Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

voice: >Jack Raoul!< I saw the eyelids
lift up, without any spasmodic contractions.
    ’Raoul’s eyes fixed themselves on mine.’
     
    Raoul looked down at himself. His body gleamed, a silver
statue.
    He peered around, trying to get oriented. He made out a tangle of
silvery rope, a complex, multi-layered webbing that appeared to
stretch around him in all directions. Everywhere he looked, Ghosts
slid along the cables like droplets of mercury. And beyond and
through it all, a deep glimmering light shone, a universal glow made
pearl grey by the depth of the tangle.
    He sure wasn’t on 51 Pegasi I-C any more.
    Jack Raoul had spent his working life at the uneasy political
interface between Ghost and human. In those vanishing days of
more-or-less friendly rivalry, governed by more-or-less equable
accords, it had been Raoul’s responsibility to ensure that humans
knew what the Ghosts were doing, on their vast, remote experimental
sites, just as Ghost observers were allowed to inspect human
establishments. Mutual security through inspection and verification,
an old principle.
    But Raoul had soon learned that asking for evidence wasn’t enough.
Somebody had to go out there and see for himself - and on Ghost
terms. That meant a sacrifice, though, that nobody was prepared to
accept.
    Nobody but Raoul himself.
    So his brain and spinal cord were rolled up and moved into a
cleaned-out chest cavity. His circulatory system was wrapped into a
complex mass around the brain pan. The Ghosts built a new metabolic
system, far more efficient than the old and capable of working off
direct radiative input. New eyes, capable of working in spectral
regions well beyond the human range, were bolted into his skull. He
was given Ghost ’muscles’ - a tiny antigravity drive and compact
actuator motors. At last he was wrapped in something that looked like
sheets of mercury.
    Thus he was made a Ghost.
    Jack Raoul couldn’t live with people any more, outside of Virtual
environments. Not that he wanted to. But he could fly in space. He
could eat sunlight and survive the vacuum for days at a time,
sustaining his antique human core in warmth and darkness. It was odd
that he was actually more at home here in a Ghost ship than anywhere
in the human Expansion.
    ’… Jack Raoul.’ The Sink Ambassador swum before him, spinning
languidly. ’How do you feel?’
    Raoul flexed his metal fingers. ’How do you think I feel?’
    ’You are as evasive as ever.’
    ’Am I on a ship, Ambassador?’ If so it was bigger than any Ghost
cruiser he had ever seen.
    ’In a manner of speaking. For now, we must ascend.’
    ’Ascend?’
    ’Towards the light. Please.’ The Ghost rose, slow waves crossing
its surface.
    Effortlessly Raoul followed.
    Soon they were passing into the tangle of silvery ropes. When he
looked back, there was nothing to mark the place he had emerged from
- not even a hollow in the tangle.
    At home or not, he knew he shouldn’t be here.
    ’Ambassador, I was under house arrest. How did you get me out of
there?’
    ’Have you improved your understanding of quantum physics since we
last met?’
    Inwardly, Raoul groaned.
    The Ambassador began, somewhat earnestly, to describe how the
Ghosts had learned to break up electrons: to divide indivisible
particles.
    ’The principle is simple,’ said the Ghost. ’An electron’s quantum
wave function describes the probability of finding it at any
particular location. In its lowest energy state, the wave function is
spherical. But in its next highest energy state the wave function has
a dumb-bell shape. Now, if that dumb-bell could be stretched and
pinched, could it be divided?…’
    The Ambassador described how a vat of liquid helium was bathed in
laser light of a precise frequency, exciting electron wave functions
into their dumb-bell configurations. Then, as the pressure within the
helium was increased, the electron dumb-bells split and pairs of
half-bubbles drifted apart.
    To Raoul it sounded like a typical Ghost experiment: extremes of
low temperature, the fringe areas of physical law.
    ’Jack Raoul, you must understand that the quantum wave function is
no mathematical abstraction, but a physical entity. We have split and
trapped a wave function itself - perhaps the first time in the
history of the universe this has occurred,’ the Ghost said
immodestly.
    Raoul suppressed a sigh. ’You guys never do anything simply, do
you? So you split an electron’s wave function. So what?’
    ’The