She drank in the view.
Some things were the same on both versions of Earth, Ponter had said: the gross details of the geography, most of the animal and plant species (although the Neanderthals, never having indulged in over killing, still had mammoths and moas in their world), the broad strokes of the climate. But Mary was a scientist: she understood all about chaos theory, about how the beating of a butterfly’s wing was enough to affect weather systems half a world away. Surely just because there was a clear sky here on this Earth didn’t mean the same was true on Ponter’s world.
But if the weather did happen to coincide, perhaps Ponter was also looking up at the night sky now.
And perhaps he was thinking of Mary.
Ponter would, of course, be seeing precisely the same constellations, even if he gave them different names—nothing terrestrial could possibly have disturbed the distant stars. But would the auroras be the same? Did butterflies or people have any effect on the choreography of the northern lights? Perhaps she and Ponter were looking at the exact same spectacle—a curtain of illumination waving back and forth, the seven bright stars of the Big Dipper (or, as he would call it, the Head of the Mammoth) stretching out above.
Why, he might even right now be seeing the same shimmying to the right, the same shimmying to the left, the same—
Jesus.
Mary felt her jaw drop.
The auroral curtain was splitting down the middle, like aquamarine tissue paper being torn by an invisible hand. The fissure grew longer, wider, starting at the top and moving toward the horizon. Mary had seen nothing like that on the first night she’d looked up at the northern lights.
The sheet finally separated into two halves, parting like the Red Sea before Moses. A few—they looked like sparks, but could they really be that?—arced between the halves, briefly bridging the gap. And then the half on the right seemed to roll up from the bottom, like a window blind being wound onto its dowel, and, as it did so, it changed colors, now green, now blue, now violet, now orange, now turquoise.
And then in a flash—a spectral burst of light—that part of the aurora disappeared.
The remaining sheet of light was swirling now, as if it were being sucked down a drain in the firmament. As it spun more and more rapidly, it flung off gouts of cool green fire, a pinwheel against the night.
Mary watched, transfixed. Even if this was only her second night actually observing the aurora, she’d seen countless pictures of the northern lights over the years in books and magazines. She’d known those still images hadn’t done justice to the spectacle; she’d read how the aurora rippled and fluttered.
But nothing had prepared her for this.
The vortex continued to contract, growing brighter as it did so, until finally, with—did she really hear it?—with what sounded like a pop, it vanished.
Mary staggered backward, bumping up against the cold metal of her rented Dodge Neon. She was suddenly aware that the forest sounds around her—insects and frogs, owls and bats—had fallen silent, as if every living thing was looking up in wonder.
Mary’s heart was pounding, and one thought kept echoing through her head as she climbed into the safety of her car.
I wonder if it’s supposed to do that…
Chapter Two
Jurard Selgan rose from his saddle-seat and paced around the circumference of his circular office while Ponter Boddit told of his first trip to the Gliksin world.
“ So your relationship with Mare Vaughan had ended on an unsatisfactory note?” said Selgan, at last returning to his seat.
Ponter nodded.
“ Relationships are often unresolved,” said Selgan. “It would be nice if that weren’t the case, but surely this can’t have been the first time a relationship you were involved in had ended in a disappointing way.”
“ No, it wasn’t,” said Ponter, very softly.
“ You’re thinking of a specific person, aren’t you?” said Selgan. “Tell me.”
“ My woman-mate, Klast Harbin,” said Ponter.
“ Ah. Your relationship with her ended, did it? Who initiated the split?”
“ No one initiated it,” snapped Ponter. “Klast died, twenty months ago.”
“ Oh,” said Selgan. “My condolences. Was she—was she an older woman?”
“ No. She was a 145, same as me.”
Selgan rolled his eyebrow up his browridge. “Was it an accident?”
“ It was cancer of the blood.”
“ Ah,” said Selgan. “A tragedy. But…”
“ Don’t say it, Selgan.” Ponter’s tone was sharp.
