To Raoul it sounded like a typical Ghost experiment: extremes of low temperature, the fringe areas of physical law.
‘Jack Raoul, you must understand that the quantum wave function is no mathematical abstraction, but a physical entity. We have split and trapped a wave function itself – perhaps the first time in the history of the universe this has occurred,’ the Ghost said immodestly.
Raoul suppressed a sigh. ‘You guys never do anything simply, do you? So you split an electron’s wave function. So what?’
‘The half-electrons, coming from the same source, are forever entangled. Put another way, if the bubbles are separated and the wave function collapsed, an electron can leap from one bubble to another…’
Raoul fought his way through that fog of words. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Teleportation. You’re talking about a new kind of teleportation. Right? And that’s what you used to get me out of my cell.’
‘Yes. Time was short, Jack Raoul. Your conspecifics were closing in.’
So they were, and so they had been for decades.
Still they rose through the crowded tangle. That all-consuming light seemed, if anything, to be growing brighter. He could sense deep vibrations passing through the ship’s structure, the booming low-frequency calls of Silver Ghosts. Here and there he saw denser concentrations – nurseries, perhaps, or control centres, or simply areas where Ghosts lived and played – little more than patches of silvery shadow, like birds’ nests in the branches of some vast tree. It was characteristic Ghost architecture, vibrant, complex, beautiful, alive – and totally inhuman.
It had always seemed to Jack Raoul that humans and Ghosts were different enough that everybody could get along. Their goals were utterly unlike humanity’s, after all. That had been the motivation behind the patchwork of treaties eventually known as the Raoul Accords. But times changed.
When Raoul was a boy, the human colonisation programme was still piecemeal, driven by individual initiative. The leading edge of the Third Expansion had been too remote from the centre, Earth, to be tightly controlled. Players like Jack Raoul had freedom of movement. But gradually the Coalition – especially its executive arm the Commission for Historical Truth – had infiltrated all mankind’s power centres. The ideologues of the Coalition had provided the species with a unity of purpose, belief, even language. The Third Expansion became purposeful, a powerful engine of conquest.
But from Jack Raoul’s point of view, it was all downside. The pro-human ideology grew ferocious. Soon even longevity, like Raoul’s, was seen as a crime against the interests of the species. As the short generations had ticked by, and as the worlds of humanity filled up with fifteen-year-old soldiers, Raoul had come to feel like a monument left standing from an earlier, misunderstood era.
And it got worse.
Raoul had been summoned back to Earth, to appear before the Commission for Historical Truth. It was part of the great cleansing that had been pursued ever since the days after the fall of the Qax Occupation of Earth, when collaborators had been hunted down and judged. After a curt hearing, Raoul’s life’s work had been retrospectively labelled as counter to the evolutionary interests of mankind.
His advisers had urged him to appeal. Everything he had done had been under the specific direction of legally constituted governments and inter-governmental bodies of the time. But he wasn’t about to justify himself to a bunch of children. He knew the true value of his legacy. After all, it had cost him his own humanity.
And so sentence had been passed.
‘How did you and I get to be the bad guys, Ambassador?’
The Ambassador’s perfect hide cast glimmering highlights from the tangle sliding past them. ‘We are old, Jack Raoul. Old and out of our time.’
‘That we are, my friend.’
‘Nevertheless, Jack Raoul, you have been a valuable interface between our species. Many sentient beings were saved from unhappiness and premature termination by your actions. This “punishment” is absurd and disproportionate. It is probably not even legal in your own terms.’
‘You’re storing up trouble,’ Raoul said. ‘Like it or not, I was tried by humanity’s highest court. If you intervene it will surely go badly for you; the Coalition is not noted for its forgiveness. As for me, maybe it’s my duty to sit tight and take my punishment. I will be the greater martyr for it.’
‘See what we offer you, Jack Raoul, before you turn it down for the sake of martyrdom.’
At last, Raoul saw, their steady rise was slowing, the tangle of silver cables thinning out, as if they were reaching the top of a vast metallic tree. But there was still no sign of black, star-studded sky above; rather he made out swathes of light, glowing brightly, bright as the sun. Maybe the ship was actually sailing through the outer layers of a sun; it wouldn’t be the first time the Ghosts had pulled such a stunt.
But the light, so his smart eyes quickly told him, was too complex for that. It was as if the sky was crowded with stars, every place he looked.
And suddenly he understood. Olbers’ paradox…
‘Sink Ambassador. This teleportation technique of yours. It can carry you from one side of the universe to the other. Yes?’
‘Further than that.’
‘And the light that bathes us—’
‘It is starlight, Jack Raoul. Nothing but starlight.’
Again he had the sense that someone called him. He ascended into the light, seeking the voice.
‘After several seconds the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the eyes took on the same appearance as before.
‘I called out again.
‘Once more, without any spasm, the lids lifted. Undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete.’
He looked down at the Ghost ship, a mass of entwined silvery cables with knots of life embedded everywhere, all of it glowing in the endless starlight. He could still make out the Sink Ambassador, a mercury droplet clinging to the tangle.
But the structure was shrinking, closing on itself. The sky was a sphere of light, glowing white, and he felt he was being drawn away from the tangle, up into the light.
‘Olbers’ paradox,’ he whispered.
‘Yes,’ said the Ghost. ‘A key moment in the evolution of human thought, a philosophical fossil preserved by exiles through the Qax Extirpation … If the universe were infinite and static, every line of sight would meet the surface of a star, and the whole sky would be as bright as the surface of a sun. Even occluding dust clouds would soon become as hot as the stars themselves. That was evidently not so, observed those thinkers of old Earth. Therefore their universe could not be infinite or static.’
‘But here—’
‘But here, things are different. This appears to be a pocket universe, Jack Raoul. We believe it is a bubble of spacetime pinched off by a singularity. The heart of a black hole, perhaps.’
‘Infinite and static.’
‘Yes.’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Raoul said. ‘If the whole sky is as hot as the surface of the sun – Ambassador, how do you keep cool?’
The Ghost rolled, shimmering. ‘There is another pocket universe at the centre of the colony. Our heat is dumped there.’
Raoul gaped. ‘You have a whole universe for a heat dump? And is that how the stars keep shining?’
‘We think so. Otherwise, immersed in this heat bath, simple thermodynamics would soon cause the stars to evaporate. We have only recently arrived here, Jack Raoul; there is much we have yet to explore. But it is clear to us that this cosmos is heavily engineered.’