Year’s Best SF 15 (36 page)

Safa waits a moment, trying to judge whether she still has the audience's attention. Are they following or just pretending to follow? It's not always easy to tell, and nothing on the administrator's face gives her a clue. “Well, we can do that. It's what we call Fixation—moving tiny amounts of entropy from one world—one universe—to another. Now, it would take a very long time to put this jug back the way it was. But if we started with a jug that was a bit damaged, a bit worn, it would happen a lot quicker. And that's sort of where we are with the Antikythera Mechanism. It's in several pieces, and we suspect there are components missing, but in other respects it's in astonishing condition for something that's been underwater for two thousand years.”

Now she turns around slowly, to confront the huge, humming mass of the Fixator. It is a dull silver cylinder with a circular door in one end, braced inside a massive orange chassis, festooned with cables and cooling ducts and service walkways. The machine is as large as a small fusion reactor and several times as complicated. It has stronger, more responsive magnets, a harder vacuum, and has a control system so perilously close to intelligence that a government agent must be on hand at all times, ready to destroy the machine if it slips over the threshold into consciousness.

“Hence the equipment. The Mechanism's inside there now—in fact, we've already begun the resonant excitation. What we're hoping is that somewhere out there—somewhere out in that sea of alternate timelines—is a copy of the Mechanism that never fell into the water. Of course, that copy may have been destroyed subsequently—but somewhere there
has
to be a counterpart to the Mechanism in better condition
than this one. Maybe near-infinite numbers of counterparts, for all we know. Perhaps we were the unlucky ones, and nobody else's copy ended up being lost underwater.”

She coughs to clear her throat, and in that instant catches a reflected glimpse of herself in the glass plating of one of the cabinets in the corner of the room. Drawn face, tired creases around the mouth, bags under the eyes—a woman who's been working too hard for much too long. But how else was an Iranian mathematician supposed to get on in the world, if it wasn't through graft and dedication? It's not like she was born into money, or had the world rushing to open doors for her.

The work will endure long after the bags have gone, she tells herself.

“The way it happens,” she says, regaining her composure, “is that we'll steal an almost infinitesimally small amount of order from an almost infinitely large number of alternate universes. In return, we'll pump a tiny amount of surplus entropy into each of those timelines. The counterparts of the Mechanism will hardly feel the change: the alteration in any one of them will be so tiny as to be almost unmeasurable. A microscopic scratch here; a spot of corrosion or the introduction of an impure atom there. But because we're stealing order from so many of them, and consolidating that order into a single timeline, the change in our universe will be enormous. We'll win, because we'll get back the Mechanism as it was before it went into the sea. But no one else loses; it's not like we're stealing someone else's perfect copy and replacing it with our own damaged one.”

She thinks she has them then—that it is all going to go without a hitch or a quibble, and they can all shuffle over to the tables and start nibbling on cheese squares. But then a hand raises itself slowly from the audience. It belongs to an intense young man with squared-off glasses and a severe fringe.

He asks: “How can you be so sure?”

Safa grimaces. She hates being asked questions.

 

Rana puts down her tool and listens very carefully. Somewhere in the museum there was a loud bang, as of a door
being slammed. She is silent for at least a minute, but when no further sound comes she resumes her labors, filling the room with the repetitious scratch of diamond-tipped burr against corroded metal.

Then another sound comes, a kind of fluttering, animal commotion, as if a bird is loose in one of the darkened halls, and Rana can stand it no more. She leaves her desk and walks out into the basement corridor, wondering if someone else has come in to work. But the other rooms and offices remain closed and unlit.

She is about to return to her labors and call Katib's desk, when she hears the soft and feathery commotion again. She is near the stairwell and the sound is clearly coming from above her, perhaps on the next floor up.

