Paradox (21 page)

After Avernon closeted himself away—even he felt the need for some preparation before his summons—Tom continued to work through auxiliary problems by himself. Awe, like a subsonic chord, thrummed constantly inside him. How could these bright marvels have appeared in Avernon's mind?

He ploughed on, not noticing the time, distractedly eating snacks which other servitors brought in, then finally collapsed on the bed and slept.

And dreamed.

On black velvet, a string of white pearls lay glistening.

A necklace
…

When he awoke again, it was fifteen hours after he had gone to bed.

Fading dream-tag:
ghostly pearls dissolved
as reality crowded in.

A waiting note from Avernon invited him to lunch. Tom said yes, and waved the tricon out of existence. Naked, he walked through the glimmering clean-film, dressed, and was in the dining-chamber within five minutes.

“They'll make you an Academician-Premier at least,” said Tom, sitting down.

“I suppose. That would be all right, so long as I could do real work.” Avernon looked morose, picking at his food with a tine-spoon. Suddenly he laughed. “Bet you a thousand coronae they never make me an administrator.”

“Er…”

“Negative occurrence, right? Twenty SY, then. If I'm still doing research, you owe me a thousand.”

Tom shook his head. “I hate to point this out—”

“No, no.” Avernon interrupted. “You'll be able to afford it. But we'll make it one corona, if that makes you happier.”

“OK. Done.”

Just then, a rigid-looking servitor in the turquoise-with-violet-slashes livery of the host Lord, Count Shernafil, marched into the room and bowed to Avernon.

“The Review Committee, my Lord, requests your presence. At your convenience.”

Avernon's smartchair extruded a tendril to wipe his mouth, napkin-like, as he rose. It startled Tom, whose own chair—reading his servitor ID from his ruby earstud—had remained in static form.

“Wish me luck.”

“Good luck.” Tom smiled at the mildly heretical form of words: Avernon's metavectors had not replaced the concept of manifest Destiny. “But you don't need it.”

“Right. Um…You know they're not so much looking for one piece of work as for someone who can produce results consistently, over time.”

“OK—”

“See you at the Grand Assembly.”

But that's five days away
, thought Tom.
What am I supposed to—?

“In the meantime,” added Avernon, “if I were you, I'd study hard.”

He turned to the waiting servitor. “Lead the way, then.”

On the fourth day, they sent for him.

Tom was exhausted, febrile, hardly able to speak: dosed to the limit with logotropes, their femtocytic networks extending his mental vision so that a thousand proof-dendrimers and phase-space manifolds coexisted in parallel.

Information-entropic logos-flow was embedded as kinaesthetic feel, proprioceptive stimulus, even emotional strength.

He was trembling from overstimulation. His training-runs—in his room, on his small running-pad—had been short, maybe fifteen minutes long, but he had run ten times a day, failing to burn off his adrenaline, while logosophical constructs whirled in his mind.

When the servitor came for him, Tom could not even acknowledge the summons; he let himself be led.

He scarcely noticed his surroundings until they reached the committee chamber's door. It was a wide copper oval containing a white membrane, growing transparent at Tom's approach.

He stepped inside.

Communication problem.
He walked across the cold flagstones and stopped before the wide marble table.
How do I demonstrate everything I know?

But the three Lords Academic themselves, beneath their canopied chairs, had the flickering eyelids and “infinity stare” of logotropic trance. They were prepared for his presentation.

“I, er.” Tom cleared his throat. “I see you, my Lords…” A grey-cowled glowcluster floated overhead, and he pointed to it. “…by photons emitted from this, reflected from your skin, then travelling into my retinae, where the photons are destroyed.

“But, as a journey's speed increases, its duration decreases, changing by a factor of (1–v
²
/c
²
)
^-1/2
. At light-speed duration becomes zero.

“So these photons, this multitude, have lives with beginnings and endings, but no duration in time.”

Tom gestured holomanifolds into being. “In Old Terran philosophy, this phenomenon was known, but not yet appreciated…”

As he plodded through the classics, he sensed the Lords' increasing boredom, their slipping out of trance.

They—presumably—had seen Avernon's new approach, which showed how pure numbers and brane-tensegrity relations defined and were
manifest through the universal subquantum matrix. The myriad contexts of emergence were tied together with well-behaved metavectors…

Tom was expounding ancient concepts, when Avernon had just changed everything.

By the time he came to demonstrate his own metalevel-recursion notation, he was becoming bored, and passed off the approach as caprice. His model, once instantiated in burning fire in his mind, now seemed a lacklustre trick; its time-saving proof solutions were chance results.

“And, er, that's it, really,” he concluded.

There was a silence. One of the Lords coughed, then said: “And have you any notion of problems you might like to investigate?”

“One or two, in, um, visual-loop algorithms and paradoxicon representations. And…I write poetry.”

“I see.”

This time the silence lasted longer.

“Thank you for your time.”

Another Lord, eyes bright beneath white, bushy eyebrows, spoke up: “I'm sure I speak for us all in saying that it was a privilege to hear your discourse.”

The other two nodded.

“You have achieved well, given your, ah, provenance. Well done, Corcorigan.”

It was a dismissal. Heart sinking, Tom bowed.

“Thank you, my Lords.”

I've failed.

He turned, and walked across the cold, shining flagstones.

Necklace.

He remembered the pearls…

A string of them, glistening against velvet blackness.

Cosmic necklace.

Dream image.

Insight? Or delusion?

He stopped. Behind him, the Review Committee's presence felt like static electricity crawling across his back.

Fist and stallion.

