Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 4: September 2013 (19 page)

Guy hurriedly explained, promising to file a full report when he returned to headquarters.

“No time. This just appeared over Newsnet an hour ago.” Guy saw a video feed showing two humans being killed by garudas while a third, obviously wounded, crouched nearby. He recognized the humans as Mahmoud, Ali, and himself.

“That’s a true picture as far as it goes,” said Guy, “but I’ll wager Malik Shah’s people edited the recording so it doesn’t show them ambushing the first garuda.”

“And now they’re making sure all Sita sees it,” said Gupta. “Opposition to the Indigenous Sentients Act is growing. In my opinion that’s just a first step toward abrogating the Colonial Charter and seceding from the United Provinces. We have uncorroborated reports that he’s in the process of raising a private army.”

“You’re talking about civil war,” said Guy grimly.

“Potentially,” said Gupta. “Possibly.”

“Sir, for the time being I’m stuck in Caledonia Province. Is there anything I can do?”

Gupta pulled up a report. “That’s why I’ve contacted you. This is a dossier containing the names of Caledonian Rangers with questionable loyalties. I’m faxing it to Captain Anson, whom I trust implicitly, at New Glasgow HQ as we speak. As soon as you can, report to him!”

“Yes, sir! But what if…”

“If what? Get to the point.”

“What if we could present evidence that the garudas are not only evolving into a species with greater intelligence, but possess biological and medical qualities beneficial to humans? Wouldn’t that deflate the secessionist movement?”

The captain gave him a dubious look. “What are you talking about, Sergeant?”

Guy opened his tunic and displayed his healed wound. “A laser knife damn near took my arm off. A new species of garuda healed it with its saliva.”

Gupta still appeared dubious. “Can you present more solid evidence?”

“How about a live specimen? Dr. Brandt here is with the University. She’s been studying these new garudas for the last several weeks.”

As if on cue Elsa spoke up. “The University can easily determine if the Garuda Superiors are truly sentient if we can examine one under controlled conditions. But to do that I’ll need the Colonial Rangers’ permission to obtain a specimen.”

“You have it, Dr. Brandt. Sergeant, once you get one of these— Garuda Superiors?—report to Captain Anson! Gupta out.”

When the screen went blank, Guy looked at Elsa. “Garuda Superior?”

She smiled and shrugged. “We have to call them something.”

***

The waters of Kelpie Loch lay placid and dark. Elsa took the pilot’s chair since the flitter was University property. Guy sat on her right, watching the monitor for heat signatures of life-forms or other aircraft.

“Robertson’s Island dead ahead,” she announced as the soaring peak pierced the star-strewn northern sky. She increased the engine’s thrust, gaining altitude. “I’m fairly certain the Garuda Superiors have a nest there.”

The dark flanks of a mountain now crowded their viewport as Elsa banked the flitter to circle it. Rain began falling, and Guy spotted many heat signatures around the slopes. “Garudas,” he said. “Looks like you were right about the nests.” He zoomed in with the imaging sensor.

She pointed at the screen. “They’re ordinary garudas. Where are the Garuda Superiors?”

Guy spotted other heat signatures inbound toward the island. And it was clear from their readings that they weren’t garudas. “It seems we’re about to have company.” He hailed them. “No answer, so I doubt they’re friendly.” Minutes later, as if in confirmation, a scorch mark appeared on the flitter’s left wing.

The aircraft were now visible: a squadron of sky skiffs, long flitters designed for the exploration of the uninhabitable lowlands. Most were armed with lasers to fend off predatory fauna. “What do you want to do?” asked Elsa.

“Not much we can do, since we’re unarmed,” replied Guy. “You’d better set us down in any cover you can find. No sense giving them an easy target. Maybe if I can record them killing defenseless garudas I can use the evidence to convict them of genocide once you finish your study.”

She took the flitter down. The peak’s base was overgrown with mink trees and other native vegetation, and the ship hugged the ground until Elsa spotted a canopy formed by a pair of giant minks whose furry limbs were intertwined. “We can hide there,” she announced, extending the landing struts and throttling down the engine.

