“We’ve advanced along Mars’s orbit fifty million two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers,” Hergesheimer sang out.
Ti Sandra shook her head, still beaming at me, eyes crinkled down to slits with her pride and her love. I wondered at the lightness of her touch.
“Now for the first big leap,” Stephen said. “Charles?”
“Assessing,” Charles said.
I had glanced away at the sound of Stephen’s voice. When I glanced back, Ti Sandra was not there, of course, but her touch on my arm remained.
I settled back into the couch, mouth dry as flopsand, and let the projectors find my eyes again, filling my field of view.
“There’s no greater time lag — no lag at all,” Charles said. “But we’ll seem to be in the blanking longer, you and I and the QL and interpeter. We have a lot more translation to do — to the larger system. That will seem to put us outside status quo longer.”
Status quo — things as they are. All the familiarities to which our minds adapt from infancy. Home ground, home turf, home rule.
“The longest ever for the QL,” I said.
“Right,” Charles affirmed.
“Temptations.”
Charles chuckled.
“Dangerous for you, too?”
“You bet,” he said.
“Like sex.”
“Much worse, dear Casseia,” he said. “I’m in here with the QL, keeping it from getting distracted, but I experience most of what it experiences.”
“You told me once you wanted to understand everything,” I said.
“I remember.”
“In the blankness… I wanted to play around, too.”
“If we played for an eternity,” Charles said, “we might learn how to put together a universe. You and I.”
“But you say there’s no time passing.”
“Eternity means no time. Infinity without time. A ring of bright and endless theorizing. The ultimate play.”
Leander broke in. “Are you still working, Charles?”
“Still at it,” Charles said. “You want reports?”
“Don’t keep us guessing, Charles,” Leander said.
“QL has finished assessing the planet and the site, and it’s preparing to fix the books,” Charles said. “Don’t mind us, Stephen.”
“Don’t mess with her mind too much, Charles,” Stephen said. “We need her after you’re done.”
“You’ll see something different, this time,” Charles told me, his voice barely above a whisper. Intimacy beyond that of man and wife: the intimacy of two young gods. “I think it will be part of the QL’s longer acquaintance with the larger system. It will be measuring the highest level of superposited descriptors, up to, and maybe beyond those that are actually in use…”
“Unused descriptors,” I said.
“Or no longer in use,” Charles said. “Descriptors for things that once were, or might be. Or for nothing at all. Vestigial or excessive.”
“How many minutes until frame shift?” Leander asked.
“Four minutes,” Charles said.
“Earth might get a fix on our new position and start again,” Leander said.
“To hell with them,” Charles said. I could tell he was smiling, man on a powerful horse, riding confidently. But that horse was going to grow unbearably magnificent in the next few minutes.
“What would you use them for, Charles?” I asked.
“The untagged descriptors?”
“Yes.”
“I think they’re waiting for when we’re mature. We could make new forms of matter. We could translate all human information into the upper memory of mass and energy. We could trick space into believing it was matter or energy, or into believing it was something we can’t even conceive now.”
“You talked about that once, a long time ago,” I said.
“A dialog with the radixes of creation.”
“Radishes?” Leander interrupted.
“Stephen,” Charles said, “leave us alone. We’re fine. Casseia is doing her job.”
“She sounds more theoretical than political,” Leander said dourly.
“One minute,” Charles said.
I had a card to play, to keep Charles rooted in this particular creation. Now seemed the best time.
“I’ve thought of you often,” I said.
“What?” Charles seemed puzzled by the shift.
“I’ve thought of you often since we were together.”
“I’ve caused enough trouble, no?”
“I’ve thought about what you said, when we were trading ambitions. I think I know why I turned you down, Charles.”
He said nothing.
“I did love you, but you were going places I could never go-”
“Right,” he said softly.
“It seems terrible to say it, but I wanted to be with someone less stimulating.”
“Right.”
Leander whispered in my ear, “Casseia, what in hell are you doing?”
I pushed him away. “There was a moment when I felt so close to you, years after, I felt as if we had actually gotten married and lived a lifetime together. You came to my rescue, Charles.”
“When was that?”
“I had my back against a wall, talking with Sean Dickinson.”
“You liked Sean.”
“He was acting on Earth’s behalf after the Freeze. He was forcing us — me — to give up everything. I never felt so trapped in my life. Then you sent your message.”
“Ti Sandra — ” Charles said.
I interrupted. “I went to the surface and looked west and saw Phobos through the clouds.” My voice hitched again with the emotion of that moment. “I knew what you were going to do. And you did it. You took all my burdens away. My God, what you did for me then, Charles. I was so very proud.”
“I’m glad,” Charles said.
The image of Mars grew dark in my field of view. Through the darkness I saw the potential coming, the blankness a huge animal moving through void to reach us. The impression of its living beauty petrified me, like a rabbit facing a tiger.
“Shifting frame now,” Charles said. I felt his calmness, his focus, his strength. Charles was really so simple, still a child. I had spoken a truth I had not been able to acknowledge until now, and he believed me.
“I love you,” I said.
“I always have, and I always will love you, Casseia,” Charles said. He took a deep breath. “Let’s play.”
Abruptly, the QL expanded the scale of our simulation. We seemed to hang over the Solar System, the inner planets bright points marked by armillaries of coordinates, references for descriptor bases, expansions of arrays for major effects on Mars.
Removing Mars would have virtually no effect on the sun or planets.
The tiger struck.
In the blankness, I wondered what the universe would be like if
Charles spoke to me reassuringly
There would have been no agreement between charges of particles having no extension, point-like particles such as the electron, and aggregates such as the neutron; and furthermore, superposition would not be possible, and the universe would crumble
But Charles held firm, and guided the QL
The blankness drew me into something like a dream, where all actuality was but a subset of
My life would have been
“Casseia.”
No going to Earth, staying home, no
“Casseia.”
My enhancement seemed to throw colored layers of notation at me, layer upon layer piling up in beautiful depths, staring through a sea of described realities, and within that sea, the Mars that I had known reduced to a vector space, a single state array forming the basis for everything thereafter, and that moment had been (searching out the root, the zero for its passage over an infinite plane of my existence)