“Yes. I know where you are going with this,” I said. “There are whole orders of theors—have been for thousands of years—that use completely different models and terminology.”
“Yes,” Orolo said, “and can you guess which model, which terminology, I am partial to?”
“The more polycosmic the better, I assume.”
“Of course! So, whenever I hear you talking of quantum phenomena using the old terminology—”
“The fid version?”
“Yes, I must mentally translate what you’re saying into polycosmic terms. For example, the simple case of a particle that is either spin up or spin down—”
“You would say that, at the moment when the spin is observed—the moment when its spin has an effect on the rest of the cosmos—the cosmos bifurcates into two complete, separate, causally independent cosmi that then go their separate ways.”
“You’ve almost got it. But it’s better to say that those two cosmi exist before the measurement is made, and that they interfere with each other—there is a little bit of crosstalk between them—until the observation is made. And then they go their separate ways.”
“And here,” I said, “we could talk about how crazy this sounds to many people—”
Orolo shrugged. “Yet it is a model that a great many theors come to believe in sooner or later, because the alternatives turn out to be even crazier in the end.”
“All right. So, I think I know what comes next. You want me to restate your theory of what the brain does in terms of the polycosmic interpretation of quantum theorics.”
“If you would so indulge me,” Orolo said, with a suggestion of a bow.
“Okay. Here goes,” I said. “The premise, here, is that the brain is loaded up with a pretty accurate model of the cosmos that it lives in.”
“At least, the local part of it,” Orolo said. “It needn’t have a good model of other galaxies, for example.”
“Right. And to state it in the terminology of the old interpretation that fids are taught, the state of that model is a superposition of many possible present and future states of the cosmos—or at least of the model.”
He held up a finger. “Not of the cosmos, but—?”
“But of hypothetical alternate cosmi differing slightly from the cosmos.”
“Very good. Now, this generalized cosmos-model that each person carries around in his or her brain—do you have any idea how it would work? What it would look like?”
“Not in the slightest!” I said. “I don’t know the first thing about the nerve cells and so on. How they could be rigged together to create such a model. How the model could be reconfigured, from moment to moment, to represent hypothetical scenarios.”
“Fair enough,” Orolo said, holding up his hands to placate me. “Let’s leave nerve cells out of the discussion, then. The important thing about the model, though, is what?”
“That it can exist in many states at once, and that its wavefunction collapses from time to time to give a useful result.”
“Yes. Now, in the polycosmic interpretation of how quantum theorics works, what does all of this look like?”
“There is no longer superposition. No wavefunction collapse. Just a lot of different copies of me—of my brain—each really existing in a different parallel cosmos. The cosmos model residing in each of those parallel brains is really, definitely in one state or another. And they interfere with one another.”
He let me stew on that for a few moments. And then it came to me. Just like those ideas we had spoken of earlier—suddenly there in my head. “You don’t even need the model any more, do you?”
Orolo just nodded, smiled, egged me on with little beckoning gestures.
I went on—seeing it as I was saying it. “It is so much simpler this way! My brain doesn’t have to support this hugely detailed, accurate, configurable, quantum-superposition-supporting model of the cosmos any more! All it needs to do is to perceive—to reflect—the cosmos that it’s really in, as it really is.”
“The variations—the myriad possible alternative scenarios—have been moved out of your brain,” Orolo said, rapping on his skull with his knuckles, “and out into the polycosm, which is where they all exist anyway!” He opened his hand and extended it to the sky, as if releasing a bird. “All you have to do is perceive them.”
“But each variant of me doesn’t exist in perfect isolation from the others,” I said, “or else it wouldn’t work.”
Orolo nodded. “Quantum interference—the crosstalk among similar quantum states—knits the different versions of your brain together.”
“You’re saying that my consciousness extends across multiple cosmi,” I said. “That’s a pretty wild statement.”
“I’m saying all things do,” Orolo said. “That comes with the polycosmic interpretation. The only thing exceptional about the brain is that it has found a way to use this.”
