Timescape. Part 25

Tachyons didn't. They made new theories possible, a 7 3kicking up .the dust of cosmological questions by their mere 'existence. The implications were being worked out.Beyond that, though, were the messages them-'

selves. They had ceased in 1963, before Zinnes could gthet extensive confirmation. Some physicists thoughtey were real. Others, forever waryof sporadic phe-nomena, thought they must have been some fortuitous error. The situation had a lot in common with Joe Weber's detection of gravitational waves in 1969.

Later experiments by others had found no waves.

Did that mean 'Weber was wrong, or that the waves came in occasional bursts? It might be decades before another flurry could settle the question. Gordon had talked to Weber, and the wiry, silver-maned experimenter seemed to take the whole thing as a kind of inevitable comedy. In science you usually can't convert your opponents, he had said; you have to outlive them. For Weber there was hope; Gordon felt his own case was forever uncheckable.The new theory by Tanninger certainly pointed the way. Tanninger had put tachyons into the general relativity theory in a highly original way. The old question that came up in quantum mechanics, of who the observer was, had finally been resolved. Tachyons were a new kind of wave phenomenon, causality waves looping between past and future, and the paradoxes they could produce gave a new kind of physics.

The essence of paradox was the possibility of mutually contradictory outcomes, and Tanninger's picture of the causal loop was like that of the quantum-mechanical waves. The difference came in the interpretation of the experiment. In Tanninger's picture, a kind of wave function, resembling the old quantum function, gave the various outcomes of the paradox loop. But the new wave function did not describe probabilities--it spoke of different universes.

When a loop was set up, the universe split into two new universes. If the loop was of the simple killing-your-grandfather type, then there would result one a 7 a universe where the grandfather lived and the grandson disappeared. The grandson reappeared in a second universe, having traveled back in time, where he shot his grandfather and lived out his life, pa.s.sing through the years which were forever altered by his act. No one in either universe thought the world was paradoxical.All this came from using tachyons to produce the standing-wave kind of time loop. Without tachyons, no splitting into different universes occurred. Thus the future world that had sent Gordon the messages was gone, unreachable. They had separated sometime in the fall of 1963; Gordon was sure of that.

Some event had made Renfrew's experiment impossible or unnecessary. It could have been the Ramsey-Hussinger press conference, or putting the message in the safety deposit box, or the Kennedy thing. One of those, yes. But which?He moved among the crowd, greeting friends, letting his mind drift. He recalled that a human being, eating and moving around, gave off 200 Watts of body heat. This room trapped most of it, bringing p.r.i.c.kly perspiration to his brow. His Adam's apple snagged on the knot of his tie."Gordon!" a silvery voice called to him above the tangle of talk. He turned. Marsha threaded her way through the crowd. He bent and kissed her. She was toting an overnight case, swinging it with abandon as she turned to call h.e.l.los to people she knew. She told him about the crush of traffic getting into town after her shuttle flight from LaGuardia, eyebrows darting upward to underline a word, hands describing averted collisions with swooping arcs. The pros-hPect of a few days of freedom from the children gave era manic, gay air that spread to Gordon. He real-ized he had grown somber as this overheated, glit-tery reception went on, and Marsha had erased that in a moment. It was this quality in her, of swelling life, that he remembered best when he was away from her. "Oh, G.o.d, there's that Lakin," she said, 4 ? 5.eyes rolling up in a parody of panic. "Let's move the opposite way,-I don't want to start off with him."

Wifely loyalty. She tugged him to the shrimp salad, which he had pa.s.sed over, probably following instinctively a genetically ingrained dietary axiom.

Marsha snared a feTM of their friends along the way--to form a protective barrier against Lakin, she said. All this was done with comic exaggeration, drawing chuckles from the somber faces. A waiter sought them out and delivered gla.s.ses cff champagne.

"Ummm, I'll bet this isn't what's in the bowl over there," Marsha said, sipping, lips puckered in approval. The waiter hesitated, then agreed, "The Chairman said to bring out some of the private stock," and then was gone, fearing he had revealed too much..Marsha seemed to polarize the medium, Gordon noted, drawing friends out of corners of the large room to form a cloud around them. Carroway appeared, shaking hands, chuckling. Gordon basked in her compact energy. He had never been able to relax so with Penny, he remembered, and maybe that should have told him something from the start. In 1968, when they were in the thick of their last elaborate sparring, he and Penny had come to Was.h.i.+ngton in winter again. It was a veiled dty. Fog rose from the Potomac's s.h.i.+fting currents. He had avoided dinner parties with physicists that trip, he recalled, mostly because Penny found them boring and he could not predict when she would get into one of her political arguments or, worse, descend into a swollen silence. They had areas they had silently agreed not to talk about, areas which expanded in time. Each had axes to grind--you're an injustice collector, Penny had accused, oncebut, perversely, the good periods between the bad had become radiant with a released energy. He had oscillated in mood through 1967 and '68, not buying Penny's Freud-steeped recipes for repair, but discovering no alternative. Isn't it a little obvious to be so hostile to a.n.a.lysis? she said once, and he had realized it was so; he felt the clanky, machinelike a 7 Gregory Ben fordlanguage was a betrayal, a trap. Psychology had modeled itself after the hard sdences, with physics as the s.h.i.+ning example. But they had taken the old NewtonJan clockwork as their example. To modern physics there was no ticktock world independent of the observer, no untouched mechanism, no way of describing a system without be'rag involved in it. His intuition told him that no such exterior a.n.a.lysis could capture what rubbed and chafed between them. And so, in the descending days of 1968 his personal nucleus had fissioned, and a year later he met Marsha Gould from the Bronx, Marsha, short and dusky, and some inevitable paradigm had come home. Remembering the events now, seeing them sealed in amber, he smiled 'as Marsha brimmed beside him.The western windows of the long room now let in a light like beaten bra.s.s. Luminaries from the funding agendes were arriving, customarily late. Gordon nodded, shook hands, made appropriate small talk.

