The Singers of Time

15

For Marco Ramos, the worst thing about the way his world was turning out was not that they were lost. "We weren't going anywhere anyway," he whispered to Daisy Fay, trying to console, "so what difference does it make?"

It wasn't very good consolation. She didn't answer. Worse, she wasn't responding at all—had even turned off her belly screen, so that there was no visible face to scan for feelings on the cherry-colored pumpkin that was all that was left of the woman he loved. Marco sighed. She hadn't done that in a long time; only did when things were so bad for her, inside that metal-jacketed mind, that she could not make herself share. It was, he told himself—not for the first time—a great deal worse for her than for himself. After all, what beautiful woman could stand being eternally trapped in the shape of a Halloween goblin? And Daisy Fay had been so very beautiful. ...

He did the best thing he could think of to do for her. He let her be, and focused his attention on what was going on around him. Things were bad enough there, too—the despondent Turtles locked in their own quarters and refusing communication; the Quintero twins unusually silent; Moon Bunderan almost weeping as she sat beside her Taur. Marco didn't like the way Thrayl was looking, either. The great bull head was drawn in lines of fatigue and unhappiness, and those beautiful bright horns were a sickly gray.

And the captain was in a cold rage of frustration, and taking it out on Moon Bunderan. "Why should we listen to that animal?" he demanded, his beard jutting out accusingly. "I can't set a course without some kind of destination!"

Moon said stubbornly, "Thrayl says we don't have to go to a destination. He says we just have to go and the destination will come to us."

"That," Krake said flatly, "is stupid" He turned to Sork Quintero, sober now and withdrawn. "And what about this funny business with time? What do your lecture chips say about that? How can it be that the old Turde ship registered hundreds of years passing?"

Sork said, "I suppose it has something to do with time dilation." Sork did not sound in the least sure of himself, Marco thought. "Or else," Sork added, "maybe it has to do with the fact that we're in an old universe now—collapsing instead of expanding—maybe time runs backwards here?"

"Time can't run backwards!" Krake said savagely. "Talk sense!"

Marco made that throat-clearing sound before he ventured, "Francis? Maybe we should all listen to some more of those chips, maybe find some explanations there?"

His captain transferred his angry glare to him. "Right! And we'll just hang here in space while we're doing it? Christ, Marco! That might be all right for you and the Turtles, but the rest of us can't handle the radiation seepage that's coming right through the shields."

"Then maybe we should go into wave-drive," Sue-ling Quong put in hesitantly.

"Fine! Going where, exactly?"

Moon Bunderan answered him. "I told you what Thrayl says, Captain. He says that doesn't matter, just so we go."

"And I've told you that that is stupid. ..." And the circular arguments went on and on.

Marco sighed. He glanced at Daisy Fay, still remote in her internal worries and confusions. He reached out and linked one tentacle with hers. She didn't resist, but she didn't respond, either.

A sudden thought struck him. He pondered it for a moment, then said, "Francis, this is getting us nowhere."

"And where do you think we should get?" Krake demanded.

"That's up to you, Francis. You're the captain. But as long as we're just sitting here, there's something I'd like to do."

Krake gave him a weary look, but all he said was, "What is it?"

The face on Marco's belly plate was suddenly eager. "All that stuff outside—I'd like to see it."

Krake's expression turned puzzled. "Look away," he said, waving a hand at the screens.

"No, Captain, that's not what I mean. I want to get outside the ship," he explained. "I want to watch what's happening out in this universe for myself. Not on a screen. I want to see the real thing."

Sue-ling said quickly, "But, Marco, that's dangerous. The radiation out there can be lethal!"

Marco waved a reassuring tentacle at her. "Not for us, Dr. Quong. We're almost as good as the Turtles when it comes to radiation—and they soak it up." He felt a stirring of Daisy Fay's touch on his, and gave her a quick look. It was true; she was beginning to respond again. The face had reappeared on her belly screen, looking puzzled, looking sad—but looking like Daisy Fay once more.

Sue-ling said uncertainly, "But don't you need to breathe, at least?"

"Of course we do, but we can take air tanks, and we'll seal our shells—we'll be all right. And it's important to me! I want to go out onto the hull and see for myself." He hesitated. Then, "You see, Sue-ling, ever since I was a kid in Chile I've wanted to know about these strange things. And nobody— nobody!—has ever had this chance before. And I want to observe it with my own senses, not through the simulations on the screens."