Neither of us said a word as we picked our way down the path for the next quarter of an hour, and the sky receded to a deep violet. I had the illusion that, as it got darker, it moved away from us, expanding like a bubble, rushing away from Arbre at a million light-years an hour, and as it whooshed past stars, we began to see them.
One of the stars was moving. So discreetly, at first, that I had to stop, find my balance, and observe it closely to be sure. It was no illusion. The ancient animal part of my brain, so attuned to subtle, suspicious movement, had picked out this one star among the millions. It was in the western sky, not far above the horizon, hence diluted, at first, in twilight. But it rose slowly and steadily into the black. As it did, it changed its color and its size. Early on, it was a pinprick of white light, just like any other star, but as it rose toward the zenith it reddened. Then it broadened to a dot of orange, then flared yellow and threw out a comet-tail. Until that point my eyes had been playing any number of tricks on me and I’d misconceived its distance, its altitude, and its velocity. But the comet-tail shocked me into the right view: the thing was not high above us in space but descending into the atmosphere, dumping its energy into shredded, glowing air. Its rise had slowed as it neared the zenith, and it was clear it would lose all forward speed before it passed over our heads. The meteor’s bearing had never changed: it was headed right at us, and the brighter and fatter it grew, the more it seemed to hang motionless in the sky, like a thrown ball that is coming straight at your head. For a minute it was a little sun, fixed in the sky and stabbing rays of incandescent air in all directions. Then it shrank and faded back through orange to a dull red, and became difficult to make out.
I realized I had tilted my head as far back as it would go, and was gazing vertically upwards.
At the risk of losing my fix on it, I dropped my chin and had a look around.
Orolo was a hundred feet downhill of me and running as fast as he could.
I gave up trying to track the thing in the sky and took off after him. By the time I caught up, we were almost at the edge of the pit.
“They deciphered my analemma!” he exclaimed between gasps.
We stopped at a rope that had been stretched at waist level from stake to stake around the edge of the pit, to prevent sleepy or drunk avout from falling into it. I looked up and cried out in shock as I saw something absolutely enormous, just above us, like a low cloud. But it was perfectly circular. I understood that it was a gigantic parachute. Its shroud lines converged on a glowing red load that hung far below it.
The lines went all quavery and the chute blurred, then began to drift sideways on a barely perceptible breeze. It had been cut loose. The hot red thing fell like a stone but then thrust out legs of blue fire and, a few seconds later, began to hiss, shockingly loud. It was aiming for the floor of the pit. Orolo and I followed the rope around to the top of the ramp. A crowd of fraas and suurs was building there, more fascinated than afraid. Orolo began pushing through them, headed for the ramp, shouting above the hiss of the rocket: “Fraa Landasher, open the gate! Yul, go out wit
h your cousin and get your vehicles. Find the parachute and bring it back! Sammann, do you have your jeejah? Cord! Get all of your things and meet me at the bottom!” And he launched himself down the ramp, rushing alone into the dark to meet the Geometers.
I ran after him. My usual role in life. I’d lost sight of the probe—the ship—whatever it was—during all of this, but now it was suddenly there, dead level with me and only a few hundred feet away, dropping at a measured pace toward the Temple of Orithena. I was so stunned by its immediacy, its heat and noise, that I recoiled, lost my balance, and stumbled to my knees. In that posture I watched it descend the last hundred feet or so. Its attitude, its velocity were perfectly steady, but only by dint of a thousand minute twitches and wiggles of its rocket nozzles: something very sophisticated was controlling the thing, making a myriad decisions every second. It was headed for the Decagon. In the final half-second, a hell-storm of shattering tiles was kicked up by the plumes of hypersonic gas shooting from those engines. Crouching, insect-like legs took up the last of its velocity and the engines went dark. But they continued to hiss for a couple of seconds as some kind of gas was run through the engines, purging the lines, shrouding the probe in a cool bluish cloud.
