Prisoners of Tomorrow (92 page)

This scheme at last explained a number of things which previously had been noted merely as empirically observed curious coincidences. It explained why quarks came in three colors: Each one-plus-two combination of dums and dees had three and only three possible permutations. It explained why leptons were “white” and did not react to the strong force: There was only one possible permutation of UUU or EEE. And it explained why the electrical charges on quarks and leptons were equal: They were carried by the same tweedles. Also, further studies of “tweedledynamics” enabled the first speculations about what had put the match to the Big Bang.

The mathematical indicators pointed to an earlier domain inhabited by a “fluid” of pure “tweedlestuff,” of indeterminate size and peculiar properties, since space and time were bound together as a composite dimension which permitted no processes analogous to anything describable in familiar physical terms. There were grounds for supposing that if an expanding nodule of disentangled space and time were introduced arbitrarily through some mechanism—pictured by some people as a bubble appearing in soda water, although this wasn’t really accurate—the reduced “pressure” inside the bubble would trigger the condensation of raw tweedlestuff out of “tweedlespace” as an explosion of tweedles and antitweedles, the tweedles preserving the “timelike” aspect, and the antitweedles the “antitimelike” aspect of the timeless domain from which they originated. Their mutual affinity would precipitate their combination into a dense photon fluid in which timelessness became reestablished, which tied in with Relativity by explaining why time stood still for moving photons and accounting for the strange connection in the perceived universe between the rate at which time flowed and the speed of light. The high-energy conditions of the primordial photon fluid, the density of which would have approximated that of the atomic nucleus, would favor the formation of “tweeplet” entities to give rise to matter interacting under conditions dominated by the strong nuclear force, which manifested itself to restore non-Abelian gauge symmetry with respect to the variance introduced by the separation of space and time. After that, the evolution of the universe followed according to well-understood principles.

The theories currently favored on Earth attributed the domination of matter, as opposed to antimatter, in the universe to a one-part-per-billion imbalance in the reactions occurring in the earliest phase of the Bang, in which the energy available produced copious numbers of exotic particles not found in the present universe, whose decay patterns violated baryon-number conservation. In the present universe they appeared rarely, only as transient “virtual particles” and were responsible for the almost immeasurable, but measured, 10
³¹
-year mean lifetime of the proton.

It was believed virtual particles were virtual because the conditions of the present universe could not supply the energy necessary to sustain tweeplets. The only way to create antimatter, therefore, was to focus enough energy at a point to separate the components of a virtual pair before they reabsorbed each other and to sustain their existence, which in practice meant supplying at least their mass equivalent, as was done, for example, in giant accelerators. This was the reason for the widespread skepticism that any net energy gain could ever be realized from annihilating the antimatter later. At best it was felt to be an elaborate storage battery, and not a very efficient one at that; the power poured into the accelerator would be better applied directly to whatever the antimatter was wanted for.

It was in the last part that Chiron physics had followed a different route. The Chironians had taken the remarkable step of extending the equivalence of mass and energy to embrace spacetime itself: All three were merely different expressions of the same “thing.” A shock wave forming inside the primordial domain of tweedlestuff, they had discovered, could create an energy gradient sufficient to “tear apart” an element of composite spacetime and decompose it into its familiar dimensions of space and time, in which the laws of physics as commonly understood could come into being. Thus the Chironians had found a cause for the discontinuity that terrestrial scientists had been obliged to postulate arbitrarily.

The subsequent expansion of space followed directly from the Chironian mass-energy-space equivalence relationship: The cooling photon fluid actually transformed into space as well as matter tweeplets, the ratio depending on the temperature and shifting from one favoring tweeplets to one favoring space as the universe cooled down. Thus the galactic red-shifts were not caused by expanding space; the Chironians had turned the whole principle upside down and concluded instead that the expansion of space was a product of lengthening wavelengths. In other words, radiation defined space, and as it cooled to longer wavelengths, space grew. Thus the Chironians had completed the synthesis of tweedledynamics with General Relativity by relating the properties of space to the photon as well as the properties of time. The “islands” of matter tweeplets left behind from the cooling photon fluid remained dominated internally by the strong force while gravitation became the dominant influence in the macroscopic realm created outside, and in many ways they continued to behave as microcosms of the domain from which they had originated.