Guy climbed out through the hatch, his flashlight cutting through the darkness as he examined his surroundings. “Hey! What’s this?”

Half-hidden by undergrowth was an opening in the mountain’s base, more than wide enough to accommodate a pair of humans. Guy probed the mouth with his flash. “It looks like lava burned its way out here at one time,” he said as aircraft engines whined overhead. “Sounds like our new friends are looking for us. We’d better go inside?”

The mouth opened into a wider cave, the walls and floor of which were smooth as glass. “It looks like a mining tunnel,” observed Guy. “Hewed out by industrial lasers. But I don’t recall ever seeing any records of a mining operation on Robertson’s Island.”

“It’s just one more mystery,” Elsa said. “I’m still trying to figure out why garudas would settle on an island lacking in large game.”

“Perhaps the mountain is sacred to them?”

She smiled. “That would certainly be convenient. It’d prove that they’re more than just very clever animals.” The smile turned into a grimace. “We need to gather data first, and then we’ll worry about interpreting it. Does your com-link still work?”

“Sure,” he replied, “but we probably won’t be able to transmit anything from under all this rock.”

“No matter, we can still record and present our findings later.”

Provided we find any evidence worth saving,
he thought.
And that Shah’s men don’t kill us first.

The floor began to slope downward as Guy wondered just how much power the flashlight still held. Elsa motioned for him to stop. “Listen! Can you hear that?”

A faint humming sound filled his ears. “Some kind of life form?” he asked.

“No. I think it’s machinery.”

She started forward, but he grabbed her shoulder. “Wait! It could be one of the sky skiffs. There may be other tunnel mouths higher up. We’ve got to move very cautiously.”

Before long they came upon a pale greenish-white glow. Crouching against the tunnel wall, they faced an even wider cavern that was filled with huge shadows. Guy killed his light and, as his eyes adjusted, he recognized the shadows as perched garudas. Their wings folded, some twenty of them stood in a semicircle before what Guy first thought was a cluster of stalagmites. There were four such items, set in a perfect square, each one about three times taller than a grown human or a Garuda Superior.

Elsa whispered: “Whatever that thing is, it’s the source of both the humming and the greenish glow.”

“But what could be powering it? There’s no generator on this island.”

She considered the question for a second before saying, “Perhaps geothermal energy. The first colonists considered it as a supplement to solar energy and helium fusion because of Rama and Sita’s tidal effect on each other.”

He looked at her. “You realize you’re saying that this thing was not created by human hands?”

“Do you have a better explanation?” Her eyes suddenly grew wide. She gasped and pointed. “Look!”

A soft yellow-white glow appeared within the square. It expanded and took on a definite form. “It…it looks like a garuda!”

Guy stared in awe. “What do you know about matter transmission?”

“Just what I’ve read in scientific journals. It works in principle, but in practice any lab animals they’ve tried to transport wind up dead at one end or the other,”

“So I’ve been told,” said Guy. “But that doesn’t mean aliens who’ve been studying the problem for a lot longer might not have discovered a solution.”

The object within the square had ceased glowing and collapsed to the floor. A pair of Garuda Superiors advanced to aid it and draw it from the square. Guy could see that it was indeed another Garuda Superior, though its plumage looked dull and oily as if it had just hatched from an egg. Its fellows started glancing about the cave, clutching their spears.

“Something’s wrong,” Guy whispered.

“Do you think they’ve heard us?”

He held a finger to his lips. “Listen!”

There came a familiar metallic chattering, and then pair of Garuda Superiors shrieked violently and pitched backward, wings flapping spasmodically and sprouting blood.

“Gunfire!” Guy said. “The sons of bitches must have found their way in!”

Human shouts mixed with garuda screeching as the avians flocked to defend the square. The dim light disoriented most of the attackers, while the garudas, possessing better eyesight, retaliated by hurling spears with deadly effect.

Guy drew a deep breath and stepped forward.

“Cease fire! Cease fire! Colonial Ranger Richard here! All humans cease fire immediately and put down your weapons!”

