'Menendez, shut up. What you saw on the cards in the seminary, on the day you were ordained, all that was true. Perdition exists; it's a neutron star, just like I always said it was.' And then Ivan talked about the nature of the star, things Sergio had learned in the seminary but then forgotten, because they were not absolutely central to his faith. That a neutron star was a sphere of nuclear matter forged in the heart of a dying star, containing as much mass as the sun, but compressed into a size no larger than Vikingville. A sugar lump from its heart would have weighed half a billion tons. Perdition was still cooling rapidly, like a cherry-red ingot removed from the furnace, implying that it had been born no more than a few hundred thousand years earlier, very close to its present position. A hot, blue star must have died, outshining the entire galaxy in its expiration. The nebula that star had shed was gone now, but there was no doubting what had happened.
Perdition had been born in a supernova.
'It shouldn't have existed,' Ivan said. 'No evidence for a supernova was ever found; no mini-extinction or enhancement in the local mutation rate; no dieback or brief flourish of speciation. Nothing.' The man looked around at the few candles still burning, their incense no longer the dominant smell in the room. 'Something like a supernova doesn't just happen without anyone noticing. Matter of fact, if you're as close to it as we would have been, you're not going to have the luxury of noticing much else, ever again. You're going to be a pile of ashes. And yet it must have happened, or else there'd be no Perdition.'
'God must have intervened.'
'Yeah. Must have poked his big, old finger into the heart of that collapsing star, causing it to happen in just such a way that we didn't get crisped. That's the point, isn't it? Our little miracle. And I suppose if you're going to have a miracle, it's not a bad one.'
The essence of it was simple enough: it had been known, on purely theoretical grounds, that supernova explosions might not be completely symmetric; that the blast might not emerge in a perfectly spherical fashion. Tiny initial imperfections in the dynamics of the pre-explosion core collapse might be magnified chaotically, building and building, until the star blew apart in a hugely asymmetric manner, lopsidedly spilling half its guts in one direction.
'They showed me how delicate it was,' Ivan said. 'How precise the initial conditions must have been. If they'd differed by one part in a billion--'
'We wouldn't be having this conversation.'
'And what does that tell you - us - Menendez?'
Sergio looked guardedly at the recorder. An ill-chosen word at this point could ruin his position in the Diocese, yet what seemed more important now was to give the Founder the answer he wanted to hear. 'An event of staggering improbability happened, an event that had to happen for humankind to survive at all. A miracle, if you like. An act of intervention by God, who arranged for the initial conditions to be just as they had to be.'
'You must have been teacher's pet at the seminary, son.'
For the first time, Sergio felt angry, though he fought to keep it from his voice. 'What they taught me, Founder, is only what they learned from you, on your return from Perdition. Are you saying you were misinterpreted? '
'No, not at all. Is that damned thing still running?'
'Would you like me to turn it off?'
'No, but move it closer because I want what I'm about to say to be beyond any possible doubt. Because when you take this back to the Diocese, they'll find every possible way to twist my words - even what I'm saying now.' He waited while Sergio adjusted the position of the recorder, a futile gesture but one that seemed to satisfy Ivan. Then he said: 'No one misinterpreted a word of what I said. I lied. Maybe it had something to do with the way the Kiwidinok drive interfered with brain function.'
'That would be convenient, wouldn't it?'
'Touche. Do you know about temporal-lobe epilepsy, Menendez? Almost no one suffers from it now, but those that do often report feelings of intense religious ecstasy.'
After long moments, Sergio said: 'The kinds of drugs that have been administered to you could cause hallucinations, I think. With all respect.'
Ivan pivoted his body across to the other side of the bed, rummaging in the dark pile of effects placed on the nightstand next to it. He held up a syringe, needle glistening in candlelight. 'I told them I was more frightened than in pain. It's hard to die a prophet when you don't believe, Menendez. They gave me this drug; said it purged fear. Well, maybe it did - but not enough.'
Words formed in Sergio's mouth and seemed to emerge of their own volition.
'How did you lie, and why did you do it?'
'To begin with, it wasn't really lying; I don't think I was clinically sane, and I think I believed my own delusions as much as anyone. But afterwards - when my brain function had stabilised, perhaps -
then
it became lying, because I decided to maintain the untruth I'd already started. And you know what? There was nothing difficult about it. More than that, it was seductive. They wanted to believe everything I said, and there was nothing that could be contradicted by the recording devices. And in return they feted me. I didn't ask for it, but before I knew it I was at the centre of a cult - one that imagined it glimpsed God in the asymmetric physics of a stellar collapse. And then the cult became a religious movement, and because it was the only movement that had no need for faith, it soon absorbed those that did.'
'The Synthesis.'
Ivan's nod was very weak now. 'It was much too late to stop it by then, Menendez. Not without having them turn against me. But now I'm dying . . .'
'They won't love you for it.'
'Sooner be reviled than martyred. Devil always had the best tunes, eh? Seems healthier to me. Which is why you're here, of course. To hear the truth, take it back to Vikingville and begin dismantling the Order.'
'They'll hate me equally,' Sergio said, feeling as if he was debating a piece of theological arcana that had no connection with reality. 'Besides - I still don't see how you can possibly have been lying, if Perdition exists. If there was no divine intervention, then all that's left is - what, massive improbability?'
'Exactly.'
'And that's somehow preferable?'
