Adam Roberts - Stone(2002) Read online

  Also by Adam Roberts in Gollancz

  SALT

  ON

  STONE

  ADAM ROBERTS

  Copyright © Adam Roberts 2002

  All rights reserved

  The right of Adam Roberts to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with

  the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2002 by

  Gollancz

  An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group

  Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane,

  London WC2H 9EA

  This edition published in 2003 by Gollancz

  A CIP catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 575 07396 9

  Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd,

  Lymington, Hants

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

  If a man does not feel dizzy when he first learns about the quantum, he has not understood a word.

  Niels Bohr

  I remember discussions with Bohr that went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair. And when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park, I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?

  Werner Heisenberg

  My heart is turned to stone I strike it and it hurts my hand.

  Shakespeare

  Understanding the nature of the quantum universe involves a profound reappraisal of the way we perceive our surroundings. If we see a natural object — an apple perhaps, or a stone — we know from experience that it will follow certain laws, the laws described by Newton. Imagine a stone lying on a table; we can measure it, apprehend it. We know that if we push it off the edge of the table it will fall to the floor; and if we are quick enough we can reach out and catch it as it falls. This means that we can see it falling, we can gauge where it is and how quickly it is travelling, and move our hand to intercept it.

  But at the level of the atom, the quantum level, things are completely unlike this. We can measure the world of atoms, but our ability to measure is compromised – not by our measuring instruments but by the nature of things themselves. We can measure where an atom is; or we can measure how fast it is travelling, but we simply cannot measure where an atom is and how fast it is going. This is impossible.

  The reasons for this are profoundly unsettling. Perhaps you think 'If only our instrumentation were accurate enough, we would be able to apprehend the nature of the quantum, to measure where it is and how fast it goes at the same time.' But if you think this you are wrong, and this is why: at the level of the quantum things are not in the way that we can confidently say

  that they are at the level of apples and stones. We cannot say an atom 'is' in the same way we can say that the stone 'is on the table.' From the atom's point of view, as it were, there are only 'probabilities'.

  You have heard of the famous thought-experiment of Schrodinger's Cat. The cat lives in an opaque box. It so happens that opening the box will kill the cat, because of the way the box is constructed. We cannot see into the box, or X-ray the box, or anything like that. But we want to know whether the cat is alive or dead inside the box. If we open the box to look, then it is certainly dead — but is it alive or dead now, before we open the box? The quantum moral of this story is that the cat is alive and dead at the same time. It inhabits both states of being simultaneously; what happens when we open the box is that our action of opening the door collapses these quantum probabilities into one single pattern, the pattern being 'the cat is dead.' Schrodinger's famous cat will test the suppleness of your mind, I promise you. You want to think 'Well, either the cat is alive or it is dead, and by opening the box we find one or the other to be the case'. But that is not the way it is at the level of the quantum; at the level of the quantum it is 'the cat is alive and dead until it is observed, and then the act of observation collapses the probability wave-form into a single determined pattern — dead, in this case.'

  Perhaps the example-cats confuse things. Think of a miniature cat made out of atoms, a nano-cat, ten atoms long. Is it here? Or there? Well, before you turn on your atomic observation machine, it is both here and there. Or to put it another way, before it is observed there is a particular probability wave form that dictates it as 40% here and 60% there — not split between the two places, mind you, but simultaneously the whole nano-cat is in each location with slightly different balances of probabilities. It sounds like I am suggesting there are two cats, but there is only one cat; it is just that it doesn't exist in the world in the same way that a full size cat does. You observe and you find the cat to be there, not here — but it is your observation that has determined the outcome. If you did not observe, the cat would continue to be here and there, would continue to exist in a quantum probability soup. But by observing you collapse the probabilities into a certainty.

  And this is the most profound implication of all, the deepest philosophical shake-down; because it follows from this that it is our observation — our power, as sentient intelligences to make the observation — that determines the universe the way it is.

  Kurt Soldan, Quanta: Essays on Quantum Physics

  The Prison

  1st

  Stone,

  The doctor has suggested that by writing letters to various objects and natural phenomena I may be able to come to terms with some of this badness, this illness, this upset (upset? downset, rather). I ought to register my dubiousness about this project right away. There is an issue of empathy here, isn't there? Empathy — that's right, isn't it? I have to assume that she is eavesdropping on this communication between you and me. My doctor, I mean. Or why would I bother to compose it at all? I do have something important to say about the nature of the universe, but I'll come on to that in due course. Later on, a little later on. To communicate with her through the stone is rather like using the language of the stone, isn't it? Don't you think? Are you listening? Hey! Hey!

  Doesn't hear me.

