Spacetime Donuts (13 page)

Jolts and trains of energy rippled through the paths around them, weaving back and forth, rising and falling. Out beyond this region Vernor could see more and more of "God's brain," but it didn't go on forever. In many places there seemed to be dark clouds, but even where it was clear there was a sort of glassy barrier out beyond it all—

"Mick, see way out past all the light?" No answer.

"Out past everything. Like a glass wall. You know what that is?"

"Nuh."

"That's us!" Vernor said, happy to one-up Mick on the subtleties of life in a hypersphere. "The space is so curved that we can see clear around it to the back of our heads. Or the back of the scale-ship, anyway."

Mick grunted and turned his full attention back to the universe itself. He seemed not to want to get sucked into the scientific frame of mind. He was right. Once again, Vernor let his attention drift out into the friendly being around them. He found himself praying.

"One size fits all," Mick said presently, and Vernor nodded agreement. On earth as it is in heaven. As above, so below.

But the zest for observation returned, and yet again Vernor sorted his Self out into subject and object, scientist and phenomenon.

They had been shrinking all this time, and the nodes at the intersections of the network had resolved themselves into clouds of bright particles darting around exceptionally bright central regions.

One of the nodes had come to dominate their visual field, and they could see now that matter was continually being ejected from the bright region at the center.

"That must be a white hole," Vernor remarked. "You know, the other end of a hyperspace tunnel which starts at a black hole. Matter falls in the black end and comes out the white end, all cleaned and simplified."

"Where are the black holes?" Mick asked, suddenly brought down. "I'm not too eager to get my matter cleaned."

"It's kind of hard to see them," Vernor answered. They were quiet for a few minutes. The shrinking was proceeding at a good rate and the node in front of them covered most of their visual field now.

"Where do you think the Milky Way is?" Mick asked.

"Well," Vernor replied, "we probably have to go down a few more levels to get to the galaxy level. I imagine it's going to end up being inside one of those bright spots . . . according to my theory we should contract right down into—"

There was something wrong. The light from the objects ahead of them was suddenly getting bluer, brighter. The brightened lights seemed to be rushing in on them faster than before. It was as if the whole universe was somehow hurrying around to get in front of them; leaving only a terrible, hungry darkness behind the scale-ship.

A deep humming from the ship's tensegrity sphere entered the range of audibility. An incredible force was pressing on them; the very air began to sputter, filled with an unheard of energy density.

Without saying anything, Mick and Vernor realized together that they were indeed being sucked into a black hole. There was no way that their Virtual Field could protect them from the real and unlimited forces which they would encounter deeper in this terrible whirlpool of space-time.

There was only one possible means of escape, and Mick thought of it. He went quickly to the control panel and turned off the VFG field. If they were not yet past the black hole's lip, they might still snap back around the curve of Circular Scale to their original size and location.

For an instant there was a charged equilibrium between the expansive force of the suddenly released space of the scale-ship and the contracting force of the black hole's gravitational field. Then, with the sound of all of Frank Zappa's songs played at top volume at the same time, the last minute of their trip was over.

As it turned out, the police were still in Professor Kurtowski's lab. "How did you guys manage to disappear for a whole half hour like that?" they wanted to know.

"We did it with mirrors," Turner replied, carefully stepping over the turds near the ship.

Better in jail than inside a black hole, Vernor consoled himself as they were led off. He still wondered how they had escaped the lethal dose of synchrotron radiation which Kurtowski had predicted would arise if they suddenly cut off the VFG. Probably the fucking black hole had blotted it up. That had been no accidental collision, oh no, the bastard had probably come halfway around the Universe to get them. And up on this level a thing called a
society
wanted his ass. Same thing in the end. Same fucking thing.

"I want to see a lawyer," Vernor shouted as they were led to the back of the waiting police van. It was an automated van, and the joke sounded stupider than Vernor had intended. The loaches were not talkative. They seemed eager to dispose of Vernor and Mick. Probably they were eager to get back to the lab . . . that was dangerous, exciting . . . not routine like mailing two losers to the detention center.

