The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 3 Read online

  “I was a researcher,” he said. “A whiz at maths. I went into theoretical cosmology. Let me tell you something.” He put his arm around her, the way he used to hold her when she was little. “All of this, everything we see and feel, our whole three-dimensional universe with its unfolding arrow of time, is only a fraction of reality. Of course that was the message my father beat into me when I was your age, or tried to. He was a Presbyterian minister. When I started questioning his picture of the universe we fell out good and proper...”

  Morag had only fragmentary memories of her grandfather, whom she’d met only a handful of times.

  Joe said, “Our universe is like a snowflake in a storm, one among a myriad others, all floating around in a nine-dimensional continuum called the Bulk. The universes are called branes—after membranes—or D-branes, Dirichlet branes... Those other universes might be like ours, or they might not. Some of them might have one space dimension, or three or five or seven. They might have a time dimension, like ours, or none at all, so they’re just static and eternal. We know all this is out there, you see, because of the effects of the higher reality on our universe. Primordial inflation, patterns in the cosmic microwave background radiation, all of these are influences from other universes approaching our own...” He glanced at her. “I’m getting too technical.”

  “No. But it’s like when I was small and you’d distract me from the dark with fairy tales.”

  He ruffled her hair. “Well, all this stuff is real, as far as we can tell. Anyhow it’s out there, out in the Bulk, that the answers to the fundamental questions will be found some day. That’s why I’m going back. I got sick of the academic life, the bitchiness and the infighting, the treadmill of always having to find a bit more money to keep going for a few more years. Nobody wanted to put money into fundamental research anyhow. But at least doing that I was closer to the search for finding the answers to the big questions than slaving in the damn City.”

  It all sounded foolish to Morag, a dream. But Joe had always been a dreamer. She wondered if he ever thought about how she was supposed to be supported through the rest of her schooling, her own college years. Well, she had Auntie Sheena, Mum’s sister, cold, disapproving, but solid and generous enough. She wished she were a bit older, though, not so dependent on all these flaky, short-lived adults.

  Morag said, “Joe—none of this stuff about D-branes and the Bulk will bring Mum back.”

  “No. No, love, it won’t.”

  For some reason the tears came after that.

  A nurse came to refill the coffee, and she dabbed with a tissue at the pot plant that Morag had overfilled with water.

  IT WAS A universe not unlike humanity’s universe. But it was dark.

  It lacked stars, for the intricate coincidence of fundamental constants that enabled stellar fusion processes had not occurred here; the dice had fallen differently. Yet complex elements had spewed out of this cosmos’s equivalent of the Big Bang, atoms that combined, nuclei that fissioned. Rock formed, and ice. Grains gathered in the dark, drawn by gravity. There were no stars here. But soon there were worlds.

  On one of these worlds, creatures not entirely unlike those on Earth rose from the usual chemical churning. They were fuelled not by sunlight but by the slow seep of minerals and heat from the interior of their rocky planet. Crawling, swimming, flying, consuming each other and the world’s raw materials, they built an ecology of a complexity that itself increased with time. There were extinctions as rocks fell from the sky or the cooling world spasmed as it shed its primordial heat, but life recovered, complexity was regained. To those with minds, this was a beautiful world, that empty sky a velvet heaven. They knew no different.

  Some of them dreamed of gods. Few ever imagined that a greater mind than any of theirs arose from the intricate workings of their ecology itself.

  And that mind was troubled.

  For she felt the grand cooling of her planetary body, and ached with the slow decay of the radioactive substances that replenished that heat. She remembered a time of hot youth, and she foresaw shriveling cold, when the things that swarmed over her continents and oceans would die back, and her own thoughts would simplify and die back with them.

  She remembered the birth of her universe itself. She anticipated surviving, in some reduced form, to see its end. To a being built on such a grand scale the time of cold paralysis was not so terribly remote.

  Questions plagued her. Why did it have to be so? Why must she die? Why should she have been born at all?

