Catch the Lightning (14 page)

Heather turned to Joshua. “We can study later if you want.”

“Yeah. Okay.” He looked like a cat jumping from a firecracker. “Can you help me carry some boxes up the stairs?” she asked. “I left them in the courtyard.”

“Oh. Yeah. Sure.” Joshua glanced at me. “I’ll be right back.” Both Joshua and Daniel left with Heather. When they were gone, I sat on the bed with Althor. “What did you mean about me leaving with you?”

“I want you to come with me,” he said. “If we get the Jag.”

“Why?”

“I—enjoy your company.”

“You want me to leave everything I know, go with you to some universe so different I can’t even imagine it, because you ‘enjoy my company’?”

“Yes.”

“That’s nuts. You’re more than thirty years older. What happens when you get tired of me? You’ll strand me someplace where I’m centuries out of date.”

“I wouldn’t strand you.”

“You say that now.”

“I say it now. I say it a century from now.” He paused. “That boy, the one with the gun at that house. He is part of why you can’t leave?”

That caught me off guard. ‘You mean Jake?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because he loves you.”

I stared at him. “How do you know that?”

“His mind was practically shouting it.”

I tried to sort out my thoughts. “We used to be together. But something has always been missing with him and me.” I spread my hands. “I don’t know how to explain. We were incomplete.” He spoke softly. “It’s like starving inside.”

“But with you it’s different.”

“We’re full Kyle operators, Tina. Telepaths, empaths, healers. Do you know how rare that is? Probably we’ll never find it again, not like we have with each other.” He took hold of my shoulders. “Don’t throw that away. Come with me.”

“I can’t.” Although I didn’t have the words to explain it then, in a sense I had already changed universes once in my life, when I left Chiapas and came to Los Angeles. Both my mother and Manuel had deserted me, or at least that was how it felt at the time. They left me alone to grapple with a universe I didn’t understand, a place where I was alien. Now Althor wanted me to literally leave my universe. He expected me to trust him, a man I hardly knew, who as far as I could see had no reason to stay with me.

I felt him consider forcing my cooperation. Then his mood changed, its sense of threat replaced by a dispirited acceptance. At the time, I didn’t believe he would ever have made me go with him. Why kidnap a nobody? I had no way to know how much it took out of him to accept my refusal. A computer would have done the requisite analysis and forced my compliance. Althor didn’t. Regardless of what Imperial Space Command may claim about his humanity, or lack of it, the decision he made that day was an act of human compassion.

He slid his hands down my arms as if he were holding a wild bird that would fly away if he let go. When he bent to kiss me, I felt his sense of loss in the place where I hid my own loneliness.

Joshua’s agitation was a gritty haze. As he locked the door, I swung my legs off the bed and sat up. Next to me, Althor continued to sleep.

“What did Heather say?” I asked.

He sat heavily in his desk chair. “She recognized you both as soon as she opened the door.”

“Josh, no! Is she going to turn us in?”

“Well—I don’t know.” He pushed back his curls. “She’s coming back in a few minutes.”

“Why?”

“It’s hard to tell with her. She doesn’t think like the rest of us.” His face gentled. “She’s brilliant, Tina. She’s up there where the rest of us can’t follow.”

I had never heard him talk this way about anyone. I couldn’t help but smile. “It sounds like she means a lot to you.”

He flushed. “She’s a senior* She doesn’t have time for a frosh like me.”

Althor opened his eyes. “This is why she has the combination to your room?”

Joshua jumped. “I thought you were sleeping.” When Althor raised his eyebrows, Joshua said, “She watered my plants last time I went home. That’s all.”

A knock sounded on the door. “It’s us,” Daniel called.

After Joshua let them in, Heather took a chair to the bed and turned it around backward. Daniel stood watching, looking first at her and then at Joshua. A grin tugged at his mouth, and I had a sense that in different circumstances he would have made some comment, teasingjoshua about being “Heather’s frosh.” Then he glanced at Althor and his smile faded.

Heather settled into the chair with her arms folded across the back, a sheaf of papers in one hand. As Althor sat up, planting his boots wide on the floor, she watched him, calm and unruffled. He blinked at her.

