On The Surface Tension Page 10

  He placed his hand on the green ball’s surface, and the entire chamber leapt into light of a million stars and galaxies that filled the interior of the chamber in three dimensions.

  Tracey’s breath was taken away.

  “It is a planetarium,” she said, wide-eyed.

  “Yes, but more,” Morrow said. He slid his fingers across the surface of the green ball in a particular pattern, and a glowing triangle appeared to hover in the space above them. It flashed green and pointed downwards and to the left.

  “The Scrytorium control ball reads what I intend to see and tells me what direction and magnification to move towards, and the color tells me whether to move forward or backward in time,” he said, pointing to the triangle.

  He traced his hand again, and the magnification increased rapidly, zooming in to show Earth floating in space.

  “Your planet,” he said, matter-of-factly.

  He zoomed it in again, and this time it showed the interior of a jet plane, with Tracey, Ron, and several dark-suited passengers in the seats.

  “Do you remember this?” Morrow asked.

  Tracey scrunched her brow, thinking.

  “Yes,” she said. “This was when Ron and I were flying back to Seattle from the base in Denver before it was destroyed.” The implications of what she was watching slowly dawned on her.

  “This thing can view events from the past?” she asked, incredulous.

  “Yes. Past or present. The future is dark, though, since the possibilities of things to come are just that—possibilities—from this viewpoint, locked as we are by life in a single point of consciousness in spacetime. Once outside of that, all of this universe’s path is collapsed, so the ‘needle’ can be dropped anywhere into the groove of the ‘record,’ and time can re-flow from that point. But as long as we are locked inside it, we can only move the ‘needle’ so far.”

  She saw Ron’s mouth move as though he were speaking, but did not hear anything. She noticed that she could not hear any airplane noises, either.

  “No sound?” she asked.

  “No,” Morrow said, with a wistful smile, “they did not see fit to give me that advantage too. I just get to read the sheet music, not listen to the song. I have learned to be pretty good at lip reading, though.”

  They watched the inside of the plane for a while, Tracey wondering what she was supposed to see. Tracey watched herself from the past look out of the plane’s window.

  “There,” Morrow interjected, pointing. “Do you remember looking out of the window then?”

  Tracey shook her head. Not particularly.”

  Morrow moved his hand across the surface of the green globe again, and the viewpoint shifted again, moving across the past Tracey’s shoulder, to a view out of the window. Tracey looked again, noticed a darkening landscape, with mountains, forests, and rivers. The sun was setting on the far horizon, casting the landscape in long shadows.

  “Notice anything?” he said quietly.

  She shook her head. The Tracey in the picture stared absently out of the window for a time, while the landscape slowly traversed across the plane’s window.

  “Watch here,” Morrow said. Tracey saw herself look away from the window to talk to Ron again.

  “So?”

  “Look out of the window,” he said.

  She did. The darkening landscape she had been watching dropped away, as though a chasm had opened, revealing a darker landscape beneath.

  “Oh yeah, the ground I thought was the real ground was just a layer of clouds,” she said. “The sun was shining on the real ground beneath.”

  “Yesss,” Morrow said. “And look at the clouds: Do they look like real ground now?”

  She scrutinized the cloud layer that she had mistaken for the real landscape. “No,” she admitted. “It didn’t look anything like the real ground. Why did I think it was?”

  “Your mind filled in the blanks,” he said.

  She mulled this over.

  “So, the point you are making is that I am mistaking something else for the real ground?”

  She sensed, more than saw, Morrow smile.

  “We are trying to discover the groundwork of reality here, which we assume to be what we know because our minds fill in that blank as well,” he said.

  “Like Plato’s allegory of the cave?” she asked.

  He considered this for a moment, then manipulated the surface of the green globe again. The viewpoint zoomed outwards until the Earth hung like a blue orb floating in space.

  “If you must use a metaphor, try a soap bubble. You know, like the kind kids blow using those little wands that float around?”

  “Ok, I’m picturing one,” she said.

  “So what makes the bubble? The soap or the empty space inside?”

  “The soap,” she said reflexively. “Inside is just empty space.”

  “True, but isn’t the soap mostly empty space too? When one of those bubbles pops, what is left but a tiny speck of sticky soap? The only thing holding that whole structure together is surface tension. What do you really notice about the surface of the bubble, too? The weird colored swirling patterns, the sheen on that surface tension. Is that left after the bubble pops? So it is the invisible part holding up the visible, giving it something to form around and be held together by the surface tension. Like the view out the plane window, though, there is a real structure that is invisible underneath. Find how that works and you find out how to manipulate the bubbles from perfect spheres into other shapes. And manipulating into other shapes, of course, appears as a miracle to those who aren’t doing the blowing.”

  “Yeah, I guess bubbles are only spheres if there isn’t a wind blowing them,” she said, then frowned. “So if the ‘surface tension’ is deformed from the perfect circle, does that mean that the bubble is more likely to pop?”

  “Now you are getting it,” he said.

