“Fraa Paphlagon, I was only made aware of this as I was en route. I’m still absorbing it,” said Ignetha Foral. “Say more, please, of what you mean when you speak of the matter being different?”
“The nuclei of the atoms are incompatible,” he said. Then, surveying the faces at the table, he shifted back in his chair, grinned, and held up his hands like parallel blades, as if to say “imagine a nucleus.” “Nuclei are forged in the hearts of stars. When the stars die, they explode, and the nuclei are thrown out as ash from a dead fire. These nuclei are positively charged. So, when things get cool enough, they attract electrons, and become atoms. Further cooling enables the atoms’ electrons to interact with one another to form complexes called molecules, which are what everything is made of. But, again, the making of the world begins in the hearts of stars, where those nuclei are forged according to certain rules that only apply in very hot crowded places. The chemistry of the stuff we are made of reflects, in a roundabout way, those rules. Until we learned to make newmatter, every nucleus in our cosmos was made according to the set of rules that naturally obtains. But the Geometers are aware of—they are made of—four other slightly different, but totally incompatible, sets of rules for making nuclei.”
“So,” said Suur Asquin, “they too learned to make newmatter or—”
“Or they came from different cosmi,” Fraa Paphlagon said. “Which makes a Plurality of Worlds Messal seem awfully relevant to me.”
“This is bizarre—fantastical!” said a reedy voice with a heavy and strange accent. No one’s lips were moving that we could see, so, by process of elimination, we turned to the Matarrhite, who was chalked up on the bell-board as one Zh’vaern, with no “Fraa” or “Suur” to give a clue as to sex. Zh’vaern turned slightly in his seat—I was guessing male, from the voice—and made a gesture. His servitor, a column of black fabric, loomed forward, grew a pseudopod, and took his plate—to the visible relief of those seated to either side. “I can hardly believe we are talking about a possibility so inconceivable as that other universes exist—and that the Geometers originate there!”
In this, Zh’vaern seemed to speak for the entire table.
Except for Jad. “The words fail. There is one universe, by the definition of universe. It is not the cosmos we see through our eyes and our telescopes—that is but a single Narrative, a thread winding through a Hemn space shared by many other Narratives besides ours. Each Narrative looks like a cosmos alone, to any consciousness that partakes of it. The Geometers came from other Narratives—until they came here, and joined ours.”
Having dropped this bomb, Fraa Jad excused himself, and went to the toilet.
“What on earth is he going on about?” Fraa Lodoghir demanded. “It sounded like literary criticism!” But he did not speak scornfully; he was fascinated.
“So perhaps this messal has already turned into what its detractors claim of it,” said Ignetha Foral. And having issued that challenge, she turned toward the topic of the research she had performed, years ago, as a Unarian.
Paphlagon was in his seventh decade, impressive-looking rather than handsome, no doubt accustomed to being the most senior, the most eminent person in any given room. He was sitting there with a trim, wry smile, staring at the center of the table—resigning himself, with all good humor, to being Fraa Jad’s interpreter. “Fraa Jad,” he said, “speaks of Hemn space. It’s probably just as well he broached the subject early. Hemn space, or configuration space, is how almost all theors think about the world. During the Praxic Age, it became obvious that it was a better place for us to go about our work, so we decamped, left three-dimensional Adrakhonic space behind, and moved there. When you talk of parallel universes, you make as little sense to Fraa Jad as he does to you.”
“Perhaps you can say a few words, then, about Hemn space, if it is so important,” suggested Ignetha Foral.
Paphlagon got that wry look again, and sighed. “Madame Secretary, I am trying to think of a way to sum it up that will not turn this messal into a year-long theorics suvin.”
And he gamely launched into a primer on Hemn space. He learned to look to Suur Moyra whenever he got stuck for a way of explaining some abstruse concept. More often than not, she was able to drag him out of trouble. She’d already shown herself to be good company. And the vast stock of knowledge that she, as a Lorite, carried around in her head made her good at explaining things; she could always reach back to a useful analogy or clear line of argument that some fraa or suur had written down in the more or less distant past.
I got yanked in the middle of it and, going back to the kitchen, found Emman Beldo on the other end of the rope. Zh’vaern’s servitor was standing at the stove, stirring the mystery pot, and so Emman and I wordlessly agreed to retreat to the other end of the kitchen, near the open door to the garden. “What the hell are we talking about here?” Emman wanted to know. “Is this some kind of ‘travel through the fourth dimension’ scenario?”
“Oh, it’s good that you asked,” I said, “because it is precisely not that—Hemn space is anything but. You’re talking about the old thing where a bunch of separate three-dimensional universes are stacked on top of each other, like leaves in a book, and you can move between them—”
Emman was nodding. “By figuring out some way to move through the fourth spatial dimension. But this Hemn space thing is something else?”
“In Hemn space, any point—which means any string of N numbers, where N is how many dimensions the Hemn space has—contains all the information needed to specify everything that can possibly be known about the system at a given moment.”
“What system?”
“Whatever system the Hemn space describes,” I said.
“Oh, I see,” he said, “you’re allowed to set up a Hemn space—”
“Any time you feel like it,” I said, “to describe the states of any system you are interested in studying. When you are a fid, and your teacher sets a problem for you, your first step is always to set up the Hemn space appropriate to that problem.”
“So what is the Hemn space that Jad’s referring to, then?” Emman asked. “What is the system that his Hemn space gives all of the possible states of?”
“The cosmos,” I said.
“Oh!”
“Which, to him, is one possible track through an absurdly gigantic Hemn space. But that very same Hemn space can have points in it that do not lie on the track that is the history of our cosmos.”
“But they’re perfectly legitimate points?”
“A few of them are—a tiny few, actually—but in a space so huge, ‘a few’ can be enough to make many whole universes.”
“What about the other points? I mean the ones that aren’t legitimate?”
“They describe situations that are incoherent somehow.”
“A block of ice in the middle of a star,” Arsibalt suggested.
“Yes,” I said, “there is a point somewhere in Hemn space that describes a whole cosmos similar to ours, except that, somewhere in that cosmos, there’s a block of ice in the middle of a star. But that situation is impossible.”
Arsibalt translated, “There’s no past history that could make it happen, so it can’t be accessed by a plausible worldtrack.”
“But if you can suppress your curiosity about those for a moment,” I said to Emman, “the point I was getting at was that you can string the legitimate points—ones not visited by our worldtrack, but that make sense—into other worldtracks that make as much sense as ours.”
“But they’re not real,” Emman said, “or are they?”
I balked.
Arsibalt said, “That is a rather profound question of metatheorics. All of the points in Hemn space are equally real—just as all possible (x, y, z) values are equally real—since they are nothing more than lists of numbers. So what is it that imbues one set of those points—one worldtrack—with what we call realness?”