Mission to Minerva g-5 Page 14

  "We can only go by the facts we have," Polk replied.

  "Well…" Caldwell showed an open hand and made a face. "That's about as much as I can tell you, Lieutenant."

  "If anything further comes to mind, would you let us know? You have my contact details."

  "Yes, of course."

  "Thank you for your time."

  "You're welcome."

  Caldwell remained staring disbelievingly at the screen for a while after it blanked out. This had to be the strangest case of leaked investment information ever. Finally, he grunted to himself, folded the memo about Weng's presentation, slipped it into his jacket pocket, and left his office.

  "Are they coming to get you?" Mitzi asked as he emerged into the outer office.

  "Oh, it seems I'll be okay for a while longer. He was trying to get ahold of Vic."

  "Vic? Why? What's he been doing?"

  "Not our Vic. The other universe's Vic. Apparently, that stuff he passed on about investing in Formaflex is still classified information. The feds think there's some financial scam going on."

  "You're kidding."

  "I don't think the unflagging Lieutenant Polks of this world are the kind who kid about anything."

  Mitzi shook her head despairingly. "As if this whole business wasn't getting crazy enough already. I want to know what Vic thinks has been happening on Thurien. Can we call them when you get back, and ask him?"

  "He's not ready yet."

  Mitzi sighed with obvious impatience.

  Caldwell stopped. There was a glass vase on a ledge above Mitzi's desk, containing a cluster of rose buds just starting to open. Caldwell gestured at it. "Things happen in their own time," he said. "The job descriptions call us managers, but you can't manage creative people. What we really are is gardeners. We put them in a place where the soil is right, make sure they get enough water and sun, and then wait for them to do their own thing. Vic and Chris may not have Thurien depth know-how, but put 'em together and they can think sideways. That's what they've got going for them in this. But only if you give them their own space, far away from where people like me might be tempted to meddle." He nodded toward the vase again. "It would be like pulling the petals of those open to try and help things along."

  Mitzi's eyes narrowed as a pattern became clearer. "That was why you sent them to Jupiter when the Charlie business needed a new angle, wasn't it?… Then Jevlen. And now Thurien. It's all the same style."

  "You know what the two worst inventions were?" Caldwell asked.

  "What?"

  "The telephone and the airplane. Because they made it too easy for Head Office or the General Staff to go messing around in details that the people on the spot should know how to handle. So they ended up with mediocrities out there. But the Romans managed to do pretty well for six hundred years without any of that. You gave the general his objectives and the wherewithal to carry them out, and after his baggage train or his boats disappeared over the horizon that was the last you knew until a messenger came back. So you had to make sure the guys you picked were good. We have to be careful that we don't make the same mistakes just because we've got Thurien h-space communicators, eh?" Caldwell glanced at the clock display on Mitzi's terminal. "Anyhow, here the lesson endeth. I gotta go."

  "Hey, Gregg," Mitzi called after him as he reached the door. He stopped and looked back as he opened it.

  "What?"

  "How come you're just attending this thing about Machiavelli? Why aren't you giving it?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Eesyan ordered the cessation of further experiments until there were at least the beginnings of some understanding of what was going on. On the day following Calazar's visit, Chien sought out Hunt in the office that he and Danchekker shared in the tower. Hunt was alone, contemplating a wall display showing the results of some calculations that he had been running with VISAR. Danchekker was embroiled in a discussion with the Thuriens in their larger office. Sandy, who had recovered to the point of feeling little more than a mild queasiness, was with him.

  "I've been having some thoughts about yesterday," Chien said.

  "All of us have been having thoughts about nothing else," Hunt replied. He swivelled in one of the human-scaled chairs that the Thuriens had provided and leaned back. Chien was looking neat and trim in a scarlet, high-necked, oriental style trouser suit, eyes and lips tinted, her hair tied high. "So what's your take?" He gestured invitingly to one of the other chairs but Chien perched herself on the edge of a desk and rested her hands in her lap, fingers interlaced.

  "Actually, I thought of it yesterday, but I wanted to let it sit for at least one night." She made a brief motion indicating vaguely the direction of the building housing the Multiporter. "The discrepancies all occurred with people who were in the vicinity of the machine. When you disagreed with Professor Danchekker and his cousin over the Thurien couple at Vranix, you were in the coupler located next to the monitor station; the professor and Mildred were elsewhere. Your account was the one that differed."

  "Go on."

  "That silly falling out that I had with Josef Sonnebrandt. Going back over it, the things we argued about were all to do with events that took place around the machine while it was running; never about anything that happened when it was quiescent, or while we were away from it. Sandy and Duncan had no such experiences, and they were in this building the whole time. And then yesterday, all the anomalies happened over there around the machine, during the demonstrations. The Thuriens have been comparing their own recollections of odd things that have been happening, and checking the records. It shows the same pattern. I've made a list."

  Hunt crossed a foot over his other knee, rested his chin on a hand, and regarded her curiously. "So what do you make of it?"

  "Will you promise to put it down to Oriental eccentricity and no more if this sounds just a little bit crazy?" Chien asked him.

