Rogers grinned. “I suppose that sort of depends on the context you’re stuck with. What Howell meant, I suspect, is that Australian Aborigines confused one with the other in an inappropriate context. They thought that, if you were from far away, then you were also from the distant past. When the earliest European explorers arrived in Australia, the Aborigines thought that the intruders were their own ancestors.”
“That is almost appropriate, over interstellar distances, is it not?”
“Whitey, you don’t know the half of it.” But Howell was working toward a point. “There are a number of different dimensions—call it directions—in the physical universe. There’s back-and-forth, for instance. There’s up-and-down. And there’s side-to-side. Those are the three dimensions of space. There’s also back-and-forth in time, the distance from past to future, with the present presumably somewhere in between.”
“That seems simple enough.”
“Yeah? Well, there’s also side-to-side, timewise—”
“So I have been told. Something about different history lines, different—”
“Probability. Look: nobody knew about statistical probability—that’s another way of looking at this sideways dimension—before Blaise Pascal. He was a mathematician, philosopher, and a gambler before he got religion, back in the—well, four hundred years ago. It took longer before anyone realized the importance of probability, that time is not only infinite lengthwise—in the dimension of “duration”—but sideways—in the dimension of probability, as well.”
“What do you mean, infinite?”
“That there is an unlimited number of universes. That every event that can happen in a number of different ways actually happens in every different way it can happen. And that, as a result, every human choice we make is actually made in every different way that it can be made.”
Enough of that. “Owen, there is something else that I have to ask you.”
The praxeologist stopped, blinked. “What’s that, Whitey?”
“Well, I got involved, today, in a discussion of repression. The fact that intelligent beings never really forget anything, stuff like that ...”
“Now you’re more into my territory,” Rogers said. “What was the question?”
“This: when scientists dig into the sands of my home planet, they occasionally run across the remains of four-legged creatures very much like Howell. Apparently, they were imported when our ancestors arrived on Vespucci, for food or some other purpose. But they were obviously not intelligent. They were domestic animals of some kind, lacking—as Howell must—the cranial capacity to be an intelligent creature. Yet Howell has mentioned several times that he has ‘circuits’. He not only never forgets anything, he seems to remember more than anyone I have met on this ship. No offense intended, I mean.” I flushed with embarrassment.
“None taken. You’re right, Howell started as a four-legged animal, not even a domestic one. He’s from a species of wild prairie-rovers. But he’s also different in that he carries several thousand gigabytes of electronic supplementation—data storage-and-retrieval, speed and capacity boosters—attached to the surface of his brain. In a sense he’s half dog and half computer and he’ll gladly tell you all about it, if you ask him. He’s a lot like the Patchwork Girl’s glass cat in that regard. But be prepared to stand around listening for several hours.”
“Oh.” It had been much as I expected. The trouble was, it led to a question that I dare not ask, not of Rogers, nor of anyone else aboard this ship. I had figured Howell out all by myself, then made a leap. No one ever had to look anything up aboard Tom Paine Maru. They all knew, at any given moment, precisely what time it was, when the next auxiliary was arriving, what the temperature was, sometimes even what the person in the next room was thinking. Were they all like poor Howell, electronically brain-implanted slaves of some giant master computer?
They certainly all believed the same things, acted cooperatively, accomplished great works (like Tom Paine Maru herself) without any visible institution to indoctrinate, instruct, or coordinate their efforts. They acted as if they were under the control of some powerful government somewhere. The problem was that they did not seem to have one.
Impossible!
The Patchwork Girl’s glass cat?
Operation klaatu
Hanging in the middle of the darkened room, I hooked my left arm under my right knee to fold myself into a sitting position. Holding the notebook against my naked thigh with my left hand, I twisted the business end of Rogers’ pencil until it shed soft light on the plastic pages:
Notes from the Asperance Expedition
Armorer/Corporal YD-038 recording
Page One:
Along the infinite dimension of “probability”, are universes, existing side-by-side (“coextant” is the expression used aboard the Tom Paine Maru), in which, to name one example, the Big Bang never happened.
Or happened differently.
Or where somebody in Earthian history named Albert Gallatin talked them out of the Whiskey Rebellion, instead of leading it to the anarchistic victory that Confederates hail as the beginning of their era.
The three principal developments that determined the history of the present era—the 3rd Century A.L., as they call it—were the perfection of catalytic fusion for power production, improvements in the area of interstellar space travel, the discovery of parallel realities.
