt through the couch’s padding. We were no longer where we had been. Earth had lost its target.
“Charles, how are you?” I asked.
“Well enough,” he said. “The QL got a little frightened back there. Changing the rules seems to be as attractive as sex. It feels at home in that kind of place.“
“Don’t let it do any dating,” I suggested. The immensity of what might have happened was lost in a sudden feeling of lightness.
“I think we did it right,” Charles said. I blinked away from the projectors and squinted at him on his couch. His eyes were closed and his breath came in shallow jerks.
Something brushed my arm. I swiveled my head the opposite direction and felt such a sudden sense of relief, tears started to flow. I lifted up my arm and reached out.
Ti Sandra stood beside my couch. She looked very healthy, back to her full weight, face wide and radiant and proud. She wore her most flamboyant gown, hand-stitched tiny glass beads sparkling. She stroked my arm, her touch as light as a breeze. “You made it,” I said. “God, it’s good to see you.”
“We’ve advanced along Mars’s orbit fifty million two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers,” Hergesheimer sang out.
Ti Sandra shook her head, still beaming at me, eyes crinkled down to slits with her pride and her love. I wondered at the lightness of her touch.
“Now for the first big leap,” Stephen said. “Charles?”
“Assessing,” Charles said.
I had glanced away at the sound of Stephen’s voice. When I glanced back, Ti Sandra was not there, of course, but her touch on my arm remained.
I settled back into the couch, mouth dry as flopsand, and let the projectors find my eyes again, filling my field of view.
“There’s no greater time lag — no lag at all,” Charles said. “But we’ll seem to be in the blanking longer, you and I and the QL and interpeter. We have a lot more translation to do — to the larger system. That will seem to put us outside status quo longer.”