  "Well, I'll say I will, even if it's not true," Hunt offered.

  "How gallant. I'm impressed."

  "Breeding and all that. You know the English."

  "No, that's the carefully cultivated English image."

  "I refuse to get into politics. So what about the Multiporter?"

  Chien opened her hands briefly. "The machine is affecting its surroundings somehow. It induces inconsistencies in the events taking place around it." She hesitated. "How can I put this?… When everyone was disagreeing with each other yesterday, Professor Danchekker said we were all living in different realities. I think he was right… well, in a sense. Obviously we were all in the same reality then. But the pasts we were talking about were different." She eyed Hunt questioningly for a moment. He made a gesture inviting her to continue. "The normal Multiverse structure that we're used to thinking about consists of paths branching apart toward different futures. But perhaps it's possible for things to be otherwise. Suppose instead that…" Chien stopped and frowned to herself. She seemed unsure of how to proceed. "We've been wondering what these 'convergences' were."

  Hunt said it for her. "Timeline lensing." It was as he had suspected: Chien had arrived at the same conclusion he'd been nursing since yesterday. The description seemed as good a term for it as any.

  Chien's eyebrows lifted in surprise. "You're saying that you think so, too?"

  "Instead of diverging, they can come together," Hunt said. "That's what my other self was trying to tell me. In his universe, they discovered that it was the single most important thing to understand before they could make any real progress. And it's easy to see why. Instead of a single point in the present leading to multiple alternate futures, you have got the opposite: a present that's a composite of people, memories, even physical objects, that arrived there from different pasts. How could you get anywhere with the kind of insanity that would generate? The gist of it occurred to me yesterday too. But I wanted to mull over it before mentioning it to anyone-like you did."

  "Have you made any kind of a start toward explaining it?" Chien asked.

 
Hunt waved at the wall behind him, half filled with tensor differentials and M-wave propagation equations. "There are some guesses that I've been asking VISAR to look into out of curiosity. It's going to need Eesyan and his people to really make a dent in it. I just wanted to feel I was halfway toward knowing what I was talking about before putting it to them. But it is starting to make a weird kind of sense-if that's the correct word. After all, convergence is just a special case of bending time lines away from their normal direction. And that's what cross-Multiverse propagation is. It's what the Multiporter was designed to do."

  "But you just said a moment ago, we'll never get anywhere with the kind of confusion it can produce. How could any complex piece of equipment ever work?" Chien made a helpless gesture. "Is there some way of stopping it, do you think?"

  Hunt thought for a second, then grinned. "Well, there has to be, doesn't there?" he replied. "They got the relay working in that other universe. But you and I aren't about to solve that here and now. Come on. I think it's time we took this to the others."

  ***

  It turned out that just about everyone else had been thinking something similar. But as with Hunt and Chien, the conclusion had seemed so extraordinary that they had all been sounding each other out privately to seek some kind of moral support before risking any general statement of the fact. When Hunt prevailed upon Eesyan to call all of the team together in the tower and presented the argument that he and Chien had talked about, there was little surprise or dissent-even from Danchekker. The general reception was one of relief that someone had brought it into the open at last, since they had all either arrived at some similar suspicion themselves or had one bounced off them by others.

  Several groups of Thuriens, independently and unknown to each other, were working with VISAR to try and lay down the basis of a mathematical treatment in the same way as Hunt. Duncan and Sonnebrandt had conceived the idea of an equivalent "M-field mass," causing a curvature Multiverse space in an analogous way to that in which physical mass curves Einsteinian spacetime. Danchekker and Sandy had been wondering if the effect was a result of the Multiporter altering quantum probabilities in the kind of way that Danchekker maintained living organisms were able to do. All of them were using VISAR to test and help develop their theories, but VISAR had said nothing to alert any to the work of the others. Its operating directives precluded informing on the activities of individuals without being asked to.

  But now that the debate was general, VISAR was able to construct a graphical depiction of the consensus, showing the event sequences that must have merged. Astoundingly, it followed inescapably that the reality all of them were now sharing and living in had to included individuals who were from at least four different past universes.

  In universe "A" that Duncan remembered, he had collected Ko's autograph book from Sandy the night before. If the electrical and chemical patterns in his head were not sufficient evidence of its reality, there could be no denying the book itself, which came with him. But there was also another universe, "B," in which he had neglected to collect the book and so Sandy had given it to Danchekker instead the following morning, along with her notes for Eesyan. Danchekker had apparently met Hunt sometime after arriving at the Institute and gone with him to the Multiporter building. It wasn't possible to check with that particular Danchekker because he didn't seem to be around anymore, but both Eesyan and Chien in Universe "B" had seen them arrive together. The Danchekker who existed in the present reality had diverged into Universe "C" by forgetting to pick up the notes, and then remembered them when on his way to Quelsang and turned back. Since Sandy attested to this, she had to be from Universe "C" also. Finally, a Universe "D" variant of the Danchekker who forgot the notes hadn't remembered them until after he arrived at Quelsang, and had left to go back to the Waldorf. This was the sequence that Hunt remembered, and so it followed that Hunt was from Universe "D" also. The lines that terminated represented continuations into other realities.

