Enigma   

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Dear Susannah

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I can tell you now a little of what I didn’t know then. Like the DreamStrip, time lends perspective.

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Like any divinity it would acquire many names, some sacred, some profane, some uttered in jest, most with reverence. A few of these names, along with the religions they inspired, would become synonymous with ignorance, cruelty and superstition. Or a fanatical belief that only the sect in question could offer its followers salvation and redemption. Others would inspire generations of research and constructive endeavour. It would inspire myths and mockery in equal measure, tales of the magical and the mundane.

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For me, its most appropriate name would also be its plainest. The Axis. For a while it was simply called The Discovery; though later whenever I thought of it in those terms I was never sure whether Tanya and I were the discoverers (if indeed such we were),  or the discovered. Perhaps we were both. How could it be otherwise in a quantum universe, full of every conceivable possibility?

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Some would claim that it marked the centre of the universe, acting as the pivot around which the very cosmos itself turned. Others that it contained the original quantum singularity, the infinitely dense seed that gave rise to the universe. And for every rational possibility there would be a thousand crackpot theories, ranging all the way from the absurd to the xenophobic, some harmless, some not. Whatever the arguments about its origins and contents, no one ever contested the fact that the discovery was unique, or that it carried within its curved boundaries a freight of force — a cosmic charge — that had no equal.

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A power that not even a supernovae could rival.

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