enough for you? And so this particular Feynman picture is a closed loop. A vacuum diagram. The particles come from nothing and return to nothing.” He grinned. “We’re here because we’re here because—”
Green raised one massive uniformed arm, pushed Taft away easily, muttered something Paul couldn’t hear.
Paul closed his eyes, hoping to make the incomprehensible Universe disappear into the vacuum from which it had sprung.
The approaching Edge was a knife-blade across the stars. The car climbed the one-in-one slope ever more slowly, finally stopping a hundred yards from the rim. “Come on, Paul,” Green said. “We walk from here.” Briskly he helped Paul seal himself into a light, one-piece pressure suit. “And go easy. Remember we’re that much further from the Lump’s center of mass; gravity is only about half what it is in the City.”
Paul climbed through the car’s membranelike airlock. A handrail had been bonded to the surface a few yards from the car. Paul stumbled towards it. The apparent forty-five-degree slope was without purchase, and his motions felt slow and dreamlike, as if he were underwater.
Clinging closely to the rail he turned and surveyed the Sugar Lump.
Beneath his feet was a hillside of glowing glass. Shadows bigger than cities moved through it. Paul knew the Face was a square six thousand miles to a side, and he had half-expected to see details of far Edges and Corners from this vantage point; but beyond a few hundred miles the surface collapsed in his vision into a single, shining line of light. Sugar Lump City was a low dome of blue, improbably clinging to the center of the line.
“Paul,” Green said softly. “Look up.”
Paul craned his neck. A Spline warship swooped overhead, no more than ten miles from the Edge. Paul could make out valley-sized wrinkles in the fleshy sphere, weapon emplacements twinkling in deep pocks. Finally the warship sailed over the Edge of the world, rolling grandly.
“They know we’re here,” Green said. “That was a salute roll.”
His voice seemed to come to Paul from far away. A sense of distance swept over him; it was as if he were shrinking, or as if the Universe were receding in all directions.
“Paul?… Are you okay?”
“What’s wrong with him? Damn it, the kid’s a liability.”
“Take it easy, Taft. Sometimes this state of semifaint is a prelude to his heightened awareness phases. Come on, help me get him to the Edge.”
The words swam by like fish. Green and Taft stood to either side of him, grasping his arms. They were figures of wood and paper, moving with dry rustles. The light of the Lump burned through them.
At last they stood in a line on the rim of the world. The Edge was an arrow-straight ridge, with the two identical Faces falling away on either side. It was like standing on the roof of some huge house. Cables had been laid along the Edge; a second car clung to them. Bundles of maintenance equipment had been fixed to the surface close to the car site.
“I hope this trip was worth it,” Green said, panting.
Taft barked laughter. The sound was like a dry leaf crumpling. “Well, you asked for my guidance and you got it. Obviously the stresses on the material are higher here than close to the center of a Face. So if your wonder boy is going to gain access he has as good a chance here as anywhere. Watch out for the Edge itself, though. It’s sharp as a knife, down to the finest limits we can perceive.”
“No,” Paul said.
Green and Taft stared at him, releasing his arms. With the loss of physical contact they became still more insubstantial, receding from his vision like ghosts.
He knelt awkwardly and ran a gloved finger along the Edge. The stuff was soft; it rippled. It was like running a hand through a fine, multicolored grass.
Words like “sharp” were meaningless, of course; wooden words used by macro-men.
Green had given him the language to understand what he was perceiving: that this was the fundamental level of reality, the grain of quantum-mechanical probability wave functions.
An event was like a stone thrown into a pond; probability functions — ripples of what-might-be — spread out through space and time. Macro-men might see the pale shadows where the waves were thickest.
And that was all.
Their hard language of “particles” and “waves” and “here” and “now” reflected their limited perception, stony words to describe shadows. But he, Paul, the boy with no past, could sometimes see the entire surface of the pond — and even catch hints of the depths which lay below.
He watched wave functions ripple away from the Edge, diminishing softly into prismatic shades of improbability, and felt his consciousness drawn out like a sword from its scabbard. He looked down at his body, bent awkwardly in its ill-fitting pressure suit; at the two stick men standing over it, obviously blind to the kaleidoscopic probability sparkles all around them.
The Face of the Sugar Lump was a window. He drifted through it.
He floated like a snowflake, wafted by probability winds. The Sugar Lump was full of wonders.
Here was an array of crystals which would grow at a touch into a fleet of a thousand night fighters, unfurling glistening wings like dark butterflies. Twist this flowerlike artifact just so and a city would unfold in a storm of walls and ceilings. Point this other at a star — and watch it collapse softly into nova.
And here, rank on rank of shadowy forms, were Xeelee themselves, features smoothed-over and indistinct, embryonic.
The Sugar Lump was a seed pod.