Into Marsha's crescent of conversation came Ramsey, smoking a thin cigar. Gordon greeted him with a conspiratorial wink. Then a face said, "I wanted to meet you, so I'm afraid I just plain gatecrashed."

Gordon smiled without interest, bound up in his own recollections, and then noticed the young man's self-lettered name badge: Gregory Markham. He froze, hand hanging in midair. The surrounding chatter faded and he could distinctly feel his heart thumping.

He said stupidly, "I, ah, see.""I did my thesis in plasma physics, but I've been readin Tanninger's papers, and yours of course, and, Jell, I think that's where the real physics is going to be done. I mean there's a whole set of cosmo-logical consequences, don't you think? It seems to me "and' Markham, who Gordon saw was really only a decade or so younger than he, was off, sketching ideas he had about Tanninger's work.

Markham had some interesting notions about the nonlinear solutions, ideas Gordon had not heard be- 4 7 ?.fore. Despite his shock, he found himself following the technical.- parts with interest. He could tell Markham had the right feel for the work. Tanninger's use of the new calculus of exterior differential forms had made his ideas difficult for the older generation of physicists to approach, but to Markham it presented no problem; he was not hobbled by the more accepted, gnarled notation. The essential images conjured up in the mind's eye, of paradoxical curves descending with elliptic logic to the plane of physical reality, Markham had mastered. Gordon found himself becoming excited; he yearned for a place to sit down and scribble out some arguments of his own, to 'let the impacted symbols of mathematics speak for him. But then an aide approached, wearing white gloves, a?d intruded, nodding respectfully but firmly and saying, "Dr. Bernstein, Mrs. Bernstein, we require your presence now." Markham shrugged and grinned lopsidedly and in what seemed an instant was gone among the crowd. Gordon collected himself and took Marsha's arm. The aide cleared a path for them. Gordon had an impulse to call out to Markham, find him, ask him to dinner that evening, not let the man slip away. But something held him back. He wondered if this event itself, this chance meeting, could have been the thing that framed the aradoxes--but no, that made no sense, the break ad come in 1963, of come, yes. This Markham wasnot the man who Would calculate and argue in that distant Cambridge. The Markham he had just seen would not die in a plane accident. The future would be different.A puzzled expression flickered across his face and he moved woodenly.They met the Secretary for Health, Education & Welfare, a man with a tapered nose and a tight, pouting mouth, the Varo forming a fleshy exclamation point. The aide ushered them all into a small private elevator, where they stood uncomfortably close to each other--inside our personal boundary s.p.a.ces, Gor- , ? 8 don observed abstractedly--and the Secretary forHEW emitted boisterous one-liners, all shaped with aspeech writer's gloss. Gordon recalled that this par-ticular Cabinet appointment had been a highly polit-ical one. The elevator slid open to reveal a pinched*.

pa.s.sageway packed with unmoving people. Severalmen gave them an obvious once-over and then theireyes went neutral again, heads routinely swivelingback to a.s.signed directions. Security, Gordon sup-posed. The Secretary led them through a narrowchannel and into a larger room. A short woman camebustling over, dressed as though about to go to theopera. She looked like the sort who habitually puther hands up to her string of pearls and took a deepbreath before speaking. As Gordon was framing thisthought she did predsely that, saying, "The audito-rium is filled already, we never thought there wouldbe so many, so early. I don't think there is any pointMr. Secretary in staying back here just through thatway everybody's out there already almost."The Secretary moved forward. Marsha put a handon Gordon's shoulder and reached up. "Your tie's tootight. You look like you're trying to strangle your-self." She loosened the knot with deft fingers,smoothed it out. Her teeth bit into her lower lip inher concentration, pressing until the red flesh wasbPale beneath the slick finish of lpstick. He remem-ered the way the beach turned white beneath hisfeet as he ran on it."Come. Come," the pearled lady urged them.

