Mysterium

Our work yields a harvest of impossibilities, speculation is that the fragment may not be matter as we conventionally know it—apart from its measurable mass and volume, it lacks qualities we would call material. It cannot be subdivided. Its structure is grainless, undifferentiated even at great magnification, though optical scanning might be misleading for several reasons. Its radiation violates the inverse-square law as if the curvature of local space were being disturbed by an immensely greater mass, though the fragment can be lifted by four reasonably strong men (although none of us would be so unwise as to touch it). It seems to conjure high-energy photons from the surrounding air and shifts them toward the red as it radiates them. The effect includes reflected light: the fragment actually seems disproportionately more distant as you back away; that is, it shrinks too quickly with distance! The inverse is also true and makes nearfield measurement almost impossible. At microscopic distances, the fragment appears as a homogeneous structure as large as the surface of a star, though fortunately not as energetic! Although this makes it hard to handle, perhaps the miracle is that it is not much harder.

What a privilege to be allowed to witness these mysteries. How strange that the fragment should have come from an excavation in a Middle Eastern desert. Draw a radius of a thousand miles around the dig site and it encloses centuries of religious thought: Moses, Jesus, Mithra, Manx, Valentinus. …

Recall Linde’s idea of the observable cosmos arising from a chaotic “foam” of possible configurations of space and time: embedded in, tangled up with, other universes similar and dissimilar. In a dream 1 saw the fragment as something whole, as a sort of “wormhole boat” for traveling between adjacent islands of creation.

In the dream the vehicle was assembled by luminous beings, strange and unknowable: dwelling in the Pleroma? Using the device to penetrate the mystery of Created Matter—but unsuccessfully—broken fragments of ur-substance scattered through countless islands of space-time including our own…

We mean to bombard the fragment with high-energy particles. Knocking on Heaven’s door.

—from the secret journal of Alan Stern

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

When the Bureau de La Convenance collaborates with the War Department, Symeon Demarch thought, anything is possible.

The test gantry had been assembled in his absence. It rose from a bald patch of ground in the forest two miles west of the wreckage of the laboratory facility, and it looked deceptively simple: a steel tourelle that might have passed for a watchtower. A crane was in place to lift the weapon into its cradle.