“ Don’t say what?” asked the personality sculptor.
“ What you were about to say.”
“ And you think that was…?”
“ That my relationship with Klast was cut off abruptly, just like my relationship with Mare was cut off abruptly.”
“ Is that the way you feel?” asked Selgan.
“ I knew I shouldn’t have come here,” said Ponter. “You personality sculptors think your insights are so profound. But they’re not; they’re simplistic. ‘Relationship Green ended abruptly, and you are reminded of it by the way Relationship Red ended.’” Ponter snorted dismissively.
Selgan was quiet for several beats, perhaps waiting to see if Ponter would say more of his own volition. When it became clear that he would not, Selgan spoke again. “But you did push for the portal between this world and Mare’s world to be reopened.” He let the sentence hang in the air between them for a time, and Ponter finally responded.
“ And you think that’s why I pushed?” Ponter said. “That I didn’t care about the consequences, the ramifications, for this world? That all I was worried about was getting to resolve this unfinished relationship?”
“ You tell me,” said Selgan, gently.
“ It wasn’t like that. Oh, sure, there’s a superficial resemblance between what happened with me and Klast, and what happened with me and Mare. But I’m a scientist.” He fixed Selgan with an angry stare of his golden eyes. “A real scientist. I understand when true symmetry exists—it doesn’t here—and I understand false analogy.”
“ But you did push the High Gray Council. I saw it on my Voyeur, along with thousands of others.”
“ Well, yes, but…”
“ But what? What were you thinking then? What were you trying to accomplish?”
“ Nothing—except what was best for all our people.”
“ Are you sure of that?” asked Selgan.
“Of course I’m sure!” snapped Ponter.
Selgan was quiet, letting Ponter listen to his own words echo off the polished wooden wall.
Ponter Boddit had to admit that nothing he’d ever experienced—indeed, probably nothing that any of his people had ever experienced—had been more frightening than being transported bodily from this world to that bizarre other world, arriving in total darkness and almost drowning in a giant water tank.
But, still, of the things that happened in this world, this universe, few could compare for sheer terror with addressing the High Gray Council. After all, this wasn’t just the local Gray Council; the High Gray Council ran the planet, and its members had come here, to Saldak, specifically to see Ponter and Adikor and the quantum computer they’d used twice now to open a portal to another reality.
No one on the High Gray Council was anything younger than a 143, twenty years Ponter’s senior. The wisdom, the experience, and, yes, when it struck their mood to be so, the sheer cussed orneriness of people that old was formidable in the extreme.
Ponter could have just let the issue drop. Nobody was pushing for him and Adikor to reopen the portal to the other world. Indeed, except maybe for that female group in Evsoy, there was no one who could gainsay them if Ponter and Adikor simply claimed that the opening of the portal had been an irreproducible fluke.
But the possibility of trade between two kinds of humanity was too significant for Ponter to ignore. Information could c
ertainly be swapped: what Ponter’s people knew about superconductivity, say, for what the Gliksins knew about spaceships. But, more than that, cultures could be exchanged: the art of this world for the art of that world, a dibalat iterative epic, perhaps, for a play by this Shakespeare he’d heard of over there; sculptures by the great Kaydas for the work of a Gliksin painter.
Surely, thought Ponter, these noble thoughts were his sole motivation. Surely he had nothing personally to gain by reopening the portal. Yes, there was Mare. Still, doubtless Mare wasn’t really interested in a being so different from herself, a creature who was hairy where males of her kind were smooth, who was stocky when most Gliksins were gracile, a being with a double-crested browridge undulating above his eyes, eyes that were golden instead of Mare’s own blue or the dark brown of so many others of her species.
Ponter had no doubt that Mare had really suffered the trauma she’d spoken of, but surely that was only the most prominent of many reasons for her having rebuffed his advance.
But no.
No, that wasn’t right.