Something watched him. Paul twisted, scattered his being like diffusing mist…
Call it the antiXeelee.
It was as old as the Xeelee race, and as young. Inside the vessel men called the Sugar Lump — and, simultaneously, within a million similar vessels scattered through the galaxies — it waited out aeons, brooding.
The antiXeelee took Paul as if in the palm of a hand. Paul tried to relax. The gaze was all-knowing, full of strength… but not threatening.
Gently he was shepherded to the gleaming walls and released.
He opened his eyes. And moaned.
He was back in the world of the stick men.
Green’s face, lined with concern, hovered before him. “Take it easy,” he said. “We’ve brought you inside the Edge car.” He slid a hand behind Paul’s neck, tilted his head forward and helped him sip coffee. “How do you feel?”
Paul felt the softness of the seat beneath him, saw the warm brown light of the car interior. Beyond the windows the glow of the Sugar Lump seemed different. Harsher? Sharper? Shadows raced through the interior. “What’s happening, Commander? Where’s Taft?”
“At the controls of the car. He got a call from his team at the City site; some kind of problem.” Green leaned over him hungrily. “Paul. You were inside the Lump, weren’t you?”
“…Not really. It isn’t like that.” Paul reached for the coffee cup and took another mouthful. “You taught me what’s happening. I have a non-local perception. Like a quantum wave function I’m not limited to the here and now; I perceive events spacelike-separated from—”
“Paul,” Green said urgently, “skip it. Tell me what you saw. I have to know. My career is hinging on this moment.
“I… Yes. It’s the Xeelee.” He groped for analogies. “It’s like a huge hangar in there. There are Xeelee, waiting, whole populations of them. Thousands of ships, ready to be — ripened. Artifacts of all kinds.”
Green smiled. “Weapons?”
“Yes.” Over Green’s shoulder Paul could see Taft approach quietly.
“What are they doing?”
“I don’t know. But, Commander, I don’t think they mean us any harm. You see, there’s another presence which—”
Taft’s bearded face was twisted with a kind of pain. He raised two clasped fists over Green’s head.
“Commander!” Paul jerked convulsively.
Green half-rose, turned his head. Two fists hit his skull with a sound like wood on wood. The reaction carried Taft perhaps a foot into the air. He cried out. His hands came away bloody.
Green tumbled into Paul’s lap; then he slid to the floor of the car.
Paul stared at the blood on Taft’s hands. Memories stirred impossibly.
“Paul, I—” Taft spread his hands, palms upwards. Paul couldn’t read his face, the shining artificial Eyes. “I’m sorry. I have to do this.” With clumsy hands he fitted Green’s helmet into place and sealed the neck; then he began hauling the huge, limp body towards the airlock. “My team back in the City are being evacuated. Forcibly, by Green’s damnable Navy goons.”
“Why? What’s happened?”
“You’ve stirred up the Xeelee with your quantum jaunt,” Taft said acidly. “The glow of the surface is brighter. And it’s getting hotter. In some places the meteorite debris is already red hot. So we’re being evacuated — at the point of a gun.” Taft sealed up his own helmet. “So I’ve got to stop this, you see, Paul. I’m sorry. It’s for the good of the species. The Xeelee have to understand we’re not continually going to attack them. The colony has to be built.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to get Green back to the Face car. Then I’ll return here and—”
Paul felt his breath grow shallow. “And what?”
Without replying Taft turned away and stepped through the airlock; the membrane closed behind Green’s booted feet.
Paul sat for long minutes. The humming of the car’s instruments was the only sound. Through the windows Taft and Green were silhouetted against a glowing Face, the pair of them looking like a single, struggling insect.
Paul imagined Taft’s return, those bloodied, space suited hands reaching for him, as they had for Green—
There was a joystick at the front of the car.
He pushed himself out of his chair and stood swaying. He took cautious steps along the narrow aisle, looking neither to left nor right.
Nervously he pushed at the joystick. The car lurched a few yards; Paul stumbled back, grabbing the arm of the nearest chair. He felt a grin spread over his face. Had Taft expected him to sit patiently and wait to die? He pushed the stick once more. Motors whirred and the car slid along the Edge.
Taft dumped Green’s inert form and came floundering back up the slope, a toy figure gesturing in tiny frustration.
Paul settled into a seat and let the satisfaction of the small victory settle over him. There would be plenty of time to face the future later… when the car reached Corner Mountain, with nowhere else to go.
The car patiently climbed the Edge’s increasing slope. The brightness of the Faces continued to increase; at last the car’s lower windows opaqued automatically.
Paul could see Taft following, a silver-suited doll riding an open maintenance buggy up the dizzying slopes of the Edge. For the first few hours Paul let Taft speak to him. When the half-rational