I picked up a lot about Heather at that first meeting. She had an outer toughness, the defenses of someone used to making her way in places where she was outnumbered. But beneath that hard shell lay a softness, a hidden bed of emotions. More than anything else, she exuded an insatiable curiosity.

Right now, though, she looked annoyed. “Josh tells me you claim to have a ship that goes faster than the speed of light.”

“I don’t have it,” Althor said. “Your air force does.” His voice made a deep rumbling note on the last word.

Her eyebrows arched. She handed him her papers. “I’m learning complex variable theory. Can you help with this problem?”

I glanced at Joshua, making my “what’s going on?” face. He spread his hands.

Althor took the papers. “I don’t know why you think I can help.”

“Just wondering,” she said.

He glanced through the papers. “This is inversion theory.”

“Inversion?” She leaned forward. “What’s that?”

“What happens when you go faster than light.” Althor lifted the papers. “This is—I don’t know the English word. Treatment with no acceleration. No tensors.”

“I’ve never heard it called inversion,” Heather said. “But yes, that’s what I get when I put faster-than-light speeds into the equations of special relativity.”

So. It was a test.

“I’m an engineer,” Althor said. “Not theorist. It’s been almost thirty years since I studied this and I never did that well in it.”

“That mean you can’t do it?” Heather didn’t look surprised. Althor blew out a gust of air and frowned at the papers. He asked her what some symbols meant, then sat reading. After a while he put the sheet on the bed and went to the next page. “This has a mistake,” he said.

“Where?” Heather asked.

He pointed to an equation. “The ratio is upside-down.”

The sweet scent of her surprise drifted through the air. It wasn’t because of the mistake; I was sure she put it there on purpose. But she hadn’t expected Althor to find it. “You’re right,” she said.

He continued to study the papers. As he found other mistakes, the fragrance of her astonishment filled the room.

Althor indicated the last page. “A factor is missing here.”

“That line is all right,” she said.

“You left out a two.”

She took the page from him. “Oh. You’re right. I did.”

I smiled. “See? He knows what he’s talking about.”

“All it shows is that he can do Heather’s math,” Daniel said. She regarded Althor. “So you claim your alleged ship can do what those equations predict.”

“Essentially,” he said.

She leaned closer. “Starting from sublight speeds?”

“Well, yes,” Althor said. “How else?”

She practically pounced. “That’s impossible. You can’t get past light speed. Time stops. Mass and energy become infinite. Length shrinks to zilch, zip, nada. Besides, even if you could get through light speed, superluminal travel has so many problems it could fill a book.”

“You don’t go through light speed,” Althor said. “You go around it.”

“Yeah, right,” Daniel said. “The hyperspace bypass from Cannes to Hell.”

Althor blinked. “What?”

“He means he doesn’t believe it,” Joshua said.

“Light speed is just a pole in the complex plane,” Althor said. “To go around it, you leave the real axis.”

“Mathematically that might work,” Heather said. “But physically it makes no sense.”'

“It makes sense,” Althor said. “You add a **** term to your speed.”

“A what term?” Joshua asked.

“It means—” Althor paused. “I don’t know the English word. Ortho-real.”

“Imaginary,” Heather said.

“Yes,” Althor said. “You add an imaginary part to your speed.”

“What’s imaginary?” I asked.

“Square root of a negative number,” Joshua said.

“Oh, come on,” Daniel said. “Imaginary numbers aren’t real. You can’t add an imaginary component to your speed.”

Althor scowled at him. “Tell this to the million starships doing it.”

Heather didn’t look convinced either. “Doing it how?”

“You rotate through complex space.”

“Of course,” Daniel muttered. “The ol’ complex space rotation.”

Heather shook her head. “Making speed complex may remove the singularity at light speed, but even if you get to superluminal space, you still have trouble. For one thing, you could go back in time.”

“Going pastward is no problem,” Althor said. “It looks like you go forward in time, but in ship made from antiparticles flying from your destination to your departure point.”

“That’s the lamest thing I’ve heard yet,” Daniel said.

Althor’s reaction caught us all by surprise. He rose to his full height, towering over Daniel, his fists clenched. “You say I am crippled?”