There had been a real, mutual attraction. Across time lines, across species boundaries, it had been real. He was sure of it.
But could things really go better between the two of them if contact were resumed? He cherished his wonderful, beautiful memories of his time with her—and they were only memories, for his Companion implant had been unable to transmit anything to his alibi archive from the other side. Mare existed only in his imagination, in his thoughts and dreams; there was no objective reality to compare her to, except a few brief glimpses caught by the robot that Adikor had dangled through the portal to summon Ponter home.
Surely it was better this way. Further contact would spoil what they’d already had.
And yet—
And yet it did seem that the portal could be reopened.
Standing in the small anteroom, Ponter looked over at Adikor Huld, his man-mate. Adikor nodded encouragingly. It was time to go into the Council chamber. Ponter picked up the unexpanded Derkers tube he’d brought with him, and the two men walked through the massive doors, ready to face the High Grays.
“The presence here of Scholar Boddit,” said Adikor Huld, gesturing now at Ponter, “is direct proof that a person can pass through to the other universe and return unharmed.”
Ponter looked at the twenty Grays, ten males and ten females, two from each of the world’s ten regional governments. In some forums, males sat on one side of the room and females on the other. But the High Gray Council dealt with matters that affected the entire species, and the males and females who had gathered here from all over the globe alternated in a great circle.
“But,” continued Adikor, “except for Ponter’s daughter Jasmel, who stuck her head through the portal during our rescue operations, no one else from this world has been to that one. When we first created the portal, it was by accident—an unexpected result of our quantum-computing experiments. But we now know that this universe and that one, the one in which Gliksin people dominate, are entangled somehow. The portal from here always opens to that particular one out of the panoply of alternate universes that our physics tells us must exist. And, as far as we can determine from our previous experience, the portal will remain open as long as a solid object is passing through it.”
Bedros, an old male from Evsoy, frowned at Adikor. “So what are you proposing, Scholar Huld? That we shove a stick partway through the portal to keep it open?”
Ponter, standing next to Adikor, turned slightly so that Bedros, at least, would not see his smirk.
Adikor wasn’t as fortunate: he was caught in Bedros’s gaze, and couldn’t look away without seeming disrespectful. “Um, no,” he said. “We have something more, ah, versatile in mind. Dern Kord, an engineer of our acquaintance, has proposed that we insert a Derkers tube through the portal.”
This was Ponter’s cue to unfold the Derkers tube. He got his fingers inside the narrow mouth and pulled. The tube, a latticework of metal, expanded with a ratcheting sound until its diameter was greater than Ponter’s height. “These tubes are used to reinforce mining tunnels in emergencies,” said Ponter. “Once expanded, they resist being collapsed. Indeed, the only way to get one to return to its original size is by using a defastener to undo the locks at each intersection of the crisscrossing metal segments.”
To his credit, Bedros got the idea at once. “And you think one of these will keep the portal open indefinitely, so that people could just walk down it, like a tunnel between the two universes?”
“Exactly,” said Ponter.
“What about disease?” asked Jurat, a local female of generation 141. She was seated on the opposite side of the room from Bedros, so Ponter and Adikor had to turn to face her. “I understand you fell ill when you were in the other world.”
Ponter nodded. “Yes. I met a Gliksin physicist there who…” He paused as one of the High Grays snickered. Ponter had gotten used to the notion, but he understood why it sounded funny; he might as well have referred to “a caveman philosopher.” “Anyway,” continued Ponter, “she proposed that the time lines split—well, she said forty thousand years ago; that’s half a million months. Since then, the Gliksins have lived in crowded conditions, and have bred many animals in large numbers for food. Numerous diseases have likely evolved there to which we have no immunity. And it may be that some diseases have evolved here to which they’re not immune, although our lower population density makes that less likely, I’m told. In any event, we will need to provide a decontamination system, and everyone who travels in either direction between the worlds will have to be treated by it.”
