Bright of the Sky (5 page)

“Which it won’t be.”

She grinned. “No, of course not.”

At last they were packed and on their way. Quinn watched as Rob’s truck climbed the steep driveway. The kids waved from foggy windows, and Rob honked the horn. All was patched up until it fell apart again. Quinn reflected that Caitlin was the best thing that ever happened to his brother. He hoped Rob knew that, or he’d have to give him a black eye.

As the truck disappeared up the road, he snapped on the juice to the property defenses. He always looked forward to seeing Caitlin, but he was glad she was gone. For a moment there, she had looked so much like Johanna.

In a heavy rain, the copter swooped down the approach to Minerva/Portland, skimming over a vast and uniform lattice of Company buildings, a land-devouring sprawl that—combined with the other corporate holdings of EoSap and TidalSphere—stretched from Portland to Eugene. Helice Maki gazed out the rain-splashed canopy at the squat office buildings glued together with parking lots and roads.

Banking, the copter provided a view of the Columbia River slinking through the city, and in the distance, Mount Hood’s white cone. These were the only things that hadn’t changed about Portland, covered as it was with Company warrens stretching from here to the horizon. Dense canyons of office buildings might be smarter use of the land, but the masses preferred ample parking for their custom transport rigs. Helice shook her head. As the ultramodern world spun toward its sapient destiny, some things remained impervious to good planning and higher math.

In the cool cabin, her business suit sent a surge of warmth to maintain her comfort zone, but her hands were clammy from nerves. This was her first board meeting at Minerva, the Earth’s fourth-richest Company. Slipping into fifth position, as Stefan Polich had admitted over drinks. Helice thought the events on the Appian II would change all that, but only if managed wisely, a task CEO Stefan Polich might fumble.

Approaching for landing, the copter sped toward the roof pad of a cavernous building housing at least eight thousand workers. As the craft settled on the roof, security crew sprinted across the pad to open the hatch, then stood back as Helice hopped out, ignoring helping hands. A short distance off, Stefan Polich stood, so lean he looked like he might disappear if he stood sideways.

He hurried forward, waving at the pilot, calling him by name. Helice winced. It was the wrong name. Stefan was starting to lose his edge.

“Helice, how was the ride on the beanstalk?” He held an umbrella for her, ushering her into the building. Stefan handed the dripping umbrella to a staffer.

“It was fun.” The space elevator
was
fun and had given her some time to prepare herself to meet the company on new terms—equal terms, as Minerva’s latest partner. And to begin to put her stamp on things—starting with the proper handling of Titus Quinn.

Dismissing the security staff, Stefan led the way in his blue jogging suit and sneakers, making Helice feel overdressed. The black fabric of her suit sparkled now and then with little computing tasks. She stranded the data from her suit into the company data tide, that omnipresent stream of data cached in data structures embedded in the walls and carried by light beams through the work environment.

Amid his long strides, Stefan glanced at her. “He said no.”

“I know he said no. Titus will change his mind.” It was essential. They needed his experience with the adjoining region, as it had been dubbed. Minerva’s great hope was that the adjoining region, if it existed beyond the quantum level and if they could penetrate it—mighty ifs, no doubt—that it might be a path, plunging through the universe in a warped course, giving access to the stars. An access that might not rip apart a stellar transport like a barn in a tornado.

Stefan said, “He likes to be called Quinn, now.”

“I heard.” Why did people insist on telling her things she already knew?

Stefan kept up a good pace, in his habit of using the Company’s long corridors to stay in shape. “He ran Lamar off the property.”

“I know that,” Helice said. “Even the threat about the brother . . . what was his name?”

“Bob.”

“Even that made no difference. But we’ll let him stew a few days. He’ll come around.” When he did, when he agreed to go, Helice would go with him. Somebody had to make the business judgments. Minerva wouldn’t let him go alone, Stefan had already said as much.

