“Five minutes.”
“Will you then leave me alone and not bother me any more?”
“By all means.”
“No, don’t tell me. I’ve changed my mind. What are you, anyway? Some kind of Ancient Mariner figure, going around telling people this thing individually? Why not publish it? Post it to your blog. Or put it on a T-shirt.”
“It has crossed my mind to publish it,” Tessimond said. “It emerged from my academic research. We usually publish our academic research, don’t we?”
“You didn’t because?”
“I didn’t see the point. Not just in publication, but in academia. Really, I realised, what I wanted to do was: travel.” He looked through the wide glass windows of the coffee shop at the shoppers traversing and retraversing the esplanade. Markets, temples, warehouses and wide paved streets. Tree-shaded squares where the bombastic statues of dead magnates and generals stood. Overhead, two clouds closed upon one another, shutting in front of the sun like a lizard’s horizontal eyelids. What is it the poet said? Dark, dark, dark, they all go into the dark. But I’m getting ahead of myself. There was a little more small-talk, before he finally told me what he’d told my colleagues. It came in under five minutes, as he said. Rather less, in fact. He said: “I read your work. It’s very elegantly done. Very elegant solutions to the dark energy problem; a real... I was going to say
intuitive
sense of the geometry of the cosmos.”
“Were going to say?”
“Well, it’s—I’m afraid it’s wrong. So your intuition has led you astray. But it’s a very bold attempt at...”
I interrupted him with: “wrong?”
“I’m afraid so. I’m afraid you’re coming at the question from the wrong angle. Not just you, of course. The whole scientific community.”
I laughed at this, but, I hope, not unkindly. Marija stirred. She twitched her little mitten-clad hands like she was boxing in her sleep, and fell motionless again. “You’d better let the Nobel Committee know,” I said, “before it’s too late!” It was all too absurd.
The late autumn sky was as blue as water, and as cold.
“Five minutes, you said,” I told him, nodding in the direction of the shop clock. “And you’ve had more than one of those five already.”
He breathed in, and out, calmly enough. Then he said: “Why is the universe so big?”
“
Why
questions rarely lead physicists anywhere good. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why was there a big bang? Who knows? Not a well-formulated question.”
He put his head on one side, and tried again. “How did the universe get so big?”
“That’s better,” I said, indulgently. “It got so big because fourteen billion years ago the big bang happened, and that one consequence of that event was the expansion of spacetime—on a massive scale.”
“All these galaxies and stars moving apart from one another like dots on an inflating balloon,” he said. “Only the surface of the balloon is 2D and we have to make the conceptual leap to imagining a 3D surface.”
“Just so,” I told him. “As every schoolkid knows.”
“Still: why expansion? Why should the big bang result in the
dilation
of space?”
I took another sip from my chocolate. “Three minutes to go, and you’ve tripped yourself into another
why
question.”
“Let me ask you about time,” he said, unruffled. “We appear to be moving through time. We go in one direction. We cannot go backwards, we can only go forwards.”
I shrugged. “According to maths, we could go backwards. The equations of physics are reversible. It just so happens that we go in one direction only. It’s no big deal.”
“Quite right,” he said, nodding. “The science says we ought to be able to go in any direction. Yet we never,” he said, stroking his own cheek, “
do
. That’s strange, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I can’t say it bothers me.”
“Time is manifold, like space. We can move in any direction in space. But we can only move in one direction in time.”
“This really is kindergarten stuff,” I said.
“What moves an object through the manifold of space?”
I was debating with myself whether to humour him further. After a moment, I said: “Force.”
“Gravity. Impulse. Those two things, and nothing else. Push-me, pull-you. You can push an object to give it kinetic energy, or draw it towards you. Kinetic energy is always relative, not absolute. The driver of a car passing by a pedestrian possesses kinetic energy from the
pedestrian’s
point of view; but from the point of view of the person in the passenger seat that same drive has zero kinetic energy.”
