Solaris Rising (20 page)

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

Zebenunai replied, “My mistake means the time has come for you to assume a new identity. I am not just Jules Aonnarron, I am many others in Luna. Come to me, child. Let me show you who else you will be.”

Freosanrai nodded. “You don’t want me to be independent, do you? You framed me –”

“To
teach
you.” Zebenunai shook his head. “I am sorry it had to be this way. But the family is more important than the individual. This, you have learned.”

Freosanrai nodded again. She had been crushed, she had been moulded. With a sinking heart she realised her fate. There was no escape. She would no longer be Freosanrai.

SHALL I TELL YOU THE PROBLEM WITH TIME TRAVEL?

ADAM ROBERTS

Adam Roberts was born in the year 3,061,965 and has time-travelled back to London, England, to the early years of the extraordinarily backward and primitive 21
^st
century, in order to convey a message of the utmost importance to humankind. That message is hidden somewhere in one of his dozen SF novels or several dozen SF short stories. You have to read them all to find it.

Zero

This is no simulation. The friction-screaming fills the sky. An iceberg as big as the sun is up there, and then it is bigger than the sun, getting huger with terrifying rapidity. This is happening to a world that had, up to this moment, known no noise at all save the swishing of insects through tropical air; or the snoring of surf on the beach. But
this
,
now
, is the biggest shout ever heard. Apocalyptic panic. And the asteroid falls further, superheating the atmosphere around it, the outer layer of ice subliming away in a glorious windsock of red and orange and black, down and down, until this world ends.

But – stop. Wait a minute. This hasn’t anything to do with anything. Disregard this. There’s no asteroid, and there never was. He doesn’t know whether he is going on or coming back. Which is it, forward or backward? Let’s go to

One

A City. A pleasant, well-ordered city, houses and factories and hospitals, built on a delta through which seven rivers flow to the sea. The megalosaurs have long gone, and the swamps have long since dried up, and the mega-forests have sunk underground, the massive trunks taller than ships’ masts, sinking slowly under the surface and through the sticky medium, down, to be transformed into something rich and strange, to blacks and purples, to settle as coal brittle as coral. The world that the asteroid ended is stone now: stone bones and stone shells, scattered through the earth’s crust. Imagine a capricious god playing at an enormous game of Easter-egg-hunt, hiding the treasures in the bizarrest places. Except there is no god, it is chance that scattered the petrified confetti under the soil in this manner.

So, yes, here we are – in a city. It is a splendid morning in August, the sky as clear as a healthy cornea, bright as fresh ice, hot as baked bread. Sunlight is flashing up in sheets from the sea.

The city is several miles across, from the foothills, from the suburbs inland and the factories to the sea into which the seven rivers flare and empty. The seven rivers all branch from one great stream that rushes down from the northern mountains. The city abuts the sea to the south, docks and warehouses fringing the coastline, and beyond it the island-rich Inland Sea. The mountains run round the three remaining sides of the delta, iced with snow at their peaks, really lovely-looking. Really beautiful. To stand in the central area, where most of the shops are, and look over the low-roofs to the horizon, and note the way the light touches the mountains – it makes the soul feel clean. This is Japan and it is 1945.

Two

Move along, move on, and so, to another city; and this one very different. This city stretches sixty miles across, from the two-dozen spacious estates and the clusters of large houses in the east, nearer the sea, to the more closely-packed blocks, dorms, factories of the west. The city is threaded through with many freeways, tarmac the colour of moondust, all alive with traffic and curving and broad as Saturn’s wings. Sweep further west, drive through the bulk of the town, to where the buildings lose height and spaces open up between them, and away further into the sand-coloured waste, and here – a mountain. And at its base a perfectly sheared and cut block of green. This is the lawn, maintained by automated systems. The style of the white marble buildings is utopian; for this is the closest we come to utopia in this sublunary world – a spacious and well-funded research facility. This is the Bonneville Particle Acceleration Laboratory. Let’s step inside this temple of science. Through the roof (it presents us with no obstacle), down from the height to the polished floor, and the shoes of Professor Hermann Bradley clakclaking along that surface.

He steps through into a room and his beaming, grinning, smiling, happy-o jolly-o face shouts to the world: “We’ve done it, we’ve cracked it –
thirteen seconds
!”

The room is full of people, and they all rise up as one at this news, cheering and whooping. And there is
much
rejoicing. People are leaping up from their seats and knocking over their cups of cold coffee, spilling the inky stuff all over their papers, and they don’t care. Thirteen seconds!

Three

So, here, clearly, this narrative is in the business of
zipping rapidly forward
through time. That much is obvious. Some stories are like that: the skipping stone kisses the surface of the water and reels away again, touches the sea and leaps, and so on until momentum is all bled away by the friction. That’s the kind of tale we’re dealing with. So another little skip, through time, not far this time – three small years, in fact. Hardly a hop. And here’s our old friend Professor Bradley, a little thinner, a little less well-supplied with head hair. There’s a meeting going on, and the whole of Professor Bradley’s career is in the balance.

Four people, two men and two women, are sitting in chairs, arranged in a U shape. Bradley is sitting in the middle. One of the women has just said, “three years, and
trillions of dollars
in funding…” but now she has let the sentence trail away in an accusing tone.

The mood of this meeting is sombre. Whatever happened to ‘
thirteen seconds
’? Whatever happened to the celebration
that
single datum occasioned?