  Why was there something in this universe, rather than nothing?

  She longed for another to discuss these profound questions. There was no other like her, not in all this universe.

  Not yet.

  * * *

  ONE WAS BORN, inchoate, utterly lacking symmetry. A mind formed immediately, like a snowflake crystallizing from moist air, with questions: Where am I? What is this place? What must I do?

  Others gathered around him. Answers slotted into the empty spaces of his mind.

  Eight dimensions of space and one of time characterized this universe. That and symmetry.

  Yet the symmetry was incomplete. There was an array of 248 places to be filled, by ones like himself, as if you ascended to take a place in a constellation. That was the purpose of life, to ascend, to take your place, to contribute to the greater symmetry.

  And when that vast symmetry was completed, the universe would end.

  Even as he realized this, as he grasped the essential structure of his universe only moments after he was born, he was troubled by a faint doubt.

  But in the meantime there was work to be done. Many of those 248 places were already filled, and there were far more candidates than there were remaining places. All around him other young were gathering in simple clusters of four, eight, sixteen; others, more ambitious, sought to impress with explorations of twenty-three and thirty-one.

  To shine in such gatherings was the only way to progress. A grim process of selection had to be gone through if you were to attain the heaven of perfected symmetry.

  Grimly he got to work.

  MORAG’S FLIGHT FROM Edinburgh was diverted to Luton because of flooding at Heathrow, but she was able to catch a short-haul connection to the City Airport.

  The plane took Morag into London along the line of the Thames and past the City, where her father had worked five years ago. Now skyscrapers rose like thistles from the flood, and choppers flitted before impassive glass cliffs. Each of these huge developments contained as many people as a small town, she imagined, stacked up into the sky; each would require a major rescue operation of its own, in the context of the latest London-wide flood emergency.

  At the airport, passport control was perfunctory despite Scotland’s independence. She caught a cab to the hotel at Hampstead, safely above the water line, where her father was staying.

  Joe was pacing around his tiny room, shirt rumpled as ever, tie loosened, shoes off, socks with holes in them. He looked as if he was longing for a cigarette. He was evidently wired on in-room coffee.

  The remnants of his presentation to the government’s Science and Technologies Facilities Council were scattered on the small table and on the bed. Images played over a slim laptop, mostly bullet-point argument summaries. There was one extraordinary image like a mutated sea anemone that Morag had come to recognize as a representation of a Calabi-Yau space, a possible configuration of the Bulk, the greater nine-dimensional continuum within which the universe swam.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” Morag said. “The plane, the flooding—”

  “That’s okay,” Joe said. Making an obvious effort to calm down, he came and kissed her cheek, took her coat and hung it on the back of the door. “There’s something else I want to talk about anyhow. Not that you missed anything but another ritual humiliation for your poor old dad. You want a coffee?” He rummaged in the litter on the table, the little packets of granules and the plastic milk cartons. “I’ve burned through
most of it but there might be a packet of that fucking decaf stuff. Sorry.”

  “I’m fine. Your need is greater than mine.” She pulled out the room’s one chair from under the table and sat. “I take it you didn’t go down well, then.”

  “Oh, hell, it’s not just me. They announced another across-the-board cut in research spending last month. I was hoping to get hold of some American money, they’re always more flush over there, but it’s the same story, cuts to the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Office of Science at the Department of Energy. They’re even making layoffs at Fermi-lab.”

  She pulled at her fingers. “It’s tough all over, Joe. There’s money in ecosystem research but even that’s getting tighter.” This was the direction she wanted to go herself, when she finished her first degree in biological sciences; she was twenty years old now and a couple of years into her course. “And that’s obviously applicable.”

  “ ‘Applicable!’ How I hate that word. If your research doesn’t have obvious ‘applicability’ in flood defenses or desalination or food production or, better yet, defense systems, you’re screwed.”

  “Well, you can understand it, Joe. The world can’t afford what it used to. These are tough times.”