It was, in a strange sort of way, soothing to hear him elucidate elementary physics in this way. “All well and good,” I said.
“That’s how things go in the physical manifold, which we call spacetime. Relocate the model to the temporal manifold—let’s call it timespace.”
This was when the fizzing started in my stomach. “For the sake of argument, why not,” I said. I couldn’t prevent a defensive tone creeping into my voice. “Although it’ll be nothing but a thought-experiment.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked, blandly.
“We’ve centuries of experimental data about the actual manifold, the spacetime manifold. Your ‘timespace’ manifold is pure speculation.”
“Is it? I would say we move through it every day of our lives. The question is—no, the two questions are: why are we moving through it, and why can we only move through it in one direction?”
There was a blurry rim to my vision. My heart had sped itself up. “More
why
-questions.”
“Let us ask instead:
what
is drawing us towards it, through timespace?”
“Why must it be a what?”
“Now you’re asking why questions,” he noted, with a wry expression.
“The fact that we’re aware of the sensation of moving through time must mean we’re accelerating,” I mused. “If we were travelling at a steady speed, we wouldn’t feel it. It’s...” I stopped.
He didn’t say anything for the moment.
Time and space, like an Escher engraving. Look from one into the mirror of the other. Look from the other into the mirror of the one. So
very
obvious! Why hadn’t I thought of it before? But then I slapped those thoughts down, and my decades of conventional learning reasserted themselves, and I got a grip. A grip, a grip.
“Your theory,” I said, in a sterner voice. “The reason we feel time as a kind of motion, one hour per hour, is because something is drawing us in, with its gravitational pull—is that it? Because it seems to me that we might just as well have been launched forward by some initial impulse. Don’t you agree?”
“The reason I don’t agree is the fact that we’re stuck moving in one temporal direction.”
I saw, then, where he was going; but I didn’t interrupt as he spelled it out.
“Think of the analogue from the physical manifold. There’s no force that could propel an object, let alone a whole cosmos, so rapidly that it was locked into a single trajectory. But there
is
a force in the universe that can draw an object
in
with such a force—draw it such that it has no option but to move in one direction, towards the centre of the object.”
“A black hole.”
He nodded.
“Your theory,” I said again, in a just-so-as-we’re-clear voice, “is that the reason we move along the arrow of time the way we do is that we’re being drawn towards a supermassive temporal black hole?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” I said, with an insouciance I did not feel. “It’s an interesting theory. Although nothing more than a theory.”
“Not at all. Consider the data.”
“What data?”
“I understand your resistance, Ana,” he said, gently. “But you can do better than this. Who knows the data better than you? What happens to time as a physical object approaches the event horizon of a physical black hole?”
“Time dilates.”
“So what must happen as a
temporal
object approaches the event horizon of a
temporal
black hole? Physics dilates. Space expands—until it approaches an asymptote of reality. From the point of view of an observer not present at the event horizon itself, space would seem to expand until it appeared infinite.” He looked through the big glass again. “What else do we see, when we look upwards?”
Look.
“So we’re still,” I said, my voice low, “
outside
the event horizon?”
“If we were outside the event horizon, the rate of apparent expansion of space would be an asymptote approaching a fixed rate—a simple acceleration. And until a few decades ago that was what the data showed. But then the data starting showing that the rate of apparent expansion of the universe is
speeding up
. That can only mean that we’re approaching the event horizon itself. That also explains why we’re locked into the one direction of time. In the timespace manifold, generally speaking, we ought to be able to go forwards, backwards, whatever we wanted. But we’re not in the manifold generally; we’re in a very particular place. Like an object falling into a black hole, we’re locked into a single vector.”
I thought about it. No—that’s not right. The truth is I didn’t need to think very hard. It fell into place in my mind. I grokked its rightness. Like the others I found myself thinking, how could I not see this before? It is so very obvious. “But if you’re right—wait,” I said. “Wait a moment.”