They walked across a stark, marbled wedge of s.p.a.ce and abruptly onto a stage. Spotlighted figures milled about. Chairs sc.r.a.ped. Another aide in the absurd white gloves took Marsha's arm. He led the two of them into the glare. There were three rows of chairs, most already occupied. Marsha was at the far end of the front row and Gordon next to her. The aide saw that Marsha negotiated a safe landing. Gordon plunked himself down. The aide evaporated. Marsha was wearing a' dress of fas.h.i.+onable shortness. Her ef- a ? oforts to pull the hem down over the curve of her knees caught"his attention. He was filled with an agreeable sense of owners.h.i.+p, that the luxuriant curve of thigh so concealed in public was his, could be his for the cost of a wordless gesture tonight.He squinted to see past the battery of lights. A curving crowd of faces swam in the hfilf-s.p.a.ce beyond the stage. They rustled with antic.i.p.ation--not for him, he knewmand o the left a TV camera peered in cyclopean stupor at the vacant. dais. A sound engineer tested the mikes.Gordon searched the faces he could see. Was Markham out there? He trolled for the fight combination of features. It had struck him how alike most people were, despite their vaunted individuality, and yet how quickly the eye could cut through the similarities to pick out the small details that separated known from stranger. Someone caught hs eye. He peered through the glare. No, it was Shriffer. Gordon wondered with amus.e.m.e.nt what Saul would think if he knew Markham was probably only meters away, an unknowing link to the lost world of the messages.

Gordon would never reveal those distant names now.

It would get into the press and confuse everything, prove nothing.It was not only keeping the ident.i.ties secret that made him slow to publish his full data. Most of what he had thought was noise in his earlier experiments was actually indecipherable signals. Those messages fled backward in time from some unfathomable future.

They were scarcely absorbed at all by the resent rather low-density distribution of matter in the universe. But as they ran backward, what was to men an expfinding universe appeared to the tachyons as a contracting one. Galaxies drew together, packing into an ever-shrinking volume. This thicker matter absorbed tachyons better. As they flowed back into what was, to them, an imploding universe, increasing numbers of the tachyons were absorbed. Finally, at the last instant before it compressed to a point, the 4 8 o universe absorbed a tachyons from each point in its own future. Gordon s measurement of the tachyon flux, integrated back in time, showed that the energy absorbed from the tachyons was enough to heat the compressed ma.s.s. This'energy fueled the universal expansion. So to the eyes of men, the universe exploded from a single point because of what would happen, not what had. Origin and destiny intertwined.

The snake ate its tail.Gordon wanted to be absolutely sure before he reported on the flux and his conclusions. He was sure it would not be well received.The world did not want paradox. The reminder that time's vast movements were loops we could not perceive the mind veered from that. At least part of the scientific opposition to the messages was based on precisely that flat fact, he was sure. Animals had evolved in such a way that the ways of nature seemed simple to them; that Was a definite survival trait. The laws had shaped man, .not the other way around. The cortex did not like a universe that fundamentally ran both forward and back.So he would not smudge the issue with a few tattered names, not for Shriffer's spotlight. Perhaps he would tell Markham, just as he would inevitably ublish the faint calls he had measured from Epsilon ridani, eleven light years away. They were voicesfrom an undated future, reporting s.h.i.+pboard maintenance details. No paradoxes there. Unless, of course, the information blunted the leap into rocketry now underway, aborted the upcoming s.p.a.ce station by some contrary twist. That was always possible, he supposed. Then the universe would split again. The river would fork. But perhaps, when this was all understood and Tanninger's squiggles cut deeper into the riddle, they would know whether paradoxes should be avoided at all. Paradoxes did no true damage, after all. It was like having a dusky twin beyond the looking gla.s.s, identical but for his lefthanded-ness.

And the nature of the tachyons made accidental a 8 !paradox unlikely, anyway. A stars.h.i.+p reporting back to its Earth w6uld use tight beams, No fringing fields would by chance catch the present Earth on its helical whirlthrough s.p.a.ce, intersect its gavotte aroUnd the galaxy.Ramsey moved across his field of vision and jerked him back into this illuminated moment.

Ramsey stubbed out his smoke, the slim cigar twisting like a dying insect. The man was nervous. Suddenly, a blare of recorded music. Hail to the Chief.

Everyone on the stage stood, belying the fact that the man who entered from the right, smiling and waving a casual hand, was a public servant. President Scranton shook the Secretary's hand with media-sharpened warmth and took in the rest of the stage with a generalized smile. Despite himself, Gordon felt a certain zest. The President moved with a comfortable certainty, acknowledging the cheers and finally sitting beside the Secretary. Scranton had discredited Robert Kennedy, tripping the scowling younger brother in a tangle of Democratic wiretapping, and then the use of the intelligence community and the FBI against the Republicans. Gordon had found the charges difficult to believe at the time, particularly since Goldwater had uncovered the first hints. But in retrospect it was good to be rid of the Kennedy dynasty idea, and the Imperial Presidency along with it.The Secretary was at the dais now, making the mechanical introductions and slipping in the obligatory puffing-up of the administration. Gordon leaned over to Marsha and whispered, "Christ, I didn't make up a speech."She said merrily, "Tell them about the future, Gordelah."He growled, 'nat future's only a dream now."She replied laconically, "It's a poor sort of memory that works only backward."Gordon grinned back at her. She had fetched that up from her reading to the kids, a line from the a 8 2 looking-gla.s.s, time-reversed scene, the White Queen.

Gordon shook his head and sat back.The Secretary had finished his prepared speech and now introduced the President to a solid round of applause. Scranton read the citation for Ramsey and Huss'mger. The two men came forward, awkwardly managing to get in each other's way. The President handed over the two plaques amid applause. Ramsey glanced at his and then exchanged it with Hussinger's, to laughter from the audience. Polite hand clapping as they sat down. The Secretary came forward, shuffling papers, and handed some to the President. The next award was for some achievement in genetics which Grdon had never heard about.

