Exhausted, Darya withdrew into her own unhappy trance of analysis and reassessment.
When J’merlia began to talk for himself, Louis Nenda ended his translation. With the attention of the group all on the Lo’tfian, he sidled across to Atvar H’sial and whispered a pheromonal question at a level that only the Cecropian could receive: “How is J’merlia? In the head, I mean. Can you tell?”
Atvar H’sial edged away from the group, leading Nenda with her. “He is mystifyingly normal,” she said softly. “Almost everything he has told us sounds impossible, yet there is no evidence that he is lying, or fabricating his own version of events.”
“So he’ll be able to talk for himself from now on? And answer questions when they have them?”
“I believe so.”
“Then this is the best time, right now. The Indulgence is fueled and deserted. You made a flight plan for us to clear the Anfract. We could take off while everybody’s sitting listenin’ with their mouths open, and head back to Glister.” He paused, a question mark in his pheromones. “If you still want to do it, I mean.”
“I am not sure.” Atvar H’sial was also oddly hesitant. “Perhaps such action is premature.” The twin yellow horns in the middle of her head turned to the group clustered around J’merlia, then back to Nenda. “He seems normal, but that only means any derangement must be deep. It is a poor time to leave him.”
“Are you tellin’ me you wanna stick around awhile, to make sure your bug’s all right? Because if you are, I guess I don’t mind doing—”
“I did not say that. I realize that we made a deal before you left for Genizee. Cecropians do not renege on their commitments. But I am J’merlia’s dominatrix, and have been since he was first postlarval. So if you wish to remain longer…”
“I agreed to that deal, too. If you want to change, it, I’ll be glad to. Just don’t start tellin’ me what you’ll be leavin’ behind if we go. I’m leavin’ behind a helluva lot more.” Nenda watched as Atvar H’sial’s trumpet horns turned to focus on Darya Lang. “Don’t get me wrong. What I mean is, I’m at least as close to Kallik as you are to J’merlia, and I’ll be leavin’ her behind.” He sighed. “But a deal’s a deal.”
Atvar H’sial scanned Nenda, J’merlia, and Darya Lang for a long time before she nodded. “We will all suffer, but we cannot take them. And if we do not leave now, who knows when our chance will come? The separation with J’merlia and Kallik — or with anyone else — will surely be as brief as we can make it. But even so, if we are going, then I would prefer to go — at once.”
Nenda nodded. The Cecropian and the Karelian human backed quietly away toward the exit of the control chamber. At the door they paused for a few seconds and stared back into the room. Finally, at some mutual decision point, they turned and hustled each other out of the chamber.
Their departure went unnoticed. Darya was still deep in her own brooding, and everybody else was focused on J’merlia.
“There are many sentient Builder constructs in the spiral arm,” the Lo’tfian was saying. “Hundreds or thousands of them, according to Guardian, set in well-hidden locations where we have never dreamed of looking. They have intermittent contact with each other, as they have for millions of years. But Guardian and World-Keeper question the actions and even the sanity of most of the others. They are united in their view that this region, and this alone, will be the home of the Builders when they return to the spiral arm.”
Darya had been fascinated by the Builders and their artifacts for all of her adult life, but at the moment other matters had higher priority.
“J’merlia!” she found a final pocket of energy and tried one last time. “You say you were here, at the same time as you were on Genizee. But that can’t be right. Nothing can be in two places at once. How do you explain what happened to you?”
The pale-yellow eyes swiveled. J’merlia shook his head. “Explain? I cannot explain. I know only that it is so.”
“And I know that it’s impossible.”
“It cannot be impossible. Because it happened.”
It was the ultimate irrefutable argument. J’merlia was calm and immovable. Darya stared at him in frustration. The rest of the group looked on in silence, until E.C. Tally stirred and turned to Darya.
“May I speak?”
“Not unless it’s relevant,” Darya snapped. She was so tired, so baffled — the last thing she could stand at the moment was some senseless digression from a witless embodied computer.
“It is, I believe, most relevant. May I speak?”
“Oh, get on with it.”
“To a logical entity, such as myself, the behavior of organic intelligences, such as yourself, provides many anomalies. For example, the history of humanity, the species concerning which my data banks have most information, is replete with cases where humans, on little or no evidence, have believed in impossibilities. They have accepted the existence of a variety of improbable entities: of gods and demons, of fairies and elves, of ‘good luck’ charms, of magic potions, of curses and hexes and evil eyes.”
“Tally, if you’re going blather about—”
“But at the same time, humans and other organic intelligences often seem unwilling to accept the implications and consequences of their own legitimate scientific theories.” Tally stared squarely at Darya. “For example, do you reject the basic concepts of quantum theory?”
“Of course I don’t!”
“So you accept those ideas. But apparently only in some abstract sense. You reject them at a practical level.”
“I do not.” Darya’s outrage was enough to burn away — temporarily — her lethargy.
“So you accept the central idea that a particle, or a system of particles, such as an electron or proton or atomic nucleus, can be in a ‘mixed’ quantum state. In essence, it can occupy several different possible conditions at once. An electron, for example, has two permitted orientations for its spin; but it cannot be said to have either one spin state or the other, until it is observed. Until that time, it may be partly in both possible spin states. Do you agree?”
“That’s a standard element of the theory. It’s well established by experiment, too. I certainly accept it. What is all this, E.C.? Get to the point.”
“I am at the point. That is the point, the whole point. You were the one who told me that all researchers of the Torvil Anfract accepted the instantaneous interchange of pairs of Anfract lobes as evidence of quantum effects. The Anfract, you said, possesses macroscopic quantum states, of unprecedented size. You said that to me before we ever entered the Anfract.
“Then we flew in, with Dulcimer as pilot. Do you recall a time when the ship’s motion became choppy and irregular?”
“Of course I do. I was scared. I thought for a moment that we were hitting small space-time singularities, but then I realized that made no sense.”
“And you asked Captain Rebka what was happening. Since humans appear to have trouble recalling events exactly, let me repeat for you his exact words. ‘Planck scale change,’ he said. ‘A big one. We’re hitting the quantum level of the local continuum. If macroscopic quantum effects are common in the Anfract we’re due for all sorts of trouble. Quantum phenomena in everyday life. Don’t know what that would do.’ You accepted his statements without question. Yet you apparently remain unwilling to face their implications. As I said, organic intelligences do not have faith in their own scientific theories.
“There are large-scale quantum phenomena inside the Anfract; and the Builder sentient constructs have learned how to utilize them.” Tally pointed to J’merlia. “He, like you and me, consists of a system of particles. We are each described by a quantum-mechanical state vector — a very large and complex one, but still a single state vector. Isn’t it obvious that J’merlia existed in a mixed quantum state when he was — simultaneously — here and on Hollow-World and in several places on Genizee? And isn’t it clear that his total wave function did not resolve and ‘collapse’ back to a single state — to a single J’merlia — until he returned here on the seedship?”