“How fast is that again?”
“Two hundred thousand miles a second.”
“That’s fast.”
“Yes. That component of time is fast. Time flies! But the second temporal dimension is very slow, by comparison. It’s so slow that most phenomena seem suspended within it, almost as if it were that absolute grid of Newtonian—I mean Galilean—space. We call this one lateral or eternal time, thus e time, and we have found it vibrates slowly back and forth, as if the universe itself were a single string or bubble, vibrating or breathing. There is a systolic/diastolic change as it vibrates, but the vibration is weakly interacting with us, and its amplitude appears to be small.”
“All things remain in God,” Galileo said, remembering a prayer he had once learned, when as a boy he had briefly attended the monastery school.
“Yes. Although it is still a temporality, a kind of time we are moving in. We vibrate back and forth in this time.”
“I think I see.”
“Then lastly,” she went on, “the third temporal dimension we call antichronos, because it moves in the reverse direction of c time, while it also interacts with e time. The three temporalities flow through and resonate with each other, and they all pulse with vibrations of their own. We then experience the three as one, as a kind of fluctuating vector, with resonance effects when pulses from the three overlap in various ways. All those actions together create the perceived time of human consciousness. The present is a three-way interference pattern.”
“Like chips of sunlight on water. Lots of them at once, or almost at once.”
“Yes, potential moments, that wink into being when the three waves peak. The vector nature of the manifold also accounts for many of the temporal effects we experience, like entropy, action at a distance, temporal waves and their resonance and interference effects, and of course quantum entanglement and bilocation, which you yourself are experiencing because of the technology that was developed to move epileptically. In terms of what we sense, fluctuations in this manifold also account for most of our dreams, as well as less common sensations like involuntary memory, foresight, déjà vu, presque vu, jamais vu, nostalgia, precognition, Rückgriffe, Schwanung, paralipomena, mystical union with the eternal or the One, and so on.”
“I’ve felt so many of those,” Galileo said, buffeted as he flew by memories of his lost times, his secret times. “In the sleepless hours of the night, lying in bed, I feel these phenomena often.”
“Yes, and sometimes in the broad light of day too! The compound nature of the manifold creates our perception of both transience and permanence, of being and becoming. They account for that paradoxical feeling I often notice, that any moment in my past happened just a short time ago and yet is separated from me by an immense gulf of time. Both are true; these are subconscious perceptions of a delaminated e time and c time.”
“And the sense of eternity that occasionally strikes? When you ring like a bell?”
“That would be a powerful isolated sense of e time, which does in fact vibrate in a bell-like way. Then in a different way, the sense of inexorable dissolution or breakdown we sometimes call entropy, also the feeling called nostalgia, these are the perceptions of antichronos passing backward through c and e time. Indeed Bao’s work leads to a mathematical description of entropy as a kind of friction between antichronos and c time running against the grain of each other, so to speak. By their interaction.”
“Things get ground up,” Galileo agreed. “Our bodies. Our lives.”
“That’s the effect of being in a manifold made of three different motions.”
“It’s hard to see.”
“Of course. We mainly experience time as a unified vector, much as we experience space as a plenum made up of the three spatial macro-dimensions. You don’t usually see the plenum as length, breadth, and height, you simply experience space. Time is similarly triune but whole.”
“Like tides in a river mouth,” Galileo ventured. One time as a boy he had watched the seaweed flow first one way, then the other. And at the moment the tide changed: “Sometimes there is flow both ways, and the interference chop can be either obvious or subtle. And the water is always there.”
“There are interference patterns, yes. Other people talk about Penelope’s Loom, and how we are all in our place of the tapestry busily embroidering it, and now the analepts are hopping back and re-embroidering certain parts. Anyway, time is not laminar. It shifts and flows, breaks up and eddies, percolates and resonates.”
“And you have learned to travel on these currents.”
“Yes, a little bit. We learned to shape a charge to create an eddy of antichronos, and push something along in it, and when that eddy touches c time again a complementary potentiality is created. That was enough to do a limited sort of time travel. We could perform analepses at certain resonant entanglements in the manifold. But it required very large applications of energy to make the first shift of the transference devices back in time. The required energies were so large that we were only able to move a few entanglers to bilocated past potentialities. Black holes sucked down large fractions of the gas of the outer gas giants for each entangler sent back. After that they were in place to be used as portals for entanglements of consciousness. These entanglements require much smaller energies, being a sort of field of induced or potential dreaming. The entanglements create a complementary potential time with every analepsis and prolepsis, and for this reason and others, the entire process remained controversial throughout the time it was being actively pursued. Shifting ten or a dozen entanglers required the complete sacrifice of the two outermost gas giants. That was felt to be enough, or too much. So really, this was mostly a technology of about a century ago, when analepts were going back frequently, and sometimes fighting over their changes, as Ganymede did more than anyone. It has all since been reconsidered. By no means does everyone agree it was a good idea.”
“I should think not,” Galileo said. “Why did they do it at all?”
“Some wanted to retroject science analeptically into a time earlier than it had naturally appeared, in the hope of making human history a bit less dire.”
“Why bother, now that you are here?”
“The intervening years were more dire than you know. And we are not just here; we are there too. You are not really comprehending what I have told you. We are all connected and alive in the manifold of manifolds.”
Galileo shrugged. “Things still seem to happen one after the next.”
She shook her head. “In any case, what you see here is a damaged and traumatized humanity. It was felt for a while that work on the past could make that better. A kind of redemption.”
“I see … I think. But, speaking of what you have taught me—that’s only eight dimensions, if I have not lost track. Five of space, and three of time.”
“Yes.”
“And the other two?”
“One is a truly implicate microdimension, inside all the rest. Each minim holds a universe in that dimension. Then all these and ours too exist inside a macromanifold, you might call it. This enfolds a multiplicity of universes—a kind of hyperspace of potentialities, well beyond human perception, although discoverable by observations of cosmically high energies, and of the background radiation. It’s said that in this manifold there are as many existing or potential universes as there are atoms in this universe, and some say even many orders of magnitude more than that, like 103000.”
“That’s a lot,” Galileo said.
“Yes, but it is still not infinity.”
Galileo sighed. He saw they were no longer flying, but in a room the size of a lecture hall in Padua. Aurora could point at one wall and mime writing, and equations appeared on the wall before them. She walked him through the mathematics of the tenth dimension, the manifold of manifolds, and Galileo, as he struggled to follow her, was comforted by the idea that even here her work was a kind of spatial geometry, things laid out in relationships, with proportions, just as always. Maybe that was for his sake, but it all fell into place. Everything could be explained: the bizarre paradoxes of quantum mechanics, the strange billowing of the universe out from a single point that had never been anywhere. All the laws of nature, all the forces and particles, all the constants, and all the various manifestations of time, of being and becoming, their suprachronological travel in time, the bizarre giant reality of universal entanglement, were explained. It was a whole, a quivering organism, and God was indeed a mathematician—a mathematician of such stupendous complexity, subtlety, and elegance, that the experience of contemplating Him was inhuman, beyond what any human feeling could encompass.