The Singers of Time

14

What was certain was that the voyage to that pale, distant Turtle beacon was going to be a long one. A day or two at least, Krake told Sue-ling, and did not dare to tell her how many years of "imaginary" time those days would encompass.

Now that there was time to spare, Krake took up some unfinished business. He had not forgiven Thrayl—or Thrayl's mistress. Although he tried to keep his tone level, there was an edge to it as he turned to Moon Bunderan. "Now I want you to answer some questions for me. Why did you let that animal keep me from saving us?"

The Taur only gazed gently at him. Moon said staunchly: "Thrayl had a reason. Thrayl always has a good reason for everything he does, only he can't always explain what they are."

"Good reason! What good reason could he have for risking my ship—not to mention all our lives?"

"Do not address this Taur in that fashion," Chief Thunderbird said severely.

"If it were not for the Taur," Litlun seconded, "we would not have found the trail of the Mother planet. One knew one was right to bring the Taur along. It is proper to praise him now."

Sue-ling blinked at the Turtles. Something was going on that she had not expected—and something that Chief Thunderbird was finding interesting, too, because she saw one of the huge Turtle's eyes slowly revolve to fix on his Younger Brother. Krake, however, was not interested in subtleties. He opened his mouth to address them, but was distracted by what he saw behind them. He craned his neck to see Daisy Fay, seated at the control board and looking agitated.

"What's the matter?" he demanded.

The machine-woman waved a few tentacles at the display. "I don't know, Francis. What do you make of this?"

The captain pushed his way between the giant Turtles to bend over her. "What is it?"

Daisy Fay stabbed out with three or four arms, pointing to several different readings on the chart. "I'm trying to establish reference points, Francis—you know, distant galaxies to use as benchmarks, to compare nearer stars with. But they—"

"Foolish human woman!" Chief Thunderbird snarled. "Why do you bother with such things? It is the sacred Mother planet you should be seeking!"

"I know, but—"

"Do not dispute!" the Turde said peremptorily. "It is simple! You must find a single planet. It cannot be far from the wormhole."

"And you must find it quickly," Litlun put in, shivering with a sudden thought, "because if the planet came through by itself it is in terrible danger—it has lost its sun! No radiation to feed the Mother and her young!"

Krake looked at him sourly. "With all the radiation from all those stars? Anyway, there's nothing like a solitary planet in the range of our instruments," he told them, his face drawn.

"And look at what Daisy Fay has discovered. Those benchmark galaxies? The navigation instruments have been marking them, and do you see what the frequency analyzers say? Each one of them is shifted into the blue."

There was total silence from everyone in the chamber. Moon dared to break it. "I don't understand. What difference does it make what color a distant galaxy is?"

"It means," Sork said hollowly, "that this is a dying universe. The blue-shift means it is not expanding; it is collapsing."

Captain Krake said tightly, "Worse than that. This whole space is flooded with dangerous radiation."

Sue-ling watched the captain critically as he tried to control himself—there was a good chance of a cerebrovascular accident there, she thought, if he didn't calm down. She put her hand on his arm in sympathy, but he seemed not to notice.

"We of the Brotherhood do not fear this," Chief Thunderbird said in contempt.

"But we do! It would kill us. If those old lectures mean anything, this whole universe is collapsing, and as it does it is heating up, producing more and more radiation—"

Chief Thunderbird turned both burning eyes on Captain Krake. "Weak wet things," he said, dismissing them. "That is of no importance. We will not stay here for billions of years, to watch it contract to the single point again, as your legends would have it. We will not be here any longer than we must to find the Mother planet!"

He gabbled majestically at Litlun, and then both Turdes turned to leave. Puzzled, Sue-ling called after them: "But aren't there things we still need to talk over?"

"Talk?" rasped Litiun. "No, what is the purpose of talk when we are on the way to the Mother planet? It is our time to rejoice."

"And we rejoice only with our Brothers—even with the excessively ambitious ones," Chief Thunderbird added, one eye rotating around to glare at Litlun.

Krake looked after the Turtles as they left. "Now, what do you suppose Chief Thunderbird meant by that?" he asked the ship at large.

Sork shook his head. "Turtles," he said, as though that explained it all. "It's funny, though," he added, his tone more wondering than sneering. "After the way they've treated the Taurs, now they make this one a hero!" He hiccoughed slightly.

Sue-ling couldn't hold back her accusations any longer. "Sork, youVe been drinking!"

He didn't deny it. "Sometimes that's the best thing to do, my love. Maybe you should try it, too. I think we may all need a drink for what comes next."

