The Light of Other Days

part 1: THE GOLDFISH BOWL Chapter 6 - THE BILLION-DOLLAR PEARL
David, with Hiram and Bobby, sat before a giant SoftScreen spread across the Wormworks countinghouse wall. The "Screen image - returned by a fiberoptic camera that had been snaked into the heart of the Wormworks" superconducting-magnet nest - was nothing but darkness, marred by an occasional stray pixel, a prickle of color and light.

A digital counter in a comer display worked its way down toward zero.

Hiram paced impatiently around the cramped, cluttered countinghouse; David's assistant technicians cowered from him, avoiding his eyes. Hiram snapped, "How do you know the bloody wormhole is even open?"

David suppressed a smile. "You don't need to whisper." He pointed to the comer display. Beside the countdown clock was a small numerical caption, a sequence of prime numbers scrolling upward from two to thirty-one, over and over. "That's the test signal, sent through the wormhole by the Brisbane crew at the normal gamma-ray wavelengths. So we know we managed to find and stabilize a wormhole mouth - without a remote anchor - and the Australians have been able to locate it."

During his three months" work here, David had quickly discovered a way to use modulations of exotic-matter pulses to battle the wormholes" inherent instability. Turning that into practical and repeatable engineering, of course, had been immensely difficult but in the end successful.

"Our placement of the remote mouth isn't so precise yet. I'm afraid our Australian colleagues have to chase our wormhole mouths through the dust out there. Chasing fizzers over the gibbers, as they put it... But still, now we can open up a wormhole to anywhere. What we don't know yet is whether we're going to be able to expand the holes up to visible-light dimensions."

Bobby was leaning easily against a table, legs crossed, looking fit and relaxed, as if he'd just come off a tennis court-as perhaps he had, mused David. "I think we ought to give David a lot of credit. Dad. After all he has solved half the problem already."

"Yes," Hiram said, "but I don't see anything but gamma rays squirted in by some broken-nosed Aussie. Unless we can find a way to expand these bloody things, we're wasting my money. And I can't stomach all this waiting! Why just one test run a day?"

"Because," said David evenly, "we have to analyze the results from each test, strip down the Casimir gear, reset the control equipment and detectors. We have to understand each failure before we can go ahead toward success." That is, he added silently, before I can extricate myself from his complex family entanglement and return to the comparative calm of Oxford, funding battles, ferocious academic rivalry and all.

Bobby asked, "What exactly is it we're looking for? What will a wormhole mouth look like?"

"I can answer that one," Hiram said, still pacing. "I grew up with enough bad pop-science shows. A wormhole is a shortcut through a fourth dimension. You have to cut a chunk out of our three-dimensional space and join it onto another such chunk, over in Brisbane."

Bobby raised an eyebrow at David.

David said carefully, "It's a little more complicated. But he's more right than wrong. A wormhole mouth is a sphere, floating freely in space. A three-dimensional excision. If we succeed with the expansion, for the first time we'll be able to see our wormhole mouth with a hand lens, anyhow..." The countdown clock was down to a single digit. David said, "Heads up, everybody. Here we go."

The ripples of conversation in the room died away, and everyone turned to the digital clock.

The count reached zero.

And nothing happened.

There were events, of course. The track counter racked up a respectable score, showing heavy and energetic particles passing through the detector array, the debris of an exploded wormhole. The array's pixel elements, each firing individually as a particle passed through them, could later be used to trace the paths of debris fragments in three dimensions-paths which could then be reconstructed and analyzed.

Lots of data, lots of good science. But the big wall SoftScreen remained blank. No signal.

David suppressed a sigh. He opened up the logbook and entered details of the run in his round, neat hand; around him his technicians began equipment diagnostics.

Hiram looked into David's face, at the empty "Screen, at the technicians. "Is that it? Did it work?"

