“Seven league boots,” Maspero-Gambacorta said. “All the dreams.”
“Enough,” Charles said quietly but firmly, his calm regained, at least on the surface. “What do you think we have left unsaid, Casseia?” He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and stared at me as if I were all that mattered on this world. “You have your enhancement now. Tell us. What do you think?”
“I don’t profess to genius, or to understand it all yet…”
“All the better,” Charles said. “You give us some idea what others will think when they hear about the newest developments. And they will. In time. Tell us.”
I resented Charles’s turnabout questioning. I felt as if I were a student up for an exam. “If you have access to the Bell Continuum — to everything that determines the nature of reality — ”
“All the hidden variables, nothing but,” Nehemiah Royce said. Charles lifted his hand: no interruptions.
“What else can you alter?” I asked. “Descriptors for momentum, angular momentum, spin, charge…” I waved my hand. “All of it. What else can you change or control?”
“Not all descriptors are amenable to tweaking,” Charles said.
“Yet,” Nehemiah Royce said.
Charles barely tilted his head in acknowledgment. “But you’re correct, and it’s interesting you mention seven league boots.”
The hollow in my stomach expanded.
“Your enhancement tells you more than you can consciously express, I suspect,” Charles said. “Others with enhancements have the same problem. It’s a design flaw, I think. Maybe they’ll get better at it soon.”
“Please,” I said.
“We can reach into a particle and tweak the descriptor for its position in space-time. We can change the descriptor and move the particle.”
“Move it where?” I asked.
“Anywhere we want. There’s a problem, however. We haven’t actually moved anything. The fact is…” He looked down at the table. “We can’t move anything small. We don’t understand why, but the Bell Continuum ties a lot of position descriptors together. It has to do with scaling, with the rules that result in conservation of energy. We can’t separate them out, so we can’t access descriptors individually — or in smaller groups — for insignificant objects.” Charles licked his lips and stared at me directly. “But we know how to tweak large numbers of descriptors simultaneously. Right now, we can’t use our theory to move this bowl of rice,” he said, shifting the bowl before him a few centimeters with his fingertip, “but most of us here think we can move a large object, if we’re so inclined.”
“How large?” I asked.
“The parameters are determined by size and density. The minimum we might move is an object of unit density, twenty kilometers in average diameter.”
“We’re ready to try an experiment,” Leander said. The room’s atmosphere had become charged with a wicked kind of excitement. “Phobos is about the smallest local object we can move. Its major axis is twenty-eight kilometers, and its density is two grams per cubic centimeter. We suggest taking a trip on Phobos.”
I stared blankly. Charles leaned his head to one side and lifted an eyebrow, as if to prompt me. “Where?” I asked.
“To Triton, actually,” Charles said. “Around Neptune . Nobody claims Triton. It’s sufficient in size…”
“Why Triton?”
Charles pointed upward. “Volatiles. We could move it and mine it. It could supply Mars for millions of years.”
“We could put it in orbit,” Maspero-Gambacorta said, “and shave ice from it — let the flakes drift into Mars’s atmosphere. In time, the atmosphere would thicken — ”
Leander broke in. “Or we could use it as a vehicle and explore.”
“Why not both?” Royce said, looking at his colleagues with an expression of boyish speculation.
“You’ve all been thinking about this a lot,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell us earlier?”
Royce spoke first. “We haven’t actually done an experiment, of course,” he said. “Until we know for sure — moving something — it’s hard to accept. You understand that.”
I nodded slowly, more dazed than ever. “Then there really is no such thing as distance. Space and time.”
Danny Pincher laughed abruptly. “I’ve been working on the time tweak,” he said. “In theory, of course. The descriptors are tightly bound, co-respondent, as we say. They keep a shell of causality in place. The whole system of descriptor logic is surprisingly classical. But the total bookkeeping leads to enormous complications if you only observe macroscopic nature. Only in the descriptor realm does the whole become simpler.”
“Ultimately,” Charles said, “we may be able to reduce our knowledge of the universe to one brief equation.”
“Completing physics,” Leander said, nodding as if this were already certain.
“But moving a moon… Where does the energy come from?” I asked. Even with my enhancement, I could not draw a clear answer from the equations in their papers.
“Energy and vector descriptors governing conservation are linked across greater and greater scales,” Charles said. “If we transfer a large object, we draw from an even larger system. If we move Phobos, for example, automatic bookkeeping in the Bell Continuum would adjust descriptors for all particles moving within the galaxy, deducting a tiny amount of their total momentum, angular momentum, and kinetic energy. The net result would be a reduction in the corresponding quantities for the entire galaxy. Nobody would notice.“
“Not for millions of years, anyway,” Royce said. “We’d have to ship thousands of stars back and forth all over the place to make any big difference.”
“It sounds so smooth,” I said. “Could we actually move stars?”
“No,” Leander said. “We think there’s an upper limit.”
“The upper limit seems to be two-thirds of an Earth mass, of any density,” Royce said. “That may not be more than a temporary problem.”
“Some of us think it’s a true limit,” Chinjia Park Amoy said. Danny Pincher and Mitchell Maspero-Gambacorta raised their hands in agreement.
“You could do this with the equipment you have now?” I asked.
The Olympians looked to Charles to give a final answer.
“We’d need to expand the thinker capacity,” Charles said. “We’ve been working on that already. We’ll have new thinkers grown and ready at Tharsis in a few weeks. We could do it in a few weeks or months. If we can do it at all.”
“Can you?‘ I persisted.
‘Theoretically, it’s no more difficult than converting matter to mirror matter,“ Charles said. ”But we can’t do it remotely. We have to be sitting on the object to be moved.“
“Can you do it?”
“Yes,” he answered, his tone sharp in response to my own.
“You could move Phobos.”
“We could move Mars, if you tell us to,” Charles said, and his look was a challenge.
What the Olympians had told me filtered down to my mental basement slowly during the next week, fed along the way by a constant stream of facts and interpretations provided by or encouraged by the enhancement. I began to understand — while distracted by official duties — all that the group’s discoveries implied, the certainties, the probabilities, the possibilities… the improbabilities.
Nothing seemed impossible.
At night, lying alone or on one occasion that week, lying beside Ilya after making love, I thought of a thousand things I wanted to say to Charles. First came angry statements of betrayal similar to what I had expressed before — Why now, why me? Why all this responsibility?
Then came horrible speculations. How would Earth react if it knew that Mars had advanced so far? Charles, you can drop moons on Earth. We can. Goofy immature unstable Mars. They don’t trust us. If they know — if they learn — they’ll try to stop us. They may not even try to negotiate. They can’t afford to be cautious and await our political maturity.