Carbide Tipped Pens Part 19

"Right," Mark said, ignoring my sandwich. "For some time now, researchers have wondered if the right-handedness of the majority of numbers might indicate that the left side of the brain, which controls the right side of the body, dominates most in the production of numbers. At the same time, the left side of the brain also seems to be least powerful in influencing the production of letters. When you include the smalls, 'ambidextrous' edges, left-handed, out-just barely-as the most common letter-form of all, even if you include capital Q among the block of letters you might call left-handed and right-brained. Makes you wonder if hemispheric non-dominance-with a strong tilt to the left hand and right brain, admittedly-is in fact the most 'dominant' factor in letter production."

"That makes both sides of my brain hurt," I said, laughing, "although I guess that makes some sense. What about spatial orientations in numbering systems other than the Arabic, though?"

"In Mayan numerals, for instance? Or how spatial orientation of letters manifests in languages read not left to right, but right to left-in Hebrew, say? Or what about other systems in which the numbers are also letters and vice versa-not only Hebrew but the Roman system, too, whose numerals were not part of a separate numeric system but derived from the Latin alphabet?"

"Let me guess: you've already thought about this."

Mark nodded and leaned toward me.

"I learned in my debriefing that all of those questions had already been asked. Neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, linguistic anthropologists-all of them have been quietly involved in investigating whether or not the spatial orientations of letters and numbers might be evidence of patterns in the 'cultural unconscious' that mirror the evolutionary history of the human brain."

"And they found...?"

"The same patterns, with some minor variations, persist across all human cultures."

That made me pause.

Mark claims his grandfather knew the First Expedition biologist who named these freshwater critters we trap "pi-rats." Although better known for naming our world Dolores after his wife, Hector Quinones was not only the mission's chief population ecologist but also a math geek of the first water-and tagged the bank-burrowers with their odd but appropriate name, given the critters' packrat thievery, giant muskrat looks, and their disproportionately long (seemingly endless) tails.

"As hatchery manager," Mark says when we get to the north end of Pond 1, "I suppose I should reiterate that, officially, we're thinning the pi-rat population because their burrows damage the levees between the ponds. It also just so happens that pi-rat fur is prime now, and bringing a good price."

"My hand is like those other exquisitely complex mechanisms, the prionoids the Bots have been bombing our worlds with," he said, grabbing the wheelbarrow's handles. "Those D-amino transmission particles, meant to morph our brain chemistry, confuse our myriad complications and defeat that thing in human consciousness that the Bots can't figure out. I guess they figure you don't have to understand something to destroy it. But all the Bots' efforts have resulted only in poisonings, and madness, and the necessity of running these LC tests on our air and water."

He lifted up on the handles.

"The p.o.o.p is in the pudding. Back to it."

I followed him down the bank, and stepped with him into the kettle once more.

"But even supposing, for the moment, we accept that the pattern-thing works, more or less, for every culture-what does it have to do with the Bots allowing you to go on living?"

"Ah. Follow the logic. What started the Knot War?"

I suppose I gave him an odd look, but then shrugged and answered.

"Surprise attacks by Bot forces. Coordinated lightning raids."

"And the goal of those coordinated attacks?"

"To capture the central junction point of universe-lines known as the Big Knot, and to abduct Elena Zametis-greatest of Raveleras in the greatest line of Raveleras-and carry her to the Knot."

"Yes. Which-with aid from singularitarian Hivists, from turncoat human-sphere AIs, and from the strangely willing Elena-the Bots managed to do. So far, so good-but what made it worth going to war over?"

I was beginning to wonder where this belaboring of the obvious might be headed, but I decided to let it roll out a bit longer without comment.

Heading south, back toward the pickup, each of us walks the bank opposite the one he walked on the way out, hoping to catch sight of anything the other might have overlooked. At the south end we climb into the Sun Dog, move the pickup to the next pond, and park again there. Standard operating procedure: walk the levees, check the traps, move and repark the truck, pond after pond.

"I know what you're thinking," he said as we started shoveling the thick muck again. "You think, 'All this war stuff is just a mask for Mark's obsession with his lost hand and lost wife-Napoleon Blownapart mourning the loss of his Josephine. This stuff with numbers and letters, handedness and sides of the brain-hand waving at best, delusion at worst. All just seeing patterns that aren't really there.' And the paranoia about spies and spying! 'Application for membership in the Tinfoil Hat Crew-approved!' as they used to say. But you'd be wrong to believe any of those explanations is sufficient."

"Because all the leaders of the worlds of human s.p.a.ce had already sworn to protect the Raveleras," I said, slowly chewing my sandwich.

"Yes. Why?"

