"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 would seem to slow down--or do I mean speed up?"
"It doesn't matter," said Grego. "It all depends whether you're Inside the new space or Outside or in some other Inspace."
"Anyway, the universe now seems to be constant in time while it's expanding in space. But if you wanted to, you could just as easily see it as constant in size but changing in time. The speed of light is slowing down so that it takes longer to get from one place to another, only we can't tell that it's slowing down because everything else slows down exactly relative to the speed of light. You see? All a matter of perspective. For that matter, as Grego said before, the universe we live in is still, in absolute terms, exactly the size of a geometric point--when you look at it from Outside. Any growth that seems to take place on the Inside is just a matter of relative location and time."
"And what kills me," said Grego, "is that this is the kind of thing that's been going on inside Olhado's head all these years. This picture of the universe as a dimensionless point in Outside space is the way he's been thinking all along. Not that he's the first to think of it. Just that he's the one who actually believed it and saw the connection between that and the non-place where Andrew says the hive queen goes to find aiuas."
"As long as we're playing metaphysical games," said Valentine, "then where did this whole thing begin? If what we think of as reality is just a pattern that somebody brought Outside, and the universe just popped into being, then whoever it was is probably still wandering around giving off universes wherever she goes. So where did she come from? And what was there before she started doing it? And how did Outside come to exist, for that matter?"
"That's Inspace thinking," said Olhado. "That's the way you conceive of things when you still believe in space and time as absolutes. You think of everything starting and stopping, of things having origins, because that's the way it is in the observable universe. The thing is, Outside there're no rules like that at all. Outside was always there and always will be there. The number of philotes there is infinite, and all of them always existed. No matter how many of them you pull out and put into organized universes, there'll be just as many left as there always were."
"But somebody had to start making universes."
"Why?" asked Olhado.
"Because--because I--"
"Nobody ever started. It's always been going on. I mean, if it weren't already going on, it couldn't start. Outside where there aren't any patterns, it would be impossible to conceive of a pattern. They can't act, by definition, because they literally can't even find themselves."
"But how could it always have been going on?"
"Think of it as if this moment in time, the reality we live in at this moment, this condition of the entire universe--of all the universes--"
"You mean now."