the speed of time - jay lake

7/17/2019 The Speed of Time - Jay Lake

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“Light goes by at the speed of time,”

Marlys once told me.

That was a joke, of course. Light can

be slowed to a standstill in a photonrap, travel on going nowhere at all

forever in the blueing distance of an

event horizon, or blaze through hardvacuum as fast as information itself

moves through the universe. Time is

relentless, the tide which measures the

perturbations of the cosmos. The 160.2GHz hum of creation counts the measure

of our lives as surely as any heartbeat.

There is no t in e=mc2.



I’d argued with her then, missing her

point back when understanding her migh

have mattered. Now, well, nothing much

at all mattered. Time has caught up withus all.

***

Let me tell you a story about SameeraGlasshouse.

She’d been an ordinary woman living

an ordinary life. Habitat chemistry tech,certifications from several middle-tier

authorities, bouncing from contract to

contract in trans-Belt space. Ten

housand women, men and inters just likher out there during the Last Boom. We

didn’t call it that then, no one knew the

expansion curve the solar economy had



been riding was the last of anything. The

Last Boom didn’t really have a name

when it was underway, except maybe to

economists.Sameera had been pair-bonded to a

Jewish kid from Zion Luna, and kept the

surname long after she’d dropped Roz

from her life. For one thing,

“Glasshouse” scandalized her Lebanese

grandmother, which was a reward in

tself.She was working a double ticket on

he Enceladus Project master depot in

ow orbit around that particular iceball.

That meant pulling shift-on-shift week after week, but Sameera got an expanded

housing allocation and a fatter pay

packet for her trouble. The E.P. got to



schlep one less body to push green

nside their habitat scrubbers.

Everybody won.

Her spare time was spent wiringogether Big Ears to listen for the chatter

hat flooded bandwidth all over the sola

system. Human beings are—were—

noisy. Launch control, wayfinding,

birthday greetings, telemetry, banking

queries, loneliness, porn. It was all out

here, multiplied and ramified beyondcomprehension by the combination of

ightspeed lag, language barriers and

sheer, overwhelming complexity.

Some folks back then claimed therewere emergent structures in the

bandwidth, properties of the sum of all

hat chatter which could not be



accounted for by analysis of the

components. This sort of thinking had

been going around since the dawn of

nformation theory—call it informationfantasy. The same hardwired pareidolia

hat made human beings see the hand of

God in the empirical universe also made

us hear Him in the electronic shrieking

of our tribe.

Sameera never really believed any of

t, but she’d heard some very weirdhings listening in. In space it was

always midnight, and ghosts never

stopped playing in the bandwidth. When

she’d picked up a crying child on a leaksideband squirt out of a nominally empty

vector, she’d just kept hopping

frequencies. When she’d tuned on the



rregular regularity of a coded data feed

hat seemed to originate from deep

within Saturn’s atmosphere, she’d just

kept hopping frequencies.But one day God had called Sameera

by name. Her voice crackled out of the

rising fountain of energy from an

extragalactic gamma ray burst,

whispering the three syllables over and

over and over in a voice which

resonated down inside the soft tissues oSameera’s body, made her joints ache,

ellied the very resolve of the soul that

she had not known she possessed until

hat exact moment.Sameera Glasshouse shut down her

Big Ears, wiped the logic blocks,

dumped the memory, then made her way



down to the master depot’s tiny

sacramentarium.

Most people who worked out in the

Deep Dark were very mystical but nothe least bit religious. The sort of

spiritual uncertainty that required

revelation for comfort didn’t mix well

with the brain-numbing distances and

profound realities of life in hard

vacuum. Nonetheless, by something

between convention and force of habit,any decent sized installation found spac

for a sacramentarium. A few hardy

missionaries worked their trades on the

E.P. just like everyone else, then spentheir off-shifts talking about Allah or

Hubbard or Jesus or the Ninefold Path.

It was as good a way as any to pass



he time.

Terrified that she’d gotten hold of

some true sliver of the Divine, or worse

hat the Divine had gotten hold of somerue sliver of her, Sameera sought to

pray in the manner of her childhood. She

was pretty sure the sacramentarium had

a Meccascope, to point toward the

center of world and mark the times for

he five daily prayers.

She ached to abase herself before theGod of her childhood, safely distant,

argely abstract, living mostly in books

and the minds of the adults around her. A

God who spoke from the radio was far oo close.