Sue-ling was puzzled. "What's that?"

Looking drunkenly clever, Sork said, "What will happen when the Turdes find their Mother planet doesn't exist any more? Don't you remember what I told them? I warned them about what that man called Hawking said: You could perhaps travel through a wormhole—I guess we proved that for him now, since we did—but the gravitational forces would destroy any matter that passed through. And what would come out on the other side, he said, would be spaghetti."

"Spaghetti?"

"Exacdy. All twisted and curled and shapeless. That's what Hawking meant: Organized matter can't survive such a trip and stay organized. If the Mother planet did fall through a wormhole, it came out as unrecognizable fragments."

Sue-ling wrinkled her brow. "Sork?" she ventured. "How can that be, when we went through ourselves, safely enough— didn't we?"

"Safely?" Sork sighed thoughtfully. "I wonder what 'safely' means now."

Krake said dangerously, "Don't play games with us, Sork! Answer the woman!"

"Oh, it's no game. It's just that what Sue-ling said is irrelevant. The planet was matter, and so it was destroyed. But we weren't in the form of matter. We were in wave-drive—in the form of waves, not solid particles—when we came through the wormhole, so we survived. No," he said, shaking his head, "you can forget about trying to find that planet. It doesn't exist anymore."

He was staring into space, almost like the Taur listening to his songs, and the look on his face was strange. Puzzlement— as though pondering a chess problem; worry—as though unsure that a great plan could work; and sadness. Then he shook himself.

"Heigh-ho," he said amiably. "It's going to be a long trip, and we're going to have to wait to the end of it for a lot of the answers. So I'm off to sleep." He gave Sue-ling a hooded glance. "Care to come and join me, my dear? No? Well, I thought not."

And he was gone.

Sue-ling said urgently, "Kiri! Stay with him, will you? He's drinking again, I'm sure of it."

Kiri gave her a patient look. "And you want me to stop him?"

"More than that, if you can! Find where he's getting the liquor from—smash the bottles—"

Kirk sighed and turned to follow his twin. But at the door he paused. "No one can be with him all the time, Sue-ling," he said. "He has to follow his own life. He's no better off than any of the rest of us, you know. It's the only life he has."

Sue-ling was gazing after him, biting her lips. Krake watched her for a moment, then turned to his crew. "Marco, Daisy Fay—you're in charge. Sue-ling? Come along with me. I think I know where he's getting it."

Sue-ling allowed herself to follow; and then, in Krake's quarters, she saw the answer. He rummaged for a moment in a private cubicle, then looked up, apologetic. "Mystery's over," he said. "It was my liquor. I had half a case of Scotch there. I should have locked it up, I guess, but I never thought anybody would steal it."

Sue-ling's expression was bitter. "You can't trust a drunk with liquor," she said, turning away. "I'd better find him before he drinks it all up."

Krake stopped her with a restraining hand. "You aren't Sork's keeper. Let his brother take care of him," he commanded. She hesitated, very conscious of his touch. "Why do you worry so much about him?" he asked.

"I worry about both of them!" She bit her lip, wondering what to tell this new man who had suddenly appeared in the established pattern of her life. "They're rather special."

He scratched his brown beard, studying her. "I suppose former lovers are always special."

She gave him a frown. How dare he say 'former'? But what she said was, "It isn't that. It isn't even just that they're twins. They're almost like mirror images of each other, Kiri careful, thoughtful, a litde slow to act, and Sork—"

"Sork rushing in where wise men fear to tread. I know," Krake said, and changed the subject. "Why don't we just take it easy for a while? I'd offer you a drink, but the bar's dry just now."

"I don't need a drink," Sue-ling said, glad not to be made to pursue the subject of Sork and Kiri Quintero. "It's nice just to relax."

"So I find it," he said seriously. "Especially with you, Sue-ling."

In Sue-ling's opinion, there hadn't been much relaxation in the times she and Francis Krake had been together so far. Nor did she feel entirely relaxed just then. "Maybe we should be getting back to the others," she fretted.

"Why?" he asked reasonably. "If we've got anything at all now, it's time. Marco and Daisy Fay can take care of anything that comes up."

"I suppose so," she said absendy. She was responding to his words, but the private part of her mind was more taken up with the fact that he had put his hand on hers. She looked down at their hands, then up into his eyes again. "Francis? Is this the way men started to make sexual overtures in 1945?"

He flushed. She could see that he was nervous, but he didn't take his hand away. "One of the ways, anyway," he agreed, "at least as far as I can remember."

