“What’s a light bubble?” Emman asked me quietly.
“A diagram that shows how information—cause-and-effect—moves across space and time.”
“Time, which doesn’t exist?” Emman said, repeating what had become a stock joke.
“Yeah. But it’s okay. Space doesn’t exist either,” I said. Emman threw me a sharp look, and decided I must be pulling his leg.
“So how’s your friend Lio doing?” Emman asked, apropos of yesterday evening. It was noteworthy that he remembered Lio’s name, since there had been no formal introduction, and little conversation. In the Convox, people met one another in myriad ways, though, so they might have crossed paths anywhere. I would not have given this a second thought if not for the substance of what Lio and I had talked about. Yesterday I’d felt easy around Emman. Today it was different. People I cared about were being drawn into—in Ala’s case, perhaps leading—a subversive movement. Lio was trying to draw me into it even as Emman wanted to follow me to Lucub. Could it be that the Sæcular Power had got wind of it, and that Emman’s real mission was to ferret it out, using me as a way in? Not a very nice way to think—but that was the way I was going to have to think from now on.
I’d lain awake in my cell all night from a combination of jet lag and fear of a Fourth Sack. Good thing that most of the day had been a huge Plenary at which the story of last night’s satellite gambit had been told, and phototypes and speelies exhibited. The back pews of the Unarian nave were dark, and roomy enough that I and scores of Lucub-weary avout had been able to stretch out full-length and catch up on sleep. When it was over, someone had shaken me awake. I had stood up, rubbed my eyes, looked across the Nave, and caught sight of Ala—the first time I’d seen her since she had stepped through the screen at Voco. She had been a hundred feet away, standing in a circle of taller avout, mostly men, all older, but seemingly holding her own in some kind of serious conversation. Some of the men had been Sæculars in military uniforms. I had decided that now was not the best time for me to bounce up to her and say hello.
“Hey! Raz! Raz! How many fingers am I holding up?” Emman was demanding. Tris and Karvall thought that was funny. “How’s Lio doing?” he repeated.
“Busy,” I said, “busy like all of us. He’s been working out quite a bit with the Ringing Vale avout.”
Emman shook his head. “Nice that they’re getting exercise,” he said. “Love to know what joint locks and nerve pinches are going to do against the World Burner.”
My gaze went to the stack of phototypes. Emman slid a few out of the way and came up with a detail shot of a detachable pod bracketed to one of the shock absorbers. It was a squat grey metal egg, unmarked and undecorated. A structural lattice had been built around it to provide mountings for antennae, thrusters, and spherical tanks. Clearly the thing was meant to detach and move around under its own power. Holding it to the shock absorber was a system of brackets that reached through the lattice to engage the grey egg directly. This detail had drawn notice from the Convox. Calculations had been done on the size of those brackets. They were strangely oversized. They only needed to be so large if the thing they were holding—the grey egg—were massive. Unbelievably massive. This was no ordinary pressure vessel. Perhaps it had extremely thick walls? But the calculations made no sense if you assumed any sort of ordinary metal. The only way to sort it—to account for the sheer number of protons and neutrons in that thing—was to assume it was made from a metal so far out at the end of the table of elements that its nuclei—in any cosmos—were unstable. Fissionable.
This object was not just a tank. It was a thermonuclear device several orders of magnitude larger than the largest ever made on Arbre. The propellant tanks carried enough reaction mass to move it to an orbit antipodal to that of the mother ship. If it were detonated, it would shine enough radiant energy onto Arbre to set fire to whatever half of the planet could see it.
“I don’t think that the Valers are really expecting to swarm over the World Burner in space suits and subdue it with fisticuffs,” I said. “Actually, what impressed me most about them was their knowledge of military history and tactics.”
Emman held up his hands in surrender. “Don’t get me wrong. I would like to have them on my side.”
Again, I couldn’t help but see a hidden meaning. But then a bell rang. Like animals in a lab, we had learned to tell the bells apart, so we didn’t have to look to know who it was for. Arsibalt took a final gulp from his flagon and hustled out.
Moyra’s voice was coming through on the speaker: “Uthentine and Erasmas were Thousanders, so their treatise was not copied out into the mathic world until the Second Millennial Convox.” She was speaking of the two avout who had developed the notion of Complex Protism. “Even then, it received scant notice until the Twenty-seventh Century, when Fraa Clathrand, a Centenarian—later in his life, a Millenarian—at Saunt Edhar, casting an eye over these diagrams, remarked on the isomorphism between the causality-arrows in these networks, and the flow of time.”
“Isomorphism meaning—?” asked Zh’vaern.
“Sameness of form. Time flows, or seems to flow, in one direction,” Paphlagon said. “Events in the past can cause events in the present, but not vice versa, and time never loops round in a circle. Fraa Clathrand pointed out something noteworthy, which is that information about the cnoöns—the givens that flow along all of these arrows—behaves as if the cnoöns were in the past.”
Again, Emman was staring off into space, drawing connections in his head. “Paphlagon is also a Hundreder from Edhar, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s probably how he got interested in this topic—probably found Clathrand’s manuscripts lying around somewhere.”
“Twenty-seventh Century,” Emman repeated. “So, Clathrand’s works would’ve been distributed to the mathic world at large at the Apert of 2700?”
I nodded.
“Just eight decades before the rise of…” But he cut himself short and flicked his eyes nervously in my direction.
“Before the Third Sack,” I corrected him.
In the messallan, Lodoghir had been demanding an explanation. Moyra finally settled him down: “The entire premise of Protism is that the cnoöns can change us, in the quite literal and physical sense that they make our nerve tissue behave differently. But the reverse is not true. Nothing that goes on in our nerve tissue can make four into a prime number. All Clathrand was saying was that things in our past can likewise affect us in the present, but nothing we do in the present can affect the events of the past. And so here it seems we might have a perfectly commonplace explanation of something in these diagrams that might otherwise seem a bit mystical—namely, the purity and changelessness of cnoöns.”
And here, just as Arsibalt had predicted, the conversation turned into a tutorial about light bubbles, which was an old scheme used by theors to keep track of how knowledge, and cause-and-effect relationships, propagated from place to place over time.
“Very well,” said Zh’vaern eventually, “I’ll give you Clathrand’s Contention that any one of these DAGs—the Strider, the Wick, and so on—can be isomorphic to some arrangement of things in spacetime, influencing one another through propagation of information at the speed of light. But what does Clathrand’s Contention get us? Is he really asserting that the cnoöns are in the past? That we are just, somehow, remembering them?”
“Perceiving—not remembering,” Paphlagon corrected him. “A cosmographer who sees a star blow up perceives everything about it in his present—though intellectually he knows it happened thousands of years ago and the givens are only now reaching the objective of his telescope.”