Bobby touched his father's shoulder. "Even I can tell it didn't. Dad." He pointed to the prime-number test sequence. It had frozen on thirteen. "Unlucky thirteen," murmured Bobby.

"Is he right? David, did you screw up again?"

"This wasn't a failure. Just another test. You don't understand science, Father. Now, when we run the analysis and learn from this."

"Jesus Christ on a bike! I should have left you rotting in bloody Oxford. Call me when you have something." Hiram, shaking his head, stalked from the room.

When he left, the feeling of relief in the room was palpable. The technicians - silver-haired particle physicists all, many of them older than Hiram, some of them with distinguished careers beyond OurWorld - started to file out.

When they'd gone, David sat before a SoftScreen to begin his own follow-up work.

He brought up his favored desktop metaphor. It was like a window into a cluttered study, with books and documents piled in untidy heaps on the floor and shelves and tables, and with complex particle-decay models hanging like mobiles from the ceiling. When he looked around the "room," the point at the focus of his attention expanded, opening out more detail, the rest of the room blurring to a background wash. He could "pick up" documents and models with a fingertip, rummaging until he found what he wanted, exactly where he'd left it last time.

First he had to check for detector pixel faults. He began passing the vertex detector traces into the analog signal bus, and pulled out a blow-up overview of various detector slabs. There were always random failures of pixels when some especially powerful particle hit a detector element. But, though some of the detectors had suffered enough radiation damage to require replacement, there was nothing serious for now.

Humming, immersed in the work, he prepared to move on-

"Your user interface is a mess."

David, startled, turned. Bobby was still here: still leaning, in fact, against his table.

"Sorry," David said. "I didn't mean to turn my back." How odd that he hadn't even noticed his brother's continued presence.

Bobby said now, "Most people use the Search Engine."

"Which is irritatingly slow, prone to misunderstanding and which anyhow masks a Victorian-era hierarchical data-storage system. Filing cabinets. Bobby, I'm too dumb for the Search Engine. I'm just an unevolved ape who likes to use his hands and eyes to find things. This may look a mess, but I know exactly where everything is."

"But still, you could study this particle-track stuff a lot better as a virtual. Let me set up a trial of my latest Mind'sEye prototype for you. We can reach more areas of the brain, switch more quickly..."

"And all without the need for trepanning."

Bobby smiled.

"All right," David said. "I'd appreciate that."

Bobby's gaze roamed around the room in that absent, disconcerting way of his. "Is it true? What you told Dad - that this isn't a failure, but just another step?"

"I can understand Hiram's impatience. After all he's paying for all of this."

"And he's working under commercial pressure," Bobby said. "Already some of his competitors are claiming to have DataPipes of comparable quality to Hiram's. It surely won't be long before one of them comes up with the idea of a remote viewer-independently, if nobody's leaked it already."

"But commercial pressure is irrelevant," David said testily. "A study like this has to proceed at its own pace. Bobby, I don't know how much you know about physics."

"Assume nothing. Once you have a wormhole, what's so difficult about expanding it?"

"It's not as if we're building a bigger and better car. We're trying to push spacetime into a form it wouldn't naturally adopt. Look, wormholes are intrinsically unstable. You know that to keep them open at all we have to thread them with exotic matter."

"Antigravity."

"Yes. But the tension in the throat of a wormhole is gigantic. We're constantly balancing one huge pressure against another." David balled his fists and pressed them against each other, hard. "As long as they are balanced, fine. But the smallest perturbation and you lose everything." He let one fist slide over the other, breaking the equilibrium he'd established. "And that fundamental instability grows worse with size. What we're attempting is to monitor conditions inside the wormhole, and adjust the pumping of exotic matter-energy to compensate for fluctuations." He pressed his fists against each other again; this time, as he jiggled the left back and forth, he compensated with movements of his right, so his knuckles stayed pressed together.

"I get it," Bobby said. "As if you're threading the wormhole with software."