The recipient was a chunky Germanic woman who spread some pages before her on the dais and turned to the audience, plainly prepared for an extended history of her work. Scranton gave the Secretary a sidelong look and then moved back and sat down.

He had been' through such things before.Gordon tried to concentrate on what she said, but lost interest when she launched into a salute to other workers in the field who regrettably could not be honored here today in such august surroundings.He toyed with the question of what to say. He would never see the President again, never again even have the ear of so influential a person as the Secretary. Perhaps if he tried to convey something of what this all meant... His eyes strayed over the audience.He had a sudden sense that time was here, not a relation between events, but a thing. What a specifically human comfort it was to see time as immutable, a weight you could not escape. Believing that, a man could give up swimming against this riverrun of seconds and simply drift, cease battering himself on time's flat face like an insect flapping against a blossom of light. If only--He looked at Ramsey, reading his plaque, oblivious to the geneticist's ramble, and remembered the a o 3 foaming waves at La Jolla, cupping forward out of Asia to break on the bare new land. Gordon shook his head, not knowing why, and reached for Marsha's hand. A warming press.He thought of the names ahead, in that deflected future, who had tried to send a signal into the receding murk of history, and write R fresh again. It took courage to send firefly hopes through the dark, phosph.o.r.escent dartings across an infinite swallowing velvet. They would need courage; the calainity they spoke of could engulf the world.ScaRered, polite applause. The President gave the hefty woman her plaque--the check would come later, Gordon knew--and she sat. Then Scranton peered into his bifocals and began to read, in the squarish vowels of Pennsylvania, the citation to Gordon Bernstein."--for investigations in ndclear magnetic resonance which produced a startling new effect--"Gordon reflected that Einstein won the n.o.bel prize for the photoelectric effect, which was considered reasonably safe by 1921, and not for the still controversial theory of relativity. Good company to be in."--which, in a series of definitive experiments in 1963 and 1964 he showed could only be explained by the existence of a new kind of particle. This strange particle, the tac--tacm"The President stumbled over the p.r.o.nunciation.

Agreeing laughter rippled through the audience.

Something p.r.i.c.ked in Gordon's memory and he searched the dark bowl of faces. That laugh. Someone he knew?"--tachyon, is capable of moving faster than the speed of light. This fact implies"The tight bun of hair, the lifted, almost jaunty chin. His mother was in the third row. She was wearing a dark coat and had come to see this day, see her son on the bright stage of history."--that the particles can themselves travel back- 4 s ward in time. The implications of this are of fundamental importance in many areas of modem sdence, from cosmology to---"Gordon half rose, hands clenched. The proud energy in the way she beamed, head turned to the flow of words---"--the structure of the subnuclear particles. This is truly an immense "But in the tangled rush of the months following November of 1963 she had died in Bellevue, before he ever saw her again."---scale, echoing the increasing connectionm"

The woman in the third row was probably an aging secretary, called fourth to see the President.

Still, something in her alert gaze The room wavered, light blurred into pools."mbetween the microscopic and the macroscopic, a theme "Moisture on his cheeks. Gordon peered through his fuzzed focus at the lanky outline of the President, seeing him as a darker blotch beneath the burning spotlights. Beyond him, no less real, were the names from Cambridge, each a figure, each knowing the others, but never wholly. The shadowy figures moved now beyond reach, bound for their own destinations just as he and Ramsey and Marsha and Lakin and Penny were. But they were all simply figures.

A piercing light shone through them. They seemed frozen. It was the landscape itself which changed, Gordon saw at last, refracted by laws of its own. Tnne and s.p.a.ce were themselves players, vast lands engulfing the figures, a weave of future and past. There was no riverrun of years. The abiding loops of causality ran both forward and back. The timescape rippled. with waves, roiled and flexed, a great beast in the dark sea.The President had finished. Gordon stood. He walked to the dais on wooden feet."The Enrico Fermi Prize form"

a a $He could not read the citation on it. The faceshung befog6 him. Eyes. The glaring light--He began to speak.He saw the crowd and thought of the waves moving through them, breaking into white, swallowing foam. The small figures dimly sensed the eddies of the waves as paradox, as riddle, and heard the tick of time without knowing what they sensed, and clung to their linear illusions of past and future, of progression, of their opening births and yawnin deaths to come. Words caught in his throat. He went on. And he thought of Markham and his mother and all these .uncountable people, never loosening their grip on their hopes, and their strange human sense, their last illusion, that no matter how the days moved through them, there always remained the pulse of things coming, the sense that even now there was yet still time.

SCIENCE MEETS LITERATURE.

SUSAN STONE-BLACKBURN.

Timescape is a genuine marriage of science and literature.

It established physidst Gregory Benford as a writer of considerable stature, winning both the John W. Campell Memorial Award and the Science Fiction Writers of America's Nebula Award for 1980's best science fiction novel. Bridging the two cultures of sd-entists and humanists, itprovides an intriguing vision of reality suggested by contemporary physics and also an absorbing portrayal of people facing challenges both personal and scientific. Benford suggests parallels between the unfamiliar concepts of modem physics that are central to its plot and the familiar human perceptions and problems of its characters.