'Truthful, maybe. Isn't that all that matters?' Ivan said it with no great conviction, still holding the syringe up to the light, as if putting it down would have been the more strenuous act. 'Quantum mechanics says there is a small but finite probability that this syringe will vanish from my hand and reappear on the other side of the Temple wall. What would you think if that happened?'
'I'd think you were a skilled conjuror. If, however, there was no deception . . . I'd have to conclude that a very unlikely event had just happened.'
'And what if your life depended on it happening?'
'I don't follow.'
'Well, imagine that the liquid in this syringe is an unstable explosive; that in one second it'll detonate, killing everyone inside this room. If the syringe didn't jump, you'd be dead.'
'And if I survive . . . it must, logically, have happened. But that's not very likely, is it?'
'Never said it was. But the point is, it doesn't
have
to be - an event can be incredibly unlikely, and still be guaranteed to happen, provided there are sufficient opportunities for it to happen, sufficient trials.'
'Nothing profound in that.'
'No, but in the quantum view the trials happen
simultaneously
, in as many parallel versions of reality as are necessary to contain all possible permutations of all quantum states. Are you following me?'
'I was, until a moment ago.'
A smile haunted the old man's lips. 'Let's say that there are, for the sake of argument, a billion possible future versions of this room, each containing one identical or near-identical copy of you and me. Of course, there are many more than a billion - it's a number so huge that the physical universe wouldn't be large enough for us to write it down. But call it a billion. Now, each of those rooms differs from this one on the quantum level, but in the majority of cases the change is going to look random, meaningless. There will also be changes that look suspiciously coherent. But all that's happening is that every possible probabilistic outcome is being played out, completely blindly.' He waited while Sergio fetched him some more water, brow furrowed as if composing his thoughts. 'Logically, there exists a future state of the room in which the syringe borrows enough energy to tunnel beyond the wall and explode safely. It's unlikely, yes, but it
will
happen if there are sufficient trials. And in the quantum view, those trials all happen instantly, simultaneously, every moment we breathe. We feel ourselves moving seamlessly along one personal history, whereas we're shedding myriad versions of ourselves at each instant - some of which survive, some of which don't.' He released the syringe, allowing it to clatter to the floor, amongst the personal detritus next to his bed. 'Not bad for an effluent disposal technician from Smolensk, huh?'
'I believe I see the tack of your argument.'
'When the supernova happened, the chance of any one version of us surviving was absurdly small - yet one version of us
was
guaranteed to survive, because every possible quantum outcome was considered.'
'How do you know all this?'
'Isn't it obvious by now? The Kiwidinok showed me. And I mean
showed
me. Put it in my head, all in one go. Their consciousness - if you can call it consciousness - is blurred across event-lines. It's what they gained when they became less like us and more like machines. That's why they see things differently.'
Sergio took a breath to absorb that.
'And what did they show you?'
'Dead worlds. Much like Earth, but where the initial conditions of the supernova collapse weren't quite right to avoid our annihilation. Where, if you like, God hadn't poked his finger into quite the right place. Worlds of ash and darkness.'
He dug through his personal effects again, brushing aside the topsoil of junk. His hands found a small, flat bundle that he passed to Sergio. The oiled paper of the bundle unravelled in Sergio's fingers, exposing a cache of glossy grey cards much like those he had been shown in the seminary, shortly after his catechist had assumed residence.
But these images were not the same.
'I don't know how they did it,' the Founder said, 'but the Kiwidinok were able to interfere with the recording devices I took with me to Perdition. They were able to plant images on them, data from other event-lines. '
'Where the supernova happened differently.'
'Where we got crisped.'
In each image the degree of laceration was different, but it was never less than a mortal wounding, so absolute that life had not managed to reestablish tenancy on dry land. In some of the images it was possible to believe that something might still live in the shrivelled, oddly shorelined oceans that mottled the surface. In others, there were no oceans to speak of at all, nothing much resembling atmosphere.
'Mostly, that's how it was,' Ivan said. 'Mostly, we never made it through.
This
event-line, the one we're living in, is the freak exception: a remote strand on the edge of probability space. It only exists because we're here to observe it. And we're only here to observe it because it happened.'
Sergio picked through the rest of the images, variations on the same desolate theme. He knew with utter conviction that they were real - or as real as any data shared between event-lines could ever be. These images were secrets that Ivan had kept for eighty years - images that spoke not of divine intervention, not of miracle, but of brutality.
We survived
, Sergio thought,
not because we were favoured, not because we earned salvation, but because the laws of probability decreed that
someone
had to.
'What now?'
'Take what you have back to the Diocese. Make them listen.'
'You're asking a lot of me.'
'You're a man of God,' Ivan said, with very little irony. 'Ask Him for assistance.'
'Why should I still believe?'
'Because now, more than ever, you need faith. That was what was always missing - when we had proof we didn't need it. But our proof was a fiction. Our Order was a lie built upon lies. But tearing down the Order doesn't mean tearing down your faith, if you still have it. Me, I never found it, except in a particularly good thermal or at the end of a bottle. But you're a young man. You could still find faith, even if you haven't already. I think you'll need it too. It'll be a kind of jihad you'll be fighting.'
'You'll find it harder than you imagine,' said a voice, which did not come from the figure in the bed.
'Bellarmine,' Sergio said, turning around to face the Apparent, who had stolen quietly into the chamber. There was a whisper of scythed air, a flash of metal, and Bellarmine's hand acquired the cards from Sergio's grip. For a moment, the Apparent held them up to its face, feigning curiosity. Then it ripped them to shreds with a deft flicking movement.