The Ambassador rolled. ‘Jack Raoul would have admired your courage in negotiating.’
‘Find my brother. Benj Wyman. He’s here somewhere, one of your “Samples”.’
‘Not mine. The faction who—’
Donn cut him off. ‘Find him. Send him home too.’
‘Done.’
‘All right.’ Donn took a step towards the Ambassador.
‘Wait.’ It was Five. ‘Take me with you, virgin. If you’re to meet the Seer, I want to be there.’
‘Why? To kill it?’
‘If it’s necessary, you’ll need somebody to do it. You won’t, that’s for sure.’
Donn asked, ‘Ambassador?’
The Ambassador rolled. ‘Abandon your weapons, Sample 5A43.’
‘Five. My name is Five.’
‘Abandon your weapons.’
Five was obviously reluctant. But she took her heavy projectile weapon and her quiver of arrows and her stabbing sword, and handed them all to Hama.
Donn held out his hand to her. ‘Come, then. But no more of the “virgin”.’
She clasped his hand; he could feel her strength through the double layer of Ghost fabric. Then they walked together, following the Silverman and the Ambassador, back into the devastated city.
The flow of Ghosts into the dodecahedral transport terminal had stopped, perhaps disrupted by the chaos the humans had caused. But, everywhere, Ghosts poured back into the crumpled heart of their city, as a purposeful operation of recovery began. Donn found it hard not to flinch, as if all those shining globular bodies in the air might come tumbling down on his head. The Ambassador assured them they would be safe.
But Five’s gloved hand grasped Donn’s, hard.
Donn asked, ‘So how are you feeling?’
‘Like I’m two years old again,’ she said. ‘Stripped of everything I built up for myself. They’ve got me back, haven’t they?’
‘No,’ Donn said firmly. ‘You walked into this – your choice. And you’ll be walking back out of it too.’
She thought about that. ‘You promise?’
‘I promise.’ And you were wrong, Hama, he thought. I did get to save her after all – or at least there’s a chance I will. ‘So, Ambassador. This device – is this how you’ve been snatching people?’
‘Shall we avoid such loaded words, Donn Wyman? We have been developing a new non-local transportation technology. It is the outcome of a wide-ranging programme of physical research . . .’
He told Donn that the Ghosts’ origin, under a failing sun, had led them to believe they lived in a flawed universe. So they wished to understand its fine-tuning.
‘Why are we here? You see, there is only a narrow range of the constants of physics within which life of any sort is possible. We study this question by pushing at the boundaries – by tinkering with the laws which sustain and contain us all. Thus we explore the boundaries of reality.’
‘While snatching children,’ Five said.
‘Get to the point, Ambassador,’ Donn said.
‘We have found a way to adjust the value of Planck’s constant: the number which gives, in human physics, the scale of quantum uncertainty.’
Five just stared. ‘What are you talking about?’
Donn stared at her, remembering how she had been brought up. ‘Planck’s constant – a small number, very small, one of the fundamental constants of physics. It’s to do with the Uncertainly Principle. But in real terms – suppose you measured an electron’s position to within a billionth of a centimetre. Then the momentum uncertainty would be such that a second later you couldn’t be sure where the damn thing was to within a hundred kilometres. The Principle is describing a fundamental fuzziness in reality—’
‘So what?’
Donn frowned. ‘Well, what if you could change that fuzziness? Make it more, or less . . . Everybody knows that Jack Raoul got himself involved in a situation where Ghosts messed with Planck’s constant. They reduced it—’
‘Yes,’ said the Ambassador. ‘We were endeavouring to produce an AI of arbitrarily large capacity.’
‘It was a disaster.’
‘Well, yes. But in the end a useful technology was derived – Ghost hide, as you call it.’
Five was struggling to follow all this. ‘And is this what you’ve done here? You’ve decreased this Planck number again?’
‘No. This time we have increased it, Sample.’
Donn saw it. ‘You’ve increased the uncertainty in the universe – or a bit of it.’ He thought fast. ‘A particle has a quantum function, which describes the probability you’ll find it in any given location. But the probability is non-zero everywhere, throughout the universe. And if you increase Planck then you increase all those probabilities.’
‘You’re beginning to see it,’ the Ambassador said. ‘It is hard to imagine a more elegant mode of transport, in theory: you simply make it more likely that you are at your destination than your starting point.’
Donn was stunned by this audacity. ‘In theory.’
‘The engineering details are soluble.’
Donn laughed. ‘Evidently. Or we wouldn’t be standing here, would we?’
‘“Soluble.” “Evidently.”’ Five stared at Donn. ‘You’re talking to this Ghost as if all this is normal. As if you’re discussing a new kind of stabbing sword.’ She turned to the Ambassador. ‘How do you change the laws of physics?’
‘Quagma,’ said Donn immediately.
He understood some of this. The principle of the GUTdrive, which had powered ancient ships like his mother’s own Miriam Berg, was related. Quagma was the state of matter that had emerged from the Big Bang, a magma of quarks. And at such temperatures the fundamental forces of physics unified into a single superforce. Quagma was bound together only by that superforce. When quagma was allowed to cool and expand, the superforce decomposed into the sub-forces of nature, nuclear, gravitational, electromagnetic. But by controlling the decomposition, you could select the ratios between those forces, ratios that governed the fundamental constants – including Planck’s constant.
Humans knew the importance of quagma. In Donn’s father’s family legend, nearly two hundred years ago, Joens Wyman had been involved in a jaunt in some kind of impossible ship as humans had raced Ghosts across space to retrieve a lode of this primordial treasure.
Donn said, ‘You scare us, with what you do, you Ghosts. You always have and always will.’
The Ghost rolled and bobbed. ‘Sometimes we scare ourselves, believe it or not. Shall we proceed?’ And it swept boldly into the open dodecahedral chamber. Doors dilated closed around it, and when they opened, only a second later, the Ghost had gone, a tonne of spinning flesh vanished.
Donn and Five were left alone, surrounded by anonymous shoals of Ghosts. Donn grabbed Five’s hand again. ‘Together?’
‘Let’s get on with it.’
The chamber was a blank-walled box, silvered like all Ghost architecture. When the doors closed behind them, they were suspended in the dark, just for a heartbeat.
And when the doors opened, they were not in the dark any more.
‘Do not be afraid,’ said the Sink Ambassador.
The Ghost hovered before them, bathed in dazzling light. Behind it Donn saw the silent figure of the Silverman, the stump of its severed arm a jarring asymmetry.
Five squeezed Donn’s hand. ‘Virgin—’
‘It’s all right. I mean, if they were going to kill us they’d have done it by now. And stop calling me “virgin”. Come on.’
Deliberately he stepped forward, into the light. Keeping tight hold of his hand, Five followed.
Donn found himself standing on a silvered platform, three or four metres across. The Ghost hovered before him. He couldn’t see any support for the platform, though gravity felt about normal. They were entirely bathed in pure white light, above, below, all around, an abstraction of a sky. The light was bright, not quite dazzling. And as Donn’s eyes adjusted he gradually made out structure in the light – billows like clouds, all around, slowly evolving, vacuoles boiling.