system, or if the helium’s behavior en masse hadmerely hinted at the detailed motion of its own atoms, then thatbehavior could only have told half the story — the classical half — andallthe quantum subtleties would have been lost in the fine print. But thecondensate was isolated as scrupulously as any cycling Qusp, and it hadbeen cooled to the point where the states of all its individual atomswere dictated completely by its macroscopic properties. With no hiddencomplications, inside or out, the result was a quantum-mechanicalsystem the size of a mountain.

The geometry of the vacuum in the Quietener inherited thehelium’s multiplicity: its state vector was a sum of the vectors forforty-eight different gravitational fields. Once the condensate’scomponents had all been nudged into place, the quantum geometry at thecenter of the sphere would be equivalent to the novo-vacuum, and a newkind of space-time would blossom into existence.

That was the idealized version: a predictable event in aknown location. In reality, the outcome remained hostage to countlessimperfections and potential intrusions. If the experimenters werelucky, sometime over a period measured in minutes, somewhere over aregion measured in meters, a few thousand cubic Planck lengths ofnovo-vacuum would be created, and survive for an unprecedentedsix-trillionths of a second.

Yann turned to Cass. "Are you ready to freeze?" The firsttime he’d asked her this, she’d been almost as nervous as the momentbefore she’d been transmitted from Earth, but the question had rapidlybecome a formality. Of course she was ready. That was howthings were done. Just a few minutes of numb immobility,watching the data appear on the screen in front of her, and the oddswere good that it would be the last time. A five-hour trip back to thestation, a day or two of analysis, a brief celebration, and she woulddepart. Her Earth body, frozen more deeply than this one had ever been,was waiting for her. She’d step across the light-years in a subjectiveinstant, a new set of memories to sweep away the icy cobwebs of her oldself.