While searching for a faster-than-light stardrive, the physicist Dora Jayne Thorens, with her partner, Ooloorie Eckickeck P’wheet (I have rendered that last name phonetically as best I can—I will discuss the lack of a written language among the Confederates later) stumbled upon another version of Earth where their Rebellion had been lost, where the state had grown for two hundred years instead of withering.
The examples above are not chosen arbitrarily. The first, somehow a different start for the universe, made what they call the “Malaise Catastrophe” possible. The reference is obscure, yet this, almost as much as the Whiskey Rebellion, seems to be responsible for everything the Confederacy is doing now. It is the reason these enormous ships are exploring the galaxy. It forms the basis for their attitude toward “Kilroys”.
The second, Gallatin’s rebellion, produced the world we stand in.
Inferences are impossible to resist. There are other universes out there where I was never forced to give up music, universes where I never met or came to love Eleva, or where I never volunteered for the Asperance expedition, or where I gave up in Sca’s dungeons, or where I—
I stopped, twisted the end of the pencil Rogers had given me to its ERASE mode, then carefully rubbed out the last paragraph I had written.
In its place, I wrote:
Each choice produces a new clutch of universes, entirely complete unto themselves, perhaps differing only by a single human decision. According to Rogers (or others I have begun asking about the subject), this is not some religious notion, but cold, scientifically proven fact.
I have had many reasons in my life for feeling insignificant or inefficacious. Yet, if each choice I make, no matter how trivial, creates an entirely new universe—an entirely new set of universes—what does that say about the power of the human mind? Any human mind?
Even mine?
I stopped writing once again. Belatedly, it had occurred to me that, if I were successful in my self-appointed spying against the Confederates, it might advance me in rank, helping my chances with Eleva.
Now, more than ever, I must get home!
Oddly, that self-serving thought made me feel guilty toward a dozen people at once. As time passed, my friend, my nominal superior, Enson Sermander looked increasingly like ... well, a rather stupid, boring individual, in contrast to those I was meeting here. Yet the man was my Lieutenant, the lawful representative of the planet I had been born on—which was, itself, looking a little stupidly boring to me.
As for Eleva—
A surge of guilt swept through me all over again, along with the tho
ught that any woman who requires something to stir her like the promotion I aspired to, does not deserve to be stirred. I stifled the thought, then immediately felt guilty for repressing it, repression being the root of all evil as far as my new-found friends seemed to be concerned.
Can you feel guilty about feeling guilty? I had asked Howell that very question. His answer had been enigmatic “Only in southern California”.
“Writing in your little diary, again?”
I jumped.
In zero gravity, this accomplished a slow rotation about my own center-of-mass. Lucille’s voice was sharp as she re-entered the room. Regaining proper attitude, along with the remnants of my dignity, I folded the notebook irritably, tucked the special pencil through its loop, tangled both in the mesh along the wall that I had kicked myself into.
She brushed her freshly-washed hair. “Don’t worry, Corporal-baby, I wouldn’t dream of peeking at your secret scribblings if you paid me to.”
“I do not worry about that, Lucille,” I replied coolly, looking around for my smartsuit. For some reason she was keeping to herself, war had been declared between us again. “I only worry about whether I can get my impressions down in a way that will make sense of them later.”
She could not know that the notebook was a weapon for the defense of my civilization. I would wrap up my dissertation on metaphysical philosophy as soon as I had provided enough background for Vespuccian Intelligence, then begin on the technological details. They might be useful to our scientists, however badly I failed to understand them myself.
“Okay, write this up in your book.”
The walls around us cleared. We were no longer in a warm cavern, but the upper section of a scoutship exactly like the first I had ever ridden aboard. Outside, the stars—the real stars—shone as hard, bright chips. The pearlescent disk of Tom Paine Maru appeared to one side like an oddly-shaped moon. The brightest object was the sun of Hoand, illuminating a half-dozen planets, most of them out of sight, with their half a hundred natural satellites. The planet itself hung before us, swirled white-green marble with its own three pock-marked companions.
“Operation Klaatu” was about to begin.
Despite my annoyance with her, Lucille was another individual I felt guilty toward, possibly toward her more than anybody. We were aboard a borrowed auxiliary spacecraft, John Thomas Maru, following the giant interstellar vessel that served as its base. This was supposed to be a holiday excursion for us. She had been working hard. Her compatriots had been working my head hard. It was time for a break.
