Diaspora

Blanca hovered at the fresh end of the trail, taking stock of vis recent dismal efforts. Ve'd spent the last few megatau trying to patch an ugly system of "higher-order corrections" onto Kozuch's original model, infinite regresses of wormholes-within-wormholes which ve'd hoped might sum to arbitrarily large, but finite, lengths, hundred-billion-kilometer fractals packed into a space twenty orders of magnitude smaller than a proton. Before that, ve'd tinkered with the process of vacuum creation and annihilation, trying to get the space-time in the wormhole to expand and contract on cue as the mouths were repositioned. Neither approach had worked, and in retrospect ve was glad that they hadn't; these ad hoc modifications were far too clumsy to deserve to be true.

After being used to create the antihydrogen to fuel the Diaspora, the Forge had been reclaimed by the small group of particle physicists in Earth C-Z not terminally disillusioned by the failure of its original purpose. Their experiments had now probed every known species of particle down to the Planck-Wheeler length, and so long as no traversable wormholes were produced the results remained perfectly consistent with Kozuch Theory. To Blanca, this strongly suggested that Kozuch's original identification between particle types and wormhole mouths was correct, and whatever else needed to he overhauled or thrown out, that basic idea should remain intact as the core of a revised theory.

On Earth, though, there was a growing consensus that Kozuch's whole model had to be abandoned. The six extra dimensions which allowed the wormhole mouths their diversity were already being described as "the mathematical fiction that misled physicists for two thousand years," and theorists were urging each other to adopt a more "realistic" approach with all the puritanical vigor of scourge-wielding penitents.

Blanca accepted that it was possible that all of Kozuch Theory's successful predictions were due to nothing but the "mirroring" of the logical structure of wormhole topology in another system altogether. The motion under gravity of an object dropped down a borehole passing through the center of an asteroid obeyed essentially the same mathematics as the motion of an object tied to the free end of an idealized anchored spring—but pushing either model too far as a metaphor for the other generated nonsense. The success of Kozuch's model could be due to the fact that it was just an extremely good metaphor, most of the time, for some deeper physical process which was actually as different from extra-dimensional wormholes as a spring was different from an asteroid.

The trouble was, this conclusion fitted the prevailing mood in C-Z far too well: the recriminations over the failure of wormhole travel, the backlash against the other polises' continuing retreat from the physical world, and the increasingly popular doctrine that the only way to avoid following them was to anchor C-Z culture firmly to the rock of direct ancestral experience, and dismiss everything else as metaphysical indulgence. In that climate, Kozuch's six extra dimensions could never be more than the product of a temporary misunderstanding of what was really going on.

Blanca had originally planned to spend no more than twenty or thirty megatau on the problem, then sleep for the rest of the voyage, satisfied that ve'd struggled long and hard enough to understand exactly how difficult it would be to find a solution. Ve'd guarded against investing too much hope in the prospect of helping Gabriel out of his post-Forge depression, despite fanciful visions of greeting him when he woke with the news that his soul-destroying "failure" had been transformed into the key to the physics of the next two thousand years. But the fact remained that Renata Kozuch had invented a universe of unsurpassed elegance, ruled by a set of economical and harmonious laws—and the bulletins from Earth were beginning to portray this marvelous creation as some kind of hideous mistake, as disastrous as the Ptolemaic epicycles, as wrong-headed as phlogiston and the aether. Blanca felt that ve owed Kozuch herself a spirited defense.

Ve ran vis Kozuch avatar; an image of the long-dead flesher appeared in the scape beside ver. Kozuch had been a dark-haired woman, shorter than most, sixty-two years old when she'd published her masterpiece—an anomalous age for spectacular achievement in the sciences, in that era. The avatar wasn't sentient, let alone a faithful re-creation of Kozuch's mind; she'd died in the early years of the Introdus, and no one really knew why she'd declined to be scanned. But the software had access to her published views on a wide range of topics, and it could read between the lines to some degree and extract a limited amount of implicit information. Blanca asked, for the thirty-seventh time, "How long can a wormhole he?"