Timescape offers both scientific and humanistic perspectives on the nature of reality.With its multiple plot lines and diverse centers of interest, Timescape has something for many sorts of readers, though this very diversity means that many will find some aspects of the book more appealing than others. Interwoven in this complex novel are the a 8 7 mystery solving of two scientific plots, the love lives and personal' concerns of various characters, the politics of contemporary science, the threat of annihilation from environmental disaster, the vivid recreation of American life in the early sixties and equally vivid creation of a devastated near-future England, musings on the nature of time and s.p.a.ce replete with time paradoxes and alternate realities, a good deal of modern physics, and a touch of mysti-dsm.Timescape is "hard" sdence fiction in the sense that the sdence in it is physics, as opposed to "soft" science fiction that is grounded in social science. Its plot hinges on tachyons and alternate universes, and it is heavily laced with speculations about causality, time paradoxes, and the nature of the physical universe.

Many readers will not know where the sdence stops and the fiction starts--since the physics is theoretical, the distinction is not always dear. Tachyons are art of current theoretical physics, but their existence as not been experimentally confirmed. There are as-palects of theoretical physics that support Timescape's ternate-universe concept, but Benford admits to a"metaphysical leap" in the novel's resolution when he splits the narrative to depict two distinct realities.The science in this sdence fiction is very evident, because its characters are scientists and its milieu is their subculture. Convincing portraits of scientists are surprisingly scarce in science fiction. Often, their personalities are only sketched, because more narrative emphasis is placed on the sdentific problem that is central to the plot. Rarely, if ever, have the intricate politics of the working lives of scientists and their implications been portrayed so effectively as in Timescape. At the same time, the private lives of Timescape's scientists are portrayed in considerable detail, and the connections between working and private lives are significant for both psychological realism and theme.In the two plots of 1962-63 and 1998 (equidistant'

a 5 8 Afterwordfrom Timescape's publication in 1980), we see scientists at work in "fat" and "lean" times, engaged in basic, curiosity-driven research. In the 1998 plot, this fundamental research has an unexpected application to a problem that threatens humankind and requires immediate solution. In the sixties plot, Gordon Bernstein's determination to pursue the implications of oddities in his data instead of brus.h.i.+ng them off as irrelevant to his particular pursuit (the prudent thing to do, given the pressures he faces) is rewarded by a stunning discovery and great prestige. In both plots, Benford defends basic research against excessive dPragrnatism and direction from the top of an aca-emic or governmental hierarchy.In both plots, too, we see essential connections among different types of scientific work. The work of experimentalist Renfrew and theorist Markham provide complementary approaches to the same problem; both laboratory experiments and thought experiments work toward its solution. Physicist Bernstein needs information from biochemist Ramsa a conceptual angle from astronomer Schriffer; and confirmation from a colleague doing related work at another university. Even one individual's work calls for a variety of approaches: Bernstein uses intuition and library research as well as a.n.a.lytical skills and intricate lab equipment to tackle the mystery of the oddities in his data. Timescape's portrayal of scientists and scientific work effectively counters any reader's inclination to stereotype sdentists or oversimplify the nature of scientific work.The entertainment value of a scientific plot typically lies in the challenge of puzzle solving and in suspense (how can the "clues" of available knowledge be pieced together to provide a solution? Can it be done in time to avert disaster?). Timescape gives us that and more, making a valuable contribution to the scientific literacy of its readers. The texture of the novel gives us considerable insight into the subculture of sdence its jokes, frustrations, rivalries, and 4 aworking conditions. It emphasizes the humanity ofscientists ad the subjective dimensions of science. Ina piece written on Timescape in 1987 for Best of Nebu-hs, Benford calls it the most private of his novels,"spun out of fifteen years of thought and experi-ence/' including his years as a graduate student in LaJolla and his sabbatical in Cambridge. He and hisidentical twin appear briefly in the La Jolla part ofthe novel, and he acknowledges a considerablegree of personal identification with Greg Markham.Benford's portrayal of Markham on the airplanesolving time paradoxes with Cathy Wickham's equa:tions is a surprisingly absorbing depiction of the the-oretical physicist at work. Breaking the stereotype ofmechanicalmanipulation of numbers and formulas,Markham's mathematics approaches an art form:'nere was more than remorseless crank-turning tobe done here Beyond the logical standards, there were aesthetic questions .... There was no choice tween beauty and truth, really. You had to wind up with both" (Chapter 31).

Obviously, most writers lack the experience and perspective necessary to create a convincing scientific novel.

It is equally true that most scientists lack the experience and perspective to write a novel with any literary value. But Timescape is interesting not just for its science but also for its characters and form and images.

Marjorie's experience of her deteriorating society makes the effects of the environmental crisis real for us. Gordon and Penny's problematic relations.h.i.+p makes us feel the distinct realities of the New York Jew and California Gentile. The novel's chapters alternate between story lines, keeping the reader suspended between past and future and reinforcing our awareness of apparently separate realities that are subtly related. The literary elements, satisfying in the'tr own right, also work in a variety of ways to support the sdentific concepts that the reader is invited to absorb.