It turned out to be another education, of sorts.
I had always wondered what lovemaking in free fall might be like. Aboard the Asperance, there had been neither the opportunity nor the room. Now I was finding out, as often as the two of us could manage, that it is fairly messy, requires considerably more energy than I had expected, plus a modicum of equipment—handstraps and so forth—but that it is interesting, relaxing once you get used to it, oddly satisfying.
As usual, Lucille was irked with me. This time (although she would never admit it), I had not tired as soon as she expected. She had that effect on me. Altogether, we were an awkward pair, our lovemaking always violent. Each seemed to have something that the other needed powerfully.
Almost against our wills, she and I had wound up together again, aboard this little ship. When things went well between us, I saw my life more objectively than I did at other times, measured it less in terms of duty, more by what it had always demanded from me without offering any reward. I entertained uncharitable thoughts about the Lieutenant. I even found myself considering the terrifying possibility that Eleva might even be something of an—well, the proctological reference Lucille used we do not employ much in polite company on Vespucci.
Lucille put her hair up now, snugging it into the hood of her suit which would dry it for her. It was just an ordinary safety precaution—we would soon be docking with the mother vessel in the usual way. With her, however, it also seemed to serve as punctuation, delineating business from pleasure, her ordinary toughness from those rare moments of tenderness that baffled me even more than her habitual combat posture.
“I have to get back to the ship,” she informed me. “There’s a big conference in an hour, over plans to discredit pro-war politicians in Great Foddu. It’s going to be a delicate job. War is always so popular with—”
I shook my head. Even a few minutes away from a crucial operation on an altogether different planet, the planning for Sodde Lydfe continued.
I decided to risk starting yet another fight. “Lucille, how can you people contemplate meddling in the lives of others a scale like this?”
Was that bewilderment on her face? “Why should the scale matter, Whitey? Is it somehow worse than meddling in the life of a single individual?”
She settled to the floor as gravity came up slowly again, produced a self-lit cigarette. I watched her puff ill-humoredly. “And what sort of meddling would you call war itself? Isn’t it better to ensure the election of anti-war ward-heelers there and in other democracies on the—”
“Or to foment a violent revolution in the Hegemony of Podfet, or its allies?” I folded my arms, sitting on a wall-couch rising to meet me.
She raised her eyebrows. “You know about that, do you? It bothers you?”
“It bothers me very much. Oh, all right, Podfet is a tyrannical dictatorship. It probably deserves whatever you people decide to do to it. But Great Foddu, that’s a constitutional monarchy, Lucille. It’s a democracy.”
“We’d do the same thing there, if it were pragmatic.” She was as close to raising her voice as she could be without doing it. “Get it through your hardened military skull. As someone said, ‘a difference that makes no difference is no difference’. Authoritarianism exists in varieties too numerously nauseating to discuss, Corporal. But that isn’t the issue on Sodde Lydfe at all. All the governments there are majoritarian.”
I threw up my hands, “Political lectures in bed, again.”
“After bed. You started this one, don’t complain. Look, stupid: just as there are only three ways that people can organize themselves, there are three basic forms of majoritarianism—socialism, fascism, and democracy. Understand that fascism is a majoritarian form. It relies just as heavily on popular support as any democracy. Look at the crowd scenes it’s so fond of. What’s more, Democracy is just as rottenly dictatorial as the other two. Should half a dozen individuals tell a seventh what to do, just because they could beat him up if they wanted?”
This was insane. “Is voting not better than beating people up? Howell says your system is based on greed. But people need taking care of.”
Lucille snorted with contempt. “A free market feeds more people, Corporal, more equitably, than any other system known to history. It’s the only system capable of feeding non-productive idiots like you. But you all eventually come to expect it, as a right, and that’ll probably be its undoing. That it accomplishes all of this as a by-product of greed is irrelevant—unless you care more about motivations than results!”
Now she had finally raised her voice, only centimeters from my face. Hers was flushed; fire crept up into my cheeks, as well. Howell had told me something like this, about the free market system, more quietly. It was difficult, right enough, separating results from motivations. Right now, I was having a lot of trouble the other way around.
“Idiot?” I asked at the top of my lungs, wishing she could just go back to being nice. Between her and Eleva, I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that I have terrible taste when it comes to women. “Stupid?”