Bradley says: “Shall I tell you the problem with Time Travel?”

“No need for you to patronise us, Professor,” says one of the others.

“It’s the metaphor,” says Bradley, quickly, not wanting to be interrupted, “of
travel
. Time is not space. You can’t wander around in it like a landscape.”

“There are five people in this room,” says one of the women. “Must I tell you how many
PhDs
there are in this room? It’s a prime number larger than five.”

“That’s just dindy-dandy!” says Bradley, aggressively.

“If you think the point of your being here is to gloss over your experimental failings…”

“OK!” barks Bradley. “Alright! OK! Alright!”

You can tell from this that the mood of the meeting is hostile. You can imagine why:
trillions of dollars
!

“Last month you reported
seventeen
seconds.”

“That’s right,” says Bradley. “And let’s not underestimate the real achievement in the…”

“Three years ago you came to us with
thirteen
seconds. You have worked
three years
to find those four seconds – and you’re still at least fifteen seconds short! How am I to see this as an improvement?”

“We have,” says Bradley, “
cracked
it. I am
convinced
that we have cracked it. I’m more than convinced. I’m certain, absolutely certain. One more test will prove the matter. One more!”

“You have
run out
of test slots, Professor. Run out! This means
there are no more test slots
. Do you understand? You have conducted over
two thousand
tests so far! You have conducted
so many experiments
that you have literally run out of slots –”

“Shall I tell you the problem,” says one of the men, waggishly, “with using up all your test slots?”

Bradley hasn’t got time for this. Urgently, he says: “The Tungayika…”

“Let us not,” interrupts one of the men, “let us not rehearse all the reasons why Tungayika would be – a terrible idea.”

“A
terrible
idea!” repeats one of the women.

“Terrible,” agrees the third.

“But of all the remaining possibilities,” urges Bradley, “it’s the best we have. Entertain this idea, I ask you. Please:
entertain the idea
. What if I really am only
one more trial away
from perfecting the technology?”

“Tungayika is a good half century further back than any test you’ve conducted.”

“It’s not the distance,” says Bradley, rubbing his eyes, as if he’s been over this a million times. Million, billion, trillion: these numbers are all friends of his. “It’s not a question of
distance
. Time isn’t like space. That’s what I’m saying. It’s an energy sine.”

“It
is
the distance,” retorted one of the men. “Not in terms of reaching the target, maybe not, but
definitely
in controlling the experiment via such a long temporal lag. And quite apart from anything else, nobody really knows what
happened
at Tungayika…”

Bradley seizes on this. You know what? He thinks this is his trump card. “That’s right!” he says, leaping up, actually bouncing up from his chair. He’s an energetic and impetuous fellow, is Bradley. “That’s the
best
reason why you should authorise the drop! Think of the
metrics
we’ll get back! We’re guaranteed
at least
seventeen seconds there. But in fact I’m certain we’ve finally got the containment right; we’ll be there right up to the proper moment. And that means … we’ll be able to
see
what it was that created such a big bang, back there in 1908. Solving that mystery is, well, icing on the… icing on the…”

“You’re playing with real things here, Brad,” says one of the men. “This is no game. Real people, real lives.”

Professor Bradley nods, and lowers his gaze, but this could be the problem – right there. Because you know what? Professor Bradley doesn’t
really think
he is playing with real things. Many years and scores of drops have reinforced his belief that reality can’t be played with. History is as it is; time paradoxes are harder to generate than kai-chi muons. Tungayika in Siberia in 1908 is further away from his conscience than anything imaginable. It was such a
sparsely
populated area! And anyway, the asteroid wiped it out! And anyway, that event has already happened. The board is worried about killing people, but all the people he might kill
are all already long dead
! None of what he does is real.

That’s the crucial one, really. That last one.

“It’s
one more
drop,” says Bradley. “Just that. Just one more! Then we’ll be able to go back to Capitol Hill with a
fully-working
time travel insertion protocol! Think of it!”

“Brad...”

“This one chance to turn all the frustration around to victory – the chance to get a return on all that money!”

“But Professor Notkin says that…”

At this much-hated name Professor Bradley positively arches his back. Like a cat! Really – like a furious, hissing feline! “Come
on
Rosie,” he cries. “Don’t
bait
me, Rosie!”

“Brad, now, listen, Notkin is…”

“– after my bloody
job
,” cried Professor Bradley, rolling his hands in an agitated dumb-show. “She’s after my Lab. She
can’t
have it. If I didn’t have to keep pouring my energies into combating her
conspiracies
against me –”

“Oh,” says Rosie, in a disappointed voice.

“Conspiracies is too
strong
,” agrees another.

“Some might consider it actionable,” opines a third.

“Agh!” yells Bradley, in the sheerest of sheer annoyance.

There is an embarrassed pause.

“Come now,” says Rosie, in a placating tone. “Notkin is a good scientist. There’s no need to get so worked-up about office politics. You can’t blame Notkin for being ambitious. Being ambitious is not a
crime
.”

“She has been undermining me for eighteen months now. She sells you on this pipe dream of remote viewing…”

“At least it doesn’t involve shit being blown up,” snaps one of the men.

And once again there is an awkward silence.

“Give me a break,” growls Bradley. “Patrick, you of all people –”

“I’m not kidding, Brad,’ says Patrick. ‘The bandwidth may be small, but with Notkin’s system…”