"And I," said Daisy Fay, suddenly coming to life, "want to go along." Her clasp on Marco was strong. "Please, Francis! Say we can do it! There's nothing to lose, and if we're all going to die here anyway—" She hesitated, and the face on her belly seemed to swallow. Then she managed a smile. "At least, then we won't have lived for nothing."

Outside the lock the two machine-people clung together, tentacles intertwined, eyes roving over the frightening sky. Daisy Fay snapped their tethers tight, for fear that any motion might send them plunging outward—downward—into that vast maelstrom of swarming suns. She knew that she was afraid. But, gazing out into those swelling clouds of glowing gas with Marco by her side, she was also beginning to be— well, very nearly—content once more.

The only thing missing, she thought, was that with their shells sealed against the vacuum, their air coming from the tanks they held in one spare tentacle each, it was impossible for them to talk. Yet what was there to say? Stalked eyes open wide—wider than any human's, because those Turtle-built optics could read frequencies far outside the human optical range —they saw the gamma radiation from far suns exploding, watched the near stars that were fattened with infalls of condensing gas and dust. It was frightening, yes. But it was also spectacularly, inconceivably beautiful.

And she felt Marco's firm, loving touch on her body as they huddled together, limbs intertwined . . . and that was all that mattered.

When she looked back to check their tethers, she could see, in the light from that ocean of stars, the pallid shape of that American flag Krake had insisted on painting on the hull of The Golden Hind. It was a reassuring sight, in a way, with its memories of home . . . but a saddening one, too. She faced up to reality. Never again, she told herself, could there be any hope of returning to that old and long lost America. . . .

But the next thing she told herself was that that chance had disappeared, long ago, on the freezing side of an Andean mountain. She nesded closer to Marco's hard, reassuring shell and let that thought slip away. Whatever would happen was going to happen.

For this present moment, she could see that Marco was happy, his eyes darting around, his tentacles quivering with excitement. Most important of all, they were together.

How long they hung there, silent and content, neither Marco nor Daisy Fay knew . . . until there was a rasping vibration from the hull of the ship. It wasn't mechanical. It was a sound, coming to them through conduction in the metal.

They stirred, eyestalks turning to look at each other in wonder. Then both realized that the sound was a voice—slow and hoarsely deep, carried by the vibrations of the hull to their own bodies. It had to be Krake's, Daisy Fay was nearly sure, and quickly deduced what had happened. The captain had rigged a speaker to the hull to reach them. Ponderously slowly, it was saying: "Come . . . back . . . inside. . . .

We're . . . going ... to go . . . into . . . wave-drive . . . again ... at once."

Back at the controls, Daisy Fay at her own position at the other board, Marco was happier than he had been in a very long time. That enriching view had been worth all the fears and pains and losses; the young South American boy that he had once been would have gladly died for such a sight, and his grown-up avatar had not forgotten the yearning.

There was a new sense of purpose in the rest of the Hind's people, too. Daisy Fay was herself again, Sork Quintero wholly sober. Even the Turtles were standing there—dour and silent, yes, but somehow it seemed that Kiri had wheedled them back into the society of their shipmates.

Marco turned for orders. "Course, Captain?"

"No course," said Krake, surrendering to the inevitable, managing a sardonic grin. "We're doing what the Taur tells us."

And when Marco gave Moon Bunderan a questioning look, she said, "Thrayl's really sick, Marco, but I think I got the drift of what he was trying to say. He said we didn't have to be traveling to a place. We won't be traveling to a 'place' at all, but in time. I'm not real sure I understood all of it, though; that kind of talk is hard for him," she apologized, "because Thrayl doesn't usually think that way, but it's what he meant. I'm sure of it."

"He means traveling in time, all right," Sork said suddenly. "I think I know what he's talking about—time dilation! Remember? Photons don't have clocks. Time stops for us in wave-drive, but it goes right on in the universe outside. So maybe Thrayl thinks if we just keep going long enough something big will happen in the universe. . . . Ask him, Moon," he begged. "Ask him if that's what he means!"

Everyone else waited while she spoke, softly and lovingly, to the Taur. Thrayl was silent for a long time. When at last he answered he hardly lifted his head, and his voice was a bass moan.

Moon looked confused. "He's very sad," she said. "He keeps hearing songs of pain and danger that hurt him."

"Time!" Sork snapped. "What did he say about that?"

"I think he said you were right, Sork. I think he said a time was coming when something would happen . . . only," she added, the look of bewilderment getting stronger, "I don't think he meant 'coming.' It almost seemed as though he meant 'returning'—but time can't return, can it?" she pleaded.

