Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten

Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten - Chapter 28

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Lying on her couch, high above the floor of the cathedral, Judy was deep within the program Sand had made for her. Her simulated room had gone through many changes from Sand's first attempt. It was now as close as she could recollect to the room where she had grown up, brightly lit and clean. Sand had even reconstructed her favorite bedspread. In the mirror on that old familiar dresser, the reflection of her curly blond hair lined up neatly around the perfect miniature of the cathedral.

Even before the couch had come to Backdoor, Judy had been the master of many technologies. But never in her life had she used such a tool. Leaning over the dresser, she reached down through the invisible ceiling to the little spheres stacked on the cathedral floor. Her hand changed state into the metal claw, and plunged down through the hazed dome. Feedback locked in, uncontrollably slowing and smoothing her movements to match the mass of the giant device. With delicate ease, the powerful appendage moved the stacks of glowing spheres, which at this scale seemed like the tiny eggs of some amphibian.

They had to be completely empty, the vacuum close to perfect. The ion beams from each sphere's center had to reach the surface without appreciable distortion. Until the circuits so inscribed could operate the beams themselves, the spheres could not evolve in an unbroken cycle, and the rate of evolution would be slow.

To achieve a Culminate, to have it search for and find the one perfect configuration, the speed of search would have to be fantastic. According to Don Andrews' theory, such speeds were indeed quite possible, but as of yet the quality of vacuum was not good enough. Or maybe gravity distorted them from being truly spherical. Or perhaps the connections between the spheres were not reliable or fast enough. Every time she tried to enter the unbroken cycle and turn them loose to search, the experiment would fail. What else could she do? From inside the globes, the whizzing particles could almost whisper a solution.

Changing programs on her dresser top, she reached in with one hand, which transformed smoothly into a micro-manipulator. Magnified, the microscopic circuits had the texture of rough ceramic. The imperfections were still too great.

As if driven by some divine concept, Don Andrews had demanded this experiment succeed. His theory had to be correct. The Culminate was possible. And they were very close. To Judy it had long become a labor of her love, not for the Culminate, but for the man whose dream she was destined to fulfill.

For she had watched Tarni and Sand grow closer in the past few weeks. Unlike Don Andrews, Judy was happy to see this unexpected couple form, and now her mind moved easily. An obstacle had been removed. If Don Andrews had to give up Tarni, he would surely turn to her.

For they went back as far as Weissenbaum himself. Despite whatever judgment anyone might pass about the wealth acquired from the families of colonists, Judy and Don Andrews had in common all the children who had filed though Backdoor. She herself had been a member of Weissenbaum's first crew, but as he had with Tarni, Don Andrews ordered Judy to remain behind in Backdoor.

She was his engineer, his only faithful follower. So what if he had never said he loved her? They had been too much involved in their joint venture. Each year he had to find young people to convince of Weissenbaum's great journey. And as the colonists were trained, their finances were quietly investigated. Meanwhile Judy would complete the building of another ship. Huge tubular vessels they had been, containing Weissenbaum's device, and everything that one might need after the universe had passed. Judy had engineered it all, like some incredible doll house, from the plan, to the plates and girders laid out on the cathedral floor, to the completed vessels themselves.

Now she was involved in a different kind of venture, but with Don Andrews by her side she could surpass all obstacles. How to connect them all, and make the vacuum hold, and keep the gravity from interfering. That was their quest, their quandary, and the music came to her, through resonance and rhythm, as though from far beyond the mirror on her dresser top, she saw the way to engineer a Culminate.

Invisible as interfaces between bubbles when they join, when the job is perfect there is no seam, no sign of fusion. When all the bubbles join, you have one bubble, one huge and delicate sphere that can exist only where gravity will not destroy it, where vacuum can be maintained with ease. A Culminate can only live in outer space. But there, it can be very big.

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