Xenocide (Ender Wiggins Saga)

two, he'll be in the other place. And if it doesn't work at all, he'll just stay right here, with all of us feeling foolish for thinking we could wish our way through space."
    "And if it turns out Jane can get him Outside but can't hold things together there, then he'll be stranded in a place that doesn't even have any placeness to it," said Valentine.
    "Well, yes," said Grego. "If it works halfway, the passengers are effectively dead. But since we'll be in a place without time, it won't matter to us. It'll just be an eternal instant. Probably not enough time for our brains to notice that the experiment failed. Stasis."
    "Of course, if it works ," said Olhado, "then we'll carry our own spacetime with us, so there would be duration. Therefore, we'll never know if we fail. We'll only notice if we succeed."
    "But I'll know if he never comes back," said Valentine.
    "Right," said Grego. "If he never comes back, then you'll have a few months of knowing it until the fleet gets here and blasts everything and everybody all to hell."
    "Or until the descolada turns everybody's genes inside out and kills us all," added Olhado.
    "I suppose you're right," said Valentine. "Failure won't kill them any deader than they'll be if they stay."
    "But you see the deadline pressure that we're under," said Grego. "We don't have much time left before Jane loses her ansible connections. Andrew says that she might well survive it after all-- but she'll be crippled. Brain-damaged."
    "So even if it works, the first flight might be the last."
    "No," said Olhado. "The flights are instantaneous . If it works, she can shuttle everybody off this planet in no more time than it takes people to get in and out of the starship."
    "You mean it can take off from a planet surface ?"
    "That's still iffy," said Grego. "She might only be able to calculate location within, say ten thousand kilometers. There's no explosion or displacement problem, since the philotes will reenter Inside space ready to obey natural laws again. But if the starship reappears in the middle of a planet it'll still be pretty hard to dig to the surface."
    "But if she can be really precise-- within a couple of centimeters, for instance-- then the flights can be surface-to-surface," said Olhado.
    "Of course we're dreaming," said Grego. "Jane's going to come back and tell us that even if she could turn all the stellar mass in the galaxy into computer chips, she couldn't hold all the data she'd have to know in order to make a starship travel this way. But at the moment, it still sounds possible and I am feeling good !"
    At that, Grego and Olhado started whooping and laughing so loud that Mayor Kovano came to the door to make sure Valentine was all right. To her embarrassment, he caught her laughing and whooping right along with them.
    "Are we happy, then?" asked Kovano.
    "I guess," said Valentine, trying to recover her composure.
    "Which of our many problems have we solved?"
    "Probably none of them," said Valentine. "It would be too idiotically convenient if the universe could be manipulated to work this way."
    "But you've thought of something ."
    "The metaphysical geniuses here have a completely unlikely possibility," said Valentine. "Unless you slipped them something really weird in their lunch."
    Kovano laughed and left them alone. But his visit had had the effect of sobering them again.
    " Is it possible?" asked Valentine.
    "I would never have thought so," said Grego. "I mean, there's the problem of origin."
    "It actually answers the problem of origin," said Olhado. "The Big Bang theory's been around since--"
    "Since before I was born," said Valentine.
    "I guess," said Olhado. "What nobody's been able to figure out is why a Big Bang would ever happen. This way it makes a weird kind of sense. If somebody who was capable of holding the pattern of the entire universe in his head stepped Outside, then all the philotes there would sort themselves out into the largest place in the pattern that they could control. Since there's no time there, they could take a billion years or a microsecond, all the time they needed, and then when it was sorted out, bam, there they are, the whole universe, popping out into a new Inside space. And since there's no distance or position-- no whereness-- then the entire thing would begin the size of a geometric point--"
    "No size at all ," said Grego.
    "I remember my geometry," said Valentine.
    "And immediately expand, creating space as it grew. As it grew, time