“Really? Think of what else they’ve made people believe. They’ve persuaded us that we’ll be safe if only we spend all our wealth so everybody on Earth can be killed in a moment–when the governments decide the time has come. I would think it’s hard to make people believe something so foolish. No, Ellie, they’re good at convincing. They need only say that the Machine doesn’t work, and that we’ve gone a little mad.”
“I don’t think we’d seem so mad if we all told our story together. But you may be right. Maybe we should try to find some evidence first Vaygay, will you be okay when you…go back?”
“What can they do to me? Exile me to Gorky? I could survive that; I’ve had my day at the beach….No, I will be safe. You and I have a mutual-security treaty, Ellie. As long as you’re alive, they need me. And vice versa, of course. If the story is true, they will be glad there was a Soviet witness; eventually, they will cry it from the rooftops. And like your people, they will wonder about military and economic uses of what we saw.
“It doesn’t matter what they tell us to do. All that matters is that we stay alive. Then we will tell our story–all five of us–discreetly, of course. At first only to those we trust. But those people will tell others. The story will spread. There will be no way to stop it. Sooner or later the governments will acknowledge what happened to us in the dodecahedron. And until then we are insurance policies for each other. Ellie, I am very happy about all this. It is the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”
“Give Nina a kiss for me,” she said just before he left on the night flight to Moscow.
Over breakfast, she asked Xi if he was disappointed.
“Disappointed? To go there”–he lifted his eyes skyward–“to see them, and to be disappointed? I am an orphan of the Long March. I survived the Cultural Revolution. I was trying to grow potatoes and sugar beets for six years in the shadow of the Great Wall. Upheaval has been my whole life. I know disappointment.
“You have been to a banquet, and when you come home to your starving village you are disappointed that they do not celebrate your return? This is no disappointment. We have lost a minor skirmish. Examine the…disposition of forces.”
He would shortly be departing for China, where he had agreed to make no public statements about what had happened in the Machine. But he would return to supervise the dig at Xian. The tomb of Qin was waiting for him. He wanted to see how closely the Emperor resembled that simulation on the far side of the tunnels.
“Forgive me. I know this is impertinent,” she said after a while, “but the fact that of all of us, you alone met someone who…In all your life, wasn’t there anyone you loved?”
She wished she had phrased the question better. “Everyone I ever loved was taken from me. Obliterated. I saw the emperors of the twentieth century come and go,” he answered. “I longed for someone who could not be revised, or rehabilitated, or edited out. There are only a few historical figures who cannot be erased.”
He was looking at the tabletop, fingering the teaspoon. “I devoted my life to the Revolution, and I have no regrets. But I know almost nothing of my mother and father. I have no memories of them. Your mother is still alive. You remember your father, and you found him again. Do not overlook how fortunate you arc.”
In Devi, Ellie sensed a grief she had never before noticed. She assumed it was a reaction to the skepticism with which Project Directorate and the governments bad greeted their story. But Devi shook her head.
“Whether they believe us is not very important for me. The experience itself is central. Transforming. Ellie, that really happened to us. It was real. The first night we were back here on Hokkaido, I dreamt that our experience was a dream, you know? But it wasn’t, it wasn’t.
“Yes, I’m sad. My sadness is…You know, I satisfied a lifelong wish up there when I found Surindar again, after all these years. He was exactly as I remembered him, exactly as I’ve dreamed of him. But when I saw him, when I saw so perfect a simulation, I knew: This love was precious because it had been snatched away, because I had given up so much to marry him. Nothing more. The man was a fool. Ten years with him, and we would have been divorced. Maybe only five. I was so young and foolish.”
“I’m truly sorry,” Ellie said. “I know a little about mourning a lost love.”
“Ellie,” she replied, “you don’t understand. For the first time in my adult life, I do not mourn Surindar. What I mourn is the family I renounced for his sake.”
Sukhavati was returning to Bombay for a few days and then would visit her ancestral village in Tamil Nadu.
“Eventually,” she said, “it will be easy to convince ourselves this was only an illusion. Every morning when we wake up, our experience will be more distant, more dreamlike. It would have been better for us all to stay together, to reinforce our memories. They understood this danger. That’s why they took us to the seashore, something like our own planet, a reality we can grasp. I will not permit anyone to trivialize this experience. Remember. It really happened. It was not a dream. Ellie, don’t forget.”
Eda was, considering the circumstances, very relaxed. She soon understood why. While she and Vaygay had been undergoing lengthy interrogations, he had been calculating.
“I think the tunnels are Einstein-Rosen bridges,” he said. “General Relativity admits a class of solutions, called wormholes, similar to black holes, but with no evolutionary connection–they cannot be generated, as black holes can, by the gravitational collapse of a star. But the usual sort of wormhole, once made, expands and contracts before anything can cross through; it exerts disastrous tidal forces, and it also requires–at least as seen by an observer left behind–an infinite amount of time to get through.”
Ellie did not see how this represented much progress, and asked him to clarify. The key problem was holding the wormhole open. Eda had found a class of solutions to his field equations that suggested a new macroscopic field, a kind of tension that could be used to prevent a wormhole from contracting fully. Such a wormhole would pose none of the other problems of black holes; it would have much smaller tidal stresses, two-way access, quick transit times as measured by an exterior observer, and no devastating interior radiation field. “I don’t know whether the tunnel is stable against small perturbations,” he said. “If not, they would have to build a very elaborate feedback system to monitor and correct the instabilities. I’m not yet sure of any of this. But at least if the tunnels can be Einstein-Rosen bridges, we can give some answer when they tell us we were hallucinating,”
Eda was eager to return to Lagos, and she could see the green ticket of Nigerian Airlines peeking out of his jacket pocket. He wondered if he could completely work through the new physics their experience had implied. But he confessed himself unsure that he would be equal to the task, especially because of what he described as his advanced age for theoretical physics. He was thirty-eight. Most of all, he told Ellie, he was desperate to be reunited with his wife and children.
She embraced Eda. She told him that she was proud to have known him.
“Why the past tense?” he asked. “You will certainly sec me again. And Ellie,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “will you do something for me? Remember everything that happened, every detail. Write it down. And send it to me. Our experience represents experimental data. One of us may have seen some point that the others missed, something essential for a deep understanding of what happened. Send me what you write. I have asked the others to do the same.”
He waved, lifted his battered briefcase, and was ushered into the waiting project car.
They were departing for their separate nations, and it felt to Ellie as if her own family were being sundered, broken, dispersed. She too had found the experience transforming. How could she not? A demon had been exorcised. Several. And just when she felt more capable of love than she had ever been, she found herself alone.
They spirited her out of the facility by helicopter. On the long flight to Washington in the government airplane, she slept so soundly that they had to shake her awake when the White House people came aboard– just after the aircraft landed briefly on an isolated runway at Hickam Field, Hawaii.