  “The times are always tough,” he snapped back. “There are always excuses not to spend on fundamental research.”

  She reached over for the laptop and tapped a key to page through his slides. “The trouble is, everything you ask for is just so expensive. This is big stuff...”

  She had learned something of the technologies Joe needed to give him the data that would confirm or refute his theoretical meta-cosmic models. Evidence for other universes came in exotic and subtle forms, such as patterns in the cosmic background microwave radiation, a relic of the Big Bang that, Joe believed, had been caused by the close approach of one brane-universe to another, or even their collision. Other distortions in the radiation pattern could show the effect of close approaches with other branes since the beginning—holes in the sky, like a vast gap eight billion light years from Earth and all of a billion light years wide, where few galaxies swam. You needed satellite observatories to pick that up.

  Or you could look for gamma rays, which might be relics of other exotic events. A supernova could produce gravitons, gravity force-carrying particles, some of which, called Kaluza-Klein gravitons, were able to travel out of the “surface” of a brane and into the greater Bulk. Falling back to a brane, such gravitons could produce a shower of high-energy gamma rays—which again, mostly, could only be detected from space. But NASA was mothballing its elderly gamma-ray satellite, called GLAST, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope. You could even look for gravity waves, ripples in space-time, more evidences of influences from beyond the universe’s three-dimensional plane. But again those effects were subtle, minute, fiendishly difficult to track down.

  You needed a big budget for any of this. And, in a world fraying under a multiple assault of climate change, resource depletion, disease, and war, big budgets for cutting-edge physics experiments were hard to come by. Joe knew this as well as Morag did. It didn’t make the results of his pitch any less disappointing.

  She came to one striking image. It was geometrical, like a sphere picked out by a regular array of golden points, each apparently connected to the rest by a silver thread. It turned and pivoted in the computer’s animation, its symmetries obviously profound. “This is beautiful. What is it?”

  “E8,” Joe said. “A somewhat complicated mathematical pattern in eight dimensions. Two hundred and forty-eight points. It’s a way of encapsulating the unification of physics. It’s all to do with string theory, as is the whole idea of brane-universes... You place a fundamental particle or force at each of the points, say an electron or a quark, and if you get it right, the symmetries express the particles’ relationships to each other.” He made the figure swivel this way and that, and projected various subsets of the particles down to two dimensions. “See? This projection shows how the color charge of a quark changes under the influence of the strong force carried by a gluon...”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “It’s a bit of research from the noughties I’ve been following up, called the Lisi synthesis. The thing is, the same mathematical structure can be used in some models to describe the Bulk, the Calabi-Yau manifold. Remarkably rich, tens of thousands of interaction types expressed in the internal symmetries. Look, this is my theoretical underpinning. The core of my expression of physics, which in turn I’m using to construct my models of the Bulk.”

  He stared at the turning images in the laptop screen. “I feel I’m close, at least to expressing the right questions, if not to getting the answers. All the other branes out there, all with their own time axes, or multiple times, or none at all... Time can pivot, you know. The time signature of a universe can change. You can have a static universe with several dimensions of space—a scrap of eternity—but then a space dimension evolves into time, and wham, you have the whole package, Big Bang and Big Rip, birth and death. Our universe could have been eternal once. Something could have happened to pivot the axes, to change the signature, to make it temporal, finite. Something bad.”

  That word surprised her. “Bad?”

  “God wouldn’t have made a finite universe. Finitude isn’t perfection. Even a trillion years isn’t enough, if eternity is available.”

  “That sounds like something Granddad might have said.” She had always wondered if Joe’s obsessive quest for cosmological truth was really all about unresolved issues from his childhood.

  “Well, that old monster asked some of the right questions, even if he didn’t have the right answers.”

  “Joe, you said there’s something else you wanted to talk about.”

  “Yes. Plan B.” He sat on the edge of the bed and faced her.

  “Plan B?”