Krake looked more unhappy than ever. He looked for help toward the morosely silent Turtles, but they were not responding—unless Litlun's faint movement of one clawed hand was assent.

Krake made up his mind. He took a deep breath and gestured to the crew manning the boards. "Wave-drive, Marco," he said. "Wherever we're going, we might as well get on our way."

What the Taur hadn't said—or couldn't—was how long they would have to travel to get to wherever, or whenever, they were heading for.

That was a hard pill for Captain Francis Krake to swallow. He sat glaring up at the screens, ignoring everyone else. When he looked away he saw nothing that pleased him. The two Turtles had retreated again for more of their private discussions—or mourning. Sork Quintero was at the other board, gazing abstractedly into space, while across the control room Sue-ling was sitting alone, silent and strained, and she was resolutely avoiding Krake's gaze. Krake swore silently to himself. What was the matter with the woman? What had hap-pcncd between them in his cabin was something warm and wonderful in his memory—what had changed her?

He started when Marco Ramos spoke to him. "Tough mission, Captain," the machine-man said, trying to be reassuring. "We'll be all right, though. The Hind's a good ship, Captain— and she's got the best captain in any universe!"

"Captain," Krake repeated tightly, unwilling—no, unable —to accept even kindly reassurance. "What the hell am I captain of, Marco? Do you know what this ship is? It isn't The Golden Hind. It's The Flying Dutchman, cruising forever and going nowhere, with no way home."

"Captain—" Marco began, but Krake was shaking his head.

"Don't you see? We're in a ghost ship. That's what wave-drive is. It makes us a sort of phantom, an energy wave flying at the speed of light and cut off forever from anything real, and I'm the one who got us into this. If I'm a captain, IVe got a crew of fools!"

His voice was louder than he intended. Even Sork looked up, giving the captain a puzzled glance. He seemed about to speak, but then closed his mouth and returned to his deep study. Marco's eyes wandered uncertainly about, then he turned away silently; and that was another pain in Francis Krake's heart. He had let his temper get the best of him again. There was no reason for him to insult loyal Marco Ramos, especially not when his anger was all at himself. . . .

With maybe a little left over for Sue-ling Quong.

She was looking at him now—she and everyone else in the control room—but he could not read the expression in her eyes. What Krake wanted most was to talk to the woman in private. If only she would leave the control room, he thought, he could follow her, ask her what the matter was, maybe even see her look at him again as she had, just hours earlier, in his bed.

Of course, there was an alternative. He considered the new thought carefully and with some surprise. He didn't have to wait for her to decide to leave. He could go over to her now, ask her to step outside with him for a private word.

But Krake had been quite right about himself in one respect. He really was not very good at getting along with women any more, and while he was making up his mind the opportunity passed. The two Turtles came back into the control room and stopped at the doorway, their eyes roving about.

Then Chief Thunderbird engaged his transposer. "Captain," he said portentously, "we have something that we wish to say to you."

Krake turned toward them, surprised. "Yes?" he said.

Chief Thunderbird said, "The statement we have to make is of importance." And he stopped there, as though having trouble getting it out. He had everyone's full attention now. Sue-ling's eyes were on the Turtles, Sork had come out of his abstraction, Marco Ramos and Daisy Fay McQueen had swiv-eled their eyes around to get a better look at the Turtles. There was something strange about their bearing. Both of them had crossed their forearms across their platens, almost as though protecting themselves from something.

"We're waiting," Krake said testily.

The great Turtle's eyes roamed unhappily around the room. Then he seemed to sigh, and said, "We are aware that our mission has caused unnecessary troubles for you."

"Damn right it has," Krake exploded. "I should have my head examined for letting you drag us off on this silly chase."

"No," corrected Chief Thunderbird. "It was not silly. We do not regret our mission. It is evident that it has failed, but it was not wrong. It can never be wrong to work to save our Brotherhood! It is a different truth that we wish to express." He seemed to take a breath before continuing. "We acknowledge that, had we not interfered by coming to your planet, you human beings might have progressed in quite a different way. It is possible that you could have been exploring our own universe now, in search of new worlds and new opportunities of profitable trade even if—" His voice broke, even through the transposer, but he rallied and went on. "Even if the Brotherhood no longer may exist. But that is not the fault one wishes to confess. What we have done is something else."

He hesitated, looking dismally at his Younger Brother. Litlun made a slight gesture with one clawed hand, as though in sympathy. Then Chief Thunderbird plunged on. "We have come to see that some of our opinions have been unfair—"

Litlun engaged his transposer. "Have been wrong," he said succinctly.