Slipping through the sacramentarium’s

hatch amid the storage spaces of



corridor Orange-F-2, Sameera bumped

nto a man she’d never seen before.

He was dark skinned, in that strangely

American way, and wore a long linenhawb with lacing embroidered around

he neck. He also wore the small, round

cap of an al-Hajji. In one hand he

carried a leatherbound book—actual

paper, with gilt edges, worn through lon

handling.

A Quran, she realized. A real one, likeher grandmother’s.

The man said something in a language

she did not understand, then added, “My

pardons” in the broken-toned Mandarinpidgin so commonly spoken in the Deep

Dark.

“My mistake,” Sameera muttered in



he same language.

“You have come to pray. In search of

God?”

“No, no.” She was moved to anuncharacteristic fit of openness. (Her

ime as Mrs. Glasshouse had left her

with an opaque veneer she’d not since

bothered to shed.) “I’ve found God, and

now I’ve come to pray.”

His expression was somewhere on the

bridge between predatory and delighted“You don’t understand,” Sameera told

him. “She spoke to me, out of the Deep

Dark.”

Another crazy, his face said, but thenhe hadn’t felt the buzzing in his bones.

***



t doesn’t matter what happened next.

All that matters was that she told the

mam. Revelation is like that. Put a drop

of ink in a bowl of water, in a momentall the water takes on that color. The ink

s gone, but the water is irreversibly

changed.

That was the beginning of the end.

Or, for a little while, the end of the

beginning.

Marlys found it funny, at any rate.Another thing she used to tell me was

hat we are all time travelers, moving

forward at a speed of one second per

second. The secret to time travel washat everyone already does it. The

equations balance themselves.

Time has to be more than an



experiential matrix—otherwise entropy

makes no sense—but there’s nothing

nherently inescapable about the rate at

which it passes. If human thoughtsmoved with the pace of bristlecone

pines, we would never have invented th

waterwheel, because rivers flash like

steam in that frame of reference.

Likewise if we were mayflies—flowing

water would be glacial.

So much for the experiential aspect ofime. As for the actual pace, well, life

goes by at the speed of time. I don’t thin

Marlys was looking for a way to adjust

hat, it was just one of those things shesaid, but her words have always stayed

with me.

***



n 1988 the Soviet Union spent a

considerable and extremely secret sum

of money on a boson rifle. Only the

azis rivaled the Soviets for crackpotschemes and politically-filtered science

America under the Republicans was in

ts way crazier, but all they truly wanted

was to go back to the fifties when

middle-aged white men were safely in

charge. The Soviets really did believe i

he future, some friable concrete-linedversion of it where the eternally -

withering State continued to lead the

workers toward a paradise of empty

shelves and dusty bread.Their boson rifle was pointed at the

United States, of course. Figuratively

speaking. The actual device was buried



n a tunnel in Siberia. More accurately,

was a tunnel in Siberia, a very special

kind of linear accelerator running

hrough kilometer after kilometer of carefully -maintained hard vacuum

hundreds of meters beneath the blighted

aiga.

A casual misreading of quantum

mechanics, combined with Politburo

desperation for a way out of the stifling

mediocrity that had overcome solidMarxist-Leninist thought, had led to it.

An insane amount of rubles went down

hat hole, along with a large quantity of

hard currency, not to mention the lives ohundreds of laborers and the careers of

dozens of physicists.

In the end, they calibrated it to secretl



attack the USS Fond du Lac on patrol in

he Sea of Okhotsk. According to the

boson rifle’s firing plan, the submarine

should have roughly tripled in mass,mmediately sunk with a loss of all

hands, and no culpability pointing back

o Moscow.

Nothing happened, of course, except a

errific hum, several dozen cases of very

fast moving cancer among the scientists

and technicians who were too close tohe primary accelerator grids, and the

plug being pulled on the universe.

Though we didn’t know that last bit

for almost a hundred years.

***

nventory of the sample bag recovered



from the suit of the deceased taikonaut

Radogast Yuang on his return from the

First Kuiper Belt Expedition (1KBE).

See specification sheet attached for precise measurement and analysis.