The loaches sealed the time-lock on the door, the idling turbine geared up and engaged, and Vernor Maxwell and Mick Turner were on their programmed path to an automated jail. There was nothing to say.

They were about ten blocks from the Professor's laboratory when a sudden explosion rocked and overturned the police van. Steps ran closer, paused, then ran off. There was another, smaller, explosion which blew open the van's rear door. A horn started a steady blast of alarm.

Mick and Vernor hit the street at a run, following the sound of those footsteps. They caught a glimpse of a figure hurrying into an alley across the street. It was the spry Professor Kurtowski.

In the darkness of the alley, the three paused to catch their breath, and to pound one another with joy. It was impossible to talk over the noise of the smashed van's automatic alarm. Sirens were approaching from several directions. Kurtowski nodded and set off down the alley with a beckoning gesture.

The alley ended in a blind wall. Too high to climb, and solid except for a small flaw at the base of the wall.

"Through there," Kurtowski said loudly, with a note of humorous challenge. "We must pass through the needle's eye to enter paradise."

Man, if you say so, Vernor thought, leaning over to examine the crumbled place in the wall. Sure enough, there was a tiny passage. Maybe big enough to put your finger through. Been working late, Prof?

But even as he thought this the hole grew larger . . . no, Vernor was growing smaller . . . the portable VFG! Kurtowski was wearing it. Vernor glanced upwards and could see the Professor's hands molding the field around him as he walked through the tiny hole. On the other side, the field faded, and it took some quick action to keep from getting stuck. Turner, and then the old scientist, came glomming through the hole in short order.

They were in a large, dimly lit room. It was a warehouse filled with stacks of packing crates. The crates were of varying sizes, but they were fitted together to form identical cubical stacks. A big automatic forklift stood idle in the aisle.

Kurtowski led them quickly to the closest stack and fiddled with a crate in the stack's bottom layer until its side swung back to reveal a hidden passageway. The tunnel led to a room which Kurtowski had hollowed out for himself in the center of the stack of crates.

Once both doors were closed, Professor Kurtowski flicked on the lights and spoke. "I had a feeling you might encounter difficulties, so when I left the laboratory I prepared to bring you from the police van to my shelter." The room was small but comfortable, with stacks of books, bits of apparatus, cushions, a soft rug, and several crates of food and drink.

"How did you get in here before you found out it was O.K. to use the VFG on yourself?" Vernor asked.

"I picked the lock on the front door," Kurtowski replied. "The warehouse is fully automated. But let's hear about the trip."

They told him the story of their adventure, with interruptions for food and drink. When they'd finished talking, Kurtowski turned to Vernor. "And what conclusions do you draw?"

"Well, for one thing, I think it's clear now that scale
is
circular."

The Professor looked doubtful. "But how
reliable
are the impressions you have brought back from below the atomic level? You said that most of the things you saw seemed to appear directly in your mind . . . is it not possible that you saw only what you
expected
to see? I have long thought that the universe does not, in fact, have any
unique
structure. Different observers can reach mutually incompatible conclusions. Only the man of knowledge can see several things at once." He paused to let this sentence sink in, then continued. "It would have been very interesting if you had managed to continue shrinking long enough to see if you could imagine the Earth into your tiny mirror universe."

"One thing," Mick put in, "the space right before we got into the universe was
infinite
dimensional."

"Hilbert space." Kurtowski said. "It's quite possible. That might explain how there could be more than one—" He broke off, seeming to savor a secret.

"What surprised me the most, though," Mick continued, "was that everything seemed to be
alive
once we were on the same level as it. Molecules, atoms, the nucleus, the universe itself . . . they all acted like they were alive, one we got into the right space and time scale."

"That's what's so great about Circular Scale," Vernor elaborated. "There can be life at
each
level, since no level is more important or complex than any other. Nothing is really bigger than anything else. And the same for
time
. The vast processes of the universe are a flickering inside an atom's shortest pulsation."