"Yes, they have even been quite wrong," the Proctor admitted. "Your Earthly science is not an abomination. Indeed, one now believes that it contains truths which we have never acknowledged. My Younger Brother—" he waved one paw at Litlun—"joins me in the wish to state that we consider it to have been an error to discourage independent human scientific research."

The beak clamped grimly shut there, as though the distasteful effort of confession was over. Behind him Litlun stirred again.

"There is also the Taur matter," he reminded his Elder Brother.

Chief Thunderbird made a sound like a groan, but he jutted his jaw forward and said pugnaciously, "Yes, one must also discuss the Taur matter. We consider that our treatment of them, too, was an error." He glared pugnaciously at everyone in the room, and then he seemed to feel he had said everything necessary. He turned abruptly and waddled toward the doorway. Litlun turned to follow, but Sork interrupted.

"Hold it there," he said, astonishment battiing with anger in his tone. "What are you saying? Is it possible that you are apologizing to us?"

Litlun continued as though he had not heard, but at the doorway he stopped. Then, slowly, he turned back, both his eyes seeking Sork's.

"Yes," he said, and was gone.

"What a strange thing for any Turtle to say!" Sue-ling said to the room at large.

"And what a weird time and place to pick to say it," Daisy Fay agreed. "Maybe, now that they think we're all going to die, they're just trying to ease their consciences?"

"That's really wonderful of them, when it's too damned late to do any good," Krake said bitterly, and Sork grunted agreement.

Moon Bunderan spoke up. "I think it was nice of them to do it anyway," she said. "It must'vc been really hard for them, especially for that big one! And, oh, Thrayl! Did you hear? They as much as said they shouldn't have been treating all you Taurs the way they've done!"

Thrayl didn't answer. From his board, Marco Ramos turned both eyes to inspect the Taur. The sight was not reassuring. Thrayl's great horns were pallid, almost lifeless, and the huge purple-blue eyes were clouded. Although the Taur was far larger than Moon, it seemed to Marco that be was leaning on her. Nude except for the apron, Thrayl's covering of red fur was unkempt, his limbs trembling.

Krake was looking too. He gave a short laugh. "I don't think he even hears you, Moon. That's marvelous. Considering we're following his orders, he doesn't exactly inspire confidence, does he?" He began to walk around the control room, looking at each person in turn. "What do you think, Kiri? Are we all as crazy as I think we are, driving full speed ahead to nowhere? You haven't been talking much; don't you have an opinion?"

Kiri spread his hands. "We do what we have to do. We haven't had many choices, Francis," he said mildly.

"How well you put it," Krake remarked. "What about you, Marco? You've known me longer than these people. Am I losing it, letting a Taur take over?" He didn't wait for an answer but turned to Sork Quintero. "What about you? You haven't been much help. Isn't there anything in those lecture chips that you can pass on to us?"

Sork looked up at him, then rose. "There might just be, Krake," he said, his tone thoughtful. "I think I'll go listen to some."

"Fine!" Krake said sarcastically. "Then we'll know what's going on, right?"

"I'm not sure of that," Sork said. "But it's worth a try. I think we need to find some explanation of—that." And he waved a hand at the screens.

Krake looked around, puzzled. There were still the myriad suns, brighter than any stars had ever been in the home universe. "What are you talking about?"

"Oh, haven't you noticed?" Sork said. "Keep an eye on the stars for a minute. You can actually see them move now. I never saw that before, did you? And I'd really like to know what it means."

He gave them all a bland smile, and disappeared. Marco Ramos swiveled his eyes to the screens. "My God," he said. That frozen sea of stars was frozen no more. And next to him Daisy Fay cried:

"Look, Marco! Everything's speeding up!"

Without words, Marco stretched one tentacle out to intertwine it with one of Daisy Fay's. The screen was almost solidly bright now. Even when Krake, scowling, adjusted the frequency controls to shut out most of the light of the collapsing universe around them, the scene in the screens looked like one of those false-color shots of a star, mottled with spots and flares, and all in motion even as they watched.

There was a moan from the Taur.

"What is it, Thrayl?" Moon Bunderan demanded sharply, gazing up into the mournful, racked face. He lowed into her ear, pointing, and she turned to search the screen.

"I see it!" she cried, pointing. "Captain Krake, do you see there, where it's brightest? Thrayl says that's our way out."

Marco turned both eyes to try to find what the Taur was talking about. In that sea of fire almost everything was spectacular—but, yes, even in that luminous inferno there was one spot that stood out, not like one of those little flawed glass distortions like the one they had plunged through, but something vaster, brighter, more ominous.

