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As I began to ponder these things, the effects of the black hole became more and more fascinating in its many metaphorical signification. Soon we were near enough to see another marvelous light show of optical magic. A large star that Martin had pointed out became torn apart in front of my eyes. Then within moments, it became reassembled again into thin threats of light that painted a pinwheel across the black hole. Moments later the pinwheel disappeared and the star re-assembled itself. Martin explained later that the effect that we had seen was an electromagnetic effect. "Light is an electromagnetic phenomenon, and so is electromagnetism in plasma streams. The two are related. One affects the other. Is this the lensing effect that we see?"
"Do we have two separate views of the Universe here?" I say cautiously. "You say one is ruled by gravity as the primary force, and the other is ruled by the electromagnetic force."
"If you are stuck in one, you can't see the other," he says.
"This makes sense," I reply. "But which one is real? Or is there a third one?"
"The electric force is 39 orders of magnitude stronger," says Martin. "Does this rule out that there might yet exist a still stronger force that no one has yet discovered or fully understands. The Bohr/Miller effect is far from being understood."
I stopped probing the question. I became content to enjoy the view.
"The Bohr/Miller effect is one of the things you will discover when you stop taking everything for granted," Martin says to me after we had turned back. "It's not the physical domain that limits you," he says emphatically. "Only the limits that you place on yourself can limit you. We have found this out to a small degree, but this bit has changed our life. Sometimes I wish it hadn't, because it has also isolated us. So, I am glad that I am able to take you a few steps out of your small Universe and invite you into mine. Unfortunately, I can only do this on a one on one basis. That is why I had to keep your friend Natalia occupied. That may soon change, though."
I felt that I knew what he had meant. Two isolated subsets of reality can't exist without either containing any reference to the other. There must be always minutely recognizable effects that hint to the as yet unseen. In a way, reality itself had appeared more and more like the black star that I had 'seen,' though it couldn't be seen in the standard sense of seeing, if indeed it did exist at all. If he was right, than, that I too, was one of those black stars that had become isolated from the real Universe by the gravity that I had placed on myself in terms of imagined limits. Martin had illustrated that one could step away from that. There was no need for a black hole effect to be submitted to in my consciousness and in my life. Wow! What a thought! What a revelation!
"Is this how you discovered the Bohr/Miller effect?" I ask him after I explained what I had just realized.
He doesn't answer my question. "Do you want to zip back to the ship, or cruise back?" he changes the subject.
"Let's cruise back, very slowly, but fast enough to be on time for dinner."
"Oh you! You have a lot to learn," he says and grins. "You should realize by now that time and speed are likewise invalid terms in the subset of reality that I invited you into, where physical distance and material laws have absolutely no validity."
I nodded as a response. Of course I should have known what was so obvious, but the bewilderment had caused me more and more to suspend what is termed 'logical' thinking and begin to think in 'illogical' terms where the logical rationality was overlaid with limits that I had falsely placed on myself. He could have said that two and two equal three, and I would have believed him, because he would have been able to prove that too. In a way, I could understand this already without his help. Natalia and I were two individuals, but combined we had become a force that the captain's war couldn't touch. In fact, I realized that we were many times greater than even three, working and thinking together. We had become a 'multitude.' I could suddenly see why all the empires in human history had been so adamant about dividing and isolating humanity. The forceful isolation, often enforced with the death penalty, gave the rulers the only chance they had to survive as an imperial force. Undivided, humanity would have eradicated all the empires long ago, together with the very idea of imperialism that can exist only on the platform of artificially imposed limits.
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