‘Or your disaster, should you topple off the bridge or bring the entire thing crashing down. But why now, Quaiche, after all these revolutions around Hela?’
‘Because I feel that the time is right,’ he said. ‘You can’t second-guess these things. Not the work of God.’
‘You truly are a lost cause,’ the scrimshaw suit said. Then the cheaply synthesised voice took on an urgency it had lacked before. ‘Quaiche, listen to us. Do what you will with the Lady Morwenna. We won’t stop you. But first let us out of this cage.’
‘You’re scared,’ he said, pulling the stiff tissue of his face into a smile. ‘I’ve really put the wind up you, haven’t I?’
‘It doesn’t have to be this way. Look at the evidence, Quaiche. The vanishings are increasing in frequency. You know what that means, don’t you?’
‘The work of God is moving towards its culmination.’
‘Or, alternatively, the concealment mechanism is failing. Take your pick. We know which interpretation we favour.’
‘I know all about your heresies,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to hear them again.’
‘You still think we are demons, Quaiche?’
‘You call yourselves shadows. Isn’t that a bit of a giveaway?’
‘We call ourselves shadows because that is what we are, just as you are all shadows to us. It’s a statement of fact, Quaiche, not a theological standpoint.’
‘I don’t want to hear any more of it.’
It was true: he had heard enough of their heresies. They were lies, engineered to undermine his faith. Time and again he had tried to purge them from his head, but always to no avail. As long as the scrimshaw suit remained with him — as long as the thing inside the scrimshaw suit remained — he would never be able to forget those untruths. In a moment of weakness, a lapse that had been every bit as unforgivable as the one twenty years earlier that had brought them here in the first place, he had even followed up some of their heretical claims. He had delved into the Lady Morwenna’s archives, following lines of enquiry.
The shadows spoke of a theory. It meant nothing to him, yet when he searched the deep archives — records carried across centuries in the shattered and corrupted data troves of Ultra trade ships — he found something, glints of lost knowledge, teasing hints from which his mind was able to suggest a whole.
Hints of something called brane theory.
It was a model of the universe, an antique cosmological theory that had enjoyed a brief interlude of popularity seven hundred years in the past. So far as Quaiche could tell, the theory had not been discredited so much as abandoned, put aside when newer and brighter toys came along. At the time there had been no easy way of testing any of these competing theories, so they had to stand and fall on their strict aesthetic merit and the ease with which they could be tamed and manipulated with the cudgels and barbs of mathematics.
Brane theory suggested that the universe the senses spoke of was but one sliver of something vaster, one laminate layer in a stacked ply of adjacent realities. There was, Quaiche thought, something alluringly theological in that model, the idea of heavens above and hells below, with the mundane substrate of perceived reality squeezed between them. As above, so below.
But brane theory had nothing to do with heaven and hell. It had originated as a response to something called string theory, and specifically a conundrum within string theory known as the hierarchy problem.
Heresy again. But he could not stop himself from delving deeper.
String theory posited that the fundamental building blocks of matter were, at the smallest conceivable scales, simply one-dimensional loops of mass-energy. Like a guitar string the loops were able to vibrate — to
But gravity was also the problem. On the classical scale — the familiar universe of people and buildings, ships and worlds — gravity was much weaker than anyone normally gave it credit for. Yes, it held planets in their orbits around stars. Yes, it held stars in their orbits around the centre of mass of the galaxy. But compared to the other forces of nature, it was barely there at all. When the Lady Morwenna lowered one of its electromagnetic grapples to lift some chunk of metal from a delivery tractor, the magnet was resisting the entire gravitational force of Hela — everything the world could muster. If gravity had been as strong as the other forces, the Lady Morwenna would have been crushed into an atom-thick pancake, a film of collapsed metal on the perfectly smooth spherical surface of a collapsed planet. It was only gravity’s extreme weakness on the classical scale that allowed life to exist in the first place.
But string theory went on to suggest that gravity was really very strong, if only one looked closely enough. At the Planck scale, the smallest possible increment of measurement, string theory predicted that gravity ramped up to equivalence with the other forces. Indeed, at that scale reality looked rather different in other respects as well: curled up like dead woodlice were seven additional dimensions — hyperspaces accessible only on the microscopic scale of quantum interactions.
There was an aesthetic problem with this view, however. The other forces — bundled together as a single unified electroweak force — manifested themselves at a certain characteristic energy. But the strong gravity of string theory would only reveal itself at energies ten million billion times greater than for the electroweak forces. Such energies were far beyond the grasp of experimental procedure. This was the hierarchy problem, and it was considered deeply offensive. Brane theory was one attempt to resolve this glaring schism.
Brane theory — as far as Quaiche understood it — proposed that gravity was really as strong as the electroweak force, even on the classical scale. But what happened to gravity was that it leaked away before it had a chance to show its teeth. What was left — the gravity that was experienced in day-to-day life — was only a thin residue of something much stronger. Most of the force of gravity had dissipated
But what of the shadows? This was where Quaiche had to fill in the details for himself. What the shadows appeared to be hinting at — the heart of the heresy — was that they were messengers or some form of communication from an adjacent braneworld. That braneworld might have been completely disconnected from our own, so that the only possible means of communication between the two was through the bulk. There was another possibility, however: the two apparently separate braneworlds might have been distant portions of a single brane, one that was folded back on itself like a hairpin. If that were the case — and the shadows had said nothing on the matter either way — then they were messengers not from another reality but merely from a distant corner of the familiar universe, unthinkably remote in both space and time. The light and energy from their region of space could only travel along the brane, unable to slip across the tiny gap between the folded surfaces. But gravity slipped effortlessly across the bulk, carrying a message from brane to brane. The stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies in the shadow brane cast a gravitational shadow on our local universe, influencing the motions of our stars and galaxies. By the same token, the gravity caused by the matter in the local part of the brane leaked through the bulk, into the realm of the shadows.
But the shadows were clever. They had decided to communicate across the bulk using gravity as their signalling medium.
There were a thousand ways they might have done it. The specifics didn’t matter. They might have manipulated the orbits of a pair of degenerate stars to produce a ripple of gravitational waves, or learned how to make miniature black holes on demand. The only important thing was that it could be done. And — equally importantly — that someone would be able to pick up the signals on this side of the bulk.
Someone like the scuttlers, for instance.
Quaiche laughed to himself. The heresy made a repulsive kind of sense. But then what else would he have