Sue-ling nodded thoughtfully. "Moon Bunderan is pretty interested in you."

"She's a child. I've never touched her."

"It might be better," she said, "if you didn't touch me right now either, Francis."

"Maybe not," he agreed gloomily, and released her hand. "I'm sorry, Sue-ling. I told you, I've forgotten how to get along with girls any more. I understand women about as well as I understand Turtles, and that's damn little."

She looked surprised. "But I thought you did understand Turtles! YouVe been dealing with them for—centuries."

"For a couple of years," he corrected, "and most of that time it was just Marco and Daisy Fay and me. Hell, I don't even scratch the surface of understanding Turtles. How did they come to have waveships, for instance?"

Sue-ling looked surprised. "They're very intelligent. I suppose they just invented them, somewhere along the way."

"Without ever studying quantum physics? And they never did, you know; it was blasphemy to them—until now, when they're desperate. And what about their history? They don't talk much about it, but every now and then I hear a name, or some kind of hint—there were those people they called the Sh'shrane that they fought against long ago. Real baddies, the Turtles say—but what was the war like, and who won, and where are the Sh'shrane now? I don't know! Hell," he said, shaking his head, "I don't know all that much about human history, for that matter. I didn't go to college, you know. I joined up when I was nineteen, and you didn't get much chance for education in the 188th Fighter Group. I know the names of a few great people—Charlemagne, Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln—but what do I know about what they did, or why?"

"You must know something," Sue-ling pointed out. "After all, you named your ship for a pretty famous one."

Krake looked pleased. "Oh, you recognized The Golden Hind? Yes. That was kind of a romantic idea, I guess. I suppose I got it from my mother. She was English born, married my father in the first World War, and she used to tell me stories of the great Englishmen. Especially Sir Francis Drake."

"And you're Francis Krake with a 'K.'"

He grinned ruefully. "Not by accident—that's what she named me, you know, Francis Drake Krake, but it wasn't one of her best ideas. It sounded funny. I had a lot of trouble with the name in school."

She was laughing. "I can see why."

"He was a great man, though," Krake said loyally. "The greatest of the English sea captains. He roamed the world in his flimsy little sailing ships, hundreds of years before I was born. I wanted to be like him when I grew up." He looked shamefaced. "When they sent me to fly in the South Pacific I —I thought of myself as covering the same ground he had. I knew that I wasn't the first, like him, but I still had that vision of myself exploring unknown places—"

"Which is exacdy what you're doing now, Francis," she pointed out.

"Yes," he said, and stopped there.

"So youVe achieved your life's ambition," she went on, feeling as though she were floundering, not sure why, beginning to have an idea.

"Not all of it," he said. His eyes were searching hers, though he made no move to touch her again.

Sue-ling sighed. "Oh, hell," she whispered, and reached out for him, and then there was not much that needed to be said by either of them. As it turned out, Francis Krake had not forgotten everything about human women. Sue-ling began to wonder why she had never made love with a man with a beard before . . . then to wonder whether there was such a word as "trigamous" . . . and then she was not wondering at all, or even thinking on any conscious level, but concentrating on what was happening to her lips, limbs, pelvis and torso, almost hearing, but resolutely not listening to, the tiny voice that, shocked, was whispering to her that this would surely make trouble.

It surely did trouble one member of The Golden Hind's crew right away. When Moon Bunderan next saw Francis Krake and Sue-ling Quong together they were not touching each other, nor was what they said to each other unusual in any way, but Moon's first glimpse of them caused her to straighten her back and bite her lip.

Thrayl noticed immediately, of course. The Taur touched Moon's shoulder with his warm, sympathetic paw, rumbling affectionately. Moon took her eyes off the pair and looked up at him. "It's all right, Thrayl," she told him. Had to be all right, she went on to herself. She had no claim on the space captain, nor did she have any right to censure Sue-ling Quong for anything the woman chose to do. (But two men ought to be enough for anyone, she told herself rebelliously.) She wasn't even angry at either of them. Sue-ling was so beautiful, with her copper hair and wide blue eyes—any man would want her!

While she, Moon Bunderan, was so incurably young.

She sighed and abandoned the subject. She could see that she was not the only one who had detected something different between Sue-ling and the captain. Tensions were building up between Sork and Francis Krake. At least Sork was not drinking at present. He wasn't entirely sober, either, maybe, but perhaps there was a limit to what you could expect from him under these stressful conditions.