"Isn't it obvious? Everybody knows the answer to that."

Mark smiled inscrutably, looked around the office, and nodded.

"Please, bear with me. Again: why?"

"Their ability to travel clewed s.p.a.ce, of course. It's what has allowed human crews to pilot starships at velocities within a hair of the speed of light. Their ability to weave and unweave s.p.a.ce-time about themselves. To witch the way the subs.p.a.ce web is woven, the way other women once witched the courses of water underground."

"Which means?"

"Which means that humans have been able to spread out beyond Earth-to settle newer home worlds on Earth-like extrasolar planets."

"Right, but that's not what I was asking. 'To weave and unweave s.p.a.ce-time'-what does that mean? How is it done?"

I puzzled over that one a minute, before speaking.

"I gather that's kind of a trade secret among the Raveleras. The scientists theorize about 'q-net'-the quantum something or other."

"Quantum Nonlocally Entangled Tunneling. The webwork of evanescent wormhole tunnels, latent in the fabric of the cosmos."

"If you say so. But the Raveleras talk about how the universe is 'holographically conscious, too.' How, through the altered state of consciousness peculiar to them, they are able to locally alter the structure of s.p.a.ce-time. To 'weave a Way out of No Way,' along that infrastructure of threads or lines or tunnels they call clewed s.p.a.ce."

"And this 'infrastructure'-what's its origin?"

Whenever we find traps that have been run out on their chains we pull them back onto the bank. Using his gripper-hook prosthetic left hand with the dexterity of a surgeon gaping an incision, Mark has shown me how to prize open like steel clamsh.e.l.ls the sprung traps and remove from those metal jaws the beached pi-rats, slick and red-brown and stiff.

"A poet of Old Earth once said that love does not alter when it alteration finds nor bend with the remover to remove. I don't know if it's really true for love-divorce'll sure make you question that-but it's definitely not true for the universe. Everything the Raveleras do, with the help of their 'entheogens,' is proof that the universe alters when it alteration finds."

Under Mark's questioning-especially in the ghost of a cla.s.sroom still haunting the office-I felt like a truant student facing an oral examination, every query of which was somehow a trick question.

"Presumably the substructure is a natural feature of s.p.a.ce-time," I explained, "although there are those who think it's an artifact created by, well, someone."

Mark gave his inscrutable inquisitor's nod-and-smile again.

"What would you say has been the greatest a.s.surance of the human future, by your lights-and what is the greatest ongoing threat to that future?"

I had to think about that one for a moment.

"I'd say control of clewed s.p.a.ce has been the greatest a.s.surance, and the Bots the greatest ongoing threat." A thought suddenly occurred to me-a delayed answer to a much earlier question. "That's why, after the Bot surprise attacks, the leaders of all the worlds of human s.p.a.ce had no choice but to raise a thousand-starship armada and go to war at the Knot."

"Very good. But what exactly are the Bots-and why did they launch those attacks?"

From Mark I've learned how to reset the traps, pushing the jaws fully open and d.o.g.g.i.ng the trip-pan in each, priming the jaws to snap shut once the pan is depressed by the next creature's paw. For all I've learned, though, I still can't match Mark for speed or skill or experience with the traps. That may explain why, of the five pi-rats we've piled in the bed of the truck by the time we reach Pond 20, four are his work.

"The Knot was our Troy," Mark said, shoveling, "and Zametis our Helen. I was there for her interrogation. She allowed the Bots to abduct her."

"Why's that?" I asked, splashing a load into the wheelbarrow.

"Because, despite her webwork witching skills, or maybe because of them. She thought the relatively easy and rapid spread of humanity throughout s.p.a.ce by such swift, Raveleran means put off, yet again, our species' having to face the moral hazard of our shortsightedness, when it comes to fouling our own nest. If we can always fly away to yet more new worlds, we never have to live as if the world in which we live has irreplaceable value in its own right."

"The Bots are expansionist machine intelligences," I answered, around a mouthful of my lunch. "There's a lot of debate about their origin. The V'gerists even claim the origin of the Bots can be found in a human s.p.a.ce probe that was altered as a result of an encounter with a distant machine civilization-and the transformed probe was the seed for all the myriad Bots that came after. What is certain, though, is that their s.p.a.ceships are limited to significantly lower speeds than ours, due to the Bots' inability to open s.p.a.ce-time and weave a Way out of No Way, the way the human Raveleras can."

"And that's why they wanted the Knot and Elena, then?"

"Yeah. But I still don't see what it has to do with this handedness you were going on about."

At Pond 20, Mark finds something odd enough that he takes his long-ashed s.k.a.n.kstick from his mouth and waves me over. He holds up the almost-empty trap, to show me.