Even more remarkable was another prediction that followed from the Chironian symmetry relationships, which required the creation of an “antiuniverse” along with the universe, populated by antimatter and consisting of an extraordinary realm in which “antitime” ran backward and “antispace” contracted from an initial volume of zero. Universes, like particles, were created in pairs. And it was the duality of universes, each exhibiting a spacetime decomposed into two discrete dimensions, which gave rise to the two-way duality manifested by tweedles and anti-tweedles: Dums, dees, antidums, and antidees were simply spacelike, timelike, antispacelike, and antitimelike projections of the same fundamental entity existing in the timeless, spaceless domain of tweedlespace.

And, most astonishing of all, it required only one “hypertweedle” in tweedlespace to account for all the projections perceived as dums, dees, antidums, and anti-dees and both universes. A universe provided, in effect, a screen upon which the same projections were repeated over and over again as a consequence of the separation of the space and time dimensions of the screen itself, which of course was why every dum was the same as every other dum, and every dee the same as every other dee. It was as if a typewriter created paper as it typed on, leaving the planar inhabitants of the flat universe that it had brought into being to ponder why all the characters encountered serially in their own “flat-time” should have exactly the same form.

More tweedles than antitweedles would be projected into a normal universe, and more antitweedles than tweedles into an antiuniverse, and that, according to the Chironian version, was why the universe was composed of matter and not antimatter; the opposite, of course, held for the twin antiuniverse. The way to obtain antimatter, they therefore reasoned, would be to make a small part of the universe look like an antiuniverse so that tweedlespace could be “fooled” into projecting antitweedles instead of tweedles into it. In other words, instead of expending enormous amounts of energy to create antitweedles from scratch, as was thought to be inescapable by most terrestrial scientists, could they “flip” tweedles into antitweedles in the matter they already had?

To the astonishment of even themselves, they found that they could. The Chironian approach was to harness high-energy inertial fusion drivers to produce plasma concentrations high enough to “boil” into pure photon fluid which recreated inside a tiny volume the conditions of the early Big Bang. Within this region, space and time recoupled and contracted inward with the imploding core to simulate for an instant the bizarre, inverted conditions of an anti-universe, and in that instant a large portion of the tweedles liberated in the process transformed into antitweedles which, under the prevailing high-energy conditions, combined preferentially into antiquarks and antileptons rather than radiation. Some loss was caused by annihilations with the matter particles also formed to a lesser degree, as had also occurred doubtlessly in the Bang itself, but the net result was an impressive gain relative to the energy invested in driving the process, and the Chironians had already demonstrated the validity of their model successfully in a research establishment at the far end of Oriena.

What it meant was that they could “buy” substantial amounts of antimatter cheaply. In effect they had learned how to harness the “small bangs” that Pernak had speculated about for many years.

The theory opened up whole new realms, Pernak was beginning to appreciate as he sat back in his office to give his mind a rest from absorbing the information being presented on the wall screen opposite. What he was starting to glimpse hadn’t just to do with the physics; it was the completely new philosophy of existence that came with the physical interpretation.

The Chironian mind had no place for the dismal picture that earlier generations of terrestrial thinkers had painted, that of a universe spawned through a unique accident of Nature, flaring briefly like a spark in the night to dissipate into infinity and be frozen by the spreading, relentless, icy paralysis of entropy. To the Chironian, the universe was but one atom of a possibly infinite Universe of sibling universes, every one of which coexisted at every point in space with the source-realm that had procreated its family with the profligacy of a summer stormcloud precipitating raindrops. Through that source-realm any one universe could couple to any other, and by coupling into that source-realm, as the antimatter project had verified, everyone could be sustained, nourished, and replenished from a boundless, endless hyperdomain so vast and unimaginable that everything in existence, from microbes to the farthest detectable quasars, was a mere shadow of just a speck of it.

