Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [9]
The others had settled back to pay attention, recognizing the sound of their captain calling the meeting to order without seeming to do so. “It has been controversial,” Hwiii said, “and to tell you the truth, there are colleagues of mine who are happier to see me out here and out of touch than back home making their lives difficult in the symposia and the journals. I’m seen as a bit of a troublemaker, I’m afraid.”
“Noooo,” Riker said, grinning. Picard smiled to himself: that mischievous look in Hwiii’s eyes could hardly be mistaken for anything but what it was.
Hwiii glanced at Riker with the mischief very much in place. “Well, thank you for the vote of confidence, Commander. But I have been troublesome, and so far there’s not enough evidence to find out whether I’m right or wrong, which would resolve instantly the question of whether the trouble’s been worth it.”
Hwiii paused for a bite of mackerel. “Starfleet took us on as navigations-research specialists particularly because of our ability to know where we were without recourse to maps or charts. They thought that this would be a useful art to incorporate into a starship’s repertoire. Now, some of our navigational and orienting ability in water has to do with the perception of local magnetic and gravity fields. But as soon as we went into space, where those fields either fell off to microstrengths or vanished entirely, it turned out that we could still navigate. And later investigation showed that we had some ability to perceive and orient ourselves by “hyperstring” structures in space. … What’s that, please?”
“Seafood sauce,” Riker said, passing the bowl. “Tomato sauce with spices.”
“Thank you. Mmmmm. … Without oversimplifying, hyperstrings are hyperdimensional, nonphysical structures on which the matter and the energy of the physical universe are more or less “strung” like beads. They aren’t anything to do with the strings you already know about, the strands of dense “cold” matter that drift about in realspace; but the name was so appropriate that it stuck.”
Hwiii put his knife and fork down crosswise on his plate and studied them for a moment. “Now, hyperstrings are, or have been, of no particular use. They’re just there. Their properties—density and so forth—have been thought to be only marginally affected by objects and occurrences in the physical universe, so there’s been some study of them to see whether hyperstrings themselves can be used as the determinants for an “absolute” coordinate system against which the movements and locations of things in the physical universe, like stars and planets, can be plotted. However … my mathematical work is leading me in another direction. I believe that our previous assumptions are wrong, and that hyperstrings are profoundly affected by objects in the physical universe … even to the point where they might be usable to predict changes in it. It’s still unproven, but my reading of the theoretical work done so far suggests that when something happens to a physical object, the hyperstring structures it’s “attached” to resonate with the change. But they resonate both forward and backward in time. Like a string, plucked, vibrating both back and forth.”
“I bet astrophysicists would find that useful, if it were true,” Geordi said. “You could tell if a star was about to go nova—because the hyperstrings it was “attached” to would be vibrating with the star’s explosion before the star itself blew up.”
“That’s exactly right, Mr. La Forge. And there are endless other possibilities for what comes down, quite simply, to predicting the future, if my conclusions are correct. But there are problems.” Hwiii grinned, and Picard smiled wryly at the look of someone so thoroughly enjoying