Benford's conception of time as a landscape rathera 9 o Afterwordthan a flowing river and its a.s.sociated a.s.sault on our conviction that cause precedes effect are no novelty in science fiction, where time travel and time paradoxes are common--but Benford is not just using oddities of time as a vehicle for his story. In.

Timescape, rather, theoretical physics poses a chal-lenge to our "quaintly human view" of time. Instead of just engineering a temporary suspension of disbelief, Benford is persuading the reader to enter the new paradigm of current theoretical physics. He even goes beyond accepted theory in his attempt to resolve the paradox that occurs when the future alters the past in a way that would have prevented the original future impulse to contact the past. His resolution employs an alternate universe, a worldline in which President John E Kennedy survives the 1963 Dallas shooting. This distinct reality veers off from the one shared by readers and 1998 characters, head.ing toward a different future a worldline in which there is a 1974 that does not belong to either the reader or the 1998 characters. This world will avoid the environmental disaster that kills Greg Markham in the worldline that leads from the shared 1962 to the 1998 of the penultimate chapter.Without some appeal to human experience, most readers would brush off such radical challenges to our traditional beliefs as multiple universes and a timescape in which "before" and "after" are meaningless.

New scientific theory is grasped by only a small percentage of people, and even these few are only changed on an intellectual level. Benford eases the reader's way into a new paradigm by suggesting parallels between the psychological truths about multiple and indeterminate realities that we accept fairly readily and the new physics that seems so radically unfamiliar. Timescape' effectively relates ideas about remote subatomic-scale and cosmic-scale universes to the familiar scale of human experience in which our intuitions develop. The human-interest plots explore relative realities, changing realities, and s.h.i.+fting real- a o !

ities in a way that prepares the reader to accept thenew conceptions of theoretical physics.One image that works to this end is the shelvesthat John Renfrew builds for Marjorie to hold pre-serves. Because the house is old and sagging, th.e.s.h.elves look crooked when John builds them straightwith respect to the earth's center of gravity. Reas-sured by the objectivity of his carpenter's level, Johnis clear about the reality of the shelves and the wall:"The shelves are straight. It's the walls. that aretilted" (Chapter 10). But no matter how Marjorie re-arranges the jars, the shelves don't look right; seenwithin the human reference frame of the kitchen,even John concedes a little later, 'It was the shelveswhich stood aslant now; the walls were right." Ourperception of truth depends on the frame of referenceWe adopt. Benford does not suggest that truth is alto-gether relative; the larger frame of reference is thetruer one. Toward the end of the novel, when John isworking late, MarjOrie is drinking, and Ian Peterson'sseduction attempt is under way, the shelves are seenonce again. Now, when everything is wrong withboth the physical environment and the human worldof emotions and relations.h.i.+ps, Marjorie notices howthe pine shelving stands out in the shadows cast bycandles. "Things in the room waved and rippled, ex-cept for the straight shelves The shelves seemed more.

substantial now than the walls" (Chapter 37). The more substantial truth is the one seen in terms of the larger frame of reference, here both the scientific one by which the shelves were built and the human one of the marital relations.h.i.+p that extends beyond the particular circ.u.mstances that account for Marjorie's vulnerability to Ian.

The difficulty of grasping truths that transcend immediate reality is central to Timescape. Nonscientist Peterson reflects on the weird landscape of the theo retical scientist's world: "For decades now the picture of the world painted by the sdentists had become strange, distant, unbelievable. Far easier, then, to 4 9 2 Afterwordignore it than try to understand" (Chapter 11).

Timescape coaxes readers to adopt an att.i.tude that * makes understanding possible.The concept of "different realities" in our world is easy to accept in the sense that Markham experiences it in contrasting California with England in 1998 (Chapter 15). The concept is still not difficult when applied to an individual. Gordon works at trying to identify "the real Penny" in view of different facets of her personality that seem irreconcilable to him: her right-wing politics, her absorption in the arts, her casual s.e.xual sophistication (Chapter 19). Most readers of science fiction won't be surprised by the fact that Timescape's two beautifully detailed worlds seem equally/eal, though its 1962 world is "fact" (true to our history) and its 1998 world is "fiction" (imaginative projection). It should be only a step, then, to the reader's acceptance of a third reality, the 1974 of the final chapter. It's a dizzying step, since this is not our historicall974, but if we don't blink at the idea of two Anglo-Saxon cultures seen as different worlds, if apparently irreconcilable characteristics in the same person seem quite ordinary, and if even the apparently different orders of reality of history and fiction appear equivalent, why should we balk at a scientific conception of distinct but equivalent realities?The concept of subuniverses or microuniverses is couched in scientific terms and mirrored in the narration of characters' personal stories, most notably Gordon Bernstein's. There is a gap in his story between 1963 and the concluding chapter in 1974. The early art of the chapter contains a couple of references to enn)5 including the information that they married in1964. We know that Gordon is expecting "the wife"

to join him, but when she appears, she turns out to be someone else entirely: Marsha, of whom we know nothing. The reader wonders, is this an indication of an alternate reality--like the one in which JFK survives?

But no; Gordon and Penny have simply divorced, and he has married Marsha--a kind of a o 3alternate reality in human terms. Penny's attractions were always clear, and the reader may have hoped that she and Gordon would live happily ever after, but in fact Gordon was frequently on edge around her. Now he is revitalized by Marsha's exuberance; he relishes her humor, basks in her loyalty. We are bound to ask why Benford springs this new pairing and the dissolution of the old on us so suddenly.