Then Orithena was silent.
I picked myself up and began hurrying down the ramp as best I could while keeping my head turned sideways, the better to stare at the Geometers’ probe. Its bottom was broad and saucer-shaped and still glowing a dull red-brown from the heat of re-entry. Above that it had a simple shape, like an inverted bucket, with a slightly domed top. Five tall narrow hatches had opened in its sides, revealing slots from which the bug-legs had unfolded. Atop its dome was some clutter I could not quite make out: presumably the mechanism for deploying and cutting free the parachute, maybe some antennas and sensors. I saw all sides of it as I chased Orolo down the spiral ramp, and never saw anything that looked like a window.
I caught up with him at the edge of the Decagon. He was sniffing the air. “Doesn’t seem to be venting anything noxious,” he said. “From the color of the exhaust, I’m guessing hydrogen/oxygen. Clean as a whistle.”
Landasher came down alone. It seemed he had ordered the others to remain above. He had his mouth open to say something. He looked half-deranged, a man in over his head. Orolo cut him off: “Is the gate open?” Landasher didn’t know. But above, we could now hear vehicles roaring around. I recognized them by their sounds: they were the ones we had brought over the pole. A light appeared at the top of the ramp.
“Someone opened them,” Orolo said. “But they must be closed and bolted again, as soon as the vehicles and parachute are inside. You should prepare for an invasion.”
“You think the Geometers are launching an—”
“No. I mean an invasion of the Panjandrums. This event will have been picked up on sensors. There is no telling how quickly the Saecular Power may respond. Possibly within an hour.”
“We cannot possibly keep the Saecular Power out, if they wish to come in,” Landasher said.
“As much time as possible. That is all I ask for,” Orolo said.
The three-wheeler was coming down the ramp. As it drew closer I saw Cord at the controls, Sammann standing on the back, gripping Cord’s shoulders to maintain his balance.
“What do you propose to do with that time?” Landasher demanded. Until now, he had always struck me as a wise and reasonable leader, but this evening he was under a lot of stress.
“Learn,” Orolo said. “Learn of the Geometers, before the Saecular Power takes this moment away from us.”
The three-wheeler reached the bottom. Sammann hopped off, unslinging his jeejah from his shoulder. He aimed its sensors at the probe. Cord gunned the engine briefly and swung the machine around so that its headlight, too, was aimed at the probe. Then she hopped off and began to pull gear from the cargo shelf on the rear axle.
“What of—how do you know it is safe? What about infection!? Orolo? Orolo!” Landasher cried, for Cord’s headlight gambit had offered a much better look at the thing, and Orolo was drifting toward it, fascinated.
“If they were afraid of being infected by us, they would not have come here,” Orolo said. “If we are at risk of being infected by them, then we are at their mercy.”
“Do you really fancy that bolting the gate is going to stop people who have helicopters?” Landasher asked.
“I have an idea about that,” Orolo said. “Fraa Erasmas will see to it.”
By the time I had got back up to the top of the ramp, Yul and Gnel had retrieved the parachute. They and a small crew of adventurous avout had wadded and stuffed much of it into the open back of Gnel’s fetch, restraining it with a haphazard web of cargo straps and shroud lines. Still, an acre of parachute and a mile of shroud lines trailed in the dust behind the fetch as they drew up to the edge of the pit.
Now at this point we ought to have put on white body suits, gloves, respirators, and sealed the alien chute in sterile poly and sent it to a lab to be examined and analyzed down to the molecular level. But I had other orders. So I grabbed the edge of the chute—my first physical contact with an artifact from another star system—and felt it. To me, no expert on textiles, it felt like the same stuff we used to make parachutes on Arbre. Same story with the shroud lines. I did not think that they were what we called newmatter.
