Schild’s Ladder

She was only teasing, but the accusation stung. Rasmah had been on the Rindler just six months longer than he had, but she’d already contributed substantially to several projects. Having helped to design the spectrometer that had been lost with the Scribe, she’d gone on to improve the design still further for the models used in both the Left and Right Hands. The Scribe’s replacement had been planned as a single machine, but when attempts to renegotiate the protocols for its shared use collapsed for the seventh time, even the most ecumenical researchers had lost patience, and agreed to the duplication.

Tchicaya stretched his arms. "I’ve certainly had enough of staring at this for one day. Are you here to take over?"

"Yes." She smiled and added, "But I’m early, so I’m afraid you can’t actually leave yet."

The destruction of the Scribe, and the end to cooperation between the factions, had delayed follow-ups to Branco’s experiment, but once the two Hands were in place and gathering data, everybody on the Rindler had been riveted by the results. For months, the Blue Room — where the Left Hand’s data was displayed, now that trips to the border were considered imprudent — had been packed with people twenty-four hours a day, and it was no secret that the Preservationists had reacted in the same way.

Branco’s technique appeared to have confirmed Sophus’s original assertion: the novo-vacuum did not obey any single analog or extension of the Sarumpaet rules. It was possible to correlate a macroscopic portion of the near side of the border with parts of the total far-side state that did obey specific rules, but each time the experiment was repeated, the rules were different. All of Sarumpaet’s carefully reasoned arguments about which patterns of nodes in a quantum graph could persist as particles had been revealed as utterly parochial; the larger truth was, the ordinary vacuum that dominated the near side was correlated with sequences of graphs that behaved in that particular fashion, so it hid the fact that they were really just part of a superposition of countless other possibilities. The quantum subtleties that could, in principle, render the whole superposition visible were buried in the sheer number of details that would have had to be tracked in order to observe it.

The far side lacked the means to conceal its quantum nature in the same fashion, but if the view was less misleading, it remained confusing. Interpreting the new experiments was like trying to make sense of a jungle by watching an endless parade of exotic creatures cling briefly to the windows of a vehicle, stunned by the light, curious, or angry, but always flying off a moment later, never to return.

At first, every new set of laws had had their fifteen minutes of fame, but since none of them could be pinned to the near side for much longer than that, the novelty had begun to wear thin. Exhilaration at the cornucopia had given way to frustration. The experiments continued, but it had become a struggle to maintain even the symbolic presence of one sentient observer around the clock. Tchicaya supposed that this was fair enough: all the theorists were drowning in data already, and they had better things to do than sit and watch more come pouring in. For a week or two, he’d hoped that patient observation might actually lead him to a worthwhile discovery himself, but that was beginning to sound as crazy as looking for patterns in any other set of random quantum results.

"Oh, there it goes!" Rasmah wailed, as if she’d seriously expected otherwise. The patch of the border they’d pinned to the latest set of laws had just reverted to the old inscrutable glow. "What do you think would happen," she mused, "if we scribed some device that could function under the far-side dynamics, before we lost the correlation?"

Tchicaya said, "Even if it survived, what good would that do us? We’ve never been able to grab the same dynamics twice."

"What if we scribed a Scribe?"

"Ha! Like that Escher drawing?"

"Yeah." Rasmah pulled a face, suddenly aghast. "Though…that’s a left hand drawing a right, and vice versa. We can’t have that, can we?"

"Are you serious, though? Do you think we could insert a machine that could signal back to us in some way?"

Rasmah didn’t reply immediately. "I don’t know. What does the border look like, from the other side? Does it always look as if our physics is happening behind it? Or is something more symmetrical going on, where someone on the far side would catch glimpses just as varied and transient as the ones we’re seeing?"