Time

So he came to the School.

Emma Stoney:

Thanks to the unauthorized launch, the spectacular sight of the golden spacecraft leaving Earth orbit, Malenfant had become a popular hero. This was his Elvis year for sure, the media advisers were telling them, and they were working hard on making

him even more mediagenic.

But he had made an awful lot of very powerful enemies. Opposition to Malenfant had erupted, as if orchestrated, right across the financial and political spectrum. Right now, it seemed to Emma, they were farther away than ever from being certificated to fly again, and farther still from being licensed to keep any money they made out of Cruithne, assuming Nautilus actually got there.

Emma called a council of war in the Bootstrap offices in Las Vegas: herself, Malenfant, Maura Della. She didn’t invite him, but Cornelius Taine came anyhow.

Malenfant stalked around the office. “I can’t believe this shit.” He glared at Emma. “I thought we figured out our prebuttals.”

“If you’re blaming me I’m out of here,” she said. “Remember, you never even warned me you were going to fire off your damn rocket.”

Maura said evenly, “I know what you tried to do, Malenfant. You thought that by simply launching, by proving that your system worked safely, you could cut through the bureaucratic mess, as well as prove your technical point.”

“Damn right. Just as I will prove my economic point when we start bringing the goodies home.”

Maura shook her head. “You’re so naive. You showed your hand. All you did was give your opponents something to shoot at.”

“But we launched. We’re going to Cruithne. That is a physical fact. All the staffers on the Hill, all the placeholders in the NASA centers, can’t do a damn thing about that.”

Cornelius Taine steepled his elegant fingers. “But they can stop you from launching again, Malenfant.”

“And they can throw you in jail,” Emma said softly. “We mustn’t argue among ourselves. Let’s go over it point by point.” She tapped the tabletop; it turned transparent, and an embedded softscreen brought up a bullet chart. “First, the NASA angle.”

Malenfant laughed bitterly. “Fucking NASA. I couldn’t believe the immediate one-eighty they pulled about the feasibility of my BDB design, after it flew.”

“Why are you surprised?” Cornelius Taine asked. “They hoped you would fail technically. Now that that is not possible, they intend to ensure you fail politically.”

“Yeah, that or take me over.”

It seemed to be true. With indecent haste — leading Emma to suspect they had been working on precisely this move in advance, and waiting for the moment to strike — NASA had come up with counterproposals for BDB designs, issuing formal Requests for Proposals to prospective industry partners. NASA claimed they could start flying BDBs of their own in five or ten years’ time — after ensuring that all the relevant technologies were “understood and in hand.”

Not only that, they were absorbing Malenfant’s long-term goals as well, with proposals for an international program to reach and exploit the asteroids.

“I’m not sure how we can win this one,” Maura said. “After all, NASA is supposed to be the agency that develops spacecraft.”

“But,” Cornelius said heavily, “this process of assimilation is precisely how NASA has killed off every new space technology initiative since the shuttle.”

“Yeah,” Malenfant growled. “By turning it into another aerospace industry cartel feeding frenzy.”

Maura held her hands up. “My point is NASA may well win. If they do, we need a way to live with that.”

We, Emma thought. Even in the depths of this tense meeting, she found time to wonder at the way Malenfant had, once again, turned a potential enemy into a friend.

“Next,” Emma said warily. “Congressional funding.”

“We’re not reliant on federal funds,” Malenfant snapped.

“That’s true,” Maura said dryly. “But you’ve been happy to accept whatever general-purpose funding you could lay your hands on. And that’s turning into a weakness. We’re being caught between authorization and appropriation. You need to understand this, Malenfant. These are two phases. Authorization is a wish list. Appropriation is the allocation of funds to the wish list. Not every authorized item gets funded.” She paused. “Let me put it simply. It isn’t wise to spend authorized money as if it were appropriated already. That’s what you did. It was a trap.”

“It was peanuts,” Malenfant growled. “And anyhow I don’t know why the hell you Congress critters can’t just make a simple decision.”

Maura sighed. “Federal government is a complex thing. If you don’t use the processes right—”

“And,” Emma said, “next year looks even worse. The bad guys all sources of federal funding we budgeted for and have put in place recision and reprogramming processes to—”

“Then we rebudget,” Malenfant said. “We cut, trim, rescope, find new funds.”