"Back on Earth, they'd consider finding these in our traps more proof of our 'frontier barbarism'-but this ain't sophisticated Earth, kiddo. One gnawed-off paw is rare enough anyway, but look at this. Two paws, each gnawed off above the wrist."

I nod.

"And they're both left front paws. From two different animals, caught in the same trap at the same time. Hard to tell, but from the smaller size I bet this one's from a female, and the larger one is from a male."

"Maybe the Bots hooked up this prosthetic not just to see how hand and mind cross-reference each other," Mark said, watching me shovel, "but also to see if a little brute-force cybernetics might jump-start the development of what the Raveleras whisper about. The appearance in time of a 'Ravelero' or 'Ravelator,' a male human not only capable of making and unmaking clewed s.p.a.ce around himself, but a true tripmaster, not bound by the speed of light."

Mark gestured to the office ceiling to emphasize his point.

"Because handedness is seen everywhere! From the microcosm to the macrocosm, the quantum scale to the cosmological scale, chirality links it all. The universe is not the same in every direction. It violates parity and funhouses mirror symmetry at every scale. The whole show was born spinning about a preferred axis from the very beginning, and that angular momentum, still conserved after fourteen billion years, shows up in an excess of left-handed, counterclockwise rotating spiral galaxies. The majority of spiral galaxies are lefty-loosey, not righty-tighty!"

"Whew! Give me some of that s.k.a.n.kweed you've been smoking, Mark! The whole universe rotating like an ice-skater-that makes my head spin!"

"As well it should, young man. And I'm not thinking this because I'm smoking that, by the way. The spin is all the way down to the smallest scales-not just galaxies and skaters, but protons and quarks as well. Nuclear beta decays, for instance, violate parity in favor of the left hand, too. The versions of molecules like amino acids found in living things-the biologically relevant versions-are overwhelmingly left-handed on Earth and every Earthlike planet we've visited, even though amino acids produced by inorganic reactions are equally split between right-handed and left-handed versions! Even the idea that left-handed molecular dominance, found throughout life on Earth, might itself have been extraterrestrial in origin has been floating around a long time. At least since left-favoring enantiomer imbalances were found on the Murchison meteorite-long predating interstellar travel to extra-solar worlds."

"But why should the left hand be favored?"

Mark springs open the trap. He shakes into his cupped right hand the two paws-red-furred hands with disproportionately long fingers and nails.

"I don't know much about pi-rat love," he says, flashing me his lopsided grin again, "but this tells me all I need to know about pi-rat divorce."

We laugh. He draws back his hand to hurl the paws into the pond, then stops. He shoves the two small hands into a pocket of his workpants instead.

"Not for naught did we Nauts of the Knot," Mark sang as he shoveled, "Teach the Bots how dearly bought was everything they stole!"

He paused to wipe his forehead.

"You have no idea how many times I sang that song with men and women of the Astronaut Service Guard-now dead, so many of them."

"One great mystery, lots of great theories!" he said, working his way through his luncherito. "Some say the lopsided favoring of left-handed biological molecules-what the experts call biological h.o.m.ochirality-is the result of slightly different half-lives of biologically relevant molecules, stemming from that beta decay connection. Others say it's from the preferential destruction of right-handed amino acids by left-circling polarized light, blasting out of rapidly rotating stars in primordial galaxies. Or Mie scattering on aligned interstellar dust particles, triggering the formation of optical isomers in s.p.a.ce. From all or whichever of the above, it's clear the bias in favor of the left hand is not just a local phenomenon."

"You called it a bias in favor of left-handedness-yet wasn't the bias against left-handedness, in almost all the cultures of Old Earth?"

Mark's face lit up. He had obviously thought about that, too.

Finding no pi-rats around Ponds 21 and 22-the westernmost, warmest, and smallest ponds in the hatchery-we return to the truck's cab. From under the driver's side of the front seat Mark pulls out a beer for himself and one for me, popping the stopper off each brewpak.

"To the silly songs of human freedom," he says, thudding his brewpak against mine in toast, "and what it costs to sing them."

He motioned me over to help him with the wheelbarrow.

"Alien hand notwithstanding, I returned to duty by the time of the final battle for the Knot. I swear, something about my new situation allowed me, and my troops around me, to be everywhere at once in that battle. It was as if something had changed the hand in the mirror of my mind. Suddenly I could funhouse a universe of mirrors, alter the fundamental info coding of the physical cosmos in my own small, unexpected-and uncontrolled-way. Maybe what the Bots had done to me had done the trick. If so, it was a trick, in my hands and mind, that I could now do to them."

Together we pushed the sludge-laden wheelbarrow up the bank.