Bayley, Barrington J - Novel 10 (26 page)

 
          
"There's
no way off this ship for us," Archier said, "unless you know of
one."

 
          
"Does
not this gun reach into the Simplex? Have not the scientists always assured us
that access to the Simplex means instantaneous travel to anywhere in our
universe? Well, they are right."

           
Again the
kosho's
faint smile.
He had
finished what he was doing with the
zen
gun. He
pointed the muzzle at each of his companions in turn, pressing the trigger stud
each time.

 
          
The
transition was without interval of time. Archier found
himself
standing on grassland in gathering dusk. The ground rose to a summit about a
mile away, where he could see a building perched in outline against the
darkening sky.

 
          
He
was accustomed to using the intermat and so was not shocked or disoriented by
the sudden change in surroundings, except that the air smelled unpleasantly
bland and odourless. There were none of the additives he was used to, both on
board ship and in the atmospheres of Diadem planets.

 
          
Then
a breeze rippled the grass, and with it there came faint nameless scents.

 
          
He
looked to see how Hesper had reacted. She seemed more bewildered than
frightened, gazing about her with an expression of total bemusement. She had
never used the intermat.

 
          
Pout
had toppled over when deprived of the wall he had been leaning against and now
sobbed with fear, until the
kosho
leaned
over him and said something in a low, reassuring voice. He helped him to his
feet.

 
          
"What
planet is this?" Archier asked him.

 
          
"This
is Earth."

 
          
"Earth?"
echoed Hesper. "The planet we were on before? But that's impossible!"

 
          
"So
everything you've told us about that gun is true." Archier nodded at the
weapon which Ikematsu still held limply in his hand. The
kosho
nodded, putting it away somewhere in his robe.

 
          
Curiously,
Archier looked at him. "Why didn't you help me when I was fighting with
Gruwert?" he asked. "Why didn't you take the gun from the chimera
yourself? You could have done that, probably. If it comes to that, why did you
have to tell the pig about the gun at all?" He paused. "It's almost
as if you set up what happened back there."

 
          
When
Ikematsu didn't answer, Archier said, "I've heard
koshos
don't get involved in political causes. Is that true?"

 
          
"Anything
you hear about
koshos
is liable to be
untrue," Ikematsu said, with a hint of levity. Seriousness returned to his
tone. "I will tell you the fact of it. My order has a rule: the
kosho
may not intervene directly in
historical events. He may only act so as to create possibilities for actions by
others. When I explained the nature of the
zen
gun to
the pig, I was really speaking to you."

 
          
"And
if I had stayed loyal to the Empire?
Or if Gruwert had won?
You wouldn't have interfered?"

 
          
"No."

 
          
Archier
shook his head. "There's no point to this rule. It leaves everything to
chance."

 
          
"The
rule does not exist for the benefit of civilisation. It exists to preserve the
kosho
from corruption. Yet,
paradoxically, because of it the order is better able to serve mankind. The
zen
gun was made because a
kosho
foresaw that the pigs would eventually seize power. He left
it to chance to preserve his weapon until that time.

 
          
"This
is why the gun's control is mental as well as manual. A pure animal cannot use
it at all. The chimera Pout was able to use it a little, beause he is partly
human. But he would never be able to unlock its real secrets. For that, a spiritually
trained intelligence is needed."

 
          
"This
kosho
foresaw what the pigs would do?
That long ago?"
Archier was incredulous. "I
can't believe it."

 
          
"But
it was inevitable from the start. When you gave artifical intelligence to
animals, you were giving base emotion an unnatural power of action. An animal
with intelligence is still not equivalent to a man. It has no possibility of
spiritual development, as a man has. This is easily proved. Animals do not
experience what we call 'beauty,' for instance."

 
          
Archier
frowned. It was true: they were beauty-blind, as the phrase had it. Implants
didn't make any difference there.

 
          
"These
creatures you have created should remain forever under the strict control of
human beings," Ikematsu went on, the grimness of his words belied by the
habitual matter-of-factness of his tone. "Base passions exist within man
also, but his higher nature is able to contend with them. When animals became
your equals in society, with the same power of thought and speech and action,
that struggle was exteriorised.
A minute or so ago.
Admiral Archier, it depended upon you alone as to whether the future belonged
to man or to the pig. And who is to say that the pig will not yet triumph? Have
you the courage to become a warrior against his Empire?
To
use the zen gun against him?"

 
          
"I?"

           
Archier felt as if he had been
struck a blow. "I am not a
kosho."

 
          
"But
you are a warrior." Ikematsu laughed, without humour. "A
kosho
will not use the gun in war.
Admiral Archier.
I just explained that. Neither does one
need to be a
kosho
to use it. One
needs a degree of mental
training, that
is all."

 
          
Lowering
his head, Archier said, "What I just did is one thing, but I don't think I
can bring myself to be traitor enough for what you are suggesting."

 
          
"Against
the zen gun, the star fleets will be powerless to enforce obedience. But a man
to use it must find the gun by himself. Well, we shall see. If my colleagues
can analyse it successfully, the gun can be duplicated. Then the equaliser will
remain always present ..."

