Grotius played a trump card.
'Before the resolution foreshadowed by Madam Mayor is put to the meeting,' he said, 'I should point out that it is envisaged that all invited to be present here tonight will have positions on at least one of the committees. Therefore if anyone is unhappy about policy he or she will be in a position to make a direct input in policy direction.'
That quieted a lot of objections. Most of the people at the gathering were not going to do anything to compromise prospects of their own power, I thought. No politician or Constitutional expert myself, I found I was on something called the Biology Committee and something else called the Defense Committee. Peter Brennan had us set up a Friendship Committee.
It went on a long time. At length I got home for a few hours' sleep.
Chapter 4
'No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.'
I found Dimity Carmody at the Lindenbaum Kafe, sitting at her usual table between the chess players and coffee addicts. With her better-than-fashion-model looks and quietly correct if obviously Tommie clothes among the eternally scruffy students, she was always easy to find, even, or especially, hiding behind those sunglasses she generally wore. I hoped I could talk to her now.
I hadn't always been able to. We had almost been lovers once, and would have been if it had not been for the difference in our intelligences. It was not a good idea to have a gap of more than 40 IQ points between oneself and one's partner. A few halting conversations between us had made that difference painfully clear. She enjoyed coming on field trips with me occasionally, but interaction in the deeper aspects of life was a different matter. I was a professor of biology with some chemistry and physics, and she was… what she was. Well, to use an old phrase, she wasn't exactly a rocket scientist.
Born with an abnormal brainwave, thought to be something in the Asperger's syndrome family, she had now learned to adopt a protective social coloration. It hadn't always been that way. Her father told me she had hardly spoken till she was seven years old. He was an outstanding mathematician and physicist-late in life he had worked on Carmody's Transform-and to have such a child had hurt him badly then, though things improved eventually. Now she could just about cope with normal people. Among her more normal socialization activities, she loved music boxes and had a little collection of them.
She was sitting drinking coffee, something she did a lot of. She didn't play chess, though, and I remembered the embarrassment when the president of the University club, an Aspirant Master, misled by her appearance of normality, had offered her a game here. He thought someone had set him up. She was doodling on some paper, one of her music boxes tinkling quietly on the table beside her. She signed for me to sit down, and stretched absentmindedly, staring at what she was doing. There was an ordinary notebook in front of her on the table, with many Brahmabytes of capacity available and connection to a really big brain if needed, but she was using pen and paper.
As she stretched I was reminded again that, despite the tricks Wunderland's gravity can play on the bones and tissue of the lazy and careless, she was near the epitome of human standards of beauty. Her body was a living version of the marble Venus of Cyrene, loveliest of all the statues of antiquity, who makes the Venus de Milo look heavy and clumsy by comparison, but as she stretched her attention remained fixed on the paper. Behind the sunglasses her face looked vacant. 'Big tits and little wits/Do often go together' a rude old poet had once written. But it was not as simple as that. She had a pink hibiscus flower in her hair which, I thought, really made me understand what was meant by that term overkill. It seemed to attract the flutterbys, and there was a small cloud of them round the table, their delicate multicolored wings brushing the gold bell of her hair with its pink headband.
I broke an awkward silence. 'What's this?'
Dimity had an almost squeaky voice. A Dimity voice, I called it privately.
'Sums. Difficult sums.'
I was sorry I had asked. Her idea and mine of difficult sums reflected our respective intelligences: embarrassingly different. She went on, with that inevitable tone of patience:
'You know the theories that have been explored here and in Sol System about the ancient stasis fields? That they are somehow uncoupled from the entropy gradient of the Universe?'
'They haven't got anywhere, have they? It's all still just speculation.'
'No. Not unless there's been anything new done in Sol System. But it gave me a notion. It's… difficult to explain… but it's to do with gravity as a function of time…'
'N-space?' I hesitated.
'No. But as you know they learned to open a stasis field long ago on Earth with relatively primitive timeretarding technology.'
'Yes. But the result was a disaster. I'm told there were a lot of casualties. And apparently it was nearly worse.'
'That wasn't the fault of the technology. It was because there was something dangerous inside the field that got out. If we can make time precess at a different rates… well, my theory is that within a gravity field we can't, or not at the scale I'm talking about. But outside a gravity field-I mean a gravity field like the singularity associated with a star… The singularity acts as a massive governor… Look, does this explain what I mean?'
I recognized some conventional mathematical symbols on her paper along with others that appeared to be her creation. Her father had told me once of how, one day at the end of a childhood that had been near-silent near- inactivity, he had found her playing with the keyboard of his computer, and of his flash of hope that she might grow into a normal child after all ('Who's a clever little girl, then?') which had died as he raised his eyes to the screen. They had published her first paper jointly. After that she had been on her own. His work on Carmody's Transform had brought him praise and when she was given her own department he had helped set it up but he had been little more than her assistant. 'What's that?' I asked, stabbing at random at one esoteric symbol to cover my embarrassment. 'It stands for the occurrence of Miss Bright's Paradox.'
'Miss Bright?'
'Yes. You know:
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light.
She went out one day
In just such a way
And arrived the previous night.
'But you see'-she pointed again-'I've eliminated it. Or rather I depend upon it: upon the fact that the universe will not permit such a paradox to occur.
'I have always thought that, doing what the tnuctipun did, time could be made to precess at different rates over a much larger scale,' she went on. 'You need an engine to generate your second field, of course, which is a problem. Caught between those fields you would be squeezed away from them, like a wet orange seed squeezed between two fingers. I calculate one of the results would be negative mass.'
Stanley the waiter brought us two coffees. The Lindenbaum had deluxe human service in this section and put its prices up accordingly. Gazing at Dimity, he tripped over a neighboring table as he backed away. She went on:
'Within a gravitational singularity, that would be the end of you. You might become something like your own wormhole, millions of miles long, the length depending on how much mass you originally had, and less than the width of a subatomic particle. But beyond the singularity, and if you had a certain velocity, you'd move. Without an increase in mass. If what happens then can be described in terms of physical structure it might be called creating your own big wormhole. A sort of shunt rather than a drive… ' She saw she was not getting through and made
