Take away that cause-and-effect narrative and you have the quantum world, disturbing enough in its own way, with all the possibilities of multiple universes and infinite probability. But if you don't take it too seriously, and if you factor in evolution and economics and everything else that's taken for granted in our world, then you have at least the illusion of free will. You can decide to become rich. You can grow up to be president. Improbable, but possible.
But in this new world of poststructuralist physics I have so much free will that nothing means anything anymore.
But you believed that before, Ariel. You've read Heidegger, Derrida. You got a thrill out of it alclass="underline" no absolutes. It's what you believed. Everything depends on everything else.
But I didn't want it to be true. Or, I wanted it to be true for the closed system of language in which nothing is ever absolutely true, anyway. I wanted uncertainty. But I didn't want the world to be made only of language and nothing else.
Maybe that's why Burlem's heading for the void.
And that's where I'd be going, too, if I didn't have to go into the Troposphere again, with a real possibility that I'll never come back. But I suppose that Burlem and Lura's reasoning is clear enough. If I'm going back to change Abbie Lathrop's mind for Apollo Smintheus, why not just keep going and change Lumas's mind for the human race? And of course what they said made sense. The Troposphere shouldn't be there. If enough people knew about the Troposphere, we'd have the worst possible scenario: no God—and no free will, either. People would simply be able to control other people's minds. Those with power could simply manipulate the rest of us to think what they want us to think. Any "bad" or "revolutionary" thoughts could be erased.
Yeah: like I'm going to erase the thoughts of Abbie Lathrop and Thomas E. Lumas.
Later that night, I can hardly sleep. And when I do drop off I just find I'm dreaming of Apollo Smintheus again. Most of the dream is the same as the one from the other night, with him saying, "You owe me," over and over again. But the other half of the dream is about everything he said about time travel and paradoxes. I'm asking him, "But how can I go back in time and change a world that is not already now changed by what I did?"
And he's saying, "You already have."
I get about an hour's sleep in the end.
When I get up in the morning the rain has stopped and Burlem's cooked me porridge. I'm not sure I want porridge: I think I want to smoke a lot and then go through the kitchen drawers until I find the sharpest knife, and then I want to spend a few hours alone convincing myself that I'm real and I'm human and I mean something. But in the end I just eat the porridge and then smoke one cigarette with a glass of water. Lura comes down from her study at about ten o'clock.
I'm sitting on one of the yellow sofas finishing my second cigarette of the day. The fire is dead and I flick the stub into it. Burlem is out walking Planck. Lura makes herself a cup of herbal tea and comes to sit in the armchair.
"So," she says.
I cough a little. "So," I say back.
"What a night," she says. "How do you feel?"
I look beyond her and out through the patio doors. The grass is still damp from the frost last night. I can see the patch of earth that we dug over yesterday, and it looks redder and fluffier than the rest of the garden.
"I feel completely wasted," I say. "All that thinking ... And I didn't sleep very well."
"Oh? Because of the thinking?"
"Mainly because of bad dreams," I explain. "Time-travel paradoxes."
"Ah."
"And the human foot."
She smiles and sips her tea. "The human foot?"
"Yes," I say. "No one knows exactly how it works—well, not well enough to be able to replicate one. And then there are things like junk DNA and cognitive processes, and the way quantum theory doesn't match up with gravity, but everyone thinks it must ... How does that work?"
"You may have to explain more clearly," she says. "How does what work?"
"Well, clearly no one's been able to 'think' these things into existence, but they do exist. I suppose what I'm trying to ask is how poststructuralist physics accounts for things that exist in the world without explanation, if the explanation is what creates them."
Lura's nodding. But she doesn't speak yet.
"I mean," I say, "in the scenario you've described, how is there any mystery at all?"
"Good question," she says. "Very good question."
"Is there an answer?"
She sighs. "Yes. I think so. It's interesting you were thinking about time-travel paradoxes, because..."
"What?"
"Well, all these questions are really about creation. What is a creator? What does a creator do? When does creation take place? Of course, scientists hate the word creation and creationist. Science says it is against creationism, or intelligent design—or at least, it's against them being taught alongside science, in science classes. But science is itself a form of creationism. It is the scientists, after all, who create the world." Lura sips her tea and then puts it down. "And we're so used to the idea of creation as something that happens in the beginning. First the world was created, then we were created; then things started to happen. That's the way the story usually goes. But what if it's the future that creates us, not the past?"
"Shit..." I say. "But..."
Lura laughs. "But how does that work? It doesn't; not according to classical physics."
"So ... This is connected to that question I asked last night, about thoughts having 'backwards effects,' isn't it?"
"Yes."
"So you're saying that in the future someone will come up with a theory that, for example, reconciles quantum physics and gravity, and that this theory makes the world work the way it does now? So scientists are just discovering things that have already happened?"
"Yes to the first bit, but no to the second. Einstein still created relativity by thinking it," she says, picking up her tea again and taking a sip. "But someone in the future will do the next bit, and someone else will do the bit after that, and it will all trickle down through history."
"So we're living in a world that has had infinite people in the future thinking about it already," I say.
"No. Because the future hasn't happened yet. And the future may not be infinite."
"But..."
"It's not a cause-and-effect universe anymore, Ariel. Nothing really happens before or after anything else. You could say that in some way everything happens at once."
I think of the train of fear, and the way I was able to return to myself at any point I wanted. But that was because I was moving on something that had no mass, that was able to travel infinitely fast. I was travelling on emotion, not on anything real.
But is thought real? Does thought have mass?
It must. We've already agreed that thought is matter.
Or have we? I'm still not sure about all this.
"Sorry," Lura says. "This is a lot to take in."
"No," I say. "Don't be sorry. I want to know it all now before I go back into the Troposphere. I want ... Lura?"
"Yes?"
"When—and I suppose if—I get back, the book won't exist, right?"
She nods. "I hope that's what happens."
"So you don't actually know?"
"No. I don't know what is going to happen."
"It's possible that I'll never have met you," I say. "After all, Saul will never have given his talk, and therefore never met you, and therefore never found the book, and therefore never had to run away. And the Project Starlight men won't be chasing us all and ... I won't actually even know Saul, because I met him at the conference. So I won't be doing a Ph.D. anymore and..."
"That's a cause-and-effect universe, though," Lura says. "I don't think we are living in a cause-and-effect universe."