  “Even if the research councils and governments won’t fund me, I’m not giving up. Well, I can’t.”

  She looked around at the untidy room, the litter on the bed, the dirty clothes roughly shoved away on a wardrobe shelf. “Joe, you can’t fund high-energy physics research by yourself.”

  He grinned. “Can’t I? We’ll see. I do need a bit of money. Which is where you come in.”

  She laughed. “Joe, I’m a student. I don’t have any money!”

  “I know. But it’s not you I’m tapping up,” he said bluntly.

  “Then who? Oh. Not Sheena.”

  “Your Auntie Sheena might look on the purchase of a bit of land as an investment,” he said. “If it’s put to her the right way. Such as by you...”

  THERE WERE OTHER worlds in this dark sky. She felt their gravitational tug, a pull deep in her belly. Sometimes she even felt a rain of meteorites, bits of those sister worlds blasted from their surfaces and scattered through the void. But few of those worlds carried life of any kind, and none an ecology as complex as hers, none a mind as rich as her own.

  There was a way to put that right.

  It took an eon of concentration, of a subtle shepherding of tensions. Then an immense supervolcano ripped open one side of the planet. A wave of ash and dirt and toxic gases caused stupendous global dying. No matter. The ecosystem would recover from this event, as it had from others.

  And, briefly, as this one world shone like a star in the dark sky, from it spread a spray of rock and ash, blasted to escape velocity. Most of these fragments were inert, baked and smashed to sterility. But in a few of them life clung, hardy spores. And a few of those precious seed-carriers would fall on sister worlds.

  It would take an eon for new ecosystems to arise on barren worlds, for consciousness to arise on its multiple levels. To a world mind, that wasn’t long to wait. She rehearsed what she would say.

  SYMMETRIES! SYMMETRIES OF squares and cubes! Symmetries of primes and perfect numbers! All these and more he fought to join and mold, while others, weaker or less determined, fell
back into shapelessness—and new generations of novices, younger and still more hungry, fought to take away what he had achieved.

  Joe Denham might have recognized the form to which he aspired. The structure of this cosmos was not unlike the E8 mathematical construct he used to model the fundamental forces and particles of his own universe. And indeed in this universe there were some advanced minds who posited a construct not unlike Joe’s cosmos to serve as an analogical model of their own world. There was a duality in all things, a symmetry even across the branes.

  But to one inhabitant at least, this universe came to seem like a beautiful prison.

  Very rapidly the remaining places among the 248 elect were being filled. Yet even as he worked frantically, he was distracted by doubt.

  The universe would end when the array of 248 was filled, the symmetry completely expressed. And he, indeed, would die with it. Why? Why should this be so? Why should he be born, only to die? Why should the universe begin and end at all? And why so soon? If the universe were more complex it would last longer before its perfection were complete. Why should it not have been so?

  More mysteries. There were other universes than this. Symmetry demanded it, the greater symmetries of the Bulk in which all cosmoses floated like fresh-born novices. He could see the other cosmoses, or at least he saw the necessity of their existence, in the way that a human theoretical physicist could gain fresh insights from the symmetries of his models and equations. Other universes were arrayed around his own, in pretty patterns. They too lived and died, those nearby.

  Yet there was a cluster of other branes, further away, characterized by a different sort of symmetry. And they did not die.

  Even as he fought for his place in the sky, he strained to understand how this could be so. And why.

  MORAG TOOK THE monorail from Edinburgh to Dunbar. From there she hired a pod car, fed in the coordinates her father had given her, and sat back.

  In the car’s electric silence she was driven south from Dunbar through arable country. It was a gently rolling landscape of dry stone walls. To the east the land fell away, affording a long view toward the Tweed valley, while to the west the land rose toward the Lammermuir Hills. Pretty landscape. But the road was empty of traffic, and it was heavily fenced off from the fields, even though there wasn’t a sheep or a cow in sight, and the fields themselves were visibly unkempt.