I listened to him carefully, trying to follow his reasoning. Some of it was clear enough, but I could not track his leaps of intuition.
Charles squinted up at the ceiling. “I’ve never told anybody that before,” he said. “You’re looking at my theoretical underwear, Casseia.”
“I’m not embarrassed,” I said. “I hardly know what I’m seeing.”
“We’ve been around and around about responsibility for discovery, about the problems descriptor theory has caused you and everybody else. I thought I’d tell you more about my excuses. God is not necessary in all this — but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been searching for God. I just haven’t found the key yet. Maybe there isn’t any. But when I contemplate these things, when I work on these problems, that is the only time I feel worthy.
“I’ve lived my life well enough, and I’m no monster, but I have sufficient emotional problems for any human. When I work, I transcend those problems. I am pure. It’s like a drug. I can’t stop thinking just to become responsible and put a halt to change. I need the purity of that kind of thought, that kind of discovery. I may never know a redemptive love, I may never have complete self-understanding, but I will have this, at the very least: the moments when I’ve asked questions about reality and gotten meaningful answers.”
“When did you first think your theory was justified?” I asked.
“I put the Olympians together. Stephen was crucial with the politics, especially when we went to work for Cailetet. First, we duplicated William Pierce’s experiment. We redesigned his apparatus, improved field damping, used more efficient force disorder pumps. We used a smaller sample of atoms. And we brought the atoms down to absolute zero. At zero temperature, the Bell Continuum becomes coextensive with space-time. They merge. Descriptors within particles can be changed.”
“That’s all?” I asked.
“That’s something all by itself,” Charles said. “But you’re right. It still wouldn’t be enough… Earth thinks descriptors are simple yes-no switches. But I decided they couldn’t be simple. First, I tried to think of them as smoothly varying functions. That didn’t work, either. They weren’t yes-no toggles, but they weren’t smooth waves, either. They were codependent. Each referred to the others. They networked. Every particle having mass contains the same number of descriptors. But that number is not an integer. It isn’t even rational. Descriptors obey Quantum Logic from beginning to end.” He looked at me with some concern. “Am I boring you?”
“Not at all,” I said. I found myself attracted by the sound of his voice, boyishly enthused and powerful at once. Children playing with matches. The fascination of fire.
“If you want to tweak a descriptor, you must first persuade it to exist,” Charles said. “You have to separate it out from the cloud of potential descriptors, all of them codependent. And to do that, you need a QL thinker.”
“But how do you reach them?” I asked.
“Good question,” Charles said. “You’re thinking like a physicist.”
“More like mud pies to me,” I said.
He smiled and tapped my hand with his finger. “Don’t underestimate yourself.”
I withdrew my hand. “How?” I asked.
“When we bring a sample of atoms down to zero, the coextensive space around it takes on the characteristics of a single large particle, what we call a Pierce region, or a ‘tweaker,’ ” he said. “It has its own charge and spin and mass, e times the mass of the original sample of atoms. Its extra mass is pseudo, of course, and the traits are pseudo as well. We suspended the pseudo-particle, the tweaker, in a vacuum. We found that when we manipulated the tweaker, we were actually choosing a descriptor, pulling it from the cloud, and changing it directly. But nothing happened. The accident was stumbling upon the unique identity descriptor that keeps a particle separate from all others.”
“So?”
“Tweaking unique identity could convert our pseudo-particle into any particle, anywhere. The pseudo-particle itself doesn’t actually exist in the matrix — the matrix doesn’t recognize it. So another particle takes on the traits we assign. It can be a single particle far away — or all the particles within a well-defined volume.”
It almost made sense. “The tweaker, the coextensive space, becomes a surrogate for others. What you do to it, you do to them.”
“Right,” Charles said. “There are no particles, you understand — no such thing as space or time. Those are just fragments of the old paradigm now. We’re left with nothing but descriptors interacting within an undefined matrix.” He looked over my shoulder at Casares and Zenger, visible as moving shapes behind the translucent curtain. Chinjia and Leander helped them. “We can excite a distant particle in a way that can be interpreted as a signal.”
“How fast?” I asked.
“How fast can the signal travel? Instantaneously,” he said. “Remember. Distance doesn’t exist.”
“Don’t you violate a few important laws?”
“You bet,” Charles said enthusiastically. “Paradigm shift. And I don’t say that lightly. We’ve thrown causality right out the door. We replace it with an elegant balancing act in the Bell Continuum. Bookkeeping.” He rounded his lips, sucked in a deep breath, folded his hands on the table and rapped the surface lightly with a knuckle. “That’s the explanation. In a nutshell.”
“All of it?” I asked. He was holding something back.
“All of it that’s relevant for now — and certainly as much as you’d care to hear.”
“You mean, as much as I’d understand. One more question. What’s the ‘destiny tweak’?”
Charles lowered his eyes. “You’ve read the letter from Stanford,” he said.
“Yes.”
“That’s why you sent me that message a few years back.”
“Yes.”
“It was speculation. Pure and unfounded.”
“Nothing more?”
He shook his head. “How’s your husband’s work going?”
“Very well,” I said.
“You’ve a curious taste for scientists, Miz Majumdar,” Charles said with an enigmatic smile.
Before I could respond, Leander and Casares pushed through the curtain. They sat in the booth and Casares said, “We’re finished. The inside of the container is scarred — as if it’s been baked and etched. I’m convinced energy was created by a mirror matter interaction in the sealed sample. Doctor Zenger is convinced, as well.”
Zenger came forward and said, “I’ll go along for the time being.”
“We can send our report directly to the President, or…”
“I’ll take it to her,” I said.
“Have you made security arrangements yet?” Leander asked. “We need to know whom we can talk to.”
“We’re still working out details.”
“Government’s in the details,” Charles said.
On the shuttle back from the lab, I looked at Charles and Chinjia, observing their postures, the play of their glances at each other and at me, Zenger, and Casares. Flying over Solis Dorsa, avoiding the edge of a thin but wide dust storm, I experienced a quick shiver of unease.
Something very important was being left unspoken, undescribed.
More than government lay in the details.
I fell into a darker mood. The less I understood, the less I could interpret what was being said, the weaker Ti Sandra and I would be. We could not afford weakness. We would have to understand more fully — and anticipate as much as we possibly could.
There was only one way for me to do that. I lacked Charles’s native ability. I could not track his leaps of intuition. I would have to take at least a step toward being more like Orianna. Charles had made the suggestion. It was obvious, it was necessary, but I still strongly resisted.
I would need an enhancement.
I would have to reach Charles’s level of comprehension, if not brilliance, and as soon as possible.