  I am a bad man, I've done some bad things. I beg your pardon, stone, in telling you these things. (Do you like that politeness? You're an ancient object, and I've got a whole store of ancient cultural habits to deploy if I feel like it). I am a bad man. I still think of myself as a man, in fact, although there's little biological evidence to support that fact. When the nanotechnology abandoned my body the default biological settings reasserted themselves. I had liked being a man, in fact. I'd been a man for so long I'd acquired the mental habit of calling myself male, of thinking it at a deep level. I still think that way, even though my male genitalia have long since shrunken and wizened like drying fruit; grapes turning to raisins and finally shrinking to nothing at all. Then the whole area itched, and I couldn't help but scratch. You won't know what itch means, stone. There's something you have in common with the rest of humanity. That's something their nanotechnology protects them from. But let me tell you, to itch, it's a strange thing. It's a torture and a pleasure at once. I scratched my whole body raw. I scratched my new genital smoothness so hard it opened up lips. So I suppose I am a she, except I'm not so in my head, it somehow hasn't percolated through to my head. I haven't grown breasts either. But maybe that's because I'm not eating. When I first came to prison, my first prison, I was in a state. I tried starving myself, but the nanotechnology kept me alive. I'm not sure how. Perhaps it picked up nutrients from here and there, drew them through my skin as I lay asleep on the soil – I don't know. Nanotechnology, dotTech as it is called, is an astonishingly clever thing. It
really is. I have battled against it, trying to kill people that it is designed to keep alive. I know my enemy. Better now than ever. Listen to what I have to tell you, dear stone, and you will know it too.

  Let me get straight to the point. I have to tell you a story — my story — about a terrible crime. The worst crime ever committed, maybe; murder (which is the worst of crimes) and murder on a scale you can barely conceive.

  Let me take it down to its basic level: I was in prison. I'm in prison now, but this was before. I was in prison for different reasons then. I didn't have you then, my dear stone. There were other stones in that other jail, but none of them were as close to me as you are becoming. Does that make you feel special? You are special. Does it make you feel loved?

  Well, let's not get carried away.

  They contacted me inside prison, inside my first prison. Stay with me, for a few moments, and I'll explain how difficult a thing it was that they did: I was inside a prison so well made that it was impossible for me to get out or for anybody to get a message in. And yet they managed both these things. Who were they7. Yes, well, that puzzled me too: they were, as they proved themselves, the enemy of t'T. We lived in a kind of paradise, in t'T, and thought ourselves immune, but enemies gathered at our borders. There were the Wheah, ancient enemies; but also the Palmetto tribes, mysterious peoples. Which of them offered me this deal? Which of them is at the root of this problem? I thought I knew; I thought it was becoming increasingly clear to me, but I was wrong.

  I apologise for my awkwardness. I'm not used to this.

  They offered me a deal. They would break me out of prison. And you understand, dear stone, that the prison I was in was impossible to break out of. Not difficult, or challenging, but impossible. My prison was surrounded on all sides by walls of superheated fire and plasma kilometres deep. But they promised me they could get me out. When I was out, they said, they would make me rich. In the worlds I have travelled amongst money means little, and there are philosophies that teach even information is of no fundamental importance. But they promised me compacted information that would have sped me through fast-space at four thousand times the speed of light; that would have built me palaces in space, genie-like, at the other end. Of course, the most attractive thing they offered was escape from the inescapable jail. Wealth and freedom — how could I not be tempted?

  In return they asked me to do one simple thing: destroy the population of an entire planet. To kill over sixty million human beings; and that was all, nothing more. I was not (they said) to destroy the planet as such; I was to leave as much of the ecology and architecture and all the evidences of civilisation as I could. But I had to kill off all the people. I was to litter the world with corpses. I am a bad man, and have done some questionable things in my time, but I was startled and rather frightened by this deal. They didn't tell me all in one go, of course; they approached me a number of times and insinuated the idea in my head. I would be wealthy. I would have help. I would be free. The people on this world, they — they would be dead, and once dead past caring.

  So I thought to myself: these people, that I am asked to kill. Are they real people?

  Now I suppose I could have turned down this deal they offered me, and gone on living in my prison. It was a spacious prison; green hills covered in plastic grass, a river and a lake filled with real water, fake plastic trees. Artificial stars dotted the false sky like bit-lights; sharp-edged, five-pointed icons of stars that glowed in the artificial night. The light that shone through these faux-stars was real light, if modified and filtered a little. Only the light and the water in my prison were real. Everything else about the place was artificial: the grass; the landscape; the trees; everything a simulated medium in which a few real people observed me as if I were a scientific specimen. And, of course, these people, the air, the very water - all of it was full of billions of dotTech machines. I could go anywhere I wanted in this space but there was nowhere to go. I could lie on my back on the chilly turf when the artificial light faded to artificial night, and the faux-stars glinted with a yellow, moist-looking light over my head. I could have lived the rest of my life there if I'd chosen.

  I said to them, whoever they were, Palmetto or Wheah, foreigner or closer-to-home, I said: Take me out of there. I'll do it, I said, I'll kill all these people.