"Is it a wormhole?" Krake demanded sharply.

Moon said, her voice trembling, "I don't know what a wormhole is! Neither does Thrayl, I think—but he says we must go into that thing."

Krake gnawed his lip. "Where'd Sork go?" he demanded. "I need to know what that is! Marco?"

The face on Marco Ramos's belly screen was grave and drawn. "I'm not sure, Francis," he said, his voice taut. "But remember what Sork said about time in this universe? Going backward? If he was right about that, and if the universe—any universe—began with a big explosion . . . then how does it end?"

Krake stared at him, uncomprehending. "With everything coming together again?" he hazarded. He glanced around, bewildered, settling on Moon Bunderan. "What does the Taur say?" he pleaded.

She was listening to Thrayl's slow, faint murmurings, her pretty face wrinkling in concentration. "He just keeps on repeating the same thing. His songs say we must go into it, Captain Krake."

"But that's not just another discontinuity," Krake said. "It's—it's big. I don't know whether the Hind could survive it!" He shook his head. "No! Get Sork," he commanded. "I'm not taking this ship into that thing on the word of a Taur!"

But Marco Ramos lifted his digits from the control board. "Francis," he said soberly, "we don't have a choice. We're going in whether we like it or not. Everything is! We're being sucked down into it with everything else. ..."

And the truth of what he said could no longer be argued. The motion on the screen was picking up speed, the great whirlpool of light was growing hugely . . . they were falling, falling. . . .

If the sight had been spectacular before, now it was terrifying. "We're watching a universe die," Daisy Fay breathed, her eyes trembling as she stared at the screen. "Look at the instruments! We're getting into a steep gravitic gradient—and so is everything else!"

For the universe was tightening around them like a closing fist, as stars and gas clouds hurtled into the burning whirlpool around the great black hole.

"Captain," called Marco Ramos from the second board. "We're getting more background radiation—heat, too! The Hind wasn't built for this kind of stress!" And, indeed, outside the entire sky was becoming incandescent.

"It's all speeding up," Kiri murmured. "Sork's lecture chips were right."

Krake swore under his breath and turned to Moon Bunderan. "Your Taur," he snapped. "Is he sensing anything?"

"I don't know. He's terribly sick," Moon said wretchedly. "But he says we must go on."

"Go on where?"

She looked at him helplessly. "Just where we're going, I guess," she said. . . .

And then they were in it.

When the shock came it was like being destroyed and born again. The whole great ship groaned and shuddered. Something crashed. Moon heard Thrayl moaning softly to himself, as though in pain. There was a tearing, shattering moment of topsy-turvy transition. . . .

And Moon found herself lying on the floor, her head throbbing. Somewhere Thrayl was whimpering, but she was too dazed to look for him. Krake stood over her, clinging to the control console, yelling, "What the hell did we hit?"

"Nothing, Francis," Marco gasped, scrambling back into sight from wherever he had been. It took him a moment to recover his voice. "It couldn't have been anything material, or we'd have been vaporized."

"It felt like a rock!"

Marco said, "I think it was magnetic fields, Francis. They'd be powerful in the contracting plasma—"

Then shock stopped his voice. The control room had gone dark. The screens winked out. That angry disk was gone, with all the blazing gas clouds and crashing suns.

"Where are we?" Krake gasped. Thrayl moaned again, and Krake's voice sharpened. "Marco! Get the lights back on again!"

"Right, Captain!" Marco began, but Daisy Fay's voice came urgently.

"Wait, Marco! There's something out there. Marco, youVe got the screen dimmed down—turn the sensitivity up again."

Marco hesitated, torn between a direct order from his captain and Daisy Fay's common sense. Common sense won out. He adjusted the screen.

At normal sensitivity it was true. The screens were not entirely black. There were tiny distant wisps of light, thousands of them.

"My God," said Krake after a moment of staring. "Those things aren't stars. Look at the shape of them. They're distant galaxies! Marco, can you get us a distance fix?"

Marco obediently reached out for the instrument adjustments—then, realizing the impossibility of obeying the order, he dropped his tentacles back. "We can't do that, Captain," he said soberly. "How can we measure their distance? When we're in our own space, the way to range an external galaxy is by red-shift—but how do we know what the shift is here? And we don't have enough of a baseline for triangulation."

"The only clue we have," said Daisy Fay, her voice low but level, "is their brightness. And that means, Francis, those things are very far away. It—it looks like we're alone in a lot of very empty space."