Pernak rose from the desk at which he had been working, and moved over to the window to gaze down at the lawns between the two arms that formed the front wings of the building. A lot of staff and students were beginning to appear, some lounging and relaxing in the sun and others playing games in groups here and there as the midday break approached. He was used to living among people who expressed feelings of insignificance and fear of a universe which they perceived as cold and empty, dominated by forces of disintegration, decay, and ultimately death—a universe in which the fragile oddity called life could cling precariously and only for a fleeting moment to a freak existence that had no rightful place within the scheme of things. Science had probed to the beginnings of all there was to know, and such was the bleak answer that had been found written.

The Chironian, by contrast, saw a rich, bright, vibrant universe manifesting at every level of structure and scale of magnitude the same irresistible force of self-ordering, self-organizing evolution that had built atoms from plasma, molecules from atoms, then life itself, and from there produced the supreme phenomenon of mind and all that could be created by mind. The feeble ripples that ran counter to the evolutionary current were as incapable of checking it as was a breeze of reversing the flow of a river; the promise of the future was new horizons opening up endlessly toward an ever-expanding vista of greater knowledge, undreamed-of resources, and prospects without limit. Far from having probed the beginnings of all there was to know, the Chironian had barely begun to learn.

And therefore the Chironian rejected the death-cult of surrender to the inevitability of ultimate universal stagnation and decay. Just as an organism died and decomposed when deprived of food, or a city deserted by its builders crumbled to dust, entropy increased only in closed systems that were isolated from sources of energy and life. But the Chironian universe was no longer a closed system. Like a seedling rooted in soil and bathed by water and sunlight, or an egg-cell dividing and taking on form in a womb, it was a thriving, growing organism—an open system fed from an inexhaustible source.

And for such a system the universal law was not death, but life.

Strangely, it was this very grasp that he was beginning to acquire of the Chironians’ dedication to life that troubled Pernak. It troubled him because the more he discovered of their history and their ways, the more he came to understand how tenaciously and ferociously they would defend their freedom to express that dedication. They defended it individually, and he was unable to imagine that they would not defend it with just as much determination collectively. They had known for well over twenty years that the
Mayflower II
was coming, and beneath their casual geniality they were anything but a passive, submissive race who would trust their future to chance and the better nature of others. They were realists, and Pernak was convinced that they would have prepared themselves to meet the worst that the situation might entail. Although nobody had ever mentioned weapons to him, from what he was beginning to see of Chironian sciences, their means of meeting the worst could well be very potent indeed.

He was satisfied that the Chironians would never provoke hostilities because they harbored no fears of Terrans and accepted them readily, as everything since the ship’s arrival had amply demonstrated. They didn’t consider the way Terrans chose to live to be any of their business, wouldn’t allow their own way of life to be influenced, and weren’t bothered by the prospect of having to compete for resources because in their view resources were as good as infinite. But he felt less reassured about the Terrans—at least some of them. Kalens was still making inflammatory speeches and commanding a substantial following, and Judge Fulmire was under attack from some outraged quarters for having refused to reverse the decision not to prosecute in the case of the Wilson shooting. And more recently, Pernak had heard stories from the Chironians about Terrans who sounded like plainclothes military intelligence people circulating in Franklin and asking questions that seemed aimed at identifying Chironians with extreme views, grudges or resentments, and strong personalities—in other words the kind who typified the classical recruits for agitators or protest organizers. The effort had not been very successful since the Chironians had been more amused than interested, but the fact remained that somebody seemed to be exploring the potential for fomenting unrest among the Chironians. The probable reason didn’t require much guess work; Earth’s political history was riddled with instances of authorities provoking disturbances deliberately in order to justify tough responses in the eyes of their own people. If some faction, and presumably a fairly powerful one, was indeed maneuvering to bring about a confrontation, and if what Pernak was beginning to glimpse of the Chironians was anything to go by, then that faction might well be in for some nasty surprises. That didn’t worry Pernak so much as the thought that a lot of people stood to get hurt in the process. Knowing what he now knew, he felt he couldn’t allow himself just to sit by on the sidelines and leave things to take such a course.