  And so they did; and so did I.

  As a stone (I'm presuming here) you don't know anything about morality. Stones are proverbial for their moral indifference. But somehow I have to convey to you the enormity of what I have done. My doctor, wherever she is (hello! hello!) will probably understand this as me trying to convey to myself the enormity of what I have done. I don't wish to argue with her.

  In fact, this whole affair put me in a very peculiar position. I committed the crime, so I was the criminal. But I was acting on behalf of somebody or some-people or other, and I did not at the beginning know who those people were. I decided early on to try and uncover who it was who had so secretly commissioned me to do this terrible thing. Even though I was committing the crime, I intended to solve it. I was both murderer and detective.

  Curious.

  Even before I escaped from that first prison, I was wondering, and worrying, about the rationale. I tried to think who would want to do so terrible a thing. To kill a whole world? Why do such a thing? Who would it benefit? And why would they employ me to do it? To go to all the bother of helping me escape from prison, the impossible-to-escape prison. Why not employ somebody else? Why not simply commit the crime themselves?

  It is true that in the many-thousand, light year wide and deep realm of t'T, the confederation of worlds in which I grew up, the concept of criminal was so rare as to be the object of study by only the most specialised scholars. I was a human amongst trillions, a freak so rare and fine as to occasion horror and fascination. It was possible that in all the half-hundred worlds of t'T they, whoever they were, could not find a citizen as criminal as me – that might have been the reason for my election to this role. But outside t'T – what of the various Palmetto tribes of star-wayers in the broken space turnwards? There were pirates and murderers enough in those realms – they furnished the stock characters for a thousand t'T romances. And rimwards, there was the barbaric realm of the Wheah. If stories were true, there were warrior-families in that space who would have gladly wiped out whole populations, and for less reward than I was being offered.

  But the offer was made to me, not them. And the person who accepted it was me.

  2nd

  Dear Stone,

  I'll tell you about my execution. What do I remember? I remember that I was nervous. Perhaps that goes without saying. I remember too that everything I have to tell you about in these letters began after my execution. How did it happen? Let me tell you how it happened.

  It is a form of dying. You're a stone – I can't expect you to understand. You are not born, and don't really die. Or do you? I can pick you up and feel the ellipse that you make of my palm. It's like cradling a cold breast; and then I close my fingers around you and it's more like gripping the forefinger of a mother when you're nothing more than a wine-coloured baby with skin as scrunched as red silk that's been worn too long. That feeling of gripping, it feels good. If I could throw you out of the prison, into the body of the sun, then you'd disintegrate - would that be a kind of death from your point of view? Or if I contemplated a more realistic throw: from this bank of putty-mud and green grass into the river. Do you see the river, there?

  Of course, you have no eyes, being a stone.

  But let's say I threw you in there. Given some thousands of years you'd be ground down, you'd be rubbed away. Skins of atoms brushed off you every day, until you became nothing more than a piece of grit on the sandbank down the way. And maybe even less than that. Would that be some sort of death to you?

  (How does one reason with a stone?)

  Well, I approached my own execution in poor style. This is how it went. I woke up, and here I was. I had been broug
ht into the prison. It's only a prison to me, naturally. The jailer and the jailer's mate can come and go, of course they can. The nano-machines themselves can come and go, of course they can. I'm the one who can't go anywhere. For me the sky presents as complete a barrier as the inside curve of my own skull. I could no more pass through it than I could step out of my own skin. It is a spacious prison, I grant you. The ground space, with its undulating landscaping, its flowing water as clear as its air, the river's path looping seven times like a thrown away cord, all about and round the seven hills. So much green! So much artificial blue, with the stars burning now as day-stars, bright yellow against the azure, letting in carefully controlled dribbles of light and heat so that we do not freeze. Photons and agitated gas.

  The executioner was also my jailer, a large woman, with a lemon-coloured droopy face. She had a deputy, a man short and tight-skinned, a man who had adapted himself to make himself a better swimmer. At some point in his past he must have swallowed some adaptive dotTech, that had swum with its billions of fellows and encouraged them to change his body. He lacked hair, and he had used his dotTech to shrink his nose until it was only a puckered nipple, like the nubbin on a tomato, overlaying nostrils that were nicks in his face. His skin was a sharp red colour, smooth and pert. He spent most of his days swimming along the river, and diving deep in the pool that exists at the bottom of the slightly conical living space of the jail. I assume the water is drained at the base of this dip and re-circulated; I can't be sure. But the deputy said little, and did little, except wait impassively at the elbow of the jailer. They were a pair, it seems; he travelled everywhere with her. Listened to her words, sometimes nodding slowly, and then running off to leap into the water to ponder them more carefully. The dotTech in his body filtered oxygen out of the water at a rate sufficient to keep him alive. I'm not even sure if he had modified his lungs; he probably didn't need to.