He no sooner finished speaking than an angry garuda swooped down on him with a stone hatchet. Just in time a second Garuda Superior intercepted the attacker and said something in what he now knew was its own language. The first avian looked at Guy questioningly, but lowered the weapon. Guy didn’t know what to do besides nod his thanks.

“Ranger!” one of the humans shouted. “We’ve no quarrel with you! We’re here to stop these monsters from killing humans. The whole planet has seen the video!”

“I was
in
that video!” Guy responded. “I was the man kneeling. Malik Shah’s men had baited a trap. They were going to kill me when the garudas saved my life! And I’ll testify to that in any court!”

“The Garuda Superiors are not monsters!” Elsa added. “They possess a technology that will be incredibly valuable to us and to all humans everywhere! Let’s not start a stupid war!”

“They’re crazy!” the first human speaker shouted. “Let’s finish what we came here to do. If the Ranger and his bitch try to stop us, we outgun them!” Angry murmuring followed.

“But you don’t outgun me!” a stern voice shouted. “Captain Robert Anson, Colonial Rangers. Do what Sergeant Richard said and put your weapons down! My people have you surrounded!”

As the Rangers collected the ranchers’ weapons, Guy noticed a solitary Garuda Superior watching him. He guessed it was the one that had saved him from its fellow’s hatchet, and was willing to pretend it was the one whose saliva had healed his wound. He paused and held out his open hand. The avian looked at it dubiously.

He smiled reassuringly at it. “Here’s to the start of a beautiful friendship,” he said as he gently took its claw in his own hand and shook it.

Original (First) Publication

Copyright © 2013 by Jeff Calhoun

******************************************

Views expressed by guest or resident columnists
are entirely their own.

Greg Benford is a Nebula winner and a former Worldcon Guest of Honor. He is the author of more than 30 novels and 6 books of non-fiction, and has edited 10 anthologies.

LEAPING THE ABYSS

Stephen Hawking on black holes, unified field theory, and Marilyn Monroe

by Gregory Benford

Stephen Hawking seemed slightly worse, as always. It is a miracle that he has clung to life for over 20 years with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Each time I see him I feel that this will be the last, that he cannot hold on to such a thin thread for much longer.

Hawking turned 63 in January 2005. Over the course of his brilliant career, he has worked out many of the basics of black hole physics, including, most strikingly, his prediction that black holes aren’t entirely black. Instead, if they have masses equivalent to a mountain’s, they radiate particles of all kinds. Smaller holes would disappear in a fizz of radiation—a signature that astronomers have searched for but so far not found.

The enormous success of Hawking’s 1988 book,
A Brief History of Time
, has made him a curious kind of cultural icon. He wonders how many of the starlets and rock stars who mentioned the book on talk shows actually read it.

With his latest book,
The Universe in a Nutshell
(Bantam), he aims to remedy the situation with a plethora of friendly illustrations to help readers decipher such complex topics as superstring theory and the nature of time. The trick is translating equations into sentences, no mean feat. The pictures help enormously, though purists deplore them as oversimplified. I feel that any device is justified to span such an abyss of incomprehension.

When I entered Stephen’s office at the University of Cambridge, his staff was wary of me, plainly suspecting I was a “civilian” harboring a crank theory of the universe. But I’d called beforehand, and then his secretary recognized me from years past. (I am an astrophysicist and have known Stephen since the 1970s.) When I entered the familiar office his shrunken form lolled in his motorized chair as he stared out, rendered goggle-eyed by his thick glasses—but a strong spirit animated all he said.

Hawking lost his vocal cords years ago, to an emergency tracheotomy. His gnarled, feeble hands could not hold a pen. For a while after the operation he was completely cut off from the world, an unsettling parallel to those mathematical observers who plunge into black holes, their signals to the outside red-shifted and slowed by gravity’s grip to dim, whispering oblivion.

A Silicon Valley firm came to the rescue. Engineers devised tailored, user-friendly software and a special keyboard for Hawking. Now his frail hand moved across it with crablike speed. The software is deft, and he could build sentences quickly. I watched him flit through the menu of often-used words on his liquid crystal display, which hung before him in his wheelchair. The invention has been such a success that the Silicon Valley folk now supply units to similarly afflicted people worldwide.