“But wait,” said Jindo, another male, who came from the land south of here on the opposite side of the unoccupied equatorial belt. Fortunately, he was sitting right beside Jurat, so Ponter and Adikor didn’t have to turn around again. “This tunnel between worlds has to be located at the bottom of the Debral nickel mine, a thousand armspans beneath the surface, is that right?”
“Yes,” said Ponter. “You see, it’s our quantum computer that makes accessing the other universe possible, and for it to work at all, it has to be shielded from solar radiation. The huge amount of rock overhead provides that shielding.”
Bedros nodded, and Adikor turned to face him. “So it’s not as though people could travel in great numbers between the two worlds.”
“Meaning,” said Jurat, picking up Bedros’s point, “that we don’t have to worry about an invasion.” Adikor turned to face her, but Ponter continued to look at Bedros. “Not only will individuals have to come through this narrow tunnel, but they will have to make it all the way up to the surface before they can get out into our world.”
Ponter nodded. “Exactly. You’ve reached the marrow.”
“I appreciate your enthusiasm for your work,” said Pandaro, the president of the Council, a Galasoyan 140 female, who, to this point, had been silent. She was sitting halfway between Bedros and Jurat, so Ponter turned left and Adikor turned right until they were both facing her. “But let me see if I understand you correctly. There is no way the Gliksins can open a portal to this world, right?”
“That’s right, President,” said Ponter. “Although I certainly didn’t learn everything about their computing technology, they are a long way away from building a quantum computer anything like the one Adikor and I created.”
“How far away are they?” asked Pandaro. “How many months?”
Ponter looked at Adikor briefly; Adikor, after all, was the hardware expert. But Adikor conveyed with an expression that Ponter should go ahead and answer. “At least three hundred, I’d say, and possibly many more.”
Pandaro spread her arms, as if the answer were obvious. “Well, then, there is no rush to deal with this matter. We can take the time to study the issue, and—”
“ No!” exclaimed Ponter. Every eye in the chamber fell on him.
“I beg your pardon?” said the president, her tone cool.
“I mean,?
?? said Ponter, “it’s just that—that we don’t know how reproducible this phenomenon is over the long term. Any number of conditions might change, and—”
“I understand your desire to continue your work, Scholar Boddit,” said the president, “but there is the question of disease transfer, of contamination, and—”
“We already have the technology to shield against that,” said Ponter.
“In theory,” said another Councilor, also a female. “But in practice, the Kajak technique has never been used in such a way. We can’t be sure—”
“You are so timid,” snapped Ponter. Adikor was looking at him with shock, but Ponter ignored his partner.“ They would not be so frightened. They’ve climbed their world’s highest mountains! They’ve gone far beneath the oceans! They’ve orbited the Earth! They’ve gone to the moon! It wasn’t the cowardice of old men and women that—”
“ Scholar Boddit!” The president’s tone thundered through the Council chamber.
Ponter stopped himself. “I—I’m sorry, President. I didn’t mean—”
“I think it’s abundantly clear what you meant,” said Pandaro. “But our role is to be cautious. We have the welfare of the entire world on our shoulders.”
“I know,” said Ponter, trying to keep his voice calm. “I know, but there’s so much at stake here! We can’t wait for endless months. We have to act now. You have to act now.”
Ponter felt Adikor’s hand land gently on his upper arm. “Ponter…” he said softly.
But Ponter twisted free. “We haven’t gone to the moon. We’ll probably never go to the moon—and that means we’ll never go to Mars, or the stars. This parallel Earth is the only other world our people will ever have access to. We can’t let the opportunity slip away!”
It might be apocryphal, but Mary Vaughan had heard the story so often she suspected it was probably true. They said that when Toronto decided to build a second university in the 1960s, the plans for the campus had been bought from an extant university in the southern U.S. It had seemed like an expedient thing to do, but no one had taken into account the climatic differences.