Cities in Flight

This was exactly and expectably the wrong answer, though Web could have had no way of anticipating it. He did not know, as Amalfi knew very well by direct memory, that women on He had once been much worse than slaves, that in fact they had been regarded as a wholly loathesome though necessary cross between a demon and a lower animal; hence he was unequipped to see that Hevian women today were still crucially subordinate to their men, and far from welcome in a situation of this kind. Nor did Amalfi see any present opportunity to explain to Web—or to Estelle, either—why both children must now go. The explanation would require more knowledge of Dee than either of the children had; they would need to know, for instance, that in Dee’s eyes the women of He had been emancipated but not enfranchised, and that for Dee this abstract distinction carried a high emotional charge—all the more so because the Hevian women themselves were obviously quite content to have it that way.

Miramon settled his papers, arose and walked smoothly toward them, his face grave. Dee watched him approach with an expression of smouldering, resolute suspicion with which Amalfi could not help but sympathize, funny though he found it.

“We are delighted to have you with us, Mrs. Hazleton,” Miramon said, bowing his head. “Much of what we are today, we owe to you. I hope you will allow us to express our gratitude; my wife and her ladies await to do you honor.”

“Thanks, but I don’t—I really mean—”

She had to stop, obviously finding it impossible to summon up in a split second the memory of what she had meant so many years ago, when she had been, whether she was yet aware of it or not, another person. Back then, she had in fact been one of the prime movers in the emancipation of the women of He, and Amalfi had been glad of her vigorous help, particularly since it had turned out to be crucial in a bloody power-struggle on the planet, and hence crucial to the survival of the city—the latter a formula which then had been as magical and beyond critical examination as the will to live itself, and now was as meaningless a slogan and one as far gone in time as “Remember the Bastille”, “Mason, Dixon, Nixon and Yates”, or “The Stars Must Be Ours!” Dee’s first encounter with Hevian women had been in the days when they had been stinking unwashed creatures kept in ceremonial cages; something about Miramon’s present mode of address to her apparently reminded her of those days, perhaps even made her feel the bars and the dirt falling into place about her own person; yet the time gap was too great, and the politeness too intensive, to permit her to take offense on those grounds, if indeed she was aware of them. She looked quickly at Amalfi, but his face remained unchanged; she knew him well enough to be able to see that there would be no help from that quarter.

“Thank you,” she said helplessly. “Web, Estelle, it’s time we left.”

Web turned to Estelle, as if for help, in unconscious burlesque of Dee’s unspoken appeal to Amalfi, but Estelle was already rising. To Amalfi’s eyes the girl looked amused and a little contemptuous. Dee was going to have trouble with that one. As for Web, anyone could see plainly that he was in love, so he would require no special handling.

“What I suggest is this,” Estelle’s father’s voice said, way up in the middle of the air. “Suppose we assume that there is no thermodynamic crossover between the two universes until the moment of contact. If that’s the case, there’s no possibility of applying symmetry unless we assume that the crossover point is actually a moment of complete neutrality, no matter how explosive it seems to somebody on one side or the other of the equivalence sign. That’s a reasonable assumption, I think, and it would enable us to get rid of Planck’s Constant—I agree with Retma that in a situation like this that’s only a bugger factor—and handle the opposite signs in terms of the old Schiff neutrino-antineutrino theory of gravitation. That can be quanticized equally well, after all.”

“Not in terms of the Grebe numbers,” Dr. Schloss said.

“But that’s exactly the point, Schloss,” Jake said excitedly. “Grebe numbers don’t cross over; they apply in our universe, and probably they apply on the other side too, but they don’t cross. What we need is a function that does cross, or else some assumption that fits the facts, that frees us of crossover entirely. That’s what Retma was saying, if I understood him correctly, and I think he’s right. If you don’t have a crossover expression which is perfectly neutral anywhere in Hilbert space, then you’re automatically making an assumption about a real No-Man’s-Land. What we’re forced to start with here is No.”

Estelle stopped at the door and turned to look toward the invisible source of the voice.

“Daddy,” she said, “that’s just like translating Hevian math into New Earth math. If it’s No-Man’s-Land you have to deal with, why don’t you start with the bullets?”