acclimatized to their condition the acorporeals were.
The Left Hand had scribed Yann’s state almost an hour before, and they were still waiting hopefully for an echo. Rasmah had ended up translating Yann’s purely algorithmic account into a kind of sophisticated scattering experiment: they were probing the far side by sending in an elaborately structured pulse that was capable of propagating relatively large distances. At least part of this pulse stood a good chance of bouncing off any structure that lay in its path, and coming back to them bearing an imprint of whatever it encountered.
This made it sound cozily familiar: a cross between radar, particle physics, and tomography. But the “distance” the pulse would travel and the “structures” it might or might not interact with were the raw topological details of an unknown superposition of quantum graphs, not properties of such elaborate near-side constructions as vacuum obeying Euclidean geometry, or the kind of matter that would reflect light or microwaves. Even the pulse itself had no real analogies in the ordinary world: it was not a particle, or a gravitational wave, or any kind of electromagnetic signal. It was a new form of dislocation in the pattern of threads from which all those mundane things were woven.
Rasmah cried out, “We’ve got something!”
People started jostling for a better view of the screen, though the image was being made available directly to everyone in the room. Tchicaya stubbornly stood his ground behind Rasmah for several seconds, then he gave up and let the crowd percolate around him, forcing him back.
He closed his eyes and saw, unobstructed, the first raw image of the returning pulse. It was a speckled, monochrome, pockmarked pattern, like a fuzzy shot of a cratered landscape, taken in such low light levels that you could count the individual photons. As he watched, the speckling of the image shimmered; it reminded Tchicaya of some kind of weird laser effect.
“Interference!” Yann crowed happily from the ceiling. “Wait, wait, let me?—?” An inset blossomed in the image, a huge, tangled, branching polymer, studded with loops and knots, built from nodes of every valence. Different parts of the pulse would have been modified in different ways by the same topology; Yann had used the interference between these altered components to reconstruct a typical portion of the kind of graph the signal must have passed through.
Rasmah said, “That’s far from an unbiased superposition. It’s not the sum of all random haystacks in there. There’s no vacuum, but there’s still order.”
Tchicaya stared at the polymer. From childhood, he’d studied the Sarumpaet patterns, the quantum graphs that could maintain stability under the old rules. And for months, he’d seen the alternatives: all the different possible families of particles, deduced from the physics they’d trapped on the border.
This was like an amalgam that some magpie of a sculptor had created to sum up that experience, combining features from all of them?—?grabbing fragments of every kind of ordinary, vacuumbased physics and welding them together, without regard to such niceties as having to build a uniform, homogeneous geometry, or having to respect a simple set of rules that stayed constant over time.
Hayashi called out from behind Tchicaya, “Is that fractal? Can you give it a dimension?”
Rasmah invoked some further processing. “No. No dimension, integer or otherwise. The branching’s not at all self-similar; there’s no redundant information.”
“Modify the probe pulse and send it again. Here are the details.” Branco’s voice rang out from midair, as if he were among the acorporeals; he’d declined to leave his cabin and join the crush. Some Yielders had been reluctant to grant access to the results to anyone who refused to declare their allegiance, but sanity had finally prevailed.
Rasmah said, “Thanks for the suggestion, but it will have to wait.” The meeting that had approved Yann’s experiment had set aside a week for the interpretation of the results, before any further action was to be taken.
Branco sighed. “Do it, don’t do it. I couldn’t care less.”
Rasmah displayed Branco’s proposal for everyone to see. It was a straightforward alteration to Yann’s original state, accompanied by some calculations suggesting that components would bounce back to them in a staggered sequence that would make changes in the graphs over time easier to deduce. If this worked, it would give them a movie of the far side, in place of a single, still image.
Suljan yelled out, “We should try that, immediately!” Bhandari, in a far corner of the room, disagreed. People started voicing approval and shouting alternative suggestions from all directions. Tchicaya would have covered his ears, but his hands were trapped. This was bedlam, but it was intoxicating. It reminded him of the time he and a group of friends on Peldan had landed a remotecontrolled vehicle on a passing asteroid: everyone wanted to grab the joystick.
Rasmah screamed, “Shut up!”
Something approximating silence descended.
“Read Branco’s proposal,” she pleaded. “Think about it. We’ll have a vote in fifteen minutes. And if anyone feels like going out to stretch their legs in the meantime…don’t rush back. You can vote from anywhere.”
The noise rose up again, but there was no real note of discord. Rasmah slumped against the control panel.
Yann poked his head down in front of Tchicaya. “You’re all completely mad. Someone’s going to get crushed.”
“Some of us have no choice about taking up space.”
“There’s plenty of room up here,” Yann suggested helpfully.
“Yeah, right, just give me a hand up.” The ship could probably have molded a tier of hanging chairs, but the ceiling was so low that this would have meant a constant risk of being kicked in the head.
“Some people are so inflexible. When Cass came to Mimosa, she insisted on a body. We obliged, but we made it small enough to fit.”
Tchicaya had never heard this detail before.
“How small?” he asked.
Yann held out his hand, thumb and forefinger a couple of millimeters apart.
“You evil, sadistic bastards.”
Tchicaya squeezed his way through the crowd back to the control panel. Rasmah looked frazzled but happy.
“What do you make of this?” he asked, gesturing at the polymer.
“It’s too early for interpretations,” she said.
“But it’s structured, isn’t it?” he suggested. “You said as much yourself.”
Rasmah had grown more cautions. “It’s not an equal superposition of all the things it could be. It’s not a maximum-entropy quantum blancmange. That still leaves a lot of room for it to be disordered, in lesser ways.”
Tchicaya didn’t pursue the point, but the very fact that Yann’s pulse had come back to them bearing information proved that there was some potential for setting up causal processes on the far side. Lawless as it was in the conventional sense, it could still support a kind of machinery. They could try to build more sophisticated exploratory vehicles. Perhaps, eventually, even bodies and Qusps.
More importantly, if they ever succeeded in doing that, the place they’d be entering was looking less and less like a featureless desert. When Tchicaya had arrived on the
“Do you think we should show this to the opposition?” Tchicaya asked. “It might give them pause, if they can finally see that they’re not just dealing with a corrosive void.”
Rasmah laughed. “You honestly believe they’d care?”
“Some would. And I don’t see what we have to lose.”
“Nor do I, but only because I’m sure they’ll end up with exactly the same details, whether we inform them officially or not.”
Tchicaya was startled. “You think someone’s spying for them?”
“Of course.”
“What makes you so sure? Do we have spies with them?”