“Please excuse my American accent,” the speaker mounted behind the wheelchair said with a California inflection. He coded this entire remark with two keystrokes.

Although I had been here before, I was again struck that a man who had suffered such an agonizing physical decline had on his walls several large posters of a person very nearly his opposite: Marilyn Monroe. I mentioned her, and Stephen responded instantly, tapping one-handed on his keyboard, so that soon his transduced voice replied, “Yes, she’s wonderful. Cosmological. I wanted to put a picture of her in my latest book, as a celestial object.” I remarked that to me the book was like a French Impressionist painting of a cow, meant to give a glancing essence, not the real, smelly animal. Few would care to savor the details. Stephen took off from this to discuss some ideas currently booting around the physics community about the origin of the universe, the moment just after the Big Bang.

Stephen’s great politeness paradoxically made me ill at ease; I was acutely aware of the many demands on his time, and, after all, I had just stopped by to talk shop.

“For years my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science,” Stephen said. “It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin. The laws would break down at the point of singularity, of infinite density.” Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity. Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.

I recalled that I had spoken to Stephen about mathematical methods of getting around this problem one evening at a party in King’s College. There were analogies to methods in elementary quantum mechanics, methods he was trying to carry over into this surrealistic terrain.

“It now appears that the way the universe began can indeed be determined, using imaginary time,” Stephen said. We discussed this a bit. Stephen had been using a mathematical device in which time is replaced, as a notational convenience, by something called imaginary time. This changes the nature of the equations, so he could use some ideas from the tiny quantum world. In the new equations, a kind of tunneling occurs in which the universe, before the Big Bang, has many different ways to pass through the singularity. With imaginary time, one can calculate the chances for a given tunneling path into our early universe after the beginning of time as we know it.

“Sure, the equations can be interpreted that way,” I argued, “but it’s really a trick, isn’t it?”

Stephen said, “Yes, but perhaps an insightful trick.”

“We don’t have a truly deep understanding of time,” I replied, “so replacing real time with imaginary time doesn’t mean much to us.”

“Imaginary time is a new dimension, at right angles to ordinary, real time,” Stephen explained. “Along this axis, if the universe satisfies the ‘no boundary’ condition, we can do our calculations. This condition says that the universe has no singularities or boundaries in the imaginary direction of time. With the ‘no boundary’ condition, there will be no beginning or end to imaginary time, just as there is no beginning or end to a path on the surface of the Earth.”

“If the path goes all the way around the Earth,” I said. “But of course, we don’t know that in imaginary time there won’t be a boundary.”

“My intuition says there will be no blocking in that special coordinate, so our calculations make sense.”

“Sense is just the problem, isn’t it? Imaginary time is just a mathematical convenience.” I shrugged in exasperation at the span between cool mathematical spaces and the immediacy of the raw world; this is a common tension in doing physics. “It’s unrelated to how we feel time. The seconds sliding by. Birth and death.”

“True. Our minds work in real time, which begins at the Big Bang and will end, if there is a Big Crunch—which seems unlikely, now, from the latest data showing accelerating expansion. Consciousness would come to an end at a singularity.”

“Not a great consolation,” I said.

He grinned. “No, but I like the ‘no boundary’ condition. It seems to imply that the universe will be in a state of high order at one end of real time but will be disordered at the other end of time, so that disorder increases in one direction of time. We define this to be the direction of increasing time. When we record something in our memory, the disorder of the universe will increase. This explains why we remember events only in what we call the past, and not in the future.”

“Remember what you predicted in 1980 about final theories like this?” I chided him.

“I suggested we might find a complete unified theory by the end of the century.” Stephen made the transponder laugh dryly. “OK, I was wrong. At that time, the best candidate seemed to be N=8 supergravity. Now it appears that this theory may be an approximation to a more fundamental theory, of superstrings. I was a bit optimistic to hope that we would have solved the problem by the end of the century. But I still think there’s a 50-50 chance that we will find a complete unified theory in the next 20 years.”

