Vaygay ushered over a girl of eleven or twelve, her blond braids bobbing as she walked.
“This is my granddaughter, Nina… more or less. My Grand Duchess. I should have introduced you before. In Moscow.”
Ellie embraced the girl. She was relieved that Vaygay had not appeared with Meera, the ecdysiast. Ellie observed his tenderness toward Nina and decided she liked him more than ever. Over all the years she had known him, he had kept this secret place within his heart well hidden.
“I have not been a good father to her mother,” he confided. “These days, I hardly see Nina at all.”
She looked around her. The Stationmasters had produced for each of the Five what could only be described as their deepest loves. Perhaps it was only to ease the barriers of communication with another, appallingly different species. She was glad none of them were happily chatting with an exact copy of themselves.
What if you could do this back on Earth? she wondered. What if, despite all our pretense and disguise, it was necessary to appear in public with the person we loved most of all? Imagine this a prerequisite for social discourse on Earth. It would change everything. She imagined a phalanx of members of one sex surrounding a solitary member of the other. Or chains of people. Circles. The letters “H” or “Q.” Lazy figure-8s. You could monitor deep affections at a glance, just by looking at the geometry—a kind of general relativity applied to social psychology. The practical difficulties of such an arrangement would be considerable, but no one would be able to lie about love.
The Caretakers were in a polite but determined hurry. There was not much time to talk. The entrance to the air-lock of the dodecahedron was now visible, roughly where it had been when they first arrived. By symmetry, or perhaps because of some interdimensional conservation law, the Magritte doorway had vanished. They introduced everyone. She felt silly, in more ways than one, explaining in English to the Emperor Qin who her father was. But Xi dutiftilly translated, and they all solemnly shook hands as if this were their first encounter, perhaps at a suburban barbecue. Eda's wife was a considerable beauty, and Surindar Ghosh was giving her a more than casual inspection. Devi did not seem to mind; perhaps she was merely gratified at the accuracy of the imposture.
“Where did you go when you stepped through the doorway?” Ellie softly asked her. “Four-sixteen Maidenhall Way,” she answered. Ellie looked at her blankly. “London, 1973. With Surindar.” She nodded her head in his direction. “Before he died.” Ellie wondered what she would have found had she crossed that threshold on the beach. Wisconsin in the late “50s, probably. She hadn't shown up on schedule, so he had come to find her. He had done that in Wisconsin more than once.
Eda had also been told about a message deep inside a transcendental number, but in his story it was not? or e, the base of natural logarithms, but a class of numbers she had never heard of. With an infinity of transcendental numbers, they would never know for sure which number to examine back on Earth.
“I hungered to stay and work on it,” he told Ellie softly, “and I sensed they needed help—some way of thinking about the decipherment that hadn't occurred to them. But I think it's something very personal for them. They don't want to share it with others. And realistically, I suppose we just aren't smart enough to give them a hand.”
They hadn't decrypted the message in?? The Station-masters, the Caretakers, the designers of new galaxies hadn't figured out a message that had been sitting under their thumbs for a galactic rotation or two?
Was the message that difficult, or were they…? “Time to go home,” her father said gently. It was wrenching. She didn't want to go. She tried staring at the palm frond. She tried asking more questions.
“How do you mean “go home'? You mean we're going to emerge somewhere in the solar system? How will we get down to Earth?”
“You'll see,” he answered. “It'll be interesting.” He put his arm around her waist, guiding her toward the open airlock door.
It was like bedtime. You could be cute, you could ask bright questions, and maybe they'd let you stay up a little later. It used to work, at least a little.
“The Earth is linked up now, right? Both ways. If we can go home, you can come down to us in a jiffy.
You know, that makes me awfully nervous. Why don't yon just sever the link? We'll take it from here.”
“Sorry, Presh,” he replied, as if she had already shamelessly prolonged her eight o'clock bedtime. Was he sorry about bedtime, or about being unready to denozzle the tunnel? “For a while at least, it'll be open only to inbound traffic,” he said. “But we don't expect to use it.”
She liked the isolation of the Earth from Vega. She preferred a fifty-two-year-long leeway between unacceptable behavior on Earth and the arrival of a punitive expedition. The black hole link was uncomfortable. They could arrive almost instantaneously, perhaps only in Hokkaido, perhaps anywhere on Earth. It was a transition to what Hadden had called microintervention. No matter what assurances they gave, they would watch us more closely now. No more dropping in for a casual look-see every few million years.
She explored her discomfort further. How… theological… the circumstances had become. Here were beings who live in the sky, beings enormously knowledgeable and pow-erful, beings concerned for our survival, beings with a set of expectations about how we should behave. They disclaim such a role, but they could clearly visit reward and punishment, life and death, on the puny inhabitants of Earth. Now how is this different, she asked herself, from the old-time religion? The answer occurred to her instantly: It was a matter of evidence. In her videotapes, in the data the others had acquired, there would be hard evidence of the existence of the Station, of what went on here, of the blackhole transit system. There would be five independent, mutually corroborative stories supported by compelling physical evidence. This one was fact, not hearsay and hocus-pocus.
She turned toward him and dropped the frond. Wordlessly, he stooped and returned it to her.
“You've been very generous in answering all my questions. Can I answer any for you?”
“Thanks. You answered all our questions last night.”
“That's it? No commandments? No instructions for the provincials?”
“It doesn't work that way, Presh. You're grown up now. You're on your own.” He tilted his head, gave her that grin, and she flew into his arms, her eyes again filling with tears. It was a long embrace. Eventually, she felt him gently disengage her arms. It was time to go to bed. She imagined holding up her index finger and asking for still one more minute. But she did not want to disappoint him. “Bye, Presh,” he said. “Give your mother my love.” “Take care,” she replied in a small voice. She took one last look at the seashore at the center of the Galaxy. A pair of seabirds, petrels perhaps, were suspended on some rising column of air. They remained aloft with hardly a beat of their wings. Just at the entrance to the airlock, she turned and called to him.
“What does your Message say? The one in pi?”
“We don't know,” he replied a little sadly, taking a few steps toward her. “Maybe it's a kind of statistical accident. We're still working on it.” The breeze stirred up, tousling her hair once again. “Well, give us a call when you figure it out,” she said.
CHAPTER 21
Causality
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods—
They kill us for their sport.
Who is all-powerful should fear everything.