“But the investors are being frightened off,” Emma said. “That’s the next point. It started even before the launch, Malenfant. You knew that. Now they’re hemorrhaging. The problems we’ve had with the regulatory agencies have scared away even more of them.”

“But,” Cornelius Taine said evenly, “we must continue.”

Oh, Christ, Emma thought.

Cornelius looked from one to the other, his face blank. “Don’t any of you understand this? Who do you want to appropriate the Solar System? The Russians? The Chinese? Because if we fail now, that’s what will happen.”

Emma said sharply, “I’ll tell you the truth, Cornelius. From where I’m sitting you’re part of the problem, not the solution. No wonder the investors took flight. If any of your kook stuff has leaked out—”

Cornelius said, “The Carter catastrophe is coming no matter what you think of me.”

Maura frowned. “The what?”

Emma took a breath. “Malenfant, listen to me. Everything we’ve built up so far will be destroyed. Unless we start to take action.”

“Action? Like what? A sellout to NASA?”

“Maybe. And you have to cut your links with this character.”

Cornelius Taine smiled coldly.

Malenfant’s hands, clasped behind his back, showed white knuckles.

The meeting broke up without agreement on a way forward. And on the way out, Maura whispered to Emma, “Carter? Who the hell is Carter?”

Emma didn’t get to her apartment until midnight that night. When she walked in the door she told the TV to turn itself on. And there, on every news channel, was Cornelius Taine.

Cornelius Taine:

So, Dr. Taine, you’resaying that these people from the future — the ones you call downstreamers — have reached into the past, to us. To send a message.

Yes. We believe so.

But if the downstreamers exist — or will exist — they survived this catastrophe of yours. Will survive. Whatever. Right? So why did they need to send a message?

You’re asking me about causal paradoxes. The downstreamers are saving their grandmothers, us, from drowning. But if she had drowned they wouldn’t even exist, so how can they save her? Right?

Umm. . . yeah. I guess —

There’s a lot we don’t understand about time. What happens if you try to change the past is at the top of the list. Let me try to explain. It is a question of transactions, back and forth in time.

The Feynman radio works on the notion of photons — electromagnetic wave packets — traveling back in time. Fine.

But photons aren’t the only waves.

Waves lie at the basis of our best description of reality. I mean, of course, the waves of quantum mechanics. These waves represent flows of — what? Energy? Information? Certainly they crisscross space, spreading out from every quantum event like ripples.

We have good equations to tell us how they propagate. And if we know the structure of the waves we can tell a great deal about the macroscopic reality they represent. A clumping of the waves here means this is the most likely place to find that traveling electron emitted from over there.

But, like electromagnetic waves, quantum wave packets emitted from some event travel both forward and backward in time. And these backward waves are vital to the structure of the universe.

Suppose you have an object of some kind that changes the state of another: a source and a detector, maybe of photons. The source changes state and sends quantum waves off into future and past. The future-traveling wave reaches the detector. In turn this emits waves traveling into both future and past, like echoes.

Here’s the catch. The quantum echoes cancel out the source waves, both future and past, everywhere — except along the path taken by the ordinary retarded waves. It’s like a standing wave set up between source and receiver. Because no time passes for a wave traveling at light speed, all of this is timeless too, set up in an instant.

It’s called a transaction, as if source and detector are handshaking. “Hi, I’m here.” “Yes, I can confirm you are.”

So there really are waves traveling back in time?

So it seems. But you don’t have to worry about them.

I don’t?

No. There are no back-in-time paradoxes, you see, because the backward waves only work to set up the transaction; you can’t detect them otherwise.

And that’s how our reality works. As the effects of some change propagate through space and time, the universe knits itself into a new form, transaction by transaction, handshake by handshake.

Umm. And this is quantum mechanics, you say? So what happened to all that quantum funny stuff? The collapsing wave function, and Schrodinger’s cat, and the Many Worlds Interpretation, and —

Oh, you can forget all that. We study that today the way we study Roman numerals. Now that we know what quantum mechanics is really all about, it’s hard to imagine how people in those days thought like that. Do you follow?

Umm. . . Madeleine?

Let me get this straight. If I go back and change the past, I create a new universe that branches off at that point… right? If I kill my grandmother, I get two universes, one where she lived and I was born, one where she dies and I was never born —

No. Perhaps you haven’t heard me. It just doesn’t work like that.