I pulled out my phone, and jabbed up the calculus app. It took me a few moments to work through the relevant equations. Of course everything fitted. Of course it was true.
I looked at him, feeling distant from myself. “When we reach the actual temporal event horizon,” I said, “tidal forces will rip us apart.”
“Or rip
time
apart,” he said, nodding slowly. “Yes. Of course, that amounts to the same thing.”
“When?”
“You’ve got the equations there,” he said, looking at my phone as it lay, like a miniature
2001
monolith, flat on the table. “But it’s hard to be precise. The scale is fourteen billion years; the calculation tolerances are not seconds, or even days. Years. I calculated seven years, plus or minus four. That was a decade ago.”
I shook my head, the way a dog shakes water of its pelt; but there was no way this idea could be shaken out of my mind. It was true; it was there. “It could be—literally—any day now,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Not for you, so much, as for—you know. The fact of you having a small kid.”
“That’s why Noo-noo was so circumspect with me,” I said. “I see. He kept glancing at my belly. And, yes, alright, I see why you haven’t published this. It’d be akin to wandering the highways with an
End-Is-Nigh
sandwich board.”
“Not that,” he said, his glittering eye meeting mine. “More that it’s so obvious. When you think about it, how could the expanding universe be anything
other
than this? We know what physical conditions cause time dilation; so we ought to know what
temporal
conditions cause space dilation.”
“Not the big bang.”
“The big bang was an effect, not prime cause.”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. I’m going home now,” I told him. But I embraced him before I left, and felt the sharkskin roughness of his unshaved cheek against my own. Then I wheeled Marija home. I called M. and told him to leave work and join me. He was puzzled, but acquiesced.
He hasn’t gone back.
:6:
T
HE EQUATIONS DEPEND
upon precision over prodigious lengths of time—since the big bang, or (rather) since the dilation effect first affected what until then must have been a stable cosmos existing within an open temporal manifold. But I’ve done my best. Tessimond’s 7 +/-4 years was, I suspect, deliberately vague; erring on the side of generosity, to ease his own mind. I think the timescale is much shorter. Download the data on the rate of acceleration of cosmic expansion, and you can do your own sums.
It’s a matter of days. Just that.
Of course I never flew to Stockholm. Why would I waste three days away from my child? None of that matters. We realised what money we could, and bought a small place by the sea. I won’t say what sea. That doesn’t matter either; except that, when the dusk comes each day, and the net curtains are sucked against the open windows and go momentary starch-stiff; and when the moths congregate to worship their shining electric deities; and when the moon lies carelessly in the sky near the purple marine horizon like a pearl of great price—when Marija is fed and happy and M. and I take our turns holding her, and then lay her down and hold one another—there is a contentment spun from finitude that my previous, open-ended existence could not comprehend. I have busied myself writing this account, although only a little every day, for there is no rush, or else there is too much rush and I don’t wish to be troubled by the latter. And as for everything else, it helps to know what is really important. For the whole of the larger world could end at
TWO SISTERS IN EXILE
ALIETTE DE BODARD
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, in a flat with her husband, more computers than people, and two Lovecraftian tentacled plants in the process of taking over the living room. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction: her stories have appeared in
Asimov’s,Interzone
and other venues, and her series of Aztec noir fantasies,
Obsidian and Blood
, is published by Angry Robot. She has won the British Science Fiction Association Award, and been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Visit
aliettedebodard.com
for more information.
I
N SPITE OF
her name (an elegant, whimsical female name which meant Perfumed Winter, and a reference to a long-dead poet), Nguyen Dong Huong was a warrior, first and foremost. She’d spent her entire life in skirmishes against the pale men, the feathered clans and the dream-skinners: her first ship,
The Tiger Lashes with His Tail
, had died at the battle of Bach Nhan, when the smoke-children had blown up Harmony Station and its satellites; her second had not lasted more than a year.