"Ja, it's a nice idea," Kurtowski agreed. "It's a shame to lose the scale-ship to the Us. I would like to go see these things for myself."

Something tickled Vernor's memory. Hadn't Kurtowski
already
seen everything . . . walking among the hyperspheres? But that had been a dream.

Mick and the Professor were arranging cushions to sleep on. "But what do we do now?" Vernor asked.

Mick grinned. "Revolution. Only way we're gonna stay out of jail is to tear it down."

"Right," the Professor said, snuggling into his cushions. "Tomorrow you will infiltrate Phizwhiz, Vernor."

Vernor lay in the dark thinking about this, and then about Alice. He felt dangerously unstable . . . his sense of reality was slipping. When he'd been with Alice, she'd formed a good and human center for his life, but now he was being hurled through unimaginable changes. It seemed like it had all started when he'd broken up with her . . .

What had Kurtowski meant, "The man of knowledge can see several things at once?" Several things . . . he relaxed into the babble of his body's cells, then sank down through further levels. Down here all linear time was gone, all cause and effect abandoned . . . the annihilation of every structure. But he didn't want to be annihilated. Change the slogan, make it . . . the
realization
of every structure. Same difference, really . . .

The Us had begun to turn into the vast prison it was, when security had become more important than freedom. Security was
one
structure, not all or none . . . one structure,
one
reality upheld at the cost of all the others.

Vernor let himself dissolve a little more. He felt fear. The Us was wrong, but it was frightening watching his realities dissolve. Go with the flow . . . and when nothing was left . . . keep going where? Alice, Alice.

During the night the loaches searched the warehouse, coming close to finding Kurtowski's shelter. The three slept badly. When their watches said it was morning, they stopped trying to sleep and had a brief discussion of their plans. It seemed best to start immediately.

The Professor equipped Mick and Vernor with disguises—piezoplastic face-putty and mustache worms. They slipped out of the warehouse and down to the walktube. They mingled with the crowd, looking no different from the others.

The people riding the walktube out of the Eastside early in the morning were mechanics and technicians who worked the nightshift. Their job was to keep the factories humming, handling the occasional glitch or breakdown which got out of the machines' control. These factory jobs could be challenging and even unsafe, and the workers took pride in this. The fact that they were indispensible gave them a superior feeling towards Phizwhiz which most of the Users could not honestly share.

A young mechanic struck up a conversation with Mick in the walktube. "Where do you work?" he asked.

"In the plastics factory," Turner replied. "The loach was all over the place last night. Some old guy had a lab hidden in the basement."

"Dja' get to see it?" the mechanic asked with interest.

"Naw, they wouldn't let anyone in. Must of been pretty good, though."

The mechanic shook his head. "You're lucky. I work over at the power plant. Nothing's happened there in three months. All night I sit there watching the dials. I might as well be a Drone for all the action I'm getting."

"You'd have plenty to do if someone got rid of Phizwhiz," Mick said in a low voice.

The mechanic glanced around nervously. This kind of talk was illegal. Reassured by Turner's unmistakably criminal appearance he finally relaxed and answered, "If only someone would. This no-risk life is dragging everyone."

Vernor spoke up, taking the role of fervent organizer, twitching his wobbly mustache. "We're going to do it. It's going to happen this week. Are you in?"

The mechanic grimaced. "Why not. I know some other guys that'll come in, too. When do we start?"

"Today," Mick said. He got off with the mechanic at the next exit, and Vernor rode on towards the EM building. The plan was that Mick would use his many contacts to mobilize a small army of guerillas, while Vernor went to turn himself in to Ken Burke of the Governor's Research Council. He was going to trade his freedom for a chance to get at Phizwhiz.

Burke's office was in the top floor of the Experimental Metaphysics building. Vernor brushed past the receptionist, removing his face putty and false mustache as he entered Burke's office.