Friction between Gordon and Penny continued, we are told, so they were divorced. Of Marsha, Benford says onl "a year later he met Marsha Gould from the Bronx. Marsha, short and dusky, and some inevitable paradigm had come home." This inevitable paradigm, Gordon's own subuniverse, the New York Jewish world to which he and Marsha both belong, to which Penny is alien. There is nothing wrong or Unreal about Penny; she just is not part of Gordon's world.The subjectivity of human truths, and the consequent degree of choice in determining one's reality, is clear in the characters' lives. In the end, Gordon gives up on life with Penny and chooses life with Marsha. In the end, John Renfrew stops struggling with cosmic time and the secrets of the universe and goes home to his family. Not in despair: his equij-ment has picked up a tachyonic message from the year 2349, which gives him some hope for a future.

Dedicated scientist though he is, under great stress he chooses his subuniverse, his domestic reality, over the reality of the awesome and mysterious vastness of the universe.Most interesting of all is the "ending" of Greg Markham's story. He has no time for a final selection of a personal subuniverse as he is killed suddenly in a plane crash caused by the 1998 environmental disaster.

However, he reappears as a younger self in the alternate 1974 of the final chapter, a self that is not destined to die in the plane crash. Markham's double fate reinforces the concept of multiple realities--scientific rather than subjective ones. His death in a 9 a Afterwordcurs recisely at the moment when he makes .1998 oc! --',,PIo! at> beyond current phys. ics the.,orme merapnyo. ler ,A : oonderin the marne-to multiple universes. rte r- , v. ....e uations that describe tacnyons in s.p.a.cerunematical q m mechanical terms.as a probability wave m quamuThe paradox is expressed as a standing wave pattern;the question is how to resolve it. What collapses theWave function into some particular physical state? Inmechanics the probability of one or anotherquantum , .

*, ..a,+ A termines the ac-state is known, rut precisely e.

e of a article is not. "The old quantt. m the-tu.al. sta!.ea,P.,,nber and Bohr on, had let in. som,eorlsts, from x*o,-. o.., lo,h m rememverect.metaphysics at tins point, *a the irre- The wave function collapsed and that was ducible fact But with tachyons that dab of sics had to go" {Chapter 31). His last metap. h.y --.

of metavhvsics with m. ulti- t t es [ltta r aception. If the universe was a wholly linked system with no mythical cla.s.sical observer to collapse the wave function, then the wave function did not have to collapse at all Markham thought of a universe with one wave function, scattering into the new states of being as a paradox formed inside it like the kernel of an idea."

Markham himself splits into two states of being along wih his world because of the paradox forced by the message sent from 1998 to 1962- 63. He dies in one reality but not in the other. The message creates a world that will not suffer the ecological disaster om ts the sending of the message. The that pr .p - -.

* is the foundation of Timescape tachyon meory um makes sending the message back through time credible-but the resulting paradox still has to be dealt with, both in terms of the scientifically grounded view of s.p.a.cetime presented in Timescape *.

erms of its story..*and,m t , ,ncentual breakthrough ?

the cl.i 'the.to. .'--, --tist's work, and the tcey to max ot the t.

neore, uc m *,-.,., *he cla.s.sical observer, it here is acKnowtectgrnem um,a o 5that purely objective scientist who in no way interacts with What is being observed, is a mythical creature.

The limitations on the possibility of scientific objectivity that are recognized in Timescape are naturally reinforced by the inevitable subjectivities of characters in human situations. Gordon sees Penny in terms of his New York Jewish imprinting and misreads her accordingly, denying her own reality.

Peterson's Don Juan-ism clashes with Wickham's les-bianism, and each views the other with h6stility; conflict between Peterson's upper-cla.s.s and Renfrew's working-cla.s.s att.i.tudes also impinges on their work together. Personality differences affect BernStein's work with his student Cooper and cause him to reflect on opportunities that are missed in science .when human clashes make effective collaboration impossible.

That sdence is a human activity is very evident in Timescape. "Theories are based on pictures of the world--human pictures," Markham acknowledges (Chapter 24). The fact that subjectivity is inevitable in any frame of reference chosen by the scientist is basic to the scientific argument about the nature of s.p.a.cetime.- Though scientists have idealized objectivity, they now find it theoretically impossible to set themselves apart from the system whose truths they hope to discover.

