As the moment approached, people started chanting a countdown. Blanca searched for Gabriel; he was surrounded by demonstrative strangers, but when he saw ver approaching he broke away.
"Five!"
Gabriel took vis hand. "I'm sorry."
"Four!"
He said, "I didn't want to be with the others. I didn't want to be with anyone but you."
"Three!"
Fear flashed in his eyes. "My outlook's programmed to cushion me, but I don't know how I'll take this."
"Two!"
"One traversable wormhole, and then the rest is mass-production. I've made this my whole life. I've made this my whole purpose."
"ONE!"
"I cap, find another goal, choose another goal, but then who will I be?"
Blanca reached up and touched his cheek, not knowing what to say. Vis own outlook was much less focused; ve'd never faced a sharp transition like this.
"ZERO!"
The crowd fell silent. Blanca waited for the uproar, the cheers, the screams of triumph. Nothing. Gabriel looked down, then Blanca did too. The femtomouth was scattering the lasers' ultraviolet, as ever, but no gamma rays were emerging.
Blanca said, "The other mouth must have drifted out of the focus."
Gabriel laughed nervously. "But it didn't. We were there, and the instruments said nothing." People around them were whispering their own theories discreetly, but their gestalt seemed more tolerantly amused than derisive. After eight centuries of setbacks, it would have been too good to be true if the Forge had delivered the definitive proof of its success at the first opportunity.
"Then there must be a calibration error. If the mouth drifted, but the instruments thought it was still at the focus, then the whole system needs to be recalibrated."
"Yes." Gabriel ran his hands through the fur of his face, then laughed. "Here I am expecting to fall off the edge of the world, and one more thing goes wrong to save me.”
"One final screw-up to smooth the transition. What more could you ask for?"
"Yeah."
"And then what?"
He shrugged, suddenly embarrassed by the whole question. "You said it yourself: linking the Forge is only the start. We haven't wrapped the universe in wormholes yet. And at this rate, there'll he screw-ups to smooth the transition for another eight hundred years."
Blanca spent half a gigatau exploring vis new imaginary world, fine-tuning the parameters and starting again a thousand times, but never intervening and sculpting the landscape directly. That was wicked—it made it less artful, and more mock-physical—but no one had to know. When ve opened it up to the public, people would marvel at its perfect blend of consistency and spontaneity.
Ve was sitting on the edge of a deep canyon, watching leaf-green dust clouds flow in around ver like a vivid but ethereal waterfall, when Gabriel appeared. Blanca had spent some time worrying about the problems with the Forge, but within the first megatau it had slipped from vis thoughts completely. Ve knew they'd sort it out, the way they'd sorted out every other obstacle. It was always just a matter of perseverance.
Gabriel said calmly, "Gamma rays are coming through the far end now."
"That's wonderful! What was the problem? A misaligned laser?"
"There was no problem. We haven't carried out any repairs. We haven't changed a thing."
"What, the mouth just drifted back into the focus? Is it oscillating back and forth in the trap?"
Gabriel dipped his hands into the green flow. He was always sitting at the Locus, perfectly positioned. "The gamma rays we're seeing now are the ones that went in at the start. We coded all the pulses with a time stamp, remember? Well, the first pulses to emerge had the time stamp for the gamma rays sent in five and a half days ago. They've taken as long to come out as if they'd crossed the ordinary space between the mouths. Exactly, down to the picosecond. The wormhole is traversable, but it isn't a short cut. It's a hundred and forty billion kilometers long."
Blanca absorbed this in silence. Asking if he was sure didn't seem like a good idea; the Forge group would have spent the last few megatau searching frantically for a more palatable conclusion.
Finally, ve said, "Why? Do you have any ideas?'
He shrugged. "The only thing we can come up with that makes any sense is this: the total energy of the wormhole depends almost entirely on the size and shape of the mouths. It's the mouths that interact with virtual gravitons; the wormhole tunnel can be as long or short as you like, and the mouths will still have exactly the same mass."
"Yes, but that's no reason for the tunnel to grow longer, just because the mouths are moved apart in external space."
"Wait. There's a tiny correction to the total energy that does depend on length. If the wormhole is shorter than the path through external space, then the energy of the virtual particles passing through it will be slightly higher than the normal vacuum energy. So if the wormhole is free to adjust its length to minimize that energy, the internal distance between the mouths will end up the same as the external distance."
"But the wormhole isn't free to do that! Kozuch Theory won't allow it to grow longer than ten-to-the-minus-thirty-five meters; in the six extra dimensions, the whole universe is no wider than that!"
Gabriel said dryly, "It seems Kozuch Theory has a few problems. First Lacerta, still unexplained. Now this." The gleisners had put a non-sentient probe into orbit around the Lacerta black hole, but it had revealed nothing about the cause of the neutron stars' collision.
They sat in silence for a while, legs hanging over the canyon's edge, watching the green mist cascading down. In terms of a pure intellectual challenge, Gabriel couldn't have hoped for more: Kozuch Theory would have to be completely re-assessed, or even replaced, and the instrument he'd spent the last eight hundred years helping to build would be at the center of the transformation.
It was only as a short cut to the stars that the Forge had turned out to be a complete waste of time.
Blanca said, "You've brought us closer to the truth. That's never a defeat."
Gabriel laughed bitterly. "No? There's already talk of cloning a thousand copies of Carter-Zimmerman and dispatching them all in different directions, to help us catch up with the gleisners. If the wormholes had been instantly traversable they would have bound the whole galaxy together; we could have moved from star to star as easily as we jump from scape to scape. But now we're destined for fragmentation. A few clones of C-Z will fly off to the stars, centuries will pass… and by the time any news comes back the other polises will be past caring. We'll all drift apart." He scooped a handful of dust forward, speeding its fall over the precipice. "I was going to build a network spanning the universe. That's who I was: the citizen who'd put it all in the palms of our hands. Who am I now?"
"Instigator of the next scientific revolution."
"No." He shook his head slowly. "I can't turn that corner. I can live with failure. I can live with humiliation. I can meekly follow the gleisners into space, slower than light, accepting that there's no better way after all. But don't expect me to take the thing that's poisoned my dreams and embrace it as some kind of triumphant revelation."
Blanca watched him staring morosely into the distance. Ve'd been wrong, for all these centuries: the elegance of Kozuch Theory had never been enough for Gabriel. So the chance to uncover and remove its flaws was no consolation to him at all.
Blanca stood. "Come on."