Eileen Gunn - Stable Strategies and Others

So why did Isaac not worship him? Isn’t that all a god asks, and isn’t it right that he ask it? But there was something in Isaac that kept him from giving over the portion of himself that religious people offer as a gift to their gods. He just couldn’t do it. He could acknowledge the power, but he couldn’t offer obeisance. Perhaps if he worshiped properly, Quetzalcóatl would return him home. Perhaps not. It didn’t matter — it wasn’t in Isaac to do it.

The turtle was approaching the boat. Isaac could hear the excited yells of the crew, pleased and surprised to see him coming back from what they must have thought was certain death. He waved jauntily.

Bob Heinlein’s voice cut through the others. “Grab the ladder, Isaac! It’s going for you!”

Isaac looked over his shoulder. Sure enough, one of the plesiosaurs was casually swimming his way. This was his chance to touch it. He had to know what it felt like. Armor-plated? Warm-blooded? He had to know.

He seized the ladder, pulling himself off the back of the turtle. Hooking an elbow around a rung, he leaned outward, as the huge reptile approached, and extended his free hand. The ladder jerked spasmodically and he felt himself being pulled out of reach. The plesiosaur stretched its tiny head up toward him, like a cat wanting to be petted. He was still straining to reach it when they hauled him onto the deck.

The sailors seemed to think he had cracked under the stress of whatever had happened to him below the sea. “You’ll be all right, buddy!” one of them kept saying in a tight voice. “You’re okay now! You’re on the ship, it’s okay!” Maybe he was talking to himself.

Heinlein clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Good work, Isaac! What did you find out?” That’s Bob all over, Isaac thought. “Good work” meant “I thought you were a goner there.” The clap on the shoulder meant “I really thought you were a goner.” And “What did you find out?” meant “Let’s not think about this any more.”

“What happened out there, Isaac?” Grace Hopper looked as though she knew more than she was letting on.

“That’s ‘Mr. Asimov,’ isn’t it, Ensign Hopper?” Isaac grinned.

“I can see the experience didn’t change you much,” she said dryly. “Who was your friend, the huge golden hypnotist? I’m not accustomed to being driven like an automobile.” It dawned on Isaac that Hopper’s experience with Quetzalcóatl might have been even more disturbing than his own.

“He’s a retired god,” said Isaac, matter-of-factly. “He bred the plesiosaurs — this world is his ranch, I think.” He furrowed his brow. “Oh, wait! I know where we are!”

“Just a moment. If the immediate crisis is past, it’s time to resume normal operations.” She turned to the crewmen, now reduced to about fifty men. “Return to your stations, men.” They dispersed, and she turned back to Isaac and Bob.

“I prefer not to have an audience for this conversation,” she said quietly. “Continue, Mr. Asimov. Where are we?”

“We’re exactly where we seem to be, in the Sargasso Sea.” Isaac paused for effect. He couldn’t help himself. “But we’re rotated through other dimensions than those we’re accustomed to.”

Hopper didn’t seem surprised by the notion. “That’s a bit of a stretch from the data at hand. Why do you think so?” Bob, of course, was already nodding. That was the advantage of being a science fiction writer — nothing was ever too strange.

“Quetzalcóatl told me.” The information had been poured into him, really, like water filling a pitcher. The ship, with everyone on board, was rotating out of alignment with their familiar dimensions into synchronization with ones they couldn’t ordinarily perceive, and each of the phase-change events that they had gone through had rotated them further from the familiar.

“And you were told this?”

Now that Isaac thought about it, he wasn’t so sure that words were exchanged. “He made it clear to me, anyway.”

Heinlein was looking at him oddly. “What makes you think it’s true?”

Isaac shrugged. “Would a god lie?” Then, “Unfortunately, he didn’t say how to stop the process — so I guess we’re as far from home as ever, unless the skipper here knows something I don’t.”

Grace Hopper’s eyes narrowed. “Let me see if I can steer you in the right direction, Mr. Asimov.” Oops, he thought. “We started off in a space-time continuum that may have an infinite number of dimensional vectors, of which we can perceive four — height, depth, width, and time. Somehow, when we discharge the Tesla coils, the ship rotates relative to these infinite dimensions, and we perceive what’s going on in dimensions we don’t usually have to deal with.”

Asimov knew that Hopper knew something about physics, but non-linear abstract geometry? Who was this woman, anyway? “I apologize, ma’am. But how come it doesn’t look any different? Except for the plesiosaurs, and so forth.”

“Quetzalcóatl is a pretty big so-forth, but that’s a good question, Mr. Asimov. This is just a guess, but it could be that so far, at least, the physics is basically the same, and it’s relatively easy to orient ourselves. It might be that if we get knocked out of alignment with all our familiar dimensions, we would find the situation much more disorienting. We’ve still got one foot on the dock, but we’re slipping away.”

“I’m not sure I follow you there.” Isaac had trouble admitting ignorance, but if anything mattered, getting this right mattered. This dimensional stuff wasn’t his strong point.

Bob Heinlein was leagues ahead of him. “That’s it, I think, ma’am, the alignment. Isaac, imagine living in only three dimensions — you don’t perceive depth, say. Things seem two-dimensional to you, as if you lived on a piece of paper. That doesn’t mean the other dimensions aren’t there, but so as far as you’re concerned, they might as well not be. Now suppose you rotate, so you do perceive depth. Because you live in only three dimensions, you’d lose the ability to perceive one of the other ones — height or width or time, see? You’d still be limited to three. But the other one would still be there.”

Isaac could see that. He nodded.

“Now suppose there are more dimensions than three or four. Suppose we inherently four-dimensional beings got realigned with another dimension somehow. We’d lose alignment with one of the ones we’ve got. Maybe what’s happening when we go through these phase-transitions is the dimensional axes are rotated, so that we’re no longer perfectly aligned with our familiar world. We’re still there, but we can’t get at it!”

“Therefore, to get home, we have to rotate our ship back into alignment with the dimensions we want to live in,” Hopper said.

“And soon,” added Isaac.

“But don’t you think it would be interesting to try a few more realignments first?” There actually was a pleading tone to Heinlein’s voice. He honestly wanted to take a few more spins through the circles of Hell.

Asimov shuddered. “I don’t think — ”

A jarring percussive clatter rattled the deck. The entire ship vibrated at a bone-numbing frequency. The area between the lines that Heinlein and Isaac had marked on the deck sublimated into gray-green fog, and the smell of ozone filled Isaac’s nostrils. Green fire played over the deck, over the guns, over the conning tower. The fire moved beyond mere green: it was the color of chartreuse tinted with the music of flutes and the vinegar taste of radio waves. It was a color that smelled like butyl mercaptan.

Someone had switched on the Tesla coils again.

“Your wish has been granted, Bob,” said Isaac, through paralyzing fear.