Diaspora

Ve watched Gabriel's face as they waited, cheating the time by a mere factor of a million instead of jumping the gap in a single bound. Even if it wasn't a moral issue, relating to the physical world could be a delicate balancing act. Should you dart from significant event to significant event, creating a life devoid of everything else? Probably not—but exactly how much subjective time should you endure between the moments you were, in all honesty, desperately waiting for? Gabriel had passed the time at the standard Coalition rate, mostly by immersing himself in elaborate schemes for the eventual deployment of the wormholes, in between his sparse contacts with the machinery of the Forge as it was constructed and tested. But he'd almost run out of future to plan; the last Blanca had heard, he'd mapped out a detailed strategy for the—careful, non-exponential—exploration of the entire universe. Local wormholes probably didn't lead everywhere, since the mouths could only have traveled a certain distance since the time they were formed, but the closed, finite universe ought further than a few hundred million light years, there'd he wormholes in the galaxies at that distance which would reach as far again.

Gabriel's mildly preoccupied expression changed to one of satisfaction, though nothing as dramatic as relief. "The other ring's confirmed. We've grabbed both ends."

Blanca swung his arm, dislodging a flurry of blue crystals from his fur. "Congratulations." If the second neutralized positron had slipped out into space, it would have been impossible to find. With luck, they'd soon confirm that photons could pass through the wormhole, but a bombardment of either tiny mouth would only produce a trickle from the other.

Gabriel mused, "I keep wondering if we could have failed. I mean… we made a few mistakes in the design that we only discovered centuries later. And we hit those chaotic modes in the electron beams where the simulations broke down, so we had to map the whole state space empirically and find a way through by trial-and-error. We did a hundred thousand small things wrong, wasting time, making it harder. But could we ever have failed completely, beyond recovery? Beyond repair?"

"Isn't that question slightly premature?" Blanca inclined vis head skeptically. "Assuming this isn't a false alarm, you've just linked the two ends of the Forge. That's a start, but you're not quite staring down the runnel to Procyon yet."

Gabriel smiled airily. "We've proved the basic principle; the rest is just a matter of persistence. Until the neutralization of those positrons, Kozuch-Wheeler wormholes might have turned out to be nothing but a useful fiction: just another metaphor that gave the right predictions at low energies, but fell apart under closer scrutiny." He paused for a moment, looking slightly scandalized by his own words; it was a risk that the Forge group had rarely mentioned. "But now we've shown that they're real, and that we understand how to manipulate them. So what can go wrong from here?"

"I don't know. When it comes to interstellar wormholes, it might take longer than you think to find one that doesn't lead straight into the heart of a star, or the core of a planet."

"That's true. But a certain amount of matter in every system has to he in the form of small asteroids, or interplanetary dust—somewhere we can burrow out from easily. And even if our estimates are wrong by a factor of a thousand, it would still only take a year or two to find and enlarge each new usable wormhole. Would you call that failure? When the gleisners are exploring a new system every century and calling it success?"

"No." Blanca tried harder. "Okay, what about this? You've just proved that you can splice two identical, electron-positron wormholes together, at the electron ends. What if it doesn't work when you substitute a proton for one of the positrons?" Only primordial electron-proton wormholes offered the chance of an instant short-cut to the stars; the current experiment was using freshly created electron-positron pairs merely for the sake of having both ends of each wormhole accessible. Working exclusively with electron-proton wormholes might have been simpler in theory, but new ones with known endpoints couldn't be created at useful rate under anything less than Big Bang conditions. Gabriel hesitated, and for a moment Blanca wondered if he'd taken the scenario to heart.

"That would be a setback," he conceded. "But Kozuch Theory clearly predicts that when you hit an electron linked to a proton with another one linked to a positron, the proton will decay into a neutron, the positron will neutralize… and the final wormhole will be even wider than the one we've just made. And there's no room left, now, for idle speculation about Kozuch Theory being wrong. So—" He thumbed his nose at ver, then jumped to the Forge scape.