"Or with a smart worm." David smiled. "Yes. It's very processor-intensive. And so far, the instabilities have been too rapid and catastrophic to deal with.

"Look at this." He reached to his desktop and, with the touch of a fingertip, he pulled up a fresh view of a particle cascade. It had a strong purple trunk - the color showing heavy ionization - with clusters of red jets, wide and narrow, some straight, others curved. He tapped a key, and the spray rotated in three dimensions; the software suppressed foreground elements to allow details of the jet's inner structure to become visible. The central spray was surrounded by numbers showing energy, momentum and charge readings. "We're looking at a high-energy, complex event here, Bobby. All this exotic garbage spews out before the wormhole disappears completely." He sighed. "It's like trying to figure out how to fix a car by blowing it up and combing through the debris.

"Bobby, I was honest with Father. Every trial is an exploration of another corner of what we call parameter space, as we try different ways of making our wormhole viewers wide and stable. There are no wasted trials; every time we proceed we learn something. In fact many of my tests are negative - I actually design them to fail. A single test which proves some piece of theory wrong is more valuable than a hundred tests showing that idea might be true. Eventually we'll get there... or else we'll prove Hiram's dream is impossible, with present-day technology."

"Science demands patience."

David smiled. "Yes. It always has. But for some it is hard to remain patient, in the face of the black meteor which approaches us all."

"The Wormwood? But that's centuries off."

"But scientists are hardly alone in being affected by the knowledge of its existence. There is an impulse to hurry, to gather as much data and formulate new theories, to learn as much as possible in the time that is left, because we no longer are sure there will be anybody to build on our work, as we've always assumed in the past. And so people take shortcuts, the peer review process is under pressure..."

Now a red alert light started flashing high on the countinghouse wall, and technicians began to drift back into the room.

Bobby looked at David quizzically. "You're setting up to run again? You told Dad you only ran one trial a day."

David winked. "A little white lie. I find it useful to have a way to get rid of him."

Bobby laughed.

It turned out there was time to fetch coffee before the new run began. They walked together to the cafeteria.

Bobby is lingering, David thought. As if he wants to be involved. He sensed a need here, a need he didn't understand - perhaps even envy. Was that possible?

It was a wickedly delicious thought. Perhaps Bobby Patterson, fabulously rich, this latter-day dandy, envies me - his earnest, dronelike brother.

Or perhaps that's just sibling rivalry on my part.

Walking back, he sought to make conversation.

"So. Were you a grad student, Bobby?"

"Sure. But at HBS."

"HBS? Oh. Harvard."

"Business School. Yes."

"I took some business studies as part of my first degree," David said. He grimaced. "The courses were intended to "equip us for the modem world." All those two-by-two matrices, the fads for this theory or that, for one management guru or another..."

"Well, business analysis isn't rocket science, as we used to say," Bobby murmured evenly. "But nobody at Harvard was a dummy. I won my place there on merit. And the competition there was ferocious."

"I'm sure it was." David was puzzled by Bobby's flat tone of voice, his lack of fire. He probed gently. "I have the impression you feel ... underestimated."

Bobby shrugged. "Perhaps. The VR division of OurWorld is a billion-buck business in its own right. If I fail, Dad's made it clear he's not going to bail me out. But even Kate thinks I'm some kind of placeholder." Bobby grinned. "I'm enjoying trying to convince her otherwise."

David frowned. Kate?... Ah, the girl reporter Hiram had tried to exclude from his son's life. Without success, it seemed. Interesting. "Do you want me to keep quiet?"

"What about?"

"Kate. The reporter."

"There isn't really anything to keep quiet about."

"Perhaps. But Father doesn't approve of her. Have you told him you're still seeing her?"

"No."

And this may be the only thing in your young life, David thought, which Hiram doesn't know about. Well, let's keep it that way. David felt pleased to have established this small bond between them.