No matter what else went wrong, Moon told herself staunchly, she still had Thrayl, her best and most faithful friend, so she took herself away with the Taur, trying all over again to discover what his "songs" were all about.

Annoyingly, she could not get Thrayl to explain any of his actions. He didn't refuse to answer her questions—Moon was quite certain that the great, gentle Taur would refuse her nothing, ever. But his answers were worse than the questions themselves. The worst of the answers were to questions that began with a "why," for the only answer to those, ever, was, "The songs bade me, Moon. The songs are always true."

"But can't you tell me if they say what's going to happen to us? Do they say if the Turtles will ever find their Mother planet?"

The purple-blue eyes turned away from her. "The small-songs do not speak of that," he rumbled.

"Then why did you make us go on?"

"The smallsongs speak of that need, Moon. There is no reason for us to stop. There is no other place where we should be."

She shivered. "Damn ... it ... to .. . hell," she said, carefully spacing out the words, as Thrayl gazed down at her. "I didn't think it would be like this! I was hoping—oh," she said, trying to remember what all those vague hopes had been, "hoping, I guess, that I could just get you safe, and then go on with my life. I certainly didn't want to let you get slaughtered!"

"Your wish, Moon," the Taur lowed softly.

"I know it's my wish! It should have been your wish, too! What do you want from your life, Thrayl?"

The great eyes looked perplexed. "Want?"

"Don't you know what you want? I do! At least, I used to think I did." And then swiftly, as Thrayl's eyes seemed to twinkle down at her, "I don't mean a person. I mean for a career. I think I'd like to be a doctor, like Sue-ling Quong. She's a wonderful woman, and she does fine things. Saving lives, helping people—well, I mean, that's what I'd like if we ever get to where there are any people again. But—I don't know."

She thought for a moment, looking up at the terrible splendor of those uncountable blue-shifted suns all around them. Then she shook her head. "I don't want a hole drilled in my skull, though, and I don't know how I can ever do all of that any other way." She shook herself and smiled down at the Taur by her feet. "That's my ambition, anyway, Thrayl. What's yours?"

"Ambition," the Taur repeated, as though tasting an unfamiliar flavor in the word.

"I mean, what do you tpant?"

"I do not 'want,' Moon. I simply 'am.' With you, I am happy, Moon. There is no more to Svant.'"

When the source of the beacon was clear on their opticals the sight gladdened no eye. "It's just a ship, Captain," Marco reported. "There's no sign of any planet anywhere around."

"I told you," Sork Quintero remarked, to no one in particular—and no one responded.

"And it's just floating there," Daisy Fay added. "It's not in wave-drive, not even in mass-drive. Their scout ship's still attached, but we're not getting any signal from either ship. All we get is the beacon, and that's really low powered."

"Communicate with the vessel!" Litlun commanded.

"We already tried that, Facilitator," Marco said, sounding almost sympathetic. "It doesn't answer."

Chief Thunderbird was accepting no compassion from humans. He thrust his beaked face forward aggressively. "We will board and investigate this vessel," he declared.

The face on Marco's belly screen showed sudden excitement. "Can we do that, Captain?" he asked eagerly, eyes turning to Francis Krake. "You know you can't go out in space here yourself, not with all that hard radiation around, but the Turtles and I will be fine—"

"Not you," snapped Lidun. "One doubts your fitness for this environment, but we will suffer no harm. The intense radiation will allow us to go into anaerobic state, requiring no atmosphere." Both wild eyes swiveled to Krake. "We will board it with no humans accompanying us. This is a Brotherhood concern only."

And to that they would admit no argument. Regardless of protestations, with no further word for anyone, the two Turtles trooped into the scout ship, where it lay nesded in its bay along the belly of The Golden Hind. A moment later the people they had left behind felt the lurch as the scout pulled free.

"Poor bastards," Sork Quintero said, sounding almost as though he meant it.

Sue-ling gave him an appraising look. "You mean you're sorry for them because they'll find out the planet's gone?"

"Hell, Sue-ling, they're not that stupid. They know that already; they're just going through the motions now."

Krake confronted him. "And what are we supposed to do?"

"Why," Sork said easily, "we're no better off than they are, are we? We've lost the wormhole, you know. There's no way for us to go back. Even if we could find the place again, I'll bet it's closed up—how many years of universe time have we been going now?"

Moon Bunderan shook herself as the Taur lowed gendy in her ear. She gave him a perplexed look, then said: "Thrayl says we shouldn't try to go back. He says we are just to go on; it's what the songs tell him."

