Stephen Baxter - The Light of Other Days

Kate gazed at his perfect face. This is a bird who is happy with his gilded cage, she thought. A spoilt rich kid.

But she felt herself flush under his gaze, and despised her biology.

She hadn't spoken for some seconds; Bobby was still waiting for her to respond to his dinner invitation.

‘I'll think about it, Bobby.’

He seemed puzzled – as if he'd never received such a hesitant response before. ‘Is there a problem? If you want I can –’

‘Ladies and gentlemen.’

Every head turned; Kate was relieved.

Hiram had mounted a stage at one end of the cafeteria. Behind him, a giant SoftScreen showed a blown-up image of his head and shoulders. He was smiling over them all, like some beneficent god, and drones drifted around his head bearing jewel-like images of the multiple OurWorld channels. ‘May I say, first of all, thank you all for coming to witness this moment of history, and for your patience. Now the show is about to begin.’

The dandy-like virtual in the lime green soldier-suit materialized on the stage beside Hiram, his granny glasses glinting in the lights. He was joined by three others, in pink, blue and scarlet, each carrying a musical instrument – an oboe, a trumpet, a piccolo. There was scattered applause. The four took an easy bow, and stepped lightly to an area at the back of the stage where a drum kit and three electric guitars were waiting for them.

Hiram said easily, ‘This imagery is being broadcast to us, here in Seattle, from a station near Brisbane, Australia – bounced off various comsats, with a time delay of a few seconds. I don't mind telling you these boys have made a mountain of money in the last couple of years – their new song Let Me Love You was number one around the world for four weeks over Christmas – and all the profit from that went to charity.’

‘ New song ,’ Kate murmured cynically.

Bobby leaned closer. ‘You don't like the V-Fabs?’

‘Oh, come on,’ she said. ‘The originals broke up sixty-five years ago. Two of them died before I was born. Their guitars and drums are so clunky and old-fashioned compared to the new airware bands, where the music emerges from the performers’ dance…And anyhow all these new songs are just expert-system extrapolated garbage.’

‘All part of our – what do you call it in your polemics? – our cultural decay,’ he said gently.

‘Hell, yes,’ she said, but before his easy grace she felt a little embarrassed by her sourness.

Hiram was still talking. ‘…not just a stunt. I was born in 1967, during the Summer of Love. Of course some say the Sixties were a cultural revolution that led nowhere. Perhaps that's true – directly. But it, and its music of love and hope, played a great part in shaping me, and others of my generation.’

Bobby caught Kate's eye. He mimed vomiting with a splayed hand, and she had to cover her mouth to keep from laughing.

‘…And at the height of that summer, on 25 June 1967, a global television show was mounted to demonstrate the power of the nascent communications network.’ Behind Hiram the V-Fab drummer counted out a beat, and the group started playing, a dirge-like parody of the Marseillaise that gave way to finely-sung three-part harmony. ‘This was Britain's contribution,’ Hiram called over the music. ‘A song about love, sung to two hundred million people around the world. That show was called Our World. Yes, that's right. That's where I got the name from. I know it's a little corny. But as soon as I saw the tapes of that event, at ten years old, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.’

Corny, yes, thought Kate, but undeniably effective; the audience was gazing spellbound at Hiram's giant image as the music of a summer seven decades gone reverberated around the cafeteria.

‘And now,’ said Hiram with a showman's flourish, ‘I believe I have achieved my life's goal. I'd suggest holding onto something – even someone else's hand…’

The floor turned transparent.

Suddenly suspended over empty space, Kate felt herself stagger, her eyes deceived despite the solidity of the floor beneath her feet. There was a gale of nervous laughter, a few screams, the gentle tinkle of dropped glass.

Kate was surprised to find she had grabbed onto Bobby's arm. She could feel a knot of muscle there. He had covered her hand with his, apparently without calculation.

She let her hand stay where it was. For now.

She seemed to be hovering over a starry sky, as if this cafeteria had been transported into space. But these ‘stars’, arrayed against a black sky, were gathered and harnessed into a cubical lattice, linked by a subtle tracery of multicoloured light. Looking into the lattice, the images receding with distance, Kate felt as if she was staring down an infinitely long tunnel.

With the music still playing around him – so artfully, subtly different from the original recording – Hiram said, ‘You aren't looking up into the sky, into space. Instead you are looking down , into the deepest structure of matter.

‘This is a crystal of diamond. The white points you see are carbon atoms. The links are the valence forces that join them. I want to emphasize that what you are going to see, though enhanced, is not a simulation. With modern technology – scanning tunnelling microscopes, for instance – we can build up images of matter even at this most fundamental of levels. Everything you see is real. Now – come further.’

Holographic images rose to fill the room, as if the cafeteria and all its occupants were sinking into the lattice, and shrinking the while. Carbon atoms swelled over Kate's head like pale grey balloons; there were tantalizing hints of structure in their interior. And all around her space sparkled. Points of light winked into existence, only to be snuffed out immediately. It was quite extraordinarily beautiful, like swimming through a firefly cloud.

‘You're looking at space,’ said Hiram. ‘“Empty” space. This is the stuff that fills the universe. But now we are seeing space at a resolution far finer than the limits of the human eye, a level at which individual electrons are visible – and at this level, quantum effects become important. “Empty” space is actually full , full of fluctuating energy fields. And these fields manifest themselves as particles: photons, electron-positron pairs, quarks…They flash into a brief existence, bankrolled by borrowed mass-energy, then disappear as the law of conservation of energy reasserts itself. We humans see space and energy and matter from far above, like an astronaut flying over an ocean. We are too high to see the waves, the flecks of foam they carry. But they are there.

‘And we haven't reached the end of our journey yet. Hang onto your drinks, folks.’

The scale exploded again. Kate found herself flying into the glassy onion-shell interior of one of the carbon atoms. There was a hard, shining lump at its very centre, a cluster of misshapen spheres. Was it the nucleus? – and were those inner spheres protons and neutrons?

As the nucleus flew at her she heard people cry out. Still clutching Bobby's arm, she tried not to flinch as she hurtled into one of the nucleons.

And then…

There was no shape here. No form, no definite light, no colour beyond a blood-red crimson. And yet there was motion, a slow, insidious, endless writhing, punctuated by bubbles which rose and burst. It was like the slow boiling of some foul, thick liquid.

Hiram said, ‘We've reached what the physicists call the Planck level. We are twenty order of magnitudes deeper than the virtual-particle level we saw earlier. And at this level, we can't even be sure about the structure of space itself: topology and geometry break down, and space and time become untangled.’