Heisenberg tied the observer into the quantum mechanical system. G6del showed that there are truths in any system that cannot be proved from *

within it, so attempts to establish such truths perpet-ually enlarge the system that contains the truth seeker. Markham broods on the hopelessness of even imagining an independent observer in his cosmic-scale problem in which tachyons tie the whole fabric of s.p.a.cetime into a single system. The world of science and the world of humanity now share an inevitable subjectivity. This recognition is the key to Markham's conceptual breakthrough, and it translates into a picture of multiple universes that invites us to reorient ourselves in a paradigm quite different 4 9 es Afterwordfrom the traditional one that a.s.sumes a unique reality discoverable by objective science.Habitual readers of science fiction will feel right at home with some features of Timescape: the ecological crisis, the contact between past and future and resultant time paradox, the scientists working to solve a scientific puzzle and save the earth, and even a certain amount of scientific theorizing. What makes Timescape distinctive is its combination of features that are less frequently found in science fiction: the detailed portrayal of contemporary science, the attention to character development, and the relations.h.i.+p between literary and scientific approaches to ideas about subjectivity, interconnectedness, and multiple realities. In Timescape the traditionally dear distinction between "hard" sdence fiction and mainstream literature is not so clear.In an article in the February 15, 1982, issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine called "Why Is There So Little Science in Literature?" Benford, who dislikes the term "postmodern," chooses "irrealism"

to describe the strain of mainstream literature in which writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Stanislaw Lem "deliberately accent some aspect of the agreed-upon world, achieving a kind of super-realism that seems both recognizable and bizarre." In Borges's writing he finds the recognition that "the fundamental notions underlying our consensual reality are themselves strange, bewildering, even unhuman, when studied in the full glare of literary imagination."

He sees irrealism as the literary equivalent of the theoretical physicist's gedanken experiment, an exploration of "what would or should or could be" by examining the world "in the warped mirror of possibilities,"

and remarks on the relations.h.i.+p between this sort of literature and science fiction.By the end of Timescape, sdence and "irrealism"

have blended in such a way that the difference between objective, scientific reality and subjective "irre-ality"

is virtually obliterated. The theory that a time a o ?

paradox of sufficient magnitnde triggers a split into alternate universes has been developed in a methodical a.n.a.lytical, scientific way. But we are also given the human experience of that s.h.i.+ft in terms of familiar, subjective, human illusions. After John Renfrew has spent wo days alone in his lab, increasingly ill from the biochemical changes in his environment and driPting "in a world where t was tSme and tea was brine and x for s.p.a.ce," he is ffrotinff for an exnlana-tion of his odd fierception: 'fdb' the weigher 'io-'s-s explained why the room rippled and stretched as he * watched. Christ, he was tired" (Chapter 45). At this point, Renfrew--who has been dogged and dediCated to the task--unimaginative and undistin-.guished by anything but his determination, dec/des that the whole exercise is "b.l.o.o.d.y boring" and begins transmitting personal comments in ordinary sentences, quite unlike his earlier transmissions. He is, one might saj6 "a changed man." There are perfectly acceptable psychological reasons for his actions, and the rippling of the room could be an illusion. But we have been alerted to the possibility of an objective manifestation of the time paradox, a sign of the splitting of the universe into two. Here the objective reality is indistinguishable from the psychological one.The novel's conclusion leaves us still unable to distinguish illusion from reality, once we have accepted as plausible the idea that time paradoxes will repeatedly change reality without warning. The jump from Penny to Marsha is explained without resorting to alternate universes, but the dizzying possibility is kept before us. In the crowd that is witnessing the ceremony in which Gordon's work on tachyons is rewarded, 'qtis mother was in the third row. She was wearing a dark coat and had come to see this day, see her son on the bright stage of history" (Chapter 46).

The last mention of his mother was two chapters and eleven years earlier They were a continent apart and estranged by the conflict over Penny, she was ill, and the pressure of his scientific work kept him from 4 9 8 Afterwordgoing to see her. Now he is excited by her presence; has the estrangement lasted all these years, then? But no: "in the tangled rush of the months following November of 1963 she had died in Bellevue, before heever saw her again The woman in the third row was probably an aging secretary.... Still, something in her alert gaze--The room wavered, light blurred into pools." In the few remaining paragraphs of the novel, his mother's presence is neither explained nor explained away. Is she a reality in yet another alter- nate universe? Is she an illusion born of his wishful thinking?Counterpointed with Gordon's thoughts about his mother is the President's speech about the signifi- cance of Gordon's work, on "an immense ... scale, echoing the increasing connection ... between the rnicroS opic and the macroscopic." Timescape shows a similar connection between the human scale of things and the cosmic with a combination of techniques from mainstream "irrealism" and from hard science fiction. Timescape's merging of science and literature is consistent with the view Benford expressed in "Why Is There So Little Science in Literature?"

that "science is ... like literature, a continuing dialog among diverse and conflicting voices, no one ever wholly right or wholly wrong, but a steady conversa- tion forever provisional and personal and living."

Timescape's central image of waves encompa.s.ses the whole range of possible ways of seeing, induding the common sense of objective reality, the physical scientist's and the postmodernist's changing maps of reality, and the psychologist's subjective illusion.

There is the ocean wave that Gordon rides success- fully for the first time after JFK's survival of the as- sa.s.sination attempt signals the division of the universe. There are the waves that are a kind of pro~ visional mapping of subatomic reality in quantum mechanics. There is the wavering, rippling effect of flickering consdousness that means uncertain vision and so suggests human illusion. There are the waves a 9 9 that are characteristic of the new view of time as a "timesEape [that] rippled with waves" (Chapter 46).

In its depth and range, the image is characteristic of Timescape, in which Benford shows that though they may sometimes seem to be at odds, the literary quest for .inner truth and the scientific quest for the truths of the physical universe are not ultimately separable.

[Note: Parts of this discussion were published in "Science and Humanism in Gregory Benford's Timescape," Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 15 (1988), 295-310]

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