She was holding the great head in her arms. "He's very sick, Captain," she said wretchedly. "He can hardly talk at all now."
"Ask him! He was the one who told us what to do—I want to hear what he has to say now, and—"
Krake stopped suddenly, listening. Then they all heard it: a call from outside the room. "Help me!"
Sue-ling Quong reacted first. "It's Kiri! Something must have happened to Sork!"
And when they got there, the facts were beyond argument. Kiri Quintero, his face ashen, was carrying his twin brother in his arms. Sork was limp, obviously unconscious. His face was bloodied, and his head was lolling at an angle it should never have had on his neck.
"He was thrown against a wall," said Kiri. "I think he hit his head. Sue-ling, is he dying?"
He didn't have to ask her that. Sue-ling was already beside them, carefully touching Sork's ruined head, lifting an eyelid to peer inside, listening for a pulse. When she looked up at last her face was somber.
"I don't know, Kiri," she said. "He needs surgery. And he needs it right away."
An Earth human who was not a scientist at all, but wondered greatly and was therefore a poet, sang this song while the aiodoi listened and were moved:
"I have to make a confession before we get into this session. See, I can stand superstrings and Grand Unified Theories and quarks, but do you know what beats me? The thing we were talking about last time. The anthropic principle, that's what beats me.
"Remember what they say about all the basic constants of the natural laws of the universe—Planck's Constant, and the numerical value of pi, and the relationship between gravity and electromagnetic force and all those things. What they say is that all these specific values came about just by chance, right at the time of the Big Bang . . . early after the Big Bang, that is; back on the other side of the Planck wall, ten to the minus
forty-third seconds, when everything was still plastic. Before the Planck barrier, all the forces were one—gravity, strong force, electromagnetic, weak force—they were all part of what we could call the 'superforce,' which we'll talk about at more length another time.
"And they also say that those numbers we call 'constants' didn't have to be constant at all. They could just as easily have been other values entirely. Pi could've been seven, instead of three point et cetera. Gravity could've been stronger than the electromagnetic force, instead of nearly two thousand times weaker. Even the law of inverse squares didn't have to be what it is. After all, you can generalize it as a power law of n minus one, where n is the number of dimensions of a space—we have three spatial dimensions, and that's why our exponent is two, and we get inverse squares. Kaluza's four-dimensional space would be quite different; the law there would be inverse cubes, and planets would fall right into their stars.
"There are an infinite number of other possibilities. But the scientists who tell us all this also say that if any of those alternative things had happened to be true, we wouldn't be here.
"Life couldn't have evolved; maybe even matter couldn't have evolved. And they say the chances are millions to one against us. In all probability, those randomly determined values would, most of the time, have turned out to have been such that we would never live.
"So that's what they call the 'anthropic principle.' It comes in two flavors, strong and weak.
"The weak anthropic principle is the one we talked about last time. It just says, wow, how lucky we are that the dice fell in just the way that would allow us to show up.
"The strong anthropic principle is even spookier. It says that such long odds are too long to be taken seriously. Such one in a zillion chances just aren't going to happen. So there must be some causal connection between those long-ago random fluctuations and us—which seems to mean that, by gosh, we are what made the universe what it is.
"One or the other has to be true ... but which one?"
The eternal aiodos sang on: "Why, yes.
"Naturally. Of course."
But among them one aiodos hardly sang at all, for he was listening to the faint and fearful songs ofsome persons who were now discovering some of those alternative possibilities to be real.
16
There wasn't any sick bay on The Golden Hind. Francis Krake had never seen a need for one. He had no interest in ever having Turtle surgery for himself, with the examples of Marco and Daisy Fay always before him, and those two, of course, never got sick.
What the ship did have was all sorts of hospital-type supplies, a lot of them, scattered here and there among the cargo. Krake and Kiri Quintero went on a hasty hunt to round them up, with the assistance of the two Turtles in lugging the supplies to the improvised operating room. The Turtles were not gready interested in the fate of one human being, not with all the weight of their woes burdening them, but they did help. Perhaps it was a kind of penance for them, Moon Bunderan thought. She had been drafted to help locate the supplies, with Thrayl shambling half-dazed behind her. Then, with Sue-ling tenderly supporting Sork's lolling head and Marco and Daisy Fay efficiendy carrying the main weight of him, they took Sork to what had once been a cargo chamber. It would suffice for an operating theater, Sue-ling thought. It had the necessary advantages of good lighting, air that no one had breathed in lately and a flat surface to put him on. The compartment was not in the shielded portion of the ship, but when Kiri anxiously raised the question of radiation exposure Krake said flatly, "We're still in wave-drive, Kiri, and anyway, radiation from what? Take another look outside."
Sue-ling was already rummaging in her kit for the appropriate memo disk. Before she put it in she checked out the equipment. "Asepsis lamps, right, anesthesia, that's good, surgical instruments, sterilizer—I'm going to need help, though," she said. "Daisy Fay, will you give me a hand? And—Moon? Didn't you tell me you'd had veterinary training?"
"But I've never treated a humanV Moon Bunderan objected, looking thunderstruck.
"Doesn't matter. Meat's meat, when you cut it, and anyway I'll be doing the complicated parts. Scrub up. All the rest of you, get out of the way," Sue-ling ordered, and slipped the memo disk into the slot in her skull.
Moon could see that the people not directly involved were glad enough to get away from the scene. It wasn't just revulsion at the prospect of blood; she knew that all of them were looking forward to the chance to talk over what had happened to their ship, or to make their guesses about what sort of place they were in now. And, after the first shock, Moon Bunderan was glad enough to stay and help out. She accepted the doctor's orders without question. How could she not? A human life was involved.
There was something else, too. For Moon, the scene in the sickbay of The Golden Hind was like a childhood dream come true. The surroundings were crazily wrong, of course— racing through the nothingness of a strange universe in a lost waveship, all her world thoroughly lost behind her. The only loved, familiar thing was Thrayl, squatting, head bowed and silent, in an overlooked corner of the room. But those dreams came flooding back. All those long sessions in the veterinary school, when what her heart wanted was to be a real doctor, a people doctor—those were adolescent fantasies, she had told herself at the time, and almost forgotten them. Now all those long-ago yearnings were becoming real. She was actually doing it!