  “So we want to be the wind that deforms the shape of the universe without popping it.” She thought for a minute more. “So we have the power to destroy the universe?”

  He laughed softly. “Well, we can’t blow that hard. We can blow our own bubbles, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s roll this movie back to the beginning. You know how the universe started?”

  “I have been told,” she said, “that there was a big bang.”

  “Yes. But do you know what that looked like?”

  “I always envisioned some kind of fireball explosion in space...or something. Actually I have no idea what that looked like, or what exploded, or what it exploded into. Professor LaGrue tried to tell us all this stuff, but it was rather unclear.”

  Morrow chuckled. “LaGrue hasn’t any idea what it looked like either, being focused on the surface of the windowpane. The physicists are only interested in making the math come out right to fit the theory. They are good with the ‘whos,’ ‘whats,’ ‘whens’ ‘wheres’ and ‘hows’ but not too keen on the ‘whys.’ So they can roll time back to within a tiny fraction of a second after the ‘big bang’ itself and explain mathematically what happened, but why did it happen at all? But before pondering that, what was there to explode and into what in the first place? It’s actually an interesting question because without a framework for an ‘explosion’ to take place in, what could it look like? It’s easy for science to explain it away by saying it is a nonsense question, but it isn’t nonsense in the same way as asking what a square circle looks like, or something else impossible. We are programmed to think in this way.”

  “Yeah, if there was no space or time, what did the universe explode in to? And if God did it, like The Bible says, was he just floating in space as a disembodied spirit and caused the big bang?”

  Morrow frowned. “What do you mean, floating in space as a disembodied spirit?”

  “You know, like it says in The Bible. In Genesis.”

  “It wasn’t like that at all. You are going to be surprised by this. Wait here,” said Morrow,
who shambled off and returned a few minutes later with a large, leather-bound book. He flipped through it momentarily.

  Oh crap, thought Tracey. He’s pulled out a Bible.

  “Ah, right at the beginning. It says ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.’ It goes on to talk about the sun, moon, stars, aardvarks, and people.

  “But then in John it says: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.’ So which was it, Jesus or his dad?”

  “Well,” Tracey said tentatively, “according to Trinitarian theology, aren’t they the same thing, along with the Holy Ghost?” She was uncomfortable with where the conversation was ambling. “Are you saying that they were both there floating in nothingness before space was even made, with their buddy the Holy Spirit, then God or Jesus ‘created the heavens and the earth?’”

  “Don’t get me started,” said Morrow, waving his left hand while the right manipulated the green ball once again. “I could spend hours just talking what the word ‘Logos,’ or ‘Word,’ means. If you want to see the beginning, you have to start at the beginning. Let’s just watch and see,” he said.

  The floating Earth grew larger and larger, until it filled the entire dome before them. Tracey turned and looked behind her and saw the bright points of stars grow dimmer and dimmer as their viewpoint entered the atmosphere, until they disappeared into the blue haze of the daylight sky. She turned back and saw the ground growing larger and larger, a dusty, mostly flat landscape with a body of water or two in the distance. The ground grew bigger, like an airplane coming in for a landing, until it appeared like a view from a skyscraper.

  The ground was dusty in places, with low scrubby vegetation, but there were forested patches. Even from this height, Tracey could see that an enormous construction project was under way. There were long files of workers, some dressed in loincloths, some in dingy long robes. Some were bearing stone, wood and mud, and hundreds more swarmed like ants on buildings in various states of completion.

  “I thought you were going to show me the start of the universe, not the start of a town,” she said.

  “Ah, but we are,” said Morrow. “Allow me to fill in a little back-story here. This is the city of Sepphoris. Thirty years before what we are seeing now, the Hebrews who are busy building this city revolted against their Roman overlords. The rebellion was crushed. Many were killed, many were pressed into slavery, many fled the region. But, like always, time marches on and the remaining inhabitants and some intrepid newcomers started to rebuild. The economy at this time is rather horrid. Working on rebuilding the city for the Romans is pretty much the only game in town, unless you are a fisherman or a tax collector. Lots of farmers losing their lands because they can’t pay the oppressive taxes, lots of poverty, graft, corruption. Revolt is always whispered in the back alleys, but not yet openly in the streets. Soon, though!”

  The view drifted ever downward from Morrow’s manipulation of the green globe. They watched a narrow portion of one building being constructed now. Some workers were installing tile on a floor to portray a woman with baskets of fruit and grain. Some were building wooden forms to hold stones that were being piled by other workers into walls, while other workers smeared plaster and grout between them. Other workers carried stones, mortar, wood, water, and red roof tiles in to the other workers in baskets in long lines. The workers were wiry and dirty. One, who appeared to be an overseer, had shorter cropped hair, a cleaner tunic, and some gold jewelry. He strode about, offering direction and exhorting the workers to work faster and harder.

  “So what are we looking at here?” Tracey asked.

  “We are about to watch a sacking.”

  “A sacking? The universe started by someone getting fired?”

