Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [115]
When he reached the porch, the door opened, and an old Unmer woman came out. She was wearing simple peasant clothes. She looked up at him and smiled. And then she hugged him fiercely.
‘It’s so good to see you,’ she said in Unmer. ‘Your father is down by the river, fishing, always fishing. Don’t you dare go and join him until you’ve eaten something.’
She ushered him inside. The interior was simple, but tidy: a few stools around a table, a bed with a colourful woollen blanket, a kettle sitting on a iron wood stove. A collection of small glazed animals stood on a shelf under the window. The old woman opened a cupboard over the sink and took out two cups.
Maskelyne turned the wheel again, forwards this time. The image of the shack blurred into pulsing shadows and lights. He heard a sound like gunfire, followed by a gravelly roar. He turned the wheel all the way forwards, to the present.
Blinding white light assailed his eyes. The noise rose to an intolerable screech. Maskelyne cried out and tore the lenses from his face again.
Gods in Hell.
It was as if some universal force or barrier prevented the dead sorcerer from viewing the present through Maskelyne’s eyes. Maskelyne could look back, but the sorcerer could not look forward beyond his own time. The cosmos would not allow a paradox. The spectacles were of little use to anyone but a historian.
Evidently Ianthe had never turned the wheel all the way forwards. Maskelyne thought about giving them back to her. She’d soon learn not to tamper with Unmer artefacts.
Later, perhaps later. He looked down at his notes, and added:
If Space is the distance and the difference between two objects, what happens in places when Space is zero?
Maskelyne rummaged through the box on the workbench until he found a matched pair of magnets. He pulled them apart, then pushed the north poles towards each other, until he felt them repelling each other. Then he turned one magnet around and noted the attraction between unlike poles. It seemed to him that the material in one pole was identical to the other. He picked up his pen again.
Can Space be stretched and compressed? Are the forces of attraction and repulsion witnessed between poles merely the tendency for such stressed spaces to reach an equilibrium determined by the mean variance of the surrounding universe? As the variance between two points is reduced, the energy required to further compress Space increases exponentially, until that space is compressed to zero. The energy contained in such minutiae must be considerable indeed. Is there a horizon where forces of attraction and repulsion no longer apply?
Could our universe have once been a single invariant point, perhaps one of many such points, containing vast amounts of Space in ultra-compressed form? What if the expansion and contraction of Space continues? Do tiny knots of super-compressed Space still remain in the heart of everything? Such knots must contain identical particles, trapped together and yet unable to repel each other until variance is introduced. Opposing particles would gather at the horizon (or horizons – if space is truly waveform), and yet be unable to come any closer. Furthermore, if compressed Space has no physical quantity, then each of these knots would act like a vacuum pump, drawing a constant flow of uncompressed Space (created by variant particles) into itself. What if we called this force gravity?
Maskelyne set down his pen again and gazed out of the window. The old ship creaked and groaned around him, rocked by the sea. He thought of the ocean currents, and it seemed to him that Space might flow in a similar fashion. It was all degrees of variance. He lifted one of the magnets and let it drop. It hit the workbench with a thud.
One wonders if it is possible for enough knots of super-compressed Space to gather