-

Three (3) narrow boltsapproximately seven centimeters

long, with pentagonal heads, bright

metallic finish, pitted surfaces

-One (1) narrow bolt approximately

two centimeters long, damaged end

dull metallic finish, heavilycorroded

-

One (1) flexible tab approximately

eleven centimeters long, plastic-



like substance, pale blue under normal lighting, pitted

It is to be noted that these finds do not

correspond in materials or specification

o any known components of the TKS

anjing or any of the 1KBE’s equipmen

and supplies. It is also to be noted thathe China National Space Administratio

never officially acknowledged these

finds.

***

Lies go by at the speed of time. The truth

bumbles along far behind, still looking

for its first cup of coffee, while the

whole world hears some other story.

All revelation is a lie. It must be. The

divine is an incommunicable disease,



oo large and splintered to fit within the

confines of a primate brain. Our minds

evolved to compete for fruit and pick

carrion, not to comb through theparasites that drop from the clouds of

God’s dreaming.

But just as an equation asymptotically

approaches the solution, so revelation

can asymptotically approach the truth

about the underlying nature of the

universe. The lie narrows to the width ohe whisker of a quantum cat, while the

ruth, poking slowly along behind,

finally merges Siamese-twinned to its

precursor.That’s what we who remain tell

ourselves. Why would I deny it?

There has been a neutron bomb of the



soul, cleansing the solar system, and thu

he universe, of the stain that was the

human race. Some of us remain,

befuddled by the curse of our survival. No corpses surround us. We survivors

don’t swim amid the billion-body

charnel house of our species. They are

gone, living on only in the dying power

systems and cold-stored files and empty

pairs of boots which can be found on

every station, the deck of every ship, inhe dusty huts and moldering marble

halls on Earth and Luna and Mars.

The lie that was revelation became

ruth, and the speed of time simplystopped for almost everyone except the

few of us too soul-deaf to hear the fadin

rhythm of the universe. Sometimes I am



hankful that Marlys could hear the musi

hat called her up. Sometimes I curse he

name for leaving me behind.

My greatest fear, the one that keeps meawake most often, is that it is we

survivors who vanished. Everyone else

s there, moving forward at one second

per second, but only our time has

stopped, an infection that will make us

see a glacier as fit driver for a

waterwheel, and even the dying of thesun as a flickering afternoon’s

nconvenience.

I keep waiting for the stars to slow

down, their light to pool listlessly beformy eyes.

And you? What are you waiting for?

There are answers in the Kuiper Belt



debris, on the frequencies Sameera

Glasshouse tapped, in the trajectory of

hat old Soviet weapon.

All you have to do is follow them, andfind the crack in the world where

everything went. One of these days,

hat’s where I’ll go, too.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Jay LakeArt copyright (c) 2010 by Stephan

Martiniere



Books by Jay Lake

Rocket Science (Fairwood, 2005)

Death of a Starship, (MonkeyBrain,

2009)

THE MAINSPRING SERIES

Mainspring (Tor, 2007)

Escapement (Tor, 2008)

Pinion (Tor, 2010)THE GREEN SERIES

Green (Tor, 2009)

Endurance (Tor, forthcoming) Kalimpura (Tor, forthcoming)

CITY IMPERISHABLE

Trial of Flowers (Night Shade, 2006



Madness of Flowers (Night Shade,

2009)

Reign of Flowers (Night Shade,

forthcoming)

STORY COLLECTIONS

Greetings From Lake Wu (Wheatland,

2003)Green Grow the Rushes-Oh (Fairwood

2004)

American Sorrows (Wheatland, 2004)

Dogs in the Moonlight (Prime, 2004)

The River Knows Its Own (Wheatland,

2007)

The Sky That Wraps (Subterranean,2010)

ANTHOLOGIES

Polyphony 1 (ed., with Deborah Layne



Wheatland, 2002)Polyphony 2 (ed., with Deborah Layne

Wheatland, 2003)

Polyphony 3 (ed., with Deborah LayneWheatland, 2003)


Wheatland, 2004)


Wheatland, 2005)


Wheatland, 2006)All Star Zeppelin Adventures (ed., with

David Moles; Wheatland, 2004)

Tel: Stories (ed; Wheatland, 2005)

Spicy Slipstream Stories (ed., with Niver Gevers; DAW, 2009)

Footprints (ed., with Eric T. Reynolds

Haley Rille, 2009)

the speed of time - jay lake

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