  “You could say that,” Morrow nodded. “It is a pretty insignificant thing to the foreman—these ‘tektons’ are a dime a dozen. Or a mite a dozen, you could say. But to them, it means survival or not. You see, before the Greeks and Romans conquered the land, there were lots of farms owned by individuals who did small-scale agriculture, owned what they grew, traded the surplus, and the community rumbled on. The outsiders changed things. Rome wanted taxes in coin, not barleycorn. They made it a money-based society and heavily taxed the landowners in order to pay for civic projects locally and all the way to Rome. Some could pay the tax, others could not. Those who could not had to sell their land to the city folk and lease back the land like sharecroppers. They had to pay huge rents and were able to keep just enough to survive on. Families had to have enough kids to survive childhood to work the leased land, but any extra kids and their kids had to find work elsewhere. Most of those ended up as laborers, or if they were a bit better trained, as tektons for the rich Jews who were collaborating with the Roman authorities.”

  “Ok,” said Tracey. “Can’t he get another job? Or are there are no labor unions around? I’m guessing not.”

  “You get the idea,” said Morrow. “The tektons had to really bust their asses or they would be replaced by others who were more willing to. And if there is only one employer in town, if you lost your job you probably don’t have many options. Girls would have to either beg or whore if they don’t get married off, while if a young man loses his work he has only to beg. Or starve.”

  “So who are we looking for?”

  “That one,” said Morrow pointing at a young man who flashed a disarming smile while dumping a box of red roof tiles he had carried to one of the roofers.

  Tracey watched him. After dropping his heavy load, he took a seat next to an old man with a long, gray beard who had likewise just emptied his box of wall rocks and appeared exhausted. Workers ambled by, leaning on shovels, and engaged in the timeless practice of “taking a breather.” The young man was apparently popular.

  “He has a magnetic personality, that Yeshua.” said Morrow. “Of course, that tends to attract the wrong kind of attention from those in charge.”

  The overseer had noticed the group of lounging men and was making his way through the worksite towards them. One of the tektons saw him coming and apparently gave the warning, because the group immediately scattered, lifting shovels and mattocks and carrying baskets as they went. The old, bearded man, however, was not able to immediately stand. He tried, but sat back down, too sore or tired to scatter with the rest.

  “I’ve had to learn to lip-read Aramaic to piece together the conversation,” said Morrow. “Not an easy thing. Anyway, here is the gist of how it goes: ‘All right, old timer, this is the fourth time this week I’ve caught you slacking off. Get out of here.’ Now watch this, Yeshua hears this and comes back to help. ‘Come on, Boss, give him a break. He’s older than my father and still has many mouths to feed.’ ‘Oh, is that my problem? I have lots of men, younger and stronger, who are waiting around for a chance to work.’ Ok, here is where Yeshua really blows it. “Oh, you mean your nephew?’ Ha, look at that foreman’s face get red. ‘Ok, smartass, you know what, I actually have two nephews looking for jobs. Why don’t you join the old man and get out of here too?’”

  Tracey watched the foreman storm away and saw the look of anguish on the faces of the old man and the young man who had been fired trying to help him. The young man helped the old one to his feet, and together they slowly walked from the jobsite. The other workers made a point to give them a wide berth, obviously intent on not being associated with either of them. They watched in silence as the two men got farther and farther from the hive of activity, walking down the crushed limestone
road to the south. After a while, the older man came to his small mud house with a thatched reed roof and tearfully embraced the younger man before entering it. The younger man, crestfallen, continued south on the road for a while, then stopped.

  “Where is he going?” asked Tracey.

  “His family lives in the little town to the south, Nazareth. They are poor and barely make enough for all of his younger brothers and sisters to eat, and that is with both his and his father’s wages. Now with only the one of them working, there is a real possibility that some of them may slowly start down the road to starvation.”

  Tracey watched as the young man continued to stand there in the road, slumped in defeat. She watched his face as the thoughts churned in his mind. He stood a long time in thought, then his faced changed to a sad resignation mixed with a wistful smile of anticipation, and he struck off the road towards the Southeast.

  “Where is he going? Is his family that way?” asked Tracey.

  Morrow shook his head. “No, he has decided not to be a burden and doesn’t want to subject either himself or them to a painful attempt to talk him out of it. He will head out into the Wilderness, looking to seek his fortune alone.”

  They watched him walk through the rocky, rough country for a while in silence.

  “How far is he going to go? Does he find work?”

  “Of a sort,” Morrow chuckled. “Not what he expected, by a long shot. I’ll fast-forward a bit here, as he wanders in that general direction for many days, asking to work in vineyards, as a shepherd, a fruit picker, and whatever else. No luck, though: Folks from Nazareth are known as good-for-nothing yokels. He’s hearing stories of a gathering of people out in the wilderness beyond the Jordan River, of a crazy guy named John who is leading them, talking radical stuff. Turns out he recognizes the name: John is a distant cousin who he’s never met.”

  They continued to watch, greatly sped up, as the young, now skinnier man, joined with the crowds listening to a hairy wild man as he railed at them and periodically dunked them in water.