Krake took a deep breath. Then he was in control of himself again, and of the ship. "Turn on the lights," he ordered again, and this time was obeyed. "Marco, what does your board say about the condition of the ship? That was quite a beating we gave the Hind; did we come through all right?" And when Marco reported that there was no structural damage, no failure of systems, "All right, how about all of you? We were thrown around a lot—anyone hurt?"

Sue-ling rubbed her arm. "A couple of bruises, Francis," she said ruefully. "Do you suppose the Turtles are all right?"

Krake said, "They're pretty tough. Still, Daisy Fay—go check them out. And what about Sork?"

"I'll go, Francis," Kiri said, moving faster than usual for him. Krake nodded.

"All right. Let's sec what weVe got. Evidendy wc went through this end-of-the-universe thing and came out in a new one. I don't know why there aren't any stars nearby, but we can figure that out later." He paused, calculating. "When Sork comes back, we'll ask him what he thinks. Maybe we can get some help from the Turdes, too, and—Moon? What does Thrayl say now?"

She was holding the great head in her arms. "He's very sick, Captain," she said wretchedly. "He can hardly talk at all now."

"Ask him! He was the one who told us what to do—I want to hear what he has to say now, and—"

Krake stopped suddenly, listening. Then they all heard it: a call from outside the room. "Help me!"

Sue-ling Quong reacted first. "It's Kiri! Something must have happened to Sork!"

And when they got there, the facts were beyond argument. Kiri Quintero, his face ashen, was carrying his twin brother in his arms. Sork was limp, obviously unconscious. His face was bloodied, and his head was lolling at an angle it should never have had on his neck.

"He was thrown against a wall," said Kiri. "I think he hit his head. Sue-ling, is he dying?"

He didn't have to ask her that. Sue-ling was already beside them, carefully touching Sork's ruined head, lifting an eyelid to peer inside, listening for a pulse. When she looked up at last her face was somber.

"I don't know, Kiri," she said. "He needs surgery. And he needs it right away."

An Earth human who was not a scientist at all, but wondered greatly and was therefore a poet, sang this song while the aiodoi listened and were moved:

"I have to make a confession before we get into this session. See, I can stand superstrings and Grand Unified Theories and quarks, but do you know what beats me? The thing we were talking about last time. The anthropic principle, that's what beats me.

"Remember what they say about all the basic constants of the natural laws of the universe—Planck's Constant, and the numerical value of pi, and the relationship between gravity and electromagnetic force and all those things. What they say is that all these specific values came about just by chance, right at the time of the Big Bang . . . early after the Big Bang, that is; back on the other side of the Planck wall, ten to the minus

forty-third seconds, when everything was still plastic. Before the Planck barrier, all the forces were one—gravity, strong force, electromagnetic, weak force—they were all part of what we could call the 'superforce,' which we'll talk about at more length another time.

"And they also say that those numbers we call 'constants' didn't have to be constant at all. They could just as easily have been other values entirely. Pi could've been seven, instead of three point et cetera. Gravity could've been stronger than the electromagnetic force, instead of nearly two thousand times weaker. Even the law of inverse squares didn't have to be what it is. After all, you can generalize it as a power law of n minus one, where n is the number of dimensions of a space—we have three spatial dimensions, and that's why our exponent is two, and we get inverse squares. Kaluza's four-dimensional space would be quite different; the law there would be inverse cubes, and planets would fall right into their stars.

"There are an infinite number of other possibilities. But the scientists who tell us all this also say that if any of those alternative things had happened to be true, we wouldn't be here.

"Life couldn't have evolved; maybe even matter couldn't have evolved. And they say the chances are millions to one against us. In all probability, those randomly determined values would, most of the time, have turned out to have been such that we would never live.

"So that's what they call the 'anthropic principle.' It comes in two flavors, strong and weak.

"The weak anthropic principle is the one we talked about last time. It just says, wow, how lucky we are that the dice fell in just the way that would allow us to show up.

"The strong anthropic principle is even spookier. It says that such long odds are too long to be taken seriously. Such one in a zillion chances just aren't going to happen. So there must be some causal connection between those long-ago random fluctuations and us—which seems to mean that, by gosh, we are what made the universe what it is.

"One or the other has to be true ... but which one?"

The eternal aiodos sang on: "Why, yes.

"Naturally. Of course."

But among them one aiodos hardly sang at all, for he was listening to the faint and fearful songs ofsome persons who were now discovering some of those alternative possibilities to be real.