I looked at him with outrage. “Can you explain how a dimension can just shrivel up?”
He smiled at me. “Fortunately not,” he said. “I say ‘fortunately’ because, if I could, it would probably get very mathematical, and then you’d be cutting me off right here. However, I can shed a little bit of light on what probably happened, anyway. By ’shrivel up,’ I mean they just don’t register anymore. Let me give you an illustration. Think of a point-say, the tip of your nose—”
“Oh, come on, Albert! We already did three-dimensional space!”
“The tip of your nose,” he repeated. “Relate that point to some other point, say your Adam’s apple. Your nose is so many millimeters up, and so many millimeters out, and so many millimeters across-that is to say, you specify its location on the x, y, and z axes. When we talk about nine-dimensional space instead of three, you can also say that it is at a specific point on the p, d, q, r, w, and k axes-or whatever letters you want to use to specify them-but.” He took a deep breath. “But you don’t have to specify those coordinates for any normal purpose, because the distances are so small they don’t signify. That’s it, Robin! Got it so far?”
I said happily, “I almost think so.”
“Fine,” he said, “because that’s almost right. It isn’t quite as simple as that. Those missing six dimensions-they’re not only small, they’re curved. They’re like little circles. Like little coiled-up spirals. They don’t go anywhere. They just go around.”
He stopped there, sucking his pipe and gazing approvingly at me.
He was twinkling again. There was something about the look in those guileless eyes that made me ask, “Albert, one question. Is all this stuff you’ve been telling me true?”
He hesitated. Then he shrugged. “’Truth,’” he said weightily, “is a really heavy word. I’m not ready to talk about reality yet, and that’s what you mean by ‘true.’ This is a model that explains things very, very well. It may as well be taken as ‘true,’ at least until a better model comes along. But, unfortunately, if you remember,” he said, perking up the way he always does when he gets a chance to quote from himself, “as my meat original said long ago, mathematics is most ‘true’ when it is least ’real,’ and vice versa. There are many elements I have not characterized here. We have not yet considered the implications of string theory, or of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, or—”
“Give it a rest, please,” I begged.
“I gladly will, Robin,” he said, “because you’ve been very good about all this. I appreciate your listening. Now there is some hope of your understanding the Foe and, more important, the basic structure of the universe.”
“More important!” I repeated.
He smiled. “In an objective sense, oh, yes, Robin. It is much more important to know than to do, and it doesn’t much matter who does the knowing.”
I got up and walked around. It seemed we’d been talking for a very long time, and then it occurred to me that that was good, because that was exactly what I wanted. I said, “Albert? How long did this little lecture of yours take?”
“You mean in galactic time? Let me see, yes, a little under four minutes.” And he saw my face and hurriedly added, “But we’re nearly a third of the way, Robin! Only a couple more weeks and we’ll be at the Watch Wheel!”
“A couple of weeks.”
He looked at me with concern. “There is still the option of powering down . . . No, of course not,” he said, watching my face. He looked irresolute for a moment, then he made up his mind. In a different tone he said, “Robin? When we were talking about what it is like for ‘me’ when I am not in being as your program, you said you didn’t believe me. I’m afraid you were justified. I have not beez~i entirely truthful with you.”
Nothing he ever said shocked me more. “Albert!” I yelped. “You haven’t lied to me? You can’t!”
He said apologetically, “That’s correct, Robin, I have never lied to you. But there are truths I haven’t said.”
“You mean you do feel something when you’re turned oft?”
“No. I told you that. There’s no ‘me’ to feel.”
“Then what, for God’s sake?”
“There are things I do-experience-that you never have, Robin. When I am merged into another program, I am that program. Or him. Or her.” He twinkled. “Or they.”
“But you’re not the same you anymore?”
“No, that’s true. Not the same. But perhaps . something better.”
17
AT THE THRONE
And time passed, and time passed, and the endless voyage went on. I did everything there was to do.
Then I did it twice. Then I did it some more. Then I even began to think seriously about Albert’s notion of a few weeks in standby mode, and that scared me enough to make Essie take notice.
She wrote a prescription for me. “Will have,” Essie announced, “a party,” and when Essie tells you you’re going to have a party, you might as well relax and enjoy it.
That doesn’t mean that that is what I did. Not right away, anyhow. I was not in a party mood. I hadn’t got over the shock of my “death” in the house on Tahiti. I hadn’t quite nerved myself up to confront the prospect of meeting more of those Assassin creatures-millions more of them-and on their home ground, at that. Hell, I hadn’t even got all the way over everything else that had ever happened to me in my life, from my nasty little mental breakdown when I was a kid, through my mother’s death and Klara’s wreck in the black hole right up to the present moment. Everybody’s life is full of tragedies, disasters, and lousy breaks. You keep on living it because now and then there are good times that make up for it, or at least you hope they will, but, my God, the number of miseries we all go through! And when you live so much longer, not only longer but in my case faster, you just multiply the bad things. “Grizzly grouch,” laughed Essie, planting a big kiss on my mouth, “cheer up, wake up, have a good time, what the hell, because tomorrow we die, right? Or maybe not, you know.”
She is a living doll, my Essie is. All of her. The meat one that was the model and the portable one who shares my life, and let’s not get into any tricky debates about what I mean by “living.”
So I did my best to smile, and, to my astonishment, I made it. And then I looked around me.
Whatever Essie had said to Albert about the luxurious surrounds he had been providing for us, she didn’t mean to let such strictures cramp her own style. Her ideas of a party have changed a lot since we’ve been machine-stored. In the old days we could do pretty much anything we liked, because we were ifithy rich. Now it’s even better. There is just about nothing that would give us pleasure that we can’t do. Not after we’ve got on a plane or a spaceship to get there. Not after we’ve invited a bunch of people to join us and waited for them to arrive. What we want to do we do right now, and we don’t even have to worry about hangovers, harm to others, or getting fat.
So, to start, Essie provided us with a party room.
It wasn’t anything outrageous. Actually, if we’d wanted one like it when we were still meat people, we could easily have had it. Probably it wouldn’t have cost more than a million dollars or so. Neither Essie nor I had ever had a ski lodge, but we’d been in a couple, at one time or another, and liked the combination of the huge ceiling-high fireplace at one end, and the bear—and moosehead trophies on the wall, and the dozen many-paned windows along the walls with the snowy mountains crisp in the sunlight outside, and the comfortable chairs and couches and tables with fresh flowers and—And, I realized, a lot of things neither she nor I had ever seen in any ski lodge. There was a wine fountain on a table by the windows, and it was bubbling champagne. (The only way you could tell that it wasn’t “real” champagne was that it never lost its bubbles.) Next to the champagne fountain was a long buffet table with white-jacketed waiters standing by to fill our plates. I saw a carved turkey and a ham, and hollowed-out fresh pineapples filled with kiwi fruit and cherries. I looked at it, and I looked at Essie. “Smoked oysters?” I ventured.