Gripping the handrail, Rana ascends. She is being braver than perhaps is wise—the museum has had its share of intruders, and there have been thefts—but the coffee machine is above and she had been meaning to fetch herself a cup for at least an hour. Her heart is in her throat when she reaches the next landing and turns the corner into the corridor, which is as shabby and narrow as any of the museum's non-public spaces. There are high, institutional windows on one side and office doors on the other. But there is the machine, standing in a pool of light two doors down, and there is no sign of an intruder. She walks to the machine, fishing coins from her pocket, and punches in her order. As the machine clicks and gurgles into life, Rana feels a breeze against her cheek. She looks down the corridor and feels it again: it's as if there's a door open, letting in the night air. But the only door should be the one manned by Katib, on the other side of the building.

While her coffee is being dispensed Rana walks in the direction of the breeze. At the end the corridor reaches the corner of this wing and jogs to the right. She turns the bend and sees something unanticipated. All along the corridor, there is no glass in the windows, no metal in the frames: just tall blank openings in the wall. And there, indeed, is a fluttering black shape: a crow, or something like a crow, which has come in through one of those openings and cannot now find
its way back outside. It keeps flinging itself at the wall between the windows, a gleam of mad desperation in its eyes.

Rana stands still, wondering how this can be. She was here. She remembers passing the machine and thinking she would take a cup if only she were not already staggering under her boxes and computers.

But there is something more than just the absence of glass. Is she losing her mind, or do the window apertures look narrower than they used to do, as if the walls have begun to squeeze the window spaces tight like sleepy eyes?

She must call Katib.

She hurries back the way she has come, forgetting all about the coffee she has just paid for. But when she turns the bend in the corridor, the machine is standing there dark and dead, as if it's been unplugged.

She returns to the basement. Under her feet the stairs feel rougher and more crudely formed than she remembers, until she reaches the last few treads and they start to feel normal again. She pauses at the bottom, waiting for her mind to straighten itself out.

Down here at least all is as it should be. Her office is as she left it, with the lights still on, the laptops still aglow, the gearwheel still mounted on its stand, the disemboweled Mechanism still sitting on the other side of the desk.

She eases into her seat, her heart still racing, and picks up the telephone.

“Katib?”

“Yes, my fairest,” he says, his voice sounding more distant and crackly than she feels it should, as if he is speaking from halfway around the world. “What can I do for you?”

“Katib, I was just upstairs, and…”

But then she trails off. What is she going to tell him? That she saw open gaps where there should be windows?

“Rana?”

Her nerve deserts her. “I was just going to say…the coffee machine was broken. Maybe someone could take a look at it.”

“Not until tomorrow, I am afraid—there is no one qualified. But I will make an entry in the log.”

“Thank you, Katib.”

After a pause he asks, “There was nothing else, was there?”

“No,” she says. “There was nothing else. Thank you, Katib.”

She knows what he must be thinking. She's been working too hard, too fixated on the task. The Mechanism does that to people, it's been said. They get lost in its labyrinthine possibilities and never emerge again. Not the way they were, anyway.

But she thinks she can still hear that crow.

 

“How can I be so sure about what?” Safa asks, with an obliging smile.

“That this is going to work the way you say it will,” the intense young man answers.

“The mathematics is pretty clear,” Safa says. “I should know; I discovered most of it.” Which comes less modestly than she had intended, although no one seems to mind. “What I mean is, there isn't any room for ambiguity. We know that the sheath of alternate timelines is near-infinite in extent, and we know we're only pumping the smallest conceivable amount of entropy into each of those timelines.” Safa holds the smile, hoping that will be enough for the young man, and that she can continue with her presentation.

But the man isn't satisfied. “That's all very well, but aren't you presupposing that all those other timelines have order to spare? What if that isn't the case? What if all the other Mechanisms are just as corroded and broken as ours—what will happen then?”

“It'll still work,” Safa says, “provided the total information content across all the timelines is sufficient to specify one intact copy, which is overwhelmingly likely from a statistical standpoint. Of course, if all the Mechanisms happen to be damaged in exactly the same fashion as ours, then the Fixation won't work—you still can't get something for nothing. But that's not very likely. Trust me; I'm very confident that we can find enough information out there to reconstruct our copy.”