A deep refrain, pounding: Dervlin's determined admonition, never to give up.

Heart thumping, Tom turned back.

“Sirs? My Lords?” Voice quavering: ignore. “A point of detail—something I missed. Can I go over it?”

An exchange of dour glances.

The central Lord nodded gravely. “Approach, young man. In your own time.”

Breath control. As in Maestro da Silva's classes: mental state changes triggered by physiological transitions.

“You're familiar, my Lords, with Lord Avernon's work?”

A widening of eyes. Surprised that he should know of it.

Use your weakness.

The maestro's refrain to a small student facing a charging bigger opponent. Use agility, the surroundings, anything…

Unable to mix socially with nobility, Tom had worked on his Sorites School assignments alone. Lacking their access levels, he endlessly replayed Karyn's Tale, exploring the limited hyperlinks to Terran ecology, sociology, to mu-space physics.

I know stuff the others don't.
Slow exhalation.
Use it
.

“Inspiring, isn't it?” He meant Avernon's theory. “Broad as well as deep.”

Striding carefully across the polished floor, he gestured one holodisplay after another into existence.

“So revolutionary, no-one's had time to work through the implications.” Animated now, he was surrounded by wafting, translucent phase-space manifolds: gossamer sheets manifested in light.

“If you think of it”—causing a burst of new volumes: blue, silver
and a hundred pastel shades—“it resolves the ancient negentropy question, once and for all.”

Stillness in the chamber.

Tom drew Avernon-style metavectors into position. The Lords, eyes flickering, descended into deep logosophical trance.

An easy picture.

His key display was a simple 3-D static image: glistening, roughly spheroidal, denoting a flat (2-D) universe. It started as a point, grew larger to a maximum diameter, then shrank again to another point.

The universe as a giant pearl; time as a horizontal axis.

Base everything around that.

It grew from the big bang—with entropic time flowing in the same direction: the big bang was in the past, the period of greater size was in the future—up to a maximum size.

Then the universe began to shrink towards the big crunch but
with time reversed
, so that, in the second half of the universe's life, the final big crunch was in the past, and, again, the time of maximum size was in the future.

From left and right, from two opposite points—like an east and west pole—golden arrows pointed across the surface to the vertical circle, like a 0-degree longitudinal circle.

Make the arrows glow
.

There were, in effect,
two big bangs.
Two cosmic histories colliding in the middle, where time switched over from one direction to the other. The concept was called Gold-Sakharov negentropy, and it was so old that Tom was not sure of its origins.

Pause now.

Tom allowed the Lords to meditate on his display.

“Previous arguments,” he continued after a few minutes, “have relied on symmetry. Avernon's—excuse me, Lord Avernon's—metavector actually requires it”—he pointed to a twisting manifold—“for consistency.”

Beyond the simple pearl image, more sophisticated imagery showed the cosmos as a hypersphere (subtly different-hued, distorted spheroids nestling along a notional time-axis) and as a moving construct in 12-space.

“It would be interesting to see how that would map to mu-space—”

Destiny!
The Lords, stony-faced in logotropic trance, said nothing.
What have I revealed?

“—which I know nothing of, except that its mythical dimensions were supposed to be fractal. As a thought experiment, consider the possibility of an infinitely recursive, self-referencing statement, attempting to complete itself.”

I'm doing it
.

Excited now, almost forgetting the committee, Tom waved golden seas and spongiform black stars into being.

“The number of depths and the number of instances are both infinite. But is one infinity a bigger class of infinity than the other?”

He waited a moment, then plunged on.

“By applying the metavector”—almost dancing, he manoeuvred through his images—“we see that it negates Gödel's theorem as a direct analogue of negating unidirectional entropic time in realspace.”

No questions.

There could not be, for the Lords were too deep in trance to verbalize, and Tom had full control of the holos.

“—which brings us back to the symmetry arguments. Our realspace cosmos begins from a tiny locus, expands with time until a maximum is reached, then contracts once more to a near-point.”

Pearl. Simple image.

“The universe essentially has two origins in time, which grow forwards to meet each other. Two big bangs.
We can't know which half of the cosmic life cycle we're in.”

Something strange about the Lords' regard…

“It means, of course, that while Destiny remains paramount as
always, a physical interpretation is that the cosmos starts at maximum size and shrinks symmetrically in two directions,
against
the flow of time.”

Unspoken communication between the Lords.

They're not surprised!

In his peripheral vision, Tom saw the near-subliminal gestures.
They know this already. And something more.

He pressed on.

“Now the Avernon metavector”—Tom hid a smile, wondering if he had just coined a name for posterity—“requires the symmetry. But symmetry
cannot be broken
at the end points, at the big bang or crunch, any more than at the midpoint. So, in fact, the universal history must look like this.”

The universe was no longer a single pearl.

It was a long string of pearls, one after the other.

Each pearl was one generation of the visible universe. But it replicated itself, over and over. Identically? Tom could not tell; he was not sure if even Avernon's metavectors would provide the answer.

It was the true cosmic cycle, revealed for the first time.

“The ancient questions were: (1) does the universe keep expanding for ever? When that was answered—definitely not—they asked: (2) does time reverse when the universe contracts? As we now know, it does.”

With a grand gesture, Tom swept every one of his two hundred displays out of existence, save one.

Only the hanging string of pearls—
cosmic necklace
—remained.

“So now the question is (3) whether the string extends infinitely or is closed up to form a loop, as in a lady's necklace…”

He was bathed with sweat, pumped up with adrenaline, as though he had run for many kilometres.

“And that question, my Lords”—he bowed low—“you are much better equipped to answer than I.”