"Oh, fine," said Sork, with a nod that managed to look sarcastic. "We've done so well following his songs so far."

No one answered that. Then Marco, who had been listening uneasily to the conversation, lifted his eyes to the screen. He spoke up: "They're at the ship, Francis."

Even at maximum magnification, the Hinds scout looked no bigger than a toy as it came to relative rest near the other waveship. The people in The Golden Hind saw the scout nudge slowly closer until it was almost touching. Then it hung motionless for a time.

"What are they doing, Captain Krake?" Moon Bunderan asked worriedly.

Sork answered for him. "They're trying to lock on, of course. And failing—of course."

"Why are you so sure of that?" Suc-ling asked him, and again it was someone else who answered.

"Because there's no one alive in that ship," said Kiri Quintero, his voice gentler than his words. "I think we all knew that. They would have responded to signals if there were anyone to do it."

Daisy Fay said sharply, "Look at them now!"

The two Turtles were coming out of the lock of their scout ship. At that great distance even the great Turtles were barely visible as they came creeping naked out into the burning light of the surrounding stars. Sue-ling shivered at the thought of those scorching rays, though she knew that the Turtles would take no harm from them—might even enjoy the influx of energy. Then, tethered to their own scout, the two Turtles swung themselves to the other scout. They crawled around it for a moment, conferred with each other, then eased themselves over to the hull of the silent waveship itself.

Moon Bunderan gasped as there was a sudden flare of tiny, white-hot sparks from the hull of the waveship.

"They're cutting their way in," Krake said somberly. "I guess you were right, Sork."

Sork Quintero nodded absently. Then he yawned. "I think I'll take a little nap," he said. "They'll be poking around there for a long time before they come back . . . and, after all, we already know what they're going to find."

Long it was. Long enough for Krake to begin muttering to himself about the length of dme they were hanging free in space, this heavily irradiated space saturated with energy from the onrushing stars. He had ordered everyone to stay inside the shielded compartments of the waveship, which perhaps preserved their health but did little to improve their tempers in the crowded conditions. But Krake kept a worried eye on the instruments. If they let themselves be exposed to that radiation indefinitely there would certainly be serious leakage even through the shielding. . . .

As soon as the muffled clank of the scout told them the Turtles had returned, Krake was at the lock, waiting for them. "Well?" he demanded.

Chief Thunderbird was first to come through, bending his parrot-beaked head to avoid the top of the lock. He stopped short, holding Lidun behind him, and his eyes roamed around the chamber.

He spoke at last. Even through the transposer his voice seemed flat, lifeless, despondent. "You wish to know what we discovered," he said. "There is no reason to conceal it from you. Every Brother on this waveship is dead."

"Long dead. Very dead," Lidun added, drawing a sour look from Chief Thunderbird. But the Proctor went on:

"Although none of the crew of this waveship survived, they left a log. It stated that the vessel had been in wave-drive, near the planet of our Mother, when the object we called a Svormhole' opened up. Both they and the planet were swept through, and they saw—" The voice halted for a moment, but when it resumed it was as unemotional as ever. "They saw the planet break up into tiny fragments, like a shower of dust. That was all. The Mother planet is . . . gone."

"Oh, Proctor," Moon Bunderan said impulsively. "I'm so sorry."

The great red eyes peered at her, but all the Turtle said was, "We wish now to consult in privacy, the Facilitator and this one."

As he moved away Sork laughed. "What's to consult about?" he called after their backs. "Gone is gone."

Litlun, following his Elder Brother, paused to regard Sork. When he spoke it was with dignity. "There are some things which we wish to say only to each other. Still, there are data of interest to you as well, one believes," he said. "The entries in the ship's log ended fifty-four years after they entered this universe—"

Sork's eyes opened wide. "Fifty-four years)" "—but the log itself," the Turtle continued, unheeding, "continued to record dates for some time after that. For a long time, Sork Quintero. Perhaps you should consult your lecture chips about this. The last entry was nearly eleven hundred years later."

He turned to leave, but one eye rolled back to look at them. "It appears," the Turde declared, "that there are some anomalies concerning the passage of time in this universe."

If there are any songs the aiodoi enjoy almost as much as their own, they must be those songs in which some smallsinger comes close to making a great song, a song of which even an aiodos might be proud ... a song which conies close to capturing great truth. And indeed one such song is heard by the aiodoi, and they rejoice at what the Earth person sings.

