Charles blinked at me, surprised by my tone, then reached for his slate. “We have a lot to catch up on.”
“I’ve read your papers,” I said. “Most of it’s way beyond me.”
Charles nodded. “The ideas are simple enough, however.”
He drew his lips together and raised an eyebrow. “Are you prepared to take some things on trust?”
“I’ll have to, won’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Then I suppose I’m prepared for it.”
“You’re angry.”
“Not with you specifically,” I said.
Leander unharnessed himself and stood. “I’m going forward for a better view,” he said. We ignored him. He shrugged and took a seat out of earshot.
“That’s not what I meant. You’re angry about our giving you so much responsibility.”
“Yes.”
“I wish we could have avoided it.”
“You wanted to change the universe, Charles.”
“I wanted to understand. All right, I wanted to change it. But I didn’t want to make you responsible.”
“Thanks for nothing.”
Charles drew back and looked away, hurt and irritated. The slate rested on his lap. “Please be fair, Casseia.”
“You know,” I said, fairness far from my thoughts at the moment, “it was you who scuttled our first initiative on Earth. You Olympians. You made everybody so very nervous… You put us under so much pressure — and we did not even understand what you were planning.”
“Planning?” He chuckled. “We didn’t know ourselves. Apparently the implications were more clear to people on Earth than they were to us.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Did you think you could do all this in a vacuum?”
He shook his head. “Vacuum?”
“Ethics, Charles.”
“Oh… Ethics.” His face reddened. “Casseia, now you’re being very unfair.”
“Dust unfairness. Do you know what this is going to do to us?”
“What kind of decision could I make? To back away from knowledge? Casseia, I’ve tried to be as ethical and straightforward as I can. Our whole group has stuck with very high standards.“
“That’s why you worked for Cailetet.”
“They are — were — hardly villains. As soon as Achmed Crown Niger came on board, we prepared to close up shop. And Cailetet actually helped us. With a push from Earth. Crown Niger was less concerned with what we could offer him than with satisfying his bosses on Earth.”
“You left when they cut funding.”
“We told them nothing even before that.”
I smiled. “Are you sure they don’t have your results locked away somewhere? Before Crown Niger ?”
“It’s possible. But if they look over that material, they won’t have a clue about what we’ve discovered since. It will be very misleading. We explored a lot of blind canyons, Casseia. Earth is still chasing up blind canyons.”
For a few seconds, I had nothing to say. Then my anger collapsed and I shivered. “Charles, aren’t you frightened?”
He considered cautiously, looking at me. “No,” he said. “You’ve put our house in order, Casseia — or it’s on its way to being put in order. A responsible government — ”
“In its infancy, uncoordinated and frail and new. We don’t even know whether the interim government can flow smoothly into an elected government. We haven’t tried it out yet, Charles.”
“Well,” he said. “I have faith in you.”
“In Mars?” I asked, wrapping my arms around myself to control my shivering. He reached out to touch me and I gave him a withering glare. He pulled his hand back. “Charles, you’re giving us the power to destroy our enemies, and we don’t know who our enemies are. Earth has very subtle means of persuading us… and all you’re offering is a sledge hammer!”
“Much more than that,” Charles said softly. “Huge supplies of power, remote control of resources. We are limited in significant ways, but that doesn’t mean we can’t defend ourselves against almost anything.“
“By threat, perhaps. You can convert matter to antimatter. Remotely. From a very great distance. With pinpoint accuracy.”
He nodded.
“We could fry Earth’s cities. You’ve brought back the horror of the twentieth century.”
He grimaced. “That’s melodramatic,” he said.
“Do you think Freechild Dauble would have hesitated to abuse such power?”
Charles said, “I know that you will use it wisely. We would not have told you if I thought otherwise.”
For a moment, I was speechless. I waved my hands and finally pointed a finger at him, not knowing whether to laugh or scream. “My God, Charles, I’m glad I made such an impression on you! Maybe I am a saint. But what about those who come after — for generations?”
“Long before then, everybody will know. There will be a balance. Look, Casseia, this is irrelevant — ”
“I don’t see that,” I muttered.
“It’s irrelevant because the knowledge is here and it won’t go away.” His face fell into an expression of weariness. “There is no peace, no end to the new and frightening in this life.”
I bit my tongue to keep from saying, Philosophy comes late, Charles.
“I know,” he continued. “I’ve thought about this for years. What happens if we complete the theory, I asked myself, and find a way to get into the Bell Continuum. To manipulate descriptors. We all worried about it.”
Leander came back and sat, looking between us. “Do we have any agreement?” he asked.
I laughed weakly and shook my head. “Bad dreams,” I said.
Charles said, “ ‘O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.’ ”
“We think of that quote a lot,” Leander said, settling into his seat. “The universe is bounded in a nutshell. Distance and time mean nothing, except as variations in descriptors. Knowing that, we could be kings of infinite space.”
“And the bad dreams?”
Leander’s expression abruptly grew stern, even sad. “Charles put me up front because I look the part and because bureaucrats respond to me better. That doesn’t mean I can be circumspect all the time. We’re in this together, Miss Majumdar. You can stand on your high mountain and accuse us of naiveté and intellectual hubris and tell us nothing we haven’t pondered a thousand times in private.”
“Don’t assume, Stephen,” Charles said. “Casseia isn’t so simplistic.”
Leander controlled himself with visible effort, smiled brightly and falsely, and said, “Sorry. I happen to think that focusing on ‘bad dreams’ points to a lack of imagination.”
“Why didn’t the President come with you?” Charles asked. “This should have taken precedent.”
“There’s a major problem. If she doesn’t solve it, the cloth might unravel, and there will be no constitutional government to decide what to do with your work. She trusts me to tell her what happens.”
“She’s afraid, isn’t she?” Charles said.
I sniffed.
“I saw it in her eyes,” Charles said. “She’s human-scale. She’s not comfortable with this kind of immensity.”
I nodded. “Perhaps.”
“What about you? Can you overcome your fear and look with a child’s eyes?”
“Don’t expect too much, too soon, Charles,” I said.
The test area had been equipped with a temporary shelter for twenty people, built by arbeiters the day before. Four of the Olympians — Leander, Charles, Chinjia, and Royce — were present, Chinjia and Royce having flown in even before the shelter was finished to prepare their apparatus.
The landscape around the site was as barren as I remembered from vids seen in areological studies in second form. Melas Doras had none of the drama of the sulci, none of the color of Sinai, no fossils, no minerals…