“I’ve always suspected that the structure never ends as we look to smaller and smaller scales—and neither will the theories,” I offered.

“It is possible that there is no ultimate theory of physics at all. Instead, we will keep on discovering new layers of structure. But it seems that physics gets simpler, and more unified, the smaller the scale on which we look. There is an ultimate length scale, the Planck length, below which space-time may just not be defined. So I think there will be a limit to the number of layers of structure, and there will be some ultimate theory, which we will discover if we are smart enough.”

“Does it seem likely that we are smart enough?” I asked.

Another grin. “You will have to get your faith elsewhere.”

“I can’t keep up with the torrent of work on superstrings.” Mathematical physics is like music, which a young and zesty spirit can best seize and use, as did Mozart.

“I try,” he said modestly.

We began discussing recent work on “baby universes”—bubbles in space-time. To us large creatures, space-time is like the sea seen from an ocean liner, smooth and serene. Up close, though, on tiny scales, it’s waves and bubbles. At extremely fine scales, pockets and bubbles of space-time can form at random, sputtering into being, then dissolving. Arcane details of particle physics suggest that sometimes—rarely, but inevitably—these bubbles could grow into a full-fledged universe.

This might have happened a lot at the instant just immediately after the Big Bang. Indeed, some properties of our universe may have been created by the space-time foam that roiled through those infinitesimally split seconds. Studying this possibility uses the “wormhole calculus,” which samples the myriad possible frothing bubbles (and their connections, called wormholes).

Averaging over this foam in a mathematical sense, smoothing its properties a bit, Hawking and others have tried to find out whether a final, rather benign universe like ours was an inevitable outcome of that early turbulence. The jury isn’t in on this point, and it may be out forever—the calculations are tough, guided by intuition rather than facts. Deciding whether they meaningfully predict anything is a matter of taste. This recalls Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that in matters of great import, style is always more important than substance.

If this picture of the first split second is remotely right, much depends on the energy content of the foam. The energy to blow up these bubbles would be countered by an opposite, negative energy, which comes from the gravitational attraction of all the matter in the bubble. If the outward pressure just balances the inward attraction (a pressure, really) of the mass, then you could get a universe much like ours: rather mild, with space-time not suffering any severe curvature—what astronomers call “flat.” This seems to be so on such relatively tiny scales as our solar system, and flatness prevails even on the size range of our galaxy. Indeed, flatness holds on immense scales, as far as we can yet see.

It turns out that such bubbles could even form right now. An entirely separate space-time could pop into existence in your living room, say. It would start unimaginably small, then balloon to the size of a cantaloupe—but not before your very eyes, because, for quite fundamental reasons, you couldn’t see it.

“They don’t form in space, of course,” Stephen said. “It doesn’t mean anything to ask where in space these things occur.” They don’t take up room in our universe but rather are their own universes, expanding into spaces that did not exist before.

“They’re cut off from us after we make them,” I said. “No relics, no fossil?”

“I do not think there could be.”

“Like an ungrateful child who doesn’t write home.” When talking about immensities, I sometimes grasp for something human.

“It would not form in our space, but rather as another space-time.”

We discussed for a while some speculations about this that I had put into two novels,
Cosm
and
Timescape
. I had used Cambridge and the British scientific style in
Timescape
, published in 1980, before these ideas became current. I had arrived at them in part from some wide-ranging talks I had enjoyed with Stephen—all suitably disguised in the books, of course. Such enclosed space-times I had termed “onion universes,” since in principle they could have further locked-away space-times inside them, and so on. It is an odd sensation when a guess turns out to have some substance—as much as anything as gossamer as these ideas can be said to be substantial.

“So they form and go,” I mused. “Vanish. Between us and these other universes lies absolute nothingness, in the exact sense—no space or time, no matter, no energy.”

“There can be no way to reach them,” his flat voice said. “The gulf between us and them is unbridgeable. It is beyond physics because it is truly nothing, not physical at all.”