Jaeger was happy to accompany Emily to the Institute, if only to break the news to Qadir. The Voyager crash had been disastrous for everybody on the team, and now he was visiting the kid genius that stole his dream job before they even graduated. It was Qadir's unabashed adoration of Planck theory that assured his residency at the ESA. And spreading the misery by telling Qadir that everything he believed was a lie... that was the most silver of linings Jaeger could imagine.
Once again, Jaeger was disappointed. After the shock, Qadir laughed even harder than Jaeger had ever heard. "You realize what this means, don't you?"
"No!" Qadir said, between laughs. "No one does! Isn't that great?"
The laughter was starting to grate Jaeger; he pointed to the wall. "How long were you guys working on that picture of the universe there?"
"I helped with the last couple of years - but so what? If your Jesus knocked on my door today, saying 'Here I am, you are wrong about everything'- I would offer him a beer. Everything is wrong, and that is wonderful! No more re-proving generations-old theories - we are discovering now!
"I will share with you a koan, a Buddhist fable: once there was a fish that was the smartest fish in his school. He taught them all about their world. Being fish, their world was water. They breathe it, are surrounded in it, move through it, they think they know everything about water... and this fish, most of all. 'Fish that leave the water? That's myth! Things living above the water? Lies! And so he believed, until the day he got caught on a hook, and pulled into a boat. And as he lay dying on the floor of the boat, withdrawn and separated for the water he had known all his life - he began to understand what water was..."
Emily was shuffling through the thermal photomontages on Qadir's desk. "I guess you understand why we're talking with you, Dr Tinibu. Is there any work your facility's doing here that might-"
"Oh, no, this is all useless, at the moment. I want to see the Voyager first, to see what undid it. We build another one. And whatever wall we hit, we have to hit it again."
inspired by Discover Magazine article "Baby Pictures of the Cosmos, Now in HD"
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