Any rock is 99.999% computationally inert, yes, but particularly in iron-rich basalts and granites, most particularly in those that have been shaped with metal tools—which of course tend to become magnetized with frequent use—chance doping of conveniently sized pockets or vacuoles yields electrical properties ideal for the capture and storage of patterned radiation, such as the image of a body flushed with fear or rage. That the inventors of magnetic tape and bubble memory failed to recognize this is often cited, as one of history’s stranger anomalies.
Granted, it often takes quite sophisticated archaeological instruments to extract the information again, to reconstitute some recognizable echo of the image itself. It’s difficult to imagine that human sensory processors can distinguish so finely, and filter so well. Unaided ghost “sightings” remain rare and difficult to confirm, leading perhaps to the conclusion that they don’t really occur. But it pays to remember that ancient folklorists—the well-nourished ones, at least—were as intelligent and reliable as any modern witness, and also that they knew, one way or another, not only about hauntings but about the vanished “dragons” and “oni” and “troglodytes” of ages past.
At any rate, modern archaeologists make a livelihood of studying ghosts virtually indistinguishable from those described by medieval scholars. It’s from just such a source that we know the following:
1. That while faxing himself home that day, Bruno de Towaji was simultaneously diverted to a place of cut stone, deep inside the Uranian moon of Miranda.
2. That he looked around in puzzlement for several seconds upon arriving there.
3. That his eyes settled on a particular location, about six meters away from where he was standing.
4. That his skin temperature rose by nearly a full degree and then dropped precipitously, and that he said “God, oh God, you’ve got to be joking.”
The ghost reveals nothing else about that particular incident, although archaeologists dutifully report a sense of dread and foreboding in the heel marks where de Towaji stood.
BOOK TWO
Twice Upon a Star Imperiled
Chapter Seven
in which an anomalous result is pondered
In the ninth decade of the Queendom of Sol, on a miniature planet orbiting at the middle depths of the Kuiper Belt, there lived a man named Bruno de Towaji who, at the time of our latest attention, sat brooding in his study, staring at the measurement his desk had reported for the umptieth time. Feigenbaum’s number, yes, hmm.[3]
Bruno had built an apparatus, a structure for testing the nature of true vacuum. The structure was called “the Onion,” and was composed of miniature black holes held in place by carefully balanced electrogravitic forces, a state of matter known as “collapsium.” Naturally, such a thing could not be kept on the miniature planet itself; it orbited several miles away, a faint puckering of the star field, powder-blue with escaped Hawking-Cerenkov radiation.
Distance notwithstanding, the Onion’s tides disturbed the planet’s tiny ocean and atmosphere, playing hell with the weather, playing hell with the orbit of the miniature moon. When there’d been one, anyway; the “moon” was really a storage heap for inch-wide spheres of extremely dense matter: neubles. Diamond-clad balls of liquid neutronium, a billion tons apiece. Black hole food. All gone now, used up.
Presently, the floor seemed to tilt under Bruno’s chair and then jerk upright, then tilt again and slowly right itself, as the Onion passed overhead. The atmosphere crackled, alive with static electricity; the ground, pulled several inches out of true and then released, rumbled in protest.
Sounds and images flitted through Bruno’s mind. Bricks, dust, cries of alarm; the ground was shaking. Well, not anymore, but his heart still hammered like a wet fist at the base of his throat, and would do so for the next ten minutes at least, before it finally faded from notice. And in another two and a half hours, whether Bruno was ready or not, it would all happen again!
He felt he should have gotten used to this at some point. Sabadell-Andorra, after all, was eight decades in his past. He couldn’t help but remember the bells of Girona clanging as the weary brick towers crumbled around them. He couldn’t help but remember the Old Girona Bistro—his own house!—falling in on itself like a magician’s box, taking his parents down with it while he bounced and surfed, more or less unscathed, on the street outside. To a fifteen-year-old, the calamity had been absolute.
But Girona’s demise had been a freak, a chance synergy of tectonics and soil composition feeding precisely the resonant frequencies of the local architecture. He’d learned some new terms that week: feedback, fluidization, condemned, aftershock, pyre. There hadn’t been another case like it in all the years since, and probably—given the extreme conservatism of Queendom building codes—there never would be again. So why was he still afraid of earthquakes? Even minor ones, even ones whose timing and severity were under his direct control?
His failure to acclimate made him wonder, sometimes, just what he was doing out here. Alchemy? Aversion therapy? The inane bumblings of a man who should, by now, have grown senile and sessile with age? He wasn’t doing controlled science, that much was obvious.
He’d never intended—never imagined—orbiting such a massive structure so close to his little planet. He’d never imagined using the entire -moon in the Onion’s construction, but what began as a transient curiosity had become first a tinkering, then a project, and finally a heedless, sleepless obsession. A handful of collapsons in low orbit had become— seemingly overnight—a nested cage of fractured spacetimes, one within the other like wooden babushka dolls, magical ones, straining at the very underpinnings of universal law. And orbiting right overhead! A structure too massive to relocate, too delicate to risk disassembling, too dangerous and disruptive to leave where it was. What had he been thinking?
No, he knew the answer to that: he’d been after the True Vacuum. Hard to blame himself for that.[4]
The project had taken several weeks, he thought. Or months, maybe; he’d long since stopped marking the passage of time. He’d eaten and slept on a schedule not matched with the rising and setting of his miniature “sun.” He remembered that much. But looking now at the wreckage of his study— the mess of socks and cups and wellstone drawing slates filled with notes and diagrams and 3-D animations that had been abandoned half finished or else crossed out with savage strokes—he marveled at how damnably entranced he could sometimes become.
It was like waking up underwater, at the bottom of a bathtub or something: looking up, seeing the surface rippling above you. It isn’t hard to sit up and take a breath, so the initial panic fades to simple confusion and astonishment. How the fudge did that happen?
And the results he’d brought back with him were astonishing, too. Or confusing. Or simply—probably?—wrong. Feigenbaum’s Number? This was the trouble with basic research Expected results told you nothing, told you that you had learned nothing. But unexpected results could mean anything; experimental error or flawed conception or simple insanity on the part of the experimenter. Bruno had known his share of scientific kooks, and this was exactly the sort of thing they were always going on about, in a thousand different mutual contradictions. So in the end, you still learned nothing, maybe for hundreds of years, until the rest of physics caught up and could finally tell if you were full of beans or not.