Donald Moffitt - Genesis 01

larger the uncertainty about its mass. Theoretically, it can assume a whole range of masses. There’s only one problem.”
    “What’s that?”
    “The Nar find it hard to believe in imaginary photons. They can’t seem to bend their minds around the concept. So they’re leaving it to us for the time being. Or rather to these fellows. I’m out of it. I’ll be on Juxt One, soaking up the Juxtshine and getting a tan.”
    “The Nar will come around to it eventually,” Trist said. “Through the back door. They have their own way of looking at abstractions. In the meantime, they’re giving us the benefit of the doubt. They know that humans have a peculiar talent for physics.”
    “Very peculiar,” Bram agreed.
    “I don’t know,” Mim said. The three physicists looked at her in surprise. “It’s easy for a musician to believe in things that only exist by virtue of other things that they turn into, but that are real nonetheless.”
    “How so, Mim?” Trist asked.
    “It happens all the time in music. Like some of the Chopin pieces. Cascades of unresolved chords that collapse into other unresolved chords linked by carry-over notes and never come to a resting place. If you play them individually, they’re all ugly discords. But they imply harmonies that the ear fills in. Harmonies that are just as real as if they existed as actual sound. In fact, you can diagram them if you care to, as a student exercise.” She wrinkled her nose. “Olan was always having to restrain students who thought they were ‘correcting’ the discords.”
    “I like that,” Jao said. “A universe that plays it by ear. That hints rather than states. Matter and energy don’t actually exist. They’re only implied by the transition states.”
    “We’ll make a physicist out of you yet, Mim,” Trist said. “You’ve got the divine madness.”
    Mim laughed. “I find it complicated enough sometimes just to try to beat time.”
    “Beat time,” Jao said. “That’s what we’re trying to do.”
    “Why do the Nar want to reach the galactic center in fifty thousand years?” Bram asked.
    Trist looked him in the eye. “Don’t you know? You work at the biocenter.”
    “Just my own little septum of it.”
    Trist and Jao exchanged glances. “Are you familiar with the absent tidings paradox?”
    Bram laughed. “What’s that?”
    “If intelligent life arises, and if billions of years have elapsed since the universe became hospitable enough to give rise to it, where are they all?”
    “But that’s been disproved. We know it happened at least twice.”
    “Make that three times,” Trist said.
    Bram glanced up sharply. “What are you talking about?”
    “The big ear that discovered Original Man finally hit the jackpot again. A couple of centuries ago, the Nar gave up on the nearby galaxies and turned the search inward, toward the galactic center. Worse odds, but closer to home, so to speak. They worked out computer techniques for filtering all the isotropic noise, and they used variable search strategies—the hydrogen line, the hydroxyl line, pulsed transmissions at all frequencies simultaneously, and so forth. All very discouraging. Finally, about the time redbeard here began to develop fuzz, they started searching at low frequencies along the magnetic field lines in the galaxy. The theory was that the lines would act as a guide, beating the inverse square rule, and that you might pick up very weak signals at very great distances.”
    “How great?” Bram said.
    “They don’t know. Maybe thirty or forty thousand light-years in toward the core.”
    “What’s in the signals?”
    “Pure noise. No information content at all. Scraps of carrier waves, maybe. Leaking radar. But there’s no doubt that they’re of artificial origin.”
    “I’d have thought the news would be all over the place.”
    “You know the Nar. They don’t go crazy like us. They only started picking up the signals a couple of years ago, and then they weren’t sure what they were. It took a while for the implications to sink in, and then the group leaders on the probe project started mulling it over with some of their opposite numbers at the biocenter, and it started to spread to some of the policy touch groups, and it’s trickling down. Some of us know, and one or two people on the human advisory council have been told, and I suppose some hacker on news net will pick it up, and then everybody will know.”
    “So that’s why the Nar want to reach