The validity of the find was becoming more convincing every day. Earth-side mSaps—tightly under control—confirmed the optical cube data Helice had salvaged. At irregular points in time and locale, Minerva sensors detected quantum particles that mirrored the proper quantum orientation. Shunning ordinary matter, they were devilishly hard to register. But the mSaps reasoned— with the nonchalance of machine sapience—that beyond the horizon of our universe lay another. It was incredible. And she wanted to see it for herself—wanted it with a fierce hunger that had slowly crept upon her during the three-day descent on the space elevator. She didn’t know who Stefan was considering for the junket, but she had to make her pitch now— now that she had him alone.

They power-walked through the savant warehouse, packed with technicians tending the savants and tabulators that in turn tended Minerva’s data tide. Every tender aspired to administer to the mSaps, but that privilege fell only to the savvies, those who could, for example, solve complex equations on the back of a napkin, or even without a pencil at all. Like Helice herself.

Here in the warehouse, young scientists on the make had only a few months to prove themselves. Failing in the Company, they might find a menial job—but most would opt for the dole, the guaranteed BSL, the Basic Standard of Living. Just shoot me, Helice thought, if I ever sit drooling in front of a Deep Vision screen.

The savant warehouse led to the central warrens, where the work cubes formed a vast lattice. Stefan broke into a jog and Helice followed. The occupants barely took note of the owners passing by, intent on their data entry quotas. This was where the data cycle began, where the information strands wound onto the skeins of the nonquantum tronics forming the broad base of the computing pyramid that embodied Minerva’s collective knowledge. This scene was repeated at similar company nests at Generics, EoSap, ChinaKor, and TidalSphere.

And now Helice Maki was at the top of that pyramid. She took a moment to savor this, but the taste ran thin. The region next door towered in her imagination, casting a long shadow on the day.

She glanced at Stefan, “Still got a fix on the emissions? Three locales, right?”

After the destruction of the Appian II, every Minerva installation in commercial space had joined in the search for anomalous particles. They’d found them in three other locations, across several parsecs of space, now that Minerva knew what to look for, and how to look, using a next-generation program of the one Luc Diers had inadvertently set in motion.

“One locale,” Stefan answered. “Two of them dried up.”

Helice knew about the shifting coordinates. “That just reinforces my thesis. It’s not merely a quantum reality. If it was, the readings would be constant. So it’s a universe of greater than Planck length.”

“Right, it’s bigger than that, but smaller than our universe. And it’s not always in the same place.” He banked around a corner and sprinted up a stairway, his face starting to redden.

On the first landing, Stefan bent over, hands on knees. He shook his head. “Damn, but I’d like to believe all this, Helice.”

“I know you would.” He’d been a worried man since the day she’d met him. She’d heard that he used to be a driving force, but these days he was afraid of risks, looking for proof before making decisions. This was not the man to lead Minerva, or manage the real estate next door.

He puffed, catching his breath. “Hell. What makes you so cocksure?”

“No guarantees,” Helice said, “but try thinking of it this way. How come we live in a perfect universe? Ever think of that, how we just happen to live in a space-time where things are stable and tend to support life? We just happen to have the exact force of gravity, the exact force of the strong nuclear force so that things cohere rather than not. That’s a lot of fine-tuning for our convenience. Religion says that God arranged it that way. Nice answer, except it kind of stops further discussion.”

Stefan unfolded from the bent-over position and leaned against a railing. She had his attention.

“So you could say,
of course
the universe is finely tuned for us. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to wonder about it. But then it leads to the idea that there must be other space-times where things aren’t perfect for life. Where the fundamental particles have different values, and some universes—maybe the majority—will be cold and dark. And some, like ours, won’t.”

“Right. The multiverse has some scientific logic behind it, if not scientific evidence.”

“No evidence. Until now.”

Stefan smiled. On his thin face, it looked more like a crack than a grin. “Wait until you see what we’ve got at the meeting.”

Frowning, Helice realized he’d kept something from her. “Tell me now, Stefan.” She hated secrets. All her life she’d had a horror of people whispering, knowing things she didn’t, talking behind her back. Being smart could be a curse in a world where intelligence measured your worth. Being smarter than her parents had been the worst, when they couldn’t follow where she went, when she outgrew them before she’d even grown up.