Daniel stepped back. “Well—no. I didn’t mean that at all.”

Althor stood there, fists knotted at his sides, while we all stared at him. Then I had the sense he reset himself, as he had done the night I asked about the hinge in his hand. He drew in a breath and sat on the bed again, letting his fists relax.

No one spoke. I could almost hear the others thinking This man committed murder. I was sure Althor had no intention of hurting them, but they had no way to know that.

After a moment Althor spoke to Daniel. “My sorry.”

“Uh—yeah,” Daniel said. “Sure.”

Heather spoke carefully. “Althor, what you describe about going into the past—that was written about in some early papers on tachyons. It’s called reinterpretation. Bilaniuk, Deshpande, and Sudarshan had articles on it. Feinberg too.”

“Then why do you act so surprised at what I say?”

“Because no experiments ever supported those theories.” Despite her wariness, her curiosity made a bouquet of flowers, each bloom giving off a different scent. “If you go into the past you get hit with paradoxes. You could stop yourself from being born.”

Althor shook his head. “ What happens in one reference frame must happen in all of them. If I stop myself from being born, everyone in every frame must observe it, as specified by the Lorentz transformations. That includes my frame. Since it’s stationary relative to me, I always observe myself traveling into the future, even if I travel into the past relative to, say, the planet where I was born. So if I could stop myself from being born, I would have already seen it happen. And I didn’t.”

“I know,” Heather said. “That’s the paradox.”

“There is no paradox,” Althor said. “You can’t do something in one reference frame and not do it in another. Don’t think of time as linear. It exists all at once, just as all space exists together. If I go backward in space relative to one observer and forward relative to another, the people who see me going backward can’t observe something inconsistent with what the people who see me going forward observe. The same is true for traveling in time. If I stopped my birth, it would happen in every observer’s frame. But it didn’t. Not in mine. I can go into the past, but I can’t do something my ancestors didn’t already experience.”

“You’re saying our existence is predetermined,” Heather said. “I can’t believe that.”

Althor shrugged. “Given initial conditions and all forces, the classical equations of motion determine your position for all times. How is that any different?”

“Classical mechanics has rules,” Daniel said. “So does quantum mechanics, or any other description of the universe. They make sense. If you go faster than light, you can go anywhere. Or anywhen.”

Althor leaned forward. “They make sense because your everyday experience involves moving in different directions in space, not time. Superluminal travel isn’t some magic time machine. For someone to observe you going pastward, both your speed and theirs must obey specific mathematical relations. And you’re going fast. By the time you travel back to your birth, you’re a long ways from Earth. How do you get home? If you reverse the sign of your velocity, you’ll no longer be going pastward relative to Earth. It’s a mess.”

“You’re in this universe before your birth,” I said.

Althor blinked. “Actually, I’m here before the Althor of this universe was born. But he’s not me.”

Heather’s fascination curled around him like a heavy-leafed vine. “Maybe you’re on the wrong Riemann sheet.”

“The wrong what?” Joshua asked.

“Riemann sheet,” Heather said. “It’s a mathematical representation designed to make multivalued complex quantities into single-valued functions.”

Daniel scowled. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?” Heather asked.

“Talking so no one understands what the hell you’re saying.” She thought for a moment. “A Riemann sheet is like a clock. The face has a cut in it from, say, the center to the twelve. The hands go around from midnight to noon, then slide through the branch cut to a second clock underneath. It’s the same as the first clock, except it goes from noon to midnight. At midnight you go back to the first clock. The more complicated the function, the more clocks you stack up.”

“Riemann sheets are just math,” Althor said. “They don’t really exist.”

“How do you know?” Daniel asked. “You’re claiming imaginary universes exist.”

Joshua spoke. “Althor, maybe when you did this inversion thing, you fell through a branch cut and came out on the wrong sheet. Like Heather’s second clock. Same time, different phase.” Althor considered him. “Do you have a history text?”

Joshua pulled a green book off his bookcase and gave it to him. Althor flipped through the pages, stopped to read, flipped more, read more. Every now and then his face blanked into his computer mode.