I broke an awkward silence. “What's this?”
Dimity had an almost squeaky voice. A Dimity voice, I called it privately.
“Sums. Difficult sums.”
I was sorry I had asked. Her idea and mine of difficult sums reflected our respective intelligences: embarrassingly different. She went on, with that inevitable tone of patience:
“You know the theories that have been explored here and in Sol System about the ancient stasis fields? That they are somehow uncoupled from the entropy gradient of the Universe?”
“They haven't got anywhere, have they? It's all still just speculation.”
“No. Not unless there's been anything new done in Sol System. But it gave me a notion. It's… difficult to explain… but it's to do with gravity as a function of time…”
“N-space?” I hesitated.
“No. But as you know they learned to open a stasis field long ago on Earth with relatively primitive time-retarding technology.”
“Yes. But the result was a disaster. I'm told there were a lot of casualties. And apparently it was nearly worse.”
“That wasn't the fault of the technology. It was because there was something dangerous inside the field that got out. If we can make time precess at a different rates… well, my theory is that within a gravity field we can't, or not at the scale I'm talking about. But outside a gravity field—I mean a gravity field like the singularity associated with a star… The singularity acts as a massive governor… Look, does this explain what I mean?”
I recognized some conventional mathematical symbols on her paper along with others that appeared to be her creation. Her father had told me once of how, one day at the end of a childhood that had been near-silent near-inactivity, he had found her playing with the keyboard of his computer, and of his flash of hope that she might grow into a normal child after all (“Who's a clever little girl, then?”) which had died as he raised his eyes to the screen. They had published her first paper jointly. After that she had been on her own. His work on Carmody's Transform had brought him praise and when she was given her own department he had helped set it up but he had been little more than her assistant.
“What's that?” I asked, stabbing at random at one esoteric symbol to cover my embarrassment.
“It stands for the occurrence of Miss Bright's Paradox.”
“Miss Bright?”
“Yes. You know:
“But you see”—she pointed again—“I've eliminated it. Or rather I depend upon it: upon the fact that the universe will not permit such a paradox to occur.
“I have always thought that, doing what the tnuctipun did, time could be made to precess at different rates over a much larger scale,” she went on. “You need an engine to generate your second field, of course, which is a problem. Caught between those fields you would be squeezed away from them, like a wet orange seed squeezed between two fingers. I calculate one of the results would be negative mass.”
Stanley the waiter brought us two coffees. The Lindenbaum had deluxe human service in this section and put its prices up accordingly. Gazing at Dimity, he tripped over a neighboring table as he backed away. She went on:
“Within a gravitational singularity, that would be the end of you. You might become something like your own wormhole, millions of miles long, the length depending on how much mass you originally had, and less than the width of a subatomic particle. But beyond the singularity, and if you had a certain velocity, you'd move. Without an increase in mass. If what happens then can be described in terms of physical structure it might be called creating your own big wormhole. A sort of shunt rather than a drive…” She saw she was not getting through and made another attempt. “A matter of getting away from a greater impossibility by being pushed into a lesser one if you like.”
“I don't understand.” But I believed her.
She gestured at the symbols again, as if it was all obvious. She had, as I had thought that sad day when I realized our brains couldn't match, given that phrase “not exactly a rocket scientist” a whole new dimension of meaning.
“If you were moving at sufficient speed already… I think you'd be projected out of the Einsteinian universe… Greenberg was able to tell us a bit of what happened with the ancient drive, the preconditions, but of course he didn't know how it worked, except that the speed had to be sufficient to affect the average mass of the universe. I think the two major achievements of the ancient technologies were connected. The stasis field was a byproduct of their drive technology, or their drive was a byproduct of the stasis-field technology…”
“Does that mean…?” I couldn't say it, somehow.
She paused, and then there was something new that was hard and defiant in her voice, a challenge: “We know the tnuctipun could do it! There would be a bending effect of space and…”
“How fast?”
“How fast do you want?”
“Where do you get the energy?”
“From the Big Bang. Space is still full of it… Look at the rest of the universe as the norm, and the singularities as the exception. In terms of getting from one singularity to another, I calculate—it's on the computer at home—a light-year in about…” She paused. I think she felt herself shy of what she was about to say “…about three days… It doesn't break the light barrier, it shatters it, because once you move into that… dimension or aspect of space you can keep accelerating!”
There had been theories before. The first major modifications to the Special Theory of Relativity were more than four hundred years old. Things happened, or were thought to happen, at the edges of black holes. Nothing practical so far… but it has been done before, once before, by a race within an empire which, it was thought, had controlled most of the Spiral Arm at least and which had vanished before life emerged from the seas of Earth.
“And… that's what you've got here?” My own voice sounded somehow very small. The thing I had sought her out for suddenly seemed almost unimportant—until I put two sets of implications together and then it suddenly seemed more important than ever. I heard another tinkling sound besides that of the music box and found my hands were shaking as I held my coffee cup.
“Not yet. Not for years, I think. Maybe never. We know that with the tnuctipun drive they had to be moving close to lightspeed anyway. Greenberg told us it was the average mass of the universe that was the critical factor. But I'm getting somewhere. So far, the computers support my theorizing. Of course, I had to instruct the computers, but if there's a fault in my instructions I can only believe it's a very subtle one.
“This is the wrong place to do it. A double star means the combined singularity is huge. And the engineering is huge enough anyway. The tools are beyond our technology.”
“Could you build such an engine… eventually?”
“Eventually is a long time. I think I could… recognize one. That's not very helpful, is it?”
I wrenched my mind away from the vision that opened up. I felt I needed her brain's connective powers for something else at the moment. “Could you come with me for a couple of hours?” I asked her. “I want to show you something.”