for them while they're in our marble, even through scanning takes about
three seconds and is utterly silent. From my vantage I could see that the
sagittal, axial and coronal windows had stopped blinking, indicating full
data capture. Silloin was skirring busily to herself; her comm didn't
bother to interpret. Wasn't saying anything baby Michael needed to know,
obviously. Her head bobbed as she monitored the enormous spread of
readouts; her claws clicked against touch screens that glowed orange and
yellow.
At my station, there was only a migration status screen -- and a white
button.
I wasn't lying when I said I was just the doorman. My field is
sapientology, not quantum physics. Whatever went wrong with Kamala's
migration that morning, there was nothing I could have done. The dinos tell
me that the quantum nondemolition sensor array is able to circumvent
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle by measuring spacetime's most
crogglingly small quantities without collapsing the wave/particle duality.
How small? They say that no one can ever "see" anything that's only 1.62 x
10-33 centimeters long, because at that size, space and time come apart.
Time ceases to exist and space becomes a random probablistic foam, sort of
like quantum spit. We humans call this the Planck-Wheeler length. There's
a Planck-Wheeler time, too: 10-45 of a second. If something happens and
something else happens and the two events are separated by an interval of a
mere 10-45 of a second, it is impossible to say which came first. It was
all dino to me -- and that's just the scanning. The Hanen use different
tech to create artificial wormholes, hold them open with electromagnetic
vacuum fluctuations, pass the superluminal signal through and then assemble
the migrator from elementary particles at the destination.
On my status screen I could see that the signal which mapped Kamala
Shastri had already been compressed and burst through the wormhole. All
that we had to wait for was for Gend to confirm acquisition. Once they
officially told us that they had her, it would be my job to balance the
equation.
Pitter-patter, pitter-pat.
Some Hanen technologies are so powerful that they can alter reality
itself. Wormholes could be used by some time traveling fanatic to corrupt
history; the scanner/assembler could be used to create a billion Silloins
-- or Michael Burrs. Pristine reality, unpolluted by such anomalies, has
what the dinos call harmony. Before any sapients get to join the galactic
club, they must prove total commitment to preserving harmony.
Since I had come to Tuulen to study the dinos, I had pressed the white
button maybe three hundred times. It was what I had to do in order to keep
my assignment. Pressing it sent a killing pulse of ionizing radiation
through the cerebral cortex of migrator's duplicated, and therefore
unnecessary, body. No brain, no pain; death followed within seconds. Yes,
the first few times I'd balanced the equation had been traumatic. It was
still ... unpleasant. But this was the price of a ticket to the stars. If
certain unusual people like Kamala Shastri had decided that price was
reasonable, it was their choice, not mine.
=This is not a happy result, Michael.= Silloin spoke to me for the first
time since I'd entered the control room. =Discrepancies are unfolding.=