Now the countdown clock neared its conclusion. Once more the wall-mounted SoftScreen showed an inky darkness, broken only by random pixel flashes, and with the numeric monitor in the comer dully repeating its test list of primes. David watched with amusement as Bobby's lips silently formed the count numbers: Three. Two. One.

And then Bobby's mouth hung open in shock, a flickering light playing on his face.

David swiveled his gaze to the SoftScreen.

This time there was an image, a disc of light. It was a bizarre, dreamy construct of boxes and strip lights and cables, distorted almost beyond recognition, as if seen through some grotesque fish-eye lens.

David found he was holding his breath. As roe image stayed stable for two seconds, three, he deliberately sucked in air.

Bobby asked, "What are we seeing?"

"The wormhole mouth. Or rather, the light it's pulling in from its surroundings, here, the Wormworks. Look, you can see the electronics stack. But the strong gravity of the mouth is dragging in light from the three-dimensional space all around it. The image is being distorted."

"Like gravitational tensing."

He looked at Bobby in surprise. "Exactly that." He checked the monitors. "We're already passing our previous best..."

Now the distortion of the image became stronger, as the shapes of equipment and light fixtures were smeared to circles surrounding the view's central point. Some of the colors seemed to be Doppler-shifting now, a green support strut starting to look blue, the fluorescents" glare taking on a tinge of violet.

"We're pushing deeper into the wormhole," David whispered. "Don't give up on me now."

The image fragmented further, its elements crumbling and multiplying in a repeating pattern around the disc shaped image. It was a three-dimensional kaleidoscope, David thought, formed by multiple images of the lab's illumination. He glanced at counter readouts, which told him that much of the energy of the light falling into the wormhole had been shifted to the ultraviolet and beyond, and the energized radiation was pounding the curved walls of this spacetime tunnel.

But the wormhole was holding.

They were far past the point where all previous experiments had collapsed.

Now the disc image began to shrink as the light, falling from three dimensions onto the wormhole mouth, was compressed by the wormhole's throat into a narrowing pipe. The scrambled, shrinking puddle of light reached a peak of distortion.

And then the quality of light changed. The multiple image structure became simpler, expanding, seeming to unscramble itself, and David began to pick out elements of a new visual field: a smear of blue that might be sky, a pale white that could be an instrument box.

He said: "Call Hiram."

Bobby said, "What are we looking at?"

"Just call Father, Bobby."

Hiram arrived at a run an hour later. "It better be worth it. I broke up an investors" meeting..."

David, wordlessly, handed him a slab of lead-glass crystal the size and shape of a pack of cards. Hiram turned the slab over, inspecting it.

The upper surface of the slab was ground into a magnifying lens, and when Hiram looked into it, he saw miniaturized electronics: photomultiplier light detectors for receiving signals, a light-emitting diode capable of emitting flashes for testing, a small power supply, miniature electromagnets. And, at the geometric center of the slab, there was a tiny, perfect sphere, just at the limit of visibility. It looked silvery, reflective, like a pearl; but the quality of light it returned wasn't quite the hard gray of the countinghouse's fluorescents.

Hiram turned to David. "What am I looking at?"

David nodded at the big wall SoftScreen. It showed a round blur of light, blue and brown.

A face came looming into the image: a human face, a man somewhere in his forties, perhaps. The image was heavily distorted - it was exactly as if he had pushed his face into a fish-eye lens - but David could make out a knot of curly black hair, leathery sun-beaten skin, white teeth in a broad smile.

"It's Walter," Hiram said, wondering. "Our Brisbane station head." He moved closer to the SoftScreen. "He's saying something. His lips are moving." He stood there, mouth moving in sympathy. "I... see... you. I see you. My God."

Behind Walter, other Aussie technicians could be seen now, heavily distorted shadows, applauding in silence.

David grinned, and submitted to Hiram's whoops and bear hugs, all the while keeping his eye on the leadglass slab containing the wormhole mouth, that billiondollar pearl.