 
          
For
a moment Ikematsu looked thoughtfully at Hesper. Then he pointed up the hill to
the craggy outline. "That is a monastery where
koshos
receive part of their training. We shall go there now. The
boy Trixa will be given mental therapy there."

 
          
He
slapped Pout on the back. "This poor tormented creature, too, needs
treatment. He should have a better education than life has given him so far.
Come."

 
          
Slowly,
moving as a group, they climbed through
the
slowly fading light to the looming, silent building.

 
          
THE
RECESSIVE HYPOTHESIS

 
          
The
invented physics used in the background to this novel is very loosely based on
a conjecture of my own of which I will give a cursory account. As I am not a
scientist, and to my shame am not competent mathematically, it is unscientific
and unquantified, but it has given me many hours of rewarding thought.

 
          
The
conjecture arises from my conviction that gravitational attraction is impossible.
My feelings about it can be illustrated as follows:

 
          
(1)  
Our experience of manipulating material objects is that we can move them about
by pushing at them, i.e. applying force causes motion in the direction opposite
to that from which the force came. Intuitively we feel this to be bound up with
the form and character of the space in which we live, so that being able to
draw an object towards us by means of magnetism or stickiness seems slightly
mystifying.

 
          
(2)  
Randomly moving objects spread out with time, and this also is a feature of our
spacetime. E.A. Milne gave the following as an example of irreversibility: a
swarm of non-colliding particles movingly uniformly in straight lines will at
some instant become an expanding system even if initially it was a contracting
one. An already expanding system, however, will never become a contracting one.

 
          
Gravitation
would be more explicable if it were repulsive instead of attractive. In physics
the tendency is to regard forces of attraction and repulsion as opposite but
otherwise equivalent, but the symmetry breaks down when the
milieu
in which they act is taken into
account: the effect of repulsive forces weakens as they push their sources
apart, but attractive force are able to act more strongly as they bring their
sources together. The difference is crucial for world-building. Once again, it
results from the 'form' of universal space, which permits limitless dispersal
but not limitless convergence.

 
          
Its
attractive character is only one of gravitation's mysterious properties, of
course. Another is the equality between gravitational and inertial masses,
which is the physicist's way of saying that all bodies fall with the same
acceleration regardless of their masses. This equality makes it impossible to
test
Newton
's third law of action and reaction with
respect to gravitating bodies.
Newton
's expression for gravitational interaction
between two bodies makes it a single force dependent on the products of the
masses, and in this form it satisfies both gravitational and inertial equality
and the third law, but this is a mathematical device. In reality it is to be
supposed that each body exerts its own influence on the other, and a proper
test of the third law would require the effects of each force taken separately
to be measured.

 
          
What
if gravitation
were
a force of
repulsion? Since every piece of matter is surrounded by all the other matter in
the whole universe, it is only necessary to suppose it is also opaque to the
passage of the repulsive force for this force to be converted to one of
apparent attraction between (relatively) close bodies. Earth and the moon are
bound together because the pressure of the whole universe overcomes their
native effort to separate. In one leap we have related gravitation to the
recession of the galaxies.

 
          
The
recessive hypothesis goes a step further. The equality of gravitational and
inertial masses suggests that gravitation is not a force acting 'through' the
immaterial 'something' we call space (as in the old ether theory) but is
instead intimately implicated in the structure of space (as in general
relativity). It is, therefore, a model of space that is called into play-, one
that answers to points (1) and (2) above.

 
          
The
hypothesis posits primary locations which henceforth shall be called particles.
The particles do not exist in isolation: they have a relationship with one
another, and the relation is a dynamic one: they are all receding from one
another at a standard uniform rate.

           
This recession is the major
constituent of spacetime. It introduces, however, the rather abstruse concept
of motion as an irreducible principle rather than a composite phenomenon played
out against an already created backdrop of time and distance. Motion begins as
the fundamental interaction, or mode of reciprocal existence, of the particles
themselves. Time and distance are its emergent phenomena.

 
          
The
idea can perhaps be conveyed with the remark that in receding from one another,
the particles are not going towards anywhere else. This remains true of the
receding galaxies.

 
          
Space,
then, consists primarily of universal recession. In a sense the hypothesis
revives the old principle of instantaneous action-at-a-distance, but this is
because it pictures space as a dynamic connector of bodies, not as a static
geometry.

 
          
In
The Zen Gun
there is talk of the
Simplex, a state of existence in which recession is the only relation between
particles. Our realm, however, could only accommodate a 4-simplex, or
tetrahedron. In other words, it introduces geometrical relations as well as
the recessive one. This means that a particle can interrupt the recessive link
between other particles. When that happens, we shall assume the link is broken,
and because of the law of perspective a pair of particles will each hide more
of the celestial sphere from the other the closer together they are. What
happens when a particle is receding from a greater number of particles in one
direction than in another? Relativity has entered. We shall suppose the
inequality to manifest itself in a lower overall rate of recession from the
occluded region. Hence, the closer together bodies are in space, the slower is
their rate of recession from one another.