  As if all this wasn't discombobulating enough, there was a further aspect of it that Hunt found even more eerie. If the operation of the machine was inducing a local convergence of time lines, it made sense that Danchekker "C" and Sandy "C" should agree, since neither of them had been anywhere near it that morning. Hence, the present universe they were in was "really" Universe "C," and everything that conflicted with it was an intrusion from someplace else. That apparently included Hunt himself, who originated from "D." Like the extraneous copies of the autograph book that didn't "belong," he had arrived here from some different reality with its own unique history that had shaped him to be what he was. He wasn't a product of this reality in which he now found himself. Yet there was no sense of any discontinuity to mark the progression of his recollections. And why should here be, he asked himself, any more than he was aware of the divergences where a minutely different version of himself branched off to experience a different future? The only clue would be to find some detail of his situation or environment that clashed with the imprint that he carried in his memories. He searched hard for such contradictions but was unable to find any.

  The restriction of the machine's influence to events in its immediate proximity meant that for the most part the convergences involved trivial differences that had arisen comparatively recently. The past of any substance, along with the life that he remembered and the history he had been raised on, remained solidly immutable. As the others on the project gradually absorbed the same message, the main question came to be, how were they to advance things further? For how could the machine and anything in its vicinity be trusted to work safely and reliably if such a state of affairs were to continue? Finding a way to eliminate or at least contain the effect became the most pressing priority. The original appearance back at Earth of the relay from Hunt's alter ego had demonstrated that it was possible.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Frenua Showm's home and its setting could conceivably have provided the inspiration for a Wagnerian crescendo of full orchestra and chorus ringing out terror and magnificence in a minor key. It was not a single structure sitting on one level in the way that most Terrans would have thought of as a "house," but consisted of a number of interconnected units distributed across a prominence of rocky crags looking out over a breathtaking Thurien scene of plummeting gorges and near-vertical precipices rising toward distant bastions of jagged peaks. "Villa" might have been a better term to describe it. Although no two parts were at the same height, moving from one to another was speedy and effortless, thanks to the inbuilt system of g-lines that came as part of most Thurien structures. The spaces between provided harmonizing chords of rocky watergardens filled with Thurien flora and greenery, and included a pool held by natural rock forms, warmed to producing a hint of vapors at its surface and fed by a cascading waterfall.

  Mildred didn't yet know if it was a general Thurien trait, but it seemed that Showm kept the different aspects of her life separate and apart, as if each functioned in its own exclusive compartment of her awareness, where it could enjoy the full focus of her attention for whatever time she was disposed to allot to it. When she was engaged in tasks connected with her ambassadorial role in Calazar's administration, she worked tirelessly and single mindedly, permitting no distraction. When she turned to the interests that she pursued to express her creative instincts, which ranged from writing a revision of Earth's history in the light of the now-revealed Jevlenese deceptions to creating neurally composed thought music that acted on the emotions directly as lucidly as sound upon the senses, Calazar and politics would be as far away from her thoughts as the star systems that most of such affairs pertained to. And when her mind sought the times of quiet and contemplation that all Thuriens looked upon as essential to a meaningful existence, if not the very point of it, she withdrew totally into herself and it was as if none of the rest existed. Her abode separated itself out to reflect those same functions. It was in a way, Mildred found herself thinking, a symbolic rendering in program-grown organics, metal-
ceramic composites, and opto-active crystal, of Frenua's life.

  The part they were in now, Mildred took to be the abode of the contemplative and relaxing Frenua. It was the high point of the layout, an eagle's eyrie of two spacious rooms to the rear of a deck projecting out over the abyss below the promontory into which the house had been blended. The shell enclosing the deck could be varied from place to place in transparency and in hue to take on any combination of the functions of windows and wall. At the moment it was predominantly clear, giving an uninterrupted view out over two vast gorges diverging away on either side below, each carrying a portion of the flow from an immense system of waterfalls tumbling down a facing wall of mountain that must have been several miles away, amid a permanent cloud of mist tinted faintly orange by the angle of the sun. The only things missing, Mildred thought, were flying dragons circling among the peaks, and Tolkeinesque castles clinging impossibly to the skyline.

  They sat in a lowered area of the floor on the very edge of the structure, in a crescent-shaped bay of outsize Ganymean seating that faced out over the chasm. It reminded Mildred of a helicopter she'd been in once, and when they first sat down had produced the same reaction of mild vertigo. She had said nothing, but reassured herself with the thought that if Thurien engineering could bring them all safely from Earth in a matter of days and beam energy invisibly from one part of the Galaxy to another, their constructions ought to remain where they put them. The meal had been a thin but tasty soup, not unlike lentil, followed by a mixed vegetable preparation on a pastalike base, vaguely reminiscent of quiche, and a dessert of chilled fruit pudding with a honey sauce. They finished with a selection of cheeses and breads, accompanied by a sweet and tangy, pale green Thurien concoction which from the slight headiness that Mildred found herself experiencing after a second glass, contained a functional surrogate for alcohol molecules.