Timeline - Michael Crichton [71]
Stern nodded. He was trying to see where this was going, but he couldn’t foresee the direction Gordon was taking.
“So we know that in certain situations, we can count on other universes to make something happen. We hold up the slits, and the other universes make the pattern we see, every time.”
“Okay. . ..”
“And, if we transmit through a wormhole, the person is always reconstituted at the other end. We can count on that happening, too.”
There was a pause.
Stern frowned.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Are you saying that when you transmit, the person is being reconstituted by another universe?”
“In effect, yes. I mean, it has to be. We can’t very well reconstitute them, because we’re not there. We’re in this universe.”
“So you’re not reconstituting. . ..”
“No.”
“Because you don’t know how,” Stern said.
“Because we don’t find it necessary,” Gordon said. “Just as we don’t find it necessary to glue plates to a table to make them stay put. They stay by themselves. We make use of a characteristic of the universe, gravity. And in this case, we are making use of a characteristic of the multiverse.”
Stern frowned. He immediately distrusted the analogy; it was too glib, too easy.
“Look,” Gordon said, “the whole point of quantum technology is that it overlaps universes. When a quantum computer calculates—when all thirty-two quantum states of the electron are being used—the computer is technically carrying out those calculations in other universes, right?”
“Yes, technically, but—”
“No. Not technically. Really.”
There was a pause.
“It may be easier to understand,” Gordon said, “by seeing it from the point of view of the other universe. That universe sees a person suddenly arrive. A person from another universe.”
“Yes. . ..”
“And that’s what happened. The person has come from another universe. Just not ours.”
“Say again?”
“The person didn’t come from our universe,” Gordon said.
Stern blinked. “Then where?”
“They came from a universe that is almost identical to ours—identical in every respect—except that they know how to reconstitute it at the other end.”
“You’re joking.”
“No.”
“The Kate who lands there isn’t the Kate who left here? She’s a Kate from another universe?”
“Yes.”
“So she’s almost Kate? Sort of Kate? Semi-Kate?”
“No. She’s Kate. As far as we have been able to tell with our testing, she is absolutely identical to our Kate. Because our universe and their universe are almost identical.”
“But she’s still not the Kate who left here.”
“How could she be? She’s been destroyed, and reconstructed.”
“Do you feel any different when this happens?” Stern said.
“Only for a second or two,” Gordon said.
Blackness.
Silence, and then in the distance, glaring white light.
Coming closer. Fast.
Chris shivered as a strong electric shock rippled through his body, and made his fingers twitch. For a moment, he suddenly felt his body, the way one feels clothes when you first put them on; he felt the encompassing flesh, felt the weight of it, the pull of gravity downward, the pressure of his body on the soles of his feet. Then a blinding headache, a single pulse, and then it was gone and he was surrounded by intense purple light. He winced, and blinked his eyes.
He was standing in sunlight. The air was cool and damp. Birds chirruped in the huge trees rising above him. Shafts of sunlight came down through the thick foliage, dappling the ground. He was standing in one beam. The machine stood beside a narrow muddy path that wound through a forest. Directly ahead, through a gap in the trees, he saw a medieval village.
First, a cluster of farm plots and huts, plumes of gray smoke rising from thatched roofs. Then a stone wall and the dark stone roofs of the town itself inside, and finally, in the distance, the castle with circular turrets.
He recognized it at once: the town and the fortress of Castelgard. And it was no longer a ruin. Its walls were complete.
He was here.
CASTELGARD
“Nothing in the world is as certain as death.”
JEAN FROISSART, 1359