 
          
If
the distance between them is small enough, the recession is decremented
sufficiently for them seemingly to attract one another. This is a definite
transition. Their own mutual recession has become negative; for the first time
particles are heading towards somewhere as they recede.

 
          
So apparently attractive forces are explained as an interference
with a general arena of expansion.
At the same time the degree in which
a body's velocity is decremented (the acceleration it apparently acquires, if
gravitating) is independent of its inertia!
mass
. It
is the velocities that have priority; inertial mass is stamped upon a particle
by virtue of its recession from the surrounding universe. (This explanation is
roughly similar to Mach's principle.)

           
As a by-product of decremented
recession, we have to consider the recession lines connecting particles whose
mutual recession has been slowed. These lines are still attempting to express
their legitimate rate of expansion. There is something analogous to pressure
upon them. A new class of effects is indicated, and to this we may assign
electromagnetism.

 
          
An
intriguing feature of magnetism is its similarity, in relation to electric
force, with gyroscopic precession. In order to give an account of magnetism
analogous to gyroscopic action, I concocted the notion of pseudospin described
in Chapter 10. With a simple set of selection rules it becomes possible to give
such an account, though the recession lines are treated as quasi-material.
Also, the diagrams for electric attraction and repulsion become
indistinguishable from already familiar lines of force.

 
          
The
'particles' spoken of so far are conceived of as a simpler form of neutron. The
retarding of recession converts a part of its mass to positive charge so that
it becomes a proton. This is followed by the creation of countervailing
negative charge to make a neutron. The negative charge is then ejected to
become an electron. Hydrogen is born.

 
          
The
recessive hypothesis is so full of holes that it can be (and has been)
dismissed as 'blind invention.' My strategy has been to get as much change out
of it as possible, skirting difficulties and leaving them as unconquered
fortresses in the rear, any one of them cogent enough to blow the conjecture's
backside off. Just the same, it bears upon a sufficient number of additional
questions, many of them previously
unconnected,
to
make me think there might be a grain of truth in it. To mention a few:

 
          
1.       
Space is a continuum only along lines of recession. Across the grain, so to
speak, it has discontinuous properties.
Interesting from the
point of view of the wave/particle dichotomy, and also because radiant energy
consists of transverse waves.

 
          
2.       
A difficulty in the way of unifying the forces of nature has been that it is
hard to imagine how one continuum could transmit them all. The recessive
hypothesis offers a hierarchy of interpenetrating 'spaces' constructed of
different sets of recession lines: (1) a space consisting of a single absolute
velocity—the velocity of light—emanating from the matter at the limit of the
Hubble sphere; (2) a dynamic space of relative velocities and gravitation; (3)
a subordinate space conveying electric force.

 
          
3.       
The hypothesis gives a physical basis to the idea of the inertial system. For
argument's sake we can take an object's inertial framework to consist of the
distant sphere of particles receding from it at the velocity of light. If it is
accelerated to a new velocity then associated with that velocity will be a
similar framework composed of a different set of particles (just as a galaxy
anywhere finds itself at the centre of a symmetrically expanding system; the
object, however, will be displaced from the centre of its system)—so it
continues in its state of motion. Without recession, dynamics might be what
Aristotle thought it was: applying a force produces not acceleration but a
uniform motion, which stops when the force stops.

 
          
4.  
It is possible to save the perfect cosmological principle, which requires that
the distribution of the galaxies should be roughly the same at any epoch. The
primary recession is an interaction antecedent to time or spatial distance. It
is therefore conceivable that the equation between time and distance is not
applicable at very long range. The farther galaxies could be receding from us
without getting any farther away.

 
          
5.         
It is an appealing idea that recession leads both to gravitation and to the
universal property of dispersal we know as the second law of thermodynamics. It
would mean that water falling through a water turbine is answering to the same
principle as steam expanding through a steam turbine.

 
          
6.         
Attributing the two forms of electric force to the two directions of pseudospin
explains the breakdown of parity in some experiments. The mirror image of a
negative charge is a positive charge. Parity is conserved if the signs are
switched.

 
          
7.         
Finally, the recessive hypothesis is the answer to the paradoxes of Zeno on the
impossibility of motion. I will not repeat them here (for an illuminating
discussion of them, see G.J. Whitrow's
The
Natural Philosophy of Time)
but the three relevant paradoxes 'prove' that
(1) a fast runner cannot overtake a slow one, (2) an arrow cannot reach its
target, and (3) the arrow can't move at all anyway.

 
          
From
the point of view of the recessive hypothesis, Zeno's paradoxes aren't
paradoxes at all. They are demonstrations that what we see as motion is
impossible. Therefore it must be something else.

           
What the arguments do is to destroy
the concept of
place:
the idea that a
physical object occupies a location in a receptive space and can move 'through
space' to another such location. In the recessive hypothesis space is purely
relational; there is no 'place' except where a physical body is. When such a
body appears to 'move' in relation to another, it is the space between them
that is modified. The objects stay in the same 'place,' i.e., they simply
remain themselves.

 
          
The
same insight is admirably expressed in the
zen
aphorism: 'Nothing moves; where would it go?'