"We suspect, you will remember, that there can be more dimensions than our senses observe in the universe we live in. We can suppose, too, that there are more universes than ours; Stephen Hawking showed how they might be formed out of vacuum fluctuations, and there's no reason to believe that our personal vacuum is the only one that ever fluctuated.

"Some people would disagree with that, I know. Wittgenstein, for instance, said, 'The existence of other universes is not a predicate'—by which he meant, as I'm sure most of you can figure out, that there wasn't much point to speculating about possible other universes as long as we couldn't detect any consequences of them.

"Well, Wittgenstein was a truly grand old guy, but I'd like to do some speculating anyway.

"What I want to speculate about is what's called 'the Everett Many-Universe Interpretation.'

"You know that quantum theory tells us that there's no fixed way for a particle to move from Point A to Point B. Instead there are a whole bunch of ways, which you can represent on a diagram by lines; when you've got all the lines drawn in they look like the braided pigtails some of you have hanging down your backs, and such drawings are called 'Feynman diagrams.' We don't a priori know which path the particle will take; so we describe the 'sum over histories' clutch of possible paths as a 'probability wave.'

"A long time ago, back in 1957, a man named Hugh Everett had an idea about these probability waves.

"He pointed out that every time a probability wave collapses—that is to say, when we actually observe a particle's passage—we suddenly have a definite, measurable state, where before there were only degrees of probability.

"You can think of this process as a kind of an election poll, if you like. X many people say the electron is at Point A, T many others say it's at Point B, Point C and so on. Probably, as in most polls, there are a lot of 'Don't know' and 'No opinion' votes. But then the election ballots are counted, and all those quantal opinions are instandy converted into a single positive fact. Once the vote is in—or once the observation has been made—there isn't any more 'probability.'

"Consider how this affects what we know about, say, electrons. In more or less that way, all we can say about the electron wave is that there is a certain chance it is here or there or wherever. You can draw a kind of Gaussian curve of the possible locations where it might be, but you don't know where in the curve the damn thing really is. But once we make the actual measurement we're not talking about a wave any more. We're talking about a particle. The wave function collapses. It is therefore certain that the electron is known to be at Point A, and it is no longer possible for it to be at Point B or anywhere else.

"That's where Everett asked his big question:

"'Why is that impossible? Why can't it be at all the points?'

"To put it in a different way: What if the electron is actually at Point A, and actually at the same time also at Point B— but in different universes?

"What if each time some quantum uncertainty is resolved, the universe splits into two identical copies—almost identical; except for that one fact, which is the different position of the electron?

"That's the notion that is called 'the Everett many-universes' interpretation of the quantum theory.

"There are other possible interpretations. The one that most people accepted for a long time was the one that may have come from Niels Bohr. That one is called 'the Copenhagen Interpretation.' It says that there are two realms of'reality,' the small, or quantal, realm, and the big, or classical, realm—and never the twain shall meet. We don't have to worry about quantal reality, in the Copenhagen view, because we can never experience it.

"For me, I do worry about it, and I propose to make you worry about the Everett interpretation, too. It has other names, some of which help to explain it. Some people, like Paul Davies, prefer to call it 'the world-ensemble.' By that Davies means the collection of universes, infinitely large in number and always increasing, each of which differs from the one 'next' to it by a single quantum event.

"Of course, a single quantum event right now wouldn't change much. Our universe is pretty set in its ways, and we almost certainly wouldn't even know that that event had happened. Maybe later on that quantal event might somehow turn out to mean that somebody would be born who otherwise wouldn't, or a war would be won rather than lost—you can imagine all that sort of thing for yourself.

"But, even if we concede that such a thing wouldn't make much difference now, it hasn't always been that way. There were critical times in the history of the universe when a single quantum event might have had big consequences.

"If it had happened in the critical moments around Planck time, when the fundamental values that describe our universe were determined, it could have made so big a difference that in one universe living things like ourselves could develop, while in another no life at all would be possible.

"Perhaps out of all the myriad possible universes, all coexisting and all equally 'real'—there's only one in which life like ours could exist.

"Of course, if so, we know which one that is. It has to be the one we are in—because, otherwise, we wouldn't be alive to be in it.

"What I have just said has a name, too. It is called 'the weak interpretation of the anthropic principle,' and we'll talk more about what that means in our next class."

And while all the aiodoi were rejoicing in the song, one aiodos was singing another song. It was not a rejoicing song. It was not a fearful song, either, because the aiodoi have no need to fear anything . . . but it was a song of concern, and almost ofpity, for certain smallsingers who were acting out the song of the Earthly scientist.