The man seems to be content with that answer, but just
when Safa is about to open her mouth and continue with her speech, her adversary raises his hand again.

“Sorry, but…I can't help wondering. Does the entropy exchange happen uniformly across all those timelines?”

It's an odd, technical-sounding question, suggesting that the man has done more homework than most. “Actually, no,” Safa says, guardedly. “The way the math works out, the entropy exchange is ever so slightly clumped. If a partic u lar copy of the Mechanism has more information to give us, we end up pumping a bit more entropy into that copy than one which has less information to offer. But we're still talking about small differences, nothing that anyone will actually notice.”

The man pushes a hand through his fringe. “But what if there's only one?”

“I'm sorry?”

“I mean, what if there's only one intact copy out there, and all the rest are at least as damaged as our own?”

“That can't happen,” Safa says, hoping that someone, anyone, will interrupt by asking another question. It's not that she feels on unsafe ground, just that she has the sense that this could go on all night.

“Why not?” the man persists.

“It just can't. The mathematics says it's so unlikely that we may as well forget about it.”

“And you believe the mathematics.”

“Why shouldn't I?” Safa is beginning to lose her patience, feeling cornered and put upon. Where is the museum director to defend her when she needs him? “Of course I believe it. It'd be pretty strange if I didn't.”

“I was just asking,” the man says, sounding as if he's the one who's under attack. “Maybe it isn't very likely—I'll have to take your word for that. But I only wanted to know what would happen.”

“You don't need to,” Safa says firmly. “It can't happen—not ever. And now can I please continue?”

 

Her finger stabs down on Katib's button again. But there is nothing, not even the cool purr of the dialing tone. The
phone is mute, and now that she looks at it, the display function is dead. She puts the handset down and tries again, but nothing changes.

That's when Rana pays proper attention to the gearwheel, the one she has been working on. There are thirty-seven wheels in the Antikythera Mechanism and this is the twenty-first, and although there was still much to be done until it was ready to be replaced in the box, it now looks as if she has hardly begun. The surface corrosion that she has spent weeks rectifying has returned in a matter of minutes, covering the wheel in a furry blue-green bloom as if someone has taken the artifact and dipped it in acid while she was out of the office. But as she looks at it, blinking in dismay, as if it is her eyes that are wrong, rather than the wheel, she notices that three teeth are gone, or worn away so thoroughly that they may as well not be there. Worse, there is a visible scratch—actually more of a crack—that cuts across one side of the wheel, as if it is about to fracture into two pieces.

Mesmerized and unsettled in equal measure, Rana picks up one of her tools—the scraper she was using before she heard the noise—and touches it against part of the blue-green corrosion. The bloom chips off almost instantly, but as it does so it takes a quadrant of the wheel with it, the piece shattering to a heap of pale granules on her desk. She stares in numb disbelief at the ruined gear, with a monstrous chunk bitten out of the side of it, and then the tool itself shatters in her hand.

“This can't be happening,” Rana says to herself. Then her gaze falls on the other gearwheels, in their plastic boxes, and she sees the same brittle corrosion afflicting them all.

As for the Mechanism itself, the disemboweled box: what she sees isn't possible. She can just about accept that some bizarre, hitherto-undocumented chemical reaction has attacked the metal in the time it took for her to go upstairs and come down again, but the box itself is
wood
—it hasn't changed in hundreds of years, not since the last time the casing was patiently replaced by one of the Mechanism's many careful owners.

But now the box has turned to something that looks more
like rock than wood, something barely recognizable as a made artifact. With trepidation Rana reaches out and touches it. It feels fibrous and insubstantial. Her finger almost seems to ghost through it, as if what she is reaching for is not a real object at all, but a hologram. Peering into the heart of the Mechanism, she sees the gears that are still in place have fused together into a single corroded mass, like a block of rock that has been engraved with a hazy impression of clockwork.