Quite a crowd had gathered around the fetch. They were respecting Landasher’s order not to go into the pit. But he hadn’t said anything about the parachute. I climbed up onto the top of the fetch and announced: “Each of you is responsible for one shroud line. We’ll pull the chute out and spread it on the ground. Form a ring around its edge. Choose your line. Then radiate. Spread the lines outwards, untangling them as you go. In ten minutes I would like to see the whole population of Orithena standing in a huge circle around this parachute, each holding the end of a line.”
A pretty simple plan. It got quite a bit messier as they put it into practice. But they were smart people, and the less fussing and meddling I did, the better they showed themselves at dreaming up solutions to problems. Meanwhile I had Yul estimate the length of a single shroud line by counting fathoms with his arms.
Gnel drove his fetch out from under the spreading chute and down the ramp to the bottom of the pit. He had equipped it with a battery of high-powered lights that I had always found ridiculous. Tonight, he had finally found something to aim them at. I took a moment to glance down, and saw that Orolo and Cord had approached to within twenty feet of the probe.
Getting the Orithenans spread out around the chute took a little while. A supersonic jet screamed overhead and startled us.
Yul’s measurement confirmed my general impression, which was that the shroud lines were something like half as long as the pit was wide. Once I explained the general plan to the Orithenans, they began to move toward the edge of the pit, parting to either side and circumventing the rim while keeping the shroud lines taut. The chute glided across the ground in fits and starts. We had to get a few people underneath it to coax and waft it over snags. But presently the leading edge of the fabric curled over the rim of the pit, and then the movement took on a life of its own as gravity helped it forward. I hoped the Orithenans on the ends of the lines would have the good sense to let go the ropes if they felt themselves being pulled toward the edge. But the chute wasn’t nearly heavy enough to cause any such problems. Once all of the fabric had gone over the edge, and the Orithenans had spaced themselves evenly around it, the thing became quite manageable. The chute seemed to cover about half of the pit’s area. The Orithenans by now had figured out the general idea, which was that we wanted to suspend the parachute above the Teglon plaza as a canopy. They began to move about en masse, adjusting its position and its altitude with no further direction from me. When it seemed right, I jogged around the perimeter urging them to move away from the hole and trace their shroud lines out as far as they could go, and to lash the ends around any solid anchors they could find. For about a t
hird of them, this ended up being the top of the concent’s outer wall. Other lines ended up finding purchase on trees, Cloister pillars, trestles, rocks, or sticks hammered into the ground.
Hearing an engine, I looked over to the top of the ramp and saw that Yul was gingerly driving his house-on-wheels down into the pit—the better, I guessed, to cook breakfast for the Geometers. I sprinted over and dived into the cabin with him. This sparked a general rebellion among the Orithenans who, ignoring Landasher’s earlier order, followed us down on foot.
Yul and I drove down the ramp in silence. The look on his face was as if he were just on the verge of hysterical laughter. When we reached the bottom, he parked amid the ruins of the Temple, just near the Analemma. He shut off the engine. He turned to look at me and finally broke the silence. “I don’t know how this is going to come out,” he said, “but I sure am glad I came with you.” And, before I could tell him how glad I was of his company, he was out the door, striding over to join Cord.
Radiant heat from the underside of the vehicle was making it difficult to approach. Yul went back to his fetch and got some reflective emergency blankets. Cord, Orolo, and I used these as bolts. Most of the vehicle was above us, so we put out a call for ladders.
It had been difficult to guess the thing’s size before, but now I was able to borrow a measuring rod from the archaeological dig and measure it at about twenty feet in diameter. I hadn’t brought anything to write with, but Sammann was using his jeejah in speelycaptor mode, taking everything down, so I called out the numbers.
A helicopter approached. We could hear it through the canopy. It circled the compound a few times, its downwash creating huge, eye-catching disturbances in the canopy. Then it withdrew to a higher altitude and hovered. It could not land here because of the parachute. All the land within the walls was built on or cultivated with trees and trellises. They’d have to land outside and knock on the door, or scale the wall.