long ago. QGT as a description of the dynamics of the universe with theminimum possible algorithmic complexity. QGT as a topologicalredescription of some basic results in category theory — a mathematicalsetting in which the Sarumpaet rules appeared as natural and inevitableas the rules of arithmetic. QGT as the most probable underlying systemof physical laws, given any substantial database of experimentalresults that spanned both nuclear physics and cosmology.

Darsono leaned toward her and interjected, "But why, inyour heart" — he thumped his chest with an imaginary fist — "are youconvinced that it’s true?" Cass smiled. That was not a gesture in thestaid vocabulary her Mediator used by default; Darsono must haverequested it explicitly.

"In part, it’s the history," she admitted, relaxingslightly. "The lineage of the ideas. If some alien civilization hadhanded us Quantum Graph Theory on a stone tablet — out of the blue, inthe eighteenth or nineteenth century — I might not feel the same wayabout it. But general relativity and quantummechanics were among the most beautiful things the ancientscreated, and they’re still the best practical approximations we havefor most of the universe. QGT is their union. If general relativity isso close to the truth that only the tiniest fragment can be missing,and quantum mechanics is the same…how much freedom can there be toencompass all of the successes of both, and still be wrong?"

Kusnanto Sarumpaet had lived on Earth at the turn of thethird millennium, when a group of physicists and mathematiciansscattered across the planet — now known universally as the Sultans ofSpin — had produced the first viable offspring of general relativity andquantum mechanics. To merge the two descriptions of nature, you neededto replace the precise, unequivocal geometry of classical space-timewith a quantum state that assigned amplitudes to a whole range of