Stefan started the next flight, a little slower now.

Helice didn’t move from the landing. “Stefan.”

He turned, waiting. This was her last chance to get him on her side.

“I’m your best thinker. Your best strategist. I’m young, in great shape. I don’t have a family to hold me back. I’m new, and willing to put myself on the line to prove my worth.” She wouldn’t beg. But she could argue.

He let the words settle. “And if true?”

She didn’t like the hostile tone, but she pressed on. “I want to go. With Titus. As his handler.” She walked up to join him, standing finally on the same step, but he still towered over her. If he sided with her, she would be the first—along with Titus—to know what the new universe held. How could
knowing
mean so much? And yet it did.

“It’ll be dangerous, Helice. Titus might not come back.”

“I’ve said I’m willing to risk a lot.”

“Maybe I need you here.”

She forestalled a harangue by a declaration: “I won’t be content to stay behind.”

He watched her with narrowed eyes, appraising her. “I’ll consider it.” He turned and, breath returned, ran up the steps, leaving her to follow. Leaving her with hope, though not much.

She and Stefan arrived at the boardroom, and all faces, real and virtual, turned to them.

Around a smart table sat the other partners: Dane Wellinger, Suzene Gninenko, Peter DeFanti, Sherman Pitts, Lizza Molina, and special projects manager Booth Waller. Twelve others shunted in virtually, and their chairs silvered with their images. Looking at Booth Waller, Helice stopped and touched Stefan’s arm. “I thought it was just the partners.”

“Booth is on track for partnership. You knew that.”

She hadn’t known. Booth was an easy man to underestimate, a mistake she wouldn’t make again.

The board members welcomed Helice with nods. She thought that one or two might even be sincere. She brought prestige to Minerva at a time when they needed it. And she’d brought them the Appian II. That was the contribution that really earned her the expedition. It was, after all,
her
region. She’d salvaged it from the Appian, ensuring its discovery wasn’t lost to an obsessed mSap.

Stefan said, “We’ve made a little progress while you were in transit.” He nodded, a motion that made his face look even more like a hatchet than it normally did. He voiced the table display, and in front of each board member appeared a V-sim projection of a small circle.

“It doesn’t look like much at first,” Stefan said. “Booth, take us through this thing.”

Booth rubbed his hands on his thighs and started to stand. Then, thinking better of it, remained seated. “It’s not always in the same place, so we had trouble getting a lock on it. We finally got this result at the Ceres Platform,” he said, referring to another K-tunnel outpost. “The physics team says we’re bumping up against the membrane of another universe. Think of it like a bubble within a bubble, where reality is on the surface, or the brane. Sometimes the branes touch.”

Helice rolled her eyes. To be lectured on brane theory by this guy . . .

Booth noted her impatience and went on: “Anyway, at one of these brane interfaces we went in about nine hundred nanometers. We’ve consistently gotten in at least that far, proceeding a nanometer at a time, and recording the sights. We’re confident we can transfer in a mass, but we’re not to that point yet. We’re using ultra-high-energy quantum implosions, followed by an inflation to macroscopic size.” He shrugged. “If you want the gruesome details, we’ll bring in the physics guys. But for now, think of it as a simulation of the big bang. But instead of creating a universe, we’re punching through to one that already exists. Apparently exists.”

Helice tried to keep her voice even. “We
know
this, Booth.”

“Okay, then,” he said, “what you’re looking at is the picture so far.”

“The picture of what?”

“The other place.” Booth got the reaction he was hoping for. “I thought you’d be surprised.” As the board members leaned in to squint at the display, he added, “We’ve been busy, as I said.”

Booth enlarged the sim until the center of the circle looked grayish, like a fried egg seen in negative. Vertical slashes appeared in the gray center. To Helice it looked like chromosomes in a nucleus. He enlarged the display again. Some of the vertical slashes were askew, or bent over. Booth pointed a wand at the display, changing angles of view, from the vector of the pointer. The scene began to look familiar, but not quite . . .

“